Enabling Digital Scholarship with the Library of Congress's First Data Librarian
Camille Salas
As born digital and digitized collections continue to grow and researchers increasingly request to use collections as data, cultural heritage institutions must enable computational use of their collections. As is often the case in libraries, competing priorities may result in limited resources for strictly managing digital collections. Beyond making digital collections accessible, abstracting born digital and digitized collections into datasets for digital scholarship could pose a myriad of technical, legal, resource, and workflow challenges.   

The Library of Congress recognizes the critical need for determining and implementing a coordinated approach to support use of collections for digital scholarship, as outlined in the [Digital Collections Strategy][1]. Prior to and as a result of the strategy, options for advancing this work were explored through a variety of experiments, pilots, research reports, and working group discussions. 

This year, the Library of Congress reached a major milestone in hiring its first Digital Collections Data Librarian to routinize the service of creating collections as data for researcher access.   

The Digital Collections Data Librarian works within the Library ’s Digital Collections Management and Services Division to centralize work and support computational use of the Library’s born digital and digitized collections and implement a coordinated approach to support use of collections as data for digital scholarship. 

The Data Librarian is formalizing and enhancing previously piloted efforts to transform data from digital collections, including born digital content, digitized books, and web archives, into datasets ready for computational use. They are providing analysis and advice, and developing solutions to solve issues and problems associated with digital lifecycle management of collections and derived datasets.  

For the lightning talk, we will give an overview on how the position originated, onboarding and orientation efforts, projects underway and outcomes/accomplishments achieved within the first few months. We will also outline upcoming plans and ways that attendees can get updates on this new program area.  



  [1]: https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2021/12/library-of-congress-digital-collections-strategy-published/
governance, resourcing, and management for dp from document to data