IT- Library Collaboration and Collaboration

This session will use the InfoCommons at Northwestern Library as a case study to examine a very successful partnership in technology application and space planning between two high-profile campus entities.

Technologists and librarians are discovering that intelligent organizational overlap is the route to the digital library of the future.

Bringing together diverse work groups from IT and libraries to develop a new service can be challenging. This session will describe how the University of Tennessee applied many of the techniques used to build and manage teams to successfully meld these campus units to create an information commons.

The author discusses the delicate balance of creating collaborative relationships between faculty, librarians and IT staff. One such Fellowship effort is sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). In attracting recent Ph.D.s who believe that there are opportunities to develop meaningful linkages between disciplinary scholarship, libraries, archives, and evolving digital tools, the program brings scholars with both teaching and digital experience into the academic library so that they may serve as a bridge between librarians, faculty, and IT professionals.

Careful consideration of student needs and testing of several prototypes yielded a successful model for collaborative workstations in the library.

This research bulletin discusses how leaders at the University of Kansas merged the Libraries and Information Technology into an Information Services department using well-documented strategies for enabling collaboration, group decision making, and mentoring of new leaders. It describes the challenges—and successes—related to making rapid changes in organizational structure, staffing, and services while remaining engaged with users and delivering technology services that were not necessarily tied to organizational boundaries.

This research bulletin describes how a group of individuals at the University of Kansas worked to design and implement a collaborative learning environment for students, based on theoretical and empirical research along with basic common sense. It discusses the many lessons learned throughout the process and provides recommendations for institutions that are about to embark on a similar voyage.