Digital Scholarship

Consultation

Faculty can seek advice from a number of specialists on campus, but they can always start with their Academic Computing Manager, who will help them navigate the process and available specialists. Other units who can provide similar support are:

Training

There is self-paced training available via the campus subscription to Lynda.com that includes a broad array of beginners to advanced courses on relevant topics such as understanding metadata and organizing data, to more in-depth courses on specific database programs, such as Bento, EndNote, Filemaker, and Microsoft Access.  If you’re just starting out on a research project that involves collecting and curating data, we highly recommend you sample some of the Lynda.com beginners courses as a first step toward creating a long-term strategy for your research. 

Digitization Support

ITS maintains limited equipment for faculty to use digitizing materials, which includes a variety of analog-to-digital converters for different time-based media. ITS’s New Media Lab offers only limited “drop-off” support strictly for the creation of video clips under Fair Use Guidelines. 

Because of copyright, ITS cannot digitize entire commercial videos, slides or other media on behalf of faculty, nor does it provide formal copyright advice on the appropriateness of digitizing commercial resources, even if owned by Wesleyan or the individual making the request.

ITS can advise on best-practices for digitization, but due to staffing considerations, ITS cannot take on digitizing projects without significant advance project planning and funding.  There are off-campus fee-based commercial services that provide digitization of personally owned documents, negative, photos and slides, or video and audio files, also subject to Fair Use Guidelines. ITS can assist you in finding an appropriate service for your needs. 

Process for Obtaining Storage

Faculty who anticipate needing more than 100 GB of storage for their digital collection should contact their ACM for an initial consultation. This meeting will establish what the faculty member’s needs are and match those needs to one of the services or platforms provided by ITS. While ITS maintains several platforms that are appropriate for average use, we recognize that there are cases where the standard support model is not sufficient.

For very large projects, we will establish the type of storage needed, determine rates of annual space acquisition, and discuss availability and retention needs, as well as plan for disaster recovery. A Service Level Agreement between ITS and the faculty member will be written and co-signed.