The latest installment in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) series highlighting digital scholarship support at ARL member libraries features the work of the Duke University Libraries.
The Duke University profile, written by ARL visiting program officer Catherine Davidson, presents a brief history of the evolution of digital scholarship support at the university, highlighting The Edge: The Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology, and Collaboration. The Edge was established in 2015 in response to a research commons exploratory committee recommendation to create a physical space that would bring digital activities together in a centralized way. A visioning workshop that included faculty, students, administrators, and library staff played a foundational role in planning the space, which enables an integrated approach to the delivery of digital scholarship services.
This profile describes the current work of The Edge, including information about staffing, workspaces, programming, services, and collaboration. The profile concludes with a brief discussion of how the Duke University Libraries are looking to the future to expand connections with strategic partners across campus through “scholarly engagement platforms,” such as The Edge.
Four established projects are featured in the profile: SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Legacy Project, which chronicles the historic struggles for voting rights in the United States and develops programs to foster a more civil and inclusive democracy; Project Vox, an online resource and international research initiative that aims to restore the voices of early modern women philosophers through traditional and digital publishing efforts; Sonic Dictionary, a collection of recordings curated by students from Duke and other collaborating institutions, developed to fill a gap in audio culture resources; and MorphoSource, an open data archive of 3-D images of skeletal specimens contributed by registered users.
To read each of the profiles in this series as they are published, watch the ARL website, follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or subscribe to our e-mail news lists or the profiles RSS feed.
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/.
