I would like to propose a combination of general discussion and helpathon to address the needs and concerns of the providers and users of digital library collections; I think this could be combined with Andy Keck’s and Katie McCormack’s Session proposals and probably others.  I am on the advisory board of an open –access digital library, the Digital Library of the Caribbean (www.dloc.com), which is a grant-funded partnership of libraries in Florida and the Caribbean(for brief description see below).* I am participating in this Unconference  in part to learn ways to improve and otherwise help dLOC, but I am hoping that some of the issues that challenge this digital library are pertinent to other digital projects and would  therefore be of interest to other people in the humanities who use or work on digital collections. Below I have listed some questions concerning digital collections (as examples) and would like to hear what other questions and experiences people have in regard to digital library collections.

Examples of Technical Questions:

• What type of tools and technologies do you find necessary and/or helpful when using a digital library? (e.g. particular search functions, bookshelves, the ability to make and save comments on materials as well as to share materials through Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• What types of pedagogical guides or editorial information would you find helpful?

(dLOC, for instance, has workshops and posts teaching guides for various materials in addition to hosting a contest for teaching guides to specific material in the collection)

• How do you organize content from multiple digital collections?

Examples of Digital Scholarship Questions:

• How do we encourage/invite scholars to conduct their scholarly work with and through digital collections like dLOC? Instead of simply using materials in dLOC, what new forms of scholarship can we foster and how do we do so?

•  Whereas projects like the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture are working primarily with newer media forms (scalar.usc.edu/anvc/?page_id=2), how do we support and encourage more traditional scholarly research to take full advantage of digital collections as source and operational resources?

Examples of Questions concerning publicizing collections and building relationships with users:

• How can a library advertise its collection so that scholars know that it exists?
• How might a library develop relationships with users of the collection to ensure that it is identifying useful texts for the field?
• Could the library foster relationships among users to develop further editorial and pedagogical materials?

Examples of Questions involving Open Access and National Patrimony Collections:

dLOC sees itself as a partnership working to preserve and make available (free of cost) content from Caribbean libraries, archives, and NGOs.  However, some scholars and some librarians consider  making digital copies of Caribbean content available through open access venues a loss—especially if those venues have their servers in the U.S.

Are there good answers for such questions as:

Why should a Caribbean National Library make rare novels and magazines available to people all over the world for free? Aren’t they (and their nation) losing income from researchers who would otherwise have to travel to the country and pay for copying, etc.?

Aren’t they also losing revenue they might gain through for-profit databases, such as Ebsco and Alexander Street Press? (dLOC’s agreements over content are all non-exclusive, so everything digitized for dLOC can also be sold to databases.)

Is it important that digital collections from the Caribbean and other regions in the Postcolony host their own servers and control their own software for digital projects?

*Each dLOC partner determines which materials it will digitize, retaining an electronic copy for itself and giving one to be housed on the dLOC server, where it will be maintained by  the University of Florida Digital Library Collections’ (UFDC.com), which functions as a technical hub for the project.  dLOC has two objectives: to preserve fragile materials, often housed in only one or two national libraries or archives in the Caribbean, and to make them available as widely as possible to citizens and scholars. Founded in 2004, with five partners, the project now has over  15  including the Archives Nationale d’Haïti and three other libraries in Haiti; the Caribbean Community Secretariat (CARICOM); the National Library of Jamaica; La Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo (FUNGLODE); Universidad de Oriente, Venezuela; the University of the Virgin Islands; Florida International University; University of Central Florida; the University of Florida, the University of the Netherlands Antilles, the Biblioteca National Aruba, and the Belize National Library Service and information System, and the Caribbean Region, International Resource Network.

Last summer I was fortunate enough to attend the NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at the University of Virginia’s Scholars Lab. Throughout the proceedings, I found myself watching my friend Jo Guldi madly switching between a number of different applications on her MacBook Pro. I wasn’t familiar with most of the tools she was using, and her work pattern for taking notes was so different from my own that I asked her abouit. Consequently, Jo, Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, and myself sat down over lunch one day and started showing each other our personal favorite tools. (Note the absence of rimshot here, please.)

I found this exchange incredibly exciting and useful, not to mention very much in the spirit of ProfHacker, which I’ve had the great pleasure to write for since 2009. As much as you think you know about the tools of the trade, there’s always more out there. And maybe, just maybe, the things that your friends are using could help you get your writing / reading / compiling / programming done all that much more quickly.

What I’d like to propose for a session, then, is a show and tell. You get 3 minutes—at most—to show us your favorite application. You tell us what’s so great about it, how you use it in your work, and why you couldn’t live without it. We all get exposed to something new and get the chance to imagine how our own work could shift if we were to shake things up and try a new approach. If we have enough time (but how could we? people will be all over this session like butter on grits), you could get a shot to share a second favorite application with us. But seriously: don’t count on it.

It will work best if you can show us your application through the projector (we’ll have connections), but all platforms and applications are allowed. That means you can wax poetic about your favorite Android app. The best Chrome MAME. Or the best media player that you’ve found for Debian. Whatever you’d like. Heck, I suppose it could even be something analog! But you only get 3 minutes to share the love. Afterward, we’ll have a handful of new applications to try out (provided your pitch was good enough) and we’ll know who to talk to to find out more.

Does this sound appealing to anyone else?

I am also interested in the neurological and spiritual impacts of technology. There was lots of buzz in the past year about Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, or at least his Atlantic article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”. As a religion scholar, I am also interested in recent conversations about whether Google is also making us “spiritually stupid,” making us too distracted to participate in corporate rituals or private meditation. My dissertation focuses on contemporary hermits who live alone and spend much of their time in contemplative prayer, but most are also online quite a lot. So, I am interested what all of us can learn from them about setting boundaries and developing discipline with how we engage technology. I would enjoy discussing with others how you deal with this yourself, and also how this fits into your teaching. As I use more and more technology in my courses, I want to be intentional about helping students develop healthy habits.

I currently teach environmental ethics. As I work to engage with technology more directly in the classroom, I also feel responsible for interrogating the social and environmental impacts of our classroom technologies and personal gadgets. These connect us to all sorts of global problems, including pollution, toxic waste, and child labor. I would be interested in sharing ideas about how to raise these critical ethical questions.

Here’s what I’m trying. I have assigned my students this semester to watch Annie Leonard’s “Story of Electronics,” to listen to a Fresh Air podcast featuring the Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, and to read a short article, “High Tech Wasteland.”

Another way I approach this is by having my students consider how our learning depends on all sorts of technologies and infrastructures that connect us to the broader world. They contribute to a blog that investigates aspects of life on campus we take for granted, so, for example they trace the source of our power, water, and food. They track where our waste flows, including e-waste, recycling, food waste, construction waste, etc. All this helps us remember the ways we are always engaged with a world beyond the classroom, even when we feel isolated in a physical or virtual academic bubble.