Thomas Padilla (Michigan State University) has shared the slides and notes from his presentation for the RUSA History Librarians Discussion group panel that explored the ‘role/s of humanities librarians in the digital humanities.’ Harriett Green (University of Illinois) also presented with Padilla. His talk in part discusses the evolving nature of the Digital Scholarship Collaborative at Michigan State. ...

Jackie Dooley (OCLC Research) has written an excellent overview post of the 2014 Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference, which took place June 24-27, 2014, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Posts from both Dooley and Merrilee Proffit (OCLC Research) discuss the plenary talk by Michelle Light (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), “Controlling Goods or Promoting the Public Good: ...

The Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library conference took place last week in Charleston, South Carolina. The conference featured keynotes from Riccardo Ferrante (Smithsonian Institution), Emily Gore (Digital Public Library of America), and Trevor Muñoz (University of Maryland), workshops, a day and a half of sessions, and a lively Twitter feed. In a write-up ...

Kevin Smith (Duke University) has written a post on the Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog about the recent Authors Guild v. HathiTrust decision, which Smith describes as “another important win for libraries and fair use.” Smith discusses a technical but important aspect of the decision: The oddity about this remand is that it does not actually question the conclusion that digitization for ...

Responding to the #esrworkshop (Evolving Scholarly Record and Evolving Stewardship Ecosystem workshop, preceding a meeting on Libraries and Research: Supporting Change/Changing Support), Jennifer Schaffner (OCLC Research Library Partnership) has written a post on the “evolving scholarly record.” Schaffner considers the changing nature of archival collections in the digital age as “components of the ‘scholarly record.'” Schaffner discusses how context ties ...

In a post to The Signal, Kate Murray (Library of Congress) summarizes a recent meeting of the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group, focused on issues around preserving digital and software-based artworks. Presenters from the Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian’s Time Based Media Art initiative, and the San ...

Paige Morgan (University of Washington) has written a post summarizing the advice she shared while leading an unconference session at DHSI 2014. “How to Get a Digital Humanities Project off the Ground” includes 15 points of general and specific recommendations. Though some address issues that are specific to graduate students, many could be useful for librarians ...

In a post introducing the African American Theater History Project, Cecily Marcus (University of Minnesota Libraries) introduces the collaboration between the Penumbra Theater and the University of Minnesota Libraries aiming to increase access to “the primary materials that document African American theater and cultural history.” In developing the IMLS-funded project, the participating institutions will be: 1. working with leading African ...

In a post prompted by the release of the Carter Cables by WikiLeaks, Ed Summers asks the question: What if instead of trying to build the ultimate user experience for archival content, archives focused first and foremost on providing simple access to the underlying data first? Responding to the “URL inspection” that is necessary to ...

Amanda Visconti (University of Maryland), who recently posted about her digital dissertation, “Infinite Ulysses,” has written a post introducing the organizational technique of affinity mapping. She explains: It’s a way to take a bunch of separate ideas and visually map out how they’re related (thus, “affinity”); this helps your areas of focus (or paper section headings) ...

Elijah Meeks (Stanford University Libraries) has posted notes from his talk at the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium’s First Annual Conference, Networks in the Humanities (#txdhc). Among several topics, Meeks addresses the notion of scholarly “interlopers” with respect to the digital humanities: I think interloping, more than computational approaches or the digital broadly construed as the object of ...