Project involving Thai Nguyen University, Vietnam

The Thai Nguyen University Learning Resource Center was awarded the 2009 Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries program grant from the Elsevier Foundation. Only six libraries received the grant.

As described on the Elsevier website,

Supporting Research Communities in Writing, Publishing and Sharing their Works in Thai Nguyen University and the Northern Mountainous area of Vietnam, Thai Nguyen University, Vietnam 

This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the Thai Nguyen Learning Resource Center, the central library of Thai Nguyen University, to substantially boost Vietnamese scholarship and Scientific, Technical and Medical information exchange at the regional, national and international levels. Faculty, researchers, administrators, information and library professionals, technologists, and postgraduate students will be provided learning opportunities for enhancing effective scientific writing skills and the use of online tools and digital repositories through a series of seminars and targeted training events. This project represents an innovative and scalable model in both Vietnam and the developing world providing a freely available and localizable training module for the developing world.

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_01407

This grant is even more exciting because it was written by Tran Thi Thanh Tam and the staff of the Thai Nguyen University Learning Resource Center (LRC). Tran Tam and a number of the librarians at the Thai Nguyen University are GSLIS alumni.   Professor Pat Oyler, Associate Dean, trained 25 Vietnamese librarians from four Universities in Vietnam through a grant she wrote from Atlantic Philanthropies. Although the librarians graduated in 2008, already they are writing successful grants and offering training programs to their own staff and to other libraries in Vietnam.

Terry Plum, GSLIS Assistant Dean, his wife, Sydney Landon Plum, teacher of creative writing and literature at the University of Connecticut, and Patrick McGlamery, former adjunct teacher for GSLIS in geo-spatial data and digital libraries, have been invited to participate in the grant. Terry is teaching two workshops; a one-day workshop titled, “Information Searching Skills for Writing Scholarly Papers for Young Researchers, Post-graduate Students, and Librarians,” and a three-day seminar, “The New Academic Librarian:  Research, Collaboration, Technology, Assessment, and Scholarly Communication.”  Sydney is offering a three-day seminar, “Writing Skills for Research Papers in the Humanities.”  Patrick is the senior consultant for the project and will help bring up an institutional repository. This part of the project begins on May 25 and ends on June 11. Later in the summer two other invited faculty from other universities will offer seminars on research in the social sciences and sciences.

This grant is innovative in the way it approaches capacity building for research at a university in a holistic way:   training the researchers to publish their research, training the librarians to support the research process, and implementing an institutional repository which will be a collaboration between librarians and researchers to make the research papers available through open access.   It is an exciting, creative grant, and it is an honor to be asked to participate.