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FACULTY UPDATE FROM THE
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND LIBRARIES SPRING 2013
NEH awards grant to digitize historic newspapers
Online and Onward
The University of Maryland Libraries was awarded $325,000
Our newly created Digital Stewardship unit oversees projects including:
from the National Endowment for the Humanities to make important historic newspapers from the state of Maryland freely accessible via the Internet. The grant will be used to digitize 100,000 pages from many of Maryland’s historic newspapers. Published between 1836 and 1922, the newspapers relate significant historical events in Maryland, including the growth of Baltimore as a commercial hub and the upheaval of the Civil War—which manifested itself in harsh censorship of Maryland newspapers.
“This project will make the state’s history available in a new way to researchers not only in Maryland, but also around the world,” says Patricia Steele, dean of the University of Maryland Libraries. “It extends our land-grant mission in a digital age and exposes the state’s collections to new audiences.” Actual digitization will be performed by a vendor using second-generation microfilm, thereby ensuring the original film is unharmed. The University Libraries are uniquely qualified to lead this project, says Jennie Levine Knies, manager of the library’s newly created Digital Stewardship Unit. “The confidence the NEH has placed in us by awarding this grant speaks highly of our expertise and track record. We’re so pleased to be serving the state in this way.” The National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is a long-term effort to develop an Internetbased, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information. www.loc.gov/ndnp
DRUM: Digital Repository at the University of Maryland
A digital home for faculty research to make it permanently accessible and freely available drum.lib.umd.edu
Research Data Services
An expanding set of services to assist faculty with data management, curation, and long-term preservation lib.umd.edu/digital
E-Publishing
A pilot project to provide infrastructure and support for journal publishing lib.umd.edu/digital
Films at UM
“We’ve made meaningful progress,” says Patricia Steele, dean of University Libraries. “Though there’s much work to be done, there should be no doubt Maryland supports the principles of free and open access.”
Our first contribution will be Der Deutsche Correspondent, a German newspaper published between 1848 and 1918. It is only the second German-language newspaper funded by the National Digital Newspaper Program.
A collection of more than 800 digital videos for classroom or independent use digital.lib.umd.edu/films
The two-year project will make the newspapers available via the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America website. The first images will be available by summer; we expect to have 25,000 pages available by October. www.chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
A collection of 8,000 items from the early years of the Occupation of Japan, 1945-49. digital.lib.umd.edu/prange
Gordon W. Prange Children’s Book Collection
Senate endorses Open Access At its meeting on February 14, the University Senate gave the academic community a valentine: unanimous approval of a proposal by the Open Access Task Force to support open scholarship. Specifically, the senate recommended that the university sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. By doing so, the university joins a group of nearly 400 universities, research institutions, foundations, libraries, museums, and archives from around the world who share the vision of disseminating information so that it’s widely and readily available to society. The task force, chaired by Patricia Steele, also recommended actions to advance open access and to ensure the academy owns its scholarly output.
Among the actions recommended: University Libraries n Inform faculty of ways of negotiating with publishers to retain rights to deposit scholarly works in DRUM, the university’s digital repository. n Establish an Open Access publishing program n Support the creation of publishing open textbooks University n Inform faculty of need for expanded view of promotion and tenure requirements in a digital age n Consider impact of Open Access measures on technology transfer n Establish a pilot program to fund Open Access fees for faculty
Big Ten affiliation benefits libraries big time When the university announced its intention to join the Big Ten, we had good reason to celebrate. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a robust organization of Big Ten member institutions, has a long and successful track record of supporting and advancing library initiatives. The Center for Library Initiatives, a unit within the CIC, has its own staff, a long history of collaboration among partner libraries, and is the most effective working group in the CIC. It is probably the strongest library consortium now functioning. We’ll be part of a can-do group of power house libraries that accomplishes ambitious mutual goals. As a faculty member, you’ll benefit from improved access to print materials through shared print repositories and robust and award-winning interlibrary loan services. Combined collections exceed 79 million volumes. We’ll see price breaks on some subscriptions. Consortial licensing agreements negotiated by CIC’s Center for Library Initiatives save the libraries $6.5 million annually. Although the university’s membership in the Big Ten becomes effective July 2014, we expect to collaborate with CIC libraries as soon as practical. The HathiTrust digital library (www.hathitrust.org) is a major nationwide initiative that was seeded in large measure by the CIC. A plan is now also under way to digitize and provide access to the entire corpus of federal government documents.
University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Minnesota University of Nebraska–Lincoln
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Northwestern University University of Chicago Michigan State University University of Michigan Pennsylvania State University Rutgers University
University of Maryland University of Iowa University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)
Ohio State University Indiana University Purdue University