Building Virtual Community through Digital Scholarship Meetups

With the launch of a newly created Digital Scholarship Program at our University Library, digital scholarship meetup events were designed and held with the intent to connect with campus stakeholders and begin to build community. This case-study paper describes the context around the development of the Digital Scholarship Program within our library and across our research institution’s community, and outlines the iterative process of identifying our core values and goals for a community-building meetup series. We discuss both the initial implementation of the series, highlighting successful strategies and the challenges we faced building community in a virtual format, as well as ways the series was modified over the course of several academic terms in response to community feedback. Our overview of the meetups includes a description of our planning, collaboration, and meeting facilitation techniques. We conclude with lessons learned and next steps to further reflect on and grow this broad-reaching virtual community of practice.