Digital Scholarship Infrastructure
The Digital Scholarship Infrastructure Department (DSI) is responsible for digital scholarship activities at York University Libraries, including open publishing, digital preservation, web archiving, and digital humanities and social sciences. The Department will advance digital scholarship initiatives in a variety of ways, including:
Digital Publishing, Open Repositories, and Creative Commons Licensing
DSI supports and provides the infrastructure that improves scholarly visibility of York community members. This includes hosting open access journals, maintaining the University’s institutional repository, YorkSpace, and providing access to software tools such as Omeka and Scalar that develop online exhibits and narratives.
Digitization Best Practices and Digital Preservation
Our librarians and archivists are experts in digital preservation and regularly consult with faculty to offer best practices around digitization. Along with handling digitization of photographic prints, negatives, transparencies, and we are currently developing expertise in the preservation of sound and moving images. The DSI team provides recommendations for vendors, options on preservation hardware and software, as well as where to host digitized heritage material. We also manage ongoing digitization and preservation of unique material held by the Libraries along with strategic preservation of York-related web sites.
Grant Applications and Research Project Design
The DSI team advises faculty, students, staff, and community partners on research projects, including: grant proposals, best practices for metadata, and stewardship of data and research outcomes. This includes sharing our expertise on digital project development, preservation, accessibility, Creative Commons licensing, software and hardware tools, and open access practices.
Teaching and Instruction
DSI assists in locating, evaluating, and reusing open educational resources and openly licensed materials for the purposes of teaching, research, and instruction. We also assist in preserving and depositing these resources into institutional repositories.
Members of the DSI team host workshops, guest lectures, and instructional sessions related to their areas of expertise, including: digital humanities and social sciences, digital project management, digitization, web archiving, and more.
We also help foster communities of practice through drop-in sessions, co-directed learning opportunities, and hack-a-thons. As well, DSI partners with campus groups to host Wikipedia and Wikidata related edit-a-thons.
DSI operates within the Digital Scholarship Centre that is located behind the Learning Commons in Room 205 on the second floor of the Scott Library. The Digital Scholarship Centre brings together expertise from around the Libraries to offer students and faculty members programming and expertise around digital cultures and teaching methods, metadata, open educational resources (OER), and more.