Seek & Find at Falvey Library:
Online Exclusives

Let’s Get Digital

Name: Erica Hayes, MIS, MLS, MFA

Role: Digital Scholarship Librarian

Department: Research Services and Scholarly Engagement

My Goal Is To... Inspire researchers to find ways they can create more interactive and engaging scholarship and use technology to enhance traditional methods of research.

Office Space... I’m really excited about Falvey’s new Digital Scholarship Lab, which we’re scheduled to open in Fall 2021. It’s a collaborative space on the newly renovated second floor where I can meet with faculty, students and staff for one-on-one consultations and training sessions. It will also have a variety of software and equipment the Villanova community can use to develop digital projects and learn new technologies.

A Technology Tool I Recommend Is... ArcGIS StoryMaps, a configurable web application by Esri that allows you to combine online maps with text, photos and videos in order to create an interactive storytelling experience and share research online. As the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Falvey, I teach a variety of workshops on digital storytelling and data visualization tools, and this is just one of the tools that I highly recommend to faculty and students of all disciplines.

Numbers Tell a Story

Name: John Banionis, MS

Role: Metrics and Assessment Librarian

Department: Resource Management and Description

Metrics Matter Because... The combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics allows Library leadership to make data-informed decisions that place Falvey in the best position to continue to meet the information and learning needs of Villanova now and in the future.

Falvey Is… The University’s steward of scholarly information–fuel for the academic engine.

A Number That Surprises Me... Zero, because I almost never see it in our yearly electronic usage statistics. Previously, I worked for academic publishers and observed that every library has some zero-use resources, which means the library needs to determine if those subscriptions are still useful. I’ve been impressed with our subject librarians’ knowledge of discipline-specific resources and relationships with faculty in identifying resources that are vital—and widely used—for Villanova’s research needs.

Numbers Are Not the Only Story... As different academic disciplines have different library usage patterns, this context is important when reviewing all materials data points, including print circulation, document delivery and interlibrary loan, Special Collections and Digital Library usage, and e-book, e-journal, database and streaming video usage.

Meet the Digital Archivist

Name: Beaudry Rae Allen ’13 MA

Role: Preservation and Digital Archivist

Department: Distinctive Collections and Digital Engagement.

My Job Is... To preserve University history, physical and digital, that represents the activities of Villanova so that future researchers have access to it.

I’m Excited About... Building Villanova’s digital preservation program from the ground up. Because so much information that’s presented today is digital, libraries need a system to store, preserve and provide access to that digital content.

I May Be the Only Person on Campus Who… Still has a floppy disk reader. We’re always dealing with the threat of obsolescence of physical records, so we extract files from CDs, DVDs and floppy disks and transfer them to a server for long-term preservation.

I Highly Recommend... Our artifact collections, which include the first nursing school uniform, engineering overalls and a small beanie cap called a “dink” (freshmen wore these in the early 1900s to distinguish themselves from upperclassmen).

A Tool I’m Using... Social Feed Manager, an open-source tool for collecting Twitter data. During the pandemic, I have been able to do weekly crawls of tweets about COVID-19 in our area that I will be able to preserve to represent what the day-to-day experience was like.

Decoding the Publishing Ecosystem

Name: Sarah Wipperman, ML

Role: Scholarly Communication Librarian

Department: Research Services and Scholarly Engagement

My Position Requires... That I wear many hats. I study the ways in which scholarship is created, disseminated, reused and shared. My expertise is in copyright, publishing, open access, and how to increase research and researcher visibility.

On a Day-to-Day Basis... I help to provide education around scholarly publishing issues and serve as a point person for scholars in the Villanova community to answer questions, navigate the process of publishing, review publishing contracts, and address copyright concerns. On a larger scale, I provide general guidance on scholarly publishing and advocate for infrastructure and policies to help Villanova researchers publish more and gain greater visibility.

Open Access Matters Because... By providing free and unrestricted access to scholarly materials, it enables us as a society and as individual practitioners to learn from each other and to be able to take scholarship and apply it in our jobs and in everyday life. It makes more scholarly content available so more people can read it without having to pay a subscription fee.

This Past Year, I Was Excited to... Build two new workshops for the Villanova Institute for Research and Scholarship as part of its series on How to Raise Your Scholarly Visibility. The first focused on How to Use Academic Social Media", including how to tweet at work, and the second offered guidance on How to Build Your Scholarly Website.

Falvey’s Vision for Scholarship at Villanova Is to… Create an institutional repository—a place for the University to publish its scholarship where the Library and University take stewardship over it. Institutional repositories give scholars a place to openly share their work with a global audience and let the University showcase the excellent scholarship we produce.