Rice University's Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS, formerly the Digital Library Initiative, DLI) provides the Rice community with services to support the creation and use of digital scholarship.  Working with faculty, students, staff and members of the Houston community, the CDS has developed a number of innovative digital collections that include digitized holdings from the Woodson Research Center, digitized private collections supporting faculty research, faculty publications, preservation copies of subscription journals (with publisher permissions), and resources in support of teaching and learning.  The CDS is actively engaged in a number of digital library research projects and collaborates nationally and internationally to enable open access to digital scholarship for all users worldwide.

The CDS is home to the Digital Media Center (DMC), providing a rich environment for the creation and use of multimedia resources.  Located in 129 Herring Hall, the DMC offers a lab to support capture, creation and conversion of video, audio, digital images and other complex media, along with training to assist users in working with new multimedia tools.

Preservation of digital resources is an additional concern within the CDS, with efforts underway to preserve Rice's digital holdings.  Rice is an active member of both the LOCKSS and CLOCKSS consortia, actively addressing the need to ensure long term access to published serials content into the future.

CDS Mission and Goals

Rice's Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) provides a critical backbone in support of the research, teaching, and outreach mission of Rice University. As the Web and other digital resources increasingly become core components for communication and dissemination of teaching and research, it is important that Rice provide long term access to these materials, along with the tools and services needed to work effectively and collaboratively with these assets. The CDS of Fondren Library is dedicated to this end.

The CDS goals are:

1.    Provide research and information support through specialized staff and services, thus helping the University raise its research and scholarship profile.

2.    Bring to the University community access to the resources needed to further its scholarly activity.

3.    Actively foster collaborative relationships with other organizations in order to broaden the range of resources we can bring to the University community.

4.    Provide leadership for the University in engaging the Houston community.

5.    Embark on a diligent and sustained research initiative that will identify both needs and possibilities for the library of the future.

6.    Energetically promote information fluency and participate in the integration of information resources with pedagogy.

7.    Create and creatively use inviting community spaces, both physical and virtual, that will represent the library to the University community, to Houston, and to the international community.

8.    Heighten awareness of and strengthen support for Fondren's special collections in the Woodson Research Center (WRC).

You can download the full description of the CDS mission and goals statement here.

Projects

• Rice Digital Scholarship Archive (RDSA)  for housing several digital collections
  
• TIMEA  (Travelers in the Middle East Archive)
• Our Americas Archive
  
• The Connexions project
• The Shoah Archive at Rice
• Advanced Placement Digital Library (APDL)
• Learning Science and Technology Repository (LESTER)
• Rice University Theses and Dissertations
• The Rice Institute Pamphlets
  

Our Team

• Geneva Henry
• Lisa Spiro
• Sid Byrd
• Jane Zhao
• Monica Rivero
  
• Nadalia Liu

contact us at dli@rice.edu