14 · Survey Results: Executive Summary
Digital scholarship support includes the creation
of the products of digital scholarship (e.g., multimedia
projects), especially the use of tools and expertise to
manipulate or create digital products (data mining,
data visualization, GIS). These categories relate to
scholars as authors and researchers, as curators host-
ing and preserving digital information, and as content
creators using innovative technologies.
Services Provided Outside the Library
Because SC encompasses such a variety of activities, it
comes as no surprise that there are many institutional
stakeholders that offer SC services outside of libraries.
Education and outreach services are also provided
by the office of research, general counsel, instruc-
tional technology offices, and teaching and learning
centers, among others. Not surprisingly, university
presses offer publishing services, but so do academic
departments, particularly for faculty-hosted electronic
journals. Research centers, institutes, and labs host/
manage digital content, as do institutional IT offices.
Support for research and creative works is distributed
among the office of research, academic departments,
IT office, technology transfer office, and digital hu-
manities centers. While all respondents report that at
least some services are offered both by the library and
the institution, the distribution of responsibility shows
that the library is the primary SC service provider
except in a few cases of patent research, disciplinary
repositories, and multimedia production.
Support for SC Services
The survey next asked who else at the library and
institution besides the “leaders” supports SC services.
The resulting comments are nicely summarized in
one respondent’s quip: “I think a better question may
be ‘Who doesn’t?’” The comments included below
highlight groups or issues not addressed elsewhere
in the survey.
Repeated most often among the comments was
the importance of liaison librarians in educating their
communities about SC issues, including copyright,
author rights, open access (OA), and institutional re-
positories (IR). As one respondent stated, “According
to our recently adopted subject librarian position de-
scription framework, these librarians are expected to:
educate and inform faculty, graduate students, and
campus administrators about scholarly communica-
tion issues, copyright, and their rights as authors
advocate for sustainable models of scholarly commu-
nication and assist in the development and creation
of tools and services to facilitate scholarly communi-
cation and support and promote the IR by helping
administrators, faculty and students understand the
role of the IR in building and preserving digital col-
lections and assisting in content recruitment.” In fact,
in over half of the 44 library staff-related comments re-
spondents drew specific attention to subject librarians
and/or liaison librarians. Additionally, two respon-
dents identified a liaison-related service: the creation
of web pages or web guides to describe the library’s
SC services or, specifically, to identify resources for
compliance with the National Science Foundation’s
(NSF) Data Management Plan requirements.
Respondents’ comments also highlight the impor-
tant outreach role for library directors: to be the SC
spokesperson who can communicate the variety of
librarians’ roles to those outside the library.
Open Journal Systems, a program that allows
faculty to host their own peer-reviewed journals,
is supported by both library and institution staff.
While journal hosting is not a new activity, it is an SC
practice that has been made increasingly easier as a
growing number of software programs facilitate the
process.
At one institution, where open access is a signifi-
cant part of the institutional culture, a unique position
outlined in the comments is the “OA System admin-
istrator: [the] librarian [who] designed and manages
[the] technical infrastructure for Open Access Policy
workflows.” In this position, the librarian plans and
handles the practical implementation of institutional
SC policy, playing a central role in that institution’s
SC and organizational landscape. The leadership
inherent in that role is very unusual and stands in
sharp contrast to many other respondents’ comments,
which tend to be more similar to the respondent who
wrote that, “one of the questions on our upcoming
survey asks who should support open access on cam-
pus.” A comment apropos to many responding insti-
tutions was that as a result of “leadership changes in
the libraries and at the university as a whole, support
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