Digital scholarship (DS) is defined very broadly as the creation, production, analysis, and or dissemination of scholarship using new technologies with emphasis on non-traditional, digital, and computational techniques. DS encompasses both the creation of research content and tools. DS can be found across disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Activities take many forms, both physical (with the establishment of actual centers) and virtual (such as the development of online repositories and the tools to analyze their content). In some cases, activity is localized within a research library with the hiring of specialized personnel, while in other cases, it is a separate unit. Although DS activity is wide spread, no single model has emerged as the de facto standard. This project will focus on identifying the skills and competencies required to support DS, regardless the institution or campus unit actually delivering the service or expertise.

“We hope that our project will contribute to the development of effective DS throughout academia,” said Xuemao Wang, dean and university librarian and principal investigator on the project. “We are enthusiastic about what the project will mean for research institutions at large and for research libraries specifically, nationally and internationally.” The project is a joint initiative and collaboration with co-investigators Vivian Lewis of McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) and Jon Cawthorne of Florida State University.

The project investigators will conduct interviews with key faculty, administrators, librarians, and technologists engaged in DS at 10 locations both in the U.S. and abroad. They plan to identify “best in class” DS programs and determine, through site visits and interviews, the key workforce-related factors associated with those centers’ success, always with an eye to continuous improvement and shared learning.

By sharing best practices from this rapidly evolving field, this Mellon-funded project will contribute to the various DS activities occurring at the University of Cincinnati, including digital humanities efforts being led by UC Forward. Initiatives in the digital humanities are just some of the projects in UC Libraries’ growing portfolio and exploration of DS, which includes online special collections, research data management, institutional repositories, and born-digital archives management.

Mellon Foundation Scholarly Communications and Information Technology Program grants support collaborative research and planning projects on the future of research library services.

Much of my time lately has been spent buried deep in the remnants of the everyday business of the Office of Economic Opportunity, where official government policies and memoranda abound. Though all of it is informative, to say that I find every item I come across riveting would be untrue. Luckily, a few striking photographs caught my attention and cried out for a closer look.

A young family pictured in their new home in Berea, KY. I’m especially fond of the kitchen. Those robin’s egg blue appliances would probably sell for thousands in an upscale vintage shop. Très mod-chic!

These images come from a series of photographs documenting the Berea, Kentucky low-income housing demonstration of 1966. It seems to have been a constant concern of the OEO and its subordinate agency, the Community Action Program, that most of the programs participating in L.B. Johnson’s War on Poverty focused only on the problems of the urban poor. The fear was that the rural poor: farmers, miners, etc. would slip through the cracks simply because their population was scattered so widely that they had little chance to organize representation within or outside the realm of state and federal governments. Thus, CAP, headed by Theodore Berry, helped start educational programs on effective farming and ranching, rural transportation programs and housing projects like this seven home demonstration community. The result of this project was a community of fairly well built homes with all the modern conveniences of 1966, (Hooray for indoor plumbing!) and the input of local private industry on how and why they might be persuaded to build in underdeveloped rural areas.

Today, Berea is one of the fastest growing cities in the nation and boasts a thriving tourism industry thanks to its mountain views and reputation for high quality artisan products, but the lessons learned from the rural poverty demonstration there have helped many other Appalachian towns thrive by helping private industry to see the profit in building for the poor and brought the problems of rural poverty in focus for suburban and urban America.

In 2010, the University of Cincinnati Libraries received a $61,287 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the Archives and Records Administration to fully process the Theodore M. Berry Collection in the Archives & Rare Books Library.  All information and opinions published on the Berry project website and in the blog entries are those of the individuals involved in the grant project and do not reflect those of the National Archives and Records Administration.  We gratefully acknowledge the support of NARA.

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After just over a month working with the Theodore M. Berry collection, I’m really beginning to feel that I have a strong grasp on who he was as a person, a politician and a civil rights activist and what he meant to the city of Cincinnati and to the United States. During my initial exploration of the collection, I was lucky enough to discover things in a fairly logical, chronological order; finding a large felt “W” from Berry’s stint on the football team at Woodward High School, a membership card for the University of Cincinnati chapter of AΦA , his 1931 class picture from the College of Law, a letter of acceptance from the Ohio Bar Association, literature from his Cincinnati City Council campaigns, over 100 letters of congratulations after his presidential appointment to the Office of Economic Opportunity, newspaper clippings from his 1972 Mayor Inauguration and a 1945 Valentine from Ted to his wife, Johnnie Mae. These things, which on their own would seem too little to be of much significance, are together telling me a story of a man whose impact on Cincinnati and on the United States as a nation seems immeasurable.

For those blog readers who may not know, Theodore Berry, in addition to having been Cincinnati’s first African-American Mayor, did a great deal of work as a presidential appointee for the War on Poverty during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Earlier this week, I came across a 1969 interview with Stephen Goodell in which Berry recalls the moment when, during a conference for the National Urban League in Washington DC in December of 1964, he first caught the attention of Sargent Shriver, then director of the Peace Corps and soon to be director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. In response to a comment aimed at Shriver and Johnson’s War on Poverty charging that the federal government should be held responsible for the economic prosperity of communities and their citizens, Berry:

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“got up in the course of the discussion… and said something to the effect that ‘It’s a misunderstanding about the legislation if you’re thinking that it’s a program in which the federal government is charged with responsibility of coming out to your community and laying something down on the table for you and say this is what you might do or have.’ I emphasized that every community would get out of the War on Poverty what it was willing and able to put into it in terms of ideas, imagination, organization; and it was a community responsibility. As I said, it was the first time that the federal government was making an offer for communities to do something for themselves.”

This frank and honest speech caught the ear of “Sarge” Shriver and barely a month later, while in Washington for the presidential inauguration, Shriver made Berry an offer to become the first director of the Community Action Program in the Office of Economic Opportunity. Citing his obligations to his law practice, his family and to the city of Cincinnati as a Councilman, Berry was hesitant accept such a position, but after a few hours and many phone calls, Berry consented, “If you have the courage to make the offer, I have the guts to accept it – the challenge.”

- Written by Laura Laugle, Berry Project Archivist

In 2010, the University of Cincinnati Libraries received a $61,287 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the Archives and Records Administration to fully process the Theodore M. Berry Collection in the Archives & Rare Books Library.  All information and opinions published on the Berry project website and in the blog entries are those of the individuals involved in the grant project and do not reflect those of the National Archives and Records Administration.  We gratefully acknowledge the support of NARA.

One of the many filing cabinets filled with birth and death records.

Genealogists, social historians, epidemiologists, and public health historians will soon have a new extensive, online resource to assist them in learning about birth and deaths in the City of Cincinnati. The University of Cincinnati Libraries have been awarded a $140,437 Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant from the State Library of Ohio to digitize 340,000 birth and death records of the City of Cincinnati prior 1908.  The records will be available on OhioLINK’s Digital Resource Commons beginning in August of 2010.

The City of Cincinnati began keeping death records in 1865 and birth records in 1874.  Each birth record contains the name of the individual along with birth date, race, gender, name and birthplace of father and mother, occupation of father, doctor or midwife in attendance, and hospital.  Each death record includes the name of the deceased, age, date and cause of death, address, occupation, race, gender, attending physician, funeral home, and place of burial.  These particular records only include births and deaths that occurred in the areas that were part of the City of Cincinnati at that time.  Records for people who were born or died in areas that were annexed into the city later are not included in these records.

The birth and death records are among the most heavily used research materials in the Archives and Rare Books Library. In the last year, the Archives and Rare Books Library received 3,000 requests for information from the birth and death records, representing 75% of genealogy reference service provided to the general public.  These records, however, will be useful to many scholars.  The database will allow historians, epidemiologists, and other researchers to examine the numbers of births and deaths per year, and track diseases and causes of death, among many other uses.

For more details see the University of Cincinnati Libraries’ press release at:  http://libraries.uc.edu/information/news/pressrelease/0910/lstagrant09.html To view samples of these cards, click on the images below.