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Today Molly and Mary Beth (and for a while, Lauren C.) watched the ARL-ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication webinar, “Broader Library Involvement in Building Scholarly Communication Programs.” The goal of the webinar was share examples and provide ideas for institutions who wish to involve liaisons in scholarly communication (SC) outreach across campus. This webinar was a good follow-up to the ideas I shared at the August liaison meeting. The three presenters were Karen Williams, University of Minnesota; Mike Furlough, Penn State; and Doug Way, Green Valley State University.
The main take-away points were:
- Part of liaisons’ SC outreach efforts should be framed by the question, “What do we do in libraries to help make faculty active in broader, global research communities?”; our faculty are collaborating with researchers at other institutions world-wide, and we should identify how we can support them
- Institutional ownership for SC issues is essential; cannot be library-owned or -only
- At UMN, the library has partnered with the research office to design librarian-taught courses for faculty that fulfill government funding agencies’ Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training requirement
- Arranging a forum for faculty editors to come together at your institution to discuss publishing issues and concerns with SC and collection development staff
- Emphasize the service an institutional repository supports, not the repository itself
- Saying “No, we can’t really help with…” will serve us better in the long run than trying to take on supporting new services that go beyond our abilities, boundaries
- Ultimately challenge will be answering questions of “Who cares? Why are you doing this when you can’t provide me all the journals I want?”
- Liaison support for SC issues will vary from discipline to discipline
All in all, it was a worthwhile webinar in that it generated new ideas, and confirmed others that have been percolating. Liaisons, stay tuned for more SC outreach info!
3 Comments on ‘Scholarly Communication & Liaison Outreach’
You’ve shared some interesting ideas. Is the webinar available for viewing after the fact?
Sorry I missed it. I like the idea of going high with the scholarly communication mission.
Susan, the webinar will be available soon. Several folks have expressed interest in viewing, so I’ll add the link and alert everyone when it’s up!