Visitors to the HSSE Library may have recently noticed some changes. Students looking for printers will discover we have moved printers, photocopiers, and scanners from the closed room in the back of HSSE to a prominent central location near the service desk. Fans of contemporary literature will now find the latest novels in the Hicks Undergraduate Library. Additionally, we reduced the size of the current periodicals area, filled the reading room with additional study tables and seating, and condensed the reference collection on the first floor, which allowed us to create additional study space while still displaying selected reference books along the wall-shelving units.

These changes provided an opportunity to meet three important goals in refurbishing HSSE's first floor. Our first objective was to streamline access to the printers, photocopiers, and scanners by moving them all into one central space close to the front service desk. This location allows staff to provide service easily and seamlessly and keep the equipment functioning well. Patrons have offered highly positive feedback about these changes, and the staff enjoy more productive work experiences because of this conversion. The second important goal was to create additional study and collaborative space on the first floor of HSSE. We routinely receive high praise from students as a favorite place to study, and these changes further that mission. The third goal, which we discuss more below, was to clear space for a new digital scholarship area dedicated exclusively to humanities and social sciences research and pedagogy.

These changes were timed to coincide with the hiring of a new faculty member in Libraries who focuses exclusively on digital scholarship. Scholars and students in the Humanities and Social Sciences have increasingly turned to computational methods and objects of study in their work, applying such digital tools as text mining, network analysis, and geospatial analysis to generate innovative research questions. Commonly known as "Digital Humanities," often referred to as "DH," this emerging field allows students and scholars to integrate technology in ways that more fully express the goals of contemporary research. Projects facilitated in this manner bring information and knowledge "off the page" through the use of technology, creating diverse projects that fully engage 21st-century possibilities for the production and sharing of knowledge (for example: Modernist Archives Publishing Project, The Walt Whitman Archive, Shakeosphere, Bdote Memory Map).

Many of the nation's top universities are investing resources into DH, building labs, centers, and other spaces within academic libraries and populating them with strategic hires with expertise in data generation, management, and visualization, alongside advanced humanities training. As result, library spaces have become destinations for faculty and students interested in supplementing humanities scholarship with the affordances of digital tools and methods, and many libraries now offer educational opportunities through trainings, workshops, and classes. As a new Libraries faculty member, Assistant Professor Matthew (Matt) Hannah (pictured on the right) will develop and implement DH initiatives at Purdue, focusing on collaboration between Libraries and College of Liberal Arts. Matt's hire has ushered in exciting opportunities to collaborate with faculty and students, who teach and conduct research in the field of DH, across campus.

Matt's work developing our Digital Scholarship Program will position Purdue Libraries as the center of disciplinary efforts to advance innovations in the study and teaching of liberal arts. Incorporating computing power into research and teaching opens new scholarly territory to explore. Training in digital scholarship has been shown to increase job prospects for graduates who combine critical-thinking and writing skills learned in liberal arts with technical proficiency in computing. Not only does this program provide an opportunity for students to gain valuable technology skills, but the projects are often led by cross-disciplinary groups, offering students unique interdisciplinary experiences in project management and team building. Merging disciplines while working with other students creates the skilled problem solvers and experienced collaborators in demand for many careers both inside and outside academia.

To support our educational mission, we have also established a physical nucleus for digital scholarship. Located on the first floor of HSSE, where the printers and scanners used to be, is a newly dedicated space, which we are calling the "DH Studio," where the courses and workshops can be held regularly within a humanities and social sciences environment. Partnering with the School of Interdisciplinary Studies in the College of Liberal Arts to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in DH, we are in the process of developing courses in which students will learn how to re-conceptualize their work in history, English, philosophy, interdisciplinary studies, art, and other humanistic disciplines as data that can be curated, managed, visualized, and represented to a broader audience. As we work with students to build original digital projects comprised of humanities data, we will use the DH Studio to host projects, digitize materials, and conduct analyses. In essence, the DH Studio will become the hub for digital humanities scholarship at Purdue, bringing together colleagues from across campus interested in imagining new possibilities for their teaching and research.

Assitant Professor Matt Hannah in the developing DH Studio, located on the first floor of HSSE Library.

Last July, Purdue University Libraries was selected as the site for Project Information Literacy’s inaugural Visiting Research Scholar program. The program—implemented over the 2017-18 academic year—enabled Purdue Libraries faculty researchers to consult with expert information-literacy researcher Dr. Alison Head (pictured on the right), the founder and executive director of Project Information Literacy, a non-profit organization based in California.

Throughout 2017-18, Head—who is also a senior researcher at the metaLAB at Harvard—has mentored Purdue Libraries researchers on their scholarly research projects, both large and small, through the program. She will be on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus in mid-May to complete the program with Purdue Libraries faculty, as well as deliver a talk that is open, free to the Purdue campus.

Head will present, “How Today’s Students Conduct Research” from 10-11 a.m. Thursday, May 17, in the Wilmeth Active Learning Center, room 1132. According Head, the talk will cover what she and her fellow PIL researchers have learned from students about students’ research practices. Registration is available at https://purdue.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_exERowtW6fjZBWt.

“We are now working on our 10th research study at Project Information Literacy,” Head noted. “My talk will cover what students have taught us about their research practices and information seeking and how they go about fulfilling course-related research, e.g., what their strategies, techniques, and workarounds are. I will also touch on our current news consumption study (which comes out in October) and what we are finding out about students’ personal uses of news—where they are getting news, what their consumption habits are, and how confident they feel about fake news. This study looks at students through the lens of their experiences, and my presentation will help shed light on something that very few educators and librarians know much about,” she added.

About PIL and the Visting Research Scholar Program

According to Head, the PIL Visiting Research Scholar program began with a pilot phase in 2016-17 at the University of Nebraska Library.

“The program’s sole purpose has been for PIL to provide a year of research consultations, so that librarians may be become more qualified and improved information literacy researchers,” Head explained.

Since 2008, Head and her team of PIL researchers have interviewed and surveyed over 16,000 undergraduates at more than 88 U.S. four-year public and private universities and colleges and two-year community colleges. PIL has published nine open-access research reports as part of the ongoing study.

In a 2016 Inside Higher Education column, Barbara Fister called PIL: “hands-down the most important long-term, multi-institutional research project ever launched on how students use information for school and beyond.”

Articles about PIL’s work have also appeared in The Atlantic Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Education Week, Inside Higher Education, Library Journal, and The Seattle Times.

Head also led the 2007 exploratory information literacy study, a forerunner to PIL, at Saint Mary’s College of California, where she taught as the Disney Visiting Professor in New Media for 10 years.

Head earned her Ph.D. in information science, as well as her MLS and BA degrees, from U.C. Berkeley. She was awarded the inaugural S. T. Lee Lectureship in Library Leadership and Innovation at Harvard Library for 2017-19. In addition, she has been a Research Fellow and a Faculty Associate and at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, as well as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, where she studied human-computer interaction.

Learn more about PIL at www.projectinfolit.org.

The following Purdue University Libraries faculty members were recognized at the Purdue University Faculty Awards Convocation held May 8 at the Purdue Memorial Union:

• Heather Howard, ATG Media's Up and Comers Award;
  
  
• Nicole Kong, Libraries Excellence in Research Award;
  
  
• Clarence Maybee, Queensland University of Technology’s Higher Education Research Network Best Higher Education Research Publication Award;
  
  
• Pete Pascuzzi, John H. Moriarty Annual Award for Excellence in Library Service and the Seed for Success Award (recognizing faculty members who attract large sponsored research grants to Purdue University);
  
  
• Megan Sapp Nelson, Libraries Excellence in Research Award;
  
  
• Michael Witt, Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), Science and Technology Section Oberly Award for Bibliography in the Agricultural or Natural Sciences and Samuel von Pufendorf Institute Research Fellowship; and
  
  
• David Zwicky, Libraries Excellence in Teaching Award.

The full list is available at www.purdue.edu/newsroom/purduetoday/releases/2018/Q2/2018-faculty-awards-convocation.html.

In late April, Purdue University Libraries student workers were recognized at the Graduating Students' Dinner in the Purdue Memorial Union. We wish all these brand new Purdue University alumni a wonderful commencement weekend and best wishes for future endeavors!