Sarah Potvin

Process as Product: Scholarly Communication Experiments in the Digital Humanities

Scholarly communication outreach and education activities are proliferating in academic libraries. Simultaneously, digital humanists—a group that includes librarians and non-librarians based in libraries, as well as scholars and practitioners without library affiliation—have developed forms of scholarship that demand and introduce complementary innovations focused on infrastructure, modes of dissemination and evaluation, openness, and other areas with implications for scholarly communication. Digital humanities experiments in post-publication filtering, open peer review, middle-state publishing, decentering authority, and multimodal and nonlinear publication platforms are discussed in the context of broader library scholarly communication efforts.

The “Wicked Problem” of Neutral Description: Toward a Documentation Approach to Metadata Standards

ABSTRACT Increasingly, metadata standards have been recognized as constructed rather than neutral. In this article, we argue for the importance of a documentation approach to metadata standards creation as a codification of this growing recognition. By making design decisions explicit, the documentation approach dispels presumptions of neutrality and, drawing on the “wicked problems” theoretical framework, acknowledges the constructed nature of standards as “clumsy solutions.”

Technical Services Report: Involving Users in Preservation Metadata. A Report of the ALCTS PARS Intellectual Access to Preservation Metadata Interest Group Meeting. American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, Philadelphia, January 2014

This is an electronic version of an article published as Potvin, Sarah, & Rowell, Chelcie. (2014). Involving Users in Preservation Metadata. A Report of the ALCTS PARS Intellectual Access to Preservation Metadata Interest Group Meeting. American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, Philadelphia, January 2014. Technical Services Quarterly, 31(3). Technical Services Quarterly is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/07317131.2014.908593

Collecting and Digitizing Forgotten Graduate Student Scholarship: The PILOs Project at Texas A&M University

This article describes a project at Texas A&M University Libraries to add a group of legacy student works (Projects in Lieu of Theses or Dissertations, or PILOs) to the collections in both hard copy and digital form. These unique works of institutional scholarship constitute a new area of acquisition for the libraries. The authors describe the new team-based workflows necessitated to evaluate, acquire, catalog, store, digitize, and preserve these reports. The cross-unit team that designed and implemented the project has devised a successful model upon which future collection development efforts can be built.