Scholarly Communication & Collaboration Across Boundaries: Building Humanities Commons
Slides used for presentation at the Second Symposium on Information & Technology in the Arts & Humanities (May 18, 2016). http://www.asis.org/SIG/SIGAH/2016/01/15/2016-symposium/ The Symposium was sponsored by the Special Interest Groups for Arts and Humanities (SIG AH) and Visualization, Images, and Sound (SIG VIS) of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).
Symposium presentations can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2v-vQy9W5DeXsuC5-l-T65WgFrPFKNDk
The Modern Language Association's repository, CORE, was created in partnership with Columbia University Libraries and modeled on the libraries’ institutional repository. Like other repositories, CORE facilitates open-access distribution, discussion, and citation of the many products of humanities research, including pre- or postprints, conference presentations, data sets, and learning objects such as syllabi and slide decks. What makes CORE stand out, however, is its social facet, the fact that it is not an independent entity but an integrated part of MLA Commons, the very environment in which MLA members already connect with one another. A member can choose to share any deposited item with up to five MLA subdisciplinary groups on the Commons, which in turn triggers preference-dependent e-mail notifications to members of that group, providing the author has an immediate and self-nominated community of interest to serve as an initial audience for his or her work.
In this presentation, Nicky Agate, project manager for digital initiatives at the MLA, will discuss the process, challenges, and next steps in building and refining CORE.
Nicky Agate is project manager for digital initiatives at the Modern Language Association, where she manages MLA Commons, the MLA repository Commons Open Repository Exchange (CORE), and the nascent interdisciplinary network Humanities Commons. She holds a Ph.D. in French literature from New York University and an M.F.A. in literary translation from the University of Iowa. Together with her colleagues in the MLA's office of scholarly communication, she facilitates and champions new and open forms of communication and collaboration in the humanities.
