Working Groups - Update!
March 16, 2012
All of the working groups have been busy identifying topics for exploration, conducting literature reviews, preparing questions for focus groups, and more. Below are the specific activities of each group so far.
Advancing Research and Scholarship
- Identifying potential themes for the report, for example:
- Data management services
- Institutional repositories
- Special collections (unique and local)
- Librarians’ roles
- Collections, including lifecycle and workflow
- Tools that enable scholars to organize/collaborate
- Preparing questions for a first round of interviews with faculty members and librarians to learn more about the research lifecycle and Library involvement
Enabling Student Success
- Creating a "Student Life Cycle" journey wall
- Brainstorming what enables and impedes student success (through a Library lens) throughout the student life cycle
- Considering the Library units' SWOT analyses and expanding on the journey wall
- Attending relevant talks
- Selecting major themes to focus on. Four major themes have been flushed out with the theme of "technology" running through all of them:
- Awareness and outreach
- Building relationships and partnerships
- Reference and instruction
- Collection and access
- With the four themes in mind, dividing the group into subgroups to tackle several tasks:
- Creating questions for the focus groups
- Conducting an environmental scan of the literature (best practices, innovations)
- Conducting an environmental scan of other universities
- Identifying other resources
New Spaces for New Times
- Identifying data requirements
- Exploring strengths and challenges of library space from 4 perspectives:
- staff space
- user space
- service points
- collection space
New Skills for New Times
- Selecting topics to focus on:
- What skills, knowledge, and approaches do library staff need to be engaged, productive and innovative in meeting their responsibilities?
- What approaches can the Library take and what environment can the Library provide to enable its staff [as related to #1]?
- Creating questions for the focus groups
- Working on a survey to send to all staff
- Scheduling open meetings with staff in various Library locations
- Conducting literature searches and contacting other institutions to see what other libraries are doing
Data Support Group
- Preparing for focus groups which started this week (for undergrads) and continue in subsequent weeks (for grads and faculty)
- Building a data repository for collected data
- Working on data collection as requested by the groups and that may be needed during the external review
Communications and Liaison Librarian
March 16, 2012
