Is Digital Scholarship Meaningful?: A Campus Study Tracking Multidisciplinary Perceptions

Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara,Melissa Hart Cantrell,Philip B White,Frederick Carey,Katherine Mika,Stacy Gilbert

doi:10.18357/kula.130

Abstract

Increased computational and multimodal approaches to research over the past decades have enabled scholars and learners to forge creative avenues of inquiry, adopt new methodological approaches, and interrogate information in innovative ways. As such, academic libraries have begun to offer a suite of services to support these digitally inflected and data-intense research strategies. These supports, dubbed digital scholarship services in the library profession, break traditional disciplinary boundaries and highlight the methodological significance of research inquiry. Externally, however, these practices appear as domain-specific niches, e.g., digital history or digital humanities in humanities disciplines, e-science and e-research in STEM, and e-social science or computational social science in social science disciplines. The authors conducted a study examining the meaningfulness of the term digital scholarship within the local context at University of Colorado Boulder by investigating how the interpretation of digital scholarship varies according to graduate students, faculty, and other researchers. Nearly half of the definitions (46 percent) mentioned research process or methods as part of digital scholarship. Faculty and staff declined or were unable to define digital scholarship more often than graduate students or post-doctoral researchers. Therefore, digital scholarship as a term is not meaningful to all researchers. We recommend that librarians inflect their practices with the understanding that researchers and library users’ perceptions of digital scholarship vary greatly across contexts.

Highlights

Digital scholarship (DS) support in academic libraries has grown significantly over the last decade and has been associated primarily with scholarly communication and digital humanities (DH) support
The survey stated, “All of the digital research methods covered in this survey are considered forms of Digital Scholarship
While the survey refrained from using the term digital scholarship until asking participants to define the term, the question that was posed had the potential to influence participant responses

Summary

Introduction

Digital scholarship (DS) support in academic libraries has grown significantly over the last decade and has been associated primarily with scholarly communication and digital humanities (DH) support. As a result of the CU University Libraries 2013 DH needs assessment at CU Boulder (Lindquist et al.) and its findings, the CU Libraries identified that dedicated infrastructure and functional specialists familiar with emergent computational research methods and open scholarship practices added significant value to its suite of support and programming. This led to the eventual founding of a new Libraries department and a cross-campus research center, the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship (CRDDS), to enhance support for digital research, the data lifecycle, and open research practices. We have learned that supporting DS exploration and creation, whether for research or teaching, requires attention to local context and regular reassessment since the nature of open and digital scholarship within the research lifecycle continues to evolve

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Conclusion