3.2 Digital Humanities Clinics – Leading Dutch Librarians into DH

In 2015, an initiative was started to set up a Dutch speaking DH+Lib community in the Netherlands and Belgium, based on the example of the American communal space of librarians and others to discuss topics “Where the Digital Humanities and Libraries meet”. At the initial meeting it became apparent that most participants were there to learn more about digital humanities (DH) and were not (yet) in the situation where they were able to offer expertise on the subject. On the administrative level, the directors of the libraries participating in the consortium of Dutch academic libraries (UKB) also expressed the wish that librarians become more fluent in DH.

The National Library of the Netherlands (KB), the University Library of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Centre for Digital Scholarship at Leiden University Libraries therefore joined forces to develop a set of clinics on DH for librarians.

The aim of these clinics is to provide basic methodological competencies and technical skills in DH, for a diverse group of library employees, consisting of both subject and technical librarians with basic technical skills. The content of these sessions should enable them to provide services to researchers and students, identify remaining gaps in knowledge or skills that they could address by self-directed learning and (perhaps) to automate their daily library work.

In order to design this curriculum we follow a four step approach with a Working Out Loud- principle:

1. Desk research about what being a DH librarian entails;
2. Identify possible subjects, based on personal experience, a comparison of existing teaching material related to DH (e.g. Programming Historian, Library Carpentry and the TaDiRAH taxonomy of research activities;
3. Get feedback from researchers on possible subjects, based on the knowledge and skills they feel librarians need;
4. Get feedback from librarians on possible subjects, based on already known gaps in their knowledge and skills.

With these in hand, we will design the curriculum of clinics, based on the method of ‘constructive alignment’(7. Our plan is to organize a maximum of 6 clinics, each one full day. Each day starts with one or more lectures by researchers, that address the conceptual knowledge needed. The afternoon sessions will be devoted to the hands-on training of skills, following the Library Carpentry model as much as possible.

In this paper we will present the curriculum and offer the lessons learned from both the design process and the first clinics. We welcome discussion about our efforts and the possibilities of applying this in other contexts.