Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 154.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2023-07-25 06:30:24+00:00
        From: Andreas Gálffy <andrisgalffy@gmail.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.152: the librarian's position

Dear Willard,

thank you very much for raising this comment which in fact pursues me since
I attended the colloquium "Digital Library" at University of Cologne nine
years ago. There, the future of the library itself has been raised and a
tendency towards competence centres could be vaguely seen, i.e. towards
metadata centres etc. Maybe the research data infrastructure services may
be regarded as such. That is what I observe and in my humble opinion,
research librarians develop into data libarians or related professions, at
least a part of. But more experienced colleagues may complete me.

I shall use this occasion to raise another concern I have since then and
which grew with the market-ready appearance of ChatGPT, namely the
dependency of digital solutions resp. the disappear of the printed book.
Disclaimer: I do not blame the developments done in AI research, I regard
them as useful and sometimes undispensible tools. But on the other hand, I
am quite worrying that on the other hand, training of the humans get lost:
"why do we need to learn it, the AI does already everything?". Both aim the
same point: the dependency upon electric current resp. digital solutions.
Should we not keep a fallback in non-digital data containes in case of
electric circuit fallouts and keep moreover training humans for that we are
know (in the sense of collaboration) what the tools we use, including AI,
are doing?

Naive questions of a DH passionate.

I hope I wrote my reply to the correct place.

Yours sincerely,
András Gálffy

On Tue, 25 Jul 2023 at 08:21, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>
>               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 152.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                       Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2023-07-25 06:11:06+00:00
>         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>         Subject: the librarian
>
> The previous posting, which crossed my desk this morning, leads me to
> wonder what has become of the librarian's position in consequence of
> digital corpora and tools. In some universities and research centres
> this position brings with it or allows serious scholarly
> responsibilities; in others, it's all about following the lead of
> academic colleagues. In my institutional library, service (in the
> limited sense) delimits it. The position of the 'research librarian'
> seems to have disappeared. I would welcome being corrected on one or
> more of these points. I raise them, however, because I'm persuaded that
> the research librarian's position--with the liberties and
> responsibilities to do research, publish etc--is crucial to the
> development of digital humanities in its potential for interdisciplinary
> research. By that I mean all that lies beyond the application of cool
> tools to problems in history, literature, sociology, art etc.
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk



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