Review: “Library-as-Publisher: Capacity Building for the Library Publishing Subfield”

I’ve been tasked with creating a “Roadmap to Digital Publishing” for the Brandel Library. I’ll post the draft of the “roadmap” I develop later on, but right now I’m in the research phase of the project and wanted to document the sources I’m reading. I could include this as a bibliography in the other post, but this is happening chronologically first and I thought it would be pretty interesting to document. So here is goes!

Library-as-Publisher: Capacity Building for the Library Publishing Subfield

Katherine Skinner, Sarah Lippincott, Julie Speer, Tyler Walters
Volume 17, Issue 2: Education and Training for 21st Century Publishers, Spring 2014 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0017.207

Although this article focused more on the professional developement needs of library staff to take on publishing activities, it also provided a very good overview and definition of the library publishing efforts and section on “Core Knowledge and Skills for 21st Century Publishers” could provide a helpful guide.

Definitions

This article borrows the following definition from the “Library Publishing Coalition” (http://librarypublishing.org/about-us) that defines library publishing as:

the set of activities led by college and university libraries to support the creation, dissemination, and curation of scholarly, creative, and/or educational works.

This relatively basic definition seems like a good shared starting point and distinguishing library publishing form other forms of digital humanities work.

Knowledge and Skills

The list of core knowledge and skills identified in this article proved to be very helpful as well. Here is a summary of that section – with my summarizing comments in the form of questions:

Scholarly Publishing Context – what is happening in the world of academic publishing?
Academic Context – why is the role of the library within the larger institution? to publish something unique? enhance the institutional brand?
Soft Skills – who do you need to build relationships with? What political connections need to be forged?
Business Planning and Management – what is your business plan? who is your audience?
Technology and Workflows for Production, Distribution, and Preservation – do you have the technology and workflow to publish (and care for) everything you want to publish? For text, audiovisual, datasets, interactive things, etc.
Editorial and Acquisitions – can you get and edit the stuff you want to publish?

Overall, this was a very helpful article. The two sections I’ve highlighted were particularly relevant – even as I read the article from an “institutional roadmap” when the original article was written in terms of professional skills and development. The Notes section as provided to be quick valuable in highlighting other relevant sources and authorities.

2015-02-032016-03-18

“Information-Seeking Behavior of Pastoral Clergy” – Review

A while back, I wondered about the Information Habits of Religious Leaders. Well, I was able to research this topic a bit and decided to post my analysis of one article here. Here is the article I read for the assignment

Wicks, Donald A. “The Information-Seeking Behavior of Pastoral Clergy: A Study of the Interaction of Their Work Worlds and Work Roles.” Library & Information Science Research 21, no. 2 (1999): 205–26. doi:10.1016/S0740-8188(99)00003-1.

I was very pleased to learn that there is a lot of scholarship on this topic and I look forward to reading more in the future!

CC image from Flickr - https://flic.kr/p/drFzGJ — CC image from Flickr – https://flic.kr/p/drFzGJ

For this assignment, I decided to explore the information habits of clergy and read the article “The Information-Seeking Behavior of Pastoral Clergy: A Study of the Interaction of Their Work Worlds and Work Roles” by Donald A. Wicks. This study used mailed surveys and structured interviews. The surveys were mailed to 989 participants spanning six denominational bodies in southern Ontario. These religious groups – Roman Catholic, United Church of Christ, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Pentecostal – were selected because they represent the largest denominations in the province and because they span the religious spectrum.[1] The 38.2% response rate provided a confidence interval of 95% with a reliability of +/- 4%. Structured interviews with 20 of the potential respondents – selected randomly from the range of the groups represented – were conducted to “add depth and richness to the survey data.”[2]

Within the general field of information studies, this study’s theoretical approach was to combine social network theories with the role theories and determine how the interaction of those fields influenced information behaviors. Social network theory was defined as “the boundaries that may influence information seeking” and this study identified three ‘pastoral worlds,’ namely: the theological world, the denominational world, and the congregational world.[3] Various role theories assert that within a given populations, information behaviors vary based on task. In this study, Wicks identified three work roles – preaching, caregiving, and administrating – and indeed found that clergy information behaviors differed based on pastoral role.

This, in fact, was the study’s most general finding, that “pastoral clergy tended to use different types of sources in different roles and that certain combinations of pastoral worlds and roles influenced…information-seeking behaviors.”[4] Wicks, however, continues by exploring how each social world – theological, denominational, congregational – intersected with each work role – preaching, caregiving, and administrating – and introduces language of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ to describe this relationship. If information-seeking for a given role was governed by the social world, Wicks described that relationship as ‘closed’ and if information-seeking behaviors were not restricted by the social world, Wicks described that as ‘open.’[5] For example, considering theological worlds and the preaching role, Wicks found that both liberal and conservative clergy tended to seeking information within a closed system whereas moderate clergy were more open to using resources from different theological worlds. In terms of the denominational world, Wicks demonstrated the denominational influences varied based on pastoral task, concluding that “denominational world does not influence information-seeking behavior when the minister is performing the preacher role” but that denominational world has a mixed influence when a pastor is in a caregiving role.[6] Lastly, Wicks found that the congregational social world has relatively little influence on any of the pastoral roles; that the theological position of the pastor and the denominational world had a much stronger influence on all pastoral roles.

Overall, the theoretical approach of combining social network theories and role theory yielded a wealth of actionable information. In general, the findings of this study imply that information systems and services should designed with particular pastoral roles in mind. For example, information systems designed to support preaching should be different than systems designed to support caregiving and administration. Furthermore, these findings indicate that information systems and services should take a diverse approach by providing access to information objects through a range of means and modes. Additionally, because information systems and services do not exist outside of social networks but are often embedded within theological or denominational frameworks, these systems should be aware of the theological polarization Wicks discovered and how it affects their organizational mission. Wick’s overall conclusion, that “we must understand the context of the user, including the role being performed and the social network of the individual,” restates his main theoretical framework and provides a solid paradigm to explore additional questions about the information-seeking behaviors of clergy.

[1] Wicks, “The Information-Seeking Behavior of Pastoral Clergy,” 209.

[2] Ibid., 210.

[3] Ibid., 206.

[4] Ibid., 205.

[5] Ibid., 209.

[6] Ibid., 213.

2014-12-182016-05-13

Working on my thesis…again

I’m working on updating and uploading my thesis to an new, online home. I’m particularly interested in the metadata and how moving from analog to digital offers new opportunities and challenges. I’ve been working on this project for a while now and think it’s time to get somewhat more serious about it. Sometimes my idealist and dreams get in the way of actual, productive work so I wanted to address them both head on here and now.

Ideals

Ideally, I’d like to use my thesis as the basis of an exploration in linked data and the semantic web. My grandest visions involve creating a “Wikipedia of Covenant history” that allows raw data (names, dates, etc.) to be incorporated into meaningful narratives as well as stand alone as definitive data sets. The narratives I have in mind would be analogous to the text of my thesis – interpreting the bare facts of the history – and the data sets would be somewhat analogous to the bibliography.

The data sources I have in mind are ambitious; they include:

Books. Given my interest, this should be obvious. But I’d also love to include other information resources: tracts, pamphlets, videos, and blog posts. Perhaps even tweets and news stories.
People. Obviously all authors and editors but also all ordained Covenant clergy, including basic biographical information. Former Covenant archivist Timothy Johnson compiled a wonderful resource that I’ve used many times – I’d love to transition that data online and mix it with other datasets
Churches. A list of all Covenant churches of all time. Ideally, this would include information such as location, date of founding, etc.
Dates. This is pretty easy – link all of these events to a standard calendar.
Events. Catalog covenant events like CHIC, Midwinter, the Annual Meetings, etc.

These would be the different data sets – at least the ones I’m currently imagining – and they would be linked by different connections. I’ve done a little dreaming and research about different taxonomies and schemas but am having a hard time (1) determining what schema/structure makes the most sense and (2) what the technical challenges would be in implementing such a thing.

Additionally, there is the question about how I would generate and manage these different datasets. I have a relatively complete lists of books…but in that process I realized how incomplete that list was and how arbitrary certain distinctions seemed in practice. For example, certain articles in The Covenant Quarterly were much more influential to Covenant life than certain books. Yet cataloging all the periodical – Covenant Quarterly, Covenant Companion, weekly newspapers! – seems like an overwhelming and daunting task but ultimately one that would be very beneficial.

I’m going to spend sometime in the next few days exploring other examples of linked data set so that I get a better sense of how these things can related, what relationships already exist, and what tweaks I would need to make locally.

I’m imagining both a site where these different entities are linked to each other (much like my current sites in Omeka) but also where the user could browse and filter so as to ask relatively complex questions and get back hard data in response. For example, a list of pastors that served at a given church, list of churches started in a certain decade, books written by North Park grads, etc. I think this falls squarely in the “digital humanities” ball park and I’m excited to continue thinking about it.

Used under CC license - https://flic.kr/p/8agsb6 — Used under CC license – https://flic.kr/p/8agsb6

Practical

I’m going to start building an omeka site that will import the Zotero for my thesis and create items for each book. This will also allow me to generate: a small set of names to begin thinking about people and some items to plot on a timeline (to see what features are available there). I think it will also be nice to get the data into a “better” format – i.e. a format where a limited amount of metadata is structured in such a way that it can move moved to a different system.

At this point, I’m thinking of these datasets much like tables in a database but I think there are alternatives (XML, JSON, etc.) that are worth exploring and a sample set of this size – and a project with no real consequences! – is a perfect test run.

I also think practically about how I will generate the datasets that I need to complete this project. That is a bit daunting but the raw data is available in the Covenant Yearbooks. Ideally, I’d build on existing works but that’s a start.

Omeka Plugins:

Bulk Metadata Editor
COINS
CSS Editor
Dublin Core Extended
Exhibit Builder
Facet by Metadata
Item Order
Item Relations
Record Relations
Search by Metadata
Simple Pages
Simple Vocab
Zotero Import

Okay. I think that is everything. More later on!