ACTION ITEMS
Students and faculty working on class-related online exhibits or personal scholarship with an online exhibit component will be directed to the Digital Scholarship Team
- Faculty working on in-person or online-only exhibits that use library material and are initiated or sponsored by the library will be allowed to use Spotlight (on the Cornell.edu page)
- Criteria/Liaisons to be determined at next meeting
- Karl to join this group
Agenda
- Clarify what exhibits end up in Spotlight and what goes to the Digital Scholarship team.
- How do we ensure that CUL staff are aware of those distinctions?
- Digital Scholarship is a clear liaison. If in Spotlight, who is the liaison?
Meeting Notes:
The main question discussed at this meeting was what content should go into Spotlight and who will be responsible for training and making sure content adheres to Cornell accessibility and copyright guidelines.
Marcie summarized the question brought up in the last meeting and discussed elsewhere with Eliza. Eliza explained to the group that the Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) is already working with students and faculty in creating online exhibits. Those sites are hosted on a non-Cornell.edu server. This allows for the possibility of keeping the audience to Cornell only. Additionally, if the student or faculty member wants to keep their content after a certain amount of time, they can use the same host at a low fee. Eliza's group has the explicit mission of this kind of work with students and faculty so it makes sense for non-library related exhibits or class related projects to be directed to that group moving forward.
Questions from Eveline around expectations of permanence. Mann differentiates between "polished" and "unpolished" even in their physical exhibits. Most of the Spotlight exhibits have been based around work done by Prof. Denise Green. First, in her own exhibits and then last semester as student created exhibits for a class. Denise is well-versed in the system and once given guidelines she and her students have done much of the work themselves. However, the other student-led exhibit from this semester not related to Denise Green has involved more help from Karl. We all agreed that it was likely new users would need help in setting up the site and adhering to accessibility and copyright guidelines. Mann library has an exhibits team that has handled it in the past and can continue this for CALS and CHE. What about other units?
Craig mentioned that at Olin/Uris, library staff and not the faculty member themselves were the ones actually doing the work of creating the Spotlight exhibit. One such exhibit had stemmed from student work but the library had a role in curation of the digital site. In that case, Rob from RLS acted as liaison, with Craig creating the exhibit. So there was no need for deep training in that case. Question about capacity if more faculty were interested in using this.
There was a question from Emily about whether there was a direct link to physical exhibits as a criteria for Spotlight? The answer was usually but not always. So that can be one element but cannot be the only criteria.
Question from Marcie about who would be responsible for training in other units outside of Mann and Olin/Uris? Would it be members of this group? Would people be permanently part of this group or a training group? Cycle off?
Evaline suggested that Spotlight needs permanent representation from each unit and the length of that obligation is up to the unit. Each unit would then be responsible for finding someone who could train/work with the faculty member to complete the online exhibit.
Emily brought up the point that even now, it is hard to navigate through the content on the library exhibit website, additional sites for student exhibits might make that navigation harder. (Note from Marcie: Navigation issues should be followed up on with CUL-IT in another meeting, there might be additions we can make)
Eliza made the point that this is the library's exhibit's page, therefore the library needs to determine what they want that content to be. There should be some level of curation since it represents the library. Not all faculty should be allowed a Spotlight site and if there is a faculty member who is interested in creating an online exhibit not sponsored by the library they could be sent to the DSG.
In the end, we all agreed that use as class assignment was out of scope for Spolight but that those faculty members could be pointed to DSG. Faculty would be allowed to continue to use Spotlight. Initial criteria are: link to physical exhibit using library materials or online exhibit initiated/sponsored by the library.
- Additional ideas for criteria will be raised at the next meeting.
- Questions about who is responsible for copy editing, accessibility and copyright also need to be decided.
- Once there is a working set of criteria - this group will reach out to different committees, Listserves, and other groups in CUL to make sure all library staff are aware of the differences and who to point students and faculty to so we can avoid confusion in the future.