ATHENA N. JACKSON
This essay expands upon and captures the spirit of a talk I presented at the panel “Special Collections in the Age of Digital Scholarship” at the “Acknowledging the Past, Forging the Future” colloquium held at Case Western Reserve University in the fall of 2014. My talking points focused on my trajectory into the field and the overarching shifts in digitization efforts I have encountered. As our profession has grown, so has our understanding of our roles and the potential for partnering with students and scholars in digital projects. In this corollary essay, I will briefly review the trends (insofar as they can be considered trends at this point; perhaps they are better described as forecasts), I foresee with respect to representing our collections to a digitally focused audience, as well as in participating in deep scholarship via digital technologies.
The panel was asked to respond to the lecture presented by Stephen Enniss, Director of the Harry Ransom Center (see chapter 13), who aimed to explore the future of the book as object: how it will look, how it will be collected, and what needs to be collected and preserved today to ensure its longevity. He also examined the emerging role and value of special collections in a world of digital scholarship, and how digital scholarship techniques can complement and advance the use of manuscripts, rare books, and other archival materials in all formats, including images, art work, and audio and video files. I have further considered this prompt over the past several months in light of our panel discussion at the colloquium. The essay below encompasses portions of my talk, combined with broader observations about the progress of digitization efforts.
Let us first consider the changes in our collections and profession. Rare books and manuscripts are certainly valued assets in special collections that should be documented and preserved for research. But now there is a growing emphasis on developing collections that represent various cultures, impressions, and interests beyond the typical canonical endeavors historically set forth in US academic libraries. We also have embraced a focus on temporality and provenance that includes cultural sensitivity and historical agency for heretofore silenced or unrepresented voices. We now fill historical gaps and surface the ideas of lesser-known perspectives of and grassroots reactions to the humanistic record. Our existing collections of works and papers of men and women of letters now include new neighbors whose provenance stems from the common voices of contemporary eras and, often, of community or cultural groups whose ideas and legacies were yet to be incorporated into the historical record until brought into the archive. Moreover, we aspire to recruit colleagues from underrepresented communities to ensure that perspectives and initiatives span the scope of our changing demographics. We have been proactive in these roles in the last decade and the results of our endeavors have visibly changed our professional composition and the multifaceted cultural heritage histories we document. Taking this into consideration, prioritizing digitization projects and promoting digital scholarship must acknowledge the wide range of collections we steward for research communities of digitally savvy and multicultural patrons.
I have been involved in a range of planned digitization projects from the small-scale boutique and project-driven to the large-scale digitization efforts of a Big Ten school where several units work together on different types of digitization projects across many platforms. All of this is buttressed by my experience on the corporate side of these types of projects in terms of how I approach the planning, piloting, and execution of digitization projects using unpublished, sometimes difficult to describe, and always historically relevant materials. In my current position, I find ways to streamline, codify, and create transparency for those processes that enhance the descriptive, interpretive, and magical moments that occur during research that takes place in the reading room and the classroom, which are often translated to the digital realm. Underscoring all of my work and professional drive is my background as member of an underrepresented community. As a Latina, a special collections librarian, an active member in our professional community, and an administrator who is committed to understanding the hybridized nature of the analog and digital work we do every day, I humbly submit that I represent a glimpse into the future of our profession. It is from this perspective that I will share the trajectory of my career as a case study for present and future digital scholarship trends in the field.
I came to the analog from the digital from an unusual background that has shaped my approach to my work as a special collections professional. In the early twenty-first century, I began my career as an indexer for an electronic publisher of digital humanities collections designed to meet unique academic research needs in an online environment. Little did I know at the time that I was participating in the earliest phases of what would now be described as digital scholarship or digital humanities, employing humanistic approaches to data mining and refined indexing. I learned a corporate model of creating what is now a common product in the library world: the digital collection, which we now often create ourselves for our research communities. I managed talented indexers who performed close readings of historical resources to provide refined and relevant topical access that established the expectations researchers now have when using databases and online catalogs. When I worked in electronic publishing in the early days of what could be considered digital humanities scholarship, the programmers, indexers, editors, and editorial advisors had direct access to one another so that their products included dynamic approaches to developing databases.
I felt such a passion for my work that I left to get a library degree with a plan to return and continue the same career path in e-publishing. However, it was during a special collections course in library school that I realized my personal vocation was for the academic library. After discovering my professional ethos to be more aligned with academic librarianship, I began my library career working on digital projects in a state archive and then moved into an NEH-funded newspaper digitization project in collaboration with the Library of Congress at Louisiana State University. After this initial foray into the field through soft-money projects, I segued into a more typical special collections librarian position, where I was responsible for curating and teaching with rare books, and often participated in digitization of archival materials. I curated exhibitions, developed a unit blog, and performed reader services for students, faculty, and researchers. As my expertise grew, I moved into a more administrative role in my current position as Associate Director of the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan.
At Michigan, I have spent the last year working on the Special Collections Image Bank, where we provide access to public domain images scanned in response to incidental requests by patrons and staff. This year, I am piloting a digital scholarship program derived from an unpublished think piece I wrote to crystallize my small team’s goals, centered on thinking beyond capturing “Figure 1.” The goal for this project is to move beyond supporting a patron in her search for an image (i.e., to acquire the image for “see Figure 1” in narratives), which we will of course continue to support. However, we want to extend our service further to support digital analysis of those images that did not make it into the patron’s research but still supported her arguments. As our researchers have been snapping digital images for their own post-visit analyses in the reading room, I have been wondering what we can do to partner with them more proactively. What more can they explore beyond just the one image selected (the common, “see Figure 1”) to make a strong argument in a publication or assignment? How can we harness our efforts toward answering a question like that in order to make our services visible to our audiences and relevant to our stakeholders? I hope the discussions borne from the colloquium and those inspired by this publication will provide some ideas about our future. I honestly do not think it will be bleak or passionless, but offers the potential for making sense of some of our pioneering moments and professionally tectonic experiences while still holding on to the “exuberant chaos” of our work, as another colloquium speaker, Jay Satterfield, so aptly put it (see chapter 14).
What skills will special collections librarians need to expose confidently and responsibly the historical record and our collective cultural heritage online to constituencies who are increasingly comfortable accessing digital surrogates of primary source materials? Moreover, what techniques should we deploy to cultivate digital scholarship that begins in the reading room or classroom, where we act as partners by extending our service throughout the research process?
Should we learn all the technical skills needed to do this? I say, not necessarily. Do we make bold outreaches to our colleagues in the library, who know key techniques that could surface a different approach to reader services and instruction that includes options for data mining surrogate images from our rare and archival collections? I say, yes.
I know I am not alone in asking these questions, and I suggest that our unique collections and our existing resources dictate our actions as we move forward in this activity in our respective institutions. There is no one set pace or single lane for this work. As I said at the colloquium, I have more questions than answers. And, I hope by opening a dialogue that begins with many questions we can find common ground in our work, and build partnerships with one another.
Academic libraries have embraced technical expertise and skills that have influenced a wave of new approaches to expanding our reach into the electronic ether. Special collections libraries and their curators, archivists, outreach and education librarians, public services staff, and catalogers have had to accommodate this shift in their approaches to describing their materials outside of the reading room by designing instruction spaces and creating finding aids, catalogs, and physical exhibitions, to name a few. I purposefully think broadly about the term “skills” rather than focusing on “technical skills.” Indeed, we can and have nurtured the latter in our special collections colleagues, and much has and still can be written as digitization approaches continue to shift around procedures, digital curation and preservation, and interoperability. Best practices, workshops, and social media flourish with opportunities to expose and grow one’s skillset in our field. Even to someone of my generation who observed humanistic digital research endeavors in earlier states, the technical aspects of our field can be daunting. Learning these skills is becoming a noble vocation in itself.
It is worth noting that, given the ways we have already captured and codified data to describe materials typically found in a closed stack setting, it is of utmost importance not to discount or remove these efforts when exposing digital surrogates from our collections in contemporary scholarship. Bibliographic knowledge and fundamental archival skills still matter. Our profession is rooted in an ethos of which we should all be proud: we strive not to be the arbiters of history, but the advocates for the historical record. It is this foundation upon which I build all of my efforts and continue to exercise the practices of descriptive bibliography, taxonomical analysis, and archival assessment while at the same time exploring activities with my metadata and digital scholarship colleagues to find where our skills and missions intersect.
Thus, my perspective is one that constantly considers how we devise ways to engender digital access, and more crucially, how we endeavor to shrink the digital divide (of both access and application) while disabusing our constituencies of the thankfully already fading notion that our collections are reserved only for an elite class and only in the reading room. Happily, proactive outreach of all types will, and already is, starting to shape perceptions of our efforts, our relevance, and our collective missions. In fact, I posit that with digital social outreach (as demonstrated by our pioneering colleagues already engaged in these activities), we have an opportunity to enable access for communities who would be reticent to visit our reading rooms without such intentionality on our parts.1 Our community outreach activities via social media promote the collection highlights, the remarkably relevant, and the quotidian (to us) work behind our endeavors. Couple these with building partnerships with our students, faculty, scholars, and enthusiasts through pointed and extended service, and we potentially have a paradigm of new approaches to the work taking place in our settings.
Put simply, answering the questions that surfaced in the colloquium segment “Special Collections in an Age of Digital Scholarship” will require a sense of moving beyond just providing access and serving digital copies of analog resources (or born-digital access in these more common times). We must continue to deploy and advocate for our skills with emphasis on providing context and primary source research expertise when partnering with digital scholars of the humanistic record. Indeed, it is time to shake a perceived (and very wrong) notion that when one thinks of special collections the adjoining epithets of “elite” or “forbidden” to describe our holdings and/or services can be far removed from the modern researcher’s awareness. It will take a certain amount of flexibility to adjust nimbly to digital humanities, whose products are experimental approaches to analyzing data. Engagement will be less orchestrated and sometimes even messy. However, the potential benefits are already apparent. There will be more opportunities to cultivate new scholarship, new champions for the historical record, and new collections where all voices—whose context and relevance are captured with our expertise—are heard at the reading room table and in the electronic ether.
NOTE
1. The University of Iowa’s Special Collections tumblr (http://uispeccoll.tumblr.com/) is a fantastic example of how many colleagues have made strides in bringing collections into the social media present. The Folger Shakespeare Library also showcases the many ways to stay connected; see www.folger.edu/connect-with-the-folger.