Thematic Research Collections: Libraries and the Evolution of Alternative Digital Publishing in the Humanities

The growth and evolution of digital scholarship in the humanities has produced new genres of scholarly work and publication, reliant upon new ways of representing and sharing evidence, analysis, and interpretation. Meanwhile, extant systems of scholarly communication, including publication, discovery, access-provision, maintenance, and preservation, too often exclude digital research products, to the potential detriment of the entire scholarly record. This paper considers one genre of digital humanities scholarship: the thematic research collection, a digital collection of primary sources gathered to support research on a theme. This genre is recognizable and increasingly common, yet wildly heterogeneous in precise form, function, and purpose. This typological analysis aims to identify and describe types of collections as a way toward comprehending the range, variation, and complexity of the whole genre. The research considers what thematic research collections are, how they work, and what challenges confront the provision of effective and ongoing access to digital scholarship.