Okay, so, two (related) things:

1) Digital humanities projects—and really most kinds of pedagogical innovations—work best when they’re supported by faculty and librarians who understand each other’s aims and abilities. But we often … don’t. I have an odd and rich perspective on the faculty-library relationship because I’m currently a reference & instruction librarian at a SLAC where I’ve worked previously in a faculty role … and where I’ll be resuming a faculty role next year. The worlds of scholarship, pedagogy, and librarianship are deeply interdependent but rarely communicate and collaborate as effectively as I’d hope. I would love to contribute to a conversation about faculty-librarian collaboration and communication. It might also be helpful to talk about how faculty and librarians imagine each other—how we think about each other’s and our own jobs, skills, limitations, quirks, and roles in teaching/learning/scholarship.

2) As the library’s liaison to the history department, I often find myself teaching students strategies for finding primary sources. I am delighted with the increasing accessibility of these cultural materials. But of course it’s more complicated than that. What I’m seeing in classrooms and at the reference desk is a major shift in pedagogical practice within history—a shift toward substantial primary research and primary source analysis in undergraduate (even first-year) courses—which springs from the ongoing digitization of so many materials and which has important implications for students, librarians, faculty-library dynamics, and librarians’ roles in student research. Any historians or other primary-source-teaching folk want to work through some of those implications together?