The Digital Library Federation (DLF) and FORCE11 have partnered on supporting Cross-Pollinator travel awards with the goal of bringing scholars, scientists, software engineers, librarians, and humanities scholars from Force11 to DLF and vice versa to provide their unique perspectives in scholarly communication.

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a “robust and diverse community of practitioners who advance research, learning, and the public good through digital library technologies.” The DLF parent organization is the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). DLF serves as a steward in promoting interdisciplinary research and believes that cross-pollination is the key to sustainability and innovation. DLF therefore partners with a number of diverse organizations to promote vibrant exchange of ideas and possible new partnerships and collaborations. DLF and Force11 are pleased to support one travel award for the FORCE2016 Research Communication and e­Scholarship Conference, to be held April 17-19, 2016, in Portland, Oregon.

The winner of the 2016 Cross-Pollinator travel award is Joshua Finnell! Please tweet him to congratulate him @JoshuaFinnell

Joshua Finnel is the Scholarly Communications Librarian at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Previously he was a Humanities Librarian at Denison University in Ohio, and Assistant Professor of Library Science at McNeese State University. Joshua reflected on his motivation for applying for, and receiving  this award:

I am very humbled and honored to receive the 2016 DLF + FORCE11 Cross-Pollinator award. Recently, I accepted an appointment at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a scholarly communications librarian. In this role, I will be collaborating with a team of librarians and researchers in building a robust data management plan to manage, publish, and archive research data. This initiative will require a holistic understanding of funding agency policies, data management infrastructure, and a considerable amount of outreach and education.

Because my educational background and training is based in the (digital) humanities, I tend to approach data as an artifact with multiple narratives: technical, social, temporal, ethical, scientific, spatial, and philosophical. As Rob Kitchin articulates in The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences, data and data infrastructures are not merely technical issues to overcome but productions of discourse that shape both communication and knowledge. I believe data management is not another problem for libraries to solve, but an opportunity to expand our concepts of collection development, citation management, and ultimately archival practices.

What attracts me to the FORCE11 community is how explicitly the organization’s manifesto blended both a philosophical and practical approach to building enriched knowledge infrastructures of computer code and statistical calculations, while understanding and facilitating the implicit relationship between data, claims, and knowledge. I very much look forward to joining this diverse and active community of librarians, university researchers, digital library practitioners, entrepreneurs, and policy makers in helping to shape the future of research communications and e-Scholarship.

Congratulations Joshua!

Both communities, DLF and FORCE11, see great benefits in giving an opportunity to a digital library practitioner to attend the Force 2016 Conference, who can envision and articulate a connection with their work and who sees great value in building a dynamic and diverse peer network. We encourage other members of the DLF community to attend the Force2016 Conference to be held in April 17-19, Portland, Oregon, and for Force11 members to attend the DLF conference in Milwaukee, WI, November 7 – 9, 2016.

Melissa Haendel and Violeta Ilik