The Digital Humanities

Implications for Librarians, Libraries, and Librarianship

Christopher Millson-Martula, Kevin B. Gunn, Christopher Millson-Martula, Kevin B. Gunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429687259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

The digital humanities in academic institutions, and libraries in particular, have exploded in recent years. Librarians are constantly developing their management and technological skills and increasing their knowledge base. As they continue to embed themselves in the scholarly conversations on campus, the challenges facing subject/liaison librarians, technical service librarians, and library administrators are many.

This comprehensive volume highlights the wide variety of theoretical issues discussed, initiatives pursued, and projects implemented by academic librarians. Many of the chapters deal with digital humanities pedagogy—planning and conducting training workshops, institutes, semester-long courses, embedded librarian instruction, and instructional assessment—with some chapters focusing specifically on applications of the "ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education." The authors also explore a wide variety of other topics, including the emotional labor of librarians; the challenges of transforming static traditional collections into dynamic, user-centered, digital projects; conceptualizing and creating models of collaboration; digital publishing; and developing and planning projects including improving one's own project management skills. This collection effectively illustrates how librarians are enabling themselves through active research partnerships in an ever-changing scholarly environment.

This book was originally published as a special triple issue of the journal College & Undergraduate Libraries.

INTRODUCTION

The digital humanities: Implications for librarians, libraries, and librarianship

Christopher Millson-Martula^a and Kevin Gunn^b

^aFormer Director of the Library at Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, VA; ^bThe Catholic University of America, Washington, DC

From small colleges to large universities, academic librarians continue to meet the challenges of digital humanities in a variety of ways. The diversity of skills, knowledge, and experience exhibited by librarians in the digital humanities continues to extend, deepen, and evolve. Seeking a deeper appreciation of the limitations of digital tools, establishing good project development practices for humanities scholarship, managing data through the research lifecycle, teaching multiple literacies (information, data, visual), and renegotiating the traditional librarian/faculty relationship from service orientated to full collaborator and partner are just some of the issues facing librarians as they reinvent themselves in the digital humanities sphere.

The Digital Humanities: Implications for Librarians, Libraries, and Librarianship is a special issue of College & Undergraduate Libraries that reflects some of the current challenges that occupy librarians who are engaging the academic community in the digital humanities. The following thirty articles on various topics have been organized around six main themes: theoretical and critical issues, transforming traditional collections, models of collaboration, planning and project management, the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, and embedded librarian instruction.

Theoretical and critical perspectives

In Evaluating the Landscape of Digital Humanities Librarianship, Poremski surveys LIS professionals who work in the digital humanities to see how they came into their roles, the scope of their training and their future training needs, what professional development opportunities are available to them, and institutional infrastructure requirements. The vast majority of librarians learn digital humanities ‘on the job’ and Poremski makes recommendations for addressing professional development needs. Another concern that has come to the forefront of librarians' concern is the emotional investment that librarians must make in managing the people and projects involved. Logsdon, Mars, and Tompkins discuss genre theory, feminist theory, and emotional labor in advocating for the significant yet often unheralded work that digital humanities librarians perform in Claiming Expertise from Betwixt and Between: Digital Humanities Librarians, Emotional Labor, and Genre Theory.

Transforming material collections

Librarians are discovering scholarly opportunities by transforming traditional physical collections into digital projects that highlight new insights. In The Rosarium Project: A Case of Merging Traditional Reference Librarian Skills with Digital Humanities Technology, Tryon provides us with a case study of how ‘traditional’ reference librarians can parlay their skills in new ways. She created a TEI database project on the topic of roses from a print annotated bibliography. Corlett-Rivera writes of the challenges in building and expanding a French Caribbean digital history website from a traditional library cataloging and digitization project in Subject Librarian as Coauthor: A Case Study with Recommendations. The author provides a list of recommendations for subject librarians interested in pursuing projects in their subject responsibilities. In Experiencing Medieval Manuscripts Using Touch Technology, Gallant and Denzer offer a case study on using Arduino boards to set up an interactive medieval manuscript exhibit. In Creating Digital Knowledge: Library as Open Access Digital Publisher, Bailey explores initiatives that librarians can employ in bringing digital publishing to their institutions through examining three case studies at his institution.

Models of collaboration

A major theme that permeates any discussion of digital humanities work is the concept of collaboration in that there is a variety of challenges in working with the stakeholders involved. In Developing Collaborative Best Practices for Digital Humanities Data Collection: A Case Study, Di Cresce and King provide us with an exploration of the data management needs of medieval studies scholars working on the Digital Tools for Manuscript Study Project at the University of Toronto Libraries and the Centre for Medieval Studies. They recommend the best strategies and practices for librarians working with scholars in such an environment. Sabharwal explores the overlapping relationships and emerging models of collaboration among digital humanities researchers, data curators and archivists in Digital Humanities and the Emerging Framework for Digital Curation. Giannetti discusses the many difficulties and failures of collaborative librarian-faculty pedagogy in Against the Grain: Reading for the Challenges of Collaborative Digital Humanities Pedagogy.

Planning and project management

Developing planning and project management skills is not part of the traditional librarian education yet such skills are essential for developing successful digital humanities projects and are often learned ‘on the job.’ Currier, Mirza, and Downing write in They Think All of this is New: Leveraging Librarians’ Project Management Skills for the Digital Humanities that public, technical, and administrative librarians already have the project management skills necessary for the creation of successful digital humanities projects. In “A Community of Common Descent”: Planning the Documentation of Diaspora through the Electronic Irish Research Experience, Edwards and McCrea discuss the planning process in determining the feasibility of a cultural heritage project documenting the American Irish experience. Burress and Rowell illustrate these challenges at their institutions through two case studies involving the redesign of a first year seminar course around a 3D model of historic Venetian buildings and a biodiversity community wiki project in Project Management for Digital Projects with Collaborators beyond the Library. Sweeney, Flanders, and Levesque take into account the challenges of sustainability in digital humanities project development and support for community involvement in Community-Enhanced Repository for Engaged Scholarship: A Case Study on Supporting Digital Humanities Research. The authors focus on the CERES exhibit toolkit rolled out by the Northwestern University Libraries Digital Scholarship Group. In Building an Ethical Digital Humanities Community: Librarian, Faculty, and Student Collaboration, Risam, Snow, and Edwards focus on building a digital humanities program at a predominately undergraduate institution by making the library the hub of digital humanities activity on campus, having students work on a campus wide project, and creating an undergraduate research curriculum for digital scholarship. In So What Are You Going to Do with That?: The Promises and Pitfalls of Massive Data Sets, Cordell and Gomis list some of the challenges of DH librarians working with data sets including staff training and allocation, the library's role in data management, and sustainability issues. They recommend an incremental approach in supporting humanities research needs through outreach, collaboration, and building technical skills. Even without a staff and a budget, librarians can still initiate and manage projects. In Digitizing More for Less: Digital Preservation at The College of New Jersey, Cowell demonstrates how to leverage time and resources by using project management techniques to prioritize highly used library resources, reallocating lightly used equipment, and cooperating with other departments in building a digital collection.

ACRL framework for information literacy for higher education

With the revision of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education in 2016, librarians have been incorporating the new framework into digital humanities projects via extended information literacy classes. Kong, Bynum, Johnson, Sdunzik, and Qin discuss all six frames in teaching a four week summer institute on GIS to K-12 teachers in Spatial Information Literacy for Digital Humanities: The Case Study of Leveraging Geospatial Information for African American History Education. In Visualizing Oral Histories: A Lab Model Using Multimedia DH to Incorporate ACRL Framework Standards into Liberal Arts Education, White created a DH lab within an undergraduate English course using the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education. Her goal is to provide a new template for other librarians to follow in building their own labs within humanities courses. The frame “Scholarship as Conversation” is the focus of our next two articles. Gerber examines both this frame and the conversation theory found in the work of David Lankes in Conversation as a Model to Build the Relationship among Libraries, Digital Humanities, and Campus Leadership. Hauck addresses the frame by working with a faculty member and an institutional repository librarian to create a project for an undergraduate theology course in From Service to Synergy: Embedding Librarians in a Digital Humanities Project.

Embedded librarian instruction

Many librarians courageously have moved beyond the one-time, 50-minute information literacy session. Such traditional library instruction is insufficient either to create knowledge or to build skill sets for students immersed in digital humanities projects. The articles in this section demonstrate the numerous ways librarians proactively have embedded themselves in the curriculum–including institutes, workshops, courses, and seminars, whose students have included librarians, undergraduates, and faculty in various disciplines. Griffin and Taylor discuss ways to support digital humanities initiatives through reference and instructional services as embedded librarians in an undergraduate English class in Shifting Expectations: Revisiting Core Concepts of Academic Librarianship in Undergraduate Classes with a Digital Humanities Focus. In Teaching TEI to Undergraduates: A Case Study in a Digital Humanities Curriculum, Brooks provides a case study of teaching two one-credit, co-requisites for an advanced undergraduate course in medieval French literature. In Faculty-Library Collaborations in Digital History: A Case Study of the Travel Journal of Cornelius B. Gold, Davis, McCullough, Panciera, and Parmer worked as a team to teach students how to build an online project over the course of a semester long undergraduate history class. In A Subject Librarian's Pedagogical Path in the Digital Humanities, Mourer documents the pedagogical path a subject librarian new to digital humanities took in supporting students' efforts in planning a project for their sophomore English course. Beyond the One-Shot: Intensive Workshops as a Platform for Engaging the Library in Digital Humanities, Powell and Kong have adopted the weeklong institute format to teach GIS and spatial humanities to students and faculty. In The Digital Humanities Summer Scholarship: A Model for Library-Led Undergraduate Digital Scholarship, Morris shows how librarians at her institution created a six week internship for summer students who designed their own research projects and provides recommendations for sustainable implementation for future classes. Tritt and Heatherly provide an outline of how to teach a multi-campus, distance digital liberal arts course using archival and historical material in Practitioners as Professors: Experiential Learning in the Distance Digital Liberal Arts Classroom. In GIS and the Humanities: Presenting a Path to Digital Scholarship with the Story Map App, Kallaher and Gamble describe the process of creating a GIS/Story Map training workshop for librarians at a national library conference. The last two articles deal with assessment. In Reading in the Digital Age: A Case Study in Faculty and Librarian Collaboration, Hukill, Arnold, and Klein collaborated with a faculty member on a project in an English senior capstone seminar in determining the students' attitudes towards reading and analyzing online and print titles. In addition, the authors evaluate the effectiveness of two tools built in-house for use in this project. In Process and Collaboration: Assessing Digital Humanities Work through an Embedded Lens, Richardson and Eichmann-Kalwara assess and evaluate their own work on a digital public history project by using the Critical Incident Technique.

In this special issue, the editors hope to illustrate the myriad of ways that academic librarians can contribute to the expanding world of digital humanities through scholarship, teaching, and service.

CONTACT Christopher Millson-Martul

[email protected]

Former Director of the Library at Lynchburg College, 1501 Lakeside Dr., Lynchburg, 24501, VA.

THEORETICAL AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Evaluating the landscape of digital humanities librarianship

Molly Dahl Poremski

Lockwood Memorial Library, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA

ABSTRACT

As academic librarians strive to meet the needs of their users, it is important to understand the current and constantly changing landscape of digital humanities librarianship. The author of this article investigated areas in which current LIS professionals working in digital humanities came into their various roles, how they have been trained, how they feel about their opportunities for training, and where improvements can be made. The purpose of this study was to provide an overview of the digital humanities librarian skill set and to explore what training and infrastructure are needed in the field. Rather than looking to define digital humanities as a discipline, this study provides a current profile of digital humanities librarians, allowing for the profession to align with this evolving field's scholars and practitioners.

Introduction

Librarians working in the field of digital humanities (DH)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1 Introduction: The digital humanities: Implications for librarians, libraries, and librarianship
• Part I Theoretical and Critical Perspectives
• Part II Transforming Material Collections
• Part III Models of Collaboration
• Part IV Planning and Project Management
• Part V ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education
• Part VI Embedded Librarian Instruction
• Index