Digital Scholarship Services

Neue Dienstleistungen von wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken für die datenbasierte Forschung

Abstract

The term Digital Scholarship is used to describe the comprehensive transformation of scholarly practice through digital, particularly data-driven methods. Research requires specific data volumes and uses data science methods and big data applications. In order to do justice to these developments, academic libraries are called upon to rework both their own and acquired collections in a structured way as data packages. They should also create easy-to-use access points to these, provide the necessary tools and infrastructures for data science, and give advice and support to researchers, lecturers and the public who want to use them. The University Library of Bern is developing such services to support Digital Scholarship as part of the university’s digital transformation strategy. The basis for this are current concepts such as Collections as Data and digital literacy education. The article first explains the concept of Digital Scholarship and gives an overview of its prerequisites. The focus is on the discussion of challenges and opportunities that arise in academic libraries with services for data-driven research. Finally, the development of the Digital Scholarship Services and the current range of services offered by the University Library of Bern are presented and initial experiences are recapped.