The Liaison Update Forum on Oct. 4 featured short presentations by UTL’s functional specialists, who explained what they do and how their services can be useful to liaisons. Below is a list of speakers and any slides or resources they provided with their presentation.
- Leslie Barnes: Digital Scholarship
- Jesse Carliner: Communications
- Nancy Fong: Digital Initiatives
- Lisa Gayhart: User Experience – User Experience Toolkit in Confluence
- Lari Langford: Information Services
- Joan Links: Media Commons
- Mariya Maistrovskaya: Institutional Repositories
- Stephen Marks: Digital Preservation
- Laure Perrier: Research Data Management
- Graeme Slaght/Stephanie Orfano: Scholarly Communications & Copyright
- Carey Toane: Entrepreneurship
Suggestions for Improving the Connection between Functional and Liaison Librarians
At table discussions after the presentations, a number of suggestions came forward on how to advance collaborations between functional specialists and liaison librarians:
- invite liaisons who may not regularly teach, to co-teach or be present during information literacy workshops
- create a directory of functional specialists in Confluence
- functionals could do more with liaison clusters during the pilot – come in to talk more about opportunities
- highlight some of the tools that liaisons could promote or use (e.g. Omeka, Islandora) as spotlight articles in In the Loop – a way of showcasing these tools to staff who may not be aware of them
- create a visualization/flow chart of a digital project, from genesis to execution – to illustrate how projects come to be, and the path to execution and completion. This could serve as a model to faculty members who may want to make their own collections of content/images available online.
- Add the work of functional specialists to the Library Resources for Faculty guide, to better highlight their work and increase awareness