Dive Brief:
- Instead of expecting every college to meet every digital scholarship service need, the Digital Liberal Arts Exchange hopes to offer members an opportunity to specialize and have other needs met from within the exchange.
- Inside Higher Ed reports the effort to build the exchange is being led by Michael D. Roy, dean of the library at Middlebury College, and while the project needs a critical mass of schools to be successful, Roy doesn't know how big that critical mass will be.
- The primary goal of the exchange is to offer digital humanities researchers access to support they can't find on their campuses, offering the opportunity to rely on the expertise of other institutions.
Dive Insight:
Middlebury has a $46,000 planning grant to get the exchange off the ground. That amount paid for, among other things, a survey of faculty members, librarians, IT staffers, and others at a range of colleges.
The exchange gives higher education institutions a way to offer their faculty services without having all the talent in-house. It also promises to increase collaboration opportunities among faculty members, which could lead to better research outcomes and additional grant funding for participating colleges and universities.
As financial constraints limit the capacity of higher education institutions at a time when more is expected than ever, collaborations like the proposed exchange offer an innovative path forward.