Enhance Research & Scholarship

Open Scholars Project (OSP) is an informal forum for FSU researchers and scholars to learn about and share their experiences with open publishing, open source code and open data across subject areas. The OSP aims to create a group that is action-oriented and supportive in bringing faculty and early career researchers, including postdocs and graduate students together. University of Wisconsin at Madison, North Carolina State University and Utrecht University have created similar communities of practice for open access.

This initiative would provide ten Wifi hotspots from Mobile Citizen to make available for checkout to students through the ASD Tech Desk for a period of three days. During the pilot timeframe, we will evaluate the need for hotspots based upon demand (and other data), and also conduct a benchmarking analysis of supply/demand and policies/procedures with comparable institutions. Based on the results of this pilot project, the sponsors will recommend if it is feasible to add this as a permanent library service and reach out to partners across the institution to expand the program.

The Human Library Project consists of individuals of various backgrounds that make themselves readily available to scholars on campus, as a “book” to be checked out and interviewed as a means of exploring diversity through open minded conversation. The goal of the Human Library Project is to provide a safe space for our scholars to gain perspective and understanding of individuals with unique experiences and stories. Many university libraries across the world are hosts for the Human Library, see FAU’s example.

This initiative is for the expansion of support for immersive scholarship on campus–this includes research and teaching that utilizes 3D data through the forms of 3D printing, virtual reality, augmented reality, and interactive 3D publications. Funding has been allocated to allow hiring a graduate assistant to help with development of workshops and 3D/VR models.

For several years, the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship (DRS) has collaborated with faculty and students on finding, evaluating, and implementing digital tools and technologies into their research to create innovative scholarly outputs. One version of this support includes consultation and partnership on immersive scholarship such as 3D printing and virtual reality. This new initiative provides additional resources to strengthen research support for the use and application of three-dimensional data, and the technologies that generate and utilize it, throughout all stages of the research cycle. This initiative adds a graduate research assistant to supplement the current faculty librarian and the technology available for this work: a pair of FDM 3D printers, a high-resolution SLA 3D printer, a high-powered desktop workstation, and a high-powered laptop/3D scanner combination. These services are housed in the R&D Commons, a space in the basement of Strozier Library which provides a space for workshops and consultations.

An overarching outcome for this project will be an increase in the facility with which FSU researchers can utilize 3D data in their research. This initiative will contribute to this by assisting research partners in developing 3D objects and scholarly outputs that utilize them. It will also foster a collaborative environment on campus, and build an interdisciplinary community of practice by developing and hosting workshops, tutorials, and events such as symposia to share skills and knowledge across campus.

As research data instruction has become a priority for the library there is a need for a technical infrastructure to support these efforts. This proposal is to develop a pilot project to test the feasibility of a virtual desktop infrastructure based on our existing virtual scientific desktops for use in data instruction classes taught by our library faculty. This will include both the virtual hardware, software and storage that is needed for students to access and manipulate research data. By using a virtual environment this will enable our faculty to use this in any of our classrooms.

The digital project incubator will provide targeted support to a limited number of faculty and student projects in digital humanities and digital scholarship. This incubator program will allow the Digital Humanities Librarian and Digital Scholarship Librarian to provide targeted support to 5-10 members of the university community each semester (10-20 over the course of an academic year). This support will help these community members kickstart their digital projects. Project support funds will be provided to these incubator participants so they can purchase goods and services to enhance their projects or present their nascent projects at conferences to enhance the reputation of the university in digital research. This program will synergize with the CreateFSU strategic initiative, as each incubator participant will be given a CreateFSU account to build up the web-presence of their digital projects.

This initiative will establish a lasting professional development group that spends dedicated time to creating, providing, and facilitating professional development opportunities library-wide. Through programming and sub-committee work this group hopes to enhance professional development across the Libraries. The group will send out a yearly survey to assess professional development interests and needs throughout the library and plan out action-oriented steps to fill those gaps.

The development and implementation of GIS and spatial data services within the library are designed to enhance data information literacy and critical thinking skills throughout the FSU community but with a focus on STEM scholars. This will be done through educational and research services to students and faculty that enhance their data information literacy competencies. These services compliment existing GIS services in other campus units and departments by providing open source alternatives as well as integrating open science concepts into spatial data research and teaching.

Create a preservation system for born digital and digitized materials to meet the needs of the FSU Libraries Digital Preservation Framework in AWS using Archivematica (AM), an open source software. Enable AM to work with DigiNole to allow for simplification of ingest processes for both access and preservation. Enable Ringling Museum to access AM as a test case for further expansion of service to other organizations.

This initiative seeks to redress inequities and injustice in the descriptive language and narrative framing of archives, special collections, and the institutional repository. In this phase of work, we will apply conscious editing principles to metadata in ArchivesSpace and DigiNole. Conscious editing is an active, critical awareness of bias, privilege, and power and an ethos of deliberate care used in the assessment, creation, and refinement of descriptive texts. One outcome of conscious editing is the increased accessibility of our collections in unserved and underserved communities seeking meaningful connections with their histories. Collection and object descriptions will undergo a metadata gap analysis to identify harmful and outdated terms and prioritized for remediation. The analysis will require a combination of computational queries and manual analysis. After the initial analysis, a small collection will be identified for a pilot remediation project and a prioritization document will be produced along with documentation for workflows and practices to remediate legacy collections and to incorporate conscious descriptive practice in work going forward.

This initiative supports ethical and inclusive descriptive practices at Florida State University Libraries by encouraging the ongoing, reflective examination of legacy descriptions, by engaging colleagues in a continuous dialog about that examination, and by connecting practice with scholarship, theory, and contemporary social justice activism.