To realize the great potential value of large‐scale digital libraries, we need a fuller understanding of the range of ways in which scholarly communities conduct research, or want to conduct research within them. Scholars build collections in the course of their work. How can we anticipate and support various kinds of collection‐building and ‐use, in order to support the diversity of researchers who work in libraries of digital books? This paper reports selected results of a study of how potential user groups of the HathiTrust Digital Library create and use collections in their research. This study aims to contribute to our broader understanding of scholarly practice, particularly of humanities scholars’ collecting activities. The results of the study inform ongoing work to develop a workset‐creation tool for the HathiTrust Research Center.

Bibliographic metadata standards are a longstanding mechanism for Digital Libraries to manage records and express relationships between them. As digital scholarship, particularly in the humanities, incorporates and manipulates these records in an increasingly direct manner, existing systems are proving insufficient for providing the underlying addressability and relational expressivity required to construct and interact with complex research collections. In this paper we describe motivations for these "worksets" and the technical requirements they raise. We survey the coverage of existing bibliographic ontologies in the context of meeting these scholarly needs, and finally provide an illustrated discussion of potential extensions that might fully realize a solution.

Text data mining and analysis has emerged as a viable research method for scholars, following the growth of mass digitization, digital publishing, and scholarly interest in data re-use. Yet the texts that comprise datasets for analysis are frequently protected by copyright or other intellectual property rights that limit their access and use. This article discusses the role of libraries at the intersection of data mining and intellectual property, asserting that academic libraries are vital partners in enabling scholars to effectively incorporate text data mining into their research. We report on activities leading up to an IMLS-funded National Forum of stakeholders and discuss preliminary findings from a systematic literature review, as well as initial results of interviews with forum stakeholders. Emerging themes suggest the need for a multi-pronged distributed approach that includes a public campaign for building awareness and advocacy, development of best practice guides for library support services and training, and international efforts toward data standardization and copyright harmonization.

With the rise of digital scholarship, humanists are participating in increasingly complex research teams and partnerships, and academic libraries are developing innovative service models to meet their needs. This paper explores modes of coworking in humanities research by synthesizing responses from two qualitative studies of research practices in the humanities and proposes a taxonomy of multiperson research that includes collaborative, consultative, and transactional research partnerships among scholars, graduate students, academic staff, and a range of other potential stakeholders. Based on an analysis of humanities scholars' self-described research behaviors, we provide recommendations for academic librarians who are developing and sustaining service models for digital scholarship.