Scholarship increasingly relies on “research data,” a catch-all term applied to the digital objects and collections that are now crucial foundation blocks for research across disciplines and fields. This content is notoriously ubiquitous and decentralized, and today’s research institutions regularly struggle to provide ways for their faculty and students to access, build, share, and store new knowledge derived from it.

In particular, universities are challenged to provide mechanisms and environments to researchers that are suitable for interfacing with these ever-changing flows of research data. The pace and rate of technical change has made it difficult for institutions to fully embrace or in many cases even fully become cognizant of the range of new opportunities they need to be supporting for their faculty, staff, and students. Anticipating and meeting the needs of these researchers requires adaptable infrastructure that is expensive to create and upkeep locally.

Collaborative networks are key players that can help institutions adapt to this changing landscape. This symposium will bring together representatives from leading digital scholarship infrastructure projects and programs to ask critical questions about how existing consortia and collaborative networks are supporting the digital scholarship needs of institutions.

The aim of this symposium is to share information and best practices on the opportunities, challenges, models, methodologies, successes, and collaborative strategies concerning data sharing for digital scholarship, science, and community formation more broadly. The broad audience addressed will include faculty, librarians, technologists, and university administrators interested in these topics.

The “Building Data Resilience through Collaborative Networks” symposium will include presentations by regional consortia and collaborative groups on developing and co-owning infrastructure. Speakers will include:

• Cynthia Vitale, ARL
• Courtney Mumma, Texas Digital Library
• Jennifer Gibson, Dryad
• Catherine Mitchell, California Digital Library
• John Sherer, UNC Press
• Doug Seefeldt, Clemson Digital History Program
• Chris Houghton, Gale Digital Scholarship Lab
• Roopika Risam & Jennifer Guiliano, Reviews in the Digital Humanities
• Kacy Reid, APLU
• Toby Smith, AAU

View the entire schedule