Our Challenge

The COVID crisis and civic tragedies of 2020-2021 spurred widespread reckoning with systemic racism. They also created a moral and civic opportunity to reframe and intentionally redirect our most valued resources (time, space, and expertise) toward common purposes: addressing problems of equity, sustainability, and inclusion.

A unique but distributed resource of academic libraries is the large number of digital scholarship programs and spaces in our libraries that are devoted to cultivating and teaching digital scholarship approaches, tools, and skills.

Many digital scholarship spaces and programs are used by faculty and students to conduct research and creative work that advances diversity, inclusion, and equity. But many of these programs present themselves to their communities as centers for access to tools and methods of digital scholarship (software, hardware, techniques), rather than as centers where these tools and methods are applied to the work of equity, inclusion, or sustainability.

Our hypothesis for this project was that libraries’ digital scholarship programs can accelerate and advance contributions to equity and sustainability by making those contributions a core and visible aspect of their programs.

Through visible commitment to equity, diversity, and sustainability outcomes, and with a modest amount of support to help build a digital scholarship community with this shared purpose, we believed that contributions to our goals of sustainability and equity could increase significantly.