Library Problems In The Humanities

The digital humanities in academic institutions, and libraries in particular, have exploded in recent years. Librarians are constantly developing their management and technological skills and increasing their knowledge base. As they continue to embed themselves in the scholarly conversations on campus, the challenges facing subject/liaison librarians, technical service librarians, and library administrators are many. This comprehensive volume highlights the wide variety of theoretical issues discussed, initiatives pursued, and projects implemented by academic librarians. Many of the chapters deal with digital humanities pedagogy—planning and conducting training workshops, institutes, semester-long courses, embedded librarian instruction, and instructional assessment—with some chapters focusing specifically on applications of the “ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” The authors also explore a wide variety of other topics, including the emotional labor of librarians; the challenges of transforming static traditional collections into dynamic, user-centered, digital projects; conceptualizing and creating models of collaboration; digital publishing; and developing and planning projects including improving one’s own project management skills. This collection effectively illustrates how librarians are enabling themselves through active research partnerships in an ever-changing scholarly environment. This book was originally published as a special triple issue of the journal College & Undergraduate Libraries.

"In the past decade there has been an intense growth in the number of library publishing services supporting faculty and students. Unified by a commitment to both access and service, library publishing programs have grown from an early focus on backlist digitization to encompass publication of student works, textbooks, research data, as well as books and journals. This growing engagement with publishing is a natural extensions of the academic library's commitment to support the creation of and access to scholarship."--Back cover.

This study explored the perspectives and information behaviors of scholars in the humanities. The following general questions were examined: How do humanities scholars think about, organize, and perform their research? How are information sources used throughout the research process? And, how do electronic information sources affect work practices? In addition, the research also looked at two specific questions related to research library collections and services: What functions and characteristics make one resource better than another? And, how can the traditional role of the library as a repository for printed works be reconciled with the provision of virtual, unallocated resources? Participants were 33 humanities scholars from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chicago. Data were collected by project-based semi-structured interviews, selected case studies, and follow-up semi-structured interviews. Findings are reported in the following areas: (1) ways of reading, including chaining to enable reading; (2) collaborative networking; (3) researching and searching, including collections as capital, many states of primary materials, multitude of sources, access tools for speed and scope, diverse skills and strategies, generic searching problems, and browsing across collections and tools; and (4) ways of writing, including information management, accretion, and refinement, as well as oscillating and overlapping synthesis work. One of the last sections is "Trends: The Evolving Information Environment for Humanists." Methods are appended. (Contains 29 references.) (MES)

Acquisitions and Collection Development in the Humanities is a one-of-a-kind guide on the procedures, approaches, and principles needed to make sound decisions in acquiring materials in various areas of the humanities. It gives you an inside look at managerial concerns in documentary delivery, changing budgetary needs, and fluctuations in journal prices and helps you address many of the important questions in acquisitions and collection development within both traditional and technological environments. As contributing author Dennis Dillon puts it, the ultimate goal of humanities librarians “is not to acquire information bytes and bits, but to promote integrity: integrity of texts, integrity of selection, the integrity of the collection, and the integrity of the library and its ultimate purpose.” This objective underlies this multifaceted and comprehensive collection of articles, as the authors address many interesting issues, developments, and challenges in the field, including: selecting candidates for digitization and producing e-texts collecting in areas that don’t have immediate utility or that may be unpopular what librarians need to know about the humanities as a discipline in order to effectively meet the informational and technological needs of their constituencies online discussion groups as useful sources of webliographic information cooperative collection building the importance of maintaining a high degree of local ownership for materials the principles, criteria, and tools needed to develop a Native American studies collection document-driven and use-driven approaches to collecting acquiring and preserving records that chronicle the role played by African Americans in the United States’development Acquisitions and Collection Development in the Humanities can help professional librarians, graduate school faculty, and students in information and library science acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for building a broadly based and academically responsive collection. It will certainly help you keep up with changes in the information environment and show you how the tools you’ve developed for selecting traditional library materials will be useful as you grapple with electronic texts, “spider” search mechanisms on the Web, becoming a webliographer, and budget shortfalls.