LBSC 751: Subject Discipline Analyses

By laura -

The last two weeks were a flurry of group projects, presentations, and Super Storm Sandy. Amongst them were the subject area presentations in LBSC 751. The groups presented about reference resources available for Art History, Folklore (my group), English, History, Film Studies, Psychology, and Theater.

Art History gave an interesting presentation which focused primarily on how their discipline has been incredibly slow to embrace digital research and scholarship. While they are late adopters, this means that the digital tools available to Art Historians are state of the art. Samples of digital resources available to Art Historians included:

Folklore was actually an early adapter to digital resources and scholarship. Some of the first educational websites were dedicated to folklore content (Library of Congress’s American Memory Project). However this means that many of their web resources are a little “old school” for younger researchers. (Typically digital collections formats are not updated without an incredible effort and outside funding.) But this early adoption means that there is a wealth of digital resources available to folklore scholars online. Additionally the majority of folklore journals have transitioned to open access journals. A listing of the major folklore resources is available at openfolklore.org.

Studying folklore pointed out a flaw in open access. Currently most open access journals are not deposited in the main research databases (JSTOR, ProjectMuse). It seems that when a journal converts to open access, their current issues are frequently no longer deposited into the databases where they were before. This means researchers must regularly check the journal’s website to retrieve content. This is burdensome and a nuisance when trying to find all resources published on a given topic. Researchers should just have to search a few databases rather than numerous individual websites.

All other presentations covered resources which were obvious (seriously people, JSTOR is the best suggestion that you can give me???) or too narrow to the particular sample instance to be of long term use. Except the psychology and theater groups, but I couldn't imagine when I would need that information so I didn't keep track of their resources (Sorry Krista & Tiffany!).

Have a great day and keep smiling! :)

Comments

Post a Comment