Taylor Davis-Van Atta

Taylor Davis-Van Atta, director of the Digital Research Commons at University of Houston Libraries, has been chosen as the 2021 recipient of the Texas Digital Library (TDL) Scholarly Communication Award. The award honors the work of an individual or group of academics, including faculty and librarians, who have made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications.

In her letter of nomination for the award, Anne Washington, semantic applications product analyst at OCLC and former coordinator of metadata services at UH Libraries, stated that “Taylor Davis-Van Atta is most deserving of the TDL Scholarly Communication Award for his leadership in transforming UH Libraries scholarly communication services and support. His achievements include significantly growing University of Houston (UH)‚ open access repositories; championing UH Libraries services across campus; and creatively engaging UH colleges and programs to make thousands of student and faculty works openly available.”

Among Davis-Van Atta’s many accomplishments are the build-out of infrastructure for the Cougar ROAR (Repositories for Open Access) to support scholars in depositing and sharing their open works, and the establishment of a curriculum vitae service to expedite the deposit of faculty works into the Institutional Repository. 

Davis-Van Atta came to UH Libraries in 2017 as the digital scholarship coordinator and was promoted to his current role in 2020. His areas of specialization include scholarly publishing, open access and author rights, thesis and dissertation development, and his research interests include digital research sustainability and the presentation and preservation of born-digital research outputs. He is also the founding publisher and co-editor of the humanities journal Music & Literature.