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Preliminary Report – ESR8 Research Secondment at Cambridge University Library

NB: For ethical reasons I have not included the names of the people I have been working with at Cambridge University Library, in the event that extracts of interviews with these people are included in an article or my thesis. I have included one name of an external researcher whom I met during the early part of my research secondment in Cambridge, but who does not work in the library.

This past March I began my DiXiT research secondment at Cambridge University Library. When I first arrived, I immediately started to work with the Digital Content Unit  (DCU), the overall name given to the unit within which both the Cambridge University Digital Library (CUDL) and the Digitization Lab are organized.  There are four photographers, two metadata specialists, one administrative assistant, and a head of department, who works across different units. Everyone has been very accommodating and genuinely happy for me to be here. The scholarly editors and academics who work with this unit also work within the library but- as with the National Library in Stockholm- there has been a significant power shuffle that occurred very recently (January). As such, people have been physically moved about to different areas of the library, though meetings between the staff members across different areas and departments in the library related to digital projects occur on a daily basis. Currently the DCU is working most closely with three projects:

1) the Darwin Correspondence Project, (https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/)  which has one full-time staff member (a library person with technical skills) working in the DCU, and two members of staff (academics) working in another area of the library, who also have affiliations with another college and academic department in the University;

2) The Genizah project( http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah) , a long term project that has significant funding from a few different sources; and

3) the Board of Longitude project (the digitization of the materials has concluded, but there are still scheduled events connected with this project and its digital outputs, and I have been invited to attend two of them). http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/longitude

Almost immediately after I began the secondment, I was invited to attend a meeting wherein members of the DCU spoke with an external member of the English faculty, Dr. Mary Newbould, who is interested in creating a digital collection of Tristram Shandy materials and anything related to the author of the novel, Laurence Sterne. Here I have provided a link to a Radio4 “In Our Time” program in which Dr. Newbould  described the novel and Laurence Sterne. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0418phf

Dr. Newbould is currently putting together an AHRC bid for a project to digitize the materials. Thus, the meeting focused on how to successfully put together the bid, as well as the cost of the staff time and digitization of the materials. Present at this meeting were myself, a Metadata Specialist in the DCU, a Senior Photographer, and Dr. Newbould. While initially I planned to observe this meeting as a silent participant in order to gain some insight about how the DCU members worked collaboratively with academic staff, this did not turn out to be the case.  As I am a member of the DiXiT ITN and thus am familiar with the intricacies of large-scale grant agreements, several questions were directed to me about the DiXiT grant- what it included, how it was organized, and how specific deliverables were intended to be achieved across such a large group of institutions. The Metadata Specialist also gave Dr. Newbould significant advice about how to shape the project – i.e., not just digitizing the collection but thinking critically about how to engage users beyond the materials in an interactive way that is built around Web 2.0 capabilities. The Metadata Specialist noted that according to Google Analytics, the videos and the ‘behind the scenes’ parts of the Board of Longitude project, in which people got to see what actually happens in the digitization process (i.e., the documentation of the research decisions made within the project), were the most viewed items of all the materials in the collection. The Metadata Specialist also suggested to Dr. Newbould that she should consider using the CUDL website as opposed to creating a boutique site for the intended Tristram Shandy digital collection, because the AHRC have been less favorable toward such website bids in recent rounds of funding. Similarly, they noted that the CUDL website is sustainable, its Graphical User Interface (GUI) is easy to navigate, well-organized, and the CUDL has built a significant international profile. So organizing the Shandy collection within it it may be mutually beneficial for her, the AHRC, and the other projects on the CUDL site which could benefit from click-through visits. Dr. Newbould wrote copious notes during the meeting and actively considered the suggestions for how to structure not only the bid proposal, but also the project in general. Considering the focus of my research project, this was an interesting experience, in that it displayed a significant intervention from a library person – particularly a person whose ‘official’ title deals exclusively with metadata- to an academic, and there was a genuine air of friendliness and respect for mutual areas of expertise between both parties.

Near the end of the meeting, we discussed the REF- the UK Research Excellence Framework, which quantifies research outputs at a very granular level, and determines the amount of funding British institutions receive based on the type and amount of research outputs achieved within each department at those institutions. The question was raised whether the Shandy/Sterne project would ‘count’ toward a REF submission, and this highlighted an ongoing issue in the DiXiT ITN, which is that the ‘quantification’ of a digital project is quite difficult; both the reviewers and some members within faculties do not have robust or even adequate policies that can be used to ‘quantify’ the contents or the impact of digital projects (i.e., is the creation of a digital collection disseminated through a digital library interface the same amount of ‘work’ as a book chapter or an article? Is it equivalent to a monograph?) Indeed, these questions continue to be of interest not just to the DiXiT fellows, but in a real sense, they direct the work of libraries and the career paths of academic in equal measure. It is easy to say from our point of view that the work of a digital project is significantly more than any traditional publication, in that it requires continual maintenance and upkeep, and indeed perhaps migration of data – but do faculty administrators consider this ‘real’ academic work? Of course, it is necessary to have significant skills in research data management in order to make decisions about and perform such tasks. However, these types of skills, often relegated to ‘library’ types of decisions, do not necessarily gain the respect in the academic community that they deserve. 

One important piece of information that came from this meeting was the way that the Metadata Specialist from the DCU talked about the digitization process with Dr. Newbould. They said that she and her team of academics (who will be working on the project from all over the world) could be as much or as little involved with the digitization process as they wished. They also left it up to her to decide WHEN in the project the digitization should occur. I.e., should it occur FIRST, and then the academics get the images and create their transcriptions, metadata and other information that they would like to have linked to the images as they appear online, or would they like to consult the physical items in situ at the library, and then decide what should or should not be digitized?  This adds a layer of complexity to the workflow of digitization, and shows considerable flexibility and willingness to adjust to the working patterns of academic researchers on the part of the Cambridge library staff. I will have to do some more digging and see if there are other, similar structures in different programs, but after hearing this it seems almost natural that such a choice should exist.

I also had a recent meeting with the head of department, who is very supportive of my research secondment and the topics being explored in the DiXiT project as a whole. They encouraged me to give a talk about my PhD research project to members of the library, and solicit ideas about how library staff can be more involved in digital humanities research. They are a part of the DH network here at the University and have put me in touch with the head of that network, whom I will be meeting with after the Easter holidays. I also met with a librarian with a subject speciality in Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts who is, basically, a scholarly editor. They work closely with the CUDL on multiple projects and feel that the CUDL needs to make more of a push to advertise and actively promote the work that they do on DSEs, but one issue seems to be a lack of common, agreed definitions within the department about what, exactly, Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarly Editions really are. There is literature which can be consulted, of course, but general literature is not the same as specific policies, which must be built on the local contingencies and infrastructures available to staff working in libraries. Their work is often directed by policy documents, and without them, there is little support for more abstract or experimental activities. 

As part of my early forays into this secondment, I have also spent time learning about the digitization protocols within the unit, from start to finish. I got to see that the photographers in the Digitization Lab are using Golden Thread, a system for color calibration and measuring the quality of images in the digital archiving industry, as well as Delta E, as a standard to measure and quantify the difference between colors that appear on a screen. (The higher the Delta E value, the further away the displayed color is from the input values of the physical item or other digital item that it is being measured against).  There are some slight differences to the protocols that the DCU engage with in regard to digitization, in variance with the National Library of Sweden, which I have also recently visited (and as the DiXiT Fellows remember, members of KB were involved in our DiXiT Camp 3 in Borås). The most prominent difference between KB and the DCU is that the DCU have significantly more (and better) variety of digital photography, lighting and physical item support equipment than KB has access to, though the three photographers I have interviewed so far think that the unit should be doing more to 1) focus on licensing and monetizing the department 2) raise the scale of fees for imaging because a significant amount of work is required for each image. They noted that the pricing has not been updated in two years, although their output has increased ten fold. While the three photographers have been informally trained in conservation, they would like to learn more about the items they are handling in order to directly answer specific questions from the academics and students who submit imaging requests through the DCU’s order form via email. At the moment, all such questions have to be diverted to an administrative assistant, who then asks the conservator, who then relays it back to the administrative assistant, and then to the photographers to relay to the academics/students. This suggests that the photographers hope to also take on a more collaborative, public-facing role in their work. Occasionally scholars do stop into the digitization lab, and then it is really fascinating to watch them discuss the materials in active conversation with the photographers. This is where the real crux of collaboration is happening.

My next challenge in this research secondment is to speak with members of staff from the conservation department. This will help me to better understand the collaboration and interplay between digitization and conservation, upon which a lot of the success of the digitization workflow seems to rest. 

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Merisa Martinez (April 1, 2015). Preliminary Report – ESR8 Research Secondment at Cambridge University Library. DiXiT. Retrieved April 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12azk


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