It’s rare to see in-depth historical and critical review of important programs within our community, and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Fellowships have certainly been an extremely important innovation, so I’m delighted to share the announcement of this recent study (reproduced below).
The CLIR fellows have been ongoing guests at our CNI membership meetings (as part of CNI’s commitment to community leadership development), and so many readers of this list will have likely encountered some of the outstanding participants in this program at our meetings in recent years.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
———————————-
Washington, DC, September 10, 2015- A new report from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) celebrates the first decade of the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program by bringing together 20 past and present CLIR fellows to share their thoughts on their experiences and, more broadly, the direction of academia. The report presents a series of collaboratively written essays in a volume titled The Process of Discovery: The CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the Future of the Academy.
“The process of discovery-obtaining new knowledge, developing insight, uncovering what was previously unknown or invisible: the wild surmise of seeing clearly what had been incoherent, fragmented, or disjunctive-is a salient theme of each essay,” writes CLIR President Charles Henry in the report’s foreword. “Each essay is a look into the working conditions associated with creating a new profession of expertise and responsibilities in response to emerging forms of scholarly communication and pedagogy.”
The collection represents the coalescence of ideas and viewpoints from multiple authors participating in collaborative writing groups over several months. The results of this effort include the essays “Collaboration in the Evolving Academy: Experiences from the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program”; “Changing and Expanding Libraries: Exhibitions, Institutional Repositories, and the Future of Academia”; “Libraries and the Research Data Management Landscape”; and “Toward a Trackless Future: Moving beyond ‘Alt-Ac’ and ‘Post-Ac’.” Collectively, these four pieces explore key themes that arose from a comprehensive survey of program participants and alumni conducted in 2014. Findings from the survey project, led by former fellows John Maclachlan, Jason Brodeur, and Jennifer Parrott, are included in the collection. Also included are an account of the program’s history, contributed by Elizabeth Waraksa, and an exploration of the goals that inform the program’s pedagogy, coauthored by longtime leaders of the fellowship’s educational activities Elliott Shore and Lauren Coats.
The collaborative writing process was conceived and led by Maclachlan, of McMaster University, and managed by Waraksa, an independent consultant, with the support of CLIR Director of Research and Assessment Christa Williford. The three also serve as the volume’s editors.
Appendices to the volume list CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship host institutions, 2004-2014, and name individual professionals who have contributed to the program over its history.
The report is available as a PDF download free of charge at http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub167/.