Initiatives
Digital Scholar is dedicated to enriching the field of open source software and open access to cultural heritage materials. This means moving beyond developing and sustaining our own software projects. Digital Scholar invests in collaborations and partnerships by offering infrastructural and financial support to projects and initiatives that share our mission and values.
Slipstream
The Slipstream initiative is Digital Scholar’s primary path for collaborating with existing open source software, open access advocates, and creators of related digital infrastructure. Members of the Digital Scholar staff offer mentoring, business strategy development, fiscal management infrastructure, legal, and technical support as collaborators pursue a path to financial and institutional stability. Currently, Digital Scholar is facilitating the work of two key projects:
Mukurtu Hosting: Mukurtu is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways. Mukurtu’s hosting service offers users access to the expertise of the team that designs and maintains the software. Digital Scholar provides the business infrastructure that makes it possible for the Mukurtu staff to contract with their users.
RightsStatements.org: RightsStatements.org provides a standardized set of rights statements designed for use by libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage organizations worldwide. The statements support clear, consistent, and machine-readable communication of copyright and reuse status, enabling greater access, understanding, and reuse of digital cultural heritage materials. As the organizational home for the initiative, DS will collaborate with the RightsStatements.org global user community to update and maintain these standards, ensuring responsiveness to evolving legal, technical, and operational contexts. DS will lead the development of a sustainable model to support the statements over the coming years.
Service To The Field
In addition to supporting projects as they move toward independence, Digital Scholar makes a number of targeted investments to support the ongoing health of the field of digital humanities. Such investments include a range of conference sponsorships, sustaining memberships, and project underwriting.
Digital Humanities Now: DHNow is an edited publication, housed at the Centers for Digital Scholarship at the Northeastern University Library, that highlights and distributes informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web. Digital Scholar fully underwrites the editorial staff and technical infrastructure for the project.