Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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The ARL report recognized that the massive amount of humanities materials that have been digitized
with<strong>in</strong> open-access projects and commercially licensed sources will be comb<strong>in</strong>ed by researchers <strong>in</strong>
new ways, and that the research library will need to develop new strategies to work with both its users
and other academic units to support digital scholarship as well as preservation and curation of digital
data. Abby Smith has made similar arguments <strong>in</strong> her overview of how the research library will need to
evolve <strong>in</strong> the twenty-first century to meet the needs of humanities scholars <strong>in</strong> particular:
The accelerated development of digital humanities is an even more significant trend for
research libraries, if only because humanists have been their primary clientele. Beyond the
<strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>g use of quantitative research methods <strong>in</strong> the humanities, there is a grow<strong>in</strong>g demand
by humanists to access and manipulate resources <strong>in</strong> digital form. With the primacy of “datadriven
humanities,” certa<strong>in</strong> humanities discipl<strong>in</strong>es will eventually grow their own doma<strong>in</strong>specific
<strong>in</strong>formation specialists. While perhaps tra<strong>in</strong>ed as librarians or archivists, such
specialists will work embedded <strong>in</strong> a department or discipl<strong>in</strong>ary research center (Smith 2008).
Many scholars and librarians have also stressed the need for research libraries to expand their
preservation mission to <strong>in</strong>clude complicated digital objects and not just scholarly research
publications. 697 Michael Fraser highlighted the importance of the ability of digital repositories to
preserve more complicated content than just PDFs <strong>in</strong> the long-term <strong>in</strong>frastructure of VREs:
Indeed, preserv<strong>in</strong>g the 'project', compris<strong>in</strong>g data, publications, workflows and the 'grey'
material of reports, notebooks and other forms of more nebulous communications is important
<strong>in</strong> a research environment where much of the material is born and raised digital. The
development of today's research by tomorrow's scholars depends on it (Fraser 2005).
Similarly, <strong>in</strong> their process of creat<strong>in</strong>g a digital library of the Roman de la Rose, Choudhury and St<strong>in</strong>son
described the new dual responsibility of libraries to provide both physical and digital preservation:
For while the curation of physical codices will rema<strong>in</strong> an essential role for libraries, the
collection and curation of digital objects will assume greater importance for libraries of the
future, and the <strong>in</strong>frastructure, budgetary priorities, and strategic plans of library organizations
would do well to account for this sooner rather than later (Choudhury and St<strong>in</strong>son 2007).
A variety of research has also proposed that new organizational structures beyond the traditional
research library or <strong>in</strong>stitutional repository (IR) may be needed to support such digital preservation and
curation activities. 698 Sayeed Choudhury has recently described how Johns Hopk<strong>in</strong>s University created
its IR as “a “gateway” to the underly<strong>in</strong>g digital archive that will support data curation as part of an
evolv<strong>in</strong>g cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure featur<strong>in</strong>g open, modular components” (Choudhury 2008). As was argued
by Abby Smith, they found that new roles were develop<strong>in</strong>g along with this new <strong>in</strong>frastructure
<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the development of “data humanists” or “data scientists.”
In a recent article <strong>in</strong> Digital Humanities Quarterly, W. A. Kretzschmar has also proposed that the only
way to effectively support long-term and large scale humanities comput<strong>in</strong>g projects may be to f<strong>in</strong>d a
“stable <strong>in</strong>stitutional sett<strong>in</strong>g” for them (Kretzschmar 2009). Crane, Babeu, and Bamman (2007) have
similarly argued that humanists may need to “develop new organizational structures to develop and
ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong> the services” on which they <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>gly depend. The need to consider what type of
697 See Sennyey (2009) for a thorough overview of how academic libraries need to redef<strong>in</strong>e their mission to meet the needs of digital scholarship.
698 For example, the Digital Curation Centre (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/) <strong>in</strong> the United K<strong>in</strong>gdom was launched <strong>in</strong> 2004 to provide advice and tools for the
curation of research data. Its website conta<strong>in</strong>s an extensive resources directory as well as a catalog of digital curation tools.