Scholarly Communication, Author Rights, and GT Library Services

Presented at the Library Faculty Advisory Board meeting on April 17, 2009

Not Your Typical Morning Dip

On June 12, 1962, three men engineered a notorious escape from Alcatraz, San Francisco\u27s island prison. Almost 50 years later, a Furman professor takes on the challenge of the Alcatraz swim

All Things Annoying

Robin Kowalski can\u27t complain about the buzz her research has generated

HUBS AND CENTERS AS TRANSITIONAL CHANGE STRATEGY FOR LIBRARY COLLABORATION

Libraries of science and technology universities worldwide are adapting to a changing environment where cyberinfrastructure, eResearch, and new technology-intensive approaches to teaching and learning are transforming the very nature of universities. While many have adopted new technologies and the resources and expertise to manage them, this is only an initial step. Libraries are experimenting with organizational models that will transform their work capacity and expertise. The goal of these libraries is being an entity that feeds and produces collaborative synergies between faculty, students, information professionals, and technologists. Virginia Tech, among the top research universities in the United States, and its constituent libraries are adopting a unique organizational change strategy that implements eScience and cyberlearning roles. This two-part strategy begins with establishing ‘hubs’. The hubs are collaborative, cross-departmental groups in which library employees of varying backgrounds and skills come together on common themes of strategic importance. The hubs act in one sense as a ‘research & development lab’ to explore, imagine, and brainstorm new library initiatives as well as engender deeper understandings of the university’s core academic enterprise. They also are a ‘strike force’ that implements, supports, and assesses emerging library roles in relation to the institution’s academic mission. In these ways, hubs also create learning and scholarship opportunities for their participants beyond the individual task-oriented projects. The second part of this strategy involves the establishment of research and service centers. At Virginia Tech, these are the Center for Innovation in Learning (CIL) and the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS). These centers are designed to incubate and sustain new collaborative synergies between libraries, researchers, instructors, and learners by providing expertise, resources, and new infrastructures to address specific academic research-based needs. The centers become focal points for library action, focused on learning and research activities within other university entities. Benefits to library employees come in the form of scholarship and research with potential for collaboration and new initiatives as relationships grow among project participants. The authors will discuss transformational aspects of the change management model, with lessons from their early experiences. They also will discuss how the model can be adapted by other libraries of science and technology-centered universities

Supporting Research Information Management in the Research University: Partnerships, Challenges, and Possibilities

Research universities are increasingly engaging in complex efforts to collect and synthesize information about an institution’s research footprint. The collection, updating, and sharing of the campus’s bibliographic research outputs is an increasingly important part of this effort, as institutions seek to develop external profiling systems and enable collaborator discovery and to also increasingly internally understand the research strengths and synergies of an institution for planning and assessment. Institutions are adopting a variety of tools to support research information management (RIM), faculty activity reporting (FAR), and researcher collaboration and discovery on campus. In this presentation, we will talk about the complex and enterprise wide institutional environment in which this research information management effort is taking place, including an overview of the multiple stakeholders: libraries, research offices, colleges and departments, provosts, and many others. The University of Illinois and Virginia Tech University will provide in-depth case studies about their own campus efforts, talking specifically about campus partnerships, RIM products, bibliographic data sources and gaps, implementation challenges, and faculty engagement. We will conclude with a discussion about the opportunities for greater interoperability between siloed campus systems that collect bibliographic metadata, and the important and evolving role of the library in this emerging and poorly defined community of practice