Keywords

scholarly communications, liaison librarians, subject librarians, research activity, environmental scan

Disciplines

Higher Education | Library and Information Science | Scholarly Communication

Abstract

Are you looking for new ways to connect with faculty? Do you know how to best support faculty publishing? Grand Valley State University Libraries has developed a scholarly activity mapping template to document current scholarly and creative practices of faculty. The data gathered can be used to identify unmet faculty scholarly needs and reveal new opportunities to build relationships with faculty.

Over the last several years, our liaison librarians have worked to closely integrate library instruction services into the curriculum of their liaison areas through the use of instruction plans. At the same time our research and publishing support expanded, largely driven by faculty needs in these areas. These two threads combined in 2016 as a group of librarians collaborated to develop a framework for exploring and documenting research practices across the university. By mapping current scholarly activity, we are gathering information that can strengthen library connections with faculty, identify needs our services can meet, and inform our instruction and collection development.

A few liaison librarians are piloting this new scholarly activity map for the 2016-2017 school year. Challenges and lessons learned will be shared, in addition to benefits already noticed and future plans for utilizing these scholarly activity maps more broadly. In this poster presentation we will describe the process of developing our template, challenges we have encountered, and the progress of our pilot project. This poster will be of interest to academic librarians looking for new opportunities to connect with faculty, especially liaison, subject, and scholarly communications librarians. The information and resources we share will help academic libraries grow a scholarly communications program and expand support for faculty research activities. In addition to the poster, we will share copies of our current scholarly activity mapping template and the documents that inspired this project.

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Presented on May 18, 2017, at the Michigan Academic Library Association Conference, Grand Rapids, MI.

The supplemental materials linked below include:

The Scholarly Activity Mapping Template we developed, as well as a Guide to using the template (shared with a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license),

AND

A 2009 ACRL Scholarly Communications Opportunity Assessment document which inspired this project (republished here in accordance with a CC-BY-NC-SA license).

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