CNI Spring 2021 Virtual Membership Meeting

An engaged discussion of how universities are managing library and university IT collaborations, library and technology leaders from University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and New York University (NYU) will provide their own experiences strategizing and managing innovative partnerships. We will draw on Athenaeum21’s (A21) digital transformation model to discuss effective strategies and models. Innovation has been happening in the Academy for centuries—in research, teaching, collections—and different service models have emerged to support these innovations. Research libraries and central university IT often now find themselves as a glue or middleware—as critical academic collaborators for leveraging university content and infrastructure. University IT, once relegated to enterprise resource planning systems, desktop support, communications, and networking, is now developing and scaling services in areas such as cloud computing and research data management. But there are overlaps in responsibilities, infrastructure, and services across all of these. Universities are now looking to rationalize and sometimes centralize IT support services, but where is the logical home for these emerging capabilities centered on teaching, learning, policy, technology, and research? Is there an ideal collaborative model that optimizes IT support and infrastructure for faculty and students? We will discuss our experiences and present two models for digital transformation. The two models will be presented by Robert McDonald, dean of the university libraries and senior vice provost of online education at CU Boulder and H. Austin Booth, dean of the division of libraries at NYU. They will debate which model is better—to bring IT into the library or move library IT into university IT. Aisha Jackson, director of academic technology applications and design at CU Boulder will discuss a recent cross-campus engagement with Pluralistic Networks, which helped campus leadership have more honest conversations and co-create ways to support their teams and the campus mission. The session is moderated by Christine Madsen and Megan Hurst, co-founders of the digital strategy consultancy, Athenaeum21 (A21), and drawing on A21’s digital strategy model.