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ARL Libraries Support Digital Scholarship—Profiles to Be Published This Spring and Summer

Creativity Studio, Hunt Library, North Carolina State University (NCSU), image by Marc Hall for NCSU

Digital scholarship—the use of computer technology to conduct research and scholarship—is at its heart an iterative and collaborative process that increasingly turns to library resources, staff, and faculty to reach fruition. To highlight efforts to support such collaboration and begin to offer insights into the challenges of such work, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) will be publishing a series of profiles of digital scholarship centers at ARL member institutions beginning this week.

Our broad definition of digital scholarship can include, but is not limited to: data analysis and visualization, GIS and digital mapping, computational text analysis, text encoding, digitization and imaging, audio, 3–D modeling, digital collections and exhibits, and metadata creation. The affordances of such tools and data sets not only increase access, but also generate new possibilities for interactive use and reuse. They allow for hybrid scholarship that uses multiple channels to present research and that can combine print and web-based text, video, audio, and still image, annotation, and new modes of multithreaded, nonlinear discourse that can exist only online.

A number of ARL member libraries support digital scholarship with innovative programs that approach the collection and curation of digital images, text, and sound, and the creation of tools to work with these materials as core parts of the institution’s mission. To provide context, the profile series is kicking off today with a brief history and overview of digital scholarship support in ARL libraries.

Watch the ARL website, follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or subscribe to our e-mail news lists or the profiles RSS feed to read each of the profiles as they are published throughout the spring and summer.


About the Association of Research Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 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 https://www.arl.org/.

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