An Interview with Digital Scholarship Intern Cindy Xaba
Cindy Xaba is an international student in her final year of studying Library and Information Science at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Coming to Marquette through the Study Abroad Learning Program, Cindy is currently working with the Digital Scholarship Lab as a Digital Scholarship Intern. And in addition to her work with the DSL team, she is spending time in Marquette’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives, where she is helping archivist Katie Blank to digitize the Marquette Tribune archives, as well as taking classes in the Diederich College of Communication.
Cindy believes that “Digital Scholarship is important because it meets the needs of 21st-century students and other library users. Today’s library users expect to find information and resources on the web.” And in her role as a Digital Scholarship Lab intern, Cindy helps students to identify those online resources and tools that will help them with their coursework and research. Some of her responsibilities include helping to staff the DSL Tutor desk located in the Lower Level of Raynor Library. As a tutor, she helps students and teachers with questions about digital scholarship and digital media. Often, this involves troubleshooting problems with software (helping someone use Adobe Photoshop, for example) or technology (such as how to transfer video from one of our Vixia cameras to a PC or Macbook).
But in addition to working at the Tutor desk, Cindy is also working on more advanced projects for the Lab. This semester she has been compiling a list of universities in America that provide support services for the study of Research Data Management. The field of Research Data Management (RDM) is one that Cindy is particularly interested in within the library profession, and the resource that she is creating will be a significant help to scholars in developing countries who may be in need of funds to conduct their research. The list will help to connect these students with universities that can help further their education in the field as well as help people keep abreast of new trends and practices.
Digital scholarship, Cindy shares, enriches content because it incorporates information in a variety ways, with visuals, audio, interactive tools, mash-ups, and more. And so the final result of her semester-long project will combine a variety of digital tools. Primarily, Cindy will use Storymap JS, an online open-source tool that allows people to create dynamic visualizations to tell a location-based story. Because the project identifies universities across the US that offer a particular type of services, Storymap JS is an ideal creative tool for the final product. In addition, Cindy is collaborating with another DSL tutor — Kendall Roemer — to create an infographic in Adobe Illustrator. This infographic will provide a basic description of what RDM is for her audience. When she’s finished with both pieces, Cindy will embed the two halves of her project into a Wordpress webpage where others can access them.
This will be the second digital tool for the study of Research Data Management that Cindy has created. For a course at Western Cape, she built a website that acts as a basic introduction to RDM, presenting an in-depth summary of the elements and process that comprise the field, including things like Preservation, Data Integrity, and Data Analysis.
The internship here at Marquette will give Cindy valuable experience for her future work as a librarian. Digital Scholarship and Digital Media are playing increasingly large roles in academia, academic libraries, and the world-at-large. But what she finds most exciting about digital scholarship is the process of putting it all together, especially going from the first step of conceiving an idea for a project in your mind, to visualizing it, and then creating it. The sense of accomplishment once the final product is up and running makes the challenge of the whole process worth it, Cindy says.
