Tiffany Camp Johnson | February 12, 2026

It’s often hard to nail down a definition of digital scholarship. But at its heart, digital scholarship leverages new technologies to advance research, enhance pedagogy, and expand access. The field draws practitioners, scholars, students (and critics) from every corner of academia. The cross-pollination of inquiry, collaboration, and innovation create powerful ways of teaching and learning.

On a typical day at Davidson, my morning may begin with a Library Information Desk shift where I may be called upon to troubleshoot a printer issue, field a research question, or pull a book from the hold shelf. By midday, the landscape may shift into planning a class session that achieves its learning objectives while engaging students in digital methodology and storytelling.

One class session that captured the spirit of this work was Professor Suzanne Churchill’s ENG 406: Digital Design & Storytelling. The Digital Learning & Scholarship Team has been involved in this class for years; and each year enables us to reflect on our success and opportunities. The last iteration of the seminar was truly a team-taught effort that harnessed the expertise of various librarians and a fellow from the Engagement Research and Learning Unit. The students were tasked with creating a digital humanities project that educates the public about a literary public domain work.

As a teaching team, we moved through the entire digital project lifecycle: from the initial “messy” stage of research to developing prototypes to user experience feedback to the affordances and constraints of digital publication (i.e., website development). Holly White, Instructional Designer for Teaching & Learning led a research and Zotero session that would prove invaluable for their annotated bibliography. Emily Murphy, Media Creation & Curation Librarian, discussed the ways that social media may enable students to find scholarly networks and a public audience. Jacob Heil, Assistant of Digital Learning, discussed using Wordpress and wireframing principles to tell their digital story. I led a discussion on the scholarly contributions of black digital humanists and revisited the class with former Library Studio Fellow and current Learner Engagement & Access Services Supervisor (Michael Chapin ‘24) to facilitate a speed dating UX session. Lastly, Jacob and Leah Duncan, Digital Humanities Librarian, guided them through a HTML & CSS Workshop.

Early faculty partnership, thoughtful cross-team collaboration, and multiple touchpoints with students ensured the success of the class.

This is the work that energizes me—not just as a curator of information, but as a collaborative partner in the “digital scholarship” umbrella, ensuring that digital tools are not just an end of semester by-product but a critically integrated asset that meaningfully impacts our learners.

While I take pride in supporting our digital collections like the Honors Theses and contributing to workflows that ensure access and accessibility, what I want to do more of is this deep-level learner partnership. I thrive when I am in a consultation, classroom, or workshop, demystifying intellectual property rights and open access publication options for a faculty member publishing their work or leading a student session on sustainable data management practices. My mission is to advance open scholarship as a standard, not an exception, at Davidson. I envision a future where my work moves even further into the realm of open access and pedagogy—collaborating with faculty to weave open scholarship practices directly into the liberal arts curriculum. By fostering an environment where learners feel empowered to use emerging research practices, I’m not just helping them find resources; I’m helping them build the infrastructure for the next generation of inquiry. Whether it’s navigating the nuances of a Creative Commons license or strategizing a digital collection’s reach, I am driven by the belief that thoughtful integration of digital tools can make scholarly work more transparent, inclusive, and impactful.