December 4, 2019

On November 19, the Drexel Libraries kicked off its new faculty seminar series with the session called Connecting to Scholarly Publications in Support of Teaching.

This new seminar series aims to raise awareness of the Libraries’ efforts to support the Drexel community to meet various dependencies on scholarship. The inaugural sessions focused on guiding teaching faculty and staff to effectively discover and access resources for their course syllabi and assigned course readings—something that is particularly important in light of the Libraries’ FY20 budget reductions and subsequent changes to its licensed resources.

“We devised this seminar series to help raise awareness of both the dynamics of connecting to scholarly publications and other research outputs, as well as ways the DUL can assist you to meet your various dependencies on scholarship,” said Danuta A. Nitecki, PhD, Dean of Libraries at Drexel, during her opening remarks. “Scholarly communications is a dynamic venue for academics, and it’s not easy to keep up with the many ways to connect to scholarship, like how to search for scholarly publications and sort through search results and evaluate what best suits your query… or how to guide your students to become savvy, life-long learners in a world that is increasingly  data and information dependent.”

Following Dean Nitecki’s introduction to the current state of the scholarly communications landscape, Larry Milliken, Manager for Scholarly Communications, presented an overview of Open Access publishing options. Milliken defined Open Access and explained just a few of the benefits of assigning OA resources in coursework, such as the free and immediate access to scholarship. He then offered strategies for using resources like the Open Textbook Network and Summon, the Libraries’ powerful search tool, to find authoritative, scholarly Open Access books, journals and other resources for their courses.

Next, Gary Childs, Drexel’s Librarian for Nursing & Health Professions, shared strategies to find and retrieve authoritative information resources. He provided a short tutorial on searching the Libraries’ owned and licensed resources via Summon, including tips for searching by topic and known item and for refining a search. Childs also described the benefits of utilizing the Libraries’ course reserves services and resource sharing services, like interlibrary loan and EZ-Borrow.

To end the sessions, attendees (both the 37 who viewed the session online via Zoom and the 15 who attended in person) shared questions and their own insights for discovering and accessing publications. Attendees also made suggestions for future seminars. Suggestions included Open Access, copyright issues, and tips for preparing research proposals.

For more information about the Drexel Libraries’ faculty seminar series or to suggest a future seminar topic, contact libraries@drexel.edu

Missed the event? View the complete recording of the session, Connecting to Scholarly Publications in Support of Teaching, online via the Drexel University Libraries YouTube page. Stay tuned for future seminars!