This special issue focuses on digital humanities and art librarianship, exploring connections, overlaps, challenges and opportunities for collaboration, including the role of libraries and librarians in digital curation (digitisation, data management, metadata production, preservation, etc.), as well as in supporting and developing digital scholarship and pedagogy. In addition to considering the range of contributions within art libraries to digital humanities and digital art history,Footnote 1 we also wanted to explore the potential theoretical and methodological benefits of this engagement, within a context of GLAM convergence in large part driven by digital materials and technologies.
Johanna Drucker's opening viewpoint “Hetero-ontologies and taxonomies in the wild” discusses the political, ethical and practical challenges of creating alternatives to current library metadata standards as well as the benefits of exposing cultural specificity within classification systems and tensions between professional practices and agendas for decolonisation, diversity and equality. How to develop alternative systems of knowledge online? Drucker proposes to engage with the act of reading schema as cultural documents, beginning with the creation of an extensive inventory of local ontologies of cultural objects that registers the diversity and difference of their structures as well as their terminology.
Stephen Bury revisits the Art history in digital dimensions report of 2017 to assess to what extent have its recommendations been implemented and whether digital art history itself has changed in this period. ARLIS/NA Digital Humanities SIG coordinator Megan Macken offers a summary of the group's activities and surveys recent digital humanities initiatives in US art libraries. Emily Pugh and Megan Sallabedra report on the “Ed Ruscha, Streets of Los Angeles” project at the Getty Research Institute and the benefits of collaboration and exchange between different areas of expertise and communities of practice, including art historians, art librarians and technical specialists.
Closing this issue, “LIBER Digital Humanities and Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group: a case study of international collaboration and network building” by Lotte Wilms, Caleb Derven and Merisa Martinez gives an overview of the group's projects, providing useful reflections on organising an open DH community to benefit digital scholarship in European research libraries. Collaboration is a key aspect common to all these articles, alongside strong evidence of the expertise and specialist knowledge that the art libraries profession contributes to the ongoing development of these emergent fields of practice.
Finally, I would like to thank Mahendra Mahey, Manager of the British Library Labs, for a very informative and enjoyable discussion, and Trevor Muñoz, Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, for his kind suggestions.
