2018 Charleston Library Conference

These short “pecha kucha-like” sessions will feature four PowerPoint presentations of 6 minutes and 40 seconds each. We will have time at the end of the session intended for Q&A for all presenters. Come for a lively, rapid-fire group of talks.

1) Research Grant Support: What’s it Like to be a Librarian on a Research Grant? (Bertha Chang, North Carolina State University Libraries)

The opportunity to participate directly in a faculty member’s research grant is one area that offers libraries new ways to support and collaborate with their faculty members. In 2016, a five-year program to train graduate students in applying advanced statistical methods to physical data was established at North Carolina State University through a National Science Foundation Research Traineeship grant (NRT).  The NCSU Libraries had provided a formal letter of support for the original grant proposal which included the support of an engineering subject librarian to help identify best opportunities for engagement. This presentation will describe the experiences of supporting this program thus far and plans for the next three years. Included will be lessons learned which can help other librarians who may be asked to provide similar support to researchers on their campuses.

2) Hack the Stacks: Promoting Diverse Scholarship in the Academic Library (Beth Blanton-Kent, University of Virginia Library; Aldona Dye, University of Virginia; Timothy Morton, University of Virginia Library) 

Hack the Stacks is a new collaborative collections initiative at the University of Virginia Library between the Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation (GSCL) and the Library’s collections team. The Library’s collections and acquisitions teams are committed to looking for opportunities to expand collection development beyond traditional academic and trade publishers, to identify and give voice to underrepresented voices in collections decisions, and to provide resources of importance to all members of the University community. Often faculty and researcher expectations for library collection decisions as well as behaviors in using information resources are projected onto the community at large. Are there ways librarians can represent all voices in the collection development and management process?

Hack the Stacks is a happy convergence of the shared purposes of students and the library. A collaborative event in the UVA Library in April 2018 taught students the process of making purchase requests as well as the importance of doing so, particularly for marginalized voices and small presses. Recognizing that academic libraries traditionally draw the majority of their collections from an increasingly consolidated set of publishers, Hack the Stacks is evolving into an ongoing series a) to ensure accessioning of materials from a diverse group of authors, publishers, and viewpoints; b) to create unique local collections that are responsive to the needs of our local research community; and c) to foster collaborative relationships and increase library engagement with our student community. In this presentation we will discuss the local background that led to the creation of Hack the Stacks; the collaboration with the GSCL in staging the events; the acquisitions process, lessons learned, and implications for future acquisitions; and provide attendees with tools to implement Hack the Stacks-type events at their own institutions.
 
3) The TOME Initiative: Year One (Sarah McKee, Emory University)

 A quick update on the progress made and lessons learned during the first year of the TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) initiative, a five-year collaborative experiment by the Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, and Association of University Presses to institutionally fund the production of peer-reviewed, high-quality open monographs.

4) The Way through the Woods: An Engineering Standards Journey (Whitney Jordan, Western Carolina University) 

Librarians find themselves tasked with blazing paths through the tangled forest of new resources, new demands, and shrinking budget streams. Unique subject-specific resources further snarl the landscape, as they offer valuable content not found elsewhere but at a price that makes navigating the way forward daunting. Engineering and construction standards are an example of unique resources that are a necessity for students and faculty, but these come at prices that dishearten even the most intrepid librarians. In this session, an acquisitions librarian from a medium-sized, regional comprehensive university will discuss their journey through the resource woods related to standards. She will elaborate on the problem of balancing broader-scope resources with niche resources, when annual collection review and prioritization skews towards broader resources that meet the needs of a wider array of users. The travails of purchasing individual standards–which have a range of price tags, formats, providers, and applicability–along with the difficulty of obtaining standards using interlibrary loan will be addressed as well. She will conclude the session by outlining newly-instated policies for standards, procedures for obtaining access, and how they envision the future as they trek down this winding road.