Sally Chambers - DARIAH, Göttingen - keynote speaker

Title: Essential for research? Are libraries necessary for digital research in the humanities?

Abstract:
Libraries have been actively embracing ‘the digital’ for many years. We created electronic catalogues and put them online. We digitised our collections and store ‘born-digital’ content in our repositories. We have expertise in metadata creation and digital preservation. We are experimenting with linked data and the semantic web. Open access and the licensing of digital content are key areas of active debate in our profession.

Digital technologies have also impacted on academic scholarship. Within the humanities ‘digital methods’ are becoming more commonplace. Statistical analysis can be used to determine the genre of a literary text, network analysis can be used to visual the interrelations between different social movements in a particular period of history, infrared and X-ray techniques can be used for the in-depth analysis of a work of art.

At the European level, a great emphasis has been placed on the importance of developing research infrastructures to provide the basic tools and services that researchers need to carry out their research. Like physicists need particle accelerators and geneticists need databases of genome sequences, what is the basic infrastructure needed by humanities scholars to undertake their research?

DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, aims to enhance and support digitally enabled research across the arts and humanities by developing, maintaining and operating such an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices. As yet, few libraries are actively participating in DARIAH. This presentation aims to question if there is a role for libraries in research infrastructures such as DARIAH? If so, what might that role be? Are our digital libraries and repositories suitable for digital scholarship? Or are (digital) libraries no longer essential for humanities research?

Bio:
Sally Chambers works for DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities based in the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities, Germany. Before joining DARIAH, Sally worked for The European Library, based in the National Library of The Netherlands, focusing on interoperability, metadata and technical project coordination. Sally has been working in libraries since the mid-1990s primarily in digital service provision. Sally is convinced that libraries have a key role to play in digital scholarship and is dedicated to understanding this role and encouraging libraries to rise to the challenge.