I’m interested in the intersection of advocacy for improvements in scholarly communication and of DH in academic libraries. For quite some time, academic libraries have been trying to educate their users about the distorted marketplace for scholarly literature and about options for open-access to literature, often providing alternative venues for disseminating publications, such as institutional repositories or library-based publishing services. At the same time, momentum is growing for libraries to provide support for digital humanities (and digital scholarship more broadly), whether it be in computing infrastructure, project management, metadata consulting, or just helping scholars use digital tools. Since DH’s default mode for its products is open and online, it naturally fits into the rhetoric of scholarly communication initiatives. In fact, both scholarly communication initiatives and DH push boundaries not just of openness and accessibility but also form, rethinking concepts like a monograph, a journal, or a scholarly edition.
Maybe the LPC and dh+lib communities are trying to solve similar problems from different perspectives. Since they’re both based in libraries, they likely both concerned with sustainability and preservation, but is there room for more closely aligning practice?
Having attended a series of DH workshops for archivists. librarians, technologies, and of course DH scholars, this is an interesting topic to me. I am myself trying to establish greater professional presence through publishing and presenting on the topic, and have developed a digital guide on DH for our academic library: http://tinyurl.com/lcpyyyr. I am interested in attending this session. Thanks for proposing!
Notes from our session: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xXdJLPiownXA_DgnGIbIAiJQMZg9OmhXIgXsbl0MgGk/edit?usp=sharing