Tar for Mortar offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature’s greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story “The Library of Babel” is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges’s narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator’s claims of the library’s universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing.
Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library — is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion?
While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges’s imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.
This presentation was part of a panel titled: "Panel: Innovative Digital Humanities Projects at Emory University." Presented at the NFAIS 2016 Humanities Roundtable that focused on Digital Humanities: Preserving the Past, Capturing the Present & Building the Future. The NFAIS 2016 Humanities Roundtable took place at the Pitts Theology Library / Candler School of Theology / Emory University in Atlanta.
Objectives: In 2017 the journal Nature published challenges to the assumption that research intensive U.S. institutions are immune to the hazards of predatory publishing. Sample articles from hundreds of potentially predatory journals were analyzed: the NIH was the most frequent funder and Harvard was among the most frequent institutions. Our study was designed to identify the publication prevalence at our institution.
Methods: Predatory publishers were defined using an archived version of Beall’s list, a now defunct website that was widely recognized as the only comprehensive black list for potential predators. The archive was collected January 15, 2017 and reflects updates made 1-2 weeks prior. To identify our NIH publications, records were collected from PubMed Central using an institution search and limiting to 2011-2016 to reflect a five-year period covered by Beall’s last update. PMC was selected under the assumption that direct journal inclusion in PubMed/MedLine serves as a proxy for quality. Journal and ISSN data were referenced against Ulrich’s Periodical Directory to determine publishers. Data were then compared against the Beall’s listing of potentially predatory publishers and standalone journals. The publication costs for the predatory journals were used to determine the total amount of NIH funding used to pay for publications in predatory journals.
Results: The review of the University’s Publications submitted to PubMed Central from 2011 to 2016 revealed 15090 publications. Of those 15090 articles 218 publications (1.4%) were from publishers that fell in Beall’s list of predatory publishers. A review of publication fees for the publishers that University faculty published in revealed that approximately $300,000 dollars of Federal grant money was spent over the 5 year period publishing in predatory publications.
Conclusions: Previously, it was thought that publishing predatory journals was primarily a problem in developing countries. However, like the 2017 Nature study, we found that researchers publishing at Emory are publishing in journals that are considered predatory. While the rate of publication in predatory journals is low (1.4%) it did cost approximately $300,000 of Federal tax payer money, which amounts to approximately 70% of the funds of one year of the average NIH R01 grant.
INTRODUCTION The support and curation of research data underlying theses and dissertations are an
opportunity for institutions to enhance their ETD collections. This article describes a pilot data archiving
service that leverages Emory University’s existing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) program.
DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM This pilot service tested the appropriateness of Dataverse, a data repository, as
a data archiving and access solution for Emory University using research data identified in Emory University’s
ETD repository, developed the legal documents necessary for a full implementation of Dataverse on campus,
and expanded outreach efforts to meet the research data needs of graduate students. This article also situates
the pilot service within the context of Emory Libraries and explains how it relates to other library efforts
currently underway. NEXT STEPS The pilot project team plans to seek permission from alumni whose data
were included in the pilot to make them available publicly in Dataverse, and the team will revise the ETD
license agreement to allow this type of use. The team will also automate the ingest of supplemental ETD
research data into the data repository where possible and create a workshop series for students who are creating research data as part of their theses or dissertations.
In 2013, the dean of Libraries at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) Libraries formed a task force composed of six librarians and charged them with completely overhauling the career progression policy for librarians and archivists that had been in place since 1995. The task force devised a new policy and a scoring rubric to assist the committee that makes recommendations regarding promotions in their evaluation process. This article describes the process of developing the policy and its accompanying rubric as well as their contents and recounts lessons learned during the first round of evaluations of candidates for promotion.
Beginning with a discussion of how collections diversity has been conceptualized and assessed within the literature, we then analyze four areas in which professional practices and modes of thinking create barriers to collecting materials from historically marginalized voices. Specifically, we discuss how metadata practices can obscure these materials from acquisitions workflows and user discovery, how relying on use statistics can reinforce existing inequalities, and finally, we discuss how understaffing in key areas and budgetary constraints impede libraries from recognizing and addressing the full scope of the problem.
Many universities have implemented faculty profile systems that capture faculty and researchers’ scholarly outputs and activities. These systems usually include public profiles and tools to help find collaborators or experts. They may be used to create reports for faculty annual reviews or for promotion and tenure, or to assist faculty with complying with open access policies by facilitating deposit in institutional repositories. In many universities, libraries play a central role in the implementation of these systems. This paper explores three case studies showing how and why libraries came into this role and examines some of the consequences of this trend.
A webinar for ASERL members on the development and implementation of Emory’s Open Access Collection Development Policy. A video of the webinar is available at https://vimeo.com/169905536, or by clicking on Final Published Version above. Like other academic libraries, Emory University has been approached by a number of open access collection initiatives seeking funding. In this webinar, Lisa Macklin & Chris Palazzolo discuss that while all of these initiatives may have merit, how should Emory choose which to support, and why. Emory's Collection Management and Scholarly Communications Office drafted an Open Access Collections Policy which outlines basic principles and processes regarding the addition of open access content to the libraries collections. It defines the criteria for the library to provide financial support for emerging open access initiatives, as well as the process for the identification and selection of open access content for the collection. The speakers discuss the process of creating the policy, the questions they asked, and how this OA collections policy relates to other collection policies and library Open Access initiatives.
Objective: Several publication databases now index the associated funding agency and grant number metadata with their publication records. Librarians who are familiar with the particulars of these databases can assist investigators and administrators with data gathering for publication summaries and metrics required for renewals of and progress reports for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. Methods: Publication lists were pulled from three main indexers of publication-associated funding information (NIH RePORTER, PubMed, and Web of Science), using iterative search strategies. All discovered variations for the cited grant number of interest were recorded and tested. Publication lists were compared for overall coverage. Results: A total of 986 publications citing the single grant number of interest were returned from the given time frame: 920 were found in PubMed, 860 in NIH RePORTER, and 787 in Web of Science. Web of Science offered the highest percentage of publications that were not found in the other 2 sources (n=63). Analysis of publication funding acknowledgments uncovered 21 variations of the specific NIH award of interest that were used to report funding support. Conclusions: This study shows that while PubMed returns the most robust list of publications, variations in the format of reported funding support and indexing practices meant no one resource was sufficient to capture all publications that cited a given NIH project grant number. Librarians looking to help build grant-specific publication lists will need to use multiple resources and be aware of the most frequently reported grant variations to identify a comprehensive list of supported publications.