Developing New Skills And Expertise To Support Digital Scholarship And Scholarly Communication.

Abstract

The growth of the Internet and digital technology has caused a dramatic and rapid change in scholarly communication practices, giving rise to new forms of digital scholarship and emerging scholarly publishing models. As libraries respond to—and help promote—these changes, they face a number of new challenges and opportunities. Libraries must develop new specialists with specific skills in digital content production and management. At the same time, they must develop a broad, general understanding, among staff across the entire organization, of how changes in scholarly communication practices affect the library enterprise as a whole. This paper discusses three new areas of activity for libraries supporting digital scholarship and scholarly communication: the development of institutional repositories, electronic publishing services, and scholarly communication outreach and advocacy. The paper will also suggest strategies for developing the capacity to support these activities.