Digital Exhibits to Digital Humanities: Expanding the Digital Libraries Portfolio

The digital libraries field has evolved in parallel with the growing practices of digital humanities and, over time, has revealed many ways in which the two converge. Increasingly, libraries are moving away from supporting research at the edges—helping researchers find materials and then acquiring new scholarship—to becoming collaborators at the center of scholarship: coordinating preservation of research materials, assisting in the creation of digital outputs, and helping demonstrate the value of scholarship across the academy. Given these trends in system convergence and service evolution, digital humanities represent a clear opportunity for libraries to offer significant value to the academy, not only in the areas of tools and consultations, but also in collaborative expertise that supports workflows for librarians and scholars alike.