Schedule for ARL Membership Meeting Spring 2014

The committee will discuss funding sources and models for sustaining the Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce (IRDW) as well as other diversity recruitment programs. Discussion will include the IMLS funded “Nexus” project, which is studying core competencies for leaders across library sectors, with a focus on assessment strategies and metrics for leadership development programs.

The working group will discuss preliminary results of asking its members to map the sponsored research workflow on their campuses, noting individual or institutional responsibility and services for such things as data management and storage and compliance tracking. There are several parallel efforts to this in ARL circles, including within the SHARE Workflow Working Group, for the group to consider. The working group will also review progress by the COAR-LIBER-ARL-CARL Task Force on Competencies for E-Research and Scholarly Communication, have a discussion about campus engagement opportunities with SHARE, and determine the mode in which the working group will report its own progress during the past year to the broader Membership.

The committee will discuss the pilot experience from the facilities inventory as well as next steps in articulating the value of facilities with approaches like the ones tested through the LibValue IMLS grant. The committee will also discuss the ‘impact stories’ collected for describing the value of special collections. Last, it will focus on discussing different strategies for pursuing easy, systematic, and flexible data collection through efforts that build on the current approaches, are cyclical but not always annual, and provide opportunities for capturing innovative developments.

In Part I, the two working groups will discuss the proposed GPO “National Plan for the Future of the FDLP” and the status of the HathiTrust Government Documents Initiative. The Initiative seeks to create a comprehensive digital corpus of government documents. There will be an update on national and international copyright issues including the review of the Copyright Act by the House Judiciary Committee and the status of court cases and related filings by ARL and the Library Copyright Alliance. Finally, there will be an update and discussion of the work of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) regarding possible library and education treaties.

ARL Visiting Program Officer Lisa Carter (Ohio State) will provide a brief overview of the recent work and possible future trajectory of ARL’s focus on rare and distinct research collections. The working group will review participant and evaluation data from the first five instances of the ARL-SAA Digital Archives Specialist courses and talk about the future of that collaboration. The group will also hear a report from the Technology and Archival Processing Workshop that ARL co-sponsored with the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study in April.

The committee will hold a conversation with Peter Berkery, executive director of Association of American University Presses (AAUP), to talk about the relationship between university presses and research libraries and potential collaborative projects. A second topic will be a discussion with Rebecca Kennison of K|N Consultants regarding a White Paper that addresses “A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access Publishing and Archiving for Humanities and Social Sciences.” Other agenda items include updates on licensing activities and programming for the fall.

In Part II of the committee meeting, there will be an update and discussion of the White House policy on access to federally funded research, which includes journal literature and digital data. The committee will also discuss related Congressional legislation such as the reauthorization of America COMPETES Act and FASTR – the privacy and surveillance legislation that is under consideration following the leaks by Edward Snowden – and Canadian policy issues. Updates on budget and accessibility issues and a joint meeting with Transforming Research Libraries for a demonstration of the Accessibility Toolkit are also on the agenda.

The committee will discuss several workforce initiatives, including the changing nature of library liaison work, the expansion of the ARL Position Description Bank to research library consortia, and a proposed web-based column on workforce transformation. Reports from its two working groups, focused on Special Collections and E-Research, will be heard and the meeting will conclude by joining the Influencing Public Policies Steering Committee to review the ARL Accessibility Toolkit in beta and how it can be deployed at member libraries to foster equity and inclusion in library services.

In  September 2013, ARL embarked on a planning process to frame the critical work of the Association and define its role in higher education. With the goal of maximizing ARL’s ability to be agile and responsive to changing priorities and member needs, a number of discussions have taken place over the past eight months. This afternoon’s session will be a deep dive into the draft vision and systems of action for the research library in 2033. Part Two on Wednesday, from 3:45 p.m.-5:00 p.m., will be a continuation of member discussions as well as a working discussions.

Members of the Strategic Thinking and Design working group (Susan Gibbons, Tom Hickerson, James Hilton, and John Wilkin) will assist in the discussions on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Few parts of our colleges and universities have changed as much as our libraries over the last quarter century. Speaking from the perspective of a professor who helped create two innovative centers in the library of the University of Virginia and another at the University of Richmond—where he is president—Edward Ayers will discuss the future of digital scholarship and what that future might mean for libraries.

The speakers will surface the opportunities, challenges, and questions for building a research and teaching infrastructure in universities. They will explore the changing needs and expectations for conducting, managing, disseminating, preserving, and reusing research results across disciplines and the roles libraries might play in creating a more collaborative network of services.

Building on Tuesday’s discussion, this session will focus on the refinement of the systems of action and will be an opportunity to suggest additional areas that should be addressed.

The panel will reflect on the value and importance of the joint ARL, AAU, and APLU SHARE Initiative to universities and will discuss the challenges and opportunities for implementing SHARE at scale.

Members will hear from Michael Tanner, Chief Academic Officer and Vice President, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), via a brief video presentation at the start of the session.

The Strategic Thinking and Design process may result in some retooling of how the Association does its work. Considering how ARL might address ongoing and new opportunities is an important discussion to begin at this time. The speakers will address changes that are underway in the governing structures of colleges and universities, ideas for implementing different types of organizational models, and how both of these issues might influence new models in ARL libraries and the Association.