What does it mean to publish digital scholarship? (...and how do I do it?)

Abstract

This presentation from the 2024 Library Publishing Forum provides a framework and set of questions for library publishers considering offering services to digital scholarship creators. Nested within the Digital Scholarship unit, Columbia University Libraries’ publishing program provides education, development support, and publishing services for a range of scholarly forms that have included, over the years, podcasts, digital exhibitions and editions, encyclopedic projects, maps, and other dynamic digital humanities projects. Through longstanding stewardship of this digital scholarship program, the Libraries have come to recognize a set of common challenges for novel forms of digital scholarship and the need to envision how these scholarly products will fit into current systems of dissemination, evaluation, and long-term storage. Through several case studies, this presentation outlines how a the menu of services was offered to digital scholarship project owners by the Columbia Libraries’ digital publishing program between 2018-2022 and the solutions that were developed to balance the need to support creativity and novelty in digital scholarship with concerns about sustainability and the ability for these projects to interact with existing systems for managing and promoting scholarship. When we think about preservation and publishing from the vantage-point of a Digital Scholarship department, which has traditionally been an incubator of “alternative” scholarly research outputs, we must consider both the research object as a whole (e.g., digital humanities project website), and as its parts (e.g., individual podcast episodes) and the vast variety of media and modes that digital scholarship may take. Any publishing tools and methods we employ must be flexible enough to recognize that DS projects require tailored solutions to help integrate them into the established publishing ecosystem built around digital but primarily text-based scholarship such as journals and monographs. This record also contains a worksheet/workbook to guide digital scholarship project owners and library publishers in designing publishing partnership agreements. The worksheet contains a sample MOU for such a partnership.