Digging Deeper, Reaching Farther: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library: An Overview

Abstract

The IMLS-funded project “Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library” is a three-year initiative that aims to prepare librarians for the new, data-driven research landscape by developing and disseminating a curriculum specifically designed to teach digital scholarship competencies to librarians and LIS professionals, with a focus on computational text analysis. The project developed a professional development that builds librarians’ text data mining skills by using the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) as the anchoring example resource for pursuing text analysis research. The project staff launched this curriculum through a series of workshops held throughout the United States, and it will be released as an open educational resource at the end of the grant in 2018. This paper will detail the implemented strategies to develop the ‘train the trainer’ curriculum, and conduct workshop events that taught librarians about text data mining, and concludes with early findings from the project’s research investigation on how librarians seek to support digital scholarship at their home institutions.