SCSU's Faculty Bibliography is a near comprehensive list of work published by Southern faculty going back to 1959. The bibliography contains over 3,000 publications from faculty in a wide array of disciplines, creating a unique record of what scholarship has looked like at Southern throughout its history. The bibliography exists thanks to the dedicated and innovative work of two librarians: Rebecca Hedreen (Head of Research and Instruction) and Diana Hellyar (STEM Librarian)
Not only did Hedreen and Hellyar compile the list of works, they also developed a strategy to simplify and partially automate the collection of this type of data in the future so that this record of scholarship can continue to grow without monopolizing staff time. I talked to Hedreen and Hellyar to find out about where the idea for a faculty bibliography originated and the steps required to put it together.
According to Hedreen, Southern tracked faculty publications in various ways over the years, beginning with a manually updated Word document maintained by RSAC (Research and Scholarship Advisory Committee) up until 2004 and later Digital Measures, both of which relied on faculty to report new publications and, in the case of Digital Measures, to upload the publication metadata on their own. Faculty are not required to update Digital Measures with past work, so faculty work has been represented inconsistently and those who did update the system did not necessarily format their publication metadata the same, which means any citations generated from Digital Measures are not standardized. For more on the history of the project, see the Faculty Bibliography LibGuide.
In the Fall of 2019, Provost Robert Prezant issued a call for a volunteer to compile a list of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters published by SCSU faculty. Hedreen knew that her experience with citation managers and data management would be valuable in this kind of project and volunteered to create and maintain the list. It occurred to her that many available citation management sources (such as Web of Science, Microsoft Academic, The Lens, and SCOPUS) would allow her to search for content by institutional affiliation and then export all resulting citations. With this method, she collected over 2,000 citations and imported them into Zotero for some data cleanup.
It was at this stage that Hellyar joined the project, and took on a significant portion of the data cleanup work. This involved removing duplicate entries, addressing formatting inconsistencies, and tagging each publication with the faculty author's department. The department tagging required a certain amount of detective work for faculty who were no longer employed at Southern, especially for publications pre-dating the internet, before individuals shared their employment history on LinkedIn or were listed in online university directories. Hellyar relied on old course catalogs and other methods to identify pre-internet faculty authors, noting that obituaries unfortunately did not often list the department of a professor when referencing their former University roles. Some faculty remain unidentified--if you want to try out your sleuthing skills, see if you can identify any of the former faculty authors on this list.
Hedreen can add new citations with additional manual imports, but says she is exploring the possibility of automatic downloads. The existing process includes running a search on institutional affiliation in a citation manager, downloading results, and then uploading them into Zotero for cleanup and department tagging.
Research bibliographies have historically been difficult and time consuming to maintain. The ability to even partially automate the process or streamline the workflow through the use of databases or repositories can generate significant time savings, enabling institutions without dedicated staff to maintain these types of datasets. Librarians' familiarity with citations and database and collection management make them prime candidates for the responsibility of maintaining faculty bibliographies, and the library, as a neutral academic department, makes an excellent centralized content host.
Thanks to the work of Hedreen and Hellyar, SCSU faculty have a standard and centralized place that maintains a list of their work, with little or no effort required of them. A publicly available faculty bibliography allows others to easily find out what kind of research is being done at Southern and what kind of scholarship our faculty are publishing. This includes prospective students, potential new faculty members or research collaborators. The collection serves as an advertisement for scholarship at Southern which benefits recruitment as well as grant competitions. The faculty that Hedreen have spoken to about this initiative have all expressed enthusiasm at having their work represented in this larger picture of scholarship at Southern. Highlighting all of the work done by faculty makes aspects of Southern more publicly accessible.
A large collection of citation data also allows for some broader analysis of publication patterns and trends. Hedreen noted that publication had increased over the last few years. Using Retraction Watch, which collaborates with Zotero, she can confirm that there have been no retractions on SCSU publications going back 70 years. The ability to easily tag research by faculty department saves individual departments from having to track this kind of data. SPAR will be able to more easily identify past work and grant associated publications. The library can also offer data sets that demonstrate publication trends at patterns at SCSU that could then be compared with similar data from other schools. This type of information might be useful for public relations and marketing, The Foundations, and Admissions. Faculty can also reach out to Hedreen to request that their data be exported from the Faculty Bibliography for uploading into ORCID or Digital Measures.
Although the primary work on the faculty bibliography is centered in the library, the project has provided opportunities for collaboration with other university departments and Hedreen and Hellyar hope to continue this cross-departmental work in the future. Hedreen reached out to the Computer Science Department with a proposal for a student project to develop a user friendly interface for the bibliography database, which engaged students and had a practical benefit to a library services. Potential plans for the future include working with departments to leverage the bibliography data for production of content relating to their publications, such as generating lists for grants and recruitment.
Moving forward, Hedreen and Hellyar plan to implement the user friendly search interface, which they have begun work on through partnerships with the Computer Science Department, investigate the potential of automatic citation downloads, and add more books to the bibliography by exporting records from the Buley Library catalog. They still have some work to do cleaning up the formatting for book review citations. Based on the update cycle of the citation databases from which Hedreen downloads the relevant bibliographic data, she expects to download once or twice a year, adding about 250 citations for each year, including new books chapters, conference proceedings, books, and articles. Faculty can also report works via a form on the Library website.
This bibliography sets a foundation for making faculty work more visible and discoverable. It could be transitioned into an institutional repository format, should the University wish to go in this direction, or it could be used as a referatory to direct users to faculty published content hosted elsewhere. There is also the potential to make this bibliography discoverable in SouthernSearch, Buley Library's main search page, which would allow students to more easily identify the work of their professors.
On the whole, Hedreen and Hellyar's work serves SCSU by making faculty scholarship more accessible. Their library expertise allowed them to conduct this project with an in depth understanding of data management and knowledge organization systems, which in turn led to a simple and efficient means of gathering and cleaning up data. In answering Provost Prezant's call for a list of publications, they have developed a mechanism which will continue to shine a spotlight on academic pursuits and accomplishments of the SCSU community.
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