Khal Rudin – Managing Director, Adam Matthew Digital

from Against the Grain v32 #5

by against-the-grain

ATG Food + beverage Roundup — Cooking at Home

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

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 the same.

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

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.

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I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O N E T A R Y F U N D

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

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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

9/3/2020 11:29:08 AM

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

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 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 telling their own stories. These virtual reality experiences tend

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

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 (moderator, 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 introduced the session whose abstract lists the scope of the undertaking Lavender 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 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.)

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

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

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

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 Advance-

ment 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’sNational 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 Asso-

ciation 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

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

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

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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

Biz of Digital from page 66

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

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 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 required developing a new workflow that “involves about a

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.

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

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 Library 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.

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

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 Minnesota went through another iteration. The directors and

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

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.

www.arl.org/resources/pubs/rli/archive/rli265.shtml.

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 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:// has also proven essential. Jaguszewski and Williams (2013)

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 Press 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 publication 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

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.

Figure 1: Comparison of metrics between

Lupton Library in its last full academic year and UTC Library in its first full academic year

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

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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.

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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 (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

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

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.

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

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 veterans. Stories about military history

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.

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

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.

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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

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.

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.

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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-

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 librarmation, 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 under-

stand its impact overall. 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.

Next Article

ATG Food + beverage Roundup — Cooking at Home

Managing Director, Adam Matthew Digital

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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The Scholarly Publishing Scene — Footprints and Karen Hunter

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Rumors

Reports of Meetings — 39th Annual Charleston Conference

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

CONCURRENTS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

SPONSORED LUNCH THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

LIVELY DISCUSSIONS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

CONCURRENTS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

CONCURRENT SESSIONS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2019

8 Library Services That Will... Make You Smile.

Headwaters — Has the Elite’s Bubble Detached?

American Association for the Advance-

Endnotes

LEGAL ISSUES

Section Editors:

Legally Speaking — The Internet Archive Lawsuit

ciation of Research Libraries

References

Questions & Answers — Copyright Column

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

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

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.”

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

Biz of Digital — Repository Quick Submit and CV Scraping

Come see us at the Charleston Virtual Vendor Showcase

Endnotes

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

Partnership Creates Path Forward

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”

Practice-Based and Practice-Led Research for Dissertation

Doctoral Collection Development, Library Research, and Scholarship Sourcing Instruction

Indexing Doctoral Faculty and Doctoral Scholars

Institutional Dissertation Repositories

Conclusion

References

Resources

Recommended Readings

Both Sides Now: Vendors and Librarians — Virtually, Yours

Rumors

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

LYRASIS Research

Survey Response

Policy and Infrastructure

Recruiting, Hiring and Retaining a Diverse Staff

Maintaining/Building Diverse Collections

Takeaways

Emphasis on Engagement

A Streamlined Liaison Librarian Framework

Disciplines Informing Services and Investments

www.arl.org/resources/pubs/rli/archive/rli265.shtml.

Value of Engagement

References

Rumors