Digital Training for Librarians and Digital Library Support-11:30 Session

Resilient Networks Projects

• How to support digital humanities projects for places that don’t have digital humanities center
• Wanted to hear everybody’s responses
• How can people start/realize digital humanities project
• A Digital Humanities Project:
  • can be many things
  • the kind Amanda is most familiar with is by putting humanities information online.
  • making searchable databases online of historical documents/images
    • WhatAmericaAte.com– created at a digital humanities center- just launched out of Matrix at Michigan State University
      • they had this content, made is searchable and available
      • they combined libraries, scholarship, and digital humanities center
• How can these projects last without being grant funded?
  • Digital humanities center and library as the same space, doesn’t really need a center.
    • Saying ejournals versus journals- they are the same thing.
    • Keeping them together can help the technological people and the content people collaborate.
  • Raises the Question: we don’t only do all humanities, how can we combine them and put them in the box?
  • Humanities- we always need to ask for money
  • Digital Humanities because a lot of humanists need help with the technology.
    • Does the library support the digital humanities center or does the digital humanities center support itself?
    • Specialized skills needed for humanities
    • Reference librarians can guide, even if they aren’t an expert
• Why the humanities particularly?
  • Difficulties with The idea of “the Library is the Humanities Lab” as a substitute for the scientific labs
    • Engineers, sciences, etc have a lab, humanists have never worked that way
      • Humanists work on their own, in the stacks
      • Technological collaboration wasn’t as much a thing in the humanities in the past.
    • Library is more “come to me and I can help you find something”
    • Digital Humanities “we want to do this/make this/etc.”
      • GMU- the center has been separate from the library and history.
      • Librarians can have people come give the humanities people the workshop
      • The case for digital humanities hasn’t been made yet.
  • Digital Humanities Center could be called Digital Scholarship Center- it isn’t just the humanities that centers support
  • The Value of Digital Humanities
    • Transcription is a big project in the digital humanities
      • People don’t realize that search engines need text to search something
  • The Negatives of Library intrinsically connected to Digital Humanities
    • Having support from the library focused on the digital humanities
      • There is a lot of money, time, and people needed for DH
    • Library needs be there for support to help researchers find things
    • Cost
      • The more information, the harder it will be to sustain
      • Libraries would need to consider divide costs
      • In a 40 hour work week, can put X documents online OR we can help someone do their research project.
        • Trying to figure out how to make the work “good enough”
    • Sustainability
      • Funders are worried about funding these projects that are then done/away
      • If in 5 years, no one is looking at it, you need to update it
    • Labor
      • Mellon foundation is using grant trying to find an alternative to digital humanities centers
      • Having the people say, “we can’t give you a beautiful website, but we can get the information on there.”
• What should we be doing locally and what should we be doing collectively?
  • “My library has to have everything my users need” – it can’t be done
  • Expertise training
    • Consortial efforts to make it
    • Creating a bare minimum of common knowledge
  • Finding Aids and Catalogued
    • Finding aids are collection guides, not item levels
      • Large amount of description in the scope
      • Teaching finding aids is difficult
      • A lot of people can’t use the finding aids
• Back to “What is a Digital Humanities Project”
  • Once you have digitized things and put it on line, there is so much more you can do with it (mapping, text analysis, etc).
  • “Digital Humanities” is a term that students don’t need to know, but the professionals do.
    • Should know about digital tools, but DH is the inside talk.
• What is in scope for libraries in the DH space and what is not in scope for libraries in DH?
  • In Libraries- should be making it discoverable, having collections, etc.
  • The analytical side should not be in scope of library/part of library’s focus
  • Similar to a writing center:
    • you can reside here, but there are specific people who work within that center.
    • not focus on transfer of resources into digital scholarship.
  • Library- needs to limit their scope of what they can do/support
    • Not everyone can do everything,
  • Some libraries feel the need to save things because no one else will
  • Encouraging libraries to not support things forever, but giving it a specific amount of time.
    • The book- you write it and you publish it, book preservation is covered by the library, but they are used to that preservation.
    • The digital project- goes out of date, the look needs to be updated, doesn’t need to be saved forever.
• “You put it online, they will come”
  • A little bit of that, but it takes large amount of labor and time to get people to see it come up.
• Back to the Library’s role in analysis
  • It is not in their scope to conduct analysis, but it is important for them to enable analysis.
    • A commons where researchers from multiple groups can come together to learn about the basic tools.
  • There is an issue of “non-consumptive research”
    • Non-consumptive research- automated analysis of big data sets
      • You’re not reading a million books, consuming all of the information.
    • A lot of for-profit databases are selling this as a service