Digital Humanities: centerNET

Bringing Together Digital Humanities Scholars and Librarians:

On January 22, 2011, CLIR hosted a meeting to discuss the possibility of a formal alliance between DLF and centerNet. The affiliation proposal was approved by the centerNet Board in February 2011.

The affiliation focused on areas where digital libraries and digital humanities converge. The aim was to promote further exploration and understanding of each community’s roles and responsibilities, and to find ways in which the two communities could work together productively.

Initial points of interest:

• Data curation: preservation of digital scholarship objects and workflows, and digital products of research and instruction.
• Cyberinfrastructure: issues relating to interoperability, data mining, shared infrastructure, and linked open data.
• Internationalization: leveraging international cooperation and existing international networks to share work. Improving awareness of and influence on international initiatives.
• Scaling up: working with Google Books, HATHI Trust, and Digital Public Library of America efforts. Understanding the meaning of this aggregated data and how data humanists will best use these digital libraries.
• Scaling down: addressing smaller scoped work, and the unique preservation challenges these types of scholarship present.
• Career paths: highlighting career opportunities in digital humanities and digital libraries, to better understand the changing roles.
• Publication and distribution: exploring how digital humanities and digital libraries share research efforts, in order to better inform practice.
• Charge working groups to explore common interests. As appropriate, and depending on outcomes of ongoing discussions as well as actions #2 and #3 above, task joint DH/DL working groups to examine, discuss, and recommend further collaborative actions.