Congratulations to the 2021 Digital Commons IR All-Stars!

At the 2021 Digital Commons North American Conference, Riding the Wave we had the honor of announcing this year’s DC IR All-Stars! Congratulations to Lisa Villa of College of the Holy Cross,  Jean Bigger of Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Annelise Doll of Michigan Technological University, and Lee Dotson of University of Central Florida!

IR All-Stars spotlights four individuals who have demonstrated a unique and replicable approach to IR success. Our goal with this annual award is to provide the IR community with the knowledge to emulate and build upon some of the most successful initiatives that we’ve identified in our community. We want to provide every IR manager with the means to become an IR All-Star, too.

The idea originated with an event we co-hosted with SPARC at ACRL back in 2011 – an IR Tailgate where Marilyn Billings (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Isaac Gilman (Pacific University), Marisa Ramirez (California Polytechnic State University), and Paul Royster (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) shared their accumulated IR wisdom over the course of several sessions. They were our Inaugural IR All-Stars, and we’ve since realized that having an annual award is a great way to not only recognize the hard work and accomplishments of people in the Digital Commons community, but to share their successes so others can learn and build from them.

Nominations are made by members of the Digital Commons Consulting Services team.  With deep IR expertise and intimate knowledge of the scholarly communications initiatives of their clients, the consulting services team members nominated an extensive list of candidates for consideration.

Selecting the winners for 2021 was incredibly challenging. All of the nominees have successful and vibrant repositories built with strong project management skills, a methodical approach, and hard work. Frankly, we’ve never seen so many IR administrators making such strong impact on their campus in such a wide variety of important and interesting ways.

Selection Criteria:

1. At least 3 years as an IR manager.
2. A track record of vibrant repository collection growth, and an innovative and tireless approach to engaging faculty and others on campus in order to support their scholarly communications needs.
3. A demonstrated eagerness to share and teach others.
4. A presentation, article, case study, or video that provides specifics and guidelines for the best practices for others to learn from and copy the strategies that made the IR manager an IR All-Star.

To commemorate this achievement, this year we decided to award each IR All-Star with a custom bobblehead made in their likeness.  As you can see below, it is also in line with the theme of the DC conference, Riding the Wave. If you’d like to view any of their presentations, please stay tuned as we are currently working on editing the recordings and will have them available for viewing as soon as possible. Thank you!