Research Libraries Advance Open Scholarship and Community Engagement – Association of Research Libraries

“The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published brief profiles of the eight institutions that participated in the 2021–2022 pilot program Accelerating the Social Impact of Research (ASIR). The pilot engaged small teams from eight ARL member libraries who wanted to share strategies to accelerate the adoption and implementation of open-science principles for social-impact and community-engaged research and scholarship.

The eight institutional profiles complement the report released by the project in 2022, Accelerating Social Impact Research: Libraries at the Intersection of Openness and Community-Engaged Scholarship. The report set the context, drew examples from the eight participating libraries, and identified opportunities available for research library leaders. The profiles highlight specific projects in each of the eight libraries and illustrate how they are advancing open scholarship and community engagement.

In addition to the eight ASIR profiles, today ARL published a blog post about community-engaged research undertaken by the University of Georgia in collaboration with Putnam County Schools and the Georgia Virtual History Project. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) named the University of Georgia the winner of the 2022 C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Scholarship Award….”

Principles of Community-Engaged Research: Conversations with Toby Graham, Christopher Lawton, Christian Lopez, and Winnie Smith

Last Updated on May 19, 2023, 9:34 am ET

Alice Walker’s childhood home in Putnam County, Georgia  Photo by Wayne Bellamy, courtesy of Willson Center for Humanities & Arts, University of Georgia

Introduction

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Scholarship and Policy team builds capacity for scholar-focused research services, with a focus on community-based scholarship. As part of its Accelerating the Social Impact of Research (ASIR) initiative, ARL released a report and profiles of how eight participant libraries are working at the intersection of openness and community-engaged scholarship for social impact research.

The Russell Library story below supplements the ASIR work. This story was informed by conversations with Toby Graham, university librarian and associate provost, University Libraries, University of Georgia (UGA), and ARL member representative; Christopher Lawton, director of Experiential Learning for Putnam County Schools and director of the Georgia Virtual History Project; Christian Lopez, head of Oral History and Media at UGA’s Russell Library; and Winnie Smith, associate director, Willson Center for Humanities & Arts at UGA.

Since this article was drafted, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) named the University of Georgia as the winner of the 2022 C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Scholarship Award.

Students in Putnam County Connect History with Place

Students in Putnam County, Georgia, are deepening their understanding of the community they call home as part of an oral history project, An American Literary Landscape: Life, History, and Memory in Putnam County, Georgia.* I learned about this project from Winnie Smith when we partnered to advocate for humanities funding as part of the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) Humanities Advocacy Day. At UGA, the Willson Center is housed in the university’s Office of Research, giving it the flexibility to facilitate public humanities and arts projects throughout the university by funding projects, speaker series, student travel, fellowships, author visits, and more.  In a follow-up conversation, Smith shared that public humanities research projects like these can show students that local stories can help them better understand who they are and where they come from.

Christopher Lawton elaborated on this point, describing how teaching and learning can connect students with the community outside of their classroom. Through activities like recording oral histories and scanning and identifying photographs, students in Putnam get to know the rich literary traditions of the place they are from, and draw from the county’s history of enslavement to give context to current economic conditions. When we spoke, Lawton described how teaching students to collect and record stories allows them to realize what is missing or wrong in the textbook version of American history, and empowers them to “untell” that history, and to create new spaces for the voices that got left out. Lawton is leading a new initiative to create a pipeline from Putnam County Public Schools to Albany State University, which has committed to keeping the students in college for four years; the initiative is meant to support students in not just understanding, but also chipping away at, the socioeconomic weights that may have held them back.

Principles of Community-Engaged Research

Christian Lopez and Toby Graham see the library’s oral history program as one way to ensure that the library’s collections reflect the local community of Athens, Georgia. The Athens African American Oral History Initiative emphasizes shared agency and shared authority, which are key to understanding how oral histories at UGA have evolved. This evolution began when library leadership recognized the need to broaden the scope of its oral histories from reflections on Georgia politics to include representation of the intersection of politics and policy, government and culture. Lopez began to expand this scope by partnering with faculty from UGA’s history department—who also had a background in oral history—on a research project on the intersection of civics and music, art, and theater in the Athens music community. In planning for what became the Athens Music Project Oral History Collection, it took more than a year to train students to conduct outreach, record the interviews, and describe them using archival indexing.

Next, Lopez partnered with music faculty to examine the intersection of politics and economics from the perspective of different local musical communities in Athens. Through a grant from the Georgia Music Foundation, the library trained and compensated community interviewers, who conducted outreach and recorded 20 oral history interviews documenting music history in Athens; half of the interviews were with the hip-hop community. Today, the Athens Music Project Oral History Collection includes dozens of interviews documenting the diversity and depth of Georgia music and culture, and the Athens music culture and community.

As it has shifted toward collecting a more diverse set of voices, UGA’s oral history program is informed by the following values and principles of community-engaged research and archiving:

  • Community-engaged research is not possible until you have already done meaningful community engagement. This involves multiple conversations, and can take lots of time to build trust. These conversations may not necessarily result in action items. Lopez advises, “Start with a conversation, not an ask.” Throughout our discussion, Lopez emphasized the distinction between community engagement and community-engaged research. In a follow-up email, Lopez reiterated, “It takes a very long time.”
  • Understand that the needs of the institution and academy may not necessarily be the same as the needs of nonacademic communities. A community’s needs may not align with grant deliverables or timelines, or even with the academic calendar. Communities may have historic distrust of academic institutions, particularly when they parachute in to purportedly “help” communities without actually taking the time to build the necessary relationships.
  • Research libraries can support a culture change on campus by supporting faculty and students in understanding best practices in community-engaged research, and helping them understand what it means to strengthen relationships with community organizations. This includes understanding what it means to share agency, to co-curate, compensate, and follow up. These practices must be sustained before and after the community-engaged research. Working outside of academia may mean being adaptable, for instance, conducting interviews off campus, and outside of the school calendar.

Humanities in Place

Graham pointed out that UGA is a flagship land-grant research university, and that it’s important to correct the disconnect between the institution located in Athens and the community of Athens and around the state through UGA’s mission of research, instruction, and service. For instance, changing the culture of academia to ensure that oral history collections, special collections, and archives include materials created by Black people and organizations will support more inclusive teaching and research by faculty and students. Culture change is a long-term investment, and may involve discomfort, but it is critical to change the way we think about and engage with communities before we do the research. Graham said:

We have a great deal of work to do to correct the historical omissions in our collections. If we fail to build, steward, and share the diverse collection needed by our faculty and students, then we simply are falling short in serving our core teaching and research missions. We take very seriously our obligation to serve the people of Georgia and beyond, as well. Representing the stories, realities, and voices of all of types of communities should be a natural extension of our service mission. Going back to the principles, respectful and inclusive community engagement is key.

Oral history programs are among the most impactful tools we have in this work. There are all kinds of inequities associated with the ability to provide an enduring paper trail of one’s experience—the traditional bedrock of archives. But most people are able to tell their stories. What I most appreciate about Christian Lopez’s approach to community-based oral history is that he prioritizes the empowerment of our partners in engaging with one another to collect their own stories largely on their own terms. Oral history isn’t an extractive industry for him. It’s about listening and building relationships.

The Willson Center is currently partnering with UGA’s Russell Library on a Mellon Foundation–funded expansion of the Global Georgia Initiative, a public humanities program that began in 2013. The expanded Global Georgia Initiative includes Humanities in Place, a program to bolster off-campus public humanities collaborations. As part of its Humanities in Place program, Lopez successfully submitted a proposal for the Athens African American Oral History Initiative, which will build on the community-engaged work of the Athens Oral History Project and Athens Music Project Oral History Collection.

Stay engaged with the Athens African American Oral History Initiative on social media.

Endnote

* The Putnam County project is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Challenge Grant, with matching funds from the UGA Willson Center for Humanities & Arts.

The post Principles of Community-Engaged Research: Conversations with Toby Graham, Christopher Lawton, Christian Lopez, and Winnie Smith appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.

ARL Comments on NIH Plan to Enhance Public Access to Results of NIH-Supported Research – Association of Research Libraries

“On February 21, 2023, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) released “Request for Information on the NIH Plan to Enhance Public Access to the Results of NIH-Supported Research.” The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is pleased to offer the following comments in response to this request….”

What Are the Copyright Implications of the New OSTP Public-Access Guidance?

“The following frequently asked questions (FAQs) address concerns about public access and copyright raised by the August 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) guidance, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research” (also referred to as the Nelson memo). TL;DR: the Nelson memo has no implications for copyright policy. The Nelson memo updated the 2013 memorandum “Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research.” Significantly, the 2022 guidance eliminates the previous 12-month embargo period for federally funded research, now requiring federal agencies to ensure that the research they fund is available immediately to the public at no cost. The new guidance applies to all agencies with extramural research and development budgets, an expansion on requirements from agencies with research and development budgets above $100 million. For more on how the federal government’s public-access guidance changed from 2013 to 2022, see this side-by-side comparison….”

ARL Statement on Texas Library Coalition for United Action Agreement with Elsevier – Association of Research Libraries

“Today more than 40 public and private academic institutions in Texas—members of the Texas Library Coalition for United Action (TLCUA)—announced the conclusion of a successful negotiation with Elsevier. TLCUA member libraries secured cost savings on journal subscription access, along with a set of favorable license terms and a novel pilot experiment in restoration of author copyrights that stands to benefit all authors, not just those associated with TLCUA member institutions….”

ARL Releases Report on US Academic Member Libraries’ Open Infrastructure Expenses | STM Publishing News

“Open access (OA) and the broad sharing of research outputs has been empirically shown to accelerate scientific progress and benefit society and individuals at scale through improved health outcomes, socioeconomic mobility, and environmental well-being, to name a few. Academic research libraries, for their part, have made significant investments in opening up research and scholarship—particularly research conducted on their campuses and made available through journal subscriptions. Yet these investments are difficult to collect given their distribution across many budget lines, the lack of standardized reporting categories, and inconsistent data collection practices.

In May–June 2022 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) surveyed its US-based academic research libraries to better understand OA expenses. The survey asked respondents to categorize expenses into six areas of investment: read-and-publish or transitional agreements, article processing charges (APC) or OA funds, non-APC-based OA publishing models, institutional repository services, OA journal hosting and publishing services, and open monographs. This ARL report provides a summary and analysis of the aggregate data from the survey, provides charts on institutional responses and averages, and discusses some outcomes and next steps….”

ARL Releases Report on US Academic Member Libraries’ Open Infrastructure Expenses

In May–June 2022 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) surveyed its US-based academic research libraries to better understand OA expenses. The survey asked respondents to categorize expenses into six areas of investment: read-and-publish or transitional agreements, article processing charges (APC) or OA funds, non-APC-based OA publishing models, institutional repository services, OA journal hosting and publishing services, and open monographs.

Institutional Strategies for the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy: Infrastructure, Policies, and Services

“In the fall of 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released its new policy for data management and sharing that will go into effect in January 2023. This policy applies to all NIH-funded research and requires investigators to submit data management and sharing (DMS) plans.

As research data sharing has started to become an enforced requirement from funders and publishers, many academic institutions, libraries, and individual researchers have developed services, technology, and workflows to meet this requirement. As institutions gear up to meet what will be a greater demand for support among researchers on their campuses given the upcoming NIH DMS policy, identifying and sharing existing tactics and expected strategic opportunities for academic institutions is critical to meeting this demand.

The Association of Academic Health Science Libraries (AAHSL), the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) conducted a mixed methods research project to identify and share these existing or proposed innovations for other institutions to reuse, build upon, or otherwise leverage to meet this upcoming NIH requirement….”

New Report and Resources Available on NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy – Association of Research Libraries

“The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) have released a new report, Institutional Strategies for the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy. The report shares infrastructure, services, and policies that institutions have developed to meet the requirements of the forthcoming US National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy.

In addition to the report, the site aamc.org/nihdatasharing will be a continually updated resource that contains links to ongoing institutional efforts and other relevant initiatives.”

Paul Courant [Receives the 2022 Paul Evan Peters Award]

“The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE are pleased to announce that economist Paul Courant, who has served in multiple roles at the University of Michigan, including provost and dean of libraries, has been named the 2022 recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award. Courant, a founder of HathiTrust, is the Edward M. Gramlich Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Policy and the Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Public Policy in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. He is also a professor emeritus of economics and of information, and he holds the distinction of Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus and Provost Emeritus. The award recognizes notable, lasting achievements in the creation and innovative use of network-based information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Named for CNI’s founding director, the award will be presented during the CNI Membership Meeting in Washington, DC, to be held December 12-13, 2022, where Courant will deliver the Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture. Previous award recipients include Francine Berman (2020), Herbert Van de Sompel (2017), Donald A.B. Lindberg (2014), Christine L. Borgman (2011), Daniel Atkins (2008), Paul Ginsparg (2006), Brewster Kahle (2004), Vinton Cerf (2002), and Tim Berners-Lee (2000).”

ARL Celebrates Biden-Harris Administration’s Historic Policy to Make Federally Funded Research Immediately Available – Association of Research Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) enthusiastically welcomes today’s announcement by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that the administration has updated the 2013 “Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” memorandum with new policy guidance, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.” The new guidance focuses on immediate public access to federally funded research and the embrace of information-integrity measures, including persistent digital identifiers. In a significant expansion over prior policy, this guidance applies to all federal agencies with any research and development expenditures.

ARL Applauds NSF Open Science Investment – Association of Research Libraries

“The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) commends the ongoing commitment of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to open science. NSF today announced awards for 10 new projects focused on building and enhancing coordination among researchers and other stakeholders to advance FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles and open-science practices.

The inaugural awards in NSF’s Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable, Open Science Research Coordination Networks (FAIROS RCN) program represent a pooled investment of over $12.5 million in open science from all directorates comprising NSF. This program is particularly unique given that the 10 projects are composed of 28 distinct NSF awards (detailed below) representing many organizations and institutions in the United States seeking to advance open-science efforts….”

Accelerating Social Impact Research: Libraries at the Intersection of Openness and Community-Engaged Scholarship

“The social impact of research, whether it is examining educational and economic disparities, developing new medications, or understanding environmental challenges, is a developing, but key, component of higher education and research institutions. Critical to accelerating this impact and advancing public good is the broad adoption of open research principles and practices, which have been shown to benefit the individual researcher through increased citations and scholarly impact, to spur scientific advancements, and to provide more equitable access to research and a deep commitment and engagement with the local community or the communities that are engaged in or using the research. As educators and stewards of the scholarly and scientific record, research libraries have a significant interest in accelerating open research and scholarship within their institutions, and are ideally situated to support the institutional mission to serve the public and their communities. Within higher education, research library leaders have a unique position on campus, supporting every discipline with services, expertise, collections, and infrastructure. To move forward together, ARL piloted a six-month cohort program for members to accelerate the adoption and implementation of open science principles at the intersection of social impact of research and scholarship….”

Accelerating Social Impact Research: Libraries at the Intersection of Openness and Community-Engaged Scholarship—An ARL Report – Association of Research Libraries

“The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the first report of a six-month pilot cohort program from 2021, Accelerating the Social Impact of Research (ASIR). The pilot engaged small teams from eight ARL member libraries who wanted to share strategies to accelerate the adoption and implementation of open-science principles for social-impact research and scholarship. The report, Accelerating Social Impact Research: Libraries at the Intersection of Openness and Community-Engaged Scholarship, sets the context for this confluence, draws examples from the participating members of the cohort, and identifies the opportunities available for research library leaders. The next installments of this publication series will include additional profiles of the cohort libraries and how they are advancing open scholarship and community engagement….”