Next in our series of interviews with Digital Library Program staff. Today, Jen Green, Digital Scholarship Librarian, answers questions about her work.
What does a Digital Scholarship Librarian do?
I work with faculty, students, and staff to provide them with current information and resources that can help them disseminate the results of their research, scholarship, teaching, and learning. This means that I work closely with Information Technology Services colleagues to plan, design, and develop Dartmouth’s emerging online scholarly repository, the Dartmouth Academic Commons and other information systems that will integrate with it. This will be a place where Dartmouth scholars can share their work openly with the world. In addition to this, I work across campus departments to build awareness about other tools, resources, and services that support publication generally and open access publishing more specifically. In an effort to help people understand the scholarly communication/publishing landscape, I coordinate education and outreach opportunities about author rights, copyright, managing scholarly identity and broader impact of research, and innovations in scholarly publishing. My work relies on highly collaborative relationships with many colleagues in the Library, Information Technology Services, the Council on Libraries, as well as Administrative offices within a variety of departments at Dartmouth.
How did you get here? That is, what was your path to becoming the Digital Scholarship Librarian here at Dartmouth?
My path to becoming a Digital Scholarship Librarian is long and winding, but I think that’s probably true for many librarians. I have always had an interest and passion for helping people work through challenges and problems, answer questions, and discover new pathways, so I spent the first three years of my undergraduate degree pursuing Psychology. When helping people in this capacity didn’t seem like the right fit for me, I refocused my attention on my own challenges, questions, and ideas by taking coursework in Art and Art History (another passion of mine). Through this, I became extremely interested in how people interact with and respond to works of art, which led me to apply for a museum internship. I ended up working in museum registration where I was asked to organize the museum’s large collection of digital and analog images representing their permanent collection. Working closely with the museum’s images, I gained a personal respect and understanding for the importance of information management and the critical role it plays in helping people find and enjoy all types of scholarly and cultural content. This is what led me to pursue work in other libraries, digital image collections, and ultimately a Master’s degree in Library and information Science. After I graduated, I continued to work in art libraries, managing digital image collections for teaching. Eventually, this role expanded to managing digital collections and projects more broadly for teaching and research at an academic institution. Shifting my perspective from managing image collections to managing image, publication, and audio collections raised my awareness of copyright, fair and responsible access to scholarly content, and the important role that open access can play in making content available to a wide audience regardless of institutional affiliation or economic status. Access to content is a key component to advancing research and technology around the world. As my interest and passion grew for how to support open sharing of scholarly, authoritative content while navigating issues of copyright and ownership, I began looking for Librarian positions that focused on this. Fortunately, scholarly communication is a growing area within the field of librarianship, and even more fortunate was that there was an opportunity for me to apply for one such position at Dartmouth College. I am very proud to be doing this work here at Dartmouth, and the conversations I’ve had about scholarly publishing and open access with students, faculty, and staff have been extremely engaging and exciting to pursue.
What’s a notable (interesting, challenging, unusual) project that you’ve worked on recently?
Part of my job involves managing the Dartmouth Open Access publishing fund, which provides Dartmouth scholars funds to pay for fees that open access journals charge authors to publish their work. These fees can be extremely high, and in some cases authors will decide not to publish in open access journals because it is personally unaffordable. Dartmouth College is a member of the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE), which means that we’ve designated a budget to help authors pay for these fees if they request them and if the journal to which they’d like to publish qualifies as an open access journal. Processing and approving these requests has been interesting work because it allows me to see what new and exciting research is happening at Dartmouth. It’s also been interesting to see in the past year that some traditionally subscription-based journals are now flipping to open access models. I think this is a growing trend, and it will be interesting to observe how the fee/funding structures change as more journals are open and more authors are publishing in that way.
What do you wish that more people knew about scholarly communication (in relation to the Digital Library Program or not)?
I would like people to know that we are here to help them understand the complicated issues surrounding publishing, copyright, open access, and how to manage your research identity online. We have resources (funding and information) that can help scholars of all types make decisions about where to publish and how to negotiate their rights with their publisher. I don’t think people always realize that they can call us for consultation on these issues and that we are happy to meet them in their office or in ours to answer their questions about scholarly communication, copyright and publishing. I’d also love people to know about our Scholarly Communication Lab blog and follow us there. It’s a great place to start if you have questions related to scholarly communication or just want to know what’s new within Dartmouth’s Scholarly Communication Program.
Who are you when you’re not being the Digital Scholarship Librarian?
Currently, I am President of the Visual Resources Association, a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to furthering research and education in the field of image management within the educational, cultural heritage, and commercial environments. Like myself, many members of this Association are finding that the scope of their work is drifting from managing image collections exclusively to managing many forms of media and scholarship quite broadly. I stepped into this leadership role to share my perspective on how to manage and embrace that shift as visual collection managers and apply our vast knowledge of image organization and access to a wider range of materials.
Outside of my work, I am a cook, an enthusiast of film/music/art, a hiker, a traveler, a cyclist, a painter, and a writer. My husband and I love to explore new places with our two children, and we’ve found that academia has led us to wonderful and interesting places around the world and has tapped nicely into our sense of adventure.
Is there a Library collection or a period of Dartmouth history you’d like to see digitized and made available to the world? (question from Anthony)
I would love to see greater access to digital images of the Hood Museum’s permanent collections. The Hood Museum provides wonderful access to objects within their collection, and I think this access greatly enriches many different teaching and learning opportunities. The kind of access that students have to the physical objects is exceptional, and I think online access to the increased portions of the museum’s collections would enrich museum visits and teaching opportunities.
What question would you like another member of the Digital Library Program staff to answer?
Are there Dartmouth collections that are currently restricted that you’d like to see available in an open institutional repository like the Dartmouth Academic Commons?