The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has received a $75,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endownment for the Humanities (NEH) to incorporate more digital humanities metadata into the open SHARE database documenting research and scholarly activities across their life cycle. ARL will work with scholars and librarians to identify requirements for using the SHARE metadata aggregator to expose and link digital humanities (DH) scholarship at all stages of development.
With the continued growth of digital humanities scholarship—reflected in academic job opportunities, conference programming, library services, and college and university courses—accessing and discovering the output of this scholarship remains a challenge. Digital projects can have highly distributed components (e.g., codebooks, content, manuscripts), which can be difficult to connect as part of the same intellectual work. Conversely, when such components are too tightly bundled and isolated on project websites, they are hidden from networked search and discovery tools.
The project, Integrating Digital Humanities into the Web of Scholarship with SHARE, is co-led by Cynthia Hudson-Vitale, ARL visiting program officer for SHARE and data services coordinator at Washington University in St. Louis Libraries, and Judy Ruttenberg, ARL program director for strategic initiatives and co-director of SHARE. SHARE is a partnership between ARL and the Center for Open Science.
With NEH support, the project leads will use a mixed-methods approach, including surveys of DH centers and focus groups of librarians and scholars, to identify existing metadata models and registries for DH scholarship. This approach will help the project leads better understand the stewardship (and gaps therein) of scholarly assets created throughout a DH project’s life cycle. Following the requirements-gathering phase, this grant will support paid interns to create wireframes and prototypes for aggregating metadata about highly diverse DH assets and for search and discovery.
Advancing SHARE’s exposure to and use within the humanities will not only increase the visibility of humanities work on the scholarly web; it will also bring together multi-discliplinary communities using common tools and practices and inform future development of humanities-based digital repositories.
This project is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this release do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
