What We Read while Looking Up from the Book: A Review of The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities

Abstract

This review of The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities, edited by Isabel Galina Russell and Glen Layne-Worthey, highlights the book’s acute representation of the work performed by librarians, archivists, and digital humanists. By means of the thoughtful selection and organization of more than thirty chapters, the editors show that libraries and archives are spaces that function because of the relations between five different systems: ethical-ideological, methodological, public, epistemological, and social. The review summarises each one of these systems and explains how they interact to showcase the complexities of academic practices such as digital preservation, digitisation, and text mining.