“Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective” is a Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR) report compiled by  Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne. The authors comment on the rise of digital scholarship centres internationally, but the lack of research regarding best practices for running such a centre. Lewis et al. stress the importance of gathering information about digital scholarship expertise, institutional structures, and requisite competencies. To remedy the want of pragmatic information on global digital scholarship centre techniques, Lewis et al. conduct interviews with 16 digital scholarship sites around the world–in Canada, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The resultant report includes recommendations for digital scholars, directors of digital scholarship centres, institutional administrators, and funding agencies. Overall, Lewis et al. focus on the centrality of collaboration to digital scholarship centres, the importance of supportive institutional structures for staff and centres alike, and the value of prioritizing curiosity-driven research at all levels of an organization.

 

Work cited

Lewis, Vivian, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne. 2015. “Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective.” http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub168