The latest installment in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) series highlighting digital scholarship support at ARL member libraries features the work of Temple University.
The Temple profile, written by ARL visiting program officer Catherine Davidson, presents a brief history of the evolution of digital scholarship support at the university, focusing on the Digital Scholarship Center (DSC). Established in 2015 through extensive collaboration by diverse units across campus representing many disciplines, the DSC serves as the central hub of digital scholarship support for the university. From the planning phase forward, the DSC has been characterized by experimentation and recalibration while working towards achieving its goals.
This profile describes the current work of the Digital Scholarship Center, including information about the space, resources, staffing, collaboration, and programs. The profile concludes with a look toward the future. The center’s leadership wants the DSC to be a bona fide research center in its own right, generating new scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts.
Three projects in progress are featured in the Temple profile: the LGBTQ Video Game Archive links to and summarizes information about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) content in video games; the Gen Con Event Program Database will provide digitized, searchable programs from the past 50 years of Gen Con, a culturally significant gaming convention first held in 1967; and Knowledge Change in Historical Editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica is tracking the transformation of cultural concepts by applying textual analysis tools to editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1797 to 1911.
To read each of the profiles in this series as they are published, watch the ARL website, follow ARL on Facebook or Twitter, or subscribe to ARL e-mail announcements or news or to the profiles RSS feed.
About the Association of Research Libraries
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at ARL.org.
