Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for research support services for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and Isabel Galina Russell, researcher at the Institute for Bibliographic Studies at the National University of Mexico, have edited a new book, The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities, which was recently released by Routledge.
Seventy authors from five continents contributed chapters for the volume, which covers a range of issues encountered in libraries and archives worldwide as they incorporate digital humanities (DH) into their research, service, and teaching. In addition to coauthoring the editors' introduction, Layne-Worthey authored a chapter on the HTRC, a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust to enable advanced computational access to in-copyright text found in the HathiTrust Digital Library.
"We consciously included many different types of libraries and library activities in the mix of chapters: university and research libraries, national libraries, archives, special collections . . . and not only libraries and librarians, but also information science professionals generally," he said. "While we ourselves have always just assumed a natural overlap and synergy between the DH and LIS fields, we were pleased and surprised to have a few chapters that addressed and analyzed this synergy specifically, and in more rigorous and data-driven (that is, not just 'impressionistic') ways—or that proposed frameworks for teaching and evaluating work occurring in the overlap of the two fields."
According to the editors, chapter authors include several members of the international "Libraries and Digital Humanities" Special Interest Group of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), which they helped cofound in 2015.
"One interesting discovery in assembling the book was that a significant portion of its chapters were written by, and addressed to, people with a wide variety of professional identities, not just DH librarians—signaling how broadly DH has permeated the libraries and archives space," said Layne-Worthey.
Layne-Worthey came to Illinois in 2020 from Stanford, where he was the digital humanities librarian, one of the first in the world to have that now-ubiquitous job title. He has held many roles in the international digital humanities community, including chair (and chair-elect) of the ADHO Executive Board from 2019-2023.