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Hi my name is Micah Vandegrift and I am a librarian currently working as a project manager in scholarly communications at Florida State University. You can find me about the web using the handle micahvandegrift.
I'm proud to be a contributor to this panel “Philosophical Leadership Needed for the Future: Digital Humanities Scholars in Museums" which is part of the 39th Annual Museum Computer Network Conference.
I'll keep my comments brief, as I am still newish to the field and my interactions and observations are mainly based on readings and experiences I've had as a student.
Here's a quick story: I had the pleasure of working at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York on a cooperative grant project with the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Historical Society.
The project is creating a shared digital collection of historic photos of Brooklyn, and is still underway although I have moved on.
One day at work I was tweeting about how cool it was to collaborate with different types of institutions and I got a tweet back from Ethan Watrall, a scholar at Michigan State University. He excitedly was asking me if the Brooklyn Museum had any plans to
digitize their slide collection from a Egyptian archeological dig, so something along those lines, and he expressed, with many exclamation points and extended syllables, how valuable access to those images would be to his research.
This was the first time I had ever encountered the idea that museum collections could be of extreme value to working scholars, and were more than institutions for preserving and sometimes show old things.
To be fair, the Brooklyn Museum is on the cutting edge of a lot of progressive technological ideas, to their credit, but it was an eye-opening moment for me.
Lately, I've been thinking and rethinking an idea that probably already exists somewhere, that the digital humanities have the capacity and are becoming the space in which public history exists. For now, we are seeing this enacted from universities outward
building tools, databases, visualizations and opening up worlds of knowledge, compiled and organized by scholars, librarians, archivists and others. As the predominant institutions of public history, it would seem that museums and historical societies
would naturally follow suit, opening up collections, creating collaborations, and generally working to deepen their connection with the public and also scholars who are beginning to expect access to all these institutions have to offer.
The subtitle of this panel could be read two ways: how does the digital humanities scholar gain greater access to museum resources, OR is it time to employ DH scholars as staff in museums? Both are relevant inquiries.
As an early career librarian, I'd prefer not to give advice to my superiors on how to move forward, but perhaps I can offer some insight from my perspective as a interested party. Public History institutions have an incredible opportunity to continue
to evolve and engage "the Public," and the key, which is continually echoed in digital humanities circles, (1) is being open to new collaborations.
Project CHART, the previously mentioned project I worked with, in my mind is a great example of this - bringing together different types of institutions, who all essentially have the same goals, to work together on providing meaning to objects, through and
across the digital space we all share. Secondly, developing these collaborations may require some non-tradtional efforts. We talk a lot about silos in the University, between departments, colleges, administrative offices, and in my experience those same
divisions exist in other places too. Beginning to think outside those boundaries and imagine projects that incorporate different types of skills, and giving teams a space (physical or other) to have conversations and begin to learn how to speak one another
anothers language will open opportunities that we haven't yet imagined.
Practically, I'd love to see museums (and libraries) free up 10% of work time for motivated employees to really explore their interests. That'd be the kind of structural change that would begin to avail digital humanities work to be done.
Lastly, I think its clear that folks who will be interested in this type of work, collaborative, broad-reaching, digital projects, will be unique.
But good news from a recent library school graduate - there are plenty of soon-to-be graduates with skills ranging from technical expertise to amazing depth of knowledge on a variety of topics, and many of them more than prepared to be innovative.
So, and this I will offer as a piece of advice, hire someone with good ideas. Hire someone who expresses interest in digital humanities, but may lack some skills. Set up a table at a job fair and start mining the schools in your area for computer science
students, communications and new media folks, digital historians, or a good old fashioned "liberal studies" major.
I think it is time to acknowledge that much of the innovation and progression that we are hoping for, in museums, universities, government, will come from non-traditional, think-outside-the-box types, and luckily they are out and about now.
If there was one point I'd like to get across about what I see as the key to adapting the philosophical leadership in museums it'd be this - the power structures are changing.
Hire good, interesting people with big imaginations and trust and support them to do good, interesting work with your stuff.