Digital Scholarship – an Irish and Galway context

Digital Scholarship is an umbrella term for modern scholarship using digital methods, tools, or approaches. It is used to define a set of functions and services that enable newer forms of scholarship in universities, cultural institutions, and other research institutions. This is often within the digital arena and can encompass: library focused research enablement, open publishing, digital repositories, digital exhibitions, project management, digital publishing, metadata, impact, discovery, digital preservation, identifiers, copyright, data management, and research metrics. There is significant overlap with Open Scholarship. Open in this context means in a way that all others can freely and easily collaborate on and contribute to. In effect, both digital and open scholarship attempt to define the same thing, that is newer forms of scholarship and the direction of travel for future scholarship. Digital Scholarship tends to focus on digital products, using data and output, infrastructure, and technology. For University Libraries, this is mainly in scholarship capture, storage, dissemination, and meta-activities. Open scholarship focuses on the practice of research and education in an open way. Library Open Scholarship can develop policy, advocate for, and develop a practice of scholarship that is open.

While this post is about Digital Scholarship and what it means, I believe the mature consensuses is that staff working in Digital Scholarship should focus on the work rather than attempting to clearly define Digital Scholarship. Digital Scholarship as a term does raise concerns, as a label it is confusing. It means different things to different people, depending on their frame of reference. However, Digital Scholarship as modern scholarship is changing fast; it is a moving target. Attempting to cleanly and clearly quantify and define Digital Scholarship consumes considerable time and is a fruitless challenge. What Digital Scholarship evolves over time while being shaped by perceptions and the local environment. Digital Scholarship functions and services should be assessed and shaped to suit the local environment. Often there are multiple units and teams providing Digital Scholarship services. An awareness of local partnership opportunities and building trust on these relationships is critical to the success of effective Digital Scholarship services.

Irish background and international outlook

In February 2018, the Consortium of National and University Libraries (CONUL) Research Group conducted a survey of Irish research libraries and institutions to better understand how CONUL Libraries currently structure Digital Scholarship services and supports (Joy et al., 2019). It can be said that libraries are still struggling to agree and use a common shared vision for Digital Scholarship. However, in recent years, guided by CONUL partnerships and colleagues, there is convergence on the meaning and purpose of Digital Scholarship. The recently formed Irish Digital Scholarship Network aims to harness national collective experience and expertise in projects in the digital area to develop and deliver a programme of work in direct support of a national action plan.

The CONUL Digital Scholarship survey found that the most library-supported digital scholarship activities are 1) digitisation, 2) making digital collections, 3) metadata creation, 4) digital exhibitions, 5) digital preservation, 6) project planning and management, 7) digital publishing, and 8) data curation and management. These core Digital Scholarship activities exist primarily as library functions, yet high levels of collaboration from both inside and outside the library are employed to be effective in these activities. The survey data shows the least supported activities are statistical analysis/support, computational text analysis, and developing Digital Scholarship software. While Libraries don’t tend to create software, survey comments suggest a healthy level of participation in open-source communities such as IIIF, Islandora, Samvera, and VuFind. For activities not strongly or typically supported within the Library context (e.g. project management, text analysis, and 3D modelling) supports that do exist are highly collaborative, whether ad-hoc or structured. In terms of partners, IT staff, researchers, and finance staff appear as the most frequent collaborative partners in supporting Digital Scholarship activity across the institution.

International Digital Scholarship surveys have been carried out in the US (Mulligan, 2016), the UK (Greenhall, 2019), and Europe (Wilms, 2021). The first survey conducted was in the US by the American Research Libraries (ARL), then in Ireland by CONUL, followed by Research Libraries United Kingdom (RLUK) in the UK, and finally LIBER conducted a European level survey. The LIBER survey included Ireland and compared results to previous surveys. The ARL, CONUL, and RLUK surveys use a similar taxonomy consisting of 19 activities to define Digital Scholarship. The LIBER survey uses the Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities (TaDiRAH) research taxonomy of digital research (Borek, 2016). The TaDiRAH taxonomy lists eight activity nodes: Capture, Creation, Enrichment, Analysis, Interpretation, Storage, Dissemination, and Meta-activities. These are subdivided into more specific activities, such as imaging, visualisation, and project management. Table 1 from (Wilms, 2021) maps the LIBER taxonomy to the taxonomy used by ARL, CONUL, and RLUK. Using the TaDiRAH taxonomy Figure 1 and Figure 2 by (Wilms, 2021) plot and compare the activity data carried out by ARL, CONUL, RLUK, and LIBER libraries. Data is included in the figures showing where the activity is primarily carried out in the local institution.

For Library activities, RLUK and CONUL data is comparable to the results of the LIBER survey (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). Data shows that activities traditionally centred in the library are the most common and include the ‘Capture’, ‘Enrichment’, and ‘Storage’ stages using the TaDiRAH taxonomy. The ARL survey data differs in that it found library activities are primarily focused on digital collections, data analysis, and project management (Wilms, 2021). This suggests that ARL libraries are more involved in projects as partners.

Table 1 Mapping of survey taxonomies (Wilms, 2021)

TaDiRAH	ARL/CONUL/RLUK
Capture	Digitisation Making Digital Collections3D modeling and printing
Creation	Developing digital scholarship software Interface design / UX
Enrichment	Encoding contentData curation and management
Analysis	Statistical analysis Visualisation Computational text analysis / support GIS and digital mapping
Interpretation	Database development
Storage	Digital preservationTechnical upkeepMetadata creation
Dissemination	Digital publishingDigital exhibits
Meta-activities	Project management Project planning
Other	Other Digital Scholarship activity

Figure 1: An overview of activities in the ARL, CONUL, RLUK libraries with absolute numbers averaged per answer type (Wilms, 2021)

  

Figure 2: Activity categories in LIBER survey with absolute numbers of responses (Wilms, 2021)

Describe a typical digital scholarship offering

Digital Scholarship often involves a suite of services including the use of digital evidence, new methods of inquiry, research, publication, and preservation. Digital Scholarship mainly aims to leverage infrastructure across three domains in particular: research data, open publishing, and digital archives. Initially a typical Digital Scholarship function should aim to consolidate existing services and collaborations. As the function matures so should the development of new Digital Scholarship services to support related digital initiatives elsewhere in the organisation. A key aspect to any Digital Scholarship function is to participate as a partner in projects locally, nationally, and internationally.

Currently, Digital Scholarship can include the listed below functions.

• Research data
• Publishing platforms and technologies
• Open publishing
• Digital innovation
• Digital collections and exhibitions
• Digitisation and digital preservation
• Workshops, training, outreach, and promotion

Many of these functions involve collaboration both at and beyond the organisational level, incorporating a variety of models in terms of personnel, expertise, and funding sources. This gives the wider organisation an excellent platform for further engagement, potentially across a broader range of activities. However, possible deficits where local expertise may be unknown and/or unshared, equipment and effort duplicated, long-term sustainability uncertain, and opportunities for collaboration missed (NUI Galway, 2017).

Conclusion

Digital Scholarship is about study and research using digital methods, tools, and approaches. It is primarily focused on using, preserving, sharing, and re-using research output. International research (Wilms, 2021, Potter, 2020, Joy et al., 2019, Cox, 2016) found that Digital Scholarship functions and services add value by delivering reusable open data and digital collections. Libraries develop and encourage Digital Scholarship with research data enablement, open and digital publishing, digitisation, and digital preservation. The library will continue to develop and improve these functions, and more, to enable institutional research to position our research for a worldwide audience.

This blog post was written by Cillian Joy, recently adapted for a Galway audience, and first published on the Digital Scholarship Network Ireland web site.

References

BOREK, L., DOMBROWSKI, Q., PERKINS, J., SCHÖCH, C. 2016. TaDiRAH: a case study in pragmatic classification. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10.

COX, J. 2016. Communicating New Library Roles to Enable Digital Scholarship: A Review Article. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2016.1181665
GREENHALL, M. 2019. Digital scholarship and the role of the research library. The results of the RLUK digital scholarship survey. RLUK.

JOY, C., KILFEATHER, E., DERVEN, C. & HEALY, A. 2019. Digital Scholarship services and supports - an overview from Irish Research and National Libraries.

MULLIGAN, R. 2016. SPEC Kit 350: Supporting Digital Scholarship.

NUI GALWAY, L. 2017. Digital scholarship - NUI Galway [Online]. NUI Galway Library. Available: https://library.nuigalway.ie/digitalscholarship/ [Accessed 28 June 2017 2017].

POTTER, A. 2020. Digital Scholarship Working Group Report: Published [Online]. Library of Congress. Available: https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2020/04/digital-scholarship-working-group-report-published/ [Accessed 19 April 2021].

WILMS, L. 2021. Digital Humanities in European Research Libraries: Beyond Offering Digital Collections. LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries, 31, 1-23.