That Cutting Edge: Technology’s Impact on Scholarly Research Processes in the Library

11:00am – 11:10a.m. Introduction

11:10 - 11:45 a.m. How to Cut Without Bleeding – Supporting Research in Higher Ed in an Age of Technological Innovation

Supporting researchers at an academic institution, especially a research 1 university, is an ever increasingly complex enterprise. Research support is generally spread across various units, including central computing, offices of research, and libraries (in addition to support provided directly by colleges and departments). Increasing requirements related to research data (both in terms of being more open and in terms of data requiring security and privacy controls), along with continuous challenges in support research reproducibility, make institutional infrastructure, services, and expertise is enormously critical and necessary. 

This talk will look at the challenges research-focused higher ed institutions face in supporting their faculty’s research endeavors, with a particular focus on new and emerging challenges in supporting data science and data-informed research. 

11:45 am - 12:15 p.m. A Trusted Citizen: Libraries in a Shifting IT Environment

As fast as technology evolves, expectations for technical support seem to keep pace, even exceed what is possible. This is true for students as much as it is for faculty and researchers, and for libraries as much as it is for campus information technology divisions. Supporting research projects with technology, either through infrastructure or consultation regarding it (or both), often puts libraries and their administrations in the position where they must manage what might be considered a form of technical debt—one that requires balancing immediate with ongoing expectations. Staffing levels, skill sets, and collaborative efforts are all key considerations. This talk shares an overall strategy and provides examples of how the University of Denver Libraries seek to position itself as a trusted partner in campus priorities regarding technology.

12:15 - 12:45 p.m. New Needs, New Approaches: Libraries as Technology Collaborators

New technologies both provide and demand increasingly connected and collaborative approaches to research support. In strategizing these potential roles and campus partnerships, libraries should recognize that:

• new technologies should empower research support, not drive it.
• our traditional library values trump traditional services.
• innovation requires experimentation.
• people and culture are always the most challenging.
• anticipating farther futures never happens enough.

As one way to support research data storage and preservation mandates from funding organizations and publishers, NCSU’s Office of Information Technology and Office of Research, Innovation and Economic Development created a new research data storage service, which provides every funded project for NCSU affiliates with 1TB of storage during the grant and for 10 years after the active grant period. Within the Libraries, a position was created to collaborate with OIT on the development and outreach of the service, and to communicate ongoing data needs to library and OIT stakeholders in order to direct the growth of this and other potential services. This talk will discuss the vision for the new Research Data & Infrastructure Librarian role, existing plans for collaborative outreach and development of the new research data storage service, and potential challenges and opportunities for this new initiative.

12:45 - 1:45 p.m. Lunch Break

1:45 - 2:15 p.m. Fostering Digital Scholarship at Bryn Mawr College

Using Bryn Mawr College’s Digital Scholarship Program as a case study, in this session I will discuss our foundational approaches to growing and sustaining digital scholarship activities within our merged library/IT organization. I will focus both on general strategies and on concrete, local instantiations of these strategies including our Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship program for undergraduates, Domain of One's Own Initiative, and our Digital Bryn Mawr seed grant program for faculty, staff, and graduate students. I will close by looking to future enhancements of the Digital Scholarship Program enabled by a new organizational configuration conceived to better support the life cycle of digital projects. 

2:15 - 2:45 p.m. Rediscovering Serendipity in the Age of Electronic Resources

The rise of electronic resources has dramatically changed the shape of library collections. It is no longer possible to judge the scope or quality of a library collection by browsing the stacks, because many resources now exist "on the cloud." As physical collections become less central to the library experience, spaces are being used in different ways. In this changing environment, how can a scholar explore a collection and make serendipitous discoveries? While many attempts have been made at a "virtual shelf browse," scrolling through virtual spines is very different from browsing physical shelves. This presentation will discuss how Villanova University's Falvey Memorial Library approached this problem by adding new features in the open source VuFind discovery layer, with the goal of creating a user experience that serves the same purpose as stack browsing while presenting an interface that feels natural in the digital environment. Current progress, technical architecture and future plans will be discussed.

2:45 - 3:15 p.m. Open Refine for Librarians: How a power tool for Google is now being used by librarians to clean up data and connect it to the world

Open Refine started as a “data wrangling” tool developed by Google in 2010 but when Google declined to stop supporting the project in 2012, they allowed the software to become supported by the community that had grown around it. At that point, Google Refine became known as Open Refine. The software developers who maintain and extend the powers of Open Refine run regular surveys to learn more about their fellow users and in 2018 they found that their largest community was from libraries – a group that did not even register as its own category in the original 2012 survey.  This presentation will introduce you to Open Refine and some of the use cases that librarians have found to employ Open Refine in the work of data cleanup and reconciliation involved with research data cleanup, scholarly communications, working with MARC records, website scraping, and exciting new connections into Wikidata.

3:15 - 3:30 p.m. Afternoon Break

3:30 - 4:00 p.m. Cutting Edges with Company: Emerging Technologies as a Collective Effort (with Case Study)

What does library engagement with emerging technologies look like when the core mission of the entire library is focused on innovation? The informationists and librarians of the Health Sciences - STEM Division Libraries at the University of Michigan have that broad focus on innovation, with the result being a wide and eclectic collection of engagement around emerging technologies and trends. This presentation will provide a smorgasbord of a baker's dozen of projects and services highlighting activities of the division, from the Anatomage to Software Carpentry, closing with a case study on a video game development project. 

4:00 - 4:30 p.m. Research Libraries and Computational Research: Challenges AND Greater Opportunities for Impact

With advances in High Performance Computing (HPC), our ability to analyze and produce data has increased exponentially over the last two decades.  However, with these advances it has placed the authority of scientific studies in jeopardy as research environments are difficult to capture, recreate, describe, and confirm.  Equally, research libraries are charged with capturing and sharing this research output as research environments are rapidly changing and being outmoded. Preserving the data is simply not enough.

So, where does that leave Research Libraries?  Within these challenges are hidden opportunities. This has forced libraries to assume a more active and impactful position in research, with active partnership with research computing groups on campus.  I will review the the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Libraries’ past and present experiences to meet these challenges, in close partnership with our Center for Research Computing, as well as the external partnerships we have forged to advance the greater community and the opportunities they present.

4:30 - 5:00 p.m. Roundtable Discussion

Moderated by Todd Carpenter