Biz of Digital — Case Study: Librarians as Interdisciplinary Digital Research Project Partners An Overview of Recently Established and Emerging Digital Research Projects and Support Services Led and Implemented by the Rowan University Libraries by Benjamin Saracco (Research and Digital Services Librarian and Managing Editor: Cooper Rowan Medical Journal, Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, One Cooper Plaza, Camden, NJ 08103; Phone: 856-342-2522; Fax: 856-342-9588) <saracco-benjamin@cooperhealth.edu> <saracco@rowan.edu> and Shilpa Rele (Scholarly Communication & Data Curation Librarian, Rowan University, Keith & Shirley Campbell Library, 201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, NJ 08028; Phone: 856-256-4970) <rele@rowan.edu> Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-3544) <flinchba@umbc.edu>
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owan University has seen rapid expansion over the last decade and has grown from a state teachers college to a Carnegie-classified national doctoral research institution. Rowan University started the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University (CMSRU) in 2012 and merged the Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine (SOM) in 2013 and is one of only three institutions in the nation that grant both M.D. and D.O. medical degrees. Due to this merger and growth in the University’s research portfolio, Rowan University earned R3 research status in 2017. One year later, the University was designated as an R2 institution. At the same time, the University has seen tremendous growth in student enrollment, which reached more than 19,618 in Fall 2019, new faculty hires (176 within the last five years) and expansion of graduate programs. Sponsored research funding grew significantly as well during this time to $5.6 million in 2010 to $39.5 million in 2018. With this tremendous increase in enrollment, research, faculty, and additional campuses, the Rowan University Libraries (RUL) has faced a proportional increase in demand for digital research project collaborations and new research support services from the university community. In 2015, RUL wisely established an institutional repository (IR), called “Rowan Digital Works,” by subscribing to the Bepress Digital Commons platform to provide open access to the increased research, scholarly, and creative outputs at the University. This repository includes peer-reviewed scholarship, open educational resources, faculty post-prints, graduate student publications, electronic theses and dissertations, conferences, events, and symposia proceedings. A committee that includes representatives from all three libraries, as well as a representative from the Division of University Research (DUR), guides the activities related to the IR. This committee has created a place for librarians of different professional backgrounds at the University to stay informed on new scholarly communications-related services available to the faculty and students with whom they interact. A key goal for the University libraries is for all its librarians, no matter their subject specialty or assigned campus, to have a core competency in the area of providing basic scholarly communications support to their patrons. This is a trend that has been reported and written about at other academic libraries as well.1
Against the Grain / June 2020
The collaboration with the DUR on the IR committee has been particularly significant as it has informed our decision to make the creation of researcher profiles a requirement for all internal grant funding application opportunities. Not only has this led to increased faculty engagement with the IR and highlighted scholarly activity on campus, the researcher profiles have proven useful for faculty and the DUR to discover collaborations across departments and disciplines. An additional example of the value of these researcher profiles is the ability of the medical students at CMSRU to utilize them to identify faculty research mentors for their required capstone projects. Another fruitful collaboration with the DUR has been the use of the IR’s journal hosting features, such as managing the backend submission workflows to running internal seed funding programs for faculty on both the Glassboro and Camden campuses. This collaboration has helped the DUR centralize the seed funding application workflows and track applicants and submissions over time in one system. The varied use cases of this University resource have grown substantially due to the fact that the University Libraries have actively marketed it to new faculty at events like New Faculty Orientation and University research-related events. The IR was also highlighted as an important resource in the Middle States Accreditation Report for the campus community. The addition of new materials and services over the past few years resulted in one million downloads last fall, an achievement that RUL celebrated with the campus community. RUL also established a Digital Initiatives Working Group with the goal of making strategic decisions to enable the implementation of digital projects in a more systematic and efficient manner and to allow for flexible and collaborative work across departments within the libraries. One project established by the Digital Initiative Working Group is a strategic digital collections development decision to segregate purely scholarly materials, such as journal articles, datasets, and symposia held in the IR, from digital assets used by digital social science, humanities, and natural science faculty and historians. The working group identified and implemented a new Islandora-powered digital asset management system to manage and provide open access to digitized content, starting with materials from both our Unicontinued on page 66
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