Against the Grain v32 #5

ISSN: 1043-2094

Short Books: An Introduction

by Steven Weiland (Professor, Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University) <weiland@msu.edu> and Matthew ismail (Director of Collection Development, Central Michigan University) <ismai1md@cmich.edu>

Ours is a fluid, some might say volatile, period for scholarly publishing, as essentials are being rethought to adapt to the digital age. Thus, Northeastern university historian and Dean of Libraries, Dan Cohen (2019), recently reported on the dramatic decline in withdrawal of books at academic institutions only weeks before a report appeared stoutly defending the scholarly role of the monograph (CUP and OUP, 2019). Plainly readers and writers do not agree on the durability of familiar forms of publishing.

It has been hard to dislodge the priority given to the article and mono -

graph. Disciplinary habits rule, as does the academic reward system with its expectations of work in familiar formats. But literature and scholarly publications scholar, Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2015), has asked about our “primary forms.” She recognizes their durability. They look “utterly natural, the shapes of thought itself.” To be sure, “the constraints presented by the forms of the book and the journal article have in many cases been productive, giving structure to the analysis and exploration that we undertake.” Still, the conventional formats are also limitations: “There has long been nothing in the large space between the

If Rumors Were Horses

The Charleston Library Conference was invited to present a session this year during the Frankfurter buchmesse 2020. The event was on Friday, October 16 and was on the Frankfurter book Fair virtual platform. Labeled the Charleston Library Conference meets the Frankfurter b uchmesse, our session included two panels with the incredibly talented moderation of Leah Hinds! The speakers were ivy Anderson, Todd Carpenter, Jill Heinze, Roy Kaufman, Jim O’Donnell, Carlo Scollo Lavizzari, Anja Smit, and Charles Watkinson. The first panel discussed the state of the academic library, the future of the monograph, values-based collection development, and developing and implementing a marketing program. The second

journal article and the book, a space that might have been occupied by the pamphlet or the chapbook but never was, because that inbetweenness of shape made them literally undistributable.” Why shouldn’t the length of books be part of how we rethink what we want from writing and reading?

In fact, by now there are many publishers of short academic books. We can even see that interest in them has a history (Weiland and Ismail, 2018). University presses have been leading the way, but SAGE can now be recognized as an important part of the story. It followed its own failed experiments (in the early 1970s) with

A few years ago b ruce Strauch did this painting of bill Hannay’s dog. We miss you bill.

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Editor:

Katina Strauch (Retired, College of Charleston)

Associate Editors:

Cris Ferguson (Murray State)

Tom Gilson (Retired, College of Charleston)

Matthew Ismail (Central Michigan University)

Research Editors:

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Assistants to the Editor: Ileana Strauch

Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)

International Editor:

Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino)

Contributing Editors:

Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University)

Deni Auclair (De Gruyter)

Rick Anderson (University of Utah)

Sever Bordeianu (U. of New Mexico)

Todd Carpenter (NISO)

Eleanor Cook (East Carolina University)

Will Cross (NC State University)

Anne Doherty (Choice)

Michelle Flinchbaugh (U. of MD Baltimore County)

Joyce Dixon-Fyle (DePauw University)

Michael Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC)

Chuck Hamaker (Retired, UNC, Charlotte)

Bob Holley (Retired, Wayne State University)

Donna Jacobs (MUSC)

Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University)

Myer Kutz (Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.)

Tom Leonhardt (Retired)

Stacey Marien (American University)

Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University)

Alayne Mundt (American University)

Bob Nardini (ProQuest)

Jim O’Donnell (Arizona State University)

Ann Okerson (Center for Research Libraries)

Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University)

Rita Ricketts (Blackwell’s)

Jared Seay (College of Charleston)

Corey Seeman (University of Michigan)

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Authors’

AGAiNST THE GRAiN TABLE OF CONTENTS

v.32 #5 November 2020 © Katina Strauch

FEATURES

Short books — Guest Editors: Steven Weiland and Matthew ismail

Short books: An introduction...................................................................................1 by Steven Weiland and Matthew ismail — There has long been nothing in the large space between the journal article and the book.

Stanford university Press: Stanford briefs ...........................................................14 by Matthew ismail — The origins of these briefs originated in a willingness to experiment at a time when the publishing world was challenged to innovate. university of Minnesota Press: Forerunners .........................................................16 by Matthew ismail — The Press didn’t exactly plan to start this series of brief books so much as they began to observe an interesting space opening in the new publishing environment. Springer Nature: Springerbriefs ............................................................................18 by Matthew ismail — These briefs were launched at a time when Springer wanted to introduce something new and innovative into the market.

Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Pivots ....................................................................20 by Matthew ismail — The origin of this series lies in a decision made to examine the publishing challenges faced by researchers in the humanities and social sciences.

Matthew Engelke and Prickly Paradigm Press: The Return of the Pamphleteer... 22 by Steven Weiland — The pamphlet and the pamphleteer can be seen as historical examples of a style in communications that can add something important to academic writing. John Hartigan: The Discipline of brevity ..............................................................24 by Steven Weiland — The University of Minnesota Press was seeking to “give authors space to explore idea-driven works that often aren’t taken up by university presses…”

Marina van Zuylen: Short books Should be Everywhere ...................................28 by Steven Weiland — The academic book can be a sign of professional habit. “The long book certainly satisfies our puritanical work ethic.”

Marina van Zuyden: An Author and Her Short books .......................................29

The French have a wonderful way of turning long essays into short books.

Op Ed – Random Ramblings ..................................................................................30

The American Library Association, Not Just for Librarians by bob Holley — Bob says there are many large groups of non-librarians who ought to be in the ALA back Talk — back to School! ..................................................................................94 by Jim O’Donnell — Well, we have a real opportunity. We’ve been analog-with-digital-supplement for thirty years+ and we’ve gotten good at it. It’s time to make sure that everything we do can be done digitally!

ATG INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

Khal Rudin – Managing Director, Adam Matthew Digital ..................................52 Profiles Encouraged .................................................................................................92

REVIEWS

booklover — Yeats. Al Writers. The Second Coming .........................................34 by Donna Jacobs — Donna explores William Butler Yeats’ short story: “The Crucifixion of the Outcast.” She also wonders whether AI will break the writing barrier. Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews .....................38 by Corey Seeman — Two types of reviews in one column. And be sure to check out Corey’s reviewers page at https://sites.google.com/view/squirrelman/atg-readers-roundup.

ATG Food + beverage Roundup — Cooking at Home ........................................90 by Nicole Ameduri and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe — This column is an inspiration to those of us stuck at home and hungry!

CHARLESTON CONFERENCE iSSuE ATG

SPECIAL REPORTS

The LYRASiS Diversity, Equity and inclusion 2020 Survey Report ..................74 by Hannah Rosen — After data clean-up, this survey – conducted between April and June of 2020 – yielded 159 responses. The majority of respondents were academic libraries. Librarian Engagement at the university of Minnesota........................................76 by Jennie M. burroughs — Almost twenty years on, the University of Minnesota continues to value librarian outreach and engagement throughout the academic community. We All Serve: Library-wide Distributed Desk Service .........................................78 by bo baker and Theresa Liedtka — The premise of this article is that the distribution of core responsibilities across all staff members supports needed library-wide operations.

LEGAL ISSUES

Edited by bruce Strauch and Jack Montgomery

Legally Speaking — The internet Archive Lawsuit .............................................63 by Anthony Paganelli — Is controlled digital lending legal under U.S. Copyright law? Questions and Answers — Copyright Column .....................................................64 by Will Cross — As always, many relevant questions and answers. Several highly pertinent questions about the Visual Artists Rights Act and the copyright office!

PUBLISHING

bet You Missed it .....................................................................................................12

by bruce Strauch — What do W.C. Fields and James Bond have in common? Read it here! The Scholarly Publishing Scene — Footprints and Karen Hunter .....................54 by Myer Kutz — A charming column about the irreplaceable Karen Hunter And They Were There — Reports of Meetings .....................................................56 by Ramune K. Kubilius — In this issue of ATG you will find the fifth installment of 2019 Charleston Conference reports. Watch for the final batch of reports in our next issue. Headwaters — Has the Elite’s bubble Detached? ................................................61 by Kent Anderson — We need to ensure we’re attached to reality and the broadest possible version of our society, or the mission of higher education may become irrelevant to millions.

BOOKSELLING AND VENDING

Oregon Trails — big Little Johnny Jenkins ..........................................................36 by Thomas W. Leonhardt — I confess, I sent this book to Tom to read because I was fascinated with the shenanigans of Johnny Jenkins. It’s quite an unsolved mystery. biz of Digital — Repository Quick Submit and Cv Scraping .............................66 by Deborah Revzin and Colin b. Lukens — Complicated licensing and author re-use rights can sometimes be viewed as a barrier by authors who are looking to deposit their work.

The Digital Toolbox: Case Studies, best Practices and Data for the Academic Librarian — ebooks and Audiobooks Support Remote Learning in Time of Crisis ... 68 by Steve Rosato — For Maria Aghazarian, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Swarthmore College, nothing could have prepared her for the“rapid changes this spring.” Optimizing Library Services — insights From a Professor and Researcher .....69 How Librarians and Doctoral Education Leadership Can Partner to Provide Stronger Programs During the “New Normal” by Dr. Robin Throne — A solid digital infrastructure between LIS professionals and other members of the doctoral community is essential. both Sides Now: vendors and Librarians .............................................................72 virtually, Yours by Michael Gruenberg — The virtual “trade show” experience is quite different from its in-person cousin.

TECHNOLOGY AND STANDARDS

Wandering the Web — An Arsenal of Military Websites .....................................82 by Dan Forrest — This particular Internet bibliography is designed to provide access to the world of those men and women who serve in our military services.

Let’s Get Technical — Linked Data: Old Wine in A New bottle ........................84 by Kyle banerjee and Susan J. Martin — Implemented well, library adaptation of Linked Data will largely be invisible to library staff.

Library Analytics: Shaping the Future — Let’s Talk Research .........................86 by Tamir borensztajn — The library functions as the “hub” that transacts the flow of information. Emerging Tech: To be or Not to be? — Analytics in an Open Access World ....87 by Deni Auclair and John Corkery — Some possible approaches to open access.

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.

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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:

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Vendors and Librarians”

From Your (nostalgic) Editor:

It’s close to the end of another year and what a year 2020 has been! Like Queen Elizabeth once said about another year — The Annus horribilis! Change is good much of the time. But the fact that the Charleston Conference has gone virtual and we are rearranging Against the Grain has got me thinking about the good old times. Still, it has not been as difficult as we imagined — at least for those of us on the front end. Those

on the back end (Toni, Leah, Caroline, Joshua, Matt and more) know that it wasn’t easy and still isn’t. Pathable is an excellent platform but there is still a lot to learn or figure out. Pathable does have a happiness coach which helps a lot!

This issue of ATG is a great one. Matthew ismail and Steven Weiland focus on the trend toward Short books Stanford Briefs, Forerunners, SpringerBriefs, Palgrave Pivot, the return of the pamphleteer,

Letters to the Editor

Send letters to <kstrauch@comcast.net>, phone 843-509-2848, 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 was so shocked and saddened by the news about bill Hannay. His passing is an incredible loss. I didn’t know him very well but he was always outgoing, cheerful and very friendly whenever we spoke. His remarkable knowledge of the law as it relates to libraries and intellectual property rights was evident when he spoke at the conference. And of course, bill’s unmatched talent and creativity enabled him to both teach and entertain all of us in such unique and memorable ways. His part in the Long Arm of the Law sessions was always a highlight during every conference. He had a special gift for making what could be dry and complicated topics come alive to his audience. As you aptly noted, bill is irreplaceable.

Thank you for the heartfelt announcement you released. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been, but you struck the exact right tone. I know that you and bruce feel his loss deeply. Please accept my condolences for the loss of your good friend.

Sincerely,

Tom v. Gilson

(Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu>

AGAiNST THE GRAiN DEADLiNES

vOLuME 32 & 33 — 2020-2021

the discipline of a Brevity and Maria van Zuylen and her short books.

We held over several special reports on Librarian engagement, distribution of core responsibilities and the LYRAS i S Diversity Report. Our Op Ed talks sbout ALA and how it’s for more than librarians, Jim O’Donnell talks about the opportunities we have to make everything digital. Our interview is with Khal Rudin of Adam Matthew Digital.

Our book review section has many book reviews, and the charming booklover Legally Speaking is about new developments in the internet Archive lawsuit and Questions & Answers has several issues that require our attention.

We have new column editors for Let’s Get Technical, Kyle banerjee and Susan J. Martin who write about Linked Data: Old Wine in A New bottle and a new case studies column by Steve Rosato

Meyer Kutz talks about the awesomely wonderful, one-of-a-kind Karen Hunter. Karen was a great woman and librarian!! I remember when she came to the very first Fiesole Retreat in Fiesole Italy. The wonderful John Tagler was a real gentleman to help her get around!

See you all virtually in Charleston real soon. — Yr. Ed.

Rumors from page 1

panel focused on artificial intelligence, copyright, and privacy. The session was summed up by Peter brantley. The session is archived at https://www.buchmesse. de/node/351586.

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.

Meanwhile, the 2020 Charleston Conference is moving along very well on the Pathable Platform which uses Zoom. We already have vendor showcase exhibitors and over 2000 registrants! Leah Hinds is to be commended hugely for ALL of the work that she has put into getting both the Frankfurt and Charleston Conference virtual meetings together! Hip Hip Hooray for Leah! The Charleston Conference program is here: https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/agenda

continued on page 12

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what became a very successful series in research methods. The “little green” and “little blue” books, as they were called (by the publisher and users alike), offered authoritative and accessible accounts of methodological essentials (SAGE, 2015). They became handy resources for learning enough about a research method to apply it to practice. Brief was better. And in 2015 with SAGE Swifts the company joined the list of publishers offering books that were longer than the green and blue books but shorter than the conventional research monograph.

In effect, SAGE too proposes that there is no ideal length for a scholarly publication. Publishers and scholars are experimenting together with “inbetween” forms. Each SAGE Swift carries this statement of what the series offers beyond the conventional length of the journal article, while reassuring scholars about legitimacy in the academic reward system: “SAGE Swifts aim to give authors speedy access to academic audiences through digital first publication, space to explore ideas thoroughly, yet at a length which can be readily digested, and the quality stamp and reassurance of peer review.” For SAGE, speed counts, as in practically everything we do today. The quickened pace in the digital age is a sign, for some readers and critics, of the “accelerated academy” (Vostal, 2016). SAGE claims that its Swifts offer learning that can be “readily digested in a culture that expects information at the click of a button.”

While it stands by the monograph (Cambridge UP and Oxford UP, 2019), the Cambridge university Press is also demonstrating the utility of alternative formats. It now has a series of short books of 20,000 to 30,000 words. Elements are described as “original, concise, authoritative, and peer reviewed.” And they are “regularly updated and conceived from the start for a digital environment.” The CuP website offers guidance for prospective authors, including attention to marketing and registering the unusual publishing format on a CV and for annual review.

Will the conventional academic reward system recognize such work with the enthusiasm that scholars are bringing to new publishing opportunities is one question to be asked about the short book phenomenon. Another is: Will libraries accept the publishers’ case for the timeliness of inbetween publications, sometimes marketed

as subscriptions, and welcome them as part of scholarly collections? Fifty years ago, when print monographs reigned, the Journal of Scholarly Publishing included in its inaugural issue a case for the short book, naming it an “ideal form” for some scholarly purposes. According to William McClung (1969), then at the Princeton university Press, neglect of short books represented a “serious irrationality” among academic publishers. For him, “The essential criterion for academic book publication should be significance, not length. If this principle prevailed, books of all lengths would be published.”

Can we define a short book? Practices vary and there is no agreed upon word or page count. Perhaps the best definition is that a short book is longer than an article and less than a book, or at least the conventional scholarly book, typically about 200 pages. McClung refers to an “intermediate length of writing” which leaves considerable room for different realizations of “short.” The Oxford university Press specifies 35,000 words, about 120 pages of text, for its well-known Very Short Introductions. The series title, with “very,” leaves no room for prospective readers to expect anything else (see Schulz, 2015). The short books being offered by other publishers are sometimes half as long but with no effort in the series titles to suggest that some books are very, very short ones.

For McClung, the economic argument against short books made sense, if that is the only criterion used to estimate their value. Thus, the fixed costs of publishing make it impossible to apply pricing differentials reflecting length and page counts. Nor is it possible, with what is plain about the limits of the audience for scholarly books generally, to reduce prices with the hope, in retail vernacular, of “making it up in volume.” In effect, the first question McClung asks of the short book is: Is it economically sustainable? From the evidence of activity in short book publishing among scholarly and commercial presses, the answer today is yes, reflecting in part the distance from McClung’s analysis and the advent of electronic publishing, though many short books appear in digital and print versions.

But, McClung is more interested in the case against short books reflecting the conventions of academic publishing, or how the image of a book is “fixed” in the scholarly system. “The concept of the long-form book has remained largely unquestioned and thus affects us almost unnoticed. ...[S]hort books are usually

expected to be frivolous, superficial, appropriate for gifts, but rarely serious.” McClung asks a second question to overturn such expectations: Are there cognitive advantages for readers in short books? He believed there were, largely because even fifty years ago “the pace of publication has produced readers who read quickly, skim, and select.” The advantage of the short book is that it “can be read as a unit, at a single sitting [of about two hours], as a singular and coherent intellectual experience.” Indeed, as an “ideal form of expository writing [a short book] probably maximizes the richness of content within a length [of about one hundred pages] that can be absorbed by the serious reader under ideal circumstances in a single period.”

The problem of the short book might also be seen as a disciplinary and professional one. Thus, a third implicit question of the short book: What will it mean for the academic reward system? McClung invokes an observation about graduate education, made in the same year of his account of short books, by Henry Riecken, then President of the Social Science Research Council Riecken (1969) wondered if “too many research problems were ‘thesis sized’ because they are undertaken with that objective in view.” Thus, as McClung puts it, research felt the adverse consequences of “the absence of flexibility that would allow the expansion and contraction of projects as needs dictated.”

Of course, the need addressed by traditional long-form books is for tenure and other academic rewards. The short book (much less in an open access format) presents potential problems in demonstrating research achievement, as in citations and reviews, according to academic and institutional norms. At least that is the conclusion a Chronicle of Higher Education columnist drew from interviews with administrators and scholars. While one acknowledged that the short book “might actually prompt us to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions about productivity and achievement” most anticipated advising younger colleagues to adhere to the long-form tradition, leaving publishing innovation to well established scholars (Cassuto, 2013). Advocates of short books see more than a genre experimentation in the format. There is the opportunity also to influence the method of scholarship itself.

At the very least the short book can offer significant operational change in writing and publishing. The Cambridge continued on page 10

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1. When a library subscribes or perpetually purchases IGI Global’s InfoSci-Databases, including InfoSci-Books (5,900+ e-books), InfoSci-Journals, and/or their discipline/subject-focused subsets, IGI Global will match the library’s investment with a fund of equal value to go toward subsidizing the OA article processing charges (APCs) and book processing charges (BCPs) for their patrons.

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4. This fund will be offered on an annual basis and will renew as the subscription is renewed for each year thereafter. IGI Global will manage the fund and award the processing charge waivers unless the librarian has a preference as to how the funds should be managed.

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ke a closer look at.... Ta

The CHARLESTON REPORT

Business Insights into the Library Market

You Need The Charleston Report...

Cassuto, L. (2013). The rise of the mini-monograph. Chronicle of Higher Education, August 12.

Colestock, R. (2012). Short-form digital grows at university press. Association of University Presses. Available at: http:// www.aupresses.org/news-a-publications/ aaup-publications/the-exchange/the-exchange-archive/summer-2012/800-shortform-publishing.

Esposito, J. (2012). Short-form publishing – A new content category, courtesy of the Internet. Scholarly Kitchen , September 5: Available at: https:// scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/05/ short-form-publishing-a-new-content-category-courtesy-of-the-internet/.

Fitzpatrick, K. (2015). Scholarly publishing in the digital age. In Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Eds.), Between humanities and the digital. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kasprzak, D. and Smyre, T. (2017). Forerunners and Manifold: A case study in iterative publishing. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 48(2): 90-98.

McClung, W. (1969). The short book. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 1(1): 45-52.

Short books: An introduction from page 8

university Press invites contributions to its Elements series by highlighting the novelty of the new format, or “an opportunity to develop a theme in greater detail than is possible in a traditional journal article, yet more concisely than would be expected in a full length book.” There is also the speed of publication after peer review (within 12 weeks of submission of the final manuscript) as well as visibility to individual readers and libraries, the latter as part of “digital collections” marketed by CuP. In fact, the eBook is the primary format, with print “on demand.” But that limit is also presented as an advantage in “platform functionality.” Thus, these short books can be updated annually and can include video and audio files. Cambridge wants “original, cutting edge insights into frontier topics.” One early Elements author told CuP that his book represented “a unique space in which to make a contribution to the literature.”

Minnesota sees its Forerunners as a form of “grey publications that [can] transform authorship” (Kasprzak and Smyre, 2017). “Grey” refers to work —

conference presentations, white papers, organizational reports, and “thought in process” digital work that is posted online — that can form the basis of a timely short book. The work is “iterative” and even “drafty,” reflecting what some will see as a publishing heresy in “encouraging authors to become increasingly comfortable with releasing their writing before they’ve perfected it.” Some authors working in the new format see their work that way while for others a short book can be as polished and even perhaps as complete as a longer work according to its scholarly goals. As the profiles and interviews that follow show, innovative publishers and authors are demonstrating that the short book, paradoxically, can have a sizeable role in academic work.

References

Cohen, D. (2019). The books of college libraries are turning into wallpaper. The Atlantic, May 26.

Cambridge u niversity Press and Oxford university Press. (2019). Researchers’ perspectives on the purpose and value of the monograph: Survey results 2019. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

SAGE . (2015). The SAGE story Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Available at: sagepub.com/sites/default/files/ a1501001_sage_story-50_june2015_final_lo-res.pdf.

Schulz, K. (2017). How to be a KnowIt-All: What you learn from the Very Short Introduction series. New Yorker, October 16: 76-80.

vostal, F. (2016). Accelerating academia: The changing structure of academic time. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Weiland, S. and ismail, M. (2019). Short books: Context and Case. In bernhardt, b., Hinds, L., Meyer, L. and Strauch, K. (Eds.) Charleston Conference Proceedings, 2018. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

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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 (Retired, The Citadel)

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

OnE SPACE OR TwO?

Do you put one space or two at the end of a sentence?

Aged folks who learned on manual typewriters were taught two and are adamant about it. But the younger digital age one-spacers seem to be winning. It has been predicted that two spaces will die out in 10 to 20 years.

Two spaces make it look less cramped. Legal professionals who wade through reams of pages are the loudest defenders. Appellate lawyers prefer it 2-to-1. And a psychology study at Skidmore came down on the side of two spaces as easier to read.

But the Chicago Manual of Style, the American Psychological Association, and the Wall Street Journal favor single space in their style guides. And Microsoft flags two spaces as an error.

But it will take one to two decades to see who wins.

See — James Hookway, “The Typographical Space Race Tightens Up,” The Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2020, p.A1.

Let’s Read Movie Music

Jon burlingame, The Music of James Bond (2012) (Michael Caine groaned at all night music making of roommate John barry who wrote the Bond Theme); (2) Henry Mancini, Did They Mention the Music? (1989) (Henry Mancini — “Moon River,” “Peter Gunn Theme,” “Pink Panther Theme”); (3) Nathan Platte, Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood (2017) (Selznick as dictator and innovator); (4) Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music (2006) (Hitch as deftest conductor of audience emotions); (5) Fred Karlin, Listening to Movies (1994).

See — Steven C. Smith, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, June 13-14, 2020, p.C8.

deadwood dick Rides again

Libraries spurned dime novels as not literature. 60,000 were printed on cheap paper and not meant to last. Private collectors have given them to libraries including the Library of Congress

Lest they turn to dust, the National Endowment of the Humanities handed Northern illinois u $350,000 to digitize 4,400 volumes published by New York company Street & Smith. Look for them at dimenovels.org. villanova hosts the website and already has 10,000 of them up.

Horatio Alger is still remembered today for Ragged Dick. Frank Merriwell was a fictional Yale football player who won 900 games at the last moment.

Edward Stratemeyer who started with dime novels, went on to create Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys Sinclair Lewis and upton Sinclair got their start with the dimes.

See — Judith H. Dobrzynski, “A Digital Afterlife for Dime Novels,” The Wall Street Journal, May 30-31, 2020, p.C14.

Let’s Read HoLLywood Lives

Carlotta Moriti, W.C. Fields and Me (1971) (mistress of the irascible alcoholic W.C. Fields); (2) George Jacobs and William Stadiem, Mr. S.: My Life With Frank Sinatra (2003) (Frank Sinatra’s valet); (3) Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: “Chinatown” and the Last Years of Hollywood (2020);

(4) Darcy O’brien, A Way of Life, Like Any Other (1977) (novel about son of alcoholic histrionic actress mother);

(5) Angelica Huston, Watch Me (2014) (John Huston’s daughter pens narrative rich in detail).

See — Susanna Moore, “Five Best,” Wall Street Journal, May 2-3, 2020, p.C8. (She is the author of the memoir Miss Aluminum.)

Many exciting things are happening with Charleston Conference colleagues! We will not see Camille Gamboa even virtually because she will be on maternity leave this fall! Camille has been working on the Charleston Communications task force! She will be back as soon as the baby arrives! Happy delivery, Camille!

What a special way for Tony Horava (once a Charleston Conference Director, now retired) to end his career! The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) is pleased to announce Tony Horava as the recipient of the 2020 Ron MacDonald Distinguished Service Award . The award will be presented on October 22, 2020, at a virtual award ceremony as part of the CRKN virtual Conference . For over 30 years, Mr. Horava has contributed to the advance-

ment of scholarly communications and knowledge infrastructure in Canada, while continuously demonstrating vision, integrity, and a passion for collaboration. In 2019, Mr. Horava retired as the Associate University Librarian (Content and Access) at the university of Ottawa, a role he held since January of 2010.

https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/en/conference/crkn-virtual-conference/program/ ron-macdonald-award-ceremony

continued on page 36

Rumors from page 6

Stanford University Press: Stanford Briefs

by Matthew ismail (Director of Collection Development, Central Michigan University) <ismai1md@cmich.edu>

Written by Matthew Ismail based on a WebEx conversation with Alan Harvey, Director of the Stanford University Press on June 25, 2019. Interviews were sometimes edited for clarity.

Every press with a brief book series approaches these series differently. Some presses have viewed brief books as a format best suited to working with ideas in progress; others (less successful) have viewed them as an opportunity to sell chapters of longer, already published, electronic books. The Stanford university Press Stanford Briefs series approaches brief books as another publishing option beyond the traditional academic monograph.

Alan Harvey, Director of the Stanford university Press, remarked that the origins of the Briefs originated, not so much in a specific desire to publish brief books, as in a willingness to experiment at a time — late 2010 to early 2011 — when the publishing world was challenged to innovate due to the digitization of the traditionally print-based scholarly communication system and the impetus of open access.

Harvey remarked that the event that led to the founding of the Briefs was pretty straightforward. The press had an author who had published with them already and he had just completed another book. The author got in touch with his editor and said he was planning to publish another book that was related to his previous Stanford book, but presumed that they wouldn’t be interested because it was only a hundred and ten pages long. The author was considering publishing it elsewhere, but since he needed to clear some rights with Stanford university Press anyway, he thought he would offer them the right of first refusal.

When the series editor came to Harvey to see what he thought about publishing a hundred and ten page book, which was out of their usual requirements for a scholarly monograph, Harvey and she discussed the question of whether letting such a fine piece of work go due to artificial page limits was really a good idea. They had a project in hand that was a hundred pages long and an author who was ready to publish it. Why not consider publishing it?

The title of this work, in fact, was The Physics of Business Growth, and as Harvey began to read the manuscript, he found that the focus of the book was on how businesses can grow, diverge and develop. “The major theme of the book is that a business shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket and then hope that all of their business goes there. Companies should, rather, try lots of small experiments and make them quick and cheap and put only the resources you need into it so that you could pull out quickly if it doesn’t work. This seemed to be a really compelling argument for doing exactly that with this book! I told the rest of the team, ‘Well, why don’t we start a series of them [brief books]? There’s no point in doing just one. Why don’t we see if there are other ideas out there?’”

Harvey also said that another matter had come up around the same time concerning their philosophy list, which was a list of critical theory or continental philosophy. “We were publishing Derrida and Agamben and all of the other European, continental, philosophers. What would typically happen is that we would learn of a project they had published, and we would go to their publisher and ask about publishing them. These were typically works in printed form between forty to

sixty pages, so we would put two, three, or four of them together and make a longer book. If you look at any of the books that we publish with Derrida and the early couple that we published with Agamben, they were a combination of two or three such short volumes. In Italy, in fact, they print them in pamphlet form and sell them in train stations.

“I don’t remember exactly what year is it was — probably 2009 or 2010 — but we had an essay from Agamben called What is an Apparatus? We had the essay, but nothing to pair it with. So, we made the decision to publish it on its own. I think with front and back matter it was about eighty printed pages and, though we weren’t sure what the market would be, it sold exactly the same number of copies as every other philosophy book we published.”

It’s interesting that, though Harvey says the Briefs were initially considered as a digital-first book — since that seemed like a good way to take advantage of the brief format — roughly 85% of their early sales were actually in print and that has been true for almost every book in the Briefs series published since then.

This is actually an important point for publishers who think that they must choose between print and digital formats with such a book series. Harvey said, “I kept saying to everybody that the two markets don’t mix. There’s a digital market and there’s a print market. If you don’t produce digital you just lose that portion of the market. If you don’t produce print, you lose that portion of the market. I mean there’s some bleed in the middle; but when you’re talking 85% — 15% even if that bleeds five percent in the middle it still doesn’t make any difference — you have to do both.”

Something else that Harvey has found working on the Briefs is that “it’s actually much harder to write a short book than a long book and the Briefs require much more work by our editors.” Being clear and concise in a format that does not allow the author to slowly build an argument and present all the supporting evidence can be quite challenging, and Briefs thus require a lot of development work. Given that Briefs are also cheaper than traditional monographs, “all of that editorial work doesn’t pay off in terms of revenue — it pays off in terms of sales, but those sales are all at a tiny margin, so we cap the number of Briefs anyone can do in a year.”

When I asked Harvey what sort of project is ideal for the series, he said, “For me it’s going to be a book project that has a point of view and that doesn’t need to spend fifty pages positioning itself within the literature. It’s there, it’s something that people will immediately grasp, you can give a two-page introduction and then you can just dive straight into what you want to say…It is actually telling you something and has an opinion rather than saying, ‘I’m going to survey what everyone else has done and then add some new research to that.’ There’s a particular scholarly trajectory that people want, and I think the Briefs should violate that.”

That violation of previous expectations is an important reason that the Briefs has been so successful in creating a new and compelling format for authors who want to write their work at the length that is natural to it.

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University of Minnesota Press: Forerunners

by Matthew ismail (Director of Collection Development, Central Michigan University) <ismai1md@cmich.edu>

Written by Matthew Ismail based on a WebEx conversation with Susan Doerr, the Associate Director of the University of Minnesota Press on June 25, 2019. Interviews were sometimes edited for clarity.

Susan Doerr, the Associate Director of the university of Minnesota Press, says that the Press didn’t exactly plan to start the Forerunners series of brief books so much as they began to observe an interesting space opening in the new publishing environment in around 2010. “We saw collectives of scholars coming together on their own to publish around a shared interest. We could see this a bit in our journal’s program when a group would want to start a journal on their topic, but they weren’t sure if they could find funding to keep paying their editor or their editorial assistants.

“You see this dynamic with a group like Reanimate Publishing, the Fembot Collective or the Daughters of the African Atlantic at Spellman College. There’s just so much excitement and interest with people wanting to find new pathways to work with traditional publishers, and we wanted to be there with them in a way that’s appropriate.”

The u niversity of Minnesota Press had begun digital publishing in around 2006 and, with their awareness of the emerging scholarly collectives, they began to think seriously about Forerunners in around 2013. The project took shape in 2014 and the first volume was published in the spring of 2015.

Doerr says that it is no surprise that many in the management team at the university of Minnesota Press were receptive to such new ideas. Many have worked at one time or another in marketing and sales, and she suggests that this changes the editorial dynamic. “We’re risk takers. When someone has a good idea, we tend to say, ‘Let’s give it a try and see if it works.’ We bring that attitude into our business.”

Doerr notes that what makes Forerunners different from other brief book series is that they “were trying to get scholarship that might not otherwise have a home at a university press. We were trying to find a way to give scholars a place to publish what is traditionally known as gray literature, such as series of blog posts on their website. There was a lot of this social publishing going on that was separate from editors and publishers and we wanted to capture some of that. Forerunners is that idea of giving a more formal home, some peer review, some editorial attention, to this sort of gray literature. We don’t intervene too heavily — we offer some suggestions, allow them to make revisions, copyedit and proofread them, so they are published with more professional attention. At the same time, we’re able to capture these ideas in progress that may not be quite ready for a traditional monograph.”

As with most digital publishing programs, one of the selling points for authors is that the Forerunners are published more quickly than traditional monographs. Doerr says that they had initially envisioned Forerunners as solely a digital line, and they thought they’d take advantage of the fact that they could publish and distribute a digital text more quickly than print. “The idea

originally was to be able to publish a Forerunner from manuscript acceptance to publication in sixteen weeks, and while it doesn’t happen that fast it is pretty fast — I would say we do it in fewer than five months.”

Oddly enough, Doerr says, even though the plan was to be an electronic series, most of their sales in the Forerunners are actually in print, something about which Alan Harvey at Stanford university Press had warned them. “Alan told us, ‘I know you’re thinking about this as an eBook series, but my experience is that you’ll sell eighty percent of them in print.’ And he was right! We’ve made them print-on-demand.”

Forerunners are mostly twenty to forty thousand words — when they cross that forty thousand words barrier, says Doerr, they become something else.

Forerunners are submitted to the press in a variety of ways. Sometimes authors pitch their text as a Forerunner and sometimes the editors receive a manuscript and pull one chapter out and suggest to the author that it would make a good Forerunner. “So much of what we do here at the university of Minnesota Press is in partnership with our authors. It’s a conversation. They have a lot of creative input in what they do, and publishing on Manifold, our online open access platform, allows them to publish Forerunners as OA books.”

“I would say ninety percent of them are open access on Manifold — and yet people still buy them mostly in print! One of the things about the Forerunners is that they aren’t about pure dollars and cents — they’re relationships with authors. Authors come to us with an idea and we feel that we can take more risks with a Forerunner then we might with a traditional monograph. If we’re not sure what the market is, or if we’re not sure how it would sell, we might do the Forerunner. The truth is, we would do the Forerunner anyway if we thought it was an interesting idea.”

While early on the press wasn’t sure how well Forerunners would sell, they’ve been quite a success. Minnesota sells thousands of Forerunners, and Doerr says this success may be related to the university of Minnesota Press’s excellent reputation. “One of the benefits that Minnesota has, like Stanford university Press, is our own brand. The weight of our brands brings the legitimacy to new ideas.”

During our discussion, I had emphasized (based on my own writing experience) the need for publishers to be responsive to the needs of authors in allowing them to publish a work at its natural length. While she agreed, Doerr also replied, “It’s not just authors, right? It’s readers and what they want, and what they see as value. For instance, a story collection can be made into a more traditional two hundred to three-hundred-page book, and then you can justify your price of $16.95 or $17.95. It made the story collection economically viable. Digital printing and print on demand have allowed us to print fewer books so that we could take more risks.

“Sometimes I hear publishers talk about authors and about publishing, but they don’t always talk about the reader. None continued on page 22

Springer Nature: SpringerBriefs

by Matthew ismail (Director of Collection Development, Central Michigan University) <ismai1md@cmich.edu>

Written by Matthew Ismail based on a WebEx conversation with Nicholas Philipson, Editorial Director, Business/Economics & Statistics, at Springer Nature on June 25, 2019. Interviews were sometimes edited for clarity.

The origin of the SpringerBriefs series of brief books lies, says Nicholas Philipson, Editorial Director, Business/ Economics & Statistics, at Springer Nature, in Springer’s entrepreneurial culture and in the desire of many at the company to be innovative at a time when publishing was undergoing some fundamental changes.

SpringerBriefs was launched in November of 2010, and Philipson remarked that “I don’t think it’s an accident that this is when open access was also really starting to take shape as a viable alternative publishing model that was putting pressure on publishers on the one hand and authors on the other — not necessarily bad pressure, it could be good pressure too.”

SpringerBriefs was launched not long after Springer purchased the pioneering OA publisher, biomed Central, in 2008, at a time when they wanted to introduce something new and innovative into the market that would both keep Springer fresh and relevant with their customers and also cater to the needs of authors. Springer asked how they could create a publishing platform that would be attractive to authors who needed a new way to present their ideas and were finding that the limitations of the journal article and the monograph were curtailing their ability to express their ideas at their natural length.

“It was a good time for us to take some risks and to see that we could afford to do some new things,” says Philipson. “Let’s shake things up! I think it’s very much a testament to the Springer leadership of the time — Dirk Hank and Peter Hendricks were very much driving this kind of innovation.” The announcement of SpringerBriefs came “about a year after there was a very big announcement at Springer that we are completely changing our philosophy from being a print-first and electronic-second publisher, to being and electronic-first and print-second one.”

“It became clearer and clearer to us,” says Philipson, “that there was a real opportunity to focus on a product line that was somewhere in between journals and books — a format where authors could experiment with ideas that didn’t quite fit into those very traditional formats — either the long format of the book or the very strict format required of journals. We recognized that no matter what subject area you were working with there was the potential that the material wouldn’t fit into those traditional formats — whether it was simply too long for an article because the author might have additional data, more exposition of the literature review, or more background to discuss, or that the author’s theoretical constructs didn’t allow them to adhere to the strict page requirements for the traditional journals. But also, we saw SpringerBriefs as a platform where authors could really experiment with ideas, especially if they were interdisciplinary and didn’t fit into traditional book series or journals. A work might be a piece of research in which the author also wanted to experiment with policy implications or more practical applications of their research that wouldn’t fit so strictly into the traditional academic presentation in a monograph or a journal article. So, I think that SpringerBriefs was born largely out of this entrepreneurial spirit that was being promoted at Springer.”

One of the very helpful aspects of being a large and well-established publishing company was that there was already a stable and productive infrastructure for producing and retailing books. “The reason that we’re able to do these SpringerBriefs successfully, in many ways, is simply because we have SpringerLink so we are not dependent on trade sales. We’re not even really dependent on a very significant number of print sales through any channel. They are first and foremost an electronic product that is a licensed through SpringerLink in our eBook packages.”

“We looked across the company at all the workflows that we had for books and journals and started to create some best practices for the SpringerBriefs based on what we already knew about publishing, so we weren’t re-inventing the wheel. We decided that we would essentially publish these as books — they didn’t follow the standard bibliographic requirements for a journal. What we could do then is publish them as books into series.”

The format, Springer decided, would be between fifty and a hundred and twenty five pages — approximately twenty thousand words to about seventy five or eighty thousand words — and they wanted to be sure that those at the longer end were shorter than any of the shorter monographs Springer published and that they were significantly longer than any of the journal articles. They decided that, for their purposes, the SpringerBriefs would go through the established books workflow, and they would be produced using all the production protocols for books, but with some customizations.

The Springer team also thought about things like the peer review process, and rather than using tools such as Editorial Manager or Manuscript Central, they processed the submissions manually, so that proposals or manuscripts would be sent out for peer review outside those systems. “So, part of the rationale [for SpringerBriefs] was that we have a new platform where authors can experiment — they can do something new. The works still need to have scientific rigor and they’re still peer reviewed and still hue to our very high standard at Springer. But it’s also experimental — we want also to be something new from the author’s point of view.”

SpringerBriefs has since become a very successful set of subject series on a wide variety of topics, ranging from Accounting to Well-Being and Quality of Life Research Springer says that SpringerBriefs are published more quickly than traditional monographs and that they can include:

• A report on state-of-the art analytical techniques

• A bridge between new research results published in journal articles and a contextual literature review

• A primer on a hot new topic in your field

• A case study or clinical example that you think deserves publication

• The core concepts of a topic, which would be beneficial to a student’s understanding.

Thus, SpringerBriefs do not replace the traditional monograph or journal article but constitute another publishing option for authors whose work might otherwise have difficulty finding a home.

…

A n A n n a l s o f I n t e r n a l M e d i c i n e s i t e l i c e n s e g i v e s r e a d e r s u n l i m i t e d a c c e s s t o t h e j o u r n a l ’s p r a c t i c e - c h a n g i n g r e s e a r c h , c r e d i b l e l e a d i n g - e d g e c l i n i c a l r e s e a r c h , s y s t e m a t i c r e v i e w s , a n d n e w s w o r t h y a r t i c l e s I n a d d i t i o n t o o r i g i n a l r e s e a r c h , s u b s c r i p t i o n s i n c l u d e I n t h e C l i n i c ®, a p a t i e n t m a n a g e m e n t s e c t i o n , a n d A C P J o u r n a l C l u b ®, a f e a t u r e t h a t r e v i e w s t h e e v i d e n c e o f c l i n i c a l s t u d i e s f r o m m o r e t h a n 1 2 0 l e a d i n g m e d i c a l j o u r n a l s

C o r e B e n e f i t s

• G r o u n d - b r e a k i n g r e s e a r c h p u b l i s h e d o n l i n e e v e r y w e e k

• F l e x i b l e a c c e s s a n d a u t h e n t i c a t i o n o p t i o n s ( I P, A t h e n s , a n d S h i b b o l e t h )

• Pe r p e t u a l a c c e s s f o r p a i d - f o r y e a r s

• C O U N T E R–c o m p l i a n t u s a g e s t a t i s t i c s

• F u l l y s e a r c h a b l e , f u l l - t e x t o n l i n e a c c e s s t o e v e r y i s s u e p u b l i s h e d s i n c e 1 9 9 3

• M o b i l e a n d r e m o t e a c c e s s

• A n n a l s B e y o n d t h e G u i d e l i n e s, a m u l t i m e d i a s e r i e s b a s e d o n B e t h I s r a e l D e a c o n e s s

M e d i c a l C e n t e r G r a n d Ro u n d s

• O n l i n e - o n l y s u p p l e m e n t s , A n n a l s G r a p h i c M e d i c i n e , a n d A n n a l s f o r H o sp i t a l i st s

• A n n a l s O n B e i n g a D o c t o r S e r i e s a n d S t o r y S l a m w i t h e s s a y s , p o e m s , a n d v i d e o t h a t i l l u m i n a t e t h e a r t a n d s c i e n c e o f m e d i c i n e

K e y F a c t s

A n n a l s o f I n t e r n a l M e d i c i n e ’s

2 0 1 8 I m p a c t Fa c t o r i s 1 9 . 3 1 8 ( C l a r i v a t e A n a l y t i c s ) . W i t h

5 7 , 0 5 7 t o t a l c i t e s i n 2 0 1 8 , A n n a l s i s t h e m o s t c i t e d g e n e r a l i n t e r n a l m e d i c i n e j o u r n a l

A n n a l s a c c e p t s l e s s t h a n 8 % o f o r i g i n a l r e s e a r c h , a n d p u b l i s h e s c l i n i c a l l y f o c u s e d o r i g i n a l

r e s e a r c h t h a t i s v a l i d a t e d b y A n n a l s’ e l i t e t e a m o f e d i t o r s , p e e r r e v i e w e r s , a n d s t a t i s t i c i a n s

Annals of Internal Medicine’s 2019 Impact Factor is 21.317 (Clarivate Analytics). Annals is the highest cited and ranked internal medicine journal in the category of Medicine, General and Internal. Annals Eigenfactor® score is 0.096 and its 2019 SCImago Journal Rank is 4.74. In 2019, 3 Annals articles ranked in the Altmetrics top 100.

A b s t r a c t e d a n d / o r i n d e x e d i n B I O S I S Pr e v i e w s , C A B D i r e c t , C h e m i c a l A b s t r a c t S e r v i c e s ,

( C A S S I ) , C I N A H L , C u r r e n t C o n t e n t s / L i f e S c i e n c e s , C u r r e n t C o n t e n t s / C l i n i c a l M e d i c i n e ,

E M B A S E , I n d e x M e d i c u s , M E D L I N E , Pu b M e d , S c i e n c e C i t a t i o n I n d e x , S c i e n c e C i t a t i o n

I n d e x E x p a n d e d , a n d S c o p u s .

Abstracted and/or indexed in BIOSIS Previews, CAB Direct, Chemical Abstract Services, (CASSI), CINAHL, Current Contents/ Life Sciences, Current Contents/Clinical Medicine, EMBASE, Index Medicus, MEDLINE, Pub Med, Science Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, and Scopus.

F o r a d d i t i o n a l i n f o r m a t i o n o r a q u o t e , c o n t a c t si t e l i c e n se @a c p o n l i n e . o r g o r y o u r su b sc r i p t i o n a g e n t .

A n n a l s. o r g

Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Pivots

by Matthew ismail (Director of Collection Development, Central Michigan University) <ismai1md@cmich.edu>

Written by Matthew Ismail based on written responses received on August 1, 2019 from: Hazel Newton, Director of Researcher and Conference Services, Springer Nature – formerly Head of Digital Publishing, Palgrave Macmillan; Christina M. Brian, Vice President Business, Economics, Politics, & Law (Books), Springer Nature; and Rosalind Pyne, Director, Open Access Books and Book Policies, Springer Nature Interviews were sometimes edited for clarity.

The origin of the Palgrave Pivot series lies in a decision in 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan’s editorial team to examine the publishing challenges faced by researchers in the humanities and social sciences. The editorial team was aware from experience that many academics were frustrated that the natural length of a work they wished to publish was too long for a journal article, but too short for a traditional monograph. This format restriction forced authors to expand the work to fit the length of a monograph, or to split their research over multiple journal articles. Either way, being forced to publish a bloated book or a series of separate articles could harm the impact of their research.

Not surprisingly, authors and readers were also quite frustrated by how long it takes to publish their research.

Of course, as Hazel Newton (then of Palgrave and now at Springer Nature) put it, the idea of an “academic novella” was not new. Several other presses had talked about this possibility for years. “But technological advances coupled with our determination to make this a scalable and sustainable program meant that we were able to launch Palgrave Pivot.”

The Pivot initiative was sponsored by Samantha burridge, then Managing Director for Palgrave Macmillan, and managed by Newton, herself, who was then Palgrave’s Digital Strategy Manager. Palgrave’s CEO at the time, Annette Thomas (now CEO of Guardian Media Group), was quick to support the Pivot series, says Newton, because “it aligned with our strategy to be a progressive publisher focused on meeting the needs of the HSS community, and we felt confident in it being a sound commercial proposition.”

Books at Palgrave had traditionally been 250+ pages due to print book economics — the cost of editing, marketing, printing, and distributing a short print book is not substantially less than it is to publish a longer one. Yet, one can charge substantially more for a longer print book and thus more than cover one’s costs. In the age of eBooks and high-quality print-on-demand printers, however, there was no need to be so rigidly restricted by page lengths. Print-on-demand technology also helped them to distribute copies around the world more efficiently, without the need for warehousing.

The book industry requires at least six months’ notice in order to sell into bookshops and many presses were taking much longer than that. Even six months felt like a long time for cutting-edge research to be published so Palgrave decided to publish the titles within 12 weeks on acceptance (after peer review). This was very much welcomed by authors, but it required Palgrave to adopt new workflows to ensure that quality did not suffer.

One of the challenges with launching Palgrave Pivot was the fact that they were neither books nor journal articles, so it was unclear how they would be received by committees such as the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. Palgrave spoke with relevant stakeholders, of course, but it still wasn’t certain if they would be accepted by academe. Palgrave proceeded with the series nonetheless and sought to bolster their credibility by working with well-respected researchers whose participation might help reassure less experienced or conservative authors.

Palgrave officially began commissioning the Pivot series in early 2012 and published the first titles in October of that year. “It wasn’t easy,” said Newton. “It required rethinking everything we were used to. At the time, like most publishers, we still treated print as the dominant format. But with Palgrave Pivot we considered the digital version as the primary format. This meant that we had to rethink hundreds of things we’d always done. For example, for a printed book, the Table of Contents traditionally started on a recto page, or right-hand page. And eBooks derived from printed books would often have pages with ‘deliberately left blank’ stamped on them to accommodate this. For a digital-first publication, there’s no such thing as a recto and verso. Whilst this is a very small example which seven years on seems laughable that this was ever the practice of publishers, the fact that the publishing industry was centuries old with very little changing for much of that time meant that there were hundreds of decisions we had to rethink.”

The oft-cited problem of the high fixed costs of publishing was not actually a problem with the Pivot series, says Christina brian, Palgrave’s Editorial Director for Politics and International Studies (now Vice President HSS Books at Springer Nature). “This doesn’t really cause an issue as Palgrave Pivots are well integrated into our standard production schedule. The only difference is that we produce them on a shorter schedule, similar to other short formats.”

brian says that Pivots were “wholeheartedly accepted by researchers across the HSS disciplines Palgrave Macmillan covers. Our editors used them as icebreakers at academic conferences as they were (and still are!) such an exciting format to talk about. As mentioned above, academics welcomed that we were one of the first publishers to consider research at its natural length and without the usual constraints. Depending on what a researcher is working on at any given point in time, s/he can submit a journal article, a Pivot, a full-length monograph or textbook or even go the extra mile and edit an edited volume, handbook or major reference work.”

One of the first Pivots published was called Fukushima: Impacts and Implications by David Elliott (October 2012). “The Palgrave Pivot initiative allowed us to publish the first academic book after this horrendous tragedy,” says brian, “and the author was awarded the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Titles. This would not have been possible without this versatile format, speedy production schedule and of course, our author’s willingness to test new ground with us!”

continued on page 22

Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Pivots from page 20

Initially, Palgrave only accepted Pivots by individual authors, such as “when an author was expanding on a strong working paper but didn’t have enough time or content to work on a fulllength monograph — and equally didn’t want to cut down their argument to journal article length. Unlike other publishers, our short format is still original, peer reviewed research rather than a review or summary of a topic.”

Yet, authors began to ask Palgrave about publishing short edited volumes based on events such as small workshops or conference panels. They revisited their publishing criteria and “realized that sometimes a short collection of well-aligned chapters is actually more useful to readers than a big edited volume with 12-15 chapters that may lack coherence. So, we continuously revise how we publish original research and like to experiment with new formats.”

Ros Pyne, now Director, Open Access Books and Book Policies at Springer Nature, says that Palgrave developed an OA model for the Pivots as part of their wider OA book program. Palgrave has published a variety of OA Pivots since they began in 2014, many sponsored by funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the EC’s Horizon 2020 program, as well as by many individual institutions. “We have also seen great usage for these publications: our most-accessed 2019 OA Pivot, The Values of Independent Hip Hop in the Post-Golden Era, has already had 120,000 downloads, while Disrupting Finance (also 2019) has been downloaded 85,000 times.”

brian also remarked that, with the success of the Pivot series, Palgrave “launched another new format of short, accessible books written by influential academics with direct policymaking experience. Palgrave Policy Essentials are designed to appeal to a wide audience, with clear summaries on policy implications and recommendations for action.”

university of Minnesota Press: Forerunners from page 16

of this would exist without the person reading your stuff! They should take primacy here, you know? What do they want? What will they bare? Forerunners is a great example — we didn’t know if readers would go for them. We knew scholars and authors wanted it. We wanted it and we were willing to take a risk — and it turns out that readers really like them.”

“We can serve readers and I can keep the cost contained in various ways — you don’t see any Forerunners heavily illustrated, for instance, and permissions can be a big factor in cost. With all of that it’s worth it to us. And who knows — maybe they will grow in readership, but I still think it’s only going to be some percentage.”

Forerunners has been a real success for Minnesota and the willingness to take such risks has been amply justified.

Matthew Engelke and Prickly Paradigm Press: The Return of the Pamphleteer

by Steven Weiland (Professor, Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University) <weiland@msu.edu>

Written by Steven Weiland based on a Zoom conversation with Matthew Engelke, Professor of Religious Studies at Columbia University on September 24, 2020. Interviews were sometimes edited for clarity.

Matthew Engelke is Professor of Religious Studies at Columbia university and editor at the Prickly Paradigm Press in Chicago. He is the author of God’s Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England (University of California Press, 2013) and How to Think Like An Anthropologist (Princeton University Press, 2019). In the late 1990s, Engelke stepped in as a young ethnographer to help guide the British Prickly Pear Press to an American presence but with a new name required by U.S. copyright requirements. He has been at an editor there since. The Press has published 54 books which are distributed by the university of Chicago Press. Engelke has maintained the tradition represented by the university of Chicago’s renowned anthropologist and independent

academic thinker Marshall Sahlins, who has been affiliated with the Prickly Pear and then the Prickly Paradigm Press for decades, now as Executive Publisher.

Like Sahlins, Engelke sees the pamphlet and the pamphleteer as historical examples, and now contemporary images, of a style in communications that can add something important to academic writing. The Press’ motto is “The Old-Time Pamphlet is Back.” For Engelke, the idea is to “get something out quickly as a passionate argument, to go beyond the kinds of things you can say in a conventional academic argument and the ways they can be said.” The 18th century pamphlet style is in the background of the press but, according to Engelke, so too is the media revolution of the 20th century, including that element of McLuhanism that focused on the increasingly fast pace of communications.

But, it is not only speed that matters for Prickly Paradigm. So does the impact of short books. Engelke guides authors toward reaching two kinds of audiences. The first can be discipline focused continued on page 24

Matthew Engelke and Prickly Paradigm Press ... from page 22

and entails, as Engelke puts it, “speaking to your people in ways that they are not generally addressed.” But, there is also the goal of “articulating a vision of your subject for an audience that is broader than your own intellectual community.” The Press’ goal is to “prompt specialists to write in ways that will reach broader audiences.” Achieving both goals in a small space is a demanding task and Engelke acknowledges, as do our other ATG interviewees, that it can be a lot harder to write a short book than one of conventional academic length. We hope, he says, for “more bang for the buck.” But, there can be scale even within limits. Thus, “we want people to make big claims if not quite in the same way that academic work generally does.” Engelke knows, of course, about the habits of academic authors. “They think they have a lot to say and that they need to say it.” But he has found that in many cases they don’t really need to.

Prickly Paradigm urges authors to “throw caution to the wind” and even to make a point with urgency and some drama — to aim for “railroading through a big argument.” Engelke recognizes, of course, that not all scholarly work can be presented in such a way. In an interview with Creative Commons, Sahlins urged authors to find opportunities to “just let go [and] get something off your chest without having a big scholarly apparatus.”

Paradigm is selling fewer books “out of the gate” than it used to and it is moving to print on demand. But Engelke is optimistic about the future of short books. “Everyone now is trying them.” But he worries about the “flip side” of this new publishing interest and, of course, the preference in today’s digital society for speed in all forms of communications. Engelke asks “Are we doing enough to maintain the long book (citing Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York [1974; 1,246 pages] and David blight’s Frederick Douglass [2019; 992 pages])? Publishers have to wonder whether more and more scholars will approach books like these and say in the argot of teenagers: “TL; DR.”

With the activities of major university presses, the prospects for publishing a short book are better than ever. According to Engelke even a small independent operation like Prickly Paradigm gets many submissions, though there are some from authors who don’t appear familiar with the unusual format. The press has also discouraged citation conventions like footnotes and a list of “Works Cited” at the end. Even though authors

understood the format some would, Engelke reports, “freak out” about the restrictions. But “the policy may now give way, as public claims are made for ‘alternative facts,’ to a limited number of citations, particularly in political books.”

Some Prickly Paradigm books appear in what is, in effect, an Open Access format (or free online). But, the Press doesn’t recognize OA as a formal category of its work. So, too has Prickly Paradigm, apart from a short time when it posted PDFs of citations for its books and declined to capitalize on the digital enhancements available to authors and publishers of short books. Contemplating the announcement that Cambridge university Press will feature annual online updates in its Elements series, Engelke speaks for the permanent text, one that “marks a moment in time.” And the prospect of Open Access for a small publisher reminds him that “nothing is free.” There are, he agrees, examples of building sales of print side-by-side with Open Access but for now, at least, the Prickly Paradigm will stick with tradition.

Like other publishers of short books Engelke recognizes their uncertain place in the academic reward system. “There are spoken and unspoken expectations.” One of the most powerful in the first category is peer review. Prickly Paradigm’s books are only occasionally peer reviewed. They reflect only the judgements of its editors. Engelke acknowledges that “they are not what the academic machine requires.” Peer review likely strengthens the value of short books for authors seeking promotion and tenure. They may be “risky” for others. But Prickly Paradigm has few authors who don’t already have substantial scholarly records. Most already hold tenure and are secure in their careers. “They will take the risk.” And there are those who “can’t find a suitable place for a long article and will consider making it into a short book.” They will then find what others see as distinctive about the format and about the Press’ aspirations for a different kind of audience. One Prickly author told Sahlins “I’m proud to be associated with a press like that.” But as far as the academic reward system is concerned, Engelke says “it is very hard to get things to change.”

Engelke recognizes the appeal of digital publications. And, though he is mindful of how much gets done with the smallest of staffs, he regrets that Prickly Paradigm doesn’t have a more active visible presence to make its books more visible. Then, again, he reasserts the Press’ commitment to the physical book, even “in a sense as a ‘fetish object.’” There is an element of “desire” in finding and reading them. He says, with a smile, “You just want to own it, to eat it, to put it in your pocket.”

John Hartigan: The Discipline of Brevity

by Steven Weiland (Professor, Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University) <weiland@msu.edu>

Written by Steven Weiland based on a Zoom conversation with John Hartigan, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Texas on September 18, 2020. Interviews were sometimes edited for clarity.

John Hartigan is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the university of Texas. He is the author of What Can You Say?: America’s National Conversation About Race (Stanford University Press, 2010), Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Diversity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and other books.

continued on page 26

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In 2015 the university of Minnesota Press published Hartigan’s Aesop’s Anthropology, one of the first three in the series named Forerunners, a vanguard effort in short books as explained earlier in this section of ATG by Susan Doerr. Hartigan was an experienced author of academic books but he welcomed the opportunity to do something different. The Press was seeking, in its words, to “give authors space to explore idea-driven works that often aren’t taken up by university presses…to combine the value of an academic publisher — peer review, editorial guidance, copyediting, and production — with the timeliness of agile publishing tools.” As an adventurous ethnographer who also worked in adjacent disciplines, Hartigan represented how, as the Press hoped to demonstrate, “intense thinking, change, and speculation happens in scholarship.”

In announcing Forerunners, Minnesota identified what might be thought of by a scholar as “too short for a book but [something] you don’t want to be languishing in your desk drawer.” Hartigan accepted an invitation to write Aesop’s Anthropology when he expressed to an editor that he was uncertain about the best way to get from a project he had just finished to another book but one which was still only partially formed in his thinking. “What happens,” he asks, “in cases where thoughts want to stay in motion?” He recognizes that “The answer generally has been to write another book, which, under the best circumstances, can take years.” Instead Hartigan proposes that scholarly authors, working in the short-format eBook and using social media, can “write a book continuously.” Aesop’s Anthropology is actually a series of brief essays responding to one basic question: “What can we learn about sociality from other species, once we suspend the belief that it is the unique possession and characteristic of humans?” The short book represents in a uniquely accessible way the problem that holds all of Hartigan’s work together.

How did Hartigan imagine an audience for a short book? When he was working on Aesop’s Anthropology, he realized that he liked the idea of getting a reader to “take him seriously for a couple of hours and then get up and talk to somebody.” He believes that a book that can be read in one sitting or so is much more likely to be the subject of conversation among readers and colleagues close to the act of reading itself. That gives such interchanges a kind of immediacy we don’t get in personal communications about books that are read over days or weeks or months. But Hartigan also had the classroom in mind. That’s why, while his book is short, it still has fifteen chapters and corresponds, like a textbook, to the weeks in a semester.

Hartigan says that the short book format helped him to think about his writing more flexibly. He welcomed the attention the Press was giving to building audiences. But, “There’s more to this than marketing. Seeing the essays as templates, I was able to write on new topics before Aesop’s was even released. Laying out a framework of speculative ideas allowed me to develop them sporadically, in turn, as new instances arose — in the media or everyday life — rather than having to hive to the scholastic argument format.” For a time, Hartigan used a blog that extended his thinking in Aesop’s Anthropology. And he

found the pace of the project appealing. “It was possible to avoid the maddening wait to get something into print. Glaciers melt faster than monographs move through the scholarly publishing system.” The Press reduced the time from peer review and a copyedited manuscript to publication from what was often a year or more to half as much.

Hartigan learned that the short book and social media could support his work together, revealing important connections, with articles and books “coalescing in ways he didn’t anticipate.” He welcomed what the pace of short book publishing meant for his thinking: “Who doesn’t like to be surprised by where their own writing leads?”

In effect, Hartigan’s experience with a short book influenced how he thought about the relations between his scholarly routines and innovation in publishing. “The best part is that though I keep accumulating more material than I know what to do with, my anxieties over what to do with it all are dissolving. I’m just watching what unfolds and trying to learn from it all, rather than worrying about how it will fit in the next book — or anticipating all that won’t make it between the next set of covers.”

Asked about the common view that short books are unimportant or even frivolous, with minimal value in the academic reward system, Hartigan said that such was what his department chair appears to have thought when Aesop’s Anthropology appeared. He received this one line note from him: “96 pages!?” Faced with professional skepticism about short books, younger scholars may be reluctant to experiment. Hartigan believes that institutions — from the President on down — need to be educated about new developments in publishing, including the timeliness of the short book. He hopes that with activity from many presses in short books standards will emerge that define the form without discouraging expressive variety. “The library can help by promoting the short book among campus readers of all kinds.”

The u niversity of Minnesota Press hopes for an audience of “general readers” for Forerunners

But Hartigan acknowledges that for the short book, as with all specialized work, “getting noticed” is never easy. The problem may be compounded with expectations for iterative publishing as with the plans of the Cambridge university Press to have authors of its short books (as in its Elements series) revise their work annually. Hartigan likes the idea of revising the story a book tells as the world changes but “How do you keep readers coming back? It may work for fan fiction but maybe not for scholarship.”

While a short book can satisfy an author’s wish for more speed in scholarly communications Hartigan believes that it demands just as much effort in writing as one of conventional length. He has published five university press monographs. The short book takes discipline: “I still struggle with the simple declarative sentence. It is hard to be concise. And as we write we are thinking through the process. Often you don’t understand what you know until you get to the end. The problem then is getting enough out and retaining the process of thought. I can say that I put as much composing time into Aesop’s Anthropology as I have in the 300 or so page book about to be published [Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain, also with the university of Minnesota Press].

John Hartigan: The Discipline of brevity from page 24

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Marina van Zuylen: Short Books Should Be Everywhere

by Steven Weiland (Professor, Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University) <weiland@msu.edu>

Written by Steven Weiland based on a written response from Marina van Zuylen, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College on September 25, 2020.

resources when space is limited. “You can’t be facile when you write short books. You have to be rigorous. Each example or quote has to hit your reader in the heart.”

Marina van Zuylen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York. She is the author of Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Life in Literature and Art (Cornell University Press, 2005) and The Plenitude of Distraction a short book published in 2018 by the Sequence Press (NY) a specialized press that deals with philosophy and the arts and is distributed by the MiT Press. She is now writing Good Enough, a short book about the unsung virtues of classical and modern mediocrity.

For van Zuylen, the academic book can be a sign of professional habit. “The long book certainly satisfies our puritanical work ethic. The pride of holding a huge tome is certainly not there when carrying a short book between your thumb and your index finger.” Length can be confused with achievement. van Zuylen speaks plainly about what many scholars appear to want: “Long books (at least for those who wrote them) can give a great sense of accomplishment. ‘I just finished a 500-page study on Jane Austen,’ one of my colleagues might say. Under the mask of modesty, you know that the person is thrilled by the heft!” van Zuylen herself had a different goal in mind for The Plenitude of Distraction. “What inspired me to cut down a very long manuscript and turn it into less than one hundred pages is that I really wanted my students and friends to take pleasure in something that wouldn’t seem daunting at all. Considering that the subject was ‘distraction,’ it would have seemed a cruel joke to keep it at 400 pages. So, I lopped off 300 pages off and never regretted it.”

Being more concise in her writing was not easy. van Zuylen believes what has been said about it being harder to write a short book than a long one. “I can’t even begin to tell you,” she says, “how much I revised, rewrote, cut, to produce a short book. Every line counts so much more if the book is under 100 pages.” Inevitably, perhaps, academic colleagues didn’t all appreciate the virtues of a short book: “Some of my friends were aghast that whole sections of the manuscript were tossed into the fire.” An analogy helps her to capture what she was after: “Aphorisms would also be very hard to write. Much harder. You can’t be heavy handed and certainly have no right to bore your reader when you write short books. If you are boring in an aphorism, then you better give up. I have written in defense of boredom, but I might have to revise my views when considering short books.”

van Zuylen’s advice to those contemplating a short book follows from her experience. “I think you have to be ready for very hard work when you embark on something short and scholarly. I’m writing a book on mediocrity and even when it seems to flow, I am brutally severe with every line. I know that I’ll end up cutting out a large number of pages. I want to write another short book because one gets spoiled when people actually read your words and respond. I also want to write about serious, scholarly, even philosophical topics, but in a conversational way. Being serious and conversational at the same time is a real challenge. But also, it keeps you on your toes; it protects you from the urge to posture.” She adds a note about the rigor that goes into using

Of course, knowledge matters most in scholarly writing. But van Zuylen urges attention to the distinctive demands she faced. Writing a short book is an exercise in discipline. “I’m really feeling this right now, paring down many pages about mediocrity for what hopefully will become another short book. When I wrote The Plenitude of Distraction, I wanted to impart unfocused focus. And with The Good Enough Life, there are similar paradoxes that have to be resolved in the concision itself. It’s very stimulating.”

There are models for the kind of concise composition van Zuylen admires. “Montaigne is one of my all-time favorites. Even if The Essays end up being a long book, each essay can stand on its own. Many have been published separately, as lovely short books that you can put in your pocket and read on the bus.” Her new project presents familiar difficulties. “You can just imagine the challenges that come with writing about mediocrity — the mixture of self-doubt and self-congratulation — gloating about accepting a good enough life while being merciless about ‘good enough’ writing.” And there is the nature of the academic year to consider. “It’s hard for me to write during the semester, so when I go back to the book after a gap of a few months, I like to reread and re-edit from the beginning, change things, look at the text with fresh eyes, restructure.” The short book format helps. “If this were meant to be a long book, I couldn’t do that. So, there is an incredibly therapeutic pleasure going over paragraphs, adding, integrating new ideas. It feels so full of potential.”

Still, van Zuylen is skeptical about what some publishers and authors see in the digital potential for short books with “enhancements,” as they are sometimes called, via linked audio and video. “I don’t think one needs to include technology in these little jewels. In fact, it’s so wonderful to just grab one (they are cheap) and immerse yourself into one of them on a park bench. A lot of the appeal is the pleasurable format. Honestly, the last thing these books need is an Internet presence. Once they make it onto Kindle, bless their hearts if they do, they would be indistinguishable from other books.” Her position is suitably pliable. Despite her print only practice in The Plenitude of Distraction, van Zuylen welcomes the access offered by digital publication.

van Zuylen recognizes the uncertain status of short books in the academic reward system. Alas, “It is no secret that many academics are rewarded not for the delight and learning their book inspires, but because they have engaged in years of arduous research, toiling away, accumulating lines on their CVs.” She recognizes what has allowed for her interest in short books. Thus, “I was lucky to publish my distraction book after I was a full professor. I can guarantee that it would not have cut it for tenure.” Her candor about the academic system is refreshing: “I can think of some atrocious tomes, weighing more than a boulder, that got someone promoted. And I’m sure many never read the whole thing.” Again, van Zuylen’s favorite model comes to mind: “It would be wonderful if a short book could be, as Montaigne might say, the moelle [marrow] of somebody’s vast knowledge, boiled down to its essence.”

Looking broadly at scholarly communications today from the perspective of an enthusiast for short books, Zuylen favors tradicontinued on page 29

Marina van Zuylen: Short books Should be Everywhere from page 28

tion and innovation at the same time. “I’m not sure,” van Zuylen says, “that everybody is ready to embrace digital over paper. Not to be cynical, but you can size up the length, the prestige, the aura of the press, just by looking at the published product.” But things are more complex with the ubiquity of digital formats. “Books pretty much look the same online.” But many people still value print. “I totally fetishize my books” van Zuylen confesses. Yet, she adds, “I am also a fan of audio books, and have read my share on the likes of Kindle. I’m still pretty old school insofar as reading novels and poetry ‘in the flesh.’” She offers this contrast: “It makes so much sense to have scholarship digitized, made available for all. If people really care about content, then they shouldn’t care about where they are reading it. But things are never that simple. It’s still important for me to read Oblomov, the novel that you kind of have to read in bed, in paperback. So, even though most scholars thank and bless JSTOR every day of their lives, they still want that book in print. Short or long.”

van Zuylen suggests a strategy, favored by some publishers but not enough: “One of the greatest pieces I’ve read in years, Zadie Smith’s Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction is the perfect article that should become a short book. Why not cull from different sources essays, manifestoes, and even short novels, and grace our checkout counters (not only bookstores, why not cafés, even supermarkets) with short books. Short books should be everywhere!”

Marina van Zuyden: An Author and Her Short books

All this reminds me that I want to get back to three beautiful short books — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry, and Günther Anders, Et si je suis désespéré que voulez-vous que j’y fasse (Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an?) All bought at the check-out counter of independent bookstores in France and the United States. Indeed, the reason I love short books so much — there are images of some of mine below — is because of French bookstores. When you’re at the cash register, you’re not tempted by chocolate bars or magazines. Your eyes rest on Schopenhauer aphorisms, a short essay on the death penalty, Neruda on solitude, or bataille on the psychological structure of fascism. I often take one of my short books with me — to keep me company, for inspiration, and just because there is something so satisfying about them. This reminds me that I have Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating in French translation. I bought it precisely because it was a short book. The French have a wonderful way of turning long essays into short books-so you have the satisfaction of finishing an essay that has all the beauty and design of a full-fledged volume. Best of all worlds!

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Photograph courtesy of Marina van Zuylen

Random Ramblings — The American Library Association, Not Just for Librarians

Column Editor: bob Holley (Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University, 13303 Borgman Avenue, Huntington Woods, MI 48070-1005; Phone: 248-547-0306) <aa3805@wayne.edu>

Think quickly. Who belongs to the American Library Association? If you answered librarians, you’re only partially correct. I know for sure because I’ve been an ALA member since 1973 and haven’t been a librarian since 2000. I was a library science professor until 2015 and then retired. I’ve frequently been annoyed when ALA hasn’t recognized this fact. My prime examples are official surveys on what I want from ALA or what my opinions are on library issues. One of the first survey questions is often about what type of library I work in without any choice in the list beyond the traditional answers of academic, public, school or special. I consider Against the Grain as a good place to express my concerns because the mix of library and non-library attendees at the Charleston Conference would indicate that many readers may be ALA members but not librarians, just like me. As far as I can tell from my research, ALA doesn’t provide statistics about how many members are non-librarians. I’ll identify categories where I believe non-librarians are ALA members, provide some evidence on their numbers and importance, and conclude with my thoughts on why this issue is important for ALA

Categories of Non-librarian

Members of ALA

The categories below appear in the order of how close they are, in my judgment, to the traditional profession of librarianship. Many ALA members who are not librarians may have been librarians earlier in their careers. Furthermore, the same person can belong to multiple categories. For example, I’m both a retired LIS professor and a member of my local public library board. With the strict definition of librarian as having an MLIS or its equivalent as defined by the ALA member categories cited below, many who work in libraries aren’t considered librarians. Under the looser definition of “a person who works in a library” according to the Cambridge English Dictionary , support staff,

library assistants, and other categorizations describing employees where the MLIS is not a requirement may also be called “librarians,” especially in common speech. (https://dictionary. cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/ librarian) The same distinction may apply to some higher-level positions such as business manager, human relations staff, donor relations, and other positions. In this column, I’ll make the distinction between these two groups where appropriate.

The first two non-librarian groups in ALA are those who wish to work in libraries and those who no longer work in libraries. Library science students and recent graduates most likely make up the majority of the first category that also includes formerly employed librarians who are out of work but wish to be rehired by a library. The second category consists of those who have worked in libraries but no longer do so and don’t plan to return. Retired members like me are the most obvious, but others may have moved on permanently to other fields but remain ALA members. Both students and retired members can join ALA for a reduced rate or for nothing if the retired member has been an “active,” paid ALA member for at least 25 uninterrupted years.” I like the term that the ALA membership page uses for those voluntarily or involuntarily unemployed — “in transit” with the following comment: “In a difficult economy this category can be helpful to those in career transition or those just beginning their careers.” (http:// www.ala.org/membership/ala-personal-membership)

The next group is the staff of professional organizations that support libraries but whose main function is not library service. The American Library Association employees would fit in this category except for those who work in its library. The staff of other independent national library associations with a specialized focus are also not traditional librarians including those employed by the Special Libraries Association, the Medical Library Association, and the Catholic Library Association. The same is true for the staff of many local, state,

and regional organizations. To these groups, I would add consortium staff whose function is to provide library services to their members that are fulfilled without having a library. Though slightly different, I would add the government civil servants employed at all levels with responsibilities for libraries. The most prominent example might be the institute of Museum and Library Services, but similar bodies can exist at other governmental levels. On the other hand, most state libraries have collections and provide traditional library services.

Another large group of non-librarians with a strong interest in libraries are members of various library advisory boards, elected or appointed trustees, and supporters of Friends of the Library organizations. I will also include volunteer library workers though they might more appropriately be placed in the section on library workers. The members in this category may have enough interest in libraries to become members of ALA.

The large number of companies and individuals who produce or sell materials, supplies, and services represent a significant group of potential ALA members, though I don’t have any idea of how many join. One way to identify these types of services would be to look at the index of exhibitors at the ALA Annual Conferences or Midwinter Meetings. A non-comprehensive list would include publishers of all types, suppliers of both books and serials, computer hardware and software providers, database vendors, dealers for furniture and library-related supplies, movers, and consultants. All these groups might join ALA for competitive reasons, to keep up with trends in the library world, or simply because they believe in libraries.

My own former situation comes next as a library educator. The ALA Committee on Accreditation lists about sixty schools that offer the master’s degree in library science. In addition, “for a career as a school librarian in a pre-kindergarten through 12th grade setting, a master’s degree with a specialty in school librarianship from an educational unit accredited by continued on page 31

Op Ed — Random Ramblings

from page 30

the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) (formerly NCATE) and recognized by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) is also appropriate.” (http://www.ala.org/educationcareers/ accreditedprograms/directory ) An additional thirty schools fall into this category according to the CAEP website. (http:// caepnet.org/provider-search?state=&program=ALA&tab=program#progresults ) These faculty may have varying interests in what ALA has to offer since the Association for Library and information Science Education “is the global voice of library and information science education”; (https://www.alise.org/) other special library associations may be more relevant; and some faculty focus on information science. Nonetheless, many library educators like me consider ALA to be their primary or secondary library association.

My final group includes two peripheral possibilities. Authors may join ALA to learn more about marketing to libraries or perhaps because they were impressed with the organization during a publisher sponsored visit to a conference. Even less likely are members of the general public because

those with an interest in libraries probably are included in one of the categories above by joining library friends groups or serving on governance bodies.

Evidence for Non-Librarian Members

What proof do I have that non-librarians belong to ALA? The most definitive evidence comes from the various ALA units that focus specifically on the various groups above. With the strict “librarian” definition of working in a position that requires an MLS, the first group is the Library Support Staff Interests Round Table formed in 1993 by a merger of the ALA Members Initiative Group and the Council of Library/Media Technicians. The membership portion of its charge is “to provide a forum within ALA for addressing a wide variety of issues relating to library support staff…” (https:// sites.google.com/site/alassrt/history) As of 2018, the latest year for membership statistics on the ALA website, this round table included 419 members. I wish to caution readers that membership statistics for this and other ALA units below most likely understate the members of each category that belong to ALA since general ALA members can participate in most subsidiary group activities without officially joining. I belong to a second group, the Retired Members Round Table. On the assumption

that it was founded in 2011, the first year when membership statistics are available, “the Retired Members Round Table (RMRT) shall exist to develop programs of particular interest to retired persons from all types of libraries and all forms of library services….”

(

http://www.ala.org/rt/rmrt/) I applaud the fact that the term “library services” clearly indicates a broader scope than only those who have worked in libraries. Membership in 2018 totaled 295.

One division and one round table have an explicitly non-librarian membership. The first is the division with the largest membership of the units on my list. United for Libraries. To quote the official description, “United for Libraries is a division of ALA with approximately 5,000 Friends of Library, Trustee, Foundation and individual and group members representing hundreds of thousands of library supporters. Begun in early 2009 with the merger of Friends of Libraries U.S.A. (FOLUSA) and the Association of Library Trustees and Advocates (ALTA), the new division brings together Trustees and Friends into a partnership that unites the voices of those who support libraries to create a powerful force for libraries in the 21st century.” (http://www.ala.org/united/about/organization) To give comparative statistics, the official membership in 2018 continued on page 32

Op Ed — Random Ramblings from page 31

was 4,052, an impressive 7% of the total ALA individual membership for that year. In addition, seven state libraries have “partnered with United for Libraries to provide all library staff, Trustees, Friends Groups, and Foundations with the benefits and resources of statewide group membership (SGM). Access includes benefits, resources, and training,” a benefit that greatly extends its reach. (http://www.ala.org/united/states) In fact, I’m eligible for these benefits as chair of my local library board.

The last group is the Exhibits Round Table (ERT), established in 1954, whose mission is “to be a resource for exhibitors — providing information and best practices related to ALA conferences [and] to act as a liaison between exhibitors and the Association.” (http://www.ala.org/rt/ert/) This round table had 408 members in 2018.

To summarize this section, 8.9% of ALA members are not librarians under the strict definition of having the MLS degree and 8.2% under the looser definition of working in a library. This figure assumes that few or no members belong to more than one group but also does not identify any members that belong to the category but are not members of the unit that deals with its interest. The second factor is most likely much more important than the first.

A second set of useful statistics would be the number of ALA members who joined with a special status at a reduced rate from that paid by “librarians as well as others employed in library and information services or related activities in positions that: (a) require a master’s degree; (b) require a state level certification; or (c) are managerial.” These pertinent membership types are Student, Non-Salaried/in transition (“librarians earning less than $30,000 per year or not currently employed”), Library Support Staff, Retired, Friend (“individual friends of libraries and members of special citizens caucuses interested in participating in association work”), Trustee (“those not employed in library and information services or related activities who, through their personal commitment and support, promote library and information services as members of governing boards, advisory groups, etc.”), and Associate (“those not employed in library and information services or related activities who, through their personal commitment and support, promote library and information services (e.g., friends and special citizen caucuses and/or individuals interested in participating in the work of the Associ -

ation)”). I tried to obtain statistics on the use of each membership option from ALA Headquarters but was unsuccessful because of the heavier workload caused by COVID rules and staff furloughs.

My final investigation of the importance of non-librarians in ALA was to examine the status of ALA Presidents during their term of office for the last twenty years. I searched their employment history in Wikipedia and LinkedIn and with a general Google search if the first two didn’t provide the needed information. I apologize if I’ve overlooked any history of library employment. As an aside, I would suggest a project to evaluate the Wikipedia biographies of ALA Presidents to enrich them with greater detail as needed. Eight were not officially librarians as President though all but two had been librarians during their earlier careers. The two who were never librarians are Maureen Sullivan (2012-2013), a consultant for twenty-nine years, and Loriene Roy (20072008), LIS professor. Two were retired librarians: Jim Neal (2017-2018) and Molly Raphael (2011-2012). The roles for the others were: Loida Garcia-Febo (2018-2019), consultant; barbara Stripling (2013-2014), LIS Professor; Camilla Alire (2009-2010), consultant and LIS professor; and John W. berry (2001-2002), head of a library consortium. Since I remember her well, I’ll add Patricia Schuman (1991-1992) who was a publisher. What this brief analysis shows is that someone who has never been a librarian can win the ALA presidency and that not being a librarian during the voting period doesn’t appear to have derailed their election bids.

implications

The principal implication of this discussion is that the American Library Association has a much bigger tent than just current librarians and has the potential to appeal to those who have never been and never will be librarians but who have an interest in libraries. Beyond the large group of retired librarians, their reasons for joining may be serving on library governing boards, helping libraries as volunteers, planning to become librarians, or hoping to make money by providing services or goods to libraries. Making up 8.2% of ALA membership, if membership in special subgroups is an accurate indication, isn’t a trivial figure, especially since my calculations based upon joining an ALA subunit probably greatly underestimate their numbers.

ALA is currently facing financial difficulties. Focusing more attention on non-librarians with a history of joining ALA is one potential way to increase membership. One good incentive

already in place is the reduced membership rates for the categories given above. Perhaps this rate could even be reduced further if the potential member joins one of the units for non-librarians. Another possibility is a lower rate for new members in the first few years as is the case with regular members.

The desire to increase membership may partially explain why many of these specialized groups, except for the Exhibitors Round Table, have been formed recently. This leads to a concern that the proposed reorganization of ALA may disband the division and round tables with a focus on non-librarians. The report on “Forward Together: Recommendations for a reimagined American Library Association governance model – Next Steps and Timeline,” submitted to Council during 2020 ALA virtual Council Meeting recommends the following for round tables: “1.1: Forward Together recommends an increase in the minimum number of dues-paying members to one percent of ALA’s membership unless identified as a strategic priority by the Board of Directors.” (page 5) None of the non-librarians round tables discussed above would have met the 1% membership criterion of 579 in 2018. To quote Aaron Dobbs’ email (9-1-2020) in response to a question from Nancy bolt, current Retired Members Round Table Chair-Elect: “My understanding of the Forward Together (FT) proposal is that smaller RTs should find relevant partners with whom to merge or get phased out in a few years. I think this is all the Small Roundtables (SRT) that I represent on Council — each has less than 1% of ALA membership.” With the narrowly focused interests of the small round tables in this column, I believe that they would find it hard to find relevant partners. I am also concerned that these groups will lose influence in ALA if Council is disbanded. Non-librarians have been able to win elections to this large body through their reputations in the field and targeted voting. With voting for fewer officers, members of these groups might have a lessened clout. Counter evidence would be my analysis above of their success in ALA presidential elections.

The next recommendation is for ALA to be ever mindful that not all its members are librarians. I began this column by stating that I’m annoyed when any ALA document, speech, or casual comment from central staff or ALA member leadership at any level assumes that everyone in the organization is a librarian. All surveys should have an “other” possibility when asking what type of library the respondent works in. As an aside, I would even encourage that ALA discussions on library research suggest ways to make sure that all researchers find ways to include non-librarians in their surveys if they might have valid viewpoints to share.

continued on page 34

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Booklover — Yeats. Al Writers. The Second Coming

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

For over the last ten plus years the Against the Grain editorial staff has graciously indulged a bucket list item of mine that entails reading one piece of work by every author who has ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature and sharing that experience with you through the Booklover column. The choice of author is random during the year, except when the newest laureate is announced and I feature a work by the newly awarded author. A recent article that appeared in the Review section of the Saturday/Sunday August 2223, 2020 edition of the Wall Street Journal got me curious. With the title “An AI Breaks the Writing Barrier,” I can only wonder will an AI author become part of the elite list that I am working my way through? It creates a huge space for thought and conversation. Stay tuned; maybe this is closer than we think.

In the meantime, William Butler Yeats, Ireland’s greatest poet, will be entertaining me with a short story: “The Crucifixion of the Outcast.”

William Butler Yeats was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” Born in Sandymount County, Dublin, Ireland in 1865 to a family with an artistic pedigree, Yeats found himself influenced by a brief period of time living in London at a young age; by a mother who peppered her homeschooling with Irish folktales; by a father in whose studio he rubbed shoulders with Dublin’s artists and writers; by the Catholic/ Protestant conflict of his home country; by an interest in mysticism, spiritualism, and the occult; and by an obsessive infatuation with an outspoken beauty named Maud Gonne. By the age of 20 his first poems were published in the Dublin University Review and he was on his way to being regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century.

“The Crucifixion of the Outcast” is featured in: Great Stories by Nobel Prize Winners edited by Leo Hamalian and Edmond L. Volpe. Before each story is a short paragraph with some biographical information on the featured Nobel Laureate. The paragraph before Yeats’ story ends with an intriguing sentence: “The following story, the product of his left hand, Oscar Wilde regarded as the best thing to come from the pen of young Yeats.” The “best thing” begins simply: “A man, with thin brown hair and a pale face, half ran, half walked, along the road that wound from the south to the town of Sligo.” The story continues with the man observing crucifixions outside of

the town as he continues to the Abbey to seek comfort from his travels. The story takes a dark turn, but the lyrically, humorous way that Yeats weaves this somewhat gruesome tale is truly a treasure to read.

Before I left my exploration of Yeats’ work, I googled “best poem of Yeats” and “The Second Coming” was listed as Yeats’ greatest work. Digging a bit deeper I found an article in The Irish Times about this 100-year-old poem. The author bestowed the accolade of “probably the most quoted poem of the past century” to this work. Check out his analysis: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/coming-to-stay-wb-yeats-s-most-famous-poem-turns-100-1.3751539. And maybe pondering your own interprtation after you embrace Yeats’ words.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Op Ed — Random Ramblings

from page 32

I, for example, believe that I could provide useful input for many collection development surveys from years of teaching and writing on this subject. On the negative side for researchers, results of ALA surveys are often given as solid evidence of what librarians think though this statement may not be completely accurate since some respondents may not be librarians.

ALA should also recognize the benefits that the non-librarian groups provide. Who can organize and give better programs on vendors than members of the Exhibit Round Table? United for Libraries can help librarians have better relationships with their

trustees and friends groups by giving the view from the other side. Perhaps the Retired Members Roundtable could provide valuable advice to those considering retirement.

Finally, ALA might sponsor or encourage research on the role of non-librarians in ALA, how to tempt them to join, what will inspire them to be active participants, and what special contributions they could make to the organization.

To conclude, I consider myself to be a librarian though I’ve spent half my career not being one. When I became a professor, I had to decide whether ALISE or ALA would be my principal professional organization since I didn’t feel that I had enough time, funding, or energy to do both. I quickly chose ALA because of my long history as a librarian and ALA’s focus on practical matters that undergirded my research. I have never regretted this decision.

Oregon Trails — Big Little Johnny Jenkins

Column Editor: Thomas W. Leonhardt (Retired, Eugene, OR 97404) <oskibear70@gmail.com>

After reading Michael Vinson’s Bluffing Texas Style twice and skimming it once, I am still baffled. Part of my confusion lies in the book’s structure; it begins at the end and then switches between times and places at the expense of a flowing, chronological narrative that might have better served the story of John Holmes Jenkins, III. As a biography, the book comes up wanting but as a mystery, it kept me turning the pages. To be fair, Vinson is a Santa Fe, New Mexico based rare books dealer and writing is an avocation, not a calling.

“John Holmes Jenkins III was an American historian, antiquarian bookseller, publisher, and poker player. Jenkins published his first book Recollections of Early Texas History the year he graduated from high school. He went on to become a well-known dealer in antiquarian books and documents, primarily of Texas history.” — Wikipedia

That Wikipedia paragraph is a study in understatement. There is so much more, or, to borrow from radio’s Paul Harvey, there is “the rest of the story” and it’s far more interesting, dramatic, ironic, puzzling, contradicting, sad, funny, and truly Texan in the best and true sense of the word — in other words, larger than life. And the rest of the story seems to contain both the truth and speculation and hearsay, sometimes mixed so thoroughly that the reader is left to decide which is which.

When I began reading Bluffing Texas Style: The Arsons, Forgeries, and High-Stakes Poker Capers or Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins, I expected the typical bookseller tale of the ones that got away, the steals (not literal), the associations, auctions, deals, victories, and disappointments such a reader finds in autobiographical accounts by book people such as A. Edward Newton, David Randall, Leona Rostenberg & Madeleine B. Stern, or Larry McMurtry. There are a few tales of large purchases and rich customers, but I wish that Vinson had told us more about “great works and archives of literature related to such well-known writers as Jane Austen, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain,” and about the 7,000 appraisals that Jenkins did for tax and insurance documentation. Vinson was able, through Jenkins’s papers and interviews with associates, family, and friends, to report on trivial details about Jenkins’s life; surely there must be some record of the purely bookman, if there really was one. I say this because it seems, on the evidence presented in this story, that Jenkins cared more for the deals than the books themselves. Vinson himself hints at this.

Jenkins never developed the skills and knowledge needed by rare booksellers, so he was uncomfortable buying rare Americana. Despite his own knowledge of Texama, by and large he did not spend his time looking for rare books to purchase from other dealers.” P. 112

Rumors

from page 12

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Jenkins acquired most, it seems, of his rare book stock through large deals involving collections that other dealers were selling. The two such collections mentioned: Edward Eberstadt and Sons, and William H. Lowdermilk, the former part of one of the largest rare book sales ever and the latter, a collection bought at auction with insider knowledge of the richness of the stock.

I still wish, despite reservations about Jenkins’s commitment to books rare and common, that there had been more about books and less about poker, but this story would not run its course if it hadn’t been for poker, high stakes poker involving months at a time when Jenkins left Texas to live in the complimentary hotel rooms in Nevada.

The reader learns that Jenkins collected and sold coins as a boy, that he liked to sing in the shower, and was fun at the parties and poker games that he hosted in a cabin given to him by his doting parents. But was that all? What about his wife who, early on, helped him run a coin shop in Austin? Where was she when he was in Nevada? Was he a good husband and father? Was he charitable, a good citizen of the state he loved, apart from his short dealings, forgeries, arsons, and thefts?

In March 2020, soon after the Vinson book appeared, The Texas Observer published a piece by Chris O’Connell, “The Legend of John Holmes Jenkins.” We learn of a young man with so much promise: publishing a scholarly book, Recollections of Early Texas (University of Texas Press) just before graduating from high school, beginning college (UT Austin) with a leg up on his fellow freshmen, and getting into law school (he didn’t finish) despite poor grades.

Calvin Trillin, following up on the mysterious death of Jenkins in 1989, wrote a piece for The New Yorker (October 30, 1989, 79-97) that adds to what Vinson and O’Connell have to say about Jenkins but the total words that they produced still leave me wanting more, wanting an answer that has not been answered for me: “What was he really like?”

Towards the end of one of my favorite westerns, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” Maxwell Scott (the newspaper reporter played by Carleton Young) says about the story he is about to print, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. John Holmes Jenkins, III, turned the notion around and would ask friends, “Do you want the story or the truth?”

Michael Vinson: Print the legend.

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continued on page 55

Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews

Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; Cell Phone: 734-717-9734) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman

Column Editor’s Note: This morning when I took my dog Runyon for a walk, there was a definite chill as the sun rose to warm up Michigan. It might have been the first thing in a while to indicate that Fall is approaching. The one thing that is not helping is our efforts to get ready for students at our colleges, universities and other schools this year. It will be strange... very strange.

As we wrap our brains around what higher education in the United States looks like in September 2020, you will see some definite trends. In libraries, our success is stemming from collaboration and technology. Luckily, in these reviewed works, that is a theme that you will find over and over again. But also critical is our ability to understand and learn from the past. To truly understand the roles of libraries, you need to embrace where we have been and the roles that we have taken to provide communities with equitable access to information. These ten works all tell part of our story or give you a sense of where we might go.

Thanks to my great reviewers for getting items for this column. I am thrilled to welcome my newest reviewers: Jennifer Monnin, Sara F. Hess, Jordan Pedersen, and Brandi Tambasco They are joined by my returning reviewers: Kathleen Baril, Julie Huskey, Amy Lewontin, Michelle Shea, Steven W. Sowards and Katherine Swart. If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain (and I can ever get back into my office), please write me at <cseeman@umich.edu> If you are a publisher and have a book you would like to see reviewed in a future column, please also write me directly.

Happy reading and be nutty! — CS

Beaty, Bart H. and Stephen Weiner (eds.). Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Independents & Underground Classics, Second Edition. Ipswich, Mass.: Grey House Publishing/Salem Press, 2019. Three volumes. 978-1-68217-913-0, 1063 pages. $395.00.

Reviewed by Steven W. Sowards (Associate University Librarian for Collections, Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing MI) <sowards@msu.edu>

To promote academic study of comic art and graphic novels, Salem Press has published a four-title multi-volume series, the Critical Survey of Graphic Novels. The first edition of these reference books appeared in 2012 and 2013: a second edition of the entire series is now complete with publication of this three-volume set, on Independents & Underground Classics The other sets in the series deal with Heroes & Superheroes (2nd ed., 2018); Manga (2nd ed., 2018); and History, Theme & Technique (2nd ed., 2019). eBook versions are available to purchasers of the hard copy.

As reference works, these books can support readers’ advisory, collection development, and orientation for research queries. The audience for this guide will be librarians and scholars who are looking at noteworthy publications, either for acquisition or

research. The audience for the graphic novels themselves will include adults and young adults, but not children, given the recurrence of sobering themes that include genocide, racism, drug abuse, sexual identity, and crime.

This guide covers graphic novels that typically are self-published or published by independent presses such as Dark Horse Comics, Drawn and Quarterly, or Fantagraphic Books. Some titles come from DC Comics (a branch of WarnerMedia) and from Marvel Comics (acquired in 2009 by the Walt Disney Company), an indication of how the “underground” has entered the mainstream.

The work includes some 217 entries covering individual works or related sets of titles, including such widely known publications as Maus, American Splendor, the Complete Fritz the Cat, Love and Rockets, Road to Perdition, and 300. The graphic novels described here are in English or in English translation for the American market. Many are widely owned by American libraries, both academic and public. While most titles are contemporary, including some published as recently as 2018, the early origins of the form are acknowledged through articles about European publications such as the Asterix series (first published in France in 1961), the Adventures of Tintin (Belgium, beginning in 1929), and Passionate Journey (Belgium, as Mon livre d’heures, 1919).

This second edition adds eleven new entries, for Anya’s Ghost, Boxers & Saints, Friends with Boys, Goliath, Home After Dark, Paying for It, Roughneck, Smile, Exit Stage Left (The Snagglepuss Chronicles), Summer Blonde, and Usagi Yojimbo. These additions do not seem to be reflected in the index or the appendices such as the list of titles by publisher. There is no change in the contributor list from the first edition: contributors are American, Canadian and British academics. Bart Beaty, one of the editors, is a major Canadian scholar of comic art. Stephen Weiner, the second editor, is the director of the Maynard (Mass.) Public Library, which hosts an annual ComicCon.

Each entry notes the author, artist and publisher for a work, and the date of first publication. Entries follow a format that indicates publication history (including translation history if relevant), a list of volumes in the case of series, plot summaries, characters, artistic style, themes, impact, notes about expression in other media such as movies, and suggestions for further reading including a bibliography of secondary works. “See also” references point to related titles in all parts of the series. Articles are three to five pages long, illustrated with photographs of authors or artists. There are virtually no images of the graphic artwork itself – a Google search can easily turn up sample pages and panels, of course.

Taken as a whole, no other work or set fills the niche occupied by the four-title Critical Survey of Graphic Novels set, or its separate parts like Independents & Underground Classics H. W. Wilson publishes Graphic Novels Core Collection (2016) covering more than two thousand comic art titles of all kinds, but that single volume has page space for only around a single paragraph about each work.

continued on page 40

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Reader’s Roundup from page 38

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.)

Botticelli, Peter, Martha R. Mahard, and Michèle V. Cloonan Libraries, Archives, and Museums Today: Insights from the Field. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 9781538125557, xxiv, 166 pages.

Reviewed by Julie Huskey (Head of Cataloging, Tennessee State University, Brown-Daniel Library) <jhuskey@tnstate.edu>

Libraries, Archives, and Museums Today is a partly student-created textbook that explores the relatively recent thought that new technologies will unify libraries, archives, and museums. Students and faculty in the Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) program at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College interviewed over fifty library, archives and museum (LAM) professionals (including a few who chose not to be named) at fourteen institutions. This work sometimes involved multiple interviews over a period of years, as part of the CHI emphasis on learning by doing. “This book tackles one of the most debated issues in the recent history of collecting institutions: convergence. To what extent are libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) converging in the digital age?” That convergence, the authors point out, is not always of institutions, but of models and systems. Providing access to digital collections promised to be the common denominator among the three subdisciplines.

Peter Botticelli (who authored or co-authored nine of the fourteen chapters) and Michèle Cloonan are currently on the

Guide to the ATG Reviewer Ratings

The ATG Reviewer Rating is being included for each book reviewed. Corey came up with this rating to reflect our collaborative collections and resource sharing means and thinks it will help to 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 within 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.)

faculty of the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. Martha Mahard, formerly of Simmons, is currently with the Boston Public Library.

The featured institutions range from a small, all-volunteer organization (The History Project) to a world-renowned museum (the Victoria and Albert Museum), primarily located in the northeastern United States. Their long-term goals varied as well: from a more unified web interface to the survival of the institution itself.

A few themes, most of which will be familiar to practitioners, emerged in this volume. They include: the silo-ing of early smallscale digitization projects, the dependence on grant funding, which makes planning difficult, and technology that is sometimes obsolescent before a project is finished. Nevertheless, the authors stress that with good leadership, most libraries can at least remain afloat and increase access to their collections

The authors conclude that most libraries and archives, given sufficient leadership and funding, and often with carefully selected partner organizations, can use new technologies to succeed. A few case studies, however, were included because the library or archives had eventually closed. Most case studies are of specialized units within a larger entity, which requires the reader to think about the relationships and the support, both financial and ideological, provided by the parent institution.

The narratives of the case studies vary in detail, and they sometimes suffer from the same frequent obsolescence of technology of the institutions themselves. Yet the volume delivers on its promise to explore the question of convergence; it does so primarily from the technical, managerial, and financial aspect. Whether LAMs will merge in general, as they serve broader groups of patrons, is not fully addressed, but the authors indicate that the situation will continue to evolve.

Libraries, Archives, and Museums Today is most useful for students and other newcomers to the field, as both a survey of developments in the past two decades and to supplement case study methodology. Case studies are familiar to most library and information science students; they are also frequently employed by practitioners in journal articles and conference presentations as well. More experienced librarians and archivists will benefit from the broader treatment of LAMs, and they may find it a useful springboard for further research. The list of questions asked in the interviews will be especially helpful to aspiring researchers.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this 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.)

Coleman, Mary Catherine. Collaborate (Shared Foundations series). Chicago: ALA Editions, 2020. 9780838919156, 144 pages. $54.99 (ALA Members: $49.49; AASL Members: $46.74).

Reviewed by Katherine Swart (Collection Development Librarian, Hekman Library, Calvin University) <kswart20@calvin.edu>

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) introduced new National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries in 2018. The standards continued on page 42

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Reader’s Roundup from page 40

comprise six Shared Foundations: Inquire, Include, Collaborate, Curate, Explore, and Engage. In addition to a main text, ALA Editions has published separate books on each foundation, giving an in-depth look at domains and competencies.

The book on the Shared Foundation Collaborate is authored by Mary Catherine Coleman , a Lower and Intermediate School Librarian at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago. With fourteen years’ experience, Coleman regularly presents at conferences on collaboration in school libraries. She even won AASL’s School Collaboration of the Year Award.

There are a lot of aligning elements in the AASL standards, and Coleman looks at competencies for school librarians, learners, and school libraries along with the domains of Think, Create, Share, and Grow. Organized into three parts, the book begins with “The School Librarian as the Architect of Collaboration.” Here Coleman suggests that school librarians model the change they wish to see in their schools. One way to encourage collaboration is to arrange for professional development opportunities, which give educators the chance to practice collaboration. Coleman gives a detailed journey map and example timeline to simplify the process. Another way to encourage collaboration is to become a “collaborative co-teacher with fellow educators.” Coleman shares different ways she has collaborated with educators in her school by expanding upon existing lessons and projects. Lastly, Coleman shares ways school librarians can collaborate with others to align the library’s mission with the mission of the school.

Part two covers “Student Learners as Mindful Collaborators.” Coleman begins by sharing creative K-12 lessons that will develop the collaboration mindset in learners. She arranges the lessons by the domains of Think, Create, Share, and Grow and then demonstrates how all of the domains work together in a lesson. Next, she shares lessons that promote learner voice and choice. These examples show the school librarian as co-learner, giving students a voice in how their learning products will be created and shared. Lastly, Coleman talks about assessment tools that define successful collaboration across different grade levels. Learning trajectories by grade level give collaborative mindset competencies and are accompanied by sample units.

Part three explores “The School Library as the Center of Collaboration.” In the same way museums are changing their outreach to guests, libraries are also becoming places of inclusivity and active collaboration. Coleman details the renovation of the Francis W. Parker School and how it became a more collaborative space. Then, she shares the story of a successful renovation at the Hubbard Woods School Library. Lastly, Coleman challenges school librarians to think not just about the library as a physical space, but also about the time spent in the library. She gives example lessons where collaboration and learner-driven inquiry are prioritized over deadlines.

Collaborate successfully blends theoretical discussion with practical strategies. While dry in some places, the book’s implementation examples are vivid and worth reading about. Each chapter in the book ends with questions for the reflective practitioner, encouraging the reader to take the next steps needed in order to implement the plans they have read about. This is just the sort of encouragement school librarians need in order to implement the AASL standards in their schools.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library – if I am a school librarian. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Hansson, Joacim Educating Librarians in the Contemporary University: An Essay on iSchools and Emancipatory Resilience in Library and Information Science. Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2019. 9781634000581, 208 pages. $22.00

Reviewed by Jordan Pedersen (Metadata Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries)

<jordan.pedersen@utoronto.ca>

As it always has been, librarianship is experiencing growing pains as the nature of the work and profession changes. Librarianship is often positioned as synonymous to, or part of, information industries, a trend that is reflected in the increasing number of iSchools that are replacing traditional Library and Information (LIS) departments. With these changes come an identity crisis, one that is exasperated by the complex relationships between librarianship and democracy, universities, capitalism, neoliberal politics and an emphasis on “innovation”. In other words, while it may be politically expedient to align ourselves with the trendy, new emphasis on big data and information-as-everything, it also places the profession in an increasingly vulnerable position.

Written by Joacim Hansson, professor of Library and Information Science at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, this book provides international comparisons of librarianship, specifically focusing on the differences between Swedish and American universities and libraries. Hansson brings thoughtful analysis of legislation and institutional mandates of each country, occasionally expanding outward to include other examples from the European Union, to emphasize ways in which capitalism and politics influence, and paradoxically undermine, the democratic goals of libraries. Hansson doesn’t mince words when they say “there are overall three main obstacles for library development today: economic cutbacks, political pressure, and ambiguity concerning the value and status of professional librarianship” (67).

The greatest value of this book is that Hansson does not stop at identifying the problems, but instead proposes clear options for creating a resilient librarianship education, and therefore a resilient profession. For example, readers will be introduced to the theories of recognition and agnostic pluralism, measurements (and the danger) of the speed of capitalism and intellectual output, along with priorities for developing an education program for strong, self-assured, librarianship. Hansson suggests that:

“the focus should be on: (1) critical analysis of the fundamental concepts of librarianship with the goal of creating an alternative to the present discourse, (2) connecting librarianship and the education of librarians to discussions about the role of the humanities in society and the higher education area, and (3) creating an emancipatory narrative about the ethos of librarianship that will be strong enough to maintain its long-term social relevance” (160).

As a recent iSchool graduate, I found this to be an enjoyable read that has prompted ruminations about the future of the profession for me, as well as provided insight into some of the more frustrating aspects of my Master of Information education.

continued on page 44

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Reader’s Roundup from page 42

This book will be valuable for anyone interested in engaging with librarianship as a profession, anyone who feels in need of some guidance to navigate the doomsday predictions of impending irrelevance and budget cuts, or to anyone concerned about the role of ethics in their daily practice. If you don’t enjoy sweeping historical analyses, you can probably skip the first chapter. And if you aren’t a fan of reading occasionally under-cited theory that reads as a conversational lecture, this book probably is not for you.

In conclusion, having spent quite some time with this book I’ve already started lending out my copy to friends, I would highly recommend it.

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.)

Johnson-Jones, Aisha M. The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 978-1-5381-0308-1, 120 pages. $70 (hardback)

Reviewed by Amy Lewontin (Collection Development Librarian, Snell Library, Northeastern University) <A.Lewontin@northeastern.edu>

Dr. Aisha M. Johnson-Jones’ timely, important and unusual historical study of the development of libraries for Black communities in the early twentieth century Jim Crow South is well worth making the effort to locate and read. The African American Struggle for Library Equality is a relatively short book heavily based on archival sources exploring the funding and philanthropic efforts of Julius Rosenwald, a wealthy businessman, born during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. Julius Rosenwald served as the President of Sears, Roebuck and Co and gave the majority of his fortune to philanthropic activities. He came to aid in early literacy efforts for African Americans, through philanthropy based around community outreach. Mr. Rosenwald initially funded the building of over 5,000 schools in the rural south in the early twentieth century. During the Depression years, he had an unusual approach to his philanthropy by encouraging local residents to make contributions of their own for schools and libraries. Rosenwald did not make efforts to end segregated schooling but worked to improve individual lives as he found it. Dr. Johnson-Jones refers to efforts such as Rosenwald’s as “social justice philanthropy.”

Dr. Johnson-Jones, a faculty member currently at North Carolina Central University, tells a tale that makes the library “user” central to her book. African Americans had long been denied an education and literacy rates in the south as a whole were very low. At the local and state level, the lack of books in schools became rapidly apparent to teachers, administrators and parents. Support from the Rosenwald Fund for schools and then for libraries and library collections developed as a natural outgrowth. As Dr. Johnson-Jones describes the efforts of teachers and librarians involved in developing book collections for children, young adults and college students, she uses

archival circulation and usage records to show that the rate of book reading between Black and white readers at the Rosenwald schools were comparable. In the south of the 1920s and 1930s, more than 70 percent of the population had no library service at all. Dr. Johnson-Jones creatively weaves her story and uses the archival records of the Rosenwald Fund Collection housed at Fisk University, to explain how truly underrepresented communities in more than 15 southern states began to see rising rates in literacy and the beginning of a library system, and library training programs for African Americans.

While this book does not offer itself as a history of education of the south in the early twentieth century, it does provide a very focused exploration of the roles that libraries played in Black communities in the early 20th Century. For a more complete understanding of the educational impoverishment of the period, the reader may want to supplement their reading of this book, with others, such as James D. Anderson’s study, “The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935.” This book should be in academic libraries concerned with issues of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion issues as well as racism.

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.)

Kroski, Ellyssa, ed The Makerspace Librarian’s Sourcebook. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2017. 9780838915042, 400 pages. $85.00 ($76.50 ALA Member)

Reviewed by Brandi Tambasco (Adult Services Librarian, Howell Carnegie District Library, Howell, MI) <tambasco@howelllibrary.org>

Library makerspaces are a thriving, popular movement within the profession at both the public and academic library space. With the focus on STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) or even STEAM (STEM including Art) programming and initiatives for all ages, makerspaces are excellent options to support libraries’ efforts to maintain relevancy in our technology-driven world. Open to use at varying levels by each library’s community of users, these spaces are typically equipped with tech such as 3D printers, Raspberry Pi, vinyl cutters, and the like. However, not all makerspaces need to be technology-focused, nor do they even have to be spaces.

While the general term “makerspace” is used to cover a multitude of high and low technology environments specifically geared towards making, creating, and innovating within a safe, educational place, the idea and implementations are not restricted to a single location or actual space. Maker programming, while often held within a designated space designed and outfitted with equipment just for this purpose, can be conducted outside of a dedicated place. Knitting classes, for example, can be held as part of a maker agenda, with simply the tools and supplies (needles, yarn, etc.) in any multipurpose room, without requiring a space solely dedicated to simply makerspace use. So even if one’s library does not have a makerspace, librarians interested in maker culture can find useful information in makerspace handbooks such as this one.

Editor Ellyssa Kroski has an extensive background in libraries and technology with over 15 years in the library field. Currently the Director of Information Technology at the New York continued on page 46

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Law Institute, she is an award-winning author and experienced editor with dozens of books to her name. In this guidebook, she has collected essays authored by knowledgeable maker librarians from academic and public libraries and makerspaces across the U.S. and Canada. Given this wide range of contributors, there’s something for everyone in this guidebook, from librarians wishing to start a makerspace at their library to those working in established makerspaces and anywhere in between.

For librarians in that first camp, for whom a makerspace at their library is currently a goal rather than a reality, the first chapter on starting a makerspace is a great resource covering necessary and useful topics like strategic planning, design, and funding sources. Even better are the equipment lists included in the chapter. It is easy to get lost in the plethora of new, shiny, innovative technologies, so having these lists as a guide can help focus not only the scope and purpose of a makerspace, but also the budget for kitting out the space.

Both new maker librarians and those with established makerspaces will find value in the discussions on transformative teaching and encouraging diversity in maker culture, each covered in its own chapter, as well as the practical information and project ideas for over 10 of the most essential and common maker technologies and tools found in makerspaces. The chapter on Raspberry Pi, for example, not only introduces the technology, but also provides several program and project ideas that can be implemented individually or as a progressive series to teach patrons the basics and advanced uses of this clever small single-board computer.

Makerspaces may seem like a fad to some in the profession, the latest and greatest idea that will run its course in time and leave libraries with thousands of dollars invested in a space no longer used or even thought about by our patrons. This is the fear for any new service or resource offered by libraries. The last two chapters in this handbook address the future and sustainability of these innovative spaces and ways librarians can maintain the positive momentum of including maker culture in our libraries’ engagement with our communities, important issues librarians must consider for their current or potential makerspaces.

As a librarian working at a public library (Howell (Michigan) Carnegie District Library) without a makerspace (or any space in which to set up a dedicated makerspace, even), this book still provided great ideas for programming and projects to offer our patrons as well as food for thought about potential maker opportunities beyond the traditional makerspace. If my library had a makerspace, I would want this book within easy reach for regular reference. As it is, I am happy to at least have access to it from another library.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this 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.)

Kroski, Ellyssa 60 Ready-To-Use Coding Projects

Chicago: American Library Association, 2020. 978-08389-1872-2, 432 pages. $68.99 (ALA Member: $62.09)

Reviewed by Michelle Shea (Education Librarian, Texas

A&M- Central Texas) <m.shea@tamuct.edu>

Coding in libraries has become the latest programming trend for public service departments. As a result, creative librarians everywhere are increasingly hosting sessions that utilize laptops, tablets, and other mobile devices. Some libraries acquire these gadgets through grant money or existing material collections, while others stick with low or no cost options. Either way, this book offers librarians great suggestions for a range of technology budgets and circumstances. With this book in hand, librarians are encouraged to think flexibly and adapt ideas to create programs for their communities.

In this compendium of projects, split into five parts, librarians share coding programs that have worked in their communities. Two-thirds of the book focuses on activities for kids and tweens, while the other sections handle young adult and adult computing sessions. Each chapter identifies a cost estimate for implementation, a list of necessary items, lesson instructions, learning objectives, and future project connections. For public, school, or academic libraries, the only requirements for success are open spaces, relevant technologies, and expertise or a willingness to learn.

Book editor Ellyssa Kroski has written extensively about technology and libraries. As an author, she has contributed to published works on escape rooms, cosplay, makerspaces, and other popular programs for youth. Ms. Kroski has also written many blog posts for respected educational websites and library journals. In those mediums, her primary focus is on digital tools that help with social media and e-resources in school, law, and business settings. As a presenter, she has spoken at conferences and continuing education workshops for over a decade. Currently, she serves as an IT Director at the New York Law Institute, where she provides electronic resources and reference help for its library members. Cumulatively, this knowledge base lends the book added credibility.

Most librarians who are interested in coding should find at least a few projects to suit their target audience. Specifically, this book balances between unplugged and plugged activities that bridge the gap for new learners. Students can create step-by-step recipes, give visual directions, make binary bracelets, and use storytelling structure to build on the fundamentals of computer-based programming. There is a clear progression from basic block-coding to line-scripted programs, although learners may fluctuate between the two modes depending on their experience and project focus. While languages such as HTML, Python, and JavaScript are given some attention for moderately challenging programs, most of the chapters are focused on visual coding aimed at beginners. Libraries may also explore robotics, video game design, music making, application creation, and circulating kits by using the recommended projects in this book.

As a minor criticism, there is some repetition concerning the tools used for library programs. For example, the “Code-aPillar” toy is mentioned in at least four different narratives for very young children, while the popular “Scratch”/ “Scratch Jr.” programs are highlighted a whopping twelve times. Even continued on page 47

so, each variation does help the reader develop an awareness of coding logic and activity modification, so that seemingly complex concepts are made much more approachable. A good library program builds on background knowledge, allows for hands-on involvement, and challenges participants to stretch their understanding. The computational thinking of coding centers on algorithms and sequencing, variables, conditional statements, and loops which can be linked to everyday activities for learners. Throughout the text, these important takeaways are indicated as bolded key words, which are repeated for emphasis. A useful index that cites chapter titles, coding platforms, programming languages, and participating libraries is also included. Readers with a specific goal can flip to relevant sections with little effort, making this book useful for quick reference when brainstorming project ideas.

Overall, this book is a fantastic purchase for librarians who are interested in technology-based programming. With that said, the focus on coding is somewhat narrow, which limits the intended audience. Public and school libraries would benefit from purchasing this item, while academic libraries might do best with an interlibrary-loan.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this 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.)

Long, Dallas. Collaborations for Student Success: How Librarians and Student Affairs Work Together to Enrich Learning

London: Rowan and Littlefield, 2019. 9781538119075, 191 pages. $85.00

Reviewed by Kathleen Baril (Director, Heterick Memorial Library, Ohio Northern University, Ada, Ohio)

<k-baril@onu.edu>

Although academic libraries have worked extensively with faculty to provide information literacy instruction to students, their collaborations with other campus offices and entities have been limited. As academic libraries move from a collection-centric to a service-centric model, they have updated spaces to add entities such as learning commons, group spaces and makerspaces. Many academic libraries have also branched out into new areas of support by adding data services and publishing. One area though where academic libraries have made less progress is in reaching out to new partners beyond the academic realm to residence life and student services. Dallas Long, in this new book examines whether or not collaborations between libraries and student affairs are happening and if they are feasible or possible.

The author of this book, Dallas Long, is well-versed in the areas of libraries and student affairs as he previously served as the residential life librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While at Illinois, he was embedded in the Division of Student Affairs and collaborated with student affairs professionals. Currently, Mr. Long is the Dean of Milner Library at Illinois State University after a stint as associate dean.

This book centers around a study that Long completed in which he conducted focus groups of librarians and student

affairs staff at five universities ranging in size from 5,830 to 17,052 students. He begins his analysis by looking at the core values of each profession to see what their commonalities might be. The library values reviewed by the author will be familiar to those in the profession but the examination of student affairs values is informative to the typical librarian. Long discovers that libraries and student affairs hold core common values in service, community development and social justice.

The most interesting observations and information in this book come from the interviews themselves and, for this reader, provided the most insights into how differently librarians and student affairs personnel work with students. The authors interviewed groups of librarians and then groups of student affairs staff at each institution and the observations and comments were extremely enlightening. Librarians tend to have short interactions with students through instruction and reference with longer relationships developing with library student workers. For librarians most of their interactions occurred in the library. Student affairs staff, on the other hand, did not feel bound by specific spaces and, although interactions sometimes were brief, felt very strongly about the teaching roles they inhabited through their work coaching students. None of the library or student affairs professionals in any of the focus groups collaborated much with each other or even seemed to know what the other group did. Since most of the professionals interviewed were at institutions that were midsized, it would be an interesting follow-up study to see if collaboration were greater at smaller institutions where individuals are more likely to know each due to the small size of their workplaces.

Collaborations for Student Success is very thorough and contains a lengthy literature review. The literature review chapter was hit or miss for this reviewer as research about libraries and student affairs is fairly sparse. A good deal of the research pertained to more general areas of research such as collaboration in higher education and student affairs professionals’ collaborations with other areas in higher education. Also, a lot of the literature (as is a problem in the professional literature) centers on specific projects conducted at the authors institutions. This chapter was less informative more because of the relative dearth of materials and not due to a lack of diligence on the author’s part.

Overall, this book is a nice addition to the library literature especially regarding a lesser-explored topic. This reviewer hopes to continue to see more collaborations between libraries and student affairs areas in the future.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this 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.)

Reed, Sally Gardner. The Good, the Great, and the Unfriendly: A Librarian’s Guide to Working with Friends Groups. ALA Editions: Neal-Schuman TechSource, 2017. 9780838914984, 168 pages.

$57.00 (ALA Members: $51.30)

Reviewed by Jennifer Monnin (Scholarly Engagement Librarian, Health Sciences Library, West Virginia University Libraries, Morgantown) <jennifer.monnin@mail.wvu.edu>

continued on page 50

Libraries and library friends groups go together like Ironman and Captain America: both parties ultimately want the same thing but often disagree on the best way to accomplish their goals. When everything is going well, the friends groups advocate on behalf of their library in their communities, raising much needed funds for library programs, services, and various other needs. However, these relationships can often be strained, whether a director inherits a poor working relationship with their friends or trouble arises later by other parties involved. Tensions rise, money gets hoarded instead of shared, the ability of these groups to function adequately is diminished, and the community is adversely affected as a result of the apparent civil war.

Sally Gardner Reed brings her experience as the Executive Director of United for Libraries and the former Executive Director of Friends of Libraries U.S.A. to bear in this book. Her decades of experience as a liaison between libraries and friends groups means that little if anything surprises her. She has experienced firsthand how well these groups can work together and how tragically the working relationships can fall apart. She has counseled library directors on how best to make use of their friends and foundations, and counseled directors on when it is time for a library to “divorce” its current friends and establish a more effective group in the future.

This book is especially useful for library directors who are looking to establish a friends group at their library. The “Howto” for building a library friends group is a clear, informative roadmap that will help all involved avoid common pitfalls along the way. The Appendices are useful tools to take and apply to your library. Reed supplies a sample Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the library and the friends. Appendix D: “Working Together: Roles and Responsibilities Guidelines” provides a helpful side by side comparison between the roles of the library director, the library board, and the library friends group on various issues. In chapter 6, Reed provides readers with numerous examples of successful friends’ group membership drives, fundraising and programming ideas, and advocacy strategies that are great ideas for already functioning friends groups to capitalize on.

Given the inclusion of unfriendly friends groups in the title of the book and Reed’s years of experience as a liaison between libraries and friends, I was surprised at how few practical strategies are presented for dealing with unfriendly groups. After reading an overview of some common issues between the two parties, I was left with the impression that if you do not currently have a MOU with your friends there is little to no hope for fixing problems after they arise. For example, the sample MOU states that the director will supply a “wish list” to the friends each year detailing anticipated financial needs for the library that the group can fulfill. This provides the friends guidance as to what the library actually needs as opposed to coming up with ideas when funds are available to donate. If no MOU is present and tensions are already high between the library and friends, I imagine a director suggesting the first yearly “wish list” to the friends may go over poorly. I understand that each situation is unique and it is hard to provide advice which can be applied broadly, but given the prevalence of tension between libraries and their friends, the inclusion of more advice would improve the book and potentially, outcomes for libraries.

Despite some misgivings, this work is still recommended to library directors and development officers who rely on friends groups for financial support. They will certainly find value in the practical tools and wise advice available within.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this 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.)

Rainy Day Ready: Financial Literacy Programs and Tools. Edited by Melanie Welch and Patrick Hogan Chicago: ALA Editions, 2020. 9780838946312, 159 pages. $59.99 ($53.99 ALA Member)

Reviewed by Sara F. Hess (Business and Entrepreneurship Librarian, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, University Park) <sfh5542@psu.edu>

Public interest in topics related to financial literacy such as income, spending, debt, and credit has led libraries of all types to work to increase and strengthen this programming in recent years. In 2014, the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of the American Library Association (ALA) adopted Financial Literacy Education in Libraries: Guidelines and Best Practices for Service, a set of guidelines that is the product of a SPARKS! grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)

Rainy Day Ready: Financial Literacy Programs and Tools presents descriptions of the development and execution of 16 financial literacy programs across 13 public, tribal, and academic libraries. The program descriptions are preceded by three chapters discussing financial literacy in libraries; gaps and biases of popular personal finance literature; and partnerships with local businesses and community resources. The final part of the book presents a brief overview of the development of the Financial Literacy Education in Libraries document followed by the text of the guidelines.

The book was edited by Melanie Welch, a project director in the ALA Public Programs Office, and Patrick Hogan, an editor with ALA’s publishing imprint. The authors of the individual chapters in the first two parts of the book are librarians who are engaged in financial literacy programming at their libraries. The guidelines and best practices presented in the final part of the book were authored by a working team consisting of three members of RUSA’s Business Reference and Services Section (BRASS) as well as an independent consultant serving as the project director. They worked closely with an advisory group consisting of librarians and personnel from nonprofit and government organizations, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The 13 authors of the programs section of the book represent libraries serving a range of communities. 10 of the authors hail from public libraries, including one tribal library; two work at four-year academic institutions; and one works at a community college. While this range is excellent for a book covering programming useful to and utilized by patrons of all ages, I found myself wondering if the diversity of patron needs related to financial literacy were represented adequately in the programs discussed.

continued on page 51

Ash Faulkner, Ohio State University’s chapter in the first part of the book establishes that popular personal finance literature is biased toward those with an existing degree of financial privilege, which includes a steady income and access to a bank account. Although there are notable exceptions, many of the programs were held at libraries serving middle class populations. Those exceptions include Anne Heidemann’s chapter on Money Smart Week at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Library in Mount Pleasant, Michigan; Andrea Fisher’s chapter on programming for recent immigrants at Lakewood Public Library in Lakewood, Ohio; and Priscilla Dickerson’s chapter on Money Smart Week at the Atlanta Technical College Library in Atlanta, Georgia. The book may have benefited from additional chapters on programs developed for specific populations as well as programs run at libraries serving more heterogenous communities.

Program descriptions range from an in-depth discussion of the development, planning, and execution of a single program or series of programs to a more general description of the library’s programming for Money Smart Week, a national program run jointly by ALA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Chapters focused on a single program or series were the most compelling in this book and include Katie Moellering’s chapter on a Harry Potter-themed series of financial literacy programming for young adults at the Emmet O’Neal Library in Moun-

tain Brook, Alabama. Moellering shared how the series arose from the ideas and work of the library’s teen advisory board. While the chapters with a more general focus on a library’s Money Smart Week programming are certainly informative, the specificity of the narrowly focused chapters better prompted me to think about how I might develop or implement programming for the communities I serve.

Finally, the inclusion of the Financial Literacy Education in Libraries shows how the described programs bring the guidelines and best practices to life. The best practice of taking particular care to protect the privacy of patrons seeking reference assistance and attending programs related to financial literacy, however, is not addressed in the rest of the book. The book would have benefited from an illustration of how to ensure privacy and anonymity in practice, particularly in a program setting.

Overall, this book is tremendously valuable as an introductory text for library staff beginning to learn about the role libraries can play in the development of financial literacy in the communities they serve. The program descriptions — coupled with the introductory chapters and the guidelines and best practices — provide an excellent road map for those beginning to plan their own financial literacy programming.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this 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.)

ATG Interviews Khal Rudin

Managing Director, Adam Matthew Digital

by Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net>

ATG: Khal, when Adam Matthew Digital (AM Digital) became part of the SAGE Group a few years ago, you told us that growing new markets and expanding your product portfolio were the key considerations for you in making the deal. Have your expectations been met? In what ways? Has anything not worked out the way you thought it would?

KR: My expectations have definitely been met. We have grown our customer base by circa 150%, sell into more countries around the world and work with far more consortia. When we became part of SAGE in 2012 we had 46 individual products and we now have a growing portfolio currently at 128 titles. We have created a new product range, Research Source for extensive faculty and postgrad research, and a subscription product AM Explorer , that provides access for the smaller or less well funded institutions. We have increased our staff numbers from 30 people to over 100, with staff based all over the world from Sydney to Beijing to Austin. The only area that didn’t fit our plans as expected was the ability to easily fill an existing reps bag with AM Digital products — we realized that specialist sales people were required to sell our products.

ATG: By all appearances, AM Digital operates independently from SAGE. Is that a fair assessment? Can you describe the relationship between AM Digital and SAGE? How has it evolved over the years? Why do you think it works?

KR: Adam Matthew Digital and SAGE have always shared a common set of values and approaches to publishing which is why both parties were so eager to secure a deal and why it has been a very positive and productive experience. The Directors and Senior Management team at AM Digital run the company as an independent subsidiary with some of the SAGE executive committee sitting on the AM Digital board. I think both companies have learnt from each other and I really enjoy being on SAGE’s Global Vice President Group where I get a 360 view of the entire SAGE organization and can engage with colleagues from around the world.

ATG: The formation of partnerships with libraries, archives, and heritage institutions seems to be an essential element in AM Digital’s approach. Can you tell us more about those partnerships and they how they work? What part do they play in your business strategy?

KR: We are proud to work with many of the world’s leading libraries, archives and research institutions, many of whom we work with long-term, across multiple projects. Partners such as the Newberry Library, Chicago; the British Library; the The National Archives, UK or the New York Public Library have worked with us over decades and we work closely and sensitively with such partners to develop a strategic partnership that works symbiotically with their own digitization strategy. Other partners may offer only a small selection of material within a single broader thematic product. For smaller institutions this offers an opportunity to have material digitized for free and a welcome financial boost that is often deployed towards other open access initiatives.

Our strong relationships with our archival partners are maintained long after the digitization process has completed; and whether the archive is contributing a small amount to a multi-archive resource, or is the sole partner providing hundreds of thousands of pages, our commitment to working with those archives, listening to their concerns and ensuring that the best possible result is achieved remains the same.

ATG: Speaking of partnerships and business strategies, we would be remiss if we didn’t ask you how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted AM Digital. What adjustments have you had to make? Have you added new primary source collections this year?

KR: Our industry has been impacted on many levels. We are a global company and our inability to travel to meet with partners, colleagues and customers has been challenging. Many archives that we should now be working with and onsite assessing their material or digitizing their content are still closed. Universities around the world are facing budget cuts on a scale we have not seen before. Despite all of these challenges, we are an agile business and I’m immensely proud of how our staff have adapted to working from home and yet still engaged on a global scale with webinars, virtual conferences, video conferencing etc. Importantly we will publish over 90% of our frontlist this year. 2021/22 will see a reduced frontlist as these products are huge undertakings that take years to publish. The global pandemic will have an impact on our finely tuned production process but important content that we know the community wants will still be delivered and we aim to be back to maximum output by 2023. We can also see how our products are needed more than ever in a world of remote and blended learning and we are investing now for the future increased demand.

ATG: AM Digital has developed Quartex, a platform designed to help libraries, archives, and other heritage institutions create their own digital collections. Can you tell us how about it? Do all of your customers have access to the platform? What benefits does it provide to its users?

KR: AM Digital has always invested heavily in new technology and we are doing so again as we develop the new software we use to build, publish and host our next generation of products. This software is licensed, as Quartex, to libraries and archives around the world, continued on page 53

Interview — Khal Rudin

from page 52

enabling them to benefit from our expertise and giving them access to the same functionality we offer in AM Digital products, so they can easily and affordably create their own online collections and exhibitions. All AM Digital customers will benefit from the new platform’s performance and enhanced features as we build new and migrate existing products onto it. Libraries and archives will have to pay an annual fee if they want the opportunity to build their own digital collections using Quartex, and benefit from exciting features we’ve developed to improve search and accessibility, such as Handwritten Text Recognition and in-platform generation of A/V transcriptions and closed captioning.

ATG: What about future primary source collections? Are there particular research themes, historic time periods or geographic regions that warrant the development of additional primary source collections? What can we expect from AM Digital in the next 3-5 years?

KR: We have many exciting projects in the pipeline, and given the complexity of large-scale digitization projects and the time they take to bring to fruition, our editorial development team are always working anywhere from three to seven years into the future. Our product development strategy tries to balance a provision of our long-term programmes — such as Archives Direct, which makes available UK foreign policy documents — with keeping abreast of emerging subject areas. Areas of study that are getting us excited at the moment include Animal Studies, Sports History, Environmental History and Latinx Studies. In a broader sense, a key focus for future product development is trying to find ways to highlight under-represented and hidden voices in the archives. Quite rightly, the community we serve is clamouring for this kind of content; showcasing it and doing it justice is the next exciting challenge for us.

ATG: Khal, our readers are also interested in the personal side of things, so we have to ask, what you like to do in your down time? Last time we spoke you said you liked to attend music festivals and that you were an avid supporter of the Arsenal football club. Is that still the case? Have any new interests cropped up?

KR: My latest hobby that was fueled by the lockdown is cycling on my electric mountain bike. We live in the beautiful Cotswolds (West of England) and there are so many hills, woodlands, bridleways and paths to explore. The electric assistance doesn’t stop you working out, it just means you can go further and more quickly and explore woods that with pure peddle power would be off limits! I’ve really appreciated for the first time in years how lucky we are to live here and now get out as often as I can to explore. My wife has also bought one so we often go out together. I’ve also discovered Reformer Pilates which uses spring based machinery to work your core and specific muscle groups. This is fantastic as I get older and still try and play soccer once a week! For my sins I’m still a season ticket holder at Arsenal. If anyone wants to understand my addiction and a time that I got into it (in the early 1980s) then please read Nick Hornby’s seminal novel Fever Pitch

IMF Research At No Charge!

•

The Scholarly Publishing Scene — Footprints and Karen Hunter

Column Editor: Myer Kutz (President, Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) <myerkutz@aol.com>

How many of us expect to leave behind an immediately recognizable footprint years after we no longer work in a profession? Who will remember most of us? Beyond, I mean, colleagues with whom we’ve worked, or even someone who remembers an anecdote that can elicit nods of appreciation or laughter at a dinner party (at a table, socially distant, or on Zoom).

You can make the footprint case for some groups quite easily. Professors, obviously, are remembered by the graduate students and post-docs they’ve trained, even by undergraduates, and, for much longer, for archived journal articles and books they’ve put their names to.

Questions about leaving behind can come down to “where” and (mainly) “how.” Painters, sculptors, photographers, etc. have museums. Movie stars, musicians, writers, now leave behind digital archives in one form or another. Statistics accumulated by professional athletes are recorded for posterity; there’s a ton of film celebrating their careers and the games they played in. Some political and national leaders will be remembered forever. Books and articles will be written about some of these people, but as the millennia roll by, the biographies of only a very few exceptionable people, particularly those who created something lasting or made enormously consequential decisions, or of evil people who murdered millions, will be of interest.

People with jobs in publishing can do wonderful work and be recognized for it during their tenure, but, I dare say, most of them will be forgotten eventually, although I do notice that at the bottom of the copyright page in one of my handbooks published by Elsevier, there are the names of the publisher, acquisitions editor, editorial project manager, production project manager, and designer. And this isn’t to say that there aren’t those who seek enduring credit. When I joined Wiley in the mid1970s, there was friend-

ly competition among the top brass about who had signed up Haliday and Resnick, the blockbuster physics textbook, which is still going strong.

As long as pension deposits are made on time, there are some who don’t care about having left any footprints. A friend who acquitted himself quite well during his publishing tenure has zero interest in news and gossip about the industry or even the company where he worked.

Others stay involved. After his retirement from Wiley, Dick Rudick, the company’s general counsel, remained active on the intellectual property front, notably as vice chairman of the Copyright Clearance Center

Having your name on the company helps in keeping your name alive, of course. After I left Wiley, I used to get calls every so often from industry watchdogs as to whether I thought the Wileys would be willing to sell their company. (There were two classes of shares, and voting shares were in the family’s hands, so selling would be up to them.) I knew people who would answer the question in the affirmative. My answer was always the opposite. “If they were to sell,” I’d say, “they’d just be these rich people. But if they keep the company, then they’re still ‘the Wileys.’”

One of the most chilling things anyone ever said to me was at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. I was eating lunch at the counter with a headhunter friend. We’d have lunch from time to time, whenever my friend wanted to keep in touch with a potential client or for no other reason than we seemed to enjoy each other’s company. This time, however, we were talking about my difficulties in “managing up,” something I wasn’t always good at, how no one was protecting me, and how likely it was that I was about to get fired. After I did get fired, even though the division I ran was doing well on a financial basis, I put together a narrative that, I suppose, was intended to comfort me. Part of the story involves the

possibility of leaving footprints and how your superiors can sometimes react.

I’d been featured in a story in Publishers Weekly about new initiatives at Wiley and had been elected to the OCLC Board of Trustees as the first publishing industry representative. I surmised that my boss hadn’t been entirely happy about any of that recognition. And when I’d asked my boss’s boss, Wiley’s president, who was basically an industry outsider, to give a talk to a group of senior publishers, she said she would consider the invitation if I wrote her speech. My dislike of this woman surfaced and I demurred, probably with a look that said, “write your own damn speech.” I can’t remember for certain why my headhunter friend said what he did — perhaps he was giving me fair warning and wanted me to be realistic about my prospects — but here it is: “the day after you’re gone, it will be like you were never there.” (Actually, I’ve been a Wiley author for over 50 years, so my name hasn’t been rubbed out.)

No one should have to consider such a thing. Instead, try thinking of yourself, for example, in terms of what Karen Hunter accomplished during her three plus decades at Elsevier. I talked recently about Karen with John Tagler, whom I got to know when he was in charge of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division at the Association of American Publishers. Before that stint, John worked with Karen during a good part of his time at Elsevier from 1977 to 2008.

I contacted John in mid June of this year, but it took until late August before he and I were able to talk. In the spring, he was hit with the Coronavirus so hard that he spent four weeks on a ventilator, which badly damaged his throat, more weeks in NYU Hospital, and more time after that in rehab. But he was home and getting around his apartment when he emailed me the number of his cell phone I reached him on it.

He told me that he and Karen began to work together in the late 1990s. That was when journals were going online. In 1994-1996 journal tapes had been loaded locally on library systems. By 1997 the Internet and web browsers enabled remote continued on page 55

The Scholarly Publishing Scene from page 54

access for libraries. Two years later, Elsevier decided to create complete archives for its journals. The project didn’t go smoothly. It took three years to round up all the paper copies, and early scans didn’t work perfectly. But, as we all know, the project was completed successfully.

Early in Karen’s Elsevier career, in the 1970s, John said, she was basically a right hand for James Kels, Elsevier’s chairman. In 1977-78, she was involved in acquiring major medical journals in OBGYN, gastroenterology, and cardiology. These were big society journals and involved different kinds of operations compared to what had been needed for the much smaller journals that Elsevier had been publishing in the U.S.

What made Karen Hunter famous was how she approached her work on Science Direct and other digital initiatives, and how others appreciated that work. “Karen was amazing in her knowledge,” John said. She knew about both technical and intellectual property issues. I witnessed

her expertise firsthand. Others have remarked on this, of course. “Knowing her stuff inside-out [including about library services — she was trained in library science at Syracuse], was one of the things that attracted librarians to her,” John said. “She was the only one librarians really liked.”

I knew Karen and worked with her a bit. She was sociable and likeable, open and giving. She was fun and she was wicked smart. She loved jazz. (Me too.) I can still see that big smile when something delighted her. Karen retired in December 2010, as Elsevier’s Senior Vice President of Global Academic & Customer Relations, and died a couple of years ago.

Karen had a tremendous positive influence on Elsevier and on the scholarly publishing industry. There are footprints: the list of publishing industry initiatives and projects Karen had a strong hand in is long; Elsevier Library Connect sponsors the Hunter Forum at ALA Midwinter Meetings. There’s stuff about her, and in her own voice, on the Internet. It’s inspirational.

Rumors from page 36

laptop, with optional use of mobile phones or Oculus devices to go further with the augmented reality. Find out more at http:// mindscapecommons.net/. Coherent Digital LLC was founded in 2019 by industry veterans Stephen Rhind-Tutt , Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence, and Pete Ciuffetti, with a goal to “tame wild content and make it useful.”

Stanley J. Wilder at LSU said that he just learned that Jennifer Cargill passed away on Oct 6th. We knew she’d been getting hospice care for the past three weeks or so, but it’s still a shock. We owe her a lot.

Choice is pleased to announce the publication of the seventh in a series of white papers designed to provide actionable intelligence around topics of importance to the academic library community. The paper, “Ebook Collection Development in Academic Libraries: Examining Preference, Management and Purchasing Patterns,” aims to provide libraries with

continued on page 73

And They Were There Reports of Meetings — 39th Annual Charleston Conference

Column Editors: Ramune K. Kubilius (Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu>

and Sever Bordeianu (Head, Print Resources Section, University Libraries, MSC05 3020, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001; Phone: 505-277-2645; Fax: 505-277-9813) <sbordeia@unm.edu>

Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition, “The Time has Come ... to Talk of Many Things!” Charleston Gaillard Center, Francis Marion Hotel, Embassy Suites Historic Downtown, and Courtyard Marriott Historic District — Charleston, SC, November 4-8, 2019

Charleston Conference Reports compiled by: Ramune K. Kubilius (Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu>

Column Editor’s Note: Thanks to all of the Charleston Conference attendees who agreed to write short reports highlighting sessions they attended at the 2019 Charleston Conference Attempts were made to provide a broad coverage of sessions, but there are always more sessions than there are reporters. Some presenters posted their slides and handouts in the online conference schedule. Please visit the conference site, http://www. charlestonlibraryconference.com/, and link to selected videos, interviews, as well as to blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins. The 2019 Charleston Conference Proceedings will be published in 2020, in partnership with Purdue University Press: http://www.thepress.purdue. edu/series/charleston

Even if not noted with the reports, videos of most sessions as well as other video offerings like the “Views from the Penthouse Suite” interviews are being posted to the Charleston Conference YouTube Channel as they are completed, and are sorted into playlists by date for ease of navigation.

In this issue of ATG you will find the fifth installment of 2019 conference reports. The first four installments can be found in ATG v.32#1, February 2020, v.32#2, April 2020, v.32#3, June 2020, and v.32#4, September 2020 We will continue to publish all of the reports received in upcoming print issues throughout the year. — RKK

CONCURRENTS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

AI, VR, and Other Interactive Content: How Libraries and Classrooms are Using Emerging Tech to Advance Knowledge — Presented by Douglas Ballman (USC Shoah Foundation), Dan Hawkins (The Citadel), Jolanda-Pieta (Joey) van Arnhem (College of Charleston) — https://sched.co/UXrv

Reported by Christine Fischer (UNC Greensboro) <cmfische@uncg.edu>

Ballman described various applications of 360-degree video in sharing testimony on genocide through the platform of the USC Shoah Foundation and in their pilot collaborations with several museums through interactive biographies of survivors telling their own stories. These virtual reality experiences tend

to have a greater impact on empathy of the participants and on the educational process than other means of engagement. In describing the makerspace at The Citadel, Hawkins told of the services being offered, equipment available, and how the makerspace fits with the library’s mission, including the value of offering students and faculty the opportunity to learn new technologies. After defining augmented reality versus virtual reality, van Arnhem specified a variety of equipment, such as headsets, available for participating in the technology and considered how libraries may best choose what could work in their circumstances. She showed a project developed by an art student. All the speakers conveyed an energy and engagement with interactive content that confirmed the potential for use within the academic curriculum.

Communicating Collections: Strategies for Informing Library Stakeholders of Collections Budget & Management Decisions — Presented by John Abresch (University of South Florida), Laura Pascual (University of South Florida), Anna Seiffert (Colorado School of Mines) — https://sched.co/UXry

Reported by Chris Vidas (Clemson University) <cvidas@clemson.edu>

It was enlightening to hear the perspectives of librarians from two very different institutions addressing unique problems regarding the ways in which libraries communicate with stakeholders, specifically surrounding collections decisions. Abresch and Pascual discussed some of the findings from a survey of 25 academic libraries and how those institutions convey collection management decisions via their websites. Pascual highlighted many of the hurdles that arise when attempting to share relevant details about building collections. Not only is it complicated to reach the proper audience or to utilize an effective method for disseminating information, but it can be problematic to determine which details are most effective to share. Ultimately, they concluded that information should be publicized, including collection development policies, e-resources decisions, and cancellation information. The goal should be to become as transparent as possible. Seiffert described a truly daunting situation at the Colorado School of Mines in which she initially had no formal liaison program, no communication with departments, and no continued on page 57

And They Were There from page 56

feedback from faculty. Using an array of usage and expenditure reports and by comparing data with peer institutions, she was eventually able to enhance the way in which she communicated with faculty, and she began to make inroads where they had not previously existed. Her progress suggests that any communication void can be overcome with the proper data and when an appropriate outreach strategy is implemented in order to appeal to a specific audience, although it could vary between institutions. Each of the presenters offered valuable details to help attendees improve the manner in which collections decisions are shared with all types of library stakeholders.

(The session’s slides can be found in Sched.)

A Comparison and Review of 17 E-Book Platforms —

Presented by John Lavender (Lavender Consulting), Courtney McAllister (Yale University, Lillian Goldman Law Library) — https://sched.co/UXrg

Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu>

McAllister provided a librarian’s perspective on eBook assessment criteria after Lavender reported on a study he undertook at the behest of the University of Michigan Press, with support from the Mellon Foundation. (The presentation slides, attached in the SCHED provide much more granular detail that could not be appreciated in viewing presentation slides in the large session room). Functionality, not content, was the focus of the study. Some of the features sought and analyzed included: filtering, browsing, search prediction, highlighting of terms, ranking, indexing, downloading by chapter or book. Not all eBook platforms licensed by (or familiar to) audience members were represented in this study, but it still served as a reminder to all that these platforms are scrutinized, analyzed, and compared against others.

(Lavender’s and McAllister’s slides are available in Sched.)

The time has come…for next generation open access models — Presented by Anneliese Taylor (University of California, San Francisco), Celeste Feather (LYRASIS), Kim Armstrong (Big Ten Academic Alliance), Sara Rouhi (Public Library of Science) — https://sched.co/UXrL

Reported by Lindsay Barnett (Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University School of Medicine) <lindsay.barnett@yale.edu>

This session explored multiple open access models, followed by a discussion of challenges and opportunities.

Rouhi detailed specific challenges faced by native open access publishers, stating that flipping subscription dollars to open access funds is not possible for publishers with no subscription revenue. The Public Library of Science (PLos) is considering new funding models such as bundled APCs and annual billing, moving away from individual APC transactions.

Taylor listed negotiation with publishers on open access agreements as a core principle of University of California’s (UC) Call to Action. She acknowledged that read and publish agreements disadvantage native open access publishers and central APC funding may influence where authors submit their articles. UC San Francisco is in discussion with PLoS about a multi-payer model in which libraries and authors, through grant funds, share APC costs.

Feather noted the diversity of LYRASIS members in type, size, and goals. An open access model must appeal to all members to be successful. Consortia should develop diverse scenarios that fit each type of content and institution.

Armstrong described the Big Ten Academic Alliance as 14 independent universities each with their own governing system. Big Ten is taking a measured approach, working to understand institutional goals and exploring emerging models.

(The session’s slides can be found in Sched.)

SPONSORED LUNCH

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Down the Rabbit Hole We Go Again (the 19th Health Sciences Lively Lunchtime Discussion) — Presented by Susan K. Kendall (Michigan State University Libraries), Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University), Sarah McClung (University of California, San Francisco), Jean Gudenas (Medical University of South Carolina), Rena Lubker (moderator, Medical University of South Carolina) — https://sched.co/UYCv

Note: This sponsored session took place off-site and was open to all. Registration was requested. Wendy Bahnsen gave words of greeting from lunch sponsor, Rittenhouse Book Distributors.

Reported by Nathan Norris (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) <nnorris@bidmc.harvard.edu>

Lubker served as moderator for the session on “things that keep us up at night,” library expansions, and considerations for moving toward “read and publish” agreements. To answer “what things keep us up at night,” Kendall concluded that our collections mix has become more complicated, and our users live in a “re-mix culture,” in which they desire a myriad of content re-use capabilities. She discussed how assessment has become more sophisticated and referred to the Bibliomagician Blog, DORA, and principles of the Leiden Manifesto as contributors. Kendall also asserted we must be flexible and rely on our values. Kubilius provided the annual “Developments” update and handout containing the major events from the publishing world from the past year. Gudenas described how she was able to quickly extend her subscriptions at the Medical University of South Carolina when her institution purchased four hospitals. She contributed her success to effective communication. Gudenas created ad hoc communication workflows and stressed the importance of including hospital administrators. McClung reported on a unique scenario at the University of California, San Francisco, as a participant in the California Digital Library (CDL). The faculty are particularly supportive of OA, and faculty have even been included in vendor negotiations there. The CDL has continued on page 58

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

And They Were There from page 57

signed a single “read and publish” agreement with Cambridge University Press. While they have not yet been able to sign a similar agreement with Elsevier, McClung believes the CDL remains open.

(Kubilius’ handout is in the Galter IR, DOI 10.18131/g3yvaf-3330 and will be deposited in the conference proceedings.)

LIVELY DISCUSSIONS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Do the Right Thing: Sustainability, Values, and Streaming Video — Presented by Trey Shelton (University of Florida), Sarah McCleskey (Hofstra University), Alex Hoskyns-Abrahall (Bullfrog Films) — https://sched.co/ UZR2

Reported by Christine Fischer (UNC Greensboro)

<cmfische@uncg.edu>

McCleskey described the need for budget predictability in an environment with many acquisition models for streaming content. While tending to purchase life of file licenses, McCleskey pointed out the necessity of meeting the needs of the academic curriculum through purchasing one- or three-year licenses or subscriptions. She seeks to contribute to the revenue stream for content creators and distributors. Shelton stated that he prioritizes owning films in perpetuity, while acknowledging that libraries are faced with balancing between building a collection versus access and serving immediate academic needs; he stated that there is no clear path forward. He touched on the issue of lack of metadata and the challenges of discovery for library users. From the perspective of a film company and distributor, Hoskyns-Abrahall talked about filmmakers as activists and films creating change by educating the public. The role of the distributor is getting films noticed through promotion and marketing, arranging for showings at film festivals, securing reviews, and curating collections. Discussion with the audience touched on topics such as commercial streaming services that offer individual subscriptions and the question of use of those services in the classroom.

Let’s give them something to talk about… Textbook

Affordability and OER — Presented by Derek Malone (University of North Alabama), Linda Colding (Florida Gulf Coast University), Jennifer L. Pate (University of North Alabama), Peggy Glatthaar (Florida Gulf Coast University) — https://sched.co/UZRl

Reported by Cori Wilhelm (SUNY Canton) <wilhelmc@canton.edu>

This session highlighted textbook affordability initiatives at two academic libraries. Pate and Malone described an Alabama Commission on Higher Education state-funded grant which served as the springboard for both UNA’s textbook affordability project and an OER initiative. Because there is not currently an OER for all courses, the library established a textbook reserve

program, focusing on the highest enrollment classes when selecting textbooks for purchase. At FCGU, librarians started a textbook affordability project focusing on loaning textbooks for courses with the highest DFW rates. They also solicited student input — some creative takeaways include FGCU’s use of a whiteboard for student textbook purchase suggestions and an online fillable form for the same. As Colding and Glatthaar explained, FGCU administration initially provided funding for the program, which has not been renewed. This led to conversations about sustainability of textbook programs, and alternatives when there isn’t funding available.

Audience members added much to the presentation by contributing questions and experiences from their own institutions, sparking lively discussion between the presenters and audience, and between audience members themselves. Ideas were enthusiastically shared regarding using eBooks, how these programs work with existing courseware, and the sustainability of such textbook affordability initiatives.

CONCURRENTS

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Never Waste a Crisis: Re-imaging Interlibrary Loan as Part of the Resourcing Picture Presented by Rice Majors (University of California – Davis), Kelley Johnson (Griffith University) — https://sched.co/UXu9

Reported by Rob Tench (Old Dominion University) <ftench@odu.edu>

The presenters expertly addressed two of the thorniest issues facing interlibrary loan/document delivery departments: migration to Tipasa and the effects of breaking a Big Deal. Johnson outlined the step by step process her library undertook over three years to implement Tipasa. Migration involved a lot of trial and error, an organizational restructure, and workers assuming new duties. Policies had to be updated, software tools implemented, and multiple workarounds developed to meet users’ needs during the transition. Among the many lessons learned were that disruption can be great when done right, assumptions should always be questioned, accountability needs to be built into the process, and failure is a learning opportunity. Above all, she counseled the audience to be patient but mindful that the future is now. In contrast, Majors and his team developed a plan to address the expected increased demand of ILL services as a result of the UC system cancelling Elsevier’s Science Direct. Challenges included translating previous downloads of Science Direct articles into ILL requests, overcoming patron uncertainty about how to place ILL requests, developing patron support for the cancellation decision, coordinating requests across multiple campuses with divergent needs, providing 24/7 access in a Monday through Friday business model, and being copyright compliant. To address these issues, a system-wide task force is looking at ways to enhance ILL operations with decisions being driven in large part by ILL usage. Both presentations were outstanding — highly informative and extremely well received.

continued on page 59

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

— Presented by Anne Rauh (Syracuse University), Vincent Cassidy (Institution of Engineering and Technology), Emily Hart (Syracuse University), — https://sched.co/UXtZ

Reported by Lynnee Argabright (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science) <lynneeargabright@gmail.com>

This session impressively approached author services from the perspective of a publisher — specifically, a society publisher — and a library in their efforts to become embedded throughout the researcher workflow. The presenters packed their slides full of valuable information and takeaways; a favorite was a visualization showing where author services had been applied to the research workflow in the case of IET and Syracuse University Library. Cassidy rapidly explained six slides on a researcher usage study in six minutes, which was far too interesting to crush into that time, so individual review of the poster presentation slides (in Sched) and the video recording is highly recommended. Syracuse librarians Hart and Rauh highlighted the value of shaping librarian roles based on their specialized skills rather than generalist support for a discipline.

Overall, the presenters conveyed their roles’ challenges, efforts to learn, and processes decided upon to become supportive, competitive, and connected. The changes both institutions rolled out can be models for turning a problem on its head, facing risk, and flexibly adapting to changing needs.

(The session’s slides can be found in Sched.)

Trot So Quick: Addressing Budgetary Changes —

Presented by Jeff Bailey (Arkansas State), Star Holloway (Arkansas State) — https://sched.co/UXu3

Reported by Amy Lewontin (Snell Library Northeastern University) <a.lewontin@northeastern.edu>

Library Director Bailey opened the session on budgetary changes, by letting the audience know he had been at the Library for ten years, and the changes he planned to outline in his talk were budgetary issues that he had been dealing with for the last year and a half. Prior to 2019, his library had traditional library accounts, as well as funds from a library fee from enrollment of each student, which then became a smaller sum, as the university’s enrollment began to drop. Some budgetary changes came quickly for their Library, presenting severe budgetary challenges, and both Bailey and Collection Management Librarian Holloway, gave a very thorough explanation of how they managed to cope with the changes. These are challenges that many libraries face, they explained, and their experience could be considered drastic, but their strategies would most likely work for any library. Arkansas State, when it began to suffer budget difficulties, hired an outside consultant to help the University find efficiencies, to cover their budget deficit. One place the consultant identified

was the Library, and its reduced spending suggested the University could save one million dollars a year, representing around a 34% budget cut for the Library. Both Holloway and Bailey explained their efforts to work with the faculty and to gain input into the cuts and changes they needed to make. They also asked departments if they could offer funds to retain items that might need to be cut. They also discussed working with their Provost, about the decisions and making sure that everything they were doing was approved by the Provost’s office.

Holloway went into useful detail on how journal packages were examined and trimmed, and how their databases were reviewed. They considered usability when making decisions on what to keep and conducted considerable overlap analysis, all of which were fruitful for the Library and then shared widely. Noteworthy in the work that Arkansas State University’s Library did to achieve the necessary savings was the speed in which this all had to be accomplished. Bailey closed the talk by acknowledging that the University’s administration developed a better understanding of the Library and its issues.

(The session’s slides can be found in Sched.)

Preprints - Why Librarians Should Care

— Presented by Susan K. Kendall (Michigan State University Libraries), Oya Y. Rieger (Ithaka S+R), Rachel Burley (Research Square), Jessica Polka (ASAPbio) — https://sched.co/UXtN

Note: Jessica Polka presented remotely.

Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu>

Polka reviewed categories of preprints and their benefits in providing: rapid dissemination, earlier, broader feedback, visibility — collaborator finding opportunities, institutional recognition (grants, jobs), reduced gatekeeping, broadened dissemination (e.g., negative results). The biggest criticism? No peer-review. Burley spoke about the “In Review” option at Springer Nature (partnered with Research Square) being piloted by 17 BMC journals, which allows sharing and feedback to take place while an article goes through the editorial and peer review process. Authors can see the peer review timeline, there is a preprint to publication continuum. Kendall surveyed the 40 some preprint server landscape, remarking that many are scientific and non-profit. Disciplines differ regarding fears of getting scooped and others exhibit slow adoption of: open access (chemists); preprints (health practitioners). Librarians can help alleviate preprint confusion — pointing out check boxes in submission checklists, journal policies, and funder requirements. Per Rieger, librarians should care — preprints ensure integrity and durability of scholarship. View business models holistically. Recognize that content is not homogenous: 20% (computer science) and 85% (materials science) preprints get published. Confusion differentiating institutional repositories and preprint servers remains. Technologies such as Open Science Framework OSF Preprints can make sharing easier. Researchers and librarians prefer community driven options, expect transparency, stability, durability. Advisory boards are optimal. There are bad actors and, in general, there should be some information skepticism.

continued on page 60

“…of research workflows - and changing roles - and the challenges it brings”

And

They Were There

from page 59

CONCURRENT SESSIONS

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

Beyond ROI: Expanding data analysis to develop a strategy for transformation — Presented by Matthew Wilmott (California Digital Library) — https://sched.co/UXuv

Reported by John Banionis (Villanova University) <john.banionis@villanova.edu>

Based on CDL’s strategic move towards transformative agreements, Wilmott explained his work supporting this initiative through the development of a data analysis tool incorporating article-level publication datasets from Web of Science (WoS), and article-level and journal-level OA status from DOAJ and Unpaywall. However, due to gaps in coverage in WoS, Wilmott also developed publisher-specific scaling factors for the tool based on WoS coverage statements, Crossref article counts, previously observed publishing patterns, and cross-checking of publisher data. This then allowed for an estimated calculation of University of California systemwide APC spend, which would be coupled with subscription spend and the other datapoints in the tool to generate transformative agreement models, which CDL would in turn propose to their publisher partners. Wilmott stressed that this data analysis was critically necessary to provide confidence in CDL’s approach while conveying a compelling message to faculty and other stakeholders. Recognizing that this process can be very time consuming, Wilmott encouraged attendees to use and adapt the tool (available at http://bit.ly/ CDL_TA_Tools) for their own institutional analyses.

Resource Discovery in a Changing Content World —

Presented by Christine Stohn (Ex Libris), Cynthia Schwarz (Temple University), Hannah McKelvey (Montana State University), Allen Jones (The New School), Rachelle McLain (Montana State University) —

https://sched.co/UXus

Reported by Janice Adlington (McMaster University) <adling@mcmaster.ca>

This forty-minute session was evenly divided between presentation and discussion, giving the three schools and one vendor relatively little time to present their content. Each library panelist provided an overview of the systems underlying their discovery solution, shared examples of customizations supporting library services (ILL, course reserves, storage retrievals), and described enhancements to expose unique or external content, including image viewers, fulltext delivery (Browzine+LibKey), and network zone resources. Stohn from Ex Libris wrapped up the presentation, suggesting methods to surface archival, special, or curated collections within discovery. This session attracted more vendors/publishers than librarians, and the ensuing discussion led into some unexpected directions. The importance of quality metadata was emphasized, with one panelist issuing a plea to

publishers to stop developing their own search platforms and instead focus on metadata and interoperability. The need to provide additional contextual information (“look inside”) was also highlighted, to help students and researchers select sources. Overall, the session was a little uneven, with differing levels of technical sophistication and many ideas presented very quickly. It could perhaps have benefited from a longer time slot to more fully explore the issues raised.

(The session’s slides can be found in Sched.)

Start From Where You Are: Key Considerations for Approaching Open Access — Presented by Colleen Campbell (Open Access 2020 Initiative, Max Planck Digital Library), Gwen Evans (Executive Director, OhioLINK) — https://sched.co/UXuI

Note: David Fischer (Vice President, Sales – Americas, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) joined the speakers listed in the program.

Reported by Lindsay Barnett (Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University School of Medicine) <lindsay.barnett@yale.edu>

This session explored transformative agreements Wiley has entered into with consortial partners.

Wiley’s open access model, as described by Fischer, recognizes that one size does not fit all. Approaches to open access vary significantly by country as funder mandates, cash flow, and institutional priorities differ. The key features of Wiley’s approach to open access are transparency, building trust, aligning with university goals, and recognizing that all models are unique.

Evans spoke on behalf of OhioLINK, a state agency made up of 90 institutions and 118 libraries. OhioLINK entered into a pilot transformative agreement with Wiley in 2019. Funding was distributed based on publishing output; there were no limits on journal type (gold or hybrid). A structural issue of the read and publish model is that the majority of institutions fall in the “read” category but the cost burden falls on “publish” institutions. The collective question is how will read consortia participate in open access?

Campbell posited that there is enough money already in the global publishing economy to flip from subscriptions to open access. She discussed Projekt DEAL in Germany, whose objective is to form transformative agreements with the three biggest publishers with Wiley as their first partner. Consortia are naturally and strategically placed to manage these agreements. (Evans’ slides can be found in Sched.)

That’s all the reports we have room for in this issue. Watch for more reports from the 2019 Charleston Conference in upcoming issues of Against the Grain. Presentation material (PowerPoint slides, handouts) and taped session links from many of the 2019 sessions are available online. Visit the Conference Website at www.charlestonlibraryconference.com. — KS

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Headwaters — Has the Elite’s Bubble Detached?

Column Editor: Kent Anderson (Founder, Caldera Publishing Solutions, 290 Turnpike Road, #366, Westborough, MA 01581-2843; Phone: 774-288-9464) <kent@caldera-publishing.com>

Criticism of higher education in the U.S. posing as a finishing program for elites isn’t new, and the explosion of administrators across college campuses has been observed for years now. (In 2014, administrators officially outnumbered instructors in the U.S. for the first time.)

What used to be an affordable way to gain social mobility has become anything but, and COVID-19 may be the factor that finally causes some strong reforms as the value proposition is reconsidered by parents and students alike.

I was the first person in my family to go to college, and because tuition was so affordable and the state school in town allowed me to commute, I incurred no student debt. Now, tuition at that same institution for an in-state student is 10x higher. Overall, tuition has increased 1,400% over the past few decades. Scott Galloway notes in his critiques of higher

education’s current rates and methods1 that higher education would now be unattainable for him, its unattainability reinforcing a de facto caste system:

In August 1982, I took a job installing shelving for $18/hour, as I had been rejected by UCLA and had no other options for college. UCLA admission would have meant I could live at home. On September 19, 1982, I got a call from an empathetic admissions director at UCLA, nine days before classes started. She said they had reviewed my appeal, and despite mediocre grades and SAT scores, they were letting me in, as I was “a son of a single mother and the great state of California” (no joke, her exact words). My mom told me that as the first person from either side of the family to be admitted to college, I could now “do anything.” The

upward mobility and economic security afforded me by education has resulted in a meaningful return for the state and the union (jobs created, tens of millions in taxes paid, etc.). It has also resulted in the profound: the resources to help my mom die at home (her wish) and to create a loving and secure environment for my kids.

Higher education is far less affordable, and social mobility has been hindered for years. More troubling, the elite’s bubble may be detaching from society, if it hasn’t detached already, making science and scholarship out of touch in both how it’s practiced and also in how it’s viewed and accepted.

Presumptions and pretensions of elitism pervade many parts of academic and media cultures, including college applications. On a recent Against the Rules continued on page 62

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Headwaters from page 61

podcast with Michael Lewis, 2 a teacher in a smaller city decided to help coach a homeless student working two jobs, who had a 4.0 GPA, and who scored a 1260 on her SAT despite taking it “cold” without preparation. As she worked with the student through her college admissions process, the adult was struck by how elitist the questions were:

Columbia asks, “What exhibits, lectures, theatre productions, and concerts have you liked best in the last year?” And I’m tempted to write, “Carmen, at the Metropolitan Opera. ... PSYCH! My town doesn’t even have a movie theater.” ... Another school asks her what her favorite periodicals, newspapers, and web sites are. She doesn’t have access to a computer except when she does homework on a school computer. She doesn’t get the New Yorker. She’s never traveled outside her town. ... I’m looking at these questions, and I’m thinking, “You clearly don’t get it, you don’t understand what it’s like to grow up in a rural town and not have resources like elite Americans do.”

Another story involves a student in a rural area who was accepted to a university in a big city across the country. He and his parents had never flown in the U.S. before, and his struggles with connecting flights and the complexity of airports almost prevented his attendance. Such mundane barriers don’t occur to us, and when we’re told about them, they strike us as quaint. But they exist, they are real, and they can block people from advancing.

In our broadband-enabled metropolitan areas, we often forget that computer access and fast Internet is still a luxury. Even in the relatively prosperous suburbs of Boston, computer and Internet access for K-12 kids has major gaps.

There are layers to such insights we need to contemplate, such as how education has become a “false meritocracy” for many, with the recent college admissions scandals only serving as a cherry of farce atop decades of biased standardized testing rewarding elites, bloated tuition blocking opportunity, corrupt admissions greased by massive donations, and surging and unforgivable student debt.

The expectations of elitism also pervade the job market. Many employers

have hard-coded requirements for bachelor’s degrees into their computerized screening of applicants, often for jobs that haven’t historically required them. Some experienced workers, who years ago did these same jobs, and who left to raise families or deal with other life issues, return to find that their experience and abilities don’t count as much as a piece of paper they never needed before — a certification which won’t matter even after they get it.

Sarah Kendzior’s passionate, imperfect, and excellent book about the ongoing corruption of U.S. institutions, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, 3 is worth a read. Kendzior, who also wrote The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America, 4 moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in the early 2000s after stints as an academic in Europe and as a journalist in New York City.

For young professionals, we are seeing a double blow — the 2008-09 Great Recession, and now the COVID-19 economic implosion — upending their early careers, perhaps setting them back forever.5 But the deck was already stacked against them. Kendzior laments what she feels is a lost pathway to a brighter future for many:

When I tell young people how I got [my first journalism job], they respond as if I’m telling them a fairy tale. I was hired after sending someone my résumé through the mail to strangers. I had no connections, no graduate degree, and no summer internships. I had spent my summers working to save money for college, which meant my résumé included positions like “Record Town cashier” and “Dannon water inventory specialist,” a job that consisted of stocking bottled water at supermarkets and did not require the ability to read. But no one cared back then; the era of elite credentialism was still years ahead.

The time Kendzior recounts was just 20 years ago. In that period, in addition to greater consolidation, two major economic

upheavals, and skyrocketing costs and pressures around college admissions and degrees, scholarly publishing has become prone to greater implicit geographic workforce elitism. Social mobility had already declined for decades,6 and it seems to be doomed to decline more with these events.

Higher education is going to be transformed by COVID-19 and other events. How do we ensure it’s transformed to be more inclusive? To elevate more lives? To be more relevant? To bring talent forward, even if it’s hidden and in unexpected locations?

We need to ensure we’re attached to reality and the broadest possible version of our society, or the mission of higher education may become irrelevant to millions.

Kent Anderson is the CEO and founder of Caldera Publishing Solutions, editor of “The Geyser,” a past-President of the Society of Scholarly Publishing , and founder of “The Scholarly Kitchen.” He has worked as an executive of a technology startup and as a publishing executive at numerous non-profits, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics

Endnotes

1. https://www.profgalloway.com/ how-i-got-here

2. https://atrpodcast.com/

3. https://us.macmillan.com/ books/9781250245397

4. https://us.macmillan.com/ books/9781250189998

5. https://www.washingtonpost. com/business/2020/05/27/millennial-recession-covid/

6. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/ institute/working-papers/17-21.pdf

LEGAL ISSUES

Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel) <strauchb@citadel.edu>

Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University) <jack.montgomery@wku.edu>

Legally Speaking — The Internet Archive Lawsuit

by Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University) <Anthony.Paganelli@wku.edu>

In my “Legally Speaking” column of the Against the Grain September 2020 issue, I mentioned the lawsuit against the Internet Archive by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House on June 1, 2020. This lawsuit was discussed further in Bill Hannay’s article from the same issue, “No Good Deed Goes Unsued!” (Hannay, 2020).

The plaintiff argued that the Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library; which was established on March 24, 2020 following the shutdown of schools and libraries, was in violation of copyright infringement. The publishers based their lawsuit on the Internet Archive’s offer to provide a single digital work for an unlimited number of people regardless that the Internet Archive only had one book. These works were digitized for patrons to view online and the Internet Archive could only lend digital copies depending on the number of physical copies in the collection. In other words, if the digital copy was checked out to a patron, then those requesting the same book would be placed on a waiting list. Therefore, the plaintiffs felt that releasing one digital book to multiple patrons simultaneously was a violation of copyright.

Due to the lawsuit that was filed in the U.S. District Court Southern District of New York, the Internet Archive returned back to their digital lending policy on June 11, 2020. The Internet Archive released a statement noting that the publishers were attacking the concept of library ownership and lending of digital books. They added that the publishers were working to provide materials for students and patrons of the schools and libraries that were shut down due to the pandemic. For example, numerous publishers did provide either free access or reduced financial expenditures for textbooks and other resources for a limited time during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Hannay also stated in the September Against the Grain issue, “Where things go from here is an open question.” Indeed, it was an open question following the Internet Archive’s decision to return to their original policy of digital lending on June 11, 2020. However, the Internet Archive did request and was granted a 30-day extension to reply to the plaintiff’s lawsuit, which was set to end July 28, 2020. This was also in part due to the publishers continued efforts to seek statutory damages against the Internet Archive, which included a demand for a jury in this case.

Prior to this lawsuit, libraries across the nation released a statement on March 13, 2020 to identify that “Fair Use” was to be a major legal issue as they tried to support students and educators during the pandemic that shutdown schools and libraries. Following the lawsuit, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) encouraged the publishers to drop the lawsuit through the statement, “As universities and libraries work to ensure scholars and students have the information they need, ARL looks forward to working with publishers to ensure open and equitable access to information. Continuing the litigation against IA (Internet Archive) for the purpose of recovering statutory damages and shuttering the Open Library would interfere with this shared mutual objective.” (Aiwuyor, 2020).

On July 27, 2020, the Internet Archive had their opportunity to make their statement regarding the lawsuit through their 28 page brief filed in the U.S. Southern District Court of New York. In the brief, the Internet Archive addressed the publishers’ 53 page suit that was filed against them on June 1, 2020. The Internet Archive reiterated the purpose of their service, which is to provide print books

through “Controlled Digital Lending.” They noted that they provide digital content securely that was the same as the publishers that release digital content. Furthermore, the Internet Archive described the purpose of establishing the National Emergency Library

In the Preliminary Statement of the brief, Internet Archive stated that their Controlled Digital Lending platform was within the regulations of digital lending that is used by publishers that sell digital books. The Internet Archive claimed that they adhere to the own-to-loan basis for their digital collection and their digitization helps preserve numerous print books. The statement also noted that libraries have purchased over a billion dollars to publishers for print books. The Internet Archive recognized their digital collection was approximately 1.3 million, which is available to patrons based on the same borrowing system of one patron to loan one book at a time.

The Internet Archive described the purpose of the National Emergency Library, “During the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, in response to urgent pleas from teachers and librarians whose students and patrons had been ordered to stay at home, the Internet Archive decided to temporarily permit lending that could have exceeded the one-to-one ownedto-loaned ration. With millions of print books locked away, digital lending was the only practical way to get books to those who needed them. The Internet Archive called this program the National Emergency Library and planned to discontinue it once the need had passed. Twelve weeks later, other options had emerged to fill the gap, and the Internet Archive was able to return to the traditional CDL approach.”

continued on page 64

Legally Speaking from page 63

Of course, the Internet Archive stated in the brief that the publishers’ “are not entitled to statutory damages,” which is based on the 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) Remedies for infringement: Damages and profits. They also requested relief and dismissal from the lawsuit in its entirety, as well as a trial by jury. While the brief replied to the publishers’ lawsuit and the Internet Archive did return to their original checkout policy, the lawsuit continues.

On August 20, 2020, both parties got together to discuss the lawsuit, but they were unable to reach a settlement. After their discussions, they filed a joint report to the court on August 28, 2020 based on the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 26. This report outlined the discovery plan for both parties between September 11, 2020 to September 10, 2021. In addition, the publishers have until November 1 to add more works to the lawsuit and December 1 to amend the complaint. Following the December 1 possible amendments, the Internet Archive would have 21 days to

respond. Over the next year, both parties will prepare for possible hearings in November 2021.

Even though, there is really not much to report on this lawsuit at this time as both parties are preparing for the November hearings, this lawsuit is bringing to the foreground the relationships between libraries and publishers as the increase need for digital content continues to be an issue. As noted by Hannay, “Where things go from here is an open question.” This open question could very well be, “Is Controlled Digital Lending legal under the U.S. Copyright Law?” Of course, numerous other questions will arise as this lawsuit moves forward. Until there is a ruling or resolution, it will be interesting as schools and libraries continue to seek of ways to access digital content.

References

Aiwuyor, J. (2020). Association of Research Libraries urges end to litigation against Internet Archive. Association of Research Libraries . Retrieved from https://www.arl.org/news/association-of-research-libraries-urges-end-to-litigation-against-internet-archive/.

Albanese, A. (2020). Publishers, Internet Archive propose yearlong discovery plan for copyright. Publishers Weekly . Retrieved from https://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/84228-publishers-internet-archive-propose-yearlong-discovery-plan-for-copyright-case.html

Ennis, M. (2020). Publishers’ lawsuit against Internet Archive continues despite early closure of Emergency Library. Library Journal. Retrieved from https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=publishers-lawsuit-against-internet-archive-continues-despite-early-closure-of-emergency-library

Hannay, B. (2020). No deed goes unsued! Against the Grain, 32(4), 52. Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers, LLC, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and Penguin Random House, LLC. v. Internet Archive. Case 1:20-cv04160-JGK.

Paganelli, A. (2020). Issues for Libraries Regarding Covid-19. Against the Grain, 32(4), 48-50.

Questions & Answers — Copyright Column

Column Editor: Will Cross (Director, Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center, NC State University Libraries) <wmcross@ncsu.edu> ORCID: 0000-0003-1287-1156

QUESTION: An academic publisher asks: “What new copyright cases are on the docket for the Supreme Court this year?

ANSWER: As it does every year, the Supreme Court began the 2020-21 term on the first Monday in October. While the last term was unusually busy with copyright issues, including major decisions on copyright in state laws and sovereign immunity, this term is mostly defined by the copyright cases the Court chose not to hear. Two particular cases have been closely watched based on their colorful facts and the significant legal questions raised by each.

The first case dealt with a set of murals painted on the 5Pointz complex in Long Island City, Queens. The complex itself was primarily made up of factories and disused spaces, but for decades graffiti artists had decorated the space with colorful murals and eye-catching tags, establishing it as a mecca for

street art. In 2013-14, however, the owner of the complex abruptly whitewashed and then demolished all the buildings to make space for a new development.

The artists sued, alleging that their rights under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) had been violated. Although VARA, which provides a slimmed down version of “moral rights” to a narrowly defined set of works of visual art, has been on the books since 1990, it has rarely been considered by the courts. This case raised VARA issues directly and drew attention when a court in 2017 awarded the artists $6.75 million dollars ($150,000 for each of the 45 pieces destroyed) in damages. The defendant development company G&M Realty appealed the decision but lost again at the Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case leaves the verdict in place and leaves us without the opportunity to hear from the Court about the scope and interpretation of VARA.

The second case offered an equally dramatic set of facts, concerning the claim of guitarist Randy Wolf , who used the stage name Randy California, that his song Taurus was the basis for Led Zeppelin’s iconic song Stairway to Heaven Wolf’s band Spirit regularly played this song when they were touring with Zeppelin in the late 1960s, shortly before Stairway to Heaven was released in 1971. Similarities between the two songs, and particularly the opening arpeggios, had been frequently noted in music fandom and press as well as in comment from California in the liner notes of a later album.

In 2014 Spirit bassist Mark Andes and a trust acting on behalf of the now-deceased California filed a copyright infringement suit against Led Zeppelin seeking writing credit for California and potentially claiming some future profits on the song. A district judge initially held that enough similarities existed that a jury could hear

continued on page 65

Questions & Answers

from page 64

the case, but later that year a jury decided that the similarities between the songs did not amount to copyright infringement. After a series of appeals, the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Led Zeppelin holding that Stairway to Heaven does not infringe on Spirit’s copyright in Taurus

Legally, this decision was significant since the Court rejected the “inverse ratio rule” that had been used to decide copyright infringement cases in the past. The rule, which holds that the more an alleged infringer had access to a work the lower the threshold for establishing substantial similarity should be, had been a source of significant uncertainty and, in some scholars’ eyes, led to some clearly bad decisions. Between this decision and the 2018 “Blurred Lines” decision related to the estate of Marvin Gaye’s claim against Robin Thicke, the “inverse ratio rule” has now been clearly abrogated in the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court’s decision not to review the case means that that rule is a dead letter in the Ninth Circuit but that the question of its application nationally will not be answered this year.

With those two cases not on the docket, the only major copyright case under review remains the Google v Oracle case left over from the 2019-20 term. Oral arguments in this case were held on October 7 with a decision expected sometime in the spring.

QUESTION: A public university administrator asks, “What is the state of sovereign immunity today?”

ANSWER: Another hangover from the previous Supreme Court term is the issue of sovereign immunity. As discussed in previous columns, sovereign immunity, the general rule that federal courts cannot hear suits brought by individuals against nonconsenting states, was considered in the case of Allen v Cooper , where the Supreme Court upheld the doctrine as applied to the state of North Carolina’s unauthorized use of images of Blackbeard’s sunken pirate ship.

The decision was based in part on consideration of the Copyright Remedies Clarification Act of 1990, which included a report from the Copyright Office that had gathered examples of alleged bad action by the states. This report was intended to establish a record of widespread intentional violations of a federal law by the states, as required to abrogate sovereign immunity. The Court was not persuaded.

Seemingly frustrated with the decision, the Copyright Office issued a notice of inquiry soliciting more examples of bad behavior by the states. Responses to the Notice were recently released and, despite claims of widespread abuse by some rightsholder groups, only 31 responses were recorded. Further, as documented by University of Kansas Libraries Director Kevin Smith in a recent blog post, those 31 responses reflect a limited understanding of the law and often do not even engage with the issues under consideration: “[c]omments that complain about Nigerian phishing schemes, rogue federal agents, or a state’s alleged infringement of an individual’s “copyright” in his name indicate that some took the opportunity to air their grievances, even when those grievances misunderstand the nature of copyright and/or have no relationship with sovereign immunity.” The full blog post is available here: https://www.arl. org/blog/sovereign-immunity-boondoggle-at-us-copyright-office/ and a tip of the cap is due to Darcee Olson, LSU’s Copyright & Scholarly Communication Policy Director for summarizing responses.

The Copyright Alliance, a group that advocates on behalf of rightsholders, also released the results of a public survey designed to “assist the Copyright Office” with building a case for abrogation: https://copyrightalliance.org/ca_post/ copyright-alliance-survey-reveals-growing-threat-of-state-infringement/. Unsurprisingly, the Copyright Alliance singled out “state universities or institutions of higher learning” as actors they most wished to remove protection from. As of this writing the Copyright Office is accepting “reply comments” and the issue of sovereign immunity is likely to remain critical for libraries, universities, and university presses who rely on the doctrine for their society-serving work every day.

QUESTION: A faculty member asks, “What is happening at the Copyright Office? It seemed like there was a lot of noise about the Office a few years ago, but I haven’t heard as much recently.”

ANSWER: After several years of drama at the Copyright Office related to a proposed “Next Great Copyright Act,” removal of one Register by new Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden, and some heated discussion about moving the Office out of the LoC, the Office has focused primarily on modernization and developing more up-to-date information for those who rely on the Office to understand the law and register their works.

The big news from the Copyright Office in 2020 is that in September of this year Shira Perlmutter was named as the next Register of Copyrights. She comes from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) where she served for more than a decade as chief policy officer and director for international affairs. Dr. Hayden and the American Library Association both praised Perlmutter’s ability to find common ground with “both users of information and rights holders.” Her work on the U.S. implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty also demonstrates her leadership on supporting access to information.

In recent years, the Copyright Office has done outstanding work updating and improving what had been a very creaky system for digital copyright registration and records infrastructure. Perlmutter is an excellent choice to continue that valuable work so that the Copyright Office can serve creators, users, and the copyright system as a whole.

QUESTION: A digital humanist asks, “How does copyright impact text and data mining?”

ANSWER: Text and data mining is emblematic of digital scholarship as a whole in that it has tremendous potential to improve the way we understand the world and build a scholarly record but it raises thorny legal questions that many scholars are not prepared to address. For this reason, I was pleased to see the National Endowment for the Humanities fund an institute to understand Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining in partnership with UC Berkeley in the summer of 2020. The Institute and openly-licensed materials are available on the project page: https:// buildinglltdm.org/.

You couldn’t ask for a better example of the impact of the Building LLTDM project than The Data-Sitters Club , a “comprehensive, colloquial guide to digital humanities computational text analysis” that evokes the popular Baby-Sitters Club novels beloved by young readers. The Data-Sitters Club site offers seven books and three multilingual mysteries that introduce topics in text analysis including “The DSC and Mean Copyright Law” which wrestles with questions about copyright, trademark, and related legal issues by discussing the way the project uses images, marks, and similar materials from the original Baby-Sitters Club series: https://datasittersclub.github.io/ site/dsc7/

Biz of Digital — Repository Quick Submit and CV Scraping

by Deborah Revzin (Knowledge Management Consultant, 18 B Hilliard Street, Cambridge, MA. 02138; Phone: 307-264-0292) <deborah.revzin@gmail.com>

and Colin B. Lukens (Senior Repository Manager, Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication, Widener Library G-20 – 1 Harvard Yard, Cambridge MA; Phone: 617-495-4089) <colin_lukens@harvard.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>

Asignificant challenge in administering an institutional open-access repository is acquiring local scholarly content to distribute and build the repository. Complicated licensing and author re-use rights can sometimes be viewed as a barrier by authors who are looking to deposit their work. Paired with the challenges of communicating the benefits of repository deposit and the rights afforded by institutional open-access policies, limited resources, or lack of administrative support, repository managers often struggle to build a broader culture around deposits outside of open-access advocates. A proactive, mediated, and collaborative publication review program can mitigate or solve some of these issues. By reviewing an author’s publication list or CV with an eye towards repository deposit, repository managers and scholarly communication librarians can demystify the process and educate depositors on licensing and open-access policies. Here, we outline such an effort at Harvard University

The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) was founded in 2009 to support the first of many open-access policies adopted by the University.1 The Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) repository was inaugurated shortly thereafter to support these policies.2 Throughout the OSC’s history, Open Access Fellows — graduate students from Harvard University and Simmons University’s School of Library and Information Science program — have and continue to identify scholarship to deposit into DASH, determine licensing for works in the repository, and communicate with faculty about DASH deposits. These Fellows are invaluable resources in the OSC’s mission to build scholarly content in DASH and to promote open access at Harvard.

Since its inception, the OSC has provided DASH depositing assistance to all members of the Harvard community. In the early years, Fellows contacted faculty to inform them of open-access policies and guide them through the depositing process. To minimize the number of steps in the depositing process and to ensure greater licensing compliance, a Quick Submit form for depositing works into DASH was created. This form has become a much faster way for authors to deposit a work, shifting metadata reconciliation and licensing determination responsibilities to Fellows and the OSC staff. The Quick Submit option on DASH’s user-facing interface asks depositing authors to sign an Assistance Authorization (AA), which provides the range of licenses used for works in DASH and gives approved proxies permission to make DASH-related license choices on the author’s behalf.3 In the case of a Harvard-affiliated faculty member, AAs re-affirm the University’s open-access policy; for all other Harvard-affiliates, it serves as the opt-in for the Harvard Individual Open-Access License.4

In addition to the self-deposit Quick Submit option, the OSC offers affiliates of the University a mediated deposit service known as a CV Scrape. This service increases deposits into DASH and has become a vital part of making more scholarship at Harvard open-access. The CV Scrape program also helps the OSC foster a culture and understanding around repository deposits at the University. Knowledge of and interest in this service is driven by presentations given to faculty and faculty assistants by OSC staff, library peers advocating this service to authors, word of mouth, and the OSC’s webpage outlining the CV Scrape service.5

The first step in the process is to acquire an author’s CV and a signed AA. From there, Fellows begin working on the scrape using a custom spreadsheet template to capture data from the author’s CV. The columns of the spreadsheet act as a workflow to guide Fellows through a series of decision points. First, citations are collected and works are crosschecked with those already in DASH, to prevent duplicate entries. Next, Fellows search for publisher DOIs or manuscript URLs and lastly, SHERPA/RoMEO is used to determine the publishers’ copyright and re-use policies. When all the necessary data has been recorded on the spreadsheet, Fellows deposit into DASH those works for which a publisher or University open-access policy allow for its distribution. Finally, the Senior Repository Manager (SRM) is informed of the completion of the CV scrape. From this point, the SRM sends a distillation of the spreadsheet to the author, which acts as an Outcomes Report. This report is color-coded to indicate what the Fellow was able to make available in DASH, what already exists in the repository, and if certain versions of a work are needed from the author to be deposited into DASH

As well as offering next steps to authors, the Outcomes Report empowers them to make more of their works available in the repository while also creating an opportunity for the OSC to educate authors on open access, licensing, and copyright and to engage in fruitful discussions on scholarly communication. These discussions position the library as the knowledge center for these issues, helping to create and cultivate a culture of open access and continued depositing into DASH

The CV Scrape service has a number of proven benefits. The primary benefit is the increase in the amount of Harvard scholarship that is open access and available in DASH. The more personal patron service model provides flexibility for authors with varying levels of familiarity with open access. Authors who are new to depositing scholarship into a repository and the concept of open access often feel unsure of where to begin. The CV Scrape process gives authors a starting point by initiating the creation of their collection in the repository. It is hoped that this beginning produces favorable statistics that can act continued on page 67

Come see us at the Charleston Virtual 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

▪290 Participating Publishers

▪300 Library Supporters

▪26,000 journal titles

▪40,000,000 journal articles

▪200,000 ebooks

▪64 journals have been triggered as open access

CLOCKSS is the first archive to be re-certified by the Council of Research Libraries for our Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC). Our score was upgraded for Organizational Infrastructure to the top score of 5. We maintained our top score of 5 for Technologies, Technical Infrastructure, Security. Our total score of 14 out of 15 is the highest score of any of the archives that have been certified.

https://www.clockss.org

as a motivator in turn, encouraging more regular deposits into DASH. For authors who are familiar with the repository and open access, the CV Scrape process mitigates complications and streamlines depositing.

Even though this process has many benefits, it also poses a few challenges. Some of the most common obstacles Fellows face when working through a CV Scrape include a lack of communication from authors, an author’s assumption that all scholarship on a CV can be made available in DASH, licensing that can often be difficult to determine (especially for older articles or journals), and the labor intensive nature of the process. Some scrapes demand a lengthy amount of time, which diverts attention away from other projects and pulls from Fellows’ limited availability.

The OSC continues to monitor ways to improve its mediated depositing service, in part by testing new applications and processes. Last year, Fellows tested the Open Access Permission Checker,6 then in its beta-form, and provided feedback and commentary on using the tool in the CV Scrape process. The Open Access Permission Checker was created by Our Research, a joint venture nonprofit co-founded by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem. The Checker was one aspect in the team’s larger project, Unpaywall, created to “help make scholarly research more open, accessible, and reusable.”7 The OSC also stays up to date on what processes are used by other colleges and

universities to build and enhance their repositories. Sharing feedback on ways to improve repository collections serves all institutions. The OSC would love to hear from you on how your scholarly communication office or repository managers are using CV Scrapes or other processes to populate collections in your institutional repository. Share your projects with us at <OSC@ harvard.edu>.

Endnotes

1. https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies/

2. https://osc-harvard.pubpub.org/pub/2m1q3hm6/release/2

3. Recently, the OSC has piloted and adopted a collaborative distributed workflow program that divides the work of repository deposits, metadata review, and licensing amongst groups of helpers located within the Harvard Library, the University’s school library units, and academic administrative staff. This program is called D3, or Distributed DASH Deposit. A 2018 DLF Forum presentation outlined this program: bit.ly/D3_DLF

4. In 2018, Harvard adopted an opt-in open-access policy for all non-faculty Harvard-affiliated authors, thereby giving all affiliates the same rights as those afforded under faculty-approved policies. Details of this new policy are outlined here: https://osc.hul.harvard. edu/policies/ioal/

5. https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/authors/cv-faq/

6. https://shareyourpaper.org

7. https://unpaywall.org/team

Biz

The Digital Toolbox: Case Studies, Best Practices and Data for the Academic Librarian — eBooks and Audiobooks Support Remote Learning in Time of Crisis

Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director and Business Development Executive, OverDrive Professional, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>

As colleges and universities adapt to new demands for services, eBooks and audiobooks thrive, supporting students, faculty, and staff at Swarthmore and Miami Dade colleges.

On March 13, when a national emergency was declared in the U.S. due to the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities across the country were forced to rapidly change the structure of their educational environment. Students completed their spring semester off-campus as in-person sessions were deemed unsafe. Six months later and schools are still navigating this new terrain as fall semesters begin.

Over the past few months, demand for digital content for education and recreation has increased, and academic librarians have adjusted to a remote learning environment by shifting focus and priorities to eBooks and audiobooks. Before the pandemic, many colleges and universities had already been using digital titles to supplement traditional print resources, both for educational and recreational purposes. But even for academic libraries that were already familiar with providing digital content, there were challenges and changes. Schools were not just responding to an increased need for digital content, but also to a need to overhaul their entire academic process completely. And nobody felt the pressure to provide access to digital resources to support remote learning more than academic librarians.

“Online Access Did Not Prepare Us For Online Learning”

For Maria Aghazarian, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Swarthmore College, nothing could have prepared her for the “rapid changes we had to make this spring,” she said.

Swarthmore, a private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, was founded in 1864 by the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, and was one of the earliest coeducational colleges in the U.S. The 425-acre campus, which boasts hiking trails, wooded hills, and a creek, has frequently been named one of “America’s Most Beautiful College Campuses” by Travel+Leisure magazine.

Prior to March 13, Swarthmore’s 1,500 full-time undergraduate students already had access to digital content that supported the school’s curricula of over 40 academic programs. With an OverDrive digital library, Swarthmore was able to customize its eBook and audiobook collection. Not just by title and format, but also the number of copies purchased. This ability to customize provides academic libraries maximum flexibility and efficiency, while users benefit from anytime-anywhere access to titles.

But as Aghazarian noted, “online access alone did not prepare us for online learning.”

In the first three months of the pandemic, Swarthmore’s library had 712 individual requests for digital copies of books. Requests covered everything from course reserves, honor exams, research, and personal use. The speed at which Aghazarian and her colleagues had to pivot to an online-only environment required developing a new workflow that “involves about a

dozen different staff members to triage requests, depending on the platform,” she said.

But adapting to this increased demand for digital created new challenges, especially when it came to creating a collection that met the new remote needs of Swarthmore’s students, faculty, and staff. “The usual factors we might consider when purchasing a book were suddenly more dire,” explained Aghazarian. Choosing the best lending model became paramount as each one affects how many users have access to a particular title at a given time.

OverDrive’s multiple lending models support a range of loan types, and for Aghazarian, choosing among these models provides an opportunity to expand access to titles. “The availability of class sets that can be assigned to students is a game changer,” she said. Right now, Swarthmore delays cataloging certain titles they purchase through OverDrive to guarantee titles are first available to students in a particular class. If Swarthmore were to add class sets, that concern would be alleviated.

Aghazarian also sees tremendous potential in other lending models Swarthmore does not yet buy, such as Cost-Per-Circ (CPC) and Simultaneous Use (SU). With CPC, libraries only pay for a title when a user checks it out, while SU titles can be checked out by an unlimited number of users simultaneously. She said that both of these options “provide greater flexibility as we prepare for the coming year.”

CPC can allow greater selection more efficiently because of the lower initial cost and the ability to set spending parameters to stay within the set budget. For example, colleges can offer an additional 300-400 titles while only paying for the ones that circ because the real cost is only a fraction (usually 10%) of the cost of purchasing outright. SU also offers potential savings by eliminating the need to buy multiple copies for a group or class reads, instead paying a per-student cost at a fraction of the price of a single copy.

“We Have Relied Heavily On Our Digital Book Collections”

Another school that has seen great success with its digital collection of eBooks and audiobooks is Miami Dade College (MDC). Located in South Florida, MDC is a public college founded in 1959. Comprised of eight campuses, it is one of the largest community colleges in the U.S. and home to a diverse student body.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Adria Leal, Librarian at the Wolfson Campus Library, recognized there were tangible benefits to digital content. Students have anytime-anywhere access to eBooks and audiobooks through OverDrive. Because the titles are digital, they don’t have to worry about carrying them around or needing to remember to return them. Library staff also benefit from a digital library. Along with eBooks and audiobooks not requiring any physical space in the library, the staff doesn’t have to worry about needing to replace lost or damaged items.

continued on page 69

Case Studies from the Field: Real-Life Perspectives ... from page 68

There is also no need for staff to handle the material, such as when physical books are returned and need to be checked back in, something of great concern among librarians during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While eBooks and audiobooks were an essential part of MDC’s collection of online resources before COVID-19, Leal said the popularity of digital content is even more evident now when access to the physical library is limited. “During these unprecedented times, we have relied on the use of our online learning resources and digital book collections,” Leal said. MDC’s collection is a mix of titles that fit course curriculum along with current bestsellers, both fiction and nonfiction. She added, “OverDrive has provided our students, faculty, and staff with a great choice of new material to meet their popular reading needs.” Indeed, MDC has consistently seen a positive trend in eBook and audiobook checkouts year over year, a trend that Leal believes will continue.

Part of MDC’s circulation success can be tied directly to their collection development policy, which relies heavily on recommendations from students, faculty, and staff. To streamline the recommendation process, MDC utilizes OverDrive’s Recommend to Library (RTL) feature. With RTL, if a user searches for a book on MDC’s OverDrive site and MDC doesn’t own it, the user has the option to notify MDC they would like this title to be added to MDC’s OverDrive collection.

MDC students are not the only ones who see the benefits to eBooks and audiobooks, said Leal. “Some of our faculty have used the

OverDrive collection for academic use as part of their reading material for some of the academic courses,” she explained. In some instances, students can choose to read a title in print, eBook, or listen to the audiobook version. Providing required reading in multiple formats supports different learning styles and increases a student’s odds for success.

Partnership Creates Path Forward

As colleges and universities continue to adapt to an everchanging remote learning landscape, digital collections will be crucial to the success of everyone as the schools identify a path forward. For both Swarthmore and Miami Dade, their relationship with OverDrive has created a remote learning environment that will allow their students, faculty, and staff to thrive in the upcoming academic year.

Leal points to OverDrive’s catalog of 3.1 million titles from over 30,000 premier publishers in more than 100 languages. OverDrive’s catalog has titles and publishers that are not available on any other platforms in a digital format. “The partnership between OverDrive and MDC Libraries has afforded a great variety of digital reading material made available in both eBook and audiobook format to our students and faculty,” Leal said. She also added that she appreciates how OverDrive has helped MDC promote reading during the pandemic.

Likewise, Aghazarian notes how partners like OverDrive have provided solutions to meet the needs of librarians during this time. “As we’ve worked to quickly adapt our resources and services, I’ve been heartened to see the ways that vendors have been doing the same, appreciating their flexibility and willingness to work with us,” she said.

Optimizing Library Services — Insights From a

Professor and Researcher

How Librarians and Doctoral Education Leadership Can Partner to Provide Stronger Programs During the “New Normal”

by Dr. Robin Throne, PhD (Independent Scholar, USA)

<robin.throne@gmail.com>

Column Editors: Ms. Brittany Haynes (Editorial Assistant, IGI Global) <bhaynes@igi-global.com>

and Ms. Lindsay Wertman (Managing Director, IGI Global) <lwertman@igi-global.com> www.igi-global.com

Column Editors’ Note: This column features IGI Global contributing author Dr. Robin Throne, independent scholar-researcher and author/editor of the highly cited IGI Global publications Autoethnography and Heuristic Inquiry for Doctoral-Level Researchers: Emerging Research and Opportunities, Practice-Based and Practice-Led Research for Dissertation Development, and Indigenous Research of Land, Self, and Spirit She outlines how librarians and doctoral educators can collaborate and pave the way for new solutions in the post-pandemic future and through the challenging upcoming semester in the midst of the “new normal.” — BH & LW

Doctoral education, like all other aspects of higher education, continues in a rapid, decision-making mode as to the instructional delivery methods and modalities for the 2020-2021 academic year amid a global pandemic. Whether the doctoral institution was previously solely on campus, fully online, or hybrid, the new academic year likely involves the expansion of digital library resource support in some manner to ensure quality levels of engagement and research productivity among doctoral scholars. Ideally, doctoral faculty, research supervisors, leadership, and program/course developers are essential partners with library and information science (LIS) professionals to ensure continued on page 70

quality levels for doctoral programs and the rigorous research doctoral scholars typically conduct.

For some, the pandemic has served to bolster collaboration, partnership, and innovation between all members of the doctoral learning community to ensure doctoral scholars, especially those who may have previously relied on face-to-face library research and subsequently faced zero-contact policies, remain engaged within the digital and virtual resources necessary to accomplish rigorous doctoral research. For others, the pandemic has simply firmed up collaboration, infrastructures, and emergent resource support that may have existed pre-pandemic but are now essential to a doctoral scholar’s success in the dissertation journey, capstone, or other forms of doctoral research. In many cases, this collaboration has served to strengthen the doctoral learning community and resulted in innovative or new approaches in the service of digital academic library research and research support.

Doctoral Collection Development, Library Research, and Scholarship Sourcing Instruction

Nothing can replace the LIS professional’s curation of academic databases for the university’s doctoral program (not to mention the dean or director’s eye on the collection budget). This vetting of academic databases can be enhanced by collaboration with doctoral faculty to assure expertise in the current research necessary for doctoral research within the discipline. This may include a review of the value of open access databases or other sources of research within the discipline. When lean library budgets result from the pandemic and post-pandemic era, collaboration with doctoral faculty can bolster limited financial resources and be essential to vet these OA-specific resources to appropriately expand doctoral library offerings. Doctoral program faculty can be an essential partner to LIS professionals to determine appropriate OA databases and OA journals relevant to specific disciplines. As Tikam (2018) emphasized, open and available current research is necessary to the scholarly community but must also be carefully considered for inclusion in academic libraries due to the complex intellectual property considerations involved with digital access and fair use.

Similarly, it often takes the triad instruction from LIS professionals, doctoral faculty, and the doctoral research supervisor as doctoral students evolve into more sophisticated users of digital access to current research sources. Thus, another essential collaboration between LIS professionals and doctoral faculty can be the opportunities these faculty can bring to library instructional processes. As doctoral students may rely on open sources easily attained from the internet, scholarship sourcing instruction is necessary to ensure doctoral scholars understand the distinctions between credible and reliable research versus non-peer-reviewed research. As Tang and Zhang (2019) stressed, complex research support services is a new digital frontier for many universities and relies on the “wisdom/skills and expertise of librarians” (p. 22) and the collective expertise from LIS professionals in collaboration with doctoral faculty may expand this wisdom for the benefit of doctoral students.

Thus, the collaboration between the doctoral program faculty and LIS professionals may enhance doctoral student instruction for not only scholarship sourcing but also research support that includes the many digital applications and tools used for citation management, data collection and analysis, and data transcription. These digital tools are updated and discontinued on a regular basis, so it is also essential that the student users of these tools have

direct communication or feedback mechanisms to the university owners of the digital access to these resources, whether they be classroom based or integrated within a university digital library space. Nickels and Davis (2020) also recommended expanding collaboration in the doctoral learning community to include other university areas, such as the institutional review board (IRB), to enhance and synchronize research support workshops and other learning events or resources. For example, as university libraries face the new post-pandemic normal, evaluation of the research instruction offered historically across various university departments may be necessary to eliminate overlapping instruction, the center for teaching and learning, student affairs, the IRB, or other departments may offer that the library also provides. A doctoral faculty member may have digitized instruction for research skills, such as citation management or literature review sourcing strategies. Therefore, a concerted collaborative effort to centralize these virtual offerings or webinars specific to various research skills, and eliminate duplication and bring economic efficiencies, may evolve into another valuable outcome of such essential collaborations between LIS professionals and doctoral faculty.

Indexing Doctoral Faculty and Doctoral Scholars

A vibrant doctoral learning community highlights the expertise of not only the doctoral faculty across the institution, but also highlights the advancing expertise of doctoral scholars and the dissemination of their graduate research. Again, with the new post-pandemic normal, virtual or digital opportunities for students may require a new definition for what constitutes the doctoral learning community across the university. As these doctoral scholars move from the margins of the doctoral community to the center, LIS professionals can partner with doctoral faculty to ensure doctoral student research is highlighted in respective platforms.

While many institutions offer digital calendars for the milestone of the dissertation or other research defense or presentation, others offer more expanded highlights to exhibit virtual conference presentations or promote other presentations and publications of both doctoral scholars and faculty across the institution. When LIS professionals offer intentional collaboration with the doctoral program and doctoral faculty, doctoral scholars are better served by the ongoing dissemination of their graduate research throughout their time at the university.

A collaboration that promotes the work of doctoral scholars and gives voice to academic successes of doctoral alumni can enhance not only the doctoral learning community but also elevate the doctoral researcher’s agency and academic identity throughout the doctoral program. For example, Belikov and Kimmons (2019) reported technology-mediated scholarship has a direct influence on the development of academic identity and may enable scholars to more readily participate in public spheres when multiple avenues are presented. Through the collaboration of LIS professionals, doctoral faculty, and leadership, these avenues may continue to strengthen a doctoral learning community and thereby advance doctoral scholar agency and academic identity.

Institutional Dissertation Repositories

Doctoral scholars may have relied on the university LIS staff early on to gain advice and direction to locate recently published dissertations that were supervised by their doctoral research supervisor or committee members. Thus, they and their supervisors may have directed them to these repositories so they may already have familiarity with sourcing techniques and strategies for dissertation repositories. Yet, these experiences do not always prepare them for their own preparation for dissertation manuscript publication continued on page 71

Optimizing Library Services from page 70

to the repository and the university’s policies on the requirements to do so, and thus, they may reach out for guidance from LIS staff if the university library is involved in this process.

This post-defense phase of doctoral study is again an ideal segue into collaboration between the many members of the doctoral learning community to ensure the student is not lost in the gap between the academic program and library services or other areas involved in the dissemination of the dissertation manuscript and requirements for inclusion in the institutional repository. The doctoral dissertation community may have already offered the congratulations to the new terminally degreed student; yet, the dissemination of the dissertation manuscript to the respective repository(ies) can bring another celebratory step in the transformation of the doctoral scholar who may or may not be versed at this phase in the entrance to the scholarly community.

Thus, the opportunity for LIS professional instruction again arises as many doctoral scholars may comprehend further the distinctions between open access dissertation repositories and those that may be provided via a commercial database as well as the university’s expectations for the availability of doctoral research from its doctoral program graduates. When face-to-face services are limited or reduced in the new normal, doctoral students may visit the virtual accessibility offered by LIS professionals if the research supervisor, doctoral faculty, or graduate program services previously accessed in person become restricted. Again, intentional collaboration with dissertation research supervisors may enhance procedures for doctoral students in the important phase of dissertation manuscript publication to repositories. This may again result in an intentional collaboration between library and faculty that enhances ongoing digital procedures for this important component of the doctoral scholar’s program culmination. Many institutions have benefited over the past two decades from the disruptive technologies surrounding digital dissertation repositories including electronic approvals, gatekeeping access and distribution, and accessibility of university research products for students and alumni. Accordingly, pandemic-facilitated reviews of existing repository procedures may reveal additional efficiencies for LIS professionals in collaboration with other staff and doctoral faculty.

Conclusion

The doctoral learning community is comprised of many members at its center and all members have a key role in bringing doctoral scholars from the periphery of this community to the center. Thus, a community constructed on a solid collaborative digital infrastructure between LIS professionals and other members of the doctoral community is essential, especially in times of great change or flux. The value of LIS professionals’ partnerships with doctoral program leadership, doctoral faculty and research supervisors, peer students, and even alumni cannot be overstated and are necessary to the evolution of a doctoral scholar’s researcher agency to move from the margins of the community to the center to ensure persistence and completion of the terminal degree program. Ideally, this enhanced agency and academic identity allows them to be prepared for ongoing research and post-doc engagement within the larger scholarly publishing community.

References

Belikov, O. and Kimmons, R. M. (2019). Scholarly Identity in an Increasingly Open and Digitally Connected World. In Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A., M. (Ed.), Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Li-

brary Science, Information Management, and Scholarly Inquiry (pp. 579-588). IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-7659-4.ch046

Nickels, C. and Davis, H. (2020). Understanding researcher needs and raising the profile of library research support. Insights, 33(1). http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.493

Tang, Y. and Zhang, C. (2019). Development and Practice of Research Support Services in Peking University Library. International Journal of Library and Information Services (IJLIS), 8(2), 22-39. doi:10.4018/IJLIS.2019070102

Tikam, M. (2018). Connection, Collaboration, and Community: Creative Commons. International Journal of Library and Information Services (IJLIS), 7(1), 30-43. doi:10.4018/IJLIS.2018010103

Resources

American Library Association. (2020). Communities of practice. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/llama/communities.

EBSCO Information Resources . (2020). EBSCO open dissertations. Retrieved from https://www.ebsco.com/products/ research-databases/ebsco-open-dissertations.

University of Chicago Library. (2020). Citation management: How to use citation managers such as EndNote and Zotero. Retrieved from https://guides.lib.uchicago.edu/c.php?g=297307&p=1984557.

University of Texas Arlington Libraries. (2020). Research data services. Retrieved from https://libraries.uta.edu/research/ scholcomm/data.

Recommended Readings

Inyang, O. G. (2022). Mentoring: A tool for successful collaboration for library and information science (LIS) educators. International Journal of Library and Information Services (IJLIS), 11(1), 1-12. doi:10.4018/IJLIS.20220101.oa1

Kaushik, A., Kumar, A. and Biswas, P. (2020). Handbook of research on emerging trends and technologies in library and information science. IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-9825-1

Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A., M. (2019). Advanced methodologies and technologies in library science, Information Management, and scholarly inquiry. IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-7659-4 Management Association, I. (2020). Digital libraries and institutional Repositories: Breakthroughs in research and practice. IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-2463-3

Olszewski, C. A., Znamenak, K. A., Paoletta, T. M., Hansman, C. A., Selker, M. L., Coffman, K. A. and Pontikos, K. B. (2020). The development of a doctoral program CoP and its members. International Journal of Adult Education and Technology (IJAET), 11(2), 1-13. doi:10.4018/IJAET.2020040101

Shirazi, R. (2018). The doctoral dissertation and scholarly communication: Adapting to changing publication practices among graduate students. College & Research Libraries News, 79(1). https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.79.1.34

Column Editors’ End Note: Understanding the increased demand for open access resources during this time and to support the collaboration between researchers, librarians, and publishers, IGI Global offers their OA Fee Waiver Initiative. Under this initiative, institutions that invest in any of IGI Global’s InfoSci-Databases (including InfoSci-Books, InfoSci-Journals, and the new InfoSci-Knowledge Solutions databases), will receive an additional source of OA funding to go toward subsidizing the OA article processing charges (APCs) and OA book processing charges (BPCs) for their students, faculty, and staff at that institution when their work is submitted and accepted under OA (following peer review) into an IGI Global journal or book. Learn more about this initiative at https://bit.ly/33ZEt3e

Both Sides Now: Vendors and Librarians — Virtually, Yours

Column Editor: Michael Gruenberg (Managing Partner, Gruenberg Consulting, LLC) <michael.gruenberg@verizon.net> www.gruenbergconsulting.com

Last week, I attended my first “virtual” library trade show. For someone like myself who has spent the last 40+ years in the information industry attending association trade shows in the U.S., Mexico and Europe, just the thought of attending a gathering of library clients and prospects other than seeing them on a face-to-face seemed challenging. As the weeks prior to the show dwindled to a precious few, our internal meetings on how to prepare for a virtual show always ended with the phrase, “Well, we will see what happens.”

Before we knew that this librarian association decided to go virtual, we had anticipated the usual machinations of making plane and hotel reservations, arranging and conducting a “lunch and learn” with one of our top editors of a popular journal and spent time figuring out what giveaway would be best suited for our booth visitors. And of course, once all the arrangements for travel were made and all the booth logistics were agreed upon, the organization contacted us and told us not to take a plane, not to make a hotel reservation, forget that trendy restaurant in the host city and to inform the editor that there would be no in-person lunch and learn since they were going VIRTUAL. Furthermore, we really did not have a significant amount of time between the time we were informed of the decision to go virtual in relation to when the show was slated to begin. Perhaps that was a good thing because we really did not have a lot of time to question the decision. We just knew that we had to attend since the association represented a core audience for the journals that we produce.

To prepare, we designed a “virtual booth” which basically took a visitor to a version of our web page. It was designed to be fully functional allowing the visitor to click into and download product brochures and our catalog and leave questions for us to answer. Additionally, included were the names and pictures of the company representatives that would attend the virtual booth. And when the visitor hovered over the picture of the company reps, a schedule appeared informing them of when that representative would be available via video chat along with their contact information. So, each day of the show for my assigned times of participation, as a rep of the company, I logged into the virtual booth, clicked onto a URL and there I was on a video screen sitting at my desk in my home/office ready to answer questions, process orders or just say “hi.”

Logistically, the association was extremely helpful. There was the name of a contact person that we could contact at any time and more often than not that person cheerfully answered whatever technical questions I had. Given that my technical skills are somewhat lacking, having a person to shepherd me through technology issues was most appreciated.

Both the library association and my publisher client were in the unchartered waters of virtual trade show management. Nether party really knew what to expect. As a result, we literally learned together and from each other on how to make this

virtual attendance work for both of us. The acid test of any trade show for a publisher is how many leads were gathered, which of those leads were “hot” and what issues were dealt with at the show. Quite frankly, our results of attendance were quite like the in-person amount we collected a year ago at the same trade show. We surmised the leads that were “hot” by virtue of the aspect that some people clicked into the virtual booth multiple times and that some people asked for a representative to contact them after the show.

The big missing for me is the absence of the one-on-one conversation. Many times, over the years, casual conversations at trade shows led to significant orders. Conversely, some conversations at shows led to unearthing some difficulties that subsequently were solved. Unfortunately, in a virtual environment, unless there is a conversation with a video of each person, I was unable to observe body language, see the facial expressions and ask the questions to ascertain needs. In that respect, the virtual booth is somewhat lacking. However, if the level of leads of interest by the prospects are good, then I would have to overlook the missing of face-to -face discussions.

Much like 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused us to alter our thinking and reexamine how we conduct our lives both in personal and business environments. We recovered, as a nation from 9/11 and never went back to traveling or entering office buildings as we did prior to that incredibly horrible event in our nation’s history. COVID-19 has had a similar impact on our lives. In both cases, we all know people who died as a result of those two events. Our job is to learn from the current pandemic and guide ourselves accordingly in the future.

Virtual trade shows, the wearing of masks and social distancing is the result of the pandemic, much the same that increased security at airports and office buildings in our cities was a direct result of 9/11. We learn, we adapt, and we grow.

Any association that conducts trade shows has or will ultimately explore the positives and negatives of conducting their meetings in a virtual manner. It is all about change and adapting to the paradigm that is set before us. For the association, there are serious technical issues that need to be dealt with. The most crucial is figuring out how to make the virtual booth experience as close as possible to the in-person booth experience. The technology is there. The sales reps need to be assured that the face-to-face aspect of the show is a seamless one and that both the vendor and the customer can communicate as though they were standing next to each other. If Zoom can do it, so must the association.

The question is how to make it work. In our first virtual experience, the association worked hard to answer our questions and assure us that they were willing to help in any way possible to make this a positive experience for their vendor community. continued on page 73

Both Sides Now: Vendors and Librarians from page 72

Moreover, they were willing to devote a contact person available to answer any questions that were technical in nature. For me, that aspect of the viability of a virtual booth was answered with flying colors. My colleague at the company who planned all the aspects of our attendance reported that the association was most helpful every step of the way leading us to our attendance.

As stated earlier, the attendance of this virtual trade show just a few weeks ago was a learning experience for both the vendor and the association. Both the association and the vendor will have their post-mortem meetings and go over what was right and what was not. The discussions of what to do in 2021 have already begun on both sides of the aisle. As a consultant to this publisher, we have already decided that if the association trade show is relevant to our market and if the decision is to go virtual, we will be there.

For all of us, the concept of “change” is exceedingly difficult to embrace. The only person who likes and expects change is a wet baby. For a business, if you are doing business today the same way you did it six months ago, you are probably out of step and losing ground to your competitors. In the association business, virtual trade shows are here and will only grow more popular in the ensuing years as the technology improves and vendors and associations realize the cost savings that will undoubtedly be enjoyed in the virtual arena. For the library, change in technology is an integral part of your daily lives. Embracing the virtual trade show experience is part of the deal. For all market segments, the Nike slogan, “Just do it” should be applied for everyone’s benefit. Be safe out there!

Mike is currently the Managing 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

Rumors from page 55

practical information and ideas for refining their strategies and adjusting expectations when integrating eBooks into their acquisitions workflow. https://www.choice360.org/research/ ebook-collection-development-in-academic-libraries-examining-preference-management-and-purchasing-patterns/

Against the Grain has just published a guest post by Brewster Kahle “On Bookstores, Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age.” https://www.against-the-grain.com/2020/09/ on-bookstores-libraries-archives-in-the-digital-age-an-atgguest-post/

continued on page 77

Serving the information needs of scientific and biomedical communities worldwide since 1987, the IOS Press portfolio of international peer-reviewed journals and books covers subjects ranging from computer science, artificial intelligence, and engineering to medicine, neuroscience,

Featured Journals

The LYRASIS Diversity, Equity and Inclusion 2020 Survey Report: Findings and Takeaways

by Hannah Rosen (Strategist, Research and Scholarly Communication at LYRASIS)

This past year we have seen social unrest foment across the country, highlighting the racial injustice still inherent to policing, economic opportunity, the availability of medical treatment, and almost every other aspect of American life. Every institution, no matter how well-intentioned, has been forced to recognize that their policies and activities may inadvertently create, rather than lower, barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Libraries are no different. There is a dearly held assumption in the library world that libraries, due to their central mission of providing unfettered access to information, are naturally inclusive institutions, welcoming both users and staff from all types of diverse backgrounds. However, this assumption, like so many assumptions about American society, must be continually re-assessed. From a hiring standpoint alone, the library profession is not diverse: the Ithaka S+R survey, “Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity: Members of the Association of Research Libraries,” (https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/inclusion-diversity-and-equity-arl/) published in August 2017, found that 71% of staff in responding ARLs are White, with 8% Black or African American; 8% Asian; 6% Hispanic or Latinx; 5% decline to comment; 1% two or more races; and less than 1% for American Indian or Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have gained traction as core values to reexamine both internally and externally within libraries over the last several years and have proven even more relevant in 2020. In August of 2020 LYRASIS Research released its DEI Survey Report (https://www.lyrasis.org/programs/Pages/ DEI-Survey-Report.aspx), an attempt to provide a snapshot of library policies and activities surrounding DEI. This article will briefly explain the background of the report, and some of its overall findings.

LYRASIS Research

LYRASIS Research began in 2019 as an effort to identify trends across the over 1,000 libraries, archives and museums within the LYRASIS membership. Due to the large size of our membership, we believed that we could map the landscape of policies and activities across GLAM institutions by soliciting member feedback to provide a 30,000 foot view of different topics that affect the profession.

In 2019, we designed, conducted and released the Accessibility Survey Report, which identified major trends in policies and activities surrounding accessibility for online library materials. In May 2020, LYRASIS Research became an official part of our new Research and Innovation Division, and we went a step further; we asked the top tier of our membership, the Leaders Circle, to identify their most desired survey topics. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) was one of the two topics chosen, along with open content. After choosing the topics, Zoom meetings were conducted with the Leaders Circle to narrow down the foci of each chosen topic, and volunteers proofread the surveys before they were distributed to the membership. We are pleased to say that the 2020 DEI Survey Report has been a truly collaborative effort.

Survey Response

The survey was conducted between April and June of 2020. After data clean-up, the survey yielded 159 responses. The majority of respondents were academic libraries. Within academic libraries, approximately 8% of respondents represented Associate’s or Associate’s dominant colleges, 16% represented Baccalaureate colleges, 18% of respondents represented Master’s colleges and universities, and 37% of respondents represented doctoral universities.

The authors speculate that due to the sensitive nature of the survey topic, a certain level of selection bias is present in the results. Many respondents appeared to be quite actively involved in DEI activities. This selection bias should be taken into account when viewing the responses.

The survey was divided into three sections: policy and infrastructure; recruiting, hiring and retaining a diverse staff; and building/maintaining collections.

Policy and Infrastructure

The majority of respondents, 47%, have a formal policy that specifically addresses DEI policies and objectives within their institution, while 14% have an informal policy (aka an intention or assumed directive, but not necessarily a written, institutionalized objective). In total, over 61% of all respondents have some form of DEI policy, and this was reflected across all institution types. Respondents were asked to provide open-ended examples of these policies, and those answers are included as examples in the report.

We also asked if institutions have performed climate surveys, aka conducting an anonymous survey within an institution, to gauge “the climate” of the environment in terms of DEI. The largest group of survey respondents for this question, 45%, have not performed a climate survey of their users. Broken down by demographic groups, Baccalaureate colleges in the survey appear to be an anomaly — they are more likely to have performed climate surveys of their users than both their academic and non-academic counterparts. Respondents were also asked if they had performed a climate survey of their staff, and, very similarly, only 43% had performed a climate survey of their staff.

continued on page 75

Finally, institutions were asked if they had one or more DEI committees. Most academic libraries have at least one DEI committee, with doctoral universities being more likely to have multiple committees within their libraries and/or participate in a DEI committee within their parent entity. Of all academic libraries, the masters colleges and universities were least likely to have a DEI committee within their library.

Recruiting, Hiring and Retaining a Diverse Staff

The majority of respondents said that their strategic plans include actions for recruiting a diverse staff. This was consistent across all academic library types.

Respondents were asked what strategies they employ to improve diversity amongst new hires. The most popular selections were 1) place job postings in outlets targeting underrepresented groups in libraries 2) develop and implement inclusive job descriptions, and 3) develop and implement inclusive search and appraisal processes. Less popular options were creating student/ intern diversity residency positions and creating staff diversity residency positions. This could potentially be due to the fact that diversity residencies require extra financial resources, whereas the other options require changes in behavior, but no strain on financial outputs.

Sexual harassment and discrimination were the top two most popular topics covered in DEI training. The authors speculate that this could be due to the legal penalties associated with the two topics. Sexual harassment and discrimination represent the main areas where institutions can be liable to litigation from employees, so the emphasis on these topics could be linked to training mandated by a parent institution, or preventative measures.

Respondents were asked what initiatives they have undertaken to make their physical spaces more inclusive. The most popular initiatives from survey respondents were creating gender neutral bathrooms, lactations rooms or spaces, and creating or changing wall art to increase a range of representation.

Maintaining/Building Diverse Collections

Unlike other areas of DEI work, only a small percentage of institutions, 18%, said that they have a formal DEI directive for their circulating collections, and only 11% have a formal DEI directive for unique collections. At this time, collections represent a lower priority for DEI work within the academic libraries surveyed. Of those respondents who do have mandates for their collections, they indicated doing a wide range of activities related to collecting policies, metadata creation and programming highlighting diverse collections.

Takeaways

Looking at the results of the survey, there are a few main takeaways. The libraries surveyed are actively thinking about DEI in many aspects of their work. However, current actions may only translate to surface work, rather than deep engagement with DEI. Upon deeper investigation, excavating the responses and carefully examining the nuances of open-ended questions, libraries are not necessarily doing the more difficult work to move the needle to a truly more diverse, inclusive, and equitable environment. Recruitment initiatives are more popular when they require less staff time and monetary resources; the important work of DEI training is popular, but more often optional, rather than required. Relatively few respondents are conducting the types of climate surveys which can reveal systemic issues.

One of the most interesting findings of the survey was related to DEI focused training/professional development. Respondents were asked which kinds of training options were provided to staff at their institutions. The top three most popular forms of training were all optional: optional in-person training, optional literature/ reading guides, and optional online training. Mandatory training, whether in-person or online, is less popular amongst academic libraries. The authors theorized that mandatory trainings were either difficult to enforce or the most monetarily resource-intensive forms of training, and therefore less popular forms of training.

It is our hope that this report will be useful on multiple levels. For those institutions that have been doing DEI work for some time, it is an opportunity to benchmark against your peers. For those institutions just beginning to create DEI policies, or those looking for new ideas, the report is a good roadmap for strategic thinking, and provides many examples of different policies and initiatives to consider. We at LYRASIS are not an exception: we face the same issues as our member libraries, and we do not have all the answers. What we do have is the ability to provide a space to have the conversation.

Librarian Engagement at the University of Minnesota

by Jennie M. Burroughs (Interim Co-Associate University Librarian for Research & Learning, University of Minnesota) <jburroug@umn.edu>

Against the Grain is pleased to include the following two additional articles on “Innovative Staffing Models at Academic Libraries” that were intended for the September 2020 ATG issue: Librarian Engagement at the University of Minnesota, by Jennie M. Burroughs (Interim Co-Associate Librarian for Research and Learning) and We all serve: Library-wide Distributed Desk Service, by Bo Baker (Public & Research Services Dept. Head, UTC Library, University of Tennessee Chattanooga) and Theresa Liedtka (UTC Library, Dean).

Emphasis on Engagement

Wendy Lougee wrote in 2002 about libraries becoming collaborators within the academy and librarians as diffuse agents, engaged with the mission of the university (Lougee, 4, 2002). Almost twenty years on, the University of Minnesota continues to value librarian outreach and engagement throughout the academic community. As accessing, structuring, and evaluating information is essential to all disciplines in the information age, the expertise of librarians goes beyond knowledge of information sources and collections to include understanding the evolving research practices, pedagogy, and goals of the departments and colleges with which they work. The positioning of the library on campus enables considerable expertise with interdisciplinary practices and an overarching understanding of the production of knowledge.

The current innovation from subject and specialist librarians stems less from staffing structures and more from the opportunities identified by librarians who are deeply engaged throughout the university. This engagement allows the librarians and the library as an organization to shape information expertise and services to the distinct needs of disciplines, research centers, and communities of students. The relationships developed between liaison librarians and the faculty, staff, and students in their assigned academic departments have been at the heart of some of the most meaningful innovations in services for research and learning.

A Streamlined Liaison Librarian Framework

In 2009, Karen Williams outlined a position framework with ten areas of focus, describing the range of work and advocacy encompassed by subject liaison roles. The liaison librarian framework has gone through multiple revisions at Minnesota, but the structure of a point person for a department who possesses “both subject expertise and strong knowledge of the interests, activities, and priorities of local faculty and academic departments” remains in place (Williams, 2009). In 2013, Janice Jaguszewski and Karen Williams surveyed the field and noted that liaison work had evolved to commonly include two roles, “that of advocate and of consultant.” The librarian’s positioning as a campus connector and expert on information production and curation makes him a frequent “ambassador of change” on campus (Jaguszewski, 2013).

In 2019, the framework for liaison librarian positions at Minnesota went through another iteration. The directors and

associate university librarians for the Research & Learning and Health Science Libraries divisions worked together to streamline the position elements to four core areas: Engagement & Partnership; Teaching & Learning; Research Services; and Collection Development. There are additional modules to include for specific assignments in some individual’s positions, such as collection coordinator, data curation specialist, research services coordinator, teaching and learning coordinator, and branch library leadership.

Included for the first time in the position description, there is a section incorporating service to the university and professional contributions, which are typically evaluated separately and key to the library’s continuous appointment process. This inclusion reflects that this work is also a core part of a librarian’s work. Also fundamental to positions is equity and inclusion work, which is embedded within the core elements by calling out the importance of connection with scholars from diverse communities and cultures.

The focus of this latest iteration is on flexibility and disciplinary differences. It describes the high level activities, desired outcomes of positions, and the impact on users, recognizing that there are multiple ways to accomplish this work. The emphasis is on the librarian’s connector role, appreciating that relationships — built through attendance at department talks, regular emails, on-site office hours — create opportunities to partner. The librarian’s attention to the information issues, research and teaching trends, and priorities in a discipline allows him to communicate resources and expertise in ways that resonate.

Disciplines Informing Services and Investments

Through their attention to the edges of disciplines, the changes in research practice, the roadblocks, and the information problems, liaison librarians have become instigators of new library services and programs. They have developed or identified programs through that knowledge of not only subject collections but of subject practices.

Two examples demonstrate how this works in practice. The Bio-Med Library had long offered a systematic review service, which aligned with a common methodology in the health sciences. Megan Kocher, librarian for several departments in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources Sciences, noticed an increase in the number of requests for help with systematic reviews and meta-analyses from her departments, and Amy Riegelman, Social Sciences Librarian, saw similar interest in her departments, particularly Psychology (Riegelman & Kocher, 2018). This trend also aligned with discourse about reproducibility in the social sciences. They pitched an investigation of a potential library service in systematic reviews and evidence synthesis that went beyond the health sciences and developed a cohort to support this methodological need. They have experimented with different levels of support for the service, have become instrumental to teaching this methodology to students in their disciplines, continued on page 77

Librarian Engagement at the University of Minnesota from page 76

and have co-authored systematic review articles with faculty members on multiple occasions.

Business librarians Mary Schoenborn and Caroline Lilyard work closely with experiential learning components of the Carlson School of Management. They serve as research consultants in the Masters of Supply Chain capstone course and work with multiple project teams of students as they develop cases for partner corporations. Similarly, these liaison librarians are integrated with the school’s Enterprise Programs, helping student teams working with corporate clients to understand the methods of market research using secondary sources and the tools afforded by the library. The librarians develop customized approaches with each student team, ensuring they understand these information practices. The librarians rightfully describe this as “high-touch, high-value work.”

Due to this high level of engagement by librarians, students and faculty knew where to turn for help as we all made the rapid shift to online learning and working remotely in spring 2020. Some librarians who were teaching research methods courses and sections of other required courses had to make the same hard pivot to remote teaching as other instructors. Liaison librarians reported a high number of online consultations with students as the semester drew to a close, and the library’s chat reference service handled a record number of questions. Even though our library buildings closed, faculty knew they could get in touch with their library contacts for troubleshooting, facilitating online content for courses, and embedding tutorials and exercises into the campus learning management system.

Value of Engagement

The sustainability of partnerships at a large research organization is a recurring question at the library. High touch engagement is hard to extend, and prioritization of effort can be difficult. Part of recognizing disciplinary differences is recognizing that some library services vary in relevance by discipline or look different depending on the discipline. This recognition supports liaison librarians as they prioritize elements of their work based on academic department needs and interests. However, part of this prioritization means setting boundaries on services, watching capacity, and saying “no” when partnership doesn’t make sense. It means focusing teaching efforts on high impact learning experiences and utilizing integrated online learning objects in other cases. It means utilizing automated collection development mechanisms when possible and delving into selection in targeted ways and priority areas.

Using a network approach to research and teaching services has also proven essential. Jaguszewski and Williams (2013)

discuss the collaboration imperative for complex initiatives and cross-campus support. There is underlying value in recognizing that other units on campus are similarly engaged with students, faculty, academic departments, and colleges. Partnering with academic technologists, instructional designers, research computing, and research centers enables stable and deep support for the research and teaching enterprise as a whole.

This is not particularly novel, and the liaison role is no longer “new.” However, what is continually innovative is what deep engagement with disciplines and their scholars affords: an ongoing attention to disciplinary shifts, nuances, and problem areas that allows a library to adapt to current and forecasted needs. The innovation stems from the partnership with campus scholars, at all levels and from multiple backgrounds, and positioning the library as a colleague in change.

References

Jaguszewski, J., and Williams, K. (2013). New Roles for New Times: Transforming Liaison Roles in Research Libraries. Lougee, W., and Council on Library Information Resources. (2002). Diffuse libraries: Emergent roles for the research library in the digital age (Perspectives on the evolving library). Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources.

Riegelman, A., and Kocher, M. (2018). A Model for Developing and Implementing a Systematic Review Service or Disciplines outside of the Health Sciences. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 58(1), 22-27.

Williams, K. (2009), A Framework for Articulating New Library Roles. Research Library Issues: A Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 265 (August 2009): 3-8. http:// www.arl.org/resources/pubs/rli/archive/rli265.shtml

Name of university or college: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Website: https://www.lib.umn.edu/

Carnegie classification: Doctoral Universities: Very High Research Activity

Number of undergraduates: 31,455

Number of graduates: 16,038

Number of faculty: 3,965

Highest degree offered: PhD

Name of library: University of Minnesota Libraries

FTE librarians: 140

Other FTE staff : 143

Library annual budget: 43 million

Annual circulation: 150,711

Annual gate entries: 1.6 million

Physical service points in the library: 12 locations

Rumors from page 73

Parneshia Jones, an editor for Northwestern University Pres s for the last two decades, was recently named its new director, according to a news release. NUP is the scholarly and trade

publishing arm of Northwestern, printing works in everything from philosophy to fiction to literary criticism. The Press’s imprint TriQuarterly Books is dedicated to publishing contemporary American fiction and poetry. An Evanston native, Jones joined NUP in 2003 as a marketing assistant and rose in the ranks at the pub-

lication over the years. According to the release, Jones revitalized TriQuarterly Books by developing its award-winning poetry list. “She is the ideal leader both to build on NUP’s traditional strengths and to continue the advances that the Press has made in Black studies, critical ethnic

continued on page 83

We All Serve: Library-wide Distributed Desk Service

by Bo Baker, MLIS (Public & Research Services Dept. Head, UTC Library, University of Tennessee Chattanooga) <bo-baker@utc.edu>

and Theresa Liedtka, MLIS (Dean, UTC Library) <Theresa-Liedtka@utc.edu>

Philosophy and Initiation

Staffing responsibilities and models create and shape a library culture and its operations. The premise of this article is that the distribution of core responsibilities across all staff members supports needed library-wide operations and enhances library culture. The UTC Library model is straightforward: all personnel work at a service desk. Personnel reporting in the service desk’s home department provide core hours and services, and staff from around the library supplement by contributing a regular weekly shift of one or two hours. The resulting shared responsibilities create a community of practice, allow for the utilization of both core and specialized professional responsibilities, and provide a common work experience for everyone.

In 2004, the University of Tennessee Chattanooga (UTC) Lupton Library employed 26 FTE staff specialists and faculty librarians and ran a traditional desk staffing model. Six Reference Librarians shared responsibility for staffing the Reference Desk. The Access Services Department, staffed by one librarian and six staff members, was responsible for the Circulation Desk. Prompted by the hiring of a new Dean and vocal interest from campus administration and faculty stakeholders, the Library began a process of changing its existing service model. Following a task force and many twists and turns including numerous open forums and meetings with academic departments, the Library launched new Reference and Circulation Desk staffing models in 2006 along with other changes to refocus operations and culture. In the new model, all faculty librarians were asked to work at the Reference Desk and all staff specialists asked to work at the Circulation Desk.

The decision to share desk responsibilities across personnel marked a conscious shift to operations that emphasized and valued library-wide work, while continuing to value specialized job responsibilities. First, these new responsibilities were written into position descriptions. Then they were integrated into the Library’s annual performance evaluation form with a unique, yearly goal that incorporates desk service into other library-wide support such as outreach, collection development, and other institutional goals. As a result, all Library personnel have specialized job responsibilities, such as a University Archivist, alongside broad library-wide responsibilities that recognize the importance and stress the intertwined nature of library operations. A physical shift occurred as well. The Reference Desk was moved closer to the entrance of the Library and, thus, closer to the Circulation Desk making for easy referrals from one point to the other.

The implementation was direct. A list of needed skills and knowledge was developed for each desk to inform participants of service expectations, such as knowledge of Library and University policies and procedures, knowledge of library databases and appropriate search techniques, and circulation functions. Personnel received training from home departments. Still, the transition was met with anxiety in some cases. Some technical services librarians expressed a discomfort in working with the public. In cases such as these, librarians were paired with experienced reference librarians for observation and knowledge growth for a time, then given shifts at less busy times of day. Other

librarians expressed concern about a slow-down or productivity reduction in their primary responsibilities. In this case, librarians were asked to have an open mind, see the potential positive new learning and community benefits, and asked to track discernible project and other work slow-downs as a result of the shift to be mitigated. This model remained in place and unaltered for the next 10 years.

Maintaining Through Change

Renovation, addition, and new construction yield seismic implications to a library’s overall services. At UTC, a $50 million investment in an all-new library predicated on the concepts of libraries serving as collaborative, dynamic, third spaces opened for the Spring 2015 semester. The new UTC Library grew by most metrics and accommodated more technology, study space, inclusion of other campus offices, and growth in new library services.

The impact on the main service desks became apparent within the first semester. Whereas the Circulation and Reference desks in Lupton Library were set within 40 feet of each other, their rebranded equivalents, the Check Out and Information desks respectively, exist on separate floors. Upon entering the new facility, patrons immediately see a battleship of a Check Out desk and expect this to be the place where all questions get answered. A large desk must surely have all the answers. Similarly, the Information desk that adjoins 175 PCs (the largest lab on campus) receives less in-depth research questions in lieu of directional and low- level tech questions. Finally, a significant expansion of private study rooms and conference continued on page 79

Figure 1: Comparison of metrics between Lupton Library in its last full academic year and UTC Library in its first full academic year

Essential reading from berghahn

GOING FORWARD BY LOOKING BACK

Archaeological Perspectives on Socio-Ecological Crisis, Response, and Collapse

Edited by Felix Riede and Payson Sheets

This book catalogues a wide range of case studies of catastrophes and human responses. This heritage of past disasters serves as inspiration for building culturally sensitive adaptions to present and future calamities, to mitigate their impacts, and facilitate recoveries.

Catastrophes in Context Series

ENGAGING WITH CHAUCER

Practice, Authority, Reading

Edited by C.W.R.D. Moseley

This volume represents an homage to a toweringly great poet, as well as an acknowledgement of the intellectual excitement, challenges, and pleasure that readers owe to him as even today, his poems have the capacity to change the way we engage with fundamental questions of knowledge, understanding, and beauty.

THE PARADOXICAL REPUBLIC

Austria 1945–2020

Oliver Rathkolb

“A fine and powerful book with many new insights…fills a major gap in the literature and deserves to be read widely.” • European History

Quarterly

We All Serve: Library-wide Distributed Desk Service from page 78

rooms made it nearly everyone’s business to understand the room reservation process and how to direct patrons to course or campus meetings.

In some sense, desk service had reverted to earlier problems. Everyone in the Library served at a desk, but desk functions seemed more siloed. To best serve patron needs, the Library now needed to distill a set of generalized processes from both circulation and reference functions that resolve most patron interactions: basic circulation, navigation, essential tech help, and basic materials discovery. In a sense, everyone working our main service desks needs to be an experienced and well-versed library patron — an astute generalist. Much like in 2006, updated expectations and updated training prompted staff and faculty to now cross populate both service desks with revised expectations to provide the basics and refer to home departments for anything else.

To complicate things further, newly founded multimedia production and writing support services initially proved resistant to the Library’s one-for-all approach. Studio is a service point that incorporates several library processes in support of multimedia literacy and production: circulation of production equipment, production room management, teaching and consultation of media literacy and technology. The Writing and Communication Center

STATES OF IMITATION

Mimetic Governmentality and Colonial Rule

Edited by Patrice Ladwig and Ricardo Roque

Drawing on historical ethnographic studies of colonialism in Asia and Africa, this volume examines how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic governmentality.

Studies in Social Analysis Series

PACING MOBILITIES

Timing, Intensity, Tempo and Duration of Human Movements

Edited by Vered Amit and Noel B. Salazar

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Worlds in Motion Series

OURS ONCE MORE

Folklore, Ideology,

Michael Herzfeld

and the Making of Modern Greece

“It is an important contribution to intellectual history in that it deals with the prevailing ideas at a given time, places them in wider context and shows their consequences in the formation of the Greek state.” • Journal of Modern Greek Studies

(WCC) supports writing of all levels and disciplines through peer consultations and classroom instruction and provides technical review of electronic theses and dissertations submitted to UTC’s Graduate School. Both services are staffed by card-carrying librarians as well as faculty with terminal degrees in related disciplines and full-time staff.

Integrating these services into the model ultimately relied upon a similar approach to our main service desks, but it was important to translate known services and leverage interest and related expertise. Metaphors to the core desk processes and clear point-of-need documentation were helpful: if you already know how to circulate books and laptops, here’s how to circulate a multi-part light kit with a form so you know what all is in the kit; if you’re already versed in helping students understand their research assignment and can explain related principles, here’s how to translate those skills in a writing context with ongoing development. The crossover took advantage of skill sets from other units. For example, members of Library IT could apply existing knowledge from working service desks while adding their heightened technical support skills and design acumen in Studio. Similarly, staff with previous experience working in writing centers or previous study in rhetoric or writing in addition to their demonstrated interactive skills have been effective consultants in WCC. Here, the shared service model extended its benefits to other public services while providing personnel opportunities to flex their expertise.

continued on page 80

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

We All Serve: Library-wide Distributed Desk Service from page 79

In both cases of establishing and maintaining a service model where everyone serves, the keys to success have been similar:

• Integrate into institutional values and culture: communicate rationale in the context of your institutional values using simple language and codify in job descriptions or responsibilities as a member of the organization.

• Define responsibilities at the service point: be clear in expectations and when to defer; reinforce that no one contributor has to be able to do it all.

• Document processes: create quick reference and provide initial and ongoing training.

• Make the commitment ongoing: repetition solidifies familiarity and confidence.

Conclusions

The benefits of all personnel participating in desk responsibilities are both cultural and practical. The model creates shared work experience that engenders job commonality and a community of practice. Similar to placing students in learning communities, the practice of library-wide responsibilities allows staff who do not usually work together to exchange ideas, get to know each other, and get to know a new side of library operations. It allows for informed shared conversation across the spectrum of library individuals and shared training sessions. Using the list of service expectations for each desk as a guide, participants increase their knowledge of university and library policy and become well-informed citizens in our university community.

The shared desk model has practical operational benefits in addition to creating a culture of library-wide responsibilities. First, it puts all members of the faculty and staff in direct contact with users. This serves as a continuous reminder to staff members of why our library exists, which is to serve our community members. Another benefit is that visiting staff members see

how their role in the knowledge creation process plays out to the end user and impacts the community served. A staff member focused on electronic resources can now see how a patron accesses and interacts with a database, for example. This model can be flexible in meeting the unique needs of a library at the time of implementation. For example, a staff member from the primary desk department may see a reduction in assigned desk hours, allowing him to spend time on new services. Or, overall service hours might be extended, which would result in staff members working the same numbers of hours.

Name of university or college: University of Tennessee Chattanooga

Website: utc.edu/library

Carnegie classification: Doctoral/Professional

Number of undergraduates: 10,297

Number of graduates: 1,394

Number of faculty: 770

Highest degree offered: Ph.D

Name of library: UTC Library

FTE librarians: 23

Other FTE staff: 18.5

Library annual budget: $4.7 million

Annual circulation: Print: 18,027

Digital: 114,627

Institutional Depository: 441,931

Annual gate entries: 697,824

Hours: Monday-Thursday: 7:45 a.m. - Midnight

Friday: 7:45 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.

Saturday: 9:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.

Sunday: 9:00 a.m. - Midnight

First floor open overnight Sunday through Thursday

Physical service points in the library: 5

Staffing innovation #1: All library personnel serve on at least one service point weekly

Staffing innovation #2: Expansion of this model into multimedia production service point and writing center

Wandering the Web — An Arsenal of Military Websites

by Dan Forrest (Associate Professor, Faculty Subject Specialist, Western Kentucky University Libraries) <dan.forrest@wku.edu>

Column Editor: Jack G. Montgomery (Professor, Acquisitions and Collection Services Librarian, Western Kentucky University Libraries) <jack.montgomery@wku.edu>

Column Editor’s Note: The initial idea for this column many years ago was to provide working librarians with selected, annotated online resources in a Bibliographic format to use for their reference and research. The topics were to be those that are not as commonplace as many topics that are accessed all the time. This particular Internet bibliography is designed to provide access to the world of those men and women who serve in our military services. Mr. Forrest is the Library Liaison to our Military Science program and is well-versed in all things associated with the military. — JM

Author’s Note: Whether you’re on active duty, a veteran, a friend or loved one of someone who’s served, or just interested in military history or news, there are a wealth of websites available for you. From surveys of historic battles to first person narratives to guides for navigating the bureaucracy, these sites will help you improvise, adapt, and overcome as you seek out the information you need. — DF

News Sites

Military.com — https://www.military.com/ — is a one-stop shop for news for and about the military, veterans, and their families. In addition to defense news, they cover military benefits and resources for service members and their loved ones. They also have subpages for each service as well as tools for job searches, relocating, educational benefits, and much more.

and culture join articles about resources for service members and veterans as well as military-oriented pop culture and humor to make this site a good place to send some down time.

Veterans’ Sites

The Department of Veterans Affairs — https://www. va.gov/ — is the U.S. government’s official site for resources for veterans. Information on health care, educational and housing benefits, as well as resources for family members, how to find military records, and burial and memorial information can be found here.

The American Legion — https://www.legion.org/ — is the largest service organization for America’s veterans. A wealth of information on health, educational, vocational, and other benefits for veterans and their families can be found here. There is also information on the Legion’s programs for communities and individuals.

Another well-known and respected organization, The Veterans of Foreign Wars — https://www.vfw.org/ — also has lots of information for veterans about the many benefits and services available to veterans, as well as information about the many community service projects undertaken by the organization.

Militarytimes.com —

https://www.militarytimes.com/ — is another site with a full slate of information on news, pay and benefits, education, and veteran’s interests. The news is updated constantly, and there are many resource guides available. This site also has reviews of gear and media of interest to service members.

The War Zone — https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone — is part of the car site The Drive, and as such its primary focus is military gear from small arms to armored vehicles and aircraft. It also covers the big defense stories and has many videos of the U.S.’s and other nation’s military might in action.

Like the site above, Foxtrot Alpha — https://foxtrotalpha. jalopnik.com/ — is affiliated with a car site, in this case it’s Jalopnik. Updates on the newest warfighting vehicles as well as defense news from around the world and personal essays by veterans about their service can also be found here.

“From drones to AKs, high technology to low politics” War is Boring — https://warisboring.com/ — proves that it is anything but. Current military-related news from around the world as well as articles on politics, interesting characters and episodes from military history and culture make up this interesting site.

We Are the Mighty — https://www. wearethemighty.com/ — bills itself as military entertainment for America by veterans. Stories about military history

Task & Purpose — https://taskandpurpose.com/ — is a military and veteran oriented news and information website staffed mainly by veterans. News articles about military and veterans issues are available as well as profiles of veterans who have excelled in their post-military lives. Reviews of gear and popular culture and information guides are also here.

History and Strategy

The U.S. Army War College’s War Room — https://warroom. armywarcollege.edu/ — has articles on the strategic aspects of current events, book reviews, and several podcasts that provide insight and context for active duty officers and armchair strategists alike. The Whiteboard series offers useful examples of leadership and strategy from popular culture.

The Strategy Bridge — https://thestrategybridge.org/ — is focused on “the development of people in strategy, national security, and military affairs.” A blog and podcast feature many book reviews and articles by thinkers on current and historical events and their strategic implications.

War on the Rocks — https://warontherocks.com/ — offers analysis and commentary “on foreign policy and national security issues through a realist lens.” From the latest military technology to current events around the world, topics and their impact on America’s strategic thinking are covered here.

Overt Defense — https://www.overtdefense.com/ — is a good source for short, informative articles on defense news, with an emphasis on the latest equipment and current events with a military aspect from around the world.

continued on page 83

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Wandering the Web

from page 82

Interested in battles from popular culture such as Lord of the Rings or Dune? A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry — https://acoup.blog/ — has you covered. Strategy, tactics, and gear from a variety of fictional conflicts are discussed and contrasted with their real-world counterparts.

“Air Power Throughout the Ages” is the tagline of From Balloons to Drones — https://balloonstodrones.com/. From the primitive observation balloons of the nineteenth century through the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II and on to the present day’s drones and Space Force, this website covers it all. In-depth articles on specific topics in past conflicts to contemporary issues and reviews of books new and classic make this a thorough source for those interested in air power.

Humor

Duffel Blog — https://www.duffelblog.com/ — bills itself as “The American Military’s Most Trusted News Source,” but it might better be regarded as the military version of The Onion All ranks and branches of the armed forces are fair game for these humor writers, who are themselves mostly veterans.

Terminal Lance — https://terminallance.com/ — is one of the most popular military comic strips online. The author is a marine and draws on his own experience and that of his readers to provide an authentic and earthy look at life in the military.

The U.S. Coast Guard, America’s oldest continuous seagoing service, is often overlooked in matters military. Brian Runion’s cartoons in The Claw of Knowledge — https://www.facebook. com/clawofknowledge/ — are doing their part to raise the profile of this service. Runion’s stick figures are as likely to point out important events in the Coast Guard’s storied history as they are to make fun of bureaucracy, but like the service they highlight they are worthy of attention.

Rumors from page 77

studies, performance studies and other subjects that enhance the University’s academic mission and commitment to social justice and inclusion,” Dean of Libraries Sarah Pritchard said in the release. Jones is a published poet and a faculty member of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. Her work in the Chicago literary community was cited by NewCity in its “Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago 2019” list. She also serves on the advisory board of the Shorefront Legacy Center, a nonprofit organization located in Evanston that documents African American history on the North Shore of Chicago.

https://dailynorthwestern.com/2020/09/22/campus/an-editorfor-two-decades-parneshia-jones-announced-as-new-directorof-northwestern-university-press/

continued on page 89

Let’s Get Technical — Linked Data: Old Wine In A New Bottle

Column Editors: Kyle Banerjee (Collections and Services Technology Librarian, Associate Professor, OHSU) <kyle.banerjee@gmail.com>

and Susan J. Martin (Chair, Collection Development and Management, Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University) <Susan.Martin@mtsu.edu>

Few topics have generated as much discussion as Linked Data. Promising richer and more complete metadata, a more compelling discovery experience, and simpler maintenance, it’s not surprising that libraries have been adding it to both systems and standards for a number of years.

Linked Data causes angst among members of the Technical Services community because they maintain the metadata ecosystem that libraries depend on. However, Linked Data isn’t as different or disruptive as many of them imagine — in reality, most have probably worked with it their entire careers without realizing it.

Although it is often presented as a solution to metadata problems, Linked Data is just a way to communicate data. Just as the fundamental metadata issues remain the same whether a record is represented in binary MARC or MARCXML, they also remain the same when the metadata is expressed as Linked Data.

Like MARC (or even paper cards), the value Linked Data contributes is a function of the quality and completeness of the metadata it depends on — which in turn depends on how that data is defined. For example, Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) based searches for works are only possible if 650 _0 entries expressing concepts users seek have been added to the MARC record. However, many areas of LCSH are not well developed so even the best catalogers can’t provide good subject access to many works.

Implemented well, library adaptation of Linked Data will largely be invisible to library staff. Just as few library staff need to know how to manipulate MARCXML or binary MARC directly or understand the storage technologies their library systems depend on, they also don’t need to know how to build and manipulate Linked Data nor the technologies it depends on. Rather, Linked Data will simply be in the background supporting their work so only basic familiarity with how it works is necessary.

What Is Linked Data?

Nebulous technical jargon makes Linked Data appear more significant and complex than it is. Reduced to its essence, Linked Data simply means storing identifiers that enforce uniqueness rather than words to describe names, subjects, locations, and other data points as well as relationships. To provide a mechanism for determining what those identifiers mean, Linked Data specifies that those identifiers are constructed as Web addresses which contain information about the things they identify.

To visualize what Linked Data in a library catalog might look like, consider the following fragment of a MARCXML record:

Author, title, and subject information is transcribed from the piece 100, 245, and 650 MARC fields with indicators and subfields indicating things such as whether primary entry is under author or title, the structure of the name, where to start indexing the title, what portion is the subtitle, and what subject schema is being used.

Expressed in Linked Data, a simplified version that same entry might look like:

[rest of record omitted]

Instead of recording the author’s name and subject headings directly, URIs (i.e., Web addresses) are provided. Likewise, other URIs are provided that describe where the meanings of the XML tags and attributes can be found. For example, the name entry leads to the following record:

[rest of record omitted]

The full record contains other URIs that point to the occupation, affiliation, location, other works by the author, and links to the author’s ORCID ID, variant forms of the author’s name. For each entry, another URI is listed as the source of the information. continued on page 85

from page 84

This structure facilitates decentralizing maintenance of metadata, but this doesn’t eliminate the fundamental task of creating good quality metadata. One of the sources for this particular name record relied on information from a variety of sources — some of it comically incorrect.

Old Wine In A New Bottle

As different as it appears, the Linked Data record is conceptually identical to storing ARNs in a MARC record rather than textual strings — a process that was well documented in the mid 1990’s (Heaney, M. (1995). Object-Oriented Cataloging. Information Technology and Libraries 14(3), 135-53.) and which is currently done in appropriate $0 subfields designed specifically for this purpose. Likewise, just as the subject URI tells us where we can find out more about the subject, the second indicator of the 650 identifies it as an LCSH heading so we know that we can find more about that subject heading by consulting LCSH.

That the URI is a Web page rather than a simple identifier doesn’t give it an inherent ability to express richer relationships or to be more complete. In this particular example, the Linked Data record does not identify insignificant words in the title for sorting purposes (specified in the second indicator of MARC 245) nor does it indicate that the author’s name is listed by surname (specified in the first indicator of MARC 100). Each system can express only what has been defined — and even then, only if it has been programmed to recognize that definition. For decades, catalogers have dutifully encoded specialized fields indicating that works are Festschrifts or conference publications, whether they contain portraits and bibliographical references, and many other things into the MARC record which are ignored by virtually all, if not all, systems. Linked Data is orders of magnitude more complicated than MARC, and systems won’t know what to do with the definitions of metadata elements until they’re told how to interpret them.

The impact of Linked Data on discovery is also modest. Just as it’s impractical for a system to use MARC in its raw binary form, it’s also impractical to do this with Linked Data. Displaying summary search results and records requires precompiled information — in other words, text. It would simply be too slow to traverse multiple levels of Linked Data for each entry. Likewise, most search behaviors such as keyword, and phrase, term searching requires indexing text.

A Better Way To Do Things

Linked Data is ultimately a tool that is only as useful as the metadata it depends on and the systems that interpret it. Identifiers only enforce uniqueness — which authorized headings already do. The URI contains the definition of the heading which we already know from indicators in the MARC record. Linked Data cannot solve problems with poor quality metadata for the simple reason that it requires good quality metadata to function. It requires comprehensive and well-maintained vocabularies, consistent and complete metadata, and systems that use that metadata the way users need.

Linked Data is still a good and logical step forward, even if it’s not as new or different as many people imagine. First and foremost, it is practical. Linked Data can be created and maintained with standard tools rather than requiring library-specific ones. It is easy for both humans and machines to work with. Linked Data’s system of distributed identifiers allows exploration and expression of much more complex relationships than can be achieved using other methods. It simplifies certain maintenance and user functions. And properly implemented, it will allow libraries to deliver richer and better services.

Library Analytics: Shaping the Future — Let’s Talk Research

by Tamir Borensztajn (VP SaaS Strategy at EBSCO) <tborensztajn@ebsco.com>

Column Editors: John McDonald (EBSCO Information Services) <johnmcdonald@ebsco.com>

and Stephanie S. Buck (EBSCO Information Services) <ssbuck@ebsco.com>

Research is under pressure. In late July, leaders of the European Union agreed on funding Horizon Europe, the EU research program, but with billions of euros cut from the budget. David Crotty, the Editorial Director Journals Policy for Oxford University Press, subsequently noted in The Scholarly Kitchen (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/08/04/twosteps-forward-one-step-back-the-pandemics-impact-on-openaccess-progress/) that the impacts of the current economic crisis on research budgets may bode poorly for institutional spending on research infrastructure. Still, as Crotty also rightfully points out, the need to fund research and drive open science practices, are certainly well understood and recognized. The question at hand then may well be one of urgency; do we need to solve pervasive problems in research today notwithstanding the world’s current economic predicament?

If the coronavirus pandemic has brought certain challenges to the forefront, those have centered on research. Think of the need today to conduct research and disseminate its findings at near-record speed; the need to support improved collaboration between researchers across geographies; or the need to understand what in fact is trustworthy versus false and even predatory in nature. Assuming then that we must address these challenges with a sense of urgency, when and how can or even should libraries play a role?

Libraries have traditionally fulfilled a function, not just as mere stewards of information, but as impartial institutions that disseminate free, reliable information to the public at large. Libraries have thereby supported platforms — such as the library catalog, the discovery service or research databases — that provide access to said information. The importance of these platforms, and the content they contain, cannot be overstated. Researchers at any level after all, expect to find and use the most relevant and trustworthy information in any area of research. At the same time, the platforms and services that libraries offer should be part of a potentially larger purpose to support not just the access to information and published research as such but the conducting of research as well. In doing so, libraries can help address the pressing challenges of research while, at the same time, gaining visibility into the research output, collecting and preserving it, and understanding its impact within the context of managing the institution’s overall collections.

Conducting research, of course, involves many different activities from ideation to data gathering, running the analysis, peer review and publishing. Along the way, researchers consult and use a variety of applications — some of which may fall within the library’s domain and others that may be thought of as outside the scope of the library’s services all together. Yet it makes sense, across this continuum, to examine which additional services can be provisioned by the library as we seek to attain the objectives noted above. To do so, we must look at the

intersection between the researcher’s goal, the library’s mission and the broader institutional aims.

Starting with the researcher, it goes without saying that certain goals hold true irrespective of the area of research. Any researcher will express a desire for greater efficiencies in their work, the opportunity to improve collaboration with peers or the ability to gain better recognition for the work that is done. The library, on its part, will welcome the ability to readily collect the researcher’s work, to disseminate it for teaching and learning, and to preserve it for long-term access and use. The institution then, more broadly, will certainly want to understand the impact of the work that was done by its researchers. Libraries can sit at the intersection of these goals by provisioning mission-critical platforms that improve how research is conducted, support the collection and dissemination of the output and provide the insights into the impact of the research.

There are a few good examples to illustrate the approach. Take the development of research methods: the processes and steps that are documented and used in the course of a study or experiment. Researchers will benefit from tools that enable them to readily find and access publicly available methods, that make it easier to organize and share their work through a “standardized” service, that support tracking any changes to methods over time, and that ensure that work can be properly cited. The same holds true for any computational code and data that has been used in the course of a research study. Here, additionally, researchers will also derive benefit from tools that make it easier to get started by enabling or “prescribing” the coding environment and any dependencies and by ensuring that the analysis can be run at any given time by anyone without any concern for outdated code.

For the library then, providing its researchers with better, centralized and open tools to do their work, creates an opportunity for improved stewardship over the research output. The library can, after all, leverage the solutions used by researchers to collect any methods, computational code or data and make the output available for immediate discovery as “first class citizens” within the collection alongside its journals or eBooks. In this manner, research methods, code and data may be properly leveraged in teaching and learning and help foster the advancement of research generally.

Naturally, the academic institution gains when its researchers can improve how they work, speed the time from ideation to dissemination and drive collaboration between peers. The institution, moreover, can point at adherence to open science goals or mandates and its contribution to the reproducibility of science. But beyond these important intentions, if researchers have centralized platforms — provisioned by the library — different insticontinued on page 89

Emerging Tech: To Be or Not to Be? — Analytics in an Open Access World

Column Editors: Deni Auclair (Editorial Director, Humanities and Social Sciences Journals and U.S. Partnerships, De Gruyter) <Deni.Auclair@degruyter.com>

and John Corkery (Client Engagement Director, LibLynx) <john@liblynx.com> www.liblynx.com

For the most part, usage statistics are reported through the Project COUNTER framework, a standard formed to provide the basis for consistent, credible, and comparable usage reporting for publishers to libraries, so libraries can understand and report how budgets are being spent on paid content.

Open Access has pretty much turned COUNTER reporting on its head: standard COUNTER reports are developed for paywalled content in which subscriber data is readily trackable via authentication. Matching this data with usage stats is fairly easy.

OA content, on the other hand, has no authentication data available, leaving usage dependent on matching IP addresses. IP data is limited to the IP data we know — those who have subscribed to our systems in the past via this method – it does not identify those who have logged in using other methods, or those we don’t know (but would probably like to). Many have tried to cobble together methods using Google Analytics (GA), but GA recently stopped reporting ISP data when they discovered they might have the means to put personal IP data and ISP information together to triangulate on personal users — a big no-no in the world of privacy (GDPR and its newer U.S. cousin CCPA). Many publishers rely on generic Internet metrics like sessions, page hits, and downloads, comparing and contrasting subscriber data to try and glean how much usage their OA content is getting. This is a “scientific” approach known as guesstimation, or what a U.S. politician once coined as the “Unknown Unknowns.” Bottom line is that OA publishers are pretty much flying blind when it comes to knowing how users are engaging with their content.

Why OA Usage is Different

Project COUNTER has done a lot to bring consistent, apples-to-apples comparable practice to the industry. As many know, they report searches, investigations, requests, and denials. Reports comprise usage data on platform, database, title, and items within the content set being analyzed. These are great for librarians, many of whom give thanks to Project COUNTER for refining them through their many releases and providing a consistent means of reporting that is easily compared.

OA publishing has a broader range of stakeholders such as funders, authors, and researchers, in addition to library patrons. They want to see reports on a variety of metrics that answer specific questions. For instance, funders might want to see specific information about a title or a topic and the organizations reading that content to measure research impact. And stakeholders have ideas about custom reports, unique to their specific needs. These diverse stakeholder communities span different types of organizations and require a flexible means to get at the data they need and ways to answer questions as they come up.

Without a real-time capability to match data up with a reliable database to identify user institutions, this remains a non-specific practice. The current de facto measurements — sessions, page hits, and downloads — are standard metrics, but do these actually tell stakeholders that the microbiology department at a leading

university verging on a big discovery is reading their research, or that an illegal content aggregator from the other side of the planet has been downloading all of their content?

Stakeholders would most benefit from a system able to use the same consistent, credible, and comparable standards established by COUNTER, informing and looking forward to a standard for OA content.

In Search of a Solution

Some organizations that have partnered to tackle this challenge include LibLynx, in collaboration with PSI Metrics, and PLOS, their innovation partners. Together they are forging ahead to bring OA Analytics to the marketplace.

For this article we interviewed Tim Lloyd, CEO of LibLynx, a tech microservice firm that delivers identity, access and analytics in many different forms, and Sara Rouhi, Director, Strategic Partnerships at PLOS. In August 2019, LibLynx formed a collaboration with PSI Metrics, a firm that has developed a high-quality database of verified IP addresses for scholarly, corporate, and government institutions. The combination of the two services and the partnership with PLOS is already showing very promising results for OA Analytics.

John Corkery: How did the thinking on OA Analytics come about?

Tim Lloyd: It came about as a conversation between myself and Andrew Pitts, the CEO of PSI Metrics Andrew saw a presentation I gave at last year’s SSP Conference on how our COUNTER tracking works and we started talking about how we could combine PSI’s databases of IP addresses with our analytics to solve other problems. OA was one we were talking about and it just seemed like a good opportunity to leverage the benefits of COUNTER-compliant metrics, which are traditionally used to report usage of paid content to librarians, to also help understand the impact of OA content. The big challenge is that you don’t know who is accessing your OA content, but the IPRegistry database enables us to identify much of the organizational source of usage.

JC: Isn’t this what COUNTER is for?

TL: No, I would say there are some very big differences between what COUNTER does with the current standard and what OA publishers want. One difference is in the nature of the usage. COUNTER reports on usage of paid databases and, while this can incorporate OA usage, it is really in the context of a paid database. In contrast, a lot of OA usage occurs outside of any related library purchase.

continued on page 88

Emerging Tech: To Be or Not to Be? from page 87

Another difference is that in a pure OA scenario it’s not necessarily the library that is your primary audience. The sort of stakeholders interested in understanding usage of OA resources may include academic administrators like the Provost. They are looking to understand the value they’re getting from OA content and how that aligns with research priorities (not something you can analyse in a traditional COUNTER report).

There are also different types of metrics that may be relevant. In a typical COUNTER scenario, you’re looking to understand how paid library content is being used, so the reports are breaking down usage of each title. In contrast, an institution reporting to its board of trustees on funding of OA content wants to understand the impact it’s having, such as how usage correlates with institutional research priorities. The work that Project COUNTER has done to define standards around metrics has hugely helped our industry. There is much greater awareness now of the value of metrics like searches, requests, investigations, and denials, compared to standard generic web metrics like sessions and downloads. So we can build on this. What needs to develop is our understanding of the questions that this broader group of stakeholders wants to answer. My bet is that this will require additional metrics and different types of reports.

JC: Do you see a context where this might help libraries?

TL: Definitely, to the extent that libraries have an ongoing role in funding OA research and/or assessing its impact in terms

About PLOS

PLOS is a not-for-profit, open access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. Since its founding in 2001, PLOS journals have helped break boundaries in research communication to provide more opportunities, choice, and context for researchers and readers. (http://www.plos.org)

About PSI Metrics

PSI Metrics is the developer of both theIPregistry.org and IP-intrusion.org. With theIPregistry.org publishers and libraries can save time and streamline processes, eliminate errors, improve the reliability of usage metrics and ensure the right content is accessible to the right users. With IP-Intrusion.org publishers and libraries, can join the community driven fight against cybercrime. (https://theipregistry.org and https://www.PSIregistry.org/ ip-intrusion-service)

About LibLynx

LibLynx provides flexible Identity, Access Management, and Analytics solutions to online resource providers and libraries. They make identity & access as simple as possible and as secure as necessary and deliver insightful analytics that are on-demand and in real time. They mitigate the risks of fraud and managing personal data. Their cloud native applications are technology and platform independent, with an architecture designed to simplify integration and facilitate customization. (https://www. liblynx.com/)

of usage. As a result of some of the transformative agreements happening in our industry, libraries are starting to switch funding from paying-to-read to paying-to-publish — which means they need to measure the impact of that research output in terms of usage. In other organizations or institutions, these responsibilities will lie elsewhere. Libraries have well-honed skills in assessing the value of online resources and these should be transferable regardless of the underlying publication model.

JC: Do you see this work as being preliminary to a new COUNTER standard?

TL: Yes, absolutely. This needs to be a standard; standards underpin a lot of what we do in our industry, and COUNTER reporting would not work unless we had standards. But standards take a long time to develop, and that’s appropriate because you really need to make sure that what you’re doing works for everyone. It’s a process of consultation and collaboration that happens over a long time, especially across an industry with diverse stakeholders. Innovation is underpinned by experimentation; people try things, and I think innovation is what our industry needs to do right now to discover what are the sorts of analytics that help us in an environment that is increasingly dominated by OA content. The iterative experimentation that we’re doing right now, along with others, will help us collectively develop the future standards in this area.

JC: Anything else you would add to these ideas?

TL: I think I would just emphasize that there is no one right answer here. When it comes to analytics, the bottom line is what the questions are people want to answer from this data, not what we can collect. As an industry, we don’t yet know what those questions are. It’s also hard to ground a discussion about questions without having something to look at, critique, tweak, and re-assess. That’s why it becomes an iterative and collaborative process. Over time, you’ll start to understand the common questions people are trying to answer and the types of tools they will need to answer them.

JC: How important are usage analytics for OA publishers, first in general and then as relates to PLOS specifically?

Sarah Rouhi: OA publishers are thinking about usage data, thanks to inquiries from our library partners, which makes sense. This is a standard offering that libraries are used to receiving from publishers so it’s natural they would ask OA publishers for those stats. That said, libraries and OA publishers need to think critically about the value they derive from the current paradigm in usage stats — that is, the paradigm that measures usage based on IP ranges. In an open-to-read landscape, measuring how often someone from your institution accessed open content on your IP range is a small fraction of the overall usage by your users. (This is even more true in our current COVID environment where users are not on their campuses and likely aren’t accessing open content via VPN or EZproxy.)

Partnering to develop appropriate stats for native-OA content is the next phase in measuring the value publishers provide as part of agreements. Ultimately, we think next-gen stats will be one component of a more comprehensive suite of metrics for evaluating the impact and “renewal-worthiness” of pure publish agreements.

continued on page 89

Emerging Tech: To Be or Not to Be? from page 88

JC: How well do existing standards support the needs of OA publishers, and what types of analytics do you see being developed in the future?

SR: While COUNTER has had great success in establishing an agreed standard that publishers and libraries have relied on for years, it is predicated on a subscription paradigm.

Right now, PLOS and other native OA publishers are making these stats work because they’re a trusted and known quantity to our library partners. We’re delighted to see COUNTER’s commitment to evolving their metrics for natively open research, including green OA content in institutional repositories. This is a natural evolution as the publishing landscape shifts from libraries paying for the right to access/read content to libraries supporting their authors’ publishing efforts.

JC: PLOS recently announced a partnership to develop OA Analytics — tell us about it and how it might help OA publishing.

SR: While PLOS has always had usage logs, it quickly became apparent when I joined PLOS that we needed standardized usage data for two reasons:

Our new business models attempt to evaluate “read” value and not just publish value. There’s no way to do that without some kind of view of readership, even if it’s partial.

Our library customers had come to expect COUNTER stats as a standard offering from all their publishing partners and we needed to meet that need, despite the current standard being less than optimal for our kind of content.

This meant that pursuing a partnership with a strong analytics partner was a top priority. While in the near term LibLynx will help us “check the box” for usage data, we’re really excited about our longer-term plans to jointly partner with COUNTER on next-gen usage data for native-OA publishers. We want to work to develop usage metrics that tell an important story about value. This is critical for PLOS as we launch new business models and seek renewals and critical for the publishing community as models flip from subscriptions.

Library Analytics: Shaping the ... from page 86

tutional stakeholders can derive insight into the impact of the work that has been done. How often, for example, was the research by any given researcher re-used in support of open science mandates? To what extent where publicized methods “forked” or an analysis used or cited by members of the scientific community? Or what contribution specifically did a researcher have to a specific field of scientific inquiry?

As we talk about research, the library occupies an exceptional position to facilitate solutions to pressing problems. At its core, the library functions as the “hub” that transacts the flow of infor-

mation, collects and preserves it and ensures its unreserved availability and accessibility. By expanding its role to provision centralized platforms where research is conducted, the library can advance the ways in which information is disseminated, help support open science goals and deliver much-needed insight into the work that is being done by the institution’s researchers. In an environment where, more than ever, the sharing of research and scientific advances is of the essence, so are our libraries. By facilitating not just the access but the conducting of research as well, libraries can help address the problems of research today, support its timely dissemination and help us understand its impact overall.

Rumors

from page 83

I have just learned that John Nichols Berry III, editor of Library Journal magazine for more than half a century, stalwart defender of freedom of speech, freedom of information and public librar-

ies, died in New Hampshire on Saturday, October 10th of an apparent heart attack. He was 87. What a long and productive career he had! https://www.legacy.com/ obituaries/stamfordadvocate/obituary. aspx?n=john-berry&pid=196955950

See you online in Charleston soon! Much love and many good, healthy thoughts your way! Yr. Ed.

ATG Food + Beverage Roundup — Cooking at Home

Column Editors: Nicole Ameduri (Licensing Manager, Springer Nature) <Nicole.ameduri@springernature.com>

and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) <Lisalibrarian@gmail.com>

Nicole’s Picks

Since the start of the global pandemic, I’ve been avoiding in-person dining at restaurants. Although, if NYC’s rates of transmission continue to remain below 1%, I am so looking forward to dining at one of Gotham City’s creative outdoor dining venues.

I’ve been cooking more than I’ve had the time to in years. Years ago, I published a cookbook to fundraise for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Praise God I am not allergic to bread or cheese, but many of my friends and colleagues are. Here are my three favorite gluten and dairy free recipes as of late.

Buckwheat Pancakes

I recently discovered Crown Maple Syrup from Dover Plains, NY (https://www.crownmaple.com/). Their farm is organic and the syrup is aged in bourbon barrels. I like the amber best.

Buckwheat, unlike its name, is gluten and grain free. Buckwheat flour has more protein, dietary fiber and B vitamins than an equal weight of oat or whole wheat flour. It’s an excellent source of potassium and essential amino acids.

12 pancakes

2 cups buckwheat flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon kosher salt

2 cups plus 1 tablespoon water

2 tablespoons vegetable oil or almond

oil

Maple Syrup

Butter (optional)

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the water and oil; whisk to mix.

Preheat pancake griddle until a drop of water “dances” on it. Use oil to coat griddle, as needed.

Spoon the batter onto the hot griddle to make pancakes about 4-5 inches across. Turn when bubbles form. Serve while hot with maple syrup and butter.

Cedar-Planked Salmon

If you look at the photo, you’ll notice that the cedar planks look dry. Yup, in the midst of a long day of work, I put them in the oven without soaking them. Thankfully, I realized after they were in the oven for about five minutes, avoiding a visit from the FDNY who were

already at my apartment once this year for a gas leak :) (not my fault).

SOAK THE CEDAR PLANKS FOR 1-2 HOURS. DON’T RISK THEM CATCHING ON FIRE. MY COLLEAGUE SOAKED THEM FOR ABOUT 30 MINUTES AND THEY CAUGHT ON FIRE.

4 servings

1 ½ pounds boneless, skinless salmon fillets (Sockeye salmon is my favorite.)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill

1 teaspoon fresh lemon zest

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Drizzle with oil, and rub evenly to coat. Sprinkle with dill and lemon zest.

Place the fillets on food-grade cedar planks, put the planks in the oven, and bake for 25-30 minutes. Test the salmon for doneness by breaking off a small piece. If the fish flakes off easily and the meat is opaque, it is done. Serve immediately.

Pickled Vegetables

8 servings

2 cups cauliflower florets

2 cups broccoli florets

1 cup radishes, quartered

1 handful green beans, stems removed

1 handful yellow wax beans, stems removed

2 cups peeled and sliced carrots (cut into coin shapes)

1 bunch scallions, cut into pieces

6 cloves garlic

3 cups cider vinegar

3 cups water

¾ cup sugar

½ cup kosher salt

1 tablespoon whole mustard seeds

2 bay leaves

3 whole cloves

1 teaspoon celery seed

1 teaspoon fennel seed

Place the cauliflower, broccoli, radishes, beans, carrots, scallions and garlic in ball jars. In a large stock pot, combine the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, mustards seeds, bay leaves, cloves, celery seed and fennel seed. Bring to a boil and cook for about 5 minutes. Pour the hot liquid over the vegetables and let stand, uncovered, until the mixture cools to room temperature. Cover and refrigerate for at least 24 hours.

continued on page 91

Lisa’s Picks – Re-Creating Restaurant Favorites at Home

In the midst of the many disappointments and losses that the pandemic has brought, I know I am not the only person who has taken to spending more time in their own kitchen. Though I didn’t join the sourdough baking trend, I have learned to make many dishes that I hadn’t made before. I’ll highlight two in this column. Depending how long the pandemic continues, I have others for future columns — but I hope to return to highlighting options for our shared conference travels soon!

Buffalo Chicken Cobb Salad

I’m delighted to say that the restaurant has re-opened (I was very worried!), but for the first months of Illinois’ shelter-athome and then phased re-opening, I was having to do without my favorite restaurant salad — the Buffalo Chicken Cobb Salad.

Crane Alley is in walking distance of my home and it was my go-to place for a cocktail and dinner when grading student assignments. Living in a university town, I was rarely the only person grading papers and there’s a steady background chatter of graduate students debating various theorists and the relative merits of different approaches to finishing one’s dissertation. I’d settle in at my favorite high top (it looks out over the street and has an electrical outlet!), put in my typical order of a Sazerac and the salad, open my laptop, and get to work.

In spite of eating this salad for almost a decade, I’d never made Buffalo chicken at home and I was overwhelmed when I started searching the web for recipes (not the least of which is that it is not easy to craft a good “buffalo chicken NOT wings” search strategy on the web … just to make this a little library/publishing relevant!). I took my usual approach of reading through a sampling of the search results until I felt I had a good sense of what is essential to buffalo chicken and then, pragmatically, looked for a recipe to follow where I had all of the ingredients on hand.

I settled on the Buffalo Chicken Bites from Six Sisters’ Stuff ( https://www.sixsistersstuff.com/ recipe/buffalo-chicken-bites/) and they turned out perfectly. Tender, spicy, and sweet – just the right amount of kick to offset the creamy blue cheese dressing. Speaking of which, I didn’t have a bottle on hand so made the dressing from scratch and, well, I’ll never buy it pre-made again! I used this recipe from Spruce Eats (https://www.thespruceeats.com/ creamy-blue-cheese-dressing-recipe-101885) — though I did increase the amount of cheese. Because — cheese!

It turns out a Cobb salad is actually a fair bit of prep and planning as it also means making bacon (I bake it for more even browning), preparing hardboiled eggs (are they hard-boiled if you make them in the InstantPot? — I’m not sure but they do come out perfectly), and timing the salad for when your avocado is ripe.

My homemade version of my beloved restaurant salad was delicious. But, did I celebrate by making a take-out order the moment Crane Alley reopened? You bet I did!

Sazerac

And, what about that cocktail I always order?

That was a bit more challenging as my home bar did not include absinthe nor did I have any sense of which absinthe Crane Alley uses. This is where having friends comes in handy, particularly those friends who are known for their cocktail making or who have lived in New Orleans. A ton of searching and reading later, plus advice from these knowledgeable friends, and I was delighted to discover the absinthe I settled on was available in a small bottle at my local Binny’s. Those from Chicago will recognize how lucky we are to have a downstate outpost of this fantastic store … for others you’ll want to make a note to check it out on some future trip. Specifically I chose the St. George Absinthe Verte (https://www.binnys.com/st-george-absinthe-verte-53412.html).

Chill an old-fashioned glass. In another glass, soak a sugar cube with Peychaud’s bitters and muddle it. Add ice and a generous pour of rye whiskey. Stir to chill. Rinse the chilled old-fashioned glass with a few drops of absinthe. Strain the whiskey into the glass (add ice if you like) and garnish with lemon peel.

Unfortunately, this cocktail isn’t on the takeout menu at Crane Alley (yet?), but the to-go Old Fashioned kit they do have is a decent substitute on days when the purpose of takeout is to have it all made for me.

Buffalo Chicken Salad at Crane Alley (Photo Credit: Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe)

Home Re-Creation – Delicious Substitute (Photo Credit: Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe)

ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Hannah Rosen Strategist, Research and Scholarly Communication, LYRASIS

1438 W. Peachtree NW, Suite 150 Atlanta, GA 30309

Phone: (800) 999-8558 ext. 2918

Fax: (404) 892-7879

<hannah.rosen@lyrasis.org>

www.lyrasis.org

Professional career and activities: Hannah Rosen administers and publishes LYRASIS Research surveys and reports, and facilitates connections between LYRASIS research initiatives and events such as the Leaders Forums and the Annual Member Summit. She is also responsible for managing vendor and not-for-profit partnerships, including, but not limited to, digitization vendors, open access (OA) initiatives, and scholarly communication services. She holds a bachelor’s Degree in social and cultural history and a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh, with a specialization in Archives, Preservation and Records Management. She came to LYRASIS from The MediaPreserve, where she assisted clients with all aspects of their media digitization projects. favorite books: Jane Eyre, Alice in Wonderland, anything by Sarah Vowell.

How/wHere do i see tHe industry in five years: I see the industry in a messy, actively hybrid state of affairs – instead of the majority of electronic resources residing behind paywalls, with a small percentage of resources being open access, I think the percentages will reside around the 50/50 mark. I think the library field thrives on hybridity, and having many different solutions and models for open access, whether pure or hybrid, will lead to greater sustainability. I also believe in five years that library publishing programs will have evolved from many disparate repositories to more concentrated and intentional national and regional grouped repositories and/or publications, to facilitate increased discovery and usage.

Khal Rudin Managing Director

Adam Matthew Digital

Pelham House, Pelhams Court, London Road, Marlborough, Wiltshire, SN8 2AG, UK

<khal@amdigital.co.uk>

www.amdigital.co.uk

born and lived: London and lived in England & South Africa.

family: Married to Zoe and we have a daughter Verity who is 15 and a son Zach who is 14.

favorite books: Flowers for Algernon and Middlemarch

How/wHere do i see tHe industry in five years: Higher Education is going through one of the most difficult periods in its long history. Ultimately these unprecedented challenges are an opportunity to adapt and grow. The good news for publishers and institutions that embrace the change needed is that we have the chance to re-imagine an HE sector that can flourish, with far more flexibility in what is offered, who can attend, and what student life means beyond the traditional campus model. As publishers we need to support online teaching and studying with research platforms that provide for this new landscape. I see a growth of technical innovation that assists and enables engagement with a dispersed community.

At a time that humanity is facing enormous challenges, combined with the troubling emergence of populist and extremist political discourse, I hope the importance of the social sciences and humanities to remind us of historical precedent and encourage balanced debate is highlighted and prioritized accordingly. The Adam Matthew Digital mission statement could not be more relevant now and this motivates all of us to grow and to reach as many students as possible: “We believe that at the heart of education is the freedom to think critically. Harnessing the latest technologies, we re-imagine primary sources, to empower current and future generations to challenge, analyze and debate.”

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Adam Matthew Digital

Adam Matthew Digital, Pelham House, Pelhams Ct., London Rd., Marlborough, Wiltshire, SN8 2AG, UK

Phone: +44 (0)1672 511921 (UK) • www.amdigital.co.uk

affiliated comPanies: www.quartexcollections.com

officers: Khal Rudin, Managing Director. Martha Fogg, Deputy Managing Director. Jennifer Kemp, Deputy Managing Director.

association membersHiPs, etc.: ALPSP, UKSG, ALA, ACRL, OLA, NAG.

key Products and services: Adam Matthew Digital’s suite of award-winning primary source products can be found here (www.am-

digital.co.uk/products). Our cross-searchable collections offer primary source material for teaching and research across a wide variety of thematic areas, including: Area Studies, Cultural Studies, Empire and Globalism, Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality, History, Literature, Politics, Theatre, and War and Conflict. New products for 2020 include: Children’s Literature & Culture, Early Modern England, East India Company – Early Voyages, Formation and Conflict, Food and Drink in History, Module 2, Foreign Office Files for Southeast Asia, 1963-1980, Mass Observation Project: 1981 – 2009, Nineteenth Century Literary Society, and Poverty, Philanthropy and Social Conditions in Victorian Britain. Adam Matthew Digital’s Quartex platform (www.quartexcollections. com) is a SaaS offering that has been developed to help organizations showcase, share, and celebrate their archival material. Quartex is designed as a simple but powerful resource with functionality that requires no technical knowledge or background, and which allows

continued on page 93

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

ATG Profiles Encouraged from page 92

customers the flexibility to establish customized workflows based on their unique needs and collections. Subscribers have access to cutting-edge Handwritten Text Recognition, Optical Character Recognition, and Audio/Visual full text search services in platform to help meet accessibility requirements and maximize discovery of all digitized content types. Quartex also utilizes open access tools such as iiiF to facilitate sharing and learning.

core markets/clientele: A global network of customers across the education community, including academic institutions, schools, associations, archives, and corporate organizations. Quartex partners include University of Toronto, Baylor University, Loyola Marymount University, Sonoma County Library, and Shakespeare’s Globe Archive. number of emPloyees: Over 100 employees worldwide.

History and brief descriPtion of your comPany/ PublisHing Program: Adam Matthew Digital (AM Digital) is an award-winning publisher of primary source content with 30 years of experience identifying and making accessible primary resource collections from leading archives and libraries around the world. Each year we publish new, relevant primary source collections that span a wide variety of topics ranging from gender and sexuality, literature, art, politics, war, business, popular culture, and more. These curated collections are offered to academic institutions on a customized platform designed to maximize discoverability and drive usage to primary source content to enhance learning.

Over time, AM Digital has become a gold standard in our industry for the quality of our resources and for technological advancements. With a keen focus on progress, we have been continuously refining and improving the means by which we deliver primary source content to end users. Members of our Academic Outreach and Project Development team regularly work with an academic institution’s library staff and faculty to reflect on AM Digital collections in new ways as part of digital humanities projects. More recently, we partnered with a third-party firm to pioneer the use of Artificial Intelligence and apply Handwritten Text Recognition software to manuscript documents in AM Digital’s primary resource collections. This resulted in a noteworthy leap forward in usage of and access to important handwritten manuscript documents. Following suit, in 2018, we released the Quartex digital collections platform to provide repositories with an advanced, hosted solution for showcasing and publishing their own digital collections and exhibits. AM Digital is an independent company within the SAGE Publishing Group, based in the United Kingdom and has offices around the world.

LYRASIS

1438 W. Peachtree Street NW, Suite 150

Atlanta, GA 30309

Phone: (800) 999-8558

Fax: (404) 892-7879

www.lyrasis.org

officers: Robert Miller, CEO. Celeste Feather, Senior Director, Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives.

key Products and services: Open Access and Scholarly Infrastructure: national outreach and support for initiatives and program such as SCOAP3 and ORCiD US. eResources: negotiated leverage through nation-wide community building. LYRASIS Learning: unlimited classes, one price. Digitization & Preservation: vetted vendors, member discounts, consulting expertise. Open source software: hosting, development, support and leader.

core markets/clientele: Libraries, Archives and Museums. number of emPloyees: 70 member requirements, etc.: In order to become a LYRASIS member, an organization must disclose their Carnegie classification and pay membership dues.

History and brief descriPtion of your comPany/ PublisHing Program: LYRASIS is one of the nation’s largest non-profit technology and services organizations serving galleries, libraries, archives, museums (GLAMs) and other cultural heritage organizations in the U.S. and worldwide. LYRASIS serves knowledge communities and collections-holding organizations through content licensing, management and access, technologies, open source software solutions, leadership opportunities, collaboration, and programs designed to foster and develop innovative ideas for GLAMs. LYRASIS serves our members and more by building communities and solving the problems of today with the solutions of tomorrow.

Back Talk

from page 94

Libraries? Well, we have a real opportunity. We’ve been analog-with-digital-supplement for thirty years+ and we’ve gotten good at it. It’s time to make sure that everything we do can be done digitally, instantly, globally, and open as far as humanly possible to all. The pioneer of digital humanities for ancient Greek studies, Greg Crane, long ago said in a talk, “If it’s not on the net, it’s not information.” OK, true enough: now a challenge. In other venues I’ve opined that whatever happens with the pioneering work of the Internet Archive in controlled digital lending and the ankle-biting lawsuit they’re facing, Brewster Kahle is on to something essential: all information

has to be digital and it all has to be available to everybody. I’ve been cribbing the old Latin motto from Harrod’s — carved in stone high above Knightsbridge over 100 years ago — in these conversations for the last several years: omnia omnibus ubique. “Everything for everybody everywhere.” It was a pushy idea then and it’s still a pushy idea.

It’s the idea librarians should wake up with every morning, in this new space, post-pandemic, post whatever chaotic transitions of this fall, in a world where the digital finally becomes central, normal, and natural. A hundred years from now, nobody will say they live in the digital age any more than we now say we live in the automotive age or the electrical age. Maybe we’ll get to that point a little sooner than a hundred years: because the future is now.

Back Talk — Back to School!

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

My autobiography is pretty short. When I was five, I figured out how to read. When I was six, I went to school. And that’s been pretty much it so far. I’m still available when the Yankees need me for center field, but in the meantime, every year this time, the same edgy impatience settles on me, the same delight in seeing all those young people again, the next swarms who still don’t know how good this year or these next four years will be. It’s time to go back to school.

Well, but oops. This sure isn’t your typical back to school season, is it? They’re back and we’re glad to see them, and a little unsettled by them at the same time. What happens next? I’m writing this on our first day of classes at ASU — campus eerily quiet as we go into our distinctive hybrid mode — and, by the time you read this, you’ll know a lot better than I do now how these weeks play out. Surprising stuff happens and weird problems present themselves (a shortage of plexiglass! thousands of gallons of sanitizer, and we can’t find a building where it’s safe to store that much flammable liquid!). I find myself saying to colleagues, ok, chill: we’re setting out to do something nobody has ever done in all of human history, so sure, it’s going to get a little weird. To quote Garry Trudeau’s character Raoul Duke: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” A lot of folks have had to turn pro this year.

I won’t try to be a prophet about these weeks, but I deeply believe that when one’s most uncertain, that’s the best time to take a deep breath and look at the horizon. What might we see there?

For the last 30 years, we’ve lived on the threshold of the digital age. I sent my first email in August 1989, bought my first book on Amazon in 1996, and turned my first nose up at an iPhone in 2007: that’s our history. (I now use an iPhone and miss my Blackberry!) But in all that time, we’ve peered around the door, nervously looking to see what’s going on. We’ve still lived and thought and acted as though the world hasn’t really changed. The digital is...nice, cool, convenient, helpful. It’s a supplement to real life.

So sure, it made perfect sense that we went to the office to work, went down the hall for meetings, and spent an hour in traffic each way. It made perfect sense that we “subscribed” to the same “journals” as before and indeed priced them traditionally with a little something extra for the digital version. And never mind that getting people together in the same place at the same time was vastly the most expensive thing about higher education — that was still the absolute norm and gold standard. “Online education” was second tier and the people who disagreed were self-evidently clueless, vaporing on about how the superstar lecturer on a screen could replace all those ink-stained wretches who used to correct pages. Life marched on: more office buildings, more highways, more cars, more of everything and some expensive technology besides.

Of course there are places where the future has gone on inventing itself. I wouldn’t be a loyal Sun Devil if I didn’t think that ASU was one of the places where the future arrived a little early. Our online

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learning enterprise is bigger, smarter, and more productive than almost anyone’s — and not through sage-on-the-screen glitz, but through the hard work of serious instructional design, innovative online pedagogy, and real engagement with the academic core of the institution.

But now is the moment to take that deep breath and take that plunge. The question for our moment as a civilization is this: can we finally take the steps to imagine and create a world where the human connections of the digital become a primary and central form of life? Not the only one — no, of course not. The f2f world is indeed inescapable and central — but it’s time to recognize that the digital world is every bit as real a source of powerful human connections and now finally essential to the effective working of that f2f world. We can all leverage our efforts better and smarter because we can take the digital possibilities really for granted.

We did a survey of our ASU Library staff mid-pandemic and learned that their views are profoundly bimodal. About a third of our people took everything in stride, shrugged, and made the whole “work remotely” thing work for them. About a third were delighted: no commute, better sleep, better relationship with family, more productive. And about a third were going nuts: families snapping at each other, too many distractions, a sense of losing control.

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We read those survey results and said, “that’s our world.” Let’s be realistic about it. We, the human beings actually on the planet, are now finally figuring out how to make choices about how to balance the opportunities and threats of these worlds. Some people will work well in one space, others better in the other: and we’ll sort out the division of labor, the way we used to sort out jobs where people traveled all the time and jobs where people went to the same office every day. This highly disruptive moment of pandemic will make us face the creative possibility of remaking the way we think about everything we do. What works best f2f? What works best virtually? Who’s good at which worlds at which stage of their lives?