As the movement toward universal open access (OA) gathers momentum, the most salient OA questions are changing from “if” and even “when,” to “what will an OA world look like?” Is open access an incremental improvement, or will it lead to fundamental shifts in the way scholarship is communicated, filtered, and disseminated? In this talk, Jason will argue that the latter is the case: new ways of measuring scholarly impact on the social Web — “altmetrics” — will allow real-time, crowdsourced filtering of diverse scholarly products, leading to a new landscape of interoperable services that replace traditional journals. Jason will also demonstrate ImpactStory, an open-source tool for gathering altmetrics, and show how it can be used to promote OA, open data, and open source to faculty.

Millions of dollars have been spent on digitizing oral histories, preserving records of otherwise undocumented lives and experiences.

But a list of digital audio files and transcripts can seem impenetrable and intimidating to all but the most intrepid scholars.

If part of the mission of these projects is to make histories accessible to the public and produce fresh understandings of our past, digitization is not enough. How might computational tools be applied to organizing and presenting these histories in new ways, making them easier to comprehend and connect?

Digital technologies are transforming the humanities in profound ways—from the very questions we can ask to the ways we communicate our interpretations to students, scholars, or a general audience. The Digital Innovation Lab has been working since October 2011 to make the digital humanities work accessible for scholars, students, and the public by lowering barriers of access—whether time, resources, or technical skill level. Adding to this work is the newly-launched Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI), which was catalyzed by a $1.39 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The CDHI seeks to develop and test an adaptable and sustainable model of transformative academic practice that embraces faculty research, graduate and post-doctoral training, undergraduate learning, and engaged scholarship in the humanities. The CDHI hopes to intervene at all levels of academic practice at the University, from undergraduate and graduate training, to faculty development, and the hiring of new DH practitioners. This talk provides an overview of the CDHI and the Digital Innovation Lab (DIL).

Pam Lach is Manager of the Digital Innovation Lab (DIL) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds a PhD from UNC in U.S. Cultural History with an emphasis on gender and film history (2007), and a MS in Information Science from the UNC’s School of Information and Library Science. Pam is interested in how new and emerging technologies can support and redefine scholarship in the humanities and hopes to bridge the divide between technology and humanists. She oversees DIL staff and project work, including the development of DH Press, a WordPress-based digital humanities toolkit. During the 2012-2013 academic year she has assisted with the implementation of the Mellon-funded Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative.

Open access and copyright issues can dominate discussions addressing the reuse of digital resources. Metadata reuse has introduced a host of rights questions and challenges. Metadata rights was explored via the SILS-Metadata Architectures and Applications class this past fall as part of a student issues presentation. Our meeting will include a recap of important issues and also covers copyright in the context of metadata, plus two case studies (one via Duke University Press, and the other examining open bibliographic data), and wraps up with a series of questions for discussion.

Do you have questions about copyright and scholarly communications? Here is an excellent opportunity to hear from Anne Gilliland (Scholarly Communications Officer for the Libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill). She will provide an overview on current issues and controversies in copyright and scholarly publishing, including fair use and recent copyright litigation. Anne will also discuss her role and services at the university as an attorney and librarian.

Please join us in a lively discussion as Carol Hunter (UNC Associate University Librarian for Collections and Services) reports from the In re Books conference that she recently attended at New York Law School. The conference provided an overview of the future of the book, with an emphasis on the cultural, economic, and legal topics. Carol will play some clips from some of the best speakers’ presentations, and lead a discussion of the issues raised by these thought leaders. For more information about the conference, be sure to check the conference website.

Please join us as we celebrate Open Access Week at UNC! Find below a round-up of events on campus.

Who Owns Your Work: Copyright and Access
Wednesday, October 17, 10-11:30 a.m. – Pleasants Room of Wilson Library
Dwayne Buttler, a lawyer who holds an endowed chair in intellectual property at the University of Louisville Libraries, will give a presentation entitled “Who Owns Your Work: Copyright and Access.” Buttler is a renowned figure in the world of library and higher education copyright (view his bio). His most recent publication, Intimacy Gone Awry: Copyright and Special Collections, was published in the Journal of Academic Library Administration. Buttler will be available for informal conversation and a brown bag lunch in the Pleasants Room at noon following his presentation.

Open Access Week 2012 Kick-Off Webcast, broadcast from the World Bank
Monday, October 22, 4-5:30pm –UNC Health Science Library, Room 527
Co-sponsored by SPARC and the World Bank, this live event will be broadcast from the state of the art World Bank facilities, featuring a liveblog and webcast (via live.worldbank.org). The event will also be recorded, and made available to the community for use during and after local Open Access events. The event will feature a panel discussion with Open Access experts from a variety of stakeholder groups – including students, researchers, and policy makers – as well as representatives from the World Bank and SPARC. As this year’s Open Access theme is “Set the Default to Open Access,” the panelists will touch upon what that means to them, their institutions, and their work. The World Bank was recently named as SPARC Innovator for its implementation of a new open access policy, which included the launch of the World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) in 2012. The World Bank opened its data to the public in 2010.

Wednesday, October 24, 3-4:00 p.m. – Genome Building, Room 200
A panel of faculty authors, editors, and publishers will talk about issues in open access publishing. For more information, contact Todd Vision, tav@bio.un.cedu or Anne Gilliland, anne_gilliland@unc.edu.

Sparked by transformative digital changes, many scholars find themselves faced with exciting new opportunities for the production and distribution of knowledge. However, much of the scholarship circulating in these new environments appears in pdf-based articles, Web-based essays, or long-form blog postings, revealing a stubborn, discursive bent. How can we account for this tendency in our emerging forms of communication? And what might scholarship look like with an emphasis on the screen as composing and performing space?

New platforms for digital research are evolving and forcing scholars, libraries, and publishers to re-imagine models for publication. Tom Elrod, Digital Production Specialist at UNC Press, will talk about some of the initiatives the Press has focused on in regards to its ebooks and digital products, including enhanced e-books, digital omnibus editions, and e-book shorts.

Digital technologies are transforming the nature of humanities research and scholarship. Digital humanities produce scholarship that is more accessible to more people than ever before, all the while transforming citizens into potential citizen-archivists, citizen-curators, and citizen-scholars. The Digital Innovation Lab, launched in October of 2007, is a virtual, collaborative, and interdisciplinary unit which seeks to leverage technology and “big data” to create projects, processes, and tools that can be used and repurposed by others—scholars and students, cultural heritage organizations, and community-based groups—in the creation of their own meaningful digital public humanities projects. Thus, the lab strives to create digital humanities that are “public goods.”

Bio:
Pam Lach is manager of the Digital Innovation Lab (http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu/), which was launched in October 2011. She holds a PhD in U.S. History from UNC (2007) and is currently finishing her MS in Information Science at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science. She is also Project Manager for Main Street, Carolina, a digital history toolkit developed with the Carolina Digital Library and Archives (CDLA).

*Note the change in location for this month! To get to Davis 219, go up the steps to the second floor of Davis, and the room’s straight ahead, past the computer labs and the study space, to the left of the microforms service desk.