Author : Willow Dressel
eScience related library services at Princeton University started in response to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) data management plan requirements, and grew to encompass a range of services including data management plan consultation, assistance with depositing into a disciplinary or institutional repository, and research data management instruction.
These services were initially directed at science and engineering disciplines on campus, but the eScience Librarian soon realized the relevance of research data management instruction for humanities disciplines with digital approaches.
Applicability to the digital humanities was initially recognized by discovery of related efforts from the history department’s Information Technology (IT) manager in the form of a graduate-student workshop on file and digital-asset management concepts.
Seeing the common ground these activities shared with research data management, a collaboration was formed between the history department’s IT Manager and the eScience Librarian to provide a research data management overview to the entire campus community.
The eScience Librarian was then invited to participate in the history department’s graduate student file and digital asset management workshop to provide an overview of other research data management concepts. Based on the success of the collaboration with the history department IT, the eScience Librarian offered to develop a workshop for the newly formed Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton.
To develop the workshop, background research on digital humanities curation was performed revealing similarities and differences between digital humanities curation and research data management in the sciences. These similarities and differences, workshop results, and areas of further study are discussed.
URL : Research Data Management Instruction for Digital Humanities