Category Archives: oa.columbia.u

Nearly Four Million Harvard University Volumes Added to the Shared Collection of The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) | The New York Public Library

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“Nearly four million volumes held by Harvard University have been added into the shared collection of the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP), a partnership between Columbia University, The New York Public Library (NYPL), Princeton University Library, and Harvard. Users of all four libraries can access the shared collection, now numbering nearly 17 million volumes, as though those items were in their own library. 

This means that Harvard Library users can now use the institution’s catalog, HOLLIS, to directly request materials in the shared collection at ReCAP contributed by any of the partner libraries, including the NYPL, its Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and its Library for the Performing Arts. 

For NYPL, this means researchers now have access to a total of 22 million research volumes: NYPL’s 11 million, plus the materials from Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton available via ReCAP.  In other words, the partnership and addition of Harvard’s 3.6 million volumes essentially doubles NYPL’s research holdings, which are available to the public. …”

Silencing Science Tracker | Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

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“The Silencing Science Tracker is a joint initiative of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. It tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information, since the November 2016 election. Read more about the tracker and related resources….”

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. …”

NextGen Innovation in Scholarly Communications: An Exemplary Collaboration between a Research Library and a Technology Partner | EDUCAUSE

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“Often, “big idea” academic projects create high expectations for major change, generate enthusiasm and funding, and yet ultimately fail to deliver on their promised benefits. I recently stumbled on a case where that didn’t happen:  the JSTOR Labs and Columbia University Libraries collaboration on the Reimagining the Monograph (RTM) project, which led to the relatively rapid creation of the TopicGraph prototype tool. As figure 1 shows, TopicGraph’s interface has monograph topics arranged in order of importance on the left (for quick scrolling), with key phrases and words highlighted in the text on the right. The interface, even in beta form, simply looks obvious. It looks almost ridiculously obvious — like iPhone-swipe-gesture obvious or peanut-butter-and-chocolate obvious — raising the question: Why hasn’t this been done before?…

The goal was to do more and get more value from the existing monographic infrastructure. Through this focus, the team landed on a particular research question or, in the parlance of design thinking, a testable hypothesis: In the transition to digital, what print-specific benefits might have been lost for readers of scholarly monographs? The team also pondered a companion question: What digital affordances might not yet have been tapped to enhance the use of digital monographs? …”

Director, Center for Digital Research and Scholarship

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“The Columbia University Libraries seeks a motivated, collaborative, and forward-thinking professional to lead its Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS). 

CDRS works to increase the utility and impact of research produced at Columbia by creating, adapting, implementing, supporting, and sustaining innovative digital tools and publishing platforms for content delivery, discovery, analysis, data curation, and preservation. The Center engages in extensive outreach, education, and advocacy to ensure that the scholarly work produced at Columbia University has a global reach and accelerates the pace of research across disciplines. CDRS is one of five entities that comprise the Digital Programs and Technology Services branch of the Columbia University Libraries….”