VPC Open Forum

The agenda for Wednesday’s Open Forum can be found here. Please RSVP to Kristen if you are able to join us. The minutes from the March 18th meeting are here.

Plan for Purposeful Action

We will be beginning the work to create our ‘Plan for Purposeful Action’ over the next few weeks. The strategy is straightforward – to set our priorities so that we will have a shared direction and purpose.  I will go into more detail at my Mashup on April 10th but I wanted to give you a quick overview of how we will begin the process. Last week VPC met and laid out 5 broad areas based on both national and local trends to focus on and explore further. Those areas are:

• Scholarly Engine

• Collective Collections

• Innovation Lab

• Operational Excellence

• Learning and Working Spaces

These areas represent the framework for which we will use to have more focused conversations. Each area was assigned discussion leaders made up of VPC directors and unit heads. They will lead conversations with the full library in their respective areas at open meetings and other forums they determine beneficial. The results of those conversations will be used to develop our action plan. It is that action plan, or the ‘Plan for Purposeful Action’ that will guide us over the next few years. This will not be a traditional “strategic” planning process often identified as lengthy and arduous but more focused on defining and refining our organization in today’s academic environment. I do hope you will join me on April 10th so that I can lay out the full plan and provide answers to any questions you may have. I will say that I am excited for the opportunity to vision our future with all of you.

Samuel Charters

Many of you may have seen the news of the passing of Samuel Charters last week. Mr. Charters was a poet, novelist, biographer, translator of contemporary Swedish poets, and likely best known as a scholar of the blues, jazz, and musical culture of the African diaspora. Samuel Charters was a friend and generous donor to Archives & Special Collections. In 2000, Sam and his wife Ann Charters, a retired professor in the English Department, donated the Samuel & Ann Charters Archive of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture and continued to add to it regularly over the years. The archives will pay tribute to Sam Charters through a series of blog posts which began this week.

Digital Commons’ First Online Digital Journal is Live

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal is an open-access, bi-annual research forum edited by graduate students of humanities, arts, and social sciences here at UConn. The journal marks the first online digital journal created in our Digital Commons using the Bepress software. In addition to the support they received from Kristin Eshelman as coordinator of the repository, Marisol has also provided support as a member of the editorial board. I also understand that forthcoming in the journal will be some photography submitted by Kathleen Deep.