ACS Information Fluency Task Force Report: Collaboration 2002

Task Force Report: Collaboration Subcommittee

2002

Our committee came together quickly, collaborated and had great (fun) conversations

Jean Parks, Southwestern
Art Moore, Centre
John Tombarge, Washington and Lee
Charlotte Ford, Birmingham Southern
Tom Lairson, Rollins
Kathy Monday, Richmond
Bob Johnson, Rhodes

Our charge - 3-part (using survey responses and reports from 1st round projects)

identify best practices for intracampus collaboration
identify best practices for intercampus collaboration
determine the prospects for interconsortial collaboration

Intracampus Collaboration

John Tombarge was first to point out the difficulty in using our sources for best practices in that we cannot be sure what worked, only what sounded like it would work - i.e., best ideas (with that in mind, we identified IT institutions with promising intracampus collaborations that we plan to keep investigating).

Centenary
Rollins - full team, including students
Southwestern
Washington and Lee

These are institutions that drew attention to their collaborations in their responses to the survey. While other institutions undoubtedly involve collaborative efforts, the explicit mention of collaboration indicated to us its relative importance to the respondents. From them, in particular, we learned:

Qualifications to Collaboration that distinguish forms of Collaboration:

Scope	The nature of collaboration shifts, understandably, with the types of program
	1. horizontal curricular elaboration - broad, lots of people may be involved
	2. vertical curricular elaboration - deep, usually a liaison is named.
Scale	using examples of either 1 or 2 for the other is problematic because of the issues of scale as Tom Lairson pointed out

Obstacles to Collaboration that Best Practitioners Overcome

Disparity in the roles of collaborators can be an obstacle when pay or release time is available to one party but not the others, problems related to personal economics may arise.
Role definition appears to be an issue. IT staff are rarely mentioned as collaborators, it would appear, because librarians are called upon to be technicians as well as research instructors in IF projects. Moreover, it appears that in many projects, the goal appears to make faculty the subject area instructor, research instructor, and technical skills instructor, suggesting that the arena for collaboration is being defined as prior to the classroom. This development may prove ultimately to be an obstacle to collaboration in that new specialties may rise up in faculty ranks to replace these non-faculty collaborators.

Best Practices for Intracampus Collaboration

With those qualifications, obstacles, and catalysts in mind, we identified the following as best practices for collaboration:

Get students involved early (if your evaluation suggests they should be - there might be roles that are more suitable than others);

Recognize collaborations;

Formalize liaisons, where possible;

Build relationships among sources of collaboration;

Market the value of specialists in collaboration;

Beware of forcing a relationship; be a diplomat;

Remember that it takes time;

Find a common thread, perhaps a common passion to generate movement.

Intercampus Collaboration

Development of a digital archive of materials/products and ideas/process for first-year and discipline-specific support;

GIS may prove to be the most productive intercampus collaboration opportunity in the short term.

Interconsortial Collaboration

Training appears to raise most hopes for productive collaboration - training for faculty primarily, but also librarians and IT staff

NITLE intrigues the committee, but we are left with need for more direction to know how we might fit in. We're just now hitting our stride as a consortium in our IF efforts.

Next Steps

Use funds remaining in current grant (and propose new grant to continue effort) to establish "Operation Awesome Force."

meeting to develop program - scopes of project
design
implementation
maintenance
evaluation
elaboration

Use remaining funds to evaluate projects to determine how each was successful or not, why or why not, identify best practices

Give priority in 3rd round funding to intercampus collaborations. There is some belief that these projects should be few in number and large in size of funding.