Book Chapters by Elizabeth Novara
Undergraduate Research and the Academic Librarian: Case Studies and Best Practices , 2017
Papers by Elizabeth Novara
College English, 2019
This essay examines the efficacy of an archive-based undergraduate public memory project in which... more This essay examines the efficacy of an archive-based undergraduate public memory project in which students held a transcribe-a-thon and invited their university community to take part in the crowdsourced digital transcription of a nineteenth-century woman’s diary. The authors offer a two-part analysis in which they reflect first on the rhetorical strategies their students used to craft invitations, publicize the event, and support participants in their digital transcriptions. Second, the authors assess students’ evaluations of the transcribe-a-thon as a relevant public memory genre that engages the public in women’s writing and history.
American Archivist , 2017
Producing exhibits is an important form of scholarly and creative activity for academic librarian... more Producing exhibits is an important form of scholarly and creative activity for academic librarians, archivists, and curators. While other forms of scholarship such as publishing a book or a peer-reviewed journal article are unquestionably accepted, exhibits are typically viewed as less intellectually rigorous. Through a literature review and a review of appointment, promotion, and tenure policies of selected Association of Research Libraries institutions with faculty status, this study seeks to uphold the creation of exhibits as a critical scholarly endeavor in the academic library and to provide guidance in evaluating exhibits as scholarship for library faculty, especially those working in archives and special collections. An overview of strategies for documentation and evaluation of exhibits as noteworthy scholarly communication is included. The recommendations provided can also assist nonacademic library and archival institutions to create high-quality exhibits of enduring value. Exhibits, digital humanities projects, and other forms of scholarship and creativity should be considered for promotion and tenure if presented in a compelling way to review communities.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, 2015
American Archivist 76, no.1, pages 196-214, May 2013
Collecting political papers related to women requires archivists to adopt a broader perspective t... more Collecting political papers related to women requires archivists to adopt a broader perspective than does collecting political papers in general. Special Collections at the University of Maryland, College Park, has collected the papers of women state legislators and other political materials related to women and women's issues for almost forty years and serves as one institutional example of documenting women in politics, more specifically women state legislators. This article identifies the unique challenges related to collecting the papers of women state legislators and provides general recommendations for developing basic collecting and selection criteria that incorporate critical thinking about women in elected office. A brief discussion about research use of the papers of women state legislators follows to illustrate how researchers utilize or neglect these collections for various reasons. Finally, this article demonstrates that even though women appear to be entering the political mainstream, archivists need to be continually vigilant of the complexities inherent in documenting women and other underrepresented groups in the American political landscape.
Archival Issues: Journal of the Midwest Archives Conference 35, no.1, pages 21-36, 2013
Unlike congressional and presidential papers collections, which have a rich archival literature i... more Unlike congressional and presidential papers collections, which have a rich archival literature in support of their acquisition and management, archivists and researchers frequently overlook and undervalue state legislators’ papers. One reason for undervaluing state legislators’ papers is the lack of legal guidelines in most states for ownership of these political papers. This article presents the results of a broad survey of state laws and collecting policies within state archives regarding the collecting of state legislators’ papers. Overall, archivists, lawmakers, and the general public need to become more aware of the value of state legislators’ papers, pass laws that protect and define ownership of state legislators’ papers, and advocate for greater collaboration between state archival programs and other archival repositories to ensure their preservation.
OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 26, no. 3, pages 166-176, 2010
Conference Presentations (Selected) by Elizabeth Novara
Women's History in the Digital World Conference, Maynooth University, Ireland, July 6, 2017, 2017
This presentation will explore the practical implementation of a collaborative teaching project f... more This presentation will explore the practical implementation of a collaborative teaching project focused on two student projects in an upper-level undergraduate English and Women’s Studies course. In Spring 2016 and 2017, a Curator/Special Collections Librarian and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, worked together to implement these projects in the classroom. The first project involved an online archival transcription project of a nineteenth century woman’s diary and the second project required students to research biographies of little-known American suffragists. Both these projects engaged students in “the archive” in different ways, taught a variety of information literacy and research skills, and allowed the students to “go public” with their projects in the physical and digital worlds. For the transcription project, the curator worked on realizing a transcription website focused on University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries’ special collections materials; providing historical context for and selecting the diary to be transcribed; and presenting an overview on special collections research. The instructional faculty member worked with the class in transcribing the material online, in providing context on similar public history projects, and creating a project for students in which they engaged in digital transcription and then reflected upon the historiographic and methodological complexities regarding both digital transcription as well as accessing and exploring women’s nineteenth-century archival materials. The students produced a reflective essay, a poster project for the university’s Undergraduate Research day, and provided critical feedback for the pilot crowdsourcing transcription website. In addition, in spring 2017 class, students worked to extend the public investment in and transcription of the diary and other documents beyond the class by holding a “Women’s Diaries Transcribe-A-Thon” at UMD. Here, the students ask the local community to participate in the transcription process in which the students recently gained expertise. To take up this work, students identified interested audiences, created publicity materials, and composed invitations to those audiences, prompting them to participate in the event. Additionally, the class collaboratively determined how the Transcribe-A-Thon would run. Together, they decided what kind of informational, contextual, or pedagogical materials they might provide users and how to provide one-on-one support during the event. The main goal of the transcription project was for students to do the real work of a historian and to engage in the production of a public memory project that asserted women’s historical presence in the digital landscape. The students also worked on writing a “crowdsourced” biography of a militant woman suffragist for the Alexander Street Press subscription database Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (WASM) which is edited by historians Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin. WASM sent out a call for assistance in writing these biographies and asked if professors would work with students to research and write these biographies. The more “traditional” biography project asked students to piece together of information, often lacking context, found in a variety of mostly digitized primary sources. In contrast to the transcription project, students had a very different view of a particular woman’s life and public engagement with the final product, the biography, is more limited. This presentation will provide an overview of the class projects and students’ learning, practical steps for implementing such projects in the classroom, and ideas for garnering feedback from students regarding these projects. Both of these students assignments produced new knowledge about individual women and made that knowledge more widely available to the public, but the research strategies used and public engagement with the archival sources were very different. Undergraduate student engagement with primary sources and special collections materials will be emphasized, as will the complexities inherent in engaging publically with digital texts particularly through crowdsourcing.
Reviews (Selected) by Elizabeth Novara
Women Archivists Roundtable Blog , Apr 7, 2014
Maryland Historical Magazine 108, no. 3, 2013
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Book Chapters by Elizabeth Novara
Papers by Elizabeth Novara
Conference Presentations (Selected) by Elizabeth Novara
Reviews (Selected) by Elizabeth Novara