Digital Scholarship Center

The Digital Scholarship Center is responsible for the digitization, preservation and access to digital collections in the Library, including items from Library Special Collections and SF State Masters Theses and Dissertations.

About the Digital Scholarship Center

After the completion of the Library Building Project in 2012, the electronic course reserves component of the Reserve Book Room separated from traditional course reserves and became the Digital Scholarship Center (DSC). Shortly after opening, the DSC, while still maintaining electronic course reserves until 2018, began managing the institutional repository (ScholarWorks) and the digital asset management system (CONTENTdm). Work began on populating the IR with the backlog of close to 2,000 theses and dissertations placed in storage during the library closure (2008-2012). Since then, over 4,000 items have been housed in the IR, many of them electronic theses and dissertations that were individually scanned and optimized by DSC staff. In addition to electronic theses and dissertations, the DSC also began creating digital surrogates of primary sources from the Library’s Special Collections and Archives, housing and displaying many rare books, student strike ephemera, and photographs in CONTENTdm. The DSC has progressed to become a fully-functioning digitization lab, upgrading its equipment and expanding its knowledge in the pursuit of higher quality imaging, and providing ongoing support for its growing institutional repository and digital asset management system.