During the last three years new leadership at the University of Cincinnati (UC) in many senior administrative positions has resulted in a rare culture of collaboration. This presentation will focus on the dynamic that has evolved among the Dean of Libraries, Vice President for Information Technology, and the Vice President for Research; discuss the development of the Research Hub@UC, which will deliver a profile-based customized suite of programs to researchers and scholars throughout the lifecycle; and explore a specific initiative (Scholar@UC) that demonstrates the depth of collaboration and its impact on the partners’ cultures, particularly the libraries’ at all levels. UC’s research support ecosystem has been disjointed, incomplete, ignored, or simply hidden. To grow the university’s research enterprise, these leaders realized that support programs throughout the research lifecycle had to be improved, expanded, and promoted. Presenters will discuss the successes and challenges of bridging different work cultures, funding development in a fiscally austere environment, and establishing collaborative models for operational support. To demonstrate the value and challenges of the partnership, including its impact on the cultures of each partner, presenters will explore two projects that have been enabled by the partnership, including the aforementioned Research Hub@UC and Scholar@UC, a faculty self-submission repository. Using these as case studies, presenters will discuss how agile (including open source) software development projects and broad system integration needs have enabled the partners to develop nimble, user-driven processes and a strong sense of risk taking to deploy new enterprise-wide systems in an environment of lean staff and resources.
The Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL), an open access digital library of U.S. federal technical reports, is now celebrating 10 years of existence. TRAIL is truly a labor of love, built from scratch and nurtured by a growing and passionate community of member organizations and volunteers. Through this group’s collective efforts, TRAIL has progressed from a small pilot (200 digitized documents) to the current library of 50,000+ technical reports, and contains content of interest to all disciplines. TRAIL provides an integrated website and search interface for discovery of reports from a range of federal agencies - well-known ones, such as the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), and obscure ones such as the Office of Saline Waters. This initiative is funded by its member organizations, including the Government Publishing Office (GPO), and works under the administration of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). It represents a strong collaboration between government document librarians, subject librarians in academia, and the many partner organizations that support the digitization workflows (e.g., University of Michigan Google Book Project scanning) and donate content for digitization. This poster will describe TRAIL’s genesis and development, its growth in membership and volunteers (including our new no-cost “personal” membership option), lessons learned while fostering the LOVE and awareness of open access discovery and digital preservation, and future plans to increase the reach of TRAIL’s activities.