2017 Charleston Library Conference

The campus’s website is its most public face to students, faculty, and funders. Its goal is to tell them what sets the university apart. Meanwhile, many libraries are sitting on a goldmine of the institution’s most unique offerings, from student research conferences to faculty art. Increasingly, libraries are bringing the university’s scholarship and creative work directly to the campus website and the audiences it serves. They show interested visitors what makes the campus unique by embedding content from their scholarly repositories, faculty galleries of mentors and researchers, and live readership visualizations into the university’s primary marketing vehicle.

In this presentation, Jean-Gabriel Bankier, President and CEO of bepress, will provide a brief overview of this trend, sharing data and examples from a community of some 500 institutions. Next, Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communications Librarian and Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, will offer a case study from the Ames Library. She will describe how embedding content lets prospective students and faculty explore Illinois Wesleyan's intellectual and cultural life on a deeper level, which creates new opportunities for the university. In fact, multiple faculty members note that the strong student work they saw on Digital Commons @ IWU—prominently listed on the main campus site—played a role in their decision to apply for positions at Illinois Wesleyan.

The session will be interactive and have time for questions and discussion at the end. Attendees will come away with ideas of how to integrate library offerings into the campus website and culture in ways that strengthen the library’s role.