 Hello. I'm Leanne George. I'm the coordinator of the spec survey program here at the Association of Research Libraries. And I'd like to thank you for joining us for the fifth in the series of spec survey webcasts. Today we'll hear from the author of the survey on Supporting Digital Scholarship in ARL Libraries. And the results of this survey have been published at spec kit 350. But before we begin, there are just a couple of announcements. First, everyone but the presenter has been muted to cut down on background noise. So if you are part of a group today, feel free to speak among yourselves. We do want you to join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen. We will take questions at the end of the presentation. I'll read them aloud and Rick will answer them. Finally, this webcast is being recorded and we'll send all registrants the slides and the link to the recording in the next week. Now let me introduce the survey author. Rick Mulligan is an American Council of Learned Societies public fellow posted as a program officer for scholarly publishing here at the Association. He is a humanities scholar and trained as a digital humanist at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and Matrix at Michigan State University. While at ARL, he's been tracking the developments and initiatives in digital publishing and digital scholarship as part of scholarly communications. For the past year, this work is focused on how the digital humanities and digital scholarship more broadly are supported within ARL Libraries. As you can see on your screen, you can use the hashtag ARL spec kit 350 to continue the conversation with him on Twitter or to submit questions during the webcast. Now, let me turn the presentation over to Rick. Thanks, Leon. Hello, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. One thing we found with this is that we realize every institution is unique and the need for digital scholarship services and support first develops at the local level. It grows organically until the needs of individual faculty and disparate departments begin to overlap. Generating a more consistent demand that requires collaboration, strategic planning, and partners beyond the library who can help support the use of digital tools and methods throughout the entire research cycle. Some institutions in their libraries have a very long history of working with digital tools or techniques, supporting text analysis from humanities computing, multimedia and digital humanities work, or geospatial information and digital mapping, while others are only beginning to receive requests for such consultations, advice, or services. In every case, no matter how new or well-established, each digital scholarship community is almost entirely dependent on the interests of local researchers and faculty advocates, efforts to make its holdings and special collections available online, and in many cases, the participation of offices for research and university-wide IT to supply an infrastructure for these tools and projects. Interdisciplinary programs might also strengthen these digital communities by attracting and recognizing the work of students, graduate and undergraduate in many cases. This is just some of the points made by a few of the 73 institutions who responded to our survey. So, in the interest of time, and because no one wants to sit through yet another history of digital humanities, I'm putting it under the umbrella definition for digital scholarship that we use to situate this survey. Quote, the use of digital evidence and methods, digital authoring, digital publishing, digital curation and preservation, and digital use and reuse of scholarship. End quote. Simply put, digital tools, datasets and methods increase access as well as generate new possibilities for interactive use and reuse by researchers and students. They move beyond traditional print research by creating hybrid scholarship that uses multiple channels combining print and web-based text, video, audio, still images, and annotation. This can mean new modes of multi-threaded, nonlinear discourse that only exist online. Now, because the STEM fields tend to integrate digital tools as a matter of course, to collect process and visualize massive amounts of data, it is now within the humanities and social sciences that we're really seeing big data, data visualization, multimedia and interactivity rapidly and sometimes dramatically change the very concept of research. From how it's envisioned, conducted, and shared to its integration into experiential teaching and the ongoing scholarly discourse. My objectives for today are to provide a context for this spec survey, give a brief overview of DS activities in our libraries, dig a little into the roles of library staff and faculty, including how they're organized and with whom they work. We'll end the session by looking at some of the future challenges to digital scholarship from the perspective of the library. So to begin with this context, we started considering digital scholarship as a focus for a spec survey. When we did this, we already had an idea that support for this work has been growing within our member libraries. This hunch was validated by Shanika Morris, the AERAL survey coordinator and our data analyst. She compared the past three years of AERAL survey, salary survey responses from 2012 through 15 and found that a steady rise in the percentage of professional staff in AERAL libraries who have specific digital scholarship responsibilities has been increasing. From 453 in 12 to 13 to 507 in 13 to 14 and 561 in 2014 to 2015, this same data also revealed that most AERAL libraries, 93% as of late 2015, now have some portion of their staff involved in digital scholarship. One of the goals of this survey is to better understand how the professional faculty and staff of AERAL libraries do this work. The steady rise in staff with specific DS responsibilities can be seen in the recent proliferation of new job postings for digital humanities or digital scholarship librarians or coordinators in the new titles in the profile section of this report and the new tasks library faculty and staff have been assigned or picked up and in the statements made by AERAL library deans and directors among others regarding the repurposing of vacant staff lines or the expanding duties of entire classes of librarians. So as you can see, these four librarians contributed a great deal to this survey, in particular helping establish the 19 categories of digital scholarship activities and portions of the profile questionnaire. This spec survey was designed in part with the goals of their proposals in mind. The first led us to try and understand how libraries are structuring their services, organization and partnerships to better collaborate in digital scholarship. The second meant to better understand the role of individual librarians in this work. But surveying each member of every AERAL library is so far beyond the scope of the spec survey that, well, we've asked respondents to help us develop profiles for those most responsible to digital scholarship at their institutions. By building these profiles, we hope to gain greater insight into their roles, tasks and how they're positioned within the libraries. This table displays both the categories we use to differentiate between varieties of digital scholarship activities and to identify where such support is available for researchers. Broadly stated, more than half of the institutions who responded offer support for all 19 activities through their libraries almost all provide support with the services of collaboration from familiar set of tasks and tools that involve digitization, collections and exhibits. These are available from almost all of these libraries, 84% or more of the time. Almost as many support a number of emerging activities involving data management visualization from between 66, 83%. Support and assistance for the rest of these activities are still found more often in the library than beyond it with a few exceptions such as statistical analysis and support or 3D modeling. Even the least supported activity, digital scholarship development, is provided by at least one in four of these libraries. So, talking about familiar activities, the digitization and imaging of analog material to increase access and enable better preservation is a mature service provided by many libraries through dedicated units or departments. Beyond scanning and reformatting material, these groups often also handle metadata creation and collaborate on digital exhibits. Our analysis of spec survey data reveals that digitization imaging support have grown from a few grant funded projects to become one of the most prevalent forms of support available in libraries. This work is closely followed by digital preservation, metadata creation and digital collections and digital exhibits. For instance, while the Digital Public Library of America, the DPLA, is becoming well-known as an aggregator of metadata and thumbnails for digital objects and collections, many of our respondents have started their own digital libraries and some are acting or beginning to act as regional hubs for the DPLA, which may in part explain some of the strong support for these activities. Librarians and archivists in particular provide the greatest share of the support. This includes the archives, digitization teams, rare books and special collections, and some others. The participation of digital projects and e-scholarship librarians, catalogers, and other specialists with specific training, or who work with, for instance, art history, architecture, or other related domains are principal amongst these efforts. Metadata creation is also available from data management librarians and departments in some instances and adds to this effort, in some cases coordinated by the centers but also outside them. Speaking of which, at this time only a minority of respondents support this work through digital scholarship centers, hubs, or labs, but the comments we received suggest that this is part of the distributed support across campus and that the number of centers will grow. Now for emerging activities, the increasing support for data, its curation, management, and visualization is not just an emergent form of work, but it's strongly represented and supported by many of these responding institutions. GIS and digital mapping, for instance, and data curation and management support are available from about 89% of these libraries in one form or another. Most also accommodate digital publishing about 85% of the time, although it's worth noting these activities vary from assistance with creating student and graduate student ETDs and digital dissertations to the availability and use of platforms such as the open journal system or other publishing opportunities. The support is not universal or I should say is not balanced between all of these and some of this can be seen in the comments. Something that stands out in particular that we found was project planning, an activity that 84% of these libraries support. Based on the comments in particular, this is a steadily growing activity rather than a dedicated specialty. For now it is rendered most often by digital scholarship coordinators and librarians or digital humanities librarians, but also very often by liaison librarians, subject specialists, and can be connected to digital humanists more broadly in some cases with those who are collaborating or in joint appointments with departments as well as coming from within the digital scholarship centers. After speaking with the leaders of library digital scholarship teams and some of those who lead these or direct these centers, we found that the demand for this work continues to increase, especially as a way to coordinate the library's involvement often at the beginning or at the end of the research life cycle when the project scope is first being set and envisioned and later when the work is being handed off and it begins to be part of the development of preservation policies or possibly integrated with the repository or for other forms of sustainable access. Speaking of digital publishing and scarlet communications, as we've already seen digital publishing is supported by many of these institutions often in a consultative role. This might help explain why a number of activities aligned with scarlet communications have been associated with this spec survey on digital scholarship. This work is not merely the creation of a digital form of publication but increasingly deals with intellectual property issues surrounding images, audio, video, and other multimedia. The movement for open educational resources and open access publications are directly tied to digital research products and sharing digitized materials online and consultations regarding office rights, copyright, and open access are available through some of these libraries and digital scholarship centers often coordinated with other units on campus. So the distributed support is becoming the norm. It's well worth noting that even where these libraries have a dedicated staff and units they often work in collaboration with other campus units to provide support in a much more coherent fashion. Of the 73 respondents only 20 have a library-based digital scholarship center providing support for these activities. The number of such centers is growing but for now this work requires distributed support employing a larger number of library units and their dedicated teams. Only a few of which have been mentioned. Some of these are virtual teams or groups who operate as virtual centers while other institutions have no plans to create a primary DS center or hub and intend to remain virtual. So in terms of organization some support multiple library and external units so collaborative and distributed. Brown University offers a great deal of closely aligned support in its libraries through its Center for Digital Scholarship. It's DS Lab and Digital Studio all of which are augmented externally by other units such as the GIS and data visualization of the spatial structures and social sciences initiative. However even with 30 years of history in humanities computing and digital scholarship and with these exciting collaborative spaces that offer high tech and low tech collaborative opportunities digital tools and often experienced consultants most of the projects Brown supports remain limited to the humanities and social sciences at least for now. Columbia University offers an example of distributed support through its award-winning Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. It also has four other digital centers supporting science, social science, humanities, and music in particular. These along with its institutional repository the academic commons are all part of the same organization the Columbia University library slash information service at CULIS. Yet again what they've said is that they're only beginning to collaborate as units on more of these projects all offer support to faculty and students in one manner or another. Moving on the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign maintains a DS Center in its library the Scarley Commons that maintains a specific space technology and office consultations. It often works as the first point of consultation and contact and it helps connect researchers and students with other resources such as the undergraduate media commons or the IDEA lab in Granger Engineering Library. The staff of these units are augmented by liaison and subject matter librarians with extensive experience or training with digital schools and tools and methods. Moving to the virtual centers so we have the University of Washington who have no plans to create a digital scholarship center within their library. Their argument is they have the Simpson Center for the Humanities that is already deeply engaged in advancing digital work and it offers a range of support including summer fellowships in the digital humanities and others. The UW library sometimes work with the Simpson Center or other partners such as the UW E Science Institute to promote the S&DH. They contribute to this distributed support model through a digital scholarship website that operates as a virtual center. It lists services, people, makerspaces and tools, projects and even funding opportunities. These funding opportunities in particular show the wide reach of their initiatives including individual fellowships for faculty and graduate students along with cross departmental working groups and support for conferences and symposia as well as community engagement collaborations. Florida State University also has no physical digital scholarship center but library staff and faculty including several liaison librarians operate as a virtual digital scholarship center. They at this point in time have no intent to create physical space but are looking at the demand and reconsidering. Last, Cornell University. They view digital scholarship as a larger overarching aspect of all research supported by the institution and so it is far beyond the scope of any single center to coordinate in-house. Their service and collaboration model involves many of its programs. These include digital consulting and production services decaps, the arts and sciences grants program, research data management services group, the RDMSG, and support for public access mandates, scarlet communication programs, graduate student immersion programs and the Summer Digital Humanities Institute. This again is a form of distributed activity that requires and recognizes the contributions of liaison librarians and a vast number of other professional staff. So we've made a number of documents or we've made a number of the documents submitted by our respondents available within the report itself. If you carefully review especially the service descriptions, the organization charts, and the job descriptions, you'll have a much more complete picture of the number of units engaged in supporting digital scholarship. As these reveal, no single team can handle all of this work, much less any individual. The number of managers, coordinators, and DHDS specialists in these descriptions do not always match to the organizational charts. The suggesting part that the effort to find these people and hire them remains a challenge from any organization. Come back to that later. So speaking of the future for digital scholarship within our institutions, first let's look at the proliferation. Both defining digital scholarship and how it is supported by libraries present a number of challenges. In surveying ARL institutions, formally and informally, we found that the definition of center could be both fluid and fraught. Some of the best known DH centers and labs are A, not in libraries, and B, not at ARL institutions. Our survey gathered responses from 73 member institutions, 69 of which are research libraries. 41 reported that they had created a new department or unit to support digital scholarship, including a number of dedicated teams and centers for specific forms of work. Our informal survey duplicated some of this data, but brought our total to 47 centers. Now many choose, many of our institutions choose not to host DH centers as one-stop shops, although almost all partner with other campus units to create distributed DH capacity. All avoid being approached as just a service center. Their ethos is one of teaching the teacher while fulfilling the service ethic of the library. Looking carefully at our data and respond in comments, it's clear that there's been a trend in creating digital scholarship or digital humanities centers within ARL libraries with the greatest growth since 2010. At the time of the survey, at least another 11 ARL institutions were considering creating a DS center within the next one to five years, but this trend as I said extends far beyond ARL. As a new source of information for you, C&I and ARL jointly hosted a two-day planning a digital scholarship center workshop this past May in Arlington Virginia. We had 114 attendees representing 45 institutions who had recently started a plan to create a digital scholarship or humanities center. Perhaps of more interest to you as a group are that 20 of these teams came from non-arrow libraries and then almost half were liberal arts colleges rather than universities. Based on the results of both our survey and analysis of teams attending the DSCW 2016, we're seeing that more than 40 digital scholarship or humanities centers will be opening in the next five years. So again returning you to just take a look at those supporting documents and the lists of positions. We expect to see these grow and we also expect to see more divisions for specialties and different units as time progresses. So a few final thoughts for you on the challenges that we saw especially coming through the comments and in some of our discussions and interviews with those running centers. The first is cultural change which incorporates outreach and communication in particular. What we found looking at the comments and we can see this in specific cohorts where all liaison librarians have been asked to take on digital scholarship tasks and activities to support them. In many cases to work closely with digital humanities specialists to augment their capacity, their ability to provide this work. Some of this is following with the evolving liaison model in that they're being asked to approach faculty, those running projects, those using digital scholarship within their courses and in their ongoing research activities to find out what new tools, what new methods are going to be needed within the library or more broadly supported on campus. This means in many instances they're not operating in a reactive role but one that is proactively collaborating across the campus and in some cases recently. This also requires them to perform more outreach. The group that is most resistant to a coherent digital scholarship program on these campuses tend to be the STEM disciplines. The explanations we've received are that in many instances STEM already have digital tools and digital savvy graduate students as part of their labs so they don't often approach the library for additional consultations. Some of the areas that have shown up of interest are actually data management planning and curation though these are more anecdotal stories for now but the suggestion is that this will grow over time. This brings us to this issue of capacity and coherence. This work takes shared efforts not just digital humanities as scholarship specialists but amongst everyone in the library in one form or another. This work engages in multiple phases and as mentioned earlier project management planning may come at the beginning phase but help understand all of the phases of the project. Project management will in some cases work as a coordinator or a collaborator to point to different groups in the library and those especially beyond the library who are supporting this work as it develops over time and take up the reins in some cases when we reach the end of a research track when the research faculty is looking to hand off a project they're ready to move on to something new and so the weight of this effort falls to those who are helping set up the preservation and curation of the project or in some instances its sustainability as a form of interactive discourse or a collaborative online community. This brings us to professional development and recruiting. This was mentioned by some comments but it's been coming out more with our series of digital scholarship profiles in their interviews. This view of the library as providing a hub for digital scholarship means that some of the deans and directors are considering where new skills where new tools are being picked up and where there are opportunities to cross-train specific groups or individuals in the library or to help support these specialists and coordinators who in many cases are running workshops. This suggestion has been in many instances this can be done in the library first and increase the number of those aware of these talents or these skills and tools and the first community again that approaches this tend to be the subject matter experts and the liaison librarians. The other part of this is it requires maintaining a lot of contact with the digital scholarship community broadly RIT. So the Digital Library Federation is one source paying attention to of all things Twitter feeds, reading publications such as Digital Humanities Now or the Digital Humanities Quarterly help those who are coordinating these activities and planning for training and professional development remain aware of what the cutting edge of the services are such as in many libraries right now GIS data visualization and digital mapping those are the new black and frequently supported some very well known out of North Carolina but a number of other institutions. So the last point to leave you here many of the problems with digital humanities projects are discoverability, preservation, sustainability. In the case of projects these are done in many instances one-off to prove that something can be done used to be done in small boutique faculty led projects that were a part of a research publication that helped generate print of all things rather than an ongoing or a sustainable digital source. This is changing but the libraries core missions its tradition have been to support discoverability, preservation, and sustainability so as Digital Humanities especially faculty are running into these problems many for the first time they increasingly are turning to the library for help and understanding how do they maintain this work how do they hand it off so that they do not become the sole point of contact this is a growing concern for those where the collaborative teams dissipate after a project is done especially those that are collaborations across multiple campuses or multiple institutions and this is where the library is becoming more prevalent in supporting such action but with that I'd like to thank you very much for listening today and we're open to your questions and comments. Indeed we do welcome your questions and please join the conversation by typing them in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen I'll read them aloud and then Rick will answer them. I know it may take you a minute to get organized to end your questions. Let me ask Rick was there any particular surprise of findings from the survey? I'll be honest as a digital humanist the the thing I found most surprising is the sharp uptick in a range of data support and the fact that both GIS GIS and data visuals are digital mapping where the first mentioned but followed immediately by research data management planning data curation that form support is also something that I'm less familiar with but a number of institutions especially Purdue or Bona Champagne UCLA have very strong programs already in place to do this work and in some cases are looking to better educate in fact that's a surprise this work is available but many of our respondents noted that campus outreach is necessary to make more of their faculty more the researchers aware of the library provides this form of support in any way. We have a question about business schools Rick had mentioned digital scholarship support for STEM and humanities did anyone report support for business schools in the survey? To be honest we did not receive anything specifically speaking to the business school I'd need to do a careful poll for all of our comments I do know that there's been some discussion of that in the broader community that some of the business schools are looking at data visualization and in some cases are leading the use of data visualization what I've had explained is that the tools that exist were often designed for the tech sector or business sectors in the first place so business schools are finding these as a natural fit their difficulty their challenge has been that those supporting these technologies are looking to repurpose them for other disciplines in the library and I would probably expect us to talk to some business librarians more directly and find how they are engaging in this work so I can't give you a good answer on that right now but it's well worth additional digging. Erin asks do you have any examples of libraries charging fees for services especially for publication related services? Nothing in the survey suggested there were such charges ongoing however let me reverse track here a number of the respondents made a point that funding that the library services are being provided for free that there was no cost recovery that said there are some digital scholarship centers that do have some form of chargeback model especially for work that involves a grant but this is again local it isn't a strong trend when it comes to digital publishing that still I'm still uncertain about that because those that I know who are trying to concentrate efforts for digital publishing within the library which at this point we have 23 ARL institutions with the libraries either reporting to or beginning to report to the I'm sorry press is reporting to the library directors we haven't heard enough about their engagement their cooperation with the digital scholarship effort or center that said I wouldn't be surprised if there will be some negotiation about payments but the ones who've been most strident most vocal have argued about open access so taking that in line we may be looking at APCs in many instances. Another question what about sustainability efforts are there any indication of how libraries are keeping these projects going five or ten years after it's been completed? The the also cut the answer would be that so few of the library supported projects are actually five years old but considering the work that's been going on at Brown, North Carolina State, Columbia for that matter from what I understand with the comments and also in some of our interviews sustainable sustainability is part of the project plan so I don't have any numbers for yet in terms of the number of projects that remain supported within the libraries anecdotally we can look at some of those coming from the University of Virginia that are supported by the scholars lab many of which have roots going back to the early 1990s and we can still find those projects online today now some do not work in full they're their full complement of features is no longer sustained because the technology has changed over time and I know that this is an active concern for the myth group at the University of Maryland in that they are looking at emulation software to try and maintain the ability to run earlier projects and look into the data but I don't I don't know in full detail what their strategies are for preserving a broad range especially when we have the technical challenges of well let's look at flash for instance that used to be one of the standards for animated visualization and is now no longer supported by so many technologies Erica asks in those organizations that don't have a DS center who seems to emerge as the point person for campus constituents as I understand looking at some of these in particular and I'm looking at the University of Florida and Florida State is two that have spoken with in detail in both instances they have the equivalence of digital humanity specialist or coordinator or director I need to look at their titles to be frank with you but they have one to two people who are the point for digital scholarship Duke University also comes to mind in having a digital scholarship librarian that works as a first point of contact or often works as a first point of contact and in many instances helps not provision the work but set up coordination or introductions or help the those who are sending inquiries understand where to go or who to work with and in other instances they're definitely doing some of the work or helping coordinate efforts of additional librarians that are available to them we have a follow-up comment on the question about business schools says that their business librarian is seeing a request for support for data mining and text analysis as well as visualization fantastic um did you get comments about campus wide funding and coordination to bring separate units together well it comes to the source of funds we did ask some questions and we understand that the support for digital scholarship is coming in many instances from the library's general budget first when it comes to when you're asking about funding do you mean funds to help bring these together as more coherent services in collaboration or just how the work is supported when it isn't using a chargeback or cost recovery system well we look for a reply there were there any institutions that implemented shared digital services such as sharing a data visualization specialist between their libraries or departments again in specific comments some suggest that there are individuals who are kind of floating so support the work of different units and can be called on by different libraries specialist libraries to engage in this effort um i'm thinking in particular that again or about a champagne i've heard of some of this and i believe Cornell as well but what we heard more of is that there are some who are using joint appointments so a library faculty who is also faculty in an English department or history department these seem to be the most common from the from the few i've seen this also matches some of the recent job postings and descriptions that are asking for this kind of unicorn that this person is expected to be a subject matter expert and to provide some measure of support broadly through the library but for those i guess asking most often for digital human and humanities or digital scholarship support in a department or allied series of departments um for going back to the funding question the answer was yes it's funding to bring about so the closest answer i have for you is that several institutions their own institutions in particular but also those outside have been using things like iMLS funds um melon seed funds to begin the development of centers brown is one in particular that uh i'd say brown the University of Connecticut a few other institutions that that uh you can do a quick google search as a matter of fact which i should do um i can think of the number of hits about 10 that i'd have to go dig out for you but the support's coming from grantors first however what i've heard is the requirement that there be matching funds available from the institution and that there be provision for this work not to be limited to say a two-year um clear fellow or a three-year uh visiting scholar that the plan is to use this to begin the development of the work and coordinate it to hire a new person to do an environmental survey and find out what kind of efforts are underway and what need greater coordination collaboration and then a very definite plan for recruitment to bring in a minimum number of uh staff of whatever rank to support this work well we've got several questions about staff um one is uh that an ALA accredited MLS used to be required for so many professional positions at air libraries are these openings hiring uh non-mls degree professionals as a matter of fact um a significant number are as you might see from just job postings right now um there has been a trend to ask in many instances for an MLS or MSIS first but to then ask for or to ask for the equivalent training in some instances both emphasizing experience is what i'd i'd note in these more fully um but what we found with the survey with our profiles is that about 53 of those profiles that we were given have an MA or an MS 67 percent actually have an MLIS for uh MS MS LAS i guess that said those two overlap but we have almost a quarter of these positions also having a PhD or having a PhD instead of the MLS or the MSIS so yes there is a trend especially going for humanities especially going for humanities faculty or former humanities faculty or the alt-ac community who've been trained to use these tools as part of research part of teaching and they're being brought into the libraries um i can't give you a hard number but i'm seeing more postings asking for this kind of shift honestly every week or two weeks through the you know the normal channels um and there's a question uh could you say some more about recruiting and staff challenges um and and what's working for recruiting i'm not sure we specifically ask that question but you've been talking to lots of this is where i'm in the field i apologize i'm falling entirely on uh talking to people at the the cni meetings or dlf or some of those who are running digital scholarship centers what they've told me and i'm afraid this may be one of our last questions um recruitment is or is is recruitment remains a challenge the difficulty is it requires someone of personality who wants to be in the research library who wants to be part of higher education because their digital skillset in many instances will draw a significantly higher paycheck if they're an industry that said those who have the phd seem to overlap here with the desire to maybe leave the classroom and do a combination of research and training in the libraries promote digital scholarship promote these these ways of doing work so what has shown up a number of cases is dedicated research time for those who've been hired to come in and support digital scholarship broadly that their work becomes part of the support their work becomes part of the profile and in many instances they are some of the first or foremost building new tools and exploring new methods that then they share with the rest of their staff or others in the library and that they can promote to their local faculty so that's one critical aspect um another seems to be the level of probably say the level of freedom they have to engage these pursuits so specific directors have talked about hiring people because they've already done research and they're already interested in presenting it further one example i might give you would be Amanda Visconti at Purdue University that was brought into the library after doing her uh her doctorate at University of Maryland as one of the she developed one of the first holy digital online dissertations so she's able to use her work as part of her education efforts as part of her outreach efforts for others on campus and i believe is part of the basis for developing a coherent digital humanities program in the near future we're about out of time i'm going to take one last question here uh they ask if we had any responses about consortia or multiple institutions working together on shared infrastructure or joint projects and i actually i would direct you to question 24 in the survey questions and responses section where we asked about partners and other libraries other agencies other societies we're asked about and i am seeing responses about consortia there yeah i can also augment that by emphasizing some are regionally located so for instance georgia is looking to develop something along the lines of a southeast uh virtual consortium that would engage not just a rail members say the university georgia georgia state but also emery and other institutions leveraging the range of potential players they have without trying to duplicate all skills in any one school another area doing this kind of regional work is uh southern california as a matter of fact a number of institutions small liberal arts colleges and major institutions research one throughout the los angeles area and beyond and from hearing they're looking to expend it beyond la to northern california in the future well thank you rick and thank all of you for joining us today to discuss the results of this survey on supporting digital scholarship uh you will receive uh slides and a link to the recording within the next week