New Web technologies could enhance collaboration within humanities digital libraries. We have investigated possible extensions to the Cervantes Project’s digital library that support collaboration across the collection of materials centering on the author of Don Quixote’s life and works. We describe the basis for our extensions, drawing from the experiences of users of the collection, and the implementation of an integrated collaborative environment that improves collaboration between users of the library through well-known Web 2.0 technologies. The resulting system provides an initial step towards building a humanities-centered Digital Community.

Background
Collaboration in the humanities has been identified as a critical issue—and one that may be addressable through digital tools. Bruce Cole mentions three goals for the Digital Humanities initiative: 1) use technology to make the humanities more accessible to everyone; 2) use the technology to foster increased collaboration in the humanities; 3) explore how digital technology will change humanities scholarship and teaching [Cole, 2007]. Further, digital libraries (DLs) are now playing an increasingly important role in the humanities, although with a primary focus on supporting individual scholars working alone. Some researchers have recognized the collaborative value of digital libraries [Levy and Marshall 1995; Twidale and Nichols 1998]. A principal digital library collaborative focus has been on their potential to contribute to the collection contents through users’ annotations and feedback [Nichols, et. al. 2000; Torres, et. al. 2004]. More recent works have highlighted the importance of Web-based services supporting users’ collaboration, such as workspace sharing, end-user interaction, and users’ awareness [Candela 2003; Coombs 2007; Stephens 2007]. However, those proposals in general do not emphasize the integration of the collaboration services with the main functionality of DLs, which implies that the users need to switch between different services when using DLs in collaboration.
The collaboration gap in the humanities can, in part, be bridged by through networked applications, particularly Web-based services. However, conventional Web technologies are mostly suited for centralized applications with no strong requirements for notification and tightly-coupled collaboration [Bentley 1997]. Recently, the so-called Web 2.0 revolution is transforming the Web into a platform for sharing and collaboration by overcoming the above limitations, which provides unprecedented opportunities for building digital communities and enabling collaboration in DL [Coombs 2007].
We describe extensions to the Cervantes Project’s digital library (http://cervantes.tamu.edu/), based on users’ experiences with the library, that integrate the following Web 2.0-based collaboration services: a geotagging service, which allows the users know about other users, to be aware about their specific interests and geographical locations in order to support digital communities building and growing; a folksonomy tagging service, which allows the users to classify and appraise the DL contents in familiar terms; and a wiki environment, which allows the users to share contents and communicate ideas freely. These services are integrated with standard services such as information searching and retrieving.