Start Date

3-16-2020 4:20 PM

End Date

3-16-2020 5:00 PM

Author(s) Bio

Jill Cirasella is Associate Librarian for Scholarly Communication & Digital Scholarship at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In this position, she oversees scholarly communication initiatives, thesis/dissertation services, and digital scholarship and preservation services. Her research focus is scholarly communication, broadly construed: recent and current projects examine anxieties surrounding open access dissertations, benefits of transforming dissertation deposit into a scholarly communication consultation, attitudes about practice-based library literature, and the professional experiences of hard-of-hearing librarians.

Keywords

scholarly communication, digital scholarship, library management, organizational change, organizational chart

Description of Proposal

This poster presents as a case study the recent library reorganization at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The reorganization was initially spurred by the need to divide the library’s large, hydra-headed Public Services and Scholarly Communication unit into smaller, more coherent units. One of the five resulting units is Scholarly Communication and Digital Scholarship, composed of librarians who provide services related to scholarly communication, the institutional repository, data management, digital scholarship, digital preservation, and theses and dissertations. In other words, this new unit provides services that pertain not to the discovery and consumption of knowledge but rather to the production, dissemination, and preservation of it. These services all already existed or were in development at the library, but the reorganization clustered and structurally surfaced them.

As its name suggests, the Graduate Center offers only graduate degrees, and the structural change acknowledges our students’ dual roles as learners and contributing scholars. Further, it puts those of us who provide scholarship-related services in closer contact with each other, leading to improved understanding of each other’s work, increased collaboration, and ideas for new services. Importantly, the restructuring was not merely a personnel action, hidden from public view — the services of the new Scholarly Communication and Digital Scholarship unit are now prominently displayed together on the library homepage. As a result, they are more visible to our students and more easily understandable as a suite of interconnected services.

What takeaways will attendees learn from your session?

Attendees will see a case study that may inform conversations at their own libraries about organizational structure or services for graduate students. They will see an example of a library unit that grew (a good thing!) until it reached its breaking point (a bad thing!), as well as a model for how an unwieldy unit can be transformed. Additionally, they will be prompted to think about services for scholarly production as necessary services for graduate students.

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Mar 16th, 4:20 PM Mar 16th, 5:00 PM

Surfacing Services for Students As Scholars: A Case Study

This poster presents as a case study the recent library reorganization at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The reorganization was initially spurred by the need to divide the library’s large, hydra-headed Public Services and Scholarly Communication unit into smaller, more coherent units. One of the five resulting units is Scholarly Communication and Digital Scholarship, composed of librarians who provide services related to scholarly communication, the institutional repository, data management, digital scholarship, digital preservation, and theses and dissertations. In other words, this new unit provides services that pertain not to the discovery and consumption of knowledge but rather to the production, dissemination, and preservation of it. These services all already existed or were in development at the library, but the reorganization clustered and structurally surfaced them.

As its name suggests, the Graduate Center offers only graduate degrees, and the structural change acknowledges our students’ dual roles as learners and contributing scholars. Further, it puts those of us who provide scholarship-related services in closer contact with each other, leading to improved understanding of each other’s work, increased collaboration, and ideas for new services. Importantly, the restructuring was not merely a personnel action, hidden from public view — the services of the new Scholarly Communication and Digital Scholarship unit are now prominently displayed together on the library homepage. As a result, they are more visible to our students and more easily understandable as a suite of interconnected services.