Against the Grain v30 #5 (November 2018) by against-the-grain

c/o Katina Strauch Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482

CHARLESTON CONFERENCE issue volume 30, number 5

NOVEMBER 2018

“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”

ISSN: 1043-2094

Library Support of Institutional Curricula by Cris Ferguson (Director of Technical Services, Murray State University Libraries) <Cferguson13@murraystate.edu>

his issue of Against the Grain is devoted to the many and varied ways in which academic libraries are supporting institutional curricula. As tuition, the prices of textbooks, and student out of pocket costs continue to rise, libraries are pressed to think both creatively and strategically about how they can best meet the demands of their users, faculty and students alike. Bringing together case studies from a variety of academic institutions, the articles in this issue highlight how libraries are working with their constituents to best support their curricular and class needs. Solutions implemented include buying and making available print and/or electronic textbooks, encouraging

the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) in place of traditional course materials, providing educational grants to faculty members who are producing or using OER content, and sometimes a combination of more than one of these tactics. This is a careful balancing act, though. At a time when budgets are shrinking, pressure is on for libraries to make the most effective use of both their holdings budgets and their limited staff time. The first article in this issue, “One Monographs Bucket,” by Kelly Smith highlights an initiative at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU), where the EKU library eliminated all departmental allocations from its library acquisitions budget and created a single

If Rumors Were Horses

continued on page 10

What To Look For In This Issue:

Sharna Williams, Registrar for the Charleston Conference, and her husband Julius celebrated their 18th Anniversary on a Carnival Magic cruise after the conference ended last year. Such a good looking couple!

monographic bucket to better support the institutional curriculum. Some of the results included an increase in budgetary flexibility and improved efficiency. Many library collection development policies used to preclude the acquisition of textbooks — primarily because textbooks change so often that keeping up to date with the editions being used requires a significant budgetary investment on the part of the library. In addition, a single print copy of a textbook can only serve a single library user at a time. However, more and more libraries, like Brigham Young University-Hawaii, are revisiting this decision in light of high student textbook costs. In “Textbooks on Reserve — Seven Years and Going Strong,” Becky DeMartini, Marynelle Chew, and Michael Aldrich discuss the success of BYUH’s growing print textbook reserve collection.

e were thrilled to hear that Lindsay Wertman, Managing Director, IGI Global had her baby Friday, September 14. Look for Kendrick Allen Wertman’s photo in this issue, p.10. Lindsay says “the little man is already giving us a run for our money and we are enjoying every minute we spend with him!” Speaking of babies, just learned that Franny Lee has a new baby girl. “Hello, I am Mackinnon (Yu-hei) Inglis, born April 1 at 9:01am pacific at 6 lbs 14 oz and 19 inches tall. I insisted on arriving 2 days late so that my mom could try out a bunch of wacky induction techniques during her 60 hours of labor. I am ridiculously cute with a full head of hair, I squeak like a hamster when I hiccup, I can quiver my lower lip when I cry, and I love to snuggle. Mom and pops are doing well, enjoying their brand new baby girl and resuming their sugar-filled pre-gestational diabetes diets, and wanted me to share the news with you! Love, Little Mac.” Her glamour shot is on p.16. I hope you have noticed ATG’s Trendspotting initiative. What does the future hold for our industry? We are lucky to have Lisa Hinchliffe in charge. She will be running the Trend Talk Panel on Thursday November 8, 2018 1:00pmcontinued on page 6

Sex, Intellectual Freedom, and Academic Libraries............................ 56 Have We Reached the Proverbial Tipping Point?.................................... 60 Springer Nature Cancels €3.2 Billion IPO at the Last Minute...................... 70 Migrations and Migraines................. 84 Taking the CIP Program into the Future with PrePub Book Link......... 88 Interviews George Machovec............................... 50 Joris Van Rossum............................... 52 Profiles Encouraged People, Library and Company Profiles................................................ 90 Plus more............................... See inside

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Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) (USPS: 012-618), Copyright 2017 by the name Against the Grain, LLC is published six times a year in February, April, June, September, November, and December/January by Against the Grain, LLC. Business and Editorial Offices: PO Box 799, 1712 Thompson Ave., Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. Accounting and Circulation Offices: same. Call (843-509-2848) to subscribe. Periodicals postage is paid at Charleston, SC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Against the Grain, LLC, PO Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482.

Editor:

Katina Strauch (College of Charleston)

Associate Editors:

Cris Ferguson (Murray State) Tom Gilson (College of Charleston) John Riley (Consultant)

Research Editors:

Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)

Assistants to the Editor:

Ileana Strauch Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)

Editor At Large:

Dennis Brunning (Arizona State University)

Contributing Editors:

Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University) Rick Anderson (University of Utah) Sever Bordeianu (U. of New Mexico) Todd Carpenter (NISO) Eleanor Cook (East Carolina University) Anne Doherty (Choice) Ruth Fischer (SCS / OCLC) Michelle Flinchbaugh (U. of MD Baltimore County) Joyce Dixon-Fyle (DePauw University) Laura Gasaway (Retired, UNC, Chapel Hill) Regina Gong (Lansing Community College) Michael Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC) Chuck Hamaker (UNC, Charlotte) William M. Hannay (Schiff, Hardin & Waite) Mark Herring (Winthrop University) Bob Holley (Retired, Wayne State University) Donna Jacobs (MUSC) Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University) Myer Kutz (Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) Tom Leonhardt Rick Lugg (SCS / OCLC) Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University) Bob Nardini (ProQuest) Jim O’Donnell (Arizona State University) Ann Okerson (Center for Research Libraries) Rita Ricketts (Blackwell’s) Jared Seay (College of Charleston) Lindsay Wertman (IGI Global)

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Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to: Katina Strauch, Editor, Against the Grain, LLC, Post Office Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. phone: 843-723-3536, cell: 843-509-2848. <kstrauch@comcast.net>

Against the Grain is indexed in Library Literature, LISA, Ingenta, and The Informed Librarian. Authors’ opinions are to be regarded as their own. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This issue was produced on an iMac using Microsoft Word, and Adobe CS6 Premium software under Mac OS X Mountain Lion. Against the Grain is copyright ©2018 by Katina Strauch

Against the Grain / November 2018

Against The Grain TABLE OF CONTENTS v.30 #5 November 2018 © Katina Strauch

ISSUES, NEWS, & GOINGS ON Rumors.................................................. 1 From Your Editor................................. 6

Letters to the Editor............................. 6 Deadlines............................................... 6

FEATURES

Library Support of Institutional Curricula Guest Editor, Cris Ferguson

Library Support of Institutional Curricula............................................... 1

TEAMing Up with Faculty: A New Tactic in the Textbook Battle............. 22

One Monographs Bucket................... 12

Digital Partners — An Incremental Approach to Supporting Digital Scholarship on Your Campus............ 26

by Cris Ferguson — This issue is devoted to the many and varied ways in which academic libraries are supporting institutional curricula. by Kelly Smith — As PDA became more popular with patrons, the idea of pre-determined subject allocations quickly became a challenge.

Textbooks on Reserve — Seven Years and Going Strong............................... 14

by Becky DeMartini, Marynelle Chew, and Michael Aldrich — This article discusses the success of Brigham Young University-Hawaii’s growing print textbook reserve collection.

Expanding Options — Promoting the Adoption of Reasonably Priced Texts that are Also Available as Library eBooks................................................. 18

by Kate Pittsley-Sousa — This approach encourages the adoption of reasonably priced titles that could be available for purchase as library eBooks.

by Christa Bailey and Adriana Poo — SJSU offers professional development funds to faculty to encourage them to adopt OER.

by Tim Bucknall — Tim explains that through the Digital Partners program the library awards grants of library staff expertise and time for creative faculty digital scholarship concepts.

Creating and Marketing Textbook/ OER Programs................................... 28 by Laura Pascual — The University of South Florida has a multi-faceted approach to providing access to course materials.

Op Ed — Epistemology..................... 32

Fact or Opinion by T. Scott Plutchak — How we can distinguish facts from opinions?

Back Talk............................................ 94 On Being A Fashionable Librarian! by Ann Okerson — IFLA’s WLIC was about Librarian Fashion? Something to emulate?

ATG INTERVIEWS & PROFILES George Machovec............................... 50

Executive Director, Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, and Managing Editor, The Charleston Advisor

Joris Van Rossum............................... 52 Director, Special Projects, Digital Science

Profiles Encouraged........................... 90 More people, company, and library profiles — very interesting.

REVIEWS Booklover............................................ 34

Book Reviews...................................... 40

Collecting to the Core........................ 36

Wryly Noted....................................... 46

Birds by Donna Jacobs — Penguin Island by Anatole France, the nom de plume for Jacques Anatole Thibault. Ever wonder where the expression “for the birds” came from? Not really but keep reading! Our Common Future by Carla Heister — Monographic works that are essential to the academic library.

Monographic Musings by Corey Seeman — Corey takes over this column from Regina Gong. Two of the books reviewed include: Collaborating with Strangers and Taking Your Library Career to the Next Level. Books About Books by John Riley — An omnium gatherum of books that reflect a summer’s worth of reading and traveling.

LEGAL ISSUES Edited by Bruce Strauch and Jack Montgomery

Cases of Note — Copyright............... 54

Rock Legends and Substantial Similarity by Bruce Strauch — Michael Skidmore as Trustee for The Randy Craig Wolfe Trust v. All The Led Zeppelin Gang and Warner Music Et Al.

Questions and Answers...................... 55

Copyright Column by Laura N. Gasaway — Many relevant questions and answers. What’s the copyright status of makerspace projects? Lolly tells us!

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CHARLESTON CONFERENCE Issue PUBLISHING

Random Ramblings........................... 56

Sex, Intellectual Freedom, and Academic Libraries by Bob Holley — Bob’s current research agenda seeks to show how honoring a commitment to intellectual freedom is not as easy as most librarians think it is.

Little Red Herrings............................ 60

Have We Reached the Proverbial Tipping Point? by Mark Y. Herring — Is the tipping point that we don’t know if the Internet is a boon or a boondoggle?

The Scholarly Publishing Scene........ 62

The Age of Acquiring by Myer Kutz — Myer has been looking for information about how scholarly publishing’s commercial sector has changed in the past decade. His findings are here.

It’s High Time..................................... 64

The Efficiency Expert by Darby Orcutt — This new column will focus on the longer horizon contexts and offer big ideas and questions relevant to our field.

And They Were There........................ 65

Reports of Meetings — In this issue we have the last installment of reports from the 2017 Charleston Conference by Ramune Kubilius and her fabulous team of reporters. And stay tuned, reports from the 2018 Charleston Conference will begin publishing in our February 2019 issue.

Straight Talk....................................... 70 Springer Nature Cancels €3.2 Billion IPO at the Last Minute by Dan Tonkery — What does this failed IPO mean for the library community?

BOOKSELLING AND VENDING Both Sides Now: Vendors and Librarians........................................... 74

What Happens Next? by Michael Gruenberg — In reality, “what happens next?” is a way for both the buyer and seller to stay focused on the job at hand which is buying and selling.

Biz of Digital....................................... 75

Exploratory Evolution: Using Participatory Change to Rethink and Reorganize Digital Collections Services by Annie Benefiel, Jacklyn Rander, Matt Ruen and Leigh Rupinski — GVSU Libraries held a series of facilitated conversations to analyze the workflows, organizational structure, and overall support for the management of digital collections and repositories.

Being Earnest with Collections......... 78

Prepping the Future: A Call for Today’s Technical Services Librarians to Develop Tomorrow’s Leaders by Cara Mia Calabrese — Cara and all of us! would appreciate feedback from ATG readers who share in a desire to promote technical services to the next generation of librarians.

Squirreling Away: Managing Information Resources & Libraries.....80

Boy, If Life Were Only Like This by Corey Seeman — All academic librarians are told that everything is free on the Internet, and that is not true. But every time we answer these questions, it is rolling a boulder up the hill. Over and over again.

Stop, Look, Listen.............................. 82

OA Books Funding: The Next Phase by Dr. Sven Fund — The fact remains that what the market really needs in order to complement existing library-funded OA models is the aggregation of single title funding or book processing charges (BPCs).

Collection Management Matters...... 84

Migrations and Migraines by Glenda Alvin — Putting people before processes and procedures, fosters strong team spirit, promotes unity of purpose, and helps get the job done, with little, if any residual negative attitudes.

TECHNOLOGY AND STANDARDS Library Analytics: Shaping the Future.................................................. 72

A Case of Strategic Library Transformation Using Data Analytics: Chalmers University of Technology by Daniel Forsman — The ability to extract high-quality, timely, actionable insights for researchers, scholarly communicators, research funders, and management from publication patterns and usage patterns would earn the library a seat at the table as an expert on how to increase the visibility and the impact of research.

Future Through the Past................... 85 Emerging Research Literature by Donald Beagle — Don has some reading recommendations.

Against the Grain / November 2018

Considering Games and Gamification in Libraries & Associated Entities.... 86

In Praise of Real People — Being an examination of Immersive Participatory, Interactive Analog Games and Their Use in Education in General and Libraries in Particular….….before I forget by Jared Alexander Seay — What Jared has to tell us is spectacularly revolutionary.

Let’s Get Technical............................. 88

Taking the CIP Program into the Future with PrePub Book Link by Caroline Saccucci — This is about LC’s PrePubBook Link.

Uncommon ...

Against the Grain is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. ATG is a unique collection of reports on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books, journals, and electronic information.

Unconventional ...

ATG is published six times a year, in February, April, June, September, November, and December/January. A six-issue subscription is available for only $55 U.S. ($65 Canada, $95 foreign, payable in U.S. dollars), making it an uncommonly good buy for all that it covers. Make checks payable to Against the Grain, LLC and mail to: Against the Grain c/o Katina Strauch Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482 *Wire transfers are available, email <kstrauch@comcast.net> for details, however, credit cards are the preferred alternative to checks ($25 fee applies).

_______________________________________________ City State Zip _______________________________________________ Company Phone _______________________________________________ Email _______________________________________________

by Bruce Strauch — What do R. L. Stine and Ringo Starr have in common? Read about it here!

Name _______________________________________________ Address _______________________________________________

Bet You Missed It................................. 8

“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”

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From Your (anticipating) Editor:

appy November everybody! Let’s hope that is stays cool but not too cool! Or too hot either! We want just right! This is the 38th year of the Charleston Conference. Like wow! Hard to believe. We have had some scares this year with last minute hurricanes like Florence but we managed to swim through. Whew! Besides anticipating the Conference, I am anticipating another grandbaby to be born, you’re right, in November around conference time. Okay!

This issue is edited by the awesome Cris Ferguson on the varied ways libraries support institutional curricula. There are six featured articles by Kelly Smith (PDA and predeterming subject allocations), Becky DeMartini, Maryellen Chew and Michael Aldrich (the textbook reserve collection at Brigham Young), Kate Pittsley-Sousa (reasonably priced texts available for library purchase), Christa Bailey and Adriana Poo (the use of professional development funds), Tim Bucknall (UNCG’s digital partnership program) and Laura

Letters to the Editor Send letters to <kstrauch@comcast.net>, phone or fax 843-723-3536, or snail mail: Against the Grain, Post Office Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. You can also send a letter to the editor from the ATG Homepage at http://www.against-the-grain.com. Dear Editor: I love Against the Grain and Charleston Conference stories! Those stories remind me of this: I started my library career in 1975, right after completing my undergraduate degree, and simultaneously worked on my MLS. I became a librarian in 1978 and began my first professional library job at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. In 1980 I learned how to search Science Citation Index with a computer and began librarian-mediated searching. I connected to Dialog in California with a 110 baud and 300 baud rate modem. Later, high speed became 1200 baud rate. We were charged by the hour/minute. You had to dial the number for Dialog on the telephone, securely connect the phone to the modem and hope you could connect if the weather didn’t interfere — rain and storms created a connection problem. That was the “horse and buggy” days of computer technology and libraries. I am excited to participate in the Trendspotting Initiative. Thank you! Audrey Powers (Associate Librarian, Liaison for College of The Arts, University of South Florida, Tampa Library) <apowers@usf.edu>

AGAINST THE GRAIN DEADLINES VOLUME 30 & 31 — 2019-2020 2018 Events ALA Midwinter

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11/26/18

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02/21/19

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04/25/19

September 2019

06/13/19

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08/15/19

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FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT Toni Nix <justwrite@lowcountry.com>; Phone: 843-835-8604; Fax: 843-835-5892; USPS Address: P.O. Box 412, Cottageville, SC 29435; FedEx/UPS ship to: 398 Crab Apple Lane, Ridgeville, SC 29472.

Against the Grain / November 2018

Pascual (University of Florida’s multifaceted approach). Ann Okerson’s B a c k Ta l k i s about fashionable librarians! Scott Plutchak has penned the Op Ed about facts versus opinions. Our interviews are with George Machovec (CARL and The Charleston Advisor) and Joris van Rossum (Digital Science). Corey Seeman returns with Monograph Musings, Donna Jacobs continues Booklover and John Riley talks about summer readings. Jack Montgomery, Bruce Strauch and Lolly Gasaway tell us about Led Zeppelin and Makerspaces, Dan Tonkery’s Straight Talk is about the failed Springer IPO, Bob Holley weighs in about academic libraries and intellectual freedom, Mark Herring is philosophical about the Internet, Myer Kutz looks at changes in the scholarly commercial sector, and we have a new column from Darby Orcutt that focuses on big ideas and the longer horizon. And of course, there’s lots more I didn’t mention. Gotta run! The new grandbaby is considering making an appearance early! See y’all in November! Love, Yr. Ed.

Rumors from page 1 2:15pm in Salon I, of the Gaillard Center. Come join us for a lively discussion! What a dynamo Courtney McAllister is! Courtney has left the Citadel (boohoo) to be Electronic Resources Librarian at Yale’s Law Library! She moved over the weekend and did not skip a beat as she was working on the Charleston Conference team to input room numbers for sessions on the website. Courtney is joining another ball of fire, Lindsay Barnett, a College of Charleston “alum.” Lindsay is Collection Development & Scholarly Communication Librarian at Yale Law Library. And, guess what? They will both be in Charleston for the Conference! Talk about an achiever! Besides his squirreling away business column, Corey Seeman has compiled a Monograph Musings column for this issue, p.40. Don’t you love Corey’s library of squirrel pictures ? Jack Montgomery — talk about energy! — has recruited a new legally speaking column editor, Anthony Paganelli, the WKU Elizabethtown-Fort Knox Campus librarian. Anthony has already sent several great ideas continued on page 10

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Join Taylor & Francis Group at the Charleston Library Conference November 5th – 9th in Charleston, South Carolina Visiting the Charleston Library Conference? Here are some reasons to connect with Taylor & Francis:

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Bet You Missed It Press Clippings — In the News — Carefully Selected by Your Crack Staff of News Sleuths Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Editor’s Note: Hey, are y’all reading this? If you know of an article that should be called to Against the Grain’s attention ... send an email to <kstrauch@comcast.net>. We’re listening! — KS

OBITS OF NOTE

Ella Brennan (1925-2018) added Creole pizazz to a dull menu at the family Vieux Carré restaurant on Bourbon Street. A family feud shoved her out for a dormant 40 years. Then, in 1969, she bought a run-down Commander’s Palace and “Hurricane Ella” won six James Beard Awards. Her secret? Well, she herself didn’t cook. But she groomed an astounding series of chefs: Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, Jamie Shannon. See — “Obituaries,” The Week, June 15, 2018, p.35. Shinobu Hashimoto (1918-2018) was a big deal screen writer who called the world’s attention to Japanese cinema. His long collaboration with Akira Kurosawa gave us Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957). George Lucas said The Hidden Fortress (1958) was an inspiration for Star Wars. And Rashomon (1950), a tale of a rape and murder from four different perspectives added the “Rashomon effect” to the language of cinema. See — “Obituaries,” The Week, Aug. 3, 2018, p.39. John Calder (1927-2018) was born into a wealthy establishment family of Scots but went bohemian, publishing controversial authors by his company Calder & Boyars. Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Marguerite Duras type authors. He won the obscenity lawsuit over Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. A serious opera buff, he claimed to have seen 900 different ones. See — James Hagerty, “Publisher’s Books Defied Censors in ‘60s,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 25-26, 2018, p.A9.

BATS IN THE STACKS

In Portugal, the University of Coimbra has the magnificent 300-year old Joanina Library with hand-illustrated Bibles and centuries-old world atlases. And a dozen bats that come out at night and eat glue-loving moths and beetles. The library was built in 1728 with opulent lacquered shelves, wood carvings and portraits. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site that drew 500,000 visitors last year. But it seems the tourists are mainly interested in the bats. And the staff is truly fed-up with answering visitor questions about the 1-1/2 inch species called pipistrelle. See — Patricia Kowsmann, “The Bats Help Preserve Old Books, But They Drive Librarians, Well …” The Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2018, p.A1.

Against the Grain / November 2018

THE KING OF FRUITS

In an age of pineapple on Hawaiian pizza, we’ve lost sight of how the fruit was once a rarity. Columbus brought back a stack of them, but only one survived the voyage. King Ferdinand was enchanted by its flavor. At that time, sweets made from cane sugar were virtually nonexistant and orchard fruits came only in season. Pineapple became a royal rage. The spiky crown helped with the symbolism to make it a manifestation of the divine right of kings. The Dutch set to growing them in greenhouses in 1682, and the Brits followed suit. Mountains of coal were burned to keep the houses hot, and the expense was so high the fruit was only used as table ornaments. Pineapple rentals sprang up. Wedgwood began using pineapple themes in China. Stone pineapples were carved into architecture and sculpted for country house gardens. They figured in paintings, adorned carriages, a symbol of good taste and wealth. Then came steamships and the then abundant fruit became blah. See — “How the Pineapple Became so Popular,” The Week, July 27, 2018, p.36 (Originally published in The Paris Review).

Rich From Horror

R.L. Stine was a poverty-stricken, anxiety-ridden nerd growing up. He liked “Vault of Horror” type comics, but his mother wouldn’t let him bring them in the house. With an old Remington typewriter he began writing humorous comics for his HS classmates. After Ohio State, he got a job at Scholastic launching Bananas, a humor magazine for kids. It folded. He was reduced to writing Bazooka Bubble Gum jokes for $25 each. Then he wrote Blind Date (1986), a scary book for teens. It shot to No. 1 children’s best seller. Likewise Twisted. His wife Jane founded Parachute Publishing and did the Fear Street series starting with The New Girl (1989). Jane urged him to add horror and Goosebumps was born starting with Welcome to Dead House (1992). He’s now 74, has sold more than 400 million books and is rich. Upper West Side Manhattan apartment and house in Sag Harbor. See — Marc Myers, “A Lifetime of Goosebumps and Laughs,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 17, 2018, p.M12.

Literary Real Estate

A Georgian five-bedroom exquisite is on the market for £1.75 in the English village of Box in leafy Wiltshire. It was the childhood home of the Reverend Wilbert Awdry who was inspired to write the Thomas the Tank Engine stories when his young son was in bed with measles. He sold copyright to the first book for £37 12 shillings. Then he wrote 25 more. Reginald Dalby did the bright artwork. Awdry’s son Christopher (measles boy) took over in 1983, and one year later sold the rights to television. Beatles drummer Ringo Starr narrated them. Thomas related merchandise ranging from pasta shapes to slippers sold massively. See — Rod Ardehali, “Beautiful five-bedroom home where Thomas the Tank Engine creator Reverend W. Awdry developed his interest in trains goes on sale,” Daily Mail, Aug. 17, 2018.

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Rumors from page 6 for columns. Coming up hopefully in the December-January issue! Unfortunately neither Jack nor Anthony will be in Charleston this year but there’s always next year! And congratulations to Jack’s wife, Lesley who has decided to pursue her online MLS at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Jack is committed to Lesley’s success in this dream of hers. He says it was through Lesley’s support that he was able to realize his own dream. We will miss you this year in Charleston, Jack! Good luck and blessings to Lesley! Just got the most eloquent email from our troubadour Albert Joy! Albert says it has been five years since he retired (can you believe it?) and he is ready to say Bon Voyage. I so hope that Albert will be back some year soon! Good luck, Albert and Happy Trails! Another email from the roadrunner JoAnne Sparks (University Librarian, University

Library, Archives & Collections, Library, Macquarie University, Australia), who is announcing her retirement at the end of the year. JoAnne has “beep beeped” her way through an impressive career! Happy retirement, JoAnne and keep in touch please! BEP (Business Expert Press) and MP (Momentum Press) have announced the Kendrick Allen winner of the Essay Wertman Contest For Registration To Charleston!, — Ms. Elizabeth Price from James Madison University. “BEP and MP were built, in-part, by a panel of librarians, and realize how important it is to support librarians — both in giving them content that continued on page 16

Library Support of Institutional ... from page 1 While recognizing that providing textbooks has not historically been a part of the library’s mission, Eastern Michigan University (EMU) has also begun to reconsider its approach to the acquisition of textbook content. Kate Pittsley-Sousa outlines EMU’s Library Textbook Affordability Initiative in her article “Expanding Options — Promoting the Adoption of Reasonably Priced Texts that are Also Available as Library eBooks,” which, among other approaches, encourages the adoption of reasonably priced titles that could be available for purchase as library eBooks. This enables students that may not be able to afford to purchase their own copy of a textbook to rely on the eBook owned by the library. In the November 2016 issue of Against the Grain, Christa Bailey and Ann Agee introduced ATG readers to San Jose State University’s (SJSU) Affordable Learning $olutions (AL$) program. Now, two years later, SJSU is back to provide an update on the AL$ program. Christa Bailey and Adriana Poo explain in “TEAMing Up with Faculty: A New Tactic in the Textbook Battle” how SJSU began offering professional development funds to faculty to encourage them to adopt OER for use in the classroom as part of a new initiative called Teaching with Engaging and Affordable Materials (TEAM). The University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) is taking a slightly different strategy with its Digital Partners program. In “Digital Partners — An Incremental Approach to Supporting Digital Scholarship on Your Campus,” Tim Bucknall explains that through the Digital Partners program, instead of granting financial incentives, the UNCG Libraries awards grants of library staff expertise and time, which support pressing and creative faculty digital scholarship concepts. In “Creating and Marketing Textbook/ OER Programs,” Laura Pascual outlines the University of South Florida’s multi-faceted approach to providing access to course materials, which includes several of the tactics mentioned in other articles in this issue. The important takeaway from this issue is that the ways in which libraries are supporting their institutional curricula are as many and varied as the institutions themselves and there are no right answers. The important part is to start taking steps. As Pascual states, “each local initiative contributes to challenging the traditional textbook model.”

Correction Notice — September Feature Article

n our last issue of Against the Grain, v.30#4 September 2018, the published article by Daniel G. Kipnis and Lisa A. Palmer (pp. 33-36), titled “Medical Institutional Repositories in a Changing Scholarly Communication Landscape,” contained errors in the two tables that were not found until after the issue had gone to press. Our apologies to the authors and our readers. The article has been updated online to incorporate the authors’ corrections and is available at https://www.against-the-grain.com/2018/10/v304-medicalinstitutional-repositories-in-a-changing-scholarly-communication-landscape.

10 Against the Grain / November 2018

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One Monographs Bucket by Kelly Smith (Coordinator of Collections and Discovery, Eastern Kentucky University Libraries) <kelly.smith2@eku.edu> Introduction

Until 2012, Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) Libraries, like most academic libraries, allocated a set amount of funds to each subject liaison to spend in their area. As we began to dip our toes into patron driven acquisitions (PDA), a small “discretionary” fund had been used for this purpose. But as PDA became more popular with our patrons, the idea of pre-determined subject allocations quickly became challenging from both practical and philosophical standpoints. When discretionary funds were exhausted, how would we replenish PDA deposit accounts? Would we have to ask a liaison for “permission” to use their funds each time a book was requested? With a deposit account in a multi-disciplinary PDA package, how was that even possible? And if the evidence showed that patron requested materials were more highly used than librarian selected titles,1 why were we still prioritizing librarian selections? Especially at a medium-sized comprehensive university where liaisons did not necessarily have subject expertise? So when I was promoted to Coordinator of the division that handled collections in early 2012, one of my first actions was to propose a “pilot” year where we took all subject-allocated monograph funds and put them in one big pool of funds to see what would happen. Liaisons were skeptical. They had questions, lots of questions. But I emphasized that this change was not permanent. That we would try it and find out what problems arose, what problems were solved, and whether the problems solved outweighed the problems created. I also made sure that the branch librarians had more leeway to request titles. For example, the music librarian could still send us lists of scores to purchase, but he agreed to let the music histories, biographies, and other monograph purchases be driven by patron requests. So in FY2013, we collapsed all the funds and set up a workflow in Illiad for InterLibrary Loan staff to send monograph requests through a quick review by the collection development librarian. Based on our collection development criteria, requests were either forwarded to acquisitions staff for purchase or sent to ILL to be borrowed. Additionally, we committed more funds to patron driven online collections, including both eBooks and streaming videos.

Process Observations

So, what were the results of our “pilot”? In terms of problems, there were only two big ones. First, and this surprised us: many faculty were annoyed that we had purchased titles that they had requested through Interlibrary Loan! They had “only wanted to review them.” We solved this problem through education, explaining that they could indicate in the notes that they would prefer ILL, but that we would use our professional judgement to determine whether individual titles might have a broader use potential that would justify purchase. Second, the onslaught of textbook requests at the beginning of each semester is hard to manage. We maintain a small collection of textbooks on reserve — primarily those donated by faculty or students. Occasionally, we will purchase a textbook for introductory classes or high DFW classes, especially to support students at the beginning of the semester as there is often a lag-time before they receive their textbook vouchers from the financial aid office. So students know that we buy textbooks and some of them request we purchase all of their textbooks. We are managing this through education and a lot of communication, but it is still a problem that we are working through, and we don’t have a set policy yet. In terms of benefits, I could probably use this entire column to list them, but I will focus on the main ones. 1. Flexibility. We can purchase whatever our students and faculty need, at the point of need. If a new faculty member comes and identifies an area in need of more core titles, we can afford as many as they need — there’s no set number. If a program is added (or removed) we can add more titles in that area (or adjust our PDA profiles).

12 Against the Grain / November 2018

2. Efficiency. We don’t have to have extensive email strings between faculty, liaisons, and the collection development librarian to get “approval” to spend funds. Requests are fulfilled with no intervention from the liaison. 3. Resource optimization. In this case, I’m talking about staff resources, in addition to collection funds. In the past, liaisons would spend a lot of time looking through catalogs, choice lists, etc., and taking educated guesses about what patrons might want. Now, they are using that time to build relationships with faculty and taking on a more curatorial role — instead of searching for new things to buy, they are exposing our vast collections to their faculty. 4. Insights. Tracking the request patterns of patrons is fascinating. We are getting a better understanding of what students and faculty want.

Outcomes

We have continued to use one large budget bucket for monographs since its successful rollout in 2012. One of the big concerns that liaisons had when I proposed this new purchasing model is that their areas would suffer from not being actively “developed.” On the contrary, looking at the evidence, we think that the mix of resources has been enhanced, and the purchasing trends have simply mirrored the trends across our curriculum. I pulled data comparing our 2012 allocations with our 2017 expenditures. • The biggest change in purchasing was in the “multidisciplinary” category. This category includes the deposits we make into our current PDA pools — JSTOR eBooks and Kanopy streaming videos — and other online monographs collections. We cannot track these by subject in our LMS, but looking at the usage reports, they represent a wide range of subject areas including humanities, science, social sciences, and health. This subject category now represents 45% of our monographs spend. • Looking at the rest of the subjects, which represent title-by-title purchases, the biggest increase was in psychology, which increased by 8.75%. Usage data of psychology resources increased similarly. Psychology happens to be our fastest growing program. • The biggest decrease was in business, down by about 5.5%. Business has shifted somewhat to using more online resources that are available in aggregated databases. • The median change among all individually tracked subjects was about plus or minus 1%. For the most part there was very little deviation from the 2012 expenditures. So the patrons are doing fine in building these collections. • The only area that had no monographs purchases in 2017 were Interior Design, a program that was eliminated two years ago.

Future Plans

Now that PDA is firmly entrenched at EKU, we are actually taking a step back and looking at how we can also encourage serendipity through curation. We started a staff picks display in our main reading room, modeled after employee staff favorites at bookstores. Staff members recommend their favorite books and we attach a fun description to each book, as well as the name of the staff member. We’ve also started a robust rotation of thematic displays, tied in with campus initiatives or seasonal themes, and before we set these up, we purchase new titles to refresh those topical areas. So while we still have a single monographs budget, continued on page 14

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Textbooks on Reserve — Seven Years and Going Strong by Becky DeMartini (Head of Instructional Services, Brigham Young University-Hawaii) <becky.demartini@byuh.edu> and Marynelle Chew (Head of Access and Collections Services, Brigham Young University-Hawaii) <marynelle.chew@byuh.edu> and Michael Aldrich (University Librarian, Brigham Young University-Hawaii) <michael.aldrich@byuh.edu>

t is no secret that textbooks have been and still are prohibitively expensive for most students (Martin, Belikov, Hilton, Wiley, & Fischer, 2017; Senack, 2014). In the past we at the Joseph F. Smith Library of Brigham Young University-Hawaii held a pretty hard line, as did many libraries, about not acquiring textbooks that were currently in use. Per the collection development policy at the time, we would accept donations of other textbooks in good condition for the circulating collections, but that was as far as we would go. News reports about the high inflation rate of textbooks were prevalent. We had read articles discussing the link between textbook availability and grades and retention. Anecdotally, we heard from students and professors about the practice of textbook sharing, or worse, going without a textbook. Students frequently requested more textbooks in the library. That there was a problem nationally and on our campus was evident, and in our library we began to brainstorm ways that we could contribute to a solution. Before we launched our textbook initiative in the fall of 2011, there were a few other programs to help students on campus. There was a minimal textbook reserve collection, hosted in the library. These textbooks were brought over by individual faculty members and often were personal copies. The mathematics department offered a rental program for upper division textbooks. The computer science department had also begun a limited rental program. We heard from one instructor that at his former institution faculty members were required to deposit copies of textbooks in the library for students to use, and we were intrigued by this

Textbooks on Reserve ... from page 12 we are reintroducing librarian and staff selected titles into the mix. The great thing is that our budget has the flexibility to accommodate both approaches.

Endnotes 1. Price, Jason S. and McDonald, John D., “Beguiled by Bananas: A Retrospective Study of the Usage and Breadth of Patron vs. Librarian Acquired eBook Collections” (2009). Library Staff Publications and Research. 9. http://scholarship.claremont. edu/library_staff/9.

14 Against the Grain / November 2018

idea as a possible solution. There was little in the literature about this concept and we knew that we would not be able to get faculty or departmental buy-in to require the purchase of textbooks to place on course reserve. If we wanted to move forward with the idea that textbooks for all courses will be placed on reserve, it would be up to the library to make it happen. As we looked for ways to make this solution real, we considered many factors, including funding, staffing, campus relationships and the trend of declining circulation rates for physical books (a trend experienced by all academic libraries) (Anderson, 2017). As a small, highly residential, undergraduate liberal arts university, we wanted to make sure we were putting money into the resources that were most needed and that would get used. We decided to cancel low or nouse monographic serials to free up money to support the reserves textbook initiative. We also chose to cancel a few direct print and online periodical subscriptions, if the titles were included in an aggregator database and had little or no embargo period. Canceling resources is not an attractive option for any institution. While a research library might want to build a “just in case” collection, as a small undergraduate library with limited space we choose to focus on “just in time.” We do subsidize interlibrary loan (ILL) for students and faculty alike for “just in time” access. Thanks to ILL agreements, we can generally have articles delivered within two or three business days after request submission. Thus far, no one has been denied access to an article they needed for their research due to our cancellations. For us, canceling low-use continuing resources and re-allocating the funds better served our students. As we continued creating the parameters for this program, we decided that it would require some shifting in staff assignments to make it work. The start-up took two months to acquire, catalog and physically process the initial collection. Currently, staff and librarians devote an average of ten to fifteen hours per week in the months leading up to the new semester and continue to spend more time on course reserves tasks for the first few weeks afterward, as not all materials are in place at the start of the semester. Most of the time is spent on checking edition changes, course number changes and trying to figure out what will no longer be used. The amount of time spent has not noticeably declined, as every title must be checked by hand each semester and new texts

are introduced each semester. Although, we have found the level of spending for new texts has declined. We recognized that we would need a robust relationship with the BYUH Bookstore to make this program work. We began and continue to work with them well before each semester starts to acquire textbook lists, which we then compare against our holdings. We cooperate with each other for resolving bibliographic questions and in identifying textbooks that faculty members may list in a syllabus but not send to the Bookstore. We try to place orders through the Bookstore whenever possible, and they have been grateful for the continued support of the library purchases. The Bookstore had mentioned that they noticed a decline in textbook purchases from students in general even before our initiative. We also developed relationships with many of the department administrative assistants, as well as individual faculty members, as we have worked together to get everything on the shelf in a timely manner. All but one or two faculty members have been most supportive of the program. A few requested that their required texts be excluded from course reserve, and instead they promised to make available for free the materials needed to those students who have a hard time purchasing the text for whatever reason. We have worked out a formula to decide how many textbooks to buy for each section. Since most of our classes have an enrollment cap of 25 students or fewer, we decided to set the purchase of textbooks at one per increment of 25 students per section. In other words, if a course had one section with 25 or fewer students, we would purchase one copy of the textbook. The texts are available for checkout, in two hour increments, to be used in the library only. There is a possibility to renew the item if no one else is waiting for it, which often is the case. There is a $1 an hour charge for returning books late. One frequent request is to let books out of the building; we declined to implement this after feedback from Circulation staff who felt that this would result in more overdue items. Circulation Desk employees are careful to let students know exactly what time the book is due back when they are checking the item out. In addition, Circulation Desk employees track requested titles and alert us when we are missing a text or when more copies may be needed. continued on page 16

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Textbooks on Reserve ... from page 14 It didn’t take long for the word-of-mouth advertising to take effect. Textbook reserve usage averaged 6,500 transactions per year prior to the launch of the all-inclusive library textbook initiative. Immediately after students found out about the program, usage soared. We peaked at 37,871 transactions in a year that coincided with a temporary bump in enrollment, and we appear to have stabilized at just over 30,000 reserves transactions per year. In addition to the numbers, the feedback from students, faculty, and administration has been largely positive. Students appreciate course reserves and several faculty members regularly contact us to ask us to investigate the possibility of eBook availability or ask us to buy a variety of supplementary texts rather than requiring their students to purchase the books. Faculty members are especially mindful of those $250+ textbooks, and they ask us to lower our student-to-textbook ratio in some cases. We don’t mind acquiring more copies of the really expensive texts for student use.

Positive Comments Continue to be Voiced by Students Comments include: “Yes, books on reserve has saved me hundreds of dollars this semester!” “Yes, I love being able to leave my books at home.” “I don’t buy books because it’s too expensive.” “It really helps out poor college students. I use it when Amazon decides to [delay shipping] my books an extra month.” “They are fantastic, super helpful and useful!”

Rumors from page 10 educates and stimulates their students, but also by giving them these kinds of financial opportunities to help librarians go to meetings that support their work,” said Sung Tinnie, COO. “This essay contest was just one way we could say, Thank You to them, as well as offering financial support to an international librarian to travel to the Charleston Conference in the Fast Pitch Contest,” Tinnie added. “This will be my second time attending the Charleston Conference (the first time I attended was in 2016),” stated Price. “I prioritized attending this academic year because it has proved to be the best place to connect with other academic business librarians and learn about emerging areas in our field,” Elizabeth added. Elizabeth Price has been an academic librarian since 2010, she moved into her current position as Business Librarian at James Madison Uni-

16 Against the Grain / November 2018

While wildly popular from the students’ point of view, there are challenges on the library side. Keeping abreast of edition changes and dropped textbooks and course number changes is an ongoing, labor-intensive, tedious process every semester. In spite of this, we view the program as a success and one that has worked well for our campus. Recently, we have gone back to the literature to see what other libraries have been doing about textbooks and have discovered that some libraries took a similar track, such as the library at University of California Los Angeles (Celik & Peck, 2016). Other librarians took a slightly different approach. For example, librarians at San Jose State University gave a presentation at the Charleston Conference in 2012 regarding the beginnings of their initiative. At that time, their Provost provided stipends for faculty members to revise their courses using library resources. The librarians subsequently developed a portal making their eBooks easily discoverable (King, 2018). Librarians at East Carolina University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro jointly received funding to help with textbook costs. One strategy they developed was to offer faculty members mini-grants to explore no-cost solutions for students. Another strategy was that the librarians identified eBooks currently in use as textbooks and which were already owned or that could be purchased as an unlimited user-access copy (Thomas & Bernhardt, 2018). Looking ahead, we believe we will continue our current model for the next several years. While some faculty members have switched to using library-licensed materials and some regularly inquire if eBooks are available, the majority of our faculty still use traditional textbooks. There is currently no OER initiative under serious consideration on our campus. Course Reserves continues

to be the most heavily used collection in the library and we are happy to help contribute to student success.

References Anderson, Rick. (2017). “Less than meets the eye: print book use is falling faster in research libraries.” Retrieved July 10, 2018 from https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet. org/2017/08/21/less-meets-eye-print-bookuse-falling-faster-research-libraries/. Celik, O., & Peck, R. (2016). “If you expand, they will come: textbook affordability through expansion of course reserves: the case of UCLA library course reserves via strategic partnership with the campus independent bookstore.” Technical Services Quarterly, 33(3), 268–278. doi:10.1080/07317131.201 6.1169788 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library at San Jose State University. (2018). “Affordable learning solutions.” Retrieved July 10, 2018 from https://library.sjsu.edu/affordable-learning-solutions/affordable-learning-solutions. Martin, M. T., Belikov, O. M., Hilton III, J., Wiley, D., & Fischer, L. (2017). “Analysis of student and faculty perceptions of textbook costs in higher education.” Open Praxis, 9(1), 79. doi:10.5944/openpraxis.9.1.432 Senack, E. (2014). “Fixing the broken textbook market: how students respond to high textbook costs and demand alternatives.” Retrieved July 10, 2018 from http://www. uspirg.org/reports/usp/fixing-broken-textbook-market. Thomas, Wm. J., & Bernhardt, B. (2018). “Helping keep the costs of textbooks for students down: two approaches.” Technical Services Quarterly, 35(3), 257-268. doi: 10.1080/07317131.2018.1456844.

versity in 2016. Librarianship sure.” Heitman points to is her second career, following the need for universities to nine years as a newspaper make books more visible on copy editor and page designer campus, and I am reminded for the Lexington (KY) Herof Jim O’Donnell’s valiant ald-Leader. efforts to do just that. Kudos to Jim O’Donnell! www.businessexpertpress.com www.momentumpress.net Those of you who know Noticed that George Mame know that I am an optichovec and Buzzy Basch mist. I don’t think that this both like stamp collecting!! generation of students is much Have you seen the movie different from my generation Charade with Cary Grant, of students. It’s just that there Mackinnon (Yu-hei) Inglis Audrey Hepburn and Walare a lot more distractions now ter Matthau? A stamp plays a big part in it! than there were back then. Back when I was I ran into this article the other day — “Don’t in college I went to the library but it was not Close the Book on Books” by Danny Heit- to check out books. I wanted a quiet place to man (August 29 WSJ). It’s about a student meet my boyfriend that was private and was who didn’t like to read and thought that books not a “date.” What concerns me more than are a bore. “A 2015 survey by Scholastic anything is the fact that libraries and bookstores and YouGov showed a sharp decline in the “have pretty much gotten out of the book busishare of young people who read for pleacontinued on page 20

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Expanding Options — Promoting the Adoption of Reasonably Priced Texts that are Also Available as Library eBooks by Kate Pittsley-Sousa (Education Librarian, Eastern Michigan University) <kpittsle@emich.edu>

ccording to economists Carbaugh and Ghosh, the original cause of high textbook prices were lack of a completely free market and concentration of textbook publishing in a few firms, although price increases were further exacerbated when the internet increased efficiency of used book sales.1 In addition to promoting open educational resources (OER), libraries can increase student choice, lower prices, and support healthy competition in the text market by facilitating text adoptions from a wider array of publishers, sometimes aided by library eBook purchases. Typical practice at colleges and universities in the United States is to assign specific texts, limiting student choice to methods for obtaining texts, in what format, or whether to attempt courses without texts. Low income students might purchase used texts, rent texts, read a text on library reserves, or frequently make do without the text. Open texts, such as those from OpenSTAX, and alternative texts, such as those from Flatworld, often provide students with ideal options, including both an inexpensive print version and free/low cost online access. Custom texts and loose-leaf formats present choices that ultimately harm students by reducing opportunities to sell back texts and the availability of used texts. Large textbook publishers’ goal of moving toward a digital platform model, where each student must purchase access through a code or a fee added to tuition, can limit student options to either paying the fee or dropping the course. Librarians should encourage options that expand rather than limit student options. Rising text costs have caused low income students to withdraw from courses, take fewer courses, or make do without the text, sometimes thus earning low grades or failing a course.2 Although providing textbooks had not historically been seen as the library’s mission, faculty librarians at Eastern Michigan University formed a committee in 2013 to experiment with multiple ways to ameliorate the problem, including improvements to print reserves, promotion of OER, creation of textbook alternative finding tools, faculty seminars, and other faculty outreach activities. As part of these efforts, we took steps to encourage adoption of more reasonably priced books that might also be available for purchase as library eBooks. This makes it possible for many students to purchase a print copy, while low income students may have an option to log in and use a library eBook. In addition to OER efforts, the Eastern Michigan University

18 Against the Grain / November 2018

Library Textbook Affordability Initiative promotes text adoptions from university presses, scholarly/professional associations, trade publishers, and other specialty publishers that provide high quality books at reasonable prices. Promotion efforts include both ways to make finding books from such publishers easier and an option for instructors to request a library eBook version. We make text alternatives easier to find by providing a keyword search engine of selected publisher web sites and offering a service where librarians prepare a list of options. The scholarly publisher search was created using a free Google custom search app, embedded in a LibGuide. Other institutions have made use of this work by embedding our Google custom search code in LibGuides, by linking to a generic version of our LibGuide created to share the resource, or adapting the Creative Commons licensed LibGuide.3 In addition to the Google custom search, subject librarians offer search assistance when faculty consider alternate texts. We receive several requests a year, but not so many that the service can’t fit within normal workflows. Time spent on requests varies from a few minutes to several hours. Frequently faculty state in initial requests their desire for an option where students can purchase a print text. We provide information on OER options and on lower priced print books, available with or without the option to provide access to a library eBook. A few specific cases illustrate our experience. In one case, a professor requested a library eBook version of a title and when that title was not available as a library eBook, librarians quickly found an open access title well suited to course needs. A faculty participant in a textbook alternatives faculty seminar was dissatisfied with the only text available for an upper level course. We purchased several library eBooks so she could enrich her course with both OER and individual chapters from multiple eBooks. Another professor requested our help when the McGraw-Hill text rose in price to $325. For this graduate course, available OER did not closely match course content, but we found several suitable books from scholarly publishers at lower prices and some were available as library eBooks. The professor eventually chose a title with a reasonable print price that was also available as a three-user library eBook. Although he still prefers the more comprehensive McGraw-Hill text, he did not want students to pay so much when the other

book would work reasonably well. For most instructors, we observe that once a decision is made to move away from an expensive standard text, availability of a library eBook to use as a reserves copy can become a major factor in the adoption decision. Experiments in providing library eBook versions of titles assigned in courses were funded through two local grants. In 2014 we applied for a $4000 technology experimentation grant through EMU’s Faculty Development Center to acquire library eBooks for courses. We experimented with different eBook platforms that offered varying levels of access and digital rights management. Less than ideal timing of the receipt of grant funds meant that we sent eBook links to professors at mid-semester. Although by mid-semester many students would have already purchased books, statistics showed that most titles received some use by students and some received a great deal of use. This isn’t surprising, as we serve many low income students, who tell us they often forego purchasing assigned books, behavior similar to that shown in Florida Virtual Campus surveys.2 Library eBooks provided an option for students attempting to make it through the class without the book. Tips sent with the links included information to moderate expectations, such as downloading and printing limitations. Where eBooks limited simultaneous users, we warned students of possible turn-aways, encouraging them to read ahead if relying solely on the eBook. Statistics did show turn-aways where limited user eBooks were busy, but these were no more frequent than delays students might expect using print course reserves. Our largely working-class Midwestern students (many of whom are studying to enter human service fields such as teaching, nursing, and social work) seem to be tolerant of the delays. We experienced very little in the way of technical problems with students using the eBooks. Previously, the most frequent problem with course eBook use occurred when professors didn’t know how to provide students with a stable/ proxied link; here the library provided proper links. One small problem occurred when students attempted to save eBooks as browser favorites after logging in, saving links with no login trigger. In a second grant, described in greater detail below, we provided links to the library catalog with advice that students could save the catalog page as a browser favorite. We were interested to see whether eBooks with limited annual uses (non-linear or concurrent use model) could work. We did not run out of uses for any title during the experiment semester. We have since sometimes run out of continued on page 20

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Expanding Options ... from page 18 uses on non-linear titles, although the database vendor sends warning messages that allow us to purchase additional copies if necessary. At EMU most classes are limited to 30 students, smaller than at some universities. We were contacted by another university planning a similar experiment and they did experience immediate problems running low on numbers of use, perhaps due to larger class sizes or more sections using the book. We encourage instructors to also place orders for print copies with the bookstore — if the other university had not done so, that might also explain the problem. For those reasons, open texts or unlimited user eBooks are a better solution for large enrollment introductory course needs, while nonlinear or limited simultaneous user library eBooks can work well as a reserves copy for upper level elective courses (where there may also be fewer OER options). We continue to be uneasy with the non-linear model and tend to purchase those only where there aren’t other options, or where we expect less use such as for optional recommended course reading. In 2015 a second $5,000 grant from EMU’s Women in Philanthropy allowed us to create an electronic form for instructors to request library eBook versions of course books. The most difficult part of the project was getting the attention of busy faculty. Some requested titles were not available as library eBooks, but it’s quick to check on availability and notify requesters, while also offering to research alternatives. A survey of participating instructors showed that most faculty didn’t notice a difference in student performance, but 29% thought more students completed the readings. More than half the instructors noticed a reduction in student complaints on the cost of course materials. Most instructors planned to explore using library eBooks for future course readings and more than half said they would also consider open access course materials. Of students surveyed, none reported major technical problems using the eBooks. Where minor issues (such as pages loading slowly or

Rumors from page 16 ness.” Why? I realize that we must “adapt to technology” but, pardon my French, why are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Libraries used to be quiet places where you could hear yourself think. Are we willingly throwing that away? Saw this article in The Spectator the other day. It’s by Dominic Green and is a review of a movie called The Bookshop. The Bookshop, directed by Isabel Coixet of Catalonia, is about that mole-like impulse to burrow away from the world, and how the world still forces us to see ugly spectacles of human nature. Adapted

20 Against the Grain / November 2018

turn-aways) were reported, those same students reported that they would still choose to use a library eBook again. Most students who used the eBook stated that they did so to save money, and only two thought the eBooks were more convenient. Some students shared that if the free eBook had not been available, they would not have read the book. The survey population was small (14 faculty, 27 student respondents), but results were in line with our experience from the previous grant experiment. After two successful grant experiments, the Library faculty voted to change our long standing collection policy of not purchasing textbooks, now allowing purchases if the title was requested by an instructor and available as a library eBook. There is concern about adding textbook support to a collection budget already strained by journal subscription costs and any solution involving subscriptions would have little support. Because we didn’t foresee a large number of requests from faculty, we judged those small number of one-time purchases could be managed within the library’s limited collection budget. In the following years, we have purchased requested eBook titles and have set up eBook contracts with additional publishers. We’ve been able to fund the moderate number of requests from general collection funds. The number of titles requested and purchased has generally been less than the number of titles purchased during the grant periods (69 in 2014 and 56 in 2015). We haven’t been able to support comprehensive purchasing of all course books available as library eBooks (and getting timely info on text adoptions would be difficult), but there is great value in helping students in specific courses where we can. Since one motivation of librarians is to encourage healthy competition in the textbook industry, we should also ask: Could provision of library eBooks for courses hurt those small publishers? The revenue effects can be both positive and negative, so it would be complex to try to measure the effects. Sales effects may be no worse than using standard print reserves, perhaps less since students face printing/copying limits on most eBooks. We see that even our “born digital” students prefer to have their

own print copy of course books, so when a title is reasonably priced many students will choose to purchase the book over using the less convenient library eBook. If the instructor chose the title in part because we could provide library eBook access for disadvantaged students, the publisher gained sales. Many of the students who use the library eBook are students who would otherwise forego purchasing the text, but there would be some who would have bought the book. In many cases, the title we purchased was published several years ago with many used copies available. We are also mindful that many smaller publishers, while needing enough revenue to operate, are not solely motivated by profit. Certainly university presses, associations, and some specialty publishers might be pleased to see their eBook offerings support low-income students and the spread of knowledge in their fields. A program to support discovery of course reading options from a wider array of publishers and to further expand student options by sometimes purchasing library eBook versions can be an effective way to immediately help some students, to offer faculty more text choices than an OER program alone, and to support healthy competition in the textbook industry. Efforts have been sustained at EMU with no dedicated OER librarian and no specific funding from the university, aside from two small grants for pilot projects. Making use of the custom search engine, offering a course readings alternative search service, and providing library eBooks for some titles may be possible for even underfunded libraries.

from Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel of 1978, this is a minor-key pleasure, beautifully paced, skillfully acted, and thoroughly sad.” https://spectator.us/2018/09/any-storm-ina-port/ https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/anystorm-in-a-port-the-bookshop-reviewed/

Are you ordering more books than you once were? Joe Esposito, Roger Schonfeld and Katherine Daniel have launched The Library Acquisitions Patterns project. An interim report was published a few months ago. The final report should be finished by the end of the year. http://www.sr.ithaka.org/blog/understanding-library-acquisition-patterns/ Textbook affordability seems to be one of the hottest topics on the Charleston agenda this year. There are several panels on this including one by Joe, Gwen Evans, Mark Cummings and Mark McBride! https://2018charlestonconference.sched.com/ event/G8SM/the-librarys-opportunity-in-affordable-textbooks

Speaking of bookstores, hear that Barnes & Noble is up for sale and this article caught my eye. “Amazon killed Barnes & Noble; now it should Buy It!” Hmmm… https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/ amazon-killed-barnes-noble-now-it-couldbuy-it-14733932 Does your library order through Amazon or through traditional companies like GOBI?

Endnotes 1. Carbaugh, Robert and Ghosh, Koushik. “Are college textbooks priced fairly?” Challenge, 48.5 (2005) 95-112. 2. Florida Virtual Campus. 2016 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey. (October 7, 2016) https://dlss.flvc.org/. 3. https://guides.emich.edu/texts/presses. 4. Pittsley, Kate. Final Report EMU Women in Philanthropy Grant. (2016) http:// commons.emich.edu.

continued on page 53

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Subscriptions Approval plans Standing orders Databases Monographs E-Books Music scores

service | quality | integrity www.harrassowitz.de

TEAMing Up with Faculty: A New Tactic in the Textbook Battle by Christa Bailey (Academic Liaison Librarian, San José State University) <christa.bailey@sjsu.edu> and Adriana Poo (Academic Liaison Librarian, San José State University) <adriana.poo@sjsu.edu>

n 2015, the California State Legislature Table 1: Faculty recruitment numbers Fall 2016 - Fall 2017 passed the College Textbook Affordability 1 Act, also known as AB 798. AB 798 encouraged faculty to adopt high quality, open educational resources (OER) in place of traditional textbooks to help make college more affordable for students. The funding provided by AB 798 is managed by the California State University (CSU) Chancellor’s Office and is designed for the CSU and California Community Colleges (CCC) systems. Institutions could apply for up Faculty attended the first hour-long, in-person workshop where to $50,000 in the first round of funding. coordinators went over the grant requirements, including explaining The CSU had already been providing students with relief from OER, stressing copyright issues, and introducing Creative Commons textbook costs for a number of years. In 2011, the CSU Chancellor’s license policies. In the second hour-long, in-person workshop, past Office established the Affordable Learning $olutions (AL$) program. AL$ grant participants were invited to serve as mentors and share their That same year, San José State University (SJSU) established its own experiences of adopting open resources with incoming participants. AL$ campus initiative under the broader CSU AL$ program. According Both workshops provided coordinators an opportunity to work oneto CSU AL$, “By reducing CSU student course material expenses, more on-one with participants. It also allowed participants to share their students acquire the course materials they need to succeed and benefit experiences with one another. from their CSU learning experience.”2 Over the past seven years, the Challenges CSU AL$ program has continued to make progress in easing student As program coordinators, we were faced with several challenges. textbook expenses with AB 798. Recruiting additional faculty for future cohorts while simultaneously In 2016, SJSU AL$ coordinators applied for and were awarded supporting faculty already in the program, it became clear that scalability $49,000. This funding was earmarked to assist faculty in converting 49 was going to be an issue. The original vision for the TEAM program course sections from traditional textbooks to OER textbooks or mate- was to operate using a high-touch approach. Significant time was spent rials. There were several stipulations to the grant funds. First, faculty planning, organizing, and conducting workshops to introduce faculty to had to replace their primary required textbook with OER materials. the grant program, grant stipulations, and use of OER materials. HighSecond, all courses were required to achieve a 30% or more savings touch was possible when the number of participants in the program from previous textbooks costs. Finally, all courses were required to im- was low; as the numbers increased, the demand on coordinators’ time plement new syllabi that reflected the adoption of OER by Spring 2020. also increased. It was difficult to maintain regular contact with faculty At the start of the 2016-2017 academic year, SJSU AL$ co-coor- working on different phases of course conversion, which led to faculty dinators began working on a strategy to recruit faculty to adopt OER feeling as if support was available only at the beginning of the process. course materials. In order to distinguish this opportunity from previous Table 2 below shows the distribution of faculty and where they were Affordable Learning $olutions initiatives, the acronym TEAM (Teaching in the conversion process during the fall 2017 semester. Some faculty with Engaging and Affordable Materials) was developed and promoted. were working to develop an understanding of OER materials, while The decision was made that $1,500 in professional development funds others were searching for OER, and some were implementing their would be awarded to faculty as an incentive to switch their course revised syllabus. materials to open educational resources. To Table 2: TEAM participants progress, Fall 2017 reach the campus goal of 49 sections without exhausting grant funds, targeted courses had to have multiple course sections taught by the same instructor. In Fall 2016, program coordinators worked with the Center for Faculty Development to recruit faculty for the TEAM grant program. An email message invited all faculty to apply for the program. The message focused on one benefit: student engagement. Other opportunities to recruit faculty included: the new faculty orientation, library resource presentations, and word of mouth. Faculty had to meet the following requirements to Attrition rates due to changes in assigned faculty teaching assignparticipate in the program: ments, inability to locate appropriate resources, and departures to teach at other institutions affected course conversion rates. Not all TEAM • Submit an online application and participants were able to locate an OER that met their teaching needs. • Commit to attending two 1-hour workshops during the course Rather than sacrifice course quality, these participants ultimately decided of the fall semester Prior to the first workshop, faculty needed to identify which class to leave the program, though several were interested in reapplying to they wished to convert to open educational materials. Once a course the program with a different course later. It was often discovered that faculty members’ definitions and underwas identified, participants had to submit an old syllabus that included the name and cost of the required textbook that was being replaced. standing of OER, copyright, and Creative Commons licenses widely Faculty new to the university were allowed to submit the syllabus from varied from participant to participant even after attending the workshops. the last instructor who taught the class at the university. continued on page 24

22 Against the Grain / November 2018

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TEAMing Up with Faculty ... from page 22 The decision was made to leverage existing technologies; specifically, the use of research guides and the university’s learning management system, Canvas, to scale and redistribute work efforts, while increasing faculty engagement and understanding of OER. Workshops no longer needed to be conducted in person; all content was moved into Canvas, including past participant/mentor videos. Hopefully, this new format will provide resources for faculty to refer to continually in order to eliminate any misunderstanding of OER or copyright issues during the phases of adopting new open educational resources. Fund distribution also proved to be a challenge. As grant administrators, we were responsible for transferring grant funds to multiple individual departments. The initial plan was to transfer professional development funds to departments in the participating faculty member’s name. However, due to grant restrictions, funds had to be placed into a special trust fund and this process was not possible. In the end, the decision was made to use a reimbursement process instead. This process, ultimately, did not allow faculty to receive their funds as quickly as anticipated. Finally, as liaison librarians and coordinators for this grant, the greatest challenge of all was lack of time. Coordinating the campus Affordable Learning $olutions initiative on top of regular assignments as liaison librarians meant providing instruction, reference, and collection development support to two to five departments for each coordinator in addition to managing the day-to-day efforts of the AL$ initiative at SJSU.

Successes

The success of the TEAM grant to date has been in great part due to the key partnerships that were formed with the Center for Faculty Development (CFD) and their instructional designers. The CFD provided many training sessions and workshops that focused on active learning and redesigning courses to better fit the needs of the students. In this process, they informed faculty about the TEAM grant opportunity. Having a designated instructional designer was also very helpful. She taught TEAM grant participants about Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which made them aware of accessibility issues when searching for course content across the different OER repositories. A continuous partnership with the campus bookstore has allowed us to publish and maintain an updated list of “Textbooks Available as eBooks in the Library” for the past five years. This list, “is created by matching the list of textbooks ordered by faculty (provided by campus partner, the Spartan Bookstore, a Barnes & Noble outlet) with the library’s collection of multiple-use eBooks, which are freely available to students.”3 At the conclusion of their conversion semester, faculty were required to submit several pieces of information: • a copy of their revised syllabus • class enrollment numbers • reflections on the teaching experience • titles of the primary OER resources used in place of traditional textbooks Data gathered (see Table 3) indicates that the majority of faculty chose to adopt materials available through the library. Some examples of materials instructors used included eBooks with multi-user licenses, journal articles, and the library’s streaming video subscription service. The grant permitted the use of library resources as acceptable replacements for traditional textbooks. There is no direct cost for library materials and all students in a course can access electronic resources at any given time.

24 Against the Grain / November 2018

Table 3: Adoption of OER Resources

Faculty reflections yielded interesting responses. Asked at the beginning of the program why they wanted to join TEAM, many stated that they were concerned with students’ access to course readings. This was a sobering insight for those faculty that discovered that not all students were able to purchase required textbooks for their courses. By the end of the program, they discovered that it was more than just saving students money. As Nidhi Mahendra, a faculty member in Communicative Disorders and Sciences stated, I was able to free myself much more to include topics on ableism/disability culture, LGBTQ issues, [the] role of any professional provider/ educator in preventing bullying and discrimination and being an ally — these are not topics that are commonly included in textbook chapters on cultural linguistic diversity issues so I think I’ve studied and grown much more as an instructor.4 Faculty who have completed the program have received $1,500 in professional development funds, which are designed to support faculty in their teaching. Faculty typically use these funds for conference registration and travel. Other faculty used their funds to hire student assistants to support them in their teaching, and some purchased materials to be used in the classroom.

Program Assessment

At the end of the first round of funding, which is two years into the grant, a final report (see Table 4) was submitted to the CSU Chancellor’s office, AB 798 Final Report Round 1. The report included a list of courses with the estimated savings and the actual savings for each course. • Estimated cost savings was calculated using the following formula: Estimated Number of students (or enrollment cap) X The Total Cost of Course Materials in a Previous Term (Bookstore List Price) • Actual Savings was calculated using the following formula: Total Cost of Course Materials in Previous Term - Actual Total Cost of Course Materials X Actual Number of Enrolled students

Table 4: SJSU Final Numbers for first round (Fall 2016 - Spring 2018) of TEAM

Next Steps

Encouraged by the University President, program coordinators applied for a bonus round of AB 798 grant funding in June 2018. The amount requested totaled $50,000. In order to make sure that an additional 50 course conversions are met by Spring 2020, TEAM coordinators plan to reach out to curriculum coordinators and departments that have multiple course sections. After two years, the TEAM program has gained momentum at SJSU as faculty participants continue sharing their experiences with their colleagues. It is the hope that through sustained evaluation, modification, and improvement, greater numbers of TEAM participants will be reached and it will be possible to develop and promote a culture of affordable learning solutions on our campus.

Endnotes 1. California State Assembly. “AB-798 College Textbook Affordability Act of 2015.” (October 8, 2015). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient. xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB798 (Accessed July 20, 2018). 2. California State University Affordable Learning Solutions. “Welcome to Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$).” https://als.csuprojects.org/ (Accessed August 17, 2018). 3. Bailey, Christa and Agee, Ann. “High Textbook Costs: The Battle Continues.” (November, 2016). Against the Grain, v.28#5, page 18. 4. Bailey, Christa and Poo, Adriana. “Affordable Learning Solutions: Aiding Students One Textbook at a Time,” (2017) Academic Gateway: Fall 2017 Newsletter, http://library.sjsu.edu/files/documents/academic_news_2017_Fall.pdf (Accessed July 20, 2018).

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Digital Partners — An Incremental Approach to Supporting Digital Scholarship on Your Campus by Tim Bucknall (Asst. Dean of University Libraries, UNCG; and Founder and Convener, Carolina Consortium) <bucknall@uncg.edu> Introduction

With the arrival of each young, newly hired faculty member on our campuses, our research output shifts slightly from traditional to digital scholarship. Libraries nationally want and need to be part of this slow but inexorable change within the academy; to ignore digital scholarship is to deny our inevitable future. Many libraries have responded by successfully implementing digital scholarship centers that are capable of supporting a wide variety of projects and technologies, and can do so at scale. But how can small and medium libraries get from “here” to “there”? Most libraries lack the resources, staff, and expertise to launch a large, well supported digital scholarship initiative. Perhaps what is needed is an interim step that will allow academic libraries to engage and support faculty digital scholarship, with modest initial resources and controlled growth as demand increases.

Digital Partners

In 2015, there was a growing interest in new models of scholarship at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. To address this need, faculty began creating a digital scholarship center proposal that unfortunately included only minimal library involvement. The UNCG Libraries found themselves in a difficult situation. If we failed to come up with a viable solution to expressed faculty needs, our opportunity to lead (or even to be significantly involved with) our university’s digital scholarship efforts might be lost forever. But we had little time to develop a response. And, because this occurred during a year of budget cuts and belt tightening, we lacked the resources to move forward aggressively. Given the situation, creating a library digital scholarship center was impossible. But failing to respond at all was not an option. The UNCG Libraries chose a middle path by creating Digital Partners, an internal grant program that allowed us to support the most pressing and creative faculty digital scholarship concepts, while allowing us to strictly control the allocation of our very limited resources. Digital Partners is a competitive grant program, with annual calls for proposals. A joint library/faculty committee reviews the proposals and selects the ones that best meet the program’s criteria. Successful applicants are granted library staff expertise and time. Most of that comes from the Library’s IT department, in the form of website development, user interface creation, and database design and development. But successful applicants have also been granted time from Special Collections and University Archives (for a local history project, and for personal archiving); from Scholarly Communications (for eBook creation); and from Technical Services (for

26 Against the Grain / November 2018

metadata consultation and creation). Our stated cap on staff time allocated to Digital Partners is one half of an FTE per year. Given that these projects are joint efforts of the faculty and the UNCG Libraries, we selected criteria that we felt best served the needs of both groups. The first criterion is that each proposal must be submitted by a UNCG faculty member. Although we would have loved to support student work as well, we lacked the resources to support the entire campus community. And, during this early phase of digital scholarship support, we were keenly interested in building long-term relationships with faculty who will likely remain at our university for many years to come. A few early successes would create faculty “champions” who would spread the word to their colleagues campus-wide. The second criterion is that each digital project must be hosted on the Library’s servers. Libraries have centuries of experience with preserving and protecting scholarship and we intend to continue supporting that responsibility in the digital age. Because our faculty are producing works with long-term relevance and value, those digital objects belong on library servers. The third criterion is that the digital project must be open access. Freely sharing information is a core library value. It also serves faculty interests, because open access resources are more heavily used and thus have more impact. An unfortunate side effect of this criterion is that we are unable to assist with very important research projects that cannot be shared because they contain personally identifiable or sensitive health information. However, with limited resources we simply can’t address every conceivable faculty need through the Digital Partners program. The fourth criterion is that the faculty member must resolve any copyright or intellectual property issues. It is in no one’s interest to spend significant time and resources constructing a digital object that we are later forced to take down, due to copyright infringement. The library does have significant copyright expertise and is happy to assist faculty, so this criterion is perhaps not as onerous as it sounds. In order to be considered, each proposal must meet each of the four required criteria listed above. In addition, we give priority to projects that met three additional objectives. First, that the project has broad and lasting value. For example, we would not want to devote significant resources to a project that a professor intended to use only one time for

one particular class. Second, we prefer projects that relate in some way to extant projects. The UNCG Libraries would rather have a cohesive collection of related items than a seemingly random collection of interesting, but unrelated, products. Third, we strongly prefer projects that have a significant chance of attracting external funding. We are particularly enthusiastic about creating demonstration projects that support external grant proposals. The first call for Digital Partners proposals went out in 2015. We chose a January 2016 proposal deadline to align our grant timeline with three other internal faculty grants offered by other agencies on our campus. We strongly urged faculty to meet with us before submitting a proposal. In its inaugural year, the Digital Partners program led fourteen faculty members to meet with library staff to discuss their digital project ideas. One idea simply wasn’t workable. For six others, we were able to direct the researcher to extant resources (campus IT support, open source tools, etc). While those ideas did not lead to formal Digital Partners proposals, we were able to help them clarify their planning and project design, and help them move toward full implementation. We were also able to point some faculty members towards specific external grants, and to help them write the technical portions of those grant proposals. After careful review of the Digital Partners proposals that year, we were able to award grants to faculty members from English, Biology, Art, and the Center for Community and Family Studies. To make these ideas a reality, the Libraries provided consultation, expertise, and labor for geolocation, mapping, digitization, metadata, copyright, hosting, and database and user interface design. At the end of the first year, we conducted an assessment to determine if Digital Partners was achieving its objectives, and to identify which areas needed to be improved. As is often the case, we found that the benefits and challenges were two sides of the same coin.

Benefits of Digital Partners Building positive faculty relationships — Overall, faculty were thrilled to work with us. They felt that we shared their research and scholarship values, and we delivered on all of our promises and met all deadlines (which wasn’t necessarily the typical faculty experience when partnering with campus IT units on projects). Creating high impact products with lasting value — Our Digital Partners projects were continued on page 28

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Digital Partners ... from page 26 featured in national media and received external grant funding. Controlling our resource commitment — We got more proposals than we could possibly accept and complete. Because we advertised this as a competitive process for limited resources, we were able to turn down some proposals with no hard feelings.

Challenges of Digital Partners

Building positive faculty relationships — The reward of a job done well is...more work. Faculty loved having an IT person devoted to their personal project for weeks or months at a time, and understandably wanted to take the fullest possible advantage of that. Nearly every researcher asked us to expand the scope of their Digital Partners project, or to work on additional, unrelated projects. It is, of course, nice to be in demand, but we already have plenty of projects and we need to give other faculty a chance to get their projects done, too. Creating high impact products with lasting value — Every product we build adds to the

amount of time we need to spend maintaining our existing digital projects. More time on existing projects means less time for creating new projects. Controlling our resource commitment — We advertised Digital Partners as providing one half of an FTE for a year, to be shared among all the accepted projects. Internally, we allocated three quarters of an FTE because we knew we’d end up going over our resource budget. But our faculty kept having just one more excellent idea that needed to be implemented before we called their project complete, and we ended up utilizing the equivalent of about one and a half FTE on the four projects that year.

Plans for the Future

Our Digital Partners program was always intended as an interim step towards a full service digital scholarship center within the library. If we could establish a full service center, we felt we could discontinue the annual competitive grant process, and instead route researchers to the new center as ideas and needs arise. The UNCG Libraries are now in the process of implementing STARS (Scholarship, Technology, and Research Services), a suite of

digital services including GIS, data visualization, metadata, digitization, digital archiving, data mining, online publishing, copyright, large scale digital projects support, and more. We hope to have STARS in place sometime during the 2018/19 academic year. But we are finding ourselves reluctant to let go of Digital Partners. The bulk of the work that has come to us through that program has fallen to the Library’s IT unit, which is currently quite busy working on several externally funded projects (one of which is a major, multi-year initiative). Lacking the capacity to expand our commitment to faculty-initiated digital projects for the next couple of years, we will likely maintain the Digital Partners grant and process for the foreseeable future. Ironically, our short-term, temporary fix has become a key element of our long-term digital scholarship center strategy.

References Digital Partners Grants — https://library. uncg.edu/research/support/index.aspx STARS — http://libresearch.uncg.edu/ index.html

Creating and Marketing Textbook/OER Programs by Laura Pascual (Collections & Discovery, Assistant Librarian, University of South Florida) <lcpascua@usf.edu>

igh textbook costs should no longer be considered an unchangeable fact of academic life. Although learning outcomes and overall student success improves with access to course materials, use of expensive textbooks that hold students hostage to increased debt and delayed graduation can be reduced as low cost and no cost alternatives grow in number. Textbook affordability is a broad issue that ultimately requires intervention by many stakeholders, but libraries have important roles both as innovators driving the creation of new content and access models and as traditional liaisons between content selectors and available content options. In addition to national and state level campaigns, each local initiative contributes to challenging the traditional textbook model. The Textbook Affordability Project (TAP), founded at the University of South Florida (USF) in 2009 through the USF Libraries, has grown incrementally and exponentially with each new program and approach over the past nine years. The effect of the rapid and disproportionate rise in textbook costs was keenly felt at USF, a large metropolitan research university with

28 Against the Grain / November 2018

a high population of Pell grant recipients, and the need for affordable course materials was realized early on. Beginning with a faculty survey to gauge awareness, a technology fee grant was sought and awarded and a website was created to inform students and faculty. The TAP website (tap.usf.edu) remains the foundation of all programs, hosting tools, data, communications, policies, and information concerning textbook affordability. Open educational resources (OER) and textbook affordability programs continue to evolve as technology and business models for academic content change and alternative resources and purchase methods become available. One of USF’s successful programs has been Ebooks for the Classroom. Beginning in 2011, using a TAP web page with an eBook request form, faculty gained the ability to request the purchase of their selected title as a library-licensed eBook for use in support of coursework. The form’s fields included faculty contact information, course identification including the course and semester the eBook would be used, and book description elements

such as title, author, ISBN, and publication year to identify the exact item being requested. A database tracking this information plus course enrollment, student cost to purchase the print version, and library cost to purchase the eBook was created to track usage of the tool and savings. Librarians working with faculty promoted the request form or made requests for course materials on their behalf. Outreach efforts at faculty and student events included advertising the TAP website in general and demonstrations of the Ebooks for the Classroom program specifically. Other traditional means of requests for books through the library such as course reserves, interlibrary loan, and faculty emails or in-person visits were funneled to the system if the material was to be used by students for coursework and could be fulfilled as library-licensed eBooks. Mediated requests from the library’s demand-driven acquisition (DDA) program and low-limit or turnaway notices from previously purchased eBooks with limited access models were upgraded or re-purchased and added to the tracking system if course use could be identified. Processing of requests and collection of applicable course usage titles for these individual eBooks is a manual process requiring the time and attention of an electronic resources librarian. Coincidentally, the Ebooks for the Classroom program followed a change in the USF Libraries collection development methodology from a print approval process to electronic continued on page 30

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Creating and Marketing Textbook ... from page 28 books. Collections from major academic publishers allowing DRM-free content had been purchased, and one of the top five largest demand driven acquisition programs established. Much of the funding for purchasing eBooks came from technology fee awards, thereby linking tech fees, eBooks, and textbook affordability efforts. More recently, evidence-based acquisition programs (EBAs) for currently published eBooks from university press consortia platforms and commercial academic publishers with their own eBook platforms provide broad access to multi-disciplinary content for course use. In addition to requesting the acquisition of specific titles as eBooks for coursework through the Ebooks for the Classroom form, titles in electronic format can also be found in the library catalog. While discovery through the catalog allows faculty to find and select eBooks already held by the library, it also creates problems. The library did not know these eBooks were being used for coursework and faculty were not informed that titles chosen may have access limitations, as USF has a large collection of older consortially purchased eBooks that are shared single concurrent-user model or local single or three-user titles. The faculty were further challenged to determine a working link to the content to give to their students. USF created the new Ebooks for the Classroom+ tool (http://ebplus.lib.usf.edu) as a solution to these issues based on the course adoption eBook database in use at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who kindly shared the concept and basic code. USF modified and expanded the functionality to accommodate our needs. The first step was to determine which eBook platforms/ publishers would be included in the database and which fields available from the majority of the vendor title lists would be used in the standardized dataset. It was decided that both completely DRM-free eBooks from publisher platforms and unlimited concurrent-user ebooks with print/download limitations from aggregator platforms would be loaded into the database. This included eBooks licensed by USF, titles available through evidence-based programs, and those that could be purchased as single titles. Due to the scale (well over half a million eBooks) and the changing nature of eBook availability, normalizing, loading, and updating this data on an ongoing basis has been a challenging process, one that is continually being refined and improved. While the eBooks are also in the library catalog, with the exception of the non-owned non-EBA titles, the database provides faculty a convenient view of unlimited access eBooks with a clear indication of the publisher, eBook platform, and DRM status for printing and downloading (http://ebplus.lib.usf.edu/faculty). This information had been consistently requested

30 Against the Grain / November 2018

by faculty searching the main catalog and the response to this feature was very favorable. The searching method and results display were modified several times to improve relevance and readability. Syndetics book cover images appear in the search results and summaries are provided if available when the link to detailed information is clicked. Faculty can click for direct access to the eBook for review if the title is accessible without cost, meaning owned or EBA titles. If the book is found suitable for a course, faculty can click to request a purchase for non-owned or DDA titles, or click to adopt already available eBooks. This feature assures the book selected for course use by faculty will not “disappear” by being removed from the DDA pool, another issue with eBooks in the main catalog. A form appears for faculty to enter their name and email address and select the semester and course section where the title will be used. An export from the University course system is periodically uploaded to Ebooks for the Classroom+ in order to populate the course section drop box with the standard course section identifier and course title, creating standardized course information and making it possible for related course data to populate a transaction table for statistical purposes. Once the adoption form is complete, faculty can choose to adopt the same title for another course or return to the search function. If an available eBook was chosen, faculty receive an email with the direct link to the title (Ezproxy prefix included) for use in their syllabus or course module. If a purchase was requested, faculty receive an email indicating that they will be notified when the purchase is complete. An administrative function was created to mark titles as owned once purchased. Once marked, faculty who adopted these titles are automatically notified that the title is available via an email with the direct link to the eBook. Statistical reports can be exported through the administrative function. The Ebooks for the Classroom+ course adoption database tool can also be used from the student’s perspective. The student view, also available from the TAP website (http://ebplus.lib.usf.edu/students), provides lookup functionality by instructor name, course title, or course number, similar to the course reserves search function in the library catalog. An alphabetic by title display of book covers indicates all texts adopted by faculty for the current semester with direct links to the eBook contents. The faculty search page still contains the original request form for use if the title being searched was not found in the database. These titles are individually analyzed and manually responded to, although we have plans to integrate some of the automated functionality and data integration of the new system to the process. The new Ebooks for the Classroom+ tool took a team of collections, acquisitions, and metadata librarians, staff, and a library developer a significant amount of time to create, populate, customize and maintain. Development should be considered an iterative process. However, the time invested pays off.

Our goal is to make it easy for faculty to locate and adopt library-licensed eBooks that are available at no cost to the students rather than expensive textbooks. Once in place, the automated nature of the tool’s functionality saves librarian time investigating and responding to individual requests. Building on our experience with marketing ebooks to the faculty as a no cost to the student alternative to commercial textbooks, the USF Textbook Affordability Project moved to expand the OER/Open Access Textbook program. While having long hosted several popular open access textbooks on our institutional repository, engaged in funding and supporting the creation of multiple USF authored open access and multimedia textbooks, and maintained a list of open access repositories on the TAP website, we needed to introduce and connect faculty to available open content in a more direct way. USF joined the Open Textbook Network (OTN) and sent a representative to their Summer Institute to learn how to analyze and promote open content. As a result, USF TAP created and hosted a two-day Textbook Affordability Days event featuring Open Textbook Network workshops for faculty, faculty adoption support staff, and campus leadership. Of the faculty attending the workshop, 58% reviewed an open access textbook. Of those who reviewed OA textbooks, 52% indicated they intended to adopt an open access textbook for their course, and more were considering adopting. Overall 68% of faculty who attended the workshop are now adopting or are considering adopting an open access textbook. In addition to the workshops, a USF author’s panel discussed their experience with creating open access textbooks and OER, and a liaison librarian explained the process of finding and substituting OER for costly textbooks, using a USF course that had done so as an example. USF has recently transitioned two major high enrollment courses from expensive commercial textbooks to open access textbooks. The most important part of any textbook program is effectively communicating to the faculty their options and alternatives. They can’t use a program they don’t know about, or don’t have time to figure out. Changes don’t have to be all or nothing. Replacing some elements, or adding in some alternative content can help. USF maintains traditional course reserves and a textbooks on reserve program where print copies are made available for threehour loans for high enrollment and other key courses where textbook replacement is not yet possible. Liaison librarians and the Textbook Affordability Project team at USF are working proactively to advise colleges, departments, and individual faculty members of all the possibilities for saving students money. Every program and every initiative at every university is important and every library can do something to help reduce costs, save students money and time, promote student success, and change the current textbook model.

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Op Ed — Opinions and Editorials

Op Ed — Epistemology Fact or Opinion Column Editor: T. Scott Plutchak (Librarian, Epistemologist, Birmingham, Alabama) <splutchak@gmail.com> http://tscott.typepad.com

ow good do you think you are at distinguishing between statements of fact and statements expressing opinions? The Pew Research Center issued a report last June studying that very question.1 How well could a sample of Americans distinguish a series of factual statements (whether or not they believed them to be true) from a series of opinion statements (whether or not they agreed with them)? What factors might be at play in affecting one’s ability to make those determinations correctly? The results weren’t surprising. They used five fact statements, five opinion statements and two “borderline” statements, drawn from current topics in the news and found that only 26% labelled all five fact statements correctly and only 36% were right with the five opinion statements. Sizable percentages (28% and 22%) got them all wrong. The study defined statements as being “factual” if they were capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence and “opinion” as something “that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it.” Note that they weren’t asking if the respondents thought the factual statements were true, only if they were capable of being proved or disproved. That so many of us can’t readily distinguish statements expressing facts from those of opinion is certainly one of the reasons our political discourse is so toxic. The oft quoted remark from Moynihan is that you’re entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. So what happens to discussion when most of us can’t tell the difference? The report was in the back of my mind when I followed a thread on ACRL’s SCHOLCOMM discussion list in July. Robin Sinn had posted expressing concern (annoyance? outrage?) at Taylor & Francis referring to their option for making an article freely available in a hybrid journal as “gold open access.”2 Her assumption (as clarified in a later post in the thread) had been that “gold open access” referred at the journal level, not the article level and that T&F was therefore misusing the term (presumably for nefarious purposes). Over the next two days, most of the comments supported the notion that “gold open access” could be applied to individual articles as well as to journals, and examples were given of other such usage besides T&F’s. Comments came

32 Against the Grain / November 2018

from a variety of people including librarians, a T&F rep and others who’ve been deeply involved in scholarly communication discussions and debates over the years. Sinn appeared to accept that consensus view. Then Jean-Claude Guédon weighed in: “Gold open access (not open access as a stand-alone expression, but gold open access) refers to journals, and exclusively to journals. …On the other hand an open access article in a hybrid journal is simply an open access article, and that is not — repeat NOT — gold open access.”3 That ended the discussion. So is Guédon stating what he believes to be a fact or is he expressing an opinion? I’ll leave you to ponder that for a bit, but I’ll come back to it. Consider some of the other statements that show up in scholarly communication discourse: “…the profit margins of many academic publishers are simply not defensible…”4 In this case, the quote is from a comment made by Pamela Benjamin to a post on The Scholarly Kitchen, but it’s easy enough to find other versions of the sentiment. Is it a fact statement or an opinion statement? Keep in mind that the Pew categories don’t require fact statements to be true — at issue is whether there is sufficient objective evidence to prove or disprove them. Opinion statements are reflections of beliefs and values. I don’t want to ascribe to Benjamin views she may not hold, but on the face of it, you could interpret the statement as either fact or opinion. As fact, however, it is simply untrue — that is, those margins certainly can be defended, which is all “defensible” means. Whether one accepts those defenses becomes a matter of opinion. Read as an opinion statement, it appears to be saying something like, “Because of the values that I hold regarding scholarly communication, I will not accept any justification offered for those profit margins. I consider them to be antithetical to my values.” The distinction matters because if the person making the statement be-

lieves it to be a fact, when it is actually an opinion, and the person they’re talking to treats it simply as a fact rather than addressing the values inherent in the opinion, then they’re talking past each other rather than to each other. Indeed, that’s what happens in that particular comment thread and the discussion ends, having gone nowhere. There’s a similar phrase that one hears often — that the increases in journal prices are “unsustainable.” This phrase is used in two ways — it may be referring to a local situation, meaning, “In my library, given my budget, I can’t afford these price increases and I’m going to have to cancel stuff I’d rather keep.” But here I’m interested in how it’s used globally, when the claim, in effect, is that the whole subscription-based system is going to collapse because of these “unsustainable” price increases. This is an example of the third type of statement referred to in the Pew study — the “borderline.” Borderline statements may be based in objective evidence (the factual element) but have vague or predictive language that makes them hard to prove definitively (the opinion element). This is the case with statements predicting the global unsustainability of the subscription model. I’ve been hearing dire warnings about the unsustainability of the current system for decades. And yet, despite budget cuts, academic libraries continue to operate; despite mergers and acquisitions, the scholarly publishing industry remains robust; and despite decades of open access activism, the subscription model remains dominant. Does this mean the system will never implode and completely collapse? No. But the uncertainty makes it impossible to classify the statement as purely factual. A similar situation pertains to the debates about embargoes when posting OA copies of journal articles in repositories. Those arguing for embargoes claim that without them publishers would be exposed to an unacceptable financial risk. Those arguing for the elimination of embargoes claim that there is no evidence that current embargoes have continued on page 34

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Op Ed from page 32 resulted in significant cancellations. This is a fact statement which, at present, appears to be true. But it does not lead inexorably to the conclusion that elimination of embargoes will not result in significant cancellations or even that six month embargoes won’t result in significant cancellations in the future as the volume of material available under those conditions expands. When the people making the statements believe they’re making strictly factual statements, they are once again talking past each other. So, back to Guédon and his insistence that “gold open access” refers to journals only. Is he making a statement of fact or expressing an opinion? If it’s a fact, then it should be verifiable by objective evidence. But what counts as objective evidence in determining the meanings of words? Grammarians have endlessly debated the purpose of dictionaries — are they to describe the way that language is actually used or to proscribe the way that it ought to be used? If it’s the latter, who gets to decide? If anyone can claim the right to be the authority on the terminology of open access it would be Jean-Claude Guédon. One of the original participants in the BOAI declaration, he has written voluminously and persuasively for many years. If your inclinations are toward the proscriptive camp of grammarians, Guédon’s pronouncement may be sufficiently definitive. Personally, however, I’ve always favored the descriptive side and if you look

at how the term is actually used, for many people “gold open access” quite comfortably describes an article where the version of record is made immediately available upon publication. Guédon wants the usage to be less ambiguous, and in the abstract I agree with him. But in actual practice I don’t think we’re there yet. So I’d be inclined to label Guédon’s pronouncement borderline — possibly subject to verification by objective evidence, but thwarted by the ambiguity in what counts as objective evidence. One of the more fascinating findings of the Pew study is that one is more inclined to judge an opinion statement incorrectly as factual if one agrees with the opinion expressed. In other words, to use one of the previous examples, if your values lead you to the judgment that corporations should not be producing large profit margins from publishing activities, you’re more likely to incorrectly classify the opinion statement “large margins are indefensible” as a fact statement. If Guédon’s definition comports with your own, you’re inclined to take it as fact. The Pew study was concentrated on statements in the news and there are no doubt limits to how far one can extend its findings into the debates and discussions around scholarly communication. But it’s a useful exercise nonetheless. Much of the smoke and heat generated by scholcomm debates is driven by people taking their opinions as facts. They attempt to convince others with appeals to objective evidence when careful discussion of the values we hold and the

implications of those values might be more productive. It’s easy to assume that others must share our values because they’re so evidently true that they don’t require much discussion. Aren’t they? Sorting our way through the opportunities and perils of the flux of scholarly communication in the digital age is important. We’ll do a better job of making sense of it all and making decisions that are in the best interests of society if we pay close attention to the differences among the statements that we make. I believe that’s a fact. I think.

Endnotes 1. Pew Research Center. “Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News.” June, 2018. http://assets. pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/ sites/13/2018/06/07161621/PJ_2018.06.18_ fact-opinion_FINAL.pdf. 2. Sinn, Robin. “[SCHOLCOMM] Taylor & Francis and their ‘gold OA’ definition.” scholcomm@lists.ala.org. July 12, 2018. 3. Guédon, Jean-Claude. “Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Taylor & Francis and their ‘gold OA’ definition.” scholcomm@lists.ala.org. July 14, 2018. 4. Benjamin, Pamela. “Comment on: Anderson, Kent. ‘The Core vs. the Crowd — Why Barriers to Entry May Help Restore Trust.’” The Scholarly Kitchen. July 2, 2018. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet. org/2018/07/02/the-core-vs-the-crowdwhy-barriers-to-entry-may-help-restoretrust/#comments.

Booklover — Birds Column Editor: Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425) <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>

he American phrase “for the birds” connotes something that is trivial, worthless, or of interest to gullible people. Penguin Island by Anatole France, the nom de plume for Jacques Anatole Thibault, is not “for the birds” but describes the history of the mythical land of Penguinia where the inhabitants were once birds; but, have a curious story of how they became human. Published in 1908, the story begins with how a member of a royal family, named Maël, devoted himself to serve the Lord. He embarked on a missionary journey across bodies of water in an awkward vessel of stone. Unbeknownst to him he came under the influence of the Devil and found himself on an island in an unknown part of the world. Exploring the island he discovered inhabitants that he assessed to be simple souls but of pure heart. He decided to teach them the Gospel and then baptize them. Now the story really unfolds, as the inhabitants are not men but penguins. “When the baptism of the penguins was known in Paradise, it caused neither joy nor sorrow,

34 Against the Grain / November 2018

but an extreme surprise. The Lord himself was embarrassed. He gathered an assembly of clerics and doctors, and asked them whether they regarded the baptism as valid.” A few chapters of debate and it was decided. An archangel delivered the news — “Maël, know thy error, believing that thou wert baptizing children of Adam thou hast baptized birds; and it is through thee that penguins have entered into the Church of God.” Maël became concerned that if he left these newly transformed beings alone they might stray from their original teachings so he decided to bring the island back with him, towing it behind his vessel, to the coasts of Armorica. In a small book of 297 pages, the reader learns the details of the religious immersion of Maël, the baptism of the penguins, the transportation of the island, the ancient times,

middle ages, renaissance, modern times and future times of Penguinia. Called a “satire of the history of mankind” on the front cover sleeve, France delivers this story in such a way that it was considered his masterpiece. And in today’s tumultuous political world, it is oddly current considering that the author’s perspective is over a hundred years old. Jacques Anatole Thibault was born in 1844 the son of a Paris book dealer. His education was classical and he held numerous diverse positions, including a 14-year period as the assistant librarian at the Senate. Regardless of the type of position he made time to master his word craft and thus created an extensive bibliography during his career. He mainly worked at storytelling and novels, but explored most of the literary genres. continued on page 38

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Collecting to the Core — Our Common Future by Carla Heister (Retired Forestry and Environmental Studies Librarian, Center for Science and Social Science Information, Yale University; Environmental Studies Subject Editor, Resources for College Libraries) <cgheister@gmail.com> Column Editor: Anne Doherty (Resources for College Libraries Project Editor, CHOICE/ACRL) <adoherty@ala-choice.org> Column Editor’s Note: The “Collecting to the Core” column highlights monographic works that are essential to the academic library within a particular discipline, inspired by the Resources for College Libraries bibliography (online at http://www.rclweb.net). In each essay, subject specialists introduce and explain the classic titles and topics that continue to remain relevant to the undergraduate curriculum and library collection. Disciplinary trends may shift, but some classics never go out of style. — AD

s an academic discipline, environmental studies is relatively young. Its rise largely coincides with the first Earth Day, which was observed on April 22, 1970, and originally promoted as an environmental teach-in by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson. However, a few academic programs, events, and publications predated that inaugural Earth Day, including the environmental studies programs at SUNY Syracuse and Middlebury College; federal legislation on water pollution and air pollution control passed in 1948 and 1955, respectively; and several influential environmental monographs, including Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.1-4 The post-World War II era ushered in an increasingly global perspective of Earth and humans’ relationship to it, influenced in part by the first views of the planet from space, a number of environmental disasters (notably the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill), and a growth in international governmental cooperation through the establishment of the United Nations (U.N.). Indeed, the internationalization of environmental studies can be chronicled partly through the formation of both the United Nations Development Programme in 1965 and the United Nations Environment Programme in 1972. While both of the aforementioned works, A Sand County Almanac and Silent Spring, have broad, multidisciplinary audiences (each is included in at least four RCL subject disciplines), this essay will focus on another influential and seminal work for the field of environmental studies: Our Common Future, the 1987 report of the U.N.’s World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED).5 Early international publications that examine the human-environment interplay include the Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, World Conservation Strategy, and North-South: A Program for Survival.6-8 In 1983, the U.N. General Assembly established the WCED with members from twenty-one different nations and tasked it with building on these preceding efforts by devising strategies for preserving the environment while promoting worldwide economic development. The

36 Against the Grain / November 2018

resulting report, Our Common Future (also known as the Brundtland Report after the chair of the Commission, Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland) was published through Oxford University Press in 1987 and is recognized as one of the first works to define and promote sustainable development. The report is presented in three parts — Common Concerns; Common Challenges; Common Endeavours — and outlines a pathway for supporting global economic interests while sustaining shared environmental resources, insisting that “the time has come to take the decisions needed to secure the resources to sustain this and coming generations.”9 Our Common Future (OCF) has had a strong and lasting impact on environmental thought, including the popularization and definitional standardization of the terms “sustainability” and “sustainable development.” It has greatly influenced the subdiscipline of environmental economics, along with environmental policy studies and the multidisciplinary field of sustainability science.10-12 The OCF report is the mortar that made the foundation of both sustainable development and sustainability strong and permanent. The enduring value of OCF can be quantified by looking at citation counts in the literature over time, with a breakdown of its citation history illustrating that its influence has not yet peaked. The data referenced here is based on a Web of Science (WOS) Cited Reference Search using matches for over 900 citation variations for the Our Common Future report. These results show a steady citation growth over the thirty years since the report’s publication. Note that 20162018 is measured only through June 2018; by extrapolation, the total Cited Reference Search numbers should again exceed the previous five years within a three-year span.

Fig. 1 WOS Cited Reference Search for Our Common Future

Our Common Future defined and advocated for then-nascent concepts of sustainability and “sustainable development,” describing the latter as an approach that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”13 Prior to the publication of OCF there is little usage of the terms found in the academic literature; these terms now permeate the environmental studies literature and can be found in thousands of publications across multiple disciplines. Usage of the term “sustainable development” increased substantially following the publication of OCF. The Web of Science database was used to track the growth of the term from 1981 to June 2018. Here “sustainable development” was searched as a bound term. Again, note that 2016-2018 is only through June 2018 so by extrapolation the total citations for 2016-2020 should exceed the previous five years.

Fig. 2 “Sustainable development” keyword search in WOS records Looking at other impact measures, within the Scopus database, the term “sustainable development” is found in over 155,000 publications. “Sustainable development” became a Library of Congress Subject Heading in 1992 and as of June 2018, over 78,000 non-fiction book records contain the subject heading. A keyword search in the Resources for College Libraries database results in 146 titles with “sustainable development” in the item record (only 15 of these from the Environmental Studies subject list) and 498 titles using the search term “sustainability” (only 38 from the Environmental Studies subject list). The breadth of subject coverage in these search results belies the impact of Our Common Future and its interdependent influence, with monographs from agriculture, business, education, engineering, health sciences, hospitality, politics, urban studies, and continued on page 38

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Collecting to the Core from page 36 more, including: Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development; The Age of Sustainable Development; NAFTA and Sustainable Development: The History, Experience, and Prospects for Reform; Sustaining Abundance: Environmental Performance in Industrial Democracies; and Towards Sustainable Aviation.14-18 Together, the above numbers illustrate the broad reach of the concepts introduced in Our Common Future and its assertion of an interlocked relationship between the global economy and ecology. The report has been used in many environmental studies curricula throughout the years as a course text, with the most recent critical analysis for classroom use by Ksenia Gerasimova for Routledge’s Macat Library series.19 In the thirty-plus years since its release, Our Common Future has become the common past for a broad array of scholarly publications, across many disciplines and sectors. As such, it retains a central place in a core environmental studies collection.

Endnotes 1. Federal Water Pollution Control Act. P.L. 80-845 Chap. 758, 62 Stat. 1155), June 30, 1948. 2. Air Pollution Control Act. P.L. 84–159, Chap. 360, 69 Stat. 322), July 14, 1955. 3. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches from Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.* 4. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.* 5. World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.* Also found at the U.N. website as Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future. 4 August 1987. Accessed May 2, 2018. http://www.un-documents. net/wced-ocf.htm 6. Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. From Report of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, June 1972. Accessed June 28, 2018. http:// www.un-documents.net/unchedec.htm 7. International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. World Conservation Strategy: Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, 1980. 8. Brandt, Willy, and the Independent Commission on International Development Issues. North-South: A Program for Survival. Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. 9. Our Common Future, Overview. 10. Du Pisani, Jacobus A. “Sustainable Development – Historical Roots of the Concept.” Environmental Sciences 3, no. 2 (2006): 83-96. DOI: 10.1080/15693430600688831 11. National Research Council. Our Common Journey: A Transition Toward Sustainability. Washington D.C.: The National Academies Press, 1999. 12. Bennett, Drew E. “Geography and the Emergence of Sustainability Science: Missed Opportunities and Enduring Possibilities.” The Geographical Bulletin 54, no. 2 (2013): 99-112. 13. Our Common Future, Overview section I. 3. 14. Daly, Herman E. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.* 15. Sachs, Jeffrey D. The Age of Sustainable Development. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.* 16. Kong, Hoi L. and L. Kinvin Wroth (eds). NAFTA and Sustainable Development: History, Experience, and Prospects for Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.* 17. Scruggs, Lyle. Sustaining Abundance: Environmental Performance in Industrial Democracies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.* 18. Upham, Paul, Janet Maughan, David Raper, and Callum Thomas. Towards Sustainable Aviation. London: Routledge, 2003.* 19. Gerasimova, Ksenia. Our Common Future: A Macat Analysis of the Brundtland Report. London: Routledge, 2017. *Editor’s note: An asterisk (*) denotes a title selected for Resources for College Libraries.

Booklover from page 34 Thibault was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament.” I leave you with a few tempting lines from the timeline of the story of Penguinia: The Ancient Times — “‘I see them,” said Bulloch. They are creating law; they are founding property; they are establishing the principles of civilization, the basis of society, and the foundations of the State.’ ‘How is that?’ asked old Maël. ‘By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most august of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be consecrated by lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it.’” The Middle Ages and Renaissance — “The Penguin critics vie with one another in affirming that Penguin art has from its origin been distinguished by a powerful and pleasing originality, and that we may look elsewhere in vain for the qualities of grace and reason that characterise its earliest works.”

38 Against the Grain / November 2018

Modern Times: Trinco — “Ægidius Aucupis, the Erasmus of the Penguins, was not mistaken; his age was an age of free inquiry. But that great man mistook the elegances of the humanists for softness of manners, and he did not foresee the effects that the awakening of intelligence would have amongst the Penguins. It brought about the religious Reformation; Catholics massacred Protestants and Protestants massacred Catholics.” Modern Times: Chatillon — “Every system of government produces people who are dissatisfied. The Republic or Public Thing produced them at first from amongst the nobles who have been despoiled of their ancient privileges.” Modern Times — “No one doubted because the general ignorance in which everybody was concerning the affair did not allow of doubt, for doubt is a thing that demands motives. People do not doubt without reasons in the same way that people believe without reasons. The thing was not doubted because it was repeated everywhere and, with the public, to repeat is to prove.” Sound familiar?

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Book Reviews — Monographic Musings Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; Phone: 734-764-9969) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman Column Editor’s Note: There are so many ideas you kick around in your head. Opportunities you might go for. Articles you might write. Presentations you might want to give. And columns you might want to edit. Typically you have the good sense to walk away and let these opportunities fall into the category of considered, but not pursued. Think of the extra time you would have doing Sudoku puzzles, or photographing squirrels, or catching up on work. Yep… that would be great. Only it was not meant to be. When my wonderful colleague Regina Gong decided to go back to school to pursue a doctorate at Michigan State, she knew she would not have the time to devote to the Monographic Musings column. Regina did a fantastic job getting this column running in Against the Grain. She also developed her skills at negotiating, which is how I found myself as the new section editor. I learned a great deal during the transition to yours truly as column editor and will be thankful for her leadership for this column. So like a football coach who has been charged with the leadership of an exceptional team, I hope I do not mess up anything big! I am starting to build up a group of reviewers who are interested in critiquing books on collection management, library issues, reference trends, library administration and anything else that matches with the diverse set of interests for the Charleston Community. The one thing that I am introducing is a standard rating reference. Being a big fan of Ebert and Siskel (may they both rest in peace), I loved the way that they presented a clear way to show if something was worth watching. Roger Ebert used four stars (for his newspaper reviews in the Chicago Sun Times) to let you know quickly if this is something worth the time and money. So to that end, I have created the ATG Reviewer Rating that would be used from book to book. I came up with this rating to reflect our collaborative collections and resource sharing means. I think it helps classify the importance of these books. • I need this book on my nightstand. (This book is so good, that I want a copy close at hand when I am in bed.) • I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.) • I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.) • I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it with three to five days via my network catalog.) • I’ll use my money elsewhere. (Just not sure this is a useful book for my library or my network.) Thanks to Rachel Bishop, Sheila J. Bryant, Jane Meland, Steven W. Sowards, Katherine Swart and my colleague Sally Ziph for writing my first set of reviews. (Seems I too am also capable of bugging my fellow Michiganders to write these). If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain, please write me at <cseeman@umich.edu> or find me at the Charleston Conference. I’ll be the dude with the squirrel tie. And you don’t have to be from Michigan. You can be from any state or country for that matter! Even Ohio… Happy reading and be nutty! — CS

de Farber, Bess G., April Hines, and Barbara J. Hood. Collaborating with Strangers: Facilitating Workshops in Libraries, Classes, and Nonprofits. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, 2017. 9780838915424, 160 pages. $55.00 ($49.50 for ALA members.) Reviewed by Katherine Swart (Collection Development Librarian, Hekman Library, Calvin College) <kswart20@calvin.edu>

Look no further than TED Talks or Lean process improvement kaizens, and you’ll see why people are inspired by innovation. TED Talks gather an audience to listen to a dynamic speaker, undoubtedly sparking conversation (if not reposts on social media). Lean kaizens gather individuals who play key roles in a process (e.g., a library’s book ordering process), and together they collaborate on mapping the broken process and envisioning a leaner workflow (e.g., fewer handoffs). Enter CoLABs, the facilitated workshop model created by Bess G. de Farber. CoLABs gather strangers who otherwise might not have met and stimulate discussion around common research interests, assets, and goals. Outcomes might be knowledge of untapped resources, collaboration on new research, or problem resolution. But, isn’t that just another term for networking? It is, but it’s even more so about innovation. Just as higher education has followed the Lean trend (for better or worse), libraries are branding themselves as incubators for innovation. To help with this, April Hines and Barbara J. Hood have collaborated with de Farber on a how-to book about facilitating CoLAB workshops in libraries, classes, and nonprofits. The authors all work at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries — de Farber as a grants manager and nonprofit management specialist, Hines as the journalism and mass communications librarian, and Hood as the director of communications. The authors lay a foundation of why collaborating with strangers can lead to innovative ideas. They walk through examples of two kinds of CoLABs: 1) individuals representing their own interests and assets, and 2) representatives from different organizations. But, it’s not until page 28 that the reader learns how libraries fit in to everything. As commonly labeled “third spaces,” libraries can be ideal locations for CoLABs and librarians can serve as facilitators. Still a little fuzzy on what a CoLAB is and what it can accomplish? That’s okay. The authors say to embrace the ambiguousness of it all. Imagine a large university library hosting a CoLAB for its librarians and staff. Individuals identify their skills and research interests, and then participate in one-on-one “speed-meetings” with people they don’t know. This structured networking is meant to spark ideas, such as individuals with similar research areas collaborating on an article or simply knowing that Jane is the one who knows about instruction strategies. Alternatively, imagine a public library hosting a CoLAB with representatives from area nonprofit organizations. Individuals do “speed-meeting” and learn about grant opportunities or similar projects. Another example is professors asking librarians to facilitate a CoLAB for one of their classes. The added value of CoLABs is that the facilitators assess the process before, during, and after the event and glean success stories. After a chapter on evaluation, the authors map step by step how to conduct a CoLAB workshop in various scenarios. Clearly, they are experts in anticipating many potential situations, and they provide email templates, sample agendas, and even floor plans. This makes this book useful as a library considers these types of services. Overall, I think CoLABs offer creative ways for people to network with purpose and proof that the time was well spent. However, I have my doubts about whether all librarians will have time to plan the CoLABs, advertise, make handouts, act as facilitators, and conduct follow-up interviews. In some of the examples, I wondered why the library had to be the one to do all the work. Couldn’t the grants office run the event? I think the authors would say, “absolutely.” They have a workshop method that’s worked in their library, so it’s obviously feasible. In the end, if libraries are looking for ways to promote themselves, build community, and ignite innovation (there’s that word again), then CoLABs could be the way to go. ATG Reviewer Rating: Available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.) continued on page 42

40 Against the Grain / November 2018

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Book Reviews from page 40 Flaherty, Mary Grace. Promoting Individual and Community Health at the Library. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2018. 9780838916278, 144 pages. $50.00 Reviewed by Sheila J. Bryant (Science Librarian, Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing) <bryants@msu.edu> In today’s society, it is important for people to “be their own best advocate”; therefore, the public’s reliance on finding useful and helpful information on the internet has shifted into high gear. Especially when it comes to Health Information. When locating and deciphering health information, patrons in the community turn to public libraries for assistance. Public librarians are using resources at their libraries and in their communities to provide patrons with health information that is informative, credible, and easy to comprehend. People should have access to information resources to enable them to make informed health care decisions. Therefore, it is important that librarians engage with community patrons concerning health information. Mary Grace Flaherty’s book focuses on the importance of assisting library patrons with finding the necessary medical/health information they are seeking. It emphasizes presenting programs to inform patrons of resources and services they may not know are available. Collaborating with community organizations allows libraries to recommend materials and connect patrons with organizations and agencies who can provide in depth and needed assistance. Mary Grace has done an impressive job of demonstrating how things related to disseminating health care information work in a public library. Author Mary Grace Flaherty is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of Information and Library Science. She teaches courses on Resource Selection and Evaluation, Health Sciences Information, and Seminar in Public Libraries. She has written extensively on Public Libraries and Health Information, focusing on rural public libraries, outreach, and health literacy. She provides excellent examples throughout the book that include case studies and overviews of relevant topics. The key is to make medical knowledge more accessible to the average individual and the library’s role in bringing that to fruition. Collaborating with the community to take advantage of working with outside groups to tap into the wealth of resources available. In one example of note, Flaherty wrote a chapter on Health Programming in Libraries and focuses on programming resources, activities, initiatives and examples. The online resources provided and the case studies presented represent just the tip of the iceberg of the resources that are available to help plan programs for patrons. She also covers objectives, promotion, marketing, and evaluation, which all tie into the assessment of the programs libraries offer. It’s key to know how well something works. Public library patrons, compared to other type of libraries, are from all age groups so it is important that programs be age appropriate and planned accordingly. The “In the Nutshell” section at the end of each chapter does an effective job of compiling the chapter contents. I definitely find this work valuable. This book is a must have for all public libraries. Especially those with a consumer health collection. I believe all librarians, no matter their subject area, can benefit from this book. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.)

McNeil, Beth. Fundamentals of Library Supervision, Third Edition. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, an imprint of the American Library Association, 2017. 9780838915547, 256 pages. $59.00 Reviewed by Jane Meland (Assistant Director for Public Services, Michigan State University College of Law, Schaefer Law Library, East Lansing) <jane.meland@law.msu.edu>

42 Against the Grain / November 2018

Beth McNeil, professor and dean of the library at Iowa State University, draws upon her extensive leadership experience to create a modern version of this definitive text. This 3rd edition of Fundamentals of Library Supervision is updated with a contemporary new look and layout, while retaining the valuable leadership advice for which it’s known. The book covers a wide variety of management topics, including facilities management, budgeting, communication, inclusiveness and diversity, and legal issues, but its strength lies in its extensive coverage of classic personnel management. The book is organized into three overarching themes, starting with the smaller scale responsibilities of individual supervision and moving through the progressively more complex tasks of managing groups and leading organizations. The chapters covering supervision of individuals provide common-sense guidance on hiring, training, and evaluating employees; and McNeil includes several practical tools such as checklists, sample schedules, scripts and policy statements that could be adapted to any library. Throughout the book, McNeil uses practical examples to illustrate concepts. She brings the examples to life using fictional characters, Chris and Jamie, who are new managers leading separate departments within a library. I found these management scenarios exceedingly effective, especially in the section devoted to managing groups. Group management concepts such as team building, group dynamics, work styles, and project management are reinforced using these case studies. For example, in the chapter on planning and organizing work, McNeil explains the planning and implementation process for establishing SMART goals and objectives and provides a list of key steps in this process. She then provides an example of how unit manager, Jamie, would employ and execute this process in a library’s cataloging department. In the third part of the book, the focus shifts from the practical day to day aspects of library supervision to the broader goal of creating a professional and inclusive organizational culture. This section includes chapters on communication skills, diversity, motivation, the legal environment and career management. The book does a nice job providing an overview of each of these topics, but I found myself wanting more indepth guidance and advice. For instance, the chapter on communication skills included information on email etiquette that is common knowledge for most employees in the 21st century, while library managers who find themselves grappling with inclusion and diversity issues would want to seek out sources that are more comprehensive. Overall, this book is filled with valuable information on the fundamentals of library supervision and is a must-have for new and aspiring library supervisors. Further, the book offers something for seasoned library managers too. In fact, as a 15-year veteran library manager, I found this text reassuring and enlightening. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Atkinson, Jeremy (ed.). Collaboration and the Academic Library: Internal and External, Local and Regional, National and International. Kidlington UK/Cambridge MA: Chandos Publishing, 2018. 9780081020845, 252 pages. $82.95 pb. Reviewed by Steven W. Sowards (Associate Director for Collections, Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing MI) <sowards@msu.edu> The critical role of collaboration among academic librarians cannot be overstated. And while librarians might feel that they have been collaborating forever, and doing quite well, the need for assessment of our collaborations remains important. Author and Academic Librarian Jeremy Atkinson argues that collaboration on a wide scale is necessary in a 21st century information landscape, to reduce the risk that library activities will be siloed, overlooked, bypassed or marginalized. Current trends — especially the capacity for digital communication at all levels — make collaboration imperative for library visibility and success. The Index underscores continued on page 44

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Book Reviews from page 42 Atkinson’s interest in barriers and drivers that affect the success of collaboration; the importance of leadership, governance, trust, technology, and communication; and areas of operations that can benefit from collaboration, such as work with Information Technology entities, the exploration of Open Access, and success in licensing. Jeremy Atkinson has written an ambitious anthology with two primary goals. One involves factors in successful collaborations involving academic libraries. The second — and more important — involves “critical reflection” as an approach to improving the quality of library services. Noting recent work in healthcare fields where “self-consciousness (reflection) and continual self-critique (critical reflection) have been … useful to the development of continuing competence” (p. 5), the editor aims not only to present examples of collaboration, but also to reveal the contributions of a reflective and self-critical perspective. The selected case studies intend to introduce and illustrate this method and its potential, which is relatively new in librarianship. The case studies deal with projects that relied on cooperation between units within individual libraries, between units on a single campus, between library staff and library users, and between elements of consortia. About half of the case studies strongly embrace the editor’s intent. Those articles can appeal not only to librarians interested in the specific situations under review, but to those interested in the features and utility of reflective analysis. Other articles may appeal to readers with specific interest in situations that are similar to those described, even if those chapters are less effective in describing the reflective model. Jeremy Atkinson is a British academic librarian and consultant who has long been active with important British consortia. Atkinson has written the introduction, a reflective conclusion, and one of the content chapters. The other 17 case studies come from 33 contributors representing primarily British and Australian academic libraries; four of those 17 chapters draw on experiences with library organizations in the United States, Finland and New Zealand. To the extent that the point of each case study is illustration of the reflective technique, content may be interesting to American readers even when their experiences differ from practices in other countries. As part of the Chandos Information Professional Series (Elsevier), the intended audience for the text consists of academic library professionals. The content can be dense at times, but when writers have taken seriously the editor’s wish to highlight self-reflection, they often inject candor and insights and make particular chapters quite readable. Tables, figures and half a dozen color photographs support the text. An appendix of abbreviations and acronyms will assist readers who have never encountered SWALCAP, SCURL, among others. The brief chapters allow the reader to grasp the fundamentals of that particular collaboration and learn more with suggested readings (although the length of the reading lists varies widely). The editor provides his own selection of 100 significant books and articles about reflective practice and specific areas of library collaboration. The editor relies on the case studies to move beyond reflection as a concept, to identification of key themes, areas ripe for collaboration, and wider social contexts. The following case studies do a good job illustrating the reflective technique while also describing and analyzing projects of potential general interest. Chapter 5 by Stephen McVey and Sophie Farrar discusses the use of communities of practice (CoPs) to improve communication among scattered branch libraries in an Australian university. Chapter 9 by Steven Yates, Melanie Thorn, Amy Han and Megan Deacon discusses team production of a copyright-orientation guide at a major Australian library. Chapter 8 by Starr Hoffman describes effective and less effective practices for “embedded” library liaison duties at Columbia University, and is one of only two entries about work in the United States. ATG Reviewer Rating: Available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get the book or specific chapters within three to five days via my network catalog.)

44 Against the Grain / November 2018

Buchanan, Heidi E. and Beth A. McDonough. The One-shot Library Instruction Survival Guide. Second Edition. Chicago: American Library Association, 2017. 9780838914861, 168 pages. $50.00 Reviewed by Rachel Bishop (Research and Instruction Librarian, Van Wylen Library, Hope College, Holland, Michigan) <bishop@hope.edu> One shot library sessions commonly occurring at academic institutions have long been a topic of discussion over the past several years. The value and use of these sessions has been explored recently as our librarians are seeking to support students in a quickly changing information gathering landscape. Many librarians have lamented that a single library classroom opportunity, or the one-shot library session, has often been thought of as an incomplete attempt to teach students the skill sets necessary to navigate information, let alone to understand the broad and complex structures of information literacy and its applications. Yet, due to limited resources and sometimes a lack of institutional understanding and support towards these important skill sets, many librarians find themselves tied to teaching one-shots as their only course of action. Heidi Buchanan and Beth McDonough have written the second edition to their first book published in 2014. Both Buchanan and McDonough are librarians at Western Carolina University and have (from their biography) “more than thirty years of combined experience teaching information literacy.” In this book, the authors provide an excellent resource to guide readers through the special situations of the one shot library session by offering tips and insights gathered from the experiences of academic instruction librarians from various institutions. Their first edition was written in response to inquiries from their ACRL preconference workshop on the topic. Their second edition addresses these concepts and while incorporating how the one-shot library session can work well within the 2015 ACRL Frameworks on Information Literacy. The authors have done a great job in not just writing a cookie-cutter recipe book for instruction. The authors understand the myriad of different situations that arise in teaching one-shot library instruction sessions. They offer different methods to illustrate ways of tailoring approaches to instruction in order for librarians to accommodate these differences. The book is organized so that each chapter separately addresses several pedagogical and organizational issues to the one-shot library session. Chapter topics include: student engagement, assessment, scope of instructional content, and collaboration with academic instructors. The emphasis on flexibility throughout the book allows the reader to create customizable instructional programs. For example, the chapter on student engagement provides several different and varied strategies to facilitate successful active student learning derived and cited from seasoned/expert librarian teachers in the field in order to provide the reader with many examples to follow. Buchanan and McDonough have done a good job of incorporating key aspects of the ACRL Frameworks on Information Literacy and have devoted an entire chapter devoted to this topic. Chapter three (“but how will I cover everything”) breaks down and specifies the six ACRL frameworks in the context of one-shot instruction sessions. The authors focus on student learning to provide instructional librarians with tools to create meaningful learning outcomes for each student. Like all resources, I find value in guides offering examples from various sources and this one provides that to any librarian who needs some inspiration for informing their goals of achieving a successful one-shot library session within the ACRL framework. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.) continued on page 46

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Wryly Noted — Books About Books Column Editor: John D. Riley (Against the Grain Contributor and Owner, Gabriel Books) <jdriley@comcast.net> https://www.facebook.com/Gabriel-Books-121098841238921/ The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax. (ISBN: 978-1-61039-821-3, Public Affairs 2017, $16.99 pb.) The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack. (ISBN: 978-0-300-12045-5, Yale University Press 2012, $30.00 hb.) Nam June Paik: Global Visionary by John G. Hanhardt and Ken Hakuta. (ISBN: 978-1-907804-20-5, Smithsonian American Art Museum 2012, $55.00 hb.) Comic Book History of Comics: Birth of a Medium by Fred Van Lente. (ISBN: 978-1-63140-925-7, IDW Publishing 2017, $19.95 pb.)

y column for this issue is an omnium gatherum of books that reflect a summer’s worth of reading and traveling. I always like to buy books whenever I visit a museum or new bookstore. I feel like supporting the effort of the booksellers and I always find something unique while I’m at it. This summer I visited the new Harvard art museum which brings together three older art museums under one roof in a new building designed by Renzo Piano. The Fogg, Sackler, and Busch-Reisinger Art Museums have all been brought together in a collection that rivals any other art museum in New England, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I came

specially to see their multimedia exhibit dedicated to Nam June Paik and found an excellent book on his career there. Later in the summer I visited the Clark Art Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. This is another World Class museum that houses some of the finest Impressionist paintings in the world. The Singer sewing machine family amassed a grand collection at a time when, oddly enough, Impressionism was out of favor in France. The Family also funded the building of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I had come to the museum to view a special collection of women Impressionist painters. While there I found The Woman Reader a unique

Book Reviews from page 44 Hibner, Holly and Mary Kelly. Taking Your Library Career to the Next Level: Participating, Publishing, and Presenting. Cambridge, MA: Chandos Publishing, an imprint of Elsevier, 2017. eBook ISBN: 9780081022719 Paperback ISBN: 9780081022702. 120 pages. $78.95 Reviewed by: Sally Ziph (Librarian, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) <sweston@umich.edu> We all know professional development is important, but how do you get started, especially if you’re new to librarianship? Public librarians Holly Hibner and Mary Kelley (both from the Plymouth District Library in Michigan) have written a wonderful guide to lead the way. Hibner and Kelley are the creators of the website Awful Library Books (http://awfullibrarybooks.net/) and are the authors of the Public Library Association Weeding Manual, 2016 and Making a Collection Count: a Holistic Approach to Library Collection Management (Chandos, 2013). Taking Your Library Career to the Next Level: Participating, Publishing, and Presenting has answers that you will need to take that next step. This is an indispensable little book for any librarian who wants

46 Against the Grain / November 2018

book which is focused on books that women have read over the ages. While on vacation in Maine I visited a new bookshop in Portland that is owned by the daughter of New England author Richard Russo. The shop is called simply “Print: a Bookstore.” It is a perfect example of The Revenge of the Analog with its expansive sections on writing, editing, and books about books. Luckily Comic Book History of Comics came across the desk at my bookshop Gabriel Books and I avidly took it home to read, as I had never been a huge comic book reader other than during the Underground Comic era in the 60s and I wanted to know about the history of such a popular medium. In research for his book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, Mr. Sax says he found that it was less a case of older generations reaching back to familiar formats from their youth than teenagers and 20-somethings discovering turntables and LPs, paperback novels and film cameras. “The younger someone was, the more digitally exposed their generation was,” he writes near the end of this book, “the less I found them enamored by digital technology, and the more they were wary of its effects.” These kids were falling in love with analog. The author explores the so called “analog technologies” such as vinyl records, print continued on page 47

to ramp up their professional development efforts with an eye toward gaining tenure or credentials. It’s packed with useful strategies for creating a “personal brand” as well as gaining name recognition through social media, publishing and presenting. It would be especially useful for early career librarians. According to Hibner and Kelly, “Brands are short-handed labels for you as a person and a professional.” They suggest creating a personal brand by focusing on a topic of interest in your job or in the larger profession. Your personal website is the “home base for your brand efforts,” and the book contains helpful tips for creating content and leveraging social media, with tips for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Examples of a brand include the authors’ website, Awful Library Books (http://awfullibrarybooks.net/). The book also contains useful advice on publishing and presenting. The chapter on “Publishing” includes advice on partnering with other librarians, open access, self-publishing, the peer review process, copyright and more. The chapter on “Presenting” is particularly useful to the new professional, covering common concerns such as stage fright, advice on writing conference proposals and practical tips for creating dynamic presentations. Finally, the book is an easy read at 120 pages and a goldmine of information on “how to do” professional development in an enjoyable, down-to-earth and career-enriching way. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.)

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Wryly Noted from page 46 books, hand written notebooks, film cameras and movies, and board games. The author previously wrote a book on the survival of old time delicatessens, Save the Deli: In search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of the Jewish Delicatessen, so he is both a fan and champion of the tried and true. In the book he also notes that the new fans of delis are younger people in search of “authentic tastes.” He is lucky to be a Canadian and to be able to enjoy the thriving Jewish deli culture that still lives on in Montreal. The author has a great chapter on the popularity of hand written notebooks, focusing on the rise of the Moleskine line of notebooks that sell over twenty million copies a year. The company consciously sought to imitate an older style of notebook, binding each one in supple leather to enhance its tactile properties. They even created ads featuring Ernest Hemingway and other writers who had used such hand wrought notebooks for their travel jottings. I still find my wire coil pocket notebook to be the most effective way to capture quick notes and to store the writings for future reference. The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack is a scholarly look at women’s reading habits from Ancient Egypt and China up to our modern era. The author made great use of diaries and even some library catalogs to trace these reading patterns. She makes note of how women were discouraged from reading and gaining literacy skills for many centuries. One interesting anecdote tells the tale of one woman who found a way to surmount that difficulty. In the Middle Ages under scholasticism women were banned from the universities, but some found novel ways to circumvent those rules, such as cross dressing to gain admission to classes. In Krakow, Poland towards the end of the fourteenth century a young woman who had inherited a large fortune, perhaps from her deceased husband, disguised herself as a man and studied for two years. When her cover was blown and she was brought before a tribunal to find out why she had done this she replied “Amor studii” or love of learning. The judge of the tribunal understood her passion and she was then made an abbess who worked diligently to encourage reading and learning among the young women in her charge. There are similar stories from Islamic and Jewish medieval culture where women found a way to pursue reading and learning. Some went on to flourish as scholars in those traditions. We now live in an era where we are well aware of the impact of women as the prime movers in the world of reading Nam June Paik: Global Visionary is a bit of an anomaly on this list, since it deals with video art. I am particularly interested in video and I found this to be a great introduction to this revolutionary video artist. I was familiar with some of Paik’s work, such as his cello piece where a woman played a “cello” that was actually constructed from

Against the Grain / November 2018

two television sets. He was also famous in his day for creating towers of television sets and even “gardens” of glowing cathode ray tubes. Paik worked during an era when selfmade videos and their broadcast on television was very new, in fact he was the innovator in this area. He was definitely a utopian and sought to humanize technology and sought to make a world-wide art form that was critical of contemporary programming. Paik collaborated with Joseph Beuys and John Cage and he was part of the Fluxus Neo-Dada movement. To see more of what Paik created you could check out his video Good Morning Mr. Orwell, broadcast world-wide by satellite in 1984 or even my short video on YouTube entitled Nam June Paik Exhibit at Harvard Art Museum. The Smithsonian Museum is the repository for Paik’s archives and art works, as they are perhaps the only museum capable of working with the artist’s by now obsolete television and video technologies. As mentioned above, I was happy to discover Comic Book History of Comics which tells a thorough history of the genre from “The Yellow Kid” (which incidentally gave name to Yellow Journalism as it ran in William Randolph Hearst’s jingoistic papers) through stand-alone comic books, animated movie cartoons, and our modern explosion of interest in “sequential art.” I had never followed comic books much, so I was happy to discover this book which recounts its history in a comic book form that allows it to illustrate and even parody its subject matter. I was also happy to find out more about the prolific careers of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Will Eisner. I was also surprised to find out more about early women and minority comic book artists. It was fun to find out that Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train and the Talented Mr. Ripley, began her career fresh out of Barnard as a comic book script writer, a trade she kept at for nearly seven years. The only drawback I found in the book was its obsessive tracking of the vagaries of comic book publishing houses and their rivalries. The fact that publishing comic books was so fad oriented is driven home by the many incarnations that these companies took trying to stay solvent. Comics also took a big hit in 1953 with the imposition of the Comics Code Authority which sought to censor the adventurous, albeit violent, trend in comics at the time. The code gave rise to the more innocuous comics of the 1950s. Mad Magazine managed to evade the 1953 code by using a slick paper stock for their covers and thus qualified as a “magazine” and so skirted all the rules. Mad has been a savior of youthful sanity throughout its long publishing history. It was only with the rise of Underground Comics in the 1960s and their different distribution channels (i.e., headshops) that comics were freed up again to be their raucous anarchic selves. We are now in an explosion of what Will Eisner termed “sequential art” with comics available everywhere and the rise of the graphic novel giving artists even more room to innovate.

<http://www.against-the-grain.com>

American Indian Newspapers A new digital primary source collection From historic pressings to contemporary periodicals, explore nearly 200 years of Indigenous print journalism from the US and Canada. With newspapers representing a huge variety in publisher, audience and era, discover how events were reported by and for Indigenous communities. Key features: • • • •

Article-level searching and browsing Contextual essays Visual galleries Interactive data visualisations

www.amdigital.co.uk info@amdigital.co.uk

Quartex, the digital publishing platform from Adam Matthew Digital, makes archival content discoverable, searchable, and accessible.

Key features: • Out-of-the box, flexible and intuitive platform • Simple upload of assets and metadata from existing platforms and repositories • Can be branded, and tailored to individual institution’s needs • Increases discoverability and searchability of your content • OCR and HTR technology available • Responsively designed for tablets and mobiles

www.quartexcollections.com info@quartexcollections.com

ATG Interviews George Machovec Executive Director of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries and Managing Editor of The Charleston Advisor by Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> ATG: George you’ve worked for the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries for nearly 26 years, the last 7 years as the Executive Director. Over that time, how have library consortiums like “The Alliance” changed in the ways they operate and in the services that they provide? What challenges have library consortiums like yours had to overcome? GM: The one common characteristic among library consortia is that they are all different. The modern consortial movement coalesced in the 1990s and was spurred by the Internet and group licensing of e-resources. Virtually all consortia have as goals reducing costs for their members, sharing expertise, and collaborating in programs and services that may not otherwise be possible. But how this plays out in a regional setting varies greatly. The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries was incorporated as a non-profit 501c3 in 1981 and currently has 16 member libraries with one library in Wyoming (University of Wyoming) and one public library (Denver Public Library). The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries was begun in the early 1970s to promote the purchase of expensive resources such as Gmelin, Beilstein, Sadtler spectra, microform sets and others. These were physical items held at one library but funded by the group with associated resource sharing agreements. By the 1980s the Colorado Alliance developed its own integrated library system since commercial offerings at the time were few and problematic. The product was sold in the 1990s (now part of TLC) and the consortia moved into group licensing and the development of a union catalog (called Prospector which operates on INN-Reach software). In the 2000s, the Colorado Alliance starting a shared digital repository service which it successfully operated for about eight years and the service was eventually returned to the local libraries for continued operation. Another service begun by the Alliance in the early 2000s was the development of Gold Rush which served as an ERMS, link resolver, A-Z service, and content comparison tool. When the Alliance develops services, it will allow other non-members to use them with an added surcharge. The biggest challenge for our consortium and others like us is maintaining a positive return on investment (ROI) for members. In our case, we are funded by member assessments with some additional funding coming from licensing some of our software. Our programs and services must provide both qualitative and quantitative benefits that meet the needs of our members.

50 Against the Grain / November 2018

ATG: Speaking specifically of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, can you tell us more about what it does? What key benefits do you provide your member libraries? Which of the various services that the consortium provides, are you most proud? GM: The current Colorado Alliance consortium continues some of its older services but also has developed new programs and services to meet the needs of its members. The Prospector union catalog began in 1999 with eight libraries and has now grown to 50 academic and public libraries and last year about 500,000 items were lent through the system. The e-resource licensing program at the Colorado Alliance now licenses more than 250 products with an annual cost of over $15 million. This is quite a large number considering that it represents 16 libraries. Different modules of the Gold Rush software suite are used by about 50 libraries around North America with the popular new module of the Library Content Comparison System. The Alliance Shared Print Trust was begun in 2015 and over 1.1 million items now have long-term retention commitments (until at least 2040), and the number is growing. This program allows libraries to tag in the catalog record which materials they intend to keep for the long-term and then other libraries in the region can weed materials based on those commitments. This program is tied very closely to the union catalog because if a site is weeding based on the holdings of others, then patrons need a way to easily find and request items from all libraries in the region. To support this program, the Colorado Alliance developed its own Library Content Comparison System inside the Gold Rush framework so that libraries could easily identify uniqueness and overlap of their holdings.

A variety of tools are offered in the system to tailor these comparisons with many ways to export data. We’ve found the software to be useful for not only the shared print program but also for building programs, collaborative collection development, populating discover layers, and other cool uses. The Colorado Alliance has also embarked on a linked data program using Bibframe. Conversion software in the Gold Rush framework can convert MARC records into Bibframe 2.0 along with associated RDF triples to support a variety of possible uses. ATG: We noticed that you recently moved your data center from its current location at the organization’s headquarters to the University of Denver. Can you talk about that and what it says about growth and change at “The Alliance”? GM: The Alliance has operated its own servers since the 1980s. We have looked into cloud hosting on AWS, Microsoft Azure and other similar services but found that with the high number of transactions coupled with the need for a great deal of storage that the costs for hosting at commercial cloud services is still too high. In 2017, the Alliance hired an outside firm to do a security audit and it’s one of the most important things we’ve recently done. In addition, to identifying cybersecurity weaknesses and the need to update various pieces of software, the audit also looked at physical security. Up until this point, our data center was just a room in our commercial office space and the audit identified numerous vulnerabilities. The University of Denver (DU) allowed us to move our entire hardware infrastructure to locked cabinets in one of their computer rooms which brought a plethora of advantages that were not possible in our earlier space. The consortium was able to take advantage of their excellent air conditioning, UPS (with diesel back-up), greater facility security, access to faster Internet through their Internet 2 connection, etc. DU has been a wonderful partner and they allow staff full access to hardware, networking, and our own firewalls. Finally, the space offers much more growth room for Alliance servers and storage arrays so that if growth is needed, it can easily be done without worrying about limitations extant in our former data center. ATG: If you were to predict a future for the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, what would it look like? GM: I think the future of our consortium, and many others, are built on the past with evolutionary changes to stay relevant. For continued on page 51

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Interview — George Machovec from page 50 example, although academic libraries are seeing a substantial decline in circulation, shared print programs which are supported through union catalogs and other finding tools bring new importance to the legacy collection which may no longer be housed in a local library. In our own consortium, I foresee that group licensing will continue to grow, collaborative collection development will be enhanced to avoid creating the duplicative purchasing of print, linked data programs will develop and evolve, open educational resources (OER) will be increasingly important, etc. We have always been big proponents of academic and public library partnerships. Our union catalog, Prospector, has 50 libraries with about half being academic and the other half being public libraries. Partnering with public libraries is a huge area of growth for us. Even if a library is not a formal member of the consortium, we allow any library to join any of our initiatives by paying an extra surcharge. ATG: George, you also wear another hat as the managing editor of “The Charleston Advisor.” For our readers who may not be familiar with the journal, can you tell us about “The Charleston Advisor?” What is its purpose and what is your role as managing editor? How about the nuts and bolts? Can you give us the details like frequency, format, and price? GM: The Charleston Advisor (TCA) was launched in 1999 and is now in volume 20! It was the brainchild of Katina Strauch, and Becky Lenzini. Others who also saw the need for an objective review tool for e-resources since libraries were spending more and more on digital resources amplified the concept and The Advisor was born. The goal was to only review products that were available on the Web and not products distributed on CD-ROM or DVD which were also popular at that time. The journal is published on a quarterly basis with about a dozen reviews per issue and subscribers have access to both the print and online version which is hosted on Ingenta. In addition to formal reviews, TCA also interviews important people in the industry, has several regular columns (Heard on the Net and Mobile Apps), and has an annual set of awards given to new products. The cost has remained at $295/year since its inception and never gone up. The publisher is The Charleston Company. http:// www.charlestonco.com/ The vision behind this review resource was to have professional librarians provide objective analysis of e-resources in areas such as content, pricing, user interface, competitive products, contract provisions and other areas. It was realized that most libraries don’t automatically purchase e-resources but run them through an internal review process and having an external objective review might be helpful in some cases. Obviously libraries use many criteria for selecting products and services, but having a “Consumer Reports” type product for libraries is another tool in the toolbox.

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All reviews go through formal peer review, copy editing, and page layout. The non-reviews are published at the discretion of the managing editor or publisher. The journal has also provided an expedited peer review process so that reviews are not too aged by the time they are published. Peer review is done by the editorial board. ATG: It strikes us that “The Charleston Advisor” has a fairly wide-open mandate as to what type resources it reviews, ranging from proprietary databases to software applications to current OER resources. Are we on target? Are we missing anything? And who are your main subscribers? Libraries? Individuals? GM: TCA does have a broad mandate and has reviewed a wide variety of Web-based resources of interest to libraries. Although the focus has been on content-oriented products and packages, the journal has reviewed things such as bibliographic managers, virtual reference tools, portals, and other services used by libraries. The journal has not reviewed things such as integrated library systems, digital repository software and a few other areas where it was felt that the products were so vast and complex that they were out of scope for the normal reviewer. ATG: Last year “The Charleston Advisor” teamed up with Choice to produce an in-depth source of reviews called the “ccAdvisor.” Can you tell us about that? How did the collaboration come about? What adjustments did you as managing editor of “The Charleston Advisor” have to make to ensure success? What have been the impacts on both “The Charleston Advisor” and Choice? GM: ccAdvisor (which stands for Choice Charleston Advisor) is a collaboration between The Charleston Advisor and Choice (the publishing arm of ACRL). Choice is best known for its book review services and updated its own platform a couple of years ago. The Choice group saw that book reviews are now more of interest to end-users and that librarians focused most of their time selecting e-resources, often through a more complex and deliberative process due to the cost. When Choice did previously review an e-resource they were very short, about 200 words, using the same format as for monographs. In deciding to provide more in-depth reviews it made sense to work with TCA who was already doing the type of reviews of interest to Choice, but as a boutique publication, there was room to grow. Mark Cummings, publisher at Choice, met with Becky Lenizni, publisher of TCA, at a Charleston Conference a couple of years ago to look at the opportunities and the collaboration was eventually formed. Choice is responsible for the ccAdvisor (http://ccadvisor.org) platform and marketing while TCA is responsible for the editorial process. The existing peer review process and other routines would be expanded but kept in place. A decision was made to update selected historic reviews from TCA and to also focus on new products and services. As part of the process, the review template was slightly modified to better meet current needs and some other areas

were more formalized so that reviews could be better added to a structured database. The advantage of having reviews in the ccAdvisor platform is that they can be added and updated at any time and are not dependent on a quarterly publishing schedule. In addition, the number of reviews could be expanded to as many as the pipeline could support. Staff at Choice have been invaluable at providing extra capacity including broadening the pool of reviewers. TCA is still being published but the publishing process is now flipped. Most reviews first go into the ccAdvisor and then about a dozen are selected on a quarterly basis to appear in the journal. Recently a package has been offered so that institutions may select both the database and the journal, if they so choose. One other advantage of the ccAdvisor is that they have an authoring tool on the back-end so that authors may write or submit their reviews online, although reviews will still be accepted in a Word template if that is the author’s preference. ATG: Can you tell us about the product itself? What exactly is “ccAdvisor?” Why should libraries subscribe to it? How are customers benefitting from it? GM: ccAdvisor is basically a review database of hundreds of e-resources of interest to libraries. Each product is described in detail including product description, pricing (some vendors don’t disclose specific pricing), content analysis, listing of competitive products, a look at contract provisions, and scoring. Each product receives a score in four areas (content, pricing, user interface, and contract provisions) which are averaged into an overall score. Libraries and vendors should subscribe to it for many reasons. • Having a third-party objective review is important for better decision making for purchasing or cancellation • Many times librarians just want to know about products and services outside of their primary area of focus. ccAdvisor provides this • This is a great source of competitive intelligence for the industry as well as librarians • The “competitive products” section of each review helps identify other resources that might be an alternative or augment an e-resource ATG: Working with Choice to create “ccAdvisor” is major undertaking. What do you think it means for the future of “The Charleston Advisor?” Will it remain as a separate publication? Will it become totally digital, forgoing the print version? What can current subscribers expect from “The Charleston Advisor” in the future? GM: The future of TCA will be decided by The Charleston Company. Certainly, decisions will be made depending on the subscriber base and advertising for both products. continued on page 53

<http://www.against-the-grain.com>

ATG Interviews Joris Van Rossum Director of Special Projects, Digital Science by Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> ATG: Joris, can you tell us about your career and what led you to your current position as Director of Special Projects at Digital Science? What are your main responsibilities? JVR: I have enjoyed working in scholarly communications for over 20 years, many of them spent working at Elsevier where I led product development and innovation teams. Then, three years ago, I took a leap and co-founded Peerwith, a platform for author services that received investment from Digital Science. In 2017, I joined Digital Science as Director of Special Projects. In my current role, I am researching and implementing new technologies in scholarly communication. A highlight from my first year at Digital Science was authoring the report “Blockchain for Research.” I am currently responsible for leading an initiative to improve the peer review process through blockchain technology together with Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press and ORCID, amongst others. ATG: What inspired your fascination with blockchain technology and its possible role in scholarly communication and academic publishing? JVR: I find blockchain truly fascinating. The more I learned about blockchain technology, having been introduced to it through bitcoin, the more I realized its potential value to research and scholarly communication. There are many challenges in scholarly communication — a lack of reproducibility of research results, limited and outdated metrics, challenges in peer review, and overall a lack of openness and transparency, to name but a few. At least in theory, all of these challenges could finally be overcome by applying blockchain technology. ATG: Many of us in the world of scholarly communication do not fully understand blockchain technology. Can you provide a clear definition that will make the concept of blockchain technology accessible to the average publisher, vendor, and librarian? JVR: In the broadest sense, blockchain is the technology that allows us to create a revolutionary new type of datastore, namely one without a curator, or central owner. With traditional technology, a curator role is required to ensure the quality and integrity of the data; with blockchain, however, this core role is replaced by technology through things like consensus algorithms and cryptography. This then allows us to create financial ledgers without a central authority, as is the case with bitcoin, but also data stores containing scientific data without a central authority owning or controlling that data. ATG: How do these consensus algorithms and the cryptography that you mention work

52 Against the Grain / November 2018

their magic? How do they mitigate the need for a central authority while at the same time assure quality control of the data? In short, how does technology replace curation? JVR: When we talk about quality in this context, we’re not talking about whether the data is good or bad, but more about its trustworthiness. How can we make sure that data that is added to the blockchain is trustworthy when there’s no central gatekeeper? And that the data is not tampered with? This is achieved in several ways; let me take you through some examples. Firstly, we can ensure that whoever adds new data (or a “block”) to the blockchain acts in good faith. This is what the “proof of work” and the “proof of stake” protocols achieve. Let’s use Bitcoin as an example. In order to add a block, a complex mathematical problem must be solved. The first to solve the problem is allowed to add the block and “wins” bitcoins. Given that the act of solving said problem requires processing power and time, this “proof of work” prevents people from spamming the blockchain with proposed blocks. “Proof of stake” works on a different principle. Only people that have a certain stake in the blockchain (for example, own cryptocurrencies) can add new blocks as these people have a proven interest in keeping the blockchain intact. Secondly, new blocks can only be added to the blockchain by consensus. If multiple computers (or “nodes”) that host the data verify that the data is accurate, the blockchain is updated with new information. In the case of Bitcoin, this happens every ten minutes. Another example of how data quality is ensured without a central gatekeeper is through hashing. Hashing generates a unique value from the data using a mathematical function. This value is unique to the data, and always the same length regardless of the size of the

data, but the data cannot be decoded from this hash. Every time a block is added, a hash is created from the entire blockchain. Tampering with the data would lead to the generation of another hash, which is immediately spotted by the system. Each of these methods further increases the quality control of data, without the need for curation. ATG: You’ve been quoted as saying that Blockchain technology could “change the role publishers play in the scholarly ecosystem.” That’s a pretty big claim. How might blockchain have such a dramatic impact? JVR: I stand by the idea that blockchain can have a fundamental impact on publishers and scholarly communication. In fact, there are potential benefits across three levels: First, through the application of this technology we could introduce a token system for researchers. Tokens could be provided to an individual when they complete certain activities, for example peer reviewing an article, or sharing datasets. These tokens could then be used to access or purchase other services or content, or even pay for article processing fees. Through this tokenization, an economy around scientific activities could be created, solving some of the current pressing issues around incentivization and recognition. Second, through blockchain we could manage digital rights much more efficiently. With our current technologies, rights, permissions and royalties are difficult to manage, and we often rely on expensive processes and third parties to manage them. Through blockchain, these could be managed automatically. Third, blockchain would help us to create datastores of scientific content that are decentralized, which would mean they do not have a single, let alone a commercial, owner. It would then be possible to create a single, global and complete datastore of scientific information, containing not just research data but also information around pre-publication scientific activities. This would make research more reproducible, transparent and also allow us to develop metrics that are more representative of scientific activities. Creating a datastore of all scientific activities with the current technology implies that we need a central owner and gatekeeper — but it is very hard, if not impossible, to find such a gatekeeper that would be willing, able and trusted enough by the entire academic community to play that role. Given blockchain’s decentralized nature, it would dispense with the need for such a role entirely. As a result, we could create a single, complete datastore of scientific data and activicontinued on page 53

<http://www.against-the-grain.com>

Interview — Joris Van Rossum from page 52 ties that would make science more transparent, reproducible and recognizable. ATG: You’ve mentioned that blockchain offers a new business model for journal publishing above and beyond the current subscription and OA models. Can you describe what that new model looks like? What are its specific advantages? JVR: Currently, making micropayments on the internet is an expensive and cumbersome experience. This means that publishers rely on business models based on advertising revenue, which is challenging, or subscription models that lead to paywalls, which are very unpopular. In academic publishing we additionally have OA (author pays) models, but after a few decades we have to conclude that this model has not been universally adopted as some had predicted. And OA has left us with another set of problems, such as predatory publishing and challenges for authors from developing countries to get published. Business models based on micropayments using blockchain technology might be an interesting alternative — users pay as they read, which can be considered more fair, transparent and therefore acceptable for everyone compared to current models. ATG: We know that you have been involved in a non-profit peer review initiative that utilizes blockchain technology. Can you tell us about it? How does it work? Why is it preferable to the current peer review processes being employed by publishers? JVR: The peer review process has several challenges — a lack of recognition for reviewers, the difficulty of finding reviewers by editors, and overall a lack of transparency leading to a decline of trust in the process, to name a few. We believe that these problems can be solved if we better share data on review activities within the research ecosystem. In response, we co-founded a new initiative that involves collaboration between our team, several publishers (Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press and Taylor & Francis), ORCID and Katalysis, an Amsterdam-based blockchain startup. By sharing data, we can recognize reviewers better, create

Interview — George Machovec from page 51 ATG: George, as busy as you are, it must be important to find time to kick back and relax. What do you do in your down time? How do you unwind? GM: My leisure time really revolves around the family. I enjoy travel, adventures, reading, stamp collecting, astronomy, walking/hiking, and technology. I am a news junkie and find it very relaxing, even with all of the drama.

Against the Grain / November 2018

better reviewer finding tools using complete review profiles, allow reviewers themselves to indicate their interest and availability, and verify and validate the review process independently. One of the key challenges when we’re talking about storing and sharing information about the review process is of course trust — how to make sure we share information while still complying with the demand on confidentiality and privacy, for example, in the case of single blind and double blind review. It is here, we believe, where the blockchain can help. Using the blockchain, we can build a decentralized datastore of review information, and there is no single owner or gatekeeper that we have to trust enough to have access to the data. Moreover, we can make use of encryption techniques ensuring that confidential information (e.g., reviewer names) remains obfuscated. We are currently building on a proof of concept and are hoping we can share the results at the end of this year. ATG: You’ve mentioned that your blockchain peer review initiative relies on a sophisticated permissions system. Can you clarify? You’ve also mentioned that good governance is essential. How do you envision that governance? What would its structure look like? JVR: An important priority is how to make sure people do not gain access to information they’re not entitled to. We do that by not storing the information itself on the blockchain, but instead provide links to the information stored on existing platforms such as ORCID and submission systems. This allows us to harness the tested and trusted permissions systems of these platforms. Governance is absolutely essential, to make sure there is an agreement on fundamentals such as what data is being stored, who is participating and who has access to what part of the information of the review process. One of the options available to us is to eventually create a (not-for-profit) membership organization that will ensure a representative governance. Here, we’re looking at successful initiatives like Crossref for inspiration. ATG: How much current adoption of blockchain has there been in the industry? Who are the main players? Can you point to specific examples and initiatives that demon-

Rumors from page 20 Media and publishing intelligence firm Simba Information has released the latest edition of Open Access Book Publishing 2018-2022. The report found that despite multiple years of growth at more than 30 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate), total revenue generated from book processing charges (BPC) remains small, well under 0.5 percent of total book revenue, comparable in size to a single university press

strate how blockchain technology is currently being used? JVR: Blockchain technology is still in its infancy, but in the last eight months we’ve seen the launch of numerous initiatives demonstrating the many ways in which blockchain could have a positive impact on research and scholarly communication. To name but a few: Artifacts.ai, scienceroot.com, and Project Aiur are all projects still in early phases, but with really interesting propositions. So it is a case of “watch this space!” ATG: We understand that Digital Science wants to expand the adoption of blockchain with grants. What level of funding are we talking about? Who is eligible for these grants? What type projects do you envision funding? JVR: Basically anyone is eligible for Digital Science blockchain grants, as long as a project is still at an early stage! As for the type of projects that we would consider, Digital Science has already provided grants to blockchain projects in data management and peer review. However, we also have an interest in exploring the wider potential application of blockchain in research and scholarly communication. Anyone with ideas they are looking to get funded should get in touch with us via our Catalyst Grant programme! ATG: Is there something about blockchain technology that we should have asked you but didn’t? JVR: Between blockchain theory and practice stand factors like legacy, habits, and vested interests. In theory, blockchain could be an ideal technology for research and scholarly communication, but for this potential to be realized many participants within this ecosystem will need to collaborate, including funders and institutions, as well as researchers themselves. Digital Science seeks to play an active role in that process!

Editor’s Note: For those of you attending the Charleston Conference, Mr. Van Rossum will be presenting a Neapolitan session entitled Blockchain: The Big Picture for Publishing! It will be held in the Grand Ballroom 3, Gaillard Center on Thursday, November 8, 9:30am-10:15am. — TG & KS

book publisher or a single open access journal publisher. On the “glass half-full” side of the equation, growth by any metric remains strong. Every company, every program and the overall market continue to grow. An important difference between OA books and journals is that the overall market for journals, particularly life sciences, remained stable through OA’s development. The current book market is troubled, which will impact OA books’ ability to progress as OA journals did. OA books may become “a” response, not “the” solution, to a crisis in social science and continued on page 58

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LEGAL ISSUES Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel) <strauchb@citadel.edu> Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University) <jack.montgomery@wku.edu>

Cases of Note — Copyright Rock Legends and Substantial Similarity Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> MICHAEL SKIDMORE AS TRUSTEE FOR THE RANDY CRAIG WOLFE TRUST v. ALL THE LED ZEPPELIN GANG AND WARNER MUSIC ET AL. 2018 U.S. APP. LEXIS 27680. Apologies in advance for not knowing squat about music. But this is much in the news and seems topical. Randy Wolfe was a California rocker in the glorious ’60s and was actually given the nickname “Randy California” by none other than Jimi Hendrix. How cool is that? Much of Randy’s work was not terribly commercial, but he was revered among guitarists, able to play like Hendrix, Clarence White, Roger McGuinn, or Wes Montgomery, often all within the same song. He wrote the song “Taurus” for his first album Spirit released in 1967 by Hollenbeck Music which copyrighted it and listed him as the author. ’67 was the Summer of Love for those of you not old enough to remember. Hippies gathered in Haight-Ashbury; Tim Leary advised “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” The “Human Be-In” at Golden Gate Park inspired the musical Hair. The Monterey Pop Festival introduced us to The Who, Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin. The media went crazy and defined the ’60s as counterculture and sex, drugs, and rockand-roll. In fact, the first half of the decade had been exactly like the ’50s. And American rubes such as myself only saw the second half through the pages of Life magazine. Led Zeppelin was formed in 1968 by Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. Page (songwriter) and Plant (lyrics) of course are legendary in rock history. The band, perhaps the most successful and influential in history after the Beatles, broke up in 1980 when drummer John Bonham drank a major quantity of vodka for breakfast on top of his antidepressant meds and pegged out. For their fleshly exploits see Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods (Wm. Morrow & Co. 1985). Mind you, the three surviving members hate the book, and the author has the industry

54 Against the Grain / November 2018

monicker of “Stephen Salacious.” But that sounds like a recommendation. Led Zeppelin and Wolfe moved in the same circles. Zep would cover another Wolfe song “Fresh Garbage.” They both performed at concerts together. The Zep gang heard “Taurus” repeatedly. Jimmy Page owned a copy of the album Spirit. 1971 brought us “Led Zeppelin IV.” And on it was — you guessed it — “Stairway to Heaven.” In 1997, Randy “California” Wolfe drowned in undertow off the coast of Molokai. All his intellectual property was put in a trust by his mother. And percolating along was the question of whether Zep had ripped off “Taurus.” The Supreme Court decided laches is not a defense for an ongoing copyright violation in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 1962, 1967-68 (2014). Laches is a defense of dorking around for too long before bringing your suit. You can see the reasoning of not a defense when “Stairway to Heaven” is beloved of drug users and still being played ad nauseam. Thus, the trust sued for copyright infringement in 2015. Trust claims the opening notes of “Stairway” are substantially similar to those in “Taurus.” Jimmy Page the famous Zep music composer admitted he owned the Spirit album but had not heard it before he wrote “Stairway.” Which given the concerts, seems untrue. The jury listened to both songs and determined that Zep had access to “Taurus” but the songs were not substantially similar. And it went to appeal.

The Ninth Circuit

The holding of this case is 19-pages long which is an exhausting read of legal gobble-degoop for me. But paring it down drastically, there’s really only one issue of interest — a particular charge to the jury. Substantial similarity is required to prove unlawful appropriation. The extrinsic test

breaks the works down into constituent elements and compares them. Swirsky v. Carey, 376 F.3d 841, 845 (9th Cir. 2004). No, the jurors don’t have to have degrees in Musicology. Expert witnesses are used. The intrinsic test is “whether the ordinary reasonable person would find the total concept and feel for the works to be substantially similar.” Three Boys Music Corp. v. Bolton, 212 F.3d 477, 485 (9th Cir. 2000). This is a subjective comparison. And juries are good at being subjective. For victory, the Trust needs a “yea” in both tests. One “nay” knocks them out. The jury found no substantial similarity under the extrinsic test so they didn’t have to go on to intrinsic. Notes of a scale are not protected by copyright, but you can combine unprotectable elements to be protectable. Swirsky, 376 F.3d at 848. The notes must be combined with enough originality to make an original work of authorship. Satava v. Lowry, 323 F.3d 805, 811 (9th Cir. 2003). Does that seem like something we need to be told? At any rate, the district court failed to tell the jury that, but the 9th Circuit saw it as pretty harmless. Because common sense? More importantly, the district court told the jury that copyright does not protect “chromatic scales, arpeggios or short sequences of three notes.” Little bitty bits are not original. Let’s remember that the bar for originality is pretty gosh darn low. It’s minimal creativity. See: Feist Publ’ns v. Rural Telephone Serv. Co., Inc. 499 U.S. 340, 348 (1991). If you recall, that one is about arrangement of a telephone book. Which seems like a quaint artifact today, but was an issue a couple of decades ago. And the 9th Circuit in Swirsky found that chromatic scales were protectable. continued on page 56

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Questions & Answers — Copyright Column Column Editor: Laura N. Gasaway (Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Law, Chapel Hill, NC 27599; Phone: 919-962-2295; Fax: 919-962-1193) <laura_gasaway@unc.edu> www.unc.edu/~unclng/gasaway.htm QUESTION: An academic librarian asks about the copyright status of makerspace projects. When are they considered intellectual property, and is there any legislation governing them? ANSWER: Before I could answer this question, I had to ask what is a “makerspace.” The questioner indicated that this is a developing area in libraries that started in computer/ IT areas. It is a “community-operated physical place, where people can meet and work on their projects.” It is sometimes called hacker space. Then I realized that I did know about these — they were earlier called “collabratoriums,” learning labs, etc. There is no special legislation dealing with makerspaces and the products of those collaborations. So, the normal copyright rules apply. Works created in a makerspace are eligible for copyright protection if they are original works that have at least a smidgen of creativity. Absent an agreement otherwise among the creators, the copyright would be owned jointly by them. If the work incorporates other copyrighted works, the creators need permission from the copyright owner if the new work is to be distributed, displayed, etc., (such as posting on the web). Today, 3-D printing capability is often included in a makerspace. It may be that the 3-D printed work created is eligible for patent protection, if it is an original device that meets the other patent requirements. Libraries should recognize that all of the equipment is likely to be reproduction technology, thus requiring posting the warning of copyright, that was first required for photocopy machines. QUESTION: A public librarian asks about eBook annotations developed by Atypon or Hypothesis that will allow interaction with eBooks. How are these annotations different from others? How long will they be active? If the user leaves Atypon or Hypothesis, may they keep their annotations? What is the copyright law re annotations? ANSWER: Created as a way to permit readers of an eBook to collaborate with one another, this is how the media described eBook annotations. “eBook annotations add a layer of conversation on top of book content, allowing readers to discuss that book with other readers in real-time. Annotations are very close to becoming a permanent part of both the EPUB standard and the open web-publishing standard, thanks to a partnership between Hypothes.is, EPUB.js, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).” Not only can users’ groups (such as book clubs) use eBook annotations for conversations, but they also have substantial use in the publishing industry. For example, in copy

Against the Grain / November 2018

editing, collaborative research, pre-publication peer review, and citation. The goal of these projects is to create a way for readers to discuss a book digitally, in real-time, and on any platform or device. Hypothes.is is an open source technology organization. Its “user-friendly tool” allows academics and scientists to make notes on documents they are reading and share those notes with others. A couple of years ago, it was reported that approximately 3.4 million Hypothes.is annotations have already been created across the web. Atypon’s Literatum publishing platform hosts nearly about onehalf of the world’s English language scholarly journals. With eBook annotations, Atypon customers will be able to add an annotation layer to their content for the creation of additional commentary, deep linking to supplementary resources or data, or post-publication peer review on top of the version of record. Whether users may retain these annotated versions depends on the licenses for these products. The same is true for how long the annotations will remain active. There are concerns about author trolling which would require moderated discussion to prevent. Annotations in a public domain work, such as Moby Dick, would be copyrightable by each author unless participants agree that their comments are public domain. With such an agreement, then the work with the annotations could be published or posted online with no concerns. If the work being discussed were under copyright, then publishing the work with the annotations would constitute a derivative work and would require permission of the author of the original work for publication or posting. QUESTION: A scholarly communications officer at a research university asks about the creation of promotional or recruitment videos for the institution. Is the use of copyrighted music in such videos fair use? What about music for athletic performances? ANSWER: The short answer to both is no, if the music is copyrighted. There are both blanket licenses (available for a fee) and open licenses available to colleges and universities. Additionally, there is a wealth of public domain music available. Of course, public domain music is not the latest thing that a college or university might want to use for a promotional video. Some universities have received cease and desist letters for using copyrighted music without a license in videos and for events and athletic performances. QUESTION: An association publisher asks about including the full text of a couple

of the Center for Disease Control documents from its public domain website into an online course that has a nominal charge for access to the course. Will this make it appear that the association is charging for access to government documents? ANSWER: The good news is that this is not a problem. Publications of the U.S. government are not eligible for copyright protection, and the CDC is a government agency. It is certainly possible to link to the CDC documents in the online course, but there is no copyright problem with including the entire document in the course content. The charge for accessing the course is not for acquiring copies of the government document but for accessing the course. Even commercial publishers often incorporate parts of U.S. documents into their works and then charge for their publications. This is not a problem, however. The Copyright Act actually states that one must identify the copyright free portions of publications that are government documents. See 17 U.S.C. § 403 (2014). One seldom sees this done, however. QUESTION: A corporate librarian asks about a recent case involving the copying of industry standards. ANSWER: The question of reproducing industry standards is a persistent one for special librarians. The recent case is Am. Soc’y for Testing & Materials v. Public.Resource. Org, Inc., 896 F.3d 437, D.C. Cir. (2018). The defendant, a nonprofit organization that makes available a variety of public documents including federal safety rules, government-produced videos and product designs, purchased copies of the standards and uploaded them to a public website. Several standards developing organizations filed suit claiming copyright in the materials uploaded by the defendant. The district court held that private standards groups could claim copyright ownership in standards that they publish. Further, the defendant had not created a genuine issue of fact about whether the use was a fair use. The D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals disagreed and found that the standards were primarily factual and that the amount and substantiality used was to be weighed in light of the public need being met. The appeals court found that the district court erred in its application of fair use and remanded the case to the district court directing that it develop a fuller record regarding: (1) the nature of each standards posted; (2) how they were incorporated; and (3) the manner and extent to which they were adopted by the plaintiffs. continued on page 56

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Cases of Note from page 54 Chromatic scale is a scale of twelve pitches, each a semitone above or below the adjacent one. And that’s completely over my head. In an arpeggio, you take a chord and play it one note at a time. Okay, I get that. The error was not harmless because the Trust’s expert witness testified that Zep had copied an original chromatic scale. He said “Taurus” had public domain elements that were modified in an original way. And this would go to extrinsic substantial similarity. An original element of a song need not be new; just created independently in a creative way. Swirsky, 376 F.3d at 849. The jury charge was dismissive of his testimony and contrary to a 9th Circuit holding. So this got sent back for a new trial. Our son, who was a young teen in the glory days of Led Zeppelin, listened to both intros and said he couldn’t hear any similarity. So trust would lose on the intrinsic test with him on the jury. He also had an interesting take on laches. He reasoned that Randy California was alive from ’71 to ’97 and heard “Stairway” numerous times. How could anyone not hear it? Over. And. Over. He was pals with Led Zep, and as a musician’s musician, knew how music is put together. If he had no objection, why should his heirs be able to bring suit?

Questions & Answers from page 55 QUESTION: A North Carolina school librarian asks about the photographs of Queen Anne’s Revenge, the vessel of the pirate, Blackbeard, found shipwrecked off the coast of North Carolina and the recent litigation with the State of North Carolina for copyright infringement. ANSWER: In Allen v. Cooper, 895 F.3d 337, 4th Cir. (2018), the appeals court reversed the district court decision. Plaintiffs claimed copyright infringement for the posting of six photographs of the shipwreck on a state website violated a 2013 settlement between North Carolina on one side and the salvage company and photographer on the other. The district court held that the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 abrogated Eleventh Amendment immunity for states from copyright infringement suits. The Fourth Circuit disagreed and found that the settlement’s language did not constitute a waiver of Eleventh Amendment immunity, nor did the aforementioned Act abrogate sovereign immunity of the state. Further, none of the exceptions to sovereign immunity applied. The case was remanded to the district court instructing it to dismiss with prejudice all claims against state officials.

56 Against the Grain / November 2018

Random Ramblings — Sex, Intellectual Freedom, and Academic Libraries Column Editor: Bob Holley (Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University, 13303 Borgman Avenue, Huntington Woods, MI 48070-1005; Phone: 248-547-0306) <aa3805@wayne.edu>

re academic libraries able to deal with overtly sexually oriented materials required by their faculty for teaching and research? I have two reasons for writing this column. First, I’m using it as a practice run for a presentation that I’ll be giving at the 2018 Charleston Conference. I’ll be examining the broader question of objectionable resources in general, but sexual materials will be a key part of my presentation. Second, I was chair of the ACRL Intellectual Freedom Committee from 2002-2006 before it was disbanded. I often heard that intellectual freedom wasn’t an issue for academic libraries, but I strongly disagree. The proximate cause for my research was a presentation at Wayne State University on December 2, 2017, by Jennifer Nash, Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She gave a fascinating talk on the role of African-American women in X-rated movies with a focus on the 1978 film, Sex World. Surprisingly, the African-American woman overcame the prejudices of the white male and seized the more powerful role in the relationship. I came away from the talk asking whether academic libraries would buy such materials for legitimate research needs. I also remember my spouse telling me about an assignment in the 1970s where she was required to visit an adult bookstore. I could see a similar assignment today to view an X-rated film. In other words, faculty and students could have a need for such materials for legitimate teaching and research, but would the academic library buy them? A few words are in order regarding pornography and commercially produced X-rated films. The most important fact is that pornography among consensual adults is legal. The Supreme Court has effectively decriminalized pornography. Commercial pornographers wish to avoid prosecution and want clear guidelines about what is legal or not. Child pornography is illegal because actors under eighteen cannot give legal consent. Most X-rated films show consensual acts where both men and women are eager to participate in sex and are shown having a good time. Violence does occur in about 13% of pornography according to one research study, but the violence shown is most often

consensual. Furthermore, in X-rated films, women also abuse men. Finally, the producers of X-rated films can find more than enough willing female and male actors so that issues of sex trafficking are irrelevant for mainstream productions. The rules for following Constitutional principles including freedom of speech are different for private and public academic libraries. Private institutions have a much greater ability to control the research and teaching of their faculty. Religious institutions have broader rights to require that their faculty and students adhere to certain standards as long as doing so does not interfere with civil liberties enshrined in law, e.g., a prohibition against racial discrimination. Some federal or state programs require further restrictions if the institution accepts tax dollars, but many offer exemptions from some rules for religious and other private institutions. One very clear exception is the ability to have single-sex colleges and universities without facing a discrimination challenge. On the other hand, a private institution that wished to support teaching topics that require the use of objectionable materials such as X-rated films may find it easier to do so than a publicly funded institution. Politicians or concerned citizens would have a much greater ability to apply pressure on the institution to avoid teaching such subjects even if doing so ran counter to the cultural diversity of the nation and the principle that moral beliefs cannot drive policy without sufficient proof that such laws have a secular purpose. I understand that overlooking constitutional rights happens frequently and that many individuals or institutions are unwilling or unable to challenge such actions in court where they often receive an unsympathetic hearing from judges and juries. One common example is the difficulty, including threats of funding cuts, that institutions of higher education have faced in sponsoring art exhibits with erotic or blasphemous content. My answer to whether the academic library should buy materials such as X-rated videos for valid teaching and research is quite simple. The mission of the academic library is to support the teaching and research needs of faculty, students, and staff. The continued on page 58

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Random Ramblings from page 56 mission is not to judge whether these teaching and research needs are valid. Others in the college or university have this responsibility. The department chair, dean, provost, university president, or governing board have the responsibility to make such determinations that will then affect what the library needs to purchase to provide support. Even here, the principle of academic freedom should protect, at least in principle, that ability of faculty members in a public institution to select their research topics and to at least propose teaching their specializations. In the example that led to this column, Northwestern University hired Dr. Nash, gave her tenure, and promoted her to Associate Professor. I do not know if she has asked the library to provide materials for her research, but I consider her claims to library support to be as valid as any other faculty member in a similar position. I accept that academic libraries can’t buy everything that their faculty want and that purchasing X-rated materials might pose some special problems for libraries. To begin, academic libraries can ethically refuse to honor faculty requests for materials for personal use. This is the function of the public library. I don’t expect my university library to support my personal reading and viewing habits though it often does with materials bought for literature and film studies research and teaching. Cost is the second major reason for not purchasing a faculty request. Most libraries have some sort of limit on the individual and cumulative amount of money they are willing to spend on a faculty member’s research. X-rated films may fit into this category if they are no longer easily available and must be purchased through secondary markets. A third reason that could be especially valid is format. Perhaps the film is only available on VHS, a format that the academic library no longer supports. This reason was used by many libraries as a way to avoid purchasing Sex by Madonna since it was spiral bound, a format that many public libraries don’t collect. I, like many others, considered this to be a dishonest but plausible excuse for not purchasing a controversial item on the

Rumors from page 53 humanities (SSH) monographs that preceded OA books. A willingness to experiment has become established in OA book culture. New trials in search of a viable future business model continue to be launched. Cooperative ventures include Knowledge Unlatched and MUSE Open. Bookboon.com uses advertising, but this only works for widely viewed topics such as textbooks or health titles directed at patients. punctum books calls for donations or subscriptions to gain

58 Against the Grain / November 2018

New York Times bestseller list. If the faculty member can deal with the obsolete format with personal equipment, this undercuts the library’s reason for not purchasing the item. Finally, I have heard librarians argue that libraries are not obligated to buy materials that will be used by only one person because the purpose of the library is to support multiple uses. To this, I say “bunk.” One use is more than a substantial percentage of librarian/vendor selected materials will ever receive. A more valid concern is that erotic materials including X-rated videos have a greater risk of being stolen. One additional reason for users to steal such items is the perceived possibility of embarrassment during the normal check-out process — the worry that the stuffy librarian will say: “Why would a nice person like you want to read (view) such horrible and immoral materials?” (I actually had this happen to me as a high school student in the early 1960s when I asked for a racy novel from the locked case in my public library). Theft may also occur during processing including the removal of such items by those who find them morally objectionable. With such issues, I would consider it reasonable to find ways to protect these materials such as putting them behind the desk or housing them in special collections. I’ll concede that this column may be more an intellectual debate than a practical matter. Any faculty member or student who needs an X-rated film can most likely find a copy through a Google video search or on a major pornography platform such as Pornhub. With the vast number of videos available and the limited number of porn descriptors, the main requirement might be advanced searching skills to zero in on the wanted item. (I needed about ten minutes to find the key film Sex World, that Dr. Nash discussed in her talk). Many free tools also exist to download these videos. Doing so is, of course, a copyright violation; but the copyright owners of X-rated videos pay much less attention to protecting their rights and issuing take down notices. Finally, the quality might not be as good as a DVD version but would most likely be satisfactory for content analysis. To summarize the main points of this column, I’ve created the following case study to test how readers respond. The situation is

reasonable and close enough to the facts to be possible. The professor who wants the library to make available a copy of the film, Sex World, is a tenured Associate Professor in gender studies with an excellent scholarly record that can be verified with a quick search in Google Scholar. Her department and college support her research. She teaches a course where this film about a black porn star is part of the syllabus and required viewing for her students. She has also given the same lecture on campus that she gave at Wayne State University and thus created possible demand for this film. She is even willing to donate the film to the library so that it will cost the library nothing. The format is DVD, which the library collects. Perhaps she is enough of a radical that she is doing so in part to test the library’s commitment to intellectual freedom. She also believes that the film is an important part of the cultural record with valuable insights on the role of race and gender in the United States and provides evidence of attitudes towards sex in the late 1970s. What would you decide? Would the size and private/ public status of the college or university make a difference?

early access. While journal publishers like MDPI and Frontiers depend on support for the original journal article, Australian National University Press relies on print sales. But, like journal APCs, most still rely on book or chapter charges. The business models are very diverse, particularly considering the relatively small number of titles involved. Open Access Book Publishing 2018-2022 provides detailed market information for this segment of scholarly book publishing. It analyses trends impacting the industry and forecasts market growth to 2022. The report includes a review of more than 20 notable OA publishers and programs, including InTechOpen,

Bookboon.com, Frontiers Media, SciELO, De Gruyter, Brill, Knowledge Unlatched and Springer Nature. https://www.simbainformation.com/Open-Access-Book-Publishing-11833736/

To conclude, this column and my upcoming presentation at the Charleston Conference are part of my current research agenda that seeks to show that honoring a commitment to intellectual freedom is not as easy as most librarians think it is. (The current controversy about having an open meeting room policy is an example of librarian pushback against First Amendment legal requirements and the Library Bill of Rights). Supporting banned books is important but is only the beginning of a commitment to intellectual freedom. A book or film can’t be banned if the public, school, or academic library doesn’t purchase it. For most, if not all libraries, some users of all ages have valid information needs on controversial topics such as sex education, non-mainstream religions/atheism, radical political movements, witchcraft, psychological disorders, and even career guidance for sex workers. I also have plans to write an article about what a “balanced collection” really means. While I doubt that I’ll change library selection decisions, I can at least broaden the discussion.

Academic open-access publisher Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) has established an Open Access (OA) agreement with Qatar National Library (QNL). QNL is committed to supporting and helping Qatar authors publish OA at no cost. Through this national agreement, QNL will cover the Article Processing Charges (APC) of continued on page 66

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Little Red Herrings — Have We Reached the Proverbial Tipping Point? by Mark Y. Herring (Dean of Library Services, Dacus Library, Winthrop University) <herringm@winthrop.edu>

ccording to Malcom Gladwell who made the tipping phrase famous, the tipping point is that sudden threshold, that critical mass or boiling point, when a series of small changes causes a much larger change to occur. He made mention of a number of sociological ones, but the phrase today has been used, overused, and abused to have become almost meaningless. Still, we need to rescue it, especially on the particular point of this column: our online future. All of a sudden, a spate of material has come before us about the uselessness of social media and online behavior. This is not necessarily new, of course, but the now resounding chorus of voices is singing a very different tune about most online life. Not even a decade ago, that chorus sounded most like Handel’s Messiah: we had entered the Promised Land! Today, however, it is sounding more and more like Mozart’s Requiem by calling on everyone to give up hope all who enter there. This “disenchantment,” as it was called in a recent Inside Higher Ed piece (https:// bit.ly/2MHGIR2), is mainly at social media, Facebook and Twitter to be sure, but it also extends to much of what is happening online. We cannot escape fake news, no matter how hard we try, and one of the best and most able vehicles of that is our online access. Consider the recent and now bogus claim that we cast 500 million straws away every day. It turns out that the claim cited by NBC, CBS, MSNBC and even the old grey lady herself was made up by a nine-year-old. To arrive at that number, every man, woman, and child in the U.S. would have to drink at least one straw-equipped drink every day. Much of the ongoing recent disgruntlement began in the winter of the last presidential election when nearly everyone’s odds-on favorite lost in a colossal upset. Facebook became the poster child for all that was wrong, accused of spreading misinformation, hacks, hate and so on. Twitter did not come off well, either, and for a lot of the same reasons. Moreover, while dishing out dubious information, both of those social media are content to censor whenever they please, or rather when the message does not please their chosen ideology. But if political sour grapes blew up social media, the upset was only just beginning. Anya Kamenetz brought forward her The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life (Public affairs, 2018). Kamenetz is not a Luddite by any stretch of the

60 Against the Grain / November 2018

imagination, but she strictly limits her family (i.e., children’s) usage of online time, and suggests everyone else do likewise. Almost immediately thereafter came Naomi Riley’s Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat: Strategies for Solving Real Parenting Problems (Templeton Press, 2018). Why this is important is that Kamenetz leans left while Riley leans right; two very different people hold differing ideologies with very different presuppositions, look at the same problem, and come to the same conclusions: there is not much to commend going online, and there’s much to discredit it. Yet these are moms, right, and we can dismiss them, can’t we? After all, we’re adults, and besides, there’s a lot of evidence out there about technology and learning. If only. PISA, the Programme for international Student Assessment, is given to 15-year olds in 38 countries. In the most recent test, 15year olds who used computers less for homework scored the highest in reading and math. What’s more, even when a computer might be needed to do work on a random basis, those who eschewed it the most, scored the highest. Meanwhile, our own students, according to Trends in Adolescence Media Use, 1976-2016, are spending much more time online and much less time reading. Those same kids also score unpromisingly on reading and math tests. Research has always shown that the human mind works especially well when it is habituated in its thinking, that is, it can predict based on what it has already learned. But new research on the growing minds of young children shows us that the point-and-click technique is short-circuiting this predictive ability altogether. The answer must be a click, not something that can be reasoned to. If all that is not enough, online gaming, for all its putative fun, has a serious downside: a Russian teen allegedly decapitated himself with a chainsaw after losing an online video game (https://bit.ly/2p2Q9wu). Even sex appears now to be ruined. Online sex education may well be the worst form of it, even worse than none at all. Chesterton once had a rather hilarious illustration about what sociologists 100 years from his time would think of men when they excavated men’s restroom walls. OMG! What will they say 100 years from now when they see what we have allowed online about sex? If nothing else, we’re raising a generation of young boys who, as men, will have a less than promising view of how to treat women. Then, there are all the technology moguls: Gates, Musk,

Sandberg, Cook, Zuckerberg, and so on, who limit, pretty severely, their online time as much as they can. What is it that they know that we do not, or know, but choose to ignore? Even Wikipedia’s inventor, Sanger, regretted his involvement to the point of leaving Wikipedia and beginning a new enterprise that involved experts. Meanwhile, Sir Berners-Lee regrets his involvement in the World Wide Web, at least insofar as it has evolved into a chattering class of nincompoops. If we sum this up, we are spending too much time online, all of us. Most of what is online, cats and all the rest, while funny and possibly entertaining, is of questionable long term value. What we thought would be revolutionary in education appears to be, if not stultifying, then certainly stymying to growing minds. The web has apparently ruined sex, opened a gaping portal into our elections for any miscreants who want to cause mischief, and created a lido-mirage for wasting enormous amounts of time. It is, if not already, ruining reading. And it isn’t exactly an elixir for memory, or reading, or so we are told by many, Nicholas Carr, Sven Birkerts, Evgeny Morozov, and yours truly. So, why is it that we keep hoping against hope? And why, why, do librarians continue to push these technologies at every turn? Don’t we understand that if they really are compromising the reading abilities of rising generations, they will eventually make libraries obsolete? Yes, yes, I know. Not all online activity is bad. Some really wonderful things are going on, not the least of which is allowing people who could not get together otherwise to do so online. And they are doing some very positive things. But we have to ask ourselves this: is the game worth the candle? I mean, if a toothpaste promised and delivered 100% whiter teeth, eliminated flossing and trips to the dentist, would you still use it if a significant side effect was the that it also slowly dissolved your tongue? Hope, however stupid, springs eternal. Only the other day an article came across my desk about some universities offering incoming freshmen a sure roommate: Alexa. The idea is to have preloaded all the questions a student might have about what is going on at the university: games, programs, the location of certain buildings and perhaps even the library’s hours. Alas, apparently we can’t even count on people to look things up unless they can do it on the Internet. And if you think that is a boon to libraries you don’t know the difference between boon and boondoggle.

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The Scholarly Publishing Scene — The Age of Acquiring Column Editor: Myer Kutz (President, Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) <myerkutz@aol.com>

recent company acquisition that caught my eye, and no doubt many other eyes, was Elsevier’s latest purchase. The acquired company was Aries Systems, founded by Lyndon S. Holmes and Sandra Holmes in 1986 and located in the Boston suburbs. Aries provides publishers an online manuscript submission and peer-review system — workflow tools that publishers can provide to authors and journal editorial boards — as well as a digital rights management solution. I learned about the acquisition from the venerable Kent Anderson’s well-reported and comprehensive Scholarly Kitchen blog post on August 6 (“Interpreting Elsevier’s Acquisition of Aries Systems.”) and another insightful post on the same day by Angela Cochran, associate publisher and journals director at the American Society of Civil Engineers, (“Clowns to the Left of Me ... Jokers to the Right: The Independent Publisher in an Age of Mergers and Acquisitions.”). These posts thoroughly discuss increasing consolidation within scholarly publishing’s commercial sector and Elsevier’s strategic aims — as well as those of its competitor, Wiley, which, a couple of years ago, acquired Atypon, a provider of an online publishing platform and web development tools to publishers — for improving the journals publishing process. They also discuss, among other topics, the necessity for maintaining firewalls in these acquired companies, which serve multiple publishers, so that other publishers remain confident that Elsevier and Wiley cannot gain access to their materials. Other than my view that Elsevier and Wiley have been willing to make substantial investments to protect their lucrative subscription-based journals businesses — not to do so would amount to business malpractice — there’s little need for me to weigh in at length, or report extensively on other opinions from industry watchers and insiders on the important topics that the two blog posts eloquently address. If you’re interested in what these acquisitions might mean for the future of scholarly publishing and haven’t yet read the posts, I urge you to read them. Instead of ruminating on the two acquisitions, I looked for other information about how scholarly publishing’s commercial sector has changed in the past decade or so. For one thing, if you peruse the member roster of the International Association of STM Publishers, the list of commercial publishers that include journals in their portfolios, which excludes STM member McGraw-Hill, isn’t very long. Besides Elsevier and Wiley, there are De Gruyter, Emerald Publishing, Karger Publishers, Qingres (a company based in China and the U.S. that, unfortunately, made Beall’s list of predatory publishers), Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Thieme Publishing Group, and

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Wolters Kluwer. (And besides several major university presses, such as Cambridge and Oxford, and numerous technical societies, much of STM’s membership now includes companies that provide technical and consulting services to publishers.) A major reason the list of commercial STM member publishers is so short nowadays is, of course, that some larger publishers have been gobbling up smaller houses. OK, it might be more fair in the case of Wiley, say, to use the term “merger,” inasmuch as in the last six decades Wiley has “merged” with Interscience, VCH, and Blackwell. And, as discussed above, several STM member commercial publishers have also been gobbling up companies that provide technical services to publishers, as well as to researchers and authors. In any event, a quick way to view some of the results of this devouring is to consult the invaluable website, crunchbase.com. (Their motto is “discover innovative companies and the people behind them.”) Now I didn’t opt for the $29 monthly fee when I looked at crunchbase, so while I could see how many acquisitions crunchbase says a publisher has made, I can’t see the total time frame the website uses, nor can I see its assessment of what overall strategy a corporation’s list of acquisitions might indicate. Nevertheless, without entering into a subscription deal, I could see as many as 15 acquisitions. So there’s enough to talk about, it seems to me. It’s the case, for example, that while Elsevier and Wiley have added to their publishing portfolios with acquisitions of, and mergers with, other publishers (the major portfolios that Elsevier has acquired over the years include North Holland, Butterworth-Heinemann, Pergamon, and Academic Press) they stand out from other large STM commercial publishers in their aforementioned acquisitions of companies like Aries and Atypon. The Taylor & Francis Group, a major STM journal publisher, has made numerous acquisitions of other commercial STM publishers, such as CRC Press and Marcel Dekker (looking at the acquisitions is a trip down memory lane for me), and probably relies on the services of either Aries or Atypon, or both, but hasn’t bought the expertise and systems these technology companies provide. Nor has Wolters Kluwer, the most active among commercial STM publishers in terms of the total number of companies it has acquired. I see on Kluwer’s acquisitions list a focus on adding software that their medical-prac-

titioner customers use in their daily work, in addition to book publishing programs. It makes sense, of course, for a publisher to acquire software-development expertise, rather than try to hire developers and put them to work in-house on projects the publisher has no experience with. Similarly, as Angela Cochran points out in her Scholarly Kitchen post about Atypon and Aries, “these systems are much harder to build than most of us think,” so the idea of replicating that work in-house should also be a non-starter for publishers. As for the rest of the major commercial STM publishers, they’ve been much less active in making acquisitions than Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer. Thieme and De Gruyter, according to crunchbase, haven’t made any acquisitions, and Springer Nature, Sage, Karger, and Emerald have been minimally active. As for these STM houses, crunchbase reports that Springer Nature, the product of a merger itself, has acquired only iversity, a Germany-based learning platform that partners with institutions to provide online courses to students, Sage has acquired only Talis, which provides technology and data in the education sector, Karger has acquired only Health Press, Limited, an information service for the medical community, and Emerald only Pier Professional Limited, a UK publisher of health and social care journals. So consolidation is concentrated mainly in just the aforementioned four large commercial STM publishing houses. There is one other important aspect of the current state of manuscript submission and tracking systems that I want to mention. I focus on it as a result of my recent profanity laden experience with an invoicing system that a publisher to whom I submitted an encyclopedia article uses. Kent Anderson points out in his Scholarly Kitchen blog post that academics, who, like the rest of us, have been spoiled by the “superbly designed interfaces of Amazon, Netflix and Google,” find that publishing systems “aren’t as smooth and sophisticated as most of the rest of their online experiences. Manuscript systems are perceived as uncaring, unforgiving, and ungainly by most users.” It sounds like Elsevier and Wiley still have a lot of technical and PR work to oversee.

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It’s High Time — The Efficiency Expert Column Editor: Darby Orcutt (Assistant Head, Collections & Research Strategy, North Carolina State University Libraries, Box 7111, Raleigh, NC 27695-7111; Phone: 919-513-0364) <dcorcutt@ncsu.edu> Column Editor’s Note: It’s high time we more fully consider the future of academic libraries. Increasingly, the hectic pace of our individual institutions, accelerated by the new normal of “doing more with less,” has led us to focus more as a profession on the short term. Libraries have thus far done a good job of steering between the potholes, but often at the expense of seeing what’s coming farther down the road. “It’s High Time,” this column, will focus on especially the longer horizon contexts of our field, and offer big ideas and questions relevant to our missions, strategies, and “that vision thing.” I intend to be frank, provocative, and evocative. I plan to pose many questions here that we all need to consider, and share my thoughts that, rather than set in stone, are constantly iterative. Furthermore, I will not be addressing the purpose of this column if I’m not occasionally sharing at least a few ideas that prove half-baked or fail to survive deeper exploration. This column, and the discussions I hope it will engender, will crossover with other nodes of future thinking in libraries, including Against the Grain’s own new ATG Trendspotting initiative, (https://www. charlestonlibraryconference.com/announcing-the-new-atg-trendspotting-initiative/). Our conversations will be the richer for their connectedness. I encourage you to communicate with me via Twitter (@Darby_Librarian), email <dcorcutt@ncsu.edu>, or wherever we might cross paths in person. — DO

lot of the economic news and predictions around higher education are grim. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School faculty famous for his theory of “disruptive innovation,” predicts the closure of up to half of American colleges and universities within 10-15 years, due largely to the rise and inevitably uneven fruits of online education programs, (https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/04/28/ clay-christensen-sticks-predictions-massive-college-closures). The Chronicle of Higher Education has already begun documenting this trend, (https://www.chronicle.com/article/ As-a-University-Is-Sold-in/243944). Moody’s recently reported on the particularly bleak financial outlook for Kentucky universities, noting the same perfect storm of lessening enrollments and rising costs that many other states are or soon will be facing, (https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article213801469.html). For The University of California, rising enrollments and declining state funding are precipitating an impending crisis, (https://cshe.berkeley.edu/ sites/default/files/publications/douglassbleemer.tipping_point_report.august_20_2018_0. pdf). Public or private, even campuses that

64 Against the Grain / November 2018

weather the coming hard times will likely do so in part by dramatically reducing library budgets, and perhaps even consolidating or outsourcing many library services. We have entered an age of the efficiency expert. Library processes, by budgetary necessity, continue being streamlined, automated, and passed from professional to paraprofessional staff. Collection decisions are offloaded to our users through demand driven acquisition (DDA), evidence-based selection (EBS), and similar programs. Bookstacks are reduced to make room for new uses, often even becoming “non-library” spaces for classrooms, student services, or meeting rooms. It is not uncommon for institutional administrators hiring new library directors to value incumbents who might best “get the librarians on board” with space, fiscal, cultural, and/or staffing changes. And yet, all of the above changes described in this paragraph could be carried out well and constitute very positive steps forward. Of course, on the other hand, they can all be carried out poorly. Sub-processes could be over-automated, paraprofessionals overtaxed, and the abilities and knowledge of librarian professionals devalued. The powerful tools of user-driven selection cannot fly on autopilot perpetually. Bookstacks changes can alienate users, and new uses of spaces not overtly linked to core mission can give the library the feel of a patchwork bazaar. Finally, directors primarily focused on efficiencies in the sense of cost avoidance can pose genuine threats to librarians’ tenure or faculty status, the functionality of the internal team, the library’s future opportunities to truly collaborate with campus partners, and the library’s ability to adapt to new needs and opportunities. Faithfully executing the role of library as efficiency expert requires embracing the larger meaning of the term: re-envisioning the library’s mission not just for the present, but for emerging and probable future contexts. For the present and foreseeable future, reducing expenditures does seem to serve these contexts, but not just as an end in itself (coping with reduced funding and buying power), but also as a means to allow the library to be proactive in re-deploying some of its financial resources to new areas. The logic applies to the time and attention resources of library staff as well. What work can we automate, streamline, consolidate, reduce, or eliminate in order to re-deploy our staff to more relevant and emerging needs of the larger institution? We see these questions being asked, for example, in conversations around new roles for library liaisons, the shift in focus from “cataloging” to “discovery,” and consideration of library support throughout the fuller life cycle of research. Yet, I often wonder if we are thinking holistically enough about such issues. Not only

do we often only talk about these problems and opportunities simply within particular library units or professional subfields, but even when we have these conversations as an institution, libraries generally think at the library level rather than that of the larger institution. Our imaginations become quickly limited by questions like “Is that an appropriate role for the library to take on campus?” — a key question, to be sure, but one that stifles creativity and collaboration when posed early on. Every academic library needs to have a strong vision for how it will provide excellent value for its campus, both now and on into the longer-term future. But we must also remember, as collections librarians are especially fond of reminding our vendors when it comes to large package deals nowadays: it’s often not about value, but simply about price. As strong citizens of our larger institutions, we need to be thinking not just in terms of how we can provide value for our campuses, but rather what role the library can take in helping the college or university control costs and especially provide value to its users and funders. Libraries and librarians are generally and perhaps nearly uniquely positioned at the hub of research and teaching across all disciplines, as well as at many points of intersection with community support services (e.g., information technology, student affairs). Our vantage point, if we take advantage of it, allows us to observe and speak to not just improving the processes and mission of the library, but of our campus as a whole. We might have extremely strong insight into needs that align with, but may be outside the scope of, what the libraries should provide, either at all or at least without tremendous discussion and collaboration with other campus units. For example: What gaps (by sizes, formats) do researchers encounter with regard to dataset storage and dissemination? What vital technology literacy skills do students seem to be lacking? Which campus services do instructors and learners have difficulty discovering? How should research outputs be considered by administrators in assessing faculty and programs? (Libraries understandably shy away from taking any perceived role in faculty evaluation, despite the fact that they can — and should — provide their particular expertise in the evaluation and contextualization of many of the data sources used in such evaluation.) In other words, we can be highly effective efficiency experts for our larger institutions, even if the library’s hands-on role ends at communicating a particular observed need. Especially in these and the times on the horizon, a rising tide lifts all boats. Libraries that can embrace a fuller role of efficiency expert for themselves and their campuses will add both real and perceived value to their services.

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And They Were There Reports of Meetings — 37th Annual Charleston Conference Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition, “What’s Past is Prologue,” Charleston Gaillard Center, Francis Marion Hotel, Embassy Suites Historic Downtown, and Courtyard Marriott Historic District — Charleston, SC, November 6-10, 2017 Charleston Conference Reports compiled by: Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> Column Editor’s Note: Thank you to all of the Charleston Conference attendees who agreed to write short reports that highlight sessions they attended at the 2017 Charleston Conference. All attempts were made to provide a broad coverage of sessions, and notes are included in the reports to reflect changes that were not printed in the conference’s final program (though some may be reflected in the online schedule, where links can also be found to presentations’ PowerPoint slides and handouts). Please visit the conference site http:// www.charlestonlibraryconference.com/ to link to selected videos as well as interviews, and to blog reports, written by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins. The 2017 Charleston Conference Proceedings will be published in 2018, in partnership with Purdue University Press. In this issue of ATG you will find the final installment of 2017 conference reports. The first four installments can be found in ATG v.30#1, February 2018, v.30#2, April 2018, v.30#3, June 2018, and v.30#4, September 2018. Watch for reports from the 2018 Charleston Conference to begin publishing in the February 2019 issue of ATG. — RKK

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2017 (continued from previous installment) CONCURRENT SESSIONS Shotgun Session — Presented by Rachel Fleming (Moderator, University of Tennessee Chattanooga); Lars Meyer (Emory University); Joe Payne (The Ohio State University Health Sciences Library); Kirsten Huhn (Concordia University) and Meredith Giffin (Concordia University); Robert Heaton (Utah State University); Jean Gudenas (Medical University of South Carolina Libraries); Pamela Bradigan (The Ohio State University Health Sciences Library) Presentations: 1) Prelude to a Health Sciences Library Assessment: Introducing the Woodward Model (Jean Gudenas) 2) Creative Acquisition Practices for Funding Clinical Resources in an Academic Health Sciences Library (Pamela Bradigan, Joe Payne) 3) Shared Print Retention: Risks, Opportunities, Issues, and Challenges (Lars Meyer) 4) Library-vendor Relations in the Era of Bad News (Robert Heaton) 5) Ask and Ye Shall Receive: Using a Commercial Document Management Service for Book Storage and Retrieval (Meredith Giffin, Kirsten Huhn) Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> Fleming moderated the session which swept through a variety of topics, some related. The first two speakers shared different perspectives on maintaining relevant health sciences collections that stay within their budgets and two others focused on storage solutions/document delivery. Gudenas described a model she is developing for the library, which can

Against the Grain / November 2018

and needs to grow, allowing it to strategize for a 3-5 year budget plan, enabling a fluid fund distribution. The Woodward Model includes core titles, takes into account the “three R’s” (recommendations, requests, and required resources), allows for non-data driven needs and emerging technology. Payne, presenting also on behalf of co-author Bradigan (who was present in the session), shared best practices when an academic health sciences library manages clinical resource licenses for a hospital. Lessons learned: start early with clinical leadership (since funding should be forthcoming from this source), as well as with customers. Look for vendor flexibility, explore multiple year license to lock in, thereby saving time. Meyer described a few collection-related aspects of his (Emory) library’s participation in two shared print programs: Scholars Trust and the HathiTrust Shared Print Program. Benefits include de-duplication, gap filling, collaboration and cooperative collection development. Among the concerns are the quality of bibliographic records, staffing and the non-participation of key libraries. The risks can be managed, he concluded. Later, in the last presentation, Giffin and Huhn shared the Concordia University (Montreal) experience with a commercial storage and document delivery management service, a solution to their university’s growth and renovation that came about after exploring other options, and how the library worked through the RFP process. In the second to last presentation, Heaton shared a practical list of considerations in library-vendor relations, e.g., knowing your limits and goals, identifying and gathering stakeholders, crafting a communications plan, being creative (and allowing others to be creative), agreeing to what is under discussion, keeping track of what happened, and follow-up/follow-through (holding parties accountable). The result? Mutual benefit.

Aligning Our Books to Our Patrons — Presented by Glenn Johnson-Grau (Loyola Marymount University); Erika Johnson (University of San Francisco); Rice Majors (Santa Clara University) Reported by Eric Parker (Northwestern University, Pritzker School of Law) <ecp278@law.northwestern.edu> In this concurrent session, Johnson, Johnson-Grau, and Majors, each representing a small, urban Jesuit institution in California, updated their presentation from 2016, titled “Assessing the Books We Didn’t Buy (The Sequel).” They provided additional insights gleaned from their continuing longitudinal study of borrowing, spending, and circulation data to define what a “normal” level of book borrowing is, as well as collection gaps. One big change in the project is the departure from their consortium, Link+, of most California State University libraries, and their replacement by more public and community college libraries. This change has had impacted the overall collection available thru Link+. Johnson-Grau reported that Loyola Marymount’s unique holdings increased dramatically, from 114,000 to 188,000, in two years as a result of the consortium change. Majors reported that Santa Clara’s borrowing has decreased from 8,500/year to about 5,500 per year. He mentioned as well that, while he expected to see their circulation data improve in five to ten years as a result of purchases made because of the study, he has found that their circulation data has seen increases after only three years. So return on investment in books purchased thru this project has been significant. continued on page 66

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And They Were There from page 65 Cameo Role: Now Casting the Future of Film through the Library — Presented by Tom Humphrey (Kanopy); Amanda Maple (Pennsylvania State University) Reported by Christine Fischer (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) <cmfische@uncg.edu> Maple described Pennsylvania State University’s tradition of distance education throughout its history and today’s need for providing streaming video access to the land-grant institution’s faculty and students. Offering those collections resources contributes to the university strategic plan’s emphasis on online education and personalized learning. She shared budget context for online content and specifically streaming video. Graphs provided a snapshot of streaming content activity for several providers, activity by faculty and discipline, user device choices, and user discovery options all of which pointed to a growing reliance on streaming video in instruction. Taking a broader market overview, Humphrey discussed several surveys covering data on media preferences, the reasons students use video, and cost per use for library subscriptions and patron driven acquisitions (PDA). The role of the library has changed over time with collections of physical media now being replaced by streaming video, with much of the content accessed by students through consumer services. Libraries can stay relevant by offering quality content that has an impact for students.

Reviewing A&I Aggregators in a Large Research Library Collection — Presented by Weijing Yuan (University of Toronto Libraries); Holly Inglis (University of Toronto Libraries); Cristina Sewerin (University of Toronto Libraries) Reported by Colleen Lougen (SUNY New Paltz) <lougenc@newpaltz.edu> The presenters all hailed from the University of Toronto which astoundingly has 44 libraries across 3 campuses. The presentation explored several important questions. What is the role of Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) and aggregator databases in the new information environment of Google, discovery systems, and extensive full text e-journal collections? How does a large research institution assess its substantial collections for duplicate indexing and full text coverage and identify low value databases? The presenters delivered practical details about their review project that could be easily adapted for any library: a methodology used to assess the value of a database; a discussion of challenges they faced; information about the tool that helped them identify overlapping full text and indexing; and finally, the outcomes of their review, including the databases they decided to cancel.

Presentations: 1) It’s NOT Just Kid’s Stuff! (Reorganization of Juvenile Collection in an Academic Library) (Heidi Busch) 2) Technology Lending: Just Like Any Other Collection, Sort Of (Bobby Hollandsworth) 3) Collection Assessment: A Cure for Office Clutter? (Thomas Karel) 4) Cooking the Books: Developing an “Academic” Cookbook Collection (Whitney Kemble) 5) Hosting a Library Vendor Week: A Better Way to Manage Vendor Site Visits? (Ed Lener, Carola Blackwood) Reported by Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> Kubilius moderated the session which provided varied views on collections (juvenile, cookbooks, and technology) in academic libraries, as well as the intersection of office and general collection assessment projects, and finally, the hosting of a fast-paced vendor (visit) week. Busch described a project to assess and update a juvenile collection, both on-site and off-site, that serves the Education Department, local educators, and the community. Hollandsworth described a rather impressive technology lending collection, and the related policies and procedures that needed to be devised. (The logistics sounded daunting to some attendees). Karel described the library’s CAP (Collection Assessment Project), comparing and contrasting it with his own work office (backlog) triage project. Kemble described the library’s aims to stay within budget limits, while building a niche, locally-relevant (particularly immigrant community) cookbook collection that benefits not only food science students, but also the university community as a whole. Lener (a librarian) and Blackwood (a participating vendor) described an interesting “speed dating” vendor visit week scheduled during a university’s spring break that featured 27 vendors with products of potential interest to the library. When asked, Lener admitted that vendors did not cross paths during the scheduled meeting times.

Successful Strategies for Partnering for Student Success — Presented by Michael Carmichael (Moderator; SAGE); Austina Jordan (University of North Georgia); Melissa Lockaby (North Georgia University); Todd Campbell (University of North Georgia) NOTE: Melissa Lockaby is affiliated with University of North Georgia.

Rumors from page 58 manuscripts published by Qatar-based corresponding authors in MDPI journals. Eligible corresponding authors affiliated with Qatar research centers and universities are prompted to choose QNL as part of the Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via MDPI’s online submission system. The program will be selected automatically if authors submit their papers using their institutional email and/or a computer registered with the institution’s IP range. QNL will then crosscheck the information and confirm the APC funding. www.mdpi.com https://www.qnl.qa/en continued on page 69

66 Against the Grain / November 2018

Shotgun Session — Presented by Ramune Kubilius (Moderator, Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library); Edward Lener (University Libraries, Virginia Tech); Thomas Karel (Franklin & Marshall College); Whitney Kemble (University of Toronto Scarborough); Heidi Busch (The University of Tennessee at Martin); Bobby Hollandsworth (Clemson University Libraries); Carola Blackwood (De Gruyter)

Reported by Robin Sabo (Central Michigan University) <sabo1r@cmich.edu> The three presenters from University of North Georgia (two librarians and the Director of General University Studies) responded to three questions posed by the moderator — 1) How should the academic library define student success?; 2) Where do you feel the library is not clearly articulating how it contributes towards this success?; and 3) Where are the opportunities for effective collaboration between the library and other stakeholders? continued on page 67

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And They Were There from page 66 Librarians are encouraged to look for opportunities “to get out of the library” and to build relationships. The presenters referenced two recent reports that may be helpful to other academic libraries wrestling with these questions. Ithaca S+R US Library Survey 2016 (April 2017), http://www. sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SR_Report_Library_ Survey_2016_04032017.pdf Association of College and Research Libraries, Academic Library Impact on Student Learning and Success: Findings from Assessment in Action Team Projects (April 2017), http://www.ala.org/ acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/findings_y3.pdf While this discussion offered many ideas to help academic libraries contribute to student success and better articulate their contributions, I was hoping for more concrete examples, such as a case study.

Transforming the Library/Vendor Relationship — Presented by Barbara Kawecki (GOBI Library Solutions from EBSCO); Maggie Farrell (UNLV); Rick Branham (SirsiDynix) Reported by Victoria Suslak (EBSCO) <vsuslak@ebsco.com> This energetic session focused on the library/vendor relationship, and how both parties can and must work together to transform that commercial relationship into a true partnership to meet their shared goals. The presenters discussed how vendors can help provide economies of scale, as well as a broad view of trends, workflows and solutions from their experience working with many libraries. In addition, vendors can be a great source of information on job trends in the industry, consortial activities and networking. Partnering with vendors also provides libraries the opportunity to be on the cutting edge of new products and services. If a vendor is testing a new service, working with a library helps the vendor validate and develop the service, while the library benefits by having a valued role in that development and an early look at what’s to come. The session ended with this: One of the reasons we all come to Charleston is to work together, and we must continue to work together because ultimately we all — libraries and vendors alike — have the same goal: to advance our libraries and our communities.

Charleston Premiers: Five Minute Previews of the New and Noteworthy — Presented by Trey Shelton (Moderator, University of Florida) and Representatives from: Bloomsbury Digital Resources, Casalini Libri, Code Ocean, Demco Software, EBSCO, Lean Library, ProQuest, The Institution of Engineering & Technology NOTE: Springer Nature was added to the roster of vendors, replacing The Institution of Engineering & Technology. Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> Shelton once again moderated this fast paced session that showcased new and innovative products. Audience members may already have known about some of them — others, not so much. This year, the audience also was invited to vote on which of the products deserved awards in these categories: best design, most innovative, having the highest impact. While some products focused on organization and discovery tools, others offer actual new digital content. Describing Lean Library, Johan Tilstra (Lean Library) built on Roger Schonfeld’s phrase (and 2015 Ithaka workshop title), “Dismantling the Stumbling Blocks: that Impede Researchers’ Access to E-Resources: An Ithaka S+R Workshop on Evidence-Based Decision-Making.” The product that already connects about 5,000 users to content was voted continued on page 68

And They Were There from page 67 #2 in design and #1 in highest impact. Michele Casalini (Casalini Libri) described the new “from record to entity” BIBRAME into practice product from Casalini Libri. Linked data is behind Demco Software’s new product. Ravi Singh (Demco Software) highlighted a discover, connect, interact product that is enriched with local holdings (upload, search, optimize geo). It was voted #2 for highest impact. James Lingle (Bloomsbury Digital Resources) described new Bloomsbury Digital Resources collections (food, Arcadian, popular music) from the thirty-year-old company’s new one-yearold division. He reminded the audience that Bloomsbury was the original publisher of Harry Potter (celebrating an anniversary this year). Travis Hewgley (Code Ocean) told the audience about the Cornell Technology start-up, that allows one to find the code behind the data (currently 11 languages) in a cloud-based environment: reproduce, execute, suggest. In the audience poll, the product won #1 for best design and most innovative; #2 for most impact. Per Tony Zanders (EBSCO), FOLIO can be used to manage all resources-it is physical, electronic format agnostic, for referential instead of copy cataloging, a foundation for extensible applications. Barbara Olson (ProQuest) described Early European Books (EEB) that encompasses 14501700, is from five European national libraries, and is an EEBO (Early English Books Online) predecessor. The availability of scatter maps, landscape and trends make things more visual. Michael DiSanto (Springer Nature) rounded out the session by describing Experiments, a site that features protocols (including current and previous versions), methods, and exchange, intelligent mining, filters for images, relevant citation trending, and the capability to communicate with authors. Read also the report by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins: http://www.against-the-grain.com/2017/11/charleston-premiers-3/.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2017 MORNING PLENARY SESSION The Long Arm of the Law — Presented by Ann Okerson (Moderator, Center for Research Libraries); William Hannay (Schiff Hardin LLP); Ruth Okediji (Harvard Law School) Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> Okerson introduced the traditional and popular conference legal update session (the 8th!), which, because of the changed conference schedule, took place first thing on Friday morning. Session regular, Hannay, was joined this year by Okediji who proceeded first. Since she is an expert in and has an interest in copyright law, she focused on recent developments, desires, concerns, abuses, and alternatives. One of the more interesting cases described involved the derivative nature (or not) of changed words to the song, whose first print reference in 1909 was “We Will Overcome.” She finished with a brief discussion about artificial intelligence, where it might be a valid use, where not (hype vs reality, substitutive vs complementary and determine “automatable rules”). Hannay updated the audience on the “right to be forgotten” case from last year and moved on to recap a few cases of possible interest to libraries, including the cases in the European Court of Justice regarding the right to lend eBooks, and the legal debate circling around the ten-year-old company, ReDigi, that is being questioned on its rights to serve as a marketplace for previously owned digital products. To lighten up the session, Hannay again amused the audience with a song, with appropriately themed words flashed on a screen, this time featuring a refrain along the lines of “You don’t own me….”

68 Against the Grain / November 2018

Read also the session report by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins: http://www.against-the-grain.com/2017/11/thelong-arm-of-the-law-5/.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2017 NEAPOLITAN SESSIONS All about Predatory Publishing: Need for Librarians & Publishers to Better Inform Authors — Presented by Charles Watkinson (Moderator, University of Michigan); Julia Gelfand (University of California, Irvine); John Sherer (University of North Carolina Press, University of North Carolina); Lisa Macklin (Emory University); Brigitte Burris (University of Pennsylvania) Reported by Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> Gelfand introduced this session and was the session moderator (Watkinson later helped moderate questions). The concept of “predatory” was described as exploitive, requiring payment of funds without the (expected, accompanying) services, e.g., peer review. A timely October 30, 2017 New York Times article (by Gina Kolata), entitled: “Many Academics Are Eager to Publish in Worthless Journals,” was mentioned. Burris argued that authors don’t always understand the consequences when the curatorial function is limited or decreased. Open access is quick, but for certain journals, this type of publishing, is not a panacea, and critical thinking still must exist. Macklin talked about needed partnerships, relationships with journals (their editorial boards), education around the entire process, reputation building. It is more than just a judgement of “this is a bad journal.” Sherer joked about the address of NCU Press being on Boundary Street…There should be an improvement in the value proposition — increased services need to include increased capacity building. An office of scholarly publishing is not “vanity publishing.” Publishers are mission driven, provide non-traditional services (e.g., selling epubs of free pdf books, publishing as a service, not cost recovery). Each project is a snowflake, he argued. There are over 100 university presses — work with them. Q&A was lively. The global scene is different. A complicating factor of being a “victim” of a predatory publisher? The shaming quality. Librarians could create a protective forum, OA publishing funds may be helpful. Who are predatory publishers? Those who see a way to make fast money in what is seen as a prestigious field (publishing), and start-up expenses are not high. Read also the session report by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins: http://www.against-the-grain.com/2017/11/ all-about-predatory-publishing/.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2017 CLOSING SESSION AND LUNCHEON Closing Session: End of Conference Poll-a-palooza Returns — Presented by Erin Gallagher (Reed College Library); Nicole Ameduri (Springer Nature) Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> The 2017 conference ended with a buffet lunch in the Francis Marion’s Gold Ballroom, and offered a satisfying, albeit breezy, review of conference-related and other topics with host Gallagher and her able assistant Ameduri (who roved the slippery floor with microphone in hand). This year, there was no co-host to offer an annual conference synopsis, but Gallagher provided a brief visit down memory lane to the three Poll-a-palooza sessions she had hosted to date, then began posing a series of questions for audience voting. What was a favorite type of continued on page 69

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And They Were There from page 68 session? (concurrent won out this year, again). Suggested changes to the conference were often humorous (e.g., no rain, midnight sessions), but also there were attempts to provide practical ideas (e.g., longer time slots for concurrent sessions, or, decrease the number of them, give umbrella titles to shotgun sessions, offer unconferences). Popular buzzwords? AI and more. Will IRs play a key role in the future of scholarly publication and research dissemination? More than half of the attendees voted “yes.” For variety, Gallagher jokingly added a question about the best books audience members had read (for her own reading list), and names of favorite Charleston restaurants (to check against her list of visited/to be visited). Were audience members mentored or served as conference mentors? About 1/3 responded “yes,” which gave clues about the composition of the audience in this year’s last session. Suggested themes for the 2018 conference ranged, from “Up the Down Staircase,” “Who’s on First,” “Tomorrow is Yesterday Before Today,” “Winning the Information Wars,” and more. Intrepid Charleston Conference blogger, Don Hawkins reports more details, including more poll results through screen captures, in his blog entry about this final session: www.against-the-grain.com/2017/11/ closing-session-conference-poll-a-palooza/.

Well this completes the reports we received from the 2017 Charleston Conference. Again we’d like to send a big thank you to all of the attendees who agreed to write short reports that highlight sessions they attended. Presentation material (PowerPoint slides, handouts) and taped session links from many of the 2017 sessions are available online. Visit the Conference Website at www.charlestonlibraryconference.com. — KS

Against the Grain / November 2018

Rumors from page 66 Publishing services provider Sheridan, a CJK Group company, has expanded its partnership with research technology company Digital Science to enable support for Dimensions badges and Figshare supplemental data widgets across the PubFactory hosting platform. Launched in January 2018, the Dimensions badges provide citation counts for any publication. Driven by the underlying technology of the Dimensions platform, which indexes over 96 million publications, users can click on the Dimensions badges to explore all of the citations a publication has received, with further detail on when they occurred and how the academic influence of the publication compares to other articles published in the same discipline. The Figshare widgets are a dynamic, embeddable integration that make it easy for publishers to provide the supplemental data relating to individual articles alongside the main text of the article, ensuring it is much more discoverable and encouraging reuse. https://www.digital-science.com/blog/news/sheridan-expands-pubfactory-partnership-with-digital-science/ This seems cool to me. According to The Bookseller, a U.S. producer and former Netflix executive are embarking on a joint venture, “TaleFlick,” which offers a library of searchable books for adaptation across film, TV and digital media. Producer Uri Singer of Passage Pictures and George Berry, previously of Netflix and Apple, said the database “bridges the gap between the written word on paper and the spoken word on screen by paving the way for storytellers around the world to shop their content to the entertainment industry.” The platform is for all content including published books and short stories and the submission fee is $88 (£67) to cover curation, which makes the content continued on page 93

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Straight Talk — Springer Nature Cancels €3.2 Billion IPO at the Last Minute Column Editor: Dan Tonkery (President and CEO, Content Strategies, Inc., 17 W. 17th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10011; Phone: 973-206-8211) <tonkery@gmail.com> www.contentstrategies.com

he library, publishing and investment community news sources have been filled with articles and notices announcing Springer Nature’s failed IPO. What’s the story here? Does this mean that Springer Nature is in financial trouble? What does this failed IPO mean for the library community? Has the Open Access movement put a stake in the financial plans of our second largest STM publisher? I am not sure that the answer is all that complex. Before I tackle that issue perhaps a little background is necessary as this is not the first time an IPO has been on the table. In 2015, Springer Nature was formed by the merger of publishing units from the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and Springer Science+Business Media held by the large venture firm BC Partners. Springer is not a new company but has a long history of scientific publishing founded in 1842. My first exposure to Springer was in 1973. As a new librarian working at the National Library of Medicine I was given the task of working with the top 50 STM publishers and selling them on the concept of Cataloging in Publication. I visited all 50 publishers and worked with their editorial staff to implement the CIP program. One of my favorite publishers was Springer. They were an old world classic German publisher and I visited them every time I was in New York City. The friends that I made there lasted for more than 25 years and I was fortunate enough to continue working with various family members during my tenure as President and CEO of Readmore, a library subscription agent based in NYC. Every year for ten years that I attended the Frankfurt BookFair for Readmore, I was invited to the private dinner that Springer held for the major subscription agents. Springer was a family run company with a great corporate culture. As the Springer family aged and lacked new leadership, the company was sold and fell into the hands of Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann owned Springer from 1998-2003 and basically left them alone. They were more like caretakers than new owners. With some chaotic changes in Bertelsmann’s management, the company began selling off several of its newer acquisitions including Springer. In the spring of 2003, Springer was sold to two British private-equity firms Cinven and Candover. Cinven and Candover also acquired Kluwer Academic Publishers and merged the two companies. In 2004, Derk Haank, the chairman of Elsevier was poached to lead Springer. Cinven and Candover had a plan to take Springer public and with the addition of Kluwer Academic plus the leadership of Haank, the stage was set for a public offering. In fact, Haank was promised a huge payday as a condition to leave Elsevier and lead the

70 Against the Grain / November 2018

new Springer. The combined Springer and Kluwer revenues were sufficient to support the market expectation and an IPO was considered nearly certain. In the end the global financial meltdown in 2006-7 ruined the Springer IPO opportunity and Cinven and Candover did the next best thing. They raided Springer’s assets, stripped out as much cash as possible, and borrowed heavily leaving Springer in near financial ruins and then sold Springer with its new debt to EQT and GIC in 2009. After a short time, the next venture group sold Springer to BC Partners in 2013 for €3 billion. Since 2004, Springer has been under the same leadership. Derk Haank has had to face different owners, changes in market conditions and expectations, navigate the Open Access movement, continue to grow the business even with the library attacks on the Big Deals. He continued to grow the company and prosper independent of market conditions. His 13 years at the helm of Springer showed his high level of competence and stomach for managing through chaos. The new owners BC Capital Partners soon decided that Springer by themselves would not make a strong IPO candidate primarily due to the heavy debt load that was still on Springer’s books. They went looking for a partner that would greatly improve the story to investors, someone with blue ribbon credentials and a merger partner that would improve the financial conditions that the market seeks for a successful IPO. Within a short time, BC Partners found a very successful potential IPO partner and they convinced Stefan von Holtzbrinck of the benefits and serious financial rewards that would come from a merger of the privately held Holtzbrinck Publishing Group’s Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macmillan Education. Stefan was sold on an opportunity to significantly increase the value of his publishing units and to enjoy a very handsome payday. A merger was completed with Holtzbrinck owning 53% of the new company and plans for a public offering were developed. Derk Haank had been planning for this IPO since 2004. His goal to run an IPO was finally in range. In the end Derk did not see his dream fulfilled at least under his leadership. Working for a venture firm is always difficult as the venture organization often lacks a real understanding of the market but does give CEO’s an opportunity to achieve certain goals.

The downside is that if you don’t achieve those goals, then a change of management occurs. In the Springer Nature case certain targets were established, and Springer did not achieve those goals partly due to a change in market conditions. Derk could no longer keep the wolf from his door. Springer Nature was left to announce Derk’s retirement. A sad farewell to the one executive that had worked tirelessly to keep Springer alive and thriving. But business is business and the owners wanted an IPO. A new CEO from the business world was hired to deliver on the IPO promise. Daniel Ropers the very successful founder and CEO of bol.com who has a sterling reputation in the investment community was brought in to orchestrate the IPO. Now with the IPO planning back on track, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley were hired as the global coordinators. Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale are the book runners. Everything was planned for July 2018, but then suddenly the IPO was moved up to the end of April. The IPO had the best banks lined up to sell the offering to potential investors. Normally an offering with this type of backing would be a slam dunk, the story was solid, the companies are highly profitable. Springer Nature posted €1.62 billion euros in sales last year and employs 13,000 staff. It publishes 3,000 scientific journals and about 12,000 new books a year. Its 2017 EBITDA of just below €600 million euros after €564 million in 2016 is still a solid profit return. And yet with all that revenue and profit, the IPO was killed! Why? How could this happen? Is Springer Nature in trouble? What does this mean to my library, my big deal, or access to my e-subscriptions? First and foremost, I believe that Springer Nature is a solid well-run company and your library subscriptions are secure. Your ebooks and big deal will continue. Springer is also one of the largest open access publisher’s publishing over 550 OA titles each year and this is a growing area. Unfortunately, most OA titles do not deliver the same level of revenue as a traditional subscription title. STM titles published even with the Gold OA model do not yield the same revenue and that is not likely to improve soon. Springer still obtains 95% of their profitability from traditional scholarly publishing. There are some individuals in the library community that would like to think that the OA access movement was largely responsible for Springer Nature’s failed IPO. That the continued on page 71

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Straight Talk from page 70 uncertainly of the market has cast a shadow on Springer Nature. Certainly, the investment community is aware of the OA movement but when you review Springer’s renewal rates for their Big Deals or consider any other financial factor, other than a large amount of OA chatter, the OA access movement has done very little damage to Springer Nature, nor has the OA movement hurt the financial returns of Elsevier’s RELX, Kluwer or Informa the owner of Taylor & Francis. I would have to say while the OA movement is alive and well, it has not impacted the financial performance of any publicly held STM company and I don’t believe that the investment community was in any way influenced or bothered by this factor when considering the investment in the IPO. What then explains the failed IPO? I believe that there are three primary reasons that the Springer Nature IPO failed. I believe the primary issue is the debt level. The IPO proceeds would have been used to reduce Springer Nature’s debt level down to 3.75 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization. Springer’s debt currently stands at €3 billion euros and too much of the IPO funds raised were going to be used to pay down the debt. Why would an investor that is already carrying Springer

Against the Grain / November 2018

bonds want to buy more debt or just replace one form of investment for another? Springer has too much debt and I believe that the company should have renegotiated their debt with their banks and reduced the level down to a more manageable level. Investors did not like buying debt. Shareholders don’t like to use their funds to cover housekeeping items. They often want their money used to expand products and services, for acquisitions, or to fund growth. The second reason for the IPO failure is the lack of growth opportunity. Investors while happy to see a well-run company that is profitable, always demand to see substantial growth potential. A 3% growth forecast is almost surely a kiss of death for a deal. It certainly takes any excitement out of an investment opportunity. Given so much of the investment money chasing IPO’s these days is being used to invest in some form of internet idea, along comes Spring Nature and offers a story of 3% growth with a promise that it could get worse if the OA access movement gets out of hand. So really the best growth rate an investor will ever see out of Springer is a disappointing 3% and investors must be prepared for the possibility that growth rate get even worse. Not a very exciting story to sell investors. Perhaps the last reason that the Springer Nature IPO failed is that investors were pricing the IPO at the bottom range of the offering. The bookrunners selling the IPO had to offer the shares at a considerable discount, below

the price that the owners had expected. The investment banks had priced the offering at €10.50-€14.50 range per share. Most of the contracts for shares came in at the low end of the offering price. The target price was so low that BC Partners decided not to sell any of their holdings and to keep their current investment. This is significant because the IPO was going to be a big payday for BC Partners. A weak market demand for Springer Nature shares, the low IPO price per share, the lack of growth and high debt level all created the perfect storm. The owners decided to cancel the IPO. Wise decision? Perhaps but my personal feeling is that the market conditions may continue to deteriorate, as the growth rate is not going to improve, and OA investment will not yield the same financial rate as a traditional journal. I think I would have gone for the IPO now. At least the debt level could have been addressed. The library community can expect business as usual. The IPO makes little difference to the everyday workings of our second largest publisher. What Springer needs is a merger with another group that is growing rapidly and is profitable. Stay tuned to see if Springer Nature decides to try another IPO. Publicly owned or private publisher, Springer Nature still has a significant impact on academic libraries and that role should continue for years to come.

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Library Analytics: Shaping the Future — A Case of Strategic Library Transformation Using Data Analytics: Chalmers University of Technology by Daniel Forsman (City Librarian, Stockholm City Library, and Former Library Director, Chalmers University of Technology) <daniel.forsman@stockholm.se> Column Editors: John McDonald (EBSCO Information Services) <johnmcdonald@ebsco.com> and Kathleen McEvoy (EBSCO Information Services) <kmcevoy@ebsco.com>

he year 2000 marked a shift for Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. It was the first year that the Library spent more than 50% of their media budget on digital resources. Today, that number is close to 99%. In 2010, the university’s implementation of a discovery tool provided us with the first insights of our digital collection size, as we had to define which sources to include. Chalmers Library holds about 500,000 physical items, while the digital collection topped 260 million records. By 2018, the discovery service has increased its scope with millions of records. The president of Chalmers mandated in 2004 that all Chalmers’ scientific publications metadata would be registered in a bibliographic repository and by 2010, the new president mandated that all publications should be registered and published in fulltext and Open Access. It took the library ten years working in a predominately digital information landscape before we could reflect upon the consequences of changed user behavior and determine the need for a strategic realignment of library services and organization. During those ten years, the value of library services eroded with our stakeholders and the library was being marginalized by the decisionmakers at the University. The library had lost its place at the table. By the end of 2009, library management challenged the university management on the library’s future, resulting in a new mission and platform for developing relevant services. At the core of this challenge was the insight and value of data. All of the services subscribed to or developed by the library left digital footprints of usage that could be aggregated into sets of behavior and analyzed. The data in our catalog, institutional repository and licensed resources could potentially provide us with new insights if we invested in studying and understanding that data. The insights could provide us with information to create new services, but would require the li-

72 Against the Grain / November 2018

brary to recruit and develop new competencies. Librarians would have to learn and understand their library from a data-centric perspective and be a part of cross-functional teams including developers, interaction designers and users. That use of data as a new tool to determine value was implemented by library management in early 2010. The challenge became how to refine that tool, but the demand for scholarly metrics and analytics at the campus level became our first method of refining those data tools. The rise of bibliometrics as a measure of academic success and visibility in the surrounding society was a result of non-academics or academic management attempting to simplify a complex system. As a library, we embraced this new focus on bibliometrics for two reasons — to safeguard academia from unfair methodologies and to make sure that bibliometrics were not used in an inappropriate way. The metrics of a publication does not equal the metrics of success for an individual. Second, the library understood that we could develop new insights based on bibliographic data. Those insights were not the “Cf:s” or “Jf:s” of bibliometrics, but the relationships that the data could describe between and among subjects, organizations, and networks. The ability to extract high-quality, timely, actionable insights for researchers, scholarly communicators, research funders, and management from publication patterns and usage patterns would earn the library a seat at the table as an expert on how to increase the visibility and the impact of research. By working with this data, understanding this data, and having the confidence to analyze and present conclusions of this data, the library became a strategic partner for stakeholders to make better, informed decisions. Today’s data-intense environment of the academy requires a deep understanding of the research lifecycle. Librarians possess that understanding from a long tradition of serving academia, by following not only their users

from student to professor, but also supporting the research process from disseminating information to the discovery of research output. The librarian can be a multi-disciplinary expert with a deep understanding of academia and the publishing eco-system. This requires library leaders to lead and inspire their librarians with confidence as they develop data-describing skills into data analytics. Librarians have been organizing knowledge for so long, now it is time to analyze this knowledge and promote a data-driven culture that identifies signs of change and drives the transformation of libraries. It is crucial for the perceived value of libraries that we develop talent and drive innovation based upon the data derived from the user behavior of our stakeholders. It is hard to transform and to adapt. Universities as old, slow organizations (for good reasons) have a hard time transforming and adapting — indeed, the nature of academia is to maintain consistency over time. But society is changing and technology is driving it forward at a fast pace. As employers start to value what you can do and not where you have been educated, the formal education system is threatened to be disrupted. Even today, with current technology, it is easy to find examples of people who have acquired great skills outside of the formal education system. These fundamental shifts in academia offer libraries the possibility to position themselves as trusted advisers based upon an understanding of technology, user behavior, and user needs from a data-centric perspective. The ability to respond to a changing society and usage behavior patterns is what is going to determine whether universities (and libraries) can maintain the trust of our society, a trust that is crucial for the brand of what we do. Academic rankings are an interesting case for university libraries. There is a lot that can be debated about university rankings (as for scientometric/bibliometrics), but it is apparent that these rankings matter for our stakeholders, as they have an impact on recruiting and the public image of a university. Librarians, with a deep understanding of the academic environment and strong skills in knowledge organization, are in an ideal position to work with university administration and faculty by taking the lead on ranking analytics. By scrutinizing the data behind academic rankings, strategically important insights emerge and allow you to understand how to change your position in such continued on page 73

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Library Analytics ... from page 72 rankings. Although this requires confidence in taking the lead on analytic approaches, it is my firm belief that by adopting a data-centric approach, coupled with the unique position of libraries in the university, this is a job for the library and librarian. This means engaging in strategic discussions on the future direction of universities as we strive to increase quality in research and education. Developing the competences of the staff at Chalmers Library has been crucial for the success of the library. But recruiting or training the staff is just one part of it. Management must offer an environment where that talent can excel, by trusting staff to accomplish their goals and avoiding unjustified oversight. It requires humility and trust, and an approach where management’s first goal is to remove obstacles for its staff to operate freely within their mandate. The largest risk for success occurs when management interferes or hinders development because they do not understand their role. For Chalmers, the role of the institutional repository has been crucial in the transition to a data-centric culture. A repository that functions as an outlet for research output is important, but the data stored in the repository can often be as valuable. The importance of our repository increased in 2012 when Chalmers Library was charged with creating a current research information system (CRIS) with information on research projects. Without already having a successfully implemented repository and the bibliometric data associated with it, this would have been unlikely to achieve. Following a period of research and benchmarking, we decided to develop a CRIS system that would include publications, biographies, and analytics on the impact/use of our research information, serving as a hub for high-quality data. The goal was to gather publication, project and personal data, then curate that data so it could be re-used for analytics. This would reduce effort and save time for individual researchers who frequently spend too much time answering surveys that could be automated by a smart research-information-system. Research.chalmers.se is a success story for the university library. By doing our homework around the user experience and understanding how the system could free up time for researchers, administrators, and managers, we were successful in developing a core functionality focused on delivering value for its stakeholders. Developed by a cross-functional team in a true agile fashion, we guaranteed the sustainability of the system by connecting our publications to our projects, to the people involved, and automating workflows, reducing effort and freeing time for stakeholders. The system provides a tool for disseminating research publications and projects. But more importantly, it provides the university with strong data sets that can be used for strategic business analytics. From the data in the repository, we can provide stakeholders with

Against the Grain / November 2018

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visualizations of research networks, author-networks, subject-networks; by connecting those networks to bibliometrics, we can broaden the study of publication success. Today, curating research information data (publications, projects, people) for the purpose of dissemination, re-use and analysis is at the core of Chalmers Library. By developing these services, we have further developed the talent of our staff, which enables us to drive innovation and re-establish the strategic importance of the University Library. We are back at

the table and our services, insights, and counsel is sought after by all stakeholders. I have recently departed Chalmers University Library to take on a new role as City Librarian of Stockholm. I am very excited to foster a data-driven culture within public libraries as we aim to remain relevant, support societal transformation, develop talent and foster innovation.

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Both Sides Now: Vendors and Librarians — What Happens Next? Column Editor: Michael Gruenberg (Managing Partner, Gruenberg Consulting, LLC) <michael.gruenberg@verizon.net> www.gruenbergconsulting.com

s parents, we are mindful on a daily basis of our responsibility to make sure that our kids are raised with certain values. We want them to turn out to be responsible and conscientious adults making their way in the world in a positive manner. After all, their actions in adulthood reflect the values we taught them as children. If you called my 40-year-old daughter today and asked her about some of the guiding principles I alerted her to when she was growing up, inevitably she would tell you that I advised her to always be aware of possible outcomes to her decisions. I advised her that some of her actions as a young adult should have the “what happens next?” litmus test applied. “If I do this, let me think of what will happen next as a result of my actions?” Only after careful consideration of the possible outcomes of my actions, will I then proceed” she would answer. It’s always good to be prepared for the present, but even more importantly to understand the possible outcomes in the future. You can’t predict the future, but you certainly can speculate as to what it might be. The process of negotiation comes with a significant degree of “what happens next?” A vendor/library negotiation is comprised of many steps. At the beginning, middle and end of each step along the way to the completion of the sale, the question of “what happens next?” needs to be addressed by both parties. For the library, the first step is to be aware of the funding limitations and data’s technical requirements associated with the possible purchase of information to be provided by the vendor. You have to cover this important aspect because quite frankly, if you don’t have the money or the technical skills to present the data to your constituents there is nothing more left to say. It’s unfair to the sales rep to go through all the machinations of presenting a product if there no hope of an eventual sale. That’s because the ‘“what happens next?” for the sales rep is that if no sale will be consummated then that means that there is better than average chance that the rep won’t achieve their sales goal. If a sales rep consistently misses their sales goals, their employment at the company will most certainly be in jeopardy. For the sales rep, the “what happens next?” needs to have a positive answer and if no sale is imminent, then it’s time to find other prospects. On the other hand, if there is genuine interest combined with the knowledge that actual funds are available for a purchase after initial curiosity in the proposed product then the answers to the “what happens next?” question takes on a more significant meaning for both the buyer and seller.

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For the seller, it means that it is time to begin to prepare a full presentation pointing out the features and benefits the product will have for the buyer. In addition, the sales rep needs to gather all those people within the organization that can be of help in preparing, and presenting the value proposition to the information professional. Most sales organizations operating in the information industry are well equipped in fulfilling this process and have fully staffed departments ready to assist in closing the sale. For the buyer, a positive response to “what happens next?” at this stage means that there will be a significant amount of planning and orchestrating to be done. All the people internally that will be needed to aid in the negotiation process with the vendor have to be contacted and briefed. The library simply does not have the same ready-made facilities and internal resources available as the vendor has. It is therefore incumbent upon the buyer to be fastidious and efficient in preparing themselves and their support staff for the eventual negotiation with the seller. The next time the “what happens next?” question is to be pondered is when the sales rep requests a face-to-face meeting. As part of the process, the rep will suggest topics to be discussed, mutually convenient times and dates to get together. Here is where the library begins to wrest control of the entire negotiation process away from the vendor by requiring that a written agenda be sent in advance of the meeting by the salesperson outlining goals for the meeting and who from the company will be there to accompany the rep. The library can say yea or nay to the proposed topics and be advised as to who will be there from the vendor side. Furthermore the buyer can suggest the day and time that is convenient for them, as well. The follow-up meeting from the agenda should be in the buyer’s control. At this point, once the interest in the product has been deemed to be authentic, funds to pay for this product are available and both sides have established an amicable working relationship, then “what happens next?” is in full force. No meeting should end without clear “to do” objectives for both parties to be completed within a specified time period. A vendor might say, “If I present a price of $20K, will the buyer think it too high?” “What will be my fallback if they reject the offer?” “Do I have an alternate price in mind?”

And so it goes….. The most difficult aspect of negotiation is determining a fair price, but more importantly a fair price that is amenable to the buyer. In other words, “what happens next when they scoff at my first offer?” Similarly, the buyer might say, “If the price presented is $20K and even if we have room in the budget to pay a little more than that, I prefer to suggest a lower number to the sales rep. How far should we push on price?” “If we go beyond the guidelines, what happens next when the director reviews the deal on the table?” “Is it worth the grief that will most assuredly occur if my boss is unhappy with the deal?” In reality, “what happens next?” is a way for both the buyer and seller to stay focused on the job at hand which is to buy and sell a product or service. Adherence to this concept will make the negotiations flow much easier and much more efficiently than not having this as part of the process. In 2002, the group Chevelle released an album called Wonder What’s Next. All lyrics written by Pete Loeffler; all music composed by Chevelle. The lyrics give speculation as to the group’s future in the music business.

M i k e i s c u r re n t l y t h e M a n a g i n g Partner of Gruenberg Consulting, LLC, a firm he founded in January 2012 after a successful career as a senior sales executive in the information industry. His firm is devoted to provide clients with sales staff analysis, market research, executive coaching, trade show preparedness, product placement and best practices advice for improving negotiation skills for librarians and salespeople. His book, “Buying and Selling Information: A Guide for Information Professionals and Salespeople to Build Mutual Success” has become the definitive book on negotiation skills and is available on Amazon, Information Today in print and eBook, Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, Kobo, Apple iBooks, OverDrive, 3M Cloud Library, Gale (GVRL), MyiLibrary, ebrary, EBSCO, Blio, and Chegg. www. gruenbergconsulting.com

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Biz of Digital — Exploratory Evolution: Using Participatory Change to Rethink and Reorganize Digital Collections Services by Annie Benefiel (Archivist for Collection Management, Grand Valley State University, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI 49401-9403; Phone: 616-331-8727) <benefiea@gvsu.edu> and Jacklyn Rander (Publishing Services Manager, Grand Valley State University, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI 49401-9403; Phone: 616-331-2623) <randerja@gvsu.edu> and Matt Ruen (Scholarly Communications Outreach Coordinator, Grand Valley State University, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI 49401-9403; Phone: 616-331-9182) <ruenm@gvsu.edu> and Leigh Rupinski (Archivist for Public Services & Community Engagement, Grand Valley State University, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI 49401-9403; Phone: 616-331-8726) <rupinskl@gvsu.edu> Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Acquisitions and Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-6754; Fax: 410-455-1598) <flinchba@umbc.edu>

hange is the only constant in digital collections work. Evolving technologies, resources, and needs require a constant flexibility in not only what work is done, but how and by whom. Over the course of the 2017-2018 academic year, Grand Valley State University Libraries held a series of facilitated conversations to analyze the workflows, organizational structure, and overall support for the management of digital collections and repositories. This article summarizes the facilitation process and highlights areas of opportunity, aspirations, and future directions. Located in Allendale, Michigan, Grand Valley State University is a comprehensive liberal arts institution with approximately 25,000 students. The University Libraries supports the curriculum by connecting students to information and resources at five diverse physical locations across three campuses. University Libraries’ digital collections previously existed in two departments, Special Collections & University Archives and Collections & Scholarly Communications. Technical support for the collections was provided by two additional departments responsible for systems, technology, and resources. Special Collections & University Archives created digital collections in order to provide increased access to the department’s unique materials, including historical photographs, moving images, oral histories, and manuscripts. Collections & Scholarly Communications developed digital collections of faculty publications, theses, dissertations, open educational resources, and journals using the institutional repository and a suite of library publishing services. While both departments have become increasingly collaborative in recent years in efforts to improve the usability of digital resources and better serve library users, the inter-departmental nature of the work led to ambiguous project leadership and difficulties with resourcing. In order to strengthen this collaboration, a Digital Objects Working Group, consisting of faculty and staff representation

Against the Grain / November 2018

from all involved departments, was established. Working Group members, however, balanced primary job responsibilities with shifting priorities and timelines inherent in digital projects. University Libraries took the opportunity of new leadership and staff changes to reevaluate the function and the sustainability of digital collection workflows. The Dean of University Libraries began a facilitated process, drawing on Appreciative Inquiry1 and Design Thinking,2 to help establish a clear and efficient set of practices for digital collections work. This facilitation framework used guided conversation and participatory activities to identify strengths, redundancies, and challenges. Over the course of eight months, the Working Group participated in five general phases of co-creation towards implementing a new structure for digital collections work: Phase 1: Analyzing functional tasks performed by each member and necessary skill sets Phase 2: Analyzing peer and aspirant institutions’ approaches to digital collections Phase 3: Identifying an ideal state and developing a feasible state for the future Phase 4: Analyzing public-facing and collection management tasks and necessary skill sets Phase 5: Consulting University Libraries’ and external stakeholders on creation of a feasible state Several phases of the facilitation process sought to identify job similarities and knowledge gaps that had developed as separate digital collections programs evolved. Analyzing individual activities revealed intersections between Working Group members’ areas of responsibility. This enabled the group to begin reimagining how their services, programs, and collections might be restructured to better share expertise and resources.

The facilitation process incorporated card-sorting and visualization exercises to affirm shared professional values and identify opportunities for growth, as well as break down job activities. For example, the team created functional categories, such as “Collection Development” and “Digital Curation,” and listed all tasks that fell into those areas regardless of which department performed them. These discussions revealed areas that could benefit from more formalized collaboration. For example, the scope of institutional repository services has been largely defined by the repository software, while digital archives projects have had more flexibility and more intentional negotiation with partners. A shared approach to establishing the scope and capacity of services will allow repository staff to draw on established processes as technology evolves, and will enable better communication with potential campus partners about what University Libraries can support. Considering digital content work from a functional standpoint revealed opportunities to improve communication between members. Terminology was a challenge in a past migration of archival content into the institutional repository, with key terms like “series” having specific and different meanings for an archivist and a repository manager. The task analysis allowed members to see similarities that had been previously obscured by terminology or past practice, which will also improve future collaborations. Initially, identified tasks were mapped to a common model of the Digital Curation Lifecycle,3 and many group members’ core responsibilities fit within the cycle. As discussion continued, however, it became clear that the model could not accommodate all activities. Programmatic responsibilities like strategic continued on page 76

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Biz of Digital from page 75 decision-making, promoting collections, and project planning do not directly involve the curation of individual digital objects, but are nonetheless essential for that curation to occur. Similarly, digital curation is related but not central to many education, outreach, and collection management activities performed by team members. Conducting archival appraisal and description, providing workshops on copyright and scholarly publishing, or building relationships with campus partners all occur whether or not any digital objects are involved. Incorporating multiple lenses for analysis was vital to authentically reflect all of the work performed by group members. The multimodal approach ensured a more complete discussion as the Working Group moved towards a new organizational structure. These additional perspectives reaffirmed the distinctive characteristics of each previously separate department, but also presented more opportunities for task-based collaboration. In addition to looking inward, the Working Group reviewed the infrastructure, content, and organization of digital collections programs at peer and aspirant institutions. The review showed that GVSU’s digital collections had developed in similar ways as peer institutions, particularly in the use of the Digital Commons institutional repository platform and CONTENTdm for digital special collections. University Libraries’ collections, however, often contained more digital objects, with a greater diversity in subject matter, content types, and file formats than peers. The University Libraries’ recent move to Omeka, a locally-supported, open source platform for digital special collections was more in line with aspirational models. Among peer institutions most tasks associated with digital special collections were performed within a Special Collections and/ or Archives department, while institutional repository and publishing programs were managed by a Scholarly Communications, Digital Scholarship, or Publishing department or librarian. Organizational charts and department directories were generally unclear about where responsibilities for digital preservation lay. Among aspirational institutions, particularly those with higher staffing numbers and a stronger research focus, digital collection work was frequently managed by a self-contained department or unit that combined all of the collection management tasks for both digital special collections and the institutional repository. Ultimately, looking at other institutions’ organizational models and achievements reinforced the Working Group’s growing consensus that closer formal organization could catalyze improvements to current practices and opportunities for new initiatives. As a result of the facilitation process, University Libraries decided to move members from each involved department to a newly envisioned Collections & Digital Scholarship department, under the leadership of the

76 Against the Grain / November 2018

Past Organizational Structure

Future Organizational Structure

Associate Dean for Curation, Publishing & Preservation Services. This new department separates individuals’ organizational position from their physical area of work, allowing a formal alignment of shared expertise across mediums and formats. It provides infrastructure for the project-based nature of the work, and integrates all collections, from general to rare, under shared vision and leadership. The shift enables a greater collaborative approach and formalizes resourcing. Areas of work that will

become closer with this integration include the management of, and engagement with, general, special, and digital collections; digital scholarship; developing and maintaining partnerships; scholarly communications; and expanding publishing services. This process also highlighted the need for increased clarity of responsibilities for each functional specialist on the team. More work still needs to take place to evaluate existing job descriptions, clarify roles, reduce unneccontinued on page 77

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Come see us at table # 77 at the Charleston Vendor Showcase For more information on how to support or participate in the archive contact us at info@clockss.org. CLOCKSS Archive is a dark archive that ensures the long-term survival of web-based scholarly publications, governed by and for its stakeholders. The archive includes over 250 Participating Publishers 300 Library Supporters 22,000 journal titles 30,000,000 journal articles 72,000 ebooks

Biz of Digital from page 76 essary overlap, and build in needed redundancies in areas of collection management, digital collection and metadata creation and maintenance, and outreach and community engagement. Using the information gathered during the facilitated discussions, University Libraries’ administration also presented a hiring plan to address some of the knowledge and support gaps identified. The plan adds two new positions, a Collection Strategist and a Data Visualization Specialist, to the department. In addition, two roles have been redesigned as a Government Documents & Open Collections Librarian and a Curator for Rare Books & Distinguished Collections. University Libraries will also leverage new membership in the ACRL Diversity Initiative to gain a Digital Scholarship Fellow, who will focus much of their work on digital collections, open collections, and data in the university’s teaching and learning. Individual teams will still maintain distinct areas of focus within the greater department structure. For instance, the Special Collections & University Archives identity remains necessary, both as a physical place and a spe-

Against the Grain / November 2018

53 journals have been triggered as open access. www.clockss.org

cific body of collections, for students learning archival research techniques and for campus offices managing long-term records. Recognizing and valuing the areas where practices differ for valid reasons will enable a healthy balance between department-wide collaborations and services that are most effective when tailored to a particular context or need. University Libraries values a strong culture of collaboration. The new Collections & Digital Scholarship department provides support for stronger internal collaborations, which complements ongoing work building and maintaining relationships outside the department. These important collaborations enable University Libraries to respond quickly to emerging trends and challenges. While the facilitation process focused on the importance of creating sustainable workflows for digital collections work, it also demonstrated the many strengths and similarities between areas of responsibility previously divided. Ultimately, the envisioned Collections & Digital Scholarship department will prioritize digital collections in a new and innovative way for Grand Valley State University Libraries.4

Acknowledgements: The authors wish to thank their colleagues in the facilitation process: Sarah Beaubien, Robert Beasecker, Annie Bélanger, Jeffrey Daniels, Kyle Felker, Alicia Huber, Diana Page, Patrick Roth, and Matt Schultz. Endnotes 1. Sue Annis Hammond. The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry: 3rd Edition. (Bend, OR: Thin Book Publishing Co., 2013.) 2. Scott Doorley et al, “Design Thinking Bootleg 2018,” Hasso Platner Institute of Design at Stanford University, https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/ design-thinking-bootleg. Accessed July 17, 2018. 3. “The DCC Curation Lifecycle Model,” Digital Curation Center, http://www.dcc. ac.uk/resources/curation-lifecycle-model. Accessed July 17,2018. 4. A white paper discussing the facilitation process in greater detail is available online: Annie Bélanger et al., “Establishing a Shared Vision for an Integrated Approach to Collections and Scholarly Communications,” March 6, 2018, https://scholarworks. gvsu.edu/library_reports/1/.

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Being Earnest with Collections — Prepping the Future: A Call for Today’s Technical Services Librarians to Develop Tomorrow’s Leaders by Cara Mia Calabrese (Electronic Resources Management Librarian, University of Wisconsin-Madison) <cara.calabrese@wisc.edu> Column Editor: Michael A. Arthur (Associate Professor, Head, Resource Acquisition & Discovery, The University of Alabama Libraries, Box 870266, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487; Phone: 205-348-1493; Fax: 205-348-6358) <maarthur@ua.edu> Column Editor’s Note: I am pleased to feature Cara Calabrese for this issue of ATG. I met Cara early in her undergraduate career at the University of Central Florida. She worked first as a student employee and later as a full-time staff member in the Acquisitions & Collection Services department. She excelled at the work and showed great promise as a librarian. She has been focused on mentoring and has encouraged those above her to serve as mentors while also encouraging her peers to seek out mentoring opportunities. I had the opportunity to co-write a short article with Cara that focused on aspects of mentoring in technical services. I am happy that she has gained so much experience and mentoring from several professionals. This article speaks to the benefits she received from mentoring and I hope that it drives others to play a key role in the development of future technical services librarians. I am sure Cara would appreciate feedback from ATG readers who share in her desire to promote technical services to the next generation of librarians. — MA

Introduction

Technical services inherently by the type of work and sometimes even its location in a library building does not make it a highly visible department, especially when compared to departments that regularly do instruction or outreach. In fact, if we are doing a good job neither patrons or librarians should notice anything is happening, like article level linking from a discovery layer, direct downloads of articles, or on trend topics being findable in any medium for use in a timely fashion. In some libraries, even our fellow librarians may not fully grasp the breadth of our work. If this is true of our fellow librarians, how are we reaching the next generation of librarians to show them how awesome our work can be and encourage them to join our ranks? I see several ways to start working on getting technical services noticed by potential librarians and to give those that are interested the tools to get ahead and succeed from the start of their career. Based on my experience, I think this lies in working to provide a good foundation for exploration and skill building as a student and early career building through completion of relevant courses and opportunities to work with current technical services librarians. Follow that early preparation with mentoring throughout the technical services

78 Against the Grain / November 2018

librarian’s career. The valuable early career mentoring then sets the stage for continuing to provide support for technical services librarians as they face almost continuous changes in the profession. I graduated in 2015 with my MLIS. During my courses I cannot recall another student as focused and excited about a technical services path as I was. I also remember being frustrated that the curriculum had tracks for instruction and reference, web development, school libraries, and information organization. Few courses were available for collection development and management and virtually nothing related to electronic resources work, licensing, troubleshooting, vendor negotiations, or acquisitions. Current programs have been very nimbly adding makerspaces, building and using technology, and data management into course catalogs, but electronic resources, collection development and management, and acquisitions still seem to be absent or limited in offerings. I recently checked the course offerings for five additional ALA accredited library schools and saw similar patterns among their course offerings. This situation may exist because those with significant expertise in these areas who could actually teach others are currently busy being technical services librarians and supporting their libraries. UW-Madison is offering a continuing education course on licensing during this fall, though there does not seem to be a comparable course for their current Master’s programs.

Mentoring & Early Career Support

I was grateful that I was able to continue working in an academic library environment during my Master’s program. Continuing to build my job and interpersonal skills through my work helped to narrow the technical service gap present in my degree, especially since a practicum or internship was not a feasible opportunity for me financially. Applying the concepts taught in class helped me relate the content to real life situations and showed me how an idea could differ in concept versus application. Just as seeing a library’s implementation of several projects, helped me build realistic expectations for my future projects. The librarians I worked with understood and embraced mentoring and teaching along with my many questions about policy and decision-making. This was a highly benefi-

cial supplement to the courses in my MLIS program. They encouraged and pushed me to experience and understand how different areas of the library functioned, interfaced with each other, and what their needs were. The mentors I encountered during my graduate years were able to discuss, not only the conceptual ideas that I was currently being taught about the profession, but also explore the reasoning behind why a library functions and make the choices it does. Passing on such institutional knowledge, was valuable on both sides. We were able to have productive conversations over many topics, possibly implement new techniques that would benefit the library, and I became a better librarian. Mentoring both informal and formal has had a big impact on my librarianship. ALCTS recently started a new formal mentoring program. ALCTS is very active in providing continuing education opportunities. I was pleased to hear that this organization built by and for technical services librarians, is working to connect mentoring pairs. Mentoring can happen between any two people. However being paired with someone who works in a similar area adds another layer to the relationship. Because of similar experiences, the pairs can engage and start building trust quicker and it may lead to accomplishing more in a given timeframe. Programs such as this are a good fit for early career librarians. Mentoring is an amazing tool to support librarians. Yet, it can only reach so many, as even the best librarian only has twenty-four hours in their day. Maybe something with a bit more reach would be helpful. In my current system, spread across different campuses, there are several early career librarians and technical services staff who are new to the profession or their current positions. My system has an Electronic Resources Interest Group that brings all the ERM librarians together to discuss issues related to shared resources. Moving forward this group is working to incorporate educational opportunities into meeting agendas with a focus on supporting continued learning. The group will especially pay attention to areas that members have little or no experience or training in. This group will draw upon the collective strengths of all of its members, providing a platform for any member to lead discussions or give a presentation or tutorial on a relevant topic. A group like this may be a good middle ground between large-scale webinars and one continued on page 79

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Being Earnest with Collections from page 78 on one mentoring, supporting and hoping to empower all skill levels to gain the necessary knowledge to become more proficient in their positions.

A Technical Services Resident

I worked in a supportive academic library environment throughout my MLIS degree. I left that position with confidence in the skills I developed as a staff member and started looking for ways to get more experience at a librarian level. Prompted by a mentor, I applied for resident librarian positions. Residencies are meant to provide recent graduates with the opportunity to earn a salary while developing professional skills in a real library environment. I was successful in my application for a Technical Services Residency at Miami University. There are quite a few residencies located around the country, but I have only come across one other technical services resident not from my program. Even amongst Miami University’s residents, my position was unique. I overlapped with five other residents during my time there, all of whom were based in Reference and Information Services. The Technical Services Residency at Miami University was structured a little differently. Other residencies may have the resident rotate through library departments before choosing one area or project to focus on, or help to support an emerging area for the library field, such as GIS or data management. My residency gave me the experience of a true job. My department treated me as a continuing contract librarian minus tenure requirements, with lots of support and guidance, especially in my first few months. I had the opportunity to do the primary work of an acquisitions, cataloging, and ERM librarian over my two year period. Through this experience I was able to achieve a higher level of confidence in my new skills that I could not have built on my own while learning directly from three talented technical services librarians. Unfortunately, this residency program is now closed and, to my knowledge, no other residency’s main focus is technical services.

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Where Do We Go from Here?

For me, I have always seen my path as a librarian leading to technical services, but I have been very fortunate on that path. I’ve met great people at opportune times. I met one mentor very early in my undergraduate career, and was introduced to technical services work as a student in the Acquisitions & Collection Services department of my college library. Ever since, I knew technical services was my future. Other students or new professionals may not have been able to encounter similar experiences to discover their enjoyment and aptitude for this side of the library field. We should work together to establish opportunities that can train and empower the future of technical services. If you have the opportunity to share your technical services know how with library students or support a technical services resident or new professional, please do so. Mentoring is and can be a great first step. Mentoring can be all the difference to one person at any point in their career. There is such talent currently in our field and from what I have seen, not many ways to effectively pass that expertise on a wider scale. We also need to start engaging the next generation sooner. Provide new librarians with a chance to sample technical services while gaining their degrees, beyond just the information organization courses, and create opportunities for both students and new professionals to explore the role of a technical services librarian, while gaining valuable on the job training. I personally hope to be in a position to effectively advocate and work with other members of our field to set up a Technical Services Residency. I also know there are librarians pushing for early career language in new position announcements, when they can. I hope our colleagues continue these practices in the future. I strongly urge organizations, like ALCTS, that support technical services librarians and bring us together, to start looking to the education of MLIS students. Help us band together to advocate for more classes related to licensing, troubleshooting, vendor negotiations, and acquisitions to be incorporated into the curriculum and “Core” courses. Help us give students a chance to explore technical services and give them a good foundation to build on.

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Squirreling Away: Managing Information Resources & Libraries — Boy, If Life Were Only Like This Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; Phone: 734-764-9969) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman Sisyphus has nothing on modern librarians. As we know, Sisyphus was the subject of an often-told story in Greek mythology. To punish him for eternity, Hades subjected him to an eternity of hard labor, but with a sadistic twist. While this labor seemed to have no end, the sad truth was that it had no purpose. Poor Sisyphus would roll a boulder to the top of a hill, only to have it roll to the bottom, forcing him to once again attempt the task. Sure, it must have really been awful to roll a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll to the bottom over, and over and over and over again. Kinda of a lousy way to spend eternity. Actually, it is a lousy way to spend any day. It might be a bleak way to start a column on modern librarianship, but please stay with me. Our role today as librarian is many things. We are trying to live with one foot in the past as the keeper of the archives of recorded knowledge. Meanwhile, we are also trying to make sense of a tsunami of information that comes at us, and our patrons, at a rate that no one can ingest. Our job is complicated because we are aspiring to solve both impossible tasks. And just when we think that we have something accomplished, we realize that we are right back where we started from. Maybe this is defending public and collection space, or protecting our collection budget or keeping our staff — the work of a librarian is not only never done, it never feels settled. Maybe it is trying to convince the new administrators that it’s only all online because we pay for it. Anyway, this is our boulder as we try to keep our operations moving and our sanity in check. Being a librarian in his mid-fifties, I went to library school at the very beginning of the Internet age. While we were exposed to a few sessions on Dialog, our training came on the index volumes that were a key aspect of every library’s reference collection. Needless to say, the world of library education 30 years ago is a far cry from what the new students are learning. And that is a good thing. The information that people can get access to from wherever they are is something only a few evangelicals could see as being in our future. However, with that ability to get virtually anything from our phones, we are seeing a line of thinking that is undercutting the value and role of the library in our modern information ecosystem. To that end, I want to look at the article that grabbed our collective attention this summer. And you know what I am talking about…On June 21st, 2018, a Forbes contributor posted an article on their site that saw librarians lose their minds. Contributor Panos Mourdoukoutas wrote a column called “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money.”1 Mourdoukoutas is the Chair of the Department of Economics at Long Island University Post and has written several books — that I hope are better thought through than this brief article on the Forbes site. The premise behind Mourdoukoutas’ assertion is simply one of privatization. In this context, privatization is the move of public services or public oversight to private or corporate control. We have actually had many instances of privatization in our workforce over the years, but they have not been front and center. Back in 1991, John B. Goodman and Gary W. Loveman wrote an article in Harvard Business Review asking “Does Privatization Serve the Public Interest?”2 This is a way that they introduced the topic: “According to privatization’s supporters, this shift from public to private management is so profound that it will produce a panoply of significant improvements: boosting the efficiency and quality of remaining government activities, reducing taxes, and shrinking the size of government. In the functions that are privatized, they argue, the profit-seeking behavior of new, private sector managers will undoubtedly lead to cost cutting and greater attention to customer satisfaction.”

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There might be many perceived benefits here for the privatization of public services. But the one that seems to drive this movement is the reduction of cost to provide the service. On the surface, if we think about janitorial services, how could an organization or a school system save money by hiring a firm to run those operations? The key appears to be in the reduced cost of labor and the less generous benefits packages that many public employees receive. I am sure there are academic libraries that outsource the maintenance services based on financial reasons alone. We have seen privatization in action across many fields. In Michigan, I had an opportunity to tour the Sault Tribe Youth Facility that also provides a way for the state to outsource or privatize services (though this to another government). From their site: “The Sault Tribe Youth Facility is a state-of-the-art, 25-bed secure juvenile detention facility. The facility houses male and female juvenile offenders from 11 to 17 years of age. The facility is licensed by the state of Michigan and federally certified through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The facility provides structured care and supervision of youth accompanied by support activities, health-related services, substance and mental health services, cultural services and focuses on furthering the educational, cultural and social development of each youth.”3 As they told us on our tour, they can provide a service that is less expensive for the state than if they ran the service themselves. This becomes a huge concern for the state — or any organization — that is charged with trying to maintain all the services needed with a budget that might not be as big as one might like. And that brings us to Panos Mourdoukoutas’ piece. A very nice summary of the response from the library community may be found on the Guardian website.4 It would not be too long for a reader of Against the Grain to see what the concerns that librarians and those that support them might be. It did not take too long for Forbes to pull the article off their website, but thanks to the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive, we have access to this work. But at its core, the author is making the wrong assumption and likely misappropriating the motivation of a company to serve in this role. Lets dig in a bit into these two thoughts.

The Wrong Assumptions

Panos Mourdoukoutas might be writing from his own perceptions and uses of the library. This is a real problem with many people in the business community, who draw from their own personal experience and instincts, rather than to look at the market information or anything resembling data. We often hear of business men and women who rely on their guts rather than what the market information tells them (who are we kidding — it’s mostly businessmen here who do that). That might explain where he is coming from in writing this column. Right off the bat, he laments: “Amazon should open their own bookstores in local communities. They can replace local libraries and save taxpayers lots of money, while enhancing the value of their stock.”5 He adds — “Libraries slowly began to service the local community more. Libraries introduced video rentals and free internet access. The modern local library still provides these services, but they aren’t for free. Homeowners have to be financed by taxpayers in the form of a ‘library tax.’ It is usually added to school taxes, which in some communities are already high.” So, through his outstanding investigative reporting, he learned that public libraries are paid for by...wait for it...tax dollars. In fact, as the continued on page 81

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Squirreling Away from page 80 argument with others spilled over to Twitter, he stated “Let me clarify something. Local libraries aren’t free. Home owners must pay a local library tax. My bill is $495/year.”6 But the same is also true about all sorts of community endeavors that you may or may not take advantage of. You should be thrilled if you have not had any interaction with the fire department in any year. While I have not needed the Saline Fire Department at my house for many a year (if ever), but I think that money as part of my taxes is exceptionally well spent. The same could be said for the police department. The same might be said for other services that I may or may not use. Every town likely has a wealthy individual who might not have kids, or never goes to the library, and grumbles for every dollar they spend to make that community a place you might want to live. But hopefully, the community can decide as a whole what its core values are and how to fund them.

The Wrong Motivations

In looking through this article, it also appears that he is completely lost when it comes to the motivations that might be at play when privatization takes place. For this to take place, ideally, there is a community that is seeking to shed an obligation while at the same time, there is a company that sees this as an opportunity to make money. We have often talked about running governments as a business, but I believe this is just plain wrong. For example, if a store cannot make money in a location, it is in the best interest of the company to close. But can government services do the same? Can they just close up a fire department and EMT because there are not enough people around? Close the town up? That cannot be easily done. One of the key aspects of any privatization argument is the motivation on the part of the company looking to get involved. In this case, the author is suggesting that Amazon could take over the role of a local library. But for a company to take on this role, it needs to make sense economically. For the companies, these will be a new revenue source. They need to be able make money for this to work for the company. And there needs to be a way for the community to save money for this to work for the municipality. This is really where Mourdoukoutas’ idea falls apart. Libraries provide many services that any commercial entity would not be interested in matching. While he states that people will just as likely read at a Starbucks, it is a bad idea for a space that is open to everyone (including visitors and people from adjacent cities). Starbucks itself ran into problems this April after two African-American men were arrested at a Philadelphia location for sitting there without being paying customers.7 I am sure that a library would not do that. But that is the million dollar question. If libraries were commercially viable enterprises, there would be for-profit entities trying to take over this work. In fact, they would have already done it years ago. Privatization does not succeed when there is not sufficient revenue to be earned by companies nor savings by communities. So while the author might use Amazon a great deal, it is not likely that he or she understands how they, or libraries operate. That did not seem to prevent him from sharing these ideas broadly, even if for a short time. And that brings us to Sisyphus. While librarians have taken great joy in pointing out the fallacies of his argument, this task is tiresome. Think of the work that we could focus on if we were not constantly needing to defend our role on campus and in communities from people who do not seem to have a great understanding of the issues involved. All academic librarians are told that everything is available electronically, and that is not true. All academic librarians are told that everything is free on the Internet, and that is not true. But every time we answer these questions, it is rolling a boulder up the hill. Over and over again. In thinking through this conundrum, I am reminded of one of my favorite movie scenes of all time. Woody Allen’s 1978 Oscar winning movie Annie Hall won four awards, including Best Screenplay for Allen and Marshall Brickman. There is a scene that takes place in a theater lobby as Allen’s Alvy Singer and Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall are waiting in line. When another man in line is trying to impress his date (we

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assume) with his knowledge about media, he draws the attention and ire of Alvy, who steps towards the camera and address the audience:8 ALVY: What do you do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you? I mean, it’s just maddening! MAN IN LINE: Wait a minute, why can’t I give my opinion? It’s a free country! ALVY: I mean, d — He can give you — Do you hafta give it so loud? I mean, aren’t you ashamed to pontificate like that? And-and the funny part of it is, M-Marshall McLuhan, you don’t know anything about Marshall McLuhan’s...work! MAN IN LINE: Wait a minute! Really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called “TV Media and Culture”! So I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan — well, have a great deal of validity. ALVY: Oh, do yuh? MAN IN LINE: Yes. ALVY: Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. So ... so, here, just let me-I mean, all right. Come over here ... a second. (Alvy gestures to the camera which follows him and the man in line to the back of the crowded lobby. He moves over to a large stand-up movie poster and pulls Marshall McLuhan from behind the poster.) MAN IN LINE: Oh. ALVY: (To McLuhan) Tell him. McLUHAN: I hear-I heard what you were saying. You-you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing. ALVY: (To the camera) Boy, if life were only like this! Having an expert around at a moment’s notice is nice, but it will not prevent people from thinking through the idea of privatizing or outsourcing the library to Amazon or another company. Given that we do not have Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden available behind every poster when we are presented with a simplistic approach to complicated library problems, we are forced to act calmly and patiently as we roll the argument back up the hill. It would be nice if it could stay up there. Boy, if life were only like this.

Corey Seeman is the Director, Kresge Library Services at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also the new editor for this column that intends to provide an eclectic exploration of business and management topics relative to the intersection of publishing, librarianship and the information industry. No business degree required! He may be reached at <cseeman@ umich.edu> or via twitter at @cseeman.

Endnotes 1. Mourdoukoutas, Panos. “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money.” Forbes (online). Posted June 21, 2018 9am. 2. Goodman, John B., and Gary W. Loveman. 1991. “Does Privatization Serve the Public Interest?” Harvard Business Review 69 (6): 26–38. 3. Sault Tribe Youth Facility. Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. URL: https://www.saulttribe.com/government/sault-tribe-youth-facility (Accessed September 23, 2018). 4. Lyons, Kate. “’Twaddle’: librarians respond to suggestion Amazon should replace libraries.” The Guardian (Online, US Edition). URL: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/23/twaddle-librarians-respond-to-suggestion-amazon-should-replace-libraries (accessed September 23, 2018). 5. Mourdoukoutas, Panos. “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money.” Forbes (online). Posted June 21, 2018 9am. Viewed from the Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web/. 6. See https://twitter.com/PMourdoukoutas/status/1021139921271230464. 7. Siegel, R. (2018, May 03). “Black men arrested at starbucks settle for $1 each.” The Washington Post. 8. Allen, Woody and Marshall Brickman. Annie Hall (original screenplay). URL: http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/annie_hall.html (Access September 23, 2018).

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Stop, Look, Listen — OA Books Funding: The Next Phase Column Editor: Dr. Sven Fund (Managing Director, fullstopp GmbH, Society for Digitality, Wartburgstraße 25A, 10825 Berlin; Phone: +49 (0) 172 511 4899) <sven.fund@fullstopp.com> www.fullstopp.com

pen Access (OA) for Books still accounts for only a very small fraction of the overall OA market, yet as I see it one that is growing pretty rapidly. In view of current market trends and the continuing evolution of what is often termed the monograph crisis the small market share is surprising and can only be explained by book publishers arriving late to the Open Access party. From both publishers’ and librarians’ perspectives, the small number of books published in OA to date is somewhat surprising: calculating the publication of a book with its revenues and costs and consequently offering it Open Access based on these calculations is far less risky than implementing the same model for journals. Sure, double-dipping is an issue with books, but thanks to recent developments it would appear to be one that is far more controllable than for journals. So why is OA for books happening so late and so slowly? It would seem that one issue has been largely overlooked when analyzing the differences between journals and books — simply because there has been no solution to hand: compared with the highly consolidated journals space, the book market is still extremely fragmented, especially within the Humanities and Social Sciences, where most of the output and hence the OA activity has taken place so far. Most current initiatives — Luminos, Open Library of Humanities and also Knowledge Unlatched — deal mainly with HSS content. While the spending of a library’s (STM) journals budget focuses on a handful of publishers and even less trade partners, the structure of the book market is the polar opposite, involving a myriad of publishers, vendors and business models. And this holds true even after more than a decade of large and midsized publishers working on journalizing their book offerings, meaning big deals and dramatically increased output volume under one specific model. Now why should that be a problem for implementing Open Access for books? The answer is simply that a few large players make it easier to standardize a model than when a great number of players are involved — especially when they are so diverse regarding size, philosophy and/or product range. For OA books to achieve breadth and volume, a platform approach is needed — much like AirBnB or Uber — in order to create transparency amongst the services offered and to ease the complexities of transactions among a large number of players. Since its inception in 2012, Knowledge Unlatched (KU) has set out to support the development of OA books, journals and initiatives through intermediation. With the

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establishment of a virtual market place — this year’s pledging round comprising 14 products all related to Open Access — KU has enjoyed strong support from both publishers and libraries worldwide. But one key component is still missing, and the team has been working on this for over two years now. Even though I don’t like the term, the fact remains that what the market really needs in order to complement existing library-funded OA models is the aggregation of single title funding or book processing charges (BPCs). If we take another look at the journals market it becomes immediately apparent that, alongside a relatively small number of really important players, another element has also helped OA to grow significantly: it is, despite all its flaws, a relatively easy, unitbased business and pricing model which can be mixed and matched in a number of ways. Books unfortunately do not allow for the same degree of simplicity, as publishers apply far more services to the diverse set of research output sent to them for publication in the form of manuscripts. Increased complexity does not however automatically equate to lack of comparability. With KU Open Funding, Knowledge Unlatched has created a database that is easy to use by both librarians and especially researchers in order to compare publishing programs from around the world and match them with their needs based on a set of 20 categories. In cooperation with publishers, KU has collected dozens of criteria within each category which can easily be filtered and provide an immediate overview of which publisher’s program best fits with the criteria selected, e.g., the licensing standard, program fit, language of publication and of course price point. Authors can then make their choice based on the results and contact the publisher directly from the database. Peer review and all subsequent processes related to the preparation of the manuscript remain an activity between the author and the publisher. Not until it comes to the publication of the book does KU become involved again in order to handle the invoicing to the publisher and the collection of funds from the library in the respective local currency. KU Open Funding builds on the experiences already made by many libraries around the world, namely that researchers publishing in Open Access for the first time usually turn initially to their librarian for information and

support. While the librarian can certainly advise the researcher in a personal conversation — as is common practice just now — he or she can also invite the researcher to the KU Open Funding database to allow them to search for themselves. Researchers can also create a personal account in the database and will be asked to link themselves to their research institution in order to simplify steps later in the process. Within KU Open Funding the researcher is free to link to the publisher of choice for his or her monograph publication and can do so with as many publishers as desired. The assumption behind this is that many publishers already offer OA options, but that only few authors know much about the specifics. In order to handle a significant increase in Open Access books funded by institutions, libraries will be in need of logistical support, and this is the second core functionality of the new database. Thanks to KU Open Funding, libraries can monitor requests of their researchers to publishers and can see which monographs they have agreed to fund and in which stage of publication these currently are. This allows for easy budget control and reporting within the institution. In the opinion of many observers Open Access books face very different challenges than the dominant journals format. There is some truth in this, but at the same time it is very much a consequence of the different market structures for journals and books — and by no means written in stone. In order to make Open Access attractive for all academics, easy-to-use and scalable business models must be available for both journals and books. Transparent models and marketplaces, where both researchers and librarians can find such services, are much needed in the book space, and KU Open Funding attempts to address this need. Already in the implementation phase with publishers, initial experience has highlighted how critical it is to strike the balance between standardization of a young and hence fast-developing field and the necessity to cater for different business models for publishers. As one of the first digitally-born disciplines Open Access is ideally suited to support this quest with a powerful, yet open database which invites participation by all publishers. And at the same time it might yet help to develop a particular quality in academic publishing, which is by no means a given at the current time — choice to authors.

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Essential reading from berghahn COMMUNITIES, LANDSCAPES, AND INTERACTION IN NEOLITHIC GREECE Edited by Apostolos Sarris, Evita Kalogiropoulou, Tuna Kalayci, and Evagelia Karimali This volume provides a synthetic overview of recent developments in the study of Neolithic Greece and reconsiders the dynamics of human-environment interactions while recording the growing diversity in layers of social organization. August 2018 • International Monographs in Prehistory: Archaeological

November 2018

COMPETING POWER Landscapes of Migration, Violence and the State

An Exploration across Disciplines

Narmala Halstead “This book looks at the phenomenon of Guyanese migration with elegance and sensibility, bringing to light the intricate relationship between intimate affects and broader socio-economic issues. Competing Power is timely, well-written, and engaging.” • Federica Guglielmo, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

“Conceptualizing the World is a fantastic, original cornucopia of valuable insights into how humans have thought about and experienced the world across history.” • Ingjerd Hoëm, University of Oslo December 2018 • Time and the World

CHANGES IN THE AIR Hurricanes in New Orleans from 1718 to the Present Eleonora Rohland “In her compelling book, Dr. Eleonora Rohland blends history with social science analysis to make a superb contribution to scholarship on hurricanes, environmental history, and American history.” • Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University October 2018 • Environment in History: International Perspectives

N E W YO R K . O X F O R D

Anna Backman Rogers “Anna Backman Rogers has produced a timely, beautifully written, and trailblazing account of female authorship and femininity in contemporary cinema, full of both conviction and compassion.” • Davina Quinlivan, Kingston University

CONCEPTUALIZING THE WORLD Edited by Helge Jordheim and Erling Sandmo

berghahn

SOFIA COPPOLA The Politics of Visual Pleasure

October 2018

TRANSFORMING STUDY ABROAD A Handbook Neriko Musha Doerr “A necessary text… [this book] could go far in changing some of the fundamental questions about designing or carrying out study away programs.” • John J. Bodinger de Uriarte, Susquehanna University December 2018

www.berghahnbooks.com

Collection Management Matters — Migrations and Migraines Column Editor: Glenda Alvin (Associate Professor, Assistant Director for Collection Management and Administration, Head, Acquisitions and Serials, Brown-Daniel Library, Tennessee State University, 3500 John A. Merritt Blvd., Nashville, TN 37209; Phone: 615-963-5230; Fax: 615-963-1368) <galvin@tnstate.edu>

hen you have stable staffing, in a place where people plan to remain for the rest of their career, years can go by without any changes in personnel or the way business is conducted. Time can pass without much notice when there is no need to make any substantial changes in the library’s delivery of services or space configurations. Sooner or later changes do come and when they occur concurrently, the upheavals can cause difficulties on many levels. During the past two years, along with the Coordinator of Media Services, we have had four librarians retire, including the entire public services faculty, except one. This basically happened because many people in the library are around the same age and have worked together for decades. We also had two librarian resignations and a staff member retire. Nowadays there is always a Search Committee going on to fill one position or another. While dealing with staff changes, our library environment and delivery of services had been shifting at what seems like a breath taking pace. In the fall of 2017, our OCLC representative informed us that Illiad was going away and Tipasa would take its place. We had not selected our new Interlibrary Loan Librarian, who would have that responsibility, so we postponed dealing with that issue until the position was filled. During the spring of 2018, we were confronted with two more migrations decisions. First we needed to migrate from a turnkey site for Innovative Interfaces, Inc to a software only site. This required a trip to Innovative Users Group Meeting for negotiations and face-to-face conversation, with subsequent frequent follow up for requesting the necessary paperwork. Along that same time line, we decided to migrate to EBSCO EDS for our discovery service and OpenAthens for our authentication service. Both required monthly meetings and testing to iron out functionality issues. In the midst of all of these pending transformations, the University’s Project Director arrived in April to inform us that he was going to build a structure to house the university’s writing program inside the library, and he could not find a better place for it, than the entire reference collection area — and it had to be done by June. Then the Facilities Man-

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agement Manager arrived to say that she was preparing to erect the Makerspace the Library Dean has requested in the area that housed the Government Documents Collection. As we were reeling from these announcements, which were previously unheard of by the librarians and staff, the Interior Designer arrived with diagrams in hand to tell us that he had ordered new furniture, for areas of the library that currently housed books and microform. Not wanting to be left out of the party, the IT Department announced that this summer they are going to replace all of the student computers, enlarge the server closet, and Oh by the way, turn-off our computer service while they worked. At an emergency meeting, I presented the department heads with the options for migrating the reference collection and government documents. The consensus was that we would weed the reference collection and move it to the bound periodicals area and do the same with the government documents, since this would keep both collections on the same floor as the reference staff. The bound periodicals would have to be weeded and moved up to the third floor, where we had previously only kept the Journal Archives. To make room for the additional journals, the Oversize Collection which was housed behind the journal archives, had to be weeded and sent to the general circulation collection. Weeding is not generally labor intensive, but when it is done with oversize and reference books, plus bound periodical volumes, it requires a lot of heavy lifting. Attempts to get temporary help with packing the discards from an outside agency or assistance from the university’s Facilities Management department proved futile. The librarians and staff had to do it all, sometimes on days when the air conditioning was not functioning. When we thought we were seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, it turned out to be a train named “Microforms.” All of the microform cabinets, which housed periodicals, ERIC, newspapers, and “The Papers of…” had to be removed to make room for seating areas for the students. We came to work on a Monday and found out this had to take place that day. After feverishly packing what we could, we got the Facilities Management Manager to move the cabinets with the microform inside. We did the weeding afterwards, to save refiling microform that was no longer needed because we had digital access.

With weeding, there can be differing opinions. Last year, the Head of Cataloging made it a personal project to go through the ERIC microfiche and weed what was available online. This year the Head of Reference maintained that what is there is never used, and he decided to discard it. Upheavals in personnel, major changes in workflow, realignment of job assignments, and modes of delivery of services can be more than stressful to staff. Transitions that do not have minimal, if any prior planning carry with them an urgency that can be irritating and breed resentment. Getting all of the physical labor done without student help and bodies that are past middle age, can make one weary and irritable at the end of the day — especially when that day is long because of a four day work week. Having all of these occur concurrently can heighten frustration and definitely affect morale. Fortunately, the librarians and staff maintained a “can do” attitude throughout the process and we were able to accomplish the first leg of the transitions before the students arrived. Where there was a job vacancy that handled a specific task, someone else stepped up to do the job. For instance, one of the catalogers was responsible for withdrawing the books, creating a list and packing them. After he resigned to take another position, a library assistant took over that job. The entire Collection Management staff moved and shifted bound volumes and read the shelves. All of us filed microform. Sharing the workload helped diffuse some of the aggravation and made the work less onerous. Sudden changes in work flow and assignments are always done better with thoughtful planning and verification. Of course, it would have been best to weed the affected areas first and to measure spaces before moving. However, when that is not possible, I think it’s important to focus on how all of the changes are affecting the staff and try to diffuse anger and resentment. I apologized to them for the haphazardness, asked for their patience, worked alongside them and thanked them for their understanding. Putting people before processes and procedures fosters strong team spirit, promotes unity of purpose, and helps get the job done, with little, if any residual negative attitudes. Fortunately, our staff has always had strong team spirit and that took us a long way towards getting the migrations accomplished and setting the library on new paths for delivery of improved and updated services.

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Future Through the Past — Emerging Research Literature Column Editor: Donald Beagle (Director of Library Services, Belmont Abbey College, 100 Belmont – Mt. Holly Road, Belmont, NC 28012-1802; Phone: 704-461-6740) <donaldbeagle@bac.edu>

ver the summer I was pleased to accept two related writing invitations. First, Lynn D. Lampert and Coleen Meyers-Martin asked me to author the forward for their forthcoming book, Creating a Learning Commons, due out in February 2019 from Rowman & Littlefield, (see https://rowman. com/ISBN/9781442272637/Creating-a-Learning-Commons-A-Practical-Guide-for-Librarians). Second, I was invited to be the latest interviewee for the “Library Design Thought Leaders” series, sponsored by Agati Co, (see https://www.agati.com/blog/designing-university-libraries-for-the-next-generation-of-students/). Both opportunities were very interesting, and together they motivated me to revisit the emerging research literature on LC assessment and learning space innovation. I want to mention two that stood out. I just finished reading a chapter titled, “Analysing the Learning Commons in the Digital Age” by W. Michael Johnson (CUNY) and Michael John Khoo (Drexel). This is Chapter 7 in the recently-published (February 2018)

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book, R. A. Ellis and P. Goodyear (eds.), Spaces of Teaching and Learning, Understanding Teaching-Learning Practice, (see https://doi. org/10.1007/978-981-10-7155-3_7). Johnson and Khoo comment, “Our approach is based on systematic observation of student populations in the field. The methodology does not seek to identify discrete causal factors between social learning and environments, only to provide empirical understandings of complementary relationships among space and acts of learning.” One of their findings, in particular, (imo), may speak to the question about Gen X and Gen Z, “...the idea that informal learning spaces are generally understood to fall into one of two pedagogical paradigms, either as a traditional / individual / transactional space or innovation / social / collaborative space. Our findings suggest that this dichotomy does not exist in the field; self and externally focused ways of learning formed an interwoven continuum across space and time.” But the authors might wish to consider that their research may have ferreted out an early marker of an important

ongoing generational shift. It may be that older studies did show a valid and sharp distinction between individual transactional spaces and social collaborative spaces because those studies coincided with LC use by (primarily) Millennial and Gen X students. But this newer study may be sending an early signal that as the percentage of Gen Z students increases on campus, that individual-transactional vs. social-collaborative distinction may be blurring or fading into more of the interwoven continuum the authors describe. The second study I want to briefly highlight is one that might otherwise easily slip under our collective radar, being a presentation paper from the Australian conference VALA 2018 Library Technology and the Future, describing outcomes from a project at the University of Wollongong Library. Titled, “Meet them where they are: Bringing the Learning Co-Op into the Digital Space,” author / presenters Kristy Newton and Courtney Shalavin, describe a planning and development approach continued on page 86

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Considering Games and Gamification in Libraries & Associated Entities — In Praise of Real People Being an examination of Immersive Participatory, Interactive Analog Games and Their Use in Education in General and Libraries in Particular….….before I forget Column Editor: Jared Alexander Seay (Media & Services Coordinator, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424; Phone: 843-953-1428) <seayj@cofc.edu> blogs.cofc.edu/seayj

irst I want to say that I am not the first to summarize an article in the title (thank you Mr. Swift).1 Second, I want to state that never in a million-zillion years would I ever succumb to needless hyperbole. But, what I am going to tell you is spectacularly revolutionary. Previously, I waxed on about how analog (board) games are experiencing a resurgent public interest. The recent theme of this column has been how this analog game renaissance is starting to figure prominently in training and education and how this is affecting libraries. Specifically, I expounded on recent library practice of turning to the design and use of escape rooms to enhance and inspire their instruction and promotion. I recently came across some information that has shed more light on this analog / education / library phenomenon. It’s about human attention span and forgetting almost everything….if I remember correctly. I am a multifaceted person. Okay, I have at least two facets. I love games, and I forget things on a regular basis. It’s what I do. Now I assume (and hope) that there is not a direct connection between these two things. But, now I know that one can certainly positively affect the other. Do I mean to say that forgetting things can make one better at playing games? Not exactly. But, leaning, after all, is systematic memorizing, and the ability to pay attention greatly helps to build this systematic memory. Also, it helps to not forget so much. In the 1880’s German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus first hypothesized the “forgetting curve.” Through a mathematical formula he developed with data from experiments, he basically showed that upon being presented information, within one hour, people have forgotten an average of 50 percent of the information presented. Within 24 hours,

Future Through the Past from page 85 that is rather distinctive from any I’ve seen described from sources such as the Learning Spaces Collaboratory co-hosted by NCSU and the University of Calgary. Sometimes the most significant innovations don’t come from media stars of the library world at well-resourced projects like LSC, but slide in from seemingly unlikely places like the University of Wollongong Library. I’m still digesting the implications of what Kristy Newton and Courtney Shalavin have done and describe in this paper, but I hope to have further observations in a future ATG column.

they have forgotten an average of 70 percent of new information, and within a month, 90 percent of it.2 Well, that is depressing.2 Now add to this the fact that the amount of knowledge actually learned in a lecture classroom in the first place is limited due to a student’s attention span. It has been estimated that the average attention span in a lecture classroom is seven to ten minutes. 3 Probably for an article it is a bit longer, but I’m still going to assume that I have only about ten minutes before I lose most of you. Bottom line here is that learning is hard. What could possibly help to increase attention and retention? Now, the regular readers of this column certainly know well what will easily alleviate this problem and make learning significantly more engaging and increase retention: games of course. You know the mantra. Games are great blah blah, and make learning fun blah blah, and we should all just play games in the classroom blah blah. Really? Well, maybe...kind of. But, before you yell “game it, baby” and charge into the classroom brandishing your copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, let’s look at the application a bit more closely. Teachers know — and educational psychologists have confirmed — some definitive characteristics that the most effective learning programs have in common: • Impactful: The experience inevitably grabs the learner’s attention. • Relevant: The content is clearly relevant to the experience (it applies to you at that moment in time) and memorable (it endures over time). • Engaging: The environment is rich and invites exploration, enables experimentation, and “Learning by Doing.” • Motivating & Inspiring: Keeps the learner motivated to maintain his/her effort and attention by offering an inspiring reason for learning the content. • Play: The learning experience incorporates the most natural way of learning all living species: Doing something simply because it is fun and challenging. So, that’s a no-brainer. Games contain all of these things. So, go educational games! Yaaa! Well, maybe. When most folks talk about “educational games,” they tend to think of video or digital games. In fact, when the “games in education” tidal wave first started washing over education, it was in the form of digital games. Though primitive at first (ahh, pong) these video and computer games offered the promise of access to effective and engaging and fun continued on page 87

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Considering Games ... from page 86 learning tools. Remember “Oregon Trail” and “Reader Rabbit” and “Math Blasters” and how these flashy interactive dispensers of knowledge virtually replaced teachers in the classroom? Me neither. Well, we don’t’ have flying cars either. To be fair we have come a very long way from those early digital days. The ability of digital technology like virtual reality, to allow students to simulate environments and manipulate objects in 3D space is phenomenal and is revolutionizing learning. Indeed, not only are digital and video games a multi-billion dollar business that is bigger than the movie industry, but games and gamification that use digital technology dominate the “educational” market. Unfortunately, many of these digital, special effects filled wonders — if they are used in any routine or formal way in teaching — are offered to students just for practice and to make rote learning a bit more palatable. To be sure they do this very well. But, though these digital games have awesome special effects and do indeed engage and even mesmerize individual students, most of them rarely test for and provide practice for more than dexterity, and good memorization skills. Most are designed for individual — one face to one screen — interface. This of course leads to the lab condition known as “everyone being together in the same room alone.” Even in massive multiplayer online games, players are sometimes not even in the same country, much less the same room. Social engagement is not exactly a strong feature. The analog equivalents of the digital revolution in education do have this strong, defining feature. Indeed, there are a group of analog games that share distinct characteristics that make them ideal social learning and teaching platforms. I have been unable to find one encompassing identifying term in the literature, so I have boldly coined a term myself. I call these “collaborative multi-player immersive games.” So, you noticed that I’m still working on that catchy label thing. Unlike solo digital games where a single player may be engaged in a highly detailed multiplayer virtual environment, these analog equivalents are in a room with real humans. Basically, these activities involve putting a group of players directly into a problem or issue or scenario while providing a mechanic to allow the players to interact cooperatively (or not so cooperatively) to resolve or experience the scenario. Their common denominator is real time, group, social interaction in a fully immersive environment. The most ubiquitous example of this concept is of course the growing entertainment phenomenon and lucrative business model of “escape rooms.” Basically, it’s just a recent form of problem based learning in a box (or room). We have seen how this “escape room”

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concept has been adopted by educators and librarians to enhance learner engagement, enliven subject content recall, and encourage and inspire student motivation. But, though “escape rooms” represent the recent lion’s share of such games used by educators, megagames and Edu-LARPS are also being adapted for classroom use. I will be going into detail about Edu LARPs and megagames in a future column, but briefly an Edu LARP (educational live action role playing game) is a form of role-playing where participants physically and vocally role-play their character within a particular scenario and pursue goals within the scenario while interacting with other players in character. Scenarios might involve the French Revolution, the Continental Congress, or the Treaty of Versailles. Of course it could be something much less controversial like the Salem Witch Trials or the Bret Kavanagh Hearings. Edu LARPing “is a form of experiential learning that engages students on multiple levels, including cognitive, affective, and behavioral. Similar to drama pedagogy and simulation, edu-larp employs scenarios in the classroom in which students enact roles and engage with class content.” 4 A good example of this is a program run by Barnard College called Reacting to the Past in which students supplement the scenarios with intensive research and writing.5 A megagame has been characterized alternatively as a hybrid LARP/board game, a LARP with an attached game board or a board game with Escape room elements and mechanics. It’s something that has to be seen to be believed. Large number of players (sometimes in the hundreds) are divided into teams that represent different factions (countries or clans) or factions within teams (gangs, government leaders). It’s like a model UN on steroids with added intrigue and interaction. It is social dynamics that is part board game, part LARP and all analog. Needless to say, learning activities that involve immersive group interactive problem solving are highly satisfying and conducive to a higher degree of learning engagement and retention. Learning is still hard work, and it can still be frustrating. But, it is now work that is engaging, challenging and increases attention and retention. In an earlier column I detailed how the concept of John Nesbitt’s “high tech high touch” explains the recent resurgence of board game design and the growing popularity of analog interactivity. An article in Games and Learning notes that, “players of digital games... rarely play together and side-by-side,

whereas players of analog games expect a more slower-paced and chatty group experience. Considering verbal and non-verbal cues as well as the immediacy of social peers sitting right next to each other, there is a visceral difference between playing an analog game versus playing a digital game.”6 “I think there’s a level of communication that we have not been able to codify and that doesn’t come through in a video game,” says Joshua Archer, director of Icaria Educational Role Playing Games.7 All of this inter and intra-group interactivity stuff clearly goes to the heart of a critical learning issue that humans crave above all else and actually defines us as a species: our ability to communicate and our need for in-person social interaction. It seems to me that if we are to bring out the full learning potential and understanding of our students and our library patrons, we need to take advantage of activity which our species is the most effective: the creative power of collaborative social groups and having a blast doing it. Somewhere in America a library escape room megagame LARP is in the works. I need only convince my colleagues to wear those Orc outfits on the reference desk with more dignity.

Endnotes 1. Swift, Jonathan. A Modest Proposal. Infomotions Inc., 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ cofc/detail.action?docID=3314953. 2. Sonnad, Nikhil. “You Probably Won’t Remember This, but the “Forgetting Curve” Theory Explains Why Learning is Hard. Quartz, 28 Feb, 2018. qz.com/1213768/ the-forgetting-curve-explains-why-humansstruggle-to-memorize. 3. Wilson, Karen, and James H. Korn. “Topical Articles: Attention During Lectures: Beyond Ten Minutes.” Teaching of Psychology, vol. 34, no. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 85–89. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, doi: 10.1080/00986280701291291. 4. Media Commons: A Digital Scholarly Network. Oct. 2018, mediacommons.org. 5. Reacting to the Past. Barnard College, Oct. 2018, reacting.barnard.edu. 6. Sande, Chen. “The World According to EDULARPS: The Analog Learning Games.” Learning Games. 2018, www. gamesandlearning.org/2016/02/18/theworld-according-to-edu-larps-the-analoglearning-games. 7. Icaria: Educational Role Playing Games. Oct. 2018, www.iocari.com.

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Let’s Get Technical — Taking the CIP Program into the Future with PrePub Book Link by Caroline Saccucci (CIP and Dewey Program Manager, Library of Congress) <csus@loc.gov> Column Editors: Stacey Marien (Acquisitions Librarian, American University Library) <smarien@american.edu> and Alayne Mundt (Resource Description Librarian, American University Library) <mundt@american.edu> Column Editor Note: In this issue’s column, we profile how the Library of Congress’ CIP program upgraded to a new platform. Caroline Saccucci, CIP and Dewey Program Manager describes the history of the CIP program and the steps that went into deciding and implementing a new platform for the publishers to use. — SM & AM

Introduction

The Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication (CIP) Program has relied on technology built in house between 1999 and 2003 to manage the flow of applications for CIP data. In 2017, Library management determined it was the right time to fully upgrade the platform used to submit and process CIP applications. As the CIP and Dewey Program Manager, I am the product owner of the database and therefore the primary customer of the development project to replace the aging system. As product owner, I have the responsibility and the authority to make decisions on most aspects of the project, in conjunction with my division chief, who is the system owner, and my team of subject matter experts. This article will discuss the reasons for the platform upgrade, the development process, and our hopes for the future with the new system. Since 1971 the CIP Program has partnered with U.S. publishers to create prepublication metadata for forthcoming books. This metadata is printed in the books and distributed via subscription to bibliographic utilities such as OCLC and to publishers and vendors. Today approximately 4,500 publishers participate in the CIP Program. In FY2017, the Library of Congress cataloged over 60,000 CIP titles, representing a significant percentage of academic, scholarly, and trade monographs published in the United States. Because these titles have already been cataloged by the Library of Congress, local libraries can quickly add these titles to their collections. CIP publishers are required to send a complimentary copy of their published books to the CIP Program, thereby saving millions of tax payer dollars which would have been spent purchasing these titles with appropriated funds. When the CIP Program started in 1971, the

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entire process was paper based and depended on the U.S. Postal Service. Publishers used to fill out a form by hand or with a typewriter. The form with marked up manuscript galley was mailed as a package to the Library. CIP Program staff would create an initial bibliographic record based on the information in the application and then send the package to the cataloging divisions to complete the cataloging. The CIP metadata would be mailed back to the publisher for inclusion in the printed book; publishers would need to retype the metadata onto the copyright page because it came in hardcopy only, not electronic format.

The Problem In 2003, the CIP Program launched an online CIP system. Publishers could now electronically submit their applications with galleys as attachments in ASCII format. This meant, however, that publishers needed to convert their Word documents to ASCII and then tag their files with html-like codes to indicate title page, copyright page, series title page, table of contents, first chapter, second chapter, etc. Very little data in the application was prepopulated, and each application was time consuming to complete and submit. After the cataloging process was completed, the CIP data was emailed to the publisher, but the mailer often garbled diacritics in the CIP data. The online CIP system was named ECIP Traffic Manager for internal use because CIP applications were submitted electronically, and it managed the traffic or flow of CIP applications. Catalogers could view the galleys as html web pages; the tagging created specific pages and chapter headings for easier navigation. Internal staff created a special cataloging software called OnTheMarc to convert application data to a MARC record. In 2010 the CIP Program was able take advantage of ONIX metadata in the cataloging workflow by linking the ISBN in the CIP application to the ISBN in the ONIX product record and mapping that record’s ONIX to MARC fields. While this process worked for internal catalogers, it was not available to our 32 partner institutions, even though their university presses produced ONIX. ECIP Traffic Manager routed CIP applications to a cataloging team, such as the History and Military Science Section, but it

was not able to be assigned to a specific cataloger. With cataloging teams having large numbers of CIP applications to process, it became necessary for some section heads to create spreadsheets to manage their CIP work. Because this system was implemented before many security protocols had been developed, ECIP Traffic Manager would have to be updated or replaced.

The Process Library Management decided to replace the aging system. As product owner, I collaborated with my chief/system owner and staff from the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) to create a statement of work and award a contract in September 2017. OCIO provided project management, user experience design, and server integration support. The CIP team worked with the user experience designer for the best possible design for a new system. The contractor provided the developers, a business analysist, and a dedicated tester. The CIP Team provided user roles, legacy application mappings, ONIX mappings, and other documentation as needed; all documentation was posted on the team Confluence site. The work was divided into two-week sprints, and user stories were created in Jira for all the functionality. Both LC and contractor staff created user stories, and the team tested the results of each sprint. The team met weekly for two-hour development meetings and two-hour design meetings. The team also met twice a week in the morning for 15-minute standup meetings to give up-to-the-minute progress. The team made data migration decisions, and the project manager mapped legacy application fields to new PPBL application fields.

The Outcome The new system, named PrePub Book Link (PPBL), is built on a ServiceNow platform. It is hosted in the cloud and is therefore accessible to all users inside and outside the firewall. PPBL will provide an array of enhanced functionality and features for publishers, catalogers, and other internal users who work with CIP applications. Publishers will be able to create and manage user accounts for single and multiple publishers and imprints. In the legacy system, imprints were not linked to each other, so the CIP Program had no real overview of how the publishing industry was connected. PPBL will allow them to have one log-in for all the publishers and imprints they need. With the legacy system, each account had one user ID and password for all users, and users locked continued on page 89

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Let’s Get Technical from page 88 themselves and others out; in PPBL, each user will have an individual account with password self-service. Publishers will be able to attach galleys as Microsoft Word or PDF documents and either in a single file attachment or in multiple files. They will no longer need to convert their files to ASCII and tag them. Instead, they will indicate the content they have attached, e.g., title page, copyright page, table of contents, etc. The advantage to LC staff is that the document will look more like the forthcoming book. With a PDF, catalogers will finally see images and graphics, which is especially useful for cataloging art books, graphic novels, and works for juvenile audience. Publishers will have the ability to use their own ONIX data to pre-populate much of the CIP application. If publishers create ONIX metadata early enough for the CIP process, they will save themselves time when filling out the CIP request. Metadata such as author(s), editor(s), title, subtitle, series, and summaries, are excellent examples of the kind of data required in the application for CIP data that are also contained in the ONIX metadata. The CIP Program already receives many feeds of ONIX from various publishers and aggregators, and we want to take better advantage of it. The CIP Program collaborated closely with the Book Industry Standard Group (BISG) to map ONIX 2.1 to CIP application fields and MARC fields. All email correspondence to and from publishers will be recorded within PPBL, so any staff member can view the history. Outbound email to the publisher was recorded in ECIP Traffic Manger, but all incoming messages landed in the staff member’s Outlook account; no one else could see the response, leading to delays and unnecessary follow-up emails. The CIP data will be issued to the publisher via an emailed link, and that link will enable the publisher to copy and paste the data without concern for garbled diacritics. PPBL will enable publishers to identify any staff who may need access to this CIP data. The CIP data will be generated directly from the MARC record, and publishers will be able to indicate whether they want the age/grade levels and/ or summaries to appear in the CIP data. (This hide/show feature would apply to the CIP data as it would appear in the published book and have no effect on the MARC record.) Library of Congress staff will be able to manage and track their own work. Individual CIP applications can be assigned to individual staff members, and section heads will have better oversight of the pending CIP applications in their team. A new MARC Editor was developed for PPBL to enable the application data to be converted into a MARC record and edited before import into the Library’s ILS. Catalogers will be able to continue cataloging the CIP immediately upon import.

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PPBL will have more advanced reporting functionality, so a section head can see their team account or an individual staff member’s account. Staff members will be able to filter the pending CIP applications by subject, so they can see what is in scope for them. There will be other filters available as well, such as publisher, ISBN, projected print date or projected date of publication. Speaking of projected print date, this is a new data element required in the CIP application to help the CIP Program prioritize the workflow. The projected date of publication will be used for the new claiming functionality, which will generate claims from PPBL, not from an email address in the MARC record. Our partner institutions currently must download custom software onto their PCs and provide LC with delete authority on their servers to follow the FTP process for their completed records to the Library. Not surprisingly, this proved cumbersome for some institutions. With PPBL, there will no more special software and no need for ftp and server access; instead, partners will be able to upload each MARC record from their cataloging client into PPBL.

Lessons Learned

This development project required an incredible number of meetings. In addition to the meetings listed above, there were many ad hoc meetings to make decisions on tiny pieces of the project, such as creating routing

rules or helper text for the CIP request form. Communication was paramount to every aspect of this project. Because the developers were working remotely, we relied heavily on WebEx and recorded most of the meetings. We utilized Jabber for quick in-house conversations, and we updated Confluence with decisions, documentation, and important links. PrePub Book Link was officially announced at ALA 2018, but we communicated with our users via email, conference presentations, and press releases. Finally, we were reminded that development projects always take longer than anticipated. The original period of performance was June 1 but was extended to later in the fall 2018.

The Future

Closer to the implementation date, the CIP team will create a full training plan and provide user documentation. The CIP Program will provide hands-on training for internal staff and training webinars for publishers and partners. The CIP website will be updated, and the online publishers’ manual will be completely rewritten. Publisher data and all pending CIP applications will be migrated; there will likely be a one or two-week work stoppage during this migration period. The CIP Program is excited for the future with PrePub Book Link! For more information, please visit the CIP Program web page at http://www.loc.gov/publish/cip/.

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ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Michael Aldrich University Librarian Brigham Young University – Hawaii 55-220 Kulanui Street, BYUH #1966 Laie, HI 96762 Phone: (808) 675-3851 <michael.aldrich@byuh.edu>

Professional career and activities: Government Documents Librarian – Ingram Library, University of West Georgia (1997-2007). Special Assistant to the Vice President for Academic Affairs – University of West Georgia (2006-2008). Instruction Librarian – Ingram Library, University of West Georgia (2007-2010). Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs – University of West Georgia (2008-2010). University Librarian – Smith Library, Brigham Young University – Hawaii (2011-present). How/where do I see the industry in five years: Continuing the emphasis on information evaluation and data analysis.

Christa Bailey Senior Assistant Librarian Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library San José State University One Washington Square San José, CA 95192 Phone: (408) 808-2422 <Christa.Bailey@sjsu.edu>

start of CD-ROM database searching, and I developed a strong interest in library technology. I am now in charge of an award-winning library IT unit that has developed quite a few “first in the nation” innovations. Family: Awesome wife Nancy, and brilliant children Kevin, Carolyn, and Michael. In my spare time: Cooking, gardening, woodworking, soccer, hiking, weight lifting, and beer. Favorite books: Liveship Traders triology, Cold Mountain, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Pet peeves: Authoritarian leaders who vilify anyone who criticizes them. Philosophy: Utilitarianism.

Most memorable career achievement: Working with the incredible folks in NC and SC to create the Carolina Consortium. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Retirement?

How/where do I see the industry in five years: Print ceases to play a meaningful role in the research process for most academic library patrons. Online access becomes increasingly mobile. As a result, academic libraries become more oriented towards social interaction.

Head, Access and Collections Services Brigham Young University – Hawaii 55-220 Kulanui Street, BYUH #1966 Laie, HI 96762 Phone: (808) 675-3863 <marynelle.chew@byuh.edu>

Born and lived: Bay Area Native.

Professional career and activities: Academic liaison librarian supporting several departments in the College of Business including Accounting & Finance, Marketing & Business Analytics, School of Global Innovation and Leadership, and the Department of Economics in the College of Social Sciences. In addition, serve as co-coordinator for the Affordable Learning $olutions campus initiative at SJSU.

Marynelle Chew

Professional career and activities: Have worked in every department of the library except for archives.

In my spare time: I can be found photographing landscapes and botanicals.

How/where do I see the industry in five years: A critical need for students of all ages, as well as the general public, is information literacy. Training in how to evaluate information and access to quality databases with reliable sources is essential in helping an informed citizenry discern between “real” and “fake” news and information.

Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: To have gained tenure at SJSU.

Tim Bucknall Assistant Dean of Libraries UNC Greensboro Jackson Library Greensboro, NC Phone: (336) 256-1216 <bucknall@uncg.edu>

Born and lived: Born in Massachusetts, but moved to Texas as a toddler. Early life: Grew up in Austin, Texas. My mother was a librarian at UT, and my father was an artist. I developed an early addiction to reading. Fortunately we lived only four blocks away from the Austin Public Library! I systematically read every single science fiction book in their collection, starting with the classics and then going back through the remaining authors alphabetically. Professional career and activities: My first professional position was as a reference librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill. That was at the very

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Becky DeMartini Head of Instructional Services Brigham Young University-Hawaii 55-220 Kulanui Street Laie, HI 96762 Phone: (808) 675-3946 Fax: (808) 675-3877 <becky.demartini@byuh.edu> library.byuh.edu

Professional career and activities: After my MLIS from University of Hawaii, for the last 11 years I have been working at Brigham Young University-Hawaii in the Joseph F. Smith Library and love it! My focus is on instruction and reference but I have also spend much time working with the website and electronic resources. Also been involved over the years with ALA, ACRL, Hawaii Library Association, and more and have enjoyed serving and learning all the while. Family: My husband and our four young children enjoy living in Hawaii and all it has to offer. We love to head back to the mainland as well to visit all of our family scattered about the country and see snow in the winter! continued on page 91

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ATG Profiles Encouraged from page 90 How/where do I see the industry in five years: I see the industry moving in the same direction, with vendors continuing to work on better systems and access, with librarians continuing to make more usable and flexible spaces and using their limited resources to come up with great solutions to help their wonderful patrons. And I see people loving libraries even more.

George Machovec Executive Director Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries 3801 E. Florida Ave., Suite 515 Denver, CO 80210 Phone: (303) 759-3399 x.101 Fax: (303) 759-3363 <george@coalliance.org> https://www.coalliance.org

Born and lived: Born in Columbus, Ohio as my dad was a librarian at Ohio State University.

Assistant Head, Collections & Research Strategy North Carolina State University Libraries Box 7111 Raleigh, NC 27695-7111 Phone: (919) 513-0364 <dcorcutt@ncsu.edu> Born and lived: Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina.

Professional career and activities: Like many librarians, my profile and my work have been constantly changing throughout my career. The constant has been finding ways to connect users with resources, services, and most importantly relationships that enhance research, teaching, and engagement across campus, national, and international communities. How/where do I see the industry in five years: Perhaps not in five years, but certainly in ten, sea changes in higher education will mean that our campuses and our libraries will be utterly transformed, as will teaching, research, and scholarship. Just how, and what we need to be doing now, provides the root of my column, “It’s High Time.”

Family: I am married to Valerie Machovec and I have two grown kids (Rachel and Alex) who live in Santa Fe and two stepkids (Ryan and Kayte) in high school. In my spare time: I very much enjoy walking, traveling, reading, stamp collecting, and technology. I’m somewhat of a news junkie. Favorite books: I really enjoy biographies and history. My most recent book is Grant by Ron Chernow. Pet peeves: As an editor of The Charleston Advisor I’m always surprised when potential authors agree to an article and then disappear. Philosophy: Be honest, hardworking and kind.

Most memorable career achievement: The Prospector union catalog and working on The Charleston Advsor which are both about 20 years old. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: To keep the consortium on solid footing with relevant programs and services. How/where do I see the industry in five years: The cost of serials and other expensive e-resources and tools will need to be brought into check as continued price increases are not sustainable. Open access and open source initiatives will play a role but many subscription-based services will have a time of adjustment.

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Adriana Poo Senior Assistant Librarian Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library San José State University One Washington Square San José, CA 95192-0028 Phone: (408) 808-2019 • Fax: (408) 808-2020 <Adriana.poo@sjsu.edu> • library.sjsu.edu

Early life: At five my family moved to Los Alamos, NM where I grew up through high school. My dad worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as a librarian. I attended the University of Arizona in Tucson for both my undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy as well as my masters in library science. Professional career and activities: My first position was at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona. I began as a science reference librarian and was also in charge of the Solar Energy Collection. Later I became the head of library technology and systems at ASU until my departure in 1993. In 1993, I became the associate director of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries and the executive director in 2012. I have been involved with the establishing of the Prospector union catalog in 1999 which now has over 50 libraries in Colorado and Wyoming. The Colorado Alliance consortium has grown to 16 libraries, and has other great programs such as a large e-resource licensing program, the Alliance Shared Print Trust, and the building of the Gold Rush software suite with tools for shared print analytics among other things. I have been managing editor of The Charleston Advisor since its inception in 1999 and have enjoyed working with the folks at Choice with the development of the companion ccAdvisor review database.

Darby Orcutt

Professional career and activities: Co-Coordinator of Affordable Learning Solutions and Health Science Librarian. Family: Adriana is married and has three daughters and two shih-tzu’s. In my spare time: Her family keeps her busy in her spare time.

Most memorable career achievement: Starting her tenure track at SJSU.

Kelly Smith Coordinator of Collections and Discovery Eastern Kentucky University Libraries 521 Lancaster Avenue Richmond, KY 40475 Phone: (859) 622-3062 • Fax: (859) 622-1174 <kelly.smith2@eku.edu> • library.eku.edu

Born and lived: Born in Illinois – lived all over the country – 8 different states. Early life: Wanted to be an artist.

Professional career and activities: I started librarianship focusing on preservation, working as a Bookmender at UC Berkeley. I also worked briefly as a corporate law librarian, an archivist, and a public reference librarian. In 2005, I was hired at EKU as its second electronic resources librarian, doing everything related to eResources. Now I head the collections division and the eResource work is split amongst six librarians and staff members. I’ve been active in the profession. I was on the original conference planning group for the ER&L Conference, hosted an Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians conference, edited a Serials Librarian column, served as chair of an ALCTS interest group, and am now serving on the ALCTS Advocacy group. Family: My husband, Jeff Richey, teaches Asian Studies at Berea College. I have two sons – one in 12th and one in 7th grade. In my spare time: Right now, my spare time is taken up with politics. I’m running for State Representative in the 89th District in Kentucky. continued on page 92

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Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Significant reduction in textbook costs for EMU students.

ATG Profiles Encouraged from page 91 Favorite books: Between the World and Me, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Pride and Prejudice, Eli the Good (by Silas House, a fantastic Kentucky author – check him out). Pet peeves: Intolerance, rudeness, narcissism.

Philosophy: If you don’t have a seat at the table, then you are on the menu. Most memorable career achievement: I think all of the work I did on the ER&L conference was very memorable. I was a relatively new librarian and it was exciting to work with other passionate librarians. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Spend a year saying “no” to everything instead of “yes.” I need a “no” year. How/where do I see the industry in five years: Honestly, I think things will keep trending in negative directions for academic libraries. I think public higher ed is in real trouble in a lot of states and funding will continue to diminish. I think video publishing will still be disrupted by digital models and publishers will clamp down more and more on institutional access. I think for profit journal publishers will still be gouging us and we’ll be continuing to try to make open access publishing in our local repositories a sustainable model. There might be some backing off from 100% patron driven acquisitions as libraries decide that focused curation is needed to encourage serendipity.

Kate Pittsley-Sousa Professor, Education Librarian & Coordinator, EMU Library Textbook Affordability Initiative Eastern Michigan University Ypsilanti, MI <kate.pittsley@emich.edu>

Professional career and activities: Academic librarian, public library director, business librarian, government documents librarian, database designer, high school teacher.

How/where do I see the industry in five years: The new generation of professors, who had trouble affording their own college texts, will pay more attention to textbook affordability, increasing their use of OERs and other less expensive alternatives. They will also increasingly see librarians as a valuable ally in this effort.

Joris van Rossum Director, Special Projects Digital Science London, UK <j.vanrossum@digital-science.com> www.blockchainforpeerreview.org

Born and lived: The Netherlands primarily.

Professional career and activities: Kluwer Academic, Elsevier, Digital Science and two start-ups, mostly in the area of product development and innovation. In my spare time: Family, reading, camping and hiking (whenever the weather in The Netherlands permits). Favorite books: Several, especially works by Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler and H.G. Wells. Pet peeves: People sniffing while on the train.

Most memorable career achievement: Not sure what to mention here, but I’ve been fortunate to have worked in innovative areas of scholarly communication throughout my career. Being part of the launch of Scopus was a great experience, but I also love the work I’m doing right now around blockchain. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Still working in innovative areas in scholarly communication, wherever that may be, and contributing to making this industry more efficient, effective and open. How/where do I see the industry in five years: I hope we’ll have been able to solve some of the challenges in scholarly communication, such as around reproducibility, peer review, and transparency.

Favorite books: Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, So Big by Edna Ferber.

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Digital Science Kings Place, 90 York Way London, N1 9AG UK Phone: +44 (0) 20 3884 9870 www.digital-science.com Affiliated companies: Altmetric, Figshare, Overleaf, Dimensions and more. Association memberships, etc.: Open Access Network, Society for Scholarly Publishing, STM, ALPSP, and Duraspace. Core markets/clientele: Researchers, Institutions, Funders and Publishers. Number of employees: 50-249 (Medium).

History and brief description of your company/publishing program: Digital Science is a technology company serving the needs of scientific and research communities at key points along the full cycle of research. We invest in, nurture and support innovative businesses and technologies that make all parts of the research process more open, efficient and effective. We believe that together, we can help researchers make a difference. Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers? Many of our employees started their careers as scientists so we know the daily challenges they face. But we go beyond this – we also work with institutions, funders and publishers to ensure they can better serve their own communities with technology that delights. continued on page 93

92 Against the Grain / November 2018

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LIBRARY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries 3801 E. Florida Ave., Suite 515 Denver, CO 80210 Phone: (303) 759-3399 Fax: (303) 759-3363 https://www.coalliance.org Background/history: The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that began in 1974 and was formally incorporated as a non-profit in 1981. From the beginning, the consortium was designed to help research and educational institutions share information resources and reduce operating costs by working together. Current initiatives include the Alliance Shared Print Trust, the Prospector union catalog, e-resource licensing, Gold Rush software suite, and training/education. Key products and services: Prospector union catalog, Gold Rush (shared print analytics, content comparison of journal packages, ERMS, A-Z, link resolver). Core markets/clientele: Academic Libraries and large public libraries. All services have been developed for member libraries in the consortium and are made available to other libraries for an additional fee. Number of staff and responsibilities: Six staff involved with the Prospector union catalog, Alliance Shared Print Trust, Gold Rush software framework, e-resource licensing, training, continuing education Overall consortium budget: An operating budget of $1 million/ year. Types of materials you buy: eBooks, ejournal packages, video streaming, databases, and other e-resources of interest to our members. What technologies does your consortium use to serve mobile users? Nothing specific.

Does your consortium have an ILS or are you part of a collaborative ILS? The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries operates a shared union catalog called Prospector (https://prospectorhome. coalliance.org). This union catalog is not an integrated library system but rather a shared discovery and resource sharing system. Do you have a discovery system? Encore for the Prospector union catalog. Does your consortium have a collection development or similar department? Staff work with the Shared Collection Development Committee to determine what should be licensed. If so, what is your budget and what types of materials are you purchasing? Print or electronic or both? About $17 million/year for licensing on behalf of our member libraries. We only license e-resources. What proportion of your materials are leased and not owned? The only “owed” materials are for some of the eBook packages and some of the backfiles of e-journal packages. What do you think your consortium will be like in five years? The future is built on the past so I’m expecting many of the same services but with new technological enhancements and opportunities. What excites or frightens you about the next five years? Collaboration fatigue is one of the problems facing many consortia. We need to be careful to not accidently give up the core benefits of collaboration since working together is still crucial in many areas of librarianship. Is there anything else you think our readers should know? Shared print programs for monographs and serials are an important effort by academic librarians in shaping long-term access to materials. Collaboration at the local, regional, and national levels are key to providing long-term access to the scholarly record.

Rumors from page 69 available for one year on the website. Authors will retain all rights to their books, but will give the Los Angeles-based company the chance to bid on their dramatic rights and present their stories to studios and production companies. https://www.thebookseller.com/search/site/taleflick.com taleflick.com SSP’s Scholarly Kitchen blog is definitely worth reading (along with ATG that is!)! Have you paid attention to the “Read and Publish model?” Is it good for the academy and will it transform the scholarly journal publishing business? Emma Wilson is the Director of Publishing at the Royal Society of Chemistry. Read and Publish just arrived in the U.S. when MIT and the RSC signed just such a deal. Emma pens that “this is significant as it signals the model has appeal to research intensive universities outside of Europe, and global uptake is needed for the model to impact the open access (OA) landscape. Our deal with MIT attracted much attention and comment. Unlike other Read & Publish models, the ‘Read’ component is directly linked to changes in the amount of paywalled content, allowing for a smooth transition toward more OA content in future.” https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/24/guest-post-why-a-society-publisher-is-moving-toward-read-and-publish-models/

Against the Grain / November 2018

Pictured above is my granddaughter, Katina Walser, who just like her father, Raymond, loves to read. She has recently moved to San Diego California and was so excited to find this bookmobile stopping nearby. She is also taking karate and hopes to have her black belt very soon. Happy November and see many of you in Charleston soon! Many good thoughts! Yr. Ed.

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Back Talk — On Being A Fashionable Librarian! Column Editor: Ann Okerson (Advisor on Electronic Resources Strategy, Center for Research Libraries) <aokerson@gmail.com> “Librarian fashion”? Did I read that right? I was looking at the program for the five-day World Library and Information Congress of IFLA, held in August in Kuala Lumpur. I’ve been attending for some years, always finding the event eye-opening and refreshing in many ways — and I currently serve on the IFLA governing board. We’ve seen many interesting programs, but a whole session on “Librarian fashion?” Well, friends, it may have been the high point of the conference. Let me tell you a little about it. Five hundred people crowded the room, first of all. And yes, the usual librarian jokes were all mentioned: hair in a bun, shushing the patrons, sensible shoes, etc. But the session was downright inspiring. The importance of the session was highlighted when we saw that it was being introduced by governing board member Antonia Arahova from Greece, one of the moving spirits behind next year’s IFLA congress in Athens, and that the keynote speaker was ALA’s President Loida Garcia-Febo. The session had been organized jointly by the IFLA committees for New Professionals (always zany and smart), Management of Library Associations, and Public Libraries. There were seven papers, each one strictly kept to seven minutes, which were delivered by speakers from Australia, U.S., Mexico, Indonesia, India, Egypt, and two from Malaysia. The papers were crisp, effective, and interesting. The two that absorbed the most interest came

from librarians in Malaysia and Indonesia: first, “Wear the past in the present for the future,” prepared by Puspa Diana Jawi, Japri Bujang Masli, and Muhammad Annwar Adenan, of the Sarawak State Library, Malaysia; and then “Traditional Costumes as librarians’ uniforms for work at Public Libraries of Yogyakarta, Indonesia,” prepared by Atin Istiarni and Ida Fajar Priyanto, of the University of Muhammadiyah and Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. Malaysia and Indonesia are predominantly Muslim countries, where modesty in dress is expected and women face particular expectations. For the most part in this region, they do not wear the heavy black robes familiar from strict Middle Eastern countries, but instead colorful long robes and equally colorful headscarves are common. (Pro tip, as we say nowadays: if you want to wear colorful clothing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to move to Malaysia, where inexpensive batiks and silks in dazzling colors and styles are widely available!) So, the theme of these talks was to explore the ways traditional dress can work for library professionals. I have my American habits and styles, but I must say these speakers made a good case for using traditional dress consciously as a strategy, not merely for personal presentation but also for library mission. Should we not think, they asked, that wearing tradi-

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94 Against the Grain / November 2018

tional dress in a library is a form of cultural heritage preservation? And of expressing commitment to the side of librarianship that is devoted to preserving and honoring traditional culture? They made a much better case than I thought one could possibly make, and they showed power-point slides with pictures of their library colleagues in various settings both casual and formal. First, we listened our way through the papers thoughtfully, and then the fun began. It was time for the fashion show! One of the Malaysian speakers on the panel, Nurfarawahidah Badruesham (https:// my.linkedin.com/in/nurfarawahidah-badruesham-5587a7112), is a professional librarian who doubles as a certified professional image consultant (she wears the long gown and the headscarf). She was amazing: one of the brains and energizers of the session! The invitation was simple: “Y’all come!” (Doesn’t this sound Katina-like?) Everyone in the room was invited to walk the “catwalk” — or, well, the stage, actually. Come up on stage on one side, pose, and pause for photos at the front, then come down into the cheering crowd — those were the instructions. There must have been 150 people, male and female, who took up the invitation. They wore everything from gorgeous African native dress to jeans-and-shirt-with-airplane-wrinkles combinations, and wore everything with a swagger and a smile. What was beautiful was that the session had become such an open, affirming, respectful occasion, that people from all over the world, in every kind of clothing, of every age, size, and shape, were delighted to have the opportunity and spontaneously jumped on it. The 15 minutes or so of the fashion show may have been among the happiest and most energetic IFLA sessions ever seen. You can see a couple of photographs here, but they hardly do justice to the session. Everyone, strutting onto the stage or crowding forward to take pictures or simply applauding at a distance, got caught up in the fun of the session. But it was fun with an important message. Rules and expectations and standards come second; self-expression and respect (even admiration!) for everyone we work with and for has to come first. What matters is not what one wears or how one looks, the message went on, but how one chooses to present oneself with confidence and ambition and respect for all one’s colleagues. Nobody left that room without a smile and an insight or three. Six of the seven papers are available in the IFLA online library at: http://library.ifla. org/view/conferences/2018/2018-08-27/927. html.

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