ACRL selects Scholarly Communication Road Show hosts

CHICAGO – The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Scholarly Communications Committee has selected five sites from 12 applications to host the “Scholarly Communication: From Understanding to Engagement” workshop this spring and summer, including the first host site outside the U.S. Recognizing that scholarly communication issues are central to the work of all academic librarians and all types of institutions, ACRL is underwriting the bulk of the costs of delivering this proven content by sending expert presenters on the road.

The institutions selected to host the 2012 road shows are:

• Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. Atlanta, Ga.
• Colorado State University. Pueblo, Colo.
• James Madison University. Harrisonburg, Va.
• University of New Mexico. Albuquerque, N.M.
• University of Toronto. Toronto, Ontario

In its fourth year, when the 2012 workshops are complete, the road show will have visited 17 different states, the District of Columbia, 1 U.S. territory and 1 Canadian province. The 20 workshops offered over these years will have reached more than 1,350 participants from more than 320 different colleges and universities. New this year, hosts will share part of the costs and the curriculum is revised.

“When we first took this workshop on the road in 2009, the central goal was to raise awareness in the library community about scholarly communications issues. Now, the program has kept pace with the evolving needs of the community by emphasizing action that accelerates the transformation of the scholarly communication system,” said Jeffrey Belliston, chair of the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee and assistant university librarian for scholarly communication, assessment and personnel at Brigham Young University.

Led by two expert presenters, this structured interactive overview of the scholarly communication system supports individual or institutional strategic planning and action. The workshop focuses on new methods of scholarly publishing and communication, open access and openness as a principle, copyright and intellectual property and economics. It is intended to provide a foundational understanding for participants and serve as a catalyst for action.

Host sites are partnering with other institutions and organizations in their area to extend the reach to as diverse an audience as possible. Library staff, including liaison librarians, catalogers, access services and senior management from two-year, liberal arts, master’s, comprehensive and doctoral institutions will attend the workshops.

The 12 applications represented 25 schools, 6 consortia (and their members) and one ACRL chapter from 11 states and Canada.

“The five hosts selected all showed strong commitment to maintain momentum, engagement and education on their campuses after the workshop. Because the materials developed for the road show are available for reuse in the ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit, the workshop has a greater reach and positive impact beyond the selected sites,” noted Kevin Smith, vice chair of the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee and director of scholarly communications at the Duke University Perkins Library.

The committee has extended the reach of the Scholarly Communication 101: Starting with the Basics workshop by adding related materials to the popular Scholarly Communication Toolkit (http://scholcomm.acrl.ala.org/). The materials include short videos, presentation templates and handouts. All of the materials are available with a Creative Commons share-alike license. Librarians are free to make use of these tools to enhance their own knowledge or adapt them to offer related workshops on campus.

For more information, contact ACRL Senior Strategist for Special Initiatives Kara Malenfant at kmalenfant@ala.org or (312) 280-2510. Learn more about ACRL’s scholarly communication initiatives at http://www.ala.org/acrl/issues/scholcomm.

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ACRL is a division of the American Library Association (ALA), representing more than 12,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments. ACRL is on the Web at http://www.acrl.org/, Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ala.acrl and Twitter at @ala_acrl.