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TRLN to Host Blacklight Summit

TRLN will host Blacklight Summit 2019 at Duke University Libraries in Durham, NC on October 9th, 10th, and 11th.

Registration will open in August, at which point we’ll be able to provide more information about accommodation and travel options. Keep an eye on this webpage for updates.

Until then, if you’re interested in participating in planning the agenda, have ideas about what you’d like to see happen this year, or want to lead a workshop, please contact Cory Lown (cory.lown@duke.edu).

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New to a TRLN Library? Attend an Orientation!

Were you recently hired by a library at Duke, NCCU, NC State, or UNC-Chapel Hill? If so, you’ve hopefully heard that your institution participates in a consortium called the Triangle Research Libraries Network — but it might not be clear to you what the consortium actually does or what opportunities it holds for you! Alternately, you might have worked at a TRLN member library for a long time, but you still have questions about how TRLN is structured or how you can connect with people working in similar specializations.

Whichever of these scenarios most closely resembles yours, you are invited to a TRLN New Employee Orientation taking place on Thursday, May 30th, in RTP! 

The orientation has the following objectives:

  • To introduce Duke, NCCU, NC State, and UNC-Chapel Hill libraries staff to the Triangle Research Libraries Network’s history, activities, and opportunities.
  • To provide staff an opportunity to network with library professionals from other TRLN institutions.

Event logistics:

  • Date & time: Thursday, May 30, 9:00am – 11:00am
  • Location: North Carolina Biotechnology Center, Dogwood Room, 15 T.W. Alexander Drive, Research Triangle Park, NC 27703
  • An agenda will be made available to registered participants before the event.

Sign up at this link: https://forms.gle/zgZiToSgevgcAesGA

If you’d like to attend an orientation but are unable to make the May date, sign up at this link to be kept informed about the Fall 2019 orientation (date TBD): https://forms.gle/YKu55BGNsqw2MiBh6

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Call for Proposals: TRLN Annual Meeting Presentations

TRLN is now inviting proposals for presentations at the TRLN Annual Meeting, which will take place on Thursday, July 11, at the Friday Center in Chapel Hill.

Who may submit a proposal? Anyone who works in a TRLN member library. We welcome submissions from people of any domain, area of expertise, library, level of seniority, or title.

What presentation topics are welcome? Topics could include interesting activities or programs at your library; current projects or those in the planning stages; or things happening on your campus which people on other campuses might find instructive or want to replicate. Presentations could also highlight current TRLN working group or interest group projects or accomplishments.

How long can presentations be? Depending on the length of time you think is best for your topic, you can propose a 5-6 minute lightning talk, a 25-30 minute presentation, or a 45-60 minute presentation.

How do I submit a proposal? Complete and submit this form by Wednesday, May 15.

When will I hear if my proposal has been accepted? All submissions will be reviewed by the Annual Meeting Steering Committee, which includes representatives from all four member institutions. Selection decisions will be announced by Thursday, May 30.

More questions? Contact Events@trln.org.

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Vacancy Announcement: Program Officer

TRLN seeks a knowledgeable, enthusiastic and collaborative colleague to serve as Program Officer for technology-related consortial programs, services, and activities and to provide support for its standing programmatic and governing bodies. The TRLN Program Officer will manage and support the work of the TRLN to explore and solve some of the complex issues facing academic libraries today. This position offers an excellent opportunity to work with talented and motivated staff across four research institutions to support long-standing cooperative collection development efforts and the discovery and delivery technologies necessary to service those materials.

Learn more about the role and how to apply by visiting the position listing: https://library.duke.edu/about/jobs/trlnprogramofficer

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Sign Up to Attend a Cultural Humility Workshop!

TRLN will host a workshop on cultural humility that is open to any who work in TRLN libraries. The workshop will be presented by Sunny Kim, Teen Services Librarian at The Seattle Public Library, and Nicky Andrews, NCSU Libraries Fellow at North Carolina State University.

The workshop will be offered in two separate sessions, capped at 60 participants each, on Wednesday, April 24, at the Archie K. Davis Conference Center in Research Triangle Park.

Workshop overview:
This interactive workshop will introduce participants to cultural humility, clarify how it is different from cultural competence, and demonstrate why it is an essential framework for resisting racism and bias in library work. Participants will:

  • Gain a deeper understanding of the cultural humility framework
  • Name and reflect on their own privilege and identities
  • Get practice in interrupting scenarios of bias and problematic behavior
  • Receive resources and recommendations for continuing to engage in cultivating cultural humility

Workshop logistics:
WHEN: Wednesday, April 24, 2019, 9:30am-11:30am OR 12:30pm-2:30pm
WHERE: Archie K. Davis Conference Center, Meeting Rooms A&B, 12 Davis Dr., Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
PARKING: Plenty of free parking at the Archie K. Davis Conference Center.
OTHER DETAILS: Light pastries, coffee, tea, and water will be available during the morning session. Light snacks, coffee, tea, and water will be available during the afternoon session. Please arrange to eat breakfast or lunch before your respective session, if desired. 

Registration:
The sign-up form is available here: https://goo.gl/forms/Fwc9MxezjcJAxEvJ2. Indicate your preferred time slot, and a TRLN staff member will follow up with you to either confirm your registration or to notify you that you are on a waitlist. The deadline to complete the form is Friday, April 5. Waitlisted individuals will be notified on or around Monday, April 8 if a spot is available for them.

Questions? Contact Events@trln.org.

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TRLN and Project ReShare Represented at Code4Lib

From February 20-22, a diverse community of developers and technologists for libraries, museums, and archives congregated in San Jose, CA, for the Code4Lib 2019 conference.  This annual event is an excellent opportunity to share ideas and foster collaboration surrounding open technologies.

This year, the conference program included presentations that highlighted two of TRLN’s high-priority collaborative efforts: the consortium’s new shared index, and Project ReShare.

On day 1 of the conference, Emily Lynema, Department Head of Information Technology at NC State and the TRLN Discovery Product Owner for NC State, gave a presentation titled “Consortial discovery and resource sharing: Making it happen with (mostly) standard tools.” You can watch a video recording of Emily’s presentation on the Code4Lib Youtube channel (starts at 52:29).

On day 2, Genia Kazymova, TRLN Applications Developer, presented a poster session about the architecture of the shared index. The poster, titled “Need a Shared Index? TRLN Discovery Project: Software and AWS Architecture Overview,” can be viewed here. Click here for the accompanying handout.

Finally, on day 3, Jill Morris of PALCI and Kristen Wilson of Index Data presented on the challenges and opportunities present in the current landscape of resource sharing, and Project ReShare’s vision for how to meet them. View the slide deck here or watch a video recording of the presentation here.

Thank you to all of these women for helping share these exciting stories of collaboration and innovation!

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Save the Date for the 2019 TRLN Annual Meeting!

Please save the date of Thursday, July 11 for the next TRLN Annual Meeting! After having hosted the 2018 Annual Meeting at the Durham Convention Center, this year we’ll be returning to the William and Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education in Chapel Hill, NC. 

Dr. Louise Bernard

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speaker will be Louise Bernard, founding Director of the Museum of the Obama Presidential Center. Dr. Bernard was formerly Director of Exhibitions at the New York Public Library. As a Senior Content Developer and Interpretive Planner in the New York office of the museum design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates, she worked on the design team that developed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, along with other international projects. She previously served as Curator of Prose and Drama for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, and as Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale, and her current research engages with the literary archive, material culture, museology, public history, and interpretive planning and design. She is a scholarly advisor to the International African American Museum in Charleston, SC, and sits on the Board of the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association.

A lunchtime program and other details, including registration and the call for proposals, will be announced in the coming months.

Please mark your calendars and plan to join us at the Friday Center on July 11!

Questions? Contact Events@trln.org

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TRLN Supports Project ReShare, Open Source Library Resource Sharing Platform

TRLN has announced that it will contribute financial support to Project ReShare, a community of library consortia, vendors, and service providers committed to an open approach to library resource sharing systems.

Project ReShare is building an open source, community-owned and managed, highly scalable library resource sharing platform and its accompanying software applications. A minimally viable product is expected to be delivered by Fall 2019 and will enable the discovery, management, and fulfillment of unmediated interlibrary loan requests. The Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI) and Index Data kickstarted construction of the platform with initial investments of funding and developer staff time, respectively. TRLN’s contribution of $6,400 matches the per library contribution previously committed by PALCI, and reflects the consortium’s desire to see alternative options and tools responsive to the strategic needs of the resource sharing community.  This monetary contribution will further support the design and development of the platform by covering costs related to Project ReShare’s membership in the Open Library Foundation. The Open Library Foundation provides ReShare with collaborative infrastructure and a home for the project’s intellectual property, which will be made openly available under a permissive Apache 2.0 open source software license.

TRLN Executive Director Lisa Croucher reflects, “TRLN has been involved in ReShare since its inception, having contributed significant staff time and leadership to the project. We are pleased to now be able to make a more tangible commitment in the way of financial support as the project gains momentum. While resource sharing is a priority for most consortia, it is especially important for TRLN, due to the geographic proximity of our members and our long history of collaborative collection development.”

Project ReShare is led by a steering committee of representatives from Duke University Libraries, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), Index Data, Ivy Plus Libraries, Knowledge Integration, the Mozilla Foundation, the National Széchényi Library (Hungary), North Carolina State University Libraries, Northwestern University Libraries, the Open Library Foundation, PALCI, TRLN, the University of Chicago Library, the University of Houston, and the University of Pennsylvania.

For more information about Project ReShare, please visit https://projectreshare.org, or contact Jill Morris, Project ReShare Steering Committee Chair, at info@projectreshare.org.

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TRLN Launches New Shared Index and Discovery Service

The TRLN Discovery project to build a shared index and discovery service reached a significant milestone this month as three of the four TRLN member institutions released the new service to their campus communities. North Carolina Central University (NCCU) was the first to launch, unveiling the service on Monday, January 7. North Carolina State University (NCSU) launched on Monday, January 14, and Duke University followed on Wednesday, January 16.  The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) will release a public Beta version on Monday, February 4. The new product will significantly streamline library users’ experience by providing a single environment in which to efficiently search for and access all research materials held by TRLN member libraries.

This major step is the result of deep, ongoing collaboration over the past two years following the consortium’s joint decision to move away from the legacy Endeca-based catalog and instead use open-source software tools (Blacklight and Solr) to build a single, easily-customized shared discovery service. Blacklight serves as the foundation for the product, which is being hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS), a secure cloud service platform. A team of developers and product owners from Duke, NCSU, and UNC-CH, as well as TRLN central office staff, has met regularly over the last two years and followed an agile software development approach to review and prioritize each phase of the work.

TRLN Executive Director Lisa Croucher reflects, “With the combination of an index shared across four institutions, open source tools like Blacklight and Solr, and the AWS cloud, this project launches TRLN into a new frontier of shared discovery, one that we anticipate will result in increased efficiency and cost savings. Eleven years after we launched the Endeca-powered Search TRLN – a similarly creative approach to discovery – I’m pleased that we are able to again share our next generation shared discovery project with colleagues in the library and consortia community.”

From this point forward, the product will be overseen by the Shared Discovery Services Working Group. A team of developers will continue to monitor the product and make modifications as needed based on local needs. Regular updates about the project will be available on the working group’s webpage.

Each institution welcomes feedback from users as they become familiar with the new catalog. Feedback mechanisms or points of contact for each institution are listed below:

Duke: Click blue “Feedback” tab on right side of search results page (see example below). More about the changes at Duke.

NCCU: Contact Vickie Spencer, Access Services Librarian (vspencer@nccu.edu)

NCSU: Click “Contact Us” in the yellow banner or the red “Chat Now” tab on the right (see example below). More about the changes at NCSU.

UNC-CH: Contact Chad Haefele, Head of User Experience and Assessment (chaefele@email.unc.edu). Once the Beta version is released, a feedback link will be added to the Libraries website.

 

 

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Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute Announces 2019 Theme and Call for Proposals

The Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) is now welcoming proposals from teams wishing to participate in the 2019 SCI taking place from October 13 through 17, 2019, in Chapel Hill, NC.

The Institute is part retreat, part seminar, and part unconference. Based on a theme that changes every year, participants set their own agenda and define their own deliverables; the Institute supplies the environment and a network of peers to help stimulate and develop creative thinking aimed at promoting positive change in research methods, publishing, digital humanities, digital archives, and other topics related to transformations in scholarly communication. Each year, about 5 teams with 4 to 6 participants each are invited to attend based on successful responses to a request for proposals, and the Institute covers all of their expenses to attend a 4-day program in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Ideally, teams are comprised of people who may not otherwise have the opportunity to interact and who wish to use this as an opportunity to launch new collaborations and projects. Teams whose participants represent a variety of backgrounds, disciplines, professions, and a broad diversity of perspectives are especially encouraged to apply.

This year’s theme is Equity in Scholarly Communications, described in part on the SCI 2019 theme page in this way:

Discussions around scholarly communications, at this Institute and elsewhere in North America and Europe, tend not to account for the wide range of factors that influence whether and how different communities create and access scholarship: not all stakeholders are from well-resourced institutions or nations; not all of us speak, write, read, search, and think in the same language; not all of us enjoy robust support for scholarship, or reliable access to the Internet, or modern research tools, or easy access to libraries, or means of keeping in touch with colleagues and abreast with global developments in our disciplines. Too many platforms, standards, systems, publications, projects, and discussions move forward with only some of us in view.

For the 2019 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute we invite proposals from teams that aim to build a more inclusive and equitable global network of scholarship. SCI is an opportunity to spend a few days with a diverse set of people to investigate challenges, develop plans, test processes, come to agreements, and launch initiatives. SCI is an ideal place to bring together perspectives and expertise that may not normally intersect, and to build understandings and new models based on them. We encourage pragmatic, proactive optimism, and hope participants will use SCI as a platform to nurture positive change.

We especially encourage teams with participants from the “global south”, historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic serving institutions, tribal colleges and universities, community colleges, K-12 schools, independent scholars, and other institutions and backgrounds whose needs and perspectives are too often overlooked in discussions about scholarly communications and the infrastructures and processes that support it.

Project proposals are due April 24, 2019. You can read more about SCI 2019 at the following links: