Greetings Colleagues, I trust you're well. The purpose of this e-mail is to solicit your commitment for participation in a nine-member Faculty Library Advisory Committee to support the Alliance's "Expanding Library Support for Faculty Research in HBCUs" project. The HBCU Faculty Development Network will partner in this project. The long-term goals of this project are the integration of HBCU library services and resources into faculty research initiatives and building collaborative approaches within the HBCU library community to provide ongoing support for faculty research. Faculty Library Advisory Committee members will each receive a stipend and serve through October 2014. Faculty Library Advisory Committee Composition The 9-member Faculty Library Advisory Committee is composed of: * three librarians, preferably reference heads or librarians that support research * six faculty members, four from the humanities and two from STEM Description The Faculty Library Advisory Committee, in conjunction with the P.I., a statistician and the HBCU Faculty Development Network, will assist with designing and interpreting a faculty survey to gather information that can assist HBCU libraries in understanding faculty research interests, plans, challenges, and support needs. The faculty survey will be aimed at teaching and research faculty at HBCUs which incorporate research into their core missions. The proposed survey will include demographic data, such as discipline, faculty rank and institution size. The Faculty Library Advisory Committee will also assist with guidelines and criteria for model projects at HBCUs. Timeframe Faculty Library Advisory Committee members will be appointed by January 2014, and a statistician will be hired at the same time. Survey design will take place during January and February, to be distributed in March 2014. The Faculty Library Advisory Committee review and interpretation will take one month, including the P.I.'s summary of that interpretation. Production of the final summary report by the P.I. and statistician will be completed by July 2014. Overall, the production of the faculty survey is expected to take nine months. Completion of a library/faculty combined report by the P.I. will take another two months, including review from the Faculty Library Advisory Committee. The combined report will be posted in September 2014. Sub-Grants to member libraries help support development or expansion of programs to improve library services. The Faculty Library Advisory Committee will assist with guidelines and proposal review. Guidelines will be developed in June/July 2014 and include description of the program, eligible and ineligible funding opportunities, application procedures, timeframes, review processes and management/reporting requirements. The September/October 2014 proposal review will include effectiveness of the plan in addressing an identified faculty need and the ability of the project to serve as a model for other HBCUs. Responsibilities Assistance with faculty survey design, distribution, interpretation and communication of survey results Advice on the best methods for distributing the survey Review of the summary level statistical and text analysis survey results and provide interpretive context Assistance with criteria and guidelines for model projects to develop or expand research support services Commitment of at least ten per cent work time for project activities through September 2014. Project Deliverables 1. A collective report on survey results of HBCU libraries that support faculty research 2. A collective report on survey results of faculty research interests and support needs 3. A comparative report for the collective results of the library and faculty surveys highlighting common findings and recommendations for collaborative opportunities. 4. A summary report for each participating HBCU providing the results of both the library and faculty survey for their institution only. 5. Implementation of eight model projects for development and/or expansion of library services to support faculty research. 6. Twenty-one web-based classes to share results of the assessments and sub-grant projects and to assist librarians throughout the HBCU community in planning and improvement of library services to support faculty research. The project's executive summary is detailed below. Contact me directly no later than Friday, December 13th if you're interested in serving on this committee. I'm excited about the Alliance's direct grant award and its impact on our community. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Respectfully, Sandra Executive Summary The HBCU Library Alliance respectfully submits this proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for an 18 month project to assess and strengthen library services in support of faculty research at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The project will foster improved library services on individual HBCU campuses and develop collaborative approaches to expand HBCU community-wide library support for faculty research. The grant budget requested for this project is $247,000. The academic library is an important component of the infrastructure to support both faculty and student research at HBCUs. In addition to the traditional role of providing access to information resources, today's college and university library provides expertise in other areas that support faculty research, such as conducting ongoing literature reviews across a wide variety of sources, identifying funding opportunities, managing intellectual property rights and copyright, preserving access to data sets and publications/preprints through repositories, and forming partnerships to increase availability of resources. While the underlying structure of many research support services is similar across libraries, each library serves distinct needs based on the research priorities of their particular campus and individual faculty member research and publication areas. Faculty at HBCUs face a number of challenges in pursuing research and their libraries can provide infrastructure to help address some of those challenges. This project proposes to begin by assessing librarians at HBCUs to better understand current capacity and identify library needs related to research support. In partnership with the HBCU Faculty Development Network, additional assessment will be done with HBCU faculty to better understand the support they need for research, especially in regard to services that are or could be provided by libraries. Assessment results would be shared with individual campuses and used to identify community-wide needs and issues that could be addressed collectively through the HBCU Library Alliance. Following the assessments, which will gather valuable information about library support and faculty research needs, the HBCU Library Alliance would develop model programs for library-based research support services through sub-grants to eight HBCU libraries. While all HBCU libraries already support faculty through a variety of services, limited attention has been paid specifically to services that support research. Sub-grants would allow participating libraries to implement innovative programs and increase engagement with faculty in provision of support for research. These models would be shared among the HBCU community with the goal of fostering replication of effective programs on other campuses. In addition, training programs would be provided to assist all HBCU librarians in developing stronger relationships with faculty and improving research support services. Educational programs supported through the project would also share the results of the library and faculty surveys and provide opportunities for sub-grant recipients to mentor other HBCU librarians in expansion of research support services. SANDRA M. PHOENIX Executive Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 800-999-8558, ext. 4820 404-702-5854 Skype: sandra.phoenix1 1438 West Peachtree NW Suite 200 Atlanta,GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (LYRASIS) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.