Category Archives: Technology

Exploring the Cost of Course Materials for Undergraduates: Toward an Affordable, Equitable Duke Education

Post by Ella Young, Research and Public Services InternCartoon illustration of people's hands holding up books, notebooks, and other printed materials.


In order to explore the true cost of a Duke undergraduate education, the Duke University Libraries are conducting a survey of teaching faculty to assess course materials costs for undergraduate students. By soliciting faculty responses, we seek to understand what types of materials are assigned in undergraduate courses across disciplines and their costs for students. The price of traditional textbooks and single-use online codes for homework has been rising for over 20 years, and students across the U.S. have reported struggling to afford their course materials alongside daily expenses. At Duke, if every undergraduate purchased every assigned textbook for their classes, they would cumulatively pay upwards of $1.4 million per academic year.

The Libraries plan to use data from the survey to assess how we can better support student access to course materials and to gauge interest in Open Educational Resources as a cost-effective alternative to traditional textbooks.  Surveying faculty about their interest in OERs moves Duke one step closer to implementing affordability initiatives and expanding OER availability on campus.

Have you taught an undergraduate course within the past 5 years? Click here to complete the survey!

What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are “openly-licensed, freely available educational materials that can be modified and redistributed by users” (The OER Starter Kit). This includes textbooks, searchable repositories, images, artwork, and even online college courses.

OERs benefit students by reducing college costs, and instructors can tailor OER to fit their needs. People who otherwise would not have access to college-level materials also can gain an education with open access materials.

How do OERs work?

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are copyright licenses that give users permission to reuse, distribute, remix, adapt, or build upon someone’s original material. All OERs are made available under some type of open license. There are six levels of license types with varying permissions, which you can explore here.

Learn more about OERs

To get started using Open Educational Resources, Duke Libraries has a guide to OERs with introductory information and links to open resources for instructors. For questions about OERs or how to make your courses accessible and affordable, contact Haley Walton, Librarian for Education and Open Scholarship, at the Duke University Libraries.

Open Education Week, a worldwide event for celebrating and promoting OERs, will take place this year the week of March 4th—8th. During OER Week, organizers across the globe will be hosting in-person and virtual events to showcase and discuss open education initiatives. A calendar of events can be found here.

We invite teaching faculty at Duke to click here to complete the survey!

All responses are anonymous.

Why We’re Dropping Basecamp

Screen shot depicts a Microsoft To Do task labelled "Let Basecamp subscription lapse."

We at Duke University Libraries have decided to stop using the project management platform, Basecamp, to which we have subscribed for almost a decade. We came to this decision after weighing the level of its use in our organization, which is considerable, against the harms that we see perpetuated by the leadership of Basecamp’s parent company, 37signals. As a result of our discussions, we will not renew our current subscription when it ends in December. In the meantime, a small group of our staff have committed to help colleagues export their Basecamp content so it can be archived, and we will move to using other productivity platforms.

In July of this year, in a team chat, one of our colleagues shared a link to a blog post authored by one of the founders and owners of 37signals, and commented, “We really might want to rethink our usage of Basecamp.”

It jogged our memories of events some 26 months earlier, when another colleague shared an article published on The Verge, “Breaking Camp.” As reported, internal conflict regarding a culturally-insensitive list of “funny” customer names led Basecamp’s leadership to ban employees from holding “societal and political discussions,” ignoring that the conflict focused on workplace dynamics. Mass resignations resulted, and the experiences of the employees interviewed paints a picture of company leaders who initially supported Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) activities but eventually placed severe restrictions on how those activities could play out at work. In a playbook for the ages, those in power failed to acknowledge the complicated interconnectedness and nuance of the issues under discussion, and set policies that shut down discussions challenging the company culture.

The discussions we had in 2021 identified concerns about both the culture at Basecamp and the impact a decision to leave it would have on our daily work. Staff reflected on the ease of using the platform, the large number of projects that rely on it, and the complication of a decision that would impact groups across in the Libraries in such a direct way. While we talked about how we might respond to the values of third-party companies, we eventually decided not to pursue a cancellation.

When we revisited the discussion this summer, it took a decidedly different direction. The blog post that our colleague shared in July, titled “The law of the land,” by 37signals co-founder, co-owner, and CTO, David Heinemeier Hansson, celebrates the US Supreme Court’s ruling ending considerations of race in admission to colleges and universities. In that post, Hansson links to another that drew our attention, “The waning days of DEI’s dominance.” We also read a third post of his, “Meta goes no politics at work (and nobody cares).” We found there a thread of ugly thought, couched in an overriding intellectual dishonesty, that re-escalated our discussion about continued use of Basecamp.

Continue reading Why We’re Dropping Basecamp

Grad Students: Satisfy Your RCR Credits with the Libraries during Fall Break, Oct. 16-17


If you’re a graduate student at Duke, Fall Break may be a good time to work through several of your RCR credits in just two days! The Duke University Libraries offer a cluster of workshops on diverse subjects in several different disciplines on Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 16-17.  Register now!

ONLINE: From Publication to Product: Take Your Research Out of the Lab and into the Environment (RCR Workshop GS717.14) Monday, October 16, 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

ONLINE: Applying a Project Management Mindset to Your Academic Life (RCR Workshop GS717.15) Monday, October 16, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

ONLINE: Shaping Your Professional Identity Online (RCR Workshop 717.13) Monday, October 16, 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

ONLINE: Expand your Toolbox for International Research (RCR Workshop GS717.16) Monday, October 16, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

ONLINE: Library Toolbox for Responsible Research in the Sciences and Engineering (RCR Workshop GS 714.05) Tuesday, October 17, 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

ONLINE: Public Humanities (RCR Workshop GS717.12) Tuesday, October 17, 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

IN-PERSON: Project Management Lab: Moving from Idea to Action (RCR Workshop GS717.17) Tuesday, October 17, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Murthy Digital Studio.

Best wishes for a pleasant fall break from Duke University Libraries!

Duke Engineering Exposition at Rubenstein Library, Sept. 27

Are you curious about the history of Duke’s Engineering School? Would you like to hold an amputation saw from the 16th century as you contemplate the evolution of surgical tools? Do you want to know how a lipstick tester would work and how it came to Duke?

Join us for a special open house especially for students, faculty, and staff from the Pratt School of Engineering!

Date: Wednesday, September 27
Time: 12:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room (Rubenstein Library 153)

Artifacts on display will highlight:

  • University Archives materials
  • medical instruments
  • other artifacts that reflect technological changes

This informal open house will feature numerous items from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library on Duke’s West campus.

Attendees will have a chance to browse materials and talk with library staff about our collections. Plus enter a raffle to win fabulous library swag! Hope to see you there!

Duke University Libraries Selects New Library Enterprise System


Although most library users won’t notice any difference, changes are coming to an important back-end system the Duke University Libraries uses to handle everything from checking out books to managing thousands of databases and online resources.  Between now and summer 2024, we will sunset our legacy library enterprise system and transition to the Ex Libris Alma Library Services Platform.

Most large research libraries like Duke’s rely on various commercial and open-source software products to handle the everyday work of library staff, integrating systems for broad interoperability and accessibility while at the same time providing a high-quality user experience to library patrons.

While Duke has long contributed to the development of open-source library technologies (we were the founding institution of the Open Library Environment and a charter member of FOLIO), the decision to implement Alma was made after an extensive internal review of the specific library needs of the Duke community, including the separately administered libraries serving the schools of Business, Law, Divinity, and Medicine, as well as Duke Kunshan University Library. After evaluating financial considerations, impact on staffing, and the sustainability of wide-ranging library technology projects in which Duke has invested heavily, library leadership decided to move forward with Alma.

“We are in a better place today because of the contributions and work of our staff, who have laid the foundation for stronger, more sustainable library system at Duke,” said Joseph Salem, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs. “These investments, collaborations, and projects have been worthwhile in preparing us for an impactful future serving the Duke community.”

“We have a notable history of innovation through leveraging and integrating multiple technology platforms for library users,” said Tim McGeary, Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies & Technology. “We remain proud of FOLIO, our contributions and collaboration, and of our colleagues that have fully implemented FOLIO.  We will work with the FOLIO community during this transition to minimize impact on leadership and staff collaboration, and we will fulfill the financial commitments we have made in shared development projects. We also remain proud of our partnership with Index Data, which will continue through hosting and supporting the Library Data Platform. Index Data’s dedication to FOLIO, Project ReShare, and open-source technology development in libraries is strong, and we look forward to future partnerships.”

Project plans for implementing Alma are being developed and will be communicated soon.

Celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Global Accessibility Awareness Day Logo. A navy circle with a keyboard around the letters G A A D.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day Logo. A navy circle with a keyboard around the letters G A A D.

Post contributed by Ira King, Librarian for Disability Studies, and Ciara Healy, Librarian for Psychology & Neuroscience, Mathematics, and Physics.

Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)! 

May 18th marks the 12th annual celebration of GAAD. This day serves to raise awareness of the need for digital inclusion and accessible web content for people with disabilities. 

Why does web accessibility matter? People with disabilities have a right to access and enjoy web content and digital objects. Based on data from the World Health Organization, an estimated 1.3 billion people have disabilities, or 1 in 6 people worldwide. According to a WebAIM report from February 2023, 96.3% of the top million homepages on the Internet had accessibility errors based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The most common accessibility error is low contrast text. Other common errors include missing alternative text for images, empty links, and improperly structured headings (very important for people using screen-readers). Ensuring web pages are accessible makes the Internet a more equitable and inclusive space. 

How can you ensure your web content is accessible? Duke’s Web Accessibility page is a good starting point. Useful info on this webpage includes Duke’s Web Accessibility Guidelines, How-to pages for creating different types of accessible content, and a list of training sessions on web accessibility. Zeke Graves, a Web Experience Developer at Duke Libraries, wrote a Quick Start Guide to Web Accessibility at Duke Libraries and Beyond that could also be helpful for those starting out in this area. 

Another expanding area of accessibility and digital inclusion is in video games. You may have watched the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us, but did you know that The Last of Us Part II’s release in 2020 was a landmark moment for accessibility in gaming? Organizations like AbleGamers and websites like Can I Play That? are advocating for a more inclusive gaming landscape. Game developers have also created a list of Game Accessibility Guidelines to make games more accessible for those with disabilities. If you are interested in this topic and want to learn more about accessibility and disability representation in gaming, you may want to check out the 2023 book Gaming Disability: Disability Perspectives on Contemporary Video Games

If you’re around Duke’s campus right now, you can stop by Perkins and Lilly to see the Disability Pride Collection Spotlights

Get a Durham County Library Card in Perkins, Apr. 25

The new Main Library in downtown Durham is one of the Bull City’s newest architectural gems. All Duke students are eligible to use your local public library, even if you’re not a permanent NC resident.

It’s National Library Week, and we’ve got a quick and easy way you can celebrate!

Stop by Perkins Library on Tuesday, April 25, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m., and sign up for a Durham County Library Card.

It’s free and easy. All you need is your Duke ID (if you’re a Duke student) or other photo ID and proof of Durham residency (everybody else).

That’s right! ALL DUKE STUDENTS ARE ELIGIBLE to get a free Durham County Library Card*. Even if you’re not a permanent North Carolina resident, you can still use your local public library, and you don’t even have to leave your dorm room once you sign up.

If you love the hundreds of popular e-books and audiobooks you can get online through Duke’s library system, consider the THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS MORE you have access to through the Durham County Library!

Not to mention popular streaming services like Hoopla (Kids TV, popular movies, comics, e-books, and more) and IndieFlix (classic films, award-winning shorts, documentaries).

The Durham County Library consists of six branches spread throughout Durham County including the brand-new Main Library in downtown. It’s one of the Bull City’s newest architectural points of pride. If you need a break from studying in our campus libraries, check out their quiet study spots with inspiring views of downtown Durham. You can thank us later when you ace those exams.

If you have any questions about acceptable forms of ID or proof of address, visit the Library Cards page on the Durham County Library website. 


Pro-Tip Footnote

* If you only have a Duke ID when you sign up, you’ll get a Student Card, which lets you check out 10 items at a time, plus access all electronic resources. If you also can show some proof of NC address (can be electronic, photo of a utility bill, piece of mail, etc.), you’ll get a full Library Card, which lets you check out up to 50 items.

ChatGPT and Fake Citations

Post by Hannah Rozear, Librarian for Biological Sciences and Global Health, and Sarah Park, Librarian for Engineering and Computer Science


Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard the buzz about ChatGPT. It can write papers! Debug code! Do your laundry! Create websites from thin air! While it is an exciting tech development with enormous possibilities for applications, understanding what’s under the hood and what it does well/not-so-well is critically important. 

ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched for public use in November 2022. While other AI chatbots are also in development by tech giants such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, OpenAI’s early rollout has eclipsed the others for now – with the site reaching more than 100 million users in 2 months. For some perspective, this is faster widespread adoption than TikTok, Instagram, and many other popular apps.

What you may not know about ChatGPT is that it has significant limitations as a reliable research assistant.  One such limitation is that it has been known to fabricate or “hallucinate” (in machine learning terms) citations. These citations may sound legitimate and scholarly, but they are not real. It is important to note that AI can confidently generate responses without backing data much like a person under the influence of hallucinations can speak confidently without proper reasoning. If you try to find these sources through Google or the library—you will turn up NOTHING. 

Why does it do this? ChatGPT is built on a Large Language Model and has been trained on a huge dataset of internet sources. It can quickly and simply generate easy-to-understand responses to any question you throw at it. But the responses are only as good as the quality of input data it has been trained on. Its core strength lies in recognizing language patterns—not in reading and analyzing lengthy scholarly texts. Given that, it may not be the most reliable source for in-depth research. The following is a shortlist of what we’ve observed ChatGPT is good for and not good for.

What It’s Good For

  • Generating ideas for related concepts, terms, and words about a particular topic. I asked ChatGPT, what are some keywords for the topic of AI literacy? It replied with: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Robotics, Data Science, Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Ethics of AI, Bias in AI, Explainable AI, Human-AI Interaction, Cognitive Computing… These are all great leads for terms I might use to look for articles and books on this topic. 
  • Suggestions for databases where I could find literature on the topic. I asked ChatGPT, What are some good library databases I could search to find more information about the topic of AI literacy? ChatGPT replied with: IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ScienceDirect, JSTOR, Proquest, arXiv, and Web of Science. It also suggested checking with my library to see what’s available. A more direct route to this type of question would be consulting the Duke Libraries Research Guides and/or connecting with the Subject Specialist at Duke who is familiar with the resources we have available on any given topic. 
  • Suggestions for improving writing. As ChatGPT has been trained on a large corpus of text, it has accumulated a range of dictions and writing variations within context. I have found it particularly useful for checking grammar and sentence structure in American English, as well as for suggesting alternative phrasing, synonyms, or quick translations of my writing into another language. Additionally, I have experimented with asking ChatGPT to rewrite my paragraph, but if it produced an unexpected response, it may indicate that my writing contains parts that do not make sense in that particular language. Nonetheless, it is important to thoroughly review the text and ensure that it meets your criteria before taking it. 

What It’s NOT Good For 

  • DO NOT ask ChatGPT for a list of sources on a particular topic! ChatGPT is based on a Large Language Model and does not have the ability to match relevant sources to any given topic. It may do OK with some topics or sources, but it may also fabricate sources that don’t exist. 
  • Be wary of asking ChatGPT to summarize a particular source, or write your literature review.  It may be tempting to ask ChatGPT to summarize the main points of the dense and technical 10-page article you have to read for class, or to write a literature review synthesizing a field of research. Depending on the topic and availability of data it has on that topic, it may summarize the wrong source or provide inaccurate summaries of specific articles—sometimes making up details and conclusions.
  • Do not expect ChatGPT to know current events or predict the future. ChatGPT’s “knowledge” is based on the dataset that was available before September 2021, and therefore, it may not be able to provide up-to-date information on current events or predict the future. For instance, when I asked about the latest book published by Haruki Murakami in the US, ChatGPT responded with First Person Singular, which was published in April 2021. However, the correct answer is Novelist as a Vocation, which was released in November 2022. Additionally, ChatGPT did not seem aware of any recent developments beyond September 2021. It’s worth noting that Murakami’s new novel is expected to be released in April 2023. 

AI chat technology is rapidly evolving and it’s exciting to see where this will go. Much like Google and Wikipedia helped accelerate our access to information in their heyday, the existence of these new AI-based tools requires their users to think about how to carefully and ethically incorporate them into their own research and writing. If you have any doubts or questions, ask real human experts, such as the library’s Ask a Librarian chat, or schedule a one-on-one consultation with a librarian for help.

Resources

Tackling the Law of Text and Data Mining for Computational Research

Guest post by Dave Hansen, Executive Director of the Authors Alliance (and a former Duke Library staff) and co-PI of “Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use,” a project supported by the Mellon Foundation. 


Over the last several years, Duke, like many other institutions, has made a significant investment in computational research, recognizing that such research techniques can have wide-ranging benefits from translational research in the biomedical sciences to the digital humanities, this work can and has been transformative.  Much of this work is reliant on researchers being able to engage in text and data-mining (TDM) to produce the data-sets necessary for large-scale computational analysis. For the sciences, this can range from compiling research data across a whole series of research projects, to collecting large numbers of research articles for computer-aided systematic reviews. For the humanities, it may mean assembling a corpus of digitized books, DVDs, music, or images for analysis into how language, literary themes, or depictions have changed over time. 

The Law of Text and Data Mining

The techniques and tools for text and data-mining have advanced rapidly, but one constant for TDM researchers has been a fear of legal risk. For data-sets composed of copyrighted works, the risk of liability can seem staggering. With copyright’s statutory damages set as high as $150,000 per work infringed, a corpus of several hundred works can cause real concern. 

However, the risks of just avoiding copyrighted works are also high. Given the extensive reach of copyright law, avoiding protected or unlicensed works can mean narrowing research to focus on extremely limited datasets, which can in turn  lead to biased and incomplete results. For example, avoiding copyright for many researchers means using very old,  public domain sources materials, which skews their scholarship to focus on works written by authors that do not represent the diverse voices found in modern publications. 

Thankfully, there is a legal pathway forward for TDM researchers.  Unlike the situation in most other nations, where text and data-mining has benefited from special enabling legislation,  the United States has instead relied on fair use, the flexible copyright doctrine that has been key to US innovation policy. While fair use has the reputation of being nebulous  and confusing (you might recall hearing it described as the  “right to hire a lawyer”) there are good reasons to believe that with appropriate safeguards, non-commerical academic research is reliably protected by fair use.  Only a handful of recent efforts have focused on helping researchers better understand the scope of these fair use rights for TDM research. For example, UC Berkeley spearheaded an NEH-funded project to build legal literacies for text and data mining in 2020. I’m happy to say that Authors Alliance, a nonprofit that supports authors who research and write for the public benefit,  is working to further advance understanding of fair use as applied to TDM research through new resources and direct consultation with researchers under a new Mellon Foundation supported project titled “Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use.” 

Unfortunately, fair use isn’t the only legal barrier to text and data-mining research. For researchers who seek to use modern digital works–for example, ebooks available only in ePub format, or movies only available on DVDs–a whole series of other laws can stand in the way. In particular,  under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the “DMCA,” a creature of late-90s copyright and information policy), Congress created a special set of restrictions on users of digital materials, seeking to give copyright owners the right to place digital locks on their works, such as DRM, to prevent online piracy. The DMCA imposes significant liability for users of copyrighted works who circumvent technical protection measures (e.g., content scramble for DVDs) unless those users comply with a series of complex exemptions promulgated by the U.S. Copyright Office. 

In 2021, Authors Alliance, the Association of Research Libraries, and the American Association of University Professors joined together to successfully petition the US Copyright Office for such a DMCA exemption for text and data mining in support of academic research. That exemption now allows researchers to circumvent technological protection measures that restrict access to literary works and motion pictures. Like other exemptions, it is complicated, containing requirements such as the implementation of strict security measures. But, it is not impenetrable, especially with clear guidance. 

An Invitation to Learn with Us About Legal Issues in Text and Data Mining

To that end, I’m pleased that Duke University Libraries, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and others units at Duke are working with Authors Alliance to take the lead in supporting researchers to overcome legal obstacles to TDM. Together, this spring we will host a series of workshops for faculty, librarians, and others at Duke as well as other Triangle area universities. On March 23, we’ll host a workshop focused on legal issues in TDM using textual materials, and then on April 4, another workshop on TDM with visual and audio-visual materials. Each workshop will give an overview of the state of law as applied to TDM – practical tips and guidance, as well as substantial hands-on discussion about how to address particular challenges. We also plan to use these workshops to gather feedback: about where the law is confusing,  or in its current state, inadequate for researchers. That work is done with an eye toward identifying ways to improve the law to make computational research using TDM techniques more accessible and efficient. 

All are invited to join. You can register for these workshops below.

Legal Issues in Text and Data Mining: Literature and Text-Based Works

Thursday, March 23
12:00 – 1:00 p.m. (Lunch Provided)
The Edge Workshop Room (Bostock Library 127)
Register to attend

Legal Issues in Computational Research Using Images and Audiovisual Works

Tuesday, April 4
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C105)
Register to attend

New Framework for Search Results Page

Screenshot displaying an example of the first two search results for the search phrase Ruby on Rails

We recently updated the unified All search results page linked from the Duke Libraries homepage. Users may notice the following updates to the interface:

  • Catalog results: Items from the catalog displayed in either the Books & Media or the Archival Materials sections include the following updates:
    • Item availability is displayed using either a green check mark or a red x
    • The call number is displayed for titles with only one item
    • A view online link is displayed for titles that are online
    • Cover images have been moved to the right
  • Chat with a Librarian: Patrons will now click to expand the chat box to use it, and the new modal is always accessible by patrons in contrast to the old version that disappeared completely once dismissed.
  • Removing two unused sections: The Images and Other Resources sections of the results page have been removed. Data for the 2020 calendar year show that links within these two sections each received less than 0.3% of all clicks on the page — these sections were simply not being used.
  • Related searches: Terms related to the current search are displayed near the bottom of the page, allowing patrons to quickly perform a new search (this feature only appears for some searches).
  • More search options: Options to search beyond the initial results using tools such as Research Databases, Online Journal Titles, etc. (displayed at the bottom of the page) have been reformatted to conserve space and to include an icon indicating that each link leads to a different website.

Changes to underlying technology

Most of the work to implement this new version is behind the scenes and focuses on the following changes.

New framework

Our old version of the unified results page was built using the Drupal 7 content management system that supports our main website; however, Drupal 7 will soon be replaced with a newer version of Drupal. Rather than migrate our unified search results page to the newer version of Drupal, we opted to migrate to an application called Quicksearch that was developed by our colleagues at North Carolina State University (NC State) and is built with the Ruby on Rails framework.

Since many of our discovery tools are Rails-based, this is a framework that is familiar to our developers, and using NC State’s Quicksearch as our starting point also saved time.

Because the new unified search results page is now a separate application from Drupal, it has a new URL, quicksearch.library.duke.edu, but the primary starting point for accessing it will continue to be the All tab on the library homepage.

Website search

The website search section of our unified search results page previously used a deprecated version of Google Custom Search Engine that was not accessible from Duke Kunshan University. We have switched to a website search based on two open source tools, Nutch (a web crawler) and Solr (a search platform). Using Nutch and Solr for our Website search will allow us to continue displaying ad-free results, will cost less to maintain over time, will be usable by patrons at Duke Kunshan University, and will help us maintain patron privacy.

Purpose

The unified search results page provides users with quick access to content across several of the discovery platforms provided by Duke University Libraries, allowing users to see wide ranging results when starting from the All tab on the library homepage. Users with more granular research needs are invited to explore more focused research paths listed on our Search & Find portal page.

Search box from library homepage with the All tab highlighted

Teamwork

Moving our unified search results page to a new framework is the result of a collaborative project undertaken by IT staff within the library. The Digital Strategies and Technologies Scrum Team completed the implementation; special thanks goes to Cory Lown, Derrek Croney, Michael Daul, Sean Aery, and Zeke Graves.

Good News for Those with Their Nose in a Book

One of the things people always say they love about libraries is the smell of old books. There’s nothing quite so comforting as the slightly musty aroma of stacks upon stacks of so much accumulated knowledge. Of all the things our students and faculty tell us they miss most during this extended period of home isolation, that ineffable library smell is up there at the top.

Now, thanks to recent advances in digital publishing, we’re excited to pilot a new feature in selected library e-books that lets you recapture that odoriferous experience virtually.


Screenshot of Scratch n Sniff e-Book
Look for the green “Scratch-n-Sniff” button in selected library e-books.

The next time you check out an e-book through our library catalog, look for the green “Scratch-n-Sniff” button in the online interface. Clicking the button will activate a feature that artificially simulates the olfactory experience of reading text on vintage, yellowed paper. Just gently scratch your display as you read to be transported back to your favorite reading nook in the library.

The first time you use the “Scratch-n-Sniff” feature, you may need to lean in close to your monitor and breathe deeply to get the full effect. The application isn’t compatible with all browsers. But if your operating system is up-to-date, you should be able adjust the display settings in the control panel of your PC or mobile device to strengthen the smell.

Library users are also advised to scratch carefully, as sharp fingernails and aggressive scratching may damage your monitor and cause the “Scratch-n-Sniff” function not to work properly.

“Over the years, e-books have represented a larger and larger percentage of library collections, even as some researchers—particularly those in the humanities—continue to turn their nose up at them,” said Jeff Kosokoff, Assistant University Librarian for Collection Strategy. “We understand. Nothing quite compares to the age-old experience of immersing yourself in a physical book. But now that digital is the only option for a while, we’re doing everything we can to replicate the experience Duke’s world-class students and faculty are accustomed to.”

“We had to pay through the nose for this add-on feature,” Kosokoff added, “but it’s worth it to keep our Duke community feeling connected to their library.”

Fans of the classics will be particularly pleased to know that the earlier a book’s original publication date, the mustier it smells. For instance, clicking the “Scratch-n-Sniff” button while reading an electronic copy of David Copperfield (which happens to be our next selection for the Low Maintenance Book Club, by the way) is like holding a real first-edition Dickens up to your nose.

The “Scratch-n-Sniff” e-book feature is available for a limited time for selected e-books in our library catalog and works with most PCs, laptops, Apple and Android devices, and e-readers, including Amazon Kindle, Kobo Libra, and Barnes and Noble Nook. It does not work with Internet Explorer, however.

Library user sniffing ebook screen
Is this fragrant feature for real? Unfortunately it snot. Happy April Fools’ Day, Dukies. Smell ya later!

Find Article PDFs Faster with This Browser Plugin

Guest post by Amanda Rizki, Cary Gentry, and Sujeit Llanes, practicum students in our Assessment and User Experience Department.


Are you one of the many students who prefer to browse the web for scholarly articles? 

Do you use Wikipedia as your starting point for research? 

Do you do most of your research before you come to the library’s website?

Maybe you are frustrated by having to relocate each article you find cited on scholarly websites within the Duke Libraries’ databases? 

Nomad Plug-In for Chrome is the tool for you! Nomad is a browser plugin for Google Chrome that helps you find journal article PDFs quickly and easily. Nomad connects your Duke Libraries access to articles found while browsing in Wikipedia, PubMed, or directly on publishers’ websites. 

Once you install the plugin, it will scan the sites you read online for journal article identifiers. When it sees an article that is available through Duke, it provides easy PDF or link access with a consistent, easy-to-find button. Links bring you to a fully accessible article page – no further login required. PDFs can be downloaded directly to your computer. 

Nomad was created by Third Iron, the same company that makes LibKey and BrowZine. The plug-in does not collect any information about you, so the tool is safe to use with your personal information and Duke log-in. While Nomad reads web pages for articles that Duke Library provides access to, it is still your Duke credentials that allow the link or download to move forward. 

An example of Nomad at work in a Wikipedia article about cardiovascular disease.

 

Nomad provides one-click access to articles in PubMed search results.

 

Get Nomad for Chrome today!


Need more assistance setting up this plug-in?  Keep reading!

Plug-ins are extra bits of software that you can add to your internet browser – in this case, to Google Chrome. Google organizes all of the plug-ins available for their browser on a site called Chrome Web Store. This plug-in, Nomad, is free, but some plug-ins must be purchased. 

1. Open Google Chrome. If you have not already installed it, Chrome is available via Google. 

2. In Chrome, type “Chrome libkey nomad” in the address bar and choose the first result. Or open this link.

3. Click the “Add to Chrome” button in the upper right corner of the page:

4. A small popup window will appear. The browser will ask for you to verify that you want to add the plug-in (called the extension) to your computer. 


5. After the plug-in installs, it will prompt you to select your institution.  Choose “Duke University” from the dropdown menu. 

6. The plugin is now ready to use. You can close the window and proceed to browse normally. 

Library Gift Ideas for the Holiday Season

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year is here! We are so excited for the holiday season but know how hard it is to brainstorm gift ideas. Luckily, the Duke University Libraries have two programs that provide the perfect opportunity for a thoughtful and unique present.

Adopt-A-Book

Game of Thrones
A few noteworthy first editions from the recently acquired Locus Science Fiction Foundation collection, all available for adoption.

That best friend who has seen every episode of Game of Thrones? Get them the perfect holiday gift by adopting the first book in the series, signed by George R. R. Martin himself! As part of our Adopt-a-Book Program, you can choose from a number of books and help fund their preservation in honor of someone else.

We have many titles across a variety of subjects, so you can find the perfect title that truly creates a gift like none other. An electronic bookplate with the name of the donor or honoree is added to the item’s catalog record, and they are also listed on the library website as a contributor. Gifts to the program help conserve a book and keep it available for current and future faculty, scholars, and students. 

Some lovely first-editions currently available for adoption are Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle (1962), Edith Wharton’s Old New York (1924), Gertrude Jekyll’s Children and Gardens (1933), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) and John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827). Find many more at our Adopt-a-Book website.


Adopt-A-Digital-Collection

Thumbnail
Duke football player Ken Abbott (c. 1933), from the Duke Sports Information Office Photographic Negatives Collection.

Maybe you have an uncle who loves Duke athletics but already has ten basketball jerseys? You can still give him the perfect holiday gift by adopting Photographic Negatives from the Duke Sports Information Office, a digital collection relating to all things Duke sports. Every year, we digitize thousands of items in our collections. These digital assets must be carefully managed to preserve them for generations of students and researchers to come. This work requires storage space, the specialized expertise of our talented staff, and you! Our Adopt-a-Digital-Collection program allows you to support the long-term preservation of these important cultural and scholarly resources, keeping them safe and accessible indefinitely. Each digital collection available for adoption is unique, allowing you to specialize your holiday gift to someone’s interests.  

Some collections currently available to be preserved include the African American Soldier’s Korean War photo album, the Isaac Leroy Shavers Papers that include his sermons and missionary work, and Italian Cultural Posters. Find those and more at our Adopt-a-Digital Collection website

 

Mellon Grant Continues Support of Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute

Part research retreat, part idea incubator, the institute provides time and space for project teams to develop ideas and refine plans in ways that are difficult to do in most work contexts. (Photo from the 2017 Triangle SCI.)

The Duke University Libraries have a received a grant of $360,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue support of the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute (TriangleSCI).

Every year, the TriangleSCI brings together teams of scholars, information scientists, librarians, publishers, technologists, and others from both inside and outside academia to discuss needs and opportunities in the domain of scholarly communications.

Each annual institute is organized under a broad theme (this year’s theme is “Equity in Scholarly Communication”), and proposals are invited for projects that fit with that theme.

The grant covers program administration, as well as expenses for approximately 30 participants from around the world to convene in the Research Triangle region for four days each fall.

Part research retreat, part idea incubator, the institute provides time and space for project teams to develop ideas and refine plans in ways that are difficult to do in most work contexts. The goal is to provide a combination of structured and unstructured time to brainstorm, organize, and jump-start ideas in an informal but highly productive environment.

The Scholarly Communication Institute began in 2003 as a Mellon-funded initiative at the University of Virginia and was based there for nine years. In 2014, it moved to the Research Triangle where it has been hosted ever since by Duke, working in close collaboration with partners at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, North Carolina Central University, and an advisory board from these partners and other universities and organizations across the country.

“We could not realize our most ambitious goals without The Mellon Foundation’s continued generosity,” said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs. “Their ongoing support has made it possible for nearly 200 people to participate in the TriangleSCI over the past six years, and to return to their usual work energized and ready to create positive and pragmatic change in the world of scholarly communications.”

TriangleSCI participants have come from more than two dozen countries, representing a variety of languages, cultures, and contexts. Teams have included senior administrators as well as undergraduate students, researchers and teaching faculty, librarians, publishers, software developers, musicians, storytellers, journalists, and more.

To learn more about the TriangleSCI, and to see the types of projects represented at each year’s program, visit the institute’s website or find them on Twitter.

Changes to Kanopy Streaming Service


Effective September 20, 2019, the Duke University Libraries have transitioned to a title-by-title access model for Kanopy, a popular library of streaming video titles. This change comes as a result of the unsustainable increase in cost of providing unlimited access through an automatic licensing model.

Kanopy’s pricing for libraries under our previous model was based on views per title. Once a title was viewed three times for longer than 30 seconds, we were charged a licensing fee of $135 for one year of access.

Under the new model, users will still be able to watch and stream all of our currently licensed films in Kanopy (of which there are more than 800). New titles may still be requested by members of the Duke community, but they will not be accessible automatically.

We understand and respect how popular streaming media has become. It is an invaluable instructional resource and a gateway for lifelong learning. We regret having to make this change. But we could neither justify nor sustain Kanopy’s skyrocketing price tag.

Duke is not alone in having made this difficult choice. The libraries at Stanford and Harvard have also had to limit their use of Kanopy, and the New York Public Library system recently canceled their subscription to the service due to the unsustainable cost.

Here’s a summary of what’s changing:

  • We will only subscribe to Media Education Foundation titles on Kanopy.
  • Already-licensed films can still be found on Kanopy and are listed individually in our online library catalog.
  • All other titles may be requested via the Kanopy platform or through a course reserve request.
  • We will continue to accept faculty requests for Kanopy films and videos assigned in courses. If you are a faculty member, use our Place Items on Reserve form for these titles. If you are using a film for a class and are concerned about the expiration date of our license for it, use the same form to ensure access.

Other options for streaming and viewing video

We have a number of other streaming video platforms available to members of the Duke community. For a complete list, please refer to our Streaming Video guide.

We also encourage you to explore our extensive DVD and Blu-ray holdings, which you can find in our online catalog and have delivered to the Duke library of your choice.

For more info

For additional questions about Kanopy or about our film streaming options, please contact:

Danette Pachtner
Librarian for Film, Video & Digital Media
danettep@duke.edu

 

 

Expanded Access to Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)

We are pleased to announce that the Duke University Libraries have greatly expanded access to the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)!

This comes in response to numerous requests over the last few years. We have a new deal for all current JoVE titles (see title list and details below). While the official start date is January 2019, JoVE has already opened up full access to Duke IP addresses.

What is JoVE?

JoVE publishes peer-reviewed videos of people doing real-world scientific experiments. By letting you watch the intricate details of experiments rather than just read about them in articles, JoVE helps you understand how to recreate those experiments, thereby improving research productivity, reproducibility, and student learning outcomes.

How and why to use it

JoVE funded a study of the impact on student performance of watching their videos prior to lab classes. A description of the study and a link to download the resulting whitepaper can be found here.

The JoVE blog also has a number of posts giving examples of how faculty are using JoVE in their teaching and research. For example:

  • Dr. Dessy Raytcheva at Northeastern University uses JoVE videos as pre- and post-assignments in her undergraduate biology course, in order to save class time for higher impact teaching activities.
  • Marilene Pavan, manager of Boston University’s DAMP lab credits publishing video protocols in JoVE with significant increases in experimental success rate and reduction in errors.

You can see all of those case studies here.

Assessment

Given the high subscription costs for this product, we will be looking at usage statistics and impact stories to determine whether to continue after an initial three years. So if you use JoVE in your research or teaching, please let us know!

Journal Title List

  • Behavior2
  • Biochemistry3
  • Bioengineering2
  • Biology1,2
  • Cancer Research2
  • Chemistry3
  • Developmental Biology2
  • Engineering2
  • Environment3
  • Genetics2
  • Immunology & Infection2
  • Medicine3
  • Neuroscience1,2

Science Education Collection List

  • Advanced Biology1
  • Basic Biology1,3
  • Chemistry
  • Clinical Skills3
  • Engineering
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Physics
  • Psychology

1 Previously subscribed
2 Perpetual access
3 Temporary access (2019 only)

Details of our access

Our new deal includes perpetual access to video articles published under most of the JoVE journal titles, even if we don’t continue subscribing to new content. For a few titles (those that are more clinical in focus or for which we have received the fewest requests), we will only have access through December 2019, unless we decide to expand even further. For the remaining titles, we will have access as long as we continue to subscribe.

Please contact DUL science librarians at askscience@duke.edu if you have any questions or comments. We are also happy to provide links to support documentation, such as instructions for embedding JoVE videos in Sakai.

Introducing the Digital Humanities to Graduate Students

At a recent lunch discussion organized by the Versatile Humanists program, I had the opportunity to talk with Duke graduate students about getting started in the digital humanities.  The proposition sounds straightforward in some ways: if you want to get started, well, jump right in. But our conversation underscored the difficulties of approaching the digital humanities as a novice.  Where do you go for training or mentoring, for example? What does training entail? Do you need to code? Should you plan a digital humanities project of your own or join an established one? How do you know whether a project “counts” as digital humanities at all?  

Those are all good questions, and they’re sometimes difficult to answer directly because DH seems so diverse and amorphous.  To help address some of these issues, I thought it would be useful to recap some of the big questions from our lunch conversation–to reflect on the digital humanities with an eye toward helping graduate students understand their nature and, ultimately, how to jump right in.  (Those wanting to pose their own questions are invited to join an encore conversation Thursday, October 18, 12:00-1:00 PM, as Liz Milewicz and I launch the Digital Brown Bag series on topics, projects, and questions in digital scholarship.)    

What are the digital humanities?
The digital humanities involve using computational technology to explore, understand, preserve, and communicate about our cultural heritage.  Anybody can do it, and you don’t need to code, but coding can offer you a fast track to understanding some of the technical dimensions of our craft.  

At least, that’s my view.  The term “digital humanities” is a site of open debate, and the debate ranges from serious critique (“is this a field with a general research agenda?”) to quibbles (“can you really call yourself a digital humanist if you can’t code?”). If you’re at all interested in the digital humanities, you’ll eventually encounter this kind of writing, which seeks to define our label and work out its implications.  For example, Routledge has published a book, edited by some DH luminaries, called Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader.  At 330 pages, it encompasses a lot of defining, and it’s not even comprehensive.  

Your enthusiasm for this genre of rhetoric may wax and wane as you do DH.  It’s easy to feel jaded after a while, but we all know and feel the scholarly urge to define, in unambiguous terms, what we’re talking about when we talk about something.  One of the hallmarks of the digital humanities themselves, though, is a comfort with variable outcomes, with uncertainty, with unexpected detours and discoveries, with transdisciplinary experimentation.  With the novel and weird — with things that are difficult to define.

Maybe defining DH is less important than we reflexively think. As Lisa Spiro has pointed out, community and shared values are a lot more useful than abstract definitions.  I think it’s enough to say that you’ll find out what the term “digital humanities” means for you if you start working in the field.  You may even find the term inadequate and prefer, as one of my colleagues does, phrases like “Big Humanities” — a banner of both venturesome scholarship and inclusivity, one that may entail fewer shibboleths and more varieties of hacking.  

But how do I get started? Do I need to code?  Do I need training in specific technologies?
The digital humanities are many things to many people, but for me, their animating spirit isn’t technology per se; instead, it’s a mode of imaginative attention that engenders certain approaches to understanding objects of humanistic study. That mode of attention is technologically inflected, but it arises primarily from the instincts of the humanist. In other words: you generally want to lead with your research interests, not with an interest in technology that may or may not meet your needs.

At the same time, it’s not difficult to imagine how exploring technology–a digital exhibit platform, a topic modeling tool, GIS software–can influence your research agenda.  A basic condition of the digital humanities is that we often use tools of precision and formal expression to learn about cultural artifacts whose enduring value is rooted in ambiguity.  But I think the use of those tools and approaches has a sharpening effect on one’s scholarly vision. When you create or work with digitized materials, when you create models, when you try to be precise and unambiguous even though you know that ambiguity is a soil where meaning grows, you have to interrogate assumptions and first impressions.  It doesn’t do to trust vague notions when you are preparing a digital edition, mapping a novel, or understanding the results of your automated text analysis. What do we really mean by this location or that name? Are we sure that we know what we think we know about this place? What does it mean for a text analysis program to discern “topics” in a corpus?  And, at a more general level, what possibilities open up when we grapple with these questions in the context of digital scholarship?

This kind of reflection seems worthwhile for scholars, and it’s also a reason that digital scholarship often serves a pedagogical function analogous to that of old-school, kinda-formalist close reading. The act of naming or identifying things precisely also reveals imprecision and uncertainty or ambiguity in a text.  Realizing cultural artifacts — literature, architecture, paintings, music — as data isn’t just anatomizing them for convenience. It’s also helping us understand those artifacts in other ways.

Put another way: to make our cultural record computationally tractable in ways that illuminate and retain what’s distinctive and untranslatable about that record, we need the experience and the perspective of the humanist scholar. And because doing DH so often means interrogating and revising our assumptions about a cultural artifact, we also sharpen that humanistic experience and perspective in doing it.  

This is a roundabout way of addressing the questions above, and I don’t mean to sell short the perspective of technologists or the value of learning to code.  In fact, I think humanists should learn to code, for many of the reasons I express above, and I think that the best digital humanities projects are broadly collaborative ventures that draw inspiration from many people with diverse competencies and interests.

Learning from doing–and failing
For that reason (and others), it probably doesn’t make sense to undertake a large digital humanities project on your own in graduate school.  But there are two good ways to immerse yourselves in the digital humanities: joining a project and aimlessly playing around.

If you can join an existing project in some capacity, you will learn a lot about the diverse and complex elements of digital humanities work.  You’ll also learn more simply by absorbing what goes on around you than you will in a year of reading about the digital humanities.

The other way of learning — aimless playing around — should become habit, too.  The DH community is supportive and experimentally inclined; you’ll be right at home asking how things work, experimenting, and emulating what you like.  And more locally, consultants, training, and support services at Duke are available to catalyze your exploration.

Of course, much of what you try isn’t going to work.  Failure happens a lot in DH, so it’s a good environment to shed any phobias of failure (and to mitigate impostor syndrome; everybody in DH is learning on the fly).  The digital humanities invite you to think about failure differently: as a ticket back to the planning stage, only you’re much wiser this time, or as an open door to a new course of project development or dissemination.  There’s always something generative about failure and failed ideas in DH, and generally speaking, the DH community is open to talking about misfires and sharing lessons from work gone wrong.

Exploring further
For more on the digital humanities, including resources and organizations here at Duke, you may want to check out the following.  For convenience, this list includes inline links from the text above.

Local events, resources, and organizations

Introductory texts and learning resources

 

Library RCR Days!

The Duke University Libraries will be offering a suite of RCR workshops for graduate students over Fall Break, October 8-9, 2018, including:

Monday, October 8

Ethics and Visualization
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
This session introduces participants to core ideas in the ethics of visualization—designing to avoid distortion, designing ethically for broad user communities, developing empathy for people represented within the data, and using reproducibility to increase the transparency of design.
Learn more and register

Digital Publishing: Multimodal Storytelling
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
This session will provide an overview of common options for publishing sound and video on the web, focusing on the benefits of various platforms, licensing and rights issues, accessibility issues to consider, and methods of integrating multiple media into research publications.
Learn more and register

Research Impact Concepts and Tools
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
This workshop is designed to help you, as a graduate student, better understand how research impact is currently measured and outline Duke’s resources for assessing impact, from Web of Science to Altmetric Explorer. The workshop will include hands-on exploration of research impact tools, so please bring your laptop to participate.
Learn more and register

Digital Publishing: Reaching and Engaging Audiences
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Who are the intended users of your digital publication? How can you reach new audiences and keep your existing audiences actively engaged? We’ll learn about some of the ways successful projects connect with their users and promote their work to potential audiences. Participants will leave this session with a solid grounding in the ethical and logistical dimensions of engaging audiences and incorporating audience involvement into their own publication practices.
Learn more and register

Image Copyright and Acquisition for Scholars
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Visual literacy standards and the law are necessary for nearly every humanities and social-sciences project.  This workshop addresses two aspects of image use in scholarship: 1) techniques in obtaining scholarly images (what a scholarly image is, determining original resolution, searching free- and free-to-use images for scholarly research, and when you should pay), and 2) a brief course on image copyright and intellectual property—both the scholar’s and the user’s rights and how each can be asserted.  Relevant case history examples will be cited to back up a scholar’s use of images.
Learn more and register

Tuesday, October 9

Retractions in Science and Social Science Literature
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
This workshop will discuss the burgeoning phenomena of retractions in the scientific and social scientific literature. No one plans to have an article retracted, so we will cover what to do to avoid or address a retraction or expression of concern and what the existing editorial literature can offer if you do find yourself dealing with a retraction as an author or one of a group of authors.
Learn more and register

Text/Data: Acquiring and Preparing a Corpus of Texts
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
This session focuses on the technical dimensions of corpus development.  Using an array of printed matter—from digital facsimiles of incunabula to modern letterpress/offset books—we will explore the risks and benefits of optical character recognition (OCR); file formatting and naming issues; organization strategies for large corpora; and problems of data cleaning and preparation. While this session will not examine legal issues in detail, we will discuss some common legal concerns around the use of textual corpora.
Learn more and register

Text/Data: Topic Modeling and Document Classification With MALLET
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Participants in this session will acquire a general understanding of topic modeling, the automated analysis technique often referred to as “text mining.”  In addition to topic modeling, this session introduces the concepts of sequence labeling and automated document classification, both of which are also possible with MALLET.
Learn more and register

Shaping Your Professional Identity Online
3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
This workshop is designed to help you consider the best ways to navigate how you want to present yourself online.  We will discuss topics such as what to share and how to share, the ethical issues involved, and how to maintain the right balance of privacy.  We will also examine some steps you can take, such as creating a profile on Google Scholar, creating a Google alert for your name, creating an ORCID ID, interacting professionally on Twitter, and creating an online portfolio.
Learn more and register

Launching the Data Curation Network

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant will fund implementation of shared staffing model across 7 academic libraries and the Dryad Digital Repository.


The Duke University Libraries will greatly expand data curation services to the Duke community as part of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Data Curation Network (DCN).

Designed to support researchers seeking data curation assistance, the three-year DCN grant will establish a shared network of data curation staff across seven academic libraries and the Dryad Digital Repository that expands the curation capabilities of all the members.

Researchers at Duke will be able to draw on a wide range of data experience with the DCN, extending the data curation staff beyond those in the Duke Libraries as established from the recommendations of the Digital Research Data Services Faculty Working Group. As data curation becomes more discipline-specific, the DCN will allow a much more specialized level of curation than is possible at any one institution.

DCN members include the following partners: University of Minnesota Libraries, Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University, University of Michigan Library, University Library at University of Illinois at Urbana­-Champaign, Cornell University Library, Penn State University Libraries, and the Dryad Digital Repository.

Currently, staff at each of these institutions provide their own data curation services. But because data curation requires a specialized skill set — spanning a wide variety of data types and discipline-specific data formats — institutions cannot reasonably expect to hire an expert in each area.

The intent of the DCN is to serve as a cross-institutional staffing model that seamlessly connects a network of expert data curators to local datasets and to supplement local curation expertise. Data curators bring the disciplinary knowledge and software expertise necessary for reviewing and curating data deposits to ensure that the data are reusable. The project aims to increase local capacity, strengthen collaboration between libraries and disciplinary projects, and ensure that researchers and institutions ethically and appropriately share data.

“The Data Curation Network allows Duke Libraries to expand its deep commitment to research data management through a partnership that will empower Duke researchers to share their data with the wider academic community,” said Joel Herndon, Head of Data and Visualization Services in the Duke Libraries.

Data curation is a relatively new service at universities as funders increasingly require that the raw data from sponsored research be preserved and shared. In addition, many publishers now either require or encourage that data sets accompanying articles be made available through a publicly accessible repository. Finally, many researchers wish to make their data available regardless of funder requirements both to enhance their impact and also to propel the concept of open science.

This project builds on previous work that includes the July 2017 report: “Data Curation Network: A Cross-Institutional Staffing Model for Curating Research Data,” which is available on the project website, datacurationnetwork.org.

For more information about the grant and/or data curation in Duke Libraries, please contact askdata@duke.edu.

 

New Service: Check Out Books with Your Phone

Duke Self-Checkout is a fast, easy way to check out books from the Duke University Libraries.

Starting this week, you can now use your smartphone to check out library books in Perkins and Bostock Libraries, without having to bring them to the desk on the main floor.

Yes, there’s an app for that. It’s called Duke Self-Checkout.

How Does It Work?

Visit the App Store (Apple devices) or Google Play (Android) and search for ‘Duke Self-Checkout’ to download the free app.

Make sure to let Duke Self-Checkout access your camera, send you notifications, and use your location.

Open the app and log in with your Duke NetID and password. Click the ‘+’ sign in the top right corner to activate your camera.

When you find a book you want to check out, use the app on your phone to scan the library barcode. The app will blink green when it recognizes the barcode and check the item out to you right there. That’s it!

Remember to demagnetize your book before you leave the building!

If you want leave the building with your book, make sure you stop at one of the Duke Self-Checkout stations to demagnetize your book so it doesn’t set off an alarm.

Don’t have a phone or don’t want to download the app? Use the iPad at the Duke Self-Checkout stations, located in Perkins near the Perkins / Bostock Lobby, and in Bostock at the Edge Service Desk.

Duke Self-Checkout is also available at the Marine Lab Library.

Visit our website to find out more.

 

Renovated and Upgraded Interview Rooms in Perkins

The newly-renovated Perkins B09, ready for your big interview. Go get em, tiger.

Got a big phone or Skype interview coming up you just have to nail? Worried about noise, bad cell service, or nosy roommates jeopardizing that all-important first impression? The Libraries have felt your pain, and we’re here to help.

We now have not one but two beautifully renovated interview rooms in Perkins Library, designed especially for phone and remote video interviews and available to all Duke students, faculty, and staff.

To reserve one of the Interview Rooms, visit the online registration page, check the schedule for an available day and time, enter your name and Duke email address, and respond to the confirmation email within 1 hour (otherwise your reservation could be canceled). That’s it! The room is all yours.

The two rooms have similar but slightly different features. Perkins B09 (located on Lower Level 2) features a brand new all-in-one telephone/videoconferencing system, whereas Perkins 130 (located on the library’s main floor) features a landline system only. Each room has its own dedicated phone number, in case the person conducting the interview prefers to call you.

Also, in response to popular demand, we have increased the 60-minute time limit on the rooms to 90 minutes.

Questions? Comments? Fan mail for helping you land that dream internship? Let us know at asklib@duke.edu.

 

 

Secure Update for Library Website

Students using computers
October 2017, National Cybersecurity Awareness Month

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and over the next few weeks Duke’s IT security office will be sharing tips and resources to help students, faculty, and staff protect their digital security.

Here in the Libraries, we’re doing our own part to make our web presence more secure. During fall break, the Duke University Libraries web site will begin using the HTTPS protocol by default. HTTPS, which means Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, ensures an encrypted connection, providing greater privacy and security than the HTTP protocol many of our sites have previously used. This change will apply to web sites that we maintain directly, such as our homepage and our digitized collections, and to hundreds of the databases and journals that we subscribe to.

What does this mean?

When you go to our web site using the old adress that begins with “http://” you will automatically be redirected to an address that begins with “https://” — for example, the full address of our homepage will be https://library.duke.edu.

You will know a web site is using HTTPS when the URL begins with “https://” and your web browser displays a closed padlock icon as seen in the following example:

A padlock icon next to a web site URL indicates it uses a secure protocol

Will the entire Library web site use HTTPS?

Most of the Library web site will use HTTPS; however, the portion of the Library web site that we refer to as the Classic Catalog will not transition from HTTP to HTTPS. Students, faculty, and staff may continue to use Classic Catalog “as is,” and it will continue to function as it always has without change. When using Classic Catalog, some newer web browsers will display a “Not Secure” warning when you type search terms into the search box.

As an alternative, we encourage you to use either the All search or Books & Media search to find resources at Duke University Libraries via the more secure HTTPS protocol. Both of these more secure search options are available within the library’s home page search box.

On October 25, 2017, we will remove the link to Classic Catalog from our home page, although this legacy platform will continue to be available “as is” at its current address.

Problems? Questions?

Additional information is available for your use in troubleshooting, reporting problems, and asking questions.

October Collection Spotlight: Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education

October marks the start of Duke NextEd Festival, a series of 30+ events celebrating learning innovation at Duke organized by Duke Learning Innovation (comprised of the Center for Instructional Technology and Online Duke). To coincide with the festival, we put together a Collection Spotlight that features some of our top reads on innovation and change in higher education.

Through these picks you can learn how the university as we know it came to be, investigate the many forces affecting higher ed today, delve into the latest research on effective teaching and learning, get great ideas for making education more effective and relevant, and explore some radical rethinking of what education should do and be.

A top pick from the October Collection Spotlight is The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux by Cathy Davidson, Duke’s former Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. In this book, Davidson argues that the American university is stuck in the past and shows how we can revolutionize it to prepare students for our age of constant change. Davidson will give a talk on the book on campus on October 11 as part of NextEd. She will be joined in conversation with Edward Balleisen, Professor of History and Public Policy and Duke’s Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies.

If you like some of the ideas you’re reading about in our selections (or hate them), we encourage you to tweet about it using the NextEd hashtag, #DukeNextEd. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni can also join the conversation about the future of education at Duke by attending one of the many NextEd events happening in the coming weeks.

If you have questions, contact Courtney Lockemer, Communications Manager, Online Duke/Center for Instructional Technology, at courtney.lockemer@duke.edu.

 

In-Depth Look at SNCC’s Past Offers Lessons for Activists Today

Man and woman looking over a brochure for a political candidate before election day in Lowndes County, Alabama, November, 1966, Photograph by Jim Peppler, Courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.

What can the immediate past teach us about voting rights, self-determination, and democracy today? A new website created by the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University explores how the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—the only youth-led national civil rights group—organized a grassroots movement in the 1960s that empowered Black communities and transformed the nation.  Told from the perspectives of the activists themselves, the SNCC Digital Gateway: Learn from the Past, Organize for the Future, Make Democracy Work (snccdigital.org) highlights SNCC’s thinking and work building democracy from the ground up, making those experiences and strategies accessible to activists, educators, and engaged citizens today.

Generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the site uses documentary footage, audio recordings, photographs, and documents to chronicle how SNCC organizers, alongside thousands of local Black residents in the Deep South, worked to enable Black people to take control of their lives. The gateway unveils and examines the inner workings of SNCC over the course of its 12-year existence—its structure, how it coordinated sit-ins and other direct action protests, and how it organized voter registration efforts and economic cooperatives to effect social change. SNCC had more field staff than any civil rights organization and was considered the cutting edge of the civil rights movement.

The SNCC Digital Gateway also presents the voices of today’s young activists in the Movement for Black Lives, sharing their views on the impact of SNCC and the southern civil rights movement of the 1960s on their activities today. “Reading through the SNCC Digital Gateway website is like taking a masters class in community organizing,” explains Jennifer Bryant, a community organizer based in Washington, D.C. “The primary source documents provide a deeper understanding of how SNCC was structured, the day-to-day work of field organizers and how campaigns were shaped. The site serves as a reminder that the civil rights movement was fought by everyday people. It provides hope that in these perilous times, we too can fight and win.” Courtland Cox, chairman of the SNCC Legacy Project, who served as an organizer in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s, explains, “Our experiences have created a level of ‘informational wealth’ that we need to pass on to young people. This unprecedented collaboration with Duke University hopefully will pilot a way for other academic institutions to re-engage history and those who make it.”

The website is a product of a groundbreaking partnership among veteran civil rights activists of the SNCC Legacy Project, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, Duke University Libraries, and civil rights scholars. Wesley Hogan, director of the Center for Documentary Studies, who has written extensively about SNCC’s work and legacy explains, “The way we are working together—activists, archivists, and scholars—is a powerful new model. This project gives us a unique opportunity to understand the work of the local people who broke apart Jim Crow that would otherwise be lost to future generations.”


For more information, contact:

Wesley Hogan, Director, Center for Documentary Studies
(919) 660-3610
wesley.hogan@duke.edu

Courtland Cox, Chairman, SNCC Legacy Project
(220) 550-8455
courtlandc@starpower.net

John Gartrell, John Hope Franklin Research Center, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
(919) 660-5922
john.gartrell@duke.edu

Edge Lightning Talks: Research in Progress, Dec. 9

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What: Research talks, coffee, and dessert
Where: The Edge Workshop Room (Bostock 127)
When: Friday, December 9, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.

You’ve seen their projects around campus—come find out what these students are working on! Join us for a series of lightning talks given by students working on projects in the Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology and Collaboration (also known as “The Edge”) or with significant collaboration from Duke University Libraries. They will discuss their research and future plans.

The participating students are working on projects with:

Following the lightning talks and a panel Q&A, join presenters for a coffee and dessert reception to celebrate a successful semester.

Interested in project space in The Edge for the spring 2017 semester? We’re now accepting applications. Submit an application online or email us at edge@duke.edu for more information.

Sponsored by The Edge: The Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology and Collaboration

Announcing a New Data Visualization Challenge

untitled-design13The Office of the Vice Provost for Research is announcing a data visualization challenge focused on a rich dataset describing research activity and output of Duke researchers. The datasets are from Scholars@Duke and they describe publications, authorships, and scholarly collaborations from university researchers.

The challenge. Create visualizations to capture the richness and dynamism of Duke research. Envisioning Duke Research | Visualizing Scholars@Duke

The dataset encompasses bibliographical information and abstracts, publication venue (including journals and conferences), and a co-authorship network. More information can be obtained on the Scholars@Duke website.

In order to participate in the challenge, simply download the data and indicate your intent to submit visualization by midnight on Sunday, January 15, 2017. The visualization will be presented at a poster session on January 19 and at the Duke Research Computing Symposium on January 20.

First prize is $500, second prize is $250, and third prize will be awarded $100. Judges of the posters are experts in data analysis and visualization in the Duke community. All are invited to participate in this amazing opportunity to showcase skills in data visualization!

Forgot Your Charger? Don’t Despair!

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Never let this sight ruin your study session again! Phone and laptop chargers available in Perkins and Lilly Libraries

With the semester halfway over, the library has become practically your second home. You’ve loaded up your textbooks, grabbed a coffee, and settled into “the perfect study spot.”

You’re halfway through writing an essay, when you realize your laptop only has 5% battery left. You scramble through your backpack, but no luck. You forgot your charger… again.

No worries! Perkins and Lilly Library now have a variety of chargers that students can check out to get you right back into your study zone.

Chargers are available at the Link Help Desk in Perkins or at the service desk in Lilly. Each charger can be checked out for three hours, plenty of time to recharge your battery and finish that paper. Below is the list of chargers that are now available:

  • Dell 90W AC Adapter
  • OB46994 Lenovo 90W AC Adapter (Slim Tip) for T440 series and current Lenovo laptops
  • Apple 80W MagSafe for earlier model laptops
  • Apple 80W MagSafe2 for current model laptops
  • Multiuse phone charger compatible with new and older model iPhones, along with a micro USB, compatible with most Android phones

So if you are need of a quick recharge, be sure to swing by the Link Help Desk in Perkins or the service desk at Lilly, and never let a forgotten charger ruin your perfect study session again!

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Duke University Libraries Receives Virtual Reality Grant to “Flip Prisons”

Durham School of the Arts students tour the abandoned prison in Wagram, NC, which the nonprofit organization GrowingChange is hoping to flip into a sustainable farm and education center.
Durham School of the Arts students tour the abandoned prison in Wagram, NC, which the nonprofit organization GrowingChange is hoping to flip into a sustainable farm and education center.

The Duke University Libraries have received a $52,647 grant from the State Farm Youth Advisory Board to help transform an abandoned prison into a sustainable farm and education center through the magic of virtual reality.

“It’s not easy to visualize how an abandoned and unused prison can be repurposed to help a struggling community,” said David Stein, Duke PepsiCo Education Technology Partnership Coordinator and principal investigator for the project. “We are ‘shackled’ by our preconceived notions of what prisons can be.”

The prison in question is an actual former correctional facility in rural Wagram, in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina with one of the state’s highest unemployment rates. The idea to “flip” the abandoned site into a sustainable farm is the mission of GrowingChange, a North Carolina nonprofit led by a team of formerly incarcerated youth.

GrowingChange gives young people in the criminal justice system job training and life skills through farming and service learning. Their goal is to create as a national model for reusing closed prisons.

Eight high school students in the Game Art & Design concentration at the Durham School of the Arts, working under veteran teacher Robert Bourgeois, will work with youth participants in GrowingChange to design a virtual reality version of the flipped prison, in order to help people visualize the site’s untapped potential. Jail cells will be transformed into aquaponics tanks, guard towers into climbing walls, the galley into a certified community kitchen, and the old “hot box” will become a recording studio.

In recent years, virtual reality technology has been rapidly transforming industries from journalism to documentary filmmaking by providing audiences 360-degree sensory experiences that are hard to forget. The grant will support the development and design of the virtual reality program, which GrowingChange can use to better communicate its vision.

Training and technical support in virtual reality content production will be provided throughout the project by the Virtual Reality Learning Experience (VRLE), an educational outreach and advocacy arm of Durham’s Lucid Dream, a virtual reality production studio based in the American Underground technology incubator. “This is exactly the sort of transformational story that cannot be sufficiently conveyed using traditional mediums like video and web,” said Mike McArdle, co-founder at Lucid Dream/VRLE. “This project is perfectly suited for the sort of immersive and visceral experience that VR enables.”

Students from the Durham School of the Arts try out virtual reality technology at the American Underground offices of Lucid Dream, a virtual reality production company in Durham.
Students try out virtual reality technology at the American Underground offices of Lucid Dream, a virtual reality production company in Durham.

According to GrowingChange director Noran Sanford, “Just as our youth leaders have re-visualized their life, virtual reality allows them to share a new vision for Scotland, Hoke and Robeson Counties, home of North Carolina’s highest unemployment, poverty, and violent crime rates and the worst health outcomes. Classrooms, state leaders, and supporters touring a traveling museum exhibit will be able to walk along the top of the front guard tower and see the future vision of it becoming a climbing wall and repelling station. Through this process, our community will be able to re-visualize how youth from tough circumstances can become the leaders to help us change our grim statistics.”

The grant will be administered through the PepsiCo K-12 Technology Mentor Program, a partnership between the Duke University Libraries and Duke’s Office of Durham and Regional Affairs. The program, endowed by a grant from PepsiCo, encourages the use of educational technology in Durham Public Schools.

GrowingChange hopes that the Wagram prison will become a national model for reusing closed prisons.
GrowingChange hopes that the Wagram prison will become a national model for reusing closed prisons.

The grant is one of 63 service-learning, youth-led projects across the United States to receive funding this year by the State Farm Youth Advisory Board. Since its inception in 2006, the State Farm Youth Advisory Board has granted over $40 million, impacting over 21.5 million students.

“State Farm supports service-learning because it integrates service to the community into classroom curriculum using a hands-on approach to mastering subject material while fostering civic responsibility,” said Kim Conyers, Community Specialist for North Carolina. “The State Farm Youth Advisory Board is a prime example of State Farm’s commitment to education, our community and our youth.”

Media Contacts:

  • State Farm: Michal Brower, media spokesperson for North Carolina, 863-318-3088
  • Duke University Libraries: Aaron Welborn, director of communications, 919-660-5816
  • GrowingChange: Noran Sanford, 910-280-4150
  • Durham School of the Arts: Robert Bourgeois, 919-560-3926, ext. 23489
  • Lucid Dream VR / VRLE: Joshua Setzer, 919-454-9075
  • Duke PepsiCo Education Technology Coordinator: David Stein, 919-812-5873

On the Road with the Frank C. Brown Collection

Guest post by Winston Atkins, Preservation Officer for the Duke University Libraries and Principal Investigator for the grant to digitize Frank Clyde Brown’s recordings of early twentieth-century folk music.

Frank C. Brown in the field, date and location unknown. Brown often used a car battery to power the recording devices he used.
Frank C. Brown in the field, date and location unknown. Brown often used a car battery to power the recording devices he used.

 

We are a nation linked by iHeartRadio stations playing “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones—that much is certain. I come to understand this as I drive the Frank Clyde Brown Collection’s 60 wax cylinders and 76 aluminum discs of folk songs and ballads to the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) in Andover, Massachusetts. There, the NEDCC will use a new and highly innovative technology called IRENE to help us rediscover these performances, which have been essentially unavailable to scholars for nearly a century.

It’s almost too easy to contrast that single, frequently repeated song (unloved by me) with my cargo, but I do it anyway: it’s a 15-hour trip and I’ve got time. The 136 cylinders and discs hold an estimated 1,367 performances collected by Brown as he traveled across North Carolina between 1915 and his death in 1943. Brown, an English professor who also served as comptroller during Trinity College’s transition into Duke University, somehow also found time to drive into back areas throughout North Carolina to record this music. There’s a certain symmetry to me driving his recordings from Duke to Andover.

Because they are too fragile to be played as intended, the cylinders and discs will be digitized using a non-contact visual scanning technology known as IRENE. Image courtesy of NEDCC.org.
Because they are too fragile to be played as intended, the cylinders and discs will be digitized using a non-contact visual scanning technology known as IRENE. Image courtesy of NEDCC.org.

The wax cylinders are especially brittle, though, which is why Craig Breaden and I finally decided I should drive them to the NEDCC rather than ship them. Craig, the Rubenstein Library’s Audiovisual Archivist, serves as the Project Manager for this grant. We’ve taken special care in packing, and each cylinder is stored in its own box. Twenty cylinders are then housed in a storage box, and for the trip, each storage box is packed in a larger box and surrounded by foam packing peanuts. The single storage box of aluminum discs is packed the same way. Although not as fragile as the wax cylinders, some of the discs use an acetate “lacquer” for the recording medium, which can be damaged.

The care extends to the trip: I’ve rented a minivan, which provides the bonus of a separate air conditioning system for the back storage area. That helps keep the cargo at a uniform temperature—changes in temperature are particularly hard on wax cylinders. In fact, I decide not to eat dinner while the outdoor temperature is above 75 degrees because I don’t want to leave the air conditioning off for too long. I drive to Hartford, Connecticut, that night and when I check into the motel, I take all four boxes into my room, where I put them on the bed instead of on the floor, just in case the fan coil unit leaks. They look kind of cozy there.

FCBrownBeddedF
The boxed-up cylinders and discs, resting from their journey.

What makes the IRENE technology worth the trouble? Craig and I will write more about it over the course of this project, but IRENE is perfect for material like this. IRENE makes ultra-high resolution visual scans of a disc’s or cylinder’s grooves to create an image of the track; its software converts the images to sound files. Creating visual scans first means that we can get an accurate digital sound file without a needle or stylus. That provides two important advantages: we don’t risk further damage to the grooves of these fragile media, and IRENE can sometimes recover sound from cracked or broken discs and cylinders if it can get an image of the grooves sufficient to match up with the other pieces. It’s amazing, and only the NEDCC provides this service.

NEDCC6
Jane Pipik, Manager of Audio Preservation Services at NEDCC, demonstrates how IRENE translates visual groove scans into digital sound files.

All of us associated with this project feel like the Brown Collection is a great collection, the music a treasure waiting to be rediscovered. The recordings contain ballads and folk songs that can be traced back to England, songs that traveled to North Carolina from other parts of the United States, and songs like those around the murder of Laura Foster by Tom Dula (a.k.a. Tom Dooley) that originated here.

And that’s what distinguishes this music from the Stones’ “Start Me Up.” Although the same song might be represented several times in the collection, each performance is unique; each musician provided his or her own take on the lyrics and music, or of the people from whom he or she learned the music. Even though the title might be the same, each performance potentially offers insights to us about the culture of the musicians’ locale. That is what makes the trip worth it.


The grant to digitize Frank Clyde Brown’s recordings is part of the Council on Library and Information Resources’ Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program, a national competition that funds the digitization of rare and unique content held by libraries and cultural memory institutions and that would otherwise be unavailable to the public. The Council on Library and Information Resources is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning. 

The program receives generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Founded in 1969, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation endeavors to strengthen, promote, and, where necessary, defend the contributions of the humanities and the arts to human flourishing and to the well-being of diverse and democratic societies by supporting exemplary institutions of higher education and culture as they renew and provide access to an invaluable heritage of ambitious, path-breaking work.  Additional information is available at mellon.org.

Edge Lightning Talks: Creativity + Research

Workshop Room

What: Research + creativity on display, coffee and dessert
Where: The Edge Workshop Room (Bostock 127)
When: April 11, 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.

You’ve seen their projects around campus–come find out what these students are working on! Join us in The Edge for a series of lightning talks given by undergraduate students using the Innovation Co-Lab or The Edge to power their work. They will discuss their research work and future plans. The participating students are working on projects with:

Following the lightning talks and a panel Q&A, join presenters for a coffee and dessert reception to celebrate a successful semester. Student projects from the Innovation Studio will be on display in the Lounge during this time.

Interested in project space in The Edge next semester? We’re accepting applications for Summer  or Fall 2016 semesters. Submit an application online or email us at edge@duke.edu for more information.

Learn more about the Innovation Co-Lab and their projects and programming: https://colab.duke.edu/.

This event is co-sponsored by the Innovation Co-Lab and Duke University Libraries.

Archive Opening and Lecture with John Palfrey, Apr. 7

 

john palfrey
Palfrey is the author of “BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More than Ever in the Age of Google”

What: Lecture and Opening of the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Archive
When: Thursday, April 7, 5:00 p.m.
Where: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room, Rubenstein Library
Reception to follow

9780465042999Join the Duke University Libraries as we celebrate the opening of the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Archive with a special lecture featuring educator and technology expert John Palfrey, distinguished authority on education and technology and author of BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google (Basic Books, 2015).

Palfrey is the Head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Previously, Palfrey served as Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School and as the founding chairman of the Digital Public Library of America. He has written extensively on internet law, intellectual property, and the potential of new technologies to strengthen democracies locally and around the world.

Palfrey’s talk will be followed by a brief response by N. Katherine Hayles, James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke and author of numerous books, including How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (University of Chicago, 2012).

Sponsored by the Duke University Libraries, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Information Science + Studies Program, Information Initiative at Duke, Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Studies Program, Center for Documentary Studies, Forum for Scholars and Publics, and the UNC School of Information and Library Science.

Fairy Tales on The Edge

Welcome to our blog series on innovative projects coming out of The Edge! The Edge is a collaborative space in Bostock Library where students, faculty, and staff can work on research projects over the course of a semester or academic year. If think you have a project that would be ideal for the Edge, head over to our project spaces page to apply.

The Project: Fairy Tales, from Grimms to Disney

Fairy Tales, from Grimms to Disney is a digital library of 210 Grimms Fairy Tales in English translation, ordered by number and themes. The team built this digital library in WordPress to support the lecture course “Fairy Tales: Grimms to Disney” (Professor Jakob Norberg, Department of German), and students use the WordPress site to blog about weekly readings. Heidi Madden, Librarian for Western European Studies and Medieval Literature, answered some questions for us about this project.

What inspired this project?

Rumpelstiltskin. All images and illustrations by Arthur Rackham from public domain sources.
Rumpelstiltskin. All images and illustrations by Arthur Rackham from public domain sources.

The Fairy Tales course is a popular lecture course taught every year in the German Department by Professor Jakob Norberg. The project arose in conversation with Professor Norberg, who wanted to draw on the visual elements of fairy tales to inspire students to read widely. He also wanted to make the large course more interactive. Students discover and write about modern versions of fairy tales; they find a wide variety—with many international examples—of tales based on Grimm fairy tale characters, themes, and plots. Professor Norberg wanted to capture some of that information from one year to the next by having students contribute their ideas to a blog.

Who are the members of your team? What departments and schools are they part of?

  • Professor Jakob Norberg, Department of German
  • Heidi Madden, Duke University Libraries
  • Nele Fritz is a Library Science student (B.A.) at TH Köln – University of Technology, Arts and Sciences, Cologne, Germany. From September 2015 to March 2016 she worked as an intern in International and Area Studies and in Research Services at Duke University Libraries.
  • Liz Milewics and Will Shaw as Digital Scholarship consultants

How has working in The Edge influenced your team?

The Edge space was an ideal central meeting place for the team. The most important affordances of the project room were the display screen and the writable walls. The site has many pages and images, and we needed room to sketch and evaluate the site. It was also useful to have a large table, so that we could work together on tasks where we needed immediate feedback. Having the project room available to us two afternoons a week really helped with keeping us on schedule.

Little Red Riding Hood
Little Red Riding Hood

What tools do you use to work collaboratively?

We used WordPress, SAKAI, Basecamp, and Photoshop. Many students in the course are in engineering and computer science, and they have explored research involving text-mining and other digital tools for students to work with text data and images. Professor Norberg wanted his class site to list examples of that type of research as inspiration for students who take the class in the future. Having those clean text files readily available on the site allows for mobile reading, but also for downloading text data for projects.

What are you learning as part of this project that is surprising to you?

WordPress can be surprisingly difficult when building multimedia content and when building it with many pages. That’s why planning and sketching out the whole site is very important. Getting an overview of what the plug-ins offer is time-consuming. However, once the project was running, Professor Norberg was delighted to get to know his 43 students through their blogs very quickly.

Tom Thumb
Tom Thumb

What are the difficult problems you are trying to solve?

When the spring course is over, we want to turn the course site into a public site, so students interested in the course can explore the website. We also want to use the public website to showcase some of the original and tech-savvy research students are doing. In addition to that, we want to retain the bibliography of Grimm version fairy tales that students bring to the course from all of their diverse backgrounds.

What would you do with your project if you had unlimited resources?

We want the site to be used in teaching beyond Duke.

Final Thoughts

Nele Fritz, a graduate student from Germany, worked on this project as part of her field experience. Besides planning, sketching and building the site, this experience also included getting to know WordPress very well and monitoring the project with project management tools and strategies.

This post was written and compiled by Hannah Pope, a Master’s of Library Science student at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is interested in instruction, helping with research, and encouraging student innovation in libraries. She is currently working as a field experience intern in the Assessment and User Experience department and with The Edge at the Duke University Libraries.

Mellon Grant Continues Support of Open-Source Library System

Duke University has received a $1.165 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the continued development of an open-source integrated library system.

Known as Kuali OLE (pronounced oh-LAY), for Open Library Environment, it is the first system designed by and for academic and research libraries to manage and deliver scholarly information. Three OLE Partners—Lehigh University, the University of Chicago, and SOAS at the University of London—have already implemented Kuali OLE in their library operations. The grant will support the further development, refinement, and adoption of the system by a broader group of public and private institutions.

Large research library systems manage and provide access to millions of books, journals, online resources, special collections, and other media. To do so, they rely on various commercial software products to handle the everyday work of ordering and paying for materials, cataloging them, loaning them to library patrons, and making disparate computer systems work together. These routine business functions are mission-critical for libraries, but the proprietary software that manages them can cost colleges and universities thousands or millions of dollars to license and maintain.

The goal of Kuali OLE is to replace some of the costly, inflexible systems many libraries currently rely on with an open-source, enterprise-level system that is freely available to libraries worldwide and supported by members of the library profession itself.

“The information environment has changed rapidly over the last few decades, but the technology of library management systems has not kept pace,” said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke. “The development of OLE offers a welcome opportunity to design a system that is flexible, customizable, and nimble enough to meet the complex needs of today’s libraries and library users.”

The Open Library Environment has been in development, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, since 2008. In that year, representatives from more than a dozen libraries convened at Duke to discuss a next-generation framework for managing library collections and resources—essentially a library system designed by and for librarians.

This grant from Mellon will support the next phase of OLE’s code development through December 2017 by strengthening the technical capacity of the Kuali OLE Core Team. This will enable OLE to respond and adapt to technical infrastructure changes. It will also allow for increased functionality and features for successful implementation at the other partner libraries, including Duke, Cornell, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, and Villanova University.

The hope is that Kuali OLE’s implementation at a range of private and public institutions will generate interest and participation among more academic institutions and partners worldwide.

“We envision this project as both a pivot for OLE that leads to a stronger, more effective and sustainable technology infrastructure, and an opportunity to renovate our organizational model to address code, community ownership, and the speed of development,” said Tim McGeary, Associate University Librarian for Information Technology Services at Duke. “We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for recognizing the promise of the Kuali OLE project.”

 

Library Receives Grant to Digitize Early Twentieth-Century Folk Music

Some 60 wax cylinders and 76 aluminum discs containing approximately 1,367 songs recorded in the 1920s and 1930s will be digitized as part of the project.
Some 60 wax cylinders and 76 aluminum discs containing approximately 1,367 songs recorded in the 1920s and 1930s will be digitized as part of the project.

Duke University Libraries has received a $74,595 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to digitize a large collection of North Carolina folk music that has never been widely heard.

The collection includes some 1,367 songs recorded in the 1920s and 1930s on wax cylinders and aluminum discs. The recordings were made in the field by folklorist, professor of English, and Duke University administrator Frank Clyde Brown (1870-1943), who traveled across North Carolina collecting folk songs, sayings, stories, and other folklore between 1912 and his death in 1943. Brown collected songs from at least 52 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, representing all regions of the state.

“The recordings include music unique to North Carolina, as well as popular American folk songs, traditional British ballads, and a range of other tunes,” said Winston Atkins, Preservation Officer for Duke University Libraries and the principal investigator for the project. “Taken together, they represent an important and untapped primary source of American folk music in the early twentieth century.”

The songs have never been widely accessible due to the age and fragility of the recording technology Brown used, as well as the difficulty of transferring them to more modern media formats.

Wax Cylinder from the Frank C Brown Collection
Because they are too fragile to be played as intended, the cylinders and discs will be digitized using a non-contact visual scanning technology known as IRENE.

“Until recently, there has been no non-destructive way to recover audio on historical wax cylinders and aluminum discs, which require a mechanical stylus and can be damaged if played today,” said Craig Breaden, Audiovisual Archivist in Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

The Duke recordings will be digitized using a new non-contact technology, known as IRENE, at the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts. IRENE takes ultra-high resolution visual scans of the grooves imprinted on the cylinders and discs and mathematically translates those into digital sound files that are remarkably faithful to the original recordings. Because there is no actual contact with the recording, IRENE’s scans can also capture sounds from damaged media.

The method has been used successfully to digitize other historical audio collections, including some of the earliest examples of recorded sound made by Thomas Edison.

Digitization will begin in the summer of 2016 and take approximately one year. The recordings will then be described and processed, and the collection will be made freely and publicly available through the Duke University Libraries website in 2018.

Undated photograph of Frank C. Brown from the Duke University Archives.
Undated photograph of Frank C. Brown from the Duke University Archives.

Born in 1870, Frank Clyde Brown began his career as a professor of English at Trinity College in Durham (the forerunner of Duke University) in 1909 and later became chairman of the department. Between 1924 and 1930, as Trinity expanded into Duke University, Brown served as the institution’s first comptroller, overseeing the construction of West Campus and the renovation of East Campus. He also served as university marshal, entertaining distinguished visitors to the new university.

In 1913, at the urging of legendary folklorist and musicologist John A. Lomax, Brown founded the North Carolina Folklore Society and was elected its first president. He later served as its secretary-treasurer, program chairman, and primary collector until his death in 1943. His efforts to record the sounds and nuances of North Carolina’s “folk” were part of a national trend in the early twentieth century to preserve American folk culture, aided by new technologies that allowed folklorists to make recordings in the field. The 1,367 songs captured by Brown are a significant part of that legacy.

The seven-volume Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, published posthumously by Duke University Press between 1952 and 1964, represents Brown’s lifetime of collecting. It is widely regarded as one of the premiere collections of American folklore ever published and is available online. Four of the seven volumes are dedicated to the music Brown recorded and include transcribed melodies and song lyrics. However, the editors of Brown’s work left out an estimated 400 songs he recorded. These “bonus tracks,” which are found on the wax cylinders and aluminum discs but not in the published collection, will be digitized as part of the project.

"All Day Singing." Woodcut by Clare Leighton, from Vol. 2 of the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, published by Duke University Press in 1952.
“All Day Singing.” Woodcut by Clare Leighton, from Vol. 2 of the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, published by Duke University Press in 1952.

Brown’s original manuscripts and notes, which were used to compile the collection, along with his original recordings, are housed in Duke’s Rubenstein Library.

In 2015, two Duke faculty members—Victoria Szabo and Trudi Abel—incorporated some of the Frank C. Brown recordings into NC Jukebox, an interdisciplinary Bass Connections course introducing undergraduate and graduate students to digital history. Students conducted original research on the history of the recordings and tracked down the descendants of some of the singers and musicians. The course will be offered again in Spring 2017.

The grant to digitize Brown’s recordings is part of CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program, a national competition that funds the digitization of rare and unique content held by libraries and cultural memory institutions that would otherwise be unavailable to the public.

 

Edge Lightning Talks: A Series of Works in Progress

Edge Lightning Talks Photo
Ever wonder who those teams of people are and what they’re working on? Come find out December 4!

 

What: Research-in-progress, coffee and dessert
Where: The Edge Workshop Room (Bostock Library 127)
When: Friday, December 4, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.

You’ve seen the project teams in The Edge—come find out what they’re working on! In between LDOC festivities, join us in The Edge for a series of lightning talks given by Bass Connections project team participants about their team’s research work in progress and future plans. The participating teams are:

Following the lightning talks and a panel Q&A, join the team members for a coffee and dessert reception to celebrate a successful semester.

Interested in project space in The Edge next semester? We’re accepting applications for the Spring 2016 semester. Submit an application online or email us at edge@duke.edu for more information.

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Horror in the Libraries

Getting ready for Halloween? So is Lilly Library! Come check out our collection of spooky DVDs and graphic novels, on exhibit through the end of October.

The H Word: Horror in the Libraries
The H Word: Horror in the Libraries
Future Imperfect: Dystopian and Post-Holocaust Cinema
Future Imperfect: Dystopian and Post-Holocaust Cinema

Our film exhibit features Dystopian and Post-Holocaust movies while graphic horror novels are highlighted in our The H Word: Horror in the Libraries exhibit. In addition, check out our guide to “Future Imperfect” for more dystopian movies. Last but not least, we have classic Halloween movie listings at the front desk, including a wide range of films from Ghostbusters to Paranormal Activity: Halloween DVDs at Lilly

No matter what you’re looking for, Lilly Library has something for everyone to get into the Halloween spirit!

History Hackathon – a collaborative happening

Students in Rubenstein Reading Room

What is a History Hackathon?

The term “Hackathon” traditionally refers to an event in which computer programmers collaborate intensively on software projects. But Duke University Libraries and the History Department are putting a historical twist on their approach to the Hackathon phenomenon. In this case, the History Hackathon is a contest for undergraduate student teams to research, collaborate, and create projects inspired by the resources available in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library collections. Projects may include performances, essays, websites, infographics, lectures, podcasts, and more. A panel of experts will serve as judges and rank the top three teams. Cash Prizes will be awarded to the winning teams.

The History Hackathon will take place over a 72-hour period from October 23-25, in the Rubenstein Library and The Edge.  All the  guidelines, rules, and details may be found at the History Hackathon: a Collaborative Happening  site.Students in the Edge

  • When:  Friday, October 23rd to
    Sunday, October 25th

http://sites.duke.edu/historyhackathon/register/

Contact : HistoryHackathon@duke.edu


Sponsored by the Duke History Department,  the Duke University Libraries, the David M. Rubenstein Library, and the Duke University Undergraduate Research Support Office.

Contributor: Susannah Roberson

 

 

New Interface for Using WorldCat

If you regularly use WorldCat through the Duke University Libraries website, you might notice a small change soon.

Starting Tuesday, June 30, the Libraries will link to WorldCat through a new platform called WorldCat Discovery, instead of FirstSearch, the platform we’ve been using for some time. WorldCat Discovery is available online now at http://duke.on.worldcat.org/advancedsearch, and we invite you to take it for a test-drive!

You can find out more about WorldCat Discovery Services at https://www.oclc.org/worldcat-discovery/features.en.html, and send feedback about the new interface to Emily Daly, emily.daly@duke.edu.

Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities: New Models of Access, Governance, and Sustainability

Image by Nige Brown under a CC BY license.
Image by Nige Brown under a CC BY license.

Date: Tuesday, March 24
Time: 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217
Contact: Paolo Mangiafico, paolo.mangiafico@duke.edu
Register to attend (it’s free!):  http://bit.ly/humanities-publishing-march24

Please join us for a talk on changing models of scholarly publishing in the humanities, and how a transition to open access models might be funded and sustained.

Through the economic and structural reconfiguration made possible by the Internet, the potential for new modes of publishing scholarship have emerged. However, there has also been much alarm in the humanities disciplines, particularly at the proposed changes to economic models that could underwrite transitions to new models of publishing, such as open access.

In this talk, Dr. Martin Paul Eve, author of Open Access and the Humanities (Cambridge University Press, 2014) will explore the contexts, controversies and pragmatic paths for the future of open access and other potential transitions in scholarly publishing in the humanities.

The event is free and open to the public, but please register to attend.

For more information on the topics Dr. Eve will be discussing, please see:

This event is sponsored by the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communications, Duke University Libraries.

You’re Invited! Open House for The Edge, Jan. 14

You’re invited to a Duke University Libraries Open House!

Help us celebrate the completion of

The Edge Overlay Image

Wednesday, January 14, 2015
1:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Bostock Library, First Floor

Remarks at 1:30 p.m. by Deborah Jakubs,
Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian
and Vice Provost for Library Affairs

  • Tour the new spaces, labs, and project rooms
  • Meet and mingle with library staff and The Edge support teams
  • Learn how The Edge can support your research and project work
  • Free giveaways
  • Enjoy refreshments by Parker and Otis
Floorplan of The Edge on the renovated first floor of Bostock Library
Floorplan of The Edge on the renovated first floor of Bostock Library

About The Edge
To meet the needs of interdisciplinary, team-based, data-driven, and digitally reliant research at Duke, the Duke University Libraries have transformed the first floor of Bostock Library into a new academic service hub. With digital tools and collaborative workspaces, reservable rooms for project teams, and expanded technology and training facilities, The Edge: The Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology, and Collaboration is an attractive new research community destination in the heart of campus.

For more information, visit library.duke.edu/edge.

Mark your calendar and join us 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. on January 14!

Link Desk Repair Work, Dec. 15-Jan. 2

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The Link Service Desk will undergo minor repair work December 15-January 2.

During the holiday break, the Link will be conducting repairs to its service desk on the Lower Level of Perkins Library. Workers will be re-laminating the surface of the desk as well as making changes to increase staff workspace.

The service desk will remain open during the repairs, but there may be brief delays depending on customer needs. The walk-up computers near the Link entrance will be removed while the work is being done.

These repairs will begin Monday, December 15, and are scheduled to be completed by Friday, January 2. There will be some noise and possible odors related to this work. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience. Thank you for your patience as we work to improve the space!

Applications Open for Project Spaces in The Edge

Workers are putting the finishing touches on The Edge: The Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology, and Collaboration, located on the first floor of Bostock Library.  The space contains nine project rooms that are reservable for short- or long-term use by project teams.
Workers are putting the finishing touches on The Edge: The Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology, and Collaboration, located on the first floor of Bostock Library. The space contains nine project rooms that are reservable for short- or long-term use by project teams.

In January 2015, The Edge: The Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology, and Collaboration will open on the renovated first floor of Bostock Library. We are pleased to announce that project spaces in The Edge can now be requested for the Spring 2015 semester, using this online form. These project spaces can be reserved for repeated use by one group during the semester as they work through their research.

Students and faculty who are working on interdisciplinary, data-driven, digitally reliant, or team-based research are invited to apply for a project room in The Edge by Wednesday, November 26.  We’ll do our best to accommodate as many requests as possible and will notify all requestors no later than Friday, December 12, so you can make plans for the spring semester.

A portion of the project rooms in The Edge will still be “grab-able” (i.e., available for ad hoc reservations without submitting the project space request form). We also hope to re-open our form in the spring to accommodate additional groups in need of shared or dedicated project space.

Visit The Edge website for a list of other types of spaces in The Edge.

Questions about The Edge, or about project spaces in particular? Email edge@duke.edu.

We look forward to sharing this exciting new area of the Perkins & Bostock Libraries with you!

Bento Searching Is Here!

bento graphic 600x360
The new “Bento Box” approach to displaying library search results on our website takes its name from the popular and often elaborately prepared Japanese lunches.

Starting today, if you search for a book, article, film, or other library resource on our website, you may notice something different.

We’ve changed the way search results appear in the library catalog, subdividing them into different groups according to the type of media (books, articles, images, etc.) and related tools and services (library research guides, library website links, and other resources). If you search for “Civil War women soldiers,” for example, you don’t just get results for books we have on that subject, but also links to related scholarly articles, images of women in the Civil War from databases and digitized archival collections, links to historical documents in the Rubenstein Library, helpful research guides, and more.

This unified approach to displaying and segmenting search results is commonly referred to as the “Bento Box” method, because of its resemblance to the popular and often elaborately prepared Japanese lunch boxes. It is designed to provide a quick, easy, and more intuitive way to find the information you need.

Bento searching was pioneered by our library colleagues down the road at NC State, and it has started catching on at other libraries around the country. It has the benefit of helping users gain quick access to a limited set of results across a variety of resources, services, and tools, while providing links to the full results.

We made an announcement about rolling out Bento over the summer. But in fact we’ve been developing, testing, and documenting our progress for over a year, and we greatly appreciate all the feedback our users have given us along the way. Your input has helped us design a better, simpler, more intuitively organized search interface for Duke students, faculty, and researchers.

Don’t like it? You also have the option of setting your default search options on our homepage if you find that Bento searching doesn’t meet your needs. Just click on the little gear icon on the bottom left corner of the search box on the library homepage. If you spend more time searching for journal articles rather than books, you can set “Articles” as your preferred search tab, and it will appear as the default every time you visit our site. You can change and customize your default search settings at any time.

Make My Default Search
Use the gear icon to change your default search to Articles, Books & Media, or All.

So give it a spin and let us know what you think! Use our feedback form to tell us how we’re doing or report a problem or issue.

New Research Commons Gets a Name: The Edge

Architectural rendering of the Research Commons on the first floor of Bostock Library. Renovations will take place May-November 2014.
Architectural rendering of the renovated first floor of Bostock Library. Renovations will take place May-November 2014.

If you have visited Duke’s West Campus lately, you might have noticed that the first floor of Bostock Library is currently closed for renovations. The entire floor is being reconfigured into a new space that will allow the Libraries to meet the growing needs of interdisciplinary, team-based, and data-driven research at Duke. There’s an article about it in the latest issue of our library magazine, and you can read more about the project on our library website.

Throughout the planning phase of the project, we’ve tentatively been calling this space the “Research Commons,” for lack of a better name. Today, we’re pleased to announce that a better name has emerged. Allow us to introduce…

The Edge Logo

Why “The Edge”?

The overall goal of this renovation project is to create a new space that will allow Duke researchers and project teams to experiment with new ideas and approaches with experts, technology, and training available in close proximity. It should be the kind of space that invites discovery, experimentation, and collaboration. We needed a name that captured all of that in a succinct and memorable way.

The word “edge” suggests standing on the brink of something, or of being on the fringes or boundaries. It’s a place where different points of view or disciplinary approaches meet.

From a physical building layout perspective, it also makes a certain amount of sense. Just as the Link is in the middle of the library complex, The Edge is on the side that is furthest from the main academic quad.

Finally, there’s the subtle hint of gaining an advantage: The Edge is a place that will help you with your research or collaborative project.

To bring The Edge to life, the Libraries have been working with the architectural firm Shepley Bulfinch, the same firm that designed and built Bostock Library and the von der Heyden Pavilion in 2005, renovated Perkins Library between 2006 and 2008 (including the creation of the Link), and is directing the current renovation of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Few parts of Duke have been transformed so completely in recent years as the Libraries, and The Edge is just the latest proof of that.

We are looking forward to unveiling this attractive and innovative new destination in the heart of campus, which should be completed later this year by November or December. In January 2015, we will formally celebrate with a grand opening event. We hope you will join us at The Edge!

Now Available: Check Out E-Books and Audiobooks on Your Phone or Tablet

Just a sampling of the hundreds of popular titles you can now download as eBooks or audiobooks and enjoy on your own device. Click on the image to get started.
Just a sampling of the hundreds of popular titles you can now download as eBooks or audiobooks and enjoy on your own device. Click on the image to get started.

Duke University Libraries and Ford Library at the Fuqua School of Business are excited to offer a new service that allows library users to download and enjoy popular eBooks and audiobooks on their own devices, including iPhones, iPads, NOOKs, Android phones and tablets, and Kindles.

The new service, called OverDrive, has hundreds of popular fiction and non-fiction titles to choose from, including best-selling novels, well-known classics, self-improvement guides, and much more. We are adding new titles to Duke’s collection all the time.

Here’s how it works:

  • To get started, visit the Duke OverDrive website. (You can easily get there through the eBooks portal on our library website.)
  • Browse through the available titles, and check them out using your Duke NetID.
  • You can check out up to five (5) eBooks or audiobooks at one time.
  • Titles will automatically expire at the end of the lending period (21 days). There are no late fees!
  • eBooks can be read immediately on any device with an internet browser. Audiobooks can be streamed using the OverDrive Media Console app, which you can download for free on all major desktop and mobile platforms.
  • If a title is already checked out, you can place it on hold and request to be notified when it becomes available. You can place up to ten (10) titles on hold at a time.
  • If you don’t see a title you’re looking for, submit a request from any search page using the recommendoption. We’ll add requested titles to our wishlist and purchase them as funds become available.
  • Once you download a title, you can transfer it to your iPhone, iPad, NOOK, Android phone or tablet, or Kindle.

That’s it! Pretty simple.

In addition to hundreds of new and recently published books, you can also download tens of thousands of public domain classics as eBooks through OverDrive. Look for the “Project Gutenberg” link under Featured Collections.

We are in the process of adding to our initial selections in OverDrive, so we encourage you to submit recommendations through the site if there are eBooks or audiobooks you’d like to see available.

To get started, visit the Duke OverDrive website. And let us know what you think!

Screenshot of the OverDrive interface. Just a click "Borrow" to check out a title with your Duke NetID, or place it hold and get notified when it becomes available.
Screenshot of the OverDrive interface. Just a click “Borrow” to check out a title with your Duke NetID, or place it on hold and get notified when it becomes available.

Customized Searching and Other Website Updates

Make My Default Search
Use the gear icon to change your default search to Articles, All, or Our Website.

We’ve received a lot of great feedback since we launched our redesigned library website earlier this year, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t benefit from a few tweaks. Our website team has been working on some small but helpful changes, based on web metrics, usability testing, survey feedback, and suggestions from YOU!

The first change you might have noticed is the little gear icon in the bottom left corner of the search box. Clicking on the gear allows you to set your personal default search preference. If you spend more time searching for journal articles rather than books, you can set “Articles” as your preferred search tab, and it will appear as the default every time you visit the library homepage. You can change the setting at any time. (The gear works with browser cookies, so if you clear your cache, you will have to reset it.)

Another addition, implemented at the request of many users, is the addition of a website search box in the upper right corner of the masthead. This makes it easier to search our website and find information about the Libraries.

Research Commons
The new Research Commons page explains what you can expect from the renovations in Bostock.

With the announcement about the upcoming construction of the Research Commons on the first floor of Bostock Library, we also added a page about that project, including a timeline, FAQs, sketches of the new layout, and more. You can find it by clicking on “Research Support” in the header of our website and following the “Research Commons” link in the drop-down menu.

We are continually refining and testing our redesigned website, and we greatly appreciate all the feedback our users have given us along the way. Your input (and patience) has helped us create a better, simpler, more intuitively organized library site for all Duke students, faculty, and researchers. If you have additional suggestions for improvement, or to report a problem with our website, let us know!

Coming to Bostock Library in January 2015: The Research Commons

 

Architectural rendering of a planned social lounge space in the Research Commons on the first floor of Bostock Library.
Architectural rendering of a planned social lounge space in the Research Commons on the first floor of Bostock Library. Renovations will take place May-November 2014.

To meet the growing needs of interdisciplinary, team-based, and data-driven research at Duke, the Duke University Libraries will transform the first floor of Bostock Library into a new academic service hub equipped with tools and workspaces for digital scholarship, reservable rooms for project teams, and expanded technology and training facilities.

The new space will be known as the “Research Commons” and will officially open in January 2015. The improvements will allow for more technology-focused library services, more spaces for collaborative work, and an attractive new destination for students and faculty in the heart of campus.

The main period of renovation activity will be May – November 2014, in order to minimize disruptions to students and faculty. The $3.5 million project was approved by the Board of Trustees at their October 2013 meeting.

Floor plan of the Research Commons, which will occupy the entire first floor of Bostock Library.
Floor plan of the Research Commons, which will occupy the entire first floor of Bostock Library. Click on the image to see a larger version.

The Research Commons will increase the Libraries’ ability to support interdisciplinary and team-based teaching and learning at Duke, such as the innovative projects emerging from the Bass Connections initiative. The space will bring together the Libraries’ Brandaleone Data and GIS Services Lab (relocated from the second floor of Perkins Library); workshop and presentation space for groups large (45-50) and small (6-8); reservable and drop-in project rooms; and expert library staff assistance, available on-site or by appointment.

“The goal of the Research Commons is to allow individual researchers and project teams to experiment with new ideas and approaches with experts, technology and training available in close proximity,” said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and the Vice Provost for Library Affairs. “It will be the kind of space that invites discovery, experimentation, and collaboration.”

Plans for the Research Commons came about through a multi-year planning process in which faculty, students, and library staff explored how Duke researchers are increasingly conducting their work in the context of interdisciplinary collaborations and digital production. Generous funding for the project was made possible through the Duke Forward Campaign.

In order to make room for the renovation, collection materials and furniture on the first floor of Bostock Library will be relocated to other library locations beginning in May. The Libraries will free up additional study space elsewhere in Perkins and Bostock to accommodate students temporarily displaced by the work. A complete list of which collections are moving is available on the Research Commons FAQ page.

Rendering of the Open Lab seating area of the Research Commons.
Rendering of the Open Lab seating area of the Research Commons.

Also in May, the front entrance of Perkins Library will close due to the Rubenstein Library renovation on May 12 and remain closed until summer 2015. Library users and visitors will enter the library through the side entrance beneath the Perkins/Bostock connector, or through the von der Heyden Pavilion, which will remain open throughout the renovations. To better accommodate patrons, a Library Service Desk will be placed near the side entrance of Perkins while the front entrance is closed.

More information on the Research Commons, including a renovation timeline and FAQ, can be found on the Libraries’ website at library.duke.edu/research/commons. More information about the Rubenstein Library renovation can be found at library.duke.edu/renovation.

Duke Technology Program Reaches Out to Durham Schools

DURHAM, N.C. – The Duke University Libraries are partnering with Duke’s office of Durham and Regional Affairs to encourage the use of educational technology in Durham Public Schools, thanks to an endowment from PepsiCo.

The PepsiCo K-12 Technology Mentor Program has been an outreach effort of the Libraries since 2007. It was originally created to provide better access to, support for, and integration of technology in Durham Public School classrooms.

Starting in March, the program will be coordinated by Duke’s office of Durham and Regional Affairs, in order to better integrate with Duke’s existing successful partnerships with Durham Public Schools.

David Stein, Senior Education Partnership Coordinator for the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, will lead the program. Stein serves as the university’s liaison to the eight public schools near Duke’s campus. Since he came to Duke in 2000, he has worked closely with Durham schoolteachers and officials to mobilize university resources in support of K-12 educational achievement.

Stein has developed and run programs like BOOST, in collaboration with Duke School of Medicine students, to encourage underrepresented minority students towards careers in medicine and science. He has also created numerous targeted enrichment programs like School Days, which encourages local eighth-graders to set their sights on college, and the John Hope Franklin Scholars, which fosters a love of history among high-potential middle-school students.

The goals of the PespiCo K-12 Technology Mentor Program are to keep classroom teachers abreast of instructional technology innovations, offer curriculum-related materials to support their work, and increase the information literacy of Durham Public School students.

Stein will work in close collaboration with Durham educators and Duke’s Libraries to develop technology training programs for educators, students, and parents. He will also continue to lead the John Hope Franklin Young Scholars Program and School Days.

“This new Duke Durham and Regional Affairs collaboration with the Duke Libraries is exciting and I am delighted that David Stein will be entrusted with this responsibility,” said Sam Miglarese, director of the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership. “His educational expertise coupled with his love of innovative technology will support effectively DPS teachers in our partner schools. I am grateful to Dr. Phail Wynn and Dr. Deborah Jakubs for making this shared vision a reality.”

Prior to coming to Duke, Stein scouted and marketed inventions for Harvard University and served as the community liaison for the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. He is a licensed secondary social studies teacher with a degree from Antioch College and attended graduate school in City Planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

For more information, contact: David Stein, Senior Education Partnership Coordinator, Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, dstein@duke.edu, (919) 668-6271

Duke to Host Scholarly Communication Institute

Scholarly Comm Institute
The Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute invites proposals from groups interested in participating in a series of seminars, discussions, presentations, and workshops, to be held over four days in Chapel Hill, NC, in November 2014.

DURHAM, N.C. – The Duke University Libraries have received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support an annual Scholarly Communication Institute with the goal of advancing scholarship, teaching, and publishing in the humanities through the application of digital technologies.

Over the last two decades, rapid technological changes have fundamentally altered the way in which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. There has been lively debate among scholars, librarians, publishers, and technologists about the ways in which scholars share their research within the academic community and beyond. Duke has long been a vocal participant in these discussions and a strong advocate for the knowledge-sharing mission of research universities.

The Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) began as a Mellon-funded initiative at the University of Virginia in 2003 and was based there for nine years. Duke will host the new SCI, working in close collaboration with partners at the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, North Carolina Central University, and the Triangle Research Libraries Network.

Like its predecessor program at UVA, the Triangle SCI will bring together a broad range of experts from inside and outside academia to discuss needs and opportunities in the domain of scholarly communications. The emphasis will be on productive dialogue across boundaries that often separate academic communities with an ultimate goal of fostering new types of collaboration and new models of scholarly dissemination.

“The goal of the SCI is not to schedule breakthroughs, but to create conditions that favor them,” said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke.

“It will bring diverse groups together and provide a combination of structured and unstructured time to brainstorm, organize, and jump-start ideas, to experiment and solve problems, and even begin to build,” she said. “This will be an opportunity both to talk and to do.”

Each annual institute will be organized under a broad theme. This year’s is “Scholarship and the Crowd.” It will be held November 9-13 at the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Participants will be selected through a competitive proposal process. For the 2014 institute, applicants from the Triangle area are especially encouraged to submit. Proposals are being accepted through March 24. More information and application instructions are available at the institute’s website: trianglesci.org.

 

Good Questions: How to Track Down a Top-Secret Letter

A declassified "top secret" letter sent by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to U.S. President Richard Nixon (via several intermediaries) in October 1973.
The declassified “top secret” letter sent by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to U.S. President Richard Nixon (via several intermediaries) in October 1973. Click on the image to see the full document on the National Security Archive website.

The questions we get in Perkins Research Services range from the fatuous to the far-fetched to the fascinating. This is the first of a series on our most interesting research questions, and how we go about answering them.

In this age of Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, a lot of current U.S. classified information is in the news and floating around on the web, should you choose to seek it out. But how do you find top-secret communications between world leaders from the past? This was the question I received via IM recently.

According to several articles, in October 1973 Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir sent an urgent letter to President Richard Nixon via Henry Kissinger. The researcher (let’s call her Mary) had already checked many primary sources, databases, and yes, even Google. But she could not locate the original letter. Only quoted fragments of the declassified document could be found.

Rule #1 of library detective work: Go with your gut (especially if it’s an experienced gut). If you think it should be found in the National Security Archive database and Mary didn’t find it there—look again, trying other search strategies. So I did.

No luck there. This question obviously would take more persistence as well as intestinal fortitude. I checked the print Foreign Relations of the U.S. and other sources in the Reference area then redoubled my efforts. (For those with less research experience in this area, there are clues in the library’s guide to International & Transnational Relations.)

In true government document fashion, my search results often had obscure titles that made it difficult to know if I had hit pay dirt. With a combination of persistence, collaboration, educated guessing, and serendipity….

BINGO! Document 7 in a search of the National Security Archive website through GWU was described thus: “Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Brent Scowcroft to Kissinger, 5 October 1973, enclosing message from Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (passed through Israeli chargé Shalev).” The murky type on the cover page said “Top Secret/Exclusively Eyes Only.” Coo-oo-uhl. Once I deciphered the trail of all the people through whom it was transmitted, it became clear that the next page was Meir’s own message. I IM’d Mary, who excitedly confirmed this by matching some of the quotes she had found.

Although we found our answer on the free web after all, it took a library to index and share the document and librarian intervention to track it down. You might call us everyone’s favorite “intelligence agency,” mining and exposing information for the common good.

Post by Catherine Shreve, Librarian for Public Policy & Political Science

Digital Humanities Project Management, Nov. 21

DoingDHImage

Doing DH is a Digital Scholarship series focusing on the basic skills needed for working in the digital humanities. Lightning-talk panels, presentations, and workshops showcase people, projects, and expertise in the Triangle and offer insights into the practical side of being a digital humanist. Presentations and panel discussions are in the FHI Garage (Bay 4, Smith Warehouse). Light refreshments will be served. Workshops are in the Wired! Lab (Bay 11 Smith Warehouse).

The next events in this series are November 21 : a workshop and panel discussion on project management in the digital humanities (more information below).

 

Digital Humanities Project Management Workshop
Date: Thursday, November 21
Time:
4:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Location: Wired! Lab, Smith Warehouse, Bay 11 (click for map)
Registration: Required (seating is limited). Please register to attend.
Contact: Liz Milewicz, liz.milewicz@duke.edu

Introduction to digital humanities project planning and management, with special emphasis on choosing the tools and applications (from free apps like Google Docs to professional software like BaseCamp and Jira) that best suit your project and your team. Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops.

 

Digital Humanities Project Management Panel
Date: Thursday, November 21
Time: 6:00 – 7:30 p.m.
Location: FHI Garage, Smith Warehouse Bay 4 (click for map)
Registration: Register online
Contact: Liz Milewicz, liz.milewicz@duke.edu

Light refreshments will be served.

Following the workshop, join us for a panel discussion on common issues in digital humanities project development. What planning and management challenges are specific to digital humanities? How do DH project managers coordinate team effort, communicate with stakeholders, and control unexpected changes in project scope? Participating panelists hail from both Duke and UNC, including:

  • Mary Caton Lingold (Soundbox Project co-director and English Department doctoral student, Duke University)
  • Erin Parish (Cultural Anthropology Department doctoral student, Duke University)
  • Ashley Reed (Manager, William Blake Archive, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
  • Josh Sosin (Duke Collaboratory in Classics Computing and Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Duke University)

Sponsored by the Duke University Libraries Digital Scholarship Services department and the Wired! Group.

Social Media Panel Discussion, Dec. 6

Social Media Academic

Academics and Unseen Publics: Approaches to Putting Yourself and Your Work Online
Date: Friday, December 6
Time: 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. (panel discussion to begin at noon)
Location: Forum for Scholars and Publics, Old Chem 011, West Campus (Click for Map)
Registration: Please register for this event
Contact: Hannah Rozear, hannah.rozear@duke.edu

There is limited attendance as lunch will be provided for attendants and panel members.

Social media offers ways to rapidly communicate ideas and research to peers and broader audiences. The personal investment required to successfully engage in these spaces, however, can compete with attention given to more traditional academic communication. The evolving conventions around engaging in these spaces (e.g., the etiquette of live tweeting), combined with immediate and unexpected challenges from readers, can also make this a difficult activity to accept and incorporate as part of one’s academic work. How can one efficiently and effectively use social media? What opportunities does it enable, and what are the potential pitfalls? How do social media interactions influence how we pursue and talk about our academic research?

The upcoming panel, Academics and Unseen Publics: Approaches to Putting Yourself and Your Work Online, seeks to address all of these questions. Composed of Duke faculty, students, and staff, the panel will  discuss the ways they engage in social media like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, and offer their perspectives on the challenges and opportunities of taking one’s research and academic self online. Discussion will be framed and moderated by Duke University Libraries Coordinator of Scholarly Communication Technology, Paolo Mangiafico.

Panelists:

  • Gary Bennett, Associate Professor of Psychology, Global Health, and Medicine
  • Kieran Healy, Associate Professor in Sociology and the Kenan Institute for Ethics
  • Caitlin Margaret Kelly, Graduate Arts Fellow for the Kenan Institute for Ethics; Artist-In-Residence, Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge; MFA-EDA student and professional photographer
  • Robin Kirk, Faculty Co-Chair of the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute
  • Ava Lowrey, MFA-EDA student and documentary filmmaker
  • Anton Zuiker, Director, Communications at Duke Department of Medicine and co-founder of ScienceOnline
  • Paolo Mangiafico (moderator)

This event is co-sponsored by Duke University Libraries, the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, the Forum for Scholars and Publics, HASTAC, and the Thompson Writing Program, as part of the Libraries’ Managing Your Research workshop series.

The Landscape of Crowdsourcing and Transcription: Nov. 20

OCR software doesn't recognize handwriting (even very fine handwriting like Francis Calley Gray's, shown here). So human volunteers must transcribe it before it can be data-mined.
OCR software doesn’t recognize handwriting (even very fine handwriting like Francis Calley Gray’s, shown here). So human volunteers must transcribe it before it can be data-mined.

Date: Wednesday, November 20
Time: 1:00-2:00 p.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217 (Click for map)
Contact: Joshua Sosin, joshua.sosin@duke.edu, or 919-681-2992

This event is free and open to the public.

One of the most popular applications of crowdsourcing to cultural heritage is transcription. Since OCR software doesn’t recognize handwriting, human volunteers are converting letters, diaries, and log books into formats that can be read, mined, searched, and used to improve collection metadata. But cultural heritage institutions aren’t the only organizations working with handwritten material, and many innovations are happening within investigative journalism, citizen science, and genealogy.

This talk will present an overview of the landscape of crowdsourced transcription: where it came from, who’s doing it, and the kinds of contributions their volunteers make, followed by a discussion of motivation, participation, recruitment, and quality controls.

 

About the Speaker

Ben Brumfield earned his B.A. in Computer Science and Linguistics from Rice University in 1997. He has seventeen years experience as a professional software engineer, including a dozen years building software for non-profit organizations, from libraries to genealogical organizations. In 2005, he began developing FromThePage, a collaborative transcription platform. He has spoken on crowdsourcing and collaborative manuscript transcription at the American Historical Association, Museum Computer Network, IMLS WebWise, Text Encoding Initiative, and Digital Humanities conferences,in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Sponsored by the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing.

Library Blogs Monthly Recap: October 2013

October disappeared while we were illicitly munching on Halloween candy, and November has appeared out of nowhere, with its shorter days and longer shadows. In case you missed something, here’s a summary of some of the top stories from around the Libraries for the month of October.

 

DoingDHImageDoing Digital Humanities: New Workshops this Fall

Our Digital Scholarship Services department has organized a series of panels, presentations, and workshops this fall to focus on basic skills in digital humanities research.

 

 

4426568251_f9ed0bd32eThe Big Picture About Peer Review

Kevin Smith, Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communications, reacts to a recent report in the journal Science and why its conclusions on open-access publishing and peer review were so wrong.

 

facultybooks13Fall Faculty Books: Yoga, Cholesterol, and Britten                                              

The faculty at Duke have been busy writing on spectrum of topics, from minority aging to differential equations and everything in between. Check out this extensive list of books penned by our very own Duke faculty members, all available in the library.

 

fantasy_collecting_600x360Fantasy Collecting Source Code Released

The source code for Fantasy Collecting, an art education and market simulation program developed here at Duke, was recently made publicly available. Fantasy Collecting is a bit like fantasy football for the art world. Students aim to increase the value and scope of their virtual art collections through promoting, acquiring, and trading art.

 

 A Postcard from Our National Book Collecting Contest Winner 

Ashley Young, a Ph.D. student at Duke and 2nd-prize winner in the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest, wrote about her trip to the awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Library of Congress.

 

httpexhibitslibrarydukeedupluginsdropboxfilesncmph080010030_609b67fac8Soul and Service: The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company

A new exhibit at the Center for Documentary Arts celebrates the 115th anniversary of NC Mutual, the country’s largest and oldest African-American owned insurance company. The exhibit is co-sponsored by NC Mutual and the John Hope Franklin Research Center, part of the Rubenstein Library.

 

ResearchLibrariesAptman and Middlesworth Prize Winners Announced

The winners of the Aptman and Middlesworth research prize were recognized at a special awards ceremony during Duke Family Weekend. These students were recognized for their outstanding work in research and the utilization of library sources.

 

 

Redesigned Library Website: A Brief Interlude

Our newly redesigned website will be right back after this short break!
Our newly redesigned website will be right back after this short break!

Good things come to those who wait. For those who appreciate a little delayed gratification, we’re pushing back the launch of our redesigned library website by a couple of weeks.

Here’s why. After soft-launching on October 14 during Duke’s Fall Break, we quickly discovered some unexpected problems with people accessing their library accounts through the new site. Rather than cause any undue delays or frustration for our patrons, we decided to leave the old site in place until we could do more extensive testing and resolve the technical issue. We will re-launch the new site by the end of this month, once the problem is fixed.

During this brief intermission, you can still explore the prototype of the redesigned library website on our development server and let us know what you think. We want to thank our library users again for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience to those who reported trouble accessing their library accounts yesterday. Everything should be working normally now.

For more about the library website redesign, check out some of our previous blog posts. And keep an eye out for the unveiling of our new and improved (and fully functioning) website later this month.

Kick off the fall “Fantasy” season… with art!

fc_title2This fall the source code for Fantasy Collecting, a pedagogical and research tool inspired by Fantasy Football and developed at Duke University, became publicly available on GitHub.

You may think you “know good art when you see it,” but this online art game will test your mettle as a tastemaker. Art fans, hackers, educators, and economists everywhere can now use Fantasy Collecting to both become the proud owners of masterpieces and attempt to mint new ones.

For those new to the notion of “fantasy art collecting” (which likely includes most of us), the Fantasy Collecting game is a classroom teaching and research tool that uses the pulse-pounding, high adrenaline activity of a virtual art market to teach art history and economics. Students try their hands at strategically increasing their collections’ value by promoting, acquiring, and trading works of art while performing micro-scholarship in the process.

Game co-designers Katherine Jentleson (Ph.D. Candidate in the Art, Art History, and Visual Studies department and member of the Duke Art, Law and Markets Initiative) and William Shaw (Duke University Libraries’ Digital Humanities Technology Consultant with the Humanities Writ Large initiative) developed and tested the game with art history and economics classes before preparing the code for public release under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Thanks to a collaboration with Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art, students were able to play first with works from the world-renowned contemporary art collection of Duke alumni Jason Rubell and later with the 1,000+ permanent collection works that the Nasher has digitized as part of its eMuseum.

Built as a teaching tool with many potential applications, the game can now be used by others as a supplement to classroom and book learning, as a basis for research studies on topics like art preferences and auction behavior, or even just for casual play. The flexibility of the code allows new users to populate the game with images relevant to his or her teaching or research goals, determine the length of desired rounds of the game, and customize game events that incentivize players to meet challenges like writing “vision statements” about their collections. Documentation and explanatory videos provided along with the code offer instruction on how the game and game play work, and specifically how it was used for art history instruction.

The three videos below explain the concept and purpose behind the Fantasy Collecting game, the rules of game play (including video captures), as well as educational outcomes and student engagement.

Background: http://youtu.be/MQsHH7fnS4c

Game Play: http://youtu.be/i8QG2bexQKM

Outcomes: http://youtu.be/aSNtbcCF3zg

IEEE Xplore Digital Library Database “Tips & Tricks” Training Session

ieee-xplore
The IEEE Xplore Home Page

IEEE Xplore Digital Library Database “Tips & Tricks” training session for Duke faculty, Researchers, and Students 

When:  Tuesday October 22, 2013
Time: 1:00-2:00 pm
Where:  Schiciano Auditorium – Side A @ Fitzpatrick Center (CIEMAS), (Click for Map)
Contact: Melanie Sturgeon, melanie.sturgeon@duke.edu
Please register to attend: Use our online registration form

Free lunch will be provided for participants before the event in the Schiciano Lobby from 12:00-1:00pm.

Come join us on October 22 and learn how to best use IEEE Xplore, one of the premier resources for scientific and technical content.

The IEEE Xplore digital library is a powerful resource for discovery and access to information published by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and its partners. IEEE Xplore provides Web access to more than 3-million full-text documents from some of the world’s most highly cited publications in electrical engineering, computer science and electronics. The content in IEEE Xplore comprises over 160 journals, over 1,200 conference proceedings, more than 3,800 technical standards, over 1,000 eBooks and over 300 educational courses.

The training session will teach attendees to use this invaluable resource more efficiently, and will focus on several key points of interest.

Topics Covered:

  • Best practices for searching
  • Advanced and Command Searching
  • Downloading Bibliographic Citation information
  • Setting up Alerts
  • and much more!

A Brief Excursion in the Wayback Machine

Here in the Duke University Libraries, we’re excited about unveiling our redesigned website next Monday, October 14. If you haven’t already tried out the prototype, you can give it test-drive on our development server.

But before we launch the new site, we thought it would be fun to take a little trip in the Wayback Machine and reminisce about just how far we’ve come. This isn’t our first redesign rodeo, after all.

So join us as we surf back in Internet Time and explore…

 

Our Library Website Through the Years
(with real archived links!)

 

1997
J. K. Rowling publishes first 
Harry Potter book, Titanic hits theaters, Hong Kong becomes part of China again, Princess Diana dies—and our website wins a “Best of the Web” award!

Click on the image to go straight back to 1997!
Click on the image to go straight back to 1997!

 

 

2001
Gladiator wins Best Picture, Ravens win Super Bowl, Duke Men’s Basketball wins NCAA Championship, 9/11 attacks, Enron files for bankruptcy—and we get Wifi in the library!

Click on the image to back to 2001!
Click on the image to go straight back to 2001!

 

 

2004
Facebook launches, Ronald Reagan dies, Lance Armstrong wins sixth Tour de France, Red Sox win World Series, Richard Brodhead becomes president of Duke—and we launch a redesigned library website!

Click on the image to go straight back to 2004!
Click on the image to go straight back to 2004!

 

 

2008
Large Hadron Collider begins operations, U.S. Stock Market plunges, Coach K leads U.S. men’s basketball to gold in Beijing Olympics, Barack Obama elected President—and we released the first mobile version of our website!

Click on the image to go straight back to 2008!
Click on the image to go straight back to 2008!

 

Stay tuned for the next chapter in our online history, going live October 14!

Redesigned Library Website: Give It a Test-Drive!

Click on the screenshot to see the new Duke University Libraries website (Duke on-campus access only).
Click on the screenshot to see the new Duke University Libraries website.

As we’ve mentioned here before, we’re getting ready to launch our redesigned Duke University Libraries website on October 14, during Duke’s Fall Break.

We’ve been documenting and testing our process for the better part of a year, and we greatly appreciate all the helpful feedback and comments our users have given us along the way. Your participation has made the process smoother and helped us make better-informed decisions about the design and functionality of our new site. Thank you!

With October 14 less than a week away, we’re ready to let the Duke community take our new website for a spin. We’re still tweaking some things and ironing out a few glitches, but we think it’s ready to share. Here’s a preview link on our development server: http://libcms.oit.duke.edu/

(Note: This is a temporary link. Our new site will publicly go live at library.duke.edu on October 14. All old URLs will be redirected to new ones.)

In our last post about the website redesign, we covered some of the major search and navigational differences between the old site and the new one. Here are a few additional improvements you may notice.

1. More emphasis on the search box.
Library websites are different from other university websites. This isn’t just our virtual face to the world. It’s a multifunctional tool, as well as the primary way most of our users “go to the library” and get to our resources. You’ll notice that the search box is larger and designed in a way to help you get the information you need more quickly, with fewer distractions on the page.

2. Easier access to important functions.
We’ve added a “Quick Links” section on the homepage to emphasize important information and answers to frequently asked questions. You’ll also notice that “My Accounts” is linked consistently in the header throughout the site. This takes you to a page where you can login to all of your library accounts in one place, from renewing books and viewing hold requests, to interlibrary loan and document delivery, to requesting materials from the Rubenstein Library.

3. Better integration with our physical space.
This is one new addition we think our students will really appreciate. Duke’s campus libraries are popular places. Study space is in high demand. With that in mind, we’ve created a new “Places to Study” page featuring a comprehensive list of library study spots on both East and West Campus. There are photos of study rooms and descriptions of their features. You can even filter study spaces by location, electrical outlets, nearness to coffee, etc. We’ve also made it easier to reserve a study space or meeting room with the click of a button.

4. New individual library homepages.
We’ve made significant updates to the homepages of our individual campus libraries, including Lilly, Music, the Marine Lab Library, the Library Service Center, and the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. For Lilly and Music, we’ve also added search boxes to make it easier to find materials housed in those locations.

Screenshot of the new Rubenstein Library homepage. (Duke access only)
Screenshot of the new Rubenstein Library homepage.

5. Easier access to international research and services.
Want to find materials on specific countries, like France, China, or Canada? Or perhaps schedule a one-on-one consultation with a subject or language expert? Click on our interactive International Resources map and see what resources and services we have available for different regions of the globe.

New interactive International Research page (Duke access only).
New interactive International Research page.

6. More personalized help.
We’ve revamped our list of librarians and subject experts to make it easier for you to find someone who knows your field and can answer questions about particular topics.

7. Enhanced searchability.
We’ve already talked about the redesigned search box on the homepage. But we also added some functionality to the website search in the header on every page. By using the drop-down button, you can search for books, articles, or all library materials without having to go back to the homepage.

8. Less jargon.
We’re librarians. We love acronyms, proper names, and technical terminology. But we recognize that not everyone else speaks librarianese. To that end, we’ve made a conscious effort to edit all of our site content for greater clarity, simplicity, accuracy, and web-friendliness. We hope it helps.

Again, take it for a spin and let us know what you think! And mark your calendar for October 14, when our new site officially goes live!

Database Training Session: Scopus, Oct. 16 (Free Lunch!)

scopus-home3

Scopus Training Session for Duke Faculty, Researchers, and Graduate Students
When: Wednesday, October 16
Time: 11:00 – 11:45 a.m.
Where: Schiciano Auditorium – Side A, Fitzpatrick Center (Click for map)
Contact: Melanie Sturgeon, melanie.sturgeon@duke.edu
Registration: Please Register to Attend

Note:  Lunch to follow in FCIEMAS lobby, 12:00-1:00 p.m. (provided by Elsevier). We will also be raffling off two iPod shuffles for attendees!

Please join us on October 16 for a Scopus training session on campus with Elsevier.

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature from international publishers, open access journals, conference proceedings, and trade publications. Database coverage includes Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Engineering; Life and Health Sciences; Social Sciences, Psychology, and Economics; Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.

This training session will educate science faculty, researchers, and graduate students about Scopus, which was designed to save you time in finding the right articles. 

Topics Covered

  • Coverage and searching
  • Author Identifier / Author Search Tab / Author Evaluator
  • Citation overview
  • Setting up alerts and exporting citations
  • much more!

Additional Training Session for Duke Library Staff:

Date: Wednesday, October 16
Time: 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Where: Bostock Library, Room 023
Contact: Melanie Sturgeon, melanie.sturgeon@duke.edu
Registration: Please Register to Attend

Snacks provided by Elsevier

Workshop: Research Data Management at Duke, Oct. 2

data mgmt

Date: Wednesday, October 2
Time: 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217 (Click for map)
Contact: Hannah Rozear, hannah.rozear@duke.edu
Please register to attend: http://tinyurl.com/my8knyd

Duke University Libraries invites you to attend GS711-10 Research Data Management, part of our Managing Your Research workshop series. Students, faculty, and staff are welcome to attend. Graduate student attendees will be eligible to receive RCR credit for participation in this event.

Workshop Description

In response to expectations for open access to publicly funded research, agencies from the NSF to the NEH require data management plans as part of funding proposals. Increasingly, researchers are expected to provide access to data as part of verifying and replicating research results. This workshop provides a high-level overview of the research data lifecycle, focusing on particular moments and issues to consider in order to effectively and responsibly manage data used in a range of disciplinary projects. Participants will learn about resources available at Duke to support data management and where to go for additional, customized help in planning data management for research.

Topics Covered

  • Funder requirements and writing data management plans for grant proposals
  • Records management for collaboratively produced data
  • Best practices for data description
  • Data storage options and appropriate back-up procedures
  • Sharing, publishing, and getting credit for your data
  • The when, why, and how of data archiving for long-term preservation

Speakers

  • Elena Feinstein, M.L.S., Librarian for Chemistry and Biological Sciences
  • Ciara Healy, M.L.S., Librarian for Psychology and Neuroscience and Library Liaison for Bass Connections in Brain & Society
  • Emily Mazure, M.S.I., Biomedical Research Liaison Librarian, Medical Center Library and Archives
  • Liz Milewicz, Ph.D., M.L.I.S., Head, Digital Scholarship Services Department, Duke University Libraries, and Library Liaison for Bass Connections in Information, Society & Culture

New App: Get Academic Journals on Your iPad

In order to make our library resources more mobile-friendly, we’ve picked up a new tool called BrowZine, an app for iPads and Android tablets that lets you browse, read, and monitor current academic journals in your subject areas. And best of all for our Duke users, it’s free!

Here’s a 2-minute video about how it works:

If you want to use BrowZine, you can download it to your iPad or Android device by following these easy steps:

  1. Go to the App Store or Google Play, search for BrowZine, and install it. (It’s free.)
  2. When you open BrowZine for the first time, you’ll see a list of schools – select Duke, then enter your Net ID and password.
  3. Select subject areas, and start browsing journals. That’s it! You can save your favorites to your personal bookshelf.

How many journals are included? BrowZine has relationships with these academic journal publishers, so any journals included in that group and published since 2005 should be viewable through the BrowZine app.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

BrowZine is compatible with Zotero, Dropbox, Evernote and other services (Mendeley and RefWorks are coming soon), allowing you to organize and manage your research seamlessly. You can also save articles to your BrowZine pin board to read later, even when you’re offline.

If you have questions or comments, please get in touch with Emily Daly, Head of the User Experience Department, or contact your subject librarian.

 

Screenshots showing the bookshelf and article view on BrowZine, a new tool the Libraries are currently trialing.
Screenshots showing the bookshelf and article view on BrowZine, a new mobile-friendly tool available for Duke University library users.

British Library Grant Helps Duke Preserve Tibetan Manuscripts

Menri Monastery in Northern India possesses the world’s largest collection of manuscripts relating to Bön, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet.
Menri Monastery in Northern India possesses the world’s largest collection of manuscripts relating to Bön, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet. All photos by Edward Proctor.

Duke University has received a grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme to digitize and preserve a trove of ancient religious manuscripts related to Bön, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet.

Once digitized, the manuscripts will be made freely available online through the British Library, giving scholars around the world access to an important archive of religious texts that were previously accessible only by traveling to a monastery in a remote part of the Indian Himalayas.

The Menri Monastery, located near the village of Dolanji in the Northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, possesses the world’s largest collection of manuscripts relating to Bön. Most of these materials were rescued from ancient monasteries in Tibet before they were destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The collection includes some 129 pechas, or traditional Tibetan books, comprising more than 62,000 pages of text. A pecha consists of loose leaves of handmade paper wrapped in cloth, placed between wooden boards, and secured with a belt. Also included are some 479 handmade colorfully-illustrated initiation cards, or tsakli, which are employed in various rituals and contain significant amounts of text.

Duke librarian Edward Proctor, second from right, worked with monks at the monastery in 2009 to determine the feasibility of digitizing the Bön manuscripts.
Duke librarian Edward Proctor, second from right, worked with monks at the monastery in 2009 to determine the feasibility of digitizing the Bön manuscripts.

As the name suggests, the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme aims to preserve archival material that is in danger of disappearing, particularly in countries where resources and opportunities to preserve such material are lacking or limited. The Bön manuscripts are an excellent case in point, according to Edward Proctor, the principal investigator for the project. Proctor is Duke’s librarian for South and Southeast Asia. He also works to develop the South Asian Studies collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library through a cooperative arrangement with Duke.

“The Bön manuscripts are subject to a variety of perils,” said Proctor. “They are currently housed in a building that is neither air-conditioned nor humidity-controlled. Having so many unique materials in one location means that a single disaster, such as a massive mudslide or earthquake (not an infrequent occurrence in this area), could quickly extinguish the records of this ancient tradition.”

The Bön manuscripts cover a wide range of subjects, including history, grammar, poetry, rules of monastic discipline, rituals, astronomy, medicine, musical scores, biographies of prominent Bön teachers, and practical instruction manuals for the creation and consecration of paintings, sculptures, mandalas, ritual offerings, reliquaries, amulets, and talismans.

Proctor first traveled to the Menri Monastery in 2009 on a Pilot Project grant from the British Library to investigate the scope and condition of the Bön manuscripts and the feasibility of digitizing them. He will return later this fall and winter to oversee their digitization, which will be carried out by monastery staff. Proctor will provide training in digitization techniques and offer guidance on best practices in archival management. Once the project is complete, the digitization equipment funded by the British Library will remain at the monastery for the future use of the Bön monks.

Pechas, or traditional Tibetan books, consist of loose leaves of handmade paper wrapped in cloth, placed between wooden boards, and secured with a belt.
Pechas, or traditional Tibetan books, consist of loose leaves of handmade paper wrapped in cloth, placed between wooden boards, and secured with a belt.

According to Proctor, this digitization project is essential to the efforts of Bön monks and nuns to preserve their unique culture, as well as the efforts of scholars elsewhere to understand the early cultural and intellectual history of Central Asia.

“These unique documents already escaped destruction once, during the excesses of the Cultural Revolution,” said Proctor. “But there is still a risk that they could disappear. Just last year, a fire in an 18th-century temple in Bhutan reduced its entire manuscript collection to ashes. Tragically, the temple’s collection had been proposed to be digitized as part of a Major Project grant. Thanks to this grant from the Endangered Archives Programme, it will now be possible to ensure the long-term survival of the Bön manuscripts in Menri Monastery.”

To learn more about the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, visit their website.

The collection also includes many tsakli, or handmade colorfully-illustrated initiation cards employed in various rituals.
The collection also includes many tsakli, or handmade colorfully-illustrated initiation cards employed in various rituals.

Digital Forensics, Emulation, and the Art of Restoration: April 24

The Thing

Who: Ben Fino-Radin
When: Wednesday, April 24, 4:00 p.m.
Where: Perkins Library, Room 217 (Click for map)
Contact: Winston Atkins (winston.atkins@duke.edu)

In 1991, from a basement in lower Manhattan, contemporary artist Wolfgang Staehle founded The Thing, an electronic Bulletin Board System (BBS) that served as a cyber-utopian hub for NYC-based artists integrating computers and into their creative practice.

The Thing emerged at a moment when contemporary artists were coming to grips with personal computers and the role they played in visual art. The BBS, which began as a temporary experiment, grew to become an international network of artists and ideas. Then the World Wide Web emerged and in 1995 Staehle abandoned the BBS for a web-based iteration of The Thing. The cultural record of these crucial early years, inscribed on the platters of the hard drive that hosted the BBS, was left to sit in a dusty basement.

The Thing 2

Fast forward to 2013. Digital conservator Ben Fino-Radin reached out to Staehle to investigate the state of the BBS. Did the machine that hosted The Thing still exist? Could the board be restored to working order?

For scholars interested in the intersection of art and technology, the ability to investigate the contents of the BBS and observe its original look and feel would help flesh out the history of the emergence of personal computers and visual art. Tragically, it was discovered that the computer that hosted The Thing BBS was at some point discarded.

Join Ben Fino-Radin on April 24 to discuss the process of digital forensics, investigation, and anthropology involved in the process of restoring The Thing BBS from the scattered bits and pieces of evidence that managed to survive, and how this story serves as a case-study in the need for a new model of digital preservation in archives.

This event is free and open to the public.

 

About the Speaker
fino-radinBen Fino-Radin is a New York based media archaeologist and conservator of born-digital and computer-based works of contemporary art. At Rhizome at the New Museum, he leads the preservation and curation of the ArtBase, one of the oldest and most comprehensive collections of born-digital works of art. He is also in practice in the conservation department of the Museum of Modern Art, managing the museum’s repository for digital assets in the collection, as well as contributing to media conservation projects. He is near completion of an MFA in digital arts and MS in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute, with a BFA from Alfred University.

 

Find Out More

Ben Fino-Radin:

The Thing:

Rhizome:

  • Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.” (from the Rhizome mission statement)

 

Information Architecture Plans for the Library Website

Since we announced our website redesign project in January, we have been working hard to plan the new site. We’re doing everything we can to ensure that http://library.duke.edu will clearly reflect our many services and resources, will be easy to understand, and will connect you quickly to the information you’re looking for.

Here’s our “information architecture” blueprint for the new site. It’s a birds-eye conceptual view; it certainly doesn’t represent all of our pages and is still under review, but it shows how we’ve chosen to organize and label the main parts of the site.

lib-ia-1.3.1-20130311

Here are the main improvements over the current architecture.

  • Navigation. We’ll have a clear main menu (“global navigation”) that will persist at the top of our pages throughout the site. Our six main areas will be:
    • Search & Find, Using the Library, Research Support, Course Support, Libraries, and About Us
  • Organization. Our most important pages will be organized under one of the six main menu items, accessible via a “megadropdown” area that will appear when you mouse-over the main menu.
  • Labels. We’re getting rid of as much library jargon as we can in the site, and will instead use natural language to make things clear.
  • Search. We’re consolidating as much as we can to make it less confusing which search box you should use to look for different kinds of information.

Data-Driven Decisions

libclicks-2011-12
Map of clicks on library homepage, 2011-12. Click to Enlarge.

searchterm-treemap-2011-12
Treemap visualization of the top 100 search terms used in website search box, 2011-12. Click to Enlarge

Our decisions about the architecture are grounded in rigorous research efforts and we continue to assess and refine the plans at every stage of the project. To date, our plans have been developed and modified based on:

• Project vision & values statements
• Usage stats for our current website
• FAQs at our service points
• Usability testing
• Reverse cardsort testing
• Search term analysis for our current website
• Analysis of comparable websites
• Literature review
• Content inventory activities
• Feedback forms
• Stakeholder discussions (especially with faculty and student groups).

What’s Next?

Over the next month, we’ll be developing and sharing visual “wireframe” mockups that will show the actual layout for the site based on our information architecture. While you won’t see colors, fonts, and photos yet, you will see some low-fidelity representations of how the pages will look. We’ll definitely be seeking your feedback on those mockups they become available.

Staying Involved

We would love to hear your feedback! Please leave your comments for us below or email them privately to me at sean.aery@duke.edu. You’ll be able to follow the project’s progress using this link. http://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/category/web-redesign/

Cultural Anthropology Takes Open Access Publishing at Duke to Next Level

Cultural Anthropology Journal CoverThe announcement earlier this week that the journal Cultural Anthropology was going open access in 2014 has generated a lot of excitement in academic circles.

Cultural Anthropology is the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. It is one of 22 journals published by the AAA, and it is widely regarded as one of the flagship journals of its discipline. The journal is edited by Charles D. Piot and Anne Allison, both professors of cultural anthropology at Duke University.

Here in the Libraries, we’re especially excited about this development, not only because it’s a great step in promoting broader access to academic research, but because we will be supporting the back end of the publication process.

In fact, this is the fourth peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal the Libraries are helping to publish. As part of a series of efforts at Duke to promote open access as an institutional priority, the Libraries piloted an open-access publishing service in 2011, starting with three journals: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (published in print since 1958); andererseits, a journal of Transatlantic German Studies; and Vivliofika, a journal of 18th-century Russian Studies.

The addition of Cultural Anthropology confirms the success of that pilot and takes the experiment to a new level. Cultural Anthropology is a major, high-impact journal read by scholars around the world. It is also one of the first flagship journals in the interpretive social sciences to transition to a fully open access model. (Although the push for open access has spread throughout medicine and the sciences, it has been slower to catch on in the humanities and social sciences.)

The Society for Cultural Anthropology recently redesigned the journal’s website, which will act as the front end of the online publication. (The new design nicely complements the print version distributed to subscribers.) But the back end of the editorial process will use a free, open-source platform known as Open Journal Systems that is hosted and managed by the Duke University Libraries.

open_access logoThe Open Journal Systems software was developed by the Public Knowledge Project, a partnership of Canadian and U.S. universities and libraries, specifically to manage the overhead of creating and sustaining academic journals. More than 11,500 scholarly journals currently use the software as their publishing platform.

Open Journal Systems is structured to help editors manage the publishing process, from receiving submissions to peer review, editing, layout, and publication. It allows both editors and contributors to track and manage articles as they move through the pipeline, so that the publication process is prompt, efficient, and transparent.

In recent years, as scholars have sought to increase the reach and impact of their work using new technologies, and universities and funding agencies have pushed for greater access to the research they support, open-access publishing has emerged as an alternative to the traditional fee- and subscription-based model of scholarly publishing, which limits access to those who can pay for it. “Libraries have always worked to increase access to information, and at Duke we’ve made a concerted effort to support emerging practices in scholarly communication,” said Paolo Mangiafico, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications Technology. “So we are glad to be able to partner with Duke scholars and their scholarly societies to experiment with new models to achieve these goals.”

For more information about open-access journal publishing at Duke, visit the Libraries’ website, or contact Paolo Mangiafico.

Further Reading:

When Art Makes the Man

Undergraduate course and exhibition, Rivalrous Masculinities, explores competing constructions of masculinity over time.

It’s one thing to tell a student that gender is constructed. It’s quite another to ask a student to collect and explain historical images of masculinity. Add to that the added challenges of communicating these insights in a foreign language with students in another country in order to develop an exhibition for the Nasher Museum of Art, and you have no ordinary undergraduate class.

In this case, the class is Rivalrous Masculinities, a seminar co-developed by Professor Anne Marie Rasmussen and Ph.D. candidates Steffen Kaupp and Christian Straubhaar of the German Languages department. They structured this course so that their students would meet and work regularly with students at German universities in order to construct an exhibition focusing on competing social and cultural constructions of masculinity over time.

RM-Exhibit-Poster
Click on the image to visit the online exhibition

With approval and funding from the Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities Writ Large project, this Rivalrous Masculinities project team was put in touch with Will Shaw (Duke University Libraries’ Digital Humanities Technology Consultant), who steered them in the direction of Omeka, a freely available and open source web-publishing platform especially useful in the organization and online presentation of image collections. Students in the fall 2012 Rivalrous Masculinities course used Omeka to collect, describe, and share images with their classmates and instructors.

This collective research can now be viewed as part of a virtual exhibition, launched in March 2013 and available through 2014. Students signed up for the fall 2013 Rivalrous Masculinities course will continue the project, this time in collaboration with students from Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Hamberg, to prepare a physical exhibition of these works in the Nasher Museum of Art in 2014.

New Library Study Room Reservation System

Use your phone to book a library study, and see photos of the available rooms!
Use your phone to book a library study, and see photos of the available rooms!

Starting today, Duke University Libraries is excited to roll out a brand new room reservation system for study rooms in Perkins, Bostock, Lilly, and Music Libraries—one that you won’t have any reservations about!

This mobile-friendly system is a move toward making library services accessible from a number of digital platforms. Duke affiliates can book rooms on their phone or computer directly from the library homepage—a new link has been added right under the “Library Services” links on library.duke.edu.

As with previous room reservation policies, patrons will be able to book study rooms for up to 3 hours per day. Use is limited to users with a valid @duke.edu email address.

Existing reservations made in the 25Live system have been migrated to the new system. Although library study rooms can no longer be reserved on 25Live, class and study rooms in the Link and other campus locations are still available through this service. If you notice any discrepancies in your bookings in the new system, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Visit our new library study room reservation website to get started, bookmark it on your phone, and let us know what you think.

Desktop view of the new room reservation interface. Click on the image to go to the site.
Desktop view of the new room reservation interface. Click on the image to go to the site.

New Library Service: Digitize This Book

The Duke University Libraries are pleased to announce a new digitization-on-demand service that lets you have out-of-copyright books scanned and delivered to you digitally for free.

Internet Archive Scribe
From stacks to scanner to your inbox. We’re piloting a new service to digitize public domain books for Duke users on demand.

digitize_this_book2Starting this semester, Duke University faculty, students, and staff can request to have certain public domain books scanned on demand. If a book is published before 1923* and located in the Perkins, Bostock, Lilly, or Music Library or in the Library Service Center (LSC), a green “Digitize This Book” button (pictured here) will appear in its online catalog record. Clicking on this button starts the request.

Within two weeks (although likely sooner), you will get an email with a link to the digitized book in the Duke University Libraries collections on the Internet Archive. You—and the rest of the world—can now read this book online, download it to your Kindle, export it as a PDF, or get it as a fully searchable text-only file. And you never have to worry about late fees or recalls!

Throughout the spring semester, Duke University Libraries will be testing how this service works and tweaking the process. Pending the results of this pilot, we hope to expand this service to other library materials and users.

So give it a try, and let us know what you think! Email us directly at digitizebook@duke.edu. If you have questions, feel free as always to ask a librarian.

For answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about the “Digitize This Book” service, visit the Duke University Libraries + Digital Scholarship site.

*Because of copyright restrictions, only books published before 1923 that have entered the public domain are eligible for this service.

Why Catalogers Seldom Blog

The stereotype of catalogers is that we sit quietly behind the scenes, not interacting with users. A walk by our cubicles supports this view. However, we know that the records we work on are a kind of direct communication with users, who can use the library without speaking to a person, but have a hard time avoiding the catalog. Even someone who picks up a book from the New and Noteworthy shelves in Perkins Library and uses a self-check-out machine has used classification and the circulation module of the catalog. Other users access electronic resources through the catalog without even setting foot in the building.

Card Catalog in the Rubenstein Library.
Card Catalog in the Rubenstein Library.

Catalogers embrace other forms of electronic communication as well. We know the proverb about all work and no play, and what looks like work may actually be an exchange of a joke with the coworker in the next cubicle via email or Facebook. Our policies and procedures are documented online, and we participate in electronic forums with catalogers in other libraries. So why has a suggestion by our department head that we blog gone largely unheeded? I wrote one post, and it was fun. I got some compliments on it. However, it was not nearly as rewarding as the creation of a cataloging record. A record for an obscure pamphlet may never be directly used, but it will stand for decades, maybe centuries, as the signpost to that pamphlet. A blog post is a bit of flotsam thrown into a sea of unstructured data.

Post contributed by Amy Turner, Original Cataloger in the Cataloging and Metadata Services Dept.

Welcome to Our Redesigned Library Website!

redesigned library website launch
Click on the screenshot to visit our new library website!

Notice anything different? Our library website has a new look!

After soft-launching the site on October 14 and doing extensive back-end testing in the meantime, we’re excited to roll out the new library.duke.edu today.

We’ve been developing, testing, and documenting our website redesign for a year, and we greatly appreciate all the feedback our users have given us along the way. Your input (and patience) has helped us design a better, simpler, more intuitively organized site for Duke students, faculty, and researchers. 

Here are some highlights of what’s new and improved:

Take a look around and let us know what you think. Use our feedback form to tell us how we’re doing or report a problem or issue.

You can also share your comments and thoughts with us on Facebook or Twitter.

 

Interlibrary Loan Temporarily Unavailable During Winter Break

 

SERVICE INTERRUPTION NOTICE

 

During the upcoming academic winter break (December 17-January 8), Perkins, Law, and Ford libraries will be moving interlibrary loan operations from a locally hosted computer server to OCLC, a non-profit computer service and research organization.

As part of this transfer of service, all data associated with document delivery operations (ILLiad) will need to be transferred to OCLC. To prepare library files for this transfer, we will be shutting down access to our local interlibrary loan service on the morning of Friday, December 14. OCLC will begin building the interlibrary loan files on their computers on Monday, December 17, a process they expect to take a few days.

During this process, neither library staff nor library patrons will have access to their ILLiad accounts or files, and all system functionality will be inaccessible for transaction processing. Please plan ahead for requesting materials. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to update our system.

We Have a Winner!

Our fellow Americans…

Earlier this fall, we got into the election spirit and decided to host a little competition.

We invited Duke students to “be our Super PAC” and make a mock election video explaining why Duke University Libraries get their vote. We received a number of creative submissions. Eligible video entries were posted to this blog and the Libraries’ Facebook page, where we invited people to vote for their favorite. It was the very embodiment of the democratic process.

Now we are pleased to announce the winning video, produced and directed by Duke undergrads Jordan Thomas (’15) and Reem Alfahad (’15). For their creativity and filmmaking skills, Jordan and Reem won two student wristbands to the Duke vs. UNC men’s basketball game in Cameron Indoor Stadium, February 13, 2013.

Jordan’s and Reem’s video demonstrates not only their great imagination, terrific sense of humor, and talent, but also their superb appreciation for what we try to provide our students, faculty, and library users here at Duke. They also did a great job of making it look, feel, and sound like an actual campaign ad!

But don’t take our word for it. Watch the video, hit that like button, and remember to go vote!

Fair Use Ascendant, Nov. 19

Date: Monday, November 19, 2012
Time: 10:00 a.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217, Duke West Campus (Map)
Contact: Kevin Smith, kevin.l.smith@duke.edu

Fair Use Ascendant:
Where Do We Stand After the Recent Copyright Victories for Higher Ed?

A presentation and discussion for librarians and faculty
Lead by Kevin Smith, Director of the Copyright and Scholarly Communications Office

In the past four months, we have seen positive rulings in two major copyright cases brought against universities and their libraries, and the dismissal of a third.  These ruling have confirmed the importance of fair use in higher education, and they suggest that libraries and faculty members should feel more confident embracing fair use for certain kinds of online activities.

Come learn about these decisions—we will review each briefly and also discuss the ARL Code of Best Practices in Fair Use—and join a discussion about the opportunities they create.

Libraries Dramatically Expand Ebook Offerings

Image by Maximilian Schönherr, Wikimedia Commons

Duke library users and Duke alumni will soon have a trove of new ebooks at their fingertips.

Approximately 1,500 scholarly monographs by Oxford University Press and its affiliates are now available as ebooks in the library catalog, with approximately 9,000 more to come later this year.

The development is part of an innovative deal brokered by Oxford University Press and the Triangle Research Libraries Network consortium (TRLN).

The ebooks are fully searchable and allow for unlimited user access, so that multiple people can read them at the same time. In addition, one shared print copy of each humanities and social science title will be held at Duke’s Library Service Center and be available for use by all TRLN institutions (Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, NCSU, NCCU).

“The partnership allows for expanded access to scholarly material, with less overlap, at a lower cost to each TRLN institution,” says Aisha Harvey, Head of Collection Development at Duke University Libraries. “It also gives researchers the option of using a print or digital copy, depending on their personal preference.”

This access agreement is one of the first of its kind to allow shared e-book access among cooperating libraries. Another noteworthy aspect is that the ebooks will be fully available to all Duke alumni. Most ebooks in the Libraries’ collection are not accessible to alumni, due to copyright and licensing restrictions. But the new arrangement expands the Libraries’ offerings to Duke graduates. (A variety of library services and resources are already available for free to all Duke alumni, including some of our most popular databases.)

“The Triangle Research Libraries Network has a very long history of successful collaboration in building print collections,” said Sarah Michalak, University Librarian and Associate Provost at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chair of the TRLN Executive Committee.

Last year, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, TRLN sponsored a “Beyond Print” summit to explore opportunities and challenges associated with ebook acquisitions and shared institutional access. The ebook deal with Oxford University Press is one outcome of those discussions.

“The agreement with OUP offers a welcome opportunity to experiment with approaches discussed at the summit, provide high-quality content to our users, and learn more about how students and researchers want to access scholarly output in a dual electronic-plus-print environment,” said Michalak.

Ebook and ejournal usage continues to rise in academic libraries across the country. In 2011, the Duke Libraries adopted an ebook advocacy model in order to guide collection decisions and advocate to publishers on behalf of researchers’ needs.

Text Mining Talk > TODAY at 2:30

Ryan Shaw is an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science, UNC Chapel HIll.

Date: Thursday, September 20
Time: 2:30-4:00 p.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217 (map)
Contact: Liz Milewicz, (919) 660-5911, liz.milewicz@duke.edu

Today Duke University Libraries launches its new Digital Scholarship Series, Text > Data, with a talk by UNC SILS faculty member Ryan Shaw – 2:30-4:00 PM in Perkins Library 217. All are welcome to attend.

Ryan will provide an overview and a critique of text-mining projects, and discuss project design, methodology, scope, integrity of data and analysis as well as preservation. This presentation will help scholars understand the research potential of text mining, and offer a summary of issues and concerns about technology and methods.

This presentation will be an excellent introduction to text mining as a methodological approach. And if you’re a PhD student, you can earn 2 RCR credits (GS712) for attending this talk — just be sure to register your attendance: http://library.duke.edu/events/digital-scholarship/event.do?id=6321.

Open Access Week Talk: Altmetrics and the Decoupled Journal

Date: Monday, October 22
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: Perkins Library, Room 217 (map)
Contact: Paolo Mangiafico, (919) 613-6317, paolo.mangiafico@duke.edu

To celebrate international Open Access Week this year (October 22-28), the Libraries have lined up an exciting talk and you’re invited to attend. Jason Priem (http://jasonpriem.org/), a doctoral student at UNC-SILS and pioneer of the idea of “altmetrics” (alternative ways of tracking the impact of scholarly work), will be speaking about how open access and new measuring and filtering tools are changing scholarly publishing. Here’s how Priem describes it:

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, I’ll 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. I’ll 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.

This event is  open to the public. We hope you can join us!

Alerts & Outages: ILLiad Service Interuption July 21

Please bear with us with we upgrade ILLiad!
(Photo by channah via stock.xchng)

On Saturday morning, July 21, approximately between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m., the Duke University Libraries will be performing an upgrade to the server which hosts ILLiad, our interlibrary loan program.  The operation is planned to take two hours, and during this time users will not be able to access their interlibrary loan accounts.

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience while we upgrade our system.

An Interlude from the Golden Age of Radio

If you’re a fan of the NPR show “The Story” with Dick Gordon, be sure to tune in to today’s episode (“Sixteen Inches of Radio”) featuring Duke’s own Randy Riddle. Riddle is an Academic Technology Consultant in the Center for Instructional Technology. But in his spare time, he collects old radio transcription discs, a recording format dating from the 1930s. Not many of these original discs survive, since many were discarded over the years and some were made of experimental types of plastics that degrade over time.

On “The Story,” Riddle talks with guest host Sean Cole about his interest in old-time syndicated radio programs from the 1930s and 1940s—from popular shows like “Suspense” (which stayed on the air for 20 years) to less well-known gems like “The American Family Robinson,” a thinly-veiled propaganda series produced in the 1930s by the National Industrial Council (a front for the powerful National Association of Manufacturers). That show follows the life and times of Luke Robinson, a small-town newspaper editor, and his wacky family. The plot lines are typically pedestrian, but they are  frequently interlaced with diatribes against Franklin Roosevelt’s “socialist” New Deal policies and praise for lower taxes and less regulation for business and industry (sound familiar?).

Riddle has generously donated many of his original transcription discs to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke, where they are part of the Randy Riddle Collection of Race Records and Radio Programs. However, if you just want a taste of Riddle’s remarkable collection, you can hear selections of “Suspense,” “The American Family Robinson,” and many more old-time radio programs on his personal blog, where he writes about radio history and posts digitized versions of the transcriptions in all their original, scratchy glory.

Label from "The American Family Robinson" Episode 42
Transcription disc label for “The American Family Robinson,” from Riddle’s collection. The show was sponsored by the National Industrial Council as part of their mid-1930s propaganda efforts to combat FDR’s New Deal economic policies.

Library Supplies “Meat” for NPR

If you’ve been following National Public Radio’s summer series on America’s love affair with meat, you’re sure to have noticed the meat marketing billboards recently featured in NPR’s food blog, with images provided courtesy of the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in Duke University LibrariesDavid M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Billboard advertising grew apace with the interstate highway system, begun in the 1950s. These images were collected by the companies who created them, as demonstration to clients of the roadside advertising they developed. Today, they’re a sign of their times and the technology and economics that drove beef consumption in the United States.

You can revisit and research more of America’s commercial culture through digitized collections from the Hartman Center. The ROAD 2.0 collection contains all the billboard advertisements featured on the NPR blog, and thousands more of these markers of America’s advertising history. Celebrate the birth of our nation and the birth of billboard advertising by searching for “meat” across this collection!

A billboard featuring Fischer's deli meats, circa 1983, from the ROAD 2.0 collection.

 

Engineering the Killer Rabbit: How We Represented a Timeline of Doris Duke’s Life in XML

“What form does the data take?” is a question that developers ask early in the life-cycle of any information technology project.

Last year, Doris Duke Archivist Mary Samouelian approached some of us in the IT department with an idea for a project that involved a specific kind of data. She wanted to produce an interactive timeline of Doris Duke’s life for a presentation she would give at a Friends of the Duke University Libraries meeting in May. We took it on, and resolved to do something innovative with it. The final result of our work is available here; for more on the project, see Mary’s post on the Devil’s Tale blog, “The Doris Duke Collection Reimagined.”

To me, an innovation means opening the way to a new service or a new capacity. A one-off project wouldn’t have done that.

When we took up the project in earnest in mid-February, the data was in the form of an extensive and detailed Microsoft Word document that Mary had written. One of the first questions we needed to resolve was how to represent the information in the Word document as data.

We needed a way for Mary to read and edit the data on an ongoing basis. At the same time, the data must be available in a structured format that computers can manipulate. This tension between the reading methods of intuitive, interpretive human beings and fussy, unforgiving computers is the central challenge of representing data.

As it happens, archivists already represent timelines in a way that computers can process. Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is an XML standard for archival finding aids. Among its many features, it specifies a way for archivists to build timelines related to the creators of a collection’s material. As a practiced author of finding aids, Mary is familiar with the use of EAD. Since the development team for the project is the same group that recently built our finding aids site, EAD seemed like a natural fit for the project.

However, there is an emerging standard, related to EAD, that also caught our attention. Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF or just EAC) “provides a grammar for encoding names of creators of archival materials and related information.” I first became familiar with it when I saw a presentation at the 2010 code4lib for the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) project. The presenter called their prototype implementation “Facebook for dead people.”

That site uses EAC records from a variety of institutions to accomplish several ends. First, it shows the array of collections from the participating institutions associated with an individual – say, Walt Whitman. Second, it builds a social network among individuals, linking a creator like Whitman to other parties with whom he corresponded, was related, or otherwise associated.

Another aim of EAC is to establish an infrastructure of name authority for the corporate bodies and people who create archival collections. To that end, the EAC community – including our former Duke colleague Kathy Wisser – has received an IMLS grant, Building a National Archival Authorities Infrastructure. The grant will fund a series of workshops through the Society of American Archivists, and the development of “a set of recommendations addressing business, governance, and technological requirements.”

As the development team discussed Mary’s project, we liked the idea of using EAC-CPF markup to represent information about Doris Duke. For one thing, we admire the SNAC web site, and have discussed in the past using it as a model for a series of “person portals” into our collections. We wanted to familiarize ourselves with EAC, and the Doris Duke project seemed like an appropriate entry point.

There was only one problem. EAC defines a “chronlist” tag for representing timelines, but its specification was not robust enough. It does not support two of our important needs: 1) linking media files (i.e., images) to events; and 2) linking individual events to the finding aids for collections that provide source materials about the events. Faced with this limitation, we decided to take liberties.

In contrast to EAC, our reading of the EAD tag library confirmed that the specification for its “chronlist” tag is robust enough to support our requirements. We decided to mix the parts of EAD that we liked into our EAC document. The basic technique for mixing and matching XML standards is to use namespace declarations. A namespace is a kind of domain identifier for XML elements. It says, to computers (and people) reading a document, “This tag belongs to that schema.”

If my explanation is overly technical, here are some fitting analogies for what we did: we invented a new fusion cuisine dish; we installed a whammy bar on a Les Paul; we used cobra genes to engineer a killer rabbit.

The resulting EAC file for the Doris Duke project is available here. The tags in that document beginning with the prefix “ead:” are the elements we borrowed from the EAD namespace.

The solution that we devised represented a kind of contract between the content creator, Mary, and the development team. It allowed the two parties to work in parallel, Mary encoding and revising the timeline, and the developers building its display.

Duke is participating in the National Archive Authorities Infrastructure project, which will ultimately integrate our collections into that “Facebook for dead people” social network. We’re also developing our expertise by working on more “people portals”; University Archives will be assigning additional Duke family EAC documents as a low-priority, background project to its interns. It probably took double the effort for the development team to produce a new service rather than a one-off project, but it helped us take our first steps toward this promising approach to describing and exposing the contents of our archival collections.