The ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication has engaged hundreds of librarians in developing campus outreach programs around scholarly communication issues. To support this community and other libraries planning outreach programs, there is now a Web site offering freely accessible institute resources (FAIR).
Initially, the Web site offers two particularly popular tools created for the institute for use under a Creative Commons Share-Alike License. The posted “Environmental Scan Exercise” is used by participants in the three-day institute events to assess their campus climates, past outreach activities, and readiness for program development prior to their arrival at the meeting. Institute faculty member Lee Van Orsdel has created an “Opportunity Assessment Instrument” that provides a framework for collecting data on academic departments. In addition to using the instrument to learn about individual departments, some institute alumni are using a customized version of this tool for a cross-campus survey.
While the FAIR Web site will not publish all of the resources used during the institute’s planning events, it will provide a place for institute faculty and alumni to share selected outreach tools that they develop.
We hope you will visit the new institute FAIR Web site at http://www.arl.org/sc/institute/instres.shtml.
