The latest installment in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) series highlighting digital scholarship support at ARL member libraries features the work of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The University of North Carolina (UNC) 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 UNC Library Research Hub, made up of three distinct hubs, each with its own unique focus: the Hub @ Davis Library, the Hub @ Health Sciences Library, and the Hub & Makerspace @ Kenan Science Library.
This profile describes the current work of the hubs, including information about staffing, spaces, programs, collaboration, and outreach. Looking to the future, Carol Hunter, interim university librarian and vice provost for University Libraries, said: “I see the UNC Libraries and in particular the Research Hub as THE HUB for empowering digital research and scholarship at UNC in the next 5–10 years. As research becomes ever more connected and collaborative, we will provide Carolina faculty, staff, and students the space, tools, and information assistance they need to successfully conduct research and manage research results.”
Three projects are featured in the UNC profile: New Roots/Nuevas Raíces: Voices from/Voces de Carolina del Norte!, a digital archive of oral histories of Latin American migrants in North Carolina; the Dr. Oliver Smithies Research Archive, which contains digitized pages of the lab notebooks created by Smithies, a geneticist and biochemist and UNC’s first Nobel Prize winner; and Convergence of Climate-Health-Vulnerabilities, a website with interactive visuals through which users can explore climate and related health information about North Carolina counties.
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.
