a discussion. Our training with liaison librarians was developed with this understanding. From the outset, liaison librarians reported they felt comfortable with this approach and that it lent itself to a natural engagement with their faculty that could be easily integrated into their liaison practices. Increasing Involvement With New Models of Scholarly Communication Moving forward with the project, the Steering Committee identified several areas to bring liaison librarians into broader interaction with campus faculty. This included involvement in new models of scholarly communication, investigating new scholarship practices at the discipline level, and supporting emerging grant funding for open access mandates. Earlier work with our Institutional Repository (IR) Project and with our journal-hosting program offered important insights into new models, which we integrated into the liaison development program. Our IR Coordinator had already had success including liaison librarians in the implementation of the IR (launched a year earlier) and in content recruitment. Her workshop on liaison roles in the success of the IR was an important element in our liaison training program. Likewise, our Digital Initiatives Librarian, who supports our faculty and editors in the development of their open access journals using OJS, was also able to share her experience engaging with faculty in the use of these new models. In addition, we felt it was critical to involve liaison librarians in exploring other new models of scholarly publishing and communication that might be occurring elsewhere on campus. This fit our goals for engaging liaison librarians to identify and describe the scholarly communication cultures and practices in a diversity of fields at UBC. We hoped this work would allow us to examine the broader issues related to the organization and curation of UBC’s scholarly output and consider how services the Library supports such as OJS1 and the IR, could potentially advance these activities. To build this broader picture, we asked liaison librarians to conduct an environmental scan of scholarly communications activities in their discipline using a data-gathering tool adapted from Lee Van Orsdel’s Faculty Activism in Scholarly Communications Opportunity Assessment Instrument.2 We named our tool “Delving into your discipline” to emphasize the exploratory purpose of the exercise and to increase liaison librarians’ ownership of the tool. In addition, seventeen UBC liaison librarians took advantage of the fortuitous RLI 265 24 Scholarly Communications: Planning for the Integration of Liaison Librarian Roles ( C O N T I N U E D ) AUGUST 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
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