64 · Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
more broadly to encompass digital scholarship initiatives more broadly like open-access publishing, print and digital
companions, etc.
The technical platforms we build and use for local digital collections have great promise for digital humanities scholars
we are entering year two of a summer digital humanities activity that seeks to identify these faculty and help them to
develop DH projects. Some of these will use our local digital collections &infrastructure.
These areas of activity relate to our digital collections through the liaison that shapes our decision making regarding
development initiatives. But faculty and student activity in various forms of digital scholarship and data curation are
often independent of our curated collections.
Trends within digital humanities scholarship and analytic methodologies have made us reconsider how we provide
content. Data mining, large-scale analysis, and visualization of historical patterns have led us to structure our
metadata differently and to arrange policies that will facilitate scholarly access to bulk collections for data mining. Also
collaboration with historians engaged with public history activities have inspired us to consider more open ways of
including online comments, public tagging, and user-contributed content. Desire for spatial analysis has encouraged us
to integrate geospatial metadata and mapping applications into our content.
Two years ago Digital Scholarship and Production Services hired an official “Digital Humanities” curator, who has been
reaching out to faculty to determine the gaps in services provided by the library. We are also trying to get much better
about disseminating information about our collections, and controlling the search results (really dated collections often
come up). LOTS of work to be done.
We are in the process of reviewing digital scholarship and, as a part of that, examining how digital scholarship relates to
digital collections.
We are partnering with Digital Humanities to create a Scholars Collaborative, a collaborative space where digital
humanists learn to use technology tools to create, manipulate, and use digital primary source materials.
We are strengthening the library’s support for digital humanities and data curation. Currently, we rely primarily on
GitHub to disseminate information related to the digital humanities. As mentioned, we expect to have a data repository
online within the next several months.
We are using Omeka as a way to better integrate our digital collections into research and learning.
We are working to provide a place to store, disseminate, and provide access to new initiatives and services. One of our
library programs is the Open Education Initiative, which fosters open education, primarily in digital format. The materials
produced from this initiative become part of the ScholarWorks collection. The program is an outreach opportunity that
is integrated with research and teaching on campus. ScholarWorks provides a place for supplemental content that is
beyond the scope of print books published by the university press, which integrates the collection with research.
We are working with the Center for Teaching and Learning to integrate our collections with online learning initiatives on
campus.
We have a digital humanities librarian who is working to identify existing or planned digital collections that might be
used to develop an exemplar DH project. Our library digital imprint also has published manuscripts from our special
collections.
We have a relatively new department addressing DH, digital scholarship, digital publishing, and data curation in
earnest—Publishing and Curation Services. Among the ways in which we would like to think differently about digital
collections, particularly in order to be of more value to researchers: 1) making easily available and accessible the files
that support our digital collections (i.e., XML files that researchers may mark up for extensive data- or text-mining
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