Digital Strategies & Innovation

The division is led by Jessica Davila, Associate Dean for Digital Strategies and Innovation. It comprises four departments, each offering expertise in the following areas:

• Digital Collections and Digitization - The Digital Collections and Digitization department brings greater access to the University Libraries Special Research Collections materials, in order to enhance scholarship, teaching, and community engagement.
• Digital Scholarship and Data Services - Our vision for Digital Scholarship and Data Services (DSDS) is to serve as a dynamic hub of innovation, collaboration, and excellence in support of scholarly endeavors.
• Library Technology Operations - This team is responsible for ensuring that our systems, platforms, and workflows support the discoverability, access, use, and preservation of the Libraries' resources.
• Open Initiatives and Scholarly Communication - The OISC team provides advocacy, information, programs, and services designed to increase information access.

AI Sandbox Pilot Project

In Summer 2025, OU Libraries received an Artificial Intelligence Seed Grant from the Data Institute for Societal Challenges (DISC) to launch the OU Libraries AI Sandbox. This pilot ecosystem provides OU students, faculty, and researchers with hands-on access to no-code and API-based AI tools for research, teaching, and creative work. The Sandbox includes generative and non-generative platforms such as LibreChat, LiteLLM, HuggingFace, AWS Bedrock, and the National Research Platform, along with training materials and workshops. Access is currently available to Library AI Workshop attendees and, by request, to current OU faculty, staff, and students. Learn more about the AI Sandbox Pilot Project.

The Nautilus Portal

University Libraries is using Nautilus to provide researchers with hosted pods (also known as containers) for JupyterLab environments to access common software setups for coding languages and applications. Check out our Nautilus service page for more info! 

Digital Collections

The purpose of the University of Oklahoma Libraries' digital collections is to provide online, public access to OU Libraries' Special Collections materials in order to enhance scholarship, teaching, and community engagement.

The Digital Strategies and Innovation team manages our digital collections platform, Islandora, which is an open-source software framework. Our team members work with the Special Research Collections team to digitize materials, manage the digital collections, support the technical infrastructure, and own the development of the platform. 

SHAREOK 

SHAREOK is the joint institutional repository for the University of Oklahoma (OU) and the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO). It serves as the home for the intellectual output of those institutions, such as: digital theses and dissertations, faculty publications, open access publications, open educational resources, institution-specific content and much more. Our team supports the technical infrastructure, development, and partner relationships for the repository.