Going Public: Library Support for Knowledge Translation and Mobilization for the Public Good

Abstract

In an era of misinformation, libraries can play a key role as a bridge between the community and the academy. Built on institutional assessment data in areas of scholarly communication and digital scholarship, a new yearly Going Public symposium was designed to help researchers forge new knowledge translation and mobilization skills. Findings from the symposium indicate interdisciplinary interest in translating research to non-academic audiences and a desire to work with the community to co-create solutions to real-world problems through public scholarship, citizen science, and community-engaged research methods.

Keywords:

• Scholarly communication
• knowledge translation
• knowledge mobilization
• open access

Acknowledgments

The author would like to extend thanks to Madeline Mundt, co-presenter at the 2021 Association of College & Research Libraries conference poster session on this topic, and for her contributions that helped launch this article. The author also wishes to acknowledge Gordon Aamot and Robin Chin Roemer for their feedback and advice on drafts of this work. Finally, none of this would be possible without the work of the Going Public planning teams, presenters, and attendees. Their dedication and enthusiasm are continued inspirations to keep this program going year after year.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 It is worth noting that Babbitt originally submitted this article with the title of “The Composer as Specialist.” The editor of High Fidelity changed the title to “Who Cares if You Listen?” prior to publication without Babbitt’s consent (Barkin et al., 2021).

2 The 2016 survey garnered a 35% response rate from faculty and a 22% response rate from graduate students. Full survey instruments may be reviewed at http://hdl.handle.net/1773/37990 (for faculty) and http://hdl.handle.net/1773/37991 (for graduate students).