Library Research & Innovative Practice Forum

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/16362

The Library Research & Innovative Practice Forum is an annual event in June featuring lightning talks, presentations, and poster sessions by UMD Libraries’ librarians and staff.

Browse

Author: search.filters.author.Wickner, AmyEnd date: 2019

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Work in Progress: Improving Labor Practices in Digital Libraries
    (2019-06-11) Wickner, Amy; Caringola, Elizabeth
    Labor sustains cultural heritage and yet it is undervalued across libraries, archives, and museums (LAM). LAMs furthermore normalize contingency through practices like using short-term funding to create short-term positions in support of long-term programs and services. Conversations about labor practices and workers’ well-being in LAM often frame these issues as individual concerns. However, the impacts of LAM labor practices spread beyond the growing number of undervalued, invisible, and contingent workers that characterizes this field. In academic libraries, for example, workers with job protections (such as non-contingent faculty status) face mounting workloads as they find themselves unable to support and retain talented colleagues. These protected workers may also find it difficult to scale down their units’ responsibilities, even as undervalued and contingent workers depart. And when library workers depart or become burned out, what becomes of libraries’ ability to sustain access to information, teaching and learning, and high-quality research collections? In this session, we’ll discuss our recent work with the Digital Library Federation Working Group on Labor in Digital Libraries, Archives, and Museums (https://wiki.diglib.org/Labor), which focuses on two research areas: foregrounding the experiences of contingent and precarious workers; and developing a research agenda for valuing labor. We’ll briefly review each research activity in the first half of the session and devote the second half to discussion with participants. This session will be interactive but we hope you’ll stay!
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Web Archiving and You
    (2017-06-08) Wickner, Amy; Archer, Joanne
    We propose an interactive session on web archiving: why it matters, how we do it, and how we can do it better. Web archiving has now been in practice for decades and is relatively well-established in libraries, archives, and museums, but there are many under-explored areas of research and practice. Web archives have been used for teaching, scholarly research, journalism, e-discovery, and art, but remain "emerging" as a source of data. The UMD Libraries have maintained a Web Resources Collection Program since 2009 but how we accomplish this work is always evolving. In this interactive session, we'll frame the landscape of web archiving today, both at UMD and beyond, and introduce issues and opportunities we might take on in the future. We'll also recruit participants to envision how web archives can play a role in their librarianship and act as a resource for the library users they know best. We hope to glean information about a community of potential stakeholders that can help inform next steps for our work on web archives.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Using the Memory Lab: Values, Impacts, and Discourses
    (2017-06-08) Wickner, Amy
    Personal digital archiving is how individuals accumulate, organize, store, and preserve digital possessions in their personal lives. New initiatives like the Memory Lab at the DC Public Library increasingly bring DIY digital conversion and preservation practices into public spaces. In order to study the values and impacts of such services and the discourses they activate, I interviewed 13 library staff and patrons about their experiences with personal digital archiving resources at DCPL. Interviewees emphasized values and impacts such as access to resources and the library's role in supporting digital literacy, as well as obstacles to participation including the difficulty of learning new skills and technologies. A critical discourse analysis of one interview reveals additional discourses at play: personal digital archiving at the public library can be valued as a resource for managing (having power over) change, a means of re-situating identity, and a vehicle for (re)imagining the future. This research contributes to our understanding of the narratives and attitudes that shape emerging personal digital archiving practices.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Getting to Know FRED: Introducing Workflows for Born-Digital Content
    (2015-06-04) Prael, Alice; Wickner, Amy