John Unsworth
jmu2m@virginia.edu
Presented at the
Annual Meeting of the American Library Association
Session of the
ACRL Law and Political Science Section
and the ARL
Office of Scholarly Communication:
"The
Politics of Scholarly Communication in the New Millennium"
Sunday, June 27,
1999
9:30 a.m.-12
p.m.
New Orleans,
Louisiana
The description of this session in the conference
program notes that “Technological changes . . . are increasingly requiring
collaboration among university faculty members, administrators, librarians, and
scholarly publishers,” and it goes on to claim that we will “encourage
librarians to help promote an environment conducive to effective research.”
I'd like to follow
through on that, or at least on part of it. I'm not going to make the argument
for doing electronic scholarly research--I've made that argument elsewhere, and
often. I'm also not going to spend much
time on the new relationships that scholarly publishers need to establish with
scholars, though if you're interested in that topic I invite you to have a look
(on the Web) at the paper I just delivered in Austin at the AAUP's annual
meeting. Instead, in the time I have
today, I will argue that the library is the most suitable place in the
university to house electronic scholarly research projects in the
humanities. Metaphorically speaking,
the library has always functioned as the laboratory for the humanities, but it
needs now to literalize that metaphor, and doing so will require new
commitments of two precious commodities--space and money--which will inevitably
displace other projects and priorities, and will therefore meet with some
resistance. Nonetheless, I think the
future of the library lies in fulfilling this new role.
At the outset of this session, Ken quoted Tip
O'Neil to the effect that all politics are local--I'd agree, and I'd add that
the devil is in the details. With those
maxims in mind, I hope you'll forgive me for delving into some local details in
what follows--I think the details are extremely important to understanding how
this new collaborative relationship actually works, in applied political and
economic terms, and how (or whether) it might be replicated at other
institutions.
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities, where I work, is housed in Alderman Library, the University of
Virginia's graduate library. IATH has
been in Alderman since it began, seven years ago. The Institute takes up about 2000 square feet--and that's a
conservative estimate focusing on our main third-floor office space, one that
doesn't count our machine room on the first floor or the faculty studies
occupied by ongoing IATH projects on the fifth floor. The library donates this space to the Institute--it was formerly
occupied by the Microfilm department, which has been moved to a considerably
smaller space on the other side of the third floor. We pay for our own networking costs and we pay our own phone
bills, but we pay no rent to the library (or anyone else). When it's time to recarpet or repaint the
Institute's space, we split these costs with the library. We have about a dozen offices (mostly
cubicles), some public meeting space and some public workstations (public in
the sense that they can be used by any IATH fellow or project assistant), and
our own keys.
Now, allow me to explain a little about how the
Institute works:
Budget:
IATH is a permanently funded research unit of the University, with budget
coming from the office of the Provost.
We cost the University about $350,000 a year, with an equal or greater
amount coming in, in any given year, in the form of grant funding. From 1993-1998, the University has invested
just under two million dollars in the Institute, and IATH has raised about 3.25
million from outside sources.
Reporting: I report to the
Vice-Provost for Research, which means that IATH is outside the College
structures at the University--not part of the College of Arts and Sciences, not
part of any other school or department.
In fact, we are also not part of the library, from an administrative
point of view.
Staffing: We have nine full-time
staff, and a number of students working part-time on IATH projects. Two of our full-time positions are systems
administrators with expertise in configuration and deployment of document
management, SGML, and database software; one concentrates on imaging and
modeling applications; one is a Java programmer; one is one is a development
officer; one provides administrative support and fiscal administration; three
are faculty-level appointments (an associate professor in computer
science--Worthy Martin--who serves as our technical director; an SGML and
information systems expert from a library background--Daniel Pitti--who serves as
our project director; and an associate professor in the English
department--me--with research interests in publishing history and scholarly
communication.
Fellows: Two fellows in residence are
selected each year through a competitive application process. Faculty in any humanities discipline are
eligible to submit proposals for long-term, large-scale research projects that
use information technology as a research tool and publishing medium. Fellows are granted half-time teaching
release (donated by their academic departments), and their departments also
provide ten hours a week of student assistance during the academic year. IATH matches those students hours, and picks
up the slack in the summer, and also provides a $10K project budget, office
space and equipment, programming, information systems design, and consulting
for the life of the project. We also
work in less intensive ways with associate fellows (UVa faculty with no
teaching release, no office space, more modest staff support from IATH), and networked
associate fellows (researchers from outside UVa; intensive support of these
projects is usually contingent on grant funding).
The Institute is one of several electronic
centers housed in Alderman Library and next door in Clemons Library--these include:
The Electronic Text Center: Established in the same year as the
Institute and located next door to us, the Etext Center is run by David Seaman:
it provides walk-in service and training to faculty and students interested in
finding, creating, or using electronic text resources. The Etext Center also builds electronic
collections, and its staff spend a fair amount of time creating or enriching
elements of these collections, either on their own or in conjunction with
faculty.
The Geostatistical Information Center:
Formerly maps and social science data, the GeoStat center is run by Patrick
Yott, and it provides a wide range of consulting, programming, and collections
development services with respect to mapping software, statistical packages, and
the visualization of statistical data.
It's also on the third floor of Alderman, right down the hall from IATH
and Etext.
The Virginia Center for Digital History:
This is the newest of the electronic centers housed in the library, having been
established only last year. It is
located next door to IATH and is an outgrowth of an Institute project--the
Valley of the Shadow, Ed Ayers' civil war archive. VCDH works with faculty at UVa and elsewhere to support teaching
and research of history in electronic form.
Like IATH, it is administratively distinct from the library: it is
funded by and reports to the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Digital Special Collections: Edward
Gaynor is in charge of digital special collections, a unit within Special
Collections that focuses on digital imaging of rare materials, the provision of
networked finding aids, and mounting the online components of Special
Collection's exhibitions.
The Robertson Digital Media Center: Rick
Provine runs this recently endowed center in a newly renovated section of
Clemons Library, next door to Alderman. The Digital Media Center specializes in
digital audio and video: like the other library centers, its mission combines
collections development, training, and collaboration with faculty and students
in teaching and research. Starting this
fall, the Digital Media Center will also house our new Director of Media
Studies, Johanna Drucker, and it may also provide support to a new Media Studies
Postdoctoral researcher supported by the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship
Foundation.
In addition to its centers, the library has an
overarching digital libraries division, charged with designing and planning the
systems that will manage and deliver the objects in a unified digital library
in the future.
Outside the Library, there are also a couple of
relevant programs run by the University's campus computing organization, Information Technologies and Communication
(ITC). These include:
The New Media Center: This is a
walk-in service center where staff assist faculty and students in digitizing,
modeling, imaging, and working with audio and video. The New Media Center has existed for about four years, and its
services overlap in some ways with the library's Digital Media Center.
The Teaching + Technology Initiative: This program, now about three years old,
provides release time and technical support to faculty members who propose to
integrate information technology in undergraduate teaching. It is managed by John Alexander, in conjunction
with the University's (originally Lilly-funded) Teaching Resource Center. I'm a TTI fellow this year, with a project
on 20th-century American Bestsellers.
Clearly, then, the Institute is not an isolated
effort, but is part of a much larger picture. Most of that larger picture is made up of initiatives that are
library funded; some, like IATH and VCDH, are funded from other sources but
housed in the library. Only a couple of
these--the ITC initiatives--exist entirely outside the library's domain. It is worth noting, by the way, that it's
much easier to stick to a limited mission and do it well in an environment
where other bases are covered by other organizations. Beyond the general benefit of being one of many centers, there
are several benefits, from my point of view, to a library-centric arrangement:
For IATH's fellows, being in the
library means they have ready access to library collections, especially those
primary materials not in digital form.
Just like any other faculty, fellows also can benefit from the
assistance of staff at Library electronic centers in relevant portions of their
projects. Also, the large number of
electronic centers, all of which employ students on a part-time basis, means
that there is a sizeable pool of students who are trained in some fairly arcane
software tools, who understand something about building digital collections,
and who can be recruited to work on IATH projects. It might seem that networked humanities research projects such
as those sponsored by IATH could easily be distributed across campus, and that
no physical facilities should be required--but in fact, I believe the most
important part of IATH's success has been the existence of a central place
where faculty from across the humanities and technical staff versed in
humanities computing can work together.
The Institute has become the University's most genuinely
interdisciplinary space, and its staff and fellows benefit in a number of ways
from cohabitation.
For IATH technical staff, being in the
library makes it easy to learn from and collaborate with staff in other library
digital centers (most of which are very close at hand). The Institute's location and its proximity
to library operations also subtly change the way the staff thinks of their
jobs, in my opinion: though they work with information technology, I believe
they come to think of themselves not only as
technologists, but also as information professionals.
For the Institute in general, the same
is true, I believe: being in the library has had a definite impact on the way
we perceive our mission and on the methods we use. Granted, the goal of supporting long-term computer-based research
projects would probably have driven us in the direction of non-proprietary
hardware- and software-independent encoding schemes, but I think our setting
has helped to promote and reinforce an awareness of long-term preservation and
access issues, an interest in best practices, and a prejudice in favor of
community-based standards. In fact, in
retrospect, it seems quite obvious that the Library was the best, and perhaps
the only, place to establish a place like the Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities.
What's maybe not so obvious is why the Library
puts up with us. I think there are
several answers to this question, though:
Kendon Stubbs: The first and, in many
ways, the most important reason that the Institute is in Alderman Library is
Kendon Stubbs. Kendon is Associate
University Librarian and for the past seven years, he has consistently
championed and promoted library digital centers and the use of library space
for humanities computing initiatives. Many others have been involved in the
development of these centers, and others, including the director of the
University's Libraries, Karin Wittenborg, have seconded Kendon's commitment to
them, but I think few people would dispute that Kendon has been a driving force
in turning the University of Virginia into an international leader in the
fields of digital libraries and humanities computing.
Public Relations: Because these
library digital centers exist, and because faculty and students come to them in
order to work on their research and teaching projects with library staff, the
library has come to be seen as a place that houses human resources as well as
information resources--a place you go to find expertise, advice, training, and
consulting, not just somewhere you go to get books and journals. In fact, as the library steadily provides
more and more of its books and journals in electronic form, and even permits
faculty to use the web to order the delivery of physical items to faculty
offices (using LEO, Library Express On-Grounds), I would say the general
perception of the library is shifting increasingly away from the repository and
toward the laboratory, or (to use a favorite neologism of the science community
a few years back) the collaboratory. In
short, places like the Institute and the Etext Center promote a faculty culture
that regards the library as an essential space for experimentation, discovery,
and creation, and regards librarians as expert colleagues.
Shared Computing Infrastructure: The hardware, software, and human
infrastructure required to run something like the Institute is considerable,
and it overlaps quite a bit with the requirements of library centers building
and delivering digital collections. The
Institute uses no library funds for this infrastructure: it attracts funding
from other parts of the University and from sources outside the University, and
it shares infrastructure with the library.
For example, the Digital Media Center uses a substantial amount of disk
on our main server, a Sparcserver 1000 with 250 GB of disk and a gigabyte of
RAM, to deliver streaming audio and video.
They, in turn, share the media server software with us, and we back the
whole thing up using our staff and equipment.
We have shared a full-time position with the Etext Center until recently
(a programmer analyst specializing in text delivery and text database systems),
and in the past we have provided considerable systems administration to the
Etext Center in particular. We often
will consult with other library centers when an expensive software or hardware
purchase is in the offing, to see if the use and the expense of that resource
can be shared, and in recent years we have pooled our resources in this manner
to purchase the IBM Digital Library package and a high-end server to run it
on.
Out of the collaboration between the Library, the
Provost's office, humanities departments, and humanities faculties, more than
forty projects have been started--the Rossetti Archive, the Blake Archive, the
Valley of the Shadow, the Pompeii Forum Project, the Piers Plowman Project, as
well as projects on Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, the Salem Witch Trials,
Tibetan mystical literature, and many others.
Some of these have gone on to be published by academic and commercial
publishers; others, like the Blake Archive, have so far been able to recover
their costs through grant funding. Its
clear that we don't yet know what the best funding model will be for projects
of this sort--or whether there will be many, or not even one. But for exactly that reason, I would say
that we need publishers to be involved and to take a few chances, along with the
rest of us.
So, what lessons can be drawn from the past six
years at the University of Virginia?
humanities research computing thrives in a
library setting
there are tangible costs associated with
establishing new centers of expertise (and I would add that the most
significant expense, both in dollar amount and in impact, is the money spent on
staff), but those costs can be spread across different units of the University
and can be offset (though not replaced) by outside sources.
nonetheless, someone in a position of
leadership has to be the first to put resources on the table
the most important initial resource is a
commitment of space, since space is required in building a laboratory of the
non-metaphorical sort
an isolated effort in the area of humanities
computing is likely to be overwhelmed with incompatible requirements, whereas a
more narrowly focused effort set in the context of other, complementary efforts
has a much better chance of success
initiatives that grow out of and correspond
to traditional university functions have a clearer sense of their own mission
than centers created ab novo
nonetheless, humanities research computing is
inherently interdisciplinary, and there are both intellectual and fiscal
economies of scale to be had in creating this kind of center above the
department, and perhaps even above the college, level
The place where research across the
disciplines of the humanities has traditionally been conducted is the library,
which brings us back to the first point, that humanities research computing
needs its laboratory to be in the library.