Last month, ZSR hosted visiting librarians from Moldova in an exchange of practices amongst our libraries. Silvia Ciubrei, Head of Communication and Public Relations Department for Nicolae and Deputy Librarian for the Testemitanu State University of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Republic of Moldova and Dr. Viorica Lupu, Director of Scientific Library of the Technical University of Moldova were hosted by Donna Flake, retired librarian and friend of Ellen Daugman, as they visited academic libraries across North Carolina.

The visit was part of the State Partnership Program between North Carolina and Moldova. The library relationship started 20 years ago focusing on medical and health sciences libraries and broadened to all academic libraries about seven years ago. As part of the visit we learned more about the higher education landscape in Moldova, our colleagues’ libraries and how they support their academic mission.

Their (Rotary funded) visit in NC lasted for several weeks, and included academic libraries at Cape Fear Community College, Duke, East Carolina University, North Carolina State University, UNC-CH, UNC-Wilmington. Between visits, the core group meets four times a year over zoom to share experiences.

In the course of the visit, our ZSR colleagues provided an overview of Wake Forest and ZSR, a tour of our space, and the role and operations of communications and outreach for ZSR.

We took a deep dive into Special Collections & Archives with a focus on collections and mission, instruction, integration into the curriculum and working with faculty, some basic workflows for archives and rare books, academic and community outreach, and Wake Forest community outreach. Following that we gave a presentation on digital collections, highlighting our workflows, collections, platforms, and demonstrated collections.

Naturally, that led into a repository conversation in which we bridged to Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication. We had shared interest in open access and researcher impact. We also showed digital projects, journal publishing, and talked about data and copyright services. In this section we also talked about our credit bearing instruction program. Over lunch the conversation continued as we talked about AI and how librarianship has changed over the duration of the partnership program. We also talked about eresource licensing and shared about the different contexts in which we operate.

As part of the day, we also learned more about the practices, services, and collections of Silvia and Viorica’s libraries. They also shared more about the history, cultural context, and STEM libraries in Moldova. They were interested in learning more about how we work with, hire, and employ student employees. We talked about the shared complexities of brand management and promotion of library resources and services. It was very interesting to share operational perspectives: their budgetary context is very different, the international publishing landscape impacts our countries differently, and they validated the importance of Open Access scholarship and Open Education Resources. Higher education in Moldova has to be offered in multiple languages. For example, students select whether to enroll in Romanian, English, Russian, or French education. It was interesting to learn that the library provides textbooks to the students with an expectation that they would be returned at the end of the semester.

Many colleagues contributed to the success of this visit! Thanks to Kristen for the planning, logistics, set up, and catering and thanks to Barry for setting up AV and ensuring we could share slides. Thanks to Sam for welcoming and escorting our guests and Sandy for arranging to be here to welcome them. And thanks to Rodrigo, Daisha, Tanya, Thomas, Kyle, Mel, Roz, Carol, and Kate S. for sharing our work with our guests.