EVENT: Introduction to the Scholarly Communication Notebook

The ACRL Digital Scholarship Section (DSS) Open Research Discussion Group will be hosting a virtual discussion forum on Monday, 29 March 2021 at 3:00-4:00pm Central Time. Josh Bolick (University of Kansas), Will Cross (North Carolina State University), and Maria Bonn (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) will present, ” Introduction to the Scholarly Communication Notebook.”

As open research and related topics continue to expand and influence the research enterprise, there is an increasing need for knowledge and skill building among researchers as well as the librarians and other allies who partner with them. Library graduate programs are a potential source of training that has been largely slow to respond to these issues, with notable exceptions, but that’s starting to change. To support this shift, practitioners should be engaged in the creation of relevant teaching and learning content to ensure that learners, whether LIS students or aspiring practitioners, are exposed to theory and practice from its primary source: the people who do the work. To that end, with support from IMLS, we are creating the Scholarly Communication Notebook, or SCN, which we hope will become the locus of an active, inclusive, empowered community of practice for teaching scholarly communication topics to emerging and early career librarians. The SCN is an online community/repository that is explicitly intended to support and educate a diversifying workforce of LIS professionals and to extend social justice values to all participants by intentionally and thoughtfully reflecting the broad range of people, institution types, and service models in scholarly communication. We are consciously modeling the SCN on Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani’s Open Pedagogy Notebook (OPN). Like OPN, the Scholarly Communication Notebook will host community-designed examples of teaching and doing scholarly communication that we hope will be regularly refreshed by librarians from across the field as well as LIS faculty and students completing coursework on these topics.

The SCN is both a standalone resource as well as a complement to an open textbook on scholarly communication topics, which is presently in development for publication by ACRL. However, we recognize that any static text is necessary hierarchical and limited. We hope that this project can open a door to the multiplicity of approaches and perspectives in the field as well as centering the dynamic and ongoing work of scholarly communication.

In this presentation, the PIs of this project will demonstrate and seek feedback on the SCN, which we are presently establishing as a Hub in ISKME’s OER Commons. At the time of this submission, the first of 3 calls for proposals for initial content population is open. By spring/summer of 2021, the SCN will be up and populated with enough content to demonstrate its potential, but with time remaining to make adjustments based on expert feedback before future CFPs are issued. We believe the Open Research Discussion Group is an ideal collection of peers to share this work with and from which to seek feedback.

Registration is required.