The library in digital humanities: interdisciplinary approaches to digital materials

Digital Humanities and Library & Information Studies (LIS) share a common interest in the collection, organisation, preservation, and use of digital materials. The academic library acts as a hub for digital humanities activities on many campuses, and this close relationship has led scholars to extensively interrogate how library services can support, and contribute to, DH (Green, 2014; Hartsell-Gundy, Braunstein, & Golomb, 2015;). What little work exists that focuses on the nexus of information studies and digital humanities has attempted to establish common intellectual ground (Robinson, Priego, & Bawden, 2015), to compare each discipline's respective strengths and weaknesses (Koltay, 2016), or to express the ways in which DH can enrich the study of information work (Clement, 2016). In response, it has been noted that training for librarians must change in order to meet the changing demands of their scholarly communities (Moazeni, 2015). To date, however, we have been less successful in expressing the direct contribution of LIS to knowledge creation in DH, and several scholars have noted the erasure of library and archival scholarship from the humanities (Caswell, 2016; Whearty, 2018). This erasure is paralleled elsewhere, due to the distributed nature of LIS research; its researchers inhabit not only departments of information studies, but are dispersed across DH centres, and departments spanning the arts, humanities, social and computational sciences. They contribute to knowledge across the academy by this very act of dispersal, while drawing on their own intellectual history, disciplinary and professional knowledge within several disciplines