The latest installment in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) series highlighting digital scholarship support at ARL member libraries features the work of the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU).
The CWRU 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 Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship. Established in 2005 as a partnership between CWRU’s Kelvin Smith Library and the College of Arts and Sciences, the Freedman Center has since expanded its mission to provide digital scholarhip services for the entire university. The center encourages openness and collaboration in its overall approach, for example, hosting a Collaboration Commons that provides space for researchers to connect and interact.
This profile describes the current work of the Freedman Center, including information about funding, staffing, collaboration, programs, and services. The profile concludes with a look toward the future. The center hopes to build on the trust and culture it has created within the CWRU community, strengthening faculty and student engagement with the center and deepening collaborations between faculty and librarians.
The Freedman Fellows program is featured in the profile. This is a competitive program that has awarded funding to a few, select, full-time, CWRU faculty each year since 2005. The program is supported by the Freedman Fellows Endowment by Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman, the Kelvin Smith Library, and the College of Arts and Sciences. Three research projects by former fellows are highlighted in the profile.
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.
