Navigating a house with many rooms: A discipline-based approach to assessing digital scholarship

As academic libraries seek to expand support for digital scholarship, soliciting input from users is critical. Traditional strategies for assessing user needs and expectations have assumed shared understandings across academic disciplines about how digital scholarship is used and defined, leading to evaluation methods that target user groups based on status rather than disciplinary affiliation. While this traditional approach has provided useful feedback to libraries, the results are not always accurate and dependable. To address this issue, the following paper reports on a discipline-specific approach to assessing user needs and expectations that accounts for disciplinary-differences in how digital scholarship is used and understood. The results, which are more accurate and dependable, can be used to address discipline-specific user needs while also facilitating better engagement with targeted user groups to facilitate and develop new and improved library digital scholarship services, resulting in increased user interest and participation.