'In an alien land': Finding Solace from Librarian-Led Digital Humanities Pedagogy in a Pandemic

The turn to working from home in March 2020 required a shift in how librarians and student employees and interns worked together. At Rutgers University--New Brunswick, the professional training offered by librarians to graduate students in the Master of Information (MI) program included preparation for reference, instruction, and special projects. In practice, those special projects had usually involved processing print gift collections, which were inaccessible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finding meaningful work for MI students preparing for careers in academic librarianship required flexibility and a bit of scrambling. In this presentation, I will discuss the adaptation of an assignment originally crafted for a semester-long course into an ongoing, librarian-led digital project. The Correspondence of the Rutgers College War Service Bureau is a minimal documentary edition of correspondence sent to and from Rutgers alumni serving in World War I. The library's stake in this project was clear from the onset: transcription and encoding using the Text Encoding Initiative markup make this collection of university records more accessible to the public. As the work unfolded, I learned that it satisfied other priorities as well, not least of which was an emerging sense of solidarity with these Rutgers men from over a century ago whose loneliness and urgency to communicate came through their letters despite implicit social codes that precluded frank assessments of their experiences. I will address how the project evolved over the course of the past year and a half, touching upon issues of workflow, software, aspirational as well as practical goals, and make recommendations for librarians and academics considering similar projects.