BIG IDEAS demand reliable information. The University Libraries supports scholarship, research, and learning at UT by acquiring, organizing, preserving, and facilitating access to the world’s knowledge. The wide-ranging expertise of our librarians might surprise you.

As scholarly communication librarian, Rachel Caldwell is an advocate for open access and new, sustainable practices in scholarly publishing.

Rachel provides UT researchers with guidance in scholarly publishing issues, assistance with copyright and fair use concerns, and support in ensuring that grant-funded researchers are in compliance with public access policies. One of her main responsibilities in scholarly communication is to develop campus awareness of best practices in open access publishing, which is intended to give authors greater rights over the products of their research and scholarship and give everyone unrestricted online access to the scholarly record. As part of this responsibility, she helps administer the campus Open Publishing Support Fund and works with library colleagues to support the Libraries’ journal hosting service.

Rachel encourages faculty to self-archive their research and creative work in UT’s institutional repository, Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. Publication in the Trace open archive, as well as assignment of unique identifiers, such as ORCID author identifiers, improve the visibility and impact of UT’s research and scholarship.

As a member of the Libraries’ new service, the Scholars’ Collaborative, she consults with UT researchers who engage in emerging forms of scholarship, equipping them with the best tools and resources for their projects and helping them understand their rights as authors and creators. Faculty and students wanting to measure the reach of their work can also consult with Rachel for information on both traditional impact metrics, such as journal impact factor, and alternative impact metrics, such as author-level metrics.

As the subject librarian for philosophy and art history, Rachel provides research consultations, instruction in the use of information sources, and collection development for those disciplines. She is also the Libraries’ liaison to Honors Programs and the Office of Undergraduate Research.

Rachel holds a bachelor’s degree in the history of art and art conservation, and a dual master’s in information science and library science from Indiana University Bloomington.