ZSR’s Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communications (DISC) team is joining the Research, Instruction, and Outreach (RIO) team. This marks both an ending and a beginning, a chance to reflect on what DISC accomplished as a standalone unit and to chart a path forward for how ZSR supports digital scholarship and digital pedagogy.

What We’ve Built

When DISC began in 2013 as the Digital Scholarship Unit, digital humanities and digital pedagogy were still finding their footing in academic libraries. Those early efforts were built around experimentation: saying yes to faculty questions that didn’t have clear answers, supporting projects that didn’t yet have established service models, and working in spaces where possibilities were still being defined.

That experimentation led to collaborations we’re proud of. We partnered with faculty on research projects like The 18th Century Common, the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project, the Queer Repertory Project, and the Wake Forest Historical Costumes Collection that explored new forms of digital publication and scholarship. We supported student projects like Gender & Sexuality in World History, Domestic Knowledge, Living the Questions, and countless other small projects that made digital methods part of how undergraduates frame scholarly questions and reflect on learning and personal growth.

Our collaboration with Information Systems on Domain of One’s Own (WakeSites) has made turnkey, DIY web hosting a reality, even for non-experts. Yellow Leaf Publishing provides library-supported, open digital publishing infrastructure for all sorts of projects. We support Electronic Theses and Dissertations for the Graduate School, and we remain committed to helping faculty navigate questions related to open access, publishing, and copyright. These programs remain central to our work. DH@Wake, our summer digital humanities institute, is something we’re hoping to someday bring back, along with other faculty development opportunities.

What We’ve Learned

The last 13 years have taught us what kinds of support are most sustainable. Increasingly, we’ve found that to be initiatives and infrastructure designed to serve the broader scholarly community, not just individual projects. We’ve also learned where intensive, project-specific collaborations can create bottlenecks. Custom-built projects often don’t scale. Bespoke solutions resist reuse. Maintenance demands grow and custom solutions eventually break. When support depends on specialized, hands-on work at every stage, participation is necessarily limited, and providing continuity becomes nearly impossible when key individuals become overloaded or leave.

Operating as a standalone unit in ZSR’s org chart also created some challenges. As a separate unit, it was sometimes difficult for our library colleagues in other departments to know what we were working on all the time, or to understand exactly what kinds of support we offered, making it difficult for them to advocate for us or market our services. We had visibility problems, too: being located in the Faculty Commons, faculty sometimes assumed that we were part of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching or IS-Academic Technologies. In short, our organizational ties to ZSR were less legible to faculty who didn’t already know to look for us.

The insight here isn’t that our experimental work or our time as a standalone unit were wrong; in fact, these things were essential to our growth. But to make our work truly sustainable, we need to focus on infrastructure and models that many people can use and replicate. And critically, we learned that digital scholarship support at Wake Forest needs to become integrated with the library relationships faculty already have with their liaisons.

What Comes Next

RIO houses the library’s liaison program—the subject specialist librarians embedded in academic departments who understand disciplinary contexts and serve as faculty’s primary library contact. Joining RIO makes digital scholarship support more legible to the rest of the library. We’ll be embedded in department meetings with liaisons and instruction librarians, making it easier to share updates, identify partnership opportunities, and collaborate on supporting research and teaching. When a liaison works with a History professor exploring digital archives or a class building a digital collection, digital scholarship expertise can be part of the conversation from the start.

Another shift is how we approach project work. Rather than intensive collaboration on custom builds, we’re moving toward consultative support: helping scholars design projects around sustainable tools and reproducible methods that don’t require ongoing specialized maintenance. Data Services already operates this way, providing specialized support across disciplines through embedded partnerships. For example, Joddy, our Data Services Librarian, and Morgan Ritchie-Baum, a business librarian, collaborate each semester on a joint instruction session for econometrics students. In this session, they introduce the students to literature review and data support services for their research. As we bring on a new Copyright and Open Access Librarian this spring, we’ll continue developing this integrated approach.

We think this transition honors what DISC built while fundamentally changing how digital scholarship support reaches faculty and students. Instead of operating as a specialized unit that faculty must seek out, we’re becoming more integrated into the library relationships that already serve every discipline on campus. For a place as relational as Wake Forest, this feels right.

Rest assured, we’re not going away. We’re entering a new phase: one designed to reach more people, more proactively, and more sustainably. We’re excited for what comes next.