IMLS Funds Community Profile System

We’re aiming to take “The Community is the Collection” from slogan to reality with a new National Leadership Grant from IMLS.

Co-PIs: Yun Huang, R. David Lankes, Jian Qin

Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies (iSchool) is partnering with Coulter Library at Onondaga Community College (OCC) and Fayetteville Free Library (FFL – an Onondaga county public library) to respond to the National Leadership Grants for Libraries (NLG) Program, addressing IMLS’s Learning Spaces in Libraries priority. This project can best be summarized as: the community is the collection. We propose to design a Community Profile System to expand library collections to include human expertise, particularly in the STEM fields. This system will enable librarians to collect communities’ learning needs, identify relevant community experts, and link the resources to serve the learning needs in a cost-efficient manner. This 3-year project will accomplish four activities: 1) assess community members’ learning needs and identify community experts’ interests and their availability in participating different libraries’ services through survey and interview studies; 2) build data models that capture the various needs and dynamic people resources as collection; 3) develop a workflow by identifying librarians’ roles in data collection, organization, and validation; 4) prototype and implement the system with user interactions and privacy protection features, as well as evaluate the system prototype via a system pilot study and diverse test cases.

Link to IMLS Announcement