The Rosarium Project: using reference skills in an online, text-encoding project

What is it about?

The role of the reference librarian has changed considerably over the past thirty years. Today reference librarians spend as much time on public relations as on answering reference questions and more time solving log-in issues than on helping with research. Despite this, there is still a role for reference librarians to play using their research and curation skills. That role involves the digital humanities, particularly text encoding projects following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI). One such TEI project is the Rosarium Project, which curates online popular materials about roses.

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Why is it important?

It demonstrates how one text-encoding project utilizes traditional reference librarian skills. It will hopefully encourage other librarians who feel their skills are going to waste to envision and engage in interesting and creative digital humanities projects.