12.2 What do Digital Humanists want from a National Library?

Large-scale digitisation of historical paper publications enables Humanities scholars to analyse vast amounts of digital surrogates using machines, algorithms and software to ‘read’ the texts. These new types of analyses have fostered the rise of the Digital Humanities (DH) discipline greatly. For national as well as academic libraries, the Digital Humanities is a new domain that can be tailored by the large amounts of digital datasets that we have available. However, a new domain asks for a new approach in assisting our patrons. At the National Library of the Netherlands (KB), we have ample experience with assisting Digital Humanities scholars. However, we found there is no one way solution for catering for the needs of Digital Humanists. In this presentation we will present our experiences with assisting DH scholars by reflecting upon their requirements for both data selection and tool use in three cases. First, we will analyse the submitted proposals to the Researcher in Residence Programme which was organised by the KB in late 2015. Since 2014, the KB invites early career scholars to work with KB data and programmers during a residency which they spend (part-time) at the premises of the KB. Through this programme, the KB aims to gain a better insight into the needs of (Digital) Humanities scholars. The first three researchers were invited personally; the current researchers-in-residence were selected by soliciting proposals with an open call. In total 12 proposals were submitted and reviewed. We analysed these submissions as starting point for creating an inventory of the requirements of Dutch DH scholars from the perspective of the National Library. Second, we will analyse the issue ‘Historical Research and Delpher’ of the Tijdschrift voor tijdschriftstudies. The authors reflect on their experiences with Delpher, the full-text search engine of the Dutch National Digital Library. By describing their challenges while working with Delpher, they give insight in what they require of such a tool as well as its functionality for exploring large-scale datasets for their current research practices. Finally, we will present the results of an analysis of all the requests for data from Digital Humanists received by the KB in 2015. What kind of data were they looking for? Why did they need the data? What were their expectations and what were their misconceptions? In analysing these three cases, we identified both valuable as well as incompatible user requirements, indicating the conflicting expectations and interests of different disciplines and researchers. We therefore argue that a close collaboration between scholars and librarians is essential if we really want to advance the use of large digital libraries in the field of Digital Humanities. Steven Claeyssens studied Germanic Philology (Ghent University) and Book and Publishing Studies (Leiden University) and obtained his PhD from Leiden University (history of publishing). He was formally Data Services Coordinator at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands