Category: NC State

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Voices from the Field: Perspectives

We’re excited to share a series of updates on the development of our forthcoming book, Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Culture: Law, Economics, and Publishing (ACRL). More specifically, on the third and final unit, “Voices from the Field,” which consists of short practical pieces by practitioners engaged in scholcomm and related work, intended to provoke reflection and discussion. “Voices” is further divided into Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies. This is an update on the Perspectives contributions. Similar posts for Intersections and Case Studies will follow in the coming weeks.

When we issued the CFP late last fall (Nov.), we really had no idea what the response might be. We ended up with more great ideas than we had room for, which was both wonderful and heartbreaking. In the end, we did our best to balance various considerations and selected 26 proposals to move forward. Honestly, all of the proposals were great and deserve development. Now that we’re seeing all those selected wrapping up towards final drafts, we couldn’t be happier with them! It’s so exciting to see all these excellent ideas come together, and to be able to provide a platform for them!

Perspectives is the largest of the three “Voices” subsections at 11 pieces. From the CFP:

Perspectives are intended to offer situated and self-reflexive discussions of topics of importance in scholarly communication and the ways in which libraries or librarians respond to those topics. Scholarly communications work inevitably leads to engagement with issues upon which opinions vary, as do the courses of action that address those issues. Personal and professional experience, as well as institutional context, and personal and community identity inform and shape the opinions and approaches of scholarly communication professionals.

Examples of Perspectives might include reflections from a solo scholarly communication librarian asked to spin up a new program, a community college librarian working to support open access with faculty that do not prioritize publishing in scientific journals, or a scholar working on politically contested topics balancing a commitment to openness with safeguarding themselves from hostile alt-right trolls and doxxing.

Concepts that loom large across these pieces include vocational awe, adaptability, collaboration, learning from experience (including so-called “failures”), and self-care.

  • Jennifer Patiño from UW-Madison looks to community archives as a model for considering inclusivity in the OA movement.
  • Jennie Rose Halperin from Harvard critically examines the imperative for openness in the humanities.
  • Elisabeth Shook from Boise State interrogates duality in scholcomm work.
  • Ian Harmon from WVU asks if vocational awe and service-oriented neutrality bring bullshit work into scholcomm librarianship.
  • Julia Rodriguez at Oakland State considers outreach and collaboration in the establishment and growth of a program.
  • A.J. Boston at Murray State examines the costs and benefits of “other duties as assigned.”
  • Brian Quinn and Innocent Awasom from Texas Tech discuss doing scholcomm work outside of a dedicated scholcomm position.
  • Teresa Schultz and Elena Azadbakht from University of Nevada Reno remind us that openness alone isn’t magically accessible and that we have a responsibility to consider and implement accessible practices.
  • Emily Kilcer from SUNY Albany, Julia Lovett of University of Rhode Island, and Mark Clemente from Case Western reflect on their transitions from first jobs to new positions.
  • Dick Kawooya from the School of Information Science at University of South Carolina discusses the importance of teaching scholcomm topics to LIS students interested in academic librarianship.
  • Carla Myers from Miami University looks to “failure” as an opportunity for assessment and improvement.

As we hope you’ll agree, this is an excellent collection of work by esteemed peers, who are sharing insights practical, theoretical, challenging, caring, and provocative. We’re thrilled they’ve been so generous with their time and knowledge and have stuck with us through the challenges of the last few months. We’re proud to be in a position to promote their excellence, and look forward to seeing these ideas discussed in LIS programs and beyond.

Look for similar posts for the Intersections and Case Studies soon.

High Five,

Josh, on behalf of Maria and Will

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Meet Jenna!

We’re excited to introduce you to our colleague, Jenna Strawbridge, who’s been doing incredible work developing the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN). You’re going to be hearing more from Jenna, her great work, and the SCN soon, but for now we asked her to write a short introduction. Help us welcome Jenna!

Jenna standing in front of triceritops skeleton.

Hello! I joined the Scholarly Communication Notebook initiative in February 2020 as a graduate research assistant. My interest in the SCN platform, including the behind-the-scenes technological and metadata wonders, stems from my background in museum collections and higher education. After getting my BA degree in anthropology from the University of Texas in 2011, I sought an MS degree in evolutionary anthropology with a graduate certificate in museum studies from the University of New Mexico. While at UNM, I taught undergraduate laboratory courses in human evolution which really sparked my interest in teaching. I spent about 7 years on-and-off in the museum and archives field with the Texas Historical Commission’s Curatorial Facility for Artifact Research, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Western Archeological & Conservation Center, and the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. I was most interested in records management related to archaeological and natural history museum collections.

In 2018, I started my MLIS degree from the University of South Carolina and just recently graduated. I worked for one year as a librarian at Morton College, a small community college outside of Chicago in 2019, and began working in technical services at Duke University in early 2020. When I saw the job listing pop up to work with the SCN team, I knew this would be a great opportunity to meld together some of my previous museum collections and data management experience as well as my newly acquired library technical skills and personal interest in open education, pedagogy, and the entire research process.

I’m looking forward to getting to know the OER and scholarly communication communities better!

Jenna’s CV

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New Article: Finding Our Way

Amidst all the challenges of COVID-19 and its numerous implications for every aspect of our lives, we’re excited to have published Finding Our Way: A Snapshot of Scholarly Communication Practitioner’s Duties and Training in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. This is the first article reporting on research conducted under our FY2017 IMLS grant (https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/LG-72-17-0132-17).

In brief, we surveyed people who do scholcomm work in libraries and found that, by and large, their education didn’t much address SC topics, skills, and knowledge. We argue that scholcomm is core to academic library work and that everyone working in an academic library (and in some cases, non-academic libraries as well) would benefit from basic literacy in SC topics like copyright and fair use, licensing, open access, and open education work, among others. In practice, we (SC practitioners) get along through a variety of field-based continuous learning strategies and opportunities, but we (the authors) argue that better coverage in LIS programs is important in helping emerging librarians navigate the job market and supporting academic libraries seeking to hire folks with SC knowledge and skills.

The article doesn’t address COVID, of course, but there’s a growing sense that SC issues like open access and open education will be ever-more important moving forward in our present reality. We hope to meet LIS programs in the middle by creating open learning content that is suitable for LIS classrooms, ready to implement, and that reflects diverse perspectives, practices, and people engaged in SC efforts in libraries. That’s why we’re hard at work pushing the open textbook of SC librarianship towards completion, establishing the SC Notebook, and thinking about ways to create opportunities for field-based practitioners to create teaching and learning content that supports LIS instruction.

We’re looking forward to building on this and related work. There are a couple more articles in our data and we hope to someday find the time to write them. For this one, we’re really happy to have it in JLSC, and deeply appreciate the editors and reviewers that helped us get it out into the world, as well as the authors of things we cited, and all the folks that participated in the survey. We welcome feedback, and hope everyone is doing as well as can be hoped for given the challenging circumstances!

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“Voices from the Field” CFP Results

On January 19 we closed the CFP for Unit 3 of our to-be-published open book, Scholarly Communication & Open Culture. We are calling this unit “Voices from the Field” which consists of field-based Perspectives (on scholcomm issues), Intersections (of SC between adjacent areas and stakeholders), and Case Studies (on implementation of scholcomm initiatives, and lessons learned). We honestly didn’t know what the response might be, but were floored by the number and quality of proposals submitted!

We received 48 submissions, representing 64 authors from 45 institutions, including a couple of government agencies and one corporation. There wasn’t a lemon among them, which made the selection process very difficult. Given enough space, we could have accepted all of them. Space isn’t infinite, however, so we did our best to balance format, topic, relationship to the book as a whole, institutional type, career status, and diversity/representation. In late January, we communicated our sincere regrets to our peers whose proposals we declined. We’ve all been accepted and rejected, but being in the position to accept and reject is a responsibility we took seriously. We hope all the authors know we were deeply impressed with the quality of the work and didn’t make decisions lightly.

We were able to accept 26 proposals from 38 authors from 28 institutions. The R1s are there, of course, but so are smaller and more teaching focused institutions (where a great deal of excellent scholcomm work happens despite the frequent over-representation of R1s in scholcomm discussions). There’s a private institution you’ll recognize, too, as well as a community college (where a lot of the best open ed work is taking place). Overall there are ten Intersections, eight Perspectives, and eight Case Studies.

The big topics are present: open access, library publishing, open education, copyright, etc. There are also interesting reflections and connections with public libraries, collections as scholcomm work, university presses, DEI in SC work, and others. There are a number of essays that engage with interpersonal skills (communication, collaboration) as well as a group of them that we think of as “nature of the work” (accepting and learning from failure, dealing with challenges, working across knowledge and/or priority gaps). The interpersonal and “nature of the work” pieces are important, as those issues have arisen in many conversations we’ve had with colleagues over the last few years as this project has taken shape.

Writing is underway, and we can’t wait to see and share the finished products. When this project is done (in the sense that it’s really ever “done”), one of the things we will be most proud of is the people who contributed their knowledge and time to enrich it. We feel very grateful and lucky to be at the helm of this, but without a doubt, this work will belong to the community that is working together to make it happen.

More soon.

-Maria, Will, and Josh

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Unit 3 CFP Proposals Under Review

Colleagues!

We are so excited and grateful to have received almost 50 proposals in response to the CFP we posted in mid-November! That’s more than twice as many as we can accept, and we have hard choices to make (a great problem to have). There are so many fantastic ideas and projects. We are carefully reviewing each proposal and will communicate with authors as soon as possible. In the meantime, please know that we take this responsibility very seriously and are so appreciative of the time our peers invested in their proposal. Gratitude also to folks who amplified the CFP!  High fives to all of you!

Very best,

Maria, Will, and Josh