To accomplish their work, academic researchers increasingly rely on digital tools and large data sets, such as data visualization in the environmental sciences, data mining a large corpora of texts in the humanities, and developing GIS or other geolocation data representations in the social sciences. Librarians and information technologists often provide consultation or might even join the research team in these collaborative digital research projects.
Here, we examine centers that go by a variety of names — including digital scholarship center, digital scholarship lab, and scholars’ lab — but that nonetheless share common features. These centers are generally administered by a central unit, such as the library or IT organization; serve the entire campus community (including undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty); and address the needs of a range of academic departments and programs.