 Over the past ten years, Cambridge University Library has developed both a range of expertise and infrastructure which has become central to digital stewardship, scholarship and scholarly communications across the university. The relationship between the library and research has been transformed from one where the library service supports research by providing content and the services and systems that facilitate and provide access to it. To one in which the library is also actively engaging in research and the research process, particularly in the field of digital scholarship. This is a very fast evolving area for us and as a library it's true to say that we are still trying to find our role and our way in this arena. So this talk will be more about our experiences so far and some of the interesting things that we have learnt along the way, rather than being the ultimate guide on the how to do it. And we're very much looking forward to hearing about your experiences in the discussion afterwards and in conversations around the conference and after the conference as well. So in this talk we are going to have a look at some of our experiences of supporting and partnering with research in the library setting. Mary will then talk about the Cambridge Digital Humanities Lab which is where we have direct contact with researchers in the digital humanities, the projects we meet, the things we want to do and how we work with them to frame collaborative research projects. Hugh will then talk through some examples of projects that have either been completed or in progress that illustrate the changing role of the library in moving from research support to research partnerships. We'll then go through some of the challenges that have been thrown up during this rapid change and some possible solutions, particularly around defining the role of the library and building capacity to support that role. And then we'll look ahead to the future and mention some of the ways that libraries might not just be able to be active partners in specific projects but also to be able to make real contributions to the whole field of digital scholarship. The library has a long history of working directly with researchers. Much of this engagement in recent years is centred around digital scholarship and in our case particularly with researchers in the humanities. The university library has two long running embedded research projects which are also leading digital humanities projects, those being the Darwin correspondence project and the Ghaniza research unit. The development of the Cambridge Digital Library provided the library with a technical infrastructure to showcase our library collections and with its continued development it has become a platform for digital humanities within the university. The digital library has attracted both funding and researchers to the library. It has been the catalyst for projects and research collaborations with our own academics but also with other institutions. One example of this is the Board of Longitude project with the National Maritime Museum. It has fostered relationships and engagement with researchers both in Cambridge and beyond with an interest in our library collections but also with those who have an interest in the expertise that we have within the library. Over the past years there has been a significant increase in the number of researchers approaching the library at the end of their research projects and I see a few nods in the audience asking us as a library to take over the hosting, maintenance and preservation of their research outputs. Of course as many as you know this may include one or many or even a format that we've never heard, sets of data, web pages, databases, interactive tools and even analytic research tools. Of course this isn't the easiest of tasks as many of the projects were never conceived with long term sustainability in mind and come with substantial overheads for the library. In 2016 the University commissioned an external strategic review of digital humanities with a view to establishing the relative position of the university's research in this area. Both in relation to other UK universities and overseas institutions and also to identify potential areas for investment to establish leading position in digital humanities within the university. The result of this review was the establishment of Cambridge Digital Humanities, also called CDH. CDH rather than being an institution or a research centre is a broad and dynamic framework that aims to consolidate digital humanities activity across the university and to foster new collaborations and other external links and relationships. The university library is a partner and has a key role in CDH helping to develop and enable the emerging academic vision for Cambridge Digital Humanities and is represented at both the directorate level and on the CDH steering committee. CDH within the university sits in the School of Arts and Humanities but its main office is located in the university library. The CDH lab was established in late 2017 and is based in the university library and we in the university library are a lead partner in the lab and we work together with universities information service and CDH as well. CDH activity is focused around four areas, research, learning, the digital humanities lab and the wider digital humanities network or community of researchers across the university. The aims of the CDH lab are to become the natural starting point for digital humanities focused research proposals in Cambridge to help frame and support successful funded projects which make a contribution to the field of digital humanities as well as answering specific research questions. We are working to form strong working relationships with centres of expertise and providers of specialized services across the university and beyond with a particular focus on the promotion of interdisciplinary research and engagement with science and technology as well. The lab has three co-directors. As deputy director for digital in the library I am one of those co-directors. The others are the head of CDH and also a member of our university's information service. We have a library digital humanities co-ordinator who is Hugh who you will be hearing from later and also a digital humanities developer who is Mary and she will also be talking. We have, there is a co-ordinator and assistant to help manage the activities of CDH as well. Within the university library the digital services development team that is the software development and innovation team and the digital content unit as well as our special collections curators contribute and provide expertise to the library's lab team and are also engaged in providing training for students as part of the learning program. So my name is Mary Chester Cadwell. I'm a senior software developer at the library so I sit in the software development team and work on things like the digital library. But with my other hat on I work with the CDH lab so I'm going to talk a little bit about what that's like. Now as Leslie has described already the CDH lab has a space in the library, a physical space, but it's also a concept because none of us work permanently or full time on the CDH lab. I'm in the software team, Hugh works on the digital library for part of his time and so on. And so although we come together in this space we are not this space. But this is the meeting place where we talk to researchers when they come to us and they might come to us at almost any stage of their research process from the I'm thinking about it to I'm somewhere in the middle. And I think a grant might be a good idea and also here's all the stuff I've got. What shall I do with it? So the things they ask about are what resources can we provide? What people do we know? Who can help me? What services do you provide? And what services do other parts of the university provide? They also ask about the elephant in the room which is permissions to use materials. If they're thinking about digitising, do they have permission to use this material once it's digitised? Do they have permission to publish it in any way on the web in the form of academic publications? Or do they have permission to OCR it and use it in a data mining context? And that automation of data and the boring parts of data is another thing they ask about along with how to analyse things. Some researchers come to us with a deep background and analysis already and they're looking for something else. But many people ask, how do I start? They also ask about how they're going to store all their stuff once they've got it and how they're going to make it accessible. And typically researchers want to do that by making a website. And they want that website to not just be a table. They want it to be interactive, to have search, to have graphs, to have all sorts of things that mean other researchers can get more out of what they've produced. So since the lab again we've been coming up with this menu of options. What can actually we offer people because we're not an institute, we don't have a lot of funding, we are here trying to become a nexus as it were for all things digital humanity in the university. So the first thing we can offer them is general advice in our experience and we have a range of experience on feasibility. We can point people to those people and resources they were asking about. We can point them to CDH learning which is a different part of CDH that runs workshops and training on a variety of digital methods and ethics surrounding digital methods. And sometimes we do have a mentorship program as well. And I do some teaching for CDH learning on text mining and Python. We can offer to digitise materials in-house in the digital content unit. And that comes with that is hosting on Cambridge Digital Library. We have a really great workflow to get digitalised material from the content unit, getting the metadata up, use the metadata man and then getting it on the digital library. The other thing we can do is offer to help writing grant technical specifications and alongside that we have a small amount of time that we can provide for prototyping. So if a grant would be more persuasive to one of those tricky funding bodies, we can offer to create something live that can be looked at. And then of course there's the partnering on grants where we have specialisms and we do have deep and long-standing specialisms in a number of areas which you will talk about later. But I wanted to speak from a personal level on what I have observed that researchers don't ask about because I think that those big open gaps, those missing spaces are where we can learn what we can do better, how we can contribute, what more is there for us to do, how can we lead. And I've noticed that there are four broad areas. There's digital archiving and preservation which of course is libraries we are constantly thinking about. It's our raison d'etreur to make sure that everything we have is preserved for the future. And we have a lot of expertise in that area. And researchers don't ask how can I make my stuff easier to archive, easier to preserve. What data formats should I use? What structures? What standards? How can I do it? They don't ask those things and they should be asking those things from the beginning. How do they know to ask those things? They don't unless we tell them. Lots of researchers are very much in favour of open data and keeping their data available. But they don't fully understand what it means to have open data, the different parts of what it means. And we have an entire department of scholarly communications and Danny Kingsley, who's the lead there, is here today. And we basically have excellent expertise in this area. We work alongside mostly scientific researchers to manage their data and how they're going to archive what they've done with it from the very earliest stages of their research. And I think this is something that humanities doesn't really do particularly well at the moment and could be an area of leadership for us. And finally, as a software developer, I often think about the requests that we have for the websites that come at the end. And from my point of view, I can see there are these gaps over interface design and user research. People come to us with the idea that a website should look a particular way. And when I ask them who's the audience for your website, they say the public. And that's wonderful and marvellous, but that's not the best way to write good software. The best way to write good, engaging, innovative visualisations and software and interfaces is to be very specific about who your users are, do research on them, test prototypes with them, and innovate in interface design. And that is what I have to say. I shall now pass over to Hugh. Thank you, Mary. So, yes, I was going to provide a bit of background to that by going through some of the projects which we've worked on over the last seven or eight years, which demonstrate something about the transition we've made from providing services to research projects through to being partners in research and being actively engaged in research processes through to the idea in the future that we might start to look around and identify opportunities to lead in research. So, I've been working for the Digital Library for the whole of its brief life, seven years. The very first thing that we put online was the Isaac Newton papers. And that was an interesting experience. It was interesting to see how many people were interested in Isaac Newton, which was a lot of people. One of the things we continually struggle with is trying to guess what's going to be popular and guess what's not going to be popular so we can communicate with Mary and say, I don't know, what do you do? Ramp up the servers? I imagine somebody plugging in some extra cables somewhere. So, where we started was really digitisation for access. I was going to click on this link. I'm now going to try and devolve that out into the crowd to show you something about the process that we go through. This is a bit risky, I know. Those of you who are on devices wouldn't mind searching Isaac Newton notebook. I'll carry on talking and hopefully you'll see that we were effective in promoting Isaac Newton. I don't know, windscreen repairs might be the first. But I think where we started was providing digital surrogates for reading. So, we weren't really doing much more than taking hard to reach material and putting it on the web so that researchers could see it. Now we're in a very different space. Did you find Isaac Newton's notebook? Isn't it a beautiful thing? But I think you can see the presentation somehow. It doesn't really take you much beyond the fantastic experience of reading Isaac Newton's notebooks. Now we're in a very different space just in terms of imaging. I suppose where imaging itself is becoming a research activity and something which we engage with researchers to see how the imaging we do can help answer their research questions. So I'm now going to ask you to search again for CUL, or one word, oracle bones. The oracle bones were fantastic things. They were recently thought to be the oldest things in the library recently when we found a cuneiform tablet in a box of medals somewhere in the archives. But hopefully you're now looking at this and what's on the screen. If you see on the right-hand side as you look at it, there's an arrow which you can start looking at a 3D model of the oracle bone. Yes, and it's a fantastic thing. The thing is, and it looks beautiful, and if I could get it to work I would do it on the screen. The thing is with that image is it's not what we would call an archival image. It's a kind of a false image made up of lots of different images. Specifically what it was designed for in collaboration with the researcher was to answer certain research questions that they had about it. I don't know if those of you who got it open can look across the top of the oracle bone. He was interested in looking at surfaces which hadn't been well investigated and immediately with the raking light on it he saw a whole new text across the top. So just in terms of imaging we've turned away from mass digitisation, specialist digitisation. We've gone from quite big to quite small and we've started to engage with researchers on imaging and analysis which will answer their research questions. Other examples are imaging. Has anyone come across the Beasts to Craft project? It's fantastically named which is doing scientific analysis of manuscripts. We're doing imaging and analysis for them. Large scale imaging, multi-spectral imaging etc. So that's images and I think just briefly we're now seeing the same thing happen with text. We had a long history as largely supporting digital editions. Diamond correspondence project probably being the most famous one that's in Cambridge but in a sense the outputs of digital editions were really providing a guided and surrogate for reading the original with lots of extra research material in it. I think now we're seeing a moment where those digital editions are starting to try to do new things with their textual output to run them through social network analysis to run them through things like there's a project called Concept Lab. It's very exciting. So we've gone back to Isaac Newton and the Newton project in their transcriptions. There was a separate project in Cambridge called Concept Lab which was looking at concepts in textual corporate and on Friday we're just going to push Newton through this concept lab software and see what happens. I think that that's a sign of a move we've made from supporting transcription, supporting imaging to engaging exciting new ways of doing stuff. So yeah I think that's it. The one last thing I think is important is that this is really to do with AAAF that we're not only engaging ourselves on a one-to-one basis with researchers or a three-to-one basis with researchers. We're also putting our data out there in such a way that it's available for researchers to analyse without asking us. This is just a quick slide on AAAF and I won't bother to go into what AAAF is because you won't probably know. As I said earlier this is still a new and evolving area for us in the library and based on our experiences today we've highlighted a number of challenges that we've actually heard in some of the other presentations today and also potentials for the future. Many of the challenges that we come up against revolve around what is the library's role within the field of digital scholarship or digital humanities. What is it now and how will it evolve with time and what will it look like in the future. The CDH lab currently has 41 live projects at various stages of development. 12 projects are funded and running. Two have submitted bids and are awaiting outcomes. Nine projects are at the bid writing stage and there are 18 at the early stages of pre-bid writing. As a result of the engagement and the publicity for the lab with the wider Cambridge Digital Humanities community enquiries are coming in steadily. Initially the new enquiries were mainly in the areas of digitisation, TEI and some of the specialisms that Hugh and Mary have talked about but we are now finding that many more are coming in in a far broader scope. Because of the variety of projects we are finding that we aren't always able to support them in the ways that people need or expect and we do not have the resources to take on everything. But of course this isn't really surprising to us or to any of you. Digital humanities is by nature interdisciplinary and is a very broad field, not just focused on our library collections or the data that we curate which is where our expertise lies. The lab needs to and will engage with the wider network across the university as well as the wider Digital Humanities community to support and broker partnerships and expertise. So what is the role of the research library in this emerging landscape where we clearly won't be able to do everything? How as a library do we prioritise what we do? How do we define our role in times of constraint and how do we build that capacity that we need in our institutions for digital scholarship and particularly in our libraries? How and when do we make decisions about drawing on the expertise, experience and infrastructure of others? How do we decide which and where to invest in specialist areas? Will the specialisms that we invest in be the ones that actually support the emerging direction of research? Or could we be offering the specialisms that we invest in more widely to the research community beyond Cambridge to help fund and build the capacity that we need? So lots of questions, but we don't have any answers yet. And so looking to the future, as well as partnering in research and research projects in the digital humanities, we are starting to think about what contribution we as a research library can make to the field of digital scholarship. We can focus on what we already do well in the library, that is publication, curation, preservation of data and research outputs. We can see that the publishing of methodologies alongside the data and research findings would make a significant contribution to the field of scholarship and we have an important role potentially to encourage and work with our researchers to allow this to happen. But what is the unique contribution that we as a library can make to the field of digital scholarship and digital humanities? In Cambridge, we feel that we are in a unique position from representation and governance in the Cambridge Digital Humanities framework through the active involvement of our library staff in the digital humanities network and the positioning of the lab within the university library. We have a broad and unique overview of research projects, research activity and teaching in digital humanities within the university that very few others have. Maybe our role will evolve from this particular overview that we have. We also know that we are interested in specialisations and technologies and methodologies and another area for the future that we will be considering is library-led research, not just partnering with researchers but inviting researchers to join us in developing and investigating technologies, methodologies and to develop innovative development solutions moving forward. So, as I said, few answers or conclusions but a lot of questions but a lot of opportunities. And in closing, a question to all of you, what is the unique contribution that your library in your organisation will make to digital scholarship and both within your institution and to the wider field? We would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you.