Scholarly Commons Program Statements
August 2009
*DRAFT*
Mission Statement
The Scholarly Commons will support the traditional and emergent needs of students, faculty, and other
scholars at Illinois by providing information resources, expert assistance, and technology resources that
support teaching, research, and public engagement (October 2008)
Overview of Services
In collaboration with partners inside and outside the library, the Scholarly Commons will provide expert,
interdisciplinary advanced research support services and open workshops for users to develop skills in areas
such as scholarly communications (e.g., authors rights and copyright , institutional and disciplinary
repositories, data curation), digital content creation, learning and teaching, and geospatial and numeric
data services. As much a function as a place, the Scholarly Commons will deliver these research support
services virtually as well as through in-person consulting.
Program Statements
Scholarly Communication and E-Scholarship Services
The Scholarly Communication and E-Scholarship service area of the Scholarly Commons provides faculty,
researchers, and graduate students with the tools and consultation services needed to increase and better
understand the impact of their research. This service area will be a tangible realization of one of the
Library’s guiding values: to speed the transformation of the current system of scholarly communication to
one that advances the distribution of knowledge through more affordable and accessible methods.
Current stakeholders are: IDEALS, Grainger Engineering Library, University Library Data Services Task Force,
University Library Scholarly Communications Committee, Subject specialist librarians, CITES, Archives, and
the Graduate College.
The services supported include:
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Consulting services on scholarly communication issues including author rights and copyright issues;
Support for subject specialists and faculty liaisons to work with their faculty on scholarly
communication issues;
Tailored services for faculty and researchers to understand impact and use of their research and to
identify new research in their areas of study;
Campus-wide applications to better understand, mine, and visualize scholarly publishing and
collaboration patterns;
Support for faculty, staff, and graduate students on the use of IDEALS and the Electronic Theses and
Dissertations deposit program;
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Preservation of research produced on campus through IDEALS and in collaboration with CITES and
the Archives;
Data curation for data produced on campus with a particular focus on supporting ‘small’ science,
that is, science that is not well served by national infrastructures or through resources such as NCSA
(in conjunction with the Data Services Librarian), as well as consultation and some tools for largescale data curation projects; and
Third party deposit services into disciplinary repositories and national repositories such as PubMed
Central.
Digitization Support Services
The Digitization Support Services area of the Scholarly Commons provides support for faculty, staff and
graduate students in the area of digital reformatting and presentation of texts, images, maps, archives, and
other documents in a variety of formats held in the Library’s collection or in scholars’ own collections.
Specific services include:
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Cost recovery digitization services
Project management for outsourced digitization
Training and workshop in best practices for digital images, metadata, text-mining and text mark-up
OCR and PDF creation services
Exploration of options for digital conversion
Copyright issues with digitization
Helping scholars locate materials held elsewhere
Ideas under consideration: sponsor a grant or fellowship program for small, seed projects, text
markup
Research Support Services
The Research Support Services area of the Scholarly Commons will provide research and instructional
support in a variety of disciplinary areas geared toward the specific needs of graduate students, faculty and
staff. In collaboration with partners inside and outside the library, the Savvy Researcher series will provide
expert, interdisciplinary advanced research support services, open workshops, online instruction and other
learning opportunities for attendees in developing a wide variety of information literacy skills. Some
examples of programming include data services, copyright education, locating and ethically using digital
images, and RefWorks.
Current partners and stakeholders include:
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Reference, Research and Government Information Services
University Library Data Services Task Force
University Library Scholarly Communications Committee
Library Business Office / IRIS Librarian
Digital Visual Resources Task Force
RefWorks Support Team
Subject specialist librarians, including Biotechnology Librarian and Multicultural Outreach Librarian
Academic Outreach (external)
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Graduate College (external)
Teaching and Learning Services
The Teaching and Learning Services program of the Scholarly Commons provides support for campus
instructors through library services that assist with, provide support for, and help in the development of
teaching and learning activities on campus. Teaching and Learning Services (TaLS) brings together other
Scholarly Commons service areas with more traditional library services such as liaison, reference,
instruction and collections in order to create a suite of services focused on teaching and learning. Initial
TaLS efforts will be to provide visibility to existing Library services and initiatives (e.g., the Certificate in
Technology-Enhanced Teaching offered through the Center for Teaching Excellence with CITES) through
marketing and outreach. Additional activities will be developed in collaboration with campus partners and
stakeholders, which include:
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Center for Teaching Excellence
Teaching Academies and the Teaching Academy Leadership Network
Campus Coordinator for Programs on Teaching and Learning, Office of the Provost and Vice
Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Campus Teaching and Learning Board, Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic
Affairs
Teaching Advancement Board, Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
CITES Research and Learning Technology Services
Chancellor's/Provost's e-Learning Committee
User Education Committee, University Library
Subject specialist librarians
Numeric and Spatial Data Services
The numeric and spatial data service of the Scholarly Commons helps researchers to find, format and use
data in advanced software programs for spatial and statistical analysis. Service is provided by library and
ATLAS staff in several ways: during scheduled walk-in consultation hours in the Scholarly Commons, by
appointment, and by referral. To help researchers become independent data users, the Numeric and
Spatial Data Librarian also maintains a web portal that provides access to commonly used data sets and
ATLAS staff teach open workshops on data related topics. Staff providing this service also collaborate with
the Scholarly Communications program of the Scholarly Commons to preserve and provide access to data
created on the Illinois campus.
Current partners and stakeholders include:
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Data Services Working Group
IDEALS
Savvy Researcher workshop series
Subject specialist librarians, including Government Information Coordinator and the Map and
Geography Librarian