LIBER’s Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group is gathering literature for libraries with an interest in digital humanities.

Four teams, each with a specific focus, have assembled a list of must-read papers, articles and reports. The recommendations in this article (the third in the series) have been assembled by the team in charge of enhancing skills in the field of digital humanities for librarians, led by Caleb Derven of the University of Limerick.

• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 1
• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 2
• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 4

The Third Theme: Skill Building

The recommended readings and tutorials in this post broadly focus on what skills are needed for providing DH services in libraries and how library staff can acquire these skills.

In the case of the former, we examined resources that resonated as representative or evocative of what skills library staff might obtain allowing them to participate in digital humanities work or practices. With the latter, we’ve highlighted a few skills tutorials that provide practical instruction in useful tools and skills for DH practice. Of course, given the sheer plurality of both web-accessible and published resources, this posting highlights a sampling of what’s available. The Working Group’s Zotero library, and items specifically related to skill building within libraries, offers a surfeit of additional starting places.

1. Coding for Librarians: Learning by ExampleThe Digital in the Humanities, Andromeda Yelton
   This issue of Library Technology Reports examines the contexts of, the motivations for, and concrete examples of coding in libraries. The chapters in the issue are notable for the range of libraries represented (albeit in primarily North American settings), from public to special to academic libraries. The chapters carefully describe not only the what of coding (specific tools or approaches used, the problems addressed by the coding, etc.) but also why librarians should code, and through exploring political and social dimensions of coding, outlines a sort of ethics of coding in libraries. The issue makes a strong case for the active role of the librarian in the creation of the digital library.
2. Using Open Refine to Create XML Records for Wikimedia Batch Upload Tool: Nora McGregor
   Many of us working in DH or digital library projects that involve any level of metadata clean-up, data munging or data transformations have likely encountered Open Refine, a veritable panacea for many data related issues. This blog post from the British Library’s Digital Scholarship department provides a comprehensive and detailed description of a specific approach to uploading collection metadata to Wikimedia Commons using Open Refine as a core tool. The post highlights openness as both platform and tool.
3. Digital Humanities Clinics – Leading Dutch Librarians into DH: Lotte Wilms, Michiel Cock, Ben Companjen
   This article describes a series of DH clinics run in academic and research libraries in the Netherlands aimed towards enabling library professionals to provide services to students and researchers, identify skill gaps and provide identifiable solutions and to assist in automating daily work, echoing themes in the Library Technology Reports issue noted above. The librarians involved in the project ran five DH Clinics in 2017 and found that the model of training collections librarians interested in DH all at once worked very well, as you not only get the training part in order, but also put a network in place.
4. Programming Historian
   As our first suggestion for DH-related tutorials, the Programming Historian provides 68 lessons in a wide range of open skills, technologies and tools, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, related to many data and content areas that librarians work with in DH contexts. The site covers a broad range of use cases that strongly reverberate with library DH work, from visualisation to textual analysis to GIS and mapping contexts and digital publishing.
5. Library Carpentry: What Is Library Carpentry?
   Building on the lessons and approach of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry could be viewed as an essential prologue before embarking on the deep dives of the Programming Historian lessons. The tools detailed in Library Carpentry’s lessons form the core of the work undertaken in many of the resources noted in this post.
6. British Library Digital Scholarship Training Programme
   This collection of courses provided by the British Library is aimed at librarians to provide them with an understanding of Digital Scholarship and to develop the necessary skills to deliver DH-related services. Links are provided to all the slides and resources used in the training. The tools and approaches are consonant with resources noted above.

The Skill-building team of the Working Group will be providing additional posts in the coming months that highlight both specific use cases faced in LIBER institutions and potential challenges in providing DH services.

To find out more about the team and LIBER’s work in this area, see the Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group page.

This summer the ‘Building Relationships’ strand of the LIBER Digital Humanities Working Group has been exploring the theme of ‘researcher needs in digital humanities’, asking how libraries know what these needs are, and how we can meet them.

This has involved considering area such as potential engagement activities for digital humanities services; how libraries work with and collaborate with researchers; skills training required by the research community; and the challenges of meeting these needs.

This resource list brings together some of the articles recommended by members of the Building Relationships subgroup, which help to navigate these questions. All submissions are saved in a Zotero reading list, with some featured below.

1) Partnering up with researchers in a national library, Kleppe, M., Claeyssens, S., Veldhoen, S., and Wilms, L. (2019)

The KB provide a brilliant example of how to work with researchers in this presentation, which begins with an understanding of who their users are. The slides describe five routes to collaboration with the KB, all of which are mutually beneficially – enabling the Library to improve their services in response.

2) Open a GLAM Lab, Mahey, M., Al-Abdulla, A., Ames, S., Bray, P., Candela, G., Chambers, S., Derven, C., Dobreva-McPherson, M., Gasser, K., Karner, S., Kokegei, K., Laursen, D., Potter, A., Straube, A., Wagner, S-C. and Wilms, L. with forewords by: Al-Emadi, T. A., Broady-Preston, J., Landry, P. and Papaioannou, G. (2019)

This book, written in a ‘sprint’ format over the course of one week by GLAM professionals and researchers, is a toolkit for setting up a ‘lab’ in a cultural heritage organisation. The ‘User Communities’ chapter discusses the need to identify and understand different users – yet doesn’t expand on different approaches for doing this. There are also a number of examples throughout the book of successful collaborations between academics and digital humanities services, providing a useful, user-focused toolkit for designing a lab.

3) Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians, Rutner, J. and Schonfeld R. C. (2012)

This paper is a study of history academics and students, exploring how libraries and other services can support their needs as they begin to use new technologies and methodologies in their work. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations for service providers, including around digitisation, discovery and the importance of non-textual materials such as video games and film. This article aligns with a related study, ‘Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Asian Studies Scholars’.

4) What Ever Happened to Project Bamboo?, Dombrowski, Q. (2014)

This is a great article of ‘worst practice’ examples of building relationships between humanities researchers and IT infrastructure services. It explores communication difficulties, funding challenges and problems of vision and scope of the collaborative ‘Project Bamboo’, a ‘humanities cyberinfrastructure’ project.

5) Digital Collaborations: A Survey Analysis of Digital Humanities Partnerships Between Librarians and Other Academics Wagner Webster, J. (2019)

This article sets out the perceptions of information professionals about their role supporting humanities scholars, as well as the perceptions of digital humanities scholars on the role of information professionals in their research. Based on survey responses, it explores how much the two groups collaborate on projects, barriers to collaboration such as funding, resource and time, and how these collaborations are instigated – with information professionals initiating collaborations far less than researchers.

If you would like to suggest further materials to be added to the Zotero reading list, please contact sarah.ames@nls.uk or liam.odwyer@dcu.ie

This list post was written by Sarah Ames, Digital Scholarship Librarian at the National Library of Scotland, with responsibility for the Digital Scholarship Service.

LIBER’s Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group is gathering literature for libraries with an interest in digital humanities.

Four teams, each with a specific focus, have assembled a list of must-read papers, articles and reports. The recommendations in this article (the fourth and last in the series) have been assembled by the team looking at the roles of libraries in digital humanities and awareness raising in academic libraries. The team is led by Kirsty Lingstadt of the University of Edinburgh and, for these recommendations, Sarah Ames of the University of Edinburgh has lent additional support.

• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 1
• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 2
• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 3

The Fourth Theme: The Role of Libraries

This theme examines a challenging question: what is the role of libraries in digital humanities? Is it to provide advice and guidance, to provide services that support these activities or to be a fully-fledged partner in digital humanities activities?

The answer is as varied as the different types of research libraries, and the literature highlights some of these tensions. It is clear, however, that libraries have a key place within digital humanities because of the collections which they hold. These collections often form the starting point of digital humanities projects and — when it comes to the outputs — libraries have a role in publishing, preserving and making these accessible.

In particular, libraries hold detailed knowledge about audiences and their different needs. As articulated in Melissa Terras’ forthcoming article¹, usability and reuse are often not considered by digital humanities projects. These factors are, however, critical if the outputs are to have value for wider audiences. The librarian can offer unique insight and partnership to ensure that DH projects have a life beyond the project and add value to the collections held by the library.

Underpinning this is a need to raise awareness of digital humanities at all levels of the library. The role of librarian as advocate is a critical one, and to do this we need to work with the academic communities and researchers: building and developing skills and, above all, deciding what the role of digital humanities will be in our libraries. We then need to showcase our findings, so that others see and understand where this will take us. As Captain Kirk would say ‘To boldly go…..’

We hope that this list, in combination with the previous lists, will help provide some thoughts on the path which we should boldly follow.

1. Digital Humanities In the Library/Of the Library. Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Sarah Potvin and Thomas Padilla.
   This special issue of dh+lib contains a number of case studies of libraries working in digital humanities areas, often leading to a reassessment of the role of the library, the services it provides and the skills of the librarian.
2. The Role of Research Libraries in the creation, archiving, curation, and preservation of tools for the Digital Humanities. Christina Kamposiori.
   The recent RLUK report examines the role of research libraries in digital scholarship, through survey responses from RLUK member libraries. The report demonstrates the ways in which libraries engage in digital humanities projects and how and what support they provide, as well as examining the changing role of librarians and the skillsets needed to actively contribute to this area. RLUK advocate knowledge exchange between institutions on how best to engage and work with researchers, despite the issue that there is no single solution for all.
3. Developing Digital Scholarship: Emerging practices in academic libraries. Alison Mackenzie and Lindsey Martin.
   This publication contains a number of different approaches and case studies of how librarians are working with digital humanities. The text looks not just at what new technologies support research and development in this area but also at the partnerships that libraries can develop.
4. Supporting Digital Scholarship. SPEC Kit 350. Rikk Mulligan.
   The SPEC Kits 350 surveys a number of American institutions about their digital scholarship provisions, and looks to specific examples of services provided by libraries, as well as projects they support.
5. Digital humanities in the library isn’t a service. Trevor Muñoz. 
   This article is a reponse from Muñoz to a blog post from Miriam Posner, in which she writes about the challenges of ‘doing digital humanities’ in libraries. In his reply, Muñoz argues the case that research lead by librarians should be the central focus of digital humanities work in libraries. By focusing on service provision, rather encouraging librarians to lead their own experimental projects, we miss engagement opportunities and detract from the intellectual labour of library work in this area: ‘Framing digital humanities in libraries as a service to be provided and consequently centering the focus of the discussion on faculty members or others outside the library seem likely to stall rather than foster libraries engagement with digital humanities.’ Muñoz explains that this does not mean that library projects, tools or research may not grow into or improve services – but that these should stem from ideas, activities and partnerships formed within the library.
6. No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library. Miriam Posner.
   Posner details the barriers to digital humanities work in the library, from lack of support and time, to the need for new skills and new relationships with academics, as well as proposing solutions. To successfully engage users with digital humanities in the library, libraries must ‘do a great deal more than add “digital scholarship” to an individual librarian’s long string of subject specialties’ (51), and instead look to space, culture (are librarians allowed to experiment? Do they have the support to do this?), technology and training for their staff.
7. Evolving in Common: Creating Mutually Supportive Relationships Between Libraries and the Digital Humanities. Micah Vandegrift and Stewart Varner.
   This article suggests ways in which libraries can engage with digital humanities research, from practical advice for establishing partnerships and engaging with the research community, to keeping up-to-date with new developments in the field. Vandegrift and Varner propose that the role of the librarian should be adapted and reframed – from ‘servitude’ to collaborator – to ‘support the journey of research as a means in itself’ (73) and embed digital humanities successfully in the library.
8. Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries. John White and Heather Gilbert.
   White’s Preface states that this text is intended to be a ‘conversation starter among rank-and-file librarians about how and why librarians, archivists, and museum professionals should engage with digital humanists as full partners in both research and teaching’ (xii). The chapters that follow emphasise the scale of the role that libraries can and should play in digital scholarship research, and the ways in which skills and roles need to adapt to accommodate this.

To find out more about LIBER’s work in this area, see the Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group page.

¹Greta Franzini, Melissa Terras, and Simon Mahony. Forthcoming 2018. Expectations of Digital Editions of Text: Surveying User Requirements in the Digital Humanities. ACM J. Comput. Cult. Herit. (Accepted 2018, In Press)

LIBER’s Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group is gathering literature for libraries with an interest in digital humanities.

Four teams, each with a specific focus, have assembled a list of must-read papers, articles and reports. The recommendations in this article (the second in the series) have been assembled by the team in charge of Cooperation and Relationship Between Libraries and Research Communities, led by Liam O’Dwyer of Dublin City University.

• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 1
• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 3
• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 4

The Second Theme: Cooperation Between Libraries & Research Communities

As Digital Humanities (DH) evolves, the role of libraries and librarians working in the field continues to develop. A core factor in realising the opportunities that DH presents for libraries – and that libraries present for DH – is the level and nature of cooperation between libraries and their research communities. How do libraries find their DH research communities? How do we let ‘them’ find ‘us’? How are these connections best facilitated and fostered?

A significant body of literature focuses on this aspect of DH Librarianship and this post results from an appropriately collaborative attempt to list must-reads.

1. The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Bethany Nowviskie
   In Melissa Dinsman’s interview, Nowviskie identifies the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) as being of most benefit to DH. Expertise in digitisation, data curation, digital stewardship, metadata, discovery and data visualisation and analysis are called out as key offerings. These are augmented by the established liaison and consultative roles of libraries.
2. Communicating New Library Roles to Enable Digital Scholarship: A Review Article, John Cox
   In his consideration of academic libraries’ approaches to DH, Cox notes the importance of language and terminology in broadcasting skillsets, for example in job titles and team names. It may be more apt for the Library to present itself as partner or collaborator as opposed to service or support provider. Cox calls for a focused communications strategy to embed libraries in digital scholarship and create new perceptions of their role as enabling partners, one “that focuses on inserting the library into digital scholarship communities, mirroring their experimental mindset, and projecting a confident, ‘can-do’ outlook”.
3. No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library, Miriam Posner and Digital Humanities in the Library isn’t a Service, Trevor Munoz
   Posner also acknowledges the importance of language and framing. She concurs with Trevor Munoz who argues that support may be unsuited to DH where projects typically need collaborators rather than supporters. In her piece, Posner identifies recurring challenges and opportunities for libraries working in DH and investigates common factors of success and failure. Among her conclusions are the importance of institutional commitment and openness to new models and workflows.
4. Evolving in Common: Creating Mutually Supportive Relationships Between Libraries and the Digital Humanities, Micah Vandegrift & Stewart Varner
   In this piece Vandegrift and Varner use texts by Lisa Spiro, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Stephen Ramsay and Bethany Nowviskie to present and discuss a variety of perspectives on the subject of library engagement in DH. They emphasise the need for deep collaboration and echo the importance of acting as equal partner and overcoming any reluctance or “timidity” in this regard. The potential of library as space is signaled as particularly pertinent for DH activity and relationship building
5. Building Capacity for Digital Humanities, ECAR Working Group
   The ECAR working group paper outlines categories to assess institutions in terms of capacity and readiness for DH and suggests practical approaches and next steps. Different structural approaches to facilitate DH collaboration are explored – centralised, hub and spoke, mesh and consortial. They stress the importance of local context in their consideration of how to best foster DH growth. The ECAR recommendation of a tailored approach recurs frequently in this literature, responding to the local DH environment, available resources and strategic goals. Performing a needs assessment or environmental scan is repeatedly advocated as an appropriate first step to inform how a library should engage with its researchers.
6. Research Libraries & Digital Humanities Tools, RLUK
   RLUK’s report on The role of Research Libraries in the creation, archiving, curation, and preservation of tools for the Digital Humanities documents the outcomes of a survey of UK research libraries, presenting a broad range of models used and approaches taken. It reinforces views found elsewhere here, such as the cautioning against a one-size-fits-all approach and the shifting role of libraries from service provider to active participant.
7. Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Sarah Potvin & Thomas Padilla
   ACRL’s 2016 special issue Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library contains many articles broaching the topic of research cooperation. Do DH Librarians Need to be in the Library?: Librarianship in Academic Units by Locke and Mapes explores how models of embedded librarianship within a faculty can help position the Librarian as an active partner. Other articles discuss the task of bringing library DH labour to light. When  Metadata Becomes Outreach focuses on the importance of communicating library skills, where metadata can become “the heartbeat making DH projects usable, robust, preservable, sustainable, and scalable”.  In another piece, by Huculack and Goddard, a tension is identified between priorities – the scholar focusing on theory/prototype/output and the librarian on practice/preservation/standardisation.
8. The Reciprocal Benefits of Library Researcher-in-Residence Programs, Virginia Wilson
   This paper looks at how use of library research-in-residence programs can enhance the research culture of the library and help foster a collaborative culture between library and faculty.
9. Digital Humanities: What Can Libraries Offer? Shun Han Rebekah Wong
   Wong undertakes a quantitative analysis of authorship in DH journals to investigate library involvement in the field. She present libraries as central to DH realizing its potential while acknowledging complexity and challenges of relationship building.
10. Special Report: Digital Humanities in Libraries, Stewart Varner and Patricia Hswe
    Varner and Hswe’s 2016 survey and report of Digital Humanities in Libraries reflects uncertainty in how to best respond to the expanding scope of activity in the field. Many themes and recommendations recur: an engaged, agile, responsive approach, leveraging of existing library strengths.
11. The Research Librarian of the Future: Data Scientist and Co-investigator
    LSE’s The Research Librarian of the Future looks at emerging roles and opportunities for liaison librarians. Meeting emerging research requirements (e.g. around data) can drive collaboration, another example of the agile approach – looking for researchers’ knowledge gaps and where they overlap with library strengths. The need for a strategic approach, supporting upskilling and committing resources, is highlighted.

It is somewhat reassuring that across these writings there are recurring themes, and interesting to see how they relate and intersect. Library skills and functions are a natural fit for DH, yet a reframing of roles can help communicate their relevance to the field. DH offers great potential as an area of growth but strategic alignment and commitment of resourcing are essential for that potential to be realised. While it may no longer be new, DH remains decidedly different in the challenges and opportunities it poses for libraries – and particularly how libraries and researchers collaborate. Posner acknowledges the reality of much DH scholarship as “eccentric, unpredictable, bespoke, and prone to failure. It will not match up neatly with a library’s existing workflows”. These truths, however unpalatable to the DH-enthused librarian, indicate that libraries need to adjust and experiment to succeed here. As Posner again puts it, “DH is not, and cannot be, business as usual for a library”

For further reading there are of course many more comprehensive listings than this post covers. In the course of our discussions, the following were mentioned:

• Miriam Posner’s Digital Humanities and the Library
• The ACRL’s dh+lib list of relevant readings on DH+Libraries

Our own Zotero list of the writings mentioned in this post can be found here.

To find out more about the team and LIBER’s work in this area, see the Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group page.

LIBER’s Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group is gathering literature for libraries with an interest in digital humanities. Four teams, each with a specific focus, have assembled a list of must-read papers, articles and reports.

The recommendations in this article (the first in the series) have been assembled by the team in charge of Recommendations for identifying and establishing policies and profiles regarding digital humanities’ portfolios, led by Demmy Verbeke of KU Leuven.

• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 2
• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 3
• Digital Humanities Reading List: Part 4

When a particular topic gains traction in academic theory and practice, literature on the matter soon follows suit. No wonder then that, in recent years, we have seen the appearance of numerous scholarly articles about Digital Humanities (DH), as well as companions, handbooks, readers and journals devoted to the topic. What is more, DH practitioners typically embrace alternative forms of scholarly communication, resulting in a steady stream of blog posts and publications on collaborative platforms like GitHub or the Open Science Framework. As an academic endeavor, DH has also captured the public imagination so we find numerous newspaper or magazine articles and opinion pieces. Finally, governments, funding bodies and academic institutions have produced numerous reports and DIY manuals as they ponder if and how to support DH.

In this post, we want to highlight a few choice examples of this literature, which we found particularly informative when contemplating why DH deserves the attention of research libraries in the first place and the various ways in which it can be integrated in the day-to-day practices of these institutions.

The First Theme: Policies & Portfolios

We want to highlight a few choice examples literature which we found particularly informative when contemplating why DH deserves the attention of research libraries in the first place, and the various ways in which it can be integrated in the day-to-day practices of these institutions.

1. There Is No Such Thing as ‘the Digital Humanities’, Eric Weiskott
   Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Weiskott argues that most debates about DH are grounded in the much-hyped crisis of the humanities and that most criticisms of DH are actually founded on misunderstandings of what DH is or is not. The use of digital technology to study the humanities is as much (and therefore just as little) a threat to the humanities as the use of print technology.
2. De-Centering and Recentering Digital Scholarship, Office of Digital Research and Scholarship at Florida State University
   This manifesto (currently available in pre-print) highlights the many positive changes in academic practice driven by digital scholarship. It connects digital scholarship (and thus also digital humanities) with librarianship, a.o. by discussing how it transforms the role of libraries and librarians.
3. Special Report: Digital Humanities in Libraries, Stewart Varner and Patricia Hswe
   Several studies have reported on the uptake of DH in research libraries in recent years, and Digital Humanities in Libraries examines how American libraries have dealt with DH. The report highlights a common thread in the literature (equally present in the aforementioned manifesto), namely that DH support based in the library not only offers the opportunity but even demands that the library goes beyond being a service provider and becomes a valuable – and valued – partner in research.
4. Skunks in the Library: a Path to Production for Scholarly R&D, Bethany Nowviskie
   Probably the most influential expression of the library’s responsibility to become a partner in research is Nowviskie’s article. It describes the activities and organization of the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library as an example of a semi-independent research-and-development lab staffed with librarians acting as scholar-practitioners.

A number of more extensive publications provide detailed advice and practical guidelines on how to organize DH support, based on experiences gathered during the last decade. Noteworthy examples include:

• SPEC Kit 350: Supporting Digital Scholarship (2016) of the Association of Research Libraries
• ECAR Working Group Paper Building Capacity for Digital Humanities. A Framework for Institutional Planning (2017)
• Christina Kamposiori’s report for RLUK: The role of Research Libraries in the creation, archiving, curation, and preservation of tools for the Digital Humanities (2017)

One of the objectives of this team’s focus on policies and portfolios of libraries in DH is to make good use of these overviews of experiences, challenges, tips and reflections to support the uptake of DH in research libraries all over Europe.

To find out more about the team and LIBER’s work in this area, see the Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group page.

Optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR) are processes most libraries are familiar with when digitising (large volumes of) text. The automated software recognises characters, which are then available for e.g. keyword search and computational analysis. The rise of machine learning applications saw a corresponding rise in HTR and improvements in OCR quality. 

This reading list aims to highlight some publications worth reading for librarians that wish to learn more about the text recognition processes, new developments in the field and the impact of lower quality text recognition in digital collections.