Open Folklore Communications Lead and IU Digital Publishing Librarian Jennifer Laherty has taken a lead this summer presenting on the Open Folklore project to eager audiences at two national conferences.
In a presentation titled "Open Folklore: A Model Collaboration" that she developed with fellow OF team member Garett Montanez, Jennifer discussed the OF project with an audience at the 2011 Open Repositories Conference in Austin, Texas.
Here are excerpts from their abstract:
The Open Folklore (OF) project exemplifies inter-institutional cooperation to maximize the strengths of digital repositories and leverage the building blocks of staff, shared mission and goals, and technology to support a new model of collaboration. Kim Fortun (2011) has offered her praise for OF:  “Open Folklore has built new social relations that can undergird and protect scholarly work and education for many years to come. Most fundamentally, Open Folklore has forged new connections between scholars, a scholarly society and university librarians.” We add to this our technical partners as well.
A variety of social and technical symbiotic relationships exist within the Open Folklore project. This cross-institutional effort takes advantage of digital repositories while leveraging the building blocks of staff, shared mission and goals, and technology. This presentation will demonstrate each community’s contribution and benefits from the project. We will also illustrate how the two technical foundations central to OF’s effectiveness and success – metadata and digital repositories – operate within OF. Finally, we will discuss plans to incorporate additional pieces such as the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus, a searchable online controlled vocabulary which would make OF Search more effective at providing access to information.
At the American Library Association meeting last month, Jennifer presented on the "Role of Humanities and Social Science Liaison Librarians in Scholarly Communication and Publishing." This presentation was part of the panel: 21st Century Scholarly Communication: Conversations for Change. The abstract for this session noted:
As the Open Access movement ramps up in the humanities and social sciences, librarians need to be aware of the initiatives that are altering traditional scholarly publishing. Open access journals, monographs, presses, and more, are changing librarians' roles and the scholarly communication landscape. This panel will discuss the progress and impact of this important reform movement from the perspective of feminist librarians and other stakeholders.
This panel was organized by the Women and Gender Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
In her remarks, Jennifer focused on examples from the humanities and social sciences work that she does with the IUScholarWorks team at IU. Open Folklore was one of the projects that she used to explain how important scholarly society/association involvement is in these very faculty-centric issues. She expressed that faculty, though they belong to institutional departments and must comply with local promotion and tenure policies, have allegiances that are likely to be stronger to colleagues in their narrower research fields as opposed to those colleagues in their home department.
In the fall, other members of the OF project team will be speaking about the project at a number of different professional conferences. Stay tuned for more information on these presentations.