The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is pleased to announce the formation of the Special Interest Group Libraries and Digital Humanities.
The connection between Digital Humanities (DH) centers and libraries was traced by the DH scholarly community in 1999, when Willard McCarty and Matthew Kirschenbaum tallied about nineteen library-based humanities computing centers, and more recently, based on a spreadsheet of DH centers compiled as a joint MITH, CDRH, and MATRIX project, as Chris Alen Sula estimated that approximately half of the nearly one hundred identified centers have a relationship, albeit some just informally, with a library. Since then, the ties between DH, libraries and librarians have garnered more formal, international recognition, as librarians around the world have been organizing around DH, forming professional organizations to address issues and needs that libraries confront in this arena, and as in many parts of the world libraries have been the main participants in large digitization projects that are of great value to Humanities scholars and DH scholars alike.
ADHO’s Libraries and Digital Humanities SIG aims at fostering collaboration and communication among librarians and other scholars doing DH work, by showcasing the work of librarians engaged in DH projects, advocating for initiatives of interest and benefit to both libraries and DH, promoting librarians’ perspectives and skills to the rest of the DH community, and offering advice and support to new and emergent associations of librarians engaged in DH projects.
The Libraries and Digital Humanities SIG encourages membership from all fields and geographic regions: please visit its Twitter page or sign up for updates through this Google Form.