SPEC Kit 326: Digital Humanities · 57
Services have been effective in responding to faculty and institutional needs that have been identified however, more
outreach and planning could reach a much larger audience for these services.
Still in developmental stage.
Still new, but promising.
The digital humanities services are bundled with the digital collection services, which makes each more successful and
in all are extremely successful.
The faculty who have been involved are very satisfied at this point.
The library has highly skilled personnel to support the different aspects of digital humanities research, including
digitization software and hardware tools, metadata application, resource acquisition, and copyright issues. But at the
moment, it is still a somewhat fragmented set of services and we do not actively coordinate on each project. Rather,
people are brought in based on researchers’ knowledge of them or referrals from someone like me.
The quality is excellent though the scope is somewhat limited.
The services are less than effective because it really has not been in existence for very long, less than six months.
The services are still in a development stage but we are encouraged.
They are in transition and should be much more robust in the next year.
Too soon to tell whether we will be more than marginally effective until we seen publications and get a sense about
sustained web traffic (ongoing demand) which might warrant longer term preservation of the products.
Very effective in the sense of building faculty relationships and being seen as a leader. Much less effective in terms of
sustainability, systematic prioritization of work, and appropriate choice of technology used. We are at a crossroads in
our plans for these services going forward, and are currently actively planning how we can maintain this type of service,
while also providing some reasonable level of long-term support for selected outcomes of these activities.
We already have a popular and well-appreciated Digital Humanities Center where patrons can get assistance with
digitization, bibliographic and resource management, and small-scale individual research projects. We have a Libraries’
Digital Program that has produced an number of first-class resources for humanities scholars. We have a Center for New
Media that does an excellent job of supporting instructional needs in the humanities and in creating curricular-related
resources. We have a fairly new Center for Digital Research and Scholarship that does excellent job supporting faculty
research and developing a repository for material produced at the university. We are looking forward to providing a
larger and more robustly equipped center for patrons to come for front-line help, and an active planning process is in
place to implement such an enhanced facility in the 2012–2013 academic year, bringing it up to par with the recently
opened Digital Social Science Center and Digital Science Center. Another area where we look to improve services would
be in developing a smoother path for transition from the front-line, fairly ad hoc project work that individual patrons
undertake in the DHC to the kinds of full-blown, fully supported projects created by our Libraries Digital and other
programs.
We are at the beginning of our engagement with digital humanities services. As a result, we don’t have grounds for
assessing our overall effectiveness. That being said, we have many improvements and adaptations to make which will
be driven by campus demand.
We are coming to the end of a major planning and strategy effort to formulate a new Digital Library Program that will
include digital humanities support. Assessment will be part of that program moving forwards.
We are just beginning but are moving in interesting directions.
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