Zhiwu Xie
Assistant University Librarian
University of California, Riverside
The University Libraries at Virginia Tech, the University of California, Riverside, the University of North Texas, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library will implement a three-year joint professional development institute (PDI) to support more active and embedded interdisciplinary research collaborations among library staff across the country. Benefiting staff working in academic and research libraries, this project will demonstrate, through multiple institutions, a career path for aspiring library scholars as well as make a strong case for the benefits of embedding librarians directly in research activities. The Joint PDI includes three commitment levels; each aims to not only help individuals build research skills, confidence, experience, and local networks, but also to invest human capital in the pivoting of libraries and library staff as research-intensive campus partners. Level-one library professionals will attend a series of free online training and mentoring events. Level-two participants will be offered seed funding to support involvement in collaborative research projects. Finally, six level-three fellows will be allowed three months to conduct focused research and produce scholarly work. After outlining the details of the program, we will report the preliminary results from Virginia Tech’s Level 2 program that have funded 48 collaborative research projects between campus researchers and library staff through funding lotteries, and share thoughts on our local implementations.
This briefing includes contributions from Jamie Wittenberg, University of Colorado Boulder; Martin Klein, Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech University.
https://library.ucr.edu/grants-awards/jpdi
https://sites.google.com/vt.edu/lib-collab-grant/
