Libraries Faculty Receive Center for Transformative Teaching Seeding Student Success Award

Catherine Fraser Riehle, Erica DeFrain, and Debbie Minter from University Libraries and English received an inaugural Seeding Student Success funding award from the Center for Transformative Teaching (CTT) for their project — “Writing Information Literacy: A Collaborative Effort to Support Intentional Integration of Information Literacy at the Foundation.”

In this year-long project, Riehle, DeFrain, and Janel Simons from the Libraries are collaborating with English Professor and First-Year Writing Program coordinator Debbie Minter and Writing Center Director Rachel Azima on a project to integrate information literacy into foundational writing courses. Funds will be used to support an inquiry group of 11 Writing Information Literacy Fellows who will develop instructional resources that they will pilot in multiple sections of composition courses in fall 2020. They will conduct a research project in the fall to assess the pilot.

HathiTrust Provides Emergency Temporary Access to Half of UNL’s Book Collection

The COVID-19 crisis has made the collections of many research libraries around the United States physically inaccessible, including the more than 3 million volumes in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library. Fortunately the HathiTrust Digital Library, a digital repository that provides long-term preservation and access services for millions of books and journals digitized from its member libraries’ collections, has granted UNL Libraries emergency, expanded temporary access to materials in its collection. Now UNL students, faculty and staff will have full-text access to 50 percent of UNL Libraries’ collection digitally, including those materials that are copyright protected.

The UNL Libraries, a longstanding member of the HathiTrust community, was one of 110 libraries that applied for the Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS). Claire Stewart, Dean of Libraries, and Casey Hoeve, Associate Professor and Head of Content & Collections, worked on the ETAS application on UNL’s behalf.  

“I know how frustrating this is for our faculty and students to not have access to physical materials,” explained Stewart, “that is why we are excited to announce that the HathiTrust Digital Library is temporarily expanding access for our users during this emergency and at least half our collection will be available online.”

The main features of the emergency access are:

●        Continued access to the physical scholarly record — UNL’s print collection — via digital copies in HathiTrust.

●        Reading access to books online, within a web browser (no full downloads).

●        Ability to “check out” a copy for 60 minutes, with an auto-renew feature for books in active use, and with a maximum use time of 2 hours. Access to items is 1-1. For example, if we have two copies in our collection, two UNL users (faculty, staff, students) will be allowed concurrent access to the digital item in HathiTrust.

Since approval, Hoeve and others have developed a libguide that provides UNL faculty and students easy-to-follow login procedures and additional information about the HathiTrust Digital Library and ETAS. 

To search for HathiTrust (Expanded) online materials:

• visit the HathiTrust digital library
• click or tap LOG IN
• select "University of Nebraska-Lincoln" from the drop-down menu
• click or tap CONTINUE

You will be prompted to log in with your UNL Credentials.

The Libraries ASKus chat is open to assist anyone having trouble searching the digital library and staff at the Law Library can be reached at lawref@unl.edu.

CANCELLED -- 8th Annual HILT Training Conference

-- Due to COVID-19, this event has been cancelled.--

Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and UNL Libraries will be hosting the 8th annual HILT

training conference. HILT, Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching, is a 4-day training institution

that will be held on UNL’s campus May 18th through the 21st. On May 22nd, conference attendees

are invited to join a day of special experiences including tours of the Sheldon Museum of Art,

Nebraska State Capitol Building, and Morrill Hall. 

The conference offers keynotes, ignite-styled talks, and local cultural heritage excursions. Attendees

will select one of nine courses to take during the conference. Course options include: 

• Anti-Racist Feminist Digital Humanities
• Critical Digital Curation: Taking Care of Black Women’s Material Culture
• Getting Started with Data, Tools, and Platforms
• Introduction to Text Encoding
• Introduction to Web Development and Design Principles
• Latinx Digital Praxis: From the Archive to the Digital
• Spatial Analysis: Theory, Methods, and Applications
• Teaching DH: Assignment, Syllabi, Curricula
• Text Analysis Methods & Practice 

The HILT conference is open for researchers, students, early career scholars and cultural heritage

professionals who would like to learn more about Digital Humanities theory, practice, and culture.

Registration is now open and is due by May 1st. 

For more information and registration please visit: http://dhtraining.org/hilt/conferences/hilt-2020/ 

Student Makes Fun Discovery in Cather Collections

By Caitlin Steiner

William Kelly, a graduate student in the UNL Department of History, was working with new items for
the Charles Cather collection when he came across a fun discovery, a short rhyme in an autograph book written in Willa Cather’s hand. Kelly works as an intern in the Archives & Special Collections, has an interest in Cather, and has been assisting Mary Ellen Ducey, University Archivist, by doing an in-depth review of items to add to the collection. During Kelly’s closer look, an old pocket autograph book caught his eye. The book belonged to Willa’s brother Douglass Cather, and dated back to 1890. The autograph book is similar to how students of today would sign each other’s yearbooks with farewell messages and poems. 

Dear Douglass

Learn your lessons, mind your teacher 

marry a girl & pay the preacher,

 die and fly to the “golden shore”

 and don’t be a sell [sic] anymore.

The medical advice of your sister WM Cather Jr. 

Last summer, Kelly interned in Red Cloud, Nebraska at the National Willa Cather Center. It was here
where Kelly learned much about Willa’s life. 

“I wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint why this was so unique, had it not been for that experience in
Red Cloud,” stated Kelly. 

The most striking piece of Willa’s message was her signature. Willa signed off her poem as,
“The medical advice of your sister WM Cather Jr.” Willa would have been around the age of 16 at
the time, starting to adopt male styles, and aspiring to become a doctor. This is shown through her
medical advice and referring to herself as William (WM) Jr. 

“To have the smallest contribution to people’s understanding of Willa Cather...is pretty cool,” said Kelly. 

Kelly has enjoyed working with the Cather collection and reading Willa’s books. 

“I always hated to read fiction, until I read Willa Cather,” said Kelly, “now she makes me proud to
be a Nebraskan.”

Digital Humanities Afternoons

Join us for two talks on February 12, 2020, at 3:30 pm in the Peterson Room, Love Library (221LLS) about important project in the digital humanities. The first talk is “How (not) to run a digital humanities startup: Building our shared digital cultural heritage and connecting creatively to artists and makers through the last five millennia" by Luke Hollis, founder of  Archimedes Digital (https://archimedes.digital), a non-profit digital humanities startup focused on preserving and offering access to our shared cultural heritages, and visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Hollis was a UCARE Fellow with the Walt Whitman Archive and graduated from UNL in 2010. In the past, he has assisted in the development of digital humanities research projects with over 120 cultural heritage institutions and authored software that has been adopted by the open source community for publishing classical languages datasets. Archimedes has partnered with American research centers and historical sites in over 30 countries to digital record and share our histories so that they can inspire and inform the next generations for years to come.

The second talk on “UNL Campus Archaeology: Building Digital Resources” by Dr. Effie Athanassopoulos an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Classics and Religious Studies at UNL. She is a historical archaeologist with interests in landscape, identity formation, material culture, and the role of digital technologies in teaching and research. In the past four years, Athanassopoulos has been working with archaeological collections recovered from excavations on the UNL Campus. These efforts have led to the UNL Campus Archaeology project, a research project that relates directly to Nebraska’s heritage. Through classroom based research and collaboration, the faculty/student team is analyzing and reassessing archaeological and historical materials to explore the lives of Lincoln’s residents and the city’s early urban development. A selection of this material will become available via a digital exhibit and later on as a digital archive. Her talk will provide an overview of these efforts and discuss the current state of the project.

 

Dr. Athanassopoulos’ primary research interests are in Mediterranean archaeology. She has been carrying out fieldwork in southern Greece, in the region of Nemea, and is the author of a monograph titled “Landscape Archaeology and the Medieval Countryside: Results of the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project” (American School of Classical Studies at Athens Publications, Princeton, 2016).