Conducting Digital Humanities Education in the Academic Libraries’ Information Literacy Class : What are the advantages and barriers if Uppsala University Library does it?

The emergence of digital humanities has provided humanities scholars with digital methods and tools to deal with digital materials and new possibilities for humanities research. What is more, digital humanities skills and experience help humanities students with their research and strengthen their employment prospects. Therefore, humanities researchers and students are also actively acquiring digital humanities skills from different sources. For academic libraries, providing teaching and research support to users is one of the strategies to achieve their research and educational goals. Scholars reviewed the discussion about how libraries could support digital humanities and found that information literacy, as an important component of academic libraries, is rarely mentioned in the supporting services for digital humanities. In this context, studies began to explore the library’s role and opportunities to support digital humanities from the information literacy perspective. This study chose to focus on this mode of conducting digital humanities education through the information literacy curriculum, which aims to provide a reference for whether academic libraries can implement this mode and how to achieve better teaching and learning outcomes from empirical analysis. Uppsala University Library acts as the case in this study because teaching information literacy is one of its primary teaching tasks, and providing digital humanities support is also one of the library’s strategies to achieve its service and support goals. From librarians’ instructional design for the information literacy curriculum and their perceptions of digital humanities and its relationship to information literacy, this thesis tries to find what support Uppsala University Library’s information literacy curriculum can provide for conducting digital humanities education. In addition to this, the thesis also aims to identify the existing advantages and barriers if Uppsala University Library conducts digital humanities education in the IL curriculum and develop suggestions on how to promote teaching outcomes. The findings suggest that Uppsala University Library’s information literacy curriculum could provide support to conduct digital humanities education in terms of teaching content that involves digital humanities knowledge, teaching activities that are conducive to active learning and librarians with positive attitudes towards digital humanities. Uppsala University Library has advantages when it conducts digital humanities education through the information literacy curriculum in terms of infrastructure, digital humanities knowledge in information literacy teaching content, active teaching activities, librarians’ literacy capabilities, and librarians’ positive attitudes towards digital humanities. It is also worth noticing that Uppsala University Library also faces barriers to the design of teaching cycles and activities as well as librarians are less expert in digital humanities concepts, skills, and pedagogical design. For Uppsala University Library, whether to conduct digital humanities education in the information literacy class in the future requires serious consideration of all aspects that affect its teaching, such as funding and administration. And this study aims to provide a reference for Uppsala University Library to choose the way of digital humanities education in the future.