Digital Libraries and the Challenges of Digital Humanities

One of the major challenges facing librarians and curators of digital repositories are the innovative ‘born digital’ documents created by scholars in the humanities. These documents range from the parsed corpora created by linguists to traditional reference information presented in electronic databases, to rich, multi-media hypertexts combining audio, still and moving video and text, and many other sorts of material. Too often, librarians think of electronic resources solely as providing access to subscription databases. This book encourages librarians to think holistically of the life cycle of electronic resources from new items being created at their institution, to end-user access, to long term preservation of digital resources.

• Focuses on role of a digital library in the complete life cycle (creation, access, long term preservation) of digital objects created by scholars in the humanities
• Covers recent developments in humanities computing and their implications for digital libraries
• Presents accessible technical information about fields such as information retrieval and computational linguistics for a non-technical audience