CURRENT POSITION Research Impact and Open Scholarship Librarian, Herman B Wells Library, Indiana University–Bloomington DEGREE MLIS and Graduate Teaching Certificate, University of Iowa, 2018 FAST FACT Liburd Tavernier hails from the smallest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, St. Kitts and Nevis. FOLLOW willaliburd.github.io Photo courtesey of Willa Liburd Tavernier

Open-Access Impact

“Life is so unpredictable,” says Willa Liburd Tavernier, reflecting on her career path. “I’m an accidental librarian, in a sense.” She was an attorney in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) when she entered the MA program at the University of Iowa, aiming to lead knowledge-management initiatives at her law firm. Toward the end of the program, hurricanes Irma and Maria ravaged the BVI. Unable to return, she applied to U.S. academic library residency programs and received an offer from Indiana University–Bloomington (IU), where she’s been ever since.

Her current role focuses on facilitating open access to research materials. Liburd Tavernier measures and interprets the impact, nationally and globally, of the research coming out of IU. She also manages a program that helps fund open-access fee payments to publishers. If an IU researcher has already published in a subscription-based journal, she strives to find a workaround. “Usually, publishers allow an earlier version of an article to be made open access,” she says. “I help our researchers deposit that version in an electronic repository so the general public can get to it.”

In 2021–22, Liburd Tavernier led the creation and launch of an openly accessible digital exhibit that garnered national media coverage, including in Ebony magazine: Land, Wealth, Liberation: The Making and Unmaking of Black Wealth in the United States . The powerful educational resource details the relationship of Black Americans to land and money over the last 200 years. Its success was the result of a collaborative effort between Liburd Tavernier and her fellow librarians, as well as faculty and students at IU.

She takes particular satisfaction in the impact the project has had on her student assistants. “Our lead research assistant said the project made him see a future in librarianship. Another student said it changed her relationship with libraries, which she now realizes do more than provide electronic resource access,” Liburd Tavernier says. “An international graduate student found that it gave him insight into caste relations in his home country.”

Liburd Tavernier intends to push full speed ahead in the arena of open scholarship. She and two partners were selected for the American Library Association Civic Imagination Station Award in fall 2022, which they used to create an open pedagogy project with Land, Wealth, Liberation as a resource. “Early proponents of open access assumed that it would, by its very nature, solve issues of inequity, but the past decade has shown that is by no means a guaranteed outcome,” she says. “In some ways, inequities have worsened, so this has to be intentional work.”