“Design a project big enough to capture the talents of others. This will allow you to do something bigger than you can do alone, and to learn from others smarter than you.”
This advice was given to one of us by an early mentor, which was given to him by his mentor. It struck a chord, and we’ve generally tried to bring people into our collaborations because we know it makes our projects better, and we hope it helps those folks, too, by providing an opportunity (for presentations, publications, funding, and, we hope, some fun) and a network of support and collaboration.
For some time we’ve been developing the Scholarly Communication Notebook, which we hope will become the locus of an active, inclusive, empowered community of practice for teaching scholarly communications to emerging librarians. We researched and identified a platform (OER Commons), and we are providing financial awards to content creators through three calls for proposals (third call coming soon; previous call for reference).
Now we’re thrilled to share that we’re welcoming six content experts to help us identify, collect, and describe existing open learning content related to their topical area. Please help us us welcome this impressive group of colleagues:
- Sara R. Benson, Copyright Collection
- Sara is the copyright librarian and an assistant professor at the Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a JD from the University of Houston Law Center, an LLM from Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley, and an MSLIS from the School of Information Science at the University of Illinois. Prior to joining the library, Sara was a lecturer at the University of Illinois College of Law for ten years. Sara is the host of the ©hat (“Copyright Chat”) podcast, available on iTunes. Sara is the editor of the ACRL book titled “Copyright Conversations: Rights Literacy in a Digital World” and the author of the ALA Editions book titled “Compact Copyright: Quick Answers to Common Questions.” Twitter: @SaraCopyLib
- Jill Cirasella, Open Access Collection
- Jill is the Associate Librarian for Scholarly Communication at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She leads the Mina Rees Library’s scholarly communication initiatives, promotes open scholarship across campus, and contributes to university-wide scholarly communication efforts. Her priorities include enabling public access to GC-authored scholarship and providing instruction about open access, copyright, fair use, publication contracts, research metrics, and more. Jill’s research focus is scholarly communication, very broadly construed: recent and current projects include anxieties surrounding open access, attitudes about practice-based library literature, and the lived experiences of hard of hearing librarians. She is committed to advancing ethical, community-led open access initiatives and currently serves as Chair of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Twitter: @jillasella
- Arthur “AJ” Boston, Scholarly Sharing Collection (library publishing and repositories)
- AJ (0000-0001-8590-4663) is the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Murray State University and MSU Office of Research and Creative Activity Coordinator. His writings and presentations incorporate popular culture to make scholarly communication more accessible. Boston is an outgoing Library Publishing Coalition Fellow and incoming SPARC COAPI Steering Committee Member and KYVL Affordable Learning Steering Committee Member. Twitter: @aj_boston
- Regina Gong, Open Education Collection
- Regina Gong is the OER & Student Success Librarian at Michigan State University. Regina is actively involved in the open education community and has done numerous national presentations, webinars, and workshops on OER, open education, open educational practices, and Women of Color in OER (#WoCinOER). Regina currently serves on the Open Education Conference Steering Committee, SPARC Open Education Advisory Group, and as faculty for the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) Institute for Open Educational Resources. Previously, she was a member of the SPARC Steering Committee and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER), where she served as VP for professional development for three years. Regina also provides leadership to the Michigan OER Network (MI-OER). She is also a recipient of the Open Education Group OER Research Fellowship and a Global OER-Graduate Network (GO-GN) member. Regina obtained her Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) at Wayne State University and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration at MSU. Twitter: @drgong.
- Hoa Luong, Open Data
- Hoa Luong is an Associate Director at the Research Data Service, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the point person for the Illinois Data Bank, known as the institutional data repository, to help Illinois researchers share their research data. Hoa leads and works with subject liaisons at the Library to curate datasets in the Illinois Data Bank and provides data management plan (DMP) review, as well as coordinates workshops and educational outreach. Hoa received a B.S. in Food Sciences and M.S. in Library and Information Science, both from the University of Illinois.
- Rachel Miles, Research Impact
- Rachel Miles is the Research Impact Librarian at Virginia Tech, where she supports researchers in improving and assessing the impact of their research through education of Open Access (OA) and author rights; provides specialized support for citation analysis, bibliometrics, altmetrics, network visualization, and emerging applications of impact data at individual, department, institutional, and other group levels; and supports best practices in developing and maintaining research profiles. Her research primarily focuses on the awareness and usage of research impact indicators, such as bibliometrics and altmetrics, among Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty and academic librarians at R1 institutions. Twitter: @metric_guru
As you can see, this is an all-star team, and we couldn’t be happier to be working with them. They’re going to be scanning the environment for a target of 30-50 open objects that are appropriate to their content area, creating metadata, depositing the resources into the SCN, and writing up a summary of their work: what’s covered, what’s missing and needs development, etc. You might see them at disciplinary conferences talking about their work, or crowdsourcing from their communities. If you know of great open content in these areas that’s appropriate for learning about the topic, please reach out to them. If you’ve created such content, send it along! Or add it yourself, if you like. Just let us know so we can endorse it and get it into the right collection/s. We’re also planning to introduce a “What/Why Scholarly Communication” collection for content that spans all or most of these areas. Will, Maria, and Josh will curate that collection.
We’re very excited to collaborate with these folks (and with you) and to see this progress and growth of the SCN!
Here’s more background on the SCN on our project site, and here’s a post reflecting on the relationship between the open book that we’re working on, and the SCN.