Lisa Goddard
Associate University Librarian for Digital Scholarship and Strategy
University of Victoria
The University of Victoria Libraries have developed a suite of services for grant funded projects in order to plainly articulate our competencies, assets, and constraints. This document acts as a “menu” of services from which researchers can select as they develop their grant applications. These include the use of our Fedora 4 digital asset management system, metadata expertise that extends to consultations around interoperability and linked data, web hosting and discovery, exhibit building software, copyright consultation, open access publishing, research data management, and digitization services. We include a break down of the in-kind value of each of these services, along with any costs that will be charged back, so that researchers can easily estimate the value of the institutional commitment. The grants “menu” is an appealing model for researchers, as it enables them to quickly understand the variety of services and in-kind contributions that the library can offer in order to strengthen a funding application. It underscores to administrators the library’s value as a university research support. It helps to promote librarians as desirable co-applicants and collaborators on funding applications, and enables critical conversations about sustainability to happen during the grant writing process, rather than towards the end of funding cycles as has too often been the case in the past.