De-centering and re-centering digital scholarship: A manifesto

Abstract

Abstract:The continued growth of digital scholarship in librarianship, as evidenced in new positions, new centers, new institutes, new reports/publications, and responding to the ethical turn that our field has undergone in response to current political culture. Following the ARL Digital Scholarship Institute, we agreed that it would be useful to have a document to point to that reflects and illuminates the impetus behind these impulses. Not finding such a document, we decided to produce this as a catalyst to begin that conversation.

Aligning the Stars: Understanding Digital Scholarship Needs to Support the Evolving Nature of Academic Research

“…Digital scholarship centres also specifically aim to serve many disciplines within the institution and facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations (Tzoc, 2016). Some authors underly the importance of physical space in the context of digital scholarship, while others argue that the focus on specialized spaces, services, and staff members serves to unnecessarily seclude digital scholarship activities from the larger mission of libraries (Head, 2016;Moritz et al, 2017). As might be expected for such a broad and diverse range of services, naming practices for these entities vary; this paper uses "digital scholarship centres" as a generic term.…”