Mark Phillips
Assistant Dean for Digital Libraries
University of North Texas
Declan Fleming
Chief Technology Strategist
University of California, San Diego
Lois Widmer
Chair, Digital Services and Shared Collections
University of Florida
Libraries around the country have evolved digital library infrastructure, workflows, and service from startup, grant-funded initiatives into core functions that define a research library in the 21st century. This shift has challenged our thinking about offering new services, moving projects into programs, and evaluating initiatives which may or may not deliver the expected outcomes. At the same time, researchers and other campus entities are looking to libraries as supporters and collaborators for research in the age of “big” research (meaning distributed, collaborative, and resource intensive research, and often referred to as e-research, e-science, research cyberinfrastructure, digital humanities, big humanities, digital scholarship, data science, etc.). Libraries now have many opportunities to leverage the infrastructure and programmatic support for digital libraries to serve also as a core component of the larger scholarly cyberinfrastructure.
This panel will discuss the challenges that three university libraries have experienced with institutionalizing digital library infrastructure and how they continue to adapt their services to meet a changing set of requests and needs from across their institutions. Each member of the panel will present a brief background of their institution and the unique collections and services which have shaped their institution’s thinking about digital library services. An overview of new initiatives each library has chosen to support and how they fit into the overall strategic direction of the institution will also be presented. Finally, all speakers will discuss challenges and opportunities in areas such as technical infrastructure, scaling of services, training and retention of professional staff to support both technical and nontechnical aspects of running repository infrastructure and services at scale.
http://ufdc.ufl.edu
http://digital.library.unt.edu
http://libraries.ucsd.edu/digital
http://rci.ucsd.edu/data-curation/index.html