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A national consortium of Canadian universities that has helped make thousands of electronic journals and online databases available to researchers in the sciences, engineering, health and environmental disciplines is about to do the same for the humanities and social sciences.
In February, the Canada Foundation for Innovation awarded $19.1 million to the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) to provide desktop access to a wide range of digital research content in the human and social sciences to its members—67 universities, large and small, including UVic. [See The Ring, March 2007.]
When leveraged with additional funding from universities and the provinces, the investment is expected to total $47.7 million.
UVic President David Turpin, chair of the CRKN board of directors, describes the initiative as showing “how Canadian universities are collaborating on a large scale—across institutions, regions and disciplines—to advance research and innovation. CFI’s investment will provide Canadian scholars in the humanities and social sciences with a new level of access to digital resources.”
The initiative promises much more affordable and equitable access to digitized human and social sciences research content, including electronic journals, diaries, audio files, conference proceedings and databases.
Online availability of these resources is also expected to stimulate research collaboration across institutional and disciplinary boundaries and foster development of new methodologies, tools and online communities to address complex issues facing contemporary society.
The rate of digital publication in the social sciences and humanities, as in other fields, is increasing rapidly. But access by Canada’s 800,000 faculty and grad students in the human and social sciences is uneven. Due to high purchase and subscription costs for e-resources, only the largest institutions in the world are able to supply their researchers with a comprehensive array of online resources in these fields.
This is where CRKN comes in. With its established expertise in content acquisition and its ability to negotiate based on a large membership, CRKN can obtain significant discounts in licensing and purchase agreements with Canadian and international publishers.
“This effectively levels the playing field so that small and medium-sized institutions can afford to provide these resources to their faculty and students,” says UVic’s University Librarian Marnie Swanson, who served for two years on the CRKN board of directors.
“This initiative indicates increased acceptance of the importance and utility of digital resources in the humanities,” says Dr. Andrew Rippin, dean of humanities. “It fits in with so many of the activities in the digital realm going on in this faculty.”
Dr. Peter Keller, dean of social sciences, says “In today’s world of team research and highly mobile researchers, access to publications any time and any place is so important. In our collaborative research environment, we often can’t wait weeks for interlibrary loans in order to discuss current findings. Digital access also allows us to do so much more at no extra cost, such as colour reproduction, animation and hyperlinking.”
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