Preparing Research Librarians for Transformed Libraries: Creating a Community of Practice

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thanks Chris. That was excellent. I am going to talk about our efforts at the NCSU Libraries – some very intentional and some that emerged organically and intentionally unintentional – to create a community of practice around our new, re-designed, and transformed libraries.
• #3: Evolution of libraries working more broadly and deeply across the research life-cycle is undeniable. This is in fact a wonderful opportunity for libraries as they transform to provide not only knowledge services, but as a collaborative partner in the creation of information in many forms.  Collaborative spaces, technologies, and expertise to support creation and ideation become catalysts for research productivity and learning. That wonderful opportunity presents significant responsibilities and challenges.  One of them is to develop the expertise to meet and exceed the possibilities provided by great spaces, technologies, and expectations of researchers.  research support librarians generally have to acquire new skills to function effectively in their newly expanded roles. In terms of partnering with researchers, however, they can also draw on those existing core capabilities they already have by virtue of having been trained as a librarian. We have heard from Deanna about the imperative and in all honesty shortfalls in information schools and the profession in general. We are trying to address that challenge and opportunity with our librarians - that of providing the skills, training, environment, and resources for existing subject specialists and other staff to evolve, transform, grow, and advance.  We think this is critical in leveraging the investment in re-designed libraries.  We can not wait for all subject specialists to retire to bring-in these emerging skills and the information schools can not deliver.  We need to grow our own – we want to grow our own. Huge investment in librarians that we have to leverage and maximize.  I would argue that in fact, if done right, most subject specialists will embrace the opportunity - can see that it will add value in their work and to their organizations, enhance their careers, and provide the kind of mastery and purpose of one’s work that make a job satisfying and rewarding.  Many librarians are expert learners, who embrace the opportunity to incorporate new tools and methods.
• #4: Each one of us is engaged with the university’s research enterprise.  That engagement includes core services along with emerging, strategic roles that add value across the research life-cycle.  That engagement connects to our overall service philosophy.  Being successful in adding value requires learning new skills, testing out how to apply those new skills in our service portfolios, exploring emerging roles, organizational commitment to those roles, and engagement with researchers to fulfill that vision. Integration.  Integration into the research enterprise of the university.  Integration into the organizational fabric of the Libraries.  Do not create a parallel organization or organizations. Mix organic and formal, credentialed approaches.  Evolving mosaic of internal and external training (peer-to-peer and instructor/expert-led), workshops, discussion series, etc. to create a multitude of opportunities for our subject liaisons to organically and formally expand their own skill sets in particular areas of resonance with today's research and teaching agendas. In period of ambiguity and change - reinforcement layer for defining and valuing work and self-worth is really challenging and important. Do not need expertise in every area - need to use words like foundation, core, and framework for providing expert research and information consultancy.  Creation of teams and hiring experts enables librarians to collaborate with specialists as part of the community skill-building approach. Do not frame it as a transformation from something poor or not good to something good - e.g. get your act together.  Pole in the future with opportunities and open doors that we can walk through with benefit to libraries and our careers.  Exciting vision for the future that we can engage as a group. Not everybody will buy-in, but most will.
• #5: This idea of evolution to partner in research and scholarship has been in the air for many years, but the planning for and opening of Hunt was a real evolutionary driver - a massive re-birth event if you will.  Very important for organizational change and advancement to accompany or develop around capital projects - one of the major arguments for designing libraries is the organizational change and vitality that can come from and with those projects. Re-designed spaces that demand diffusion and expertise to optimize their value. That is point of the quote on this slide from Deanna. This is too often a missed opportunity and missing key ingredient. "what is missing is a sustained commitment [HMD's emphasis] to tackling the future of the research library, with an important component of that being the staffing requirements." One of the ideas for addressing that sustained commitment is developing a community of practice evolving around organizational expectation that subject specialists become conversant in the operations, capabilities, and messaging of the high-technology spaces in Hunt (and eventually Hill). That was followed the organization by our Head of Collections of training sessions for all subject specialists in those spaces. Also had our Research Data Committee begin expanding their training and skills to all subject specialists in the organization around NSF mandates, data management planning, and data curation.  Then expanded that model through the visualization services team. Teams led by specialists, but that engage the broader network of subject specialist librarians to test, develop, market, scale, and extend emerging services and spaces. Let’s look at some elements of that reinforcing community of practice in our environment.
• #6: A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a craft and/or a profession. The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in 1991. CoPs can evolve naturally because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created specifically with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally (Lave & Wenger 1991).
• #7: Articulate the importance of emerging services and technologies and engaging the research life-cycle in ways that add value. Articulate general expectations for developing competencies with these emerging services and technologies. Embed those in goals, appraisals, projects, and reviews. Hope is that the librarian, manager, and administrator are aligned, at least roughly, on this process of embedding expectations for emerging services, technologies, and spaces.
• #8: This is seemingly obvious, but if an organization embeds expectations for skill development, large-scale changes in work, and outreach to primary user communities – then it has to back that expectation up with time to develop skills, test new services, refine, and extend. We also need to be willing to identify resources and invest in transformational skill building and opportunities.
• #9: Hiring talent with skills in these emerging areas to lead efforts, conduct peer-to-peer learning and engagement, and identify and develop extensible services. Experts become leaders of teams and points on the triangle that can help transform and engage fellow librarians – building infrastructure through nimble team development is an important component.
• #10: Peer-to-peer learning is an area that has been unexpectedly, from my vantage point, rich in terms of developing a community of practice and generating buy-in. Critical in many ways for developing autonomy, mastery, and purpose with these emerging services. It is not top-down. It is not sporadic. It is coming from trusted colleagues who can help sustain skill building and engagement. Research Data Committee and Visualization Team models. Internal Seminars (all attendees are library personnel): Managing Born Digital Collections Brown Bag (04/2015) – 24 attendees Visualization Discussion Series: Geospatial Data Visualization (08/2015) Visualization Discussion Series: Code+Art (05/2015) Visualization Discussion Series: Tableau Public (05/2015) – 30 attendees Visualization Discussion Series: D3.js (04/2015) – 19 attendees Visualization Discussion Series: Library Spaces and Research Lifecycle (04/2015) - 30 attendees Visualization Discussion Series: OpenRefine for Data Cleaning (02/2015) – 23 attendees Visualization Discussion Series: Using SAS for Data Visualization (01/28/2015) – 20 attendees Visualization Discussion Series: Let’s Be Honest About Data Visualization (01/2015) – 22 attendees ARL webcast series: Data Management and Visualization with Tableau (03/3/2015, 03/10/2015, 03/17/2015) – 5 attendees each Subject Specialist Brown Bag: Let's Talk APIs! (12/2014) – 20 attendees Libraries and Higher Education - GSU Copyright Update (12/2014) – 22 attendees Faculty Support Brown Bag: Experiences, Lessons, and Successes Working w/ Interdisciplinary Faculty (07/2014) MicroTiles Brownbag (12/2013) - 21 attendees Research Data and IRB Protocols Workshop (11/2013) - 20 attendees Who Owns Research Data, and What Can You Do With It? (10/2013) - 22 attendees Data Management Isn't Just for Researchers workshop (10/2013) - 13 attendees Reviewing Data Management Plans (10/2014) - 14 attendees Special Presentation on Data and Analytics at NC State (10/2013) Reviewing Data Management Plans (07/2013) - 19 attendees Public Access to Federally Funded Research Workshop (07/2013) - 17 attendees PIVOT training (06/2013) - 20 attendees NIH Public Access Compliance support from Libraries (2/2014) - 7 attendees External Seminars (# of attendees scoped to library personnel): Coffee & Viz: David Hill, College of Design (04/2015) - 15 library attendees Coffee & Viz: Gary Lackmann (03/2015) Coffee & Viz: Christopher Healey (02/2015) – 15 library attendees Coffee & Viz: Helena Mitasova (01/2015) – 25 library attendees Alt Textbook Orientation (01/2015) - 10 library attendees TRLN Sci-Tech librarians meeting (07/2014) - 8 NCSU attendees Statistical Consulting Service Discussion (08/2014) – 23 attendees Science Boot Camp for Librarians – Southeast (07/2014) - 13 NCSU attendees TRLN Sci-Tech librarians meeting (05/2013) Internal Training  (all attendees are library personnel): Practical Experiences with Hunt Viz Spaces (08/2014) – 21 attendees Creativity Studio Training (07/2014) - 20 attendees Teaching and Viz Training (11/2013 & 12/2013) - 22 attendees Visualization Studio Training (12/2014) - 24 attendees
• #11: Partnered with Odum Institute here in the Triangle to leverage existing training and partner to develop new transformational skill development series. Talk about this more in a moment, but will note how critical it is to have formal, credentialed training as part of developing a community of practice. Both from practical skill building and from an optics/organizational design perspective.
• #12: Odum course From the Libraries’ Annual Report: “The Libraries is the first in the country to develop an intensive, customized professional development curriculum in these areas for librarians in all disciplines, partnering with the Odum Institute at UNC-CH. This training program and the associated organizational commitment to deep engagement in competitive research will be a model for many other research libraries facing similar challenges.” Data Science Short Course for the NCSU Libraries: Genesis of idea came from subject liaison librarians who are living at the interface of the practical and emerging needs of researchers (and researchers-in-training), technologically evolving library spaces, and a shifting landscape of scholarly collections.   These very subject liaison librarians requested library support to attend Odum Data Matters short courses in summer 2014 (Markus Wust was the person who discovered these short courses and shared with colleagues) We attended these courses (list examples) and gathered soon after to share our experiences - what worked, what didn’t work, what could we put into practice in our roles supporting research and teaching?  Our conclusion was that we needed a Data Science Short Course targeted specifically to the needs of subject liaison librarians and those who were supporting emerging academic technologies.   We needed foundational training that would get us all on the same page in terms of supporting researchers who need to mine our content, who need help with first step data analysis and data manipulation, who are looking for help in telling compelling stories with their data through visualization best practices and in deploying their research in large-scale, high-resolution viz walls.   Charged core group composed of librarians across functional roles (Collection Management, Research and Instructional Services, Digital Library Initiatives, Research Data Committee, Visualization Services Committee, Open Data Fellows initiative) to develop proposed topics for the curriculum. Iterative process of defining content, learning objectives, explaining role of librarians with Odum. Initial curriculum is centered around: Information visualization; Data analysis and curation; Content and text mining; Statistical analysis and modeling; and Bibliometric analysis and tools. Iterative process of getting uptake with librarians and supervisors to commit time to the short course series (1 week) and engage in capstone projects The capstone idea was pitched to dept heads to consider to encourage (but not require) participants of the short course to carry out group or individual projects that take place in Oct-Nov-Dec, in consultation with supervisors and dept heads.  The goal is to practice and reinforce what we learned from the short course and open conversations to discuss successes, hurdles, half-baked attempts and continue to build experiences of working together on these kinds of projects. The projects would be at the discretion of the department heads and supervisors.  They could be a simple application of a tool, method, strategy learned from the course (e.g., updating graphs in a presentation to use data viz best practices) or more in-depth (e.g., creating a co-author network or creating an API). Short course will occur in Oct, so we’ll have more to the story later this year. Hoping this can be offered more broadly and become a model for the profession for early and mid-career transformational skill and tool building.
• #13: Buy-in from all levels. Then feeds and sustains this cycle = true community of practice. What you can achieve is in addition to extrinsic motivators – pay, feedback, reviews, etc. is tapping into intrinsic motivators which have a more sustained and effective impact on motivation and productivity. Trifecta of intrinsic motivators:  Autonomy, or the desire to be self-directed; Mastery, or the itch to keep improving at something that’s important to us; and Purpose, the sense that what we do produces something transcendent or serves something meaningful beyond than ourselves. A decade of scientific and management studies tell us fairly clearly that these intrinsic motivators are more powerful than extrinsic motivators – and I think our experience in creating a community of practice with a mosaic of opportunities, expectations, and buy-in at multiple levels bears that out to date.