VTechWorks
VTechWorks provides global access to Virginia Tech scholarship, including journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, conference papers, slide presentations, technical reports, working papers, administrative documents, videos, images, and more by faculty, students, and staff. Faculty can deposit items to VTechWorks from Elements, including journal articles covered by the University open access policy. Email vtechworks@vt.edu for help.
Open Access Policy
Virginia Tech's open access policy enables researchers to deposit the accepted version of scholarly articles with no embargo.
Theses and Dissertations
Virginia Tech was first in the world to require ETDs in 1997, and continues to add scans of older theses and dissertations.
Open Textbooks
More than 50 freely available and openly licensed textbooks are among our most downloaded items.
Communities in VTechWorks
Select a community to browse its collections.
Recent Submissions
Under New Management: Restructuring an Established Service for Long Term Sustainability
Fletcher, Lauren; Kraus, Hilary; Haygood, Laura; Sawyer, Kelsey (Virginia Tech, 2026-06-15)
Since 2019, at our mid-size R1 university, the library's unit that serves health and biomedicine has offered a Systematic Review Service. Our service population is broadly defined; we serve a cross-section of clinicians, academic faculty, researchers, and scholars at all levels in medicine, public health, psychology and psychiatry, and related disciplines. Requests submitted to the service have been high since its inception, but it is staffed by a team of only four librarians whose jobs comprise a great deal more than this one responsibility.
After five years, we realized our informal approach, combined with ever-increasing demand, was unsustainable. Because the service had grown organically, and due to inevitable turnover in departmental staffing, workflows were decidedly ad hoc. There was limited coordination in how and when requests were received, responded to, and claimed. Each librarian approached their projects differently, including in how they documented the substance of their work and the time commitment required. Team members also possessed varying levels of expertise in some aspects of evidence synthesis methodology. And frankly, more researchers wanted librarians to take on author-level labor than we could possibly accommodate.
In the summer of 2025, we decided a significant overhaul of the Systematic Review Service was essential. Our primary goals included creating clearer and more sustainable policies, formalizing and streamlining our internal processes, and playing to the strengths of members of our team. Ultimately, the most effective part of this process, which now seems inevitable, was assigning a team lead to manage the service.
The role of the team lead is a demanding one. It was important they had deep methodological expertise with the evidence synthesis process, as well as institutional knowledge of the department and the existing service. To make the position feasible, we kept our eye on the original goals, restructuring the service in a way that supported, rather than overwhelmed, the librarian who took on the role.
This presentation will discuss the changes we made to serve that purpose: creating a structured process for requesting support with a single entry point, defining workflows for all requests; and integrating new tools (JotForm and Airtable) with Google Drive. The team lead became responsible for implementing these strategies, including setting up and managing selected tools, establishing the new workflows, coordinating the request queue to ensure timely service, and providing an intake consultation to researchers when requests were received. We will discuss the successes and challenges of our management model, and how we plan to review its effectiveness and long-term sustainability.
Defining Liaison-Based Evidence Synthesis Services at a Non-Health Science Library
McCall, Elizabeth; Corning, Sean (Virginia Tech, 2026-06-15)
As evidence synthesis becomes increasingly common across disciplines, academic libraries outside of the health sciences need to grow to support this type of research. In this lightning talk, we will share our initial steps to define evidence synthesis service and create a community of practice at Tufts University’s Tisch Library in its School of Arts, Sciences, & Engineering. While other libraries at Tufts, including its health science and veterinary libraries, have robust support for evidence synthesis, support at Tisch Library was not defined and varied widely based on librarian expertise. Our librarians’ experience with evidence synthesis ranged from no experience, to formal training and experience publishing evidence synthesis projects. After assessing interest among librarians in defining our services, we spoke with librarians at other Tufts libraries and external institutions, wrote language to share publicly about our services, and created internal documentation for librarians. Most importantly, we formed communication channels among library staff for questions and skill-sharing around evidence synthesis. We will also discuss our planned next steps in advertising our evidence synthesis services and growing our internal expertise.
A Critical Look at the Evidence Synthesis Service Page
DiGiovine, Elizabeth (Virginia Tech, 2026-06-15)
As evidence synthesis (ES) teams across academic libraries contend with high demand and limited resources, it is essential to consider how we advertise our services in digital spaces. An ES libguide or service page can be a researcher’s first interaction with a library’s ES service. Therefore, it is essential to clearly communicate service offerings through the webpage and perform updates as service models and workflows evolve and change over time. A service page can serve several functions, including but not limited to, 1) outlining and describing the steps in an ES project, 2) providing clarification on how librarians can assist researchers, 3) distinguishing among tiers of service, and/or 4) providing an avenue for submitting a consultation request. As such, an opportunity exists to leverage a service page such that it not only serves as an information source for researchers but also helps to set researcher expectations and protect librarian time. Currently, the Evidence Synthesis team at Cornell is updating its “Evidence Synthesis Service” page and “How Librarians Can Help” page, which have not undergone significant updates in over five years. To perform this update, the team is currently holding strategic meetings to critically review the webpage for usability, transparency, and accuracy in light of ongoing changes in personnel and available resources. This presentation will outline the approach taken to perform this update, describe changes made to the website, and provide justification for changes made. More generally, this presentation will reflect on how services across institutions can foster more sustainable workflows and clear service models by creating transparent and thoughtful service pages. Common themes and examples will be discussed following a review and synthesis of content from ES service pages across a sample of 20 to 30 academic libraries. This will provide participants with an opportunity to explore the different ways in which ES teams advertise their services, communicate boundaries, and establish standards for collaboration. The goal of this session is to challenge participants to think critically about the information provided on an ES service page and the potential impact it can have on both librarians and researchers involved in ES work. Towards the end of the session, participants will be encouraged to reflect on and discuss how they might be able to use their service page to build clear service models and reinforce sustainable workflows given the personnel and resources unique to their institution.
Data Management Meets Evidence Synthesis
Iverson, Marissa; Benfield, Megan (Virginia Tech, 2026-06-15)
For this year’s Love Data Week, the UConn Health Sciences Library’s Data & Systems Librarian reached out to colleagues hoping to plan instruction sessions beyond the typical catalog of data management topics. Together with the Research Support Librarian, a session on Data Management for Systematic Reviews was created. This was the first time these two topics had been explored together in the library’s instruction catalog. The resulting session was a 30 minute class that covered data needs for PRISMA compliance, data extraction and synthesis recommendations, and best practices for file naming and version control for evidence synthesis projects. This presentation will review topics that this class covered and provide attendees with a new lens in which to think about file management and data needs of evidence synthesis work.
From Gap to Growth: a Sustainable, Low-Cost Evidence Synthesis Internship Model
Chan-Park, Christina; James, Amy B.; Yarger, Heidi (Virginia Tech, 2026-06-15)
This lightning talk will present a novel internship proposal designed to address the lack of evidence synthesis (ES) training in library schools. With the rapid growth of ES research across non-medical disciplines, there is an increasing need for librarians trained in ES methodologies. Major organizations, such as the Cochrane Library, Campbell Collaboration, and Joanna Briggs Institute, now identify librarian participation on ES teams as a best practice. As Baylor University Libraries currently employ seven librarians trained in ES methods across multiple disciplines, the institution is well-positioned to lead in addressing this professional gap. The Baylor University Evidence Synthesis Internship is a 12-month, remote professional development opportunity for library and information science students or early-career librarians seeking advanced training. Although the internship is unpaid, Baylor offsets this by covering costs for the Medical Library Association’s Systematic Review Services Specialization (SRSS) Level 1 certification. This financial support, totaling between $536.5 to $600.50 per intern, includes an MLA membership, MLA Continuing Education Passport, and SRSS certification application fee. The internship may also count toward MLS/MLIS practicum requirements if applicable. The internship follows a June-May cycle with a commitment of 3-5 hours per week, with the inaugural intern beginning in June 2026. The curriculum is intentionally scaffolded: the intern begins by attending monthly Community of Practice meetings and completing the 14 MLA courses. This foundational work transitions into active practice, where the intern shadows consultations and meets with assigned librarians to discuss database translation and search techniques. Final deliverables include completing two search translations, leading a search strategy, conducting a consultation session, and designing and delivering an ES-related workshop for Baylor faculty and students. To ensure comprehensive support, Baylor utilizes a distributed mentorship model divided into administrative oversight, training supervision, review guidance, and workshop preparation. This shared model distributes responsibilities according to librarian expertise and ensures the intern receives targeted mentorship while maintaining a sustainable workload for the librarians. The intern benefits from enhanced employability through the SRSS certification and practical experience under expert guidance. Simultaneously, the internship expands the libraries’ capacity for interdisciplinary research and establishes a sustainable pipeline for skilled librarian collaborators. This program offers a low-cost, high-impact framework that can be easily replicated by other institutions with existing evidence synthesis services.