Friends and readers,

During our restorative hiatus, the dh+lib team has been reflecting on our processes and working to address the challenges and inconveniences that have created extra burdens on our Review editorial team as well as on our Editors-at-Large. We’ve made a number of changes and are about to launch our call for EALs so that we can resume the Review in September.

Additionally, there have been a few personnel changes during our break. One of our editors-in-chief, Sarah Melton, has stepped down; she has been a valued and supportive member of our team since 2017, first as a Review editor and then as an editor-in-chief. We will miss Sarah and are grateful for all of her contributions to dh+lib.

We also welcome two additions to the Review editorial team: Hillary Richardson and Rachel Starry. Both Hillary and Rachel have jumped right in to help us refresh the reviews process and we are delighted to have them on board.

We are looking to add to our team of Review editors!

Review editors take an active role in shaping the content that appears in the dh+lib Review, as well as contributing to strategic discussions about our workflows and future directions for the publication. Responsibilities include working on rotation to manage the biweekly production effort (selecting items from nominated content, authoring/publishing posts) and, when not on duty as shift editor, providing occasional editorial support with the other editors. Due to our editorial calendar, most of this activity takes place on Wednesday evenings/Thursday mornings, and Review editors often collaborate informally and have infrequent editorial meetings throughout each semester.

Each editorial appointment will be for a term of two years with options for renewal. We anticipate new editors will be trained during the fall and most likely begin Review shifts in January 2023.

Candidates should submit a letter (no more than 300 words) expressing their interest and any relevant experience to dhandlib.acrl@gmail.com by September 23, 2022 for consideration.

John Russell

John Russell is Digital Humanities Librarian and Associate Director of the Center for Virtual/Material Studies at Penn State University. He can be found on Twitter as @johnruss28.

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As we begin a new year, there are some changes to announce at dh+lib! Editor-in-Chief Patrick Williams and Review Editor Ian Goodale are both leaving dh+lib.

Patrick served as an Editor-at-Large for years before becoming the lead Review Editor in 2015 and then one of the Editors-in-Chief in 2018. Sarah Melton and John Russell will remain as Editors-in-Chief of the site.

Ian served as an Editor-at-Large and then joined the team as a Review Editor in 2019. Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Linsey Ford, and Pamella Lach will continue to serve as Review editors, and will be joined by a new addition, Alasdair Ekpenyong, in the newly created role of Graduate Student Editor, bringing our rotating team of editors for the weekly publication to five. Alasdair, a graduate student at Syracuse University’s MLIS program at Data Analyst at Utah State University, joins the Review after serving as an Editor-at-Large.

We are thrilled to announce some new members of the dh+lib Editorial Team:

Linsey Ford (University of Houston – Clear Lake), Ian Goodale (The University of Texas at Austin), and Pamella Lach (San Diego State University) have been named co-editors of the dh+lib Review.

Jason Mickel (Washington & Lee University) will be joining our team as Technical Editor.

dh+lib Contributing Editor Josh Honn (Northwestern University) will be assuming the new role of Outreach Editor. dh+lib Review editor Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara will now serve as Lead Editor of the Review.

Welcome, all!

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.

We are pleased to welcome Thomas Padilla to the dh+lib editorial team as a Contributing Editor.

As Digital Scholarship Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries, Thomas develops and promotes data collections to Humanists, teaches on Digital Humanities methods and tools, and engages scholars across disciplines on data curation and research data management needs. Previously, Thomas worked at the Scholarly Commons and the Preservation Unit of the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and at the Library of Congress, where his work focused on digital preservation outreach and education.

Thomas will be editing a new Data Praxis series, highlighting a range of perspectives on the practice of digitally inflected research, pedagogy, curation, and collection building and augmentation. The first post in that series, an interview with Matthew Lincoln (University of Maryland), was published this past week.

Welcome, Thomas!

The Editors

The Editors of dh+lib, Sarah Potvin, Roxanne Shirazi, and Zach Coble.

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We are pleased to welcome Patrick Williams and Caitlin Christian-Lamb to the dh+lib editorial team. Patrick joins our project as Lead Editor for the dh+lib Review, a position previously held by founding Review editor Zach Coble, who remains an Editor-in-Chief of the site. Caitlin joins us as an additional Review Editor for the dh+lib Review.

Caro Pinto and Roxanne Shirazi will continue to serve as Review editors, bringing our rotating team of editors for the weekly publication to four.

Patrick Williams is Associate Librarian, Subject Specialist for English, Communication & Rhetorical Studies, and Linguistics in the Syracuse University Libraries. As Lead Editor, he will be recruiting and coordinating our editors-at-large and will contribute to the ongoing strategic development of the dh+lib Review. Patrick has been involved with dh+lib as a frequent editor-at-large, and in 2014 he contributed an original piece, “Why I Go to MLA.”

Caitlin Christian-Lamb is the Associate Archivist at Davidson College in North Carolina. As Review Editor, she will join the rotating team of editors to synthesize the work of the editors-at-large by publishing a weekly review of digital humanities and libraries. Caitlin has been involved with dh+lib as a frequent editor-at-large.

We were thrilled with the enthusiastic response to our call for editors in February, and we are incredibly fortunate to bring such exceptionally talented individuals to help guide and grow the dh+lib project. Stay tuned for further announcements about our future plans this summer!

The Editors

The Editors of dh+lib, Sarah Potvin, Roxanne Shirazi, and Zach Coble.

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We are pleased to welcome John Russell to the dh+lib editorial team as a Contributing Editor.

John is the Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Oregon Libraries, where he teaches digital scholarship methods and tools to graduate students, collaborates with faculty on digital research projects, and advocates for open access through outreach, instruction, and overseeing a library publishing program.

An early and dedicated contributor to dh+lib, John published two posts with us in 2013, introducing and reflecting on the experience of teaching a graduate-level course in the library. In his guise as a Contributing Editor, John will initially be building out the dh+lib Resources page.

Welcome, John!

The Editors

The Editors of dh+lib, Sarah Potvin, Roxanne Shirazi, and Zach Coble.

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We are pleased to welcome Josh Honn to the dh+lib editorial team as Contributing Editor. Josh is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation at Northwestern University.

Josh has been an active participant in the digital humanities and libraries conversation that we’ve tried to foster here at dh+lib, and was one of our earliest contributors with the publication of Digital Humanities (101) in 2013. He will be working on a project to broaden the scope of dh+lib featured content through translations, beginning with posts originally published on RedHD’s Humanidades Digitales blog.

Welcome, Josh!

The Editors

The Editors of dh+lib, Sarah Potvin, Roxanne Shirazi, and Zach Coble.

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One of the findings of the ACRL Digital Humanities Discussion Group’s inital survery was that respondants were interersted in an aggregation service that presented a curated selection of content from the web on digital humanities and libraries. In response to that need, dh+lib is excited to unveil its aggregator, a volunteer-driven service for highlighting and sharing the best content on digital humanities and libraries.

What is it? How does it work?

This content appears on the dh+lib homepage as snippets prefaced by tag distinguishing the type of content.

dh+lib snippet

Once we finish the dh+lib site redesign (coming soon, stay tuned!) it will be easier to tell the difference between this aggregated content and dh+lib original contributions.

The snippets that appear on the dh+lib homepage are selected from the stream of content produced and shared by the dh+lib community. This stream – in the form of RSS feeds – casts a wide net and includes content produced by librarians, archivists, museum workers, faculty, information professionals and technologists, just to name a few.

[pullquote]We currently need editors-at-large for the spring semester – sign up today![/pullquote]

The aggregation process relies heavily on the work of our editors-at-large, who volunteer for one-week shifts to survey the stream of content and select what should be highlighted on the dh+lib homepage. Once the editors-at-large have made their nominations, the editors (currently, Zach Coble, Sarah Potvin, and Roxanne Shirazi), make a final selection decision and post the selected content to the dh+lib homepage.

Are you interested in helping dh+lib? It’s an easy way to get involved in the dh+lib community and great for staying current with conversations in DH. Editors-at-large commit to a one-week shift that involves approximately 45 minutes a day. We currently need editors-at-large for the spring semester – sign up today!

Purpose

The point of this exercise is to share useful resources and build community. It is the hope of the aggregator and the dh+lib site to be both a resource for librarians and information professionals interested in DH as well as a voice for us to participate in the larger DH conversation.

While we are supported by the ACRL Digital Humanities Discussion Group, there is no membership requirement and all are encouraged to participate – both librarians and those working outside libraries. We want to work with you to make the site what you want it to be. We strongly encourage you to share the content you find useful with your friends and colleagues, and to participate in the conversation. We have created individual posts for each piece of content from the aggregator to provide a space for comments and conversation, and we encourage you to take the conversation to other venues.
[pullquote]We want to work with you to make the site what you want it to be.[/pullquote]

Similarly, we would love for you to contribute to dh+lib. We are always looking for posts on how you’re doing or trying to do DH at your library. Or perhaps you have another idea you think would be useful for the site – let us know!

Content Categories

Content featured from the aggregator fall into seven categories:

Recommended: These are indispensable pieces, often a blog post or article, that will be most helpful to the dh+lib community. These pieces should offer a critical analysis of the broader field of digital humanities or the role of libraries, archives, or museums in digital humanities work. Similarly, we are also looking for works of digital humanities scholarship – research that applies digital methodologies to questions in the humanities or applies critical methodologies to the relationship between the humanities and digital technology – with some consideration of libraries, archives, or museums.

Digital Projects: We are interested in featuring new digital projects, both projects that focus on particular research questions and projects that bring particular collections into the digital space.

Posts: These are blog posts that offer a timely analysis of current conversations. They might not fit in the Recommended category but are worth sharing with the dh+lib community.

Resources: This include items such as reports, white papers, conference presentations, and lectures as well as tutorials, tools for digital research, and sources for further information on a topic within the digital humanities.

Calls for Papers: We interpret “CFP” quite broadly, including calls for participation, calls for projects, and requests for feedback, in addition to more traditional calls for papers.

Job Announcements: We are looking for work opportunities that are specifically focused on both digital humanities and libraries. Positions might be postdocs, #alt-ac or tenure track, and will likely be situated in libraries, archives, museums, or galleries.

Funding and Opportunities: Funding and Opportunities is a catch-all category for items that are outside the scope of jobs or CFPs but that offer either learning opportunities or monetary support for digital humanities work.

As many of you have probably guessed, this process is very similar to Digital Humanities Now (DHNow). In fact, DHNow is the inspiration for this project, and I owe the Editors of DHNow a huge thanks, especially Joan Troyano, for their guidance, encouragement, and sharing of workflow materials.

Zach Coble

Digital Scholarship Specialist, New York University

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In March 2012, a conversation bubbled up on the newly-created ACRL Digital Humanities discussion group (DH DG) listserv about the need for a blog or online resource for those of us “big tent” information professionals– librarians, archivists, curators, and students–engaged with digital humanities. When the group assembled at the June 2012 ALA Annual conference in Anaheim (Bob Kosovsky, in attendance, has helpfully shared his notes), the conversation around how this resource might take shape deepened. Not wanting to restrict these decisions to those in attendance at ALA, we circulated a link to an informal survey on the DH DG listserv over the summer of 2012 to gauge preferences. A more thorough account of those results can be found here; what follows is a digest.

Who responded?

Librarians were the top respondents to the survey; of the 83 submissions, 65 identified themselves with this category. Additionally, most respondents did not have “Digital Humanities” as part of their job descriptions or titles. A slender majority of respondents hailed from institutions that either host or plan to host dedicated DH facilities; curiously, an impressive 21% noted that these facilities were “under development.” A desire for resources, then, is coming in part from those based in institutions with emergent DH initiatives, or from professionals engaged with DH outside of the bounds of dedicated centers or facilities.

Source preferences

The survey attempted to gauge whether the community had a preference for the source of content–aggregated or original– in addition to what themes and stories might be included.

The group assembled at ALA in June responded strongly to the question of source, indicating a preference for original blog posts rather than aggregated content. Additionally, we heard requests for content aimed at profiling and spotlighting the work being done in DH in collaboration with libraries. There was a particular interest in case studies around project management.

Source was not as prevalent a concern for survey respondents. While 75% of those who indicated a preference voted for original content, this number represents only 48% of survey respondents. 36% of those responding reported “No preference.”

Content preferences

Asked to express a preference for the topics to be covered–whether through original or aggregated content, respondents favored:

+ Case studies or write-ups of projects
+ Reviews or write-ups of tools
+ Articles on best practices around DH librarianship
+ Announcements and calendar of DH trainings, events, and conferences
+ Links to papers, presentations, and talks on DH librarianship published elsewhere

A surprising dud of the features list was “Profiles of DH librarians,” which 10% of respondents singled out as “Not helpful.”

Beyond the rankings of features we suggested in the survey, about a quarter of you responded to “What resources not listed above would you like included?’ with thoughtful suggestions (the full range of which can be found here).

What kind of blog are you?

A range of interesting descriptions were provided as freeform in response to the request to “describe the blog you would most want to read, recommend to colleagues, and contribute to.” 37 responses were recorded. Some took the opportunity to emphasize a preference for original content, an aggregation of current events, a practical or theoretical focus, or a regular posting schedule. Others were thoughtful about the spread of the blog, calling for a resource offering “tiers of accessibility,” with “appeal to the humanities librarian who has been thrown into the digital humanities cauldron and also to the librarian/IT specialist who has been given an assignment to support the digital humanities,” expressing “the diversity of DH librarianship.”

One respondent requested “non-English-language efforts and reportage.” We also saw some themes around a need for advocacy and commentary that went beyond standards and announcements, including:

+ calls for “critical” content that “rais[ed] difficult questions with space for discussion”;
+ “Something with ‘meat’– thoughtful/analytical content”;
+ “thoughtful writing that consistently balances hype and hope”; and
+ “frank discussion of the difficulties” around DH projects.

Several respondents emphasized the value and potential of a resource specifically focused on DH and information professionals. One wrote: “ideally, the blog would foster an actual community.” Another wrote: “It seems obvious, but I’d like the site to make sure it fully covers the library angle.” We saw an eagerness for content that would help librarians do DH well– and better.

For those who requested more specific content, we will be soliciting along those lines, in an attempt to meet your demand. If you are interested in suggesting a topic or post, whether you want to write it yourself or toss it to another author, please use our contributors form or contact us directly.

-Sarah Potvin and Roxanne Shirazi