0.21 Recommendations  (Page 6/11)

At the campus level, university administrators should go out of their way to ensure that representatives from thesocial sciences and humanities are at the planning table alongside librarians, scientists, and engineers when issues ofcyberinfrastructure are being decided. All too often, humanists and social scientists learn about policy and funding decisions afterthey are made. By the same token, scholars in the humanities and social sciences must not hesitate to insist on being included inthese discussions and decisions.

5.encourage digital scholarship.

Addressed to: Universities; research libraries; the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); theNational Endowment for the Arts (NEA); the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS); the National Academies; the NationalArchives; major private foundations; major scholarly societies; individual leaders in the humanities and social sciences

Implementation: Federal funding agencies and private foundations should establish programs that addressworkforce issues in digital humanities and social sciences, from short-term workshops to postdoctoral and research fellowships tothe cultivation of appropriately trained computer professionals. The ACLS should lead its member organizations in developing uniformpolicies with respect to digital scholarship in tenure and promotion.

The Commission believes that digital scholarship is the inevitable future of the humanities and socialsciences, and that digital literacy is a matter of national competitiveness and a mission that needs to be embraced byuniversities, libraries, museums, and archives. In order to foster digital research, teaching, and publishing, we recommendspecifically that there be

• fellowship and research leave for digital scholarship and for collaborative research projects in laboratories that take fulladvantage of cyberinfrastructure;
• policies for tenure and promotion that recognize and reward digital scholarship and scholarly communication; recognition shouldbe given not only to scholarship that uses the humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure but also to scholarship thatcontributes to its design, construction, and growth;
• workshops aimed at introducing scholars and teachers to the methods and possibilities of digital scholarship and giving themthe opportunity to develop their own creative ideas in the context of cyberinfrastructure;
  See, e.g., (External Link) .
• workshops that bring scholars and technologists together around a set of goals and that forge working partnerships withcomputer scientists and engineers;
• university support for software, data storage, and technical support for librarians and computer professionals.

We might expect younger colleagues to use new technologies with greater fluency and ease, but with tenure atstake, they will also be more risk- averse. There is a widely shared perception that academic departments in the humanities andsocial sciences do not adequately reward innovative work in digital form. A handful of recent examples provide exceptions to the norm,but in the most elite universities, traditional scholarly work, in the form of a single-authored, printed book or article published bya university press or scholarly society, is the currency of tenure and promotion; work online or in new media—especially workinvolving collaboration—is not encouraged. Senior scholars now have both the opportunity and the responsibility to take certain risks,first among which is to condone risk taking in their junior colleagues and their graduate students, making sure that suchendeavors are appropriately rewarded.