Panel Session # 2

About This Session

Advancing Open Access through Digital Services

Open Access (OA) activities to improve knowledge generation and dissemination in universities are rising. Several U.S. universities are considering the adoption of OA policies for their institutions. There are many digital services libraries can perform to advance the free access to scholarly and research knowledge such as managing information in open repositories and through publishing OA journals, producing conference proceedings, and capturing scholarly events such as distinguished lecture series and symposia. The example of the Georgia Tech Library and Information Center’s successful OA digital services, in existence for six years now, will be presented.

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database -- A Case Study in Transitioning to Open Access

When it was published in 1999, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database -- the merging of multiple decades of individual archival research on four centuries of trans-Atlantic slave trade -- pointed towards new directions in humanities scholarship. As a CD-ROM publication, however, it constrained much of the potential of new digital scholarship by limiting the frequency of updates and, through its price tag, potential users. Making this resource open access while simultaneously migrating it online expanded its audience and its potential use. At the same time, maintaining and developing an open access digital resource have highlighted the need for cultivating and expanding partnerships to sustain Voyages.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

 

Presenters

Photo of Tyler Walters

Tyler Walters

  • Dean of University Libraries and Professor at Virginia Tech
  • Founding Director of SHARE

Tyler Walters is the Dean of University Libraries, Virginia Tech. Previously Walters was the Associate Dean of the Library and Information Center, Georgia Institute of Technology. He was a 2008-2010 Fellow in the Association of Research Libraries'€™ Research Libraries Leadership Fellows program.

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Photo of David Eltis

David Eltis

  • Woodruff Professor of History, Department of History, Emory University
  • Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Emory University

David Eltis is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, Emory University. He has a Ph D from the University of Rochester, (1979). He is the author of Economic Growth and The Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, Oxford Univ.

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Photo of Elizabeth Milewicz

Elizabeth Milewicz

  • Post Doc Fellow, Department of History, Emory University
  • Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Emory University

Liz Milewicz holds a post-doctoral fellowship at Emory University, where she manages the NEH- funded African Origins Portal, an extension of Voyages that will engage public assistance in discovering the ethno-linguistic origins of Africans caught up in the slave trade.

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Logistics

When:

Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - 11:50am to 12:45pm

Where: