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Author: Rebecca Stuhr


The Ovid Concordance and Other Aspects of Classics Librarianship

April 9, 2020 Posted by Rebecca Stuhr under News, Professional Development
1 Comment

Blogpost contributed by Michael Konieczny, Ph.D. Classics, Harvard 2019

Most of the writing I have done has taken the form of academic papers, student evaluations, and job applications (the worst!): the blog post is a new genre for me, so I apologize in advance if I don’t get it quite right. I’ve been asked to write about the Center for Hellenic Studies from the perspective of someone who has just recently completed their Ph.D. in Classics (I graduated from Harvard in May of 2019); in addition, I will talk about some of my work for the Open Greek and Latin Project, which I have been involved in as part of my appointment at the Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS).

My interest in librarianship began a few years into my Ph.D. program, when I took up the role of assistant librarian for the Smyth Classical Library at Harvard. One of my tasks as Smyth assistant was to select new books for the library to buy, so I sometimes liked to think of myself as wielding an immense power and influencing the course of the research that would be conducted there in the future; in fact Smyth’s purchasing program was fairly restricted and focused mainly on critical editions and commentaries, so my power was not so immense after all, even if the satisfaction of providing users with essential resources was real. In addition to drawing up purchase orders, I was also responsible for taking care of the books that we already had: much of this involved moving huge quantities of books to clear space on the shelves, which gave me a fresh perspective on the scope of publications such as the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. (In connection with this I might mention that one of the most interestingly-shaped books in any Classics library will be the old Concordance to Ovid, which is the most nearly cube-shaped of book of any I have seen; sadly the Concordance has now been relegated to the “Corridor,” a dark hallway in which Smyth stores its libri antiquiores and that also houses the desk of the assistant librarian.)

I started working at the CHS library in November 2019, about six months after earning my degree from Harvard. Much of the work was familiar to me from my Smyth assistantship: shelving and re-shelving books, fixing spine tags, creating an inventory of books that had been donated to the library or ended up there by mistake. From my new colleagues, Erika, Lanah, Sophie and Temple, I also learned about many other aspects of librarianship, including how to use the all-powerful ALMA software to catalogue new books, process invoices, and check items back into the stacks. Around Thanksgiving we prepared a shipment of paperback books to be re-bound in hardcover at the Acme bookbindery in Charlestown, Massachusetts: the sacrilegious prelude to this operation involved tearing the original covers off of the books and throwing them (the covers) away!

What I most enjoyed about working at the CHS, however, was the spirit of collegiality that exists among all of its members. Every day at 12:30, fellows and staff come together in the dining room for a wonderful lunch, and throughout the workday the campus is animated by a shared enterprise of research, work and conversation; everyone knows each other by name. The Center also hosts a variety of talks, workshops and performances, and welcomes researchers from all over the world to use its library and take part in the community. Coming from the sometimes dispiriting rigors of dissertation-writing and the academic job market, I was invigorated to find myself in an environment where the pursuit of Classics is both joyful and inclusive.

In addition to working in the library, my appointment at the CHS enabled me to participate in the Open Greek and Latin (OGL) Project, whose ultimate aim is to make digital editions of every work of Greek and Latin literature freely available online. (Currently available texts can be found at the Scaife Viewer website. Ideally, these digital editions will someday include a complete apparatus criticus, so that any user can in effect define a “custom” edition that incorporates the textual variants of whatever manuscript tradition they desire.) The nature of this work was somewhat unexpected, as it required me to learn the basics of XML (for editing texts) and, most daunting of all, GitHub, whose whimsical jargon (“push,” “pull,” “fork”) belies its almost mind-bogglingly confusing protocols. My expert and patient guide through all of this material was Lia Hanhardt, who also trains the CHS’s undergraduate interns during the summer. Like the CHS, the OGL is defined by an ethos of collegiality and egalitarianism: contributors are dispersed across institutions in multiple countries (coming together via Google Hangouts or Zoom), and the absence of a rigidly hierarchical organization means that the project is receptive to the ideas of even its most junior members.

It has been a year of unlooked-for surprises. In January of 2020, after just two-and-a-half months, my work at the CHS was cut short unexpectedly when I was suddenly called back to Harvard to teach two courses for the Classics Department. Then, in March, normal life was suspended on account of an unprecedented global health crisis: college students all over the country, including Harvard, were sent home, and teaching was moved entirely online. As of this writing, shelter-in-place orders are still in effect in most states.

One effect of the coronavirus pandemic has been to underscore how indispensable libraries and librarians are to academic work. On the one hand, the closure of libraries nationwide (including Harvard and the CHS) has put essential materials out of reach for many scholars; on the other hand, we have seen how resourceful librarians have been able to partner with publishers and other companies to put tremendous volumes of previously inaccessible material online for the duration of the crisis. As a lover of physical books, I would never wish to see the day when libraries close their stacks in favor of a completely electronic collection (something which would be nearly impossible to achieve, anyway). Nevertheless, perhaps it is inevitable that these few weeks or months (hopefully not more) will serve as a kind of inflection point in the way that libraries conceive of the nature of their collections and services. In the best-case scenario, the increasing availability of e-resources will help to democratize Classics as well as many other fields, particularly in the humanities, whose research materials are still heavily concentrated in a small number of elite libraries; in this new environment, projects such as the OGL will have an important role to play. But the universal restlessness shared by everyone after just three weeks on lockdown speaks to the vital importance of the day-to-day physical interactions facilitated by spaces such as the CHS, for which Zoom can never be an adequate substitute. So, let us hope that the era of “social distancing” will be a short one indeed.

Challenges and Changes in Publishing, Spotlight on Classical Studies Part II: Multi-modal Publishing in the Humanities

March 21, 2020 Posted by Rebecca Stuhr under Professional Development, Publishing
2 Comments

Read Part I

Multi-modality is unavoidable when researching the ancient world. Scholars rely on primary evidence derived from multiple physical and virtual formats. How can we represent this cornucopia of possible evidence in a way that makes it intuitive for an audience and that is affordable for publishers?

Libraries offer one solution through their institutional repositories (IRs). IRs can handle multiple media formats from music samples, to 3D imagery, to video, to interactive maps. IRs notably provide permanent links and DOIs for digital artifacts, and their best practices include long-term storage, accessibility, and portability. Scholars and publishers can work with their libraries to take advantage of this service. IRs are highly discoverable via Google and Google Scholar searches, and discovery of your supporting media will raise the discoverability of and direct the public to your published work even if the final version is not openly accessible.

Multi-modal Sites To Explore

Open Context, founded by archaeologists Eric and Sarah Whicher Kansa, is funded by the NEH, IMLS, Hewlett Foundation, and the NSF. Exploring Open Context will introduce you to a different paradigm for publishing. Open Context’s goals resonate with traditional publishing, but they emphasize replication and reusability, sharing, and an open path for enriching and fostering future research. Open Context publishes documents, field notes, diaries, images and maps, vocabularies and typologies, artifact and “ecofact” data. Items receive stable identifiers for online and offline citation. Open Context strives to interlink its data to other research repositories in order to raise discoverability and use across the wider universe of information. Publishing services do come with a fee. Significantly, Open Context creates partnerships with academic presses to provide the printed text with the data and evidence that support arguments and findings. Additionally, Open Context’s editorial board assists contributors with the cleaning and organizing of their data.  The Digital Archaeological Record, tDAR, is a not-for-profit that provides similar services for small fees. tDar allows you to “identify digital documents, data sets, images, and other kinds of archaeological data for a number of uses, including research, learning, and teaching.” Both Open Context and tDar are committed to long term preservation.

The Humanities Commons began as an initiative of the Modern Language Association (MLACommons).  It expanded to incorporate three other humanities associations, Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Euroasian Studies (ASEEScommons) the Association for Jewish Studies (AJScommons), and the visual arts association, College Art Association (CAAcommons). Any individual can engage with the materials in the HumanitiesCommons, although association members have additional privileges. The site provides a venue for a professional presence, discussion of common interests, and development of scholarly works in a system that facilitates collaboration and comment. Unlike some of the other academic sharing sites that we’ve become familiar with during the past decade (Academia.edu or ResearchGate, for instance), HumanitiesCommons is open-access, open-source, and not-for-profit. HumanitiesCommons just received a $500,000 challenge grant from the NEH, which will support the project’s long-term sustainability. Kathleen Fitzpatrick was the Director for Scholarly Communication at the MLA at the inception of the Commons and largely responsible for the early development and concept of the MLACommons. She is still the project director. Fitzpatrick has experimented with these new approaches with her own work. She blogged extensively about the content for her recently released book, Generous Thinking, while it was in progress. Fitzpatrick also arranged with her publisher, Johns Hopkins UP, to have an open peer review of her book. Fitzpatrick is a co-founder of MediaCommons, which supports scholarly innovation in media studies.

While there may be challenges due to departmental or institutional policies and politics, there is also a certain inevitability about this new face of publishing. The highly commercialized and profit centered practices that have grown up around science publishing are not compatible with the very different set of resources, priorities, and needs in the humanities.  Disciplines working with ancient philology, texts, and archaeology are set to lead the way – because of the inter-disciplinary-multi-disciplinary nature of the field, the multi-modal nature of the evidence scholars rely on, and the broader field’s history of applying and experimenting at the cutting edge of technology.


Part I: Challenges and Changes in Humanities Publishing with a spotlight on Classical Studies

March 21, 2020 Posted by Rebecca Stuhr under Professional Development, Publishing
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This post originates from my contribution to the 2020 SCS Panel on Humanities Publishing organized by Deborah Stewart and sponsored by the FCSLSC

I have spent the entirety of my career in collections. My first position was at the University of Kansas. I had a typewriter to produce order slips and I remember hauling around the volumes of the German books in print. Our collections were in print, we worked from card catalogs, and we had a microfiche catalog for journals. We had one dedicated OCLC terminal, and we offered mediated database searching at cost, with no screen, a printer, thermal paper, and dial-in access. The US dollar was weak against European currencies, and European journal prices were beginning to escalate. Today, our libraries provide access to multi-formatted resources, and we work with publishing environment that is increasingly disrupted. 

I began librarianship as German languages and literature bibliographer, and today I work with multiple European languages, Greek, and Latin as a classical studies librarian. I find it exhilarating to work with the extremely interdisciplinary classical studies field. It is a field that  embraces the future along with the past. Scholars in the field have been leaders in the development of digital publishing.

Ancient studies, broadly speaking, can boast the Bryn Mawr Classical Review as the oldest continuously open-access online resource – predating arXiv by one year—as well as long-lived openly accessible platforms such as Perseus Digital Library, TOCS-IN, and Nestor and newer groundbreaking platforms such as Open Context, tDAR, and Dickinson College Commentaries, to name just a few.

These long-lived and newer projects do not privilege the new. The published record for ancient studies does not become obsolete. The monograph remains an important publication format, and research collections represent primary evidence in multiple languages and formats, including printed text, inscriptions, physical and represented artifacts, all of which cross multiple disciplines including economics, history, philosophy, art, architecture, archaeology, numismatics, philology, and literature. Many of these projects made their contents openly accessible before the phrase “open access” was in use.

A growing number of open access initiatives promote a sustainable environment that supports scholars, publishers, and libraries. The Penn Libraries, my home institution, supports many open access initiatives, including, among others, Open Library of the Humanities, a grant and library supported effort primarily for journals. Its model takes into consideration the limited funding available to scholars in the humanities. Peerj is a platform for biological sciences and computer science. It posts pre- and post-peer reviewed work and facilitates an open-peer review process. Knowledge Unlatched works with libraries and existing publishers (including Brill, DeGruyter, and US and European university presses) to provide sustainable, open access monographic publishing, especially for subjects which may target smaller audiences.

Our current publishing environment includes fewer and fewer publishers. This consolidation effectively erodes the competitive market, which translates into growing costs for libraries. Ultimately, this means that libraries trend away from purchasing scholarly monographs, which are still central to humanities scholarship. University presses have seen expected sales to libraries drop significantly over the past years. With fewer publishers, bargaining power is diminished, and even the scholarly community’s control over its own production is eroded.

Publishing is essential for the success of the humanities scholar. Libraries have a mission to share and preserve the scholarly record. It then follows that it is within a research library’s mission to work toward a solution for a sustainable publishing ecosystem in order to serve scholarship across all disciplines. Humanities scholars, who have a unique set of goals and needs, can see their library as a partner in the challenges and changes ahead. Libraries are already pursuing different approaches to resolve the challenges within an increasingly complex and unsustainable publishing ecosystem. 


Scholars can work with publishers, libraries, and other entities in order to develop their aspirations for open and/or multimodal scholarship

Open access publishing is an experimental area of publishing, developing in large part to counter some of the more hegemonic and costly publishing practices that have become dominant.

If you are considering publishing in an open access journal, you can take a couple of steps to determine the viability of your chosen journal.  While many open access journals are peer reviewed, others are not. You do want to verify that you are choosing the right publication, and there are ways you can do this.

One obvious solution is to confer with your colleagues, but there are also tools available that can help you with this process. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a Creative Commons licensed platform. The DOAJ has a thorough review process (recently revised to address the rise of opportunistic publications). Each journal meets criteria for inclusion. DOAJ also awards a “seal” for a high level of openness and high publication standards (both defined at the site), including long term preservation and archiving and allowing the author to retain their copyright. Each journal’s editorial information is clearly presented, including the journal’s method of peer review, its aim and scope, its submission charges, if any, and more. You can easily review a journal’s articles to see which scholars are publishing with the journal.

Ulrichsweb, a subscription database, is a journal directory that is available at most academic libraries. There, you can limit your journal search to scholarly, peer-reviewed status. Each Ulrichsweb journal entry notes whether the journal is open access or subscription based. It also provides a link directly to the journal or publisher site. Journals have to be well established, to be included in Ulrichsweb. For instance, Archivio d’Annunzio (AA) is listed in DOAJ and it is also listed in Ulrichsweb. Ulrichsweb confirms that AA is an academic, open access journal that is both refereed and peer-reviewed, with a start year of 2014.

READ YOUR CONTRACT CRITICALLY

Regardless of whether the journal with which you are publishing is open access or not, you will want to secure your ability to promptly post your work in (usually your library’s) institutional repository (IR)–whether or not you are posting the “version of record.” Materials in IRs are highly discoverable via Google searches, which means you will reach a wide audience, going well beyond the readers of the journal or those in your immediate discipline.  (For an example of a journal’s guidelines to self-sharing of published research, see Cambridge Core on social sharing.)

It cannot be over-estimated how important it is to read and consider your contract with your publisher. You may find that its terms limit your ability to freely reuse elements of your work without permission from the publisher. Look at alternative model author contracts to help you understand what you can reasonably ask for even if you are not prepared to replace the publisher’s contract completely. The SPARC Addendum is a good place to start. SPARC, an international scholarly coalition, worked with Creative Commons and Science Commons to develop the contract. You can download the addendum, a one page legal document, which is intended to “supplement and modify” a publisher’s contract.

Why go to this extra effort? Making your work open access means that you make your work available to the largest possible audience. Your work will be discoverable and accessible beyond those who share your specialization. Undergraduates will be more likely to come across your work, high school students and their teachers will come across your work, and curious people – who will never have heard of and likely have no access to discovery tools that are used by the discipline – will benefit from your scholarship.

PART II : Multi-modal Publishing in the Humanities IN NEXT POST


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