105 SPEC Kit 350: Supporting Digital Scholarship
yet another silo in the organization. Ensure that you are doing what your website and promotional
materials state. That leads to legitimacy. Growing pains are normal.
Our support for digital scholarship relies heavily on a number of librarians and staff wearing multiple
hats, and although their chief duties may lie in DS support, they are not devoted to it. At the moment
our Center for Digital Scholarship is a little unusual in that it does not have faculty leadership.
Some of the key roles the library plays on this campus that aren’t addressed by the survey include
building strong partnerships with other units around campus. We have relied on partnerships with
subject librarians as well to serve as marketing channels and expertise in supporting digital scholarship
discipline by discipline. Finally, we have made a concerted effort to not duplicate services available
elsewhere on campus. This has been a conscious choice and will continue to inform services and
referrals to other expertise available to researchers.
The directorate for digital scholarship is very new, so our documents and plans are being created.
Please excuse the sparseness of our responses!
The Libraries have significant resources to provide as “raw material” for DS through its strong
collections, in particular historic audio, photographs, video, and film.
The responses in this survey do not incorporate the activities of the Libraries’ Program on Information
Science. This program is deeply involved in a number of ways in various aspects of digital scholarship.
It wasn’t included, because it doesn’t directly develop or support services to the community. That
doesn’t detract from the value of the research, but noting those activities in the body of the survey
might have painted an inaccurate picture about organizational support for DS.
There is a trend across academic institutions that sees some of the organizations that formerly lived
in central IT moving into provostial or library organizations. These include centers for teaching and
learning, instructional technologies, research technologies, academic media resources, and educational
technologies. As IT units focus on infrastructure, cloud sourcing, and business systems, those services
that face faculty and students will be less central to the core IT functions. Libraries of the future should
be prepared to incorporate these services, many of which are essential tools for digital scholarship.
We are a very fragmented, decentralized institution. As such, a large and wide variety of activities may
be taking place with little or no knowledge outside the small circles of directly impacted individuals
and entities.
We are growing in this area, and it’s clear that librarians and other professionals from across the library
have been supporting facets of DS over the years. Coordinating those efforts is something we’re keen
to do.
We have a joint faculty position in digital humanities that will be recruited and hired in the near future.
The Research Services Strategic Initiative is moving from an initiative into the implementation of
a formal research data services group. We have a team of developers who work on our institutional
repository and other digital projects within the library.
We have many pieces of the digital scholarship puzzle in place. The recent recruitment of a Digital
Initiatives and Scholarship Librarian will help us bring these pieces together into a cohesive program
to support our students and scholars, initially creating a virtual space while planning and developing a
physical space.
We use the librarians in systems for development work, and there is a need for dedicated development
to support DS activities. Our “Digital Library” area covers much of what is referred to as DS activity
(scanning, metadata, digital collections, digital preservation), and as these positions were not
highlighted via the four position descriptions, that work is not reflected in that section.
yet another silo in the organization. Ensure that you are doing what your website and promotional
materials state. That leads to legitimacy. Growing pains are normal.
Our support for digital scholarship relies heavily on a number of librarians and staff wearing multiple
hats, and although their chief duties may lie in DS support, they are not devoted to it. At the moment
our Center for Digital Scholarship is a little unusual in that it does not have faculty leadership.
Some of the key roles the library plays on this campus that aren’t addressed by the survey include
building strong partnerships with other units around campus. We have relied on partnerships with
subject librarians as well to serve as marketing channels and expertise in supporting digital scholarship
discipline by discipline. Finally, we have made a concerted effort to not duplicate services available
elsewhere on campus. This has been a conscious choice and will continue to inform services and
referrals to other expertise available to researchers.
The directorate for digital scholarship is very new, so our documents and plans are being created.
Please excuse the sparseness of our responses!
The Libraries have significant resources to provide as “raw material” for DS through its strong
collections, in particular historic audio, photographs, video, and film.
The responses in this survey do not incorporate the activities of the Libraries’ Program on Information
Science. This program is deeply involved in a number of ways in various aspects of digital scholarship.
It wasn’t included, because it doesn’t directly develop or support services to the community. That
doesn’t detract from the value of the research, but noting those activities in the body of the survey
might have painted an inaccurate picture about organizational support for DS.
There is a trend across academic institutions that sees some of the organizations that formerly lived
in central IT moving into provostial or library organizations. These include centers for teaching and
learning, instructional technologies, research technologies, academic media resources, and educational
technologies. As IT units focus on infrastructure, cloud sourcing, and business systems, those services
that face faculty and students will be less central to the core IT functions. Libraries of the future should
be prepared to incorporate these services, many of which are essential tools for digital scholarship.
We are a very fragmented, decentralized institution. As such, a large and wide variety of activities may
be taking place with little or no knowledge outside the small circles of directly impacted individuals
and entities.
We are growing in this area, and it’s clear that librarians and other professionals from across the library
have been supporting facets of DS over the years. Coordinating those efforts is something we’re keen
to do.
We have a joint faculty position in digital humanities that will be recruited and hired in the near future.
The Research Services Strategic Initiative is moving from an initiative into the implementation of
a formal research data services group. We have a team of developers who work on our institutional
repository and other digital projects within the library.
We have many pieces of the digital scholarship puzzle in place. The recent recruitment of a Digital
Initiatives and Scholarship Librarian will help us bring these pieces together into a cohesive program
to support our students and scholars, initially creating a virtual space while planning and developing a
physical space.
We use the librarians in systems for development work, and there is a need for dedicated development
to support DS activities. Our “Digital Library” area covers much of what is referred to as DS activity
(scanning, metadata, digital collections, digital preservation), and as these positions were not
highlighted via the four position descriptions, that work is not reflected in that section.
