Digital Preservation for the Future of Research

Hear from David Shankland, Director, Royal Anthropological Institute and Ray Abruzzi, Program Director, Wiley Digital Archives on the impact of digitization efforts on education and research.

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This webinar is useful for librarians who are interested in purchasing archives to complete their collection.

About this webinar

Students expect everything they need for their schoolwork to be available digitally. While this expectation has often been criticized, faculty and researchers are also seeing the benefits of large-scale digitization programs in the research and education efforts, particularly in terms of access to and discoverability of primary sources.

David Shankland, Director, Royal Anthropological Institute and Ray Abruzzi, Program Director, Wiley Digital Archives, will speak about the impact of digitization efforts on education and research, and how universities and libraries can position their institutions for leadership roles in this ever-growing landscape.

  • Digitization of primary sources creates new pathways for increased access and positively impacts the discoverability and connections within and across archival collections
  • Relevance of content to faculty research can be impacted by the ease of access, not simply by the subject matter
  • Acquisition of unique primary source collections raise the profile and relevance of the library with faculties by providing content which facilitates scholarly publishing

Presenter(s)

Raymond Abruzzi - Digital Archives Program Director, Wiley

Raymond Abruzzi

Digital Archives Program Director, Wiley

After several years in legal publishing with WestLaw, Ray entered the world of academic publishing in 2000, working for Charles Scribner’s Sons and Macmillan Reference USA, as an editor developing print reference sets. This work evolved into a role as product manager for newly-emerging publishing platforms during the transition from print to digital. Ray built and managed library databases which integrated content from proprietary, licensed, and public domain sources into digital resource centers, which served the needs of students and faculty, primarily in history and literature.In 2002, Ray began working on the digitization of primary source collections for Cengage Learning, developing and maintaining relationships with over 350 libraries and archives around the world to identify, catalog, conserve, digitize, and make accessible their unique and valuable content for education and research through library databases, as publisher for the Gale Primary Sources program.At Wiley, Ray is developing a new program to digitize and make available the unique content from Wiley’s journal publishing partners, and from other learned societies, archives, and libraries around the world. This includes working at the intersection of digital primary source collections and the emerging needs of students, libraries, faculty, and researchers in the digital humanities, to make data sets and content available in ways that tie to institutional needs and outcomes.Ray is also a student at Columbia University, and lives with his family in Brooklyn, NY.
Dr. David Shankland - Director, Royal Anthropological Institute

Dr. David Shankland

Director, Royal Anthropological Institute

David Shankland is Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Honorary Professor of Anthropology University College London.  Formerly, he was Reader in Anthropology at the University of Bristol.

By training a social anthropologist, he has worked extensively in modern Turkey, where he was sometime Assistant and Acting Director of the British Institute of Archaeology. His ethnographic researches include the study of state, politics and religion in Turkey, with the special study of the Alevis, a non-normative minority (The Alevis of modern Turkey, Routledge, 2007), and investigations into the relationship between excavation, archaeology and the secular state.

He has also conducted researches over many years into the history of anthropology, particularly concentrating on the emergence of modern disciplinary boundaries (Shankland, ed. Anthropology and Archaeology, Berg 2012). He has also produced work on Westermarck (Westermarck, ed. RAI 2014), F. W. Hasluck (Archaeology, Anthropology and Heritage in Anatolia, 2004, 2013: Isis Press, Istanbul), and also on J. L Myres, and the emergence of modern anthropology at the University of Oxford, where he has been Humphrey Wanley Bodleian Library Fellow.

He directs the institute’s ongoing project on the history of anthropology over the last 150 years, which attempts to reassess the place of the RAI in the creation of anthropology, and to highlight the multiple, interlocking scholarly roots of the modern discipline.