Executive Summary

Ground-breaking scholars, vibrant communities, and passionate archivists are building scholarly works that ask new questions, uncover new sources, and often employ digital technologies throughout their research and its dissemination. Their work of recovery scholarship diversifies the historical and cultural record and shifts and expands both the scholarly conversation and public knowledge. Their work is profoundly changing our understanding of the past, present, and future. Yet much of this new knowledge was produced only by overcoming obstacles and cobbling together support. And even as we celebrate successful projects, the digital results of that work face an uncertain future and may never be available to a future generation.

The Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship was convened by the American Council of Learned Societies at the behest of the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities to understand how to foster the work of diverse scholars and communities contributing to the fields of racial and social justice, to analyze the issues preventing their digital results from being sustained and preserved, and to map directions that will enable this work to thrive and ensure that its products will endure. The Commission’s process explored a complex landscape of academic and community-based work and the multifaceted, many-layered contexts in which this work is created and shared. The Commission drew on the extensive and diverse knowledge of its 21 members along with the focus group and interview contributions of more than 120 scholars, librarians, technologists, publishers, academic administrators, funders, community archivists, and many others engaged in the work of digital humanities, recovery scholarship, and all aspects of scholarly communication from publication to access to preservation. This report includes their voices and stories. Each conversation added new ideas and understandings of challenges, barriers, and some inspiring successes in the current environment, and enabled the Commission to identify the points for action described in the recommendations.

As the Commission probed needs and issues, it became apparent that layers of supporting infrastructure that scholars have taken for granted for more than a century often did not work for a new generation of digital recovery scholarship. Successful scholars in the field have had to work against the tide, innovating and inventing to make the work possible for themselves and others. Digital recovery scholarship faces structural impediments that have limited the support and preservation of much digital humanities scholarship in the last decade. We were able to see places where ingrained, conventional practices and organizational structures are no longer serving a knowledge environment that now relies on digital methodologies, encompasses a wide and varied universe of higher education institutions, includes community-based initiatives, and serves a student body representing North America’s diverse population. While there have been notable successes, conversations revealed that achievements were only gained by surmounting systemic obstacles—obstacles that must be removed to make such success reproducible and to ensure that their results endure for future generations. Rather than serving as easily replicated models, the case studies of successful projects often highlighted where deep infrastructural change is needed. And the lack of easily applied or replicated models for enduring preservation reveals glaring gaps in our scholarly communication infrastructure for new digital material.

Thriving recovery scholarship requires new modes of engagement, collaboration, and reciprocal expectations across disciplines, across institutions, and between institutions and communities. The Commission report considers how to rethink and change the values, policies, and opportunities that can enable diverse scholars and communities to collaborate and accomplish sustainable work. Within institutions, current structures for financial and administrative support and for evaluation and rewards now need to serve new modes of humanities scholarship that are team based, community engaged, and use digital methodologies. Across the academic enterprise, healthy digital recovery scholarship requires interdisciplinary pipelines and partnerships with, for example, data science, library and information science, social sciences, and archival theory. The Commission’s investigations also revealed the extent to which a core challenge in digital humanities work remains unsolved: Much digital work lacks provision for enduring access and is at risk of loss. Building on more than two decades of digital experience, the scholarly communication community now needs to organize an integrated, coordinated effort to address gaps in publication and stewardship, and to articulate and implement expectations that are widely shared.

This report offers seven strategic objectives that the Commission believes can set a course for essential change. Its recommendations lay out a road map and initial implementation steps toward reframing and updating aspects of academic and scholarly infrastructure that are not well supporting 21st-century humanities work. Infrastructures are not changed or rebuilt overnight. The recommendations are intended as a map, both pointing directions and suggesting steps to get the journey robustly underway. The way forward will necessarily engage a wide and collaborative network of individuals, communities, societies, foundations, and all parts of the academic enterprise. It will entail initiatives and contributions within and across individual institutions, organizations, and communities, and will create new support capacities and new collaborations. It will build on long-established infrastructures and on recent innovations. And in many significant areas, it will require deep reconsideration of assumptions and values, and a readiness to embrace change.

As the Commission considered its recommendations, taking a big picture view of collaborative and networked possibilities was a necessary perspective. The Recommendations section of the Commission’s report includes actionable steps to implementation that engage partnerships and conversations across a wide spectrum of organizations, institutions, and individuals. The Resources section of the report provides guidance and useful reading both for those engaged in recovery scholarship and community archiving and for those who want to support and further their essential work. Fostering and sustaining diverse digital scholarship is a grand challenge that merits the focused attention of active coalitions of institutions and the creative financial support of a coordinated network of committed funders. The Commission report frames the work needed and proposes a road map toward essential change.

Summary of Recommendations

Build two-way streets for knowledge to travel between institutions and communities.

Institutional leaders, scholars, librarians, archivists, and communities can work together to design, promulgate, and implement new modes of mutually determined and mutually supportive interactions between academic institutions and their geographically and socially adjacent communities. For the full recommendation go here.

Reorganize institutional research support to match the changed nature of the humanities research enterprise.

Institutional leaders—provosts, deans, budget directors, research officers, and department chairs—can recognize and create the kinds of reliable support structures for grants administration, project management, human resources management, and cyberinfrastructure (from data management and technical support to publication and preservation) that are now necessary for much humanities work. Institutions can also work together to build shared support services. For the full recommendation go here.

Reward brilliant scholarship even when it includes new modes of work and requires new approaches to evaluation.

Provosts, deans, department chairs, and disciplinary societies can adapt appointment, retention, mentoring, tenure, and promotion practices in humanities departments to value and reward high-quality scholarship manifested in new as well as conventional formats and to appreciate the demanding nature of community-engaged research and scholarship.

For the full recommendation go here.

Grow and nourish the networks and pipelines that build a field and inspire students.

Funders, discipline societies, professional associations, and academic institutional leaders can continue to expand and multiply internships, fellowships, mentoring, and other programs that create interpersonal support networks and pipelines for undergraduates, graduate students, faculty at all levels, and community members. There are many excellent model programs, and at the same time, there is an enormous demand for more. For the full recommendation go here.

Create opportunities for pollination across domains of expertise, within and across institutions.

Institutions, funders, and professional organizations can create new structures and opportunities for interaction across fields of expertise within institutions and across institutional, organizational, and community environments, enabling established networks to collide, learn, and collaborate in new ways to produce innovative digital work in racial and social justice and to enable sustainable models. For the full recommendation go here.

Fill the gaps in the scholarly communication infrastructure for new forms of digital work.

Librarians, technologists, scholarly publishers, and peer reviewers have successfully transformed the long-standing publishing and knowledge cycle from print to digital, but it is now time for them to muster their purpose, collaboration, and innovation to adapt the infrastructure of scholarly communication to new kinds of born digital work. For the full recommendation go here.

Build the support structures that will enable diverse institutions and communities to accomplish sustainable work and preserve its content.

Funders and professional and academic leaders can collaborate to design and initiate new organizations, collaboratives, and service structures that can extend technical, administrative, and advisory capacities to all types of institutions and community initiatives. Leaders of existing collaborative organizations can reshape or expand their services to support a more diverse base. For the full recommendation go here.