Christine Madsen is a librarian and academic whose research aims to re-centre libraries at the heart of all the disciplines, and re-focus the work of librarians on creating a space for the transformation of information into knowledge. Her current and recent projects include a survey of humanities scholars’ use of online research and collaboration tools; a webmetric analysis of library digitization web sites; a collaborative project to study archived web sites in the humanities; and a theoretical grounding of the study of Internet in philosophy, society and religion. Her dissertation project is a critical analysis of the impact of digitization on scholarship and practice in the Tibetan and Himalayan region, but her larger research agenda is to recapture an integrated space in and from which to study the future of libraries.
After completing her first degree in the visual arts, Christine began her career in libraries as manager of analogue and digital image production in the Art and Architecture Library at UC San Diego. While at UCSD, she went on gain her MLIS and served as a technical consultant on several large-scale digitization and metadata mapping projects, including ArtSTOR. In 2003 she joined the Harvard University Library as the manager of the Open Collections Program where she gained expertise in the development of efficient, replicable methods for the creation of comprehensive, subject-based digital resources.
Many humanities scholars are enthusiastic users of digital resources, however there is a potential mismatch between what (and how) resources are offered, and how scholars might use them. How should they be designed to ensure maximum use by scholars?
This project explores how to bridge the gap between archivists and researchers, and how preserved web content archives might be used by researchers and others to ask meaningful new questions.
This project combined quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of online scholarly resources and to develop a best practices toolkit that allows assessment of the impact of digitisation projects by researchers and funding bodies.
With Professor Mike Thelwall, Professor Eric T. Meyer, and Dr Christine Madsen
Presenting the results of the Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study project, which combines quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of online scholarly resources.
With Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Christine Madsen, Y. Hafri, and M. Middleton
Results of a project that aims to establish a framework for e-Humanities research using open source tools and technologies and archived web content to create novel research interfaces to the first of many, scholarly, e-Humanities web collections.
