Digital Scholarship Skills and Librarian Training Toward Digital Scholarship Services——A Case Study of National Science Library at Chinese Academy of Sciences

Digital Scholarship Skills and Librarian Training Toward Digital Scholarship Services——A Case Study of National Science Library at Chinese Academy of Sciences

Digital Scholarship is becoming a new focus of research community and libraries, which can be interpreted from different perspectives: a new kind of digital technology and digital products as well as a new kind of scholarly communication model, a new teaching and learning style and scientific research paradigm, these constitute a complete digital scholarship ecosystem in the digital, networked and new media era. Academic library is incubator of digital scholarship and in turn the new engine of academic library. Digital scholarship is the reasonable expanding of libraries’ new business and librarians’ core competitiveness, and it empowers libraries’ innovation and transformation. During August 2017, we investigated 15 academic libraries’ digital scholarship services overseas and found that: Digital scholarship services programs were called as Digital Scholarship Commons/LAB, Center for Digital Scholarship and so on, which mainly include 7 types of issues: Physical Space, Tools, Research Data Services, Scholarly Communication and Digital Publishing, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship Seminars and Trainings, Digital Technology Support Services. Accordingly, librarians play roles of data analysis librarian, metadata librarian, online publishing designer, app engineer, it requires librarians to have diverse disciplinary backgrounds as well as a variety of digital skills above. In China, digital scholarship services is promising but still emerging, digital scholarship skills training for librarians is necessary and significant. As the top-level academic libraries in China, Peking University Library, Tsinghua University Library, National Science Library attach great importance to cultivating qualified digital scholarship services librarians in plentiful ways, such as training, recruiting, setting up groups for online discussing and brainstorming. Just in Recently two years, they recruited three graduates from high-level universities as digital services librarian, they provided several training programs cantered with data librarian, research data management, they held three Digital Humanities forums, they set up Data Librarian Group and Digital Humanities Groups for scholarly communication and information sharing. The trainings, forums, and groups were popular and attracted librarians’ active participation. Digital scholarship services require librarians to master diverse skills, taking three academic Libraries in China as examples, this paper discusses the effective and feasible ways of cultivating skilled digital scholarship services librarians by recruitment, trainings, seminars and social network in China.