ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communications: Workshop Report
| Pages | 17-18 |
| Published date | 30 January 2007 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050710745497 |
| Date | 30 January 2007 |
| Author | Mitchell Brown |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly
Communications: Workshop Report
Mitchell Brown
LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 1 2007, pp. 17-18, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050710745497 17
The second Association of Research
libraries (ARL)/Association of College
and Research Libraries (ACRL)
Institute on Scholarly Communications
was held 6-8 December 2006 at the
Millennium Hotel near Duke University
and built on an earlier institute held at
the University of California, Los
Angeles in July 2006. The 103 attendees
represented 39 different institutions,
31 universities, 6 colleges, and 2
government agencies. Workshop
members included 10 teaching faculty, 1
library director, 6 vice provosts, 30
associate or assistant university
librarians, 18 people with the phrase
‘‘scholarly communications’’ in their
titles, 15 people with ‘‘collections’’ in
their job title, and 18 science librarians.
Drawing on experience from the first
institute held at UCLA July 2005, the
teaching faculty asked team members to
prepare an environmental scan of the
institutions scholarly communications
activities, develop a list of priorities
anticipated by the institution, and
interviews with faculty members on
publishing, author rights, copyright, and
distribution concerns prior to the
meeting. Before the workshop the teams
of three members from each institution
were asked to review their local
environment assessing the general level
of faculty awareness and engagement in
scholarly communication issues, the
readiness of the library to work with
faculty issues, and the availability of
resources to support the development of
scholarly communication program. The
three day institute was taught by a team
of six with experience in publishing,
electronic services, and outreach: Julia
Blixrud (SPARC), Karla Hahn (ARL),
DeEtta Jones (ACRL), John Ober
(California Digital Library), Lee Van
Orsdel (Grand Valley State University),
and Karen Williams (University of
Minnesota).
The goals of the institute were to:
.increase the knowledge of the range
of relevant scholarly communica-
tion issues,
.learn about available resources to
support program development,
.learn about success strategies for
engaging faculty,
.explore what is needed to build
relationships with other colleagues
to draw on for ideas and support
.prepare initial planning for a local
program for faculty outreach and
library planning that can be imple-
ment on their campuses within the
next year.
Academic faculty attending the
workshop as part of the three member
institution teams contributed provocative
insights to the discussion and challenged
librarians, administrators, and publishers
to consider issues relevant to faculty
interests, such as barriers to publication,
simplifying copyright negotiations and
strong discipline-specific repositories.
The academic faculty agreed that raising
topics that did not speak to their interests
were not effective in engaging faculty on
topics of scholarly communications –
faculty listen to issues that relate to their
research interests.
The workshop provided teaching
opportunities in a series of small
presentations sessions followed by
small group discussions and sharing
outcomes with the workshop
participants. ‘‘Faculty roles in scholarly
communications’’, lead by Lee van
Orsdel (Grand Valley State College),
discussed methods to promote activism
of faculty in scholarly communications,
to help recognize their stake in the
changing scholarly communications
landscape. Useful communications aids
include library web pages, campus
blogs promoting interests relevant to
faculty, and the ACRL toolkit (www.ala.
org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/scholarlycomm/
scholoarlycommunicationtoolkit/toolkit.
htm). Karla Hahn (ARL) spoke on
‘‘New publishing models and roles for
libraries’’ and explored different
publishing platforms that are internet
enabled, with new forms of interaction,
new business models, and new
relationships to peer review. Examples
of different publications that blur lines
of journal/blog/website include ‘‘The
Valley of the Shadow’’ (http://
valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/), the hosted
group blog ‘‘Savage Minds’’ (http://
savageminds.org/) maintained by six
anthropologists, openly accessible
journals identified as ‘‘green’’ in
SHERPA RoMEO (www.sherpa.ac.uk/
romeo.php), a new emerging model of
hybrid open access articles in
subscription-based journals allowing
author opt-in payment, and helping
faculty take advantage of Web
2.0 tools. Karen Williams (University
of Minnesota) presented ‘‘Digital
repositories/ conservancy’’, which
covered not just current installations of
institutional repository software but the
purpose, institutional strategies, and
support for institution and subject-
oriented repositories. The attendees
shared success and disappointments in
recruiting content, educating faculty
about author’s rights, use of copyright
material for teaching, and the benefit to
their reputation of open access
repositories. Strategies for recruiting
content highlighted success stories of
discipline repositories that support
technical reports, economic white
papers, and data sets from NSF-
sponsored grants.
Julia Blixrud (ARL SPARC) lead a
discussion of ‘‘Evidence-based action:
what facts are needed’’ to collect from
attendees data sources for quantitative
and qualitative assessment of scholarly
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