Tom Hickerson
Principal Investigator, Academic Research and University Libraries: Creating a New Model for Collaboration
University of Calgary
John Brosz
Project Coordinator, Academic Research and University Libraries: Creating a New Model for Collaboration
University of Calgary
Suzanne Goopy
Associate Professor in Community Health, Faculty of Nursing
University of Calgary
Research has changed. Have libraries? Research at the University of Calgary has identified a constellation of services necessary to enable today’s multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research. This session will address the nature of evolving challenges and explore steps critical to the future of research libraries. With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Libraries and Cultural Resources is seeking to instantiate a combination of services, expertise, and infrastructure through direct partnerships between library staff and scholars in a diversity of research endeavors. This research, enabled by competitive sub-grants, has ranged from providing real-time public access to arctic sensors to digitization and textual analysis of early science fiction writings to a repository for 3D scans of cultural heritage sites. This process will be examined from the perspective of the project coordinator, detailing the nature and results of direct participation by library staff in the various research projects and in the re-envisioning of library space as a constantly changing research lab. A social anthropologist, and lead investigator in one of the funded projects, will illustrate her team’s introduction of empathetic cultural mapping, an approach that blends personal stories with population-level data. She will provide a researcher’s perspective on how this experience has produced for her and her team a new understanding of the scope of library services and the opportunities for substantive collaboration. The project’s principal investigator will address the critical importance of implementing a functional infrastructure and adopting a new model for the role of the library in campus research. He will describe the potential impact of this redefinition on libraries and on their continuing relevance in the research enterprise.
https://library.ucalgary.ca/libraryresearchplatform
https://library.ucalgary.ca/libraryresearchplatform/dissemination