SPEC Kit 326: Digital Humanities · 59
29. Do library staff play any role in providing theses services? N=7
Yes 4 57%
No 3 43%
If yes, please briefly describe which staff participate and the role(s) they play. N=4
Called on for cataloging services for the English Short Title Catalog.
Library staff, especially subject librarians, may advise faculty and graduate students about services offered by the
(University of Washington) Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Not formal or systematic, but library staff are occasionally consulted for assistance and/or advice on format transfers,
rights issues, and arrangement and access issues.
The library will digitize library materials for the Press and for Digital Humanities projects. These digitized materials are
usually hosted on the library server, but can also be hosted elsewhere.
Additional Comments
30. Please enter any additional information that may assist the authors’ understanding of your
library’s support for digital humanities projects. N=20
As stated earlier, we are in the early stages of offering these services. We consciously went with a “policy lite”
approach to get things off the ground. The design and outfitting of the space and the services offered were guided by
participating faculty from African American Studies, Art, English, Gender and Race Studies, History, Modern Languages
and Classics, Music, and Women’s Studies. The faculty who have been involved are very satisfied and pleased at this
point.
At our institution, the projects are all very different and funding is limited. So our approach to digital humanities is
informal and varied. There isn’t a central coordinator role.
I think the primary strengths of the digital humanities initiative is our partnership representing the libraries, research,
and faculty as well as incorporating the program into the Center for Digital Scholarship.
It is difficult to draw a line between humanities and other digital library services. We are developing most services as
part of our RUcore repository platform, including support for video, audio, and data, and a full suite of digitization
services through our Digital Curation Lab. These services support all disciplines, and are used by humanities researchers,
but we do relatively little “target marketing” to the humanities only. At Douglass Library, we have the Margery Somers
Foster Center which conducts multimedia training and outreach, in conjunction with digital multimedia production
facilities in the Sharon Fordham Lab (video and audio creation and editing). This is probably the closest we come to a
“humanities” center.
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