Meeting the demands of digital scholarship: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

The synergies of numerous emerging trends such as the development of open standards and open source software, geometric growth of blogs and podcasts, peer‐to‐peer networking, cross discipline collaborations, etc. provide new directions for scholarship. Likewise, digital libraries and supporting technologies have now matured to the point where their contents are incorporating complex and dynamic resources and services. Powered by network capability and fuelled by digital developments, research is becoming more data intensive in almost every discipline. The rapid pace of development poses new threats and problems. Many of these innovations, for example, may have come at the expense of simplicity, sustainability, and other commonly understood applications in the life cycle management of digital resources. Based on the University of North Texas Libraries' “Portal to Texas History” implementation experiences, this paper provides a general overview on the emerging trends and innovative usage of digital library technologies. This paper provides an overall scenario in the areas of aggregating a variety of digital formats; deploying, maintaining, and archiving digital contents; and other innovative uses of digital library technologies.