Eleanor Dickson (HathiTrust), Harriett Green (Washington University), Amanda Henley (UNC Chapel Hill), and Terese Heidenwolf (Lafayette College) recently presented “Empowering Librarians to Support Digital Scholarship Research” at ACRL 2019. The presentation discussed the findings of their three-year study “Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources” (DDRF), a project funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. From the article:
Training librarians to become active facilitators of or partners in digital scholarship requires acknowledging the multifaceted ways in which digital research methodologies are applied. Next, amidst this shifting landscape, the profession has tended to separate digital scholarship or digital humanities librarianship into a professional sub-specialization. As a result, knowledge of key skills, tools, and strategies for digital scholarship are not widespread within academic libraries despite the growing demand for librarians to be trained in these areas.
Their project aimed to “develop and implement a training curriculum for librarians in the methods, tools, and concepts for text data mining” utilizing the resources from the HathiTrust Research Center for text analysis. The three phases of the project included drafting a first iteration of workshop materials, teaching pilot workshops at partner institutions, and teaching national and regional workshops using their “near-finalized curriculum.” The authors also conducted post-workshop interviews with attendees to ascertain additional information, such as the librarian roles represented at the workshop, as well as how long those librarians had been in their fields.
The training materials produced from this project were released as an Open Education Resource last fall.