29 SPEC Kit 350: Supporting Digital Scholarship
Due to limited resources at present (Digital Scholarship vacancies), we focus on affiliated researchers
and/or affiliated projects.
External researchers collaborating with affiliated researchers.
“External Researchers” may not be exactly right here, but I wanted to capture the fact that we have
digital projects that include researchers from other institutions. So it is a formal relationship. We don’t
support external researchers with whom we don’t have a project-based relationship.
Faculty and graduate researchers are the primary non-library clientele of the Libraries Digital
Scholarship Center. However, advanced undergraduates researchers are also welcome.
The DSC manages the institutional repository, which publishes undergraduate work with
departmental approval.
In practice most support is given to affiliated researchers. Many types of support are also available
to external researchers and the general public but we do not target those groups when advertising or
promoting the services.
Publishing available to any faculty, staff affiliated with a Canadian Institution Digital Collection
management available to general public, based on research value of materials (and grant funding).
University-affiliated faculty, staff, and students
We are a land grant institution, therefore we serve the general public. We also have many collaborative
relationships across institutions and countries, therefore we also serve external researchers.
We provide support for limited activities.
3. Please enter any additional comments you may have about available digital scholarship support
for researchers at your institution. N=35
Developing regional digitization service planning and digital humanities research education studio
Digital Scholarship support is intended to support the academic mission of the university and to
provide the mechanisms for sharing products of research.
Digital scholarship support ranges from consultation on a project to creating a data visualization or
a map.
For this service, we considered providing guidance and advice as a service. Many digital scholarship
software and activities were created for in-house purposes (within the Libraries) but have been adapted
by other institutions.
In the library: There is a lot of digital scholarship expertise distributed throughout the library, however,
not one central place for researchers (or even other librarians) to know who to contact about what.
Short of a digital scholarship center, we could perhaps maintain a list of folks’ expertise or have a
shared email to direct patron questions to. The other issue is scale—while we are well equipped to point
people to resources and provide basic training and outreach (i.e., workshops and activities like OA
week) to introduce researchers to these concepts, there is a limit to how much we can help beyond that.
As individual faculty members we can only collaborate in-depth on one or two projects at a time. It is
also difficult to do outreach and share this expertise, as all of us have other duties, i.e., as liaisons, and
there is no one person or group tasked with coordinating these activities (a sizeable task). Elsewhere in
the institution: Here I am referring primarily to the Digital Arts and Humanities initiative on campus.
In addition to being a loose network of interested parties, they collaborate more intensively with a
number of scholars advising on a range of questions from project planning to development. The issue
is that this does not scale well if demand is higher than availability. Support for all kinds of DS activity
is available outside of the institution, ranging from free tutorials (i.e., DH Answers, Programming
Due to limited resources at present (Digital Scholarship vacancies), we focus on affiliated researchers
and/or affiliated projects.
External researchers collaborating with affiliated researchers.
“External Researchers” may not be exactly right here, but I wanted to capture the fact that we have
digital projects that include researchers from other institutions. So it is a formal relationship. We don’t
support external researchers with whom we don’t have a project-based relationship.
Faculty and graduate researchers are the primary non-library clientele of the Libraries Digital
Scholarship Center. However, advanced undergraduates researchers are also welcome.
The DSC manages the institutional repository, which publishes undergraduate work with
departmental approval.
In practice most support is given to affiliated researchers. Many types of support are also available
to external researchers and the general public but we do not target those groups when advertising or
promoting the services.
Publishing available to any faculty, staff affiliated with a Canadian Institution Digital Collection
management available to general public, based on research value of materials (and grant funding).
University-affiliated faculty, staff, and students
We are a land grant institution, therefore we serve the general public. We also have many collaborative
relationships across institutions and countries, therefore we also serve external researchers.
We provide support for limited activities.
3. Please enter any additional comments you may have about available digital scholarship support
for researchers at your institution. N=35
Developing regional digitization service planning and digital humanities research education studio
Digital Scholarship support is intended to support the academic mission of the university and to
provide the mechanisms for sharing products of research.
Digital scholarship support ranges from consultation on a project to creating a data visualization or
a map.
For this service, we considered providing guidance and advice as a service. Many digital scholarship
software and activities were created for in-house purposes (within the Libraries) but have been adapted
by other institutions.
In the library: There is a lot of digital scholarship expertise distributed throughout the library, however,
not one central place for researchers (or even other librarians) to know who to contact about what.
Short of a digital scholarship center, we could perhaps maintain a list of folks’ expertise or have a
shared email to direct patron questions to. The other issue is scale—while we are well equipped to point
people to resources and provide basic training and outreach (i.e., workshops and activities like OA
week) to introduce researchers to these concepts, there is a limit to how much we can help beyond that.
As individual faculty members we can only collaborate in-depth on one or two projects at a time. It is
also difficult to do outreach and share this expertise, as all of us have other duties, i.e., as liaisons, and
there is no one person or group tasked with coordinating these activities (a sizeable task). Elsewhere in
the institution: Here I am referring primarily to the Digital Arts and Humanities initiative on campus.
In addition to being a loose network of interested parties, they collaborate more intensively with a
number of scholars advising on a range of questions from project planning to development. The issue
is that this does not scale well if demand is higher than availability. Support for all kinds of DS activity
is available outside of the institution, ranging from free tutorials (i.e., DH Answers, Programming
