A history of digital scholarship at the UI Library
The University of Idaho Library has been producing digital scholarship projects for many years. These projects take many forms, and as the internet has evolved, the forms of these projects have evolved as well, necessitating, in a very meta but nonmetaverse way, the need to develop skills to preserve digital scholarship as well.
In the early days of the internet, much of the scholarship done online involved collecting links and resources and interpreting the content available for other users. The University of Idaho Library’s former Head of Special Collections and Archives Terry Abraham was truly a pioneer in this regard. Starting in the early 1990s, Abraham spent more than 20 years at the library writing about his wide variety of interests and keeping track of online archival resources.
My colleagues and I at the library have endeavored to preserve this work and keep it accessible via our Terry Abraham Web Archive(lib.uidaho.edu/special-collections/t-abraham) for two reasons: 1. His work provides valuable perspective and context on the rise of digital archival scholarship and 2. The sites he built, particularly his project, Repositories of Primary Sources, continue to be some of the most visited of our websites.
In preserving Abraham’s work, or any early internet publications, most everyone relies on the work of the Internet Archive, which has been archiving the internet since the 1990s. Using their WayBack Machine (archive.org), one can visit preserved websites and navigate them as they were presented at a certain moment in history. We’ve used these capabilities to maintain the links that Abraham collected, most of which are no longer available on the “live” internet.
Beyond Abraham’s work, the library and its librarians have been involved in documenting and interpreting Idaho history online in significant ways for over 30 years. The Library’s early “Digital Memories” project(harvester.lib.uidaho.edu/series/digitalmemories.html), for instance, has been preserved and republished as blog posts on our Special Collections blog, Idaho Harvester.
More recently, many of our digital scholarship projects have come out of the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning, or CD?L) (cdil.lib.uidaho.edu). CD?L was established collaboratively with the UI’s College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences in 2016, and since that time we have produced more than 25 digital scholarship projects and received more than $800,000 in grant awards to support our work, the majority of which is driven through collaborations between librarians and faculty or students awarded fellowships through the center.
Our student fellows’ work has driven many of our best projects. An early project, CTRL+Shift (ctrl-shift.org), features interviews with 11 contemporary poets, including Moscow’s own Robert Wrigley. CD?L’s first two graduate fellows, Corey Oglesby and Lauren Westerfield, worked with me one summer to envision and develop the variety of visualizations and playful interpretations that make up CTRL+Shift.
More recently, graduate student fellows Jack Kredell and Chris Lamb worked with CD?L to produce Storying Extinction (cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/storying-extinction), “a multidisciplinary digital humanities project that responds to the recent extirpation (2019) of southern mountain caribou from the South Selkirk mountains of North Idaho.” Kredell and Lamb worked with CD?L to develop a “deep map” where users can explore, through a unique interactive environment of 30-plus oral histories of caribou encounters, original historical and scientific research, nonfiction narratives, and more than 600 trail camera images and videos from the caribous’ former habitat.
Our undergraduate fellows have also produced digital scholarship of great scope and variety. Our latest, Liam Marchant, worked with ethnomusicologists, digital librarian Olivia Wikle and Ghanian music specialists including UI professor of rethnomusicology Barry Bilderback to actively document and preserve the sounds, dances and traditions of Ghanian music through the Ghana Music and Dance Initiative database (ghanamusicdance.org). Our 2020 undergraduate fellow, composer Samson Matthews, worked with CD?L co-director Evan Williamson in 2020 to produce our most creative piece of digital scholarship, a digital and aural interpretation of former MFA poet Emmy Newman’s poetic work. The resulting piece, “What Glass Shards are Called” (lib.uidaho.edu/digital/shards) presents Newman’s poem and Sampson’s music together in an interactive, multilayered site.
Tragically, Matthews died in a car accident in 2021. Matthews was a truly exceptional and talented person, and those of us at CD?L feel lucky that through our digital scholarship work, we can help preserve and present a small example of Matthews’ creativity.
Becker is the associate dean for research and instruction at the University of Idaho.
