Digital Scholarship and Initiatives

Digital Scholarship

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What is digital scholarship?

Digital scholarship relies on digital technologies and new methods for the creation, dissemination and long term care of scholarly products and their underlying information, code and data. Digital technologies enable the emergence of new approaches to scholarship and utilization of a wide-range of tools that can enhance the development, analysis, assessment, and presentation of text and data. Products include digital media, web sites, archives of scholarly information, digital exhibits, and more.

Planning your project

We are here to help you with your digital projects and research. We provide consultation and support for project development including:

  • project planning
  • digitization
  • metadata
  • collection building

We also offer space, training, and support for creating collections and exhibits in our instance of Omeka. Please come to us with ideas for grants, websites, databases, or other digitally-based projects.

  1. What is the purpose of your project?
  2. Who is the audience?
  3. What materials and content do you have?
  4. Is it already digitized or does it need to be converted?
  5. How will users interact with your content?
  6. Do you have permission to digitize and publish online, this material?
  7. What impact will the project have on teaching and research?
  1. It has a clear purpose.
  2. The project will work well in a digital medium.
  3. You know whether you have the rights to digitize and use the content.
  4. You will enhance an existing digital collection, OR
  5. Your content is unique, distinctive, and not available online in any format.
  6. The project has likely to receive high use
  7. Your project has potential for academic use, general education or public benefit.
  1. Submit your project proposal form.
  2. For Special Collections Personnel only: Special Collections project proposal form.
  3. Digital Scholarship and Initiatives will review your proposal and we will meet with you to assess your project materials and further discuss the project development process.
  4. DSI staff will complete project documentation necessary to move forward your project, including a cost estimate and project brief that details project deliverables.
  5. We will contact you to about the proposal either to accept it or suggest other alternatives for support.

Project examples

Our projects are deliberately focused on partnerships within the university, with community organizations, and other libraries.

  • We create digital projects and sponsors speakers, conferences, and workshops.
  • We can develop, manage and disseminate datasets, digital collections and webpages, and digital publications.

  • Appalachian Consortium Press Publications Digitization: With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation we collaborated with UNC Press to digitize Appalachian Consortium Press publications, which are freely available as epubs and PDF documents.
  • Open Access Publishing: We are working with the Center for Developmental Education to digitize the Journal of Developmental Education and offer it as an open access publication.
  • Dissemination of data sets: Multiple faculty have consulted with us on the dissemination of their data sets to satisfy grant requirements.

We co-sponsor events with campus partners including Information Technology Services, the Office of Research, Library Technology Services, Special Collections, The Center for Appalachian Studies, University Documentary Film Services, and the Digital Humanities Working Group.

  • Events include the Digital Appalachia Lecture Series.
  • Conferences include THATCamp for digital humanities.
  • Workshops can be offered on copyright, open access, and digital research tools such Blender and Clio.

Resources