For notes on my participation, see: [https://twitter.com/wscotth].

Why not make all our hi-res images easily downloadable? I would have never heard of the Rijksmuseum has it not been for the work they’ve done to expose and share fabulous images of their holdings. And downloading them doesn’t kill the experience of viewing the physical art, it just makes me envious of visitors who actually get to go. Digitization drives patronage, it doesn’t drive it away.

If it is indeed the goal of the IU Libraries to make the “digital” pervasive, it behooves us all as information professionals to look closely not just at the units in which IT-related work is conducted, but all units across the IU Libraries, from catalogers to subject librarians. If we sincerely want to embark on transforming our role in the academy, it’s time for a sweeping cultural change, not just an organizational change.

We are not alone in this sentiment, and we have begun to see initiatives and trends happening at peer academic libraries like University of Virginia and University of Maryland, College Park with impressive collections, strong digital infrastructure, and renown digital humanities research conducted in partnership with the library: IATH at UVa and MITH at Maryland. At UVa, library staff follows the 80/20 research model, where librarians, technologists and other library professionals are able to dedicate 20% of their time pursuing their own research and creative interests. As in the case of UVa some of these endeavors become important software solutions like Blacklight. Bethany Nowviskie’s celebrated blog post, “a skunk in the library,” illustrates the importance of keeping library professionals engaged and skill sets current – in ways that are meaningful and in the spirit of recognizing librarians, technologists and archivists as the researchers and equal collaborators that we are. The 20% would allow us to experiment, innovate, and simply grow professionally regardless of the end result, but we suspect in most cases the end result would form the basis of supporting services moving forward. Bethany discusses this approach to professional development in the context of the Scholar’s Lab, but this approach is being more widely adopted across the UVa Library.

At Maryland, Trevor Muñoz highlights a new albeit experimental initiative undertaken in partnership between the library and MITH, in which librarians are recognized as digital humanists in their own right in his post “Digital humanities in the library isn’t service.” The initiative is known as the Digital Humanities Incubator, and is very much inspired by Bethany Nowviskie’s “skunk in the library” blog post and the UVa Scholar’s Lab Praxis Program . The Incubator provides a collaborative space with technical resources and training opportunities that will allow for librarians to realize their own digital research projects without necessarily having to attain approval or partner with teaching faculty. Instead they are afforded some percentage of time, along with dedicated resources, to pursue this endeavor.

At the recent HathiTrust Research Center Uncamp, we learned that other academic libraries are transforming their librarians and professional staff in relevant ways. Columbia University under Alex Gil’s direction is in the process on defining a two-year, hands-on training program modeled after the Praxis Program to prepare subject librarians to take the front lines in their digital humanities efforts. We learned of other academic libraries in the process of embracing this shift – University of Minnesota, Johns Hopkins and others. We are not alone in reconceiving our reference services or our digital library/humanities initiatives. Nor should we do so in a half-hearted manner or without consulting other groups who have led the way.

In truly embracing a radical shift in how we do our work and how we value research and creative output by librarians and library professionals, we not only do we keep growing and learning, but we also make the Indiana University Libraries a coveted place for prospective employees and cross-campus partnerships.

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So yeah, this is on my mind.

* Level Zero, Commodity Tools: Use of open source and site-licensed software tools supported by the Libraries and/or UITS to provide personal digital asset management/digital collection building, text analysis, data mining, statistical analysis, reference management, and other functions useful to digital humanities and scholarly projects.

* Level One, Fundamental Services: Use of standard digital collection and repository services provided by the library and DLP with no minimal customization, including support and training.

Level Two, Customized Services: Building on fundamental library services, customizations should be designed and developed in such a way that they contribute to the ongoing development of our fundamental services and technical infrastructure.

Level Three, New Developments: Development of new software to support scholarship. New developments should be designed with the aim to be “first of a kind” rather than “one of a kind,” and could lead to the development of entirely new services and expanded technical infrastructure.

I am in principle a supporter of this model, but I think this model and others like this one may be fundamentally flawed in that our library at least is still creating barriers to digital scholarship. We would need to get through at least two levels before we can truly engage the scholar, not to mention the problem with assuming that the underpinnings of the first two levels are indeed in place.

I see threads of all three posts before this one manifesting here, but I wonder if some part of the libraries, in collaboration with other groups, centers, people across campus, can get to the point in which it is perfectly valid to invest resources in a specialized digital research project regardless of broader impact or long-term sustainability. Perhaps more weight should be given to transormative scholarship that is initiated by the research (research needs before content) versus by the libraries (content, then, maybe, research needs).

Putting on my computer-science hat, I suspect that a big factor in long-term sustainability is robust, well-structured and easily shared data. If you can encode the knowledge embedded in the project in portable forms, then it can move between components and infrastructures as the knowledge remains valuable, and as new kinds of useful components and infrastructures arise. So I wouldn’t mind seeing some discussion specifically focusing on sustainable data in digital humanities projects, though I don’t know offhand whether it fits best under the umbrella of this proposal or is best discussed on its own.

The modern languages department has 10 years of born digital data that they don’t know what to do with, including some incredible documentation of languages that are at risk of disappearing. I’m trying to get them to do an inventory of the files, but they didn’t use consistant file naming structures. (Several people gathering data over several years = a mess!)

How do I get the faculty started on thinking about this holistically? How can I get the other librarians and the campus IT department to see this as a priority? It’s a little overwhelming for me to think about all the options and potential projects.

If this seems more appropriate to consider as a separate proposal, that’s okay with me, too, but I woke up thinking about this and your post struck me as closely related.

Thanks,
Deb Morley
MIT Libraries