DLF Forum 2015

Bring your lunch—this session will get started at 12:15.

Digital humanities practice and practitioners have long found a welcoming home in libraries, and DH has long loved its libraries. Library workers around the world have begun organizing around digital humanities, forming professional organizations to address shared issues and needs.

The international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) recently established a "Libraries and Digital Humanities" Special Interest Group (L&DH SIG), with founding conveners from France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, and the U.S., and a stated mission "to provide the connective tissue" between ADHO organizations and DH initiatives in library organizations.

Our problem is how best to organize ourselves: the many national and international organizations operating in both library and DH spaces share both a desire for interconnectedness and a tradition of individual identities (and of course a shared distaste for duplication of efforts). The combinatorics of this complex set of relations, made more so by our international mission, leads to a frightening proliferation of organizations and organizational ties.

The possible resolutions of this confusion are also legion: Should we seek to unite all these "Lib+DH" organizations into a whole ("One Ring to rule them all"), sending emissaries to like-minded professional organizations? Or should we allow diversity (and chaos) to reign, relying on informal networks to relay information and share expertise? While both options are unrealistic extremes, in fact each possible configuration leads to very practical questions: Should we share email lists, membership lists, publications, meetings, officers?

The ADHO L&DH SIG is of course seeking to establish a relationship with DLF, as well as with many other organizations around the globe. With DLF, as with these others, we have substantial overlap in both formal and informal membership.

We're seeking appropriate and effective organizational structures, governance models, and working metaphors for our shared libraries + digital humanities effort.