Over the 2024-2025 academic year, the Catholic University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship team has continued to support and inspire a vibrant research culture by offering practical instruction, writing on critical scholarly issues, and engaging with our community through outreach and collaboration. As the digital landscape evolves, so too has our programming, especially in areas like generative AI, data visualization, and scholarly communication.

This post reflects on our activities from May 2024 to April 2025—highlighting the services, resources, and professional development that help shape the future of research at The Catholic University of America.

Empowering Researchers through Skill-Based Workshops

The 11 digital scholarship workshops offered this year were not merely instructional sessions—they were selected to target the most pressing methodological and technological gaps observed in faculty consultations, classroom interactions, and student questions. The suite of introductory sessions on Tableau, OpenRefine, Gephi, Zotero, and AntConc was structured to meet the needs of budding researchers and established scholars who need a foundation for building particular skills.

For example, Tableau was offered in response to a growing campus-wide demand for visually clear, data representation. The strong attendance and high viewership reinforced the need for accessible data-visualization training. OpenRefine—both introductory and advanced workshops—was intentionally emphasized because data cleaning remains one of the most persistent bottlenecks in faculty and student project workflows. AntConc and Gephi workshops extended our support into digital humanities and social network analysis, fields where the demand for non–coding-based tools continues to rise. Citation management sessions on Zotero and RefWorks served basic needs that cut across all disciplines.

We conducted 11 digital scholarship workshops with 51 registered participants, covering a wide range of tools and methods. These sessions were led by Kevin Gunn, Charles Gallagher, and Ben Cushing, and were recorded and made available on YouTube—collectively garnering hundreds of views.

Notable offerings included:

• “Working with Tableau” – 13 participants and 235 views, making it our most-watched session.
• “Using OpenRefine for Cleaning Data” – A consistently popular workshop with 110 views.
• “Text Analysis Using AntConc” – Introduced basic regular expressions and concordance features for linguistic and literary research.

We also introduced four new workshops this past year:

• Citation Management with Zotero (58 views)
• Citation Management with RefWorks (65 views)
• Advanced OpenRefine (78 views)
• Visualizing Network Data using Gephi (34 views)

These hands-on workshops provided researchers with concrete digital methods that enhance both individual and collaborative scholarship.

 

 

Special Feature: Exploring AI Research Platforms

In February, we hosted two well-received workshops titled “Harnessing AI for Research: Explore, Experiment, and Engage”, coordinated by Charles Gallagher and Kevin Gunn. These sessions attracted 19 participants from across campus, including 5 MLIS students, and introduced attendees to AI-powered platforms that assist with literature review, synthesis, and data analysis. The workshops served as a “sandbox” where researchers could test emerging tools without the pressure of adoption. The positive feedback affirmed the importance of continuing AI literacy initiatives within the library setting.

Additionally, we shared our approach to integrating AI into library services during a presentation to fellow librarians at the WRLC Annual Meeting in May 2024.

Writing and Advocacy: Sharing Knowledge through Blog Posts

The Digital Scholarship team published 17 blog posts under the Digital Scholar Bytes blog this year. Post were written by Kevin Gunn, Joan Stahl, Melissa Foge, Ben Cushing, Charles Gallagher, and Marla Koenigsknecht. Topics spanned a rich spectrum of scholarly issues:

• Legal & Ethical: fair use, copyright, data ownership, public domain
• Research Tools & Practices: open science, citation management, GIS
• Emerging Trends: generative AI, equitable publishing, disruptive collection models
• Pedagogical Themes: student well-being, literacy, peer review practices

These posts not only document our expertise but also serve as a bridge between scholarly communication and practitioner needs.

Engaging the Campus Community

We extended our impact beyond the library through collaborative outreach:

• Kevin Gunn participated in the Center for Teaching Excellence’s faculty book club, which read Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT. This initiative brought together instructors experimenting with AI in the classroom.
• Charles Gallagher joined a faculty social event—“Discuss AI Innovation Over Appetizers”—to engage with administrators and researchers on the future of AI in higher ed.
• In March, 2025, Stephen Connaghan (University Librarian), Joan Stahl (Director of Research and Instruction) and Kevin Gunn (Coordinator of Digital Scholarship), met with the American Library Association (ALA) accreditation committee as liaison librarians for the Department of Information Sciences. The accreditation committee was interested in our work in digital scholarship—the AI workshops were a key focus of the discussion.
• In collaboration with Marla Koenigsknecht (Library and Information Science graduate student at Wayne State University), we updated the Copyright and Scholarly Communication LibGuides to ensure compliance, accessibility, and instructional clarity.

Staying Current: Professional Development and Learning

Keeping pace with developments in digital scholarship requires continual learning. The team’s professional development activities were deliberately structured around needs in teaching, research support, and scholarly communication. Participation in intensive, multi-day programs focused on text analysis, large language model-based classification, retrieval-augmented generation, predatory publishing, and AI literacy directly informed both public-facing workshops and internal staff training. Some of the workshops, webinars, and conferences included:

Multi-day Programs

• Ithaka Constellate’s Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute
• Automated Text Classification using LLMs
• Introduction to Retrieval Augmented Generation

Webinars on Scholarly Communication & Research

• Profiling Predatory Publishers
• Transformative Agreements in Libraries
• Best Practices for Managing Data in Research

Generative AI and Libraries

• Generative AI in Libraries (GAIL) Virtual Conference
• AI Literacy for Librarians
• Build an AI Chatbot in 30 Minutes
• Copyright and AI: Legal Implications and Future Trends

Through this engagement, we have refined our understanding of emerging tools and brought this insight back to our programming and outreach.

Looking Ahead: Priorities for the Coming Year

As digital research tools and expectations evolve, we remain committed to:

• Expanding AI literacy initiatives for students and faculty;
• Offering hands-on workshops in digital methods and platforms;
• Supporting inclusive, ethical, and sustainable scholarly communication;
• And partnering across campus to integrate digital scholarship into the research life cycle.

Whether you are a student just beginning to explore digital methods or a seasoned scholar needing to learn a new tool, we invite you to take part in our upcoming workshops, read our blog, and contact us for a one-on-one consultation. For more information or to view our past workshops, visit our Digital Scholarship Services page or contact Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship.

Kevin Gunn is the Coordinator of Digital Scholarship at The Catholic University of America Libraries.