Thea Lindquist

Academic/Research Librarians with Subject Doctorates: Experiences and Perceptions, 1965-2006.

The topic of academic/research librarians with subject doctorates remains largely unexplored. Based on survey data gathered from subject-doctorate holders (excluding those with doctorates in LIS) currently working in U.S. and Canadian academic/research libraries, this article extends the analysis published by the authors in the January 2008 issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy. While the first article featured quantitative analysis to highlight data and trends relating to these librarians over a 40-year period, focusing on their demographic profile, educational background, paths into librarianship, and range of positions, this article analyzes qualitative data to report their perceptions about their work environment and the advantages and challenges of academic librarianship as a career. Providing more information about this group of librarians and their experiences highlights the valuable skills they bring to the academic/research library environment. Moreover, it can help advanced-degree holders to determine whether a career in librarianship is right for them.

Using Linked Open Data to Enhance Subject Access in Online Primary Sources

Using online primary sources is both rewarding and challenging for users. Improving subject access is essential as these sources become increasingly important in educational curricula. A user needs assessment with humanities users showed improving findability and context for historical subjects were major needs. Linked Data can help by linking related concepts in the sources using specialized vocabularies, enriching them with outside resources, and enabling semantic services that empower users. This article discusses a project to enhance subject access in an online World War I collection by deep linking historical data on the civilian experience in occupied Belgium and France.

WW1LOD: an application of CIDOC-CRM to World War 1 linked data

The CIDOC-CRM standard indicates that common events, actors, places and timeframes are important in linking together cultural material, and provides a framework for describing them. However, merely describing entities in this way in two datasets does not yet interlink them. To do that, the identities of instances still need to be either reconciled, or be based on a shared vocabulary. The WW1LOD dataset presented in this paper was created to facilitate both of these approaches for collections dealing with the First World War. For this purpose, the dataset includes events, places, agents, times, keywords, and themes related to the war, based on over ten different authoritative data sources from providers such as the Imperial War Museum. The content is harmonized into RDF, and published as a Linked Open Data service. While generally based on CIDOC-CRM, some modeling choices used also deviate from it where our experience dictated such. In the article, these deviations are discussed in the hope that they may serve as examples where CIDOC-CRM itself may warrant further examination. As a demonstration of use, the dataset and online service have been used to create a contextual reader application that is able to link together and pull in information related to WW1 from, e.g., 1914–1918 Online, Wikipedia, WW1 Discovery, Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America.

From the Ashes: Identifying, Documenting, and Rebuilding the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek’s Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft Collections

In 2004, fire struck the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek ( HAAB ) in Weimar. The fire particularly affected its seventeenth-century collections, among them rich holdings of works associated with the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, the foremost seventeenth-century German cultural society. This article investigates the impact of the blaze, looking back over the decade that has elapsed since the event. Among the questions investigated are: what are the numbers of lost, damaged, and surviving volumes? What are the effects on the scholarly research community? How successful has the HAAB been in replacing lost Society editions? What roles have the HAAB ’s duplicates and restoration efforts played in the editions’ continued accessibility? How has, in sum, the significance of the library’s Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft holdings been altered due to the damage inflicted by an early twenty-first century disaster?

John Taylor (1597-1655): English Catholic Gentleman and Caroline Diplomat

During the Thirty Years’ War, John Taylor served at the Habsburg courts in Brussels, Madrid, and Vienna. Although he figured prominently in Charles Is secret Habsburg foreign policy during the war and was one of the ‘persons of distinction’ included in the original Dictionary of National Biography, published information on Taylor is sparse. His story is especially compelling given his own and his familys connections with Continental Catholicism as well as his involvement, as a gentleman of indisputably Catholic background, in English diplomacy of the time.