Tom ScheinfeldtDec 9, 2022

I am increasingly convinced that #DigitalHumanities cannot and should not be operated as a service—of the library or any other unit. We should not be hiring people to help others do #DH. We should hire people to do #DH themselves. Those people should be faculty, yes, but also librarians, archivists, developers, designers, and managers. And they should be empowered to range the campus to build teams of their own making to work on ideas of their own devising.

Putting people in service to others’ work doesn’t scale, isn’t sustainable, and, most importantly, produces bad work. When administrators (especially library directors) recruit a “digital scholarship librarian” or similar to support digital humanities on their campuses, they’re setting them up to fail. @dh

Show threadKarin Dalziel

@foundhistory I'm having a really hard time envisioning how this would work. I agree that one DH librarian can't carry a campus, but the Center model has been very good to me as staff. I started as an office assistant and even then, was (mostly) made to feel like a collaborative partner in DH projects, something I find hard to imagine would be the case if I was doing the same tasks (minutes, setting meetings, etc) as a generic office staff person. That feeling like a part of things led me to get a library degree and work to Designer, Developer, head of dev team, and now Assistant Manager of the department.

The other thing about hiring specifically for DH is that every part of the process can be seen as an essential part of the team. So when our server admin points out the security implications of something a PI wants to do, it's not from a service model, its from the perspective as full collaborator on the project.

Dec 9, 2022 at 6:48pmWeb
Show threadKarin DalzielDec 9, 2022

@foundhistory It may be different that we are emphatically NOT a service center, and work hard on the messaging for that. We're collaborators.

But the team synergy we get from being a cohesive unit focused on DH is hard to overstate