The Texas A&M University Libraries Bridge Group: First Year Report

Abstract

The Texas A&M University Libraries Bridge Group was formed in 2007 and charged to "support the developing infrastructure of the Texas A&M University's and TDL's Repositories" by increasing the awareness among library staff of the Texas A&M institutional repository and other Texas Digital Library services, and to promote, facilitate, and support their use by the academic community at Texas A&M. The group consists of faculty librarians from a diverse set of backgrounds and functional areas within the library.

As background, the Libraries communication approach is decentralized, which relies on each subject librarian, in their role as liaison, to communicate services to their assigned departmental areas. This concept extends to the communication of the concepts of open access, scholarly communication, repositories and TDL services, so it is imperative that all librarians have a certain level of understanding of the issues.

This report will chronicle the building of the group's two-part strategy; first, to educate themselves on the issues of repositories and scholarly communication and secondly, creating a plan for and conducting library wide educational initiatives.

Further, the report will include an overview of the ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication, which was attended by two of the group's members in December 2007, and the impact of that conference on the direction and focus of the group.