went to MITH, did a little song and dance…

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending time with friends/colleagues at MITH (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities), as they invited me to say a few words for a session in their Digital Dialogues speaker series.

I took the opportunity to say a few words about something fundamental to my work at UVa Library, and that is the Hydra Project (ed. note: I worked at UVa from from Jan – Dec 2011 and am no longer involved with UVa or the Hydra Project). The abstract for my talk read as follows, and I actually discussed most of the things listed here:

The University of Virginia Library is a key partner in the collaborative project known as “Hydra”; the goal of the Hydra Project is to create a comprehensive set of open source repository workflow tools that allow librarians and scholars to manage describe, deliver, reuse and preserve digital information. U.Va.’s committment to the project includes the definition of metadata standards, the creation of search and discovery interfaces, and the development and implementation of multiple Hydra “heads” such as the interface and workflow in use for the U.Va. institutional repository. This talk will provide a brief overview of the Hydra Project and the tools under development, describe some of the processes and challenges for development teams working within a library setting, discuss the value of having a Digital Humanities R&D group (the Scholars’ Lab) embedded in this same setting, and the types of “alt-ac” positions, roles, and responsibilities that can be found in this environment.

Here are the slides!

If there’s something you’d like to know more about, please leave a comment and I’ll use that as fodder for a blog post…