Rikk Mulligan
Digital Scholarship Strategist
Carnegie Mellon University
Jessica Otis
Digital Humanities Specialist
Carnegie Mellon University
David Scherer
Scholarly Communications and Research Curation Consultant
Carnegie Mellon University
Lisa Zilinski
Research Data Consultant
Carnegie Mellon University
The Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Libraries and Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences are currently in the process of creating a center for digital research and publishing, as part of CMU’s 2025 Strategic Plan. This presentation will address the infrastructural challenges that we face in operationalizing CMU’s strategic goals to advance digital humanities, digital scholarship, scholarly communications, and research data management. While acquiring access to space, dedicated technology, and funding are familiar challenges in a university research environment, they are made more complicated in this instance by the low visibility of libraries and the humanities in tech-rich universities. The disjunction between the ambitions of CMU’s Strategic Plan and the reality of our available infrastructural resources creates a liminal space in which we have been working (mostly successfully) to achieve our center’s goals as part of the evolution of the University Libraries.