Developing Library Support for Publishing Expansive Digital Humanities Projects

David Hansen
Director, Copyright & Scholarly Communications
Duke University

Liz Milewicz
Head, Digital Scholarship Services
Duke University

Paolo Mangiafico
Coordinator of Scholarly Communications Technology
Duke University

This session will explore how research libraries can support expansive digital humanities publishing projects—projects that are interactive and dynamic in their content as they span and often grow over time across multiple content types, audiences, and contributors. Recognizing that the digital humanities are often not static, and change and grow as the scholarship and its community expands, what role can libraries and the institutions that back them play in planning, growing and sustaining these publications? How can institutions adequately evaluate and reward this type of scholarship, particularly when the audiences and collaborators for these publications extend beyond the academic community? This session is based on work done under a new Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to address library services in support of expansive digital publishing. The grant focuses on investigating five areas of support: 1) planning, 2) resource allocation and production; 3) discovery; 4) evaluation; and 5) preservation and sustainability. Workshop leaders will briefly introduce each of these ideas, and participants will be asked to actively contribute in a roundtable discussion format structured around each topic. The aim of that discussion is to help form a collective understanding of what works and what doesn’t in establishing ongoing institutional support for expansive digital projects. We also plan to incorporate elements of this discussion into a comprehensive report, to be released in summer 2018, that will offer a framework for research libraries to develop sustainable services within their institutional context in support of expansive digital publishing.