EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION TO LIBRARIES, ARCHIVES, AND THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES

This Editors’ Introduction to the Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities includes a summary of the landscape in which this book appears, mention of a few previous books on the subject, and brief descriptions of each of the collection’s 33 chapters in the context of the book’s five sections, covering the “Ethical and legal foundations” of Digital Humanities (DH) in libraries and archives; library and archival “Collections as data”; “Publishing and other public-facing practices”; the various “Profession and the disciplines” involved in this work; and “DH in organisations” relevant to these institutional settings. One of the central motifs in this introduction, as in the book as a whole, is that the “two” fields which are our focus—DH, on the one hand, and the library, archival, and information sciences, on the other—are in fact deeply intertwined, productively interdependent, and mutually reinforcing. We place these on an equal footing: not looking at how DH “impacts” archives, or how libraries “support” DH, for example, but rather how they coexist and collaborate in equal partnership.