Introduction

The role of the library in support of research is changing. Lorcan Dempsey (2010) has traced the shift in focus away from outside-in resources, where the library is buying or licensing materials, to ‘inside-out’ resources that may be unique to an institution. This has led to the library supporting creation, not just consumption, of scholarly outputs.

This is reflected in the new roles and services libraries are developing around digital scholarship. Weller (2011, 41) identifies different flavours of digital scholarship; one ‘refers to the curation and collection of digital resources, which places it in the information sciences, whereas others use it in a broader sense to cover a range of scholarly activities afforded by new technologies’.

This chapter explores the background to the development of these new roles and services and looks at how libraries are supporting different flavours of digital scholarship, using examples from the University of Salford in the UK and other academic and national libraries. It examines scholarly communication initiatives; research data services; digitization, curation and preservation activities; consultancy and training. The relationship of the library with faculty and other support services is considered, as are the challenges in developing new roles and services that enable the library to become a partner in digital scholarship.

Background

Liu and Thomas (2012) state that we

The key drivers behind this change are the digitization of content and the development a global, social network (Weller, 2011). The internet has removed barriers to communication and collaboration and enabled the development of new tools and techniques to interrogate the abundance of scholarly information and knowledge that is now available online.