In 2015, an initiative was started to set up a Dutch speaking DH+Lib community in the Netherlands and Belgium, based on the example of the American communal space of librarians, archivists, LIS graduate students, and information specialists to discuss topics ‘Where the Digital Humanities and Libraries meet’.
At the initial meeting it became apparent that most participants were there to learn more about digital humanities and were not (yet) in the situation where they were able to offer expertise on the subject.
On the administrative level, the directors of the libraries participating in the consortium of Dutch academic libraries (UKB) also expressed the wish that librarians become more fluent in DH.
A year later, the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), and the University Library of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam again concluded that librarians at their institutes who wanted to get involved in DH needed more training to adequately support researchers and students in this field.
We see this as the ideal opportunity to provide these educative sessions not only to our own librarians, but also to the academic librarians of other Dutch research libraries.
In essence, we want to teach our country’s librarians the ins and outs of DH in order for them to take up their natural role of facilitating and supporting research and ideally become the research partner needed in DH projects.
The aim of these clinics is to provide basic methodological competencies and technical skills in DH, for a diverse group of librarians, consisting of both subject and technical librarians with basic technical skills.
The content of these sessions should enable them to provide services to researchers and students, identify remaining gaps in knowledge or skills that they could address by self-directed learning and (perhaps) to automate their daily library work.
We are not setting out to turn them into programmers or data crunchers, but want to boost their knowledge level to where they feel comfortable providing information about DH projects, follow the literature and research, follow online tutorials and hopefully take up the challenge of finishing this professional development by engaging with the DH community.
Desk research about what being a DH librarian entails (e.g. Hartsell-Gundy et al., 2015; Mulligan, 2016; also see the Zotero library of the LIBER Digital Humanities working group);
Identify possible subjects, based on experience, a comparison of existing teaching material related to DH (e.g. The Programming Historian, the Digital Scholarship Training Programme at the British Library and Columbia University's Developing Librarian project) and the TaDiRAH taxonomy of research activities;
With these in hand, we will design the curriculum of clinics, based on the method of 'constructive alignment' (Biggs et al., 2011), to make sure that the intended learning objectives and the teaching/learning activities stay aligned.
By having researchers provide the lecture sessions, we hope to fuel the enthusiasm of the librarians with the inspiration of direct contact with researchers and to provide access to a network within and across universities.
The poster at DH2017 will present the curriculum, its position in the international context and offer the lessons learned from both the design process and the first clinics.