PALNI is engaging with faculty to create affordable and effective learning opportunities that draw upon the newest technologies and reduce costs for private colleges in Indiana at the same time. The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) has launched collaborative Scholarly Communications and Instructional Technology programs to incorporate the best of today’s technology, open access materials, and services to directly support teaching and learning by sharing expertise and deduplicating effort across the twenty-four PALNI colleges, seminaries, and universities. To introduce these projects, PALNI Scholarly Communications Director Amanda Hurford and University of Saint Francis Teaching and Learning Services Team Coordinator Andrea Cohn presented in person, while Manchester University Virtual Instruction and Emerging Tech Librarian Rebecca Johnson joined virtually to deliver a session at the Fort Wayne Teaching Conference.  

Within this conference talk, Ms. Cohn, Ms. Hurford, and Ms. Johnson presented a call to action to faculty which invites direct engagement with PALNI’s resources and in PALNI’s newest advisory groups and task forces. The corresponding groups – Scholarly Communications and Instructional Technology Advisory Groups and the Affordable Education Initiatives Task Force – will help faculty and instructional designers achieve goals around classroom tech, course design, open educational resources, open access publishing, and digital scholarship across the consortium.

“Using a method of “deep collaboration” among the consortium’s members, we are able to draw on each other’s strengths to advance these ideas,” remarks presenter and PALNI Scholarly Communications Director Amanda Hurford. “These efforts evidence an evolution in strategy for PALNI, into programs that extend impact beyond the library and out onto campus.”

All three groups are open to join by anyone at a PALNI institution. They meet monthly to quarterly in order to advance action items as directed by PALNI’s 2017-2020 strategic plan.  PALNI invites faculty involvement at the Advisory Group level, and also on more targeted task forces like Affordable Education, which require a time commitment to create impactful outputs to share across the PALNI audience.

Ms. Hurford has been pleased with the current campus-wide responses to the programs, “We have solid buy-in from library administrators, we are completing action items with good momentum, and we’ve had significant interest in our programs across PALNI campuses.”

For those in a PALNI institution who would like more information about joining one of these groups, please contact Amanda Hurford (amanda@palni.edu) for Scholarly Communications/Affordable Education Initiatives or Rebecca Johnson (rejohnson@manchester.edu) for Instructional Technology.

For more information about the presentation:

Presentation Slides: https://drive.google.com/a/palni.edu/file/d/1hr3ULW5wn9JUKbT3oqkh6Sent5wv5Duv/view?usp=sharing

instructionaltech.palni.org

scholcomm.palni.org

libguides.palni.edu/scholcomm

libguides.palni.edu/affordable_education

About the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI): www.palni.edu

PALNI is a non-profit organization supporting collaboration for library and information services to the libraries of its twenty-four supported institutions. PALNI provides everything from resource management systems to sharing expertise in many areas including strategic planning, reference, information fluency, outreach, data management and configuration, and has identified greater collaboration in acquisitions as a key goal.

PALNI Supported Institutions: Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary | Ancilla College | Anderson University | Bethel College | Butler University | Concordia Theological Seminary | Christian Theological Seminary | DePauw University | Earlham College | Franklin College | Goshen College | Grace College | Hanover College | Huntington University | Manchester University | Marian University | Oakland City University | University of Saint Francis | Saint Mary’s College | Saint Meinrad Theological Seminary | Taylor University | Trine University | University of Indianapolis | Wabash College