Building Faculty Communities that Support Scholarly Communication

Strategic Plan Content Analysis

To fully understand how academic units on campus were discussing interdisciplinary culture and community topics, during the fall of 2023, we completed a content analysis of web pages of strategic plans and initiatives. After reviewing 62 college and department web pages, we found that 37 of them included relevant content. The content analysis revealed that academic units prioritized four areas:

1. Scholarship, Expression, Culture;
2. Career Resources and Development;
3. Recruitment and Retention; and
4. Collaboration.

Discussions with Libraries staff

We talked with Libraries staff to share our results from the content analysis and gain their insights on the next step of the project, researcher interviews. Staff were interested in learning more about the researchers whose experiences are less represented, identifying gaps in researcher workflows, and determining where change is needed in our collections and scholarly communication processes. 

Researcher Interviews

We interviewed 10 NC State researchers across the Colleges, with the majority identifying as both early career and less represented within their respective disciplines. Interviews were completed during the spring and summer of 2024. Our interview guide included questions about what “cultural research” means in their field, what elements of the Libraries spaces and services are the most appealing to researchers within their community, and how the Libraries can best advocate for their scholarly communication practices.

Researcher interviews: Three main themes

Building Community

Faculty want to connect with their colleagues in both formal and informal ways which lead to improved research, representation, and support systems. There was a desire to form collaborative groups for research advancement, but there was also an expressed need for the development of informal support networks that can provide guidance and advice in ways that are less transactional:

“One thing that became very clear through a couple of efforts [in my department] was that the sense of community goes a very long way for keeping people around … [The Libraries] have the ability to connect people across the university. Identifying and creating the spaces for conversation of people of different disciplines, especially if it's, ‘Let's just actually have a chat’ … It's not like, ’Oh, what do they want from me?’ It's less transactional.” —Biological Sciences faculty member

“It would just be nice to maybe potentially work with other people and to just meet other junior faculty who are doing all this as well. I think as someone new on campus, it's nice to be able to talk about research, but it's also nice to be able to talk about, ‘Well, how does this look in your department? How does this work in your department?’ ” —Social Sciences faculty member 

Building Holistic Support for Evolving Research Communities

Faculty approach complex research questions through a variety of  methods, such as community-engaged practices and interdisciplinary partnerships. Reflections on these emerging approaches offer unique insights on the research process and the holistic needs of researchers, including work/life balance.

“When we started that project, we were really intentional about making sure that we had voices from across different cultural backgrounds because we knew we were going to be working with communities that also had that representation.” —College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty member

“My vision…is to have an impact on the clinical and medical space, neuroscience…. In that case, I leverage all these concepts and the engineering of electronic systems, and direct them to solve problems. That involves keeping a close collaboration team between medical doctors, veterinarians, also neuroscientists.” —Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty member

“I have a child with special needs. I'm a mother. I do have a husband, but I'm mom, so it's always going to be me. There's less time to figure out how to learn these new things …taking that extra time is what I feel underrepresented faculty often don't have.” —College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty member

Increasing Research Visibility and Impact

Faculty participants were interested in both creative research methods and outputs. Communicating research through a variety of formats extends impact and increases visibility. Participants were interested in making their research more visible through open access publishing, community and political engagement, and translating their research to local and national media outlets.

“How do you communicate your research to that next generation? That's going to be important. It could be a cool collaborative work between students from media, students from the Libraries, from engineering, and all of that stuff. Creating short videos … to demonstrate to people why they should come and be part of NC State. The way I got attracted toward research is back when … my parents made a point that I have to read [the] newspaper every day. That was something.” —Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty member

“Do our [state] representatives know what we're doing and is there a new way to foster or even provide training that helps people understand [our research]? Or we're working across the state, so we might be in a particular county somewhere, meaning we have to have an understanding of all these representatives and who to contact in that process to, again, get them aware of the work that's being done so they can go and promote it.” —College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty member 

What's Next?

During summer 2025, we’ll develop a set of actionable recommendations by working with our Libraries colleagues and campus partners to apply what we learned from the first three phases of the project.