In my teaching I have designed assignment sequences that combine the use of wikis and archival research. In doing so, I intend to introduce my students to the critical dimensions of collaborative digital forms of knowledge production as well as the experience of classic hands-on archival research. In this session I hope to discuss strategies of using wiki-style technologies as a collaborative tool for students to engage in writing as well as interacting as a community of writers and editors with an eye to the public dimension of knowledge production. I also want to explore ways of  exciting our students about the possibilities of original research and the importance and experience of pre-digital archival work.

I am interested in how the Digital Public Library can be used (in your teaching, for an assignment, or in your own research) and am in search of folks who want to experiment together. Let’s explore the DPLA through multiple kinds of searching. I am interested in exploring New York State history, but am open to all kinds of topic suggestions—ballet, vaudeville, shipwrecks!   Perhaps we could work as a team to search 1 or 2 topics as deeply as we can think to do so across all the ways of searching. How would you use the content of the DPLA and its search interface for gathering historical and cultural materials and images? We all have a touch of the curator in us.  Let’s work on one another’s research areas and have a mass search of the DPLA to uncover content.  I continually find big surprises in it.

If the group wants to we can also take a look also at OpenPics Application (free via iTunes): dp.la/apps/6  to gather a personal “collection.”

Anyone who is interested in DPLA can come!

Resources:

A librarian’s guide to DPLA: resources.library.lemoyne.edu/barnello/DPLA
Howard, J. (December 3, 2013). “DPLA: Young but Well-Connected,” Chronicle of Higher Education. chronicle.com/article/Digital-Library-of-America/143489/

–Inga H. Barnello, librarian, Le Moyne College & DPLA Community Rep.

I’m interested in the use, and usefulness, of what I’ll call here (both for want of a better term, and as a deliberate provocation) “scholar-scale” collections of materials. To flesh out what I’m talking about, let me given an example: for a while I have been fascinated by a French painting which had a truly remarkable, and remarkably productive, afterlife in the United States in the first half of the twentieth-century: Paul Chabas’s 1913 September Morn. After inspiring a short-lived obscenity controversy (featuring American anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock), the painting was reproduced on postcards, pennant flags, watch fobs, and many other places; it was turned into a musical, a short film, and continued to be a key point of well into midcentury. An online archive uniquely allows one to capture and share the mass of material related to this painting, and the way in which an unremarkable French academic painting became an occasion for American popular cultural reflection on art, obscenity, and (most pressingly) race.

I have collected all sorts of material related to this painting and at one point started putting it all in an online “archive” (I now regret that term); while I haven’t updated or improved it in age, it is still online at septembermorn.org.

I’m interested in both big questions of why (and maybe when) one would want to share one’s personal research archive, and whether it is worth the effort, as well as the smaller practical questions of how to do so (my own collection of September Morn material, for instance, is built on Omeka—a platform made more attractive with the release of Neatline).

I would be happy for this session to turn into a practical discussion of the hows of Omeka (installation, use, etc), or a more conceptual conversation about the way that web technologies may potentially allow us to tap the scholarly potential of odd, personal, hobbyist, semi-scholarly, or para-scholarly collections.