Building Collaborative Relationships through Digital Projects

The Rowan Public Art project (http://publicart.rowan.edu) is an online, interactive digital scholarship website of campus public art. The project includes descriptions of Rowan\u27s public art including original photography and video, an interactive campus map, and links to library resources on the art, the artists, and public art in general. Digital scholarship projects like this offer libraries ways to collaborate across campus, position the library as leaders in collaboration, and demonstrate that the library is an effective collaboration partner. This project has allowed us to support the efforts and successes of others across campus. We have collaborated in the creation of this project with entities as diverse as University Publications, University Planning, the Rowan University Art Gallery, and the Department of Art. All of them have contributed in significant ways to accomplishing this project. Since we have launched this project additional collaborations have been initiated and proposed. The Department of Geography is already using it for course material in urban geography and public art and as a result are now partnering with us on a new project to collect data related to public art. A writing arts instructor is planning to use this project as a core piece of her composition class. This project is but a piece of our long term goals with the Digital Scholarship Center at Rowan University Libraries. Soon similar digital scholarship projects will be initiated to develop research and creative opportunities, curricular assets, community outreach, and student and faculty success. These projects serve as models for effective collaboration across campus and transform the library into an organization that directly supports campus initiatives and goals. Mike and Jon will discuss this project and how it fits within the libraries\u27 plans with digital scholarship and collaboration

Classifying Data Deposited by Scientists into a Library\u27s Data Repository

In 2014, a team of librarians at Brown University began a concerted effort to ingest, describe, and publish scientific data and digital scholarship into the Brown Library’s data repository, the Brown Digital Repository (BDR). The Library targeted outreach towards student, staff, and faculty researchers in the sciences to encourage them to deposit their digital scholarship, such as digital research products related to grants and data related to their publications, into the BDR. This poster presents a snapshot of the types of scholarship that were deposited by scientists during a 2-year period and classifies the nature of these digital objects. The authors looked at the total number of files deposited by scientists over this period and created a tool to classify and categorize these objects in order to characterize the nature of digital scholarship that scientists were depositing. The instrument classified these objects into several categories and subcategories based on concrete criteria. The first category described digital objects associated with a publication. Data in this category were further classified into the subcategories “underlying data” and “supplementary data”. Underlying data included files that contained the results reported in the publication, files necessary for the peer review of the paper’s reported results and/or necessary for replication or reproduction of research results, such as code that was used to analyze results. The supplementary data were files accompanying a publication, including tables, graphs or visualizations that were not able to be included in the paper or were referenced by authors. The second category was files created by student, staff or faculty researchers not related to a publication but could stand alone as scholarly products equivalent to a publication, such as research posters, animations, visualizations, or software. The last category described digital collections, and included three subcategories: legacy data, digital libraries, and grants. Legacy data were digital products published by retiring faculty or faculty nearing the end of their research careers. Digital libraries included the published collections of scientific data not associated with a single publication. These collections could be published by individual researchers, a collaborative team, labs, and/or departments, and their purpose is to make these items available for other researchers to access and reuse. Lastly, the subcategory grant data contained collections of scientific data and/or other types of digital scholarship associated with a funded-project. These collections could be published by individual researchers, a collaborative team, labs, and/or departments, and the purpose is to disseminate items resulting from sponsored research and/or make these resulting grant-funded digital objects available for other researchers and/or the public

Designing Research Libraries for Digital Scholarship Innovation: Exploring Global Practices to Revitalize Local Strategies

Digital publishing, new business models, open access policies, and social networking have created opportunities for research libraries to engage in scholarly communication at a deeper level across the scholarly knowledge cycle. Libraries are extending their roles into repository management for a wider array of resources, and expanding into hosting and publishing books and journals. They are providing education, consultation, production, curation, and evaluation services, particularly on copyright and licensing; open access and data mandates; and author identifiers and impact. They are participating in software development, digital humanities, computational research, and advocacy for change in the scholarly communication system, collaborating locally and globally on migration to open textbooks and journals. The digital revolution has resulted in new positions, teams, and units; but there is no standard model, with significant variation in how digital scholarship is practiced, presented, prioritized, and promoted in libraries. Our research offers a cross-cultural perspective on scholarly communication support, structures, strategies, staffing, and services in America, Asia, Australasia, and Europe. We provide a tour of salient examples, identifying similarities and differences, and highlighting innovative thinking and practice. Our objective is to prompt reflection and encourage debate around alternative ways of fulfilling our mission in the open scholarship ecosystem

Columbia’s Evolving Research Data Storage Strategy

The Academic Commons repository hosted by the Columbia University Libraries / Information Services’(CUL/IS) Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) continues to not only collect and preserve the scholarship of the faculty, but also to make it accessible through search and discovery tools. The scholarly products preserved by Academic Commons are not limited to datasets and raw data, but may additionally include works based on those data such as articles, book chapters, essays, monographs, working papers, technical reports, conference presentations, multimedia creations (e.g., simulations, three-dimensional maps), and other materials in digital formats. As the scale and types of data being generated by research are constantly, and respectively, growing and evolving, CUL/IS is developing policies, procedures, communications, and training to accommodate these transformations

Different views on Digital Scholarship: separate worlds or cohesive research field?

This article presents a systematic review of the literature on Digital Scholarship, aimed at better understanding the collocation of this research area at the crossroad of several disciplines and strands of research. The authors analysed 45 articlesin order to draw a picture of research in this area. In the first phase, the articles were classified, and relevant quantitative and qualitative data were analysed. Results showed that three clear strands of research do exist: Digital Libraries, Networked Scholarship and Digital Humanities. Moreover, researchers involved in this research area tackle the problems related to technological uptake in the scholar's profession from different points of view, and define the field in different – often complementary – ways, thus generating the perception of a research area still in need of a unifying vision. In the second phase, authors searched for evidence of the disciplinary contributions and interdisciplinary cohesion of research carried out in this area through the use of bibliometric maps. Results suggest that the area of Digital Scholarship, still in its infancy, is advancing in a rather fragmented way, shaping itself around the above-mentioned strands, each with its own research agenda. However, results from the cross-citation analysis suggest that the Networked Scholarship strand is more cohesive than the others in terms of cross-citations