Last March I was lucky enought to go to, and give a talk at, the 2008 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World in sunny Miami Beach, Florida. Speakers from the conference were asked to write up their talks for a special edition of First Monday, which is now out. If you want to get a sense of how Web 2.0 is starting to affect libraries, museums, and scholars, it’s worth reading. My contribution, “Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem: Building Connections in the Zotero Project,” focuses on the importance of the unglamorous but critical work of connecting digital tools and repositories together via APIs, standards, and openness.

On this week’s podcast, we were lucky to have a live link to Liam Wyatt in Alexandria, Egypt. Liam is a co-host of Wikipedia Weekly and was attending Wikimania 2008. Tom, Mills, and I covered Wikipedia in the very first episode of Digital Campus, and if anything it has become an even hotter topic on campuses since then. Liam gives us a valuable insider’s view of some of the issues Wikipedia and its community are facing, including questions over authority and internationalization. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Just a reminder to those who are interested that there’s only a week left to get your application in for the potential National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Center for History and New Media. This is a terrific program that NEH has set up, and a real opportunity for fellows to learn from our experience and vice versa.

After nearly six months of extensive testing and tweaking, and with countless bug fixes done in progression with the movements of the Firefox 3 team, I’m pleased to report that the first version of Zotero that synchronizes with the much-awaited Zotero Server has been released for trial by the general public. Yes, you can now access your Zotero collection from anywhere and synchronize it across multiple machines (of any operating system). And of course the copy of your collection on our server means that you now have a free automatic backup of your Zotero library data.

[Long-time readers of this blog and my writing elsewhere know that this major update to Zotero was due some time ago; all I can say in my defense is that: 1) Firefox 3 was also supposed to be released last fall but finally was released at the end of June (and we needed Firefox 3 for the server versions of Zotero); 2) we've continued in the meantime to add dozens of new features and hundreds of new supported sites suggested in our forums to the "classic" version of Zotero; 3) synchronization of digital collections across multiple machines and our server is an outrageously difficult task (ask your local computer science guru); 4) we've also used the additional time to add functionality to Zotero 1.5 and subsequent versions that we believe will keep it far ahead of any commercial alternatives, and that will begin to enable Zotero's communication with the Internet Archive. OK, enough of the mea culpas. Let's get back to the exciting news.]

Although Zotero 1.5 maintains its easy-to-use iTunes-like interface, behind the scenes it includes a complex, robust communications and synchronization layer that provides the foundation for all subsequent releases of the software and our soon-to-come Zotero website and services, including public and private groups, collection sharing, and recommendations. This new layer also means that Zotero can begin to synchronize and link to other repositories, services, and applications on the Web. Although we have already gotten a lot of interest from outside software developers in creating extensions to Zotero, the new 1.5 will be another leap forward in allowing these developers to combine Zotero with whatever scholarly software or collections they are working on.

Other goodies we’ve thrown in (beyond this list of additions ported from 1.0) simply because we listen to our users and like to make them happy:

• Even though Zotero has beaten Endnote in head-to-head competition, one point of comparison that some people thought Zotero was inferior on was its lack of the thousands of citation styles available on that commercial program. We still believe that the open source style system we have adopted, CSL (created by Bruce D’Arcus), is far more flexible and robust than the citation style systems of Endnote and other tools, and when you really look at the supposed “thousands of Endnote styles” they are really just many of copies of a limited number of styles with different journal names stuck on. Nevertheless we decided to make this point of comparison moot. Zotero users can now use Endnote styles as well as CSL styles, although we still plan to aggressively build out from the dozens of CSLs currently available and strongly encourage the creation and use of CSLs.
• We have added preliminary support for ZeroConf. Let me translate the tech-speak: underneath the hood, Zotero now has the ability to broadcast collections over a local network, without going through the Zotero server. This means that a group of students in a classroom or academics at a conference can enable sharing and see and grab references or links from other users, much the same way that you can share your iTunes music library with others nearby. We plan to expand support for this feature in subsequent releases. (For now, it’s a bit hidden for testing.)

As always, when I use “we” in posts about Zotero, I mean our incredible team: the Center for History and New Media’s Director of Research Projects Sean Takats (who has succeeded me in that role), Lead Developer Dan Stillman, Connie Sehat (former CHNM senior staffer who has just been hired as Emory’s Director of Digital Scholarship), Zotero community liaison Trevor Owens, and the core developer team of Simon Kornblith, Jon Lesser, Michael Berkowitz, and Raymond Yee.

Why not take Zotero 1.5 for a spin (we include the normal caveats about beta software on our site, but in my experience it’s rather stable), extend it with plugins, or develop your own software for the Zotero platform?

Tom, Mills, and I take up the much-debated issue of whether and how digital work should count toward promotion and tenure on this episode of the podcast. We also examine the significance of university presses putting their books on Amazon’s Kindle device, and the release of better copyright records. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Happy 4th of July!

New York University’s Archives and Public History Program (History
Department) is now considering applications for a one-year
grant-funded Digital Curriculum Specialist.  The Program seeks a
scholar experienced with the technical and intellectual issues in
digital humanities to help the Program incorporate digital
technologies throughout its curriculum and internship programs.  The
successful candidate will work with existing faculty to reconfigure
existing courses, develop a digital history track within the program,
provide technical services and conduct workshops for student and
staff,  create a platform for mounting student digital projects, and
partner with archival and public history institutions in order to
establish digital humanities internships for students.   He or she
will work closely with NYU’s Information Technology Services and
Digital Library staff.

Qualifications: The successful candidate will have an advanced degree
in either humanities or computer or information science, with a solid
grounding in the issues and technologies relevant for humanities
scholarship.  Knowledge and experience with XML, XSLT, TEI, PHP
programming, and Web 2.0 social networking technologies.  Familiarity
with archival metadata and digitization standards.

For three decades, NYU has prepared students for successful careers
as archivists, manuscript curators, documentary editors, oral
historians, cultural resource managers, historical interpreters and
new media specialists.  The program emphasizes a solid grounding in
historical scholarship, intense engagement with new media
technologies, and close involvement with New York’s extraordinary
archival and public history institutions. For more information on the
program, see
http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/history.gradprog.archivespublichistory.html

Salary and Benefits: Competitive depending on qualifications. Review
of applications will begin on July 31, 2008 and will continue until
the position is filled.

Please submit cover letter, curriculum vitae, and names of three references to:
Dr. Peter J. Wosh
Director, Archives/Public History Program
Department of History, New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
(212) 998-8666
(212) 995-4017 (fax)
pw1@nyu.edu

If you haven’t already been reading Mills Kelly’s outstanding series “Making Digital Scholarship Count,” (part 1, part 2, part 3) you should put it on your must-read list. Mills finished the series today with a perfectly sensible conclusion about how academia might assess digital work for promotion and tenure. I completely agree.

Oh, and yes, even though Mills published this work on his blog rather than in a journal, it is scholarship. And it should count.

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM, http://chnm.gmu.edu) at George Mason University invites expressions of interest to join the Center in applying to the National Endowment for the Humanities for one of NEH’s Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers.

NEH Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers (FDHC) support collaboration between digital centers and individual scholars. An award provides funding for both a stipend for the fellow while in residence at the center and a portion of the center’s costs for hosting a fellow. Awards are for periods of six to twelve months. The intellectual cooperation between the visiting scholar and the center may take many different forms and may involve humanities scholars of any level of digital expertise. Fellows may work exclusively on their own projects in consultation with center staff, collaborate on projects with other scholars affiliated with the center, function as “apprentices” on existing digital center projects, or any combination of these. The results of the collaboration may range from “proof of concept” to finished product.

The aims of the program are to 1) support innovative collaboration on outstanding digital research projects; 2) expand digital literacy and expertise; 3) promote the work of digital humanities centers; and 4) encourage broad and open access to the humanities. (For the full guidelines, see http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/fdhc.html)

CHNM plans to select a scholar for its application by July 31, 2008. Interested scholars should send a CV and a 2-3 pp. description of 1) their general interest in the fellowship and the Center; 2) what specifically they would like to work on during the term of the fellowship; 3) any experience they might have that is applicable to this work; and 4) how this work dovetails with any current Center projects (e.g. the National History Education Clearinghouse, Zotero, Omeka, the Bracero History Archive, etc.) Send these two documents to chnm@gmu.edu with the subject line “NEH Fellowship” as soon as possible. Applications will be reviewed as they come in, through July 31. The selected scholar will be notified soon thereafter, and CHNM will work with that scholar to submit a grant application to NEH by September 15, 2008.

On this episode of the Digital Campus podcast, Tom, Mills, and I think in greater depth about whether the stodgy academic conferences we often go to could be (at least partially) recast into more informal affairs along the lines of THATCamp, a “barcamp” or “unconference.” We also look at the upcoming iPhone 3G (soon to be the cell phone on campus at its lower price) and what mobile apps might mean for teaching and learning. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Tom has the news that Omeka reached over 1000 downloads in only 10 weeks—a remarkable number for a collections management and web exhibit system primarily adopted by institutions rather than individuals.

Creating a successful tool for universities, libraries, and museums is incredibly difficult; kudos to the entire Omeka team. They’ve done a lot of things right. They understand that design matters. Omeka looks great to the curators who administer it as well as to the users who visit an Omeka-powered site. Little details matter. Omeka’s metadata entry page, for instance, automatically morphs (using AJAX) so that curators aren’t confronted by fields that aren’t applicable to the object at hand. Documentation matters. The Omeka team is doing a weekly video/screencast to explain its features and operation. Creating a community around the tool matters. Omeka already has an active user forum and developers’ list, and the team meets regularly with institutional stakeholders.

Coming in 2009: a hosted version of Omeka, to make it even easier for those who want to use the software but who might not have the technical skill or staff to install and maintain the open source package.