Center for Digital Research and Scholarship

Center for Digital Research and Scholarship
Name	Center for Digital Research and Scholarship
Type	Research support center
Founded	2006
Location	Columbia University Libraries
Leader title	Director

Center for Digital Research and Scholarship is a research support unit within an Ivy League university library that provides digital scholarship services, open access publishing infrastructure, and repository management. The center supports faculty, students, and staff by offering tools for data curation, scholarly communication, and digital preservation across multiple academic domains. It operates alongside university libraries, campus IT offices, research offices, and academic departments to enable digital projects, repository services, and publishing platforms.

History

The center was established amid institutional investments in digital initiatives inspired by models at Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of California, Berkeley; early influences included efforts at Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Chicago. Its formation followed national conversations reflected in reports from Association of Research Libraries, Council on Library and Information Resources, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and National Science Foundation. Leadership drew on practices from Digital Public Library of America, HathiTrust, Europeana, and projects at Library of Congress, British Library, and Bibliothèque nationale de France. Early collaborations linked to grants and pilots with Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Getty Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and European Research Council.

Mission and Services

The center's mission aligns with mandates articulated by Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, SPARC Europe, OpenAIRE, Creative Commons, and Directory of Open Access Journals to advance open scholarship, repository stewardship, and scholarly communication. Services include institutional repository management akin to DSpace, Fedora Commons, and Invenio, digital preservation modeled on LOCKSS Program, metadata strategy influenced by Dublin Core, MARC, MODS, and schema standards used by ORCID, CrossRef, and DataCite. It provides publishing platforms comparable to Open Journal Systems, supports research data management practices promoted by Research Data Alliance, and offers text and data mining support paralleling tools from Project Gutenberg, HathiTrust Research Center, and Google Books. Training and consultation programs reflect pedagogical frameworks used by EDUCAUSE, American Library Association, Association of College and Research Libraries, and International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.

Organizational Structure

The center reports to a university library administration analogous to structures at Columbia University Libraries, New York Public Library, Yale University Library, and University of Pennsylvania Libraries and works with campus offices such as Office of the Provost, Research Office, Information Technology Services, and General Counsel. Teams include repository managers, digital librarians, software developers, preservation specialists, scholarly communications librarians, and outreach staff. Staff roles mirror positions found at MIT Libraries, Duke University Libraries, University of California, Los Angeles, and Princeton University Library, and governance involves advisory boards with representatives from faculties in Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia Business School, School of International and Public Affairs, Mailman School of Public Health, and affiliated research centers such as Earth Institute, Zuckerman Institute, Data Science Institute, and Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Major Projects and Initiatives

Major initiatives include development and deployment of an institutional repository aligned with practices at arXiv, SSRN, bioRxiv, and Zenodo; publishing services supporting monographs and journals similar to University of Michigan Press and Open Library of Humanities; and data curation projects akin to efforts by Dryad, Figshare, and ICPSR. The center has overseen digitization programs, scholarly portals, and special collections projects comparable to collaborations with Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Museum of Natural History, New-York Historical Society, and Museum of Modern Art. Technical work incorporated systems and standards from GitHub, Jupyter, Omeka, Scalar, Blacklight, Solr, Islandora, and Geonode. Grant-funded research connected to initiatives at National Institutes of Health, Simons Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Partnerships and Collaborations

The center partners with academic publishers, libraries, consortia, and research infrastructures such as CrossRef, DataCite, ORCID, CLOCKSS, Portico, Project COUNTER, Learned Publishing, SPARC, Revue, JSTOR, Project MUSE, and OCLC. Collaborative alliances extend to peer institutions including Barnard College, Teachers College, Columbia University, City University of New York, New York University, Rutgers University, Columbia Business School, and cultural institutions like The New York Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center, and Apollo Theater. International ties mirror networks with European University Association, Council of Australian University Librarians, Canadian Association of Research Libraries, National Diet Library, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, and Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Impact and Reception

Scholars and administrators cite the center's contributions in enhancing visibility for faculty, improving compliance with funder mandates from National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and European Research Council, and supporting metrics work using standards from ORCID, CrossRef, and Altmetric. Evaluations reference best practices established by Association of Research Libraries, Scholarly Communication Institute, PLOS, COPE, and Committee on Publication Ethics. The center's work influenced curricular initiatives at Teachers College, Columbia University, grant proposals to Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, and operational models adopted by peer libraries at Harvard Library, Yale University Library, Princeton University Library, and University of Chicago Library.

Category:Academic libraries Category:Digital libraries