Administrative Tips, Tricks, Helps, and Hindrances in Digital Scholarship

The Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory and the University of Iowa Libraries’ Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio are leading a workshop at the 2019 DH Conference to consider infrastructure around digital humanities support on campuses.

Designed for staff-side administrators—whether they be a singular Digital Humanities Librarian charged with serving an entire campus or a collection of people working within a clearly defined center—and welcoming of interested faculty and graduate students, the workshop will engage participants in a frank, pragmatic set of discussions and exercises.

Topics addressed will include: org charts (real and desired), working across units and institutions, the administrative politics of turfiness, GLAM collaborations, public engagement workflows, staff agency, and advocacy of others in service to getting things done.

Some of the guiding documents we’ll use during the breakout sessions are included below. Every campus will have its own unique constraints and freedoms; the materials below (CC BY 2.0) are intended to provide starting points for conversation.

• Space – This worksheet is designed for (re)imagining existing or future physical spaces for digital humanities support. What's essential to have in the room? Will you subdivide the space equally according to function (workshop, consultation, computing, etc.) or will some services have more room?
  
• Adjacencies – This prompt asks you to identify other units or individuals on campus who provide complementary services or who address a gap in your offerings. While filling this out, consider whether you or the other units charge for any of the services and how that affects who can access them.
  
• Project Lifecycle – This worksheet tracks different stakeholder responsibilities over a project's lifecycle. Who is responsible for what, and who needs to be notified when?
  
• Communications – This handout provides a list of communication channels for promoting services, opportunities, and project updates to audiences. Different platforms lend themselves to different kinds of engagement, so think about your desired outcome.
  

For more information on the workshop, visit the Getting Things Done site.

Organizers: Catherine DeRose (Yale), Leah Gehlsen Morlan (Iowa), Tom Keegan (Iowa), Peter Leonard (Yale)