In the world of academia, research and teaching projects often move at a careful — one might say plodding — pace. The UVA Library Sprints program serves to jumpstart these types of projects, offering support from teams of expert librarians, technologists, and information specialists to help faculty make significant progress in a short amount of time. Together, they tackle everything from developing roadmaps for projects to navigating institutional repositories when they’re completed, or on the teaching side, enhancing courses to incorporate archival sources, digital tools, and even ethical AI use.
In late spring, faculty from UVA’s Center for Community Partnerships worked with a Library team on a Research Sprint to redesign the center’s Charlottesville/Albemarle Youth Opportunity Center website and create a methodology for their ongoing work to maintain it. “This was a really fulfilling kind of project to work on,” said Rebecca Cooper Coleman, Librarian for Architecture, who was on the sprint team. “Sometimes it can take months or years to see a project with these elements (research, metadata, data literacy) come together for a publication. Then, it can take more months and years to see the impacts of that publication. For this project, the impacts were immediate and practical.”
A collaborative effort, a real pleasure
The Center for Community Partnerships built the Charlottesville/Albemarle Youth Opportunity site for parents and caregivers to navigate available resources and programs for children and teens in the local region. “By pulling together opportunities across various sources and sites, we hope to streamline engagement efforts in the community,” said Beth Mitchell, a Senior Research Specialist at the Center for Community Partnerships. Mitchell and her colleague Jess Harris, Assistant Director of Community Research, worked with the Library Sprint team over the course of one week to add user-friendly functionality to the website, making sure it would best serve community members. “We also spent time developing new resources, thinking about metadata, and building out a methodology around our process,” Mitchell said.
The site now features 88 resources for youth to engage in throughout the year, from summer camps to job training programs to free mental health services. The Library team helped identify new program providers; improved site navigation; added filters for program category, participant age, cost, and program timing; and worked with Mitchell and Harris to collaboratively draft an “About the Directory” page to clarify the scope and purpose of the directory as well as document criteria for those who maintain the site over time. “It was a real pleasure to collaborate in new ways with the Center for Community Partnerships and to support the incredible work they do through robust partnerships in our region,” Coleman said.
Laura Hjerpe, a Senior Research Data Management Librarian on the sprint team, said the project gave her a taste of web development outside of the library environment. “I gained a new appreciation for youth programs, especially summer camps,” she said. (The additional Library Sprint team members were Jenn Huck, Associate Director of Research Data Services & Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences, and Jeremy Boggs, Head of Research & Development at the Scholars’ Lab.) “It was a privilege to work with Jess and Beth,” Hjerpe said.
The Center for Community Partnerships faculty shared similar thoughts. “Working with the UVA Library Team was a rewarding, collaborative experience,” Mitchell said. “Everyone brought not just their expertise, which was extensive, but a considerable amount of care to our project. The Library team treated our project like their own, and their investment really shows in the quality of work we accomplished during the sprint.”
The Charlottesville Albemarle Youth Opportunity Center is a joint venture of the Charlottesville Department of Human Services, Charlottesville Area Network Dedicated to Youth Development, Region Ten, and the Center for Community Partnerships at UVA.
To learn more about the Library Sprints program:
- Consult with your library liaison
- For teaching projects, write to ceg-steering@virginia.edu
- For research projects, write to research-sprints-steering@virginia.edu
- Contact Judith Thomas, Director of Faculty Programs
