Last week PhilPapers, “a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers,” sent letters to academic librarians asking for financial support to sustain their work. As a recipient of such a letter, I would like to invite philosophers, librarians, and others interested in volunteer-run digital projects like PhilPapers to talk about issues raised by the organization’s call for support.  Among other topics, we can consider such questions as what is the value of such a service for scholars? for graduate students? for undergraduates?  Is asking for subscriptions from libraries the most appropriate method for supporting resources like PhilPapers?  Should libraries regularly factor funding for such services into collections budgets and how should libraries prioritize such funding with traditional journal and database subscriptions?  All are welcome to bring their opinions and their questions to the table.

If you are unfamiliar with PhilPapers or their call for subscriptions, here are a few links to more information:

Check out PhilPapers here: philpapers.org/

See PhilPapers public notice calling for institutional subscriptions here: philpapers.org/post/8146

For an overview of the response from librarians see this post from Wayne Bivens-Tatum, philosophy librarian at Princeton University: blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2014/04/a-last-bit-on-philpapers/

Facilitated by Suzan Alteri and Dan Reboussin

Digital curation is the “active management of digital resources over the life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest.” We will discuss several activities that can be undertaken once a collection is online in order to improve scholarly access. State of the art access depends on the acknowledgement of both social and technical aspects of the way information is indexed by online search engines. Effective curation allows researchers to discover relevant collections they weren’t already aware of prior to conducting an online search. Examples of curation activities to be discussed and demonstrated include: creating detailed metadata, building a rich scholarly context on collection landing pages, creating useful subcollection divisions, and contributing to appropriate sites in ways that support online discoverability.

What is TEI? What can you do with it? How can one get started with TEI editing? What avenues exist for publishing online with TEI encoded projects?

TEI (or the Text Encoding Initiative) is a way to prepare archival documents to be coded and searched electronically.   This session aims to explore TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) through an examination of two mark up projects:  the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition www.brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/   and a digital edition of Virgil’s Aeneid (dissertation).

In addition to understanding how one can use an XML editing tool like <Oxygen> www.oxygenxml.com/, the session will illustrate the process for coding texts in basic structural ways along with more in-depth interpretive ways or tagging.

Time will also be spent exploring traditional publishing platforms such as XTF xtf.cdlib.org/  and more recent initiatives such TAPAS  www.northeastern.edu/nulab/tapas/    It will also examine the state of cutting edge XML tools such as Juxta Editions.