sept16_b.indd September 2016 385 C&RL News Irene M. H. Herold Supporting scholarly communication Considerations for library leadership Ihave been impressed by the wide diversity of topics that encompass scholarly com- munication, and the intellectual capacity and thoughtful prose that has filled this column. While familiar with scholarly communication issues as the head of a library and through the work supported by ACRL and its Research and Scholarly Environment Committee, which oversees such diverse activities as the Schol- arly Communication Road Show to advisory statements on national information policy,1 I am not a scholarly communication expert. My research and scholarship have been on leadership and leadership development. Starting from the question of what library leaders can do, I approach the topic of sup- porting scholarly communication from three perspectives: mentorship, effective partner- ships, and the leadership role. I reviewed past columns from a leadership perspective. I also asked some of my “thought leader” colleagues what they saw as important trends and considerations. Mentoring David Clutterbuck views a mentor’s key role as encouraging mentees to reflect and make choices about the future.2 This definition contrasts with what may typically be thought of as the “sponsorship” approach to mentor- ing for career advancement. In the spirit of reflecting and moving into the future, ways of thinking about what may be needed to help our colleagues grapple with the chang- ing work in scholarly communication can be summarized as follows. • Increase knowledge and awareness. Writing on the ARL Library Liaison Institute, Nisa Bakkalbasi, Barbara Rockenback, Korne- lia Tancheva, and Rita Vine discussed the per- ceived skill gaps that librarian liaisons felt in view of new expectations with the increasing need to support scholarly communication.3 They identified five areas to address: project management, skill and attitude changes, empathy, relationship development for more effective learning, and expertise. They also identified training and reskilling as essential. • Engage with other disciplines. In the editorial introduction to Nancy Sims’ June 2016 column, a “train-the-trainer” concept was presented, whereby librarians become knowledgeable enough to “educate research- ers about copyrightability as applied to scholarly publishing.”4 Maria Bonn reinforced this need for further education in order to broaden the role from person-to-person to one of library as an entity to the campus’ scholars: “The libraries step in to help bridge this gap between interest and expertise and develop frameworks of support for scholars.”5 Joan Lippincott, associate executive director for the Coalition for Networked Informa- Irene M. H. Herold is university librarian at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and ACRL President, email: heroldi@ hawaii.edu © 2016 Irene M. H. Herold scholarly communication C&RL News September 2016 386 tion (CNI), summarized her thoughts about mentoring for scholarly communication as, “Librarians who are expected to partner with faculty should be mentored on how to build relationships, communicate their expertise, and facilitate both informal and formal inter- actions with faculty.”6 • Reconceive liaison and team work. Amanda K. Reinhart talked about what is needed to be perceived as scholarly commu- nication resources for the campus. She out- lined the six skills of active listening (paying attention, withholding judgment, reflecting, clarifying, summarizing, and sharing), and likened learning about others’ needs in the scholarly communication arena to a reference interview, in which clarifying and meeting a user’s needs involves establishing trust.7 Ann Campion Riley described librarians, subject specialists, and technical staff as consultants in the data management realm.8 Riley pointed to the trend of data concierge, which implies a specific ability to connect a user to many dif- ferent aspects of research data management. • Bridge local to global trends and ac- tions. Riley also stated that librarians “need a specific body of knowledge, with training in local and nonlocal options for data cura- tion, to help researchers effectively.”9 From Bonn’s perspective, libraries are uneasy with activities that resemble marketing, since they define their work as service and not sales. She suggested, however, that libraries are “systematically and strategically applying their long-held and well-developed skills in con- necting users to information,” in this case for open access—a sentiment that applies across the scholarly communication landscape.10 There is a need for reskilling, open dia- logue, and creating a community. Mentoring approaches should include acknowledge- ment that turning to outside experts is ap- propriate. We need to educate each other and reshape our thinking about what constitutes librarians’ roles in this changing landscape. Effective partnerships When considering effective partnerships in the area of scholarly communication, multiple entities come to mind. SHARE,11 SPARC,12 Li- brary Publishing Coalition,13 HathiTrust Digi- tal Library,14 and many other organizations and ventures have arisen to offer partnerships in the 21st-century scholarly communication world. However, figuring out which ones to work with can be challenging. A recent institution’s library partnership with a ven- dor to make the journal articles authored by the institution’s researchers more visible by ingesting vendor-supplied article metadata into their institutional repository received mixed responses, including one that called it a “Trojan Horse.”15 Chris Bourg, director of MIT Libraries, pointed me to several blog posts that describe MIT Libraries’ collaboration with MIT Press.16 Bourg and Amy Brand’s blog post described their work as connected to three communi- ties: “the global academic community, the MIT community, and the community of library and press employees.”17 Another innovative approach in MIT Libraries is to place the col- lections budget under the scholarly commu- nication program “to transform the scholarly communications landscape towards more openness, and toward expanded, democra- tized access.”18 In essence, MIT Libraries are creating new partnerships for scholarly com- munication within the libraries and with other campus constituents. It is a holistic approach to the changes in the scholarly communica- tion environment within the academic and research library. In addition to other entities with whom libraries may partner, consider the partnership we enter into with scholars. Helping research- ers “to find places and ways to preserve the data in and from their research is an essential extension of the ways librarians have for many years helped authors find places to publish,” said Riley.19 Lippincott cautioned, “While librarians bring their professional expertise to partnerships with faculty, they must also be aware of the cultural and disciplinary en- vironment in which faculty do their work.”20 Leadership role When thinking about leadership in an evolv- September 2016 387 C&RL News ing environment, John Kotter’s definition of change leadership as concerning the “driv- ing forces, visions and processes that fuel large-scale transformation” is helpful.21 Kot- ter developed it into an eight-step approach to leading change.22 As students, Gennie Gebhart and Juliya Ziskina provided an ex- ample that exemplifies Kotter’s description of change leadership when they described the process of their campus adopting an open access (OA) policy.23 They gained support for the concept of implementing OA, met with diverse stakeholder groups, created a vision of how this initiative could be of benefit, and created “a united commitment to moving this cause forward.” Bringing together a “nexus of support” that removed barriers, Gebhart and Ziskina also drew on champions who talked to their peers about OA issues, generated short-term wins—such as the efforts to draft the resolution that passed—and instituted the first steps to implementing change that marked “a key threshold victory.”24 While Gebhart and Ziskina are examples of nonpositional leadership, Deanna Marcum, in Library Leadership for the Digital Age, sug- gests that those in positional library leader- ship roles require recalibration to meet the evolving world. She expresses concern about leaders who, for the majority of their careers, were firmly rooted in the print world but now are responsible for “articulating the digital library’s mission and vision. And most have been trained to focus on local collections, but now a national, even global mindset is key. And this different and necessary perspective requires a different kind of leadership.”25 I concur that library leaders need to be open to different and evolving perspectives. Successful leadership practices today require the same essential skills and approaches that made one a successful library leader in a pre- vious era. An effective leader uses multiple approaches (is situational and flexible), cre- ates a culture that invites experimentation and risk-taking (not failures but, rather, wins and learning experiences, to paraphrase Nelson Mandela), and is emotionally intelligent. Kevin Smith, dean of libraries at the Uni- versity of Kansas, notes two administrative issues looming in scholarly communication: It can no longer be the task of one person or a small team, but needs to be reflected in the values of the community, which in turn means we need to evolve our liaison mod- els to a team consultant approach not only for service requests but also for acquisition decisions—whether purchased, stored, or harvested. Smith’s take affords a “big picture approach to facilitate the transitions” in how we spend funds and position ourselves “for the production of scholarship instead of its consumption.”26 Lippincott adds, “Library leaders can encourage their staff to better understand the priorities of their institution, the manner in which faculty are evaluated, and the ways that infrastructure assists or hinders their work.”27 Clifford Lynch, execu- tive director of CNI, offered these thoughts: One of the greatest challenges for library leadership for the next decade or two is finding a balance between participating in a national and global network of memory and knowledge management organizations and stew- ards of the broad scholarly and cultural record on the one side, and meeting the particular needs of the local in- stitutions that they are employed by on the other. Closely related to this is balancing short-term and long-term objectives, commitments, and needs.28 Smith summarizes that the library leader’s role is “to help the library staff keep their eye on the ball—focus on why we are mak- ing these changes and understand that the changes are really ways that we can con- tinue to serve our core mission to support the teaching and learning of our faculty and students.”29 Smith’s view aligns with the fourth goal area that ACRL added in 2016 to its Plan for Excellence, “New Roles and Changing Landscapes” (NR&CL).30 NR&CL focuses on equipping us to work effectively at leading, managing, and embracing change, which is certainly the situation in scholarly com- C&RL News September 2016 388 munication—a growing and changing field. Of course, if we revolutionize the academic discourse by employing change leadership along the way, being a catalyst for transfor- mational change in higher education, while helping to understand NR&LC and scholarly communication, that’s good too! Notes 1. See ACRL Speaks Out, www.ala.org/acrl /issues/acrlspeaksout. 2. See page 3, http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi /viewcontent.cgi?article=1379&context=gsb papers. 3. Nisa Bakkalbasi, Barbara Rockenback, Kornelia Tancheva, and Rita Vine, “ARL Library Liaison Institute: What We Learned About Needs and Opportunities for Reskilling, C&RL News, vol. 77, no. 3 (March 2016), 118-121. 4. Nancy Sims, “My Unpublished Research was Scooped? Misconduct Reveals One Way Copyright Preserves Academic Values,” C&RL News 77, no. 6 (June 2016), 296. 5. Maria Bonn, “Computation, Corpus, Community: The HathiTrust Research Center Today,” C&RL News 77, no. 4 (April 2016), 195. 6. Personal communication with the author, June 13, 2016. 7. Amanda K. Rinehart, “Getting Emotional About Data: The Soft Side of Data Management Services,” C&RL News 76, no. 8 (September 2015), 438. 8. Ann Campion Riley, “Data Management and Curation: Professional Development for Librarians Needed,” C&RL News 76, no. 9 (October 2015), 504-5. 9. Ibid., 505. 10. Maria Bonn, “Maximizing the Benefits of Open Access: Strategies for Enhancing the Discovery of Open Access Content,” C&RL News 76, no. 9 (October 2015), 493-4. 11. SHARE, www.share-research.org/. 12. SPARC, http://sparcopen.org/. 13. Library Publishing Coalition, www. librarypublishing.org/. 14. HathiTrust Digital Library, https://www. hathitrust.org/. 15. Ellen Finnie and Greg Eow, “Beware The Trojan Horse: Elsevier’s Repository Pi- lot and our Vision for IRs & Open Access,” http://intheopen.net/2016/05/beware-the -trojan-horse-elseviers-repository-pilot-and -our-vision-for-irs-open-access/. 16. See https://www.insidehighered.com /blogs/higher-ed-beta/hacking-library-publisher -partnership-mit and http://intheopen. net/2016/03/what-organic-food-shopping -can-tell-us-about-transforming-the-scholarly -communications-system/. 17. See https://www.insidehighered.com /blogs/higher-ed-beta/hacking-library-publisher- partnership-mit. 18. Visit http://intheopen.net/2016/03/what -organic-food-shopping-can-tell-us-about -transforming-the-scholarly-communications- system/. 19. Reilly, October 2015, p. 506. 20. Personal communication with the au- thor, June 13, 2016. 2 1 . S e e w w w . f o r b e s . c o m / s i t e s /johnkotter/2011/07/12/change-management - v s - c h a n g e - l e a d e r s h i p - w h a t s - t h e -difference/#73077ab918ec. 22. The eight steps are: “Create a sense of urgency; build a guiding coalition; form strate- gic vision and initiatives; enlist volunteer army; enable action by removing barriers; generate short term wins; sustain acceleration; institute change,” www.kotterinternational.com/the -8-step-process-for-leading-change/. 23. Gennie Gebhart and Juliya Ziskina, “Students as Leaders in Open Access Advo- cacy: The Story of the University of Washington Initiative,” C&RL News 76, no. 10 (November 2015), 530-33. 24. Ibid. 25. Deanna Marcum, “Library Leadership for the Digital Age Issue Brief” (Ithaka, March 28, 2016), 2. 26. Personal communication with the au- thor, May 22, 2016. 27. Personal communication with the au- thor, June 13, 2016. 28. Personal communication with the au- thor, June 14, 2016. 29. Personal communication with the au- thor, May 22, 2016. 30. See www.ala.org/acrl/aboutacrl /strategicplan/stratplan.