41 Identifying essential components for a project

How to Use a Project-Based Approach to Start a Campus Initiative

Having been a university librarian since 2013, I have become a great believer in a project-based approach to initiative building. Informational materials, presentations, and workshops have their place. But I have found that an approach consisting of a series of, at first, small, individual projects with stakeholders will build a program more effectively than simply arguing in favor of that program’s merits. When done strategically, such an approach cultivates allies, raises your institutional profile, and advances your own initiative goals.

I began to develop this approach in my first librarian position, as a scholarly communication librarian charged with building a scholarly communication program on campus. Two near universal goals for such projects are 1) to build an institutional repository and 2) engage the library in journal publishing. After spending the first semester conducting an environmental scan of the campus and undertaking trips to visit scholarly communication colleagues around the state. I was still unsure how to approach the task of building a program involving multiple stakeholders. However, I had no extra funding to help out.

One of my initial ideas was to visit every department meeting on campus and make the case for Open Access. Such presentations are usually met with polite approval and often result in little additional engagement. I knew that there must be a population of faculty on campus who had published articles with agreements that permitted Green OA – deposit into an institutional repository. The problem was in motivating faculty to reach out to me. Eventually, I decided to populate the IR manually, starting with the easily achievable goals.

I. Building an IR from Nothing

We had access to a larger university instance of space. As a smaller campus of a statewide system, we could operate as a community within a larger state school repository. First, I went through the annual faculty publication report and cross-referenced it with Sherpa/Romeo to determine papers I could possibly deposit, and contacted the authors. After consulting an IR coordinator at a peer institution in Illinois, I contacted my university’s graduate school and started a project to digitize the library of print master’s theses and place them in the IR. The IR also had an opt-out policy that students could use to request removal. With the plans for these projects in place, I was then able to convince my library to let me hire a part-time student worker to help scan and deposit.

Once I had this population of items, I started counting impact – downloads, views, citations to faculty papers. One paper, by a faculty member in the biology department, accumulated over 10,000 downloads in the first year. I regularly reported these numbers to faculty whose papers I’d deposited. At the time, the DSpace instance we used didn’t allow for automated updates, as one might see from BePress. This ended up helping me, as it kept me in regular contact with multiple faculty members. These numbers also made presentations to stakeholders much more impactful, and word of mouth began to spread thanks to faculty telling colleagues about their download figures and including them on their tenure packets.

The tenure angle was particularly valuable. I contacted each college and offered to give regular presentations each summer to new faculty on how to track the impact of their scholarship, including using Altmetrics and multiple citation count aggregators. Colleges have a vested interest in helping their faculty successfully complete the tenure process, so they were grateful for the offer. This led to a regular workshop for new faculty through the university center for excellence in teaching – a must-have stakeholder ally for any such initiative.

I also sought those in charge of various student research awards on campus and placed their winners into the repository, and started working with the undergraduate and graduate research conference to do the same for poster presentations. In all of these cases, for individual faculty happy to have additional reach of their research, for departments happy to have additional help onboarding new faculty, for the center for teaching excellence, happy to have additional programming. For the organizers of student research awards and conferences, these ready-at-hand projects dovetailed with their existing efforts and goals. While also advancing my own. I cultivated allies by doing these projects well and successfully, building capital I could later use for my projects.

II. Journal Publishing

Journal publishing is another common feature of campus scholarly communication programs. Taking a similar approach to the IR, I tried to find easy adds that would allow me to build online journal pages that I could then showcase to potential partners. The solution came in the form of the Student Publications Committee, which oversaw multiple student peer-reviewed student journals. I approached them about building homes for the journals in a single space, using Open Journal Systems. We digitized the back issues of those and put a workflow in place to include new issues as they were published.

Having these up and online lead to a faculty member who was previously the editor of a now-defunct medieval studies journal, who asked if we could do something similar for that journal. Eventually, I was able to find an active journal in need of a home and, using the existing online issues, convince them to use our infrastructure to host their publication. Again, each of these projects cultivated allies while also advancing our own goals for scholarly communication.

Rather than rigidly sticking to a predetermined, specific goal, the flexible approach of taking on projects as the opportunity arose allowed for the program to develop allies and make use of existing project investment. In almost any educational institution, one will find existing projects and initiatives whose goals live in the same theoretical solar system. These projects will have already seen money and labor power invested into them. Thus, those who oversee them have a vested interested in advancing them, and coming up with a way to help them toward that goal creates a powerful population of allies.

The project-based approach accomplishes two things—it creates a suite of projects to demonstrate to the next potential partner, and, provided they’re successful, it creates faculty allies. Faculty allies are effective at spreading the word about a program. Much more than an outsider joining a department meeting for ten minutes to explain why faculty should get involved with campus-initiative-x, finding faculty members who will work on a project with you offers more FaceTime than a presentation. It helps them succeed professionally, while also incrementally building the program one has set out to build.

So, You’re Starting a [Campus OER/Scholarly Communication/Open Access, or Something Else Entirely] Program:

With this experience in mind, and building upon my additional experience in working with campus affordable content and OER initiatives at University of Nebraska Omaha, I’ve developed the following guide to a project-based, ally-building approach for multi-stakeholder programs:

Step 1: Getting to know you, getting to know all about you

• Start with an environmental scan. There are probably organizations out there who have guidelines for this, in addition to toolkits offering guidance throughout the process. The SPARC OA Toolkit is a good example.
• During this scan, identify stakeholders, centers of power (both official and unofficial), well-connected faculty and administrators, and current engagement with whatever kind of program you’re trying to build.
• Don’t simply conduct the scan through internet research. Schedule introductory meetings with as many people as possible.
• Explain your own goals and ask them about their own. At the end, ask the person who else you should meet with. Continue this until you stop hearing new names suggested.
• Write the results up in a report for your reference. It does not need to be formal. It needs to be accurate.

Step 2: Oh, the places you’ll go

• Write up goals. Separate these into near term (1-2 years), midterm (3-5 years) and long-term (5+ years). For example, one of my near-term goals when I started working at UNO was simply to develop an OER text with a faculty member. Another was to find more courses for the Affordable Content Grants that satisfy the Arts & Humanities requirement. One of my long-term goals was to develop a no-materials cost General Education pathway, although what form that would take I did not specify.
• Schedule meetings with relevant individuals, including administrators, directors of centers for teaching and learning, deans, as many people as possible. Tell them your goals, ask them how you can achieve them. You should have the population of people identified from your initial scan meetings.
• Keep your goals general enough to allow flexibility as you find ready projects you can help with.

Step 3: Let me help you with that

• Once you’ve done this, find the easily achievable goals. Anything you can find that will create a) a product and b) a positive experience for the person you’re working with. These projects need to live in the same solar system as your initiative. Don’t just take a project for the sake of taking a project. Ask yourself and your colleagues, if such a project logically dovetails with your initiative.
• Repeat the last step as many times as possible, but don’t take on too much at once. Easy wins are better. Existing initiatives whose goals dovetail with your own are initiatives into which centers of power have invested time, money, and labor power. Why start from scratch when you can find symbiotic relationships which advance those projects while also raising your profile and advancing your own goals?
• Follow these steps, and the program will begin to take shape, organically, perhaps in unexpected ways, until you’ve built the community you want.
• Examples of stakeholders to approach for these kinds of ready projects include:
• • Campus centers for teaching: These centers are usually happy for more content in the way of presentations and programming
  • Tenure committees or administration looking for additional ways to help faculty through the process
  • Curriculum committees: there will usually be at least one curriculum review project going on at a school at any one given time
  • Student affairs/student success working groups/SGA
  • Departments of academic affairs

Furthering the goals of existing campus projects and initiatives helps you as well. It raises your profile, it develops allies, it often advances your own goals in real, tangible ways. Remember to keep an open mind, to think expansively and creatively, and seize opportunities as they arise.