Digital scholarship as a learning center in the library: Building relationships and educational initiatives

As co-conveners of the newly formed ACRL Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) Interest Group, we organized a 2016 ALA Annual Conference program, Starting from Scratch: Build Your Digital Scholarship Center Program, which emerged from what we learned after conducting two webinars, a face-to-face meeting of our members, and a survey of existing digital scholarship centers. The program was based on presentations from three different digital scholarship center implementations, from the most basic at a four-year liberal arts college to a sophisticated technology hub at a large research university. The main takeaway from the ALA session resonated with the focus of the interest group: to share what we have learned along our journey and to emphasize that digital scholarship centers should not be limited to large research universities or those with extensive resources. The DSC Interest Group currently serves 358 members, a testament to growth in this area. We meet in-person at the ALA Midwinter Meeting and ALA Annual Conference, hold online meetings in-between, moderate an email list, and post activities to our ALA Connect space. In 2016, two of our members facilitated a survey of digital scholarship centers to benchmark foundational information, including types of services offered, space, programming, and technology. We have been inspired by the ongoing work of Joan Lippincott and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). In May 2016, CNI partnered with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to facilitate a workshop, “Planning a Digital Scholarship Center: A CNI-ARL Workshop,” and the corresponding report reminds us, “The work libraries are doing in digital scholarship is very deep, but more work remains.” Initial interest in our conversations has come from librarians looking to design and develop a digital scholarship center at their institutions, searching for inspiration and workable strategies from colleagues already taking a leadership role in centralizing and advancing institutional capacity for digital scholarship. There are many, sometimes competing, visions for what a digital scholarship center looks like—a hub for the digital humanities, experts to answer questions about data management, a maker space with 3-D printers, and much more. What works for one campus looks very different for another. The technol-