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Secondment Update – ESR8 DiXiT Fellow at Cambridge University Library

NB: As in my previous post about my DiXiT Research Secondment, for ethical reasons I am not using the names of people I work with in Cambridge University Library in case I use excerpts of interviews with them in future articles or in my thesis, which will include an extended discussion of this secondment.

 I have now been working in and performing participant observation research at Cambridge University Library for nearly two months. I have been lucky to meet a lot of people who work in the Library and also several academics who work closely with the library staff. It’s amazing how much activity is going on here.

 Working in the library

I do not have an assigned desk that I use everyday within the Digital Content Unit (DCU) because when I am in the library, I am mainly interacting with the photographers in the digitization lab (the CUDL staff and the photographers work in one space, with a room divider that can be moved back and forth to separate or adjoin the lab with the work space of the CUDL staff), and they rotate to different work stations to access files on different servers and hard drives. Certain image files are saved on different hard drives, and that means that photographers need to actively switch up workstations depending on which projects are being developed, and this can shift from day to day. While it was a bit jarring at first, I quickly got used to it. Now I find it to be a positive development, because it means I have the opportunity to work in different areas of the studio and therefore I have more access to different people, which stimulates new discussions and introduces me to a more diverse set of practices and approaches to digitization within the unit. Every photographer here also seems to have their own, self-refined method of approaching their photography set ups, constantly – and it sometimes seems subconsciously – adjusting seating, lighting, positioning of cameras and lenses and tables in a series of micro-movements that are unique, and which respond not only to the equipment used to digitize the materials, but also the materials that are undergoing digitization.

 While the digitization performed by the photographers is clearly essential to the work of the Cambridge University Digital Library (CUDL), and they are considered to be core staff, at present their jobs are funded through soft money (grafts and contingent funds), and thus the long-term viability of their positions exists in a somewhat uncertain state. This situation denotes a wider issue in the library infrastructure regarding how central the management view the work of the CUDL in their research profile. The CUDL staff hope to submit a business plan in the coming year to library management, in order to demonstrate how they can maintain their research outputs while controlling costs. This would hopefully ensure long-term, stable investment for the DCU and the staff who work within it.

 ‘Editions,’ or not?

In my previous report, I noted that I sensed some negative connotations with the term ‘edition’ when I discussed this with people both in and outside of the library.

I spoke with a high-ranking staff member of the Library on Thursday last week about editions, and our conversation clarified why there is some significant hesitancy to engage in projects with this specific label. While it would be improper to go into detail, I think the general questions raised by this conversation are of importance to the DiXiT network. Currently some members of the university are working on an edition of culturally-sensitive modern materials in collaboration with editors from other British institutions and other European countries. There were some discussions in the press of one of the European partner countries regarding the appropriateness of pursuing this edition. While this is going on, the members of the University still have contractually-binding collaborative project deadlines and technical work to discuss and implement with the editors from the other country. The stress this situation has caused resulted in a disinclination among digital service staff across the university to participate in further digital editions, particularly those of modern materials which might be considered culturally sensitive.  Indeed, it is complicated to consider investing time and long-term infrastructure to a project (of any name) that might be contested during the workflow – it produces a level of uncertainty that cannot always be planned for sufficiently before such a project begins.

This situation brought to mind the previous discussions we have had among the DiXiT Fellows and Supervisors regarding how one might approach editing documents of high cultural value, but which also carry complex geopolitical provenance and hold importance for multiple cultures, especially where those cultures have a history of aggression toward one another (I discussed this briefly during my initial project presentation in Cambridge during DiXiT Camp 1). This was certainly the case of the Codex Gigas project at KB, of which the central materials to be digitized were culturally significant in Sweden, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. Some might argue that there is an upside (from a marketing point of view) in digital editions gaining press attention, but that is perhaps more understandable as an argument when the active project work has concluded, and what remains is a research output in some state of ‘finishedness.’ This allows for project workers to point to the critical design of the project and the availability of underlying data structures to demonstrate that care has been taken to contextualize the edition in a way that is sensitive to the complex cultural importance of the materials involved. However, when a project is still underway and has yet to be released, such press attention can cause anxiety that distracts from the implementation of the project and forces the editors to question their motives and plans. This is not altogether negative, in so much as it can stimulate further discussions among project teams about the intended outcome and aims of the project. But it can also result in overall abandonment of the project. 

Earlier this week I had extended discussions about this topic with one of the Metadata Specialists in the DCU, with whom I have been working particularly closely. While there is a significant understanding of the core staff here (including the Metadata Specialists and the head of the department) about the differences between documentary, facsimile, and critical editions, I was told that in general, the term ‘edition’ is avoided in the DCU because it is considered to be quite definitive. By making a ‘collection,’ the DCU staff consider that there is more room for what a given academic wants to do with the materials, whether they want enriched metadata and transcriptions on a few images at first, before the launch of a project, or later when the ‘hype’ of a project launch has died down, and they may have more time to devote to improvements or alterations of the content of a collection (for example, after AHRC funding runs out, but the project researchers still want to keep enriching the collection by adding more information to it when time allows). As it was explained to me, there is a sense that the point of a digital library is not to provide a particular slant on an item or collection, rather to provide access to both the physical item and structured data associated with that item or collection, and then to make that data open so that others can contextualize it as they wish. The rationale in the DCU is that such an approach makes the data more reusable in different contexts, say for the sake of a boutique edition, where the DCU staff would have a sort of basic schema that they use for metadata and XML and then others can come in and do more as they wish, or link to the images from other editions. The CUDL staff appear to take a document-centric approach, as in their view this proves easier in terms of legality, and it also facilitates reuse. However, discussions about the ‘approach’ of the DCU must be tempered with a note that this is an incredibly fluid process, completely dependent on the needs of the researchers, and further determined by the funding available to CUDL to pursue large-scale and document-centric projects. The essential point is that for the DCU, the primary goal is to make the data associated with projects as reusable and remixable as possible.

During these discussions with the Metadata Specialist, I recalled the meeting I attended with Dr. Newbould (described in my previous report), about the potential Tristram Shandy/Laurence Sterne project, and noted that the meeting seemed to be framed in terms of the work one might associate with a digital scholarly edition. The Metadata Specialist said that it does sometimes end up being a similar workflow, but that academics are also wary of the word ‘edition,’ because many are not specifically trained as scholarly editors, and thus they worry about the immense and diverse skill sets one must acquire – and the wide range of decisions about content, design, and dissemination one must consider – in order to work on an edition. This seems to fit directly into one of the research questions that DiXiT sets out to explore: namely, what specifically must an individual researcher learn how to do in order to be a digital scholarly editor? As was noted again and again by the supervisors in our DiXiT Camps, and particularly by Prof. Elena Pierazzo, the expectations of the broad set of skills (technical, organizational, managerial, marketing, etc) has expanded so significantly in the past ten years that many interested scholars are simply frozen by the anxiety of getting started. Or indeed, unable to make room in their already busy schedules to acquire these skills. A good alternative is to share the skills among a collaborative group of researchers, but determining how and where to delegate tasks while also documenting these choices effectively (so everyone is aware of what each team member is doing) and ending up with a viable finished product is another formidable set of skills in itself. It is excellent, therefore, that more interested scholars are turning to digital scholarship centers and digital content units within wider library infrastructures. However, it is necessary to facilitate working relationships among all parties to ensure that the library staff working within these infrastructures are treated as equal academic and technical partners in the creation of digital textual scholarship. 

Infrastructure and support in CUDL – a remedy for scholarly anxiety 

As I noted in my previous report, the general advice for academics who wish to pursue projects with CUDL is to build the technical infrastructure of their projects within the existing library architecture designed and maintained by the CUDL staff. The digital library has a long-term sustainability and data preservation plan with several backups along the way to ensure data security. It would be useful to consider what benefits, if any, there could be in editors/academics creating a dedicated site outside of the CUDL infrastructure. Individual sites that exist outside of library infrastructures are quite normal in Scholarly Editing circles, but is this method of production and dissemination sustainable for the long-term? (As the DiXiT network demonstrates, significantly more research needs to be done on this topic).  The web infrastructure of CUDL supports interesting work that has a lot of different ways to be customized either by the metadata team here or by the people who perform research on the topics covered in the CUDL collections. The academics are usually keen to have their infrastructure taken care of by the CUDL because the unit has demonstrated success and an established digitization and dissemination workflow. A majority of academics that I have talked to so far who have worked on projects with CUDL (most notably the staff of the Board of Longitude project) did not have any previous experience using TEI or any kind of web or XML based infrastructure. One of the largest challenges faced by the CUDL during that project was how to marry the research input provided by the academics with the technical structure of the project. Eventually, the Board of Longitude researchers were taught how to work with the TEI by the CUDL staff, but even then significant changes and corrections had to be made to the TEI records after they were handed in.

While the Board of Longitude project was not the first instance of the CUDL staff teaching academics how to work with the TEI, the CUDL staff now regularly hold workshops with the researchers attached to projects associated with the unit. During these workshops, they teach the researchers more about the TEI and explain what can be done with it. This is an iterative process, as the researchers then go away and create the TEI records, and the CUDL staff review and correct them, and send them back with explanations about the corrections. Where relevant to the subject matter of the given edition/project, this process is also performed in consultation with other librarians in different areas of the Library. For example, two librarians with doctorates in their respective areas of study, and who have considerable experience working on digital projects, provide specific TEI-focused support for Medieval Manuscripts and Arabic and Near-East manuscripts, respectively.

An increased local emphasis on digital humanities

Cambridge is known for research on both the history of and current advancements in the sciences, and as a result, there has naturally been a focus in the library on supporting and promoting digital projects related to scientific texts and objects. For example, in the CUDL, the two most prominent and long-standing projects are the Newton Project (joint affiliation with Oxford) and the Darwin Correspondence Project (discussed further below). Given Newton and Darwin’s connections to Cambridge and the wealth of local materials to use for these projects, this focus is understandable. However, staff within the library would also like to pursue more humanities-focused digital projects as well. To that end, there have been some recent discussions regarding the establishment of a digital humanities center within the library. Given the library’s (relatively) finite resources, establishing such a center would require the support of one or more of the older colleges (such as Trinity College or King’s College). Their support could legitimize the potential DH center, if the treasures of these colleges were digitized by staff of the CUDL. One upside of pursuing affiliation with these colleges in particular is that they operate independently from the University, meaning they can make their own decisions about how much or how little contact they want to have with the University Library. Similarly, there are ongoing discussions with Magdalene College to digitize Samuel Pepys’ diary. This would be a significant project for the library, given the recognition of the diary in the wider research community as an item of significant cultural and academic importance. Beginning with such a project would ensure local and national impact. However, questions have also been raised by stakeholders with less experience of digital project work, regarding whether or not digitizing the Diary would detract from the College’s reputation as the holder of the physical object. However, these concerns are actively being assuaged by members of the library, who have shown that traffic to the CUDL and interactions with the digital objects have not decreased interest with the physical manuscripts and objects in the library. Rather, they have served to publicize and remind the wider network of interested parties that access to these physical items is available.  There does seem to be potential for this project to get going, and I hope that it does, as the diary would be a wonderful object to make available to the academic community in this way.

I met with one of the Heads of CRASSH http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk , the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, which is a DH-focused network that spans across departments in the University. While it boasts a strong program of talks and workshops, at the moment the staff involved in CRASSH do not have significant financial and organizational support from the larger university infrastructure. This has been attributed to the primary focus in the University on promoting the sciences rather than the humanities. Among the affiliated researchers involved with CRASSH, there are some who have experience working on – and indeed want to focus solely on – digital editions. There are others who are proponents of digital editions, but think that CRASSH can have a broader focus on other types of digital work as well.  As the Head of CRASSH explained, another interesting focus could be Social Network Analysis, and they hope to develop this as a specific sub-theme of the network. Specifically, the Head of CRASSH hopes to design a data-mining project wherein the system through which academics in the University input their work for the REF (called Symplectic) is mined for different tags relation to digital work. This would help to measure how and to what extent researchers in Cambridge are defining their work as ‘digital.’  By demonstrating that significant digital work is being done by humanists, it would then be possible to use this evidence to show the University that additional structural and financial resources allocated to CRASSH could bring together the digital humanists in the university and promote their work in a more significant and structured way.

Library staff pursuing project collaborations with academics?

The push to pursue humanities-focused digital research in Cambridge has also been mentioned by the Head of the Genizah Project, a large research project to digitize and analyze an extraordinary volume of scraps of manuscripts brought over from Egypt in the 19th century.  The Head of that project is also in charge of the ‘Digital’ side of the university library, and therefore oversees the DCU (and CUDL). I mentioned to the Head of Genizah that in my previous conversations with DCU staff, they have noted that academics actively seek out their help when preparing grant applications. However, they also feel that when it comes to digital projects, library staff need to be included in talks with academics much earlier, and indeed, that there should be a push for the library to be less reactive to academics’ needs, and instead seek out project ideas from within the library’s collections and then approach academics after researching relevant grants that could be co-financed by the library and larger bodies like the AHRC. We discussed possible workflow protocols in which someone from either conservation, the manuscripts department, or the CUDL (or a combined team) would be tasked with seeking out specific research materials and putting together research proposals which could then be addressed to relevant academics identified within the larger university/college network. This would potentially ‘flip the script,’ so to speak, and place the library in the driver’s seat of pursuing research projects that are connected to their collections. Currently, any outward facing public engagement is done by one of the members of the DCU, and at present that person is solely responsible for meeting with other academics. However, this has been complicated by their (technically-focused) job description, which does not account for a time percentage devoted to this outreach. The Head of Genizah provided significant insight into the library structure, and noted that attempts so far to create a Digital Humanities department or centre within the library have been strongly supported by library staff, though library management have questioned the quantifiable benefits of such a center.About two years ago, an idea had been discussed for the library and an academic from the university to jointly apply for AHRC funding to create a center, the purpose of which would be the exploration of the performative nature of editions, what exactly constitutes an edition, how editions can be remediated, etc. While the grant application was unsuccessful, this idea still seems to have significant merit and I hope it will be taken up again in some form again in the future. Before I began my secondment, an external academic with a strong profile in digital scholarship was previously called in to make a report and give suggestions to the library management about how a digital humanities/digital scholarship center within the library could be put together. In the resultant (internal) report, that person shared the views of many members of staff at Cambridge University Library , which is that a DH center could legitimize and focus the digital scholarship activities within the library and strengthen the profile of Cambridge as a digitally-minded University.

 Future plans for the secondment – Fall 2015

While the first part of my research secondment in Cambridge will draw to a close in June, I will return for a second part of this secondment in the autumn of this year. During the second part of my research in Cambridge, I hope to attain a Visiting Studentship in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS). This would provide me with a library affiliation as well as a university affiliation. In Cambridge, having both of those affiliations allows me to gain access to more sites across the university, but it would also aid me in making further contacts within the specific department that interacts with the CUDL staff on a regular basis. The Department of History and Philosophy of Science funds the Darwin Correspondence Project a self-described digital edition. Another DiXiT Fellow, Aodhán Kelly (University of Antwerp) is also interested in exploring the DCP, so it will perhaps be possible for both of us to work on this together if Aodhán is able to come over for a few weeks from Antwerp. The staff responsible for the DCP are researchers affiliated with HPS faculty, though their work takes place mainly in the library. Staff are shared between the DCP and the CUDL two days a week, so their work is very much bound up together. Working closely with academics who conduct a digital edition maintained by the library but paid for by an academic faculty would be an interesting experience, and would directly address one of the topics I am exploring in my PhD, namely, how and where do memory institution staff and academic staff interact to create digital textual scholarship?

Prof. Simon Schaffer,  Head Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science Department, and whom I met and spoke with in connection with the Board of Longitude project, has kindly agreed to act as my supervisor and sponsor my Visiting Studentship application. In the Fall, we will have the opportunity to further discuss his experience as an academic working on a long-term (two year) project with the digital library. Prof. Schaffer is also eager to strengthen ties between the Department of HPS and the DiXiT project, especially if Aodhán also decides to work here with the DCP.

 Currently, I am developing the scope of my Visiting Studentship application with regard to the Darwin Correspondence Project and potentially also the Board of Longitude Project. It would perhaps be beneficial to explore Linked Open Data, as the staff associated with the DCP are exploring how to link the DCP with other 19th century science- related digital projects, as well as other collections in other university libraries or museums. Thankfully, I have maintained contact with one of the CIDOC (International Committee for Documentation) teachers from my Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School workshop “A Humanities Web of Data” which I attended in July of last year.  Hopefully this teacher would consider discussing with both myself and members of the CDP how best to integrate linked data principles into their project workflow using the CIDOC CRM (Conceptual Reference Model).

 As I conclude this report, I am preparing to travel to Cologne for our DiXiT Mid-Project Review Meeting, where I hope to share the experiences, findings, and questions outlined here with the DiXiT Fellows, Supervisors, and our external reviewer from the European Commission. I look forward to further work at Cambridge University Library, which I hope will provide more insight into how staff at memory institutions contribute to the development of digital textual scholarship.

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Merisa Martinez (April 22, 2015). Secondment Update – ESR8 DiXiT Fellow at Cambridge University Library. DiXiT. Retrieved April 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12b2y


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