67 SPEC Kit 355: Campus-wide Entrepreneurship
Scalability. Interest in this area has exploded on campus and there is now more work than any one
librarian can handle. We will need to move to managing a team of librarians offering complementary
services (GIS, 3D printing, data services) and will also need to train non-business librarians to handle
the new research and reference questions that they may face. Licensing restrictions on electronic
resources. Most of the business resources requested by entrepreneurship students and faculty are
restricted to non-commercial use. This gets fuzzier when students are using the resources for class
projects or case competitions that have the launch of a real business as an educational goal. New
arrangements with database vendors need to be explored to allow for this kind of use. Keeping up
with campus initiatives. There are many and priorities often change quickly. This is one area where a
library’s inability or unwillingness to pivot quickly will leave them in the dust.
Securing funding to improve the CID space. Developing long-lasting collaborations between partners.
Resources licensed for non-commercial use.
Staffing. Licensing limitations. Scale/impact: managing growth and expectations.
Staffing. Outreach to faculty. Decentralized nature of university innovation centers.
Staffing. Budget for resources. Awareness of services.
Staffing constraints. Collections budget restraints.
Students are often seeking very specialized market research and industry reports, which cost several
thousand dollars per report. The Libraries is not able to provide access to every single specialized report
in existence. Students sometimes expect the business, management, and entrepreneurship librarian to
provide guidance on how to use or interpret the data and information available. The business librarian
is not qualified to do this (and it is not the business librarian’s role to do so). Fortunately, the business
librarian is able to refer to other sources on campus, such as the Blackstone LaunchPad, to provide that
type of guidance when the person asking is an aspiring entrepreneur. But, it is a little more complicated
when students in a class are seeking this type of guidance because they are often reluctant to approach
their professor for guidance. And, for either user, it is inconvenient to have to make an appointment
with someone else, if they had expected the business librarian could provide this guidance. There is
always a need for more staff (or maybe more training of existing staff) to be able to help students and
entrepreneurs who have business research questions right at the point of need. Often, if the question is
complicated, it gets referred to the business, management, and entrepreneurship librarian, who is not
able to answer or schedule a meeting with the user until the next business day. This approach may be
unavoidable, but there may be some ways we can provide greater business research support at the point
of need (without relying primarily on one individual).
There is no specific, over-arching coordinated campus-wide effort to which the library could
contribute, which means our current services are scattered and hit-or-miss rather than carefully
targeted for efficiency and impact. Budget restrictions make expanding resources and services for
entrepreneurs impractical at this time. Neither collections funds nor personnel funds are likely to be
allocated for the needs of entrepreneurs at any time in the coming five years. Licensing restrictions
on databases, particularly market research databases, prohibit use for non-classroom activities or use
by anyone unaffiliated with our institution, as vendors perceive this as misuse on behalf of for-profit
ventures. Vendors have temporarily halted institutional access to some databases in response.
To get the library recognized as an added value, and the librarians as major stakeholders in
entrepreneurship. To develop our competencies to respond to entrepreneurship needs. To get involved
in research and innovation issues.
We have no plan in place to support. We have no resources to support. Work is done mostly through
business school.
Previous Page Next Page