Bob Kieft, College Librarian, Occidental College; Lisa Norberg, Dean of the Library and Academic Information Services, Barnard College; Janet Simons, Associate Director of Instructional Technology, and Co-Director, Digital Humanities Initiative, Hamilton College; Alan Boyd, Associate Director of Libraries, Oberlin College (representing the Five Colleges of Ohio); Marsha Schnirring, Associate Vice-President for Scholarship Technology, Occidental College; Patrick Rashleigh, Faculty Technology Liaison for the Humanities, Wheaton College; Stewart Varner, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Emory University Libraries, Emory University; Katherine Rowe, Chair and Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College. NITLE members Barnard, Hamilton, Five Colleges of Ohio (represented by Oberlin), Occidental, and Wheaton, together with Emory University, all of which have grants from such funders as The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services to enhance support for teaching and learning, will update NITLE members on their work. Moderator Katherine Rowe (Bryn Mawr) will then lead a discussion of how liberal arts colleges can collectively set and execute a research and demonstration agenda for digital scholarship, broadly construed.

1. Granting Collaboration, What’s Next?
NITLE Symposium, April 17, 2012
Barnard College (Lisa Norberg-- lnorberg@barnard.edu)
Critical and Empirical Approaches to Problem-Solving in the Liberal Arts Curriculum (CEAPS)
The systematic production, use, organization, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data should be a
skill that rises to the same level that writing does in the liberal arts college curriculum. In order to build the
curriculum and support this faculty development, Barnard is strengthening the College‘s intellectual
infrastructure by establishing an empirical reasoning lab that will serve all disciplines, including the
humanities. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the lab will provide foundational and advanced
support for the exploration and application of new tools and methods of inquiry. A new data librarian will
work closely with an interdisciplinary faculty task force to develop curriculum and train a cadre of
“empirical reasoning fellows” to support the use of everything from GIS to textual analysis. A hoped-for
outcome of this project is that Barnard will produce humanists with more interest in, respect for, and
capacity to use empirical evidence, while producing social and natural scientists more likely to critically
question the assumptions behind evidence.
Emory University (Stewart Varner--stewart.varner@emory.edu)
Digital Scholarship Commons
From its home in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, The Digital Scholarship Commons
(DiSC) works with scholars to plan collaborative projects and coordinates with copyright experts, metadata
librarians, subject liaisons and technologists. DiSC is funded by the Mellon Foundation, and its mission is
to support, produce and sustain innovative and interdisciplinary work and to help train and inspire the next
generation of scholars and librarians.
DiSC is working with Emory scholars to build an interactive map of ancient Rome, develop an online
community for scholars of Postcolonial studies, map and study lynching in Georgia, and create a process of
cataloging digital items from the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace. Additionally, DiSC has held
workshops on a variety of topics including managing your online identity, using content management
systems in scholarship, and using Prezi to animate your presentations. As a hub of digital activity on
campus, DiSC has hosted guest speakers and held a symposium on disability studies. DiSC is managed by
the Digital Scholarship Coordinator and staffed by two post-doctoral fellows, three graduate fellows, and
four undergrad employees. It occupies a physical space in the Library’s Research Commons which is an
open and flexible area designed to facilitate collaboration and community.
Hamilton College (Janet Simons--jsimons@hamilton.edu)
The Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) at Hamilton College: Creating a Collaboratory for Digital
Humanities in a Liberal Arts Setting
DHi at Hamilton College is a collaboratory where new media and computing technologies are used to
promote humanities-based teaching, research, and scholarship across the liberal arts. DHi creates
opportunities for new interdisciplinary models and methods of collaboration in order to 1) support a
fundamental shift in humanities research at Hamilton and, potentially, in partnership with other
institutions, and 2) lead to the generation of new knowledge.
Hamilton’s DHi models collaboration across academic and administrative units and prioritizes sustainable
curricular integration and student/faculty collaborative research. Co-Directors Angel David Nieves, Ph.D.,

2. Associate Professor & Chair of Africana Studies, and Janet Thomas Simons, M.S., ITS, unite faculty
research goals, technology and library science resources to build upon Hamilton’s significant strengths in
teaching and research. DHi also builds on the existing foundations of Hamilton’s Information and Learning
Liaisons group (HILL), a collaboration of instructional technologists and reference librarians to support
learning; an existing humanities curriculum as well as a new Cinema and New Media Studies (CNMS)
program; and institutional support for humanities research involving undergraduates.
Occidental College (Marsha Schnirring--mschnirring@oxy.edu)
Building Capacity for Digital Scholarship
Occidental is in the midst of an ambitious, forward-looking effort to re-imagine its library building as an
Academic Commons: a premier scholastic environment that makes visible our commitments as a 21st
century liberal arts and sciences college. When fully realized, this project will include delivery of new
services to strengthen student and faculty scholarship, emphasizing public/participatory digital scholarship,
new or re-skilled professional staff able to assist in this work, and development of an integrated academic
support system for students -- all within a renovated structure. While the Academic Commons will have a
“traditional” library of books and quiet study areas in it, spaces for collaboration, digital content creation,
and experimentation in pedagogy and scholarly work will be central. With great fanfare and intention, we
have decided to privilege the use of resources (teaching, learning, research) over the resources themselves
and access to them. A $700K grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2010 has us well on our
way to building Oxy’s “capacity for digital scholarship.” Funding supports three postdoctoral fellows, three
annual week-long Digital Scholarship Institutes for faculty, a Digital Scholarship Symposium and Speaker
Series, assorted workshops, and outreach to regional and national communities of interest.
Ohio Five (Denison, Kenyon, Oberlin, Ohio Wesleyan, Wooster; Alan Boyd--alan.boyd@oberlin.edu)
Integrating Digital Collections into the Liberal Arts
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Five Colleges of Ohio project, Next Steps in the Next
Generation Library: Integrating Digital Collections into the Liberal Arts Curriculum, has allowed library
and archives staff to work with faculty to create over 30 digital collections, most designed to support
student research or to be actively used in the classroom. These encompass work in the humanities, arts,
social sciences, and sciences. The grant supports a Digital Projects Coordinator position and a part-time
Interface Specialist Programmer, both shared by all five institutions. Our projects are tightening the
collaboration among our institutions, digitizing and opening access to materials that were largely unused,
creating a digital projects “mainstream” within our institutions, and shaping statewide strategic planning for
all OhioLINK DSPACE-supported digital collections.
Wheaton and Partners (Patrick Rashleigh--rashleigh_epatrick@wheatonma.edu)
The TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS)
Encoding texts in machine-readable, standardized formats (particularly the TEI standard) forms a
cornerstone of the practice of digital humanities. Many scholars have put considerable effort into learning
encoding standards and transcribing their text into XML for the purposes of dissemination and machine
conversion into multimedia formats. Having made that effort, however, there are few avenues available to
the scholar who does not have the expertise or technical skills to convert XML into human-readable
formats (such as HTML or PDF), and who does not have ready access to long-term, accessible, archival
digital storage. TAPAS seeks to address that need by allowing a scholar to upload, store, and publish their
TEI data in a variety of forms — including a project website — with minimal technical knowledge.
Wheaton’s partners in TAPAS are Brown University, Dickinson College, Hamilton College, Mount
Holyoke College, SHANTI at the University of Virginia, University of Chicago, University of Puget
Sound, Vassar College, Wheaton College (Massachusetts), and Willamette University.