Scanning the Digital: Using Survey Data to Support Digital Scholarship Initiatives at the University of Mississippi

Digital scholarship (the use of digital technology in research or teaching applications) is a new and growing field but many Mississippi libraries, including the University of Mississippi, are not officially supporting digital scholarship. To change this, librarians at the University of Mississippi sent out an online survey to faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students in order to gauge their interest in and experience with digital scholarship methods and tools and how the library can best support digital scholarship on campus. The results showed a wide variety of interest and expertise across several fields, mostly in the humanities, with important data and suggestions for future digital scholarship initiatives. The authors hope to use this data to improve digital scholarship support at the university library, and to offer it as a template to other libraries interested in digital scholarship that do not yet have a formal program of support.