The Council on Library and Information Resources’ Digital Library Federation program and centerNet are delighted to announce today their formal alliance. Established in 1995, the Digital Library Federation is a community of library practitioners engaged and committed to building and sustaining digital libraries through collaborative effort and establishing best practices. The DLF community includes project managers, code developers, and digital curators.
The affiliation will focus on areas where digital libraries and digital humanities converge and need further exploration and understanding of each community’s roles and responsibilities. Areas of likely collaboration include the following:
- Data Curation–examining options for the preservation of digital scholarship objects and workflows, and digital products of research and instruction;
- Cyberinfrastructure–exploring interoperability, data mining, shared infrastructure, and linked open data;
- Internationalization–sharing work with international networks to increase awareness and cooperation; improving communities’ awareness of and influence on international initiatives;
- Scaling up and scaling down–working with Google books, HATHI Trust, and the Digital Public Library of America to explore the meaning of aggregating data, and the new types of research questions that can be asked using huge digital libraries; also examining how to leverage smaller scoped work, and understanding the unique preservation challenges this scholarship presents;
- Career paths–highlighting career opportunities in fields of digital humanities and digital libraries to better understand changing professional roles;
- Publication and distribution—exploring how we share research efforts to better inform practice.