Katherine Skinner

From Digital Innovations @ Emory Libraries

Dr. Katherine Skinner is Digital Projects Librarian at the Emory University Libraries.

[edit] Background

Dr. Katherine Skinner is the Digital Projects Librarian at the Emory University Libraries, and provides leadership for the library's digital projects that are supported through grants or other sponsored funding sources. She is a Co-Principal Investigator on the SouthComb Project (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and Co-Director of both the MetaArchive Project (Library of Congress) and the MetaArchive: A Sustainable Digital Preservation Service project (NHPRC). She's a founder and an editorial board member of the peer-reviewed Internet journal, Southern Spaces, the curator/manager of the web-based resource "William Levi Dawson: The Collection at Emory University" (Ford Foundation), and a consultant on the Voyages—TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database project (National Endowment for the Humanities). She has recently co-edited a monograph entitled Strategies for Sustaining Digital Libraries with Martin Halbert. Katherine also serves on the Aquifer Services Working Group committee and the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program's Sustainability Committee, and is on the faculty for the Northeast Document Conservation Center's (NEDCC) Stewardship of Digital Assets workshop series.

Katherine has a Ph.D. from Emory University and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Katherine worked in academic/non-profit marketing at Mindpower, Inc., prior to starting graduate school in 1999. She has worked in the digital library field since 2000, and served as the digital programs team leader for Emory University until she relocated with her husband to North Carolina in 2006. Following her move, Katherine started up a Digital Programs "outpost" in Greensboro, from which she continues to work full-time for the division--a testament to the power of digital media as a tool for maintaining close connections across geographical space.

[edit] Interests

Katherine's academic work in Sociology of Culture focuses on field formations and institutionalization, primarily in the recording industry. Her relationship with Digital Programs began as an outgrowth of this interest. She managed several grants for the division while she was a graduate student, and surmised from the experience that the transformative powers of the digital medium were beginning to have a direct impact on scholarly communications methods. She began working for the division full-time in 2002 as its Scholarly Communications Analyst. Today, as the team's Digital Programs Librarian, the digital scholarship, digital publishing, and digital library research projects that Katherine directs allow her to simultaneously study and participate in this transformation. Her main topical interests are open source software development, open access publishing methods, digital preservation, inter-institutional collaborative efforts, and emergent models of faculty-librarian-IT relationships.

[edit] Publications

• Strategies for Sustaining Digital Libraries. K. Skinner and M. Halbert, Eds. (Atlanta, GA: Emory University Digital Library Publications, 2008).
• "The Safety of this Journey Depends on Unity: The Emergence of the Field of Women's Music." International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (forthcoming, 2008).
• "A Space of Our Own: Bridging New Media and Traditional Scholarship with Southern Spaces in the Classroom," Sarah Toton and Katherine Skinner. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, Vol. 2, No. 3, September 2006.
• "Born Again: Resurrecting the Anthology of American Folk Music." Popular Music 25, no. 1 (January 2006): pp 57-75.
• Doctoral Dissertation: “That We All Be Free:” Music and Social Change, 2005. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.
• "The Music of Social Change: Using OAI-PMH in the Creation of a Digital Memory Site." Proceedings, Workshop on Applications of Metadata Harvesting in Scholarly Portals: Findings from the MetaScholar Projects. October, 2003. Emory University.

[edit] Selected Presentations

• Stewardship of Digital Assets Workshop (Faculty, NEDCC/NEH, Dallas, TX, 2008)
• "Implementing User-Centered Design with Agile Software Development" (DLF Spring 2008 Forum, Minneapolis, MN, 2008)
• "The MetaArchive Cooperative: A Collaborative Approach to Distributed Digital Preservation" (NISO Digital Preservation Forum: Planning Today for Tomorrow's Resources, Washington D.C., 2008)
• "Collaborative Adventures in Distributed Digital Preservation: The MetaArchive Cooperative and the Educopia Institute " (Archaeoinformatics Lecture Series, 2008)
• Stewardship of Digital Assets Workshop (Faculty, NEDCC/NEH, Atlanta, GA, 2008)
• "New Cooperative Strategies for Distributed Digital Preservation: MetaArchive and Educopia" (Co-presenter with Martin Halbert and Tyler Walters, CNI Task Force, Washington DC, 2007)
• "Collaborative Networks: Producing, Promoting, and Preserving Our Partnerships" (NEDCC, Persistence of Memory, Seattle, WA, 2007)
• Stewardship of Digital Assets Workshop (Faculty, NEDCC/NEH, Philadelphia, PA, 2007)
• "Creating Collection Guidelines: Notes from the Trenches of the U.S. South" (PALCI-LSTA Digital Collections Grant Panel (Harrisburg, PA, 2007)
• "To Work His Wonders on a Scene: William Levi Dawson Online" (Co-presenter with Randall Burkett and Micah Wedemeyer, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 2007)
• "Scholarly Communication: It's Not Just About Rising Journal Costs" (Invited Presentation with Frances Maloy and Liz Cooper, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 2007)
• "Musical Spaces: William Levi Dawson's Routes" (American Historical Association, Atlanta, GA, 2007)
• "Collaborative Adventures: Promoting and Preserving External Partnerships" (NEDCC/IMLS Persistence of Memory: Stewardship of Digital Assets Conference, Tucson, Arizona, 2006)
• "Defining the Digital Landscape" (Invited Speaker, Tufts University, Boston, MA, 2006)
• "MetaArchive: Preserving Southern Cultures and Histories" (Digital Library Federation Roundtable, Boston, MA, 2006)
• "Disciplining Search/Searching Disciplines." (WebWise06 PreConference, Los Angeles, CA, 2006)
• "The Digital Evolution: Trends in Digital Scholarship." (Invited Speaker, Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Atlanta, GA, 2006)
• "The MetaArchive of Southern History and Culture." (OCLC Statewide Digitization Planners Conference, Ohio, 2005)
• "The View from the Starting Gate: Defining the Ideal Long-Term Future" (CLIR Scholarly Communication Institute, University of Virginia, 2005)
• "Southern Spaces: A Collaborative Model for Open Source Scholarly Publishing" (Digital Library Federation Spring Forum, San Diego, 2005)
• "Folklore Goes Digital: Open-Access Publishing on the Internet" (Folklorists in the South Annual Meeting, 2005)
• "Southern Spaces: Emergent Spaces in Open Access Publishing" (Open Access and Digital Preservation Symposium, Emory University, 2004)
• "A Demonstration of Open Access Publication" (InfoForum, Emory University, 2004)
• "Music of Social Change: The Digital Library and its Implications for Museum and Library Collaboration" (SOLINET Annual Membership Meeting, 2004)
• "The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting" (WebWise04 PreConference, Chicago, IL, 2004)
• "The Music of Social Change: Using OAI-PMH in the Creation of a Digital Memory Site" (Workshop on Applications of Metadata Harvesting in Scholarly Portals, Emory University, 2003)
• "Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Janis Joplin and the Ball n' Chain of ‘Appropriation’" (Midwest Modern Languages Association, 2001)
• "Time Out of Time: The Life of a Festival On-Line" (Smithsonian Institution, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, 2000)