One vision of the project

I envision the goals of our project in the following way:

Computers and the internet are rapidly changing the face of scholarship, a process perhaps most dramatically illustrated in the humanities, which has been historically less reliant than other fields on technology, but is equally present in all fields of scholarly endeavor.  Researchers today are able to assemble and work with unprecedentedly large collections of material in all media and formats to study, annotate, and analyze, and to communicate the results of their work to others, all at unprecedentedly high rates of speed.  Taking advantage of this potential represents an enormously exciting opportunity and, as more and more scholars do so, a necessity for all researchers in all fields.  For the humanities, a field where individual, isolated scholarship has long been the norm, these new possibilities are also  driving the emergence of a new collaborative, team-based approach.

These changes present a similar set of opportunities and imperatives to academic librarians.  If libraries are to continue to play their traditional role in scholarly support, and the enormous body of organization and expertise that libraries have assembled not be permitted to go to waste,  they need to embrace and become part of the new ways in which their patrons will increasingly be doing their work.   This is particularly true since many of the forces driving these changes are coming from outside the academy.

In addition to their traditional roles as experts in the organization and retrieval of information, academic librarians need to become adept in supporting the ways that scholars work with that information, both in helping research to negotiate the complex terrain of intellectual property and varied formats that confront them as they assemble their collections, and to participate with them as they reshape, document, annotate, analyze, and republish that material.    They also need to develop the skills to participate as collaborative members of scholarly teams.  To be able to do so, they need to develop a good familiarity with the kinds of tools and techniques that are available to their scholarly patrons.  Indeed, just as librarians today are often the ones who bring knowledge of important information sources to faculty and students, it is perhaps reasonable to expect that the librarian of tomorrow can play the same role in advising researchers about the kinds of tools and techniques available to them.  The experience of library technology centers to date suggests that library users are frequently likely to turn to the librarian for support in these areas as readily as they long have for assistance with information resources.

Acquiring such expertise requires a hands-on familiarity.  It is impossible to assist a patron with a citation management, markup, annotation, analysis, or communication tool unless one has used it oneself.  It is likewise difficult to participate effectively in a research team without direct experience of the research process. The Morningside project at Columbia represents an attempt to address this challenge.  It seeks to enable a team of history and humanities librarians to deepen their familiarity with the range of tools and techniques available to their patrons through collaborative participation in a scholarly research project of their own design.  The choice of subject, a documentary history of Morningside Heights, is one that brings together the common interests of a diverse team of specialists who nonetheless share a common interest in this city and this neighborhood.  The subject lends itself to use of a wide range of technology tools – for authoring, citation management, web publishing, annotation, analysis, publishing and communication – and a wide range of media and formats – text, image, audiovisual, statistical, and cartographical – make it well suited for such a training exercise.   The goal of producing a resource that can be shared with the broader community and can interface with the many efforts to document the history of this city, and the likelihood that the results will be of interest to many researchers adds a degree of commitment that can ensure serious collective involvement of all of us but also a great deal of satisfaction about the final outcome of our work.

There are many directions that the work can take, and it will be part of developing our collaborative team skills to collectively determine exactly which of those we will chose as the work progresses.  A preliminary syllabus has been drawn up, but it is really just an inventory of the kinds of tools and resources we can address.

Bob Scott

Author: Bob Scott

Now Columbia’s Digital Humanities Librarian and formerly Head of the its Electronic Text Service, I am excited by the potential of a new wave of tools and techniques for finally realizing the promise of the digital format for humanities scholarship. My own academic interests lie in the history and culture of Eastern Europe, particularly in the Middle Ages, but I look forward to applying my desire for better tools to share and analyze historical sources in that field to the more immediate focus of the history of Morningside Heights. For the Morningside project, I bringing together sources illustrating the history of the Bloomingdale Asylum, which occupied the land that is now the main campus of Columbia from 1821 to 1894.