Following the Liberal Arts Colleges and Digital Scholarship Services Pre-Conference at the 2013 Digital Library Federation Forum, I was one of five people to write the following manifesto intended to guide digital scholarship and digital humanities efforts at liberal arts colleges.

Librarians and technologists at liberal arts colleges are well-positioned to create and collaborate on generative digital scholarship. Our colleges benefit from several strengths: close working relationships among faculty, students, librarians, and technologists; a history of faculty-student collaboration; limited systems legacy; and fewer administrative layers. The small size of our individual schools may limit technical capacity in some areas, but we will share successes and challenges, emphasize openness and collaboration, and ensure that the community, as a whole, advances together. As librarians and technologists engaged in digital scholarship at liberal arts institutions, we are committed to these principles:

  • Our work is driven by scholarly questions and aided by technology. Not the other way around.
  • Digital research that produces generative scholarship, and which leads to new data, interpretations, and questions even as projects are being developed and used, creates especially rich opportunities for learning and teaching in liberal arts colleges.
  • Digital scholarship, with its opportunity for multidisciplinarity, meaningful collaboration, and focus on productive experimentation and exploration can embody what is richest in the liberal arts environment.
  • Developing students as research partners and project collaborators is central to our mission, and should be pursued wherever possible.
  • Central to a strong digital scholarship program is investment in management, preservation, and access to digital assets.
  • To encourage sustainable development as well as free and open use and reuse of scholarly materials, we promote Open Access to scholarship, Open source software development, open metadata, and reusable data.

via Manifesto – Digital Scholarship at Liberal Arts Colleges.

 

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