The University Library and Digital Scholarship a Review
The University Library and Digital Scholarship: a Review of the Literature Lindsey Martin Edge Hill University
Starting Point • What is scholarship? • What is digital scholarship (DS) – and what are the scholarly practices associated with it? • How have libraries and librarians positioned themselves to better engage with and support DS and associated scholarly practices?
What is Scholarship?
What is Scholarship? Ernest Boyer’s categories of scholarship Discovery is, for Boyer, what was usually referred to as ‘research’. He describes discovery as disciplined, investigative efforts within the academy leading to the discovery of new knowledge. Integration Disciplined work across disciplines where fields converge; that seeks to question, interpret, place one’s own and others research within a wider context and draw out new insights. Application New intellectual understandings arise out of applying the outcomes of discovery to in the real world - creating interactions between theory and practice that benefit government and society. Teaching Beyond transmitting information to learners, teaching as scholarship is transformative through reading, activity, discussion. Teaching as scholarship shapes research and practice by extending both learner and teacher in creative new directions.
What is Digital Scholarship?
So … what is Digital Scholarship? • Consensus that technologies impacted on scholarly practices but no consensus on what constitutes digital scholarship – portrayed as a binary divide between disciplines • Is it an ideology? “More than just using information and communication technologies to research, teach and collaborate; it also includes embracing the open values, ideology and potential of technologies born of peer-to-peer networking and wiki ways of working in order to benefit both the academic and society. ” Weller, 2011, 50 “It is rooted in an ethical pursuit of democratisation, human rights, equality and justice. ” Veletsianos and Kimmons, 2012, 181
What do we know about digital scholars and their practices? • An under-researched area populated with self-ethnographies • Only 5 empirical studies 2010 – 2016 • Offers some insight into the mindsets and practices of participants • For some • Pragmatic – want to see discernible benefit before use • Traditionally ‘digital’ moderately ‘networked’ and occasionally ‘open’ • For others • Digital scholarship is a ‘mindset’ with commitment to openness and open access as key to scholars practices • Almost no reference to libraries or librarians and what they can offer
Policy, incentives, pragmatism shaping scholarly practices • Research behaviors and practices are “directly shaped by systems of evaluation, changing funding patterns and priorities. Existing evaluation and reward structures tend to lead to conflicting incentives in relation to scientific and scholarly communication. ” (Houghton et al, 2003, xi) • UK REF metrics still largely derived from the publication of research outputs in peer reviewed journals • US - tenure issues impact on adoption of networked/open practices • Open data has potential to be a game changer
How have Libraries Responded?
Four themes emerged from the literature • The emergence of digital scholarship centres, • Changing roles, new roles and the emerging skills gap, • Moving from a service model to engagement, partnership and collaboration with scholars, • Strategy and leadership: balancing sustainable practices and innovation BUT there are too few critically reflective studies that evidence how together, strategic leadership, new service models and innovative practice that is sustainable and/ or scalable are having a real impact within their institutions
DS Centres / Changing Roles • DS centres are an area of library activity that is mostly policy ‘light’, with staffing and support provided in an ad hoc manner • Some agreement that as with changing research agenda and research workflows, new library roles are emerging and that existing roles are changing – with ‘hybrid roles’ blurring the lines between scholar, library and technical roles • Impact greatest on subject librarian roles – with attendant skills gaps (Auckland, 2012) • Changing roles - when … not if
Engagement, partnerships and collaboration • Evidence of: • Case studies especially around DS Centres and project work • Activities relating to engaging with scholars in their workflows: • Some references to ‘embedded librarians’ • Use of marketing segmentation, business intelligence, user surveys • Leaving the library – committee, networks and event attendance • What is missing, however, is evidence of how librarians are deepening their engagement in scholarly workflows and the added value or impact of that engagement • References to librarians “timidity”, “academic inferiority complex” and “vocation of servitude” – this mindset seen as the key challenge to successfully engaging and collaborating with scholars
Strategy and leadership: balancing sustainability and innovation • Most of the literature points to an ad hoc approach to service provision and resourcing • Nearly 2/3 of US academic library directors in Ithaka S+R survey (Marcum, 2014) reported their libraries had not undertaken sufficient strategic planning to meet user needs and manage collections in the digital era • Overall message is of significant challenges that libraries face in order to appear relevant to scholars • Some consensus that libraries must decide at a strategic, team and individual level what is no longer a priority and can be discontinued in order to redirect time or resource to new areas of importance (Vinopal and Mc. Cormack, 2013)
Concluding Thoughts
Challenges & opportunities • Scholars are seemingly unaware of librarians’ expertise and are uninformed about services available to them – so they bypass the library as a source of support • Librarians tend not to fully understand what their scholars need • Ad hoc-ness in how service models and staff roles develop • Libraries are not writing about how they strategically and systematically support digital innovation, scholarly activity and librarian skills development • No exchange of ideas with scholars through the traditional channels of scholarly communication – publish more widely! • Blurring of the lines between publishers’ platforms and academic social media sites provide many opportunities for librarians who understand the territory and can advise on the difficult grey areas around copyright and paid-for publishing models (Bosman and Kramer, 2015)
Digital scholarship activity across Boyer’s framework and where librarians are adding value to scholars workflows Discovery New insights, cross-discipline, new knowledge created. Sharing of datasets and related activity: management, analysis, visualisation Digitisation of primary sources Networking and virtual communities of practice Visual and data literacy Application Public engagement and influence via social media – blogs, twitter, You. Tube Personal ‘brand’, online persona and ‘voice’ - and identity management Integration Publishing models, open publication, peer review Collaborative working on texts e. g. blogging Open access repositories for scholarly outputs and data Digital Scholarship Centres and Makerspaces Teaching Information literacy and digital skills Reproducible and sharable OERs and Open Data. Open Educational Practices Digitisation of primary sources Discoverability, discovery tools & repositories UG scholarship – students as producers – publishing,
References Auckland, M. (2012) Re-skilling for Research: An investigation into the role and skills of subject and liaison librarians required to effectively support the evolving information needs of researchers. RLUK http: //www. rluk. ac. uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/RLUK-Re-skilling. pdf Bosman, J. and Kramer, B. (2015) 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are getting to grip with the myriad of new tools. Available from http: //blogs. lse. ac. uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/11/11/101 -innovations-in-scholarly-communication/ Boyer, E. (1990) Scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, N. J: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Davidson, J. (2014) Supporting early-career researchers in data management and curation. In: Mackenzie, A. , and Martin, L. (eds) Mastering digital librarianship: strategy, networking and discovery in academic libraries. London, Facet Publishing. Houghton, J. , Steele, C. and Henty, M. (2003) Changing research practices in the digital information and communication environment. Technical Report, Department of Education, Science and Training, Canberra, Australia, at http: //eprints. vu. edu. au/456/ Lankes, D. (2014) On productivity: introducing a blog series on reinventing the academic library. R. David Lankes. http: //davidlankes. org/? p=6510 Marcum, D. (2014) The Digital Transformation of Information, Education, and Scholarship. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 8 (supplement), pp. 1 -11. Veletsianos, G. , and Kimmons, R. , (2012) Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 13(4), pp. 166 -189. Vinopal. L, J. , and Mc. Cormack, M. , (2013) Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability. Journal of Library Administration, 53(1). Weller, M. (2011) The digital scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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