Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability

Abstract

New York University Libraries and our partners in Information Technology Services offer effective enterprise-wide technology solutions for many academic practices, but we are still working to solve the “faculty Web site problem”—providing services for digital scholarship and publishing in a way that is both scalable and sustainable. This article describes our study of NYU scholars’ needs and digital scholarship support at other research institutions, and then introduces a service model we developed for supporting such services (which may include digitization, hosting of research data, digital publishing, the development of software for scholarly practices, and more). We then discuss the challenges to research libraries of implementing our service model in a scalable, sustainable way, by addressing project and tool selection, staffing, and organizational change.