Faculty Spotlight: Joshua Been
Joshua Been is an assistant librarian and digital scholarship librarian. He coordinates library efforts around digital scholarship, which allows him to collaborate with library and other campus faculty partners to carry out innovative data-related projects.
What drew you to the Baylor Libraries?
For about a decade, I provided academic data-focused research support as a librarian, while also teaching graduate courses in GIS, data research, data visualization, and Python programming. Over time, I developed a vision for how academic libraries can foster campus-wide leadership by using digital scholarship. I was looking for the perfect academic home to develop and implement my vision. I saw right away that Baylor University is special; it turned out to be a perfect fit. Here at Baylor, I’m surrounded by faculty, staff and students eager to partner with the libraries to promote the use of digital scholarship and integrate digital research tools into their research.
What is digital scholarship? And how is it important to our faculty and students?
Digital scholarship is the use of computers to analyze words, numbers and maps. Words can be analyzed by obtaining collections of books, articles and poems. Text analysis tools may help to determine topics or even emotions. Numbers, or numeric data, can be analyzed by obtaining collections of structured data, such as spreadsheets or databases. Data analysis tools can create visualizations to both help explore or understand data, as well as telling stories inherent in the data. Maps, or geospatial data, can be used to explore relationships and find patterns across space. Digital scholarship is important because it provides digital tools and techniques to answer research questions that either may not have been able to be answered otherwise, or to greatly ease the answering of these research questions.
You can see examples of Josh’s collaborative projects at blogs.baylor.edu/digitalscholarship/digital-research-examples/.
Staff Spotlight: Andrea Turner
Andrea Turner is special collections manager for the central libraries’ special collections. She helps connect researchers, students and faculty with the unique materials found in the collections and has been part of the libraries team for almost 15 years.
What is the most important part of your job?
My goal is to connect people with information. I do this in a variety of ways, including managing appointments with rare materials, pulling resources from stacks, working with patrons to find appropriate sources, searching for resources to enhance our collections and processing new collections. Primary materials make history come alive. When students visit the library, they are already familiar with our resources. But something magical is unlocked when they turn the pages of an original slave narrative, hold the journal of the biblical archeologist who unearthed the Holy Lands, or read the quips of Ben Franklin in an almanac. The history chapters they’ve read about for years morph into real people and breathe life experiences of the past.
What are some new and interesting additions to the central libraries’ special collections?
Some of our newest additions to the collection include a 1776 pocket almanac printed by John Dunlap; he printed the first copies of the Declaration of Independence. We also recently acquired Memoir of Phillis Wheatley, the first African American published poet. In the weird category, we have a 1733 book of poetry titled Callipaedia, or, The Art of Getting Beautiful Children. You can also find Der Struwwelpeter, a horrifying book of German children’s poetry.
In the truly fascinating category we have Rene Descartes’ De Homine Figuris, a 1662 anatomy and physiology book that contains detailed illustrations of the heart.
Of course, my other favorites include the intriguing Gutenberg facsimile, the beautiful medieval manuscript facsimiles and early printed works with hand-colored illustrations. I’m continually surprised by the wealth of topics and range of years accessible in our rare collections.
This article originally appeared in the 2018 ITS & Libraries Magazine.