I have been asked this question many times by librarians so I am way overdue for this post. Most recently I was asked “….are librarians the people best equipped to define and interpret transliteracy (as opposed to say cognitive scientists, anthropologists, or critical theorists).”  This is a modified version of my original answer. No librarians are probably not the best people to define and interpret transliteracy. Fortunately we are (or at least I am) not defining it, and we certainly are not the only ones thinking about it. Where did the word transliteracy come from? Transliteracies came first, introduced by the Transliteracies Research Project directed by Alan Liu, Dept of English, University of California at Santa Barbara. “Established in 2005, the Transliteracies Project includes scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and engineering in the University of California system (and in the future other research programs). It will establish working groups to study online reading from different perspectives; bring those groups into conjunction behind a shared technology development initiative; publish research and demonstration software; and train graduate students working at the intersections of the humanistic, social, and technological disciplines.” Sue Thomas attended the first transliteracies conference and was inspired to form the PART Group

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