Brown will launch a new digital scholarship initiative this spring with a $1.3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The initiative, to be administered jointly by the University Library and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, will support the development, publication, and preservation of digital publications, with an emphasis on long-form digital publications by Brown faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. For more information, see: https://news.brown.edu/articles/2015/01/digital
Two temporary, grant-funded positions will be added to the Library: a Digital Scholarly Editor to partner with faculty on developing projects selected under this initiative and also to Mellserve as a liaison to publishers, and also an Information Designer to assist faculty in the layout of their scholarly content and the integration of dynamic multimedia and data applications as part of the online publications.
Other campus initiatives that are part of the grant include (1) creating guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship and incorporating these guidelines into departmental standards and criteria documents for faculty performance, tenure, and promotion; (2) establishing systems for internal and external review of digital scholarly works to compensate for the lack of regular reviewing of digital scholarship in the main disciplinary journals; (3) providing opportunities for the next generation of scholars, at both the graduate and undergraduate level, to gain significant experiences and skills in the conception and realization of digital scholarship in the humanities.