2016 Charleston Library Conference

With the growth of digital humanities and a wide range of free and open source analysis tools at our fingertips, librarians have a unique opportunity to use these new tools to critically analyze library collections. Moving beyond usage and budgets, strategies such as text analysis, temporal pattern finding and data visualization offer insights into the structure and content of our collections, which in turn supports evidenced-based decision-making for future acquisitions. At the Claremont Colleges Library, librarians across divisions have been encouraged to learn tools and approaches to Digital Humanities, and apply these principles to our own work and relationships with researchers.

Using free digital scholarship tools such as TimelineJS and Voyant Tool, this team of librarians compared historical patterns of print book acquisitions to domestic and transnational acts of terrorism during a 20 year period from 1995 to 2015. The work offered insights into the subject categories of books purchased during this period in the context of significant political events. We also studied the relationships between words commonly found in the titles of terrorism-related texts, such as "terrorism and government" or "terrorism and religion" to uncover any potential biases in collecting.

This presentation will cover: methods for gathering historic acquisitions data; strategies for using Digital Humanities tools to both analyze and communicate findings; an overview of our findings on terrorism and collection development at Claremont; and potential future applications for the use of Digital Humanities tools to support collection assessment and development.