102 Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
Supporting digital scholarship inserts libraries at different stages of the research lifecycle than what
was traditionally supported. There is still an adjustment period for libraries where support of digital
scholarship is becoming more institutionalized. Digital scholarship will become (or already is) just
scholarship, and will be less of a novelty to libraries.
The Libraries hopes to expand its support of digital scholarship activities and increase collaborative
projects with faculty across campus. We also hope to form a solid partnership with university Analytics
and Technologies in order to provide supports that meet current digital preservation standards and
best practices.
The Libraries will continue to offer key services in support of digital scholarship. We anticipate
becoming a hub for connections and referrals, offering expertise and technology that enables
digital scholarship. The Libraries already works with graduate students and faculty and will
continue to facilitate greater interdisciplinary work and access to resources that support digital
scholarship endeavors.
The Libraries will have an expansive role supporting all aspects of the research life cycle. Libraries will
continue to serve as a place for longitudinal support and archiving over time. In addition, the Libraries
will draw on expertise throughout the organization and partner with other units in the university and
external to the university to provide a distributed model of support.
The libraries’ role in supporting digital scholarship activities will only increase, as “digital” becomes
an assumed aspect of scholarship rather than a qualified one. At our institution, there are some areas
of concentrated expertise (like metadata creation, digitization of analog materials, creation of digital
collections, and digital preservation) that are already well developed but not yet fully available (if at
all) to researchers. It seems quite likely that over the course of the next few years we will begin to see
more staff devoting their expertise to support user services in these areas. Among those staff who are
already public-facing but lacking sufficient expertise in digital scholarship work, project planning
and management, digital publishing, and data curation and management are obvious areas for role
development, given the growing and broad needs in these areas and librarians’ already well-established
value as guides in the research process and the libraries’ position in all areas of the research life cycle,
from inspiration through creation of scholarly works, to the management of these works and their long-
term preservation.
The University Library is and will continue to be a leader in support for digital scholarship.
This area will only grow. We are realigning our resources and staffing to ensure adequate support
in this area. We will need to continue to balance this support with our other services, but this is a
significant area of investment for our libraries.
Through expanding DS services, the library will become a partner in the creation of knowledge. It will
also continue its role as an agent of knowledge dissemination through analog and digital means.
To foster, preserve, and support digital scholarship by faculty, student, and staff across the university.
To help members of the university achieve—and model—the technologically enabled potentials of
a university degree in the 21st-century. To build bridges among the various units that offer digital
resources/tools or support digital scholarship across campus.
To some extent, I wish to mitigate against the sense of these activities being new or different. Libraries
have been the enablers of teaching, learning, and research and continue to do so in the digital age.
However, a recalibration of library staff’s meaningful collaboration in the provision of services, such as
crafting software to parse large data or producing visualizations, will demand dedicated and sustained
communication and demonstrated successes.
We anticipate the continued rise of digital scholarly projects among undergraduate and graduate
students, as well as among the ranks of all the faculty. As those projects increase in number and
Previous Page Next Page