Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group

The Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group is building a knowledge network within European libraries with an interest in digital humanities.

It operates as part of LIBER’s Strategic Direction on Digital Skills & Services, which in turn is one of the key pillars of our 2018-2022 Strategy.

The Working Group’s main activities are to identify and to share the library services for supporting digital humanities, and to establish key prerequisites in order to enable libraries and librarians for the related tasks. We aim to strengthen the position of libraries in the European digital humanities network. Our goal is therefore that LIBER libraries can easily find peers in the library sector, know where to find relevant information on digital humanities, and know how to provide their collections as data and therefore be a true partner in digital humanities research.

We are doing this by establishing teams, which are focused on various aspects of the work around digital scholarship in libraries. The teams, and their topics, are as follows:

• Team 1 – Pro(vi)ding Expertise. Chaired by Caleb Derven (University of Limerick, Eire) and Puck Wildschut (Utrecht University).
• Team 2 – Relationships with the Research Community. Chaired by Liam O’Dwyer (Dublin City University, Eire) and Sarah Ames (National Library of Scotland).
• Team 3 – Impact of Digital Humanities Activities in Libraries. Chaired by Kirsty Lingstadt (University of Edinburgh, Scotland) and Merisa Martinez (KU Leuven, Belgium).
• Team 4 – Digital Collections. Chaired by Marian Lefferts (CERL) and Lotte Wilms (KB, Netherlands).

Priorities

The working group is delivering the following:

• Mailing List – An open mailing list to share best and worst practices in the form of short reports and blog posts from members. Sign Up;
• Reading lists – The reading lists provide an easy entry into a topic related to digital scholarship. All resources discussed in these lists (and more) are also available in a Zotero library.
• Report – A report outlining the state of Digital Scholarship in European research libraries. The Europe’s Digital Humanities Landscape: A Study From LIBER’s Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group report is available on Zenodo;
• Workshops – Several workshops have been organised by the Working Group and more will be forthcoming. Join the mailing list to stay up to date and hear about upcoming events.
• Webinars – The Working Group has so far organised two webinars on ‘Setting up a GLAM workbench‘ in collaboration with Tim Sherratt, and ‘Open a GLAM Lab‘ on the book sprint method and publication of the book on GLAM Labs.

Please see the Working Group’s workplan for more details and activities.

Working Group Structure

Working Group members are split into Core Members and Team Members. The Core Members coordinate the activities of the Working Group. They are the:

• Two chairs;
• Representatives of the subject teams;
• LIBER office representative.

Team members are members of the Working Group who contribute and belong to one of the subject teams. Each subject team nominates one colleague as a chair, who becomes a core member of the group. The team chair can also be chair of the working group. Members can join any, or all, teams they are interested in by indicating their interest on this spreadsheet or by sending an email to either one of the chairs.

Relationship to European Research Infrastructures

There is a very active digital humanities community throughout Europe. Researchers work together across borders and find each other in European research infrastructures such as DARIAH and CLARIN. This is therefore the natural place to liaise with the scientific community and to ensure libraries are the ideal research partner within their domain.

The Working Group will actively engage with other European networks working in this field.