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Matthew Harp, Joanne Paterson Named Visiting Program Officers for SHARE Humanities Project

Joanne Paterson (left) and Matthew Harp (right)

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has appointed Matthew Harp and Joanne Paterson as visiting program officers for a SHARE project to help make online, scholarly works in the humanities more findable and usable, sparking further discovery and learning.

Digital humanities scholarship can be especially hard to discover and access. Some projects have widely dispersed pieces—such as codebooks, content, and manuscripts—that can be difficult to connect as part of the same work. On the other hand, some projects’ components are tightly bundled and isolated on project websites, hidden from networked search tools.

This SHARE project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), will explore what is needed to uncover and link digital humanities scholarship by adding more metadata—fundamental information about scholarly works, such as author names, work titles, and topics—to those scholarly works in open repositories. SHARE, a collaborative initiative between ARL and the Center for Open Science, harvests metadata about scholarly works at all stages, from grant proposals to posters, preprints, publications, and more. The project team will work with scholars and librarians to learn how to best incorporate digital humanities metadata into the SHARE data set.

Matthew Harp and Joanne Paterson have joined the team working on this project, “Integrating Digital Humanities into the Web of Scholarship with SHARE,” from September 2017 to September 2018. Harp and Paterson served as SHARE curation associates in 2016–2017. Harp is a research data librarian at Arizona State University Library and Paterson is head of metadata access at Western Libraries, Western University.

In their roles as visiting program officers on the project team, Harp will focus on learning more specifically how digital humanists produce, describe, and archive their work, and Paterson will evaluate the technical requirements for enhancing SHARE tools and applications accordingly.

Harp will develop a survey of digital humanities practitioners and create tools for use in focus groups of librarians and scholars. He will help design the agenda for a workshop to identify the skills needed in libraries supporting the digital scholarship workflow (for both stewardship and discovery), and to explore how ARL and other associations’ educational programs can work together to help library staff gain those skills. He will also lead the production of the workshop proceedings.

Paterson will map the information received from the survey, focus groups, and workshop to SHARE tools for collecting metadata—noting any gaps or technical development requirements. She will also oversee a feasibility study of subsequent prototypes developed in the course of the project.

University librarian at Arizona State University (ASU) Jim O’Donnell said, “In today’s rapidly changing research and learning landscape, the importance of managing digital scholarly data, in order to make it more accessible and usable, cannot be understated. Matt Harp’s skills in this area have been hugely beneficial to ASU Library as we continue to chart our digital future, transforming the ways we connect users to information. Matt’s efforts to enhance our digital scholarly research services will only become increasingly important as we look to expand our institutional repository at Arizona State University in addition to supporting the work of a growing and vibrant digital humanities research culture here at ASU.”

Catherine Steeves, vice provost and chief librarian at Western University, said, “SHARE is an exciting and innovative open initiative that Joanne is well suited for. I am confident that her metadata expertise, her enthusiasm for network-scale digital projects, and her joyful approach to collaboration and teamwork will serve the program well.”

The ARL Visiting Program Officer program provides opportunities for staff in member libraries to contribute to special projects and programs, either in whole or in part, in order to advance the agenda of the Association. Visit the ARL website for more information about ARL’s Visiting Program Officer program.


About the Association of Research Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at ARL.org.

About the Center for Open Science

The Center for Open Science (COS) is a non-profit technology startup founded in 2013 with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools. The Open Science Framework (OSF), COS’s flagship product, is a web application that connects and supports the research workflow, enabling scientists to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their research. Researchers use the OSF to collaborate, document, archive, share, and register research projects, materials, and data. Learn more at cos.io and osf.io.

About SHARE

SHARE is a partnership between the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Center for Open Science (COS), underwritten in part by generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. SHARE’s mission is to maximize research impact by making research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. To fulfill this mission SHARE is developing services to gather and freely share information about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle. SHARE is on the web at share-research.org.

 

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This project is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this release do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 

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