Abstract:

In recent years, more and more university libraries in North America have carried out digital scholarship support. SPEC Kit 350：Supporting Digital Scholarship is a research report published by the Association of Research Libraries on the basis of a survey of its members’ digital scholarship support. Analyzing this report can provide an indepth understanding of the status quo of digital scholarship support in university libraries in North America, and university libraries in China can learn how to carry out digital scholarship support. This paper describes the change from digital humanities support to digital scholarship support of the ARL members, analyzes the characteristics and the core content of the report. This report has comprehensive content, which is convenient for user to learn and use, and it has the significance of practical guidance. The report covers the types of digital scholarship support activities of the ARL member, the partners, the composition of the personnel of the digital scholarship support and the positions, the digital scholarship support department, the skills gap, the service areas, the source of funds, the assessment of the service capacity and so on. In the future, our university libraries can carry out digital scholarship support work in the following ways: carry out existing service assessment and scholarship staff investigation, arrange digital scholarship support personnel flexibly, establish digital scholarship support department, pay attention to improve the staff’s digital scholarship support skills, carry out the digital scholarship support of humanities firstly, pay attention to digital scholarship support fund raising.

Keywords: University libraries, Digital scholarship, Association of Research Libraries(ARL), North America, America, Canada