Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) announced that there are now over one million readily available electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) online worldwide.  The NDLTD (www.ndltd.org), OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, www.oclc.org), VTLS (www.vtls.org), and Scirus (www.scirus.com) maintain and provide access related to the NDLTD Union Catalog (www.ndltd.org/find), of ETDs available in institutional repositories around the globe.

The NDLTD, of which Texas A&M University is a member, is an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the creation, dissemination, use, adoption, and preservation of digital theses and dissertations. The NDLTD assists students and universities in using electronic publishing and digital libraries to more effectively share knowledge in order to unlock potential benefits worldwide.  The NDLTD also promotes student efforts to transform the genre of the print dissertation through the use of innovative software to create cutting edge hypertext/multimedia ETDs.

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Bernard Frischer will deliver the Digital Humanities lecture at Texas A&M on February 26, 2010, at 4:00 PM in Green Auditorium, Architecture Building.  The topic of the lecture is “‘Rome Reborn’: A Case Study in Digital Documentation and Publication.” 

Dr. Frischer is a Professor in the Classics Department of the University of Virginia, where from 2004-09 he also served as Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. He is currently Director of the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory, whose mission is to apply 3D digital tools to simulating cultural heritage artifacts and sites as heuristic instruments of discovery. (more…)

The Modern Language Association’s Committee on Information Technology (CIT) created a wiki for “The Evaluation of Digital Work.” It allows any teacher or scholar to contribute and use content on developing, gathering, and sharing material about the evaluation of digital work for hiring, tenure, promotion, and other rewards of the profession.  The URL is http://wiki.mla.org/index.php/Evaluation_Wiki. (more…)

NBOL-19: An Online Review of New Books on English and American Literature of the Nineteenth Century  is “here to revolutionize academic reviewing” — by posting reviews of new books on English and American literature of the nineteenth century within ninety days of their publication, by inviting authors to respond to each review within thirty days of its submission, and by making use of tools available in an online format such as tagging and commenting.

The National Humanities Alliance (NHA) began in 2006 to explore issues related to scholarly journal publishing in humanities and social science (HSS) associations. Eight prominent scholarly societies agreed to participate in a study with financial assistance from the Mellon Foundation.  The study analyzed data provided by the association for eight journals, considered the flagship journals in anthropology, sociology, economics,  modern languages, history, religion, politics and statistics. The new report, “The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations” by Mary Waltham was recently released.

Some interesting details from the report: (more…)