From the posting:

This position is being reposted.  Previous applicants are still under consideration.

Reporting to the Assistant Dean of Library Services, this position will bring a deep understanding of the major strategies, opportunities, challenges and trends facing academic research libraries today in the areas of open publishing, data and digital scholarship, the preservation and curation of digital assets, and the enhancement of research, teaching and learning through digital services and throughout the research lifecycle. This is a twelve-month, tenure-track position. The faculty rank of the candidate selected will be determined based on the candidate’s experience. The work schedule includes some evenings and weekends.

Minimum requirements:

o ALA-accredited master’s or other advanced degree appropriate to the position.

o Supervisory and leadership experience.

o Knowledge of data services, and digital scholarship.

Preferred experience:

o Experience with grant writing and implementation.
o Knowledge of scholarly communication services and trends.
o Ability to integrate a scholarly communication perspective into library services.
o Commitment to fostering an environment of equity, diversity, and inclusion.
o Ability to collaborate effectively and work in a team environment.

From the post:

Employer

Case Western Reserve University

Location

Cleveland, Ohio

Salary

This position is a Librarian 3 with a minimum of $77,780.

Posted Date

Oct 17, 2023

Case Western Reserve University seeks a forward thinking, inclusive, and collaborative
individual for the Digital Scholarship Team Leader position.

POSITION DESCRIPTION The Digital Scholarship Team Leader heads a highly collaborative
team that supports the Creation and Curation Services division in the Kelvin Smith Library at
Case Western Reserve University. The Team Leader has responsibility for articulating,
developing, and implementing a digital scholarship strategy and is responsible for the
management of the Digital Scholarship team and services including areas of scholarly
communication, open access, text analysis, geographic information systems, and data
management services. The team leader will work with the Associate University Librarian for
Creation and Curation Services to play a leadership role in library-wide policy making, and in the
development and evaluation of services. The Digital Scholarship Team Leader serves as a
member of the library leadership team.

ENVIRONMENT: Consistently ranked as one of the country’s leading private research
institutions, Case Western Reserve University is a member of the Association of American
Universities (AAU) that offers a robust learning environment for approximately 5,792
undergraduate and 6,400 graduate and professional students. Students enroll in the schools of
dental medicine, engineering, management, medicine, law, nursing, and social work and the
College of Arts and Sciences. Students can further engage with 100 interdisciplinary academic
and research centers and institutes, all within an academic culture that promotes and values
innovation of all kinds. Situated in Cleveland’s vibrant University Circle cultural community,
CWRU is an integral partner with world-class cultural organizations such as the Cleveland
Museum of Art, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Botanical Garden, and
the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
The Kelvin Smith Library is the knowledge and creativity commons of Case Western Reserve
University and part of a library system with over three million titles in print and digital formats.
KSL is home to the University Archives and Special Collections and manuscripts consisting of
over 17,000 linear feet, the Kulas Music Collection, and the Freedman Center for Digital
Scholarship which advances research by partnering with scholars and students to explore and
develop new forms of scholarship. KSL is a member of the Association of Research Libraries
(ARL), OhioLINK, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), HathiTrust, and the Center for
Research Libraries. In 2019 KSL was the recipient of the ACRL Excellence in Academic
Libraries Award. KSL affiliate libraries include the Cleveland Institute of Art Library, the
Cleveland Institute of Music Robinson Music Library, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library,
and a cooperative relationship with the Western Reserve Historical Society Research Library.

QUALIFICATIONS Team leaders must have sufficient experience and expertise in the work of
the Team to serve as a supervisor, advisor and mentor to others. Appointment to this level
assumes that all requirements of Librarian 2 have been met and sustained, that the individual
has demonstrated continued and outstanding growth in the profession and is able assume
leadership responsibilities and perform existing responsibilities at the highest level. Promotion to
this level requires not only excellence of performance but also recognition of contributions at the
state, national or international level. Leadership at this level can be managerial, communicative
or intellectual in nature, and can manifest itself in any aspect of the profession.
Experience: 6 years of appropriate experience required.
Education: Master’s degree in library science or related discipline required. Advanced
educational credentials (second Master’s degree, Ph.D.) preferred.

SALARY This position is a L3 with a minimum of $77,780. The salary will be offered to
commensurate with qualifications and experience.
APPLICATION PROCESS The full job description and application information are available at
https://bit.ly/3MhdWUv Job ID 11958. Please submit CV and Cover Letter.
CWRU LIBRARIES DIVERSITY STATEMENT The Case Western Reserve University Libraries
are deeply committed to achieving racial justice, and promoting a culture of anti-racism,
inclusion, equity, and diversity, so all people are welcome, heard, empowered, and valued.
CWRU DIVERSITY STATEMENT: In employment, as in education, Case Western Reserve
University is committed to Equal Opportunity and Diversity. Women, veterans, members of
underrepresented minority groups, and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

From the post:

The Data Services Librarian leads the library’s efforts to support digital scholarship and data science research and teaching. They lead the management and use of the Federal Depository documents collection. They act as a library liaison, teach information literacy skills, provide outreach, and build relationships with students, faculty, and staff, contributing knowledge and creativity to the library, the college, and the profession.

This is a full time, benefits eligible, salaried position with a hiring range of $60,954 – $76,207 annually.

Core Responsibilities:

• Develop strong working relationships with faculty, staff, and students who use (or support the use of) quantitative and qualitative data in their research, teaching, and scholarship.
• Provide expert instruction to students, faculty, and staff regarding the discovery, acquisition, management, manipulation, interpretation, analysis, and visualization of data (e.g. infographics, charts, maps, and interactive media) using specialty software and coding languages (e.g. R, Python, Stata, ArcGIS, QGIS); provide expert instruction in specialized methods (e.g. statistical techniques, text/data mining, sentiment analysis, network analysis, GIS).
• Provide proactive leadership, direction, and vision for the support of digital scholarship and data science research and teaching in the libraries; collaborate with faculty and staff from all Middlebury campuses.
• Lead the collection, management, and use of internal library data and the Federal Depository documents collection; create analyses, visualizations, and reports using internal data sources, and regional, national, and international data sources; support of assessment, collection management, research and instruction, and user experience research; advise other library staff on these practices.
• Build relationships with students, faculty, and staff by providing discipline-specific research advice, proactively communicating about relevant resources, and making decisions about library collections and spaces that are informed by curricular needs.
• Teach research and information literacy skills in the classroom and in one-on-one meetings, modeling best practices from instructional design and the science of learning.
• Develop web guides and other learning and outreach materials that highlight library resources and exhibit universal design principles for accessibility.
• Contribute knowledge and creativity to the library, the college, and the profession by supporting principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, working cooperatively, participating in campus initiatives, and engaging in scholarly and professional service activities.

Middlebury College is an equal-opportunity employer where diversity, equity, and inclusion are core values. To this end, the College recruits talented and diverse faculty, staff, and students from across the United States and around the world. Middlebury College encourages applications from women, people of color, people with disabilities, and members of other protected classes and historically underrepresented communities. The College also invites applications from individuals who demonstrate an ongoing commitment to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.

Requirements

• Knowledge of and some experience with data science and digital scholarship tools (e.g. Python, R, Stata, NVivo, GIS tools, etc.) and techniques (e.g. web scraping, APIs, statistical analysis, text/data mining), as well as ability and interest in learning new tools and techniques, required.
• Knowledge of established and cutting-edge tools and methods for scholarship, research and data management, and publication (including open access, open data, and preservation), especially in the social sciences and humanities, required.
• Understanding of government information sources and their use, preferred.
• Three to five years of progressively responsible experience in data science and digital scholarship services at an institution of higher education or research library, preferred.
• Graduate degree in library or information science from an accredited institution, or its equivalent in education and experience, required.
• Technical aptitude, including proficiency with web authoring tools, communication tools, and citation tools, along with a willingness to develop new competencies, required.
• Strong interpersonal and problem-solving skills, including the ability to work collaboratively in a team-oriented environment, a passion for providing empathetic research support, a strong sense of accountability, and excellent attention to detail, required.
• Learner-centered teaching skills and outstanding oral and written communication skills required; foreign language skills preferred, but not required.
• We encourage candidates who meet the minimum requirements to apply. There are multiple paths to success, and we are committed to supporting professional development and growth in this position.

Physical Demands and Working Conditions:

• This is a full-time, on-campus position. 1-2 days of remote work per week is a possibility most of the year.
• Shared participation in evening and weekend hours may be required.
• The work is mostly sedentary and includes no special physical demands. It may involve some walking, standing, bending, or carrying light items.

All three have contributed to the project in various capacities: Sarah as a Review Editor (since 2017), John as editor of the Resources page (since 2015), and Patrick as lead editor of the dh+lib Review (since 2015). The incoming Editors-in-Chief reflect the collaborative spirit of dh+lib, and will work as a team of editors with a collective mission to provide a dedicated venue for librarians, archivists, and information professionals engaged in the digital humanities.

As founding (and now outgoing) editors, who have witnessed our “group blog” blossom into a community of practice, it is a bittersweet exit. We are thrilled to be able to pass the helm to this stellar group of editors, and we look forward to seeing the project grow and develop in new hands. In the meantime, we will remain involved in an advisory role.

Stay tuned for more information on what this editorial transition means for dh+lib, along with new opportunities for participation and community input.

The dh+lib site debuted at the Digital Library Federation Forum in November 2012. As we approach the five-year anniversary of this project, we thought we should take a moment to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going. Sarah and Roxanne are the founding editors of dh+lib and, along with Zach Coble (who joined just a few months in), have been steering the project since its inception, aided by the collaborative efforts of Patrick Williams, John Russell, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Sarah Melton, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Thomas Padilla, Caro Pinto, and Josh Honn. 

How it got started

The dh+lib project was born out of a listerv. More specifically, it was a desire to break out of the library listserv bubble.

In 2011, members of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Literatures in English Section began to circulate a petition to form a Digital Humanities Discussion Group within ACRL. (According to ACRL, discussion groups are typically experimental, and are designed to do just that: discuss.) By the fall of that year, the discussion group was approved, with Kate Brooks and Angela Courtney as conveners, and the accompanying email list was created. While messages about DH and libraries began to trickle in, things really heated up when Bob Kosovsky shared a call for panelists from the Theatre Library Association on “Digital Humanities and the Performing Arts,” noting that many of the questions were worth addressing more generally—outside of the performing arts context. In typical fashion, Micah Vandegrift replied with a provocation:

“I think it’s time to be more assertive about the librarian as co-equal, co-creator, collaborator, co-PI, integral to the entirety of the digital humanities process, from grant-writing to project development and management, to preservation and maintenance of the products/objects.”

This set off a flurry of messages, including one from Roxanne Shirazi, who suggested that if we were to bring librarians to the center of the digital humanities discussion we should take our discussion off a listserv and make it public. Soon, plans for a group blog were taking shape. Brooks and Courtney found that ALA could provide a WordPress installation for the group, while Shirazi had connected with Sarah Potvin, who’d volunteered on the list, to scope out a project separately. Within weeks, the two pairs had combined efforts, and dh+lib was born.

Only it wasn’t called dh+lib just yet. While we worked to survey our group for input on just what kind of site we should make, the project itself remained nameless. [pullquote]Note to future project creators: name your site in such a way that people know how to pronounce it.[/pullquote]Following the trends of the time, the leading contender was “DH @ Lib” but that soon became “dh & lib”—until a simple design choice changed it to “dh+lib,” with the tagline: “where the digital humanities and librarianship meet.” The plus sign was intended to be read as “and,” with the hopes that it would visually indicate a crossroads, or meeting place. (Note to future project creators: name your site in such a way that people know how to pronounce it.)

The ACRL group had its first business meeting in the summer of 2012 at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, California. Those in attendance at that meeting will remember the scene: a smallish conference room in a far-flung ALA hotel, a continuous stream of chairs unstacked and occupied as more and more people arrived. A portion of the meeting was devoted to discussing the direction of the group blog (for a full recap, see Bob Kosovsky’s notes). Many pointed to ProfHacker, Hack Library School, and Digital Humanities Now as models to follow. Zach Coble was in attendance, and had recently participated in a PressForward workshop at THATCamp Prime. Zach offered to help build an RSS-driven aggregator for the blog, and joined Sarah and Roxanne as project developers.

For the next few months, Sarah, Roxanne, and Zach moved forward with testing out blog themes, crowdsourcing rss feeds, compiling resources, and inviting contributors. Meanwhile, Angela Courtney was scheduled to appear on a panel at the Digital Library Federation Forum in Denver, and was one of the organizers of a Digital Humanities & Libraries THATCamp preconference. We decided that would be a good time to unveil the new site. DLF also seemed like a natural fit for launching the project, signaling our intentions to serve a community beyond ALA/ACRL.

Our first original blog post was an essay from Jefferson Bailey published on January 17, 2013, “Digital Humanities & Cultural Heritage, or, The Opposite of Argumentation.” This was followed closely by “TEI and Libraries: New Avenues for Digital Literacy” from Harriett Green. We also created a Resources page (now maintained by John Russell). The dh+lib Review had its first test run on January 19, 2013, and was officially launched with a regular rotation of Editors-at-large on February 5, 2013.

Highlights

Since launching in beta in 2012, dh+lib has:

• Gotten its very own ISSN (2380-1255)
• Hosted the contributions of more than 200 volunteer editors-at-large
• Published more than 1,000 posts
• Published original content by more than 50 authors
• Published two special issues
• Been accessed for more than 100,000 sessions (150,000 unique pageviews) by over 63,000 users (source: GoogleAnalytics)
• Gained more than 6,500 Twitter followers (@DHandLib)
• Launched the Data Praxis series (edited by Thomas Padilla)
• Launched the Scene Reports series
• With GO::DH and the Libraries and DH SIG, organized a pre-conference workshop at DH2016, “Translation Hack-a-thon!: Applying the Translation Toolkit to a Global dh+lib“

As of October 2017, our most-visited posts have been:

• Lisa Spiro, “Defining Digital Social Sciences,” 9 April 2014.
• The History and Humanities Team, Columbia University, “The Developing Librarian Project,” 1 July 2013.
• Dot Porter, “What if we do, in fact, know best? A Response to the OCLC Report on DH and Research Libraries,” 12 February 2014.
• Sebastian Chan, in conversation with Thomas Padilla, “Museum as Play: Iteration, Interactivity, and the Human Experience,” Data Praxis Series, 16 December 2015.
• Thea Lindquist, Holley Long, and Alexander Watkins, “Designing a Digital Humanities Strategy Using Data-Driven Assessment Methods,” 30 January 2015.
• Josh Honn and Geoff Morse, “Digital Humanities (101),” 27 March 2013.
• Michelle Dalmau, “Digital Humanities & Libraries: More of THAT!” 22 May 2013.
• Trevor Muñoz, “In Service? A Further Provocation on Digital Humanities Research in Libraries,” dh+lib mini-series, 19 June 2013.
• Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Sarah Potvin, and Thomas Padilla, “Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library,” special issue introduction, 29 July 2016.
• Laura Braunstein, “Open Stacks: Making DH Labor Visible,” 7 June 2017.

An online publication is the core of dh+lib, but, given our goals of facilitating conversation, exchange, and a community of practice, the project also extends offline, primarily at conferences, where editors have hosted meet-ups, workshops, and THATCamp sessions, participated in panels or given posters. Hundreds of dh+libbers have sipped drinks or balanced pizza slices at events held at Digital Humanities, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the Digital Library Federation Forum, the Society of American Archivists annual meetings, and the American Library Association Annual and Midwinter meetings.

Building a community of practice

How do you start a site, a project, a community and develop it from an idea on a listserv into something that people list on their CVs, dedicate their time to, affiliate with? Not without the championing and support of many. The ACRL group cultivated the project unjealously, dedicating time and resources to it while supporting its independence. The first conveners, Angela Courtney and Kate Brooks, were instrumental, and, as the DH Discussion Group became the DH Interest Group in 2014, we collaborated with conveners Zach Coble, Krista White, Thomas Padilla, Harriett Green, and Hannah Scates Kettler. Alix Keener and Chelcie Juliet Rowell, the DHIG’s final conveners, and Brianna Marshall, chair of the newly-formed Digital Scholarship Section (DSS), have conscientiously guided the project through the DHIG’s merger into the DSS.

As young upstarts, we were encouraged and advised by luminaries in the field. Most strikingly, these key figures—including Michelle Dalmau, Harriett Green, Trevor Muñoz, Lisa Spiro, Stewart Varner, and many many others—volunteered as editors-at-large and wrote posts. Editors at In the Library with the Lead Pipe and DHNow either advised directly or helpfully shared documentation that guided our early workflows. The team at PressForward has been unfailing in their willingness to collaborate and adapt Review workflows: thanks are due to Lisa Marie Rhody, Joan Fragaszy Troyano, and Stephanie Westcott.

Over the past five years, more groups and organizations have formally ventured into digital humanities and libraries, providing us with opportunities to join forces and to move beyond the North American context.[pullquote]In 2013, a Libraries and Digital Humanities Special Interest Group was formed under the ADHO umbrella … balancing out our DH-in-libraries affiliation with an international libraries-in-DH scope.[/pullquote] In 2013, as dh+lib was just getting started, a Libraries and Digital Humanities Special Interest Group formed under the umbrella of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), convened by Zoe Borovsky, Glen Worthey, Angela Courtney, and Sarah Potvin. That convener group, which grew to include Isabel Galina Russell, Thomas Stäcker, Hege Stensrud Høsøien, and Stefanie Gehrke, has provided a second institutional home for dh+lib, balancing out our DH-in-libraries affiliation with an international libraries-in-DH scope.

In this vein, dh+lib has begun to focus on building a more inclusive and international community around digital humanities and libraries. One of our targeted areas is translation, as a means of increasing the recognition of non-Anglophone digital humanities work among our English-speaking audiences. In collaboration with RedHD, the network of digital humanists based in Mexico, we worked to simultaneously publish English and Spanish versions of an essay on self-representation and geopolitics in DH. With support from ADHO’s Global Outlook::Digital Humanities and Libraries and DH special interest groups, we are currently pursuing growth that will allow us to identify relevant scholarly work in languages other than English and circulate it to our community of practice.

Another targeted area is lowering the barriers to entry for community identification and expression. In 2015, dh+lib, thanks to an introduction by Bethany Nowviskie, collaborated with Laurie Allen and Kelcy Shepherd, the organizers of the DLF Forum’s Liberal Arts Colleges pre-conference (#dlfLAC), to launch our Scene Reports series. Framed as “lightweight ethnographies,” Scene Reports are designed to spur informal community interaction and participation.

dh+lib has been sustained, enlivened, and strengthened by its contributors—editors, authors, editors-at-large. Every week, the site grows by the contributions of our volunteer editors-at-large, who have nominated relevant research, resources, calls for papers, and other items of interest or written up what they’re reading. Our talented editors—Patrick Williams, John Russell, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Sarah Melton, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Thomas Padilla, Caro Pinto, and Josh Honn—have devoted countless hours towards a community goal. As our team has grown over the years, we have stayed true to our collaborative ethos, while recognizing that we are all volunteers in this publishing experiment. We communicate frequently, but informally, relying on the give and take that happens when a group of dedicated individuals are working across institutions and time zones while navigating the competing demands of our personal and professional obligations. One of the challenges of institutionalizing the project has been the difficulty in setting clear roles and dividing lines between a team of generous editors who move fluidly between responsibilities, picking up where another has left off.

Looking ahead

It’s a funny exercise, as an editor or a project founder, to look at a project for what it is, what it has produced or influenced. Our view is often obscured by all the things that might have been—the series or efforts that have stalled, the collaborations we always intended to pursue, the posts still in editorial limbo, the projects we always wished we had more time for.

As we’ve approached the five-year launch anniversary, all of the abstract conversations we’d had about succession planning and governance coalesced into something more concrete. Sitting with Zach at a coffeeshop up the street from Bobst Library in April, we found ourselves all in agreement: it was time to transition the project to new editors. In many ways, the timing was right: the ACRL Digital Humanities Interest Group was being absorbed into a new Digital Scholarship Section, spurring questions of affiliation and ownership. The landscape of dh and libraries had shifted significantly since 2012, and we wondered: approaching this area today, what would we design to forge, to serve, this community? Have we filled the need we set out to fill?

The question of where and how the digital humanities and librarianship meet is one that still drives us today. And while it may be time for the founding editors to move on, we’re not leaving just yet! At this moment of opportunity, the dh+lib editorial team has begun discussing new governance structures and working out scenarios for strenthening the organizational and community ties we’ve established along the way. As part of that process, we’re going to spend more time documenting what we’ve done and compiling data that can be used to guide these decisions for the future (and sharing that data more widely, in the interest of transparency as well). We hope that this post on our history was a useful start to that process.

Photo credit: “Happy birthday !!!” by Detlef Reichardt on Flickr

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Attending ACRL 2017? Interested in chatting about digital humanities? Join dh+lib and the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Digital Humanities Interest Group for a meet up on Thursday, March 23, starting at 5:30PM, at Peter’s Pour House in Baltimore.

Hosts include Alix Keener (DHIG), Krista White (DHIG), and Roxanne Shirazi (dh+lib).

Peter’s Pour House, 111 Mercer Street, Baltimore, MD 21202 (corner of Water & Grant Streets).

Sarah Potvin

Sarah works as the Digital Scholarship Librarian in the Office of Scholarly Communications, Texas A&M University Libraries.

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What are the points of contact between digital humanities and libraries? What is at stake, and what issues arise when the two meet? Where are we, and where might we be going? Who are “we”? By posing these questions in the CFP for a new dh+lib special issue, the editors hoped for sharp, provocative meditations on the state of the field. We are proud to present the result, ten wide-ranging contributions by twenty-two authors, collectively titled “Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library.”

We make the in/of distinction pointedly. Like the Digital Humanities (DH), definitions of library community are typically prefigured by “inter-” and “multi-” frames, rendered as work and values that are interprofessional, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary. Ideally, these characterizations attest to diversified yet unified purpose, predicated on the application of disciplinary expertise and metaknowledge to address questions that resist resolution from a single perspective. Yet we might question how a combinatorial impulse obscures the distinct nature of our contributions and, consequently, our ability to understand and respect individual agency. Working across the similarly encompassing and amorphous contours of the Digital Humanities compels the library community to reckon with its composite nature.

Points of contact between digital humanities and libraries are troubled when we push against the notion of a role that is bound by physical space and administrative structure. In a piece that complicates assumptions often made about library digital humanities work, Brandon Locke and Kristen Mapes present a model of deeply embedded librarianship that emphasizes the values and expertise of librarians working outside of the institutional structure of a library. As professional librarians based in disciplinary units, Locke and Mapes are situated to promote direct partnerships with teaching faculty and facilitate further connections with librarians based in other units. Conversely, DH centers located in libraries may find themselves in need of translation when seeking to communicate their value and role to a diverse array of librarians and digital humanists. Prompted by a reorganization of the University of Virginia Library aimed at alignment with the strategic goals of the university, Purdom Lindblad, Laura Miller, and Jeremy Boggs of the Scholars’ Lab detail shifting organizational identities that brought out “… tensions inherent in [their] situation: inside versus outside of the Library; bespoke research projects versus broadly applied systems and platforms; and creators versus consumers of digital tools as modes of best supporting digital work.” Through a process of reflection, translation, and building, grounded in the learning-by-doing practices of the Lab, the work of the Scholars’ Lab was re-positioned as “quintessentially Library work.”

Characterizations of the library community as interdisciplinary substantiate and extend arguments for the library itself to function as an optimal site for research to occur. Variants of this argument have been utilized time and again in recent years to support the development of digital scholarship units, centers, initiatives, and positions in libraries large and small. Sarah Stanley and Micah Vandegrift’s contribution speaks directly to the tension between significant library community investment and the degree to which graduate school curricula are tuned to support the aspirations those investments are meant to realize. Through their examination of a split corpus of self-described Digital Humanities syllabi from Humanities programs and Library and Information Science programs, Stanley and Vandegrift make strides toward better understanding how coursework aligns– or does not align– librarians with rhetoric encapsulating ideal institutional roles.

Invisibility and/or systematic undervaluing of librarian work forms a theme across several contributions. Emma Annette Wilson and Mary Alexander provide a strategy for making the expertise of librarians more visible and accessible to digital humanities partners by exposing metadata work as “… the heartbeat making DH projects usable, robust, preservable, sustainable, and scalable.” Through discussion of several case studies, Wilson and Alexander argue that a collaborative approach to metadata consultation brings library labor to light. As a digital humanities librarian, Paige Morgan engages with “project design, technology/method implementation, risk assessment, and scalability and contingency planning” while consulting on projects. This work, which is “closely entangled with optimism and expectations,” frequently involves unacknowledged–or disparaged– emotional labor. In a call for recognition of complexity, Morgan urges a closer examination of the labor dynamics of librarian-faculty consulting relationships and the potentially generative messiness of DH work. J. Matthew Huculak and Lisa Goddard argue that tenure and promotion models in the humanities, with their emphasis on short term output and results, serve as impediments to collaboration between humanities scholars, whose focus may be on theories and prototypes, and librarians, focused on standardization and preservation. Calling for increased awareness of these tensions, Huculak and Goddard assert the importance of long-term planning for DH work that ensures the care and repair of DH work.

Librarians play an integral role in developing tools and frameworks that attend to the affordances of digital and print resources. In a meditation on what “digital” suggests in the context of scholarship, with particular attention to the acts of copying and transferring, preserving and proliferating, Craig Dietrich and Ashley Sanders go beyond amorphous definitions of digital scholarship to consider the current and emergent parameters of the digital in libraries. “Digital,” they argue, is no mere semantic imposition; rather, it deeply affects every aspect of librarianship, “from collection development, curation, exhibition, and preservation to user services, reference, and instruction.” Smiljana Antonijević Ubois and Ellysa Stern Cahoy call for “… nuanced understanding of humanists’ research practices . . .  arising from empirical studies of user behavior and needs.” By arguing for re-centering user experience in DH/library discussions, Antonijević and Stern Cahoy present a more holistic approach to understanding the analog and digital components of scholarly workflows, applying their findings to an optimization of the Zotero research tool.

Engagement with digital environments provokes re-examination of library and archive community roles. Two contributions responded to this provocation by asking how critical archival and library praxis could support ethical engagement in a digital environment. Jennifer Rajchel and Elizabeth Myers raise and explore the, “question of how to ensure a feminist method of curation.” Working on Smith College’s first Massive Open Online Course, The Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World, Rajchel and Myers ask, “Whose feminism are we representing? Who has agency? How can the power of digital representation be distributed?”, and respond with a series of critically nuanced design decisions. In doing so, they model an engaged, ethically grounded example of what it means for librarians to collaboratively build in a digital environment. A “praxis of critical librarianship and digital humanities” guides the contribution by Pamella Lach, Brian Rosenblum, Élika Ortega, and Stephanie Gamble, who argue that “… libraries can advance a vision of DH that is more inclusive and expansive, and at the same time less universal in its methods and approaches.”

***

dh+lib’s first mini-series, “Make It New?,” explored themes of continuity and disruption. As that series introduction observed, contributors made: “ . . . some claim to the core functions of libraries as they explore[d] where digital humanities methods and implementations fall along that spectrum, while questioning whether DH represents a paradigm shift for libraries or simply an extension of existing services.” Now, three years removed from grappling with questions of novelty, two years removed from digital humanities’ classification as an Association of College and Research Libraries’ “top trend,” contributions to “Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library” reflect maturation of library work in this space; broadly, the special issue gestures toward greater consensus around Bethany Nowviskie’s argument for the place of “technology-inflected humanities research services” in every library and the wise resistance to a one-size-fits-all model of implementing them.

We hope you enjoy “Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library.” Many thanks to the twenty-two contributors who authored the ten pieces that comprise the series. This special issue deployed the entire dh+lib editorial team– Roxanne Shirazi (City University of New York), John Russell (Pennsylvania State University), Patrick Williams (Syracuse University), Caro Pinto (Mount Holyoke College), Zach Coble (New York University), and ourselves– to oversee the many layers of framing, correspondence, edits, and WordPress tweaks that enabled publication. Roxanne, in particular, was a driving force in bringing the series to light and keeping an unruly (if spirited!) editorial team moving in sync; we are grateful for her leadership.

“How can we move beyond a monolingual DH, and promote exchange of works among linguistic communities? And how can we ensure this exchange is ongoing and sustainable?”

dh+lib has long been interested in tackling these issues for our community of practice. The 2016 Digital Humanities conference will offer an opportunity to design and test an approach: attendees at a July 12 preconference workshop will join dh+lib editors and leaders from Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH) and the Libraries and DH SIG (both Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Special Interest Groups) in an attempt to take up these questions and hack a solution.[1. The full list of workshop organizers: Sarah Potvin (Texas A&M University), Élika Ortega (University of Kansas), Isabel Galina (National University of Mexico), Alex Gil (Columbia University), Daniel Paul O’Donnell (University of Lethbridge), Patrick Williams (Syracuse University), Zoe Borovsky (University of California Los Angeles), Roxanne Shirazi (City University of New York), Zach Coble (New York University), and Glen Worthey (Stanford University). Additional thanks to dh+lib editor Josh Honn (Northwestern University) for helping to forge a dh+lib approach to translation.]

The workshop will introduce translation work and practices, and move towards developing a pilot translation process for dh+lib with potentially broad applicability to other scholarly communication vehicles and venues. The group will think through existing infrastructure, address questions around translation, labor, and design, and perform hands-on translation. We will build on previous translation exercises put into practice by GO::DH and dh+lib, including DH Whisperers, the simultaneous bilingual publication of blog posts, and the newly-created GO::DH Translation Toolkit.

The weekly dh+lib Review is made possible by more than two hundred volunteer editors-at-large, four Review editors, a handful of dh+lib editors, PressForward developers, and American Library Association technical staff. We think a community translation effort will need to build upon and extend these generous contributions.

As a first step: we’d like the hands-on translation efforts undertaken at DH2016 to focus on works nominated by the DH and libraries community. Isabel Galina has pointed to “… a general perception of an Anglo-American dominance and English language as the main language” in DH, observing that, even when vibrant DH unfolds in, for example, German- and French-language communities “… a lack of publications and communications in English leads to invisibility on the mainstream channels.” While translation may ultimately proceed in multiple directions, we’d like to start with non-English language works that you want to see translated into English, to address the gap that Galina describes.

In the interest of visibility, transparency, and ease of participation, there are two ways you can nominate content:

• Tweet a link to the work, with the hashtag #GOdhlib
• Add information about the work to an open GoogleSheet

To make sure works are included in these initial translation efforts, tweet or add them by Friday, July 8.

Roxanne Shirazi

Roxanne is the Dissertation Research Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

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Patrick Williams

Patrick Williams is Associate Librarian for Literature, Rhetoric, and Digital Humanities in the Syracuse University Libraries. He received his MSIS and PhD in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the editor of the poetry journal Really System.

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Zach Coble

Zach is the Digital Scholarship Specialist at New York University.

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Mx A. Matienzo (Digital Public Library of America) has posted a version of their keynote address from the 2015 Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) Forum, “To Hell With Good Intentions: Linked Data, Community and the Power to Name.” Matienzo frames the talk in the context of a hope that “… we can start to examine linked data, particularly within the context of cultural heritage, and how it is decidedly not neutral, nor an intrinsic good, but instead as another space in which ideology and systematic oppression are likely to be reproduced.”

The talk opens with an acknowledgment of its own deep context, with nods to the influences of individuals, personal and professional background, conversations, articles, books, and “… the stark reality that students of color are facing at University of Missouri, and other campuses across the country.” Matienzo references the power of naming and classification: “It should be clear that the naming function of metadata raises a contentious point in that it allows assumptions and oppression to be reproduced over time.” Given that “… naming is fundamentally unavoidable in knowledge representation …. we need to make a decision whether we choose to name with an intention of justice, or with the pretense of neutrality and objectivity.”

How does linked data extend or interrupt the constructed, non-neutral character of metadata? Matienzo asserts a belief in linked data’s power to decentralize and democratize assertions but argues that linked data’s value propositions– such as Web-accessibility– and foundational concepts–“the open world assumption” and the “anyone can make statements about any resource” aspect– bear closer scrutiny and work. They write:

… we have to recognize the folly of imposing our good intentions in regards to the production of linked data, or any form of documentation, without listening to these communities. These spaces are not always ours, and like the students occupying the quad at University of Missouri, we should be ready to make the space they demand when they do so. Even when we directly engage members of a community and request their presence in a project to correct a perceived absence of voices, we must recognize that this in itself is a form of labor that also has political and emotional impact. In her recent article “Minor Threats,” Mimi Thi Nguyen relates a case where she was urged to add materials to the riot grrrl archive at the Fales Library at New York University which viewed the absence of materials created by or about women of color from the collection, as “a crisis, a decisive historical moment that demanded mediation.”¹⁶ She asks us to consider what might be lost or hidden in the process of “correction” of an absence and that correction is pursued. Without thought, without conversation, and without vulnerability on the part of those of you with good intentions, our process of correction can simultaneously introduce and spackle over its own violence. To Hell with good intentions, and to Hell with well-intentioned linked data.

Matienzo calls for the development of simple tools to encourage community-authored narratives and make linked data “… easier to publish, consume, and reuse for all kinds of institutions and communities,” asserting:

Despite my concerns about the lack of access to effective user-facing tools for linked data, I still believe its power is in its ability to leverage that decentralization. Relying on centralized authority management or metadata creation for everything, and the corporatization of library infrastructure, actively resists that decentralizing force, further limiting our own effectiveness in the construction of radical democracy.

The Texas Digital Library is collaborating with the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium to co-host their annual conferences in 2016: The Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (May 24-26, 2016) will be followed by a Texas Digital Humanities Consortium Mini-Conference (Mary 27, 2016) in Austin, Texas.

The Texas Conference on Digital Libraries will feature Trevor Owens (Institute of Museum and Library Services) as a keynote speaker. The CFP invites proposals for presentations, panels, posters, workshops, tutorials/demos, and birds of a feather sessions, on topics that consider the “creation, promotion, preservation and management of digital projects and assets, as well as the software and applications that drive the digital library world.”

The Texas Digital Humanities Consortium Mini-Conference “will combine the openness and participatory spirit of unconferences such as THATCamps with the presentation opportunities provided by more formal conferences.  Each session will feature a speaker or team of speakers presenting their research for 15 minutes, followed by discussion or hands-on experimentation. The presentation should raise key concepts and questions that can serve as a springboard for exploration during the rest of the hour.” Potential topics include: digital making, 3D modeling, cultural criticism and digital humanities, spatial humanities, digital archives, curation of humanities information, and book history and digital humanities.

The deadline for submitting a proposal to either conference is February 7, 2016.

Laurie Allen, Coordinator for Digital Scholarship and Services at Haverford College, was the very first person to be interviewed for a Scene Report. dh+lib Editor Sarah Potvin, the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Texas A&M University, conducted the interview.

Preface from Laurie: After having finished answering these questions, I read Bethany Nowviskie’s awesome “On Capacity and Care” and it has become clear to me that I should re-write everything here to reflect her insights, which serve to challenge and deepen my ways of thinking as always. But if my standard for letting my writing live on the internet is that it must match Bethany’s, I’ll continue to not write things. So, if you haven’t already, you should go read that. If I’d read it before writing this, I’d have answered these questions differently, and I look forward to letting that essay seep into my ways of thinking over time, and seeing how it changes the ways I see things.

Sarah: Which came first for you: DH or libraries/archives?

Laurie: Libraries. I started library school in 2000, a year after finishing college. At that point, becoming a librarian felt very much like a calling. I was a philosophy major in college and I worked as a student worker in the library as an undergrad but never thought of becoming a librarian until my sister brought it up that winter after I graduated from college. Then it all fell into place. Since then, there have been lots of narratives about why librarianship was right for me. The cynical narrative: “I wanted to be around academically minded people, but I didn’t want to have my own research agenda, or devote myself to one thing forever, and I didn’t want to have to move somewhere for a job.” The philosophical narrative: “I had just written my senior thesis exploring how the ways that we organize the world around us shapes everything. I was convinced that, basically, by putting things in categories, we bring them into existence as a community, and I saw libraries as the seemingly benign but secretly powerful way that our culture expresses its organizing principles. I wanted to be part of changing everything, so changing how we organize what we know seemed like the key; I thought I’d be a cataloger.” (That narrative was the one I used in my essay to apply to library school.) There was the personal: “My sister had just read The Goldbug Variations and there was a librarian character and she got to learn cool stuff all the time in Brooklyn and that seemed awesome to me.” And there was the fact that almost everything I wanted for the holidays that year was a reference book or a historic city map. Anyway, libraries are and always have been my home. DH came later. It appeals to me for a lot of the same reasons and for some new ones that have developed as I’ve gotten older. DH is also my home now. Sometimes it feels like my two homes are in tension but mostly it’s a tension I enjoy.

Sarah: What are some of the special issues that liberal arts colleges encounter around DH and libraries? How does this shape your collaborations?

Laurie: Working in DH in a liberal arts college library has been, for me, tremendously fun. Both DH and liberal arts colleges foster individual collaborations. They are both kind of personal in a way that I really enjoy. In my version of DH, it is also very much a liberal art, drawing on different ways of knowing and requiring depth, breadth, and explicitly ethical ways of learning. And those are also qualities that liberal arts colleges pride themselves on fostering, so we get to be involved in great projects with great students when we work at the intersection. Also, DH lends itself to creativity and small schools allow a kind of creativity that is harder to imagine when you have to worry about “what if 10,000 people want to do this?” I’ve said this before and I’m not sure everyone agrees but it seems to me that the whole liberal arts college enterprise is antithetical to the notion of scalability, so it allows for kinds of risk and creativity that work well with DH projects where, at least for me, the goal is to find the mode of inquiry and expression that connect most closely to the question you’re developing. Of course the small scale can also be limiting. There just aren’t as many resources or people at a liberal arts college and so the scope of what we can do might be smaller than at a bigger place.

Sarah: Tell us about an author or publication/project that you recommend and return to.

Laurie: Two answers come to mind. First, everything written by Miriam Posner or Bethany Nowviskie. Truly, in my career, their writing and thinking has been absolutely vital to keeping me inspired and excited about what I do, and what it can be part of.
Second, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” by Jonathan Letham, an article in Harpers in 2007. I have since become somewhat disenchanted with him as an author but that way of thinking about art, culture, and creativity continues to really resonate with me.

Sarah: How has DH affected your work in libraries?

Laurie: I find DH really empowering. As I mentioned, there’s a part of me that became a librarian because I liked the idea of being a helper in the world of ideas — I wanted to get to learn things and be useful, but I didn’t want my main intellectual work to be the production of my own scholarship. But as I’ve gotten older, I suppose I’ve become more bold, and I like how DH expects me to bring myself to the work I do; to bring my own agenda and my own values and perspective — to be a collaborator in addition to being service provider. As I said, it feels like a natural part of getting older. (I’m picturing a terrible t-shirt that says “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple and I’ll take credit for my ideas.”) Certainly there are librarians who don’t do DH who have always seen themselves as full collaborators in the scholarly work on their campus. But that didn’t really resonate for me personally, and I don’t think it’s the expectation at our institutions, for the most part. In the model where a lone scholar produces knowledge through grueling labor with the help and support of others, I relate much more to the helpers than to the scholar. But in DH, where collaboration is really at the center of projects, I’m finding that I’m enjoying feeling some ownership over our projects and contributing in ways that feel really satisfying (and new) to me.

Sarah: What’s one thing you’re working on now that you’re excited about?

Laurie: There are really so many. Monument Lab is a public art and civic engagement project in Philadelphia that asks people in Philly to reflect on our civic memory. My part of the project mostly engages me in thinking about how official and unofficial uses of data make and obscure meaning within communities. The project has been really fully co-created with scholars, artists, and undergraduates. And a huge piece of the project has been to ask this open-ended question– “what is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia”– to residents of Philly, and to collect and work to understand and value the answers we get. I love that project. It’s also made me really step up my javascript skills, which is also fun. But really it’s one of a few projects I’m really passionate about at the moment. This fall is busy.

Sarah: Busy: I hear you on that. A good sort of busy. Could we find time, though, to make that t-shirt you pitched in your second-to-last answer a living reality?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.