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Mar 22

Collection Manager for Nation American Languages Collection (SNOMNH)

From Mary S. Linn, Curator of Native American Languages, Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

Hello Friends and Colleagues,

I am writing you to announce the that we are taking applications for the position of Collection Manager (CM) for the Nation American Languages collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK. This is one of only a few digital and physical archives of endangered languages in a museum setting in the US. We are partnering with many different Oklahoma and regional tribes and tribal people as the collection grows, and we are involved in collaborative efforts to make the collection significant to revitalization work. The CM is directly responsible for the processing, care (of both digital and analog collections), and accessibility issues. In addition, we sponsor programming in language documentation, revitalization, and conservation, and the CM makes the collection available and user-friendly to patrons, and makes it up-to-date as technology and user-needs change. A proactive CM will also help shape the future growth areas of the department. So, this position is unique and exciting, and a great opportunity for someone starting their career.

I encourage you to pass this information on to students and others you know with a BA or MA degree and experience in language media.

Here are the instructions to get to the application:

http://hr.ou.edu//

left Quick Links: Job Postings

left: Search Listings

Job Listing Number: 11275 (this is enough to get you the full listing and application)

Title: Curator/Archivist I
For more information on the Sam Noble Museum, please go to : http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/
For a brief introduction to the NAL Collections, please go to: http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/collections-research/nal.htm
You can search our catalog at: http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/db2/nal/index.php

Thank you all,
Mary
Mary S. Linn
Associate Curator, Native American Languages
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Adjunct Associate Professor, Native American Studies

Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
University of Oklahoma
2401 Chautauqua Avenue
Norman, OK 73072
405-325-7588 (voice) 405-325-7699 (fax)

Mar 20

2 Comments

Anthropologies

Thanks to everyone who is working to create new ways of communicating and discussing the pressing issues of our time. As has been discussed by Kerim at Savage Minds and Daniel at Neuroanthropogy, a new project in anthropology has just debuted:  Anthropologies edited by Ryan Anderson. It is blog based magazine focused on exploring:

contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives.  There is no single way to define the field, hence “anthropologies.”  By presenting various viewpoints and positions, this site seeks to highlight not only what anthropology means to those who practice it, but also how those meanings are relevant to wider audiences.

I have just begun my reading of the first issues with Keith Hart’s “Kant, Anthropology and the New Human Universal.” It is a an accessible, compelling, valuable, and brief essay that builds upon the key arguments about the promise/necessity of anthropology that he has been developing in recent work, including The Human Economy, which I am now reading. It certainly has motivated me to remedy my failure to have read Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

Thanks Keith and the other authors. Thanks to the editor and everyone else who is fostering this project.

I would like to offer one suggestion, by way of a coda. Having been down a similar path before, I know how handy blog software like blogger is for getting such a project off the ground quickly and cheaply. All to the good. The only costs are that there is no built in preservation framework and the site does not allow for Open Archives Initiative Protocols for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Without an OAI compliant framework, broadly used tools like Google Scholar will not be able to harvest metadata and, along the way, put works published in Anthropologies on scholarly radar. More specifically, OAI-PMH allows more topically focused projects, such as the Open Folklore project on which I work, to harvest and thereby promote the discovery of, content published in places like Anthropologies. There are many ways to address this matter inexpensively. A place to begin would be UKnowledge, the University of Kentucky Institutional Repository, which appears to be gearing up to support journal like projects, among other things. Such repositories make materials available in harvestable ways while also insuring longterm preservation. It would be possible to deposit PDF copies of Anthropologies content after the fact without giving up the basic blogger-based format.

 


Mar 16

5 Comments

Visiting Colorado College

I was educated at big public research universities and–when not employed in museums–I have worked at large public research universities. My only teaching experiences outside such contexts were two courses taught at the private University of Tulsa as an adjunct during my time working as a curator at the Gilcrease Museum. This summer, I have been given a unique opportunity to teach in a very different context. During late July and early August, I will be a visiting professor at Colorado College (CC) in Colorado Springs. I will be teaching Introduction to Folklife for the Anthropology and Southwest Studies programs at CC. The class will be small and the teaching intense because CC has (and is famous for) The Block Plan. In the Block Plan, students take only one course at a time and work on it intensively for a bit more than three weeks before moving on to their next class. There are many reasons for me to be enthusiastic about this opportunity but, more than anything else, I think that it will be a great experience that will strengthen my work as an undergraduate teacher.

Among the simpler advantages of the block plan is the fact that it makes class excursions possible, thus the class and I will be able to visit, for instance, key museum exhibitions in Denver. We will also be able to host visiting experts in class.

Outside of the teaching aspect, Colorado College is home to a great faculty that includes many fantastic scholars in the fields of anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology. It is notably the home to my friend and collaborator Victoria Levine. I am very thankful for the opportunity that the faculty and administration at CC is providing me.

If you know anyone interested in studying anthropologically-oriented folkloristics this summer in Colorado, CC accepts visiting undergraduate students for its summer sessions.

Mar 16

Share Anthropology!

Share Anthropology is the brand new place to go when you want to share anthropology. The site is for “sharing and disseminating open access anthropology.” What does that mean?

The simple site has a “submit” button at the upper right. If you click it you can get some clear and helpful guidance.

Please help share and disseminate open access anthropology articles, books and dissertations by linking to blog posts, reviews, and discussions about that work. DO add a short “description.” DON”T link to the primary Open Access works themselves. Rather, link to blog posts, reviews, and discussions of that work. (Linked discussion should contain at least one link to an Open Access anthropology article, book, or dissertation.)

So, what this new tool is built to do is to aggregate and circulate open access discussions of scholarly works in anthropology that are themselves made available in open access form. It is not an aggregator of the scholarship itself (as the Open Folklore search tool is in the neighboring field of folklore studies) but is instead an aggregtor of value-added discussions of that underlying open access scholarship. Thus is it a place to discover, but also to call attention to, articles, blog posts, etc. that build on or comment upon open access works. (As open access scholarship continues to expand, this distinction might break down, but for Share Anthropology’s startup phase, it seems clear.)

The other main part of the site is an RSS feed so that you can learn about what others are sharing via a feed reader.

Congratulations to Kerim Friedman for getting this going! Kerim has introduced the project in a Savage Minds post. Check it out and check out Share Anthropology.

Very promising!

Mar 15

4 Comments

Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool + Ethnobiology Letters

Two things that I am happy and excited to learn about are:

The Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool being held this summer at Michigan State University.

Ethnobiology Letters, a gold open access publication of the Society for Ethnobiology.

Mar 5

Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights

My review of Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights by former NEA Chairman (and AFS President) Bill Ivey was recently published in JFRR (Journal of Folklore Research Reviews). JFRR is an open access fork of the established toll access folklore journal Journal of Folklore Research. JFRR publishes reviews of diverse media in folklore studies and circulates the reviews via email.  They are also available in search-able form online at http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/reviewsearch.php.

My review can be found online here:  http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=715

Feb 18

New Jobs: Terri Jordan Edition

In more great job news from Oklahoma, Terri Jordan, an MA graduate of the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology who has been working as collections manager in the Native American Languages Division of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (at the University of Oklahoma), has just taken a new job as Curator of the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive, also at the University of Oklahoma.  During her time at IU, Terri pursued the double MA/MLS degree with a focus on archives, museum work and public folklore. I had the unusual honor of working with Terri both at the University of Oklahoma, where she was an undergraduate student and at IU at the final phase of her MA work. Congratulations go to Terri on the occasion of this promotion to a position of greater responsibility. Curating an archive of political advertisements!  What a great opportunity for a folklorist (and archivist, of course).

Feb 15

1 Comment

Stuart Shieber on Dissertations Online

I recommend Stuart Shieber’s recent remarks on [OA] Dissertations being made available online. Shieber is Director of Harvard University’s Office of Scholarly Communications and a professor of computer science. He importantly highlights the foundational “public contribution to knowledge” dimension of the Ph.D. tradition.

Feb 13

1 Comment

New Jobs: Kimberly Marshall Edition

I am super pleased to learn that Kimberly Marshall, an excellent anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, folklorist and Native studies scholar with whom I work at Indiana University Bloomington has just accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. Kimberly is presently finalizing a dissertation for the IU Departments of Anthropology and of Folklore and Ethnomusicology that focuses on music and cultural performance in the context of contemporary Navajo Christian communities. She is a great fit for Oklahoma and she is joining a vital anthropology department with great students and colleagues, as well as a deep history of important work across her many fields. Congratulations Kim!  Congratulations Oklahoma!

Feb 3

Kim Fortun Reflects on the Open Folklore Project

Anthropologist and science studies scholar Kim Fortun has written an essay discussing the Open Folklore project for Anthropology News. Her piece is currently accessible (toll free) via the AAA website. Kim is the outgoing co-editor of  Cultural Anthropology and a thoughtful advocate for rethinking scholarly communication work in anthropology.

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