Peter Hall (current SLIS Master of Information Science student) and Robert Noel (SLIS graduate - MLS'90, and Head of the IU Swain Hall Science Library) recently had a proposal accepted by the ACRL 14th National Conference planning committee.
The proposal "Depicting Faculty Impact: Visualizing Contributions to Research with Dossier Inserts," demonstrates ways that librarians can collaborate with faculty members to support faculty tenure processes. Peter Hall is working as a graduate assistant in the Swain Hall Library with Robert Noel. The (Association of College and Research Libraries) ACRL 14th National Conference will be held in Seattle, Washington, March 12-15, 2009.
Excerpts from the proposal are included here:
Presentation Title:
Depicting Faculty Impact: Visualizing Contributions to Research with Dossier Inserts
Program theme:
Get It to Go
Short presentation description: Dossier preparation is a necessary, time-consuming, and sometimes stressful process that junior faculty are expected to complete before being granted tenure. Rather than simply compile accumulated research and describe its impact in a dossier, academic research libraries are uniquely positioned to collaborate with faculty, analyze their research record, and depict their overall impact using bibliometric measures such as cited reference counts, journal impact factor, in addition to other factors, and new forms of scholarly communication.
Full presentation description: Peer-reviewed publications are an important measure of a scholar's contributions to his or her field. Dossiers often include portions or descriptions of published research, but sometimes fail to put that research in context, explain its impact, and offer suggestive evidence of a scholar's likely success in that discipline. By collaborating with junior, tenure-track scholars, librarians are well equipped to analyze researchers' publications, synthesize wide-ranging submissions, and depict faculty influence in a concise, bibliometric-centered image.
This poster (small version is a folded, dossier insert) shows the scholarly impact and promise of Indiana University biophysicist John Beggs. He is scheduled to go up for tenure in 2009. The libraries have created a poster showing his publications and their current influence based on various bibliometric measures. This poster also stresses the scholar's strengths, highlighting the multidisciplinary nature of his work and showing that his research bridges the fields of physics with neuroscience and biophysics. Finally, the poster acknowledges the scholar's participation in new forms of scholarly communication, including his curatorship of "neuronal avalanches" in the new, wiki-based, collaborative open access Scholarpedia.
• Poster Visualization: http://peterahall.net/images/beggs_final.jpg
The role of citation counts in determining faculty influence and productivity continues to be a contentious topic both within and outside of the library science literature. This poster neither endorses nor dismisses citation counts, but merely offers a method whereby librarians and faculty may collaborate to view individual bibliometric measures in order to fortify or enhance a dossier before turning it in.
Learning outcomes
- Recognize the importance of bibliometric measures with regard to faculty impact
- Recognize the value of a concise, visual representation of a scholar's achievements
- Stress the collaborative opportunities that exist between scholars and librarians in the tenure process
Posted December 18, 2008