I know that many of us are starting to feel things speeding up as we draw nearer to the beginning of the school year, and with a new year come students with new research projects (many of which will be digital in nature). In order to better help you help your patrons, the Humanities Digital Information Service is now offering a new workshop series called <digiPrep> that is geared toward library staff, enabling them to share best practices for successful digital projects. 

In this series, we will focus on skills and resources available to SUL staff not only for helping patrons, but also for facilitating staff members' own digital research projects. While the content of this series was originally designed with digital humanities projects in mind, these workshops will be facilitated by an interdisciplinary team of SUL staff members from the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Sciences. Each workshop will take place on a Thursday from 2:00pm to 4:00pm in the SSRC, and some of the workshops may not take the full two hours. A complete schedule of workshop topics can be found below, along with workshop descriptions.

If this sounds like a workshop series that you would like to attend, please take a minute to fill out this registration form so that we know how many to anticipate. We look forward to seeing you all at the <digiPrep> Workshops!

P.S. -- You may have also heard that we're doing a <digiPrep> for non-SUL staff, you can find and share information on that series at http://digitalhumanities.stanford.edu/digiPrep or follow us on Twitter @digiPrepSUL.

2013-2014 SCHEDULE

Project Management

Topics include an overview of Project Management and why it is fundamental for the successful completion of projects, discussion of the Project Management framework, as well as providing a short list of best practices for helping patrons implementing basic Project Management, as well as in SUL staff's own digital projects.

SUL Staff Only: Thursday, October 3, 2013, 2:00 to 4:00

Data Management

Topics for this workshop include an overview of Data Management, a discussion of why it is necessary for the successful completion of digital projects, as well as providing a short list of Data Management best practices for digital projects, as well as tools available to patrons and library staff.

SUL Staff Only: Thursday, October 31, 2013, 2:00 to 4:00

Text-Based Model Creation

The focus of this workshop will consider the best practices necessary for successfully constructing text-based models that can be used for a myriad of qualitative analysis techniques; in particular, we will discuss both the questions that you should make sure patrons address in order to establish a sampling policy and framework, as well as the different resources for humanities and social science subject areas available from the library for corpus creation.

SUL Staff Only: Thursday, November 21, 2013, 2:00 to 4:00

Metadata for Digital Projects

Topics include a discussion of what metadata is, an overview of why metadata collection and management is vital for digital projects, as well as some best practices and tools for helping students and faculty successfully document metadata in their own digital projects. 

SUL Staff Only: Thursday, January 16, 2013, 2:00 to 4:00

Code Management for Non-Programmers

Topics include an overview of code management principles, discussion of why code management is useful, as well as how it can be used not only for digital humanities projects but also in tasks inherent to the humanities and even library-oriented tasks. 

SUL Staff Only: Thursday, February 13, 2013, 2:00 to 4:00

Meta/Data Discovery Through Indexing

The focus of this workshop will be to cover the skills necessary for creating a SOLR index from digital project metadata. SOLR is an open source search platform that provides full-text search capabilities, hit highlighting, faceted searching, near real-time indexing, and more. If participants are currently working on a digital project, they are asked to bring with them a spreadsheet containing the metadata for their project. Any participants not having their own metadata will be provided sample metadata for use during the workshop.

SUL Staff Only: Thursday, March 13, 2013, 2:00 to 4:00

Preservation Strategies for Digital Projects

Topics include an overview of Data Preservation, a discussion of why it is necessary for the successful completion of digital projects, as well as providing both a short list of Data Preservation best practices for digital projects, and resources currently available from Stanford University Libraries.

SUL Staff Only: Thursday, May 15, 2013, 2:00 to 4:00