VPC Open Forum

The Open Forum this Wednesday will focus on the action steps for the Purposeful Plan of Action. The minutes from the June 10th meeting can be found here.

Scholarly Communications Design Studio

This is an exciting project that I mentioned at last week’s VPC Open Forum as well as in other conversations with staff and thought I would take a moment to dig a little deeper into what it is and what it means for the Libraries. The Scholarly Communications Design Studio is a collaboration with Digital Media & Design (DMD) and the Humanities Institute and will change the way the University approaches scholarly work. The idea is simple – to take the collaboration often done at the implementation stage of a project, like we have been doing with the Scholars’ Collaborative, and bring that collaboration in at the start. This allows the opportunity for fresh insight and deep, sustained conversations with professional designers, web and app developers, librarians, data management experts, editors, and scholarly publishers. It uses the two years of successes of the Scholars’ Collaborative and work done by DMD and the Humanities Institute as pillars to reach the next level of scholarly communication.

Being led by Tom Scheinfeldt, Associate Professor in DMD and History, the proposal was accepted for funding by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The support from the Mellon Foundation is due, in part, to the University’s commitment to refill the position vacated by Anna Kijas in February. The position has been reworked and will now be the Digital Scholarship Librarian/Scholarly Communications Design Studio Managing Director. This position, as well as the center, will be housed here in the Homer Babbidge Library. This is a key piece of the collaborative theme in our Purposeful Plan of Action, particularly when considering usage of facilities space. This need is part of the conversations we are having regarding the Babbidge Master Plan so more on how it will fit in physically will be coming in the future. In the meantime, the project will move forward with the planning stage which includes surveying and fact-finding from other institutions, determining the right organizational structure to maximize our resources, creating an advisory board of experts in the field, and defining the design process. This planning stage has been funded by Mellon at $95,000 and we anticipate it will go through December, 2016. On our end, we will begin advertising the position shortly and Greg Colati has agreed to serve as co-investigator along with Brendan Kane from the Humanities Institute. The planning stage will lay the groundwork if we successfully meet the grant requirements, for a subsequent, three-year, $1,000,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2017.

I am excited to see this project as it unfolds. There will be much more information coming from this project but if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me or Greg.