Associate Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Maria Bonn and colleagues in North Carolina and Kansas have received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (MS LG-36-19-0021-19) to fund their project, Scholarly Communications Notebook (SCN). Co-principal investigators on the project include Will Cross, director of the Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center at North Carolina State University Libraries, and Josh Bolick, scholarly communications librarian at the University of Kansas Libraries.
SCN will be an open educational resource index and repository that will serve as the location for an active, inclusive, empowered community of practice for teaching scholarly communications to emerging librarians. The project's investigators have a book forthcoming from ACRL Publications intended to support education and training for scholarly communication librarianship. SCN will complement this book with examples of more modular and focused content, such as case studies, exercises, videos, and games.
"In our many conversations with friends and colleagues, we've been regularly reminded of the limitations of a book, even an openly licensed one, and realized the need for a more inclusive, collaborative hub of open learning content to support and expand instruction in scholcomm topics," Bonn said. "At first, this content will mostly come from the community of practice, but we hope that over time, LIS faculty and students will start to feed content back into it so that it becomes a rich, collaborative multi-stakeholder community of mutual support and encouragement."
According to Bonn, several faculty members have agreed to pilot this resource and invite their students to complete coursework that will culminate in contributions centering their own voices and experiences. The investigators also plan to offer financial support to contributors with an eye to recruiting the stories and experiences of "scholcommies" from a broad range of institutions and intersectional identities, to bring in diverse perspectives.
"We're really excited about this opportunity to use open pedagogy to build a more active and inclusive community around teaching and practicing scholarly communication," Bonn said.
Bonn's research focuses on understanding the needs of scholars in a contemporary publishing environment; comparing the collaborative practices of scientists and humanists and how they might inform each other; and examining best strategies for libraries to benefit from economies of scale while remaining embedded in local communities.
Prior to joining the iSchool in 2013, Bonn served as associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan Library, where she managed the University of Michigan Press and Scholarly Publishing Office. She also has served as assistant professor of English at institutions both in the United States and abroad. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester, master's and doctoral degrees in American Literature from SUNY Buffalo, and a master's in information and library science from the University of Michigan.