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Transcript of Spotlite on SocHum
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VVol. 4, #1ol. 4, #1 Fall 2011Fall 2011
Collecting ‘Outside the Margins’
Also in this issue:SocHum’s Trace Completed Project
Journalism Student Gaming Excercise
The Indian Ocean region.
SocHum’s subject spe-
cialists are increasingly using
the advantages of NYU’s book
approval plan to expand the li-
brary’s collections outside of
the “easy to get” materials.
Approval plans are
arranged so that vendors send
titles to libraries on ”approval”
based upon a detailed descrip-
tion of the library’s collection policies. Some of
the criticism of approval plans were that they
would, in the words of one critic, “...produce li-
brary collections that were too much alike, with-
out the collective richness resulting from local
selection...”
While approval plans and the growth of e-
books may lead some library holdings to re-
semble a “cookie cutter” collection, librarians
can also use the time saved by approval plans
to locate and acquire materials that make their
collections distinct.
Over the past six years Bobst has been
building a collection of research materials on the
Indian Ocean region. This collection includes
rare books, maps, prints, and sea charts.
The Indian Ocean area, touching on East
Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, is a
growing area of research and many scholars
believe it is a developing
heuristic device - similar to At-
lantic Studies - to study the
surrounding areas. Building a
research collection in this area
also aligns with NYU’s opening
of the Abu Dhabi campus. In
March 2010, NYU’s Africa
House sponsored a confer-
ence at NYU Abu Dhabi on
“Africa and the Indian Ocean,” which brought to-
gether scholars from the across the world to dis-
cuss topics such as “Africa and the Indian
Ocean,” “Conflict across the Indian Ocean,” and
“Migration and Remittances Across the Indian
Ocean.” Since much of Indian Ocean research
also involves the continent of Africa, Bobst has
also been building a collection of pre-colonial
maps of the African continent.
Given that the research interest in the In-
dian Ocean region includes NYU faculty at
Washington Square and Abu Dhabi, there are
plans to digitize unique elements of the Indian(cont’ on page 6)
Google Apps for Higher Education
Spotlite on SocHum Page 2
by Meredith Levin
NYU’s CTE hosted a Google Apps for
Higher Education session on December 1, 2011
at Kimmel to showcase several academic uses
for Google Apps. A panel of five presenters (one
Tisch faculty member and four Academic Tech-
nology Services staff members) discussed var-
ious ways in which Google Apps can be
implemented in a classroom setting, including
using Google Docs for the Tisch Film Produc-
tion clearance process, formatting Google Cal-
endar as a course syllabus, the benefits of
Google Forms for surveys, and how to create
Google Groups for collaboration.
Devin Nix, an original member of the NYU
Google Apps team, unveiled a new feature of
Google Calendar, appointment slots, that can fa-
cilitate setting up office hours or meetings with
students. It eliminates the irritating email chains
when trying to find a mutually convenient time.
The librarian does not have to share his/her cal-
endar, students can be given a range of avail-
able options to choose from, the process is
automated, and the librarian can send a link to
the appointment sign-up via email or can embed
it into a wiki page. Booked appointments appear
as regular calendar events with notifications; the
appointment slot that is selected by the student
becomes automatically blocked off in the librar-
ian’s calendar to prevent new invitations, which
prevents double-booking.
Meredith Levin is a Reference Associate in SocHum.
SocHum’s Trace Completed Project
One of the more annoying occurrences at
the reference desk is encountering a BobCat
record that states an item’s availability as “Re-
quest ILL.” Although not very transparent, it is
meant to tell patrons that the title is missing from
the stacks, but is available on interlibrary loan.
In the past year the SocHum staff have
completed three rounds of the Trace Completed
project, which is an attempt to find items in Bob-
Cat listed as “Request ILL,” and re-order them.
The Resource Management staff of
KARMS generates a list of Request ILL titles,
which are sent to SocHum, then routed to the
appropriate subject librarian, and then reordered
as a print or e-book, or the record is deleted
from BobCat. In the first two rounds of the proj-
ect the SocHum staff reviewed 4,660 titles and
re-ordered 1,835 titles. In some cases the miss-
ing titles are duplicate copies and - based upon
the decision of the subject librarian - may not be
re-ordered. This process has also been made
more efficient by our ability to place orders with
Alibris, as often the replacement copies are out
of print and only available from out of print book
dealers.
Spotlite on SocHum Page 3
A Library Gaming Experienceby Alexa Pearce
If you have worked at the reference desk
in Bobst during the last five years or so, you
might be familiar with Journalism Professor
Adam Penenberg’s penchant for challenging re-
search assignments. As he described in his re-
cent Fast Company column, he used to present
his Business & Economic Reporting graduate
students with questions such as “How many
vice presidents died in office” or “How many
countries were represented in the 2008 Summer
Olympics.”
It sounds pretty manageable until you read
the fine print: no use of the internet in the com-
pletion of this assignment. At all! As a reference
librarian, I have no shame in admitting that I am
every bit as relieved as the students that the no-
internet stipulation is no longer part of the as-
signment. In my capacity as the liaison to the
Journalism Institute, I’ve had the opportunity to
work much more closely with Adam in design-
ing research activities for his students.
Our most recent effort took the form of an
elaborate game, which we affectionately re-
ferred to as the “Library Treasure Hunt,” as it en-
tailed the use of game mechanics, which Adam
is studying for a book that he’s writing, along
with an effort to get the students into as many li-
brary spaces - both physical and virtual - as pos-
sible.
For my part, I can say that the Treasure
Hunt entailed the highest degree of collabora-
tion that I’ve yet experienced with a faculty
member. Adam and I met several times to dis-
cus our goals, brainstorm content, and work out
logistics. The result was a series of 15 individual
games (one per student) that would be played
over a period of approximately three hours, in-
troducing the students to everything from the
cookbook collection in Fales to the OED. Stu-
dents had to complete specific tasks, such as
scanning and emailing articles from our micro-
The Treasure Hunt was described in an article on the web-
site Fast Company.
film collections or using their phones to read QR
codes, in order to move between clues. The em-
phasis on gamification meant that students
faced penalties (loss of points for hints received)
as well as rewards (coffee and doughnuts on
LL1). The games were challenging and I wor-
ried, having authored them, that the students
might mutiny.
I can’t say they didn’t panic at the begin-
ning, (they did and so did I). But by the end, they
were positive, if weary. (We started at 8:45
sharp on a Tuesday morning.)
They thanked me profusely for facilitating the
game, which would allow the top-scorers to opt
out of other assignments, and for introducing
them to resources and service points within the
library that they may not have explored on their
own. I visited their class the following week to
debrief and they remarked on how much more
confident they felt in using the library and how
resolved they were to continue using it. Looking
back on the semester, I’d count the Treasure
Hunt as among the most enjoyable and reward-
ing experiences I’ve had. I’m happy to share the
template with anyone who is interested.
Alexa Pearce is the Bobst Librarian for Journalism,
Media, Culture and Communication.
SocHum Staff News
Jason Phillips (Librarian for Soci-
ology) published “Undergraduate
Information Seeking Behavior, E-
Reference and Information
Literacy in the Social Sciences.” in
E-Reference Con-
text and Discoverability in Li-
braries: Issues and Concepts. S.
Polanka (ed). Hershey, PA: IGI
Global, (pp. 83-88) and [with
Samantha Guss and David Mc-
Garry], “The NYU Survey Serv-
ice: Promoting Value in
Undergraduate Education.” College & Under-
graduate Libraries, 2011, V. 19 (2/3): 183-199.
Jason also presented “Understanding the
21st Century Research Landscape: Emerging
Trends and Needs Within and Across
Disciplines,” at the Charleston Conference, No-
vember 2011, with Mike Diaz, Audrey Powers,
Corey Seeman and Dennis Brunning.
Tim Johnson (Librarian for Africana
Studies) published “The Communist
Party and the Alabama Sharecrop-
pers Union,” in Science & Society,
2011, V. 75 (4), pp. 454-479.
Meredith Levin (SocHum Reference Associ-
ate) was awarded an NYU Libraries' HR Pro-
fessional Education Award for the Fall 2011
semester to attend LIU’s School of Library and
Information Science. Meredith is a student in
the NYU/LIU Dual Degree Program and is pur-
suing a masters degree in Italian Studies in ad-
dition to an MLS.
SocHum Staff Produce a Video
Tour of Bobst Library
Tim Johnson and Meredith Levin com-
pleted work on a 30 minute video “Tour of Bobst
Library,” which is now available on the Bobst
Research Guide “New to NYU Libraries,” where
it has received over 80 views. The project took
one year and a half to complete - largely due to
reconstruction work on the fourth and fifth floors,
which necessitated changes in the script and
the visuals.
The script for the tour was edited by
Meredith Levin and was based on an audio tour
produced by Scott Collard and Nadaleen Tem-
pelman-Kluit several years ago.
The filming and editing were done by Tim
Johnson using Apple’s iMovie program. iMovie
allows for easy editing so that, as changes occur
within library services or call number locations,
they can quickly be edited into the video. It also
allowed for the edited creation of smaller seg-
ments of the tour (five to ten minutes) for people
who don’t have the time to watch the entire
video.
NYU-TV has expressed interest in broad-
casting the Bobst Tour video on its television
channel and the SocHum VideoCasting com-
mittee is planning on producing a series of video
introductions on conducting research in various
subject areas.
Spotlite on SocHum Page 4
Spotlite on SocHum is produced by the Social
Sciences & Humanities Department of NYU’s
Bobst Library and is published two times per
year (Fall and Spring). Contributors to this issue
include Tim Johnson, Tatiana Bryant, Andrew
H. Lee, Meredith Levin and Alexa Pearce.
Spotlite on SocHum Page 5
THATCamp: A Digital Humanities “Unconference”by Tatiana Bryant
This Fall I had
the opportunity to at-
tend two THATCamps,
one in Philadelphia
and the other at Bran-
deis University in New
England. THATCamp
is an “unconference”-
an inexpensive, infor-
mal meeting open to
anyone (humanists
and technologists of all
skill levels) interested
in the intersection of the humanities and tech-
nology (i.e., the Digital Humanities). No associ-
ation membership or institutional affiliation is
needed, just a strong willingness to collaborate
in an unstructured environment and an interest
in experimenting with new tools.
THATCamp was created by the Center for
New History and Media at George Mason Uni-
versity and funded through a grant from the Mel-
lon Foundation and other sponsors. Volunteers
offer to organize THATCamps at their respec-
tive institutions, typically over the course of a
weekend.
Participants decide on the content of work-
shops, writing and hacking sessions, and gen-
eral discussions, which can range from:
understanding the history of DH; scholarly com-
munication and copyright issues; citation man-
agement using open source tools; digitization
and preservation of humanities materials; ma-
nipulating and analyzing humanities data; visu-
alization and web analytics; open access
publishing; project management; text analysis;
usability; web and computer programming and
social media.
Attendees also volunteer to offer training
on topics they are knowledgeable about and
propose and facilitate discussion sessions on
what interests them related to DH.
At tendees
also volunteer to
offer training on
topics they are
knowledgeable
about and pro-
pose and facilitate
discussion ses-
sions on what in-
terests them
related to DH. A
few of the work-
shops, trainingsand discussions I attended include: DH project
management, data manipulation using Google
Refine, Map creation using GIS, utilizing regular
expressions for text analysis, and promoting
linked open data.
THATCamps have begun to expand out-
side of academia and specialize in smaller, re-
lated fields. For example, there is now
THATCamp Museums, THATCamp Games, and
recently THATCamp Pedagogy (which focused
on expanding the practice of DH amongst un-
dergraduates) and THATCamp Publishing. Tatiana Bryant is a Reference Associate in SocHum.
Spotlite on SocHum Page 6
collection - including monographs, maps, and
sea charts.
In addition to building the Indian Ocean
collections, Bobst Library has also been
strengthening it’s the collections in Iberian Stud-
ies. In the summer of 2011, NYU’s Librarian for
History, Andrew H. Lee, made contact with sev-
eral Portuguese and Spanish book vendors
while in Spain for a conference. He also visited
the oldest still functioning bookstore in the world,
Bertrand’s in Lisbon, founded in 1732.
As a result of his meetings with publishers
and vendors, Lee was able to expand the depth
and breadth of our holdings of materials that are
erratically collected in the United States. He
added that, “ A broader variety of Spanish DVDs
are now coming to Bobst and we started a con-
versation about e-publishing with an important
university press that will possibly bear fruit in a
year or two.”
Tim Johnson, Librarian for Food Studies,
has been building the Library’s collection of Mid-
dle Eastern and African cookbooks. Through
contact with a Turkey-based vendor, he has
been able to add a number od rare titles and
books that are not widely available in the U.S.
“Through my work with graduate students
in Food Studies and a faculty member in
Africana Studies, I became aware of a signifi-
cant gap in our holdings of African and Middle
Eastern cookery,” he noted. “The vendor in
Turkey travels widely in both areas and has
been able to supply us with a large number of ti-
tles that would be otherwise difficult to get.”
While the approval plans serve the pur-
pose of streamlining the ordering and process-
ing of common materials, they also provide time
for librarians to seek out rare and hard to get
materials. It is these materials that will ultimately
define and differentiate the library collection.
18th century map of Africa (from NYU’s In-
dian Ocean Collection).
Bertrand’s, the oldest bookstore in the world.
“Outside the Margins” (from page1)
Several of the recent Bobst acquisitions in African and
Middle Eastern cookery.
An 18th century map of the Guinea Coast (West Africa) to be
added to the Bobst collection.
SocHum
Commencement Celebration
2011
Spotlite on SocHum Page 7