HOUSTON – Many Houston academic figures have been rewarded with prestigious awards for their contributions. One of them is Taylor Davis-Van Atta, director of the Digital Research Commons at the University of Houston Libraries, who was awarded the Texas Digital Library (TDL) Scholarly Communication Award this year.
The award is given to honor the work of an individual or group of academics, including faculty and librarians, who have made significant advances and contributions in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications.
Anne Washington, semantic applications product analyst at OCLC and former coordinator of metadata services at UH Libraries, said Taylor Davis-Van Atta is the most deserving candidate to receive the awards. She referred to his leadership in transforming UH Libraries scholarly communication services and support and his achievements at the University of Houston.
One of his accomplishments is the build-out of infrastructure for the Cougar ROAR (Repositories for Open Access) to support scholars in depositing and sharing their open works. Another noteworthy accomplishment is establishing a curriculum vitae service to accelerate the deposit of faculty works into the Institutional Repository.
Joining UH Libraries in 2017 as the digital scholarship coordinator, Davis-Van Atta was promoted to his current role in 2020. He is also the founding publisher and co-editor of the humanities journal Music & Literature.
Davis-Van Atta's areas of specialization include scholarly publishing, open access and author rights, and thesis and dissertation development. His research interests include digital research sustainability and the presentation and preservation of born-digital research outputs.