In April 2020, a virtual team of Digital Scholarship experts from LSA Technology Services and U-M Library were engaged to support an interdisciplinary research project at the same time the University transitioned to remote classes and work.
Professor Stefan Szymanski (Sports Management, School of Kinesiology) and Professor Silke-Maria Weineck (Comparative Literature/German, LSA) are the co-authors of City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit (forthcoming with The New Press, 2020) and are working on a digital exhibit for the project. “Between 1938 and 1967, Detroit sought no fewer than nine times to win the bid to host the summer Olympics Games,” Szymanski and Weineck say in their 2020 research proposal. After getting access to several historical documents and images, they wanted to create an online exhibit that matched or augmented a planned physical exhibition in Detroit for the spring/summer of 2020. The exhibit would “...document the bids, the communities that supported and those that opposed them, and the complex local, national, and global political forces that doomed them” (Szymanski and Weineck, 2020). Additionally, Professor Szymanski wanted to use the collection with his winter 2020 Kinesiology course.
The support request for this project came in through the U-M Library, so a virtual team of Digital Scholarship experts between U-M Library and LSA Technology Services was quickly formed and deployed. Caitlin Pollock, Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Joe Bauer, Digital Scholarship Research Consultant, met with the research team to provide an initial “getting started” consultation, which included documenting and conceptualizing the project and resulted in the recommendation of the Omeka S online collection platform as a good fit for the research goals.
From there, the hosting was set up and a few follow-up “how-to” consultations were provided to help the research project understand and use the new platform. Pollock crafted and led an online introduction to Omeka S for Professor Szymanski’s Kinesiology course. Bauer provided consultations on best practices, including how to align the platform with the research goals. Practical matters, such as how to demonstrate the scholarly rigor of a digital project and how that is different from a traditional publication were also covered. However, because of the pandemic, these consultations needed to be provided online and with a different sense of urgency—since it was now integral to the presentation of the research since the physical exhibits were postponed.
“I really appreciate the support, both in showing me how to use the system and showing my students how to go about it. Just as the crisis was hitting [LSA Technology Services and U-M Library] were there to provide support and this system has been particularly well suited to online learning. While our exhibition has been postponed until next summer to coincide with the rescheduling of the Tokyo Olympics, I am planning to publish the student projects later in the summer, ideally at the time the Olympics would have taken place this summer,” Professor Szymanski said of his experience.
