When the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University was planned, NCSU Libraries made the strategic decision to build immersive visualization spaces throughout the building, including four large, public, architecturally-integrated video walls. These visualization displays allow the Hunt Library to be a storytelling building: a building that provides a narrative window for the teaching, research, and learning activities on campus.

Video walls and immersive digital environments are creating new opportunities for digital humanities research and pedagogy. In this session, you can learn a little bit about our walls, but more importantly, we’ll brainstorm about potential DH applications for this kind of technology and discuss the challenges around implementing projects and services.

The session today on Omeka raised questions we have been wrestling with on support and scaling for tools in the digital humanities.  What has been working and what has not?  How do you decide on what tools, versions, plugins, etc. support and when to upgrade?  Do you make exception for certain sets of users or use cases?  DH tools are often experimental, so what is reasonable to support and push and how far can we stretch it?  How has it been when you have had to say no?

I’m proposing this as a ‘talk’ session. I’m sure I don’t have much to add, but I’m wondering what considerations for digital preservation (security, metadata) may be unique to DH. Any roadblocks, requirements that others have found, particularly when working with an IR or non-DH folks.

This may not make sense, help me out if you have any thoughts. I’m hoping to get some digital preservation insight on Thursday!

Let’s meet up, demo our projects, and share secrets.  Ultimately we are interested in providing baseline workflows and best practices for geospatial discovery layers for our core digital library collections that can be adapted and customized for digital research projects.  I’d like to know how other libraries are handling mapping with Neatline or other open-source tools.

For more context, see a recent Digital Humanities Questions & Answers session: digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/are-any-libraries-using-neatline.

Also, for those of you interested in issues like these, you should consider joining to the GeoHumanities ADHO special interest group: adho.org/announcements/2013/announcing-geohumanities-special-interest-group.

For the majority of the life Clemson University Libraries’ digital imaging lab we’ve been concentrating on a large IMLS grant and digitizing over 150,000 items from the national and state park systems, compared to the meager 10,000 items we have digitized of our own collections and for our partner institutions in the South Carolina Digital Library.

The grant is now winding down and we will soon be seeking to digitize many of the collections within our Special Collections’ archives.

As an academic library, what methods can we employ that will generate interest and traffic of the digital items? How can we use technology to engage students in our other library collections besides the available study spaces?

In a recent tweet from THATCamp New England, archivist Andrew Berger asked: “Thinking about DH projects and discovery: do libraries put these kinds of resources in the catalog/discovery layer/etc? #THATCampNE.” Berger pointed to the University of Virginia’s catalog record for The Valley of the Shadow as an example of a cataloged DH resource.

How can libraries apply expertise in discovery, access, metadata, and publishing to make unique DH output findable? Do customs, standards, and best practices exist around discovery of digital humanities projects and complex objects? Are they emerging? As Saskia Scheltjens tweeted, are the projects the preferred cataloged resources, or would searchers “rather look for the data itself and the products resulting from #DH projects in an OPAC?”

There are many models and potential library patrons for digital humanities services in the library.  What services have you offered and to whom and how have been your results?  What systems and tools have you been hosting or training on?  How much project support do you offer?  What have been the most common questions and needs you have been approached with?  Who have you been serving; undergrads, graduate students, faculty, librarians, etc.?  What training do you wish you have?  Lets get together and discuss what we have learned so far in our own institutions and help each other take something back to improve all of our DH programs at home.