Trends in Digital Scholarship Centers, Joan Lippincott (CNI), Harriette Hemmasi (Brown U.), Vivian Lewis (McMaster U.)

Many higher education institutions are considering how to better support e-research in a wide variety of disciplines on their campus. One response is the development of physical spaces, often called “digital scholarship centers,” that provide high-end technologies and support services primarily to faculty, graduate students, and seniors working on capstone projects. This presentation provides an overview of digital scholarship center trends.

In 2012 George Washington University Libraries started collecting social media data from Twitter. The process began in direct response to researcher needs: social sciences professors were analyzing how major media organizations use Twitter and how congressional representatives interact with their constituencies, collecting tweets through painstaking manual processes that did not scale and slowed down research progress dramatically. To simplify their process, staff developed Social Feed Manager, a free and open source Web application that collects data from multiple Twitter accounts using the free Twitter API. This presentation includes lessons learned so far about building social media collections and establishing a program in support of researchers and special collections/university archives.