Digital Scholarship Services – Embracing Digital Transformation of Learning and Scholarly Research

The Digital Scholarship Services at PolyU Library aim at providing digital tools and technologies to support faculty and students in enhancing their learning and scholarly research. The following services are offered:

• Specialised software  for data analytics, data mining and data cleaning, Geographic Information System (GIS), statistics and multimedia production;
• Online tools and resources for data science, AI and machine learning, and self-paced learning platforms for coding and data science;
• Visualisation of digital content at the Digital Visualisation Room;
• Digitisation service to digitise printed materials and 3D object; and
• Self-service studios for creating research impact stories or enhancing students’ academic presentation skills.

Highlights of the Digital Scholarship Services

• Equipping students with digital skills to embrace digital transformation
  High-performance and graphic computers with specialised software to support digital scholarship are installed in i-Space at 4/F North Wing and 3/F North Wing as shown in the floor plans below.  Students can use these resources to develop their digital skills and delve into a variety of software including Python, data analytics, spatial computing Geographic Information System (GIS), 3D modelling, and immersive virtual reality technology. They can also explore the online tools for AI and machine learning.

i-Space (4/F North Wing) – Location of Digital Scholarship (DS) workstations installed with specialised software such as NVivo, SPSS, ArcGIS Pro, Open Refine, Blender, SketchUp Pro and Unity.

3/F North Wing – Location of iMac and Graphic PCs installed with Adobe Creative Cloud

Additionally, the following new VR equipment is provided to enable students to experience the latest immersive technologies and develop their own VR or Metaverse applications. Please reserve the VR Experience Zone (4/F i-Space) via iBooking to try them out or make an appointment for a consultation service if needed.

HTC VIVE Pro 2, Facial Tracker & Tracker	Meta Quest 3	XREAL AIR 2 PRO
Sony mocopi	TrackIR 5

• Enhancing students’ presentation skills through self-service studios
  Five self-service studios including a Multimedia Production Studio, two One Button Studios and two Sound Recording Studios are set up at 3/F North Wing for students to enhance their public speaking and presentation skills. These studios are equipped with recording equipment and editing software to enable students to produce high-quality videos and multimedia contents for projects and research impact stories to facilitate learning and scholarly research.

• Supporting Digital Humanities Projects
  To support Digital Humanities Projects at PolyU, the Library collaborates with the PolyU community to make their research projects available for open access on the Library’s Digital Collection Portal if appropriate. The Library’s team will provide consultation, digitisation assistance, content enhancement or project hosting services depending on the project stage if applicable. An example of Library’s digitisation services is to convert the physical items into digital objects via large-format/3D scanning and optical Character Recognition (OCR) for further processing for digital projects. Please do not hesitate to share your research project details with your Faculty Librarians or the Digital Initiatives & Technology Librarian  and explore the opportunity for collaboration together.

Come and find out more about the Library’s Digital Scholarship Services!