The Culture Of Digital Scholarship In Academic Libraries

At the heart of digital scholarship are universal questions, lessons, and principles relating both to the mission of higher education and the shared values that make an academic library culture. But while global in aspirations, digital scholarship starts with local culture drawn from the community.

Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries examines the library's role in the development, implementation, and instruction of successful digital humanities projects. It pays special attention to the critical role of librarians in building sustainable programs. It also examines how libraries can support the use of digital scholarship tools and techniques in undergraduate education. Academic libraries are nexuses of research and technology; as such, they provide fertile ground for cultivating and curating digital scholarship. However, adding digital humanities to library service models requires a clear understanding of the resources and skills required. Integrating digital scholarship into existing models calls for a reimagining of the roles of libraries and librarians. In many cases, these reimagined roles call for expanded responsibilities, often in the areas of collaborative instruction and digital asset management, and in turn these expanded responsibilities can strain already stretched resources.Laying the Foundation provides practical solutions to the challenges of successfully incorporating digital humanities programs into existing library services. Collectively, its authors argue that librarians are critical resources for teaching digital humanities to undergraduate students and that libraries are essential for publishing, preserving, and making accessible digital scholarship.

This book provides strategic insights drawn from librarians who are meeting the challenge of digital scholarship, utilizing the latest technologies and creating new knowledge in partnership with researchers, scholars, colleagues and students. The impact of digital on libraries has extended far beyond its transformation of content, to the development of services, the extension and enhancement of access to research and to teaching and learning systems. As a result,the fluidity of the digital environment can often be at odds with the more systematic approaches to development traditionally taken by academic libraries, which has also led to a new generation of roles and shifting responsibilities with staff training and development often playing ‘catch-up’. One of the key challenges to emerge is how best to demonstrate expertise in digital scholarship which draws on the specialist technical knowledge of the profession and maintains and grows its relevance for staff, students and researchers. This edited collection spans a wide range of contrasting perspectives, contexts, insights and case studies, which explore the relationships between digital scholarship, contemporary academic libraries and professional practice. The book demonstrates that there are opportunities to be bold, remodel, trial new approaches and reposition the library as a key partner in the process of digital scholarship. Content covered includes: • the impact of digital scholarship on organizational strategies • an insight into new services and roles, partnerships and collaborations • case studies exploring new technologies to support research and development • new approaches to service delivery • re-visioning of space, physical and virtual. This is an essential guide for librarians and information professionals involved in digital scholarship and communication, who wish to extend their awareness of emerging practices, as well as library administrators and students studying library and information science.

Collecting important original essays by librarians and archivists - all of whom are actively engaged in building digital collections - Digital Scholarship details both challenges and proven solutions in establishing, maintaining, and servicing digital scholarship in the humanities. This volume further explores the ways in which the humanities have benefited from the ability to digitize text and page images of historic documents, mine large corpuses of texts and other forms of records, and assemble widely dispersed cultural objects into common repositories for comparison and analysis--making new research questions and methods possible for the first time. The ten notable scholars included in Digital Scholarship offer a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to digitization, reporting both progress and problems, examining new business models, new forms of partnerships, and the new technologies and resources that make many more library and archival services available. Librarians and library staff everywhere will find Digital Scholarship an essential text for the modern library and an illuminating resource for anyone looking to understand the changing face of research in the electronic age.

Collecting important original essays by librarians and archivists – all of whom are actively engaged in building digital collections – Digital Scholarship details both challenges and proven solutions in establishing, maintaining, and servicing digital scholarship in the humanities. This volume further explores the ways in which the humanities have benefited from the ability to digitize text and page images of historic documents, mine large corpuses of texts and other forms of records, and assemble widely dispersed cultural objects into common repositories for comparison and analysis--making new research questions and methods possible for the first time. The ten notable scholars included in Digital Scholarship offer a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to digitization, reporting both progress and problems, examining new business models, new forms of partnerships, and the new technologies and resources that make many more library and archival services available. Librarians and library staff everywhere will find Digital Scholarship an essential text for the modern library and an illuminating resource for anyone looking to understand the changing face of research in the electronic age.

The digital humanities in academic institutions, and libraries in particular, have exploded in recent years. Librarians are constantly developing their management and technological skills and increasing their knowledge base. As they continue to embed themselves in the scholarly conversations on campus, the challenges facing subject/liaison librarians, technical service librarians, and library administrators are many. This comprehensive volume highlights the wide variety of theoretical issues discussed, initiatives pursued, and projects implemented by academic librarians. Many of the chapters deal with digital humanities pedagogy—planning and conducting training workshops, institutes, semester-long courses, embedded librarian instruction, and instructional assessment—with some chapters focusing specifically on applications of the “ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” The authors also explore a wide variety of other topics, including the emotional labor of librarians; the challenges of transforming static traditional collections into dynamic, user-centered, digital projects; conceptualizing and creating models of collaboration; digital publishing; and developing and planning projects including improving one’s own project management skills. This collection effectively illustrates how librarians are enabling themselves through active research partnerships in an ever-changing scholarly environment. This book was originally published as a special triple issue of the journal College & Undergraduate Libraries.

This landmark collection will help readers understand the open access movement, open data, open educational resources, open knowledge, and the opportunities for an open and transformed world they promise.

This inspiring book will enable academic librarians to develop excellent research and instructional services and create a library culture that encompasses exploration, learning and collaboration. Higher education and academic libraries are in a period of rapid evolution. Technology, pedagogical shifts, and programmatic changes in education mean that libraries must continually evaluate and adjust their services to meet new needs. Research and learning across institutions is becoming more team-based, crossing disciplines and dependent on increasingly sophisticated and varied data. To provide valuable services in this shifting, diverse environment, libraries must think about new ways to support research on their campuses, including collaborating across library and departmental boundaries. This book is intended to enrich and expand your vision of research support in academic libraries by: Inspiring you to think creatively about new services. Sparking ideas of potential collaborations within and outside the library, increasing awareness of functional areas that are potential key partners. Providing specific examples of new services, as well as the decision-making and implementation process. Encouraging you to take a broad view of research support rather than thinking of research and instruction services, metadata creation and data services etc as separate initiatives. Dynamic Research Support in Academic Libraries provides illustrative examples of emerging models of research support and is contributed to by library practitioners from across the world. The book is divided into three sections: Part I: Training and Infrastructure, which describes the role of staff development and library spaces in research support Part II: Data Services and Data Literacy, which sets out why the rise of research data services in universities is critical to supporting the current provision of student skills that will help develop them as data-literate citizens. Part III: Research as a Conversation, which discusses academic library initiatives to support the dissemination, discovery and critical analysis of research. This is an essential guide for librarians and information professionals involved in supporting research and scholarly communication, as well as library administrators and students studying library and information science.

As new technology and opportunities emerge through the revolutionary impacts of the digital age, the function of libraries and librarians and how they provide services to constituents is rapidly changing. The impact of new technology touches everything from libraries' organizational structures, business models, and workflow processes, to position descriptions and the creation of new positions. As libraries are required to make operational adjustments to meet the growing technological demands of libraries' customer bases and provide these services, librarians must be flexible in adapting to this fast-moving environment. This volume shares the unique perspectives and experiences of librarians on the front lines of this technological transformation. The essays within provide details of both the practical applications of surviving, adapting, and growing when confronted with changing roles and responsibilities, as well as a big picture perspective of the changing roles impacting libraries and librarians. This book strives to be a valuable tool for librarians involved in public and technical services, digital humanities, virtual and augmented reality, government documents, information technology, and scholarly communication.

Digital Humanities is a burgeoning field of research and education concerned with the intersection of technology and history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, music, cultural studies, and the arts. Supporting Digital Humanities for Knowledge Acquisition in Modern Libraries aims to stand at the forefront of this emerging discipline, targeting an audience of researchers and academicians, with a special focus on the role of libraries and library staff. In addition to a collection of chapters on crucial issues surrounding the digital humanities, this volume also includes a fascinating account of the painstaking restoration efforts surrounding a 110-year-old handwritten historical source document, the results of which (never before published on this scale) culminate in a full-color, 70-page photographic reproduction of the 1904 Diary of Anna Clift Smith.