One Culture: “Urgent, Pointed, and Even Disruptive”

DH can be a big messy world and is often tied to big messy issues (copyright, open access, tenure and promotion, etc), so I found it helpful to start with what I knew – I’ve worked with Omeka before and did my undergrad in history, so I asked a history prof if he wanted to create an Omeka site for one of his courses. It’s not groundbreaking but it’s something.

I think you are right that DH offers greater opportunities for involvement by librarians, though I wish you had been a bit more concrete than polemical. Your rousing “cast off our chains!” rhetoric runs the risk of reinforcing a divide between librarian-work and research proper.

Strongly asserting that librarians need to do digital work without ever providing referents can lead to the reading I had when first going over your piece: librarians need to become scholars; scholarship is progressive, librarianship is servitude. But talk to some folks doing DH (and Stewart Varner’s post gets to some of this) and they don’t need more scholars, they need people who have metadata, preservation, and project management skills. I would argue that librarians who want to be involved in DH can do so by promoting skills they have as librarians, not by trying to be scholars or on the basis of non-librarian subject knowledge.

Personally, I’d like to see librarians who are excited by DH do a better job of showing how librarian skills bring a lot to the table. One possible avenue would be critically assessing DH projects, say on a DH&Libraries blog of some sort.