Academic librarians are increasingly required to understand and experience in the digital scholarship that supports any scholarly activities conducted in using digital technology. GIS and spatial humanities are part of the digital scholarship that provides dynamic visual impact to the rapidly growing area of digital scholarship. In meeting the needs of this growing field, librarians need to develop the skills and knowledge to assist researchers in creating successful and insightful projects.
During this session, panel experts will focus on overview of spatial humanities in digital scholarship, the skills and innovations available to librarian to successfully guide researchers in spatial humanities, and challenges that may emerge in spatial humanity practices for various research projects.
Panelists include Katherine Hart Weimer (Rice University), Nicole Kong (Purdue University) and Chelcie Rowell (Boston College). Leslie Wagner, Chair of MAGIRT, will act as moderator.
Co-sponsored by ACRL/DSS Numeric and Geospatial Data Services Discussion Group
(https://github.com/MAGIRT/ALA2018/tree/gh-pages/bios.md) [Brief biographies]
Head, Kelley Center for Government Information
Data and Geospatial Services
Rice University, Fondren Library
Houston, Texas
Ms. Weimer will present an overview of the 'spatial turn' in digital scholarship and how librarians can contribute to scholarly inquiry within a framework of spatial thinking. She will conclude with a few projects and organizations which focus on these concepts.
Assistant Professor of Library Science
Purdue University
At the raise of spatial humanities, library plays an important role in supporting scholarly research as a centralized place for spatial information, digital mapping, and learning resources. Different with other information, spatial information are usually saved in relatively complicated format, which are difficult to manipulate and requires additional learning curves. This provides challenges for humanities researchers to acquire, use, create, publish, and preserve the spatial information in their “spatial turn” projects. Librarians can collaborate in these cases to integrate the spatial information into the research. In this presentation, I will introduce different ways I have used in collaborations, including integrating spatial information literacy into instruction, assisting digital mapping projects using different tools, and spatial information management and publication support. I will also discuss tips and tricks I have learned that could help to effectively working with the community.
Digital Scholarship Librarian & History Liaison
O'Neill Library, Boston College
Subject librarians engage deeply in the research, teaching, and learning activities of their departments. With the spatial turn, we are increasingly being called upon to participate in the whole lifespan of spatial humanities, from finding raw materials to creating, sustaining, and preserving spatial humanities research. Although I am not a GIS specialist, I have performed many roles in spatial humanities research—including data provider, methods consultant, instructional designer, and cheerleader. During my talk, I will discuss the spectrum of my involvement, as well as how I gained confidence to engage in spatial humanities research.