On Service, Services, and Maintaining the Public Interest
Thomas Padilla
@thomaspadilla.bsky.social
Higher Education advances the public interest.
Higher Education advances the public interest?
“The fundamental relationship between our nation’s research universities and the federal government was established during the greatest crisis the world had seen. Roosevelt and Bush understood that scientific resources in American universities should be mobilized to help win the war against fascism.
And win it they did, with the development of vaccines and blood substitutes to keep troops healthy and technologies like radar, aeronautical innovations and the atomic bomb.”
Mary Coleman
Chase-Dunn, Christopher; Kawano, Yukio; Brewer, Benjamin D. (2000). "Trade Globalization since 1795: Waves of Integration in the World-System"
Library of Congress, [Group of men and women in conversation, half-length portrait]
Tom Cramer
ED
Statistics published by IPEDS for Association of Research Libraries
Higher Education advances the public interest?
Higher Education advances the public interest.
Assorted Strategies
San Francisco, circa 2007
Be crystal clear about your scope of work and what agency that work affords.
Be a storyteller (aka always be tellin’).
Refine and adapt the story so its value is well understood.
Your stakeholders are key advocates.
Scale impact of work through representation.
e.g., membership organizations work to advance our interests.
by ronmacphotos
Tragedy, disaster, and uncertainty are a fact of life.
How can we continue to design for just in time solutions for data preservation and access?
Stand up for Research.
Embrace the free rider.
Statistics published by IPEDS for Association of Research Libraries
Sustain the exchange of expertise.
Do together > do alone.
Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties.