Building our infrastructure to expand the research lifecycle

The theme of this year’s Humanities Roundtable is building better — better diversity, better accessibility, better technology — in order to develop a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable humanities community. From the complexities of controlled vocabularies and thesauri in the humanities, to dealing with historically offensive language, and from defining accessibility in a humanities context to designing for it, our speakers will touch on many of the critical changes the digital humanities need.None of this is simple but, at the same time, if we work together to find solutions, it’s not impossible. By bringing together stakeholders from across our community — librarians, publishers, technology providers — this year’s Roundtable will kickstart a discussion on the practical requirements and implications of delivering a more diverse, a more accessible, a better information environment for the digital humanities community. The event will include small group breakout sessions to encourage attendees from a range of stakeholder communities to engage productively with one another and to collaborate in identifying next steps.

Join us for talks by Daniel Ayala, Secratic, Cindi Blyberg, OCLC, Mark Gross, Data Conversion Laboratory, Steph Garrett, PodDB, Chris Iannicello, The Optical Society (OSA), Lauren Kane, Morressier, Kevin Muha, SAGE Publishing, John Shaw, SAGE Publishing, and Chris Shillum, ORCID. Historically, scholarly publishing has focused on technology and platforms that primarily supported the handling of text. Systems were built to facilitate submission, review, editing, formatting, organization, storage, distribution, and discovery. Resources were poured into these systems and they became increasingly sophisticated. Now, we are seeing the emergence of technology and systems optimized for support of the new content types, formats, and interactions that are of increasing importance and visibility in scholarly communication. Traditional publications are still with us, but users need and expect more. New systems are required, but those striving to justify and build them face numerous challenges. Transformation requires extensive advance planning and buy-in from a variety of internal stakeholders. And it’s complicated. For example, over time, there may have been home-grown customization —  who remembers now what that code  or its associated metadata looks like? How many schemas might have been brought in at different times? How do you manage — and meet — the needs of multiple stakeholders, internal and external? Collaborative effort is essential even before any new system is introduced.   In this program, we explored the challenges from both a management and a technology perspective to consider how the information community can develop systems that continue to add value to scholarly communication and success.

Every organization, as a standard course of action, should be implementing protection policies and updating protective measures surrounding their confidential data and internal systems. Phishing and malware are a constant threat. As a response, reliable cybersecurity requires an integrated approach in ensuring the safety of networks, devices, and data. How should enterprises and institutions be thinking about their cybersecurity needs? What basic requirements should be in place? What guidelines or best practices exist? What are the best resources? This roundtable discussion will bring together experts active in the field to address these and other questions.

Eugene Spiegle has an extensive background as an educator, teaching and training project management. He will summarize the state of the art in project management, both as an evolving field and as an opportunity for further training and certification.