Introducing the Scholarly Communication Awareness Program
It is a great pleasure to announce a new program that we’ll be piloting this fall to provide discussion and awareness building forums for CUL’s liaisons in regard to scholarly communication and digital scholarship.
One of the CUL Priority Objectives (III.1) has been formalizing the network of library liaisons to departments and academic programs across the University to strengthen relationships. Led by Kathy Chiang and Kornelia Tancheva, the team has developed expectations and best practices in three major areas of liaison responsibilities: reference and instruction, collection development, and scholarly communication. In the light of this vision, we will offer a series of discussions on subject and institutional repositories, archiving, intellectual property rights, data-driven science, digital publishing, and digital media creation and management. The scope of the awareness program is based on a broad definition of scholarly communication as described in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.
CUL’s library liaisons serve as a communication conduit between faculty and the library regarding their existing and evolving needs for scholarly communications services and tools. Our goals include:
- Explore what scholarly communication and digital scholarship mean within the context of CUL’s services, priorities, and expertise
- Partner with library liaisons in promoting a range of services to faculty and researchers
- Understand expertise and tool needs based on library liaisons’ interactions with faculty
- Enable the library liaisons to bring service gaps and expectations to our attention so that we can refine and expand CUL’s related services
The awareness program aims to introduce library liaisons to emerging issues, programs, and service points in scholarly communication (e.g., copyright, digital media creation and management, research data support). We also want to collaborate in promoting use of institutional and subject repositories and foster a better understanding of open access and new models of scholarly communication.
We’ll start with a lightning session that will provide a general introduction followed by one-hour focused sessions on each topic offered. We hope all the liaisons will attend one of the introductory lightning sessions, and then participate in the detailed sessions that are relevant to their programs. We also recognize that some of the liaisons have expertise and experience in some of the program areas that we’ll be discussing – we look forward to learning from them.
We will have an iterative approach and periodically assess the awareness program to make sure that we are meeting needs within the context of faculty expectations and requirements. The network and support system we will put in place needs to be sustainable – this is not a one-time effort. Based on feedback, we will repeat the awareness program during Spring’13 after making the necessary adjustments.
Fall Program Dates
- Introduction: Lightning Sessions (repeated twice) October 10, 2:30pm-3:30pm, 2B48 Kroch Library; October 15, 11am-noon, 102 Mann Library
- Intellectual Property Rights, Peter Hirtle Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 10-11 a.m., 106 Olin
- Data-Driven Scholarship, Wendy Kozlowski & Gail Steinhart Wednesday, November 14, 2012, 2-3 p.m., 160 Mann
- Digital Publishing Awareness & Engagement, Peter Potter & Kizer Walker Thursday, November 29, 2012, 11 a.m.-12 p.m., 2B48 Kroch
- Subject and Institutional Repositories & Archiving, Jim DelRosso & David Ruddy Thursday, December 6, 2012, 1-2 p.m., 219 Ives Hall
- Digital Media Creation and Management, Jason Kovari & Danielle Mericle Thursday, December 13, 2012, 1:30-2:30 p.m., 106 Olin
CUL’s Scholarly Communication Awareness Team include Jim DelRosso, Peter Hirtle, Jason Kovari, Wendy Kozlowski, Danielle Mericle, Peter Potter, Oya Rieger, David Ruddy, Gail Steinhart, Kizer Walker. We are excited to initiate a systematic discussion of scholarly communication topics that are increasingly becoming core service areas in research libraries.
Oya Y. Rieger
Associate University Librarian
Digital Scholarship & Preservation Services