Understanding the Evolution of the Academic Library Research Commons

Photo by Henry Be

I have been Research Commons Librarian for two-years now, and it's been a wonderful time learning this role and new service in an academic library.   There are only a handful of Research Commons Librarians in the world and as a new functional position that mostly specializes in supporting the research needs of graduate students, faculty, and researchers, every moment feels as if it's an evolutionary process, small steps that took leaps and bounds looking back.   One of the more interesting parts of the role is articulating the role of the Research Commons and how it fits into the existing services of the Library. “Research Commons” may mean different things to different people, but Elliot Felix has argued that if we take it as the umbrella term, we can see seven distinct roles or functions of a Research Commons:

• Club
• Service hub
• Studio
• Lab
• Incubator
• Connector
• Showcase

Research Commons has even entered the moniker of public libraries as evidenced in this update in Russia.   My research over the past two years has been examining the rise of the Research Commons and its evolution on the spectrum of the 'commons'.   Is it just space or a service?   In my view, it's really a careful and thoughtful blend of the two.   Here are some Research Commons around the world.  

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UBC's Research Commons

“a multidisciplinary hub supporting research endeavours, partnerships, and education. We are a community space that embraces both new and traditional exploratory scholarship and provides access to services and expertise for the advancement of research”

SFU's Research Commons

"Supports the research endeavours of the University community, with particular focus on graduate students during all stages of the research lifecycle - ideas, partners, proposal writing, research process, and publication - and provides easy access to both physical and virtual research resources."

McGill's Innovation Commons

"A technology-enhanced, collaborative space that brings together services and resources to support researchers. The Commons includes spaces, support, and equipment for integrating technology and research."

Duke University's The Edge: The Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology, and Collaboration

"The Edge extends Duke University Libraries’ mission by providing a collaborative space for interdisciplinary, data-driven, digitally reliant or team-based research."

University of Washington's Research Commons

• A place to collaborate and connect with fellow students and faculty on research projects
• A hub of support for graduate student research
• A venue for workshop and presentation opportunities

UCLA's Research Commons

"The center for the Research Library's flexible, technology-enabled spaces in which students and faculty can utilize library resources, conduct research, and collaborate with one another."

The Ohio State University's Research Commons

"Leverages campus partnerships to provide support services at each stage of the research lifecycle. It enhances the Libraries’ mission by providing a hub for collaborative, interdisciplinary research that is both expertise and technology enabled."

University of Illinois’ Scholarly Commons

"Is a technology enriched space for faculty, researchers, and graduate students to pursue research and receive expert copyright, data, digital humanities, digitization, scholarly communications, and usability consultation services. Scholarly Commons services are supported by experts in the Scholarly Commons, subject specialists at the University Library, and partners throughout campus."

Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Commons

"Innovatively-designed and specifically-zoned to meet the research needs of postgraduate students, researchers and faculty."

University of Maryland’s Research Commons

"Including the GIS and Spatial Data Center and the Media Lab, it expands the boundaries of the traditional library through support in core areas such as research organization, statistical and geospatial analysis, data visualization, and media production."

University of New Brunswick’s Research Commons

"A modern, interdisciplinary, research-driven learning environment to further innovation, scholarship, and research at UNB."

New York University's Research Commons

"comprises quiet and collaborative spaces on Floor 5. The staff, technology, equipment, and furnishings you’ll find in the Research Commons ensure that users can work with maximum productivity."

COVID-19 and the Residue It Leaves Us as a Society

COVID-19, the disease that causes a respiratory illness with flu-like symptoms, has forever changed and reshaped the way the society has comfortably settled in for the past century of the industrial and information era.    Unless if one is in a remote part of the world untied to society, everyone has been affected by the political, economic, and social consequences.

Zoom - If it weren't popular already for companies using videoconferencing for telecommuting, the Zoom app has shot up to ubiquity for most who are now working from home, with one media outlet christening it as the "darling of remote workers."   It's quickly becoming a verb for those who need to community digitally over the web and sits atop as of the most popular free apps in dozens of countries.   It speaks the future of working for those who don't need an office or an organization that doesn't necessarily need to spare physical spaces for its workforce, particularly as workers become disposable upon projects.  It's an eerie

Amazon - "Coronavirus Is Speeding Up the Amazonification of the Planet" as one article puts it, and as restaurants, bars, and local shops close down, Amazon is quickly swooping to fill the void of customers and jobs.  Amazon is taking advantage of the gap by welcoming these unemployed staffers "until things return to normal and their past employer is able to bring them back" - which of course may take a while -- or never -- depending on the economic damage of Covid-19. The consumer shift to online retailers from physical storefronts has been happening already, and this may be the tipping point in accelerating the takeover over the retail market.   I can't blame Amazon.  I simply can purchase more items instantaneously with a click of a button and forget about it until it arrives at my front door.

Netflix - In this age of the pandemic, who isn't streaming from an online service during those quiet quarantine hours into the night?   It seems like what entertained you yesterday evening on Netflix has become watercooler talk.   Aside from its entertainment, Netflix has really driven home the ubiquity of streaming collections and digital platforms that consumers now rely on more so than ever along with broadband internet.  Of course, it's not just Netflix, but other services such as Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO GO, and Xfinity.   While on the one hand this divergence away from the cable networks and big Hollywood may appear to disrupt traditional media platforms, has it really changed anything? It seems that much of the same monolithic and cultural hegemony continues albeit in another technology.    The question remains, what's really changed after this is all over?

Text Analysis: A Hermeneutical Exercise

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I'll be teaching a short intro workshop on text analysis using Voyant, an open-source, web-based application.   Geoffrey Rockwell (Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, Canada) and Stéfan Sinclair (Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at McGill University) developed the application to support scholarly reading and interpretation of texts or corpus, particularly by scholars in the digital humanities.   I've been reading their text, Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities, to brush up on my knowledge in the teaching of the session to get to teach Using Voyant and the NLTK for Text Analysis.

 This video is part of the #dariahTeach platform (http://teach.dariah.eu), an open-source, community-driven platform for teaching and training materials for the digital arts and humanities.  As part of the course Introduction to Digital Humanities and the series Digital Humanities in Practice, this video discusses text visualization in Digital Humanities, emphasising that visualisation is not the end product but an intellectual process of thinking and interpreting text.

In their book in Hermeneutica, Rockwell and Sinclair suggest:

"In the slippage between our literary notion of a text and the computer's literal processing lie the disappointment and the possibility of text analysis.  Computers cannot understand a text for us.  They can, however, do things that may surprise us."