Category Archives: oa.religion

Call for Submissions to Theological Librarianship Special Forum on the Ethical Imperative of Open | Theological Librarianship

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“The Atla Scholarly Communication & Digital Initiatives Committee in collaboration with the Theological Librarianship editorial board seeks submissions for a special forum on the “ethical imperative of Open” to be published in October 2023 to commemorate Open Access Week 2023.

 

The opening sentence of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 is very clear in stating that the nascent movement was seeking to “make possible an unprecedented good.” The question that arises out of that statement is if there is anything that turns the Open movement into something that should happen rather than merely something that can happen. In other words, is there an ethical imperative that should compellingly drive librarians to promote the production and dissemination of Open resources? And if so, what is it?…”

New England Quaker Records to be Digitized

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“The New England Yearly Meeting of Friends Records—rich and voluminous materials of Quakers going back to their mid-17th-century beginnings—will be the focus of a new digitization project by the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA), in the UMass Amherst Libraries. When the project is completed, the vital records and meeting minutes heavily consulted by historians and genealogists will be available in SCUA’s digital repository, Credo, on the web, and through the collaborative Massachusetts digital portal, Digital Commonwealth, of which SCUA is a member….”

Project MUSE Hosts New Interactive, Open-Access, Born-Digital Chapter

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“Project MUSE is pleased to host a new interactive, open-access, born-digital chapter, “The Web of History” from A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures by Shahzad Bashir published by the MIT Press. The chapter of the publication hosted on MUSE mirrors the content from the born-digital product’s primary site, and is intended to provide an additional pathway to discovery, as well as spotlight the MUSE platform’s suitability for hosting robust and innovative digital humanities works.

A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures brings together the MIT Press’s global publishing experience and the Brown University Library’s digital publication expertise. The groundbreaking scholarship decenters Islam from a geographical identification with the Middle East, an articulation through men’s authority alone, and the assumption that premodern expressions are more authentically Islamic than modern ones. Aimed at a wide international audience, the publication consists of engaging stories and audiovisual materials that will enable readers at all levels to appreciate Islam as an aspect of global history for centuries. The book URL is islamic-pasts-futures.org.”

Guest Post — Exploring the Strengths and Limitations of Replication in the Humanities: Two Case Studies

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“In the past few years, a variety of articles have examined why attempts to replicate studies in biomedical, natural and social sciences often are without success. These debates on the so-called ‘replication crisis’ led Rik Peels and Lex Bouter in 2018 to ask the question: What about replication in the humanities? Scholars in the humanities go about their research in other ways than those in the sciences, because of the difference in the sources, data and methods they work with, the type of questions they try to answer and the purposes they aim to serve. But two of the things that both domains have in common, is that they aspire to acquire knowledge that is not largely dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the researcher and that their future studies often relate to or build upon the findings of previous ones. Might replication studies be a useful way to corroborate findings in the humanities? If so, what would they look like in various fields within the humanities and how would they differ from replication in the biomedical, natural and social sciences? What aims would they strive for in terms of epistemic progress? What can the humanities learn from replication studies in the sciences and vice versa? In addition to this, we need to ask whether and how, as Peels and Bouter introduced, replication might contribute to the trustworthiness of research in the humanities. Furthermore, concerns regarding replication studies in the humanities voiced by other scholars, like Leonelli and Penders, Holbrook and De Rijcke, call for further investigation….”

Internet Archive Broadens Global Access to Theological Material – Internet Archive Blogs

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“Claremont School of Theology, Hope International University, Evangelical Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary have all recently donated portions of their library collections to the Internet Archive or are working with the Internet Archive to digitize their materials. The scanned books and periodicals will be available freely online at archive.org to anyone who wants to check them out one item at a time through Controlled Digital Lending.

The move solved logistical and storage problems for Claremont, Hope and Evangelical, all of which were relocating or downsizing. Faced with a space crunch, transforming their collections from print to digital format allowed the libraries to provide continual access – and extend their reach….”

Thoughts on Calling Out Brill Publishers Today – Cal schol.com

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“I’m using my book and its evident public interest (500 downloads and 1000 hits in a couple days)–as well as my pioneering of a Fahrenheit 451 model of how a humanities author can become a living, iterative digital book–as a platform to shake up academic publishing, which is what my ScholComm job is all about, advocating for Open Access.

I don’t want to just bring Open Science into the heart of Religious Studies. I want to help make the whole world smarter by freeing up important research by REALLY, REALLY SMART people. I want publishing to be the Humanistic force for good that it was first created and born to be!

I’m all for great publishing and working with top quality publishers. I’m all for helping publishers shift to a web-traffic based revenue model.

But I’m done pretending like books shouldn’t be available for free for the world to read, or to pretend that all publishers produce equally valid or important research….”

Premier Religious School Donates Quarter of a Million Volumes to Internet Archive’s Open Library – Internet Archive Blogs

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“Scholars will soon have online access to 250,000 research volumes from a premier theological school, thanks to a donation from the Claremont School of Theology to the Internet Archive. 

Strengths of the collection include Comparative Theology and Philosophy, Feminist Theology, and Afro-Carribean spirituality. In addition to the 250,000 volumes, the library is donating its Ancient Biblical Manuscripts Collection, the world’s largest collection of images of ancient religious (Jewish and Christian, biblical and extra-biblical) manuscripts, currently housed on microfilm. Half to three quarters of the collection contains images of manuscripts which are not currently available on the web from any provider. …

So the Board of Trustees authorized a donation to the Internet Archive so the 250,000 piece collection could be placed in the Internet Archive’s Open Library for controlled digital lending, and the Ancient Biblical Manuscripts Collection can be mobilized and made available online. The Internet Archive will find funding for the digitization and long-term preservation of the collections. …”

Premier Religious School Donates Quarter of a Million Volumes to Internet Archive’s Open Library – Internet Archive Blogs

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“Scholars will soon have online access to 250,000 research volumes from a premier theological school, thanks to a donation from the Claremont School of Theology to the Internet Archive. 

Strengths of the collection include Comparative Theology and Philosophy, Feminist Theology, and Afro-Carribean spirituality. In addition to the 250,000 volumes, the library is donating its Ancient Biblical Manuscripts Collection, the world’s largest collection of images of ancient religious (Jewish and Christian, biblical and extra-biblical) manuscripts, currently housed on microfilm. Half to three quarters of the collection contains images of manuscripts which are not currently available on the web from any provider. …

So the Board of Trustees authorized a donation to the Internet Archive so the 250,000 piece collection could be placed in the Internet Archive’s Open Library for controlled digital lending, and the Ancient Biblical Manuscripts Collection can be mobilized and made available online. The Internet Archive will find funding for the digitization and long-term preservation of the collections. …”

2,500 rare texts from Islamic world to go online for free | Books | The Guardian

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“More than 2,500 rare manuscripts and books from the Islamic world covering a period of more than a thousand years are to be made freely available online.

The National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem is digitising its world-class collection of items in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, dating from the ninth to the 20th centuries, including spectacularly beautiful Qur’ans and literary works decorated with gold leaf and lapis lazuli….”

Just Launched: Muftiships Web Archive – Libraries Spotlight BLOG

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“Columbia University Libraries is pleased to announce the launch of the Muftiships Web Archive. Developed by librarians within the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, the archive preserves the websites of Muftis (Muslim legal experts) and leading jurists from the Islamic world. Included are websites that cover the responses of judicial authorities to current events in their respective countries and beyond, illustrate the manner in which these authorities engage with the public, and illuminate the ways in which Islamic law is administered in the digital age. And though included websites have gained greater visibility in light of the Coronavirus pandemic in the Middle East and Islamic world, the jurists and their institutions have been the focus of interest for decades. Curators of the Muftiships Web Archive are: Gayle Fisher (Harvard University), Roberta Dougherty (Yale University), Peter Magierski (Columbia University), Sean Swanick (Duke University), and Guy Burak (New York University), with additional help from Dr. Adnan Zulfiqar (Rutgers Law School), who supplied Fatwas related to the Coronavirus as part of the “Mapping COVID Fatwas“ project in conjunction with Harvard’s Program in Islamic Law. …”

OLH OA Award Kudos, Followed by a Well-Organized CD Rant – Cal schol.com

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“What are the key features of this infrastructure of Toll Access Digital Collection Management?

Captive-Consumeristic. Libraries focus on paying for academic publications, more and more through non-OA licensing of electronic content rather than purchasing print books.
Price-Gouging. Libraries are often forced to pay more for access to electronic content than are members of the general public, and vendor offerings and sales platforms are set up in a way that prohibits or preempts price negotiations.
Opaque. Vendors typically disallow negotiations or contracts with libraries to be shared with others or publicly disclosed.
Divided. Purchasing is often done by individual libraries or (somewhat better) institutional or regional consortia.
Legalistic. Digital license terms and related negotiations are absurdly complicated and protecting university interests in such licenses is tremendously difficult.
Redundant. Acquisitions are almost always held by other libraries or consortia, but not as actual downloaded copies that keep the content safer.
Unoriginal. Catalog records are typically copied from other libraries or from vendor supplied records without substantive improvements, and libraries rely on vendors to describe and organize content as vendor-branded items and/or collections.
Insecure. Libraries are typically dependent on the whim of vendors for titles being continued as part of packages.
Restrictive. Acquisitions typically only benefit a limited pool of readers currently affiliated with a university or consortium, and even then often with additional restrictions on the number of simultaneous readers.
High Maintenance. Librarians have to spend a lot of time and energy troubleshooting Electronic Resource Management issues related to vendor systems, links, and proxy servers.

How about the key features of Open Access Digital Collection Management, as being practiced by the OADTL? ….”

Global Digital Theological Library

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“The mission of the Global Digital Theological Library (GLDTL) is to make high quality digital content in religious studies available to academic institutions in the developing world in an economically feasible manner. The GLDTL seeks to accomplish this mission by licensing with publishers and vendors on behalf of these small institutions and creating one shared and professional managed, global library for their benefit. Check out our Membership page if you are interested in joining the GLDTL.”

Open Access Digital Theological Library | a digital library for theology, religious studies, and related disciplines

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“The mission of Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL) is to curate high-quality content in religious studies and related disciplines from publisher websites, institutional repositories, scholarly societies, archives, and stable public domain collections. The OADTL uses the world’s most advanced integrated library system (ILS) for cataloging and discovery. This system, OCLC’s WorldShare, makes content easily discoverable and retrievable. The OADTL is staffed by professional librarians and curates content without regard for theological or confessional perspective. It is hoped that the increased access to high-quality religious studies content will serve scholars and students of religion….”

News – Winners of the OLH Open Access 2020 Award announced

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Earlier this year, the Open Library of Humanities launched the OLH Open Access Award 2020, a fund dedicated to promoting the benefits and impact of open access to humanities scholars and disciplines and to knowledge worldwide. Our open access awards have been awarded to two organisations in recognition for their exceptional open access scholarly projects. Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone who applied. The winners are announced below:

National Library of Kosovo; Zaide Krapi and Liridon Zekaj…

Open Access Digital Theological Library; Ann Hidalgo….”