[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- It might be a good idea for you to disappear from Casablanca for a while. There's a free French Garrison over at Brazzaville. I could be induced to arrange a passage. - My letter of transit? I could use a trip. It doesn't make any difference about our bet, you still owe me 10,000 francs. - And that 10,000 francs should pay our expenses. - Our expenses? - Mm-hmm. - Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. [END PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Casablanca. Lost in the Stacks, The Research Library Rock and Roll Radio Show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Marlee Givens and Fred Rascoe. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it.
And our show today is called How to be a Liaison. It's another in our occasional How To Series. We are speaking to a pair of liaisons from a professional library organization to other non-library professional organizations. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, Fred, I'm sorry. I hear that out loud and I just can't parse it. It's kind of a tongue-twister.
I even wrote the line and I don't quite get it.
How about this? Our guests are both liaisons.
Yep.
They're both librarians.
Yep.
And both members of the ACRL's Digital Scholarship Section.
OK.
Their liaison responsibilities, in part, include taking the ACRL's ideas to other non-library organizations and bringing back new ideas to the ACRL.
Got it.
Yeah. They're sort of like library ambassadors and translators for other disciplines.
Oh. Hey, speaking of translations, do you all want to hear some acronym craziness?
How about no?
Sorry. During the course of this interview, I realized that could tell the story like this. ACRL's DSS sent liaisons to HASTAC and to ACH, which is a constituent organization of ADHO, and one of those liaisons is a member of DHCNC.
Oh, we love our acronyms-- CHARLIE BENNETT: There are so many! So let me see if I got all those.
Go for it.
All right, the Association of College and Research Libraries, Digital Scholarship Section sent liaisons to the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory-- CHARLIE BENNETT: That's a rough one. And the Association for Computers and the Humanities.
Mm-hmm.
Which is a constituent organization of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. And one of those liaisons is a member of the Digital Humanities Collaborative of North Carolina.
I believe you nailed it. But also, I don't know well enough to know.
Our songs today are about understanding, connecting, and building relationships in spite of things like language barriers, and for all those qualities, establishing clear communication with your community of users is key for a liaison librarian. So let's start with a song about setting the parameters for clear and honest communication and maybe avoiding acronyms. This is "Spell it Out" by Papernut Cambridge right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[PAPERNUT CAMBRIDGE, "SPELL IT OUT"]
That was "Spell it Out" by Papernut Cambridge. I don't know if that qualifies quite as a banger, Fred, but I've never heard that before and it was great.
And they got a great band name.
It's a really good band name. This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called How to be a Liaison. Our guests are the two most recent liaisons from the ACRL's Digital Scholarship Section, Lauren Haberstock, the Librarian for Emerging Technologies and Digital Projects and Director of the Genesis Lab Makerspace and Academic Center for Excellence at Pepperdine University in California; and John Knox, Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
Lauren is the liaison to HASTAC-- H-A-S-T-A-C, which stands for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. Collaboratory or co-laboratory?
I think it's collaboratory-- like a collaborative laboratory? But also, you say it how you like.
All right. And John is liaison to ACH, the Association for Computers and the Humanities-- I guess it's not ach.
Oh, it should be ach. Our first question was, why did you respond to the call for DSS liaisons?
Because of the call for liaisons to very specific organizations, I had-- the organization that I'm liaising with is called HASTAC. And yes, it took me a little while to figure out how to say it because it's like-- it's just an acronym. That's H-A-S-T-A-C, and I was like, I don't know how people say it, but they clarify pretty early on that it is pronounced HASTAC.
But it's the Humanities, Art, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, and specifically, I was looking at their conference for last year because it was their first in-person conference back pretty much since COVID time-- so since 2019, and they were having a conversation about critical making. And so since I oversee a makerspace, I'm acquainted with a lot of the design literature, I was really interested in this topic.
And so then when they announced the topic, it aligned right when the call for liaisons went out, and I thought, OK, this is-- the stars are aligning a little too well, so let's see what happens. CHARLIE BENNETT: And so you hadn't been to one of their conferences before? It was just something you were interested in general?
LAUREN HABERSTOCK: It was something I was interested in because, yeah, their last conference was before I was a librarian, so I don't think I would have heard about it otherwise. CHARLIE BENNETT: John, how about you?
Maybe some similarities to Lauren's experience. I had actually served as a liaison to ACH as a member or representative from the North Carolina Digital Humanities Collaborative. And that's a regional DH group here in North Carolina.
So I was familiar with ACH, familiar with the role of liaison in those terms, but then subsequently having become a member of ACRL DSS, saw the call go out for a liaison to ACH from DSS, and thought, what a great opportunity because I enjoy being a part of ACH and working with the folks there, and obviously was looking for ways and opportunities to get involved in DSS as well. It was just fortuitous-- yeah, things coming together in terms of previous experience and interests and so on.
What is compelling about ACH for you?
Well, lots of things. I mean, there are lots of great people, many of whom are also members of DSS. So there are a lot of librarians and library work represented in ACH. But ACRL is the North American body of ADHO, the Alliance of DH organizations. So the preeminent digital humanities organization for folks in North America. So just an opportunity to be involved in the DH community in a broader sense outside of libraries or a group like ACRL.
So serving as liaison gives you an opportunity to build connections between the two groups.
What did you do as liaisons? And what do you think a liaison ought to do? LAUREN HABERSTOCK: I would say already I was planning to submit a proposal to the HASTAC 2023 Conference, but especially after-- once I found out that I was the liaison to HASTAC, I thought, OK, I really need to make sure I have a proposal there so that I can, in some ways, be embedded in the programming and that makes it more likely that I will get funding from my institution to show up.
So I presented a-- I presented a poster, which was I always enjoy poster sessions because it allows you some time to float, to mingle, you start chatting with the person whose poster is right next to you. And that led to a lot of fun discussions with people who were teaching, a lot of people who are practitioners, I would say. The conference attendance, I really had no idea what to expect because this is such a broad organization. And I think they do that on purpose.
They're like, we're a collaborative, and it's sort of-- if what you do touches us in any way, please join us. So it's librarians, it's artists, it's practitioners, it's designers, it's anyone in between. Knowing this wasn't specifically a library conference where everyone knows what you do, I was trying to be mindful about how do I share what we do in library land, especially coming from an academic library?
I think for me, this probably ties in with what does it mean to be a liaison, but this idea of bridge-building and information sharing and building common language that-- like you mentioned, we have so many acronyms in library land, and every other discipline does as well. And so how can we build a common knowledge and a common language that we can all use and, therefore, understand each other?
So I would say as a liaison, that's kind of what I was trying to do, especially since it was my very first time at HASTAC and I was trying to learn about the organization. And I feel like you-- to have a reciprocal conversation, you have to listen and learn first, so that's what I was trying to do. Did you tell anybody, hey, I want to talk more deeply because I'm liaison to an ACRL section?
Did you highlight your role or did you just go through the conference like you would have anyway and tried to pay attention?
I was just going through the conference, and I think it wasn't until afterwards it's like, oh yeah, maybe I should have been like, oh, Hi, I'm-- by the way, I'm the DSS liaison and I had my secret liaison hat because apparently forgot to make it known.
It's funny. It's like it's not a position I think that we immediately think of-- like, I wonder where all the liaisons are. It's just-- we know the systems in place, but it's not something that-- no one's wearing a fedora with a card that says "Liaison" in the brim as they move around the conference. John, you had the opposite experience of having been a liaison before and coming back to it. So what do you think is the liaison's role? How did you approach this ACH visit?
Yeah. Thanks, Charlie. And I'll just clarify. So ACH is the Association for Computers and the Humanities. And I just want to shout out the North Carolina group. It's DHCNC, which is the Digital Humanities Collaborative of North Carolina. So yes, I had previously served as the liaison for DHCNC to ACH. And that role as a liaison was sort of initiated by the folks at ACH.
They were actively, several years ago, making a push to incorporate liaisons from regional groups or other kinds of professional organizations. And so my role as the DHCNC representative was part of that push, if you will.
When the call went out from DSS, the Digital Scholarship Section, seeking an ACH representative, from my point of view, really exciting opportunity that comes along with this role is I get to be a part of their extended executive board, folks like myself who are in liaison roles, but also folks who were elected to various officer roles and so on the ACH side get together for a meeting.
And so I'm able to be involved in how ACH operates, and that's-- through that, was able to learn about opportunities to volunteer with ACH, to be a part of the Conference Planning Committee and that effort for the upcoming conference in 2024. So it's not just that I was able to attend ACH 2023 and report back to DSS, it's an ongoing opportunity to share information between the two groups. And so that's been really enjoyable to be a part not only of DSS, but to also become more of a part of ACH.
We will be back with more from John Knox and Lauren Haberstock, liaisons for the ACRL's Digital Scholarship Section after a music set.
File this set under Z675.U5A5977.
[CAUGHT A GHOST, "CONNECTED"]
That was "Connection" by Elastica, and before that, we heard "Connected" by Caught A Ghost, songs about connecting.
This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called How to be a Liaison. Our guests are the current liaisons for the ACRL's Digital Scholarship Section, one to HASTAC and one to ACH. Let's get a quick informal report from Lauren Haberstock, the liaison to HASTAC.
From what I know from some initial meetings with folks from the DSS Liaison Group, ACRL has not had a liaison relationship with HASTAC before. So in some ways, this was maybe a fact-finding mission of what is HASTAC, what are they doing, what are they about? And so because of that, when I was looking at the conference program and schedule, anything that had anything related to the organization, I was like, cool, I'm going.
So one of the biggest sessions that they had was actually talking about their migration from their old website to Humanities Commons, which is now where HASTAC lives. And they went through an entire process of why they chose Humanities Commons as the place where that's going to be their repository, in other words, and all the decisions along the way, and it was very nitty-gritty, there's somebody--
I have to ask you, would you have ever gone to that if you weren't framing this as a liaison visit? LAUREN HABERSTOCK: Absolutely not.
[LAUGHTER]
Absolutely not. I would have been like, good for them, web archiving is not my thing, so will not be there. But because I went, I realized, oh, what they're talking about, a lot of it is digital preservation. A lot of this is exactly what my colleagues in digital preservation do, this idea of migration and where longevity, how do we maintain this, how do we migrate things?
And so for me, just going to this made me realize, OK, there's a lot of common language that we may not always associate with each other of, yes, any organization that has a web presence at some point is going to need to archive or think about migration.
And so this is where I think groups like ACRL and other more formal networks of people who are information professionals can offer some support and help of, hey, we have workflows for this, hey, we've thought about this, we've thought about data management lifecycles.
So I think just kind of sitting and being a fly on the wall made me start thinking about, OK, how can there be cross-pollination between these groups of not just, like, OK, we're-- hi, I see you over there; hi, I see you over there. Cool work, great. But actually, how can we assist each other and help each other and build a working relationship where we're each giving the other something?
This is the second time you mentioned common language. And John, pay attention because this question is coming to you after this. Tell me what made you think in terms of, oh, finding a common language would be a good thing or-- what is the lack of common language say between HASTAC and ACRL?
Personally, I think this was well-exemplified in one specific workshop I went to where-- it was actually a workshop hosted by a group of librarians. And they were, to my knowledge, the only other librarians besides me at the conference. There was four of us at HASTAC. But their session was looking at the information literacy framework that ACRL has and this idea of playing with the framework of this is a scaffold that you can build onto, you can experiment with.
So it was a workshop to encourage that playful inquiry, and that was people are like, what's an information literacy framework? What in the world are you talking about? And was like, this frames so much of my day-to-day work and when I'm planning an outreach session or truly anything in my day-to-day job. And for someone on the other side, they're like, I literally have no idea what that is.
And so just realizing that oftentimes, the way that you daily structure and frame your work, that doesn't exist for somebody else. Instead, they have a different framework that they're using, that they're thinking of. They have a different theory behind why they're doing what they're doing. And oftentimes, we're trying to do the same thing, we're just calling it completely different things. So you almost have to dig past the jargon to figure out, OK, what is our goal, what are we trying to do?
And then what I call this, you call that, great. Now we understand what we're doing.
I have this experience with the phrase-- or the word "toolkit." I've been working on one of those, and it turns out that everyone has a slightly different idea of what a toolkit is. And there might be some people who are listening are like, yeah, I mean, it could be in a box, it could be up on a corkboard, but this is a digital toolkit for scholarship. Another show.
You're listening to Lost in the Stacks and we will be back with more about being a liaison for a library professional organization on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi. This is Steve Albini. I'm a recording engineer, and I'm in the band Shellac of North America. You are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK.
Today's show is called How to be a Liaison. Our guests are the newest liaisons for the ACRL's Digital Scholarship Section, which is, quote, "A forum for ACRL members engaged in exploring, adapting, and implementing emerging digital scholarship services," unquote. So I had a question for one of our guests, the Digital Scholarship Librarian John Knox. Explain digital scholarship to someone who doesn't care about it.
Digital scholarship is, in some ways, everything you're already doing. So if you're communicating about your research, your scholarship, even your teaching in a digital venue or via a digital platform, or if you're utilizing right computational methods or various other technologies, I would argue you're doing digital scholarship. It's almost impossible to avoid.
It encompasses so many activities, from how you go about designing your research teaching to disseminating those artifacts and the environment that you're in. It's shaped by so many resources and practices. There's so much infrastructure that supports that work that's all part of the digital scholarship landscape as well. So I think it's just part and parcel of academia now.
File this set under BF637C45F56.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WELSH] I think, which translates to "Girls Doing Each Other's Hair" by Gorky's Zygotic Monkey-- I'm not up on my Welsh, so I might I might not have pronounced that exactly--
You're more up on Welsh than a lot of people, I think.
Mm-hmm.
And before, that "Don't Leave Me," "Ne me quitte pas." How was that, Marlee?
That was good.
OK. By Regina Spektor. Those are songs about building a relationship using various languages.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks before the mid-show break, we heard from Lauren Haberstock about her first impressions of being a liaison to HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. She spoke about the search for common language between academics in various fields.
So John, did you feel the same kind of thing-- because you'd had experience with your organization, you probably knew the language better, but could you tell, are ACRL and ACH-- and broadly, the whole kaleidoscope of organizations, are they talking the same way about things? Are they-- do they-- do we need to find points of commonality in their understanding of the work?
I think the short answer is-- well, there is no short answer, I guess, I'll back up. Lauren--
Put that on a T-shirt.
That's right. Lauren, I'm actually really excited to hear your response, and I'm curious now to know who those librarians were and to learn more about their presentation because what you're describing there is very much in alignment with the presentation that I and our fellow DSS colleague, Teresa Burrs, gave at ACH 2023. We argued for our what we're calling a framework for digital scholarship, or you could say a framework for digital humanities for higher education.
So explicitly calling back to the ACRL framework for information literacy there. And our book chapter and our presentation argues for, really, the central role of a group like ACRL DSS in helping to spearhead the development of such a framework, but also presenting models for how you might collaborate with other groups like ACH and the broader global DH community.
So whether that's library-focused professional organizations like IFLA or other DH-- and/or other DH groups like ADHO or any of the other groups you know that represent that digital humanities and other regions of the world. So there's disciplinary groups, regional groups.
So any of these groups that support communities, there's value, in my opinion, in getting their input on what common standards-- Again, so whether we want to call it a framework, a toolkit, standards, but something that could really start to ground and bring our practice together. And we in our book chapter, we're pointing to the framework as an example of a knowledge infrastructure to try and use some more generic terminology than framework that means something specific in library land.
People use framework generically as well, but we were-- because we were referencing this sort of specific idea of a framework and a process for what it means to bring a framework together in terms of ACRL, we were going to some of these other conversations. But I agree. I think-- and we also are drawing on obviously this idea of the threshold concepts that ROOD, the IIL framework.
And so we are starting now to ask this question in other-- again, I want to acknowledge other folks that are doing this as well, acknowledging that there's, I think, a real question there. Like, do threshold concepts make sense in the context of digital humanities? And if that theory applies, what might those concepts look like? And can we really develop threshold concepts that are useful for DH across lots of disciplines, across lots of various kinds of practice?
Or are those threshold concepts, if we wanted to move forward with that idea, going to be relevant to specific disciplines, but then shaped in light of DH methods or approaches? But this is a conversation I'm really interested in having and hearing what other folks have to say. So I think I'm answering your question, Charlie.
And Lauren, again, I think your answer and my answer, I feel like it shows that I think lots of folks are interested in some of these questions and that there's a lot more conversation to be had, I think, around some of these topics. So to me, that's it's all very exciting.
I am always going back to a 1950s essay written by a science fiction author, who will remain nameless, who was trying to describe how ideas happen. This was his declining membership in a think tank. And so he had some suggestions. And one of his suggestions was, you need to let everyone talk to each other loosely because new ideas aren't what happen when you're talking to someone.
New ideas are what happen when you take away the different relationships or viewpoints that someone has provided for you-- he called them fact combinations. How you link up fact A, fact B, and fact C? And then you might go away, and you've heard how someone else put together A, B, and C, but you know how you put together C, D, and E, and those things start to coalesce into a new idea.
Just in this conversation, I think all of us have heard one or two things that knocked our understanding or attention off to the side where it hadn't been, and I'm reminded that librarians are multidisciplinary, especially academic librarians, almost to the point of distraction.
And having to learn more about what each other discipline that you interact with, how they think of things, it's almost like we're the Swiss army knife and we have to add more and more blades for the way that we're going to interact with the different groups out there. I see both of you smiling, so go ahead and tell me what you think of that when I say it.
LAUREN HABERSTOCK: Yeah, I was just thinking about my day-to-day work of I'll tell anyone regardless of what your area of research or teaching or learning is. Like, let me know what you're curious about and I'll build a bridge to you. And so I think that also follows the Swiss army knife metaphor of just tell me-- like, tell me what it is that you all do and we'll fashion a blade that works and we'll stick it-- we'll jimmy it into our Swiss army knife.
And we're going to hope that it works in another context, too. LAUREN HABERSTOCK: Yeah, absolutely. John?
As you were speaking, Charlie, I was thinking of how apt the idea of the Swiss army knife, multi-tool, whatever it is, in my opinion, for the framework and for the other-- even outside of that specific reference, all of the various supports that a group like ACRL provides to us. And this is something that think about in my local context. With the advent of the framework-- you two may be able to correct me. I think I know this, but I could get it wrong.
It was officially rolled out, approved 2015, I believe? And so in a very short period of time following the implementation of the framework within ACRL, that really, I think, supercharged IIL education and awareness across higher education.
And if I look at all of the things that have grown out of that at my local institution, we have a very well-established Faculty Fellows Program, we have student learning outcomes that have been adopted across the curriculum with respect to information literacy. And I think a lot of that stuff was really born out of the success, really, of the framework.
And so to your point, Charlie, I think one of the things that we're good at as librarians is seeing-- and I'm not claiming this for us exclusively, but we're very good at surveying and seeing how can a particular resource-- or how can we do this or that in a way to support as many folks as possible. And I think as librarians, we're well-positioned to play that connector multi-tool role. And so it's just a, I think, part of the job and I think what a lot of us find satisfying and about the work.
You've been listening to Lost in the Stacks. Our show today is called How to be a Liaison, and our guests are two-- are the two most recent liaisons from the ACRL's Digital Scholarship Section. MARLEE GIVENS: Lauren Haberstock is the Librarian for Emerging Technologies and Digital Projects and Director of the Genesis Lab Makerspace and Academic Center for Excellence at Pepperdine University in California.
And John Knox is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
File this set under PE1128.D827.
[THE MISSING PERSONS, "WORDS"]
That was "Words" by "The Missing Persons. A bit of a nostalgia bomb in the studio here. That was a song about listening to understand.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is called How to be a Liaison. We spoke with the liaisons for the ACRL's Digital Scholarship Section.
One of those liaisons was Lauren Haberstock who is the director of a makerspace and interested in physical material methods.
And considering material methods and digital scholarship together brings up one last question.
Tell me how-- how digital scholarship and making-- I assume a very material focus, how they interact. LAUREN HABERSTOCK: That's a great question. I think about that every single day. In a lot of ways, unless you are physically next to somebody who is making, the way that you're then going to share what it is that you made or that process of making, it's probably 99% of the time going to be transmitted digitally.
Even if it is like come to my workshop, most of the time you're not sending carrier pigeons out to be like, come to my workshop. Like, you're utilizing email, you're utilizing all these platforms that digitally connect us to one another. So when I think about making, I think about referencing different social media platforms, but more and more that's how people are becoming acquainted with new ways of making, new techniques of making.
As people seek those digital connections with one another, that's how we are transmitting knowledge and information. You find someone you like, you like the style of what they do, and so you follow them. You see what they're posting, you see what they're doing. And so rather than physically being in the studio or the workshop with them, you're following along as they share and transmit what it is that they're doing.
I am a hands-on person, so I still love that physical aspect of it, and I think there's certain things like the physical residency or something like that that you're never quite going to get away from, but I think they're becoming more intertwined. CHARLIE BENNETT: And with that, we should just roll the credits.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration-- or a co-laboratory-- between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library. Written and produced by Alex McGhee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and an acronym decoder-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, we needed that. Were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special Thanks to John and Lauren for being on the show; to Teresa Max and Sherry in the Digital Scholarship Section; and thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us because we have no carrier pigeons.
Next week, we'll virtually walk the streets--
Whoa!
--of the historical Red Light Districts of Atlanta.
Whoa!
--with a troublemaking archivist.
Oh, that makes sense. OK.
All right. So it's time for our last song today. Liaison librarianship is, in many ways, all about having a conversation. No matter what technology you use, no matter what language you use, no matter how complex or simple the research topic is, to be a good liaison is to be able to connect with a library user and have a fruitful conversation. So let's close with "The Conversation" by Sacred Paws. Have a great weekend, everybody.
[SACRED PAWS, "THE CONVERSATION"]