A few weeks ago I asked about techniques for successfully
recruiting faculty participation in scholarly communications workshops.
Thank you to everyone who replied, on- or off-list.
Here’s a summary of the responses I received:
·
Partnerships—teaming up with other campus support
offices (teaching & learning centers, scholarship/research support) or
co-sponsoring event series can let you reach pre-existing audiences and combine
marketing efforts.
·
Targeting workshops at the department level, in
order to customize the workshop for a specific department’s concerns but also
to have buy-in and endorsement from the department (or at least the chair).
·
Free food is appealing to more than just
students.
·
Faculty champions who can encourage their peers
to participate in the event and/or co-lead an event.
·
Endorsement/promotion by university
administration—provosts, deans, chancellors, etc—can lend more legitimacy or
grab more attention than something the library is doing on its own.
·
Instead of (or in addition to) pre-planned
events, regularly seeking time at faculty meetings for a quick overview of
issues/services, which may lead to more individual, point-of-need
consultations.
·
Timing is a fundamentally unsolvable problem;
there are some lulls in the academic year, but even those can be unreliable.
·
Webinars/online content might offer an
asynchronous solution to the timing and point-of-need problems.
In any case, I think Jill Cirasella summed up the most
common theme--“TL;DR: Effective workshop outreach is so much harder than it
seems!”
At the CUNY Graduate Center, we’ve been experimenting with
rebranding our scholcomm-related workshops to make clear, right in the workshop
title, what specifically attendees will learn and why it matters. The
workshop titles are longer now – borderline unwieldy, even – but we’re
attracting more attendees than we did before.
For example, we changed our authors’ rights workshop from
“Introduction to Authors’ Rights” (yawn) and “You Know What You Write, But Do
You Know Your Rights?” (too clever for its own good?) to “What to Know Before
You Submit to a Journal, or Sign Its Contract” (longer, but gives them a hint
what it’s all about).
Also, we completely revamped our “Why and How to Deposit to CUNY
Academic Works” (our IR) workshop into “Your Google Scholar Profile: Why to
Create It and How to Fine-Tune It.” (Thanks to Monica Berger at New York City
College of Technology, who made us aware of http://researchguides.wcu.edu/scholarlyprofile
and http://libguides.citytech.cuny.edu/boost,
which inspired the new workshop.) Instead of being all about the IR, the
workshop is now mostly about curating your Google Scholar Profile, with the big
reveal being that depositing works to the IR can improve your Google Scholar
Profile and help Google Scholar searchers. We offered this incarnation for the
first time last semester, had a healthy handful of attendees, and then received
numerous IR submissions from the attendees.
As for marketing, we have a whole outreach workflow that
involves the library blog, Twitter, Facebook, Eventbrite, Mailchimp emails, and
digital signage around campus. There’s no denying that this is
time-intensive, though. We are only able to do all this because one of
our part-time reference librarians spends one-third to one-half of her time on
digital outreach.
All that said, it’s still the case that our scholcomm workshops
attract fewer attendees that our other workshops – Zotero, Archival Research
Basics, etc. Our best guess is that it’s because they’re not tied to a
specific and time-sensitive research need. But we will keep offering
them, and keep offering one-on-one consultations to those who can’t make the
workshops. Awareness is definitely higher now than it was a couple of
years ago…
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