As more and more scholars experiment with digital methods and with building digital collections, what measures are in place to make sure that the fruits of these labors are kept vital for the long term? Library directors and chief information officers sense that there is interest on the part of faculty, but does this mean they need to invest in a digital humanities center and hire new staff or just reconfigure the people and resources they already have? First and foremost, what does university leadership seek to gain from such an investment? This study seeks to address the fate of digital research resources - whether they be digital collections of scholarly or other materials, portals, encyclopedias, mapping tools, crowdsourced transcription projects, visualization tools, or other original and innovative projects that may be created by professors, library, or IT staff. Such projects have the potential to provide valuable tools and information to an international audience of learners. Without careful planning and execution, however, they can also all too easily slip between the cracks and quickly become obsolete.

The phrase “scholarly communication” appears often in the description of library roles and responsibilities, but the function is still new enough that it takes different forms in different institutions. There is no common understanding of where it fits into the library’s organizational structure. This landscape review of offices of scholarly communication grows out of research originally conducted by Ithaka S+R for the Harvard Library. The project was designed to undertake a review of how academic institutions support the scholarly communication function in their libraries and to gather basic information about the issues at some of the largest research intensive university libraries. It finds categorical differences in the vision for the scholarly communications unit and its organizational placement, as well as associated differences in staffing and budget.