One of the goals of AMICAL’s current grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the development of “Community and Infrastructure for Collaboration”. We’ve been pursuing this through a broad range of efforts supporting connections across consortium membership – connections between institutions and connections across campus roles in libraries, technology and teaching. This post marks the first of a series focused on just one of those initiatives: the AMICAL 2023 Project Incubator.

Goals

Drawing inspiration from the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute, in which a group of AMICAL members participated last year, we created a similar opportunity specifically for AMICAL members to work face-to-face on collaborative projects. Members were invited to apply for the AMICAL 2023 Project Incubator program with cross-institutional teams working on projects related to libraries, technology and/or pedagogy. The AMICAL Conference is one of the rare opportunities for our members to meet in person, so we integrated the Project Incubator into the larger program of AMICAL 2023, allowing the teams to:

• have an extended period of focused time for working in-person as teams
• get feedback on their projects from over a hundred peers from AMICAL’s 30 member institutions present at the conference

Structure

Following our pre-conference encouragement for teams to work on initial project development, we organized at the conference two sessions for the teams:

• Collaboration sprint: 6 hours of focused time on the pre-conference day, for each team to work on their own project. Most of this time was unstructured, and each team was allowed to organize the time in the way they found most useful. Plenary opening and debriefing sessions allowed us to build a sense of shared experience and collaborative spirit.
• Feedback session: teams presented informally their projects and solicited feedback from interested conference attendees as part of a larger, 75-minute Community Idea Exchange session (similar to a poster session)

Details about our organization of this program can be found on the AMICAL 2023 Project Incubator page.

Project teams

Here are the project teams that were accepted for the AMICAL 2023 Project Incubator:

• IFLA-AMICAL Book Project (“Changing Information Services and User Experiences”)
  • Meredith Saba, Instruction and Reference Librarian (American University in Cairo)
  • Michael Stoepel, User Services Librarian (American University of Paris)
  • Christine Furno, Engagement and Outreach Librarian (American University of Sharjah)
• Rethinking CLTs (strategizing CLT development across AMICAL institutions)
  • Angie Popova, Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (American University of Central Asia)
  • Rukhsana Zia, Head of the Center for Learning and Teaching (Forman Christian College)
• Adoption of Open Educational Resources (OERs) at FCCU (collaboration with AUB)
  • Mehreen Tahir, Liaison/OER Librarian for Sciences & Humanities (Forman Christian College)
  • Madiha Asghar, Liaison/ OER Librarian for Social Sciences & Humanities (Forman Christian College)
  • Anish Arif, Faculty Development Coordinator, Center for Learning and Teaching (Forman Christian College)
  • Adeel Khalid, Lecturer (Forman Christian College)
  • Dalal Rahme, Data Services Librarian (American University of Beirut)
• EcoJustice OER initiative (curating pedagogical resources that support environmental justice)
  • Elena Berg, Associate Professor of Environmental Science (American University of Paris)
  • Nadine Aboulmagd, Senior Instructional Designer at The Center for Learning and Teaching (American University in Cairo)
  • Alex Armstrong, Program & Technology Officer (AMICAL Consortium)
  • Jeff Gima, AMICAL Consortium Director (American University of Paris)

Watch for other posts in the coming weeks with updates from the Project Incubator teams!