If you do school library research, please help us birth a community

I am thrilled to be a member of AASL’s Community of Scholars Task Force and equally thrilled about our plans to move forward in creating a truly meaningful community.

Discussed at last year’s CLASS (Causality: School Libraries and Student Success) Summit, the project is realized and described as one of three goals in the CLASS White Paper:

Goal 3: To outline mechanisms by which a community of scholars can be cultivated and nurtured toward furthering the research agenda and its activities. A major goal of the CLASS Forum was to create a rich and diverse community of scholars focused on rigorous, empirical research in school librarianship. Participants at the Forum discussed strategies to sustain communication and relationships established and developed at the event. Complex problems call for the networked efforts of a community of scholars. The CLASS Forum was a first effort that demands follow through from participants and leaders in the field.

Our charge is to:

develop a proposal for a structure that will support the development of a community of scholars in the school library research field, or scholars ancillary connected to school library research.

Our function is to:

• Identify the communities, or groups, that would fall under this structure
• Define the purpose of this community of scholars
• Define the needs of this community of scholars
• Develop a structure that would be able to house and maintain the community of scholars
• Recommend next steps to ensure this newly developed group is able to be maintained.

Our first step is to discover who we are, the scope of our research interests, and where we live, publish and speak in our public/online academic lives.

Please help us as we begin to build a community to connect all those working on school library research across organizations and backgrounds.

In partnership with the School Library SIG of ALISE, the AASL Task Force created this survey to better understand the needs and affiliations of school library scholars.  If you consider yourself a scholar/researcher/academic/professor of school libraries or a related field, we encourage you to contribute and help us create a truly meaningful community.  It should only take about five minutes.  The survey will close on April 1, 2015.

http://tinyurl.com/schoollibres

Please feel free to share the survey with other interested researchers.  You can share the survey on social media using #schoollibres and/or #aaslres as well as your favorite other hashtags.

Filed under: research, scholarship, school libraries