This paper discusses how librarians collaborate with humanities scholars in projects involving the creation and curation of cultural and heritage materials in digital format.  Libraries, as the “laboratory for the humanities,” have played a significant role in curating printed materials. In the digital era, libraries continue to take up the challenges of facilitating and preserving collections for digital humanities.  Librarians, with training in data curation and analysis methods, can support humanists in the exploration of digitized artefacts, presentation of research findings in digital means, and curating the data created for seamless, persistent and long-term access. An environmental scan of digital humanities curated by libraries, such as the University of Toronto Library, Stanford University Library and the University of British Columbia Library, will be presented. Specifically, this paper examines the “Hong Kong-Canada Crosscurrents Project,” a collaborative project among the author and humanities scholars in Canada and Hong Kong. This examination presents a viable model for the convergence of librarianship and humanity scholarship in the digital humanities.

Dr Jack Hang-tat Leong is the Director of the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library at the University of Toronto. He chairs the Standing Committee of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions “Library Services to Multicultural Populations” Section, and the International and Community Outreach Coordinating Group at the University of Toronto Libraries. He also serves on the Director Board of the Canadian Foundation for Asian Culture.

Jack Leong has degrees in computer science (1997), education (2005), English literature (1999; 2003), and library and information science (2006). His PhD dissertation investigates the concepts of ideology and utopia in science fiction from Canada, the United States, Poland, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. His research interests include Asian studies, Chinese diasporas and knowledge organization. He publishes and organizes numerous conferences on library science and Chinese Canadian studies. He has curated digital collections on Hong Kong’s Handover in 1997 and Hong Kong immigrants in Canada.