Library Liaison Lunch and Learns with Faculty

There are of course many ways librarians who play a liaison role reach out to departments and programs. One successful effort at Villanova’s library is the lunch and learn. Last summer the liaison librarians brainstormed topics around which they could in pairs successfully facilitate conversations with faculty members that were not oriented to specific academic disciplines. This provided an opportunity for the subject specialists to grow awareness about the expertise of librarians in other issues related to research and scholarly communication.

The outcome was regular informal drop-in meetings during lunchtime throughout the fall semester. It was marketed as a brown bag lunch series.

The topics with the blurbs we sent to faculty:

Let your research bloom with ORCID: Researcher IDs in academic publishing
The unique ORCID identifier number provides researchers with a free, secure, perpetual location to showcase their professional portfolio and allows them to choose the information they share with other researchers, funders, and publishers. Come to the Library to set up your ORCID identifier in less than ten minutes and pick up your FREE ORCHID (while supplies last). Librarians will be on hand to assist you with registration and to answer your questions.

Pixelated Pedagogy: Creating Digital Projects in the Classroom
This informal presentation and discussion will focus on initiating course-related digital scholarship and cover topics such as potential platforms, useful applications and resources, and tips on how to leverage various formats in a digital environment. Past projects will also be showcased and discussed.

Measures of Impact
We’ll discuss impact factors, fake impact factors, other citation measures, and altmetrics.

Staying Alert: Tracking New Books and Publications in Your Field
Let your inbox be your watchdog and get notified of new publications on your interests or new citations of your work. We’ll show you how to have Browzine, Google Scholar, and other common databases let you know when there’s something to get excited about!

Open Access Scholarship and Publishing
Review considerations for selecting open access journals for publishing and learn how the Falvey SOAR fund relates to these publishing efforts.

Use, Publish, Share: Creative Commons Licensing and Scholarship
We are all too familiar with copyright infringement on the web. But there is a wealth of open-access resources that can be re-used with proper attribution under Creative Commons (CC) licensing. What is CC licensing? How can you protect your rights as an author and share your work freely with the public? How can you find and use CC-licensed works? Come to this session for a discussion that aims to tease out some answers.

Citation Wrangling
Serious research projects call for no-nonsense tools for taming citations. Learn how to use Zotero and Mendeley to save, organize & share references.

The series was so successful we’ve decided to run another brown bag series next fall. This time however we’re asking faculty for feedback now, before the summer, on what topics would interest them the most. This is an early way of alerting faculty to the fact that we will be having the brown bags again. Faculty responses have started rolling in, which hopefully means we’ll have lunch and learns on issues that we know matter to faculty.