From Digital Arts and Humanities to DASH

Academic libraries around the United States have been responding to an emerging style of research, the digital humanities, that promises to expand and revolutionize the humanities. Libraries are finding themselves to be generative sites of innovative partnerships and projects. Seeing a new opportunity to showcase cutting edge research and demonstrate value in an era of competitive demands for financial resources, there is significant incentive for libraries to quickly anticipate scholarly needs. Yet how do academic libraries best support a field of practice that is still developing? To address these issues, the University of Minnesota Libraries conducted a multi-year assessment of scholarly trends and practices, infrastructure needs, and roles of digital humanities centers and academic libraries, the University of Minnesota Libraries have designed and are in the process of implementing a service model as part of its Digital Arts Sciences + Humanities (DASH) program.

Filling the Gap

Graduate students in the humanities increasingly view training in the use of digital tools and methodologies as critical to their success. Graduate students' interest in becoming familiar with digital tools often accompanies their awareness of a competitive academic job market, coupled with a recognition that teaching and research positions increasingly call for experience and skills in the Digital Humanities (DH). Likewise, recent debates over DH's role in the future of humanities scholarship have heightened the sense that DH skills can translate to crucial job skills. While many graduate students receive encouragement from faculty to pursue digital scholarship, individual academic departments often have limited resources to prioritize the development of these skills at the expense of existing curricular components. This chapter looks at initiatives at the University of Michigan Library that demonstrate the ways in which subject librarians, in collaboration with data and technology specialist librarians, can fill this gap by creating opportunities for graduate students to develop DH skills.

An Assessment of Readiness for Supporting Digital Humanities in Hong Kong Academic Libraries

This book chapter will assess the state of digital humanities across Hong Kong academic libraries and evaluate the potential for international collaborations. A survey was administered to the eight member institutions of the University Grants Committee in Hong Kong to examine the level of engagement in digital humanities, support structure at their institutions, partnership opportunities, etc. Survey respondents indicated the importance of supporting digital humanities, but this importance has not been fully reflected on the institutional level. Hong Kong libraries have undertaken a range of activities to support digital humanities, and they embrace intra-institutional partnerships. Surveyed institutions also indicated that the potential for international collaborations, in particular, exists and is worth the efforts of further exploration. Their major challenges are building a strong faculty-librarian partnership, getting adequate financial and personnel resources, and enhancing staff experience and skills in this area.

Models for Partnering with Faculty and Supporting Digital Scholarship

Libraries have grown with Digital Humanities and they have evolved their support structures and developed the expertise required to partner with faculty. This chapter explores the library models that have been established at major research universities by surveying directors of public services of libraries who are members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The results of a survey of CIC Libraries are discussed and the findings are shared. The chapter offers a literature review of digital humanities which the authors refer to as digital scholarship or DS, discusses and describes models for partnering and supporting digital scholarship, and illustrates how large academic libraries at research universities are meeting challenges associated with DS services.

Social Annotation

Annotative social reading is an interactive form of reading that is performed either synchronously or asynchronously by multiple users who access and annotate the same source text. This mode of online reading has the potential to advance metaliteracy in the digital humanities by supporting critical student conversations by design. This chapter explores how faculty, librarians, and technologists can collaborate to manage emerging technologies and develop online learning communities that maximize learning opportunities. Challenges related to collaboration, metaliteracy, and online learning are explored, and resources for content and technology, including social reading and digital humanities software, are provided.

A DH State of Mind

Partnering with faculty and students working in the digital humanities is a natural extension of librarian roles as liaisons, subject specialists, curators, and digital collections specialists. Librarians are well-positioned to identify campus needs and opportunities, and provide research consultations, information resources, and digital project management expertise for the digital humanities. The authors propose that a “digital humanities state of mind” is a way for librarians to approach engaging in and supporting the digital humanities. This chapter explores the roles and contributions of librarians working on digital humanities projects, examines how some libraries collaborate in the digital humanities at their institutions, and explains the importance of environmental scanning and needs assessment for understanding the digital humanities researchers at one's own institution. The authors discuss three examples of digital humanities library collaborations: digitization of Mexican and Mexican American newspapers, digitization of borderland materials, and a 16mm film project.

Becoming the Gothic Archive

The Gothic Archive is the flagship digital humanities project for the Marquette University library. The project was birthed from a simple digital collection, and through the partnership of faculty and librarians, was transformed into something more. The core tenets of digital collection creation were adhered to in order to create a solid foundation upon which to build the Archive. The expertise of both groups and communication were key in the evolution of the collection, and in discovering and highlighting the relationships between the objects. This case study reviews the steps Marquette took in creating the collection and taking it to the level of digital humanities project.

Digitizing the Humanities

Scholarship in the humanities is rapidly becoming digital, and patrons expect libraries to offer new resources. The influence of Web 2.0, especially social media, amplifies these changes and enhances digital scholarship. The collaborative creation of digital collections allows libraries to modernize their available resources while encouraging dynamic patron participation in the educational process through initiatives like crowdsourcing. The developing digital elements of humanities scholarship and how they can be affected by the participatory web is examined through discussion and review of literature, and applied and observed through a case study of The Skeptiseum, a digital museum of physical artifacts, and how digitization contributes to modern scholarship in the humanities.

Digital Humanities in Cultural Preservation

Libraries and cultural institutions have been proactive in adopting different policies for preservation of culture. This is evident by the growing number of cultural repositories and digital libraries set for managing and making accessible different forms of cultural assets ranging from folklore, custom documentaries, craft designs and patterns, architectural setups etc. These procedures not only help them to preserve valuable indigenous knowledge but explore the richness in the cultural values of different nations. The proliferation of Information communication technology (ICT) has resulted in the merging of different forms of digitalized information which combine print, voice, video, and graphics for educational and recreational purposes. The application of Digital Humanities in preservation, management and accessibility of cultural resources ranging from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets cannot be neglected. The chapter discusses the concept of Digital Humanities in the light of its rich background and importance in present times for preserving human culture by acquiring, managing and making available cultural assets for further research. The chapter also attempts to explore and identify the recent contributions to the concept by analyzing ongoing Digital Humanities initiatives and projects by different organizations and information centers to stimulate future Research and development trend in the field.

Shaping the Roles of Academic Librarians to Meet Emerging Demands of DH Scholarship

As digital technologies permeate research, teaching, and learning on academic campuses, librarians are increasingly expected to be conversant in the tools and resources used in digital humanities (DH) scholarship. They are also expected to play a role in managing DH projects and promoting them to their campus communities and beyond. This growing niche of support calls not only for expanding librarians' DH toolkits and knowledge, but also for novel and energetic collaborations with other college staff, particularly information technologists. This chapter considers ways to create and sustain partnerships between faculty, instructional technologists, and librarians in support of DH activities at a liberal arts college. By focusing on collaborative approaches to DH training, events, and project planning and management, the chapter provides a blueprint for creating a DH Team that capitalizes on the existing skills of librarians and instructional technologists and for fostering a culture in which librarians can acquire new skills to support DH scholarship.