Introduction
The Digital Scholarship and Digital Cultural Heritage Collections Working Group (DSDCH WG) is a knowledge and skills sharing network for colleagues within European libraries with an interest in digital humanities, digital scholarship, and digital cultural heritage collections.
Our Working Group is focused on empowering European libraries to keep apace with the evolving landscape of library and cultural heritage services in support of digital scholarship, digital humanities and other computationally driven research domains. Our primary objective is to enhance the capabilities of libraries to operate confidently in digital and data-centric research domains and strengthen our position as collaborators within European digital humanities and similar research networks. To this end, our aim is to provide a space for colleagues to connect with fellow institutions in the European library sector to locate and share pertinent experiences, resources, knowledge and skills in this domain.
Working Groups ultimately conduct their work in fulfilment of the LIBER strategy, and for LIBER’s 2023-2027 Strategy, the DSDCH WG operates under the direction of the Steering Committee for Upskilling the Library Workforce.
In 2023/2024 we will build on the WG’s previous years work which identified LIBER member’s staff skills needs (Europe’s Digital Humanities Landscape: A Study From LIBER’s Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group) and began to surface and collate resources to provide an easy entry into topics relating to digital research.
For 2023-2027 we are exploring the potential for a centralised, sustainable, library staff skills hub for LIBER members to more easily discover, and share, trusted training materials at the intersection of library & cultural heritage collections and computing. We are working in close collaboration with the LIBER Data Science in Libraries (DSL) WG to develop a proof of concept for such a resource presently.
We aim to meet once a quarter, typically online, with two additional in-person workshops/meetings a year at the Annual LIBER conference and the Winter Event respectively.