Expanding digital access to literature by Black Canadians

Abstract

Academic library collections serve each broad discipline as either the raw material for research or the overarching structure that places its scholarly production in context.

Within the humanities, the raw materials of research that are available to scholars are often biased towards a Western literary canon. This is especially true of the digital humanities where scholarship can only reflect what it is possible for scholars to see. Historian Kim Gallon (Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities, 2016) describes a digital humanities that frames human culture and society through digital library collections that lack equity in their representation of Black experience. Black studies, she argued, cannot leverage the opportunities digital humanities affords if this problem with digital collections remains.

This poster will first present an overview of the methods library staff used to assess the digital collections at a large Canadian university library to identify the gaps that exist in its holdings of the literature of Black Canadians. Next this poster will describe how these gaps need to be addressed both through traditional commercial acquisition and through direct partnerships with publishers and authors to ensure this important work can be digitized, preserved, and shared.