The latest installment in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) series highlighting digital scholarship support at ARL member libraries features the work of the New York University (NYU) Libraries.
The NYU 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 Services (DSS) department. Established in 2013, DSS partners with several affiliated departments to offer a wide range of support, from repository services, digital publishing, and website creation and hosting to digital humanities tools and methods, copyright and fair use expertise, and digital scholarship workshops.
This profile describes the current work of the Digital Scholarship Services department, including information about collaboration, staffing, services, workshops, and funding. The profile concludes with a reminder—from a 2013 analysis that informed the structure and service model of DSS—that research library leadership in digital scholarship services requires “an organizational culture that is inquisitive, adaptable, responsive, and that welcomes change, one that is willing to try new things, assess their success, and sometimes simply move on.”
Three projects are featured in the profile: Web Hosting, a service that provides users with flexible web space and customizable hosting platforms, as well as command-line and FTP access to web development technologies; Spatial Data Repository, NYU’s platform for storage and discovery of geospatial data, which makes GIS content held by multiple institutions available via a single interface; and Displaced Histories, an example of a collaboration between DSS and a faculty member interested in having her students build Omeka exhibits for their final project.
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 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 ARL.org.
