SPEC Kit 361: Outreach and Engagement

ARL SPEC KitLibrary outreach is experiencing a renaissance. Librarians have been reaching out to their communities and developing programming for decades, but libraries are increasingly being asked to demonstrate their value to the communities that they serve. In response, outreach positions are becoming more commonplace and communities of practice are emerging around measuring the impact of library outreach activities. This SPEC Kit was born out of the authors’ struggles and successes in providing academic library outreach services at their local institutions. The survey questions were designed to gather information from ARL institutions to create a picture of library outreach that spans across institutions; a professional baseline. Questions of organizational priorities, vision, goals, resource allocation, staffing models, and assessment come together to paint the picture of how libraries are approaching outreach programs. The survey was sent to the 125 ARL member institutions in July 2018, with 57 (46%) responding by the August 6 deadline. The data gathered suggests that systematic outreach programs are still very much in their infancy and highly dependent on local organizational culture. This SPEC Kit highlights the areas where libraries share approaches to outreach programs while also shining a spotlight on issues that warrant continued research and attention by outreach librarians and library administrators

Resurfacing Historical Scientific Data: A Case Study Involving Fruit Breeding Data

Objective: The objective of this paper is to illustrate the importance and complexities of working with historical analog data that exists on university campuses. Using a case study of fruit breeding data, we highlight issues and opportunities for librarians to help preserve and increase access to potentially valuable data sets. Methods: We worked in conjunction with researchers to inventory, describe, and increase access to a large, 100-year-old data set of analog fruit breeding data. This involved creating a spreadsheet to capture metadata about each data set, identifying data sets at risk for loss, and digitizing select items for deposit in our institutional repository. Results/Discussion: We illustrate that large amounts of data exist within biological and agricultural sciences departments and labs, and how past practices of data collection, record keeping, storage, and management have hindered data reuse. We demonstrate that librarians have a role in collaborating with researchers and providing direction in how to preserve analog data and make it available for reuse. This work may provide guidance for other science librarians pursing similar projects. Conclusions: This case study demonstrates how science librarians can build or strengthen their role in managing and providing access to analog data by combining their data management skills with researchers’ needs to recover and reuse data. The substance of this article is based upon a panel presentation at RDAP Summit 2019

Considering Outreach Assessment: Strategies, Sample Scenarios, and a Call to Action

In Brief: How do we measure the impact of our outreach programming? While there is a lot of information about successful outreach activities in the library literature, there is far less documentation of assessment strategies. There may be numerous barriers to conducting assessment, including a lack of time, money, staff, knowledge, and administrative support. Further, many outreach activities are not tied back to institutional missions and event goals, meaning they are disjointed activities that do not reflect particular outcomes. High attendance numbers may show that there was excellent swag and food at an event, but did the event relate back to your missions and goals? In this article, we examine the various kinds of outreach that libraries are doing, sort these activities into six broad categories, explore assorted assessment techniques, and include a small survey about people’s experience and comfort with suggested assessments. Using hypothetical outreach scenarios, we will illustrate how to identify appropriate assessment strategies to evaluate an event’s goals and measure impact. Recognizing there are numerous constraints, we suggest that all library workers engaging in outreach activities should strongly consider incorporating goals-driven assessment in their work

SPARK: A US Cohort of 50,000 Families to Accelerate Autism Research

The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) has launched SPARKForAutism. org, a dynamic platform that is engaging thousands of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and connecting them to researchers. By making all data accessible, SPARK seeks to increase our understanding of ASD and accelerate new supports and treatments for ASD