Fondren Library’s annual Research Award program is funded by the Friends of  Fondren Library and recognizes students who demonstrate extraordinary skill and creativity in the application of library and information resources to original research and scholarship. Winning papers are deposited in the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive.

Winners of the 2020 awards were recently announced:

Graduate

First Place: Sophia Martinez-Abbud, “Re-membering Veracruz: A Decolonial Reading of Regional Colonial Cartography”

Undergraduate

First Place: Jolen Martinez, “Materials of Movement: Homeless bodies and mobile technologies in a feminist new materialist lens”

Second Place: Molly Wancewicz, “Organized Labor and Faction in the United States, 1930s and 1940s”

Honorable Mention: Jennifer Wang, “Literary Landscapes: A Future for Post-Frontier Regionalism in Literature of the American West”

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important the sharing of information and research results is to help address a worldwide health crisis. It has also disrupted many plans for in-person scholarly conferences and meetings.

The Rice Digital Scholarship Archive (RDSA) is available to support the Rice community during this time. The RDSA provides global access to research and scholarship produced at Rice University. It has long served as the online home for Rice theses and dissertations, faculty, staff, and student work, and historical documents and images. The archive is now also available for new uses, such as:

• COVID-19 research and/or data
• For those who have had to cancel events or shift to virtual meetings and conferences, the RDSA can serve as a place presenters can share conference papers and other presentation materials.

Benefits of using the RDSA include:

• Visibility: When you deposit your work in the RDSA, it becomes available to search engines as part of a worldwide network of research collections–your peers worldwide will be able to find it quickly. Items can also be assigned DOIs, which further helps with citation and discovery.
• Stability: Each item deposited in the RDSA gets a permanent, citable, linkable URL that will not change or break over time.
• Longevity: The RDSA provides long-term storage for your materials by managing backups, and ensuring that your work remains accessible at a stable location on the Web and available to search engines. RDSA will help keep works in common file formats up to date, ensuring that as technology and formats evolve, your work will remain accessible and usable.

If you would like to learn more, please contact Fondren’s Digital Scholarship Services at cds@rice.edu.

Fondren Library has been closed since March 19 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Although library users can no longer physically access the building, most library staff are remotely working and many online resources are still accessible (library staff have provided information about remote access in a LibGuide). This includes access to the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive (RDSA).

If you need assistance with digital projects or tools, scholarly communications issues like copyright or open access, or would like to make your work available in the RDSA, contact Digital Scholarship Services at cds@rice.edu. Staff are available to remotely assist you. A number of online resources are also available, including:

• Research Data Services
• Accessible PDFs: The purpose of these guidelines is to provide steps to create accessible PDFs in compliance with accessibility standards US Section 508 and WCAG.
• Copyright and Fair Use: This guide is intended to serve as an introduction to copyright for members of the Rice community, highlighting issues relevant to an academic environment.
• Creative Commons: Guide for choosing a Creative Commons (CC) license for your own work and finding and using CC-licensed content.
• Finding and Using Images in Publications: This guide is intended to provide information on finding and using images in art and art history publications. Topics such as copyright, Fair Use, public domain, and Creative Commons are discussed.
• Finding Images and Text in the Public Domain
• Fondren DOI Services: Information about how you can get a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for your work.
• Rice Open Access Policy: Learn more about the policy and how to comply.
• Open Educational Resources: Resources for finding and using open educational resources (OERs).
• ORCID and Other Author Identifiers/Profiles: Resources for creating and using ORCID, ResearcherID, and Scopus Author ID.
• Rice Author Open Access Fees: Outlining Fondren Library’s program to subsidize open access fees for current Rice faculty, students and staff

The Spring 2020 issue of the department’s electronic newsletter was recently distributed to campus via email. It can also be found here.

We welcome feedback on this newsletter and questions about Digital Scholarship Services. Contact cds@rice.edu.

Digital projects often require many resources to be successful. This includes the labor of individuals who help to make collections available and usable online. One current Fondren digitization project that is very labor intensive is the Shepherd School Recording Digitization Project. This multi-year project has digitized thousands of vintage Shepherd School of Music performances.

Jihyun Kim, Shepherd School Graduate Student in Composition, has worked on the project for two years. She has participated in several activities, including digitizing cds, matching reel-to-reel recordings with their printed programs, and packing reel-to-reels for third-party digitization. However, Kim says that her current work is her favorite. She is currently using the digitized recordings and programs (available in the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive) to generate time-stamps that will help users navigate the recordings. Kim’s work is helping to make this collection easier to use by helping visitors more easily find and listen to specific works.

Jihyun says that she has learned a lot during her time at Fondren. In addition to learning about the digitization process, she says that she has realized the importance of the musical recording. It serves as a long-lasting record of the work. Kim says that, as a performer, this will encourage her to think about both creating a good performance for the audience and for future listeners.

You can learn more about Jihyun and hear some of her work at her website.