Research portal offers access to NC State’s COVID-19 experts

We’ve all been hearing experts on the news talking about the COVID-19 outbreak and the public health, economic, and social issues around it. Now, the Libraries offers a publicly accessible portal to connect with expert researchers and faculty at NC State and to dive into their research, too.

The Libraries’ COVID-19 research access portal features a roster of expert researchers compiled for the media by NC State University Communications. Most of the researchers are experts on topics related to what COVID-19 is altering, such as food safety, public policy in crisis, youth outdoor engagement, risk and epidemic communication. The Libraries’ portal also provides open access to some of their published works.

“As a connection point to our expert researchers, we hope this portal will be used by journalists to comb through their works and connect facts and data from these scholars to important messages and information for the populace,” says Micah Vandegrift, Open Knowledge Librarian. “Also, in a time when mis/disinformation is a real challenge, this portal can be a resource for the curious public to discover new and pertinent knowledge on using social media for food safety communication, or what healthy homes for middle schoolers look like in research literature.”

Vandegrift spoke with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) about the portal.

He is currently working with the individual researchers to make more of their published work openly available.