Each year, millions of dollars awarded to libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) fund a variety of processing, digitization, and digital infrastructure projects. In the process, the field creates hundreds of contingent and precarious positions. Workers dedicated to their fields’ missions to steward, preserve, and share knowledge and culture accept low salaries, benefit-less positions, and cycles of precarity.

Digital humanists have a labor problem, but it’s not what you might think. In this chapter, I describe the problem of student labor in digital humanities as I see it, and examine some of the structural issues that drive the use of student labor. I place the labor economy of digital humanities projects within the broader context of the innovation economy writ large to demonstrate how labor within the academy cannot operate under the same system of consensual participation which informs movements like crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. And in conclusion, I offer suggestions for how ethically managed student labor in the classroom can empower students to demonstrate both CV-ready skills and humanistic knowledge in durable products for which they receive full credit.

Hosted on the Open Science Framework

Four librarians were among the eight tenured faculty members laid off from St. Cloud State University, MN, at the beginning of the 2019–20 academic year. Final notices to those impacted, who also included three philosophy professors and a theater professor, were delivered on September 16. Their contracts will be terminated effective May 13, 2020. Laying off four full-time librarians would cut the library’s faculty by one-quarter; currently 13 full-time library faculty serve a student body of over 13,000, as well as members of the St. Cloud community.

Mined Minds came into West Virginia espousing a certain dogma, fostered in the world of start-ups and TED Talks. Students found an erratic operation.

Use of keycards and self-service scanners cannot replace librarians, say campaigners

This fact sheet explores the role of library staff in the workforce, the demographics, educational attainment and wages of librarians, as well as the benefits of union membership for librarians - including the union wage premium for library professionals.

The artificial-intelligence industry runs on the invisible labor of humans working in isolated and often terrible conditions—and the model is spreading to more and more businesses.

Library unions are as diverse as libraries themselves. The landscape is complex, but this overview looks at the commonalities all library workers should know.

To increase the effectiveness of graduate research training, many universities have introduced boot camps and bridge programs lasting several days to several weeks. National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health currently support such interventions with nearly $28 million in active awards. Previous evidence for the efficacy of this format exists primarily in the form of anecdotes and end-of-course surveys. Here we show that participation in such short-format interventions is not associated with observable benefits related to skill development, scholarly productivity, or socialization into the academic community. Analyzing data from 294 PhD students in life sciences from 53 US institutions, we found no evidence of effectiveness across 115 variables. We conclude that boot camps and other short formats may not durably impact student outcomes.

Laura Braunstein is the Digital Humanities Librarian at Dartmouth College and co-edited Digital Humanities and the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists (ACRL 2015).

This post was written by Alice Griffin, who has worked in La MaMa’s Archives since November as the Metadata/Digitization Assistant. She’s leaving La MaMa at the end of July to pursue a …