Illustration of artificial neural network

Scholarly communications and inclusivity: Solutions that help to bridge digital divide between countries

Posted on July 28, 2023 by Paolo Mangiafico

This is the fifth and final in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2023 and their projects.

The Internet has altered how we see, perceive, and move within the world. While access to travel and shopping has become more prevalent, the reliability of educational resources has been taken for granted. The rise of the Internet’s tool, Chat GPT, is a pre-trained Artificial Intelligence chatbot providing natural conversations and mostly accurate, appropriate, and personal responses to almost any question.

Our team comprises five practitioners from diverse institutions, collaborating to assist first-year students in their pre-requisite courses with critically, ethically, and thoughtfully using Chat GPT in post-secondary work. Our initiative will enable us to create a video series, short and long-form social media videos, Lib Guides, FAQ Handouts, mentoring and tutoring sessions. We plan to work with various departments such as records, writing centers, student life, and the registrar’s offices at our respective institutions to disseminate our content to as many incoming students as possible.

While we can see the allure of free and instant responses to inquiries, Chat GPT is not flawless, and it has some limitations. The processing tool lacks creativity and the ability to assess information and texts critically, give solutions from its data, and to justify if the responses are right, wrong, or inappropriate. It is with these hindrances in mind that we want to teach students to utilize Chat GPT as an additional resource rather than becoming dependent on it. We want to instill in students the skills to trust their research fully.

We know that as practitioners at various institutions in higher education, we will face many issues. We all work at minority-serving institutions and are aware that we face a different set of challenges. With the growing capability of AI and in a digital native generation that implicitly trusts the Internet, students of color enter institutions of higher education less academically prepared. They need more access to technologically advanced tools; their institutions receive less funding and have less academic rigor and prestige. Although these obstacles can affect the success and retention of first-year students, it is our goal to alleviate some of the obstacles they may have with research assignments. As scholars, we have a keen awareness of the needs of our institutions. Bringing together four librarians and an English professor/Ph.D. student is an intentional combination of ambitious, competent, sincere academics committed to student success. Together, we will interact with students throughout their entire educational journeys.

The librarians encounter new students earliest in their matriculation can help reduce library anxiety, foster new relationships, and provide creative ways to orient students with available resources. The librarian who interacts mostly with graduate students can identify areas in the resources that need emphasis to better prepare students for more advanced and complex research assignments in undergraduate school and beyond. The English professor comes across the students in the midst of their degree pursuit and can hone in on the specifics of interpreting and understanding primary and secondary sources. Lastly, the graduate librarian intermingles with advanced students and aids in the particulars of data analysis, collection development, and digitizing information. We will proactively, rather than reactively, meet weekly to sort out any current issues that could serve as barriers to completing our goal. Within these different sectors of education, we are a dynamic committee and can fully serve our students in meeting their academic goals.

Participants

The team is bringing together a group of four academic librarians and an English professor/PhD candidate. We are a dynamic and diverse group with varied experiences and expertise who serve at minority serving institutions (MSIs) in the United States and the Caribbean.

Renise Johnson
Head of Access Services/Systems Librarian at Morgan State University at Earl S. Richardson Library. Morgan State University is an HBCU in Baltimore, Maryland. Ms. Johnson is currently the library liaison to the School of Social Work, School of Education & Urban Studies, and School of Business Management. In her role, she teaches information literacy to both undergraduate and graduate students. The experience of working with a multiracial, multi- ethnic, and multinational population will bring an understanding of the challenges that this community faces as it relates to academic integrity. Moreover, Ms. Johnson understands what is needed to help students where English is not their first language. A large population of students at MSU comes to see librarians after they have received a failing grade as a result of plagiarism. Developing these resources will help students to avoid the potential pitfalls of academic dishonesty.
Sabrina Dyck
Ms. Dyck is a dedicated professional with extensive experience in education and library services. With over ten years of teaching experience spanning K-12 and community colleges, she brings a wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective to her work. Her expertise lies in areas such as First-Year-Experience (FYE), instruction, library outreach, and research design. Throughout her career, Ms. Dyck has served in various roles, including as a high school history teacher and library media specialist in Alabama’s Black Belt Region. She later transitioned to the field of library science, working as a Reference and Instruction Librarian at different institutions. With a focus on serving diverse student populations, particularly those from minority-serving institutions and underserved communities in the rural South, she is passionate about addressing their research behaviors and information needs. In her current role, Ms. Dyck serves as a community college librarian where she acts as a bridge between K-12 and higher education. She provides invaluable guidance on introducing scholarly communications to students within the classroom setting, emphasizing the importance of adapting to technological advancements like AI technologies in scholarship across all education levels.
Rachael Falu
Ms. Falu is a full-time Ph.D. student and adjunct professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. Before relocating to Maryland, Ms. Falu was an Associate Professor at Chattanooga State Community College, teaching several Composition and African American Literature courses. Her area of specialty is mid-19th-20th century African American Literature and American Gothicism. Ms. Falu wants to contribute to the conversation that examines the history of American slavery and its dark aftermath and provides a vehicle for understanding the specific terrors in American Gothic Literature. After completing her degree, Ms. Falu hopes to earn a tenure-track position at an institution of higher education.
Karen Tyrell
Mrs. Karen Tyrell has been a Reference Librarian at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Science, and Engineering Branch Library since 2018. As a Reference Librarian, Mrs. Tyrell is expected to provide current and up-to-date research resources for undergraduates, postgraduates, and faculty for research purposes and cater to other information needs. She conducts Information Literacy sessions teaching students how to navigate the UWI OPAC (UWILinC). She facilitates searching numerous databases to find scholarly resources to complete assignments and research projects on various topics. She has worked in the library environment since 1992. Her research agenda focuses on Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning (CPDWL), metadata creation, and reference services. Mrs. Tyrell has attended several IFLA/NASIG conferences, seminars, and workshops to broaden her knowledge and skill set while building and enhancing her network profile both locally and internationally. Mrs. Tyrell is also the Liaison Librarian for the Faculty of Science and Technology in the Chemistry Department, Earthquake Unit, Agriculture and International Centre for Environmental and Nuclear Sciences Unit.
Anidza Valentin, Ph.D
Dr. Anidza Valentín is currently the Library Director at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, coordinator of the Center for the Development of Information Literacy and Bibliographic Research and the library liaison of the Business Administration School and Kinesiology Department. She develops and offers workshops, online guides, and videos for the entire academic community on reference management tools, citation styles, searching strategies, tools to identify plagiarism and academic dishonesty. In addition, she offers an interdisciplinary course in library research methods to undergraduate students. Dr. Valentin also develops and manages content for the official Library website and social media and administers our Springshare platform. She has participated as a speaker at various conferences and has attended the NYU Faculty Resource Network Summer Program on two occasions.

Each institution represented by the assembled diverse and inclusive team will significantly benefit from the knowledge gained and the products derived from their participation in the Scholarly Communication Institute. At the same time, the Institute will gain from the unique perspectives that can bring individuals with such different backgrounds and life experiences. Furthermore, the geographically dispersed areas of the convened team members will widen the institute’s impact from a regional to an international level.

The deliverable from this collaboration will provide resources to aid researchers with the challenges and benefits of incorporating artificial intelligence chatbots into the scholarly communication system, particularly concerning the ethical consequences of its use, authorship, originality, and plagiarism. As a result of this team’s participation in the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute, a series of multilingual learning objects exploring the use of ChatGPT will be created using a free digital animation software. Videos will include captions in English and Spanish. All created resources will be freely and widely available via a LibGuide hosted by one of the institutions and could be used at future campus events such as welcoming week, library orientation, Freshman and International Student Orientation and more. If opportunities arise, the team also plans to disseminate the results of the experience by presenting at local and regional professional events or conferences.

During the preparation of this proposal, under the leadership of Renise Johnson, the team met via Google Meet for one hour per week to brainstorm ideas and establish the parameters of this collaboration. The team will continue its weekly meetings until the start of the institute. We will collaborate on the best approaches to share these resources among our campus, faculty, staff, and other campus-wide stakeholders, and we will devise strategies for publicizing our initiative among undergraduate students at our respective institutions. Participating in Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute will provide an arena to vet this project with other higher education professionals. These resources will be used to bring awareness of this new and innovative natural language processing tool driven by AI technology and how to effectively utilize this technology within the educational environment, especially as it relates to student scholarship. This opportunity will help us to develop a collaborative model between different countries that will build a bridge between these four universities and could serve as a model for other higher education institutions.

[ Illustration by mikemacmarketing used under CC-BY license and photo by vnwayne fan used under Unsplash license ]

Photo of many security cameras mounted on a wall

Resisting Surveillance in Scholarly Publishing

Posted on July 27, 2023 by Paolo Mangiafico

This is the fourth in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2023 and their projects.

“Academic research is meant to be a public good, not a data-collection tool for private data broker companies. Academic research providers should be focused on supplying high-quality academic journals to the public, not on collecting and crunching researchers’ data to make more money.”¹

We would like to explore the use of surveillance technologies in scholarly publishing, with the goal of helping both authors and journals push back against the problematic surveillance practices endemic in the industry.

Scholarly authors, including libraries and the library workers that support them, face an industry dominated by extremely profitable companies determined to extract all possible value from every stage of the research process. These firms are incredibly effective at extracting profits, for example, “Elsevier operates at a 37% reported operating profit margin compared to Springer Nature which operates at a 23% margin.”² For many of these companies, surveillance publishing (or what they call “data analytics”) have become essential tools to aid them in this extraction of value. In the recent book “Data Cartels”, Sarah Lamdan uses the example of Elsevier to demonstrate how “the companies’ millions of academic research materials are ideal data vectors – data analytics companies can put their research databases online and collect tons of personal data about both the people who write the materials and the people who access them.”³

Lamdan notes that these big publishers have been rebranding themselves to emphasise their role as “data analytics brokers”.⁴ Lamdan’s research started with one of the most problematic applications of these strategies: the relationship that two of these major publishers (Relx [Elsevier] and Thomson Reuters) have with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), helping build a massive surveillance network that helped ICE conduct extreme vetting and imprison and deport people “who’d lived in the United States their whole lives.”⁵ The ICE example may be the most egregious, but Lamdan goes on to highlight other examples of this exploitation of author and user data that authors deserve to know.

This brings us to trust…

Scholarly authors trust publishers to be responsible stewards of their intellectual property and personal information. The vast majority of scholarly journal authors publish for free, or at a significant cost in the form of an article processing charge to publish open access (OA), shocking though this is to many readers.

In addition, readers need to trust publishers. Much as scholarly authors may be shocked at the cost to an individual reader to access their articles, they may be shocked that the publisher is collecting data on readers to monetize as part of their data analytics programs.

Publishers effectively launder the trust of authors with that of readers: authors choose journals based on their perceived quality, often based on metrics; readers in turn choose those same journals based on the quality, including based on who publishes there. Understanding data collection of publishers has become an unexpected task both of scholarly authors, and of readers. ACRL’s Information Literacy Framework reminds us that information has value – in this case, we see that even the data created by publishing and reading information has value, in this case as a commodity.

The use of surveillance technologies detracts from trust in scholarly publishing, and authors and readers deserve transparency about how their data is being used. We need to increase awareness of these issues across the scholarly publishing ecosystem and give authors and librarians tools to better advocate on behalf of both author and users. This project would build on the research done by Sarah Lamdan and others, and offer outreach in partnership with the Library Freedom Project.

What are the challenges?

There are a variety of challenges related to both the research we plan on doing and our proposed outputs.

First, the landscape is vast, and scoping our project correctly will help us create useful and effective outputs for both authors and users. Second, determining suitable criteria and standards to use to evaluate publisher practices will be more challenging than with the original scorecard where existing NISO guidelines were used (see “Sharing our Results” below for context). We will need to determine if we can re-purpose the NISO guidelines, or if new criteria will need to be found or created. Third, we will also need to consult with publishers, who would surely say that they are doing their fiduciary duty with regards to this data as the law stands, so there will be an element of negotiation there. Fourth, for the best practices guide, we may need to consult experts outside of the core group in order to build suitable model policies and contracts. Fifth, there are many other groups engaged in this type of work, like SPARC and the Author’s Alliance. We will need to build and strengthen existing relationships to ensure that this work complements and does not overlap with the work that they are doing.

The virtue of bringing together this team together

Libraries, and librarians, are central to supporting the publication process at universities, particularly as it relates to OA publishing. Libraries support scholar-led OA journals and monographs, manage repositories, teach and provide guidance, and help researchers navigate the increasingly complex open publishing environment dominated by APCs and transformative agreements.
Library workers also consider privacy to be one of the core values of the profession, and many academic librarians “identify privacy as foundational to a library’s mission (ALA 2017b)”.⁶ The Library Freedom Project is a network of values-driven librarian-activists taking action together to build information democracy and is the ideal group to do this work. This is why we have selected a diverse group of academic and public librarians, most of whom are Library Freedom Project members, to embark on this work.

Our group includes two librarians who focus on supporting both OA publishing and scholar-led journals, and a number of Library Freedom Project members that represent varied perspectives, backgrounds, and expertise.

Sharing our Results

With that context, we propose the creation of three complementary outputs that will be the result of our participation in the Institute.

The first output will be a scorecard (or something similar) to help authors consider (library values, ethics, etc.) when determining where to publish. One of the most popular initiatives of the LFP has been the vendor privacy scorecard, which examined major library vendor policies and graded them “against a common rubric and practices were denoted as being good privacy practices, areas of concern, or privacy practices that were incompatible with library privacy values”.

We plan to create something similar for a set of major journal publishers, including both the oligopoly publishers and the major OA mega journals, so that authors would be able to determine what journals were the most trustworthy in their stewardship of author intellectual property and corresponding personal data. Consideration will be given to a variety of factors, including: the presence or lack of an author data policy, whether there is any opacity in terms of where author data is shared, and the degree to which authors have some control over the use of their data via opt-ins or or other mechanisms. While the primary audience for the scorecard will be scholarly authors, it also offers a means to assess trust and user tracking more holistically across a given publisher’s practices. Librarians can use this scorecard as they work both with scholarly authors and with researchers – for example, fitting into information literacy instruction under the frame Information Has Value, as noted above.

A corresponding brief will also accompany the scorecard, with contextual information about each category considered. It will also include a set of questions for authors to ask publishers when publishing their work.

The second is a best practices guide for journals and scholarly publishers that wish to resist surveillance capitalism in the publishing process. This guide would help journal publishers create policies and procedures that align with this goal, and may include model contract language. We would also include recommendations for communicating this resistance to users, and detailed guidelines for implementing procedures within journal publishing platforms like OJS and repository platforms like DSpace.

The third will be a paper that includes the methodology used to develop both of the first two outputs. This paper could be published in a journal like the “Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communications” or the “Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship”. We will also create a corresponding slide deck that can be used at conferences to share our research.

We see these contributions as supporting individual scholarly authors, journal publishers, and scholarly communications librarians, but in service of addressing more holistic problems within publishing. Because librarians work with authors, readers, and publishers, they make an important secondary audience for these outputs, which we hope will help librarians understand the stakes and what they can do to start to make change.

Membership

Mark Swartz (he/him) is the Scholarly Publishing Librarian at the Queen’s University Library in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In this role, he supports OA publishing at the university, including many OA journals, an open monograph press, and an institutional repository. Mark recently completed a 5 year secondment as a Visiting Program Officer with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) where he was engaged in a wide variety of library related policy issues, including privacy, copyright, and online harms/misinformation. Mark is a member of the Library Freedom Project and his passion for open access publishing, fair copyright, and privacy will drive his contributions to the Institute.
Graeme Slaght (he/him) is the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Outreach Librarian at the University of Toronto Libraries. His work focuses on scholarly publishing literacy and outreach to undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty, and on implementing and advocating for balanced copyright policies and practices. As part of his work in the Scholarly Communications & Copyright Office at U of T, Graeme has been involved in negotiating and assessing e-resource licences, and will bring that experience working with publishers to bear on this project.
Kelly McElroy (she/her) is the Student Engagement and Community Outreach Librarian and an Associate Professor at Oregon State University. Her work focuses on information literacy and outreach to undergraduates, and she also serves as a liaison librarian in the social sciences. She is a member of the Library Freedom Project, and has worked on privacy outreach and training to students, faculty, and library workers.
Andrea Puglisi (she/her): A privacy advocate through Library Freedom Project, Andrea’s career in public and academic libraries has focused on the relationship between people and their use of technology and educating communities on the skills needed to safely navigate the digital information landscape. As Digital Initiatives/Technology Librarian at Westfield State University, Andrea is also responsible for their upcoming digital repository, and brings an understanding of the impact of monetized digital information systems on learning, discourse and polarisation.
Danielle Colbert-Lewis (she/her) is the Head of Research and Instructional Services at the North Carolina Central University (NCCU), James E. Shepard Memorial Library. Librarian expertise includes the following areas: reference, information literacy, utilizing legal resources, First-Year Experience, government documents, institution repository, scholarly communications, and library programming. She is a member of the Library Freedom Project and educates library staff on the importance of privacy.
lawrence maminta (they/them) is a librarian and definitely not a fugitive from North Long Beach, CA. They do reference and instruction work in community college settings while specializing in protecting users’ personally identifiable information (PII). A few years ago, lawrence conned their way into joining the Library Freedom Project and no one’s been the wiser.

Footnotes

Sarah Lamdan, Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 44.
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, “Research Companies: Elsevier,” SPARC: Community Owned Infrastructure, accessed April 25, 2023, https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/landscape-analysis/elsevier.
Lamdan, Data Cartels, 37.
Lamdan, 36.
Lamdan, 4.
Callan Bignoli et al., “Resisting Crisis Surveillance Capitalism in Academic Libraries,” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 7 (December 15, 2021): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.33137/cjalrcbu.v7.36450.

Bibliography

Bignoli, Callan, Sam Buechler, Deborah Caldwell, and Kelly McElroy. “Resisting Crisis Surveillance Capitalism in Academic Libraries.” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 7 (December 15, 2021): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjalrcbu.v7.36450.
Coalition, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources. “Research Companies: Elsevier.” SPARC: Community Owned Infrastructure. Accessed April 25, 2023. https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/landscape-analysis/elsevier.
Lamdan, Sarah. Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.

[ Photos by Lianhao Qu and ev used under Unsplash license ]

Photo of Chetham's Library reading room. The library is one of the oldest public libraries in Britain. Located in Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, UK.

Trust and the Archive: New Methodologies for Inclusion

Posted on July 26, 2023 by Paolo Mangiafico

This is the third in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2023 and their projects.

The Issue

US-and UK-based archives have historically excluded people of color both within the historical materials deemed worthy of preservation and as users of those documents. Many archives, in fact, were founded on the notion of exclusion. Joseph Quincy Adams, the first director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, for instance, celebrated its opening in 1932 with a speech that praised the library as a repository of the “Anglo-Saxon” culture that would serve as a bulwark against immigration and miscegenation. Additionally, cataloguing and archival guides were often constructed when race was not deemed a worthy topic of research, a practice that often still curtails deep engagement with archival holdings. There is also a startling lack of diversity among those who maintain the archives: 82% of the archivists currently working in the United States are white. As a result, regardless of intent, the archive is primarily an edifice of whiteness that reflects its desired users. Sculptures, paintings, portraits, photos, statues, busts and friezes, pamphlets and brochures, maps, catalogs, as well as the faces of staff, and other researchers signal to people of color that the archive is a place designed by and for white users. All of this impacts both who has access to the archives, their experience working with staff and leadership, and how they use its materials (see Ashley Farmer “Archiving While Black”). Generations of archival researchers have been excluded, shamed, and made to feel unwelcome in spaces that need their expertise and unique points of view. One casualty of their experience is trust.

Despite these challenges, it is important to consider that archives are both “vital active sites of social justice and injustice” and they “both constitute and enact injustices but also are central to justice” (Saucier and Wallace, Archives, Recordkeeping and Social Justice). In this especially urgent political moment when the study of the past, especially as it relates to race, is under assault from various sources, upholding the value of ethical archival methodologies, making those methodologies more transparent, and inviting new publics into archival communities is essential. While brick and mortar repositories can sometimes function as mausoleums (indeed, have sometimes been designed to serve this purpose), they also have the capacity to serve as anchor institutions, spaces that support efforts at connection, meaningful exchange, and community building. For legacy institutions in particular to engage in this work “archive” must become synonymous with “access,” “equity,” and with “open source,” and must balance sober reverence with joy and play. Trust in archives as open and available must be earned and built: by acknowledging and making visible the invisible barriers designed to restrict access; through transparency about process so that the unwritten rules of the archive are legible to new users; and by destabilizing the fictions of ownership (provenance) that haunt its catalogs.

This diverse, international team of art historians, curators, historians, and literary scholars proposes a project on trust as both verb and noun–acting to build it with new readers especially those it has historically excluded, and to reimagine the archive as a community trust with a binding relationship of shared responsibility. In the first instance we assert the need for intentional practices that require time and sustained resources, and in the second, the clear articulation of how trustee institutions will serve the beneficiary public. Our work attends to our shared goal of addressing practices of exclusion and is rooted in the belief that meaningful work that disrupts exclusionary systems and practices happens when specialists apply their experiences and expertise to a common problem. We know that trust is key to ensuring that new practices offer sustainable interventions that can become embedded in every archival mechanism rather than just quick ‘tick-boxing’ exercises.

Project Team

Our team represents experts with various vantage points on the archives and how they shape the way we understand the past. We all work with both professional and public communities to bring new, diverse voices into traditional institutions. We are a multicultural, cross-institutional, international group of scholars, teachers, and leaders. Some of us are charged with maintaining archives and making them accessible to a diverse community (Patricia Akhimie and Karin Wulf). We interpret the archives for the public in various mediums (Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth and Patricia Matthew), and we lead initiatives that develop new ways to disseminate analyses (Kim F. Hall, Ayanna Thompson, and Karin Wulf). Several of us are faculty at Minority Serving Institutions (Patricia Akhimie, Patricia Matthew, and Ayanna Thompson). In particular, we have worked with children and young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds in London, across the UK, and in the US to show that everyone deserves access to the archive, its history and its potential as a tool for public engagement. This has included object-handling sessions, re-making sessions and co-curated exhibitions (Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth and Kim F. Hall). Our projects are international in focus with particular attention to transatlantic cultural history and representations of race.

SCI will enable us to deepen the impact of the projects we develop and to bring them back to our different disciplines and institutions, here and abroad (the group includes international participants). Although some of us have done research at repositories in the South, being together at SCI will help us decenter our own primary locations. It will be a geographic prompt that helps us consider how the Black, Indigenous and local repositories in the South are deeply, but perhaps differently, affected by the issues we are raising.

We all work with an understanding that social media’s various platforms can amplify the work of scholars of color, lead to community building, and make important social challenges transparent to a cross-section of academics and the public. Our team:

focuses on pre-1900 transatlantic culture, arts, and politics
interrogates archival practices
roots its methodologies, critical framework, and analyses in Critical Race Theory
navigates the exclusionary practices we plan to address in our project
engages with a broad public, beyond the academy, speaking to different industries about the role of humanities in society

Team member profiles:

Patricia Akhimie is Director of the Folger Institute, the scholarly hub of the Folger Shakespeare Library, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of early modern books, manuscripts, and other rare materials. Through innovative scholarly programs and fellowships, she works to increase access to the Folger’s resources, broaden the scholarly conversations that the library sponsors, and connect humanities scholars with the public. Her research has been supported by the NEH and Ford Foundation as well as archives including the Folger, National Sporting Library, and John Carter Brown Library. Akhimie is also Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she received the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (2018), and editor of Othello for the Arden Shakespeare 4th series and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, both forthcoming. Akhimie’s public facing work includes projects with Reconstruction.us, an online education company; the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival; Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company; the Public Theatre; and the PBS series Great Performances. She also serves as Director of the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network, which supports an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars at various career stages studying race in the premodern era (antiquity to the 17th century).
Kim F. Hall is Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College where she teaches courses in Critical Race Studies, Black Feminist Studies, and material culture. Her book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, helped create the field known as premodern critical race studies. She has written on the racialization of the archives and has taught and lectured widely on questions of race and culture to everyone from Black sororities to middle and high school teachers to college communities. Additionally, she has taught art practices in programs for placed-at-risk students, quilt guilds, and senior centers. The Barnard College Library named her their first “Faculty Partner of the Year,” and she led the effort to acquire the Ntozake Shange Collection at Barnard College which has helped renew the college archive as a feminist space. Diverse Issues in Higher Education named her one of “25 Women Making a Difference in Higher Education and Beyond” largely based on her “Digital Shange Project” in which undergraduates use digital tools and archival research to learn about Shange’s work and legacy. She has won several prestigious fellowships, including a National Humanities Center Fellowship; a Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; an NEH fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago; and an ACLS fellowship. HBCU and other Black archives play a large role in her current project, Othello Was My Grandfather’: Shakespeare and Race in the African Diaspora.
Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth is an art historian and curator specialising in the visual and material cultures of early modern Europe. She is Lecturer in French and British History of Art c.1650-1900 at the University of Edinburgh. Caroline was previously Curator of 1600-1800 Ceramics & Glass in the Department of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She is Co-Investigator on the pioneering science heritage public engagement CapCo Project Making London Porcelain funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council with the V&A, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and Newham Borough in London. She is currently writing two books, one on the art collector and philanthropist Lady Charlotte Schreiber for Lund Humphries (2024), and a monograph entitled Sèvres-mania: The Craft of Ceramics Connoisseurship for Bloomsbury Academic (2025). Caroline regularly acts as an advisor for museums and ceramics collections, including: the Victoria & Albert Museum, Art UK Ceramics Strategy, Doddington Hall, Winterthur Museum and Bristol Art Museum.
Patricia A. Matthew (team leader) is associate professor of English at Montclair State University and a specialist in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She has edited and co-edited journal issues (Romantic Pedagogy Commons, European Romantic Review, and Studies in Romanticism); the edited volume Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and is co-editor of the new Oxford University Press series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she has written about Regency, race, and popular culture for The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement. In 2020-2021 she was a Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUNY Buffalo, and in 2022-2023 she was the Anthony E. Kaye Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her forthcoming work includes the Wondrium/audible.com lecture “Pride and Prejudice in the 21^st Century.” She is currently writing a book about Britain’s sugar boycott, gender, and abolitionist visual culture for Princeton University Press and editing Mansfield Park for The Norton Library.
Ayanna Thompson is a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). In 2021, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Thompson is the author of numerous books, including Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach, co-authored with Laura Turchi (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), and Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011). As a supporter of collaborative endeavors, she founded the RaceB4Race symposia and networking series for scholars who specialize in premodern critical race studies. Through this collective, she has worked closely with several important archives to host the symposia, including the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Newberry Library. She also organized the Huntington Library’s conference, “Imagining Shakespeare in 2050: Performance/Archives,” which invited the leading artistic directors and Shakespeare librarians to think about their entwined futures. Thompson is also known for her public facing work with theater companies. Thompson serves as a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theater in New York, and currently serves on the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Parks Arts Foundation, and Play On Shakespeare. She is a past-President of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Karin Wulf is Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director & Librarian at the John Carter Brown Library, and Professor of History at Brown University. A historian of “Vast Early America,” from 2013 to 2021 she was the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and Professor of History at William & Mary. She is finishing Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in 18^th Century British America for Oxford University Press and is under contract to complete Genealogy: a Very Short Introduction, also for OUP. She was the academic co-director for the Georgian Papers Programme, was appointed by Governor Ralph Northam to the Virginia 250 commission, is a board member for the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation Inc., and is a co-founder of Women Also Know History. At the JCB, a library of the early Americas, she is leading a Welcome and Access Plan that prioritizes programming, staffing, and transparency about stewarding legacy collections in a library of colonialism, and that is focused through renovations of its physical and digital space on how the library can invite and welcome the broadest group of researchers and visitors.

Future Projects

The projects that emerge from the SCI will offer those engaged in archival work–those who maintain them and those who use them–new languages, tools, and ideas that can lead to more openness and access and a more nuanced understanding of how to work with its materials.

To facilitate this, the first project will be a virtual symposium that reexamines Cheryl Harris’ landmark essay “Whiteness as Property.” Given that the materials that archives hold in trust often either originate as or become white property, Harris’ thinking has particular salience to the communities we hope to reach.

The Harris symposium will be used as the foundation for the second project –a white paper about trust and the archives. Following the model of a similar essay about academic gatekeeping published by the RaceB4Race Collective (led by Ayanna Thompson), this white paper will offer practical advice for inclusion but also reflect on the necessity of reading against archival structures.

Based on the philosophical and ethical discussions sparked by the “Whiteness as Property” symposium and the praxis proposed in our white paper, our future projects will bring students, creatives, and independent researchers into ongoing conversations about legacies, access, and trust. Relatedly, we plan to provide tools for institutions wishing to build trust with previously disenfranchised communities. These tools will help institutions think about resources they can make available to the neighborhoods they inhabit (or have displaced). Other activities will include:

A collaborative project at Brown University and the John Carter Brown Library on “Monumental Archives.” This project would explore how the spaces of archives have often echoed the colonial and imperial hierarchies of their holdings with a specific focus on trust that explores how the critical archives turn in scholarship and the work of librarians and archivists in critical archives studies can and should (but have not regularly) learn from and enhance one another.
A research proposal workshop that brings junior scholars, artists, or others and consults together in an archive like the Folger Library to create a list of potential archives and related residential fellowships for which the proposed project might be appropriate.
A public engagement workshop working with key local community groups including school children, targeting 15-18-year-olds, to consider what young people can and should access from archives. We will do an object-handling session and ask participants to interpret these objects by considering the opportunities offered from holding a piece of history in their hands.

[ Photo of Chetham’s Library reading room by Michael D Beckwith used under CC-BY license. Photo of archival book by Patricia Matthew, used by permission. ]

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