It is wonderful to see recognition of the great work being done across the Digital Commons community. We are seeing associations recognize special projects which advance collaborative partnerships, consortia recognize outstanding programs which show innovation in online education, and schools recognize dedicated faculty who increase the impact of scholarly work.
The Association of American Medical Colleges has honored Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis for its innovative work in the Human Research Protection Office Collection, captured in its IR, Digital Commons@Becker. This unique, open access, globally-viewed collection houses materials relevant to the development, conduct, and review of human subject research studies including conferences and podcasts. The announcement from the Association of American Medical Colleges explains that:
“The primary goal of this year’s awards program is to identify bright spots and disseminate innovations in two different areas: institution-community partnerships and maximizing research efficiency. The six awarded projects were selected by a panel of leaders in biomedical research, education, and training from AAMC-member institutions as well as senior AAMC staff. Entries were judged by the extent to which they advance creative, collaborative partnerships and their impact in the institution and community.”
In our next story, excellence and innovation in a degree program have been honored by a library consortium. The Online Learning Consortium has recognized the exclusively online Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree program at San Jose State University’s School of Information, which won the “Outstanding Online Program Award.” SJSU’s repository, SJSU ScholarWorks, houses a number of collections from the department. According to the press release:
“The OLC Awards acknowledge creative and effective approaches to advancing online education. The criteria for the Outstanding Online Program award included learning effectiveness, cost effectiveness, student satisfaction, and faculty satisfaction.”
As stated in a separate OLC press release, “The 2014 recipients represent extraordinary examples of the exciting innovation happening in online learning today, and we congratulate them on their successes.”
Finally, it’s great to see schools recognizing their outstanding faculty! Sheryl Sheeres Taylor, Director of Library Services at Dordt College, was presented with the campus’ annual faculty award for Scholarship and Service because of the excellence of her work with Digital Collections @ Dordt.
“In today’s digital age, it is not enough to merely write, publish, and wait. Digital strategies are needed to ensure that scholarly and created works are freely available worldwide, search-engine optimized, and presented in a manner that is intuitive, natural, and easy to access,” said Dordt College’s Director of Research and Scholarship Dr. Nathan Tintle. “As nominators of Taylor pointed out, while all efforts at Dordt College are a team effort, she in particular has a vision for increasing the impact of the scholarly work of the Dordt community and providing ways to measure this impact has had a dramatic effect.”
Sheryl focused on faculty work as well as the extensive Grotenhuis Music Collection early on, writing of the IR that “I wanted to make sure that both the Provost’s Office and the faculty realized that this was something they couldn’t live without…. It was crucial to get faculty hooked right away (the readership reports and readership maps are awesome).”
We love to highlight your award-winning DC community IRs, and we invite you to let us know at outreach@bepress.com when you have an award we can trumpet!