Background
Since 1978 the National Humanities Center has supported, stimulated, and disseminated the best scholarship in the humanities. One of the most prestigious independent research institutes in the world, the Center is the only one dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Our primary initiative is a Fellowship Program, which each year brings up to forty scholars to the Center, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, to pursue research in an atmosphere of freedom, collegiality, and scholarly support. Books written by Center Fellows have won many prizes, and the Fellows themselves have gone on to hold leadership positions in their colleges and universities, and in virtually every major scholarly organization in the humanities. Notably, ninety-eight past Fellows have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to supporting humanistic scholarship, the Center pursues public engagement through lectures, seminars, conferences, and various other programs.
As an institution devoted to scholarly excellence across the humanities, the Center seeks to provide leadership in the curation and dissemination of scholarly work. Going beyond the traditional book or article, the Center aims to establish a robust online presence that will showcase its scholars’ work across multiple platforms and types of scholarship. This new project, entitled Scholarly Work Re-Examined, will collect and curate the scholarly products that have resulted from Fellows’ stays and effectively communicate the benefits and relevance of humanistic scholarly inquiry to the Center’s diverse audiences.
Opportunity
This intern will help the Center develop, plan, and implement better ways to capture, curate, and showcase scholarly work beyond the book. The project will begin with the transfer of existing records for books by Fellows into a Zotero database and the application of metadata to those records. A subsequent phase will recover other scholarly works by Fellows from the past decade. The intern will also develop online exhibits of books and other scholarly projects and integrate this process with the Center’s follow-up surveys of Fellows. This process will contribute to an ongoing efforts to evaluate the impact of the Center’s fellowship program as well as the evaluation of scholarship in the humanities more broadly.
Overview
- Raise the profile of the Center by highlighting the work of Fellows
- Increase discoverability and usefulness of the work of the Fellows’ website
- Expand types of scholarly work collected and displayed
- Reflect changes in scholarly publishing to include digital projects, blog posts, interviews, public outreach, and other non-traditional scholarly products
- Influence how scholars’ work, particularly non-traditional scholarship, is evaluated for promotion and tenure
- Design an Omeka based website that will helps us
- Allow for greater discoverability and interactivity with Fellows’ work
- Leverage our vast alumni base by reengaging past Fellows
- Provide a clearinghouse of potential speakers and authors for Center events and publications
Tasks
- Transfer existing bibliographic records for Fellows’ from an EndNote database to a Zotero database
- Apply metadata to transferred records, including subject tags
- Write and disseminate survey to collect information about the books, journal articles, web publications, digital projects, public outreach, and other types of scholarly work produced as a result of Fellows’ time at the Center
- Locate and gather bibliographic information for fellowship products for past Fellows who do not respond to the survey
- Enter bibliographic information and metadata about fellowship products into the Zotero database
- Assist in designing an Omeka based website displaying Fellows’ work
