Zhiwu Xie
Assistant University Librarian
University of California Riverside
This lightning talk will introduce an innovative library funding model, explain its intention, and highlight its successful pilot at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VT) Libraries. Transforming the library’s technology and service model is a complicated process, often intertwined with different and sometimes conflicting understanding of the library’s vision and value proposition as well as staffing, skills preparedness, and inertia. To untangle these complications, VT Libraries has been implementing an “organic” model to incubate the library’s growth areas. The library provides matchmaking opportunities and then seed grants of $5-10K each to incentivize research partnerships between library staff and campus faculty through short-term projects that directly advance the faculty’s (instead of the library’s) research and teaching agenda. The project proposal must include at least one library staff and one faculty/researcher as co-prinicpal investigators (PIs), both of whom need to explicitly address their specific contributions to the project’s SMART goals. The model is “organic” because the library administration intentionally avoids artificial stimuli through setting agendas for its staff and their collaborators, but provides a fertile environment for these partnerships to grow on their own terms. The funding selection is through a lottery after a scope review by program co-directors, one from the library and another a distinguished faculty member. In two years, VT Libraries has funded 48 projects in four funding cycles, with faculty co-PIs covering all colleges, including disciplines previously much less engaged with the library. The library growth areas particularly strengthened by these projects include digital humanities, data, artificial intelligence, 3D/virtual reality, open educational resources, systematic review, studios and makerspace, teaching and learning, media production and communications, oral history, metadata, etc. Library staff’s strengths demonstrated in these projects are not limited to skills derived from their educational background and work experience but also from their life experience and social networks. Status biases typically associated with the merit review have been effectively corrected in this funding program, where faculty members in assistant professor rank and women/BIPOC faculty are more likely to be selected for funding. In two years, many peer-reviewed papers and other forms of creative work including music performances and podcasts have been produced as the result of this program. One project recently won the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers Impact Award. Three funded projects have subsequently won external funding from the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Mellon totaling $727K, about three times the amount of the seed funding provided by the library. Through an Institute of Museum and Library Services Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program project, three other Association of Research Libraries member libraries are currently studying this model and will implement their local adaptations in the near future.
https://sites.google.com/vt.edu/lib-collab-grant/