IMLS National Leadership Grant: Partnership Selection Update

We’ve been very busy with the usual beginning-of-the-semester rush, in addition to planning our grant work. I’m taking a quick moment over the Labor Day weekend to post an update about the partnership selection process.

We’ve narrowed our list of potential partners to five, and will make our first site visit on Monday, Sept. 11. We hope to conclude site visits in early October. From those five site visits, we will select three partners, and expect to announce our partners by the end of October here on the Thinking Outside the Stacks blog and other UTA news outlets.

To identify potential partners for the project, we used data gathered in a 2016 makerspace survey, reviewed current literature to find academic library makerspaces doing similar work, and attended conferences where we mined for referrals. By July, when the grant work officially kicked off, we had compiled a list of 22 academic library makerspaces that show evidence of integrating curriculum into the makerspace, strong faculty relations, and culture of assessment. We ranked them according to various criteria using a scored partnership selection rubric, and then contacted the top twelve to gauge their interest in the project. Two of them were not able to participate; we sent questionnaires to the remaining ten to help fill in some knowledge gaps. Once answers were received, we re-ranked according to the new data, and we selected the top five for site visits.

That brings us up to date. My next update probably won’t be until the end of October when we have finalized our partner selection. In the meantime, I’m happy to answer questions about the selection process or other grant details by email.