Guide for AMICAL Representatives

Role of Representatives

The duties listed here are adapted from the Operational Guidelines (“Article IV: Local Representative”). The rest of this page elaborates on some practical details relating to these duties.

  • Facilitate awareness, engagement and participation among local colleagues
    • Encourage local participation in the consortium’s activities and networks.
    • Maintain awareness about AMICAL, and their institution’s AMICAL-related activities, with their chief academic officer and other relevant campus leaders.
    • Engage with and facilitate AMICAL-related communications, using AMICAL’s collaboration networks, social media and other channels. Facilitate input from local colleagues to AMICAL, and distribute AMICAL information to appropriate local colleagues.
    • Perform administrative tasks related to their institution’s participation in AMICAL, such as vetting/transmitting applications and requests for technical or financial support (Small Grants, conference/workshop participation, etc.)
  • Document institution-level engagement, needs and value of membership
    • Submit their member institution’s annual report.
    • Keep records of AMICAL activities related to their institution, and make them readily available to their local colleagues and successors as AMICAL Representatives.
  • Participate in consortial governance
    • Participate in the annual Members Council meeting.

Facilitate awareness, engagement and participation among local colleagues

Disseminate information about programs and initiatives

AMICAL will send out announcements for events that we’re organizing. Although we are likely to be able to reach some of your colleagues directly, we rely on you to get the message out to local colleagues. Our email announcements are designed to be easily forwardable.

You may do this by:

  • Forwarding AMICAL announcements to colleagues who may be interested (sending to them individually, or through an institutional mailing list).
  • Notifying key stakeholders of AMICAL initiatives relevant to their area. For example, notifying your provost or department chairs about an initiative targeting faculty, etc.
  • Highlighting AMICAL initiatives in your own articles or messages in institutional newsletters, circulars or chat systems.
  • Sharing AMICAL initiatives with interested colleagues verbally, over lunch, etc.

On our end, we’ll do our best to keep you apprised of when colleagues from your institution participate in AMICAL programs, typically by sharing registration data with you.

Respond in a timely fashion

You will be occasionally contacted by AMICAL staff or other working groups within AMICAL to provide information about your institution and its members. Try to respond within the timeframes requested if you’re able to, and reply to request more time if you aren’t. If we don’t hear back from you at all, we’ll do our best to follow up. If we aren’t able to elicit a response, the assumption will be that your institution is not interested in participating in those kinds of activities or initiatives.

Endorsing Small Grant applications (for Full/Affiliate members)

We ask representatives to endorse Small Grant applications before they are reviewed. It’s a proactive way of filtering applications that are completely misaligned with the program before they get to the reviewing committee.

The process is as follows: When a member of your institution applies for a Small Grant, you will receive a copy of their application. As your institution’s AMICAL representative you should forward that message to contact@amicalnet.org with a brief statement that you endorse it (e.g. “I endorse this Small Grant application”), meaning that you believe it responds adequately to the review criteria. If you do not endorse it you should reply to note that. The Grant Review committee will not review an application unless you endorse it. These instructions will be included in the copy of the application you receive.

If a representative submits an application themself, they do not need to endorse it. We assume they will have considered the alignment of their own application with the Small Grant guidelines before submitting it.

Email deliverability

We ask that you request your IT department to put all emails sent from the amicalnet.org domain in the “allow list” to ensure that messages from AMICAL reach you and your colleagues, even if you don’t believe there have been problems receiving AMICAL’s email at your institution in the past.

Our systems may send emails to members through several different email providers. In some cases, the IPs used by our email service providers may be shared between AMICAL and other users of the service.. This can result in certain email servers at AMICAL member institutions categorizing AMICAL email as spam, or rejecting it altogether. Putting the amicalnet.org domain in the “allow list” will help prevent such issues.

Document institution-level engagement, needs and value of membership

Keep institutional details up to date

We ask that you notify us immediately of any changes to your institution’s AMICAL Representative, President or Chief Academic Officer.

We will annually request you to:

  • Update information about key institutional contacts:
    • AMICAL Representative
    • President/CEO
    • Provost or Chief Academic Officer
    • Other dean/academic officer for liberal arts school/program (if applicable)
    • Director of center for learning/teaching/faculty development (if applicable)
    • Director of writing center (if applicable)
    • IT director
    • Academic IT director (if different from IT director)
  • Review your institution’s page on AMICAL to identify any colleagues who may have left (alumni), and suggest any other changes to the information there.

For those institutions interested in consortial e-resource deals, the E-Resources Committee will periodically contact to request further institutional details pertaining to e-resources (FTEs, IP ranges, library budget details, etc.).

Next step: Communication →