Supporting Digital Scholarship

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.

"This SPEC Kit explores how library roles are evolving as multimodal and collaborative scholarship become more visible in the research landscape and how the emergence of these newly identified roles influence the work of library staff. This study covers the types of support libraries offer researchers, how the individuals involved in digital scholarship activities are positioned within the library organization, their range of responsibilities, collaboration with partners inside and outside the library, how support for digital scholarship activities is funded, and how it is assessed, among other questions."--Publisher's web site.

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.

"This SPEC Kit explores how library roles are evolving as multimodal and collaborative scholarship become more visible in the research landscape and how the emergence of these newly identified roles influence the work of library staff. This study covers the types of support libraries offer researchers, how the individuals involved in digital scholarship activities are positioned within the library organization, their range of responsibilities, collaboration with partners inside and outside the library, how support for digital scholarship activities is funded, and how it is assessed, among other questions."--Publisher's web site.

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.

Many in the world of scholarship share the conviction that open access will be the engine of transformation leading to more culture, more research, more discovery, and more solutions to small and big problems. This collection brings together librarians, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and thinkers to take measure of the open access movement. The editors meld critical essays, research, and case studies to offer an authoritative exploration of the concept of openness in scholarship, with an overview of how it is evolving in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia; open access publishing, including funding models and the future of library science journals; the state of institutional repositories; Open Educational Resources (OER) at universities and a consortium, in subject areas ranging from literary studies to textbooks; and open science, open data, and a pilot data catalog for raising the visibility of protected data.

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.

Digital scholarship is the incorporation of computational techniques and digital tools to traditional scholarly research. Digital scholarship has shown great potential for transforming humanities studies, and humanities researchers have long used computer technology to support their work. However, the application of computational techniques is far less common. Applying computational techniques would enable humanists to solve problems that historically have been too difficult. Archivists can now consider ways to allow researchers access to rare materials, and Librarians can provide personalized help and recommendations for subjects they themselves may not be familiar with. Digital Scholarship provides a brief grounding in the history of digital scholarship by introducing several of the main areas in which digital techniques can enhance scholarly information processing. Subsequent chapters cover metadata and issues of born-digital artefacts. The remaining chapters move on to text analytics, analyzing information and conclude with social issues of digital scholarship. Provide readers a grounding in the history and theory of digital scholarship using the humanities as an area of focus Instruct readers on the use of common tools for collection processing, collection presentation, and collection analysis Combines the discussion on a range of topics with practical tutorials and sample projects to help readers understand both the theory and practice of digital scholarship so that they may apply it to their own work