The emergence of digital humanities from a relatively marginal space in the academy to its recent celebrity has clearly had an impact on libraries. Positions have been created, resources have been reallocated and staff have been re-skilled.

However, it is also true that libraries have shaped the evolution of DH. Some of the best known and longest running projects have been created in partnership with libraries and those projects bear the marks of the librarians who worked on them. While we are always searching for better ways to do it, librarians have insisted that accessibility and sustainability be part of the DH conversation. Librarians have also worked with faculty partners to advocate for Open Access as well as ethical use of materials. This is not to mention the digitized collections, server space and technical expertise that the library often provides.

In this session, I would like to start putting together the history of libraries and DH and remember the projects, people, users and relationships that got us to this point. I would also like to assess what these partnerships have meant; what values have emerged, what traditions have been established and what problems reoccur? Also, what can a look back tell us about the way forward?

Inspired by Char Booth’s closing keynote presentation, I would like to discuss how we ensure our DH projects are accessible to the widest possible audiences.  Where does the accessibility review happen in your project workflow?  Are your institutions crafting accessibility policies?  If so, how are you educating your staff about the policy? Who are our campus partners when thinking about accessibility issues?  As you can tell, I have more questions than answers, but would love to have a conversation.

The inaugural issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities (Winter 2011) published Moya Z. Bailey’s article “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.” Her title draws on a vital text of feminist history, the collection All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith and published by the Feminist Press in 1982. Recently, Moya Z. Bailey put together a Storify of the tweets around the 2013 Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference (CESA 2013) panel “Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities.” These moments track an ongoing conversation about race in Digital Humanities.

The discussion around race and the Digital Humanities addresses multiple facets of the issue from what kinds of work gets called digital humanities work to how accessible the tools of the work are and who’s involved in creating them.

I’m interested in talking together about the role of librarians (in conversation with faculty and students) in collaboration with/as creators of projects by digital humanists of color and digital humanities projects considering racial justice. Librarians’ responsibilities here seem to stem both from our involvement in shaping the futures of digital humanities and how our resource pages, classes, and orientation sessions say something about what we think counts as the humanities and whose work belongs there.

Within librarianship we rarely talk about how our own identities affect our perspectives, our practice, and our outreach. I’m interested in how we can enact such accountability and engagement in our digital humanities practice. I’m a queer feminist and white antiracist ally in librarianship, teaching, and other collaborations.

It would be exciting to imagine together an ethics for our practice, to share tools and resources we know about, to take a look at ongoing projects (like those highlighted by Moya Z. Bailey or by Anne Cong-Huyen in her post of the talk she gave at CESA 2013 “Race in DH: Transformative Asian/American Digital Humanities,” and more), and how librarians’ ethnic identities and sociopolitical locations are important to these futures.