The University of Virginia has some of the most extensive experience with digital scholarship. Over the past years UVA has received a significant Mellon grant to research issues involved in supporting digital scholarship. See the final report for that project.

At the recent Free Culture & Digital Library conference in Atlanta, Bradley Daigle gave a paper on How to Sustain Digital Scholarship. I’ve not seen the actual paper yet but the abstract looks very interesting:

Conventional scholarship required faculty and students to use library materials in traditional methods (publishing in journals or books, using reference materials, to name a few). Now, digital scholarship has pushed libraries to revisit their strategies for meeting researchers’ needs and has introduced the new role of librarian cum technologist. Libraries are now expected to employ experts in emerging technologies, particularly with respect to the services they offer both in hardware and software. In order to support what they have always excelled at, namely organizing and preserving information, libraries now have research and development units, digital specialists, and legal counsel. With the integration of library services and digital scholarship, libraries now find themselves playing a leading role in how faculty research is developed and disseminated.

A major challenge for libraries in the face of these changes lies in developing, forecasting, and even imagining a consistent approach to digital scholarship. A single unit within a higher education institution is unlikely to be entirely successful in offering a comprehensive approach to digital scholarship. Collaboration among university units that are conducting digital scholarship seems to be the best solution. There is now a need to work closely with university presses, faculty-driven centers and institutes, technology units, and schools to explore the changing relationships among libraries and the university environment. The goal of this collaboration is to develop a flexible model for sustaining digital scholarship that can be applied to any level of research. At my library, I am now part of an assessment team whose mission is to explore three selected faculty research projects and their impact on the “model” for sustaining digital scholarship we are developing. This team’s responsibilities are to: clarify what will be collected; document the scope of the project; establish the basis for written agreements and intellectual property rights; and recommend a timetable for implementation, or successful integration into our digital library.

Building upon funding received from the Mellon Foundation to investigate the theoretical policy structure to the actual current implementation process, this paper will discuss the current approach the University of Virginia Library has undertaken to address its own strategies for supporting and sustaining digital scholarship.