How do you start a blog post about faculty activity amidst a global pandemic without sounding trite and tone deaf? Obviously countless individuals are facing much more pressing matters than understanding the research footprint at a university — but even in our current climate, having a reliable, reusable source of accurate information about the same has proved crucial. What, perhaps, is most inspiring is how we see typically disparate departments and organizational groups coming together to identify, track, analyze, and ultimately strategize around their university’s scholarly outputs and influence, with the end goal of ensuring maximum impact of their research.
When I started my career as a digital services and scholarly communication librarian I was surprised to find how little often collaborations or joint projects would occur between the library and IT or research development and faculty affairs offices. I was fortunate at my time at William & Mary to work under the astute leadership of a library director who knew a cross-organizational approach was by far the most efficient, effective, and cost conscious. I recall at a first task force meeting among cross-campus departments around technology services the library learned faculty often went directly to the technical contact they had, versus their liaison librarian, when they were interested in some new software, often leading to redundancy in licenses and subscribed tools.
