Investigating & Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience Receives $185K Grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The Digital Library Technology Services (DLTS) initiative to archive scholarly use of “Git” repositories (such as GitHub) has been funded by this $185K grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through April 2020. The initiative addresses the pressing need to investigate: first, how academics are using Git hosting platforms; and second, how library and information professionals can effectively archive the scholarship, typically in the form of software, hosted on these platforms.
The project will explore how to more closely align the Git hosting platforms with the needs of academics, and how library information sciences (LIS) professionals can effectively archive and make accessible the scholarship and scholarly ephemera hosted on these platforms. The results from this project will help inform the way code and annotations on Git hosting platforms move from a phase where they are highly active and collaborative, to a state where they are stable, permanently citable, and under active preservation from a professional.
Creating the Architecture for Enhanced Networked Monographs Awarded $786K Grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
In 2015, New York University Libraries and NYU Press received a grant of $786,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop infrastructure to enable publication of a new scholarly form: the Enhanced Networked Monograph. The project, which ends in April 2019, enabled DLTS and its partners to demonstrate the effectiveness of annotation and semantic technologies that have recently or soon will become available.
The goal of the project has been to “balance the needs of scholars, publishers, libraries, and readers in the creation of online works that may contain media and archival content in multiple formats, can be produced efficiently, are easily discoverable, and invite and measure reader engagement.” To date, a number of monographs from NYU Press and project partners, University of Michigan Press and University of Minnesota Press, have been made available, open access, on the web.
The project has identified a need to address the precision of reference within a text, a prerequisite to any citation or annotation. Future research will include focus on improving that precision as a foundational priority.