Thomas Hickerson
Vice Provost and University Librarian
University of Calgary
The title of this session, “But We Don’t Do Research Like That Anymore,” is a quotation from an associate dean (research) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary. His comment was elicited in the fall of 2015 in our discussion of the Library’s principal means of supporting faculty research. Soon thereafter, we conducted a series of workshops sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to identify the new forms of support for multidisciplinary research needed by scholars in 15 different disciplines. We reported on our findings at the spring 2016 Coalition for Networked Information meeting. In this presentation, I will describe the next steps being taken to transform our research support environment based on new Library roles and relationships within the University. While driven by the impact of new technologies and research techniques, this model is about shared platforms, service constellations and partnerships, ranging from the performing arts to medicine, and incubating a suite of faculty-led projects, all serving to reposition libraries within the academic research enterprise.