Partnering through Collections in Digital Humanities: Looking at Researchers’ Needs

Abstract

Recent years have seen cultural heritage organizations undergo a cultural shift as part of an agenda with an increased focus on digital innovation and audience engagement. Opening up collections through digitization and making them accessible to scholars, students, and the general public has been a strategic priority for many institutions. Alongside the technological advances of the past decades, the proliferation of various types of digital information objects has brought large changes to traditional scholarship in the Arts & Humanities. The emergence of Digital Humanities has been a result of the possibilities offered by the digital age, while the characteristics of the field reflect the shifting nature and role of scholarship in a modern society. More specifically, interdisciplinarity, openness, and collaboration are some of the core characteristics of scholarship in the field that make it distinct from scholarly practice in more traditional Arts & Humanities areas.[1] Moreover, as part of the nature of Digital Humanities work, scholars create, use, and communicate various types of digital data in previously unimaginable ways.