2019 Charleston Library Conference

As scholar/practitioners, academic librarians face a wide range of expectations for scholarship in their job responsibilities, including for rank, tenure, and promotion. From podcasts and blogs to Against the Grain column authorship to conference presentations and research articles, the range of scholarship produced by academic librarians reflects the diversity of expectations and job responsibilities in the profession, and impact can be difficult to contextualize or even quantify. The very definition of scholarship varies widely across academic institutions, with some more inclusive of professional service and non-peer-review outlets than others. At the same time, the nature of scholarship itself is rapidly changing to include a stronger focus on concerns about open access, author’s rights, equitable production and ‘gate-keeping’ that is associated with many traditional and emerging forms of scholarly communication. This session will engage in a discussion about a proposed framework, created by the ACRL Impactful Scholarship and Metrics Task Force, that is designed to facilitate the work of academic institutions as they evaluate and update their guidelines for measuring the impact of academic librarian scholarship. The framework outlines a wide variety of scholarly outputs, and creates two primary categories of impact - scholarly and practitioner - with a variety of metrics, measures, and altmetrics for the evaluation of each category. The task force representatives will discuss their background research findings, introduce the proposed framework, and guide the participants in a conversation about the strengths, weaknesses, and next steps for this framework. We will also discuss other initiatives that will inform scholarship, including open access and equity issues, spearheaded by academic librarianship