Altmetrics – web-based measures of research usage – have existed for a decade. However, a significant proportion of social science research fails to register any online attention at all. This impairs the usefulness of altmetrics as a tool to understand the relevance of social science research and also suggests social researchers are less inclined to engage in online arenas. In […]
Category: digital scholarship
Rethinking the rights of children for the Internet Age
The internet is now 30 years old, making it the same age as the key formulation of children’s rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the intervening years, our understanding of the transformative effects of the internet on both society and children have developed in tandem. In this post Sonia Livingstone outlines some of the issues […]
Say blockchain one more time! What is the real value of blockchain to higher education?
The revolutionary potential of blockchain has been much touted in many fields including research and higher education. In this post, Martin Hamilton discusses some of the potential applications of blockchain to academia and raises key questions about how these systems could be implemented and safeguarded from malicious exploitation. Blockchains are all the rage right now. They’ve joined cloud computing, […]
Introducing the Observatory of International Research: A simple research discovery tool for everyone
Andreas Pacher presents the Observatory of International Research (OOIR), a research tool that provides users with easy to use overviews and information for whole fields of social science research. Reflecting on the advantages and limitations of other discovery tools and the potential for information overload, Andreas points to the utility of OOIR in producing search results that are both broad […]
Creative Technologist and 2018 Papamarkou Chair Tahir Hemphill Looks Back on his Year in the Archives
This is a guest post from Tahir Hemphill, the 2018 Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Labs team first met Tahir – a creative technologist, educator and radical archivist – when we invited him to speak at our Collections as Data: Impact conference about his […]
Born to Be 3D: Born-Digital Data Stewardship
Today’s post is from Jesse Johnston and Jon Sweitzer-Lamme. Jon is the Librarian in Residence at The Library of Congress’ Preservation Directorate. He is a 2017 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s iSchool, receiving a MSLIS with a minor in Museum Studies and a certificate in Special Collections. On November 2, the Library hosted […]
The main obstacles to better research data management and sharing are cultural. But change is in our hands
Recommendations on how to better support researchers in good data management and sharing practices are typically focused on developing new tools or improving infrastructure. Yet research shows the most common obstacles are actually cultural, not technological. Marta Teperek and Alastair Dunning outline how appointing data stewards and data champions can be key to improving research data management through positive cultural change. This […]
Piloting Digital Scholarship with the John W. Kluge Center and LC Labs
This is a guest post from 2018 Library of Congress Labs team Junior Fellow Eileen Jakeway that discusses her work on a collaborative Digital Scholarship pilot with the John W. Kluge Center. In her address at the 2018 Junior Fellows Program closing ceremony this August, Manuscript Division Junior Fellow Patrice Green said that she learned a […]
Nothing lasts forever: questions to ask yourself when choosing a new tool or technology for research
Academia has become increasingly reliant on third-party tools and technologies to carry out many of the processes throughout the research lifecycle. But there are genuine concerns about the sustainability of some of these tools and what the implications would be for users in the event they were discontinued. Andy Tattersall suggests a series of straightforward questions researchers should ask themselves […]
Inside, Inside Baseball: A Look at the Construction of the Dataset Featuring the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress Digital Collections
This is a guest blog post by visiting scholar archivist Julia Hickey who is on a professional development assignment from the Defense Media Activity to the Library of Congress Labs team. Julia has been helping us prepare for and build out a visualization of collection data for our Inside Baseball event. This post was also […]