Digital Scholarship Labor

Description

The main theme of this Twitter chat will be exploring issues around labor, especially contingency, in the support, maintenance, and growth of digital scholarship in academic libraries.

Following the Twitter chat, one action item for this spring would be to create a survey that could be distributed to digital scholarship centers and librarians and eventually integrated into grant funding.

It would be great to also to build out the set of resources/references to share with participants of the Twitter chat.

Questions

1. Introduce yourself. Do you do digital work in libraries? What kind of work? Have you ever been in a contingent position?
2. What are some of the forms of digital scholarship labor in your library, DS/DH center, and/or at your institution? How have you seen digital scholarship labor in libraries change over the last five-ten years?
3. How many people do you know working on digital scholarship who do not have permanent employment? How long are typical appointments? What percentage are “student workers”?
4. What routes do you see into permanent positions in digital scholarship environments’?
5. Who are the primary beneficiaries of our labor and how is that represented in your community of practice? In other words, who benefits most from digital contexts of contingent labor?
6. What would standards for DS labor positions need to include? Full benefits? Inclusion in unions? Opportunities for development (skill and professional)?
7. How do we ensure accreditation for contingent labor who work on digital projects? How to address the collaborative nature of digital scholarship without resorting to traditional hierarchical models?

Relevant Organizations

• Postdoc Laborers Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/postdoctoral-laborers
• The Postdoc Laborers Group are working up a survey to distribute more widely on how postdocs in the humanities (and more specifically DH postdocs) are viewed, and putting together a Bill of Rights that individuals and institutions can consider in hiring or accepting a position.
• DLF
• Working Group on Labor in Digital Libraries: https://www.diglib.org/groups/dlf-working-group-on-labor-in-digital-libraries/

References

• This whole Twitter thread (I wonder if we should just raise up this thread again to advertise the Twitter chat and wrangle in all these great people and organizations): https://twitter.com/lellyjz/status/1059540387726061568
• Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/704356
• Co-ops to Postdocs: Models of Labor in Digital Scholarship: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17hF6lNcNssEgnkma4nm_Fa7adqf69y_roBgAlazWC14/edit
• Toward Collective Models of Digital Scholarship: https://osf.io/j7qvk/
• Research Agenda: Valuing Labor in Digital Libraries, August 2018, A collaborative project of the DLF Working Group on Labor in Digital Libraries: https://wiki.diglib.org/images/d/d0/DLF_ValuingLabor_ResearchAgenda_2018.pdf
• Contingent Laborers Discussion Coffee Break
• National Forum on Labor Practices for Grant-Funded Digital Positions.
• Building Community and Solidarity: Disrupting Exploitative Labor Practices in Libraries and Archives
• We Here, which I was introduced to by a fellow librarian of color previous to this session, was created to offer a space for peer support to information workers of color. Groups like this, and research done by groups like the Working Group on Labor in Digital Libraries, Archives, and Museums, are essential for the greater collective action
• National Forum on Labor Practices for Grant-Funded Digital Positions,
• Forthcoming Book: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers, University of Kansas Press, Editor: Lee Skallerup Bessette, Georgetown U