2015 Presentations (Communicative Events)

New Partnerships in the Scholarly Communication System and the Open Source Toolkit

Cartolano, Robert T.; Crewe, Jennifer; Fitzpatrick, Kathleen; Newton, Mark P.; Rockenbach, Barbara A.

Community-supported open source projects such as Hydra, Fedora and Blacklight create opportunities for collective advancement and strategic support and sustainability for essential digital library infrastructure. Commitment to and participation in the development of stable platforms, however, opens and strengthens partnerships for libraries and their collaborators. Reciprocally, partnerships built on such platforms expand the range of potential use cases and feed back neatly into the community development model. The Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) at Columbia University Libraries has been developing project-based partnerships with allied groups in the broader landscape of scholarly communication that draw upon the organizational commitments to contribute to the growth and proliferation of these platforms. CDRS and its partners attained two related project milestones in 2015: (1) The Modern Language Association and CDRS completed an NEH-funded pilot project (HumCORE) to couple digital research repository technology and service infrastructure with a society-supported disciplinary-focused community hub for scholars; (2) In partnership with the Columbia University Press, the Columbia Libraries refreshed the search and discovery interface for the Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) database. The presenters will explore the rationale that led to the development of these projects and the infrastructure choices made to support them. The presenters will also explore the hoped-for impacts and effects of such projects as they may inform use case development for the open source projects themselves.