Collaborating Across Units and Institutions to Support Digital Scholarship

Abstract

Unlike much traditional scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, digital scholarship and digital humanities projects often require support teams with a wide range of expertise from across the institution. Libraries play key roles at many stages of a digital project’s lifecycle, from consultation, to training, to project management. Although some features of successful models for collaboration will be unique to the institution, many strategies will be widely applicable in the liberal arts context. In this discussion, we briefly described three recent examples of successful collaborations at Middlebury College: the first was a pilot program for hosting and supporting Omeka and Neatline instances from conception to preservation; the second was a four-day Liberal Arts Data Bootcamp that introduced faculty and academic staff to data management basics and demonstrated ways that data is, or might be, applied in the liberal arts context (e.g. data visualization, mapping, and text mining); the third was the in-process development of a digital repository, hosting faculty/student/staff scholarship, including articles, datasets, and materials from Special Collections and Archives.

Ryan Clement

Data Services Librarian

I help students, faculty, and staff find, use, and visualize data and other information. My research interests include information and data literacy, data visualization, library assessment, and user experience/service design.