The Digital Scholarship Center: Home

The Digital Scholarship Center at Siena College supports teaching, scholarship and stewardship using digital content (digitized text, photographs, videos, audio, maps, charts, archives, data sets and models, and any multimedia in digital formats). The Center functions as a teaching and learning laboratory where academic faculty and students will collaborate and have the support of library faculty and IT staff on course or research projects. Students will develop new technical and lifelong information literacy skills in the multidisciplinary project based learning offered through the Center. Digital literacy skills include creating, describing, archiving, accessing, preserving, conducting research and creating scholarly products, and finally - disseminating and sharing them for global access or further research.

The Center currently includes The Active Learning Classroom that supports group or project based learning in a flexible and high-tech environment.  This room will be available for course scheduling in the spring, 2017 semester.  There is an adjoining Production Laboratory equipped with scanners for various formats and associated software tools for managing digital content.  Students will learn how to describe digital content so it can be contributed to digital collections and shared with internal or external communities.  Library collections will also be offered for digitization, especially from the Archives, Special Collections and the Fine Art collection.  Community groups and historical societies will be invited to bring their collections for digitization and management – enhancing shared access to hitherto uncovered or unknown information resources.

The Digital Scholarship Center displays digital content to an adjoining Information Commons through the Media Wall.  Large monitors continually exhibit digital content and projects once they are completed.  These are intended to share projects with the many students studying in the area or working collaboratively at the group tables.  Interest in digital literacy is important in all fields of teaching and research, across all three schools at Siena, and for competitive eligibility for jobs and careers that do, or will, require both cognitive and technical skills of their employees.  Such skills will also serve Siena graduates in their community engagement and service roles.  It is anticipated that internships and student projects with entrepreneurial partners will be supported by the Center.