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If your library doesn’t add genres to the MARC record of films, it’s really difficult to browse a collection that is shelved alphabetically by title (which is common). If you know what film you want to watch, you can search the OPAC/library catalog and go to the shelves to find it. But suppose you’d like a western or a romantic comedy or a horror flick for the weekend, and you want to browse the collection of horror films, you can’t do it onine — and you’re stuck browsing the whole collection of DVDs on the shelves until you land some satisfactory horror movie, romantic comedy, or western. To make a list browsable online by director, say, is easy enough since most directors are listed in a MARC record field from which the data can be exported. But if you want to sort by data that isn’t in the film’s MARC record….   Wouldn’t it be nice to have a list of DVD holdings browsable by genre? Let’s solve this problem, design the solution, and build it!

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As a librarian, I’ve been immersed in reading and discussion about the kinds of support that researchers in digital humanities might need.  My question is being asked in a lot of places — how can libraries reinvent information services and products in the digital age?

A lot of the discussion about supporting digital scholarship is visionary, focussing on ultimate goals — well-developed, high end, mature products and services.  I would like to see a discussion that is more process-oriented, more about the nuts and bolts of getting libraries from where we are now to where we need to be.  Here are some sub-topics around which I would organize that kind of discussion:

• What are the tools and services already existing that serve the needs of early-adopter scholars in the digital humanities?  And how can libraries leverage what is already going on to further develop relevant services and tools? I’m thinking of an environmental scan thru the abundant literature to create a digestible mindmap or overview of the categories of new tasks and research questions being asked, and the concomitant essential tools.  I’m focussed here on interpretation and research (not new forms of expressions).  For example, how is close reading different in the digital age?  How does technology make different kinds of intellectual biography possible?  How can massive-multiplayer collective reading change the way we privilege certain interpretations of a text?  How are place and time mashups affecting research into a text or the body of work of a creator?  How are haptic or visual technologies changing interpretation?   And then, how does the library put that knowledge to use?  With a sense of what early adopters are about, we can think more concretely and systematically about supporting all scholars. By examining how early adopters are solving their information needs (finding, in some cases developing, or accessing the data they need; using tools; doing version control; documenting their methodology; storing their data in the short and long term with various levels of access; presenting their results), we can start asking what resources would help provide more robust structures via our institutions or our consortia or via other groupings?  A very simple example here is the “oneweek-onetool” workshops in which practitioners get together and identify a real need, and then develop a tool to address it–that’s a way to build not only tools, but also relationships, new skills, networks, and organizational capacity.
• In a parallel way, what are the problems facing scholars who are novices in digital humanities?  What kinds of services and support do they need? Once we have a good problem statement, we can begin to think of solutions that are less of the “gee whiz” one-off pilot variety, and more of a systematic approach to creating a people-and-tools infrastructure that we can build on over time.
• Those two discussions, to me, precede the important discussion of expertise.  What are the new skills and understandings needed in the library profession to support these researchers? We’ve had a very specific model of support for decades that has created an explicit understanding of what an “expert” librarian is — how is that changing based on the solutions we need to try and put in place for new modes of research?

To facilitate this conversation, I plan to review “No Brief Candle” especially the sections by Paul Courant and Rick Luce, and to look at the British Library’s new website “Growing Knowledge: the evolution of research.”  There are lots of great reports and examples out there suitable for the kind of inductive review I’m proposing, and I hope folks will use the comments to suggest others!

Finally, and humbly, I’m not saying this kind of categorization hasn’t already been done, but that I want to engage with other people in conversation about it in order to “get it” more deeply and learn to better articulate how to shape library services in a fluid environment.