DHN Labs – Workshop @ DHN2019

Digital Humanities and the National and University Libraries and Archives (in the Nordic and Baltic Countries)

Organizers

Stig Roar Svenningsen, Mads Linnet Perner, Ditte Laursen, Lars Kjær (1), Annika Rockenberger (2), Olga Holownia (3)

(1) Royal Danish Library, (2) National Library of Norway, (3) British Library/International Internet Preservation Consortium

Time & Place

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

9.00–12.00

The Royal Library, Copenhagen/Denmark

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Workshop description

Recent years have seen an increased focus on digital humanities at national and university libraries, driven by a strategic desire to develop key digital services for university faculty and students, as well as a means to explore the libraries’ vast collections of heritage data. Through their services, libraries often have direct access to scholars and students. Meanwhile, after years of digitization, they now hold large repositories of digital heritage data, ready to be explored. The focus on digital humanities has resulted in a number of developments, ranging from improved access to digital repositories to organizing datasprints at the university libraries. The work has, however, not always been straightforward, as various organizational, theoretical and technological problems arose in the process. Those issues range from the curation of library materials, through selection biases of the process of digitization to access. One of the key objectives of this workshop is to start a discussion on these and other issues, that rise in connection to national libraries’ engagement with the digital humanities.

Although policies and services offered at national and university libraries are the main focus of the workshop, we encourage participation of other institutions, including national archives and museums, that offer or plan to offer access to their digital collections for research purposes.

The workshop will be organised around four themes:

1. Collections as Data

Libraries have invested resources in digital access to the digital repositories. This includes dedicated websites for access, crowdsourcing portals, API and data repositories. This section will focus on best practices regarding accessibility and usability of the digital heritage data at the national libraries.

• What is the preferred form of access for faculty and students as well as third-party users?
• How can we approve access to meet the demand from researchers and students?
• How can the Interoperability of data be enhanced, such the ability to use data in different research tools as well as together with data from other institutions?

2. Utilizing the Full Potential of the Collections

Text holds a primacy in current digital humanities scholarship. This does not, however, fairly reflect the material diversity in the collections of the library, which include both images, artwork, computer games, apps as well as audiovisual material. Thus, a key question from the perspective of the library is how to encourage the inclusion of such types of material in DH scholarship. Key questions include:

• How to stimulate an increasing use of non-textual material across disciplines?
• Which tools are needed to encourage the use of non-textual material?
• How to explore non-text data in 3D/VR environments?

3. Curating Digital Collections and Learning Resources for Faculty and Students

Despite the recent expansion of digital repositories and learning facilities, such as Labs and dedicated DH librarians, the share of students and faculty using data and DH infrastructure in their work is still rather low. This theme will address issues such as:

• How to turn students’ attention to DH tools and data?
• How can dedicated DH librarians effectively engage students’ and faculty members in activities that underpin their interest in digital data and methods?

4. Selection Bias of Digital Collections

The current digital repositories reflects the digitization and collection efforts by libraries. Although vast and important collection of digitized and digital collected data has become available for research, there is a significant bias, as the selection of material for digitization has been driven by other concerns than potential for research. This theme will reflect upon the potential bias from the digitization and collection practice of the library and take on questions like:

• How is material selected for digitization?
• How will this praxis affect future DH scholarship?
• How to keep information about provenance of data?
• How should material be selected – research driven or decided librarians?
• How to account for and communicate these biases to researchers and students?

Outcome

The workshop is expected to facilitate the dialog between research and GLAM-institutions as well as sharing the lessons learned by libraries and archives. We also propose that we present the workshop outcomes at the conference as a first stepping stone to reaching a wider audience and contributing to the proposal for the establishment of a Nordic/Baltic DHN working group in digital humanities in national libraries and archives.

Draft Programme (TBC)