The Authority File

Oh, how the internet has changed…

Once, homely, Comic Sans-ridden websites occupied the top-search returns in Google and blurry, camcorder-recorded videos glued users to YouTube. Now, nearly everyone has the means to create professional-looking media or websites, thanks to the ubiquity and fairly affordable pricing of high quality products like smartphones and website builders.

In this episode, Ellen Carillo, associate professor at the University of Connecticut and author of the new book, the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy,discusses the misconception that proficiency in using digital media equates to skill in evaluating it, and how that misconception has prevented teachers from training their students to be digitally literate. While students today may know how to post a story on Instagram or tweet a .gif on Twitter, it doesn’t mean they are equipped with the skills necessary to find primary sources or determine biases in digital news stories. Carillo also thinks through what universities can do to incorporate digital literacy into every discipline, and what this delay in literacy has meant for students—and our democracy—as educators scramble to catch up.

Income, religion, region, and party—all of these divide America. But another divide is the one between those who are digitally literate and those who aren’t. Ellen Carillo, associate professor at the University of Connecticut, works to shrink that divide, with her new book the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy. While it’s designed to serve as a textbook—with hands-on activities, writing prompts, and sample lesson plans all included—it also functions as more. It’s a real-life guide to evaluating sources and making sound choices for those struggling to withstand the derecho of information howling around us every day.

In this episode, Carillo breaks down eight guiding principles of digital literacy, clarifying that students are not the only ones who need to learn its lessons. It “plays a huge role in what it means to be a citizen.” Which is why each of us could use fifteen minutes or so of enlightened conversation on the hows and whys of the important and often-overlooked topic of digital literacy.

Building a diverse contributor pool requires intentionality and—as Bryan Keene of the J. Paul Getty Museum discovered—a number of different perspectives to point out limitations, blind spots, and oversights. In this episode, Keene explains how he ensured Toward a Global Middle Ages is as inclusive as possible. Peer reviewers played crucial roles in suggesting diverse scholars and works, as did Keene’s own colleagues at the Getty. Thanks to the combined effort of his team of designers, editors, and his rights coordinator, Keene compiled manuscripts from every corner of the world from a host of unique backgrounds. Keene describes the practicalities of organizing such an exhaustive book, such as formatting the impressively-long reference list, standardizing spellings of titles across languages, and choosing which dating conventions were most appropriate for a volume that looked beyond European time lines.

Academics have long championed the term “globalization” for expanding Eurocentric perspectives to include a broader, better represented world. However, Bryan Keene of the J. Paul Getty Museum reveals how globalization, despite its inclusive intentions, can homogenize instead of diversify, often ignoring the painful effects of colonization, and flattening or even dismissing diversity among countries and regions. In Keene’s new and exciting edited volume Toward a Global Middle Ages, contributors instead use globalization to reveal diversity. They employ the French variant of globalization, “mondialisation”—roughly translated to “world-making strategies”—to acknowledge histories and cultures outside of Europe during the medieval period. By focusing on microhistories in Northern Africa, Indonesia, South America and beyond, Toward a Global Middle Ages demonstrates how “Europe is just a small region in a greater Afro-Eurasia … just one place in a much larger world.”

Is it possible to pull apart the Eurocentric perspective long cast upon the Middle Ages to not only include, but focus on other parts of the globe? Bryan Keene of the J. Paul Getty Museum certainly thinks so. In this episode, Keene discusses how contributors used illustrated manuscripts as a tether to dive into the medieval period in his monumental edited volume Toward a Global Middle Ages. Using broad terms like “the book,” “identity,” or “itineraries” as a guide, this work breaks out of its art history concentration to include the multidisciplinary perspectives of its many contributors, and redefines the word “medieval” to establish a fresh, modern take on the Middle Ages.

Global approaches to the Middle Ages have long been part of historical and literary studies, but only over the last ten years or so has a global approach emerged within the field of art history. In this episode, Bryan C. Keene, associate curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, discusses the timeline of assembling his monumental edited volume Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, and what a “Global Middle Ages” actually means.

During the Charleston Conference’s Vendor Showcase Bill caught up with Caroline Muglia of the University of Southern California to talk about her presentation, “Developing a Framework for Measuring Reuse of Digital Library Collections: Discovery, Assessment, and Sharing.” In their conversation Caroline covers what she means by reuse, how user privacy is written into how she and the team with which she works think about reuse, and how reuse can help libraries demonstrate value.

During the Charleston Conference’s Vendor Showcase Bill caught up with Oya Rieger of ITHAKA S+R and Antje Mays of the University of Kentucky Libraries to discuss their talk “Legacy Missions in Times of Change: Defining and Shaping Collections in the 21st Century.” They talk about what a “legacy mission” is and why legacy is important. They also talk about how collections are changing and what that means for the library’s mission and vision of itself.

Their talk is based upon Oya’s fascinating issue brief for ITHAKA titled, “What’s a Collection Anyway?” Recommended reading for anyone working with collections or thinking hard about the ways libraries are changing.

In this episode Suzanne Mangrum details her ambitions and her process for promoting Open Educational Resource (OER) adoption at Middle Tennessee State University. Recorded live during the vendor showcase at the Charleston Conference.

This episode was recorded live on the show floor of the Charleston Conference. Mark Derks jumps right into a conversation with Mary Ellen Sloane of Middle Tennessee State University about a workshop she runs for graduate students on data management and visualization.