Year in review: 2016–2017

Now that the summer is finally upon us, we’d like to take a look back over the previous year to highlight just some of the recent events and projects supported by AMICAL. Their success reflects the increasing breadth and enthusiasm of participation across the faculty, librarians and technologists of our consortium.

Our programs are shaped around the following strategic focus areas:

• curriculum-integrated digital initiatives
• information literacy
• leadership of libraries and technology services
• cooperative acquisition of library resources
• building faculty & staff communities of practice

We work on those areas primarily through our faculty & staff development events, through our Small Grants, and through our online community platforms and collaboration tools. The fruits of these efforts provide some of the material and inspiration for the AMICAL Conference, the annual gathering of our members.

Curriculum-integrated digital initiatives

DHI-B: Digital Humanities Institute – Beirut 2017

This three-day series of workshops and mini-courses provided hands-on digital humanities training with a regional focus. The Institute was founded on the principles of co-learning and co-teaching among a community of faculty, librarians and instructional design staff. The event helped participants coalesce around a consortial community of practice in digital scholarship. Other outcomes include a panel session at AMICAL 2017 and plans to nurture this nascent community by the Digital Scholarship Committee, which organized this event.

Small grants for projects & staff exchanges

Seven small grants were awarded to five institutions working on digital projects. They ranged from digitization projects of various stripes, including text encoding, to student audio storytelling, and more.

• AUCA digital collections (American University of Central Asia)
• Creating a corpus of multilingual TEI XML transcriptions from the Linguistic Landscapes of Beirut Project (American University of Beirut)
• Digital Radioactive Security (American University of Central Asia)
• Digital humanities workshops & consulting at AUP (American University of Paris)
• Digitizing Perestroika in Kyrgyzstan (American University of Central Asia)
• Podcasting Life 101: AUC Centennial (American University in Cairo)
• Thesis repository for the Bissell Library (American College of Thessaloniki)

Information literacy

Co-design: Integrating information literacy into your disciplinary course

In this two-day workshop, Samantha Godbey and Xan Goodman (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) led disciplinary faculty and librarians to collaboratively design course-embedded information literacy activities. Using ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, participants developed a course to be taught in the fall of 2017. Organized by the Information Literacy Committee, this event also generated a panel session and a mini-workshop at AMICAL 2017.

Small grants for professional development

Two teaching librarians were awarded small grants to attend ACRL’s Immersion Program, bringing back know-how they can share with colleagues at their institution and across the consortium (American University of Paris & American University of Nigeria).

Leadership of libraries and technology services

Assessing and communicating library contributions to institutional priorities

A two-day intensive workshop for library directors on strategic and sustainable library assessment for academic libraries, led by Kara Malenfant (ACRL) and Karen Brown (Dominican University). This event was organized by the Institutional Research & Assessment Committee, who developed out of it a benchmarking template for AMICAL libraries to benchmark and compare with one another, as well as a mini-workshop for AMICAL 2017.

Small grants

A new library director was awarded a small grant to attend Harvard’s Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians, allowing them to acquire tools and insight for in their new role (American University in Bulgaria).

Cooperative acquisition of library resources

The E-Resources Committee created a new working group, the Library Resources Buyers Group, to allow institutions interested in participating in consortial deals to shape the consortium’s e-resources strategy. One outcome to come from this group was a deal with JSTOR to provide ebooks under a demand-driven acquisition model to participating members with a substantial discount.

Building faculty & staff communities of practice

Small grants funded four staff exchanges among five institutions to establish library collections collaboration, provide digital humanities workshops and consulting, and support faculty development through the work of the teaching and learning centers.

• AUC-AUB-LAU library collections collaboration meeting (American University in Cairo, American University of Beirut, Lebanese American University)
• Digital humanities workshops & consulting at AUP (American University of Paris)
• Support between learning centers to help establish teaching excellence certification and faculty learning communities (American University of Central Asia, American University in Cairo)
• Faculty development and community media (American University of Central Asia)

Our annual Conference

AMICAL 2017, our most recent annual meeting and conference, was held 17–20 May at the American College of Thessaloniki.

The theme was “Centering on learning: Partnerships and professional development among librarians, faculty and technologists,” and the balance of campus roles among registered attendees reflected that interest in partnership:

• 48% libraries & archives
• 33% faculty or faculty developers
• 19% instructional designers/technologists or IT managers/staff

The annual AMICAL Conference never fails to generate praise from members. Our favorite this year was from Anguelina Popova, who succinctly summarised what it’s all about:

The AMICAL Conference is a highlight event of the year for me. It’s the place to meet like-minded people with similar academic interests, and exchange on the projects and experiences we have had through the year. It is also an excellent event to start new projects.

The Conference included keynotes on partnerships for information literacy (Christine Susan Bruce) and digital innovation in higher education (Kristen Eshleman). Recordings of the keynotes and other sessions are now available. Sessions with slides (or other resources) available are noted on the conference schedule with an icon – just click through to access the files. Session reports and other discussions are happening in our members-only forum. A summary of the event in selected tweets is on Storify (courtesy of Dimitris Tzouris).

More information

Photos from our events are available on Flickr.

AMICAL members can also read the committee annual reports, which detail their accomplishments for the past year and future goals.

Note: Parts of this blog post were reported earlier in “Program Highlights · Spring 2017”.