Blog

Earlier this week I was delighted to be able to attend the launch of the new Dimensions product from our colleagues at Digital Science. Held at the Wellcome Trust building in central London, the evening was a mix of invited talks and panel discussions from speakers across the research workflow, along with a live demo of the new product from Daniel Hook and Christian Herzog who have led this project from its inception. The reaction in the room was very positive and engaged, which was all the more impressive given that this was an after work event on a Monday night!

At its core, Dimensions is connecting together the data behind the different elements of research – including grants, publications, citations, clinical trials and patents – and allowing the user to query that data in a very flexible way to make it as broad or specific as they need. For researchers it provides immediate, free access to search and citation data for 86 million articles and books.

Many activities in the classroom, the lab, and the research group intersect with the library and the resources provided by the library budget. Students, faculty and researchers use an amazing array of online resources—e-books, journals, conference proceedings, datasets, complex databases—usually funded by the university library. But what about the scholarly tools needed to analyze, write, publish and archive the results of the research completed? Which budget supports the analytic software for social scientists, the GIS software to map data, the authoring software to format articles, the supplies for the 3D printer lab? In this article Helen Josephine explores the options for libraries to partner with other campus departments and units to fund the tools and services needed to support today’s digital scholarly environment.