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Fondren Digital Scholarship Services

Welcome to the Fondren Digital Scholarship Services newsletter! In this publication, we highlight services, tools and collections of interest to the Rice community. We also share staff news and spotlight recent collaborations.

We welcome feedback on this newsletter and questions about Digital Scholarship Services. Contact cds@rice.edu or 713-348-2480.

DSS Services Move Online

Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) partners with faculty, students and staff to advance research, teaching and creative expression in the digital age, offering expertise and access to facilities and tools. Although staff have been working remotely, many of our services have transitioned online. In addition, we have developed new services and resources to address this unique situation.

The Digital Media Commons (DMC) transitioned many of its workshops to an online (Zoom) format. Staff also provided virtual consultations on a number of topics including Zoom, Zotero, Photoshop, Tableau, and Blender. The DMC was featured in a recent Rice News story about library remote services.

In collaboration with Rice’s Center for Research Computing and volunteer instructors Mauro Lepore and Jackson Hoffart, Research Data Services hosted a six-hour online workshop on R (programming language) based on the Software Carpentry curriculum.

The GIS/Data Center has provided virtual consultations to support a range of research projects, including a student digital storytelling project about COVID-19 in Brazil.

The Kelley Center for Government Information staff developed guide to doing qualitative research online and co-developed a COVID-19 guide.

DSS is working with the Woodson Research Center to develop a project called "Covid-19-Reflections" which will invite online contributions of Rice and Houston-area stories, journal entries, and images documenting the experience of this pandemic.

Data Workshops Offered Via Zoom

The Data @ Rice Workshop Series, sponsored by Fondren Library and the Center for Research Computing, provides hands-on training in the basics of organizing, documenting, analyzing, and visualizing your data. Summer sessions will be offered via Zoom. Course descriptions and registration can be found on the library website .

RDSA Now Accepting Coronavirus Research

The Rice Digital Scholarship Archive (RDSA) provides global access to research and scholarship produced at Rice University. It has long served as the online home for Rice theses and dissertations, faculty, staff, and student work, and historical documents and images. The archive is now also available for new uses, such as:

COVID-19 research and/or data.
For those who have had to cancel events or shift to virtual meetings and conferences, the RDSA can serve as a place presenters can share conference papers and other presentation materials.

Benefits of using the RDSA include:

Visibility: When you deposit your work in the RDSA, it becomes available to search engines as part of a worldwide network of research collections–your peers worldwide will be able to find it quickly. Items can also be assigned DOIs, which further helps with citation and discovery.
Stability: Each item deposited in the RDSA gets a permanent, citable, linkable URL that will not change or break over time.
Longevity: The RDSA provides long-term storage for your materials by managing backups, and ensuring that your work remains accessible at a stable location on the Web and available to search engines. RDSA will help keep works in common file formats up to date, ensuring that as technology and formats evolve, your work will remain accessible and usable.

For more information, see the DSS blog or contact cds@rice.edu.

Library Promotes OER

As instructors prepare for the Fall semester, DSS encourages them to consider incorporating Open Educational Resources (OER), when appropriate. OER are teaching and learning resources that are licensed in a way that allows anyone to freely use and re-purpose them. Examples of OER include textbooks, syllabi, lectures, learning activities, assignments, and tests. Benefits of using OER include customization of course materials, easy online access, and reducing student cost.

Often, finding the right OER for a course is the most difficult part of OER adoption. DSS staff have created an Open Educational Resources guide to help users find and use OERs. If additional help is needed, DSS staff are here to help! Simply email us to schedule a consultation.

If suitable OER are not available in your subject area, see our Affordable Course Materials guide to learn other strategies for saving your students money, such as by using library materials in your course.

DSS Online Resources

In addition to providing virtual workshops and individual consultations, a number of DSS resources are available online. A curated list of these online guides can be found on the DSS blog. Subscribe to the blog to receive information about additional resources and programming. The blog covers a wide range of topics, including Fondren's DOI services and using images in theses and dissertations.

Find additional resources and learn more about what’s going on around DSS:

Fondren Library, Rice University | Digital Scholarship Services | Houston, TX 77005
Email: cds@rice.edu | Web: http://library.rice.edu/dss | Blog: http://digitalscholarship.blogs.rice.edu/