Catholic schools face many challenges. In recent decades, the steady supply of free labor from religious men and women has dried up. Demographic changes resulted in most inner-city Catholic schools serving poor, non-Catholic populations. Stagnant wages put the cost of a Catholic school education out of reach for most middle-class Catholic families. And the rising cost of education at all levels, from kindergarten through college, has affected profoundly the crowning glory of U.S. Catholicism, our vibrant educational system.

The Catholic Research Resource Alliance (CRRA) and the symposium planning committee invite proposals for posters to be displayed at the 2012 CRRA symposium Nurturing the ‘Spirit of Perfect Charity’: Libraries and Archives at the Intersection of Service and Scholarship in Catholic Social Justice Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, October 15-16, 2012.  The planning committee seeks posters that showcase innovative technologies, best practices, future trends, and unique research findings from librarians, archivists, and scholars.

Referees Pat Lawton (CRRA) and Megan Bernal (DePaul University) will choose the best poster and a prize will be awarded.

The May Update includes details about the CRRA All-Member Annual Meeting in Anaheim, June 25-26, 2012.  Also noteworthy: on June 23 and June 25, Jennifer Younger, CRRA Executive Director, will participate in panel discussions of interest to our membership.  Details on these events are also in this Update.

In this issue we  introduce the impressive Ade Bethune Collection at St. Catherine University and Diane Maher, Chair of the Collections Committee provides an update of Committee activities.

On Wednesday, October 12, 2011 I had the opportunity to attend and present at the second annual VuStuff meeting held at Falvey Library, Villanova University (Philadelphia). This posting documents my experience there, but in a nutshell, this small and intimate meeting provided a venue for interesting discussion on the topic of modern librarianship.

On Friday, April 15 I had the honor and pleasure of giving a presentation to the Chicago Area Theological Library Association. This posting documents the experience.

This is the briefest of travelogues -- a description of what went on at the Digital Humanities Forum, February 24, 2011.

On Thursday, February 24, the Hesburgh Libraries and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) sponsored the Digital Humanities Forum. The purpose of the event was to raise the awareness of the digital humanities across campus just a little bit. To that end we hosted two speakers and a couple of hands-on workshops.

Just about this time last week I was attending the CRRA All-Members Meeting in Philadelphia (March 29-30, 2011). This posting documents the experience.

The Meeting began Tuesday afternoon, March 29, at Villanova University where attendees were treated to a number of show & tell presentations describing the digital library goings-on of the Falvey Library. Joseph Lucia began by listing a number of well-articulated reasons why open source software is akin to the values of librarianship. Most notably, he alluded to the Second Enclosure and the very real threats to the public commons. Other presentations outlined local digitization efforts using Tesseract, their institutional repository implementation, scholarly publishing with Open Journal System, and their newly released digital library software called VUDL. I am continually impressed with the work being done by the folks at Villanova. Administration has a vision, a plan, and puts the plan into practice. "We do things for the sake of scholarship... We collaborate and find partners." This approach to digital librarianship seems to me to be the best long-term strategy and ensures sustainability. It is not so much about getting more money but instead about setting priorities and allocating resources accordingly.

This posting lists the results of a usability study done against the "Catholic Portal".

In a previous posting called "Usability testing" (dated February 14, 2011) a set of eight usability questions was outlined. Since then Team Catholic Portal here at Notre Dame facilitated six usability studies made up of five graduate students and one faculty member. These participants were scholars in philosophy and theology. We used the simple facilitator/note-taker approach. We employed usability software (Silverback), but didn't use it to evaluate our results. Using our notes as well as professional judgement, we evaluated the results and came up with the following prioritized list of things to be addressed with the Portal's interface:

Digital Humanities Forum
and Workshops
February 24-25, 2011

sponsored by
Hesburgh Libraries, the Center for Research Computing (CRC), and the
Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA)

We look forward to seeing many of you in San Diego for our upcoming meeting.  Full details follow and are on the web at http://tinyurl.com/crra-jan2011.

Portal development is a focal point for this meeting.  Many milestones have been met and Eric will demonstrate new portal functionality including Web 2.0 features of VuFind, an EAD indexing and display tool, and text mining techniques to facilitate discovery and creation of new knowledge.

This message outlines an upcoming event tentatively called the Notre Dame/CRRA Forum on Digital Humanities:

    Who: Anybody and everybody across the University
   What: A set of presentations and workshops on
         digital humanities
   When: Thursday afternoon (February 24) and Friday
         morning (February 25)
  Where: (probably) Geddes Hall
    Why: Because it is about more than find and
         access, it is also about use and
         understanding

The Hesburgh Libraries, the Center for Research Computing (CRC), and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) are jointly sponsoring a set of presentations and workshops on the digital humanities Thursday afternoon (February 24) and Friday morning (February 25). While all of the details have yet to be ironed out, we expect there to be at least two presenters on Thursday:

VUFind is the technical backbone of the "Catholic Portal", and this posting documents my experiences at the VuFind 2.0 Conference held at the Villanova Conference Center on September 15 & 16, 2010. In short, it provided an opportunity for the community to share successes, challenges, and visions for the future.

An inaugural VUFind "Midwest" User's Group Meeting was held Friday, September 3, and this posting outlines my perceptions of what happened there.