2018 Charleston Library Conference

This session explores how research institutions can support publishing expansive digital humanities projects--i.e., projects that are interactive and dynamic in their content as they span and often grow over time across multiple content types, audiences, and contributors. The session will include a discussion of the Summer 2018 report "A Framework for Supporting Expansive Digital Publishing Projects," which is the result of a recent initiative at Duke University funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Recognizing that the digital humanities are often not static, and change and grow as the scholarship and its community expands, the report addresses question such as what role can libraries and the institutions that back them play in planning, growing and sustaining these projects? How can institutions adequately evaluate and reward this type of scholarship, particularly when the audiences and collaborators for these publications extend beyond the academic community? And how can libraries, technologists, and humanities centers collaborate with university presses to "publish" these projects?

This session addresses five key areas of support for expansive digital publishing projects: 1) planning, 2) resource allocation and production; 3) discovery; 4) evaluation; and 5) preservation and sustainability. The session will address an overall framework for institutions, and especially libraries, to develop sustainable services in support of expansive digital publishing, and will also seek to engage session participants on how best to make meaningful, incremental progress at their local institutions to support publishing these expansive digital humanities projects.