Ball State Librarians Contribute to Book on Digital Scholarship

James A. Bradley, Head of Metadata and Digital Initiatives, and John B. Straw, Assistant Dean for Digital Initiatives and Special Collections, contributed chapters to a new book entitled Digital Scholarship, published by Routledge as part of their Studies in Library and Information Science series.

The book presents ten original essays by librarians and archivists detailing both challenges and proven solutions in establishing, maintaining, and servicing digital scholarship in the humanities. The authors report progress and problems, examine new business models, new forms of partnerships, and new technologies and resources.

Bradley’s chapter, “The Russian Doll Effect: Making the Most of Your Digital Assets” explains that digital artifacts will find themselves repurposed and repackaged several times over for a variety of environments, gateways, and diverse user types. He demonstrates that careful attention to metadata in the project planning stage will yield extremely flexible digital objects. His findings are illuminated using specific examples drawn from Ball State University’s Digital Media Repository.

Straw’s chapter, “Digital Partnerships: Collaborating to Build Digital Resources” explores issues of digital project collaborations including advantages and disadvantages, politics, pitfalls, potential partnerships, project management, communication, resource sharing, written agreements, and promotion and publicity. Examples are cited from Ball State University Libraries’ experiences in developing a Digital Media Repository (http://libx.bsu.edu) and specifically from a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) digitization grant project involving multiple partners.

The volume editor is Marta M. Deyrup, Associate Professor at Seton Hall University Libraries, South Orange, New Jersey. [Publication Information: Deyrup, Marta Mestrovic, ed. Digital Scholarship. Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science Series. New York: Routledge, 2009.]