28 September 2021
The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) has joined the Open Library Foundation as a Project Member. By joining the Open Library Foundation, ARC is able to leverage the community of projects that are part of the Open Library Foundation.
The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) serves as a hub of humanities virtual research environments or research nodes. ARC provides support, coordination, and a set of evolving standards for more than 200 digital humanities projects that are open access and peer reviewed by five period-specific and thematic research communities, with more projects and communities joining every year. The ARC Catalog is available through BigDIVA (Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application), a web-based search and discovery service designed for humanities scholars and students.
ARC provides BigDIVA as a free service for searching open-access materials. Institutional subscriptions to BigDIVA are available and allow institutions to enable searches of open-access material along with proprietary databases to which they subscribe.
ARC is housed at the Center of Digital Humanities Research, at Texas A&M University. Laura Mandell, a professor of English at Texas A&M University, is the Director of the Center of Digital Humanities Research and Director of ARC. She says joining the Open Library Foundation allows ARC to liaise with other open source projects that revolve around libraries. “While we have our own missions, the commonalities among the Open Library Foundation projects and those that it will attract will help all of us as we work to create innovative solutions for libraries and impact research. We learn from one another and as we share our experiences, we all benefit.”
Tom Cramer, Associate University Librarian and Director of Digital Library Systems and Services at Stanford University, is the President of the Open Library Foundation Board. He says projects of all sizes that need support are within the scope of the Open Library Foundation. “The Foundation is tasked with supporting open source projects that need infrastructure and that are looking to connect with other library-related open source projects. The Open Library Foundation can provide not only support as ARC grows but that opportunity to network with other projects.”
More information about the Open Library Foundation is available at: https://www.openlibraryfoundation.org