BU Libraries Scholarly Papers and Presentations
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A collection of scholarly presentations and papers published by BU Libraries staff.
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Item Salary Survey: New England Health Sciences Librarians(2024-06-12) Ettien, A’LlynItem Don’t Panic! Teaching Strategies for Introverts(2024-06-12) Maratos, BarbaraYou’ve just been given your first library teaching assignment. You may be new to the library profession or a mid-career librarian taking on your first teaching role. Do you panic at the thought of standing up in front of the class? For introverts the prospect of teaching or public speaking can feel especially daunting. While teaching may take you out of your comfort zone, it is possible to develop effective strategies to manage the process. In this presentation, hear from an experienced instruction librarian (and self-described introvert) who has been successfully teaching for more than 15 years.Item Building A Community of Interest Around Cultural Heritage Digitization(2024-06-12) Castro, EleniThis presentation will walk you through a tour of several Boston-area digitization programs that BU Libraries' Digital Ventures team went on as they went about setting up their new digitization and digital collections program. This brief talk is for information sharing purposes for the BLC community to see where a variety of different institutions are in their cultural heritage digitization journey and to solicit feedback from the BLC community on how we build a community of interest to regularly get together to discuss best practices, new and ongoing projects, and community developed guidelines on digital collections and digitization.Item Boston University Libraries: Building New Connections with Digital Ventures(2024-05) Castro, EleniItem An introduction to the African Ajami Library(2020-11-17) Castro, EleniPresented on the African Ajami Library (AAL) project at the 4th Annual Princeton African Humanities Colloquium, Africa and Digital Humanities on November 17, 2020. The AAL is an almost ten year partnership with international partners and researchers, BU Anthropology Professor Fallou Ngom, the BU African Studies Center, and BU Libraries. This ongoing project’s main goal is to aggregate and make openly accessible to the world digitized manuscripts from all across Africa, which are written in African languages using modified Arabic script called Ajami.Item Beyond orality: digital preservation and the African Ajami Library(Boston University Libraries, 2020-04-07) Adugna, Gabe; Castro, Eleni; Dwyer, RachelThis talk will provide an overview of the African Ajami Library (AAL), an open access digital repository of materials written in Ajami script (modified Arabic script) from all over Islamized Africa, which is hosted in OpenBU at Boston University. AAL is a collaborative initiative between Boston University and the West African Research Center (WARC) in part funded by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. We will discuss use cases of collaborations from both East and West Africa, along with more general technical digitization workflows, lessons learned, and opportunities for international scholars to engage more deeply with these manuscripts.Item Building a library talent program from scratch: how Boston University Libraries separated talent from HR to transform its people operations(Boston University Libraries, 2020-03) Zanders, Tony; Castro, EleniThe uncertainty of the future of the academic library casts a long shadow on today’s library operations. This session will discuss the important distinction between talent and HR, and the need to recast a vision of future-proofing our organizations under unprecedented budgetary and environmental constraints.Item NIRDs unite: building a community of institutional repository practitioners in the Northeast(Against the Grain, 2019) Castro, Eleni; Jerome, Erin; Lukens, Colin; Simon MacDonald, Mikki; Palmer, Lisa A.In the northeastern United States, there is a noticeable lack of any organized regional events specifically related to the topic of IRs. With other regions across the country holding similar events — along with recent national discussions and projects proposing a move away from local repositories (Coalition of Networked Information [CNI], 2017; Weinraub, Alagna, Caizzi, Quinn, & Schaefer, 2018) — starting a regional community of practice could prove beneficial in the long-term for repository managers and their institutions. Repository managers have a vested interest in the ongoing success of the repositories they manage; have genuine policy, copyright, and self-archiving concerns; and have developed robust workflows to manage their IRs’ unique content and needs. At the end of the day, how do we communicate the value of the work we do to external stakeholders, our broader institution, and library administration?Item Beyond African orality: digital preservation of Mandinka ʿAjamī archives of Casamance(Wiley, 2019-06-14) Ngom, Fallou; Castro, EleniThis article focuses on the digital preservation of African sources written in Mandinka ʿAjamī, i.e. the enriched form of the Arabic script used to write the Mandinka language for centuries. ʿAjamī writing has been utilized to document intellectual traditions, histories, belief systems, and cultures of non-Arab Muslims around the world. ʿAjamī texts have played critical roles in the spread of Islam in Africa and continue to be used for both religious and non-religious writings. However, African ʿAjamī texts such as those of the Mandinka people of Casamance in southern Senegal are not well known beyond local communities. ʿAjamī texts in Mandinka and other Mande languages are among the least documented. Only a few Mande ʿAjamī texts are available to scholars. Thanks to the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), Africa’s rich written heritage in ʿAjamī and other scripts previously unavailable to academics is being preserved and made universally accessible.Item Dolly Parton, gender, and country music(Taylor & Francis, 2019-04-15) Cohen, MarciItem Opening doors for libraries on campus and beyond(Association of College and Research Libraries, 2018) Liss, Ken; Brown, Karen; Gilchrist, Debra; Goek, Sara; Hinchliffe, Lisa Janicke; Malenfant, Kara; Ollis, Chase; Payne, AllisonItem Evaluating and promoting open data practices in open access journals(University of Toronto Press, 2017-10) Castro, Eleni; Crosas, Mercè; Garnett, Alex; Sheridan, Kasey; Altman, MicahThe last decade has seen a dramatic increase in attention from the scholarly communications and research community to open access (OA) and open data practices. These are potentially related because journal publication policies and practices both signal disciplinary norms and provide direct incentives for data sharing and citation. However, there is little research evaluating the data policies of OA journals. In this study we analyse the state of data policies for OA journals by employing random sampling of the Directory of Open Access Journals and Open Journal Systems journal directories and applying a coding framework that integrates both previous studies and emerging taxonomies of data sharing and citation. This study, for the first time, reveals both the low prevalence of datasharing policies and practices in OA journals, which differs from the previous studies of commercial journals in specific disciplines.Item Reading in the 21st century; reading at scale(2015-11) Ammerman, Jack