Session Type: Presentation/Panel
Session Description:
As the digital humanities have gained new and greater prominence on university campuses, conference programs, funded grant projects, and popular media’s front pages, many research libraries have responded by creating new positions intended to serve (or perhaps catalyze) digital humanities activity in their communities. These positions are usually titled “Digital Humanities Librarian,” or some close variant, but the institutional situations, duties, disciplinary affiliations, and goals vary across institutions.
This panel will survey the current landscape of digital humanities librarianship as it is practiced by librarians who are working in these relatively new roles at a variety of institutions. By presenting a unique “on the ground” perspective, this panel will complement recent past presentations on supporting digital humanities in libraries—such as that on the findings from the SPEC survey published by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in 2011—which offered a more high-level, strategic perspective.
Through a mix of short presentations and discussion, the collected panelists will share their perspectives on what it means to “do digital humanities” in libraries on a day-to-day basis, as well as what their experiences might mean in terms of the strategic outlook for serving digital humanities research. In particular, the panel will devote attention to issues such as: goals when starting out in a digital humanities librarian position, how to grow and scale a program (particularly, how to involve other library staff), how digital humanities librarians are working with researchers, and the place of librarianship and information science in the landscape of digital humanities as a field.
Session Leaders:
Trevor Muñoz, University of Maryland
Harriett Green, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Angela Courtney, Indiana University Bloomington Libraries
Jean Bauer, Brown University Library
Glen Worthey, Stanford University Libraries
Session Notes:
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Session Slides:
