Invest in People

Open Scholars Project (OSP) is an informal forum for FSU researchers and scholars to learn about and share their experiences with open publishing, open source code and open data across subject areas. The OSP aims to create a group that is action-oriented and supportive in bringing faculty and early career researchers, including postdocs and graduate students together. University of Wisconsin at Madison, North Carolina State University and Utrecht University have created similar communities of practice for open access.

Our initiative is to improve internal communication within the library. We hope to understand our current environment, develop recommendations for better information sharing, and to reinforce good communication policies and practices.

We also hope to understand how internal communication is perceived, used, and preferred. By doing so this will help streamline and facilitate stronger communication between units, departments, and the libraries as a whole.

This initiative is for the expansion of support for immersive scholarship on campus–this includes research and teaching that utilizes 3D data through the forms of 3D printing, virtual reality, augmented reality, and interactive 3D publications. Funding has been allocated to allow hiring a graduate assistant to help with development of workshops and 3D/VR models.

For several years, the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship (DRS) has collaborated with faculty and students on finding, evaluating, and implementing digital tools and technologies into their research to create innovative scholarly outputs. One version of this support includes consultation and partnership on immersive scholarship such as 3D printing and virtual reality. This new initiative provides additional resources to strengthen research support for the use and application of three-dimensional data, and the technologies that generate and utilize it, throughout all stages of the research cycle. This initiative adds a graduate research assistant to supplement the current faculty librarian and the technology available for this work: a pair of FDM 3D printers, a high-resolution SLA 3D printer, a high-powered desktop workstation, and a high-powered laptop/3D scanner combination. These services are housed in the R&D Commons, a space in the basement of Strozier Library which provides a space for workshops and consultations.

An overarching outcome for this project will be an increase in the facility with which FSU researchers can utilize 3D data in their research. This initiative will contribute to this by assisting research partners in developing 3D objects and scholarly outputs that utilize them. It will also foster a collaborative environment on campus, and build an interdisciplinary community of practice by developing and hosting workshops, tutorials, and events such as symposia to share skills and knowledge across campus.

The digital project incubator will provide targeted support to a limited number of faculty and student projects in digital humanities and digital scholarship. This incubator program will allow the Digital Humanities Librarian and Digital Scholarship Librarian to provide targeted support to 5-10 members of the university community each semester (10-20 over the course of an academic year). This support will help these community members kickstart their digital projects. Project support funds will be provided to these incubator participants so they can purchase goods and services to enhance their projects or present their nascent projects at conferences to enhance the reputation of the university in digital research. This program will synergize with the CreateFSU strategic initiative, as each incubator participant will be given a CreateFSU account to build up the web-presence of their digital projects.

This initiative will establish a lasting professional development group that spends dedicated time to creating, providing, and facilitating professional development opportunities library-wide. Through programming and sub-committee work this group hopes to enhance professional development across the Libraries. The group will send out a yearly survey to assess professional development interests and needs throughout the library and plan out action-oriented steps to fill those gaps.

This strategic initiative will create a group charged with organizing and implementing an on-boarding process for new Libraries faculty and staff. This includes the creation of a workflow that helps new employees understand how the Libraries work, who we are, and how we communicate. While there is a goal to create a comprehensive workflow for new employees and their supervisors, this will also create a positive experience while they adjust to their new working environments and colleagues.

This initiative seeks to redress inequities and injustice in the descriptive language and narrative framing of archives, special collections, and the institutional repository. In this phase of work, we will apply conscious editing principles to metadata in ArchivesSpace and DigiNole. Conscious editing is an active, critical awareness of bias, privilege, and power and an ethos of deliberate care used in the assessment, creation, and refinement of descriptive texts. One outcome of conscious editing is the increased accessibility of our collections in unserved and underserved communities seeking meaningful connections with their histories. Collection and object descriptions will undergo a metadata gap analysis to identify harmful and outdated terms and prioritized for remediation. The analysis will require a combination of computational queries and manual analysis. After the initial analysis, a small collection will be identified for a pilot remediation project and a prioritization document will be produced along with documentation for workflows and practices to remediate legacy collections and to incorporate conscious descriptive practice in work going forward.

This initiative supports ethical and inclusive descriptive practices at Florida State University Libraries by encouraging the ongoing, reflective examination of legacy descriptions, by engaging colleagues in a continuous dialog about that examination, and by connecting practice with scholarship, theory, and contemporary social justice activism.

FSU Human Resources will be involved by providing guidance and advice on adherence to university policies. We may also consult with the President’s Council on D&I (Recruitment and Retention Subcommittee) and the recommendation from the Anti-Racism Task Force group. We will also contact the College of Business Center for HR regarding research on recruitment strategies.

The team will identify best practices pertaining to all phases of the recruitment process. We will modify vacancy announcements to be more inclusive, identify a list of appropriate and helpful venues for posting ads, review and articulate a clear and effective workflow for the recruitment process, establish training requirements to application review and candidate evaluations, review and modify the interview process, and ensure appropriate resources are provided for future search committees.

Led by the Teaching, Learning & Engagement Instruction & Reference Unit, the Reference & Instruction Librarian and Library Instruction Specialist will use Articulate 360, a suite of e-learning authoring applications, to create online learning objects, such as web-based lessons and modules that can integrate with Canvas. This work will meet the information literacy-related instruction needs of FSU learners in an accessible and mobile-friendly format. We will also use the software to create asynchronous internal training materials. These materials will support employee onboarding processes as well as library-wide projects. Other library personnel will also be trained on how to use the software if they identify a need to create online learning materials related to their operations and areas of expertise.

This initiative will provide web hosting for digital projects through an educational technology company called Reclaim Hosting. This service would be available to any FSU faculty members, graduate students, or undergraduate Honors students who wants a web domain to host content related to their research, meeting both research and pedagogical needs for which there is currently no solution on campus.