Digital Humanities 2010 1 A Tale of Two Cities: Implications of the Similarities and Differences in Collaborative Approaches within the Digital Libraries and Digital Humanities Communities Siemens, Lynne siemensl@uvic.ca Faculty of Business/School of Public Administration, University of Victoria Cunningham, Richard richard.cunningham@acadiau.ca Acadia Digital Culture Observatory, Acadia University Duff, Wendy wendy.duff@utoronto.ca Faculty of Information, University of Toronto Warwick, Claire c.warwick@ucl.ac.uk Department of Information Studies, University College London Besides drawing on content experts, librarians, archivists, developers, programmers, managers, and others, many emerging digital projects also pull in disciplinary expertise from areas that do not typically work in team environments. To be effective, these teams must find processes – some of which are counter to natural individually-oriented work habits – that support the larger goals and group-oriented work of these digital projects. This paper will explore the similarities and differences in approaches within and between members of the Digital Libraries (DL) and Digital Humanities (DH) communities by formally documenting the nature of collaboration in these teams. The objective is to identify exemplary work patterns and larger models of research collaboration that have the potential to strengthen this positive aspect of these communities even further, while exploring the key differences between them which may limit digital project teams’ efforts. Our work is therefore designed to enable those who work in such teams to recognise factors that tend to predispose them to success, and perhaps more importantly, to avoid those that may lead to problematic interactions, and thus make the project less successful than it might otherwise have been. 1. Context Traditionally, research contributions in the humanities field have been felt to be, and documented to be, predominantly solo efforts by academics involving little direct collaboration with others, a model reinforced through doctoral studies and beyond (See, for example, Cuneo 2003; Newell and Swan 2000). However, DL and DH communities are exceptions to this. Given that the nature of digital projects involves computers and a variety of skills and expertise, collaborations in these fields involve individuals within their institutions and with others nationally and internationally. Such collaboration typically must coordinate efforts between academics, undergraduate and graduate students, research assistants, computer programmers and developers, librarians, and other individuals as well as financial and other resources. Further, as more digital projects explore issues of long term sustainability, academics and librarians are likely to enter into more collaborations to ensure this objective (Kretzschmar Jr. and Potter 2009). Given this context, some research has been done on the DL and DH (See, for example Liu and Smith 2007; Ruecker and Radzikowska 2008; Siemens 2009) communities as separate entities (See, for example Johnson 2009; Liu, Tseng and Huang 2005; Johnson 2005; Siemens et al. 2009b), but little has been done on the interaction between these two communities when in collaboration. Tensions can exist in academic research teams when the members represent different disciplines and approaches to team work (Birnbaum 1979; Fennel and Sandefur 1983; Hara et al. 2003). Collaborations can be further complicated when some team members have more experience and training in collaboration than other members, a case which may exist with digital projects involving librarians and archivists, who tend to have more experience, and academics, who have tend to have less. Ultimately, too little is known about