Attendees have begun gathering in Bishkek for AMICAL 2018, the Consortium’s 15th Conference, hosted by the American University of Central Asia (AUCA). The Program Committee has assembled a terrific program tied to the theme of “International liberal arts in a digital era: Reimagining a shared vision for libraries, technology and learning.” But what if you aren’t able to attend the event? Not to worry! You can join us online: Watch the live stream of the keynotes and panels Participate in an online discussion with the Conference keynotes. The keynote speakers This year we are pleased to have two exceptional speakers keynoting our event on different aspects of digital literacies: Gina Siesing, Chief Information Officer & Constance A. Jones Director of Libraries at Bryn Mawr College, will deliver a keynote that grapples with this question: “How do we ensure that students at our liberal arts institutions are prepared to be effective in their chosen fields of pursuit both immediately after graduation and throughout their lives and careers?” Students at the center, all of us in support: Digital competencies at scale in the liberal arts (6 May 2018) John Traxler, Professor of Digital Learning at the University of Wolverhampton, in his keynote will deconstruct the simplistic assumption that digital litercacy is "easy and obvious, almost a universal human right in a digital world. It should be the educational concept that underpins learning, prosperity and fulfilment.” Digital literacy… is it critical? (5 May 2018) Both Gina & John will participate in a hybrid (of course!) discussion on digital literacies (6 May 2018). This Virtually Connecting session will be co-facilitated by Nadine Aboulmagd, Instructional Designer & Technologist, and Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice, both from AUC. To join this session, leave a comment on the Virtual Connecting event blog post or tweet to @vconnecting. The panels We also have two panels that will be live streamed. New learning spaces: Transforming the way we teach, learn and research (5 May 2018). Members from four AMICAL institutions, and the architect behind the award-winning AUCA building will provide ideas on further design/redesign/transformation and evaluation of learning spaces. Beyond Co-design! Next steps for ACRL Framework collaboration (6 May 2018). Moderated by librarian, this faculty panel will discuss the impact of the Co-Design information literacy workshop and how to sustain and institutionalize emerging practices. Tweet along We’ll be tweeting with the #amicalconf hashtag. Follow along and join the conversation! See you all online!

Responses were recently sent out for the latest group of applications for AMICAL’s Small Grant Program. Of the 7 applications received, 1 was ineligible, and the rest were reviewed by the Grant Review Committee. 2 applications were declined, revisions were requested of 3 applications, and 1 application was accepted: Title Applicant Institution Category Facilitating Access to Egyptian and AUC Heritage Oral Histories Through Transcribing and Description Stephen Urgola American University in Cairo Project Next deadline for applications The next round of applications will close at midnight on 4 March. Applicants must be from Full or Affiliate member institutions. Find out more Full information, including the criteria we use in evaluating applications, can be found in our Small Grants guidelines.

We’re proud to share this news just released from The American University of Paris, the founder and host of the AMICAL Consortium: Mellon Foundation grants 1.1 Million USD to The American University of Paris for International Digital Liberal Arts across the AMICAL Consortium PARIS, France – January 26, 2018 — The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a 1.1 million USD, three-year grant to The American University of Paris (AUP) for “Building Leadership and Capacity for Digital Liberal Arts across AMICAL.” Founded and hosted by AUP, AMICAL is a consortium of 27 American-style liberal arts institutions in 21 countries across Europe, Central and Southern Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The grant uses digital scholarship and pedagogy as a focal point for bringing librarians, faculty and technologists to work together on their shared teaching and learning missions. Grant goals The grant will support the following goals across the AMICAL Consortium’s member institutions: Strengthening library and technology leadership – Promoting innovative and effective leadership among librarians and technologists, in light of their changing and collaborative roles within evolving liberal arts institutions. Advancing programs for information and digital literacies – Helping students develop effective skills and critical dispositions in their use and creation of information in a digital environment. Developing localized and collaborative forms of digital liberal arts – Helping learners and scholars combine digital methods with humanistic inquiry, anchored with the resources or geo-cultural contexts of AMICAL institutions. Grant-funded actions To achieve these goals, grant funds will be used to enable the following programs and resources for librarians, technologists and faculty: Virtual collaboration environment The grant will help AMICAL improve its online forum and peer profiles, while developing tools for project-partnering and shared hosting of members’ digital projects. The grant will also support strategic types of intra-consortium relationships through a mentoring framework, campus liaison programs for digital liberal arts and other initiatives. Annual AMICAL Conference AMICAL will expand its member-driven annual conference – an event that combines professional development, networking and work on collaborative projects. Strategic professional development AMICAL will organize multi-institution events and fund individual professional development opportunities, aligned with the consortial goals mentioned above. Small grants for projects Members will be able to apply for funding for projects that relate to AMICAL’s mission or the goals listed above. Special priority will be given to projects that help develop localized and collaborative forms of the digital liberal arts. Capacity-building programs for the digital liberal arts The grant will fund a fellowship for digital scholarship and pedagogy to help guide four consortial initiatives: Consulting visits by the fellow to member institutions Consortial support and virtual collaboration structures for the digital liberal arts Coordinated participation by AMICAL cohorts in digital humanities summer schools Course integrated digital collaborations Building bridges and collaborative capacity Members of the AMICAL Consortium tend to be locally isolated because of their American-style approach to higher education in globally dispersed locations. This grant will help AMICAL continue to build bridges between them and collaborative capacity among them. Celeste Schenck, President of The American University of Paris, attests: “The community of administrators, faculty, librarians, and technologists within the AMICAL Consortium has strengthened with every year since its founding and has had remarkable impact on each of the members. Jeff Gima’s leadership on behalf of both AUP as the founding institution and AMICAL itself has been an essential driver of this multinational, multilingual experiment in sharing Anglophone resources across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.” Jeff Gima, AMICAL Consortium Director, explains some of the opportunities represented by the grant: “Faculty and learning tech staff interested in experimenting collaboratively with digital projects will see some exciting opportunities in this grant. But librarians even more so. They’re uniquely able to make connections between digital projects, which tend to be idiosyncratic and ephemeral, and the library’s longstanding roles – like information organization and access, curating local scholarly production and cultivating information literacy. The grant will help librarians lead that side of the digital liberal arts.” In combining the information expertise of librarians and technologists with the diverse local resources of students, faculty and their environments, this grant will help member institutions to explore their unique opportunities for developing liberal arts education that is both international and digital. About The American University of Paris Chartered in Paris as an American-style liberal arts college in 1962, The American University of Paris is today an international university located at the meeting point of France, Europe, and the world. The University provides a curriculum that combines liberal arts inquiry, preparation for professional life, and student-centered, active learning in small classrooms of students from many nationalities. A global faculty teach 27 undergraduate majors and four core fields of graduate study, all taught in English. AUP’s 20,000 alumni live and work in 145 countries. For information about The American University of Paris, visit the AUP website (www.aup.edu). To find out more about the AMICAL Consortium and this grant, see the consortium’s website (www.amicalnet.org) or follow them on Twitter (@amicalnet). PDFs of this news release and an abbreviated version are available from the original news posted by The American University of Paris.

There’s a lot going on with AMICAL this month! To help you keep track of deadlines and other key dates in January, we’ve compiled this list: Date Program / initiative Activity / milestone 10 January ACRL-AMICAL project documenting “Library partnerships in international liberal arts education” Q&A session 1 (Meeting details in AMICAL Connect) 16 January Workshop Grants for AMICAL 2018 extended (pre-conference) workshops Deadline for proposals by committee chairs 21 January Small Grants Deadline for applications (current round) 23 January ACRL-AMICAL project documenting “Library partnerships in international liberal arts education” Q&A session 2 (Meeting details in AMICAL Connect) 31 January ACRL-AMICAL project documenting “Library partnerships in international liberal arts education” Deadline for proposals 31 January AMICAL 2018 - Call for Proposals Deadline for proposals Note: The dates above are subject to change. Any date changes will be noted in the Announcements on AMICAL Connect and updated here. Some AMICAL activities that are being planned for January may not be included here but will be announced to their target audiences and/or on AMICAL Connect once finalized.

Responses were recently sent out for the latest group of applications for AMICAL’s Small Grant Program. Of the 5 applications received, the Grant Review Committee accepted the following 4: Title Applicant Institution Category Skills for information literacy teaching and curriculum design Rania Azad American University of Iraq, Sulaimani Staff exchange & peer training Participation of AUCA team at Open Education Global 2018 Conference Zhanylai Keldibekova American University of Central Asia Professional development Certificate in Library Management Clélie Riat Franklin University Switzerland Professional development Incorporating Nearpod in undergraduate accounting classes in Egypt (present at conference) Caroline Mitry American University in Cairo Professional development Next deadline for applications The next round of applications will close at midnight on 21 January. Applicants must be from Full or Affiliate member institutions. Find out more Full information, including the criteria we use in evaluating applications, can be found in our Small Grants guidelines.

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just reopened AMICAL’s Small Grants program for new applications. The program was closed briefly while we revised the guidelines based on feedback from the Grant Review Committee and AMICAL Administration’s observations of previous applications and activity reports. Among other things, the new guidelines bear the following improvements: Less emphasis is placed on previous AMICAL involvement: new participants are strongly encouraged! Staff exchanges and peer training have been distinguished from other (external) forms of professional development activity, and we’ve made it clearer how to strengthen, through planning processes, your Small Grants applications for this kind of activity. We’ve introduced questions that encourage you to think concretely about how activities relate to your own role and will have impact on your institution. For professional development activities, we’ve emphasized events that are smaller in terms of attendees, but extended in depth and length – and we’ve opened up the possibility of using Small Grants for semester-length online courses. For projects, we’ve provided clearer guidelines for timelining your plans, along with very brief “check-in” reporting along the way. The goal here is to provide AMICAL Admin with a way to monitor the healthy progress of projects, and to facilitate assistance in cases where a project may be facing difficulties. The new application form is aligned much more closely with the review criteria, which we hope will make it easier for applicants to build successful proposals – and plan for successful activities. The next deadline to apply for Small Grants is 10 December, at midnight wherever you happen to be. As a reminder, the program is open to staff and faculty at AMICAL Full and Affiliate member institutions (see the guidelines for full information). If you have any questions about the program, send them to contact@amicalnet.org. We look forward to seeing your applications! Special thanks go to the current and previous Grant Review Committees (the elected officers of AMICAL’s Coordinating Committee) for the time and effort spent improving the Small Grants program through their feedback.

In theory, I fully support the idea of struggling against the unbelievable, unaffordable prices that I see every day, and, even better, making knowledge available to all. But being in a small, teaching institution where faculty face the “publish or perish” alternative in a quite traditional manner, I’ve always felt that there was little to do. The open access movement has been for me a noble initiative, shining at distance like a beautiful moon. Attending the European meetings of ICOLC on behalf of AMICAL in 2016 and 2017 has been like landing on that moon. The kingdom of Gold Open Access. Sustained by EU policy and belonging to big national consortia, the visionary participants to ICOLC Europe are fully involved in open access negotiations, aiming to make the entire research output of their home countries publicly accessible. Moreover, not satisfied with the current pace of open access publishing initiatives, many European institutions started urging for a faster, global transition, planning to make it happen by 2020. Dr Ralf Schimmer (Max Planck Digital Library) says: Our regular subscription focus with its limitation to read access privileges is just not good enough anymore. Publishing and reading are but two side of the same medal. They are interrelated and need to be combined in our service level agreements with the publishers. Three years from now? Are they crazy? And what if they are right? And above all, what can AMICAL do here? AMICAL is not a big national consortium and doesn’t have the power of negotiating open access agreements with publishers. Yet, it could do something. Inspired by the preceding experiences of a couple of member institutions, the Electronic Resource Committee approached Knowledge Unlatched (KU), whose mission is to work with libraries and publishers to promote open access for books and journals in the humanities and social sciences. Every year since 2014 KU has been selecting and submitting to libraries a well selected list of scholarly titles. By participating in the pledge, libraries commit to pay the cost of publishing these titles with Creative Commons licenses. To this day, KU has already secured open access for 443 monographs. Helped by a generous consortial offer, a small squad of five AMICAL member institutions has just landed in open access territory by signing the KU 2017 pledges for both books and journals. If successful, the American University in Bulgaria, the American University of Kuwait, the American University of Paris, Ashesi University College, and John Cabot University – together with many other libraries will “liberate” a pouch of 343 monographs and 21 journals selected by 40 librarians from 12 countries. For everyone, everywhere. Fingers crossed, Knowledge Unlatched! The KU pledge is open until November 30. Details for the offer to AMICAL libraries are in Connect. Join the squad, AMICAL friends!

Mark your calendars for 4-7 May 2018! The American University of Central Asia has graciously agreed to host our next AMICAL Conference, and we hope to have as many AMICAL colleagues as possible join us for the event, whether in person or online. What’s in the future for education at international liberal arts institutions? What’s changing in the ways that students and faculty acquire, use, create and share information and scholarship? This year’s conference will set the stage for AMICAL members to engage with each other and with invited experts on those questions — and on many other questions related to libraries, technology and learning at our member institutions. Basic information about the event is provided on our just-launched AMICAL 2018 page. Information for sponsor-exhibitors will be posted shortly. We’ll launch the full event site later this fall with an overview of anticipated features of the program, a call for proposals, and information about financial support, accommodations and the venue. In the meantime, visit the AMICAL 2018 page to find out how you can send suggestions for shaping the program and how to stay in touch with conference updates.

In a recent AMICAL survey, Chief Academic Officers told us that developing capacity for the digital humanities at member institutions was, on average, one of the “High importance” areas of our consortial work. Our current A.W. Mellon Foundation grant is enabling us to get started on that this year. We’ll be supporting the coordinated participation of a cohort of AMICAL members in DHSI 2018, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute to be held in June 2018 at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada. Are you, or your colleagues, developing a project related to digital humanities scholarship, pedagogy or resources at an AMICAL member institution? DHSI may offer courses relevant to your project, and participating as part of AMICAL’s cohort is an opportunity to maximize the benefit of DHSI while building a peer network that will be useful now and in the future. Chief Academic Officers at AMICAL institutions have received an announcement about this initiative, encouraging them to identify a local team to endorse their application. If you have a team or project that matches what we’re looking for in applicants, and you’d like to join us for DHSI, get in touch with your provost or dean to let them know you’re thinking about applying. Keep in mind that they’re only allowed to endorse one team from your institution. AMICAL members: Build your team and apply Here’s what you can do to get a team from your institution into our DHSI cohort: Share this message with deans, faculty, librarians or technologists who might be interested in joining our cohort as a project-based team. Review the AMICAL DHSI Cohort website, paying close attention to the criteria for teams and applications under Who should apply? and How to apply. Discuss your team and project with your provost/dean, so they’re aware that you’ll be requesting endorsement of your application. Complete the application form. Send your completed application form to your provost/dean, asking them to endorse and forward your application to AMICAL by 31 October. Financial support Endorsement by your provost/dean does not guarantee your team will be accepted for the cohort, since our grant resources limit the numbers we can support, and since our application criteria may give higher priority to certain kinds of team or project. For applications accepted from Full and Affiliate member institutions, however, AMICAL would fully cover airfare and accommodations. A maximum of one team may be accepted from each institution for financial support. Your institution would need to cover the registration fees. See Costs and co-funding for more information. Not all applicants can be accepted, but we hope to have as many AMICAL teams as possible joining the cohort. Basic information about the target profiles for applicants is shown below. Full information is on the AMICAL DHSI Cohort website, but any questions can be sent to contact@amicalnet.org.

Responses were recently sent out for the latest group of applications for AMICAL’s Small Grant Program. Of the 8 applications received, the Grant Review Committee accepted the following 6: Exchange experience: Digitization of university materials and ingesting of faculty publications in university repository [staff exchange] Sawsan Habre, Senior Archivist (Lebanese American University) Oral history collection development [project] Maria Patsarika, Adjunct Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences Division (American College of Thessaloniki) Harvard’s Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians [professional development] Aziz El Hassani, Multimedia Librarian (Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane) EDUCAUSE Annual Conference [professional development] Rayane Fayed & Rana AlGhazzi (American University of Beirut) Building data analysis and hosting capacity at AUCA [project] Meghan McCormack, Associate Professor (American University of Central Asia) AKYN: Analysing Kyrgyz narratives [project] Anguelina Popova, CTLT Director (American University of Central Asia) Next deadline for applications: 5 November The next round of applications will close at midnight on 5 November. Applicants must be from Full or Affiliate member institutions. Find out more Full information, including the criteria we use in evaluating applications, can be found in our Small Grants guidelines.