The TEI Archiving, Publishing and Access Service, or TAPAS
(http://www.tapasproject.org), is a new community service for
scholars and other creators of TEI materials who need a place to
publish and archive their data and ensure it remains accessible over
time. TAPAS will provide repository services with a user-friendly
interface for contributing, managing, and publishing TEI data, and
will also offer training and supporting services for those who need
help developing and publishing their projects.

Qualifications:
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent education and experience
• 2-5 years of demonstrated experience and proficiency
planning, developing, and maintaining web sites and back-end systems.
• Substantial experience with PHP; Drupal experience strongly preferred.
• Familiarity with XML, XSLT, Solr, and Fedora Commons desirable.
• Experience developing web applications using APIs and web services.
• Familiarity with TEI & common metadata standards (e.g., MODS,
Dublin Core) desirable
• Strong interpersonal skills; ability to work successfully as
part of a distributed team.

This is a 2-year full time position with the possibility of renewal,
contingent on funding. We are also willing to consider part time work
arrangements.

To apply for this position (JOB# B01380), please visit Brown’s Online
Employment website (https://careers.brown.edu), complete an
application online, attach documents, and submit for immediate
consideration. Documents should include cover letter, resume, and the
names and e-mail addresses of three references. Review of
applications will continue until the position is filled.

Brown University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer

The Brown University “Garibaldi on the Surface” project is once again in international exhibitions. A centerpiece in last year’s British Library exhibition, “Growing Knowledge – the Evolution of Research,” the digital scroll was recently on display in Bologna Salaborsa (November 15-30, 2011) as part of the Storia da toccare [History to Touch]: the Panorama Garibaldi at Salaborsa, and is currently on view through January 15 in the Sala del Risorgimento of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico.

Garibaldi on the Surface allows users to explore and examine this massive double-sided 270 foot linear painting depicting the life and times of the Italian liberator, along with a wide array of pre-selected historically and culturally relevant digital documents, images, web pages, video and audio narration from the Garibaldi-Risorgimento digital archive. Researchers can zoom in and out on specific scenes, listen to a voice-over narration in both Italian and English, access embedded documents, and read explanatory notes about characters and events depicted in the panorama.

Further exhibitions are in the works. Visitors to the digital archive can retrieve additional information about panoramas and dioramas as optical devices and popular representational media in 19th-century Europe. A video about the scroll is also available online.

Within their work, art historians, archeologists, and their predecessors across centuries have accumulated large amounts of structured data, in the form of indices, inventories, catalogues, and databases. In addition more and more such structured data is published in places such as the Linked Open Data cloud or Freebase.com;extracted from unstructured sources such as Google Books or JSTOR; or accumulated by crowds in services such as Flickr or Facebook. Meanwhile the multidisciplinary fields of complexity science in general, and complex network research in particular, provide more and more methods and tools that allow us to explore these data beyond the traditional limits of reference catalogues, printed books, or database interfaces. As a consequence, we are presented with an extraordinary chance to make significant progress in the key mission of art research, namely to uncover the morphology, ecology and evolution of cultural artifacts, understanding meso- as well as global-scale phenomena that characterize the complex system of culture. Making use of this situation, my talk will map structured data collections ranging from simple bibliographies to complicated research databases as networks of complex networks between objects, persons, locations, time ranges and events. Highlighting surprising phenomena in these networks, I will make a convincing case for high-throughput approaches in art history, embed the datasets in question in a
multidisciplinary universe of data, and show that even seemingly boring pieces of data can contain thrilling insights that are mission critical for our entire discipline.

TAPAS will add a new dimension to Brown’s text encoding initiatives, pairing Brown’s technical expertise in digital repositories with emerging developments in web publishing and data representation. This new IMLS grant will enable large-scale infrastructure development to make TAPAS a reality. For more information on TAPAS visit tapasproject.org

The Brown University Library seeks an energetic and innovative individual for the position of Digital Repository Manager. The Brown Digital Repository (BDR) supports digital scholarship at Brown by providing a platform to use, publish, and curate data and digital collections across the disciplines. The primary responsibility of the Digital Repository Manager is to act as the technical lead for the Brown Digital Repository. The Digital Repository Manger supervises the Digital Repository Programmer and manages projects to create and publish digital collections of scholarly data. S/he collaborates with colleagues across the University in designing applications to retrieve and manipulate collections, and works to establish workflows that ensure the timely and efficient delivery of repository services. The incumbent works with librarians in the Scholarly Resources group to establish data curation and management practices in support of research, and with colleagues in the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship to explore and implement new technologies that enable scholars to interact more effectively with digital materials. Additionally, the Digital Repository Manager will ensure that the documentation and web presence for repository services are kept current, and will work with stakeholders across campus to enact best practices for data formatting and storage. S/he is expected to maintain a keen awareness of trends in institutional repositories, and to pursue opportunities for enhancing repository services through the adoption of new technologies, linked data practices, funded projects, and partnerships.

Qualifications:

· Bachelor’s Degree. Advanced degree in library/information science, data curation, computer science, or related fields preferred.

· Experience of 3-5 years in the developing and implementing complex web applications using MVC frameworks such as Django or Rails.

· Demonstrated experience with digital repositories and related software, including Fedora and Solr.

· Knowledge of Java or Python.

· Demonstrated experience with Unix or Linux server platforms, related software, and basic system administration utilities.

· Demonstrated understanding of digital library standards (METS, MODS, etc.), data standards (TEI, media formats, etc.) and RDF.

· Familiarity with best practices, standards, and trends in the application of technology in libraries.
· Ability to thrive in an environment of change and to foster that capacity in others.
· Excellent communication, interpersonal, and organizational skills.
· Ability to learn new technical skills quickly; ability to meet deadlines; strong service-orientation

To apply for this position (Job #B01351 (B zero 1351)), please visit Brown’s Online Employment website (https://careers.brown.edu), complete an application online, attach documents, and submit for immediate consideration. Documents should include cover letter, resume, and the names and e-mail addresses of three references. Review of applications will continue until the position is filled.. Brown University is an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action Employer.

As to the significant image, it comes from an album of chromolithographs depicting World War One scenes published in Japan by Shobido & Co. between August and November 1914. These rather garish and outlandish prints titled The Illustration of the Graet [sic] European War depict fanciful images of the fighting on the Western Front and elsewhere. The Japanese had a tradition of creating wood-block prints and many fine examples depicting their wars against China in 1894-95, and Russia in 1904-05 exist in the collection (yet to be digitized). The current series, while not of the same standard or quality of the earlier ones, is nonetheless telling in its portrayal of a war that was being fought thousands of miles away. The fact that these highly imaginative prints also include English titles suggests that the publishers also hoped to tap the foreign market.

This particular scene is straight out of an H.G. Wells epic and shows a fantastic confluence of airships and airplanes dueling in the skies above, what appears to be Paris. Aptly titled Severe battle in the sky French and German, it was printed on October 31, 1914 and published three days later. While the artist is unidentified, he may have been Ryozo Tanaka who worked for Shobido and is known to have authored at least one similar scene.

It is only through the combined efforts of many members of the Brown University Library staff that this incredible achievement could be made. In addition to the work of Peter Harrington, curator of the collection, and the staff of the Digital Production Services unit of the Center for Digital Scholarship, we have seen significant contributions in the form of high-quality metadata record creation from Betsy Fishman and Henry Gould in technical services and scanning of the graphics by a number of student employees.

Jean Bauer is a historian, database designer, and photographer. She holds degrees in history from the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, where she is completing her doctoral dissertation, “Revolution Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825.” Jean has worked for the Archives of the New York Philharmonic and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Library and has held research fellowships at the University of Virginia Library’s Digital Scholars’ Lab and NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). She has also transcribed, translated, and decrypted letters for The Papers of James Madison, designed a database for The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and served as Design Researcher for Documents Compass, a digital consulting organization for documentary editors. Jean is the lead developer of two open source projects: DAVILA, a relational database schema visualization and annotation tool, and Project Quincy, a Ruby on Rails application with a MySQL database that uses information about people, places, and organizations to trace how social networks and institutions develop over time and through space. The flagship application for Project Quincy is The Early American Foreign Service Database, which allows researchers to trace Early American diplomats, consuls, special agents, and their clerks all over the globe.
Welcome, Jean!