Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age: The Value of Collaboration

Sponsored by Springer Nature

Recorded on 01/27/2021
Posted in The Authority File

Episode 177

We often hail collaboration as the key to success in academic pursuits. But does higher education culture prevent collaborative relationships from developing? Has the pandemic opened up opportunities between departments that weren’t present before?

Susan Mizruchi, editor of Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age, explains how academia can encourage specialization or “tending our own gardens,” which prevents exciting, fruitful collaboration between departments. Susan argues that engaging librarians in pedagogy and librarianship in academia can only produce more well-rounded, comprehensive results.

In the final episode of this series, Susan discusses the value of collaboration between departments and its increasing necessity in our multi-dimensional, complex digital age. Despite our collective “Zoom fatigue,” Susan points out potential opportunities for interdisciplinary partnerships thanks to our new reliance on virtual technology and lack of geographical constraints.

About the guest:

Susan Mizruchi
William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities
Director, BU Center for the Humanities
Professor of English
Boston University

Susan L. Mizruchi has been working between disciplines throughout her career, earning B.A.s in both history and English from Washington University in 1981, and her Ph.D. in English from Princeton University in 1985 with a dissertation on nineteenth-century literature and historiography. Since coming to Boston University in 1986, she has focused on the intersection of social, religious, and literary studies. Her specialties are American literature and film, religion and culture, literary and social theory, literary history, and history of the social sciences.

Her books include: Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (Norton, 2014, 2015); The Rise of Multicultural America (North Carolina, 2008) Becoming Multicultural: Culture, Economy, and the Novel, 1860–1920 (Cambridge, 2005); The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (Princeton, 1998); The Power of Historical Knowledge: Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, & Dreiser (Princeton, 1988); and as editor, Religion and Cultural Studies, (Princeton, 2001) and Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

She is the recipient of many academic honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Scholars Program. She serves as Oxford University Press’s Delegate in Literature, Film, and Media Studies, and as a consultant for many foundations, among them, PBS (the American Master’s Series), ACLS, NEH, and the Princeton University English Department Advisory Council. Susan has been on the faculty of the Teachers as Scholars Program since 1999. She has directed thirty dissertations at BU and is the recipient of the Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Education (2015), and a Distinguished Teaching Award from Boston University’s Honors Program (2001). She became the Director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities in July 2016. In 2017, she was named the inaugural William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities.

Enjoy the episode? Listen to the rest of the series:

• Episode one: Background, Forum, and Fruition
• Episode two: Let’s Talk Politics
• Episode three: Navigating the Flood of Information

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