Helen Agüera
Senior Program Officer
National Endowment for the Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities

Brenda Gunn
Associate Director for Research and Collections, Briscoe Center for American History
University of Texas at Austin

Mark Phillips
Assistant Dean for Digital Libraries
University of North Texas

More than 200 libraries, museums, archives, and scholarly research centers collaborated to create the statewide Portal to Texas History over a 10 year period. This rich resource now contains millions of files comprising more than 220,000 titles, many of which are extensive back-runs of historic state newspapers. The Portal is now used millions of times per year by both academic and public researchers. This panel will discuss the Portal to Texas History as a case study in large-scale collaboration to develop networked information content. Issues that will be discussed by panel participants include the national context of digitization efforts, scholarly guidance in content selection, community engagement, standards-based technology for content aggregation at scale, assessment of usage and impacts, and strategies for long-term sustainability.

http://texashistory.unt.edu/

Teresa Walker
Head Integrated User Services, Library
University of Tennessee

Martha Kyrillidou
Senior Director
Association of Research Libraries

Mary Ellen K. Davis
Executive Director
Association of College and Research Libraries

Kara J. Malenfant
Senior Strategist for Special Initiatives
Association of College and Research Libraries

How Libraries Contribute to Student Success: Findings from LibValue
(Fleming-May, Kyrillidou, Walker)

What do we know about the ways libraries contribute to student success? The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) LibValue grant is a three-year effort testing different methodologies articulating the value of the library and return on investment. One of the areas of investigation is the contribution of the library to student success. This session will highlight two areas that relate to student success: the physical space of the library and teaching/learning environmental interventions. The results of two perspectives will be discussed, one from the commons surveys and the second from the surveys of instructors and students. Both perspectives highlight the importance of a positive environment that inspires studying and the articulation by students of positive outcomes.

Presentation (Walker)

Assessment in Action: ACRL’s Newest IMLS Grant-Funded Project (Davis, Malenfant)

The Association of College and Research Library’s (ACRL) Value of Academic Libraries initiative has ambitious plans for the next few years. This briefing will provide an overview of the new Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project “Assessment in Action: Academic Libraries and Student Success” (AiA). The grant funding will support ACRL, in partnership with the Association for Institutional Research and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and build on their IMLS 2011 Collaborative Planning Grant, which convened two invitational summits. In the first year of this three-year project, 75 campus-wide teams from all types of institutions will be selected to develop and implement action-learning projects that examine the impact of the library on student success. Each participating institution will identify a team consisting of a librarian and at least two additional team members as determined by the campus. The librarian team leaders will participate in a one-year professional development program that includes team-based activities carried out on their campuses. A blended learning environment and peer-to-peer network will support the librarian team leaders. As part of AiA, they will document and share their work so that others in the wider academic library and higher education communities can benefit.

http://libvalue.cci.utk.edu/
http://www.ala.org/acrl/AiA
Presentation (Malenfant)

In 2011, the University of Kansas hired the consulting firm HURON to undertake an intensive review of how the University conducts business, and to help the institution identify ways to increase its effectiveness. This effort, “Changing for Excellence” (CFE), encompassed campuses in Lawrence, Kansas City, and Wichita and was divided into phases in which Information Technology (IT) and the Libraries have been involved: Assessment and Analysis, Business Case Development, and Implementation.

This presentation will include descriptions of the business cases developed in both the IT and in the Libraries, work with the consultants and campus stakeholders, movement forward into implementation, and the connections between CFE, the University’s strategic planning effort (Bold Aspirations), and possible organizational transformation.

http://chancellor.ku.edu/changingforexcellence/

Presentation

The Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) project continues to look more broadly than standard learning management system functionality to engage and connect learners around their academic activities, enhancing the contexts for content authoring, sharing, and discovery, and emphasizing authentic assessment. With broad support for the creation and sharing of templates, offering a Widget Standard Development Kit (SDK) and Widget Marketplace, and supporting IMS Learning Tools Interoperability standards, OAE continues to push the boundaries for ways for anyone to straightforwardly contribute new capabilities.

This presentation will discuss New York University’s current pilot implementation of the Sakai OAE. It will also detail the roadmap for development of the Sakai OAE as well as give background information on the bodies of community representatives developing it, the OAE Steering Group, the OAE Technical Reference Group (TRG), and the OAE User Reference Group (URG).

https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/
http://chartingatlas.blogspot.com/
https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/content#l=page1&p=ker9TYL5aa

February 10, 2012

In this report, CNI director Clifford Lynch discusses a wide range of issues:

• Mention of his conversation with David Lewis about e-textbooks
• New Media Consortium Horizon Project Megatrends Report – meeting summary
• The International Council for Science (ICSU) scenarios project
• A self-published e-book by Shelley Gehrig, I Heard the Sirens Scream
• White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) comments
• Long-term bit storage and economic and pricing models
• CNI’s Fall 2011 Executive Roundtable report on Risk Management and Disaster Planning

Joan Lippincott, CNI’s associate director, talks about sessions on assessment and on innovative student projects at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) meeting, and the ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee’s program Let’s Talk Trends: A Discussion of Higher Education Trends that Influence Academic Library Services & Systems, where she served as a panelist.  Joan references the following sources in her discussion:

• AAC&U 2012 Annual Meeting
  http://www.aacu.org/meetings/annualmeeting/index.cfm
• Documenting Uncertain Times (follow-up study to Academically Adrift)
  http://highered.ssrc.org/?page_id=158
• NILOA
  http://www.learningoutcomeassessment.org/
• NSSE
  http://nsse.iub.edu/

We hope you enjoy this program and we welcome your feedback.  For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.

Mary Ellen K. Davis
ACRL Executive Director
Association of College and Research Libraries

Kara J. Malenfant
ACRL Scholarly Communications and Government Relations Specialist
Association of College and Research Libraries

Librarians are increasingly called upon to document and articulate the value of academic and research libraries and their contribution to institutional mission and goals. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) responds to these demands and positions academic librarians as contributors to campus efforts in several ways. This session will include discussion about recent developments with ACRL’s Value of Academic Libraries Initiative, a multiyear project designed to aid academic librarians in demonstrating library value.  As one of its recommendations, the ACRL publication “The Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report,” released in fall 2010, called on the association to create a professional development program to build the profession’s capacity to document, demonstrate, and communicate library value in advancing the mission and goals of their colleges and universities.

In late fall 2011, ACRL joined with three partners (the Association for Institutional Research, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Council of Independent Colleges) to convene two national summits. In the first, a wide range of participants from the higher education sector discussed the data campus administrators would like libraries to provide and what collaborative assistance is available through institutional research offices. In the second, librarian participants addressed strategies to prepare the library community to document and communicate the library’s value.

These summits are the basis of the project “Building Capacity for Demonstrating the Value of Academic Libraries,” made possible by a National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  This project briefing will report on the advice given by those attending the summits: college and university chief academic officers, senior institutional researchers, representatives from accreditation commissions and higher education organizations, and academic librarians from a broad spectrum of institutions.

http://www.acrl.ala.org/value/

Handout (PDF)

Presentation

Malcolm Brown
Director, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI)
EDUCAUSE

Jeanne L. Narum
Principal
Learning Spaces Collaboratory

What is known about the impact and use of networked information content by faculty, graduate students and undergraduates?  The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), in collaboration with the Association of Research Libraries, has been engaged in assessing the impact of networked electronic resources available to the academic libraries in Ontario with the implementation of MINES for Libraries®, a protocol that collects data from users at the point of use of electronic resources.

Data collection activities from the Scholars Portal in 2004-2005 and in 2010-2011 document the increasing value of networked electronic resources offered by Scholars Portal and provide key insights on the shifting trends of the use of electronic resources.  Analysis of a random sample of more than 35,000 representative uses of faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students across 21 higher education institutions in Ontario, Canada, will be discussed in relation to issues including:

•    Shared technology infrastructure and resources at Scholars Portal
•    Assessment infrastructure needed to study digital library use, i.e. what kinds of management decisions need to be informed by what types of data
•    Originality and value of use of SFX (an OpenURL link resolver) as the instrument for intercept surveys in the digital environment
•    Possible research designs, sampling plans, and implementations for point-of-use or intercept surveys

http://www.minesforlibraries.org
http://www.statsqual.org
http://www.minesforlibraries.org/home

Presentation

Nov. 28, 2011

Updates on issues ranging from open data to innovations in publishing to assessment were topics covered in the latest report from CNI.  Clifford Lynch discusses the U.S. Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) Calls for Comment on open data (http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28621) and open publications (http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28623), notes a European Knowledge Exchange paper on an action program for research data (http://www.cni.org/news/4-nation-action-program-for-research-data-a/), and describes issues related to new forms of publication and author identity discussed at the Innovation in Science Publishing conference.  At the McCusker lecture at Dominican University, Lynch addressed the relationship between bibliography and biography.

Joan Lippincott summarized the recent Berlin 9 meeting (http://www.berlin9.org/), an international conference held for the first time in the US, focusing on all aspects of open access.  She also provided some comments on the current emphasis on assessment in higher education and previewed a project briefing on that topic at the December CNI membership meeting. She will be joined in that session by Malcolm Brown of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and Jeanne Narum of the Learning Spaces Collaboratory (LSC).

Cliff wrapped up by highlighting some upcoming meetings, including the upcoming CENDI meeting on repositories, which will focus on emerging developments in federal agency repositories, the International Digital Curation Conference (IDDC, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc11) for which CNI is a co-sponsor, and a talk he will give at the National Library of Medicine/NIH on December 16.  He reminded listeners about the CNI meeting on December 12-13 in Arlington, VA (http://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2011/).

We hope you enjoy this program and we welcome your feedback.  For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.

Oct. 14, 2011

In this podcast, CNI director Clifford Lynch reports on several recent conferences:

• A plenary presentation given by Steve Kelling at the ASIS&T annual meeting on eBird (http://ebird.org/)
• The Internet2 fall meeting
• Theory & Practice of Digital Libraries Conference (TPDL), formerly European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL)
  http://www.tpdl2011.org/
• ARL-CNI Fall Forum 21st-Century Collections and the Urgency of Collaborative Action
  http://www.arl.org/events/fallforum/forum11/index.shtml

Joan Lippincott, CNI’s associate director, talks about the Net Gen and generational differences in the use of technology, and regarding assessment, the importance of knowing your use communities.  Joan references the following sources in her discussion:

• NPR Story

  http://www.npr.org/2011/09/26/140813332/political-ads-target-tv-but-not-everyone-is-tuning-in

• Pew Internet & American Life report

  http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Cell-Phone-Texting-2011/Main-Report/How-Americans-Use-Text-Messaging.aspx?src=prc-number

• Char Booth’s blog “info-mational”
  http://infomational.wordpress.com/
• Project Information Literacy.  October 12, 2011 report.
  http://projectinfolit.org/

We hope you enjoy this program and we welcome your feedback.  For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.