A recent press release for Western Washington University’s IR, Western CEDAR, outlined the great outreach work the library is doing for both the IR and their SelectedWorks profiles, allowing their faculty to network easily across disciplines and across the globe.
Of all stakeholders on campus, faculty in particular have been outspoken about the benefits both the IR and their SelectedWorks profiles have provided in networking with other scholars. Clarissa Mansfield, Western Libraries Communications Coordinator, explains that “while one of the goals of CEDAR is to make scholarship available and accessible to anyone in the world, a local benefit of using SelectedWorks is that it provides scholars at Western an opportunity to discover what their colleagues here at Western are researching and creating.”
Elementary Education Professor Wiggins describes the scholarly import of the IR and SelectedWorks:
“[Faculty] tend to stay encapsulated in our disciplines and respective departments because we are so busy just teaching, attending to service and squeezing in our writing that we sometimes forget to look up from our desks and seek other like-minded folks from different disciplines that bring a whole new, fresh insight to our work. That’s what’s so exciting to me. CEDAR is one way to connect us.”
SelectedWorks profile pages for faculty are a key part of this initiative to share Western research. Western CEDAR points to the live readership map (below) as one view of the global impact of work produced at Western. “Ultimately, this is about providing access to the broadest range of one’s scholarship to as many people as possible,” said Francisco Rios, Dean of Woodring College of Education. “As an educational institution, we have a commitment and obligation to generate new knowledge. But that knowledge, to have impact, needs to be shared with as many others as possible. And others need to be able to access that knowledge.”
Kudos to Western Washington for their inventive use of SelectedWorks to connect their faculty! To find out about even more uses of SelectedWorks, including the expanded features of the upgraded SelectedWorks coming this fall, please read our recent blogs detailing this exciting improvement or contact outreach@bepress.com for a demo.
