Beyond the Tabletop: Collaboration for a Campus-wide Initiative

Description: In the library, it's easy to get caught up in your own workflows and forget about the people you need to work with the most: faculty, students, and other stakeholders on campus. However, working with other offices and individuals across campus can create extremely rewarding projects and long-lasting partnerships. 

My name is Abbey Elder, Open Access Librarian for Iowa State University, and in 2017 I started the Open Education initiative at Iowa State University with the help of a small committee of campus stakeholders. I'd love to run a discussion roundtable to share the work I did to get that committee off the ground and to discuss the myriad ways we can each get up from our desks and engage with people on campus to create initiatives that go above and beyond our daily routine.

Whether you want to show off some cool work you've done or learn from the experiences of others, the ways we can leverage the experience of others on our campus is a great discussion topic for librarians of all types.

Takeaways: Those who attend this roundtable will leave with tangible examples of how they can engage with faculty, students, and the administration on their campus to start or grow an initiative of any type. I'd be happy to share examples of the planning documents I used to create my OER grants and the other pieces of my Open Education initiative on campus.

Organization: While this idea is still forming in my mind, I'd love to include other librarians who might have an initiative they've created on a different topic (Special Collections or Digital Humanities, maybe?) to share their experiences and lessons learned as well so we can get a good dialogue going about different approaches to initiative development.

Contact Information: Abbey Elder (aelder@iastate.edu)