c/o Katina Strauch Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482
VOLUME 33, NUMBER 2
APRIL 2021 TM
“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”
ISSN: 1043-2094
Access to Affordable Educational Resources By Lars Meyer (Associate Dean, Access & Resource Services, Emory University Libraries) <lars.meyer@emory.edu>
A
cademic libraries have traditionally avoided buying textbooks for general or reserves collections. Typically, students have been expected to buy textbooks. Over the course of a fouryear academic period, students may expect to spend about $4,000 on textbooks and supplies, according to the University of Georgia, for example (2020). For some students, these costs present challenges. To address those challenges, librarians, faculty, administrators, consortia, and publishers are developing alternatives to supplying textbooks and other course materials to students at low cost or no cost. The topic of access to affordable learning materials continues to evolve, and in this issue Against the Grain au-
thors share a variety of perspectives and experiences. Themes examined include, among others: • • • • • •
Open Educational Resources Leveraging LibGuides Course reserves Library budgets Faculty collaborations The role of the bookstore
To help frame the discussion, Meg White’s article compares several models that describe access to educational resources. Anne Osterman, Genya O’Gara, and Sophie Rondeau review Virginia’s state funded program to supply library owned and affordable course materials to students for subjects where there
If Rumors Were Horses
W
elcome to almost Spring! After some serious bouts with cold weather that made us doubt the accuracy of the groundhog, some warmer weather has arrived. Hooray!
Movers and Shakers We Must Mention Heather Staines has joined the Delta Think team as Community Engagement Director and Senior Consultant. She comes to Delta Think with extensive experience in strategy and business model creation for established and startup organizations. Prior to joining Delta Think, she’s held positions with both not-for-profit and commercial organizations including Hypothesis, MIT Knowledge Futures Group, Springer Nature SIPX, and Proquest.
is typically a lack of open educational resources. Sandra Bozarth and Amanda Grombly discuss California State University Bakerfield’s agility in supplying and sustaining access to digital course reserve alternatives throughout the pandemic. Lastly, Jeffrey M. Mortimore and Nikki Cannon-Rech demonstrate how LibGuides can be used to provide an OER textbook by collaborating with the chemistry faculty.
Reference Office of Financial Aid, University of Georgia. https://osfa.uga.edu/costs/
What To Look For In This Issue:
As part of her new role at Delta Think, Heather will focus on business development and community support for the Delta Think Open Access Data & Analytics Tool (OA DAT), fostering relationships with publishers, libraries, consortia, service providers, and aggregators. As Senior Consultant, she will use her expertise to support consulting engagements focused on analysis, strategy, and industry infrastructure in scholarly communications. Meg White has also joined Delta Think as Senior Consultant bringing with her deep experience in content, technology, and educontinued on page 6
Booklover.................................. 25 Learning Belongs in the Library...................................... 39 Expert Commentaries from CEOs................................. 42 TOC for ATG Online Articles..... 46 Biz of Digital............................. 47
Interviews Mitchell Davis........................... 54 David Parker............................. 56
Profiles Encouraged Profiles Encouraged................... 60 Plus more...................... See inside
1043-2094(202104)33:2;1-3
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Against The Grain – ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) (USPS: 012-618), Copyright 2020 by the name Against the Grain, LLC is published six times a year in February, April, June, September, November, and December/ January by Against the Grain, LLC. Business and Editorial Offices: PO Box 799, 1712 Thompson Ave., Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. Accounting and Circulation Offices: same. Call (843-509-2848) to subscribe. Periodicals postage is paid at Charleston, SC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Against the Grain, LLC, PO Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482.
Editor:
Katina Strauch (Retired, College of Charleston)
Associate Editors:
Cris Ferguson (Murray State) Tom Gilson (Retired, College of Charleston) Matthew Ismail (Central Michigan University)
Research Editors:
Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)
Assistants to the Editor: Ileana Jacks Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)
International Editor:
Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino)
Contributing Editors:
Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University) Deni Auclair (De Gruyter) Rick Anderson (Brigham Young University) Sever Bordeianu (U. of New Mexico) Todd Carpenter (NISO) Eleanor Cook (East Carolina University) Will Cross (NC State University) Anne Doherty (Choice) Michelle Flinchbaugh (U. of MD Baltimore County) Joyce Dixon-Fyle (DePauw University) Michael Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC) Chuck Hamaker (Retired, UNC, Charlotte) Bob Holley (Retired, Wayne State University) Donna Jacobs (MUSC) Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University) Myer Kutz (Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) Tom Leonhardt (Retired) Stacey Marien (American University) Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University) Alayne Mundt (American University) Bob Nardini (ProQuest) Jim O’Donnell (Arizona State University) Ann Okerson (Center for Research Libraries) Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University) Rita Ricketts (Blackwell’s) Jared Seay (College of Charleston) Corey Seeman (University of Michigan) Lindsay Wertman (IGI Global)
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Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to: Katina Strauch, Editor, Against the Grain, LLC Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482 cell: 843-509-2848 <kstrauch@comcast.net>
Against the Grain is indexed in Library Literature, LISA, Ingenta, and The Informed Librarian. Authors’ opinions are to be regarded as their own. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This issue was produced on an iMac using Microsoft Word, and Adobe CS6 Premium software under Mac OS X Mountain Lion. Against the Grain is copyright ©2021 by Katina Strauch
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Against the Grain / April 2021
v.33 #2 April 2021 © Katina Strauch
ISSUES, NEWS, & GOINGS ON Rumors............................................................................................................... 1 From Your Editor................................................................................................ 6 Letters to the Editor........................................................................................... 6 Advertising Deadlines........................................................................................ 6 Table of Contents for Against the Grain Online Articles.................................. 46
FEATURES Access to Affordable Educational Resources...................................................... 1 OER: Who Picks Up the Check?........................................................................ 10 From Seed To Harvest: Growing A Multi-pronged Affordable Course Content Program Statewide............................................................................. 14 Integrating Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) and Course Reserves during COVID-19............................................................................................. 17 There’s No Place Like Home: Hosting Dynamic OER in the Library CMS........ 20 Op Ed — Considering Games in Libraries and Such......................................... 22 Tribute To Dan Tonkery................................................................................... 58 Back Talk — My First Library............................................................................ 62
REVIEWS Booklover — Letters and Laureates.................................................................. 25
LEGAL ISSUES Legally Speaking — Google v. Oracle................................................................ 26 Questions and Answers — Copyright Column.................................................. 29
PUBLISHING Bet You Missed It............................................................................................... 8 The Scholarly Publishing Scene — A Full Life.................................................. 31 Don’s Conference Notes................................................................................... 34 And They Were There — Reports of Meetings.................................................. 37
TECHNOLOGY & STANDARDS AND TEACHING & LEARNING Learning Belongs in the Library — Three Focal Points to Guide This Column’s Investigations.................................................................................. 39 Let’s Get Technical — Using Record Manager to Update Archival Collection Records............................................................................................................ 40
EXPERT COMMENTARIES AND SPECIAL REPORTS Expert Commentaries from CEOs — Achieving Open Science: Building on Historical Partnerships.................................................................................... 42 Fall 2020 Virtual Finals Events: Innovative Practices for Post-pandemic Future?............................................................................................................. 44
BOOKSELLING AND VENDING Biz of Digital — Records Management for Research Data................................ 47 Optimizing Library Services — How the Shift to Online Learning Is Changing Content Management and Access Needs for Libraries and Their Patrons........ 49 The Digital Toolbox: Case Studies, Best Practices and Data for the Academic Librarian.......................................................................................... 52
ATG INTERVIEWS & PROFILES Mitchell Davis – Founder and CEO, BiblioLabs................................................ 54 David Parker – Founder, Parker the Publisher Consulting............................... 56 Profiles Encouraged......................................................................................... 60
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From Your (anxious to hear from you) Editor:
H
ey All! Well, we are still “transitioning” from the print to the virtual. And based on a lot of you who still want print, we will probably be transitioning for some time!
This — the second print and virtual issue of ATG, v.33#2 — is guest edited by the awesome Lars Meyer and is about access to affordable educational resources. There are articles dealing with available models for access to resources (Meg White). Virginia’s state funded program to supply library owned and affordable course materials to students for subjects where there is typically a lack of open educational resources (Anne Osterman, Genya O’Gara, and Sophie Rondeau). Sandra Bozarth and Amanda Grombly let us in on California State University Bakerfield’s agility in supplying and sustaining access to digital course reserve alternatives throughout the pandemic. Finally, Jeffrey M. Mortimore and Nikki Cannon-Rech demonstrate how LibGuides can be used to provide an OER textbook by collaborating with the chemistry faculty. Back Talk is about Jim’s first library visit (do you remember yours?). There is a special report on virtual
events for final exams by Marta Bladek. We have two stellar interviews with David Parker and Mitchell Davis. Our Op Ed (Jared Seay) is a call to action for us librarians to engage in more interactive engagement with faculty and students. Optimizing Library Services talks about dealing with online learning, Biz of Digital is about records management and The Digital Toolbox reflects on Covid and 2020. We are introducing several new columns with this issue — a teaching and learning column (David Parker) and an expert commentaries column (this time by Frank Vrancken Peeters). We invite you all to send us submissions, issues, and questions! <kstrauch@comcast.net> Please! Last and certainly not least, the insightful and clever Amira Aaron sends us a moving tribute to our long-time friend and colleague, Dan Tonkery. I welcome (really) all the comments, input, whatever you want to send me! Thank heavens for spring! Yr. Ed.
Letters to the Editor
Rumors continued from page 1
Send letters to <kstrauch@comcast.net>, phone 843-509-2848, or snail mail: Against the Grain, Post Office Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. You can also send a letter to the editor from the Charleston Hub at http://www.charleston-hub.com/contact-us/. Dear Editor: My copy of the NEW and improved ATG issue arrived today! I still have to dig into it, but congratulations on the changes and updates ... the February 2021 issue looks terrific! Best, Meg White (Senior Consultant, DeltaThink; Director of Vendor Partnerships, Charleston Hub) <megmwhite13@gmail.com> Dear Subscribers: We’d love to hear what you think too. Send comments to your editor. And remember to visit https:// www.charleston-hub.com/membership-account/membershiplevels/ to subscribe or renew your ATG subscription today! Sincerely, Katina Strauch, Yr.Ed.
AGAINST THE GRAIN ADVERTISING DEADLINES VOLUME 33 — 2021-2022
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Against the Grain / April 2021
cation. Her experience includes developing and implementing strategies to launch and manage eBook and journal portfolios, translating strategies into creative technology approaches, and optimizing content revenue opportunities. Her expertise in book publishing, book portfolio management, and education further enhance the Delta Think team’s expertise in strategy and execution. Prior to joining Delta Think, Meg held numerous executive-level positions with leading publishers and distribution companies including Mosby, Wolters Kluwer, and Rittenhouse Book Distributors. Delta Think is a consulting and advisory firm focused on helping publishers, societies, and information providers anticipate, create, and manage change. Since 2005, Delta Think has served more than 120 organizations across the scholarly enterprise to analyze market intelligence, develop customer insights, and create effective business strategies as related to products, services, and full portfolios. Delta Think engagements are as varied as our clientele, but are always grounded in carefully curated market data and trend analysis. To support data-driven decisions surrounding Open Access, in 2017 Delta Think launched the Open Access Data and Analytics Tool (OA DAT), a subscription-based product which allows users to stay abreast of the continually evolving market through carefully curated data, visualizations, and expert commentary on APCs, funding, market sizing and dynamics, and more. For more about Delta Think visit www.deltathink.com and https://oainfo.deltathink.com/ or contact <info@deltathink.com>. The multifaceted Audrey Powers is moving to Ithaca, NY in June or July. She is retiring on August 6 from the University of South Florida libraries where she was associate librarian serving the college of the Arts. Audrey and her delightful husband Mac will be building a house in Ithaca. We have really enjoyed our association with Audrey who is one of the Charleston Conference directors and movers and shakers. Thankfully, Audrey will remain involved with the Charleston Conference and Against the Grain! continued on page 18
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Bet You Missed It — Press Clippings — In the News Carefully Selected by Your Crack Staff of News Sleuths Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Editor’s Note: Hey, are y’all reading this? If you know of an article that should be called to Against the Grain’s attention ... send an email to <kstrauch@comcast.net>. We’re listening! — KS
Rare Book Heist
Obit of Note
A warehouse break-in near Heathrow Airport in 2017 turned baffling when the police discovered that all that was missing was 240 rare books of staggering value. It came to be called the “Mission Impossible Case” due to the acrobatics needed to scale to a roof and descend avoiding laser alarms. Then the gang spent five hours selecting treasures such as the Einstein copy of Johannes Kepler’s The Cosmic Mystery and Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Connoisseur book thieves are very much a problem, but they typically pilfer over years. The rare book archivist at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh lifted $8 million worth, but it took him 25 years. The London haul was $3.4 million in a night. As it turned out, the culprits were garden-variety thugs who operate freely now in the EU and Britain, and they were captured in 2020 by standard police sleuthing. When they were rounded up, only four books were missing, and there was little damage to the rest. A London bookseller pronounced the crime brilliant due to the technique, but extremely dumb because “there is nothing less fungible than rare books.” Is that why they still had the books three years after the theft? But how did they know which ones to pick?” See: Marc Wortman, “The Case of the Purloined Books,” Vanity Fair, April, 2021, p.86.
Lawerence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) was a UNC journalism grad by golly, then a naval officer in WWII. Afterwards, he took degrees at Columbia and the Sorbonne and failed to make a living as a painter in SF. Then opened the legendary City Lights bookstore which he ran while writing poetry and essays.
Pomegranate Molasses Southern Turkey is a land of pomegranates. A symbolic part of the culture, they are given as wedding gifts to symbolize fertility and smashed on doorsteps for New Year. Pomegranate molasses is catching on in the US, although many are put off by the name “molasses,” thinking it will be icky sweet. In fact, the Turks call it “pomegranate sour” as it is super tart. It’s put in sauces, marinades and soups. Mixed with olive oil, you can dip your bread for breakfast. Spice up a salad, drizzle over seared tuna, marinate a rib-eye. It will definitely penetrate the meat. A burning rosemary sprig adds another layer of smoke. See: Albert Stumm, “The Home of Pomegranate Molasses,” Milk Street, March-April, 2021, p.16.
Librarian of Note Faye Jensen is CEO of the South Carolina Historical Society in the historic Fireproof Building in Charleston. They have two million maps, plats, photographs and manuscripts. Faye has a doctorate from Emory and worked in the National Archives and the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. Her favorite eating spot is the Grocery. See: “Faye Jensen,” Garden & Gun, April/May,2021, p.45.
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Against the Grain / April 2021
He published Corso, Burroughs and Ginsberg, was prosecuted for obscenity for Ginsberg’s Howl, but acquitted. His poetry collection, A Coney Island of the Mind sold over a million copies. See: “The poet who became a counterculture icon,” The Week, March 12, 2021, p.35.
And Speaking of Bookstores When you’re in Charleston, there are two noteworthy independent bookstores just over the Cooper River in Mt. Pleasant. Trade-A-Book is on Ben Sawyer Boulevard. The owner, Beverly Gibbs, is noticing growing numbers of young people who are tired of screens and want physical books. Karen-Ann Pagnano’s The Village Bookseller is on Coleman Boulevard. She delivered books to homes during the pandemic, now is having face-to-face conversations with customers eager to talk literature. She has a strong Classics section that is popular with young readers. See: Kenna Coe, “Independent bookstores anticipate interest in tangible, physical books,” Moultrie News, March 17, 2021, p.A1.
Let’s Read About the Cabinet Peter Baker, Days of Fire (2013) (how Dick Cheney and George Bush were tight and then grew apart); (2) Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (2005) (Lincoln appointed his rivals to the cabinet, and they did not get along); (3) Robert Dallek, Camelot’s Court (2013) (the unlikable men in Kennedy’s cabinet, none of whom trusted the military); (4) Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers (2013) (Allen and John Foster Dulles running the CIA and State Department under Ike); (5) Jill Watts, The Black Cabinet (2020) (a group of black advisors to FDR among whom was Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman University). See: Lindsay M. Chervinsky, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, March 27-28, 2021, p.C8. Chervinsky of the author of “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution.”
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OER: Who Picks Up the Check? By Meg White (Senior Consultant, DeltaThink; Director of Vendor Partnerships, Charleston Hub) <megmwhite13@gmail.com>
W
e’ve all been there … a delicious meal, fine wine, the outstanding company of a large group of friends and colleagues. A good time had by all, filled with laughter, wisdom, and good wishes. And the momentary awkwardness when the bill is presented and placed in the center of the table. Everyone enjoyed the evening and there is a bill to be settled. Of course, picking up the check is usually a matter of good manners and politeness. There are social norms based on the set“Most accurately, ting and context perhaps we when the time comes to reach for the bill. But regardless of who is should reframe paying, especially in the days of the the discussion pandemic, a shared meal is one of into a question the cornerstones of human relationships. of “who is
picking up the check?” when it comes to learning materials. Open does not mean free. Content, even if freely available, is not produced or provided without cost, so who pays?”
Basic economic theory (Khan Academy, 2021) tells us that when goods and services are provided, they must be paid for by someone — that is, you don’t get something for nothing. In the more familiar vernacular, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Which brings us to Open Education Resources (OER). The data is clear, access to learning materials improves student learning outcomes (Follett Higher Education White Paper, 2020). There is large agreement among stakeholders (faculty, administrators, students, librarians, publishers, even politicians!) that access to textbooks, review materials, online tutorials, etc. helps ensure that students are able to successfully gain proficiency in their selected area of study. Consequently, what is in question in the discussion of OER is not the value of course materials as an essential component in student success. Most accurately, perhaps we should reframe the discussion into a question of “who is picking up the check?” when it comes to learning materials. Open does not mean free. Content, even if freely available, is not produced or provided without cost, so who pays?
Individual students purchasing their books at the local campus store is perhaps the most traditional and still most prevalent model (Student Watch, 2020), despite the disruptive impact of technology on format and purchase options. Amazon, Chegg, RedShelf and other services provide more choices than ever (rental, new, used, eBook, print book) potentially creating competition and savings for students. Government regulations (U.S. Department of Education, 2008) have helped bring transparency to pricing. However, it is important to note that significant percentages of students consistently report that due to cost (Halliday, 2019), they do not purchase any course materials.
Departmental Purchase Departments often invest in “course-related” materials, often due to high prices for specialized learning materials. A good example is patient simulation software to support health sciences students or conversation software to support language students.
Institutional Purchase Libraries have always served a key role in ensuring that the scholarly enterprise has access to the materials they need to do their work. They have been stewards of resources designated for this purpose and have collaborated with faculty, administration, and researchers to curate, collect, and manage learning materials. This skill set makes libraries and librarians invaluable as institutions examine how to best support student success. There are many institution-wide initiatives driven by libraries (UCLA Library, 2021) that expand access to course materials. Library leadership on OER and other initiatives requires a significant re-examination of traditional funding and resources at the institution level.
Illegal Access Piracy and illegal activity has always been part of the landscape in academic publishing. Digital formats have only served to make illegal activity and copyright violation more prevalent. For U.S. publishers, the annual loss of revenue attributed to piracy of eBooks is estimated to be $300 million (Forbes, 2019).
Public Funding
The current landscape of “who pays” resembles a tapestry or, perhaps more accurately, patchwork quilt. There is no shortage of funding models that provide access to course materials; some mature, some nascent, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Scholars, Faculty, Institutions, Librarians, Publishers, public and private entities — all have a potential role to play in providing potent solutions to this complex problem. Let’s take a quick look at a few of these models.
More than 8 million students enrolled in post-secondary education in the United States receive Pell Grants (Protopsaltis, S. and Parrott, S., 2017) direct payments from the federal government based on financial need. These funds can be used for tuition and purchase of course materials. The Open Textbook Pilot (U.S. Department of Education, 2018), a federal program launched in 2018 to support OER and textbook affordability, has provided more than $24 million to “support projects at institutions of higher education that create or expand the use of open textbooks to achieve savings for students.”
Student Purchase
Inclusive Access
The time-honored tradition of trekking to the bookstore and standing in line at the start of the term certainly has changed.
This is an emerging model that includes access to course materials with tuition and fees. Included access has gained support
Funding Models
10 Against the Grain / April 2021
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from publishers and some institutions, contending that these models save students up to 50-70% off retail prices (McKenzie, L., 2017), but critics have pushed back (Carrns, 2020) against policies that do not allow students to opt out or are not transparent in communicating fees. The Chronicle of Higher Education estimates that more than 500 post-secondary institutions now offer some form of included access.
Equitable Access Equitable Access is based on a health-insurance model. For a flat fee, all students are guaranteed access to all course materials for all classes on day one. This book fee is the same every term, no matter the course or discipline. The University of California at Davis, a pioneer in the Inclusive Access movement, is working with stakeholders to pilot this model (Blumenstyk, 2019).
Private Funding Private foundations and other philanthropic organizations have also been active in funding educational materials. The Hewlett Foundation was an early proponent in this area and has supported OER development since 2002. Each of these models is unique, but the common theme is that there is a cost associated with the creation of and providing access to course materials. They each achieve the goal of supporting student outcomes … what changes in each is who pays and how much. No one disputes the value of pedagogically sound course materials. We all agree that the meal was delicious, the question we should be asking is “how do we divvy up the check?”
Textbook Affordability and What Costs So Much Many initiatives to change or disrupt traditional course material creation and access have been specifically developed and targeted as a tool to make these materials more affordable for students. By removing the cost burden of these materials, a potential barrier to student success is alleviated. However, even in an open environment, costs remain to create, maintain, and distribute course materials. Tied up in the discussion of OER is the persistent myth that digital course materials “cost less” than physical content. This is a persistent misrepresentation and has created a prevalent false narrative.
Copy One Effective learning materials contain not only facts, but knowledge. They are nearly always the result of measured collaboration between many professionals working to define learning objectives and present information in a manner that optimizes the mastery of information and concepts. This can be as simple as presenting complex chemical reactions in an illustration or creating patient simulations for a nursing student. Regardless of format, the intellectual property required to create effective learning materials is not trivial. To get Copy One completed takes time, effort, and resources.
The Internet is Free (Sort of) Another common myth about learning materials (and other formerly print-based information) is that digital materials can be duplicated and distributed at little or no cost, because the variable costs associated with manufacturing and distributing physical goods no longer exist. What this assumption ignores are the fixed and variable costs associated with the technology
12 Against the Grain / April 2021
infrastructure required to enable digital access for students. Additionally, compliance with ever-evolving standards for privacy (GDPR) and accessibility (WC3) require constant and continual updates and enhancements. Perhaps a better way to frame the discussion of OER is as just another business model. “Open” does not mean free, it simply means that the cost of creation and access has been paid by someone other than the user. Paul Farmer famously argued that healthcare and education are essential to create a functional economy. Using Dr. Farmer’s logic, education is a public good, and learning materials are an essential component of that public good. If textbooks and course materials are an essential component of education, we can therefore start to talk more clearly and transparently about how to sustainably fund their creation and distribution. In other words, can we all agree that we enjoyed the meal and the good company, now let’s focus on defining the most efficient and equitable way to split the check?
References Khan Academy. Lesson summary: Introduction to Macroeconomics. February, 2021. https://www.khanacademy.org/ economics-finance-domain/ap-macroeconomics/basic-economics-concepts-macro/introduction-to-the-economic-way-of-thinking-macro/a/lesson-summary-opportunity-cost-and-the-production-possibilities-curve Follett Higher Education White Paper. Outcomes Made Accessible. 2020. https://follettaccess.follett.com/follettaccess/assets/ File/Follett_ACCESS_Student_Outcomes.pdf Student Watch. Attitudes and Behaviors toward Course Materials 2020 Report. 2020. https://www.oncampusresearch.org/ U.S. Department of Education. Higher Education Opportunity Act. 2008. https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/leg/hea08/index. html Halliday, M. 65% of Students Skip Required Textbook Purchases, How Well Do They Do in College? 2019. https://tophat.com/ blog/65-of-students-skip-required-textbook/ UCLA Library. OpenUCLA Affordable Course Materials Initiative. 2021. https://www.library.ucla.edu/openucla/openucla-affordable-course-materials-initiative-award Forbes. U.S. Publishers Are Still Losing $300 Million Annually To Ebook Piracy. 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2019/07/28/us-publishers-are-still-losing-300-million-annually-to-ebook-piracy/?sh=26cd91f3319e Protopsaltis, S. and Parrott, S. Pell Grants — a Key Tool for Expanding College Access and Economic Opportunity — Need Strengthening, Not Cuts. 2017. https://www.cbpp.org/research/ federal-budget/pell-grants-a-key-tool-for-expanding-collegeaccess-and-economic U.S. Department of Education. Open Textbooks Pilot Program. 2018. https://www2.ed.gov/programs/otp/index.html McKenzie, L. “Inclusive Access” Takes Off. 2017. https://www. insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/07/inclusive-access-takes-model-college-textbook-sales Carrns, A. That Digital Textbook? Your College Has Billed You For It. 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/your-money/ college-digital-textbooks.html Blumenstyk, G. Can a Health-Insurance Model Bring “Equitable Access” to the Textbook Market? 2019. https://www.chronicle.com/ newsletter/the-edge/2019-06-18
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Introducing ACM OPEN
open A New Model for Open Access Publication Developed in collaboration with leading academic libraries, ACM OPEN has the potential to make all new research articles published by ACM accessible to the widest possible readership without paywalls. More than 75 institutions around the world have begun ACM OPEN participation over the past year, and we expect many more to soon join them. The ACM OPEN license provides: • Unlimited publishing of Open Access ACM research articles from the institution’s corresponding authors • Full ”read” access to all ACM Digital Library subscription content • Default CC-BY license option • Automatic deposit of an institution’s accepted ACM research articles in its • institutional repository • Fixed fees for the life of the multi-year term • Detailed online self-service reporting to track ongoing published research
For more information, please visit https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen or contact us at dl-info@hq.acm.org.
From Seed To Harvest: Growing A Multi-pronged Affordable Course Content Program Statewide By Anne Osterman (VIVA Director) <aelguind@gmu.edu> and Genya O’Gara (Viva Deputy Director) <gogara@gmu.edu> and Sophie Rondeau (Assessment & E-Resources Program Analyst) <wrondeau@gmu.edu>
V
IVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium (https://vivalib.org/), was founded in 1994 and had early programs in resource sharing and shared collections that continue to the present day. More recently, an emphasis on open and affordable course content (OACC) to reduce student textbook costs has been added to the consortium’s portfolio of services. This work started with a pilot of an Open Education Network system membership in 2016 and was followed in 2018 with sustained funding from the state for a new VIVA OACC program. Although VIVA’s OACC program is grounded in the open educational movement, it was recognized that open educational resources do not exist for every subject. To meet the needs of the consortium, the program needed to provide library-owned and affordable options at no cost to students to bridge this gap.
VIVA Faculty Textbook Portal The initial implementation of the affordable part of VIVA’s OACC program was an instance of EBSCO Faculty Select, branded as the VIVA Faculty Textbook Portal. Through this service, which began in January 2019, faculty can select course content from a variety of sources including OER, the consortium’s shared collection of eBooks (which was a first for this EBSCO product), and eBooks for purchase. When faculty find a title for a future course, they can submit a form to record the adoption of the OER or shared eBook (noting how they plan to use it, “All of the including course name and estimatcontent ed enrollment, which is meaningful for tracking the usefulness of the purchased tool), or request a purchase. VIVA through this then purchases selected titles for program is individual institutions. This creates targeted, permanent additions to fairly traditional our libraries’ collections that are academic library directly relevant to their institucontent, not tions’ curricula.
textbooks, and it illustrates the strong connection between library collections and course content.”
There have been 227 adoptions across a wide range of subjects through the Portal to date, with some subjects like biology, computer science, mathematics, performing arts, and sociology having adoptions in all three areas of open, purchase, and shared. VIVA also uses the adoption data to get a sense of which subjects have particular gaps in OER. History, health, and education, for example, have a large number of purchased items, which suggests that targeted grants for OER in these areas might be useful. This data also informs which of VIVA’s shared collections are most directly relevant to course content in the state. Titles from Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Oxford Scholarship Online,
14 Against the Grain / April 2021
for example, have been particularly successful with matching to courses. All of the content purchased through this program is fairly traditional academic library content, not textbooks, and it illustrates the strong connection between library collections and course content. The Portal has had adoptions recorded to date at 19 of our 39 public institutions, the adoptions have benefitted over 6,400 students, and there has been an estimated student cost avoidance of over $624,000. The benefits go far beyond any initial course matching. These permanent additions to libraries’ collections have been shown to help students for multiple semesters, and the hope is that the materials are relevant to the institutions’ curricula for many years. The Portal has been successful in helping faculty identify resources with no cost to students for their courses. It also laid the foundation for a natural expansion to how VIVA could support libraries’ collection development in ways that were relevant to their institutions’ courses, VIVA’s new Curriculum Driven Acquisitions (CDA) program.
Curriculum Driven Acquisitions Program The start of VIVA’s CDA program had the markers of synchronicity. Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) reached out to VIVA to determine if bookstore lists could be matched to available Portal content around the same time that VIVA was brainstorming ways to more proactively match curricular materials to available Portal content. VIVA and VCU formed a pilot partnership to determine if this would be an effective strategy for eliminating textbook costs for students. During the first pilot, VIVA purchased 55 EBSCO eBooks and matched 9 VIVA shared eBooks to VCU spring 2020 semester bookstore lists, resulting in an estimated student cost avoidance of $120,500. This approach developed into an extended pilot program involving three representative public institutions (doctoral, four year comprehensive, and two year). Institutions were selected based on expressions of interest as well as student financial need, as determined by reports from the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia. Participation requirements included the following: 1. Verification of the bookstore’s willingness to work cooperatively with the library. 2. Readiness to work with tight turnaround times related to duplication verification. 3. Collection and sharing of adoptions data to assess program effectiveness. Although VIVA handles the acquisitions of the eBooks, the entire process is collaborative. For the pilot, eBooks were purchased through GOBI with institution-specific licenses as well as consortial licenses for Taylor & Francis and EBSCO eBooks. This enabled VIVA to purchase eBooks from a wider range of e-suppliers depending on the institution’s contracts.
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The first full academic year pilot with multiple institution types was completed in Spring 2021, and VIVA purchased 346 eBooks and matched 38 shared VIVA eBooks through this program during this 2020-2021 academic year. The eBooks have benefited 494 courses, including 91 repeat adoptions of eBooks purchased or shared in an earlier semester. These books will reach over 12,000 students and create a student cost avoidance of over $579,000 for the academic year. Since these books are owned by the institution, they will be available for subsequent use in the courses. History, English, and political science are the three most highly served disciplines in the program. The lack of STEM disciplines being served by the program is apparent and is corroborated by a corresponding interest in those areas within VIVA’s Open Grants program. Based on the course names and numbers, it also appears that the program is predominately serving upper level undergraduate and graduate courses. This is not entirely surprising given that the eBook content available for purchase by libraries in GOBI rarely includes the latest edition of commercial textbooks often used in lower level courses. Overall, faculty response to these programs has been very positive. VIVA’s Open and Affordable Course Content Committee will review the results to determine if and how the program may continue in the future.
Challenges For all the positives there remain a number of challenges, not the least of which is the fact that VIVA’s program is both open and affordable. The grassroots origins of VIVA’s OACC program are
16 Against the Grain / April 2021
deeply rooted in the open education field, and there is concern that funding of other efforts, even in areas where there is no open content available, dilutes this effort and could ultimately hinder wide-scale adoption of OER. Scalability is another challenge, particularly in a small central office. One individual, the Assessment and E-Resources Program Analyst, is responsible for coordinating with pilot institutions, troubleshooting issues, setting up sub-accounts for ordering and receiving materials, and implementing targeted and time-sensitive purchasing. Similarly, data collection “These books for assessment is time-intensive and will reach over reliant upon teaching faculty vol12,000 students unteering information about what library resources classes may be usand create a ing, painting an incomplete picture student cost of program reach and impact.
avoidance of
Critical to the success of the CDA over $579,000 pilot is a close working relationship for the academic between the member library and their campus bookstore. This is a year.” challenge in that, for many VIVA libraries, this is the first time they have worked with their bookstores; additionally, there may be institutional non-compete clauses that make this a difficult path to embark upon. The majority of the VIVA shared collections and the eBooks available for purchase are purposefully non-traditional textbooks. This pairs well with member library collection development practices where relevant course materials are often added to the permanent circulating collections. However, because traditional textbooks are excluded in this practice, there are a great number of courses that will not benefit from this approach.
Opportunities and Next Steps In spite of very real challenges, this program has been impactful and clearly supports VIVA’s goal of leveling the academic playing field for students across Virginia. The need for both open and affordable programs such as this has become even more apparent during the pandemic when students’ access to library materials has been limited. Ensuring the program is sustainable from a staffing and program reach perspective is therefore a major focus. VIVA has several initiatives that will shape how the program evolves, including a Virginia Course Materials Survey Task Force that is working to deploy a statewide survey to better understand how course material costs impact educational equity among Virginia students. The results of this work will inform next steps for the program broadly, as well as specific needs that might be addressed through the CDA arm of the program. Another VIVA project is mapping available OER resources to high enrollment courses in Virginia. This project may expose existing gaps in available open materials that could be filled by affordable resources. The resources added to libraries’ collections through the VIVA affordable program will support institutions for many years beyond the initial cost savings for students. VIVA will continue to let program data and community input inform the best ways to creatively and strategically grow the affordable program to ensure that students have barrier and cost-free options for required course materials.
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Integrating Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) and Course Reserves during COVID-19 By Sandra Bozarth (Interim Dean, Stiern Library, CSUB) <sbozarth2@csub.ed> and Amanda Grombly (Collection Development and Management Coordinator, Stiern Library, CSUB) <agrombly@csub.edu>
C
alifornia State University, Bakersfield (CSUB) has actively participated in the California State University Affordable Learning Solutions initiative (AL$) for the last seven years. The initiative is aimed at driving down textbook costs. Support was provided at the system level to each campus with annual funding opportunities, training, and faculty support. In that same time, the Walter W. Stiern Library at CSUB transitioned several of their traditional library services with the aid of 21st century technologies. The last great stand was course reserves. When the pandemic hit California in March 2020, the library was faced with migrating over 500 physical course reserves, mostly books and videos, into an online format. At the same time, publishers from around the world made their content available digitally to colleges and universities for the remainder of the spring semester, free of charge. At CSUB, this perfect storm pushed staff and librarians to reinvent how they provided course reserve service and how to sustain it digitally throughout the pandemic.
In preparation for fall, the library contacted faculty to offer support in identifying existing library resources or Open Educational Resources (OER) content to support continued instruction. In addition, collection development and subject librarians identified subscription and Evidence Based Acquisition (EBA) content to bridge the gaps. The goal has been, and continues to be, to provide faculty reasonably priced alternatives to print textbooks and supplementary materials while maintaining academic freedom, textbook affordability, copyright compliance, and “Staff and faculty stewarding the library budget.
at the library worked together to integrate textbook affordability workflows within course reserve, collection development, and electronic resources workflows to enhance the course reserves web page.”
The California State University (CSU) Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) initiative began in 2012. It consists of three main student-centered goals regarding textbooks: provide quality materials, reduce prices, and offer a choice of print or electronic access. Estimated student savings from the 23 campuses participating in the initiative have been over $40 million (Reports, 2019). Since the CSUB AL$ team began their efforts on campus in 2013, the total textbook savings for CSUB students are over $1,520,000 (Affordable, 2020).
Affordable learning initiatives began at CSUB with the establishment of an advisory team, the CSUB AL$ team. The team is led by the library on campus and includes the bookstore manager, the campus disability services manager, one administrator, one student, and one faculty member. The team applied for funding each year to help continue to drive the CSU initiative. The team provided workshops, presentations, competitions, and stipends while also
Against the Grain / April 2021
attending meetings with faculty and vendors to spread the word about the AL$ initiative and to show faculty and students how they could actively participate. Team members from the library and the bookstore worked with other librarians and a library student worker to assist faculty in selecting library owned materials, “At CSUB, this Open Educational Resources (OER), perfect storm creating course materials, or identifying low-cost bookstore alternapushed staff tives to provide students with low or and librarians no cost options.
to reinvent how
Once faculty selected materials, they provided library staff added those materials to the AL$ website. When the pancourse reserve demic began, the library was able to service and incorporate the AL$ textbook list on how to sustain the AL$ website into the print course reserve list using ExLibris Alma. it digitally This integration was something the throughout the library had been wanting to do for pandemic.” years but had been unable to find the resources to devote to the project. Staff and faculty at the library worked together to integrate textbook affordability workflows within course reserve, collection development, and electronic resources workflows to enhance the course reserves web page. Library staff accomplished this using Primo, and it generated a finding aid for staff and librarians who were assisting patrons. Students were now able to more easily find out if their textbook was available in the library without having to search two different lists on the library website. In addition to adding materials selected by faculty, a library student employee manually searched all required textbooks listed with the bookstore against our library catalog to determine if the library owned any of the required textbooks. If a match was found with electronic, simultaneous user access, the faculty member was notified and the material was added to our AL$ list, and the course reserves list as well. Prior to the pandemic, if a print or older version was found, a team member would email the faculty and ask if they wanted it added to the lists. During the pandemic, the library did not allow print course reserves to be checked out. The print course reserves list is now called the “course reserves list” as it includes both print and electronic titles. In the traditional print course reserves model, students were granted short-term access to these frequently used items in 2-hour, 24-hour, 3-day, and 7-day intervals. Two-hour access was the most frequently utilized loan period for these materials, and most course reserves are books. As textbook affordability became a priority on campus, course reserves evolved to focus more and more on access to textbooks rather than supplemental readings and media. In a pandemic, however, it is not practical or safe to lend textbooks out in two-hour intervals, and most of the textbook access initiatives provided by publishers at the onset of the pandemic have ended. Staffing and copyright re-
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strictions limit what can be facilitated with document delivery, and the library is not yet able to offer controlled digital lending. Print or physical course reserves were finally integrated with AL$ workflows as a result of the pandemic. The availability of these materials is determined by faculty participation whereas the AL$ program is more library-driven. Each year participation in the AL$ initiative at CSUB has looked different. The AL$ team established a friendly competition for departments to try to adopt the most course sections with low or no cost textbooks. This worked well, with two of CSUB’s smallest departments emerging as leaders in the effort. Newer faculty members often seem to the be most excited and willing to adopt or change their textbooks. One oddity that has come from the initiative is that because it is led by the library, faculty participating in the initiative assume that the library will purchase the required textbooks for those wanting to participate. Even prior to the initiative the library did not purchase the required textbooks on purpose. This happened naturally at times but not by request; sustaining textbook purchases for all courses is not within the means of the library budget. By chance, when we purchase for a research area or curricular need and/ or an eBook package, we may happen on acquiring textbooks. It is part of the library’s collection development policy not to purchase textbooks to support classroom instruction. Selectors can purchase titles used as textbooks if they are scholarly and serve as research sources like those typically used to supplement the textbook. Titles on the course reserves list that were not explicitly textbooks and that were available for purchase at a reasonable cost in DRM-free, unlimited, simultaneous use were purchased. However, it is well known amongst libraries that DRM-free, unlimited, simultaneous use textbooks are rarely reasonably priced, if they are available at all. As a result, the library began investigating alternatives like demand driven acquisition programs with vendors and publishers who are most commonly placed on course reserve. The library found that the textbook
publishers most used at CSUB did not offer affordable solutions: the most commonly utilized publisher does not offer their textbooks as eBooks, the second most common only offers personal licenses of their textbooks, and eBooks from the third and fourth most common publishers are known to be some of the most expensive on the market. One course reserve title has a three-user license cost of over $600. As a result of the obstacles faced by instructors, the library has amended collection policies during the pandemic. The library purchases all faculty requests for supplementary texts and streaming video licenses that can be accommodated by the library budget and market availability, thereby allowing faculty to use textbook alternatives. The library is also providing Open Access materials, as they become available in the library’s discovery platform. This provides instructors with cost-free alternatives for their courses which students can easily access via the library. All full-term library courses at CSUB are also zero-cost textbook courses where library faculty utilize existing library resources, OER materials, and archival content available on the web. While the goals may have been high to reinvent how the library provided digital course reserve service, using AL$ and the system already in place, and making it sustainable, with no increased funds during a pandemic, it was definitely worth the efforts. A new way of thinking has begun and different approaches to old practices and services will allow for changes and improvements as the plan continues to move forward.
References Reports and Research. Affordable Learning Solutions. (2019). Retrieved Feb 1 2021, from http://www.affordablelearningsolutions.org/reports_research. Affordable Learning $oultions. (2020). AL$ Annual Campus Report. California State University, Bakersfield. Unpublished.
Rumors continued from page 6 Knowledge Unlatched, the international initiative for Open Access (OA), is pleased to welcome Udit Tomar as the newest member of its growing Sales team. In his new role as KU’s Representative for India, Tomar will be responsible for carrying KU’s message on the relevance of OA and its evolving facets to academic libraries throughout the Indian subcontinent. A native of Delhi, India’s capital, Tomar has a bachelor’s degree in Zoology, Botany and Chemistry. He spent his early sales career in the health industry, representing GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Aventis, and Astra Zeneca, among other known brands. He later entered publishing as a representative of McGraw Hill Education, where his role was to promote the publisher’s books to the faculty and librarians at Indian medical colleges. “I have been following the development of OA in the western world for some time now,” says Tomar. “And I have long admired KU’s innovative approaches. India can benefit a great deal from KU’s OA products and services, and I am honoured to be entrusted with the task of spreading KU’s message in this part of the world. Tomar may be reached at <udit@knowledgeunlatched.org>.
18 Against the Grain / April 2021
A Thank You and Some Sad News to Share A huge shout-out to Amira Aaron who wrote the tribute to Dan Tonkery! See p.58 in this issue. And we are collecting more remembrances on the Charleston Hub. See https://www. charleston-hub.com/2021/04/tribute-to-dan-tonkery-remembered-by-colleagues-and-friends/. I was devastated to learn of the fire at the University of Cape Town Library. Digby Sales came to the Charleston Conference frequently until he retired. You can read more at https://www. news.uct.ac.za/article/-2021-04-19-devastation-as-historic-uctbuildings-gutted-by-runaway-fire.
Bloomsbury Acquires RGP Imprint Bloomsbury has signed a sale and purchase agreement for the acquisition of academic imprint Red Globe Press (RGP), from Macmillan Education Limited. The imprint, which is part of the Springer Nature Group, specializes in titles for higher education students globally, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, business and management, and study skills. RGP has a continued on page 24
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Direct to Open Introducing Direct to Open: A New, Collective Action Open Access Business Model for Scholarly Books from The MIT Press
D2O harnesses collective action to support open access to excellent scholarship. Developed over two years with the generous support of the Arcadia Fund, in close collaboration with the library community, the model will: • Open access to all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections (~90 titles per year) from 2022 • Provide participating libraries with term access to backlist/archives (~2,300 titles), which will otherwise remain gated. Participating libraries will receive access even if the model is not successful. • Cover partial direct costs for the publication of high-quality works that are also available for print purchase. • Our participation fees take into account library type, size, and collections budget. They are also dynamic. If total participation exceeds our financial goal, the Press will reduce the fees for all participating libraries.
Learn more about D2O at https://direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open
There’s No Place Like Home: Hosting Dynamic OER in the Library CMS By Jeffrey M. Mortimore (Discovery Services Librarian, Georgia Southern University) <jmortimore@georgiasouthern.edu> and Dawn (Nikki) Cannon-Rech (Georgia Southern University) <dcannonrech@georgiasouthern.edu>
Abstract This paper addresses how librarians at a mid-sized R2 university in the southeastern United States collaborated with instructional faculty to employ the Springshare LibGuides CMS platform to host an OER textbook. This paper highlights LibGuides CMS’ suitability to host sophisticated OER projects. Given that hosting is integral to any project, this paper explores issues relevant to all OER developers and managers. Keywords: Open Educational Resources, Content Management Systems, LibGuides CMS
Introduction As colleges and universities increasingly engage in the creation and repurposing of Open Educational Resources (OER), libraries are stepping up to provide faculty the support they need to manage these resources, including finding, vetting, transforming, and licensing OER content. But what about hosting? OER content comes in many forms, and faculty need the flexibility to update and revise content over time. While institutional repositories have been widely adopted for this purpose (Ferguson 2017, 35-36), many OER projects are not well suited to document-based hosting platforms (Thompson and Muir 2020, 690; Rolfe 2016).
The thought of creating OER from scratch was intimidating. Therefore the faculty decided to adapt the Chemistry 1e textbook from OpenStax. OpenStax is based at Rice University and provides a large catalog of high-quality, peer reviewed, OER textbooks and course materials that are free online or for very low cost to print. OpenStax’s use of fully-open Creative Commons CC-BY licenses made this text ideal for adaptation, and strong endorsement from other chemistry faculty allayed any quality concerns. Once the faculty had chosen this text, the task turned to exploring options for hosting and delivery. To do this, the platform would need to accommodate multiple faculty editing the material over time. The course averages five sections per academic year with at least three faculty teaching during any term, so they knew that they would need to integrate new images, videos, charts, graphs, problem sets, surveys, and other forms of student assessment. Also, the platform would need to handle importing large quantities of material, be compatible with the university’s learning management system (D2L), meet accessibility requirements, and be aesthetically pleasing. Finally, the platform would need a minimal learning curve for everyone involved. With guidance from their subject librarian and the discovery services librarian, the faculty agreed to use LibGuides CMS to develop this project.
Background, Development, and Hosting
Development of the OER fell into three stages: 1) proof of concept testing and migrating content, 2) revising content, and 3) cleanup and go-live. When development began, OpenStax allowed visitors to download their XML source files for the Chemistry 1e textbook. While the XML would need to be cleaned up and CSS recreated, migrating OpenStax’s core HTML and MathML-formatted equations appeared manageable. Before committing, the librarians migrated a test page with equations and verified that LibGuides could display them correctly by linking the MathJax JavaScript library in the Guide Custom CSS/JS dialog. Next, they audited a sample of the XML to ensure that extraneous HTML elements and attributes could be removed and CSS reapplied after the content was revised by the faculty.
This project began in Spring 2019 as part of a Faculty Learning Community program centered on developing OER course materials. One learning outcome for participating faculty was to develop a proposal for Affordable Learning Georgia’s (ALG) Textbook Transformation Grants. These grants are sponsored by the University System of Georgia and provide funding to faculty willing to replace costly course materials by adopting, adapting, or creating OER. The faculty leading this project teach an introductory chemistry course required of all engineering majors. The course is intense as it condenses two semesters of content into one. In a typical academic year, the course enrolls approximately 620 students. The faculty teaching this course knew that many students did not purchase the required course materials due to their cost. Also, they felt that students were disengaged from the materials as “a majority of the general chemistry textbooks are not written from the perspective of teaching Engineering Majors,” and therefore “Many students lack motivation to excel when the course objectives do not appear applicable to their academic major.” (Narendrapurapu et al. 2019, 4)
Once the initial migration was complete, the faculty revised the imported content for several weeks. During this time, the faculty revised or replaced text and images; revised page names, section headers, and example problems; updated or prepared
To address this hosting challenge, librarians at Georgia Southern University collaborated with instructional faculty to employ the Springshare LibGuides CMS platform to host an OER textbook. Unlike document-based OER, this textbook includes an array of dynamic content that can be edited by the faculty in real time over multiple semesters. By leveraging LibGuides CMS’ permission controls and ability to host custom XML, CSS, and JS libraries, librarians and faculty adapted a technology already available to them to support this sophisticated OER hosting project.
20 Against the Grain / April 2021
Once these proofs of concept were complete, the librarians downloaded and archived OpenStax’s XML source files, created a LibGuides CMS group and “shell” guide to contain the textbook, and developed a migration workflow, including steps to process the OpenStax XML before importing the resulting HTML into LibGuides’ Rich Text/HTML fields. To do this, the librarians used Notepad++ for batch revisions to remove elements and attributes, and revise select ids and classes. At the same time, the faculty identified the specific content to import from the Chemistry 1e textbook. Not surprisingly, as the librarians and faculty gained experience processing the OpenStax XML, the workflow required troubleshooting and revision to accommodate variances not identified in the initial audit of the sample XML. Fortunately, the faculty knew enough HTML and MathML to catch issues early as they reviewed the imported content.
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new equations in MathML using Microsoft Word’s Equation Editor; and created new problem sets and summative assessments. Meanwhile, the librarians provided ongoing training and support as the faculty gained familiarity with the LibGuides interface, performed troubleshooting of the HTML and MathML, and helped with copyright questions as the faculty revised the content. Needless to say, because the faculty worked back-andforth between LibGuides’ Rich Text Editor and HTML view to revise the content, some revisions significantly impacted the integrity of the underlying HTML, especially on section divs and classes that would be employed to apply CSS styling. However, by encouraging the faculty to follow consistent steps when revising the content, the librarians were able to isolate a majority of these variances and perform batch corrections using Notepad++. Once the faculty had completed content revisions, the librarians stepped back in for a few weeks to finish cleaning up and validating the HTML, then develop and apply the new CSS. To start, the librarians verified numbering and anchors for all sections, figures, tables, and examples; verified that all links resolved correctly and included correct target attributes; verified that all images were hosted on LibGuides and included alternative text; and verified all CSS-related divs, ids, and classes. Finally, they worked with the faculty to develop new CSS rules using the Group Custom CSS/JS dialog, then corrected any outlying content and display issues. After setting up Google Analytics via the Guide Custom CSS/JS dialog, the textbook was ready to launch for the course. Since its launch in early spring 2019, the textbook has been viewed over 22,500 times with each chapter page averaging over 450 views. As of this writing, the textbook is available at: https://georgiasouthern.libguides.com/chem1310.
Lessons Learned While the librarians and faculty experienced some challenges using LibGuides CMS, it’s not an overstatement to say that LibGuides made hosting this project possible. Because the ALG Textbook Transformation Grant under which this project was developed did not include costs for hosting infrastructure, the faculty needed a stable hosting solution that was already available to them. Due to the dynamic nature of much of the content, the institutional repository was not an option. Furthermore, given the need to update and train new instructors over time, the faculty needed a platform that would be accessible, easy to learn, and include plenty of “free” technical, content, and copyright support provided by the librarians. The minor “cons” of using LibGuides for this project are largely related to managing and updating large chunks of HTML, something for which the platform was not built. For example, LibGuides enforces character limits on Rich Text/HTML fields, which presents a challenge when importing large blocks of HTML, some of which exceed 120,000 characters. Also, LibGuides’ Rich Text Editor does not include a Find/Replace tool, which would be helpful for batch revising large blocks of HTML. However, both of these issues were addressed by processing HTML in Notepad++ prior to importing it into LibGuides, then stacking Rich Text/HTML fields within content boxes to sidestep LibGuides’ character limits. On the other hand, the “pros” of using LibGuides have far outweighed any drawbacks. First, using LibGuides has not incurred any new hosting costs, and the institution is unlikely to cancel its subscription. Second, LibGuides is a familiar platform with which librarians have extensive experience, as well as it is easy to teach. Third, using LibGuides significantly reduces the faculty’s dependence on campus IT services and leverages their access to the librarians as technical, content, and copyright experts. Fourth, LibGuides CMS provides sufficient permission
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and access controls to separate OER projects from other groups and guides while providing access to the faculty and students who need it. While LibGuides CMS offers enhanced options and makes configuring permissions easier, a standard LibGuides subscription is able to support most OER projects as well. Lastly, LibGuides’ support of custom group and guide-level CSS and scripting, including MathJax, supports global style management and cleaner, more accessible HTML. Lessons learned from the faculty perspective include the importance of determining the faculty’s HTML skills prior to revising content. The faculty involved in this project were generally able to troubleshoot and correct issues with the source HTML, and they were quick to consult with the librarians when they encountered problems. Without these skills, the faculty would have required far more intervention and support from the librarians. Librarians should evaluate these skills early to determine what impact they may have on their ability to facilitate the project. All the same, the faculty member’s and students’ engagement with the final product further support using LibGuides CMS. Faculty and students were familiar with LibGuides and used the platform frequently for research assistance. For this reason, the learning curve to navigate course materials was very low. Also, platform-level accessibility was managed by Springshare and the librarians, which provided ease of mind to the faculty as they created and adapted guide content. The look and feel of the final product also satisfied the faculty’s desire for an aesthetically appealing product and has caught the eye of others in and outside the institution. For example, faculty instructors love the static URLs and anchors generated for specific pages and content, as this simplifies directing students to the exact material being covered in class or on exams.
Conclusion Overall, using LibGuides CMS to host dynamic OER has been a positive experience and has solved a number of technical issues that would make employing a text-oriented institutional repository untenable. While repositories offer notable advantages for version control, long-term access, and preservation, the traditional collection priorities of academic libraries must be held in balance with curricular needs as well as students’ need for ready access to free or low cost course materials. Just as for librarians creating and updating their own instructional guides, faculty who employ dynamic, frequently-updated OER for their courses deserve the same flexibility and ease of use from their hosting platform.
References Ferguson, Christine L. 2017. “Open Educational Resources and Institutional Repositories.” Serials Review 43, no. 1: 34-38. https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2016.1274219 Narendrapurapu, Beulah, Debanjana Ghosh, Arpita Saha, Leah Williams, and Dawn Cannon-Rech. 2019. “Textbook Transformation Grants, Round Fourteen (2019-2020): 468.” Grant application, accessed February 7, 2021. https://affordablelearninggeorgia.org/assets/documents//468_GASouthern_Proposal_18500.pdf Rolfe, Vivien. 2016. “Web Strategies for the Curation and Discovery of Open Educational Resources.” Open Praxis 8, no. 4: 297-312. Thompson, Seth D., and Adrienne Muir. 2020. “A Case Study Investigation of Academic Library Support for Open Educational Resources in Scottish Universities.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 52, no. 3: 685-693. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0961000619871604
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Op Ed — Opinions and Editorials
Considering Games in Libraries and Such — The New Normal: Opportunity or the Toll of Doom? AND How Game Thinking Can Keep the Robots at Bay — and Sharks Column Editor: Jared Alexander Seay (Media & Services Coordinator, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424; Phone: 843-953-1428) <seayj@cofc.edu> blogs.cofc.edu/seayj
T
hough the public attitude to all things “public” will be changed forever, eventually this pandemic thing — or at least the associated lockdown — will be over. We will be back to “normal” interaction in public spaces or whatever the “new normal” means in the post-pandemic world. At least I think so … mostly. But, what does this portend? (Que ominous foreshadowing music here). In a recent article in Inside Higher Ed1 Christopher Cox, dean of libraries at Clemson University, talked about “the significant ways academic libraries will shift” — or must shift — in the “new normal.” Cox talks specifically about collections, services, spaces and operations and how the pandemic has changed how they are perceived by patrons and administration. Print collections, for example, have become even more problematic due to access issues, and libraries must more intensely look into “e-everything” in the form of more online access to titles, digitization of current collections and more intense concentration on copyright and fair use challenges. Service models must be examined to more fully integrate self-service, virtual alternatives, artificial intelligence and embedded librarians as well as leaning further into online teaching, online research, and the library website as the “virtual front door.” The physical library space itself must be further adapted to accommodate both social distancing and collaborative study as well as dynamic group interaction and be flexible enough to easily shift from one to the other at a moment’s notice. Cox talks optimistically, as one would expect and hope from a dean of libraries, of both the challenges and the opportunities this situation has afforded the library for more interactive engagement with faculty and students on campus. However, I was drawn to one particular comment on the article (in the comments section of course) which resounded with a particular poignant, pessimistic assessment of the “new normal.” This commentator noted that the move online and the resulting application of more technology (i.e. self-service and less human contact) in library services will only accelerate the current integration of Libraries under IT departments and downgrading of libraries from traditional research support services. The concerned commenter said that a librarian might soon “be a repurposed IT worker being passed off as a librarian” and further noted that, “some universities, such as mine, have their libraries now reporting to IT whose view of what libraries actually do is severely limited. The CIO at my institution thinks that librarians could easily be replaced by automation — a feeling supported by the consistent reduction in force that has been occurring since IT took over. They also eliminated tenure for the librarians and made the move to have them report to generic IT project
22 Against the Grain / April 2021
managers many of whom have no comparable educational background or experience.” But, assimilation into the IT Borg collective is only the beginning of the end. For our commentator further lamented that in their library, “the spaces that Libraries occupy are always being examined for ‘actual use’ in an attempt to re-purpose the space (usually to accommodate more administrators). The commenter warned that the student’s insistence for study space and access to ‘actual’ resources and people is “the only thing that keeps the wolves at bay at least for the time being.” Though this beleaguered commentator does seem to have been scarred by IT thugs somewhere in a past departmental encounter (or is perhaps currently engaged in an epic departmental struggle with the dark forces of IT), the fear expressed here is rational, and this dystopia is a plausible, potential alternate universe to Cox’s vision of library opportunity. Resource and personnel slashing is a very real thing. “…the move And on my campus I have online and heard aplenty of the high the resulting degree to which some in the application of administration covet the “unused” or “rarely used” more technology spaces in the library. Of (i.e. self-service course, it is only natural on and less human a campus that is constantly starved for space (academic contact) in or administrative) that those library services perceived “unused” spaces, will only wherever they are, would be coveted. It seems then also accelerate a natural response for librarthe current ians to convincingly show integration of that these spaces are indeed Libraries under “actually” being effectively used, and it is this particular IT departments point I shall address.
and downgrading
Other than increased atof libraries tention to environments for from traditional student work and study and collaboration (including research support duel monitors for students services.” to hook into with their own devices — because in the “new normal” students will apparently always bring their own devices), Cox does not provide any detail of how libraries can leverage — and subsequently retain — the vast spaces they currently control. Of course, I do provide the answer. And as this column would suggest, it involves games or at least game-like thinking. Indulge me for a bit if you will.
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Though Cox does not explicitly state it, I am sure he would agree that the library physical space must be utilized in tandem, mutual support with any application of the academic library service model utilizing technology and online presence. In a traditional sense such spaces can and should be used to house the people (library instructors and/or students) and technology (screens/cameras for online/ hybrid use). More efficient and effective ways to make this happen should be found. But, I am envisioning a more innovative concept that involves active library support of the institution for an increasingly pervasive pedagogy — game-based learning. Why not get the library involved in more interactive engagement with faculty and students on campus? I have certainly reiterated ad nauseam the concept that gamification in general and game-based learning (GBL) in particular is increasingly being understood as a core pedagogy for a “potentially powerful learning environment” and “the “next generation of learning engagement.”2 In as much as the best learning is active and immersive, gaming (in the broadest sense of the term) falls into the whole milieu of active learning — also referred to as experiential learning or engaged learning or problem-based learning.3 An academic library as a game center? Well, not exactly … rather a campus hub of resources, expertise, and physical space for experiential and immersive learning. Not only is this a direct way for the academic library to fully realize the opportunity for more direct, interactive engagement with faculty and students, but it becomes a direct method to solidify the library’s virtual and physical space relevance. How is that for a win-win?
How is that for a humble call to arms to all librarians who long to revolutionize the profession and invigorate their day-to-day interaction with students and faculty? So, considering the environment fostered by the pandemic, academic libraries should lose no time in adapting this perspective as a significant part of the effort to adapt to the “new normal.” I invite any librarian so inclined and with creative gumption to jump with me into this immersive lake with both feet. For those who may not wish to plunge fully immerged all at once into potential shark infested waters, dipping one’s toes into the cool stream of the new normal may still invigorate you. Besides, sharks are people, too, after all.
Endnotes 1. Cox, Christopher. “Changed, Changed Utterly.” Inside Higher Ed, June 5, 2020. https://www.insidehighered.com/ views/2020/06/05/academic-libraries-will-change-significant-ways-result-pandemic-opinion. 2. Oblinger, Diana G. “The Next Generation of Educational Engagement.” Journal of Interactive Media in Education. Ubiquity Press, May 21, 2004. https://jime.open.ac.uk/ articles/10.5334/2004-8-oblinger/. 3. Seay, Jared A. “Active Learning Immersive Scenario Games in Teaching & Learning.” Research Guides Addlestone Library. College of Charleston. Accessed February 27, 2021. https://libguides.library.cofc.edu/immersivescenariogames/.
Rumors continued from page 18 backlist of more than 7,000 titles and publishes more than 100 new titles a year, with content including digital platforms, textbooks, research-driven materials and general academic publishing. RGP’s three digital products will be migrated to Bloomsbury Digital Resources’ own platform and its content added to Bloomsbury Collections. The business will operate within the publishers Academic and Professional division. RGP generated £9.6m of revenue in the year ending 31st December 2020, and profit before tax of £1.1m, with gross assets of approximately £0.8m. In the remaining nine months of Bloomsbury’s financial year ending 28th February 2022, RGP is expected to contribute approximately £6m of revenue and £0.4m of profit before tax, before integration and acquisition costs. See https://www.thebookseller.com/news/bloomsbury-acquiresrgp-imprint-1256801?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_term=&ut for all the details.
Podcast News! Have you heard it? What’s the latest podcast that you have attended? Was it from Against the Grain? Episode 109: Conversation on the University of California/Elsevier Open Access Agreement is available at https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/04/atg-the-podcast-ep-
24 Against the Grain / April 2021
isode-109-conversation-on-the-university-of-california-elsevier-open-access-agreement/. Apple is the latest to announce a Netflix-style subscription for podcasts. The service does come with trade-offs. Podcasters have to pay a flat fee of $19.99 per year to even offer subscriptions, and they then give Apple a 30% cut of revenue for each subscriber’s first year and 15% for the years following. See https://flashesandflames.com/. Interesting, according to Mashable, Apple company will not be providing podcast creators with their subscribers’ details. That means no names, no emails, no way to reach out to subscribers outside of the podcast content. Creators won’t know who is paying to listen to their show — even though Apple will. Hopefully, this will be changed? Read more at https:// mashable.com/article/apple-paid-podcast-subscription-creators/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%.
From Eileen Lawrence “Gary Gibson, who attended The Charleston Conference year after year until recently, died very suddenly eight weeks ago. continued on page 33
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Booklover — Letters and Laureates Column Editor: Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425) <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>
A
s a person who has had many pen pals during my lifetime, I have often wondered: Will email exchanges between contemporaries be as fun to read in 50 or 60 years? Will the exchanges even be discoverable? Treasured letters are often tied with ribbons or stored in a favorite box. I won’t necessarily be around to learn the answer, but I can somewhat guess at what the outcome might be. “Correspondence,” the compilation of letters between two poets, Paul Celan, the pseudonym for Paul Antschel, and the Nobel Laureate, Nelly Sachs, is an intimate behind the curtains look at two creative literary minds who struggled to find their place in post World War II society. The reader gets a glimpse at Sachs’ poetic skill as the letters are lovingly peppered with poems that Sachs composed for Celan. “Correspondence” is interesting in its construction. There is an Introduction penned by John Felstiner, 68 pages of translated correspondence, an Editorial Afterword, Editor’s Notes to the Letters, Annotated Index of Names, and a side-by-side Chronology of Celan and Sachs for the time period of the letters. This is a thorough offering. Born in Berlin, Germany in 1891, Sachs experienced the horrors of Nazi persecution at the beginning of World War II including members of her family falling victim to the Holocaust. This, coupled with her fragile health, created the attitude under which she lived and wrote. Her relationship with the author Selma Lagerlöf, the 1909 Nobel Literature Laureate, provided the opportunity for her and her mother to flee Nazi Germany for Sweden in 1940 just as Sachs was scheduled to report to a concentration camp. Nelly Sachs shared the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature with Josef Shmuel Agnon. Agnon was the first Hebrew writer to win the Prize and this recognition came “for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people.” Sachs’ work was seen “for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength.” “Correspondence” won’t necessarily introduce the reader to the inspiration stated for awarding Sachs the prize as letter writing and poetic verse are two different skill sets. Yet it offers a unique reading opportunity. The letters span the time period from 1954-1969 and many of them speak of her ill health, her extensive hospitalization due to mental breakdowns, and her fear of persecution. They are balanced with her deep affection for her friend Celan, his wife, Gisèle and his son, Eric. These two pen pals were raised as only children, scarred by the atrocities of World War II, later in life found companionship and solace in their friendship and died one month apart from each other in 1970 — Sachs from cancer in May and Celan from suicide in April. Now step behind the curtain and experience Sachs’ joy, poetry, pain, despair, and celebration from a most intimate perspective.
Joy 1958: “Dear poet and dear person Paul Celan, Once again your letter brought so much joy, but please, call me by my name, it is as if in order to celebrate the miracle of having won someone so far away, one ought to meet without formalities, with the inner essence alone.”
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Poetry 1958: “Dear Friend Paul Celan, …I am always happy to know of you and of how your work draws broader and broader circles around it. Below is a minute of dawn for you: Why this sadness? This flowing-the-world-to-its-end? Why in your eyes the pearling light that dying is made from? Quietly we slip down this sheer cliff of terror it gazes at us with star-studded deaths these dust-stiffened afterbirths where the song of the birds leaked away and the lip entombed the wine of speech. Oh beam that awakened us: how you took us weary for home in your darkening arms then left us alone in the night-”
Pain 1959: “Paul Celan, dear Paul Celan, …I fell ill, so badly was I struck. Dear Paul Celan, let us keep reaching across to each other with the truth. Between Paris and Stockholm runs the meridian of pain and comfort.” The footnote here states: “One year later, Paul Celan will write ‘The Meridian’ above the text of his Büchner speech”
Despair 1960: “Paul you dear brother and my whole beloved Celan family I have waited so long for news — but perhaps I hurt you — before in my despair, in the midst of my journey through Hell. I was so afraid for you that I sent all those telegrams — but now I have been brought out into the brightness. The clarity that I found on this path of purification is such that I had to reach out my hand to all those who were involved in this unhappy story and took away my belief in everything and in myself (I conceded that my tormentors were right and felt myself to be the greatest of sinners). What is the point of all this fighting against races and nations if people don’t even know each other as a person.”
Celebration 1966: “Paul and Gisèle would you come to Stockholm for December 10? I need hardly say that it would be the greatest birthday joy. But if so let me know by telegram, so that we can get tickets from the Nobel Foundation and reserve rooms.” The footnote states: “The Nobel Prize award ceremony took place in Stockholm on this day; it coincided with the 75th birthday of Nelly Sachs.”
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LEGAL ISSUES Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University) <jack.montgomery@wku.edu>
Legally Speaking — Google v. Oracle Column Editor: Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University) <Anthony.Paganelli@wku.edu>
T
ypically, most notable copyright infringement lawsuits involve popular songwriters and musicians, major publishing companies, or the misuse of materials on the Internet. However, technology has added another issue to the already complicated copyright law, which is how to interpret computer programs, specifically the computer language code. According to the U.S. Copyright Office, they identify both Source Code and Object Code as the same when interpreting computer programs that pertains to the “sufficient amount of original authorship in the form of statements or instructions to a computer” (Compendium, 2021). While most copyrighted works are typically original literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic works, computer programs and software might appear to belong to the patent category, but it does not. Because patents protect inventions, computer programs rely on code. The computer code is often debated as a language. For instance, in 2015, the University System of Georgia declared that computer science could be used as foreign language in place of the required two years of foreign language that is an admissions requirement. The decision was based on the fact that computer science courses were increasing, whereas foreign language courses were decreasing. Yet, the Modern Language Association noted that computer science is an important educational requirement, however computer science is not a replacement for a foreign language. Of course, legislators have been creating legislation regarding the protection of computer software for several decades. On December 12, 1980, Congress amended the Copyright Act to allow computer programs to be protected under the copyright laws. A decade later, Congress approved the Computer Software Amendments Act, which allows computer program owners exclusive rights “to authorize or prohibit the rental, lease, or lending of the program for direct or indirect commercial purpose” (copyright.gov, 2021). Another amendment for computer software was added in 1998 with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
that “created an exemption permitting a temporary reproduction of a computer program made by activating a computer in the course of maintenance or repair.” Because of the recent additions to the U.S. Copyright Act, previous case decisions and briefings are limited, such as the definition for computer programs, which was defined by the Copyright Office. According to the U.S. Copyright Act definition for computer program it is stated, “A computer program is a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result.” Despite the newly established amendments to the U.S. Copyright Act to address computer programs, there have been several high profile computer software lawsuits. The most recent significant lawsuit regarding technology was between Google and Oracle that the U.S. Supreme Court decided on April 5, 2021 after it was introduced to the Supreme Court in 2018. Of course, the oral arguments were postponed on March 16, 2020 due to the pandemic, which required shut downs globally. The arguments resumed on October 7, 2020. The case involved the Java SE computer program and “fair use.” In a 6-2 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, they determined that Google did not commit copyright infringement against the Oracle Corporation. The 6-2 decision was completed by only eight U.S. Supreme Court Justices because Justice Amy Coney was not sworn in at the time of the arguments for the case were heard. Oracle was seeking approximately $9 billion in the copyright infringement suit, which began in 2010. The legal case has gone through “two jury trials and numerous appeals” (Stohr & Decker, 2021). The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision reversed a previous appeals court’s decision that regarded 11,000 lines of code from the Java SE computer program. The code was from Oracle and was used by Google for the Android operating systems, which they claimed was protected under the U.S. Copyright Act, even though the U.S. Supreme Court did not determine if the code was actually copyrightable. In fact, Stohr & Decker (2021) noted that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer stated, “the court would assume, for argument’s sake, that the material was copyrightable.” The Supreme Court had to decide “Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface,” and “Whether, as the jury found, petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use” (U.S. Supreme Court, 2021). The Supreme Court reviewed the U.S. Copyright Act’s “original work of authorship” and “the fair use of a copyrighted work.”
26 Against the Grain / April 2021
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The summary of the case stated, “As is relevant here, software interfaces are lines of computer code that allow developers to operate prewritten libraries of code used to perform particular tasks. Since the earliest days of software development, developers have used interfaces to access essential tools for building new computer programs. Contravening that longstanding practice, the Federal Circuit in this case held both that a software interface is copyrightable and that petitioner’s use of a software interface in a new computer program cannot constitute fair use as a matter of law” (U.S. Supreme Court, 2021). According to Stohr & Decker (2021), they described the purpose of the code as “pre-written directions known as application program interfaces, or APIS, which provide instructions for such functions as connecting to the Internet or accessing certain types of tiles. By using those shortcuts, programmers don’t have to write code from scratch for every function in their software, or change it for every type of device.” Google claimed the code was freely accessible to anyone, whereas Oracle argued that the code is protected by copyright laws because the code creates shortcuts that can be used in multiple devices from different competitors, which should be licensed according to Oracle. In defense, Google stated that the 11,000 lines of code used in the application was based on the “fair use” doctrine. Justice Breyer noted that the lines of code could be copyrighted, but using the code fell under the fair use doctrine. Romoser (2021) stated that “The fair use doctrine permits unauthorized use of copyrighted material in some circumstance, including when the copying transforms the original material to create something new.” Breyer also wrote, “Google reimplemented a user interface, taking only what was needed to allow users to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program” (Romoser, 2021). Breyer mentioned that from the code, Google was able to add more original code to contribute to the innovation of new technology. Following the decision of the Supreme Court, Google released the statement, “a victory for consumers, interoperability, and computer science.” In addition their chief legal officer Kent Walker noted, “The decision gives legal certainty to the next generation of developers whose new products and services will benefit consumers” (Romoser, 2021). Oracle declared that Google’s use of the code cost Oracle millions in lost licensing agreements and future contracts with other companies. They added, “The Google platform just got bigger and market power
28 Against the Grain / April 2021
greater — the barriers to entry higher and the ability to compete lower. They stole Java and spent a decade litigating as only a monopolist can. This behavior is exactly why regulatory authorities around the world and in the United States are examining Google’s business practices” (Romoser, 2021). Copyright lawyer J. Michael Keyes of Dorsey & Whitney claimed that the Supreme Court’s decision was “the biggest copyright decision in a generation” (Romoser, 2021). He added that “we will see more copying, more cases, and more claims of fair use” (Romoser, 2021). Indeed, computer programs or computer coding will continue to enter our court systems in regards to copyright infringement, as the courts continue to make groundbreaking decisions, such as the case between Google and Oracle.
References Band, J. (2021). Five observations about the Supreme Court’s decision in Google v. Oracle. Disruptive Competition Project. Retrieved from https://www.project-disco.org/intellectualproperty/040721-five-observations-about-the-supreme-courtsdecision-in-google-v-oracle/. Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices. (2021). Literary Works: Chapter 700, Computer Programs. Retrieved from https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap700/ch700-literaryworks.pdf. Jaschik, S. (2017). Computer Science as (foreign language) admissions requirement. Insidehighed.com. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/11/27/ should-computer-science-fulfill-foreign-language-admissions. Romoser, J. (2021). Google wins copyright clash with Oracle over computer code. SCOTUS Blog. Retrieved from https://www. scotusblog.com/2021/04/google-wins-copyright-clash-with-oracleover-computer-code/. U.S. Copyright Office. (2021). United States Copyright Office: A brief introduction and history. Retrieved from https://www. copyright.gov/circs/circ1a.html. U.S. Supreme Court. (2021). Google v. Oracle. Retrieved from https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/ docketfiles/html/public/18-956.html. Stohr, G. & Decker, S. (2021). Supreme Court overturns Oracle’s copyright win over Google. Bloomberg: Technology. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-05/ supreme-court-overturns-oracle-s-copyright-win-over-google.
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Questions & Answers — Copyright Column Column Editor: Will Cross (Director of the Open Knowledge Center and Head of Information Policy, NC State University Libraries) <wmcross@ncsu.edu> ORCID: 0000-0003-1287-1156 QUESTION: A university press publisher asks, “How can we support authors of open educational resources who want to rely on fair use?” ANSWER: Openly-licensed teaching materials such as textbooks, often called open educational resources (OER), have been discussed in past columns on resources for copyright education and offer a more inclusive and invitational model of education. Unfortunately, OER creators have often struggled with applying fair use when creating OER, often based on general anxiety around the doctrine and uncertainty about how fair use aligns with placing an open license on materials that include third party content. As a result, many creators have reported that they felt unable to rely on fair use and some of the largest repositories for OER likewise have relied on policies that did not permit OER that included materials based on fair use. In practice, most learning materials, open or otherwise, already rely on fair use. It would be difficult to find a textbook that does not quote anyone, build on work that came before, or otherwise include any materials without formal permission. Creative Commons licenses have only existed for a few decades and the vast majority of materials that reflect the state of any given field, as well as the lived experiences of students, are not and are not likely to be openly-licensed. As such, an unwillingness to engage with fair use thoughtfully and explicitly has serious costs. Uncertainty about fair use can warp both what subjects are covered in OER and how those subjects are taught. In order to address these issues, a team from American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) and North Carolina State University have developed a Code of Best Practice in Fair Use for OER.1 The Code describes a set of best practices as reported in interviews and focus groups with a wide cross-section of people working in the open education community and vetted by a team of legal experts. Like previous codes of best practice such as the ARL Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries2 which many librarians rely on for everything from digital archiving to electronic course reserves, this document is designed to reflect the community’s sense of best professional practice as a way to support responsible action by members of that community. This Code states four consensus “Principles” that reflect best practices identified by members of the OER community in applying fair use in certain repeated scenarios in OER development. Each of the Principles is given shape by its associated contextual “Considerations,” which are integral to application of the Principle. Each Principle is also accompanied by a brief description of “Hard Cases,” which reflect agreement about some situations in which educators relying on fair use should exercise special care. In addition, the Code includes a set of Appendices that flesh it out in a variety of contexts including the general relationship between fair use and education, additional considerations about structural limitations on copyright, and related issues such as
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trademark and patent law. In particular, two appendices address a central issue raised while developing the Code: how fair use practices described in the Code play out when OER are shared internationally. The Code described the general harmony of exceptions for educational use and quotations across different national copyright regimes. It also includes analysis from noted Canadian copyright expert Dr. Carys Craig, who notes that “the fair dealing doctrine in Canada is remarkably similar, in purpose and scope, to the US fair use doctrine” and that these “significant similarities between the US fair use doctrine and Canada’s fair dealing doctrine should alleviate concerns about cross-border fair use/dealing in the OER community.” The Code also offers guidance for marking inclusions based on fair use, reflecting the general consensus from the open education community that clear marking is important so that a downstream user is aware of what materials are openly licensed and what materials are included under fair use. Because practices vary so widely across disciplines and professional communities, however, the Code offers several options and advises individual creators to mark inclusions in the way that best-reflects their institutional setting, the extent of reliance on fair use in the particular OER, and other considerations. For those that support OER by hosting, sharing, and archiving materials, the Code offers a nuanced and principled way to vet OER that rely on fair use that moves beyond the binary “all or nothing” approach that had been such a barrier. Rather than choose between either completely forbidding OER that rely on fair use or allowing unbounded reliance based on unclear criteria, these archives can include materials based on clear guidance that reflects the community’s shared sense of best practice and ratified by a set of legal experts. For OER creators — from individuals to publishers — the Code can provide a shared framework for evaluating and understanding when and how to incorporate existing content to meet pedagogical needs. Librarians, instructional designers, and others that support OER creation can also use the Code as a way to teach about copyright and fair use more generally. Because the Code “describes an approach to reasoning about the application of fair use to issues both familiar and emergent” it provides guidance for meaningful individual analysis rather than the illusion of certainty offered by rules of thumb, brightline rules, or other decision-making shortcuts. It is meant to teach and support thoughtful analysis, not just answer a specific question. As such, the Code itself has an educational purpose and, as it is openly licensed, constitutes an OER in its own right. The Code was released in early spring of 2021 and the team has been explaining and promoting it at a range of professional venues. Beginning in the summer of 2021, the team will begin to support exemplary projects that use the Code to develop new OER and to improve and make existing OER more inclusive. If you are supporting an OER project or community of practice and would like to explore opportunities to partner, you can reach out here: https://form.jotform.com/210464937980060.
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QUESTION: A university librarian asks, “What did the Supreme Court decide in the Google v. Oracle case and what does it mean for higher education?” ANSWER: The case of Google v. Oracle3 has been closely-watched for several years and has been covered here in earlier columns. Anticipation has been especially high since it was one of only a few cases carried over from the previous term. The issue in Google v. Oracle was whether the technology corporation Oracle can claim a copyright in Java APIs (“application programming interface,” specifications that allow programs to communicate with each other) and, if so, whether Google infringed these copyrights when they used the same names, organization, and functionality as the Java APIs in their software. After some procedural back and forth, the case was heard on the fair use issue and a jury unanimously agreed that Google’s use of the Java APIs was permitted under fair use. In 2018, however, the Federal Circuit took the unusual step of rejecting the jury’s verdict and held that Google’s use was not a fair use as a matter of law. Google appealed to the Supreme Court, which was expected to hear oral arguments in March of 2020. In March, however, oral arguments were postponed in light of concerns surrounding COVID-19. In April of this year the Court handed down a surprising decision with significant implications for copyright in education and scholarly sharing. The first surprise came from an issue the Court chose not to decide: the basic question of whether APIs are protected by copyright at all. Many observers, especially those who work closely with software, felt that APIs were clearly unprotected but the Court finessed that question. Instead, Justice Breyer’s opinion for the Court assumed “for the sake of argument” that APIs are protectable but held that Google’s use was permitted under fair use. Breyer grounded his analysis in the core purpose of copyright to promote the progress of knowledge and fair use as a critical safety valve for cases where an exclusive right would stifle that society-serving purpose, as well as fair use’s flexible, judge-made character, which the statute “indicates, rather than dictates.” Breyer also took the unusual step of leading with a discussion about the nature of the original work, typically described as the “second factor” in a fair use analysis and noted that the code at issue exists much nearer to unprotected ideas and processes than many works that courts consider in other fair use cases. He likewise concluded that the purpose of Google’s use was transformative and that the amount and substantiality used was appropriate in light of that transformative purpose. Taken together, these conclusions about Google’s transformative and proportionate use would have been enough to decide the case. However, Breyer went a step further in his analysis of market effects. First, he noted that market harm in and of itself is not dispositive since some types of harm such as “lethal parody” that kills demand for a work are “not cognizable under the Copy-
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right Act.” Further, Breyer went out of his way to note that courts “must take into account the public benefits the copying will likely produce.” This analysis of market effects that includes the harm and benefits to the public confirmed the Court’s decision that Google’s use was fair and offers powerful support for a growing body of fair use that truly lives up to the Constitutional purpose of the law. Creators, librarians, and the often-overlooked public as a whole should celebrate this decision. QUESTION: A media librarian asks, “I read something about a new TV series that draws on public domain stories. How does that work?” ANSWER: Of course, many popular books, films, songs, and other artwork draw on the public domain. From remakes and reimaginings of classical literature and Elizabethan plays to updates and postmodern versions of Pride and Prejudice and Dracula, new creations routinely draw on the rich stock of the public domain. Indeed, both the United States’ founders and modern Supreme Court opinions have spoken powerfully about the public benefits of the public domain. Many libraries, including the Library of Congress’ popular Citizen DJ project,4 have held events and developed resources that invited remix and incentives uses of public domain materials. I suspect the specific program your question is referencing is a new program from Showtime called Cinema Toast. Described as an “experimental new series from an eclectic group of celebrated indie filmmakers who’ve re-edited and re-scored footage from public domain films and overdubbed them with performances of contemporary actors to tell new, wholly original stories” this show makes creative use of existing materials in a way that is perfect for a moment when COVID-19 has made traditional development especially challenging. The first episode, titled “Familiesgiving” uses footage from a 1939 film called “Made for Each Other” overdubbed with the voices of well-known actors including John Reynolds, Alison Brie, and Megan Mullally to tell the story of “a young couple who get roped into inviting Johnny’s overbearing, Q-Anon following mother Eunice to their ‘Friendsgiving’ after she’s disinvited from her sister’s.” Early reviews have been positive, and it will be exciting to see how other creators continue to remix materials from the public domain into new creative expression.
Endnotes 1. https://www.wcl.american.edu/impact/initiativesprograms/pijip/documents/code-of-best-practices-infair-use-for-open-educational-resources/ 2. https://www.arl.org/code-of-best-practices-in-fair-usefor-academic-and-research-libraries/ 3. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_ d18f.pdf 4. https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/?l11_uid=66143
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The Scholarly Publishing Scene — A Full Life Column Editor: Myer Kutz (President, Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) <myerkutz@aol.com>
M
ore than three years afterwards, Margaret Dion-Marovitz remembers details of the minutes in 2017 when her husband, Bill, slipped away from her. It was a beautiful sunny day, she recalls, and she came home from work unusually early. Bill had completed immunotherapy four weeks earlier, and he looked and sounded better than he had in months. They were enjoying a lively, cheerful conversation until he walked into the kitchen and suddenly keeled over. She saw his fingers clawing for the top of any kitchen surface he could hang on to. She pushed a chair under him. He kept saying, his voice raspy, “oxygen . . . oxygen . . . oxygen . . . .” Bill and Margaret had talked about how advantageous it was, in case of a medical emergency, that their Connecticut home was just two miles from an ambulance facility. It took nine minutes for an ambulance to arrive. The ambulance personnel didn’t know how to help Bill. Fourteen more minutes elapsed before medics got to the Marovitz home. By then it was too late. Bill was gone. He was 75 years old. The cause of death was a pulmonary embolism. He’d had other medical episodes in recent years. Seven years earlier, in the summer of 2010, he was hospitalized for some time with massive cellulites on both legs. While he was hospitalized he developed a pulmonary infection and AFib. Back home, finally, after time in a rehab facility, he had to be on oxygen around the clock for several weeks, but was able, subsequently, to resume working in his NYC office. He’d had cancer — a rare form of lymphoma — that required immunotherapy in 2017. His older son, Daniel, told me that Bill, who had weight problems throughout his life, had become “massively obese at 400 pounds.” Daniel theorizes that the chemo could have further weakened Bill’s heart muscle. On the day Bill died, he and Daniel texted back and forth while Daniel was on a flight from London to San Francisco. Texting stopped a couple of hours before the flight landed. Bill died a half hour later. This past February, an email arrived from my friend Diane Hoffman. The subject was, “Did you know about this?” The email contained a link to an obituary for William Franklin “Bill” Marovitz (you can find it on the Internet easily) and the line, “I am shocked, surprised and full of sorrow that I only saw this 3 years later.” So was I, I told Diane, when we talked on the phone right after I read the obituary, which dated back to October, 2017. We talked about how odd it seemed that neither the information services industry, nor the publishing industry, in both of which Bill had held prominent positions, had provided notice of his passing. The obituary, I later learned, was written jointly by Margaret, Daniel, and Margaret’s son, Brendan. It covers the main elements of Bill Marovitz’s eventful life. He was born in Salt Lake City and grew up in Oakland, CA. His father was a haberdasher, his mother a librarian. Bill trained as a rabbi, but was never ordained, (His parents weren’t religious; he probably learned more about men’s clothes and library operations than about religion from them.) Instead, he attended UC Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in anatomy and physiology.
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Bill was a professor of anatomy at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, the Technion in Haifa, and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. The obituary notes that Bill was “widely recognized for his research in Otolaryngology and his pioneering work in electron microscopy.” Google reveals that from 1969 to 1979 he coauthored 10 papers for Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology and another paper for Otolaryngology. (Margaret told me that his CV lists over 80 articles in the professional literature.) He ran three major companies — Bibliographic Retrieval Services (BRS), Elscint, which manufactured advanced medical imaging equipment and was the first Israeli company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Churchill Livingstone, the world’s oldest medical publisher. He also developed an independent company that dealt with medical information and data management (he did that with Margaret) and was associated with or ran other companies that employed digital technologies. He developed and ran several companies for an Omnicom medical division. The obituary contains numerous personal details, as well as glimpses of other facets of Bill’s life that I wanted to know more about. For example, there’s a mention of work for the Israeli government — “but I can’t talk about that,” he would always say. Also, “he maintained a professional [photography] studio in Manhattan while at Mt. Sinai and worked for Vogue.” It took me some weeks to track down Margaret and, during telephone conversations with her and then Daniel, to flesh out those intriguing details of Bill’s life. I also spoke with people who had worked with Bill, including Diane (I worked with him during two periods in his life — more about that in a moment). One detail about Bill’s work for the Israeli government was that while on assignment he was stabbed at Charles de Gaulle Airport. His assailant, it turned out, was a Palestinian/Jordanian operative. Years later, Bill sat down in a chair in a barbershop in Connecticut. He looked at the barber and exclaimed, “It was you!” “It was you!” the barber also exclaimed, probably at the same instant. “The greatest coincidence in the history of the universe,” Daniel calls it. Bill let that barber cut his hair on that day (I’m not sure I would have) and for years afterwards. The two men became friends. That barber also cut Daniel’s hair. Only in America. As for photography: Daniel told me that Bill was a student of Phillipe Halsman (1906-1979), the famous portrait photographer. Bill shared a loft studio on 33rd Street in Manhattan with another photographer. It was there that he took fashion pictures for Vogue. For years, he also took stills that were used as background when 60 Minutes correspondents sat on high stools facing CBS cameras. Both sons of haberdashers, Bill and I talked about men’s clothes. He was a trim 43 long in those days, as I remember. According to Daniel, Bill didn’t consider fashion frivolous. He considered great designers great artists. He was interested in
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the craft of tailoring. While I don’t remember our discussing the technological development and use of fabrics and other materials in clothing, I’m sure he would have been as interested as I’ve always been. The second time I worked with Bill was when he ran Churchill-Livingstone. He was offered the job around 1994/1995 in “a call out of the blue,” as Margaret put it. (There was a connection, however, which I’ll mention in a moment.) The office was on Sixth Avenue. I showed up there a couple of days a week, as I remember, as a marketing consultant. Churchill had acquired Wiley’s medical list, the crown jewel being Principle and Practices of Infectious Diseases. (I knew one of the original editors, Jerry Mandell, better, let’s say, than I wanted to. The work is still going strong all these years later.) Bill was attracted to Churchill because it published Grey’s Anatomy which, as an anatomist, he’d been interested in for a very long time. During his time there, he brought out the 38th edition on a dynamic CD-ROM and in print. But by his fourth year, Bill realized that Pearson, which owned Churchill, wanted to sell it off. According to Margaret, Bill was asked to start letting go people who would be redundant after the sale to another publisher, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. Around 1999, W. B. Saunders bought Churchill; eventually, Saunders was swallowed up by Elsevier. The first time I worked with Bill was when he was running BRS in the 1980s. The first deal I made after Wiley assigned me to establish an electronic publishing operation in 1980 was with the Harvard Business Review (HBR). When HBR asked me to arrange for their bibliographic information to be available online, I said I would do so providing I could also put the full text of the magazine online. BRS was the only online service at that time that had the computing power (courtesy of a deal with SUNY that Bill’s predecessors had made) and software to do so. Not too much later, I discovered that the Mack Printing Company, which printed Wiley’s 26-volume Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology, a premier reference work, had saved the composition tapes, so BRS could put that work online, as well. (Wiley’s management didn’t want me to put journals online for fear that I would destroy print sales. There was no need to worry; no one had saved composition tapes. On the other hand, Martin Grayson, the in-house editor of Kirk-Othmer, had no such fear and was all for electronic publication. ) Eric Johnson, whom I’d hired when I was finalizing the contract with BRS for the HBR project, and who later was second-in-command at Engineering Information, which is now owned by Elsevier (isn’t everything? you may be muttering), reminded me recently about how delighted he and I were when we learned that BRS could make Kirk-Othmer’s tables fully searchable. In their obituary, Margaret and her sons wrote: “Keenly interested in technology and medical information, Bill and a Harvard-trained M.D. . . . developed the first fully searchable fulltext online medical database. . . .” That M.D. is David Margulies, who eventually went on to his own distinguished career at the intersection of medicine and information technology. We spoke in early April for the better part of an hour about Bill’s career, about BRS, and about David’s and Bill’s association. David, who was in clinical training some forty years ago, was investigating ways to create a knowledge management system for the neurosciences. He bought a Radio Shack microcomputer that didn’t work. On his way to bring the machine back, he happened to find a seat on the NY subway next to a man who happened to be a Tandy Corp. executive (Tandy owned Radio Shack), who noticed the box, struck up a conversation, and made
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the connection to another man who, the executive happened to know, was also interested in medical information and had also bought a Radio Shack microcomputer — Bill Marovitz. As David put it, “Bill was undergoing a transformation from an academic to a medical technologist.” “Bill loved teaching but his heart and soul were in electronic publishing,” Margaret said in an email to me. He and David decided to create a company to distribute microcomputers for text management software for medicine. When Mead Data Central backed out of a deal to support them, they went to BRS with its computer power and search software. When BRS was about to come under the umbrella of Thyssen-Bornemisza, which had a portfolio of information handling companies, Bill and David rolled their project into BRS and in “one fell swoop,” as David put it, rolled the project into Thyssen. So when Bill was brought in to run BRS around 1982, he had more heft behind him, but he was also part of a corporate structure. “What I remember most about Bill,” Diane told me, “was his vision. He could see four or five years out. But that didn’t necessarily put him in synch with management. I don’t know whether he was listened to or not.” (Margaret recalls that “Bill did enjoy working with H. Thyssen.”) David would go back to Columbia Presbyterian, where he pulled together the first electronic medical textbook. Later, among other things, he went into the medical records business. He’s still very much active. BRS, with Bill at the helm, launched a service called BRS Colleague, with textbooks and peer-reviewed journals licensed from medical publishers, including Churchill Livingstone (which is when Pearson, Churchill’s owner, came into contact with Bill). With Colleague, BRS was delivering electronic medical information to physicians’ workplaces. Debbie Hull, who went on to head OVID Technologies, ran the project. Under her leadership, the number of users ran into the high 70,000s. BRS developed a standalone version of full text search software. (Bob Hamilton was the lead software architect behind BRS Search.) Bill invested heavily in it, David told me, and there is a straight line between that project and Google software, he added. BRS technology and product design, through W.B Saunders to Elsevier, he also noted, was the “root stock” of Elsevier’s electronic publishing. Margaret noted that Bill was also very proud that other organizations, such as Scotland Yard, were using BRS Search on his watch. BRS, David told me, was “ground zero” for commercial full text searching and for electronic medical publishing. But it wasn’t the Internet. He and Bill knew what was needed to go to the next step: they knew that pay-by-the-minute (the way online usage was charged back then) didn’t work, that there were too many interfaces, that a common query language was needed. Nevertheless, he had to admit, they didn’t have the tools and systems to develop anything like the Web. Still, they did show that full text searching was possible. Although, when the Internet burst out, the focus was on consumer stuff, not information for medical and other professionals. That came a little later, when STM publishers got their act together. Maybe, in the last analysis, what BRS did amounted to “proof of concept,” as Eric commented. As Margaret told me, Bill used to say that his years at BRS were the “golden years.” “He was a wonderful man, a delight to work with,” Joe Paulson, who did software development at BRS and eventually went to work at OVID, said. “Bill excited the people who worked at BRS.”
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But after five years or so, Bill walked away. He had a non-compete. Drawing on his Israeli connections and career as an anatomy professor, he became CEO of Elscint. 1989 he went into business with Margaret, his second wife, the woman who saved him from the dark despair he experienced after his first wife, Ronnie, died much too young of cancer. The business was called Reliance Medical Information (RMI). “We always said we co-founded it; he did technical and I did editorial for a variety of projects,” Margaret wrote in an email to me. Years later, in the spring of 2011, Bill retired. He told Margaret that he was “done.” Not quite, however. Despite his rabbinical training, he wasn’t a religious man, but he did believe that Judaism has a lot to teach, and in his retirement he became intensely interested in the Talmud. He studied the texts and commentaries every day and, being Bill Marovitz, he read them in Amaraic, Cannanite, Syriac, and Biblical Hebrew. He would debate Hasidic rabbis, whom he met online. When it came to rules and regulations, Bill was “defiant,” Daniel told me. Bill considered funerals “stupid.” So was sitting shiva. His requests were that he be buried in a shroud and that there should be a party. There was a traditional Jewish graveside service three days after he died. An hour later, there was a luncheon at a local Italian restaurant, with a quartet playing the jazz that Bill loved. (“Dave Brubeck was his god and Take Five his anthem,” Margaret reminisced to me.) It was the party that Bill wanted when he died. He would have loved it. The pianist/ leader of the quartet agreed that that post-funeral party was a wonderful idea.
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Rumors continued from page 24 He was successfully treating pancreatic cancer but then had a cardiac event during a procedure. John Teskey and Jocelyne Thompson (Librarian Emeritus and AUL Emerita respectively, University of New Brunswick) put their heads together on a narrative, hoping to capture the significance of Gary’s career for younger librarians who haven’t been in the profession long enough to understand his role over decades of activity in the community.” John and Jocelyne’s narrative about Gary is on the hub and you can see the twinkle in his eye! See it here https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/04/why-gary-gibson-mattered-to-librariesa-remembrance-by-john-teskey-librarian-emeritus-at-university-of-new-brunswick/. Update on Eileen. She says that she has been mostly staying safe and raising Sophie, her 60-pound standard poodle who is parto-colored. Oh yeah… and launching Coherent Digital! Just off phone with Eileen who had an encounter with an unfriendly car and reinjured her leg which was getting better! Ouch!
News From the Charleston Conference Team The 2021 Charleston Library Conference will be a hybrid event, with opportunities to attend, present, and exhibit in person in beautiful, historic downtown Charleston, or online through our robust and interactive virtual event platform. The in-person Vendor Showcase will be held in the Grand Ballroom continued on page 41
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Don’s Conference Notes Column Editor: Donald T. Hawkins (Freelance Editor and Conference Blogger) <dthawkins@verizon.net> Column Editor’s Note: Because of space limitations, the full text of my conference notes will now be available online in the issues of Against the Grain on Charleston Hub at https://www. charleston-hub.com, and only brief summaries, with links to the full reports, will appear in Against the Grain print issues. — DTH
The Virtual NISOPlus 2021 Conference The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) convened its second NISOPlus conference on February 22-25, 2021 with the theme “Global Connections and Global Conversations.” It attracted a global audience of 835 attendees. The organizers especially wanted to have an event at which attendees could discuss and share their issues with others, not only at the conference but afterwards, so ample time was provided at every session for discussion. Well-known science fiction novelist Cory Doctorow presented the keynote address and began by noting that big technology controls our lives, which is a problem because unchecked power leads to bad outcomes. Companies should not spy on us or manipulate us. Facebook and similar companies are conducting non-consensual experiments on millions of people. Taken at face value, such actions are extremely alarming and self-serving; they are leading to monopolies which subvert evidence-based practices. Digital technology monopolies are not like those we faced in the past because they have additional technology available to them. Only a small number of people are now controlling our digital lives. Doctorow concluded by warning us that monopolies are bad because of democratic harms and because they are taking away our free will, even though many people are thriving under the status quo. Sessions on accessible eBooks and sharing, protecting, and saving research data noted that accessibility is the guiding principle for eBook work, and soon it will be the only way we will be able to get eBooks and other content. Publishers must certify that their products are fully accessible, which is a burden because it is costly. The whole eBook process must be made accessible — from production to accessing to purchasing. The research data policy landscape is evolving; more funding agencies (approximately 22% of them) now require data sharing, which publishers and journals are obliged to support. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) developed 14 principles to encourage data sharing and increase the adoption of standardized research data policies. All citations and software references should be machine readable. In the second day keynote address, Margaret Sraku-Lartey, Principal Librarian, CSIR-Forestry Research Institute of Ghana, said that COVID-19 has virtually brought the world to its knees by affecting every sector of the economy and spawning digital behavior changes. New trends like remote working and telemedicine are not likely to disappear any time soon. Information professionals have always been concerned with explicit knowledge, but little attention has been paid to tacit knowledge. Indigenous knowledge (IK) is that which has transferred orally and spans several generations, and today we risk losing the knowledge stored in people’s memories. IK is a basic component of a country’s knowledge system and forms the basis for local-level decision making.
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Applications of IK include: • Health. There is a need to find new cures for diseases and especially viruses that can cause epidemics, such as SARS, Ebola, and COVID-19. One of the best ways to find such cures is to talk to local people. Forest plants and products derived from them are used to treat various ailments, and many remedies based on them have been used for generations and have become generally accepted as viable treatments. • “Sacred groves” are small patches of the original habitats or forests of various dimensions. They are treasure troves of knowledge that have cultural, historical, and scientific benefits and provide valuable medicinal plants and herbs that can serve as a refuge for threatened species. Sacred groves are common in many developing countries but their impact may be diminishing in some places. • Living libraries. Many local libraries do not have books; instead people substitute for books. People have history in their memory and can therefore be treated as libraries and custodians of knowledge. Many of them have knowledge that is centuries old, so the people can be regarded as librarians. IK is thus an important source of developmental information, and it is imperative for all information personnel to begin to learn proactively about IK and meet the needs of local populations. To move forward, each player must be recognized as an equal partner, and there must be mutual respect for the knowledge and collaboration between them. In a session on innovative forms of scholarly publishing, panelists were asked to respond to questions from the moderator: What are some significant projects in scholarly publishing? • Recognize the need for publishing to accommodate new types of research and represent the evolution of digital scholarship. • Hip hop as scholarship has never been published before. But a book is in progress, and there is a need to work with the author to decide what to publish and how to handle peer review. • Can we speed up the research cycle by sharing work in progress? Transparent workflows are based on an open review of preprints in which editors decide whether an article is appropriate for the intended journal and it is then published OA. After at least 2 open reviews have been published, the editor decides whether to revise the article or accept it for publication to the website. Thus, early results can be made available during the review process. The publishing process is moving toward openness. How is that working? • The more readers we can reach the better it is for authors. OA is not occurring across all disciplines; the big challenge is finding funding to make works available OA. • “Open” once applied at the article level, but now it is applied across the whole publishing process. Libraries need to think of new and attractive ways to showcase OA.
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• Collaboration is particularly valuable to open up the elements of research, view open generally, and give authors insights into new forms of knowledge. What about the structure of publishing itself: what deserves to endure and what walls can come down? • An essential part of the work that academic publishers do is to validate peer review. The walls of the black box of peer review can come down. • We can take advantage of technologies, but we need people to work them out. Barriers to collaboration can come down. • Humans vet projects in the early state. Curation and vetting add value to publishing programs. Scholarship should move away from text as the primary medium and publish works that do not look like a monograph. Another question and answer session was devoted to the preservation of new media: Digital preservation has been underway for some time now. Aren’t we done yet? • Digital preservation is not looking back, it is looking forward. It makes the web more useful and reliable. • Preservation of local content and coverage gaps are the concerns of many librarians. We have just begun and there is very much more to do in helping make information more useful and helpful to people. Digitization opens opportunities not available with analog content, such as word frequency analyses, meta analyses across papers and journals, etc. Who is responsible for preservation and how is that shifting? • Publishers have been responsible from the outset. Now, vanishing journals are OA, and we see fewer preservation efforts among publishers. We need to make sure that the scholarly record remains intact. Managers of preprint servers are still trying to find out if there is a preprint business model, or if there should be one. What are some challenges and what are you most excited about? • We have an exciting opportunity to work collaboratively with people who are passionate about preservation. Content is becoming dynamic and interactive. Authors can bring a lot of creativity to bear; how can we preserve that? Some content is not just in a single place, so we must preserve not only the content but also the connections between it. What should attendees of this session take away? • If you see it, save it. Try things, ask for help, and be of service to others. The Miles Conrad Memorial Lecture, a highlight of NISO meetings, was presented by Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). She noted that since she joined SPARC in 2005, the landscape of openness has changed significantly; in her lecture, “In Pursuit of Open Knowledge”, she reflected on her career and some of the lessons she has learned from it. All of her work is on advocacy and rooted in a social justice context. Access to knowledge is a fundamental human right. OA is a priority that facilitates the free flow of knowledge across national borders and is rooted in the principles of social justice. To be truly effective, our actions must embrace the 4 principles of social justice: access, participation, equity, and rights. She illustrated these principles with 3 examples from her career:
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• The American Astronomical Society made her comfortable with technology and knowledgeable about the business processes of publishing. TeX and SGML exposed the role that markup languages played in converting text to be discoverable, searchable, and readable on the web. • The American Association for Cell Biology had a new approach to sharing science information by taking advantage of the power of the Internet. Its proposed “e-biomed” system became PubMed Central, and the journal that Heather managed was the first one to host its content entirely on it. The OA environment is author-driven, subsidized by funders, and free to publish on and access. Authors retain ownership of their intellectual works, and peer review occurs when the community chooses. • SPARC optimized using the Internet to share research articles. OA is the convergence of an old tradition and new technology to make possible the worldwide distribution of peer-reviewed journal literature with completely free and unrestricted access to it. We are no longer talking about whether or why to get open, but how to get there. OA publishing has become the fastest growing segment of scholarly publishing, and acceptance of OA as a growth strategy is increasing. The UN and UNESCO have embraced OA for their global mission, and research funders are now among the leading advocates of OA. Heather is often asked what she would change if she could return to the beginning of the OA movement, and she mentioned 2 things: 1. Tackle the need to change incentives for OA earlier on. In the middle of the pandemic one of the first actions was to facilitate OA for all COVID articles so that they were fully machine searchable and available for text analysis. That database of articles has been downloaded over 150 million times! We should not have to wait for an emergency to create a corpus of machine-readable OA papers. We need strategies and solutions that address the whole picture: get better and more deliberate at looking inward. 2. The name “OA” implies that all we care about is getting the information. But there is much more: we must enhance the global participation in knowledge production and dissemination, and particularly the equity aspect. We need to think about large scale changes in improving the way we are disseminating scientific knowledge and about improvements in the way we share knowledge on a systems level. We need to center equity and inclusivity decisions when we are making decisions on business models, technology, rights, behaviors to be rewarded and incentivized, and leadership or governance bodies. We can only make these choices by recognizing that every decision is critical. Knowledge sharing and access cannot be treated as an after-thought. We need to look at the barriers that we are inadvertently throwing up, such as language, etc., be more inclusive of forms of scholarship beyond articles, and make a system that is more representative of the inclusivity that we want to include. Can we connect openness and recognition? We should stop treating incentives and knowledge sharing as a market. A keynote by Dr. Norohiro Hagita, Chair and Professor, Osaka University of Arts, and Director of the Japan Science & Technology’s Moonshot Goal 1, noted that the goal of the Moonshot project is the realization of a society in which humans can be
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free of the limitations of body, brain, space, and time by the year 2050. Moonshot is a bold new program for creating disruptive innovation, tackling challenges facing future society, and going beyond limits of technology without fear of failure. Cybernetic avatar technology will make work and play available to everyone. Targets to be achieved have been established: Target 1: Avatar infrastructure for diversity and inclusion • Development of technologies and infrastructure to carry out large scale tasks: one person can operate up to 10 avatars at once. • Virtual reality will give us the ability to move back and forth seamlessly between cyber and physical space and will allow us to enjoy new lifestyles and new experiences, reduce time and money spent on travel, and minimize the risks associated with overcrowding. • Capabilities that have diminished due to aging and illness will be augmented with cybernetic technology to promote more social activity. Target 2: Cybernetic avatar life • Development of technologies that will allow anyone to increase their physical, cognitive, and perceptional capabilities to the top level. By 2050, our lifestyles will have dramatically changed. We will have greater freedom in our choice of location and how we spend our time. • We must consider ethical, legal, social, and economic issues. Dario Rodighiero, a researcher at Harvard University, gave a fascinating example of mapping a conference using NISOPlus as his example. When conferences went online, attendees felt a need for new ways to orient themselves. In his map, terms are determined by text analysis of the presentations, and speakers are placed on an imaginary topographical terrain. Speakers at NISOPlus are connected by many terms from information and library science, research, and publishing. Such a map can function as an instrument for speakers to determine their lexical content, for attendees who can find talks by keywords, and for the conference committee to arrange panel discussions. Open data makes it easier to create a visual mapping, increase information precision, and create scientific awareness among scholars. A session on misinformation and truth: from fake news to retractions to preprints examined whether OA has a role in fighting fake news. Many research results are not well used outside of academia because people generally do not have access to information behind paywalls, and it is difficult to verify research results especially if there is only a single article on a subject. With 2 million articles published every year, it is very difficult to find the right article containing the desired information. By analyzing sources, semantic analysis, and numerical data retrieval, these problems can be overcome, and the conclusion was that OA can be useful in detecting fake news. The inadvertent spread of retracted articles can jeopardize trust and professionalism in research. Retractions were long believed to be career ending, and authors felt shamed. From an information seeker’s perspective, the primary harm of retracted research is its potential use without knowledge of the retraction or the reason for it. Researchers build on previously published work, and when a link in that chain is broken, they move away from the truth. The harms of retracted research are reputation damage, scientific dissonance, professional damage, and feelings of failure. As librarians, we can account for retractions in knowledge production workflows, address inconsistencies in data display and transfer between systems, and educate end
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users about identifying and using retracted information. There is a lot of inconsistency in the way publisher sites communicate the retracted status of an article. It is fascinating to see how people use information and to think about how we have been hosting early outputs, i.e., preprints. The spotlight is on preprints now because they were the first articles to appear during the pandemic. Preprints are not without their problems, but the problems are not intractable. Other sessions discussed FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles and analytics to transform data into actionable information; lessons from 2020 for the information industry; controlled digital lending (CDL) and new models of sharing; copyright law, including the Fair Use and First Sale exceptions as they apply to libraries and circulation of materials from closed libraries; identifiers (ORCID, the Research Orientation Registry (ROR) and DOIs), metadata, and connections; and data visualization. The closing keynote by Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, Associate Professor, School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and author of Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale University Press, 2018) was titled “What Does the Pandemic Teach Us About Trust, Reliability, and Information?” She began her address by observing that we have a public sphere very much geared toward attention, and it has become individualized. Digital public fear has increased the demand for information which has affected our response to the COVID pandemic. Group and social dynamics have mixed with our attention; for example, in February 2020 when Wuhan, China had been shut down for a month and COVID cases were popping up all over the world, here, the attitude was “What’s the big deal? Don’t worry. Keep calm and wait for the evidence. Don’t panic.” We were lectured for being panic-prone, that COVID was no worse than the flu. That is how group think works: people have an identity which confirms their belief. Finally, ranks were broken when we got evidence, and the information landscape switched to taking the pandemic seriously. It has been useful because it has given us a stress test that has allowed us to see these human dynamics. What can be done if there is a future epidemic? What did we do that caused some of the bad outcomes this time? Many of the responses were due to blind spots and failings. We should have a task force and not blame scientists but study the responses to find ways to fix problems. Could social media learn from scholarly publishing? Preprints and rapid peer review have been excellent. Comments can be very helpful if they are specific. Fraudulent papers can make us suspicious of legitimate ones, so we must be careful. There has never been a better time to be informed or misinformed! We need a platform that will encourage structured debate so we can clarify and get to the heart of the disagreements. See the full report at https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/04/ dons-conference-notes-the-virtual-nisoplus-2021-conference/. Donald T. Hawkins is an information industry freelance writer based in Pennsylvania. In addition to blogging and writing about conferences for Against the Grain, he blogs the Computers in Libraries and Internet Librarian conferences for Information Today, Inc. (ITI) and maintains the Conference Calendar on the ITI Website (http://www.infotoday.com/calendar.asp). He is the Editor of Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage, (Information Today, 2013) and Co-Editor of Public Knowledge: Access and Benefits (Information Today, 2016). He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley and has worked in the online information industry for over 50 years.
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And They Were There — Reports of Meetings 2020 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> Column Editor’s Note: Thanks to the Charleston Conference attendees who agreed to write brief reports that highlight and spotlight their 2020 Charleston Conference experience. Out of necessity, the conference moved from on-site to virtual, and all registrants were given the opportunity to view recordings, to re-visit sessions they saw “live,” or to visit sessions they missed. Without a doubt, with 173 total choices, there were more Charleston Conference sessions than there were volunteer reporters for Against the Grain, so the coverage is just a snapshot. For the 2020 conference, reporters were invited to share what drew them to various themes and sessions, or what they learned, rather than report on individual sessions as they’ve done for “And They Were There” reports in past years when conferences were on-site. There are many ways to learn more about the 2020 conference. Some presenters posted their slides and handouts in the online conference schedule. Please visit the conference site, https://www.charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/, and link to selected videos, interviews, as well as to blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins, https://www.charleston-hub.com/category/blogs/chsconfnotes/. The 2020 Charleston Conference Proceedings will be published in 2021, in a new partnership with University of Michigan Press: https://www.press.umich.edu/. — RKK
CONFERFENCE Five things I learned at the 2020 virtual Charleston Conference Reported by Carol Fisher (Washington State University, Vancouver) <carol.fisher1@wsu.edu> The 2020 Charleston Conference arrived at an incredibly pivotal time in this year [2020] and the question of “where do we go from here?” has been more present in my mind than ever before. A civil rights movement, a global pandemic, and a tumultuous American election have reminded us how quickly things can change in our seemingly stable environment. At its core, the 2020 Virtual Charleston Conference was a success. The keynotes, sessions, and roundtables proceeded as advertised and the conference cultivated fruitful ground for discussion and reflection. I was reminded of five things throughout my attendance: libraries are not neutral, libraries will need to rethink the way we operate in order to adapt and overcome, the landscape of librarianship is in constant flux, collective action and collective knowledge are imperative to our success, and we are needed now more than ever before. “ C r e a t i v i t y, C o n f l i c t a n d B l a c k L i v e s M a t t e r ” (https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/ Lx8d46MxWr63b58Se) presented by LaQuanda Onyemeh, Howard
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Rambsy, and Kiera Vargas highlighted the ways that libraries and library workers systemically fail Black patrons and showcased how libraries and library workers can show up better for folks of color. The first keynote, “Leading in an Age of Chaos and Change: Building a Community of Grace” (https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/QJhPmKK9PFp4nQPWG), given by Earl Lewis, also illustrated the ways in which libraries can gracefully work towards a truly equitable future, one that actively includes marginalized folks. Lewis also spoke of the need to reimagine some of the ways that libraries do business, including reworking established hiring and tenure practices. The idea of reimagining the way we operate was a theme that extended beyond the keynotes. Several sessions addressed ways in which the library landscape is changing, and how collective action and knowledge is key to nimbly addressing upcoming challenges. Bobby Reed and Stephen Rhind-Tutt presented a session titled “Virtual Reality and Libraries in post-COVID world” (https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/nwW2mvuiCmfZBmNjz) which exhibited the ways we can use technology like VR headsets and gaming to adapt to our changing world while remaining engaged with our users. The most impactful takeaway from the conference was the reminder of how vital libraries are to our communities, no matter how our communities are composed. John Palfrey presented the final keynote, “Do Librarian’s Matter and What Might Matter to Librarians?” (https://2020charlestonconference. pathable.co/meetings/virtual/RyMSEeK6iDwbJcg6d), where he led a lively discussion about how indispensable libraries, and library workers, are to our culture and communities.
Five things I learned at the 2020 virtual Charleston Conference Reported by Cara Mia Calabrese (Miami University) <calabrcm@miamioh.edu> 1. Working with Data Hearing how my fellow librarians were working to demystify and showcase data in innovative, but usable formats was amazing. I especially appreciated the sessions that took attendees through their development thinking, like “Close EnCOUNTERs of the 5th Kind” (https://2020charlestonconference. pathable.co/meetings/virtual/8PQz9frgGAQLXSnGe) and Not just for the sake of: from analytics to informed decision making (https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/4ePTb3JKHQC7iCF9C). 2. Open Access (OA) Many sessions discussed the future of OA and models available. I found a heavy emphasis on collectively supporting OA and how can we continue to work towards a sustainable
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future. SCOSS (http://www.scoss.org) was a new group I found through the session, “Crowd-funding the Open Science and Open Access Infrastructure: Reports from the Field” (https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/3pqtq3TXW3DKte5rq). Some other sessions discussed what changes were needed for OA to really flourish and several consortia weighed in how they approach OA and which models were currently being explored. 3. Transformative Deals OA is now inherently tied to transformative deals. Libraries are not only looking to change how they approach collecting content, but are exploring how to support the research and publishing process more heavily. Libraries and Librarians have always supported the research process, but now are actively looking to meet faculty, researchers, and students where they are and looking to become participants and partners in that space, rather than just a resource to be referenced. I was pleased to be able to attend several sessions that touched on transformative deals and talked about workflows for both researchers and libraries, including successes and pain points. 4. Vendors Adding Value More than any other conference, I see libraries and vendors share how working together created a better experience. I felt that the vendor perspective added unexpected benefits to sessions and the dynamics between vendors and librarians as they discussed shared projects were wonderful to see. 5. Colleague Conversations The final thing I walked away with was the value of discussion among colleagues. I hadn’t realized how much I missed and needed places to have important conversations with varied perspectives. Seeing how the chats in many of the sessions I attended were conversing in parallel to the speakers or asking questions I was thinking about was uplifting. I appreciated the opportunity to dive into these topics with others who are interested and whose work will be affected by the subjects at hand. Having a year where distance has been paramount, the Charleston Virtual Conference managed to close the gap.
Five things I learned at the 2020 virtual Charleston Conference Reported by Helen McManus (George Mason University) <hmcmanus@gmu.edu> 1. Consider impacts on small publishers. In “The Big Deal and the Local Environment,” Joe Esposito outlined three categories of publishers. In addition to the big five, there are the smaller publishers who have licensing agreements with them, and therefore rely on the big deals. Finally, there are the small independent publishers, including many scholarly societies. While big deals may marginalize this last
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group, transformative deals and the APC model of Open Access publishing constitute “an existential threat.” Libraries exploring a future beyond the big deal might therefore be alert to the impact of emerging models on small publishers. 2. When preparing for negotiations, do your research. In a panel on the serials crisis, Keith Webster offered practical steps on preparing for negotiations. He recommended assessing how important your library, or a particular contract, is to this publisher. Librarians should research the publisher as a business, its market environment, and SEC filings, as well as the institution’s relation to the publisher — licenses, usage, and interactions beyond the library (e.g., “inclusive access” textbook arrangements with a publisher). A key lesson: a lot of information and connections are outside the library. 3. Librarians have a superpower. John Palfrey’s keynote address asked “do libraries matter?” He seemed to argue libraries do and will continue to matter, but only to the extent that librarians use their superpower. That superpower is “to create a world that is the one that we wish to have, and to be able to imagine that and bring it into being.” Librarians should embrace their (our) ability to shape the architecture of the digital world. 4. As a White librarian, I have a responsibility to address exclusion and inequity in libraries. In a letter addressed “Dear Black Patron,” presented in the session “Creativity, Conflict, and Black Lives Matter,” Keira Vargas outlines what that might look like. She identifies numerous specific actions librarians and staff can take, so I encourage you to read the letter in full (text and video at https:// www.wocandlib.org/features/2020/11/13/letter-to-black-patron). 5. How to participate in a virtual conference. I expected to treat a virtual conference much like a faceto-face event — block out time, schedule out-of-office reply, arrange all-day care for dependents. Yet my conference experience began in October with the pre-conference “Skills for leading in an uncertain future,” and is still ongoing as I refer to recordings and slide decks. A well-organized virtual conference permits a more flexible kind of participation, thanks to a robust platform, high-quality recordings, and file-sharing for presenter materials. That’s all the reports we have room for in this issue. Watch for more reports from the 2020 Charleston Conference in upcoming print issues of Against the Grain. Presentation materials (PowerPoint slides, handouts, etc.) and recordings of most sessions are available to Conference Attendees on the Charleston Conference event site at https://2020charlestonconference. pathable.co/. Or visit the Charleston Hub at https://www. charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/. — KS
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Learning Belongs in the Library — Three Focal Points to Guide This Column’s Investigations Column Editor: David Parker (Publisher and Consultant; Phone: 201-673-8784) <david@parkerthepublisher.com>
I
n 2014 I wrote my first Against the Grain article arguing for the central place of the university library in supporting learning. Shortly after the article was published, several librarians reached out to me and made the point that the library has always been central to learning. It occurred to me then, and it has resonated with me since, that precision in how I think about and discuss “learning” and “research” is critical to my argument. I take “research” in the context of the library to mean the search for primary and secondary sources in the pursuit of answering a ques“I am kicking off tion; and the question can range from the pedestrian (the new college this new column student research assignment) to entitled Learning the profound (the advanced scholar Belongs in the at the liminal edge of her field of knowledge). I take “learning” in the Library. My goal context of the library to mean the is to advocate support of faculty in developing a for the increased curriculum and aligning appropriate content to the syllabus or reading role of the library list. These are narrow definitions and librarians and, of course, contestable, but I use in supporting them to frame the major challenges the institutions’ I see the university library uniquely positioned to address as concerns curriculum access to quality learning content needs.” to drive curriculum diversity and affordability. I am kicking off this new column entitled Learning Belongs in the Library. My goal is to advocate for the increased role of the library and librarians in supporting the institutions’ curriculum needs. I will feature people and organizations making high value contributions and I will do so while focusing on three core challenges that I believe are the leading hurdles to moving the library from the periphery to primacy in course content provisioning: 1. The B2C versus B2B Business Model 2. The Curation and Discovery of Open Educational Resources 3. Aligning Paid, Open, and Library-held Content Across Curriculum
The B2C versus B2B Business Model I place this first as there is no greater limit on access to e-textbook, course reading content, business cases, etc. than the prevailing “one student, one purchased copy” versus institutional sales models. I do not approach this question from a position of naivete nor without awareness of the dilemma faced by textbook publishers, case publishers, or monograph publishers with a significant course adoption base. The first 10 years of my career were with Cengage Learning and Pearson Education. I signed, developed, and published many textbooks and several are still market-leading today with new editions published in 2020. But I must also note I left the textbook publishing industry in
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2008 when I realized there was little to no interest in innovating in packaging, pricing, and distributing. I was oft noted for saying that students are not necessarily unhappy with the textbook itself, but rather the pricing, revision and packaging/bundling options or lack thereof. It is a new era and today’s textbook publisher/EdTech leaders are very keen to introduce new business models; let us be sure to stimulate thinking on this front, especially as concerns institutional access business models.
The Curation and Discovery of Open Educational Resources Open Educational Resources (OERs), as a percentage of content in use today in assigned course readings, is still relatively small but the percentages have climbed substantially, especially in the past decade. The most often cited impediments to OER adoption, in my experience, are quality of content and completeness of the resources (this extends to the instructor’s resource package that supports the textbook and includes test-items, homework packages and integration tools for learning management systems (LMSs) and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). I acknowledge that these are legitimate concerns that merit attention and effort and I will explore solutions aimed at these challenges. But I am convinced the larger issue limiting OER adoption is curation and discovery. There are numerous high quality OER textbooks available with complete faculty and student resource packages. But finding these resources, especially in an integrated search initiated through the library discovery service, is nearly impossible. Through this column I will introduce people, libraries, companies, and technology solutions that seek to improve the curation and discovery of OERs in library search.
Aligning Paid, Open, and Library-held Content Across Curriculum There are several excellent solutions designed to bring together content and align it to course reading lists, such as Legnato and Talis. And there are limited curation efforts across paid and open content, such as EBSCO’s Faculty Select. And there have been efforts to curate library-held content to curriculum, such as the now shuttered Intellus Learning. But no single solution to the core need has emerged. In a perfect world a faculty member and a librarian, working together or independently, could search across a course by learning objectives or syllabus topics and unearth curated OERs, Open Access monographs, appropriate content held by the library and items available for purchase from publishers focused on learning content. And this logic should extend across all content formats in use in course design: eBooks, cases, videos, podcasts, etc. This column will focus especially on efforts to address this opportunity, as aligning paid, open and library-held content into a curriculumaligned and learning-friendly curation and search experience subsumes the first and second core challenges described above. Please reach out with ideas for the column, especially with the names of people and organizations doing pioneering work to bring faculty and librarians closer together in addressing course development, design, and student affordability.
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Let’s Get Technical — Using Record Manager to Update Archival Collection Records By Lisa Romano (Head of Technical Services, University of Massachusetts, Boston) <Lisa.Romano@umb.edu> Column Editors: Kyle Banerjee (Sr. Implementation Consultant, FOLIO Services) <kbanerjee@ebsco.com> www.ebsco.com www.folio.org and Susan J. Martin (Chair, Collection Development and Management, Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University) <Susan.Martin@mtsu.edu>
The Situation The University of Massachusetts Boston is an urban public research university and has a student population of approximately 16,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The Healey Library that serves the institution has a small staff. For the past few years, the Technical Services department has consisted of only one professional librarian and no support staff. This librarian was asked by the Interim Dean of the library about possibly training non-Technical Services staff in cataloging. In prior meetings with the Healey Library, OCLC representatives had discussed Record Manager and how it could be used by non-cataloging staff. The Technical Services Manager investigated the use of Record Manager and found that overall Record Manager was handy and easy to use to update existing records.
The Problem Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Massachusetts Boston decided to move to online learning in March 2020 for the rest of the Spring semester for the health and safety of students, faculty, and staff. The Healey Library and the campus were closed, and all library staff was asked to work remotely until further notice. A couple of months later, due to the lack of access to print materials and the semester nearing an end, the Technical Services Manager had the opportunity to tackle some longstanding projects that could be worked on remotely. One such project was the updating of existing archival collection records created several years prior.
“In general, Record Manager is a handy tool but there are a few quirks.”
University Archives and Special Collections houses over 400 collections and these collections indicate “the university’s urban mission and strong support of community service reflected in the records of and related to urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, war and social consequence, and local history related to neighboring communities.”1 Only about a third of these collections had been cataloged, and those that had been cataloged were outdated, in Anglo-American Cataloging Rules-2 (AACR2) format, and inadequately cataloged. In particular, the records contained sparse titles, such as Records (or Papers, etc.), followed by the dates. They needed more specific titles to make them more discoverable to patrons. Members of the the Archives Department had been suggested as possible candidates for cataloging training by the Interim Dean in order to update these collection records and add other titles acquired by the department. The Technical Services Manager had already set up an account in Record Manager, but had
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only briefly tested the product. No further set-up was needed, and Record Manager is provided at no additional cost with cataloging subscriptions. Because some of these collections were already cataloged and needed updating, the Technical Services Manager determined that this project was a good test case to try out Record Manager to see if non-technical services staff could be trained to help copy catalog and if it was an easy to use tool.
The Records The Archives Department tracks these collections using a spreadsheet that includes title, collection number (call number), language, and finding aid Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The information in this spreadsheet and the finding aid was used to update the records. Several types of changes were needed: • Upgrading from AACR2 to Resource Description Access (RDA) format • Updating titles to be more specific by including full titles, correct dates, and added titles for improved access • Verifying Library of Congress (LC) authors and subjects making sure that there was at least one authorized LC subject heading reflecting the content of the collection • Adding RDA relationship designators to the main entry and added entry fields • Editing the date in the fixed field if no longer accurate and adding the 264 date field as it was missing in most records • Updating the collection contents in the physical description to include changes to the collections • Revising contents and biographical notes to better reflect the collection • Modifying restrictions on access notes to current policy • Adding in the languages of the collections if they included non-English materials • Changing the finding aid link to include https • Fixing any coding errors such as records not coded as collections, single date instead of range of dates, etc. Additionally because these records were collection records, OCLC did not automatically add the content/media/carrier type fields to the existing records. Instead, the finding aid needed to be consulted to locate the types of formats to add (significant ones).
Using Record Manager Locating records in Record Manager is straightforward since there are several search options and a browse feature. The initial search options are not as detailed as Connexion; nonetheless with some basic information such as International Standard
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Book Number (ISBN), OCLC record number, specific title, and/ or author, users can easily find the record they want. A small Advanced search link allows for searching by OCLC indexes. A list of recent searches and edited records conveniently remains in the display during a session. Record Manager features two different views: text view and MARC view. The text view presents a non-MARC view with text labels instead of MARC values. Unfortunately, the collection records could not be opened in Record Manager using the text view as they generated an error and opened instead in the MARC view. OCLC support indicated that the text view was not available for these records because they are mixed materials with a range of dates. Thus, the MARC view was the only option to edit these records. In the MARC view, Record Manager has a clear display for the MARC indicator and text fields. Plus there are several useful features. To the left of these fields, there are up and down arrows to reorder the MARC fields. The red minus and green plus sign buttons to the right are a quick way to delete and add rows to the record. Several fields such as the leader fields can be expanded to edit them. The expanded field contains useful text descriptions, help links, and drop downs to select the desired information. These field descriptions were generally sufficient that checking the online help was not necessary. But if needed, the online help provides a choice of accessing a tooltip (brief description) or field help (detailed description). Record Manager online help also displays the excellent OCLC Bibliographic Formats and Standards pages. Text fields allow for direct entry in most fields. Entering the content/media/carrier type fields in Record Manager is designed so users can choose one set of these fields from the same drop down. Most of these records had more than one format type and additional content/media/ carrier type fields needed to be added individually. In general, Record Manager is a handy tool but there are a few quirks. The 100 and 700 fields lack in-line editing features. Some of the menu items such as copying fields, inserting and creating field strings, controlling headings, and getting field help are available by right clicking in the field but may be quicker accessed from the top menu. There is no spell checker in Record Manager, but red squiggly lines within the browser indicate potential misspellings. Records that are in progress and not complete can be saved using the Save Bib Record In-Progress option from the Save menu. Users can choose a name that they can remember. Then
these records can be directly located via the Save file search. When complete, these records can be sent to an Export list where they can be exported either via Send to my computer or Send to local system (via TCP/IP) option. Customization of the Record Manager display is available in the User Preferences area. Users can choose the format of the export (such as MARC 21 with UTF-8), and data to exclude for both authority and bibliographic data. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) connections can be set up here. Advanced and Basic Search options allow for selecting language and search scopes. Other options include text/MARC view, cataloging standard, classification scheme, and fields to include when deriving records. Plus, users can also create and edit strings from the Toolbox area. These options should be sufficient for most users.
Conclusion Archival collection records are complicated records and probably not the place to start for new catalogers. However, Record Manager could be used by non-cataloging staff to update some of the fields such as collection dates, title, physical description, notes such as contents (including collection formats) and biographical information, access restrictions, and finding aid links. The contents and biographical information notes sometimes took quite a while to create as the descriptions in the finding aid could be long or difficult to determine a summary without knowing much about the collection. Even though Archives staff may not be familiar with LC subject headings, a few suggested headings would help Technical Services locate a proper LC term, thus reducing the time Technical Services staff would need to spend on the record. Connexion users may find Record Manager is missing some of their favorite features. However, Record Manager is suitable for editing existing records. And non-cataloging staff will probably find Record Manager’s simpler interface easier to learn.
Endnotes 1. “Archives and Special Collections,” University of Massachusetts Boston, Healey Library, accessed October 31, 2020, https://www.umb.edu/library/about/departments/ uasc.
Rumors continued from page 33 of the Charleston Gaillard Center as before, and we will be following all of their protocols for the safety and comfort of our attendees. Limited in-person registrations will be available depending on the requirements of our local venues, but we will be monitoring the requirements as they change and will open additional registrations if we are able to do so. We will be using the Pathable platform again following our successful virtual event in 2020, and they’ve made several improvements to their already impressive offerings for exhibitors. One exciting new feature is the “Talk Now” option that allows conference attendees to join a one-on-one video chat with an available booth representative without worrying about joining
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an already full room in the middle of a conversation. Booth reps can turn on and off their availability for the “Talk Now” option as needed, and if the first person doesn’t answer the call will automatically be forwarded to the next available representative. Expanded metrics and analytics will offer vendors the ability to see more granular details for booth traffic beyond leads or visits — the dashboard will offer content consumption details, including a total and unique number of views per file/document, average length of booth visit, video average view duration, and link clicks. Our 2020 exhibitors can log into their dashboards from last year’s conference to see an example of what’s continued on page 48
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Expert Commentaries from CEOs — Achieving Open Science: Building on Historical Partnerships By Frank Vrancken Peeters (CEO, Springer Nature) www.springernature.com Note From Your Editor: Do you have a point of view or comment to share with us at ATG? We are introducing this new column “Expert Commentaries from CEOs” to provide you that opportunity. Our inaugural column is by Frank Vrancken Peeters. Thanks for your contribution! — KS
selectively and OA was possible. And only last year, we committed to transitioning all our journals to OA via adoption of the Transformative Journal model, including the prestigious Nature Portfolio titles. This means that all authors are now able to publish OA in all 2,900 primary research journals that we publish.
A
However, without the support of libraries and library consortia we would not have made the inroads that we have. Transformative agreements, what used to be called read and publish / Springer Compact deals, have proven instrumental in delivering this transition at scale.
t this year’s thirteenth APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) Conference I made a clear, but simple, request — for the research community, in order to accelerate the transition to open science which COVID has shown can deliver huge benefits, to collaborate more. Publishers and librarians have a long joint history of such collaboration as seen not least with the creation of Crossref and embedding of COUNTER reporting. While the exact form it has taken has changed over time, our joint mission remains the same — to make research content accessible and discoverable. Authors want their research published as fast as possible and researchers (library users) want to have access to the most up to date relevant information in their field to use and build on for their own research. Take 30 years ago when research distribution was a fairly straightforward, analogue, proposition. A publisher’s primary focus was on receiving manuscripts from authors, guiding them through the peer review process and working with them to make the final published version as good as it could be and then compiled with other articles into a journal issue. The job of distributing what were then print journals to libraries around the world was dealt with by agents. The transition from print to digital (of which academic publishing, out of the rest of the “content” industries, was very much at the vanguard) which has taken place over this time saw the first shift in how we work together to make content accessible and discoverable. It precipitated a closer relationship between publisher and librarian given the easier distribution and individual access to publications made possible by electronic search, links and access. And, with the creation of consortia agreements and multi-content deals, it enabled libraries to provide cost-effective access to a wider set of content than had been possible in a purely physical landscape. The transition to digital has also opened up a wider range of areas for us to work together on to make research content both more accessible and more discoverable. Taking increased accessibility of content as an example. The biggest advancement in making content more accessible over the past twenty years has been the advent of open access; the transitioning of primary research articles from behind the paywall and making them immediately accessible to all to use and reuse from the point of publication. At Springer Nature we have been very clear in our commitment to this transition; twenty years ago only 1% of Springer Nature articles were gold OA, now it’s around 35% of articles. Twenty years ago, our BMC imprint was the only commercial OA publisher. Now its portfolio of 316 journals sits as part of around 600 fully OA journals offered by Springer Nature. Ten years ago, there was no highly selective OA journal. Nature Communications changed that, proving that
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We are proud to have worked with libraries and consortia around the world on 16 such agreements, from the world’s largest by volume of articles with Projekt DEAL in Germany and the largest in North America with the University of California (UC) and California Digital Library, to national agreements with the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland, amongst others. In addition, working with institutions and consortia outside of Europe has also enabled us to have agreements in India with Manipal Academy of Higher Education and in Qatar with the Qatar National Library. We also concluded our first TA for the Nature Portfolio titles with Max Planck Digital Library at the end of 2020. These agreements are proven to work and are great examples of partnership working as they show what we can achieve if we work together across the research landscape. DEAL is an excellent example of this. Negotiations took a long time; it was important to first build trust as a basis for partnership and the amount of necessary detailed work was easy to underestimate. It worked, though, because all parties could see the benefits to the research community in Germany from such an agreement. However, it is important to note that there is no standard model, no blueprint available as the landscape varies from country to country. For example, the agreement with UC needed to take a different approach to the agreements we had been using to reach Europe. A flexible multi-player model was needed to allow both library and funder (via the author) to contribute to the APC to take into account the different funding situation in the U.S. This shows that, collectively, we need to be open to new solutions and also sometimes take a risk. And with data showing that across the eight countries where we had a national TA live in 2019 between 70-90% of research content produced by researchers in each country published with us was published gold OA, the potential benefits far outweigh the risks. The shift from print journals and books to electronic access has also opened up new opportunities and collaborations to aid discoverability. It has provided the opportunity for us to work together to help students, academics and other library users access this research remotely when they are not on campus, and across multiple devices and platforms. Working in partnership with the library community, we were delighted to be the first publisher to implement Seamless Access to make the user journey for researchers accessing content when outside their institution smoother. Users from participating institutions now only have to log in once per browser. After this, we remember their institutional affiliation, making further authentication when outside of their insitution’s network easier. We also worked with other publishers to develop GetFTR. This
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enables researchers to be able to identify from search results content to which their library is providing access. Internally, we have also made investments and changes to make the researcher journey on our own platforms smoother and more seamless. The result of this was that at Springer Nature we saw a 51% increase in web visits between January and November 2020 and a growth in article downloads of around 38%, with institutional site license downloads up by 17%. As providers of and to content, publishers and librarians need to think creatively and consider whether providing access to licenced material via other platforms is also desirable. Making it easier for researchers to discover and access research papers they already legitimately have access to, via for example their library’s institutional subscription, is what is at the heart of our partnership with ResearchGate. We know that there was some scepticism amongst the library community when our pilot was first launched. We hope that the way the relationship is now structured with libraries having greater transparency as to how their subscriptions are being used provides reassurance that this is about giving library users another avenue to utilise their subscriptions not about competing with them. In fact, our recent white paper analysing the partnership, indicated that it provided a number of benefits to librarians, researchers, and authors. Particular benefits for libraries included: improved entitlement recognition through the use of researcher profiles alongside IP identification ensuring that libraries’ subscriptions to journals are fully utilised, giving library users an additional validated place where they can access the version of record on which to build their own research, providing richer insights into content usage, enabling both partners and libraries to learn more about researchers’ requirements. It is not just in making research more open and discoverable where publishers and librarians can work together. Other elements of open science, diversity of content, access to underlying code, data and protocols, are equally important in the modern research environment. It has been most acutely visible during the COVID pandemic with a spotlight placed on the importance of immediate access to research, data sharing and curation, and good data management for boosting the reproducibility and reliability of research. This is where gold OA comes into play. Providing only access to the unfinished accepted manuscript via green OA, which does not have the benefits of post-accept improvements, is not linked up with data or code, does not show corrections, or retractions, and ultimately does not support libraries in the repurposing of their budgets to support OA publishing, risks embedding an inferior version of OA. The result is that we fall short in delivering on the promise of an open science future that is so crucial to the whole research enterprise. This potential to significantly advance scientific discovery and further scientific progress is the prize waiting for all; an accelerated and more effective research system delivering benefits like vaccines and SDG solutions for the whole world. There is great potential here for further collaboration between publishers and librarians, not least in the area of ensuring research meets the needs of societal challenges. Our partnership with the Dutch University Association (VSNU) and the Dutch Library Consortium UKB sought to explore the exact nature and scope of this wider impact as well as the societal relevance of the underpinning research. Working with technology partners Digital Science and Dimensions, a biblio-
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metric analysis was undertaken of nearly 360,000 documents published in 2017. This, coupled with the results of a survey of nearly 6,000 readers on Springer Nature platforms, led to the white Paper “Open for all, Exploring the reach of open access content to non-academic audiences.” This showed not only the effects of content being published OA but, more importantly, who that research is reaching. Where could enhanced collaboration lead us? Let’s take open data, a key element of open science. Global R&D spend has reached almost €1.7 trillion. Within this, publishing spend accounts for less than 1% but it has a very big role to play in helping to ensure that the other 99% is spent efficiently and effectively to accelerate progress demonstrating that the potential is real and quantifiable. A PWC study undertaken for the European Commission estimates the cost of research data not being FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, re-usable) could cost up to €26 billion in Europe alone. This is the cost of work that has been duplicated due to a lack of awareness of existing research or negative results. €26 billion is almost double the annual Horizon Europe research budget, over 10 times the annual spend in the EU on combined journal subscriptions and OA APCs and 2.5 times the equivalent spend globally. Publishers and publishing may therefore be a relatively small cog in terms of global R&D spend but by playing our part in opening up science and in improving the efficiency of the research process and robustness of the research output through greater partnership working, the benefits for the wider community can be so much larger, enabling us to contribute much more than we have in the past. I talked at the start about accessibility and discoverability being what joins publishers and librarians together. By speeding up access to the outputs of research, and making it all re-usable via open licenses, we make the progress of science more efficient. By making research more reproducible (via open data, open code and protocols), reducing duplication and publishing negative results, the process itself is made more efficient. With less money wasted on redoing research either already done or tried and failed, and reducing time researchers spend trying to find associated code and data, more money is kept in the system. The pandemic has demonstrated acutely and in real time, how open research can fundamentally change the way that researchers communicate and collaborate, leading to vaccines being developed in record time. Dynamic workflows are merging and distribution channels are changing enabling others — patients, businesses, teachers, policy makers — to benefit from critical insights. Speed, openness and transparency of research are all important elements of an open science future but alongside this we need to ensure that the research is correct, that the quality of the data underpinning it is robust. These changing characteristics means partnerships between institutions and publishers will be, if anything, more vital going forward, helping us understand the benefits of these and enable us together to deliver increased insights into the societal impact of open research, its relevance and impact. To share your point of view or comments for this new column send contributions to Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> or Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu>.
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Fall 2020 Virtual Finals Events: Innovative Practices for Post-pandemic Future? By Marta Bladek (Associate Librarian for Public Services, The Lloyd Sealy Library, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York) <mbladek@jjay.cuny.edu>
Finals Events In Academic Libraries Each exam period, libraries offer a host of finals-related services, events and programming. Popular with stressed and overwhelmed students, finals weeks initiatives emphasize the library as a place to study and relax. Extended service hours, pet assisted therapy sessions, a variety of games, as well as arts and crafts activities are the most common library offerings during the most demanding time of the semester.1 In Fall 2020, due to COVID-19 restrictions, most academic libraries permitted limited physical access or remained fully closed. Not only did students lose their favorite study space during exams, they were also unable to participate in on-site finals events that traditionally afforded them some stress relief as they navigated the end-of-term pressures. Since libraries had prior experience with online resources and virtual reference, they were able to transition quickly to the remote learning environment. However, finals weeks interventions had previously involved the physical space of the library and relied on in-person participation. Adapting these initiatives to an online context posed a challenge. Just a couple of months into the pandemic, few libraries offered any kind of Spring 2020 finals programming. Remarkably, many libraries have been able to move their Fall 2020 finals initiatives online to meet students where they were — studying alone in their dorms or family homes.
Fall 2020 Virtual Finals Events To capture this emerging trend, I conducted an informal Internet search for library finals initiatives in the U.S. This brief article identifies the most common practices and describes in more detail some of the more inventive approaches to virtual finals services and programming. Overall, libraries created finals-related guides, social media and blog posts that highlighted library online resources and reference services, announced special virtual events, and focused on student overall well-being, with an emphasis on stress management. To assist students in navigating the challenges of online exams, libraries actively promoted chat or Zoom consultations, while promoting specific databases, ebook and streaming video collections. Often, information on campus writing and tutoring help complemented the information on library- and research-specific assistance. In direct response to the COVID-19 crisis, library finals postings frequently mentioned the availability of mental health services, food pantries, and emergency assistance programs, on campus and beyond. Besides directing students to academic resources and mental health services, libraries attempted to provide most of the de-stressing activities they would normally offer on site in a remote format. Links to online games and puzzles, coloring pages, animal and nature live streams, recipes for healthy snacks, meditation playlists, and fitness videos were included in most guides on how to manage the stress of the finals.
Virtual Study Rooms While the above strategies targeted the individual student working on their own, some libraries offered a host of online
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communal events. Either synchronous or asynchronous, these shared activities sought to remedy the isolation many students felt this term by approximating the unique experience of studying for finals in the library among peers. With its physical space closed, the UC San Diego Library arranged virtual study rooms where groups of students could join their “Looking beyond classmates for two-hour long study exams weeks, did sessions overseen by a librarian.2 Fall 2020 virtual Similarly, the Ohio State University finals expand Libraries invited students to visit library-hosted virtual study rooms.3 libraries’ ideas Encouraged to download the library for outreach background images “to virtually to online and place yourself in the library,” students were able to further simulate distance students the in-library study experience. In overall?” turn, the Fairfield University Library and the campus writing center organized their virtual study room to give students the opportunity to be accountable to their peers.4 A tutor moderated the session and provided resources as needed. At the outset, students shared their study goals and reported on their progress at the end. Such informal accountability check-in aimed to motivate and inspire students who could not otherwise study together. A different example of bringing the campus community closer during the intense finals weeks came from the New York University (NYU) Libraries. To facilitate a sense of community at a distance, the libraries called on students to co-create a finals study playlist. Hosted on Spotify, the NYU Collaborative Playlist allowed the community to add their favorite music to a soundtrack for focused study.5
Virtual Pet Therapy Study-focused groups and activities were not the only online participatory events that libraries organized. Finals weeks in libraries usually feature some stress-relief opportunities. Similarly, Fall 2020 virtual offerings included diversions for students needing a break from studying. Therapy pet sessions, a staple of final weeks programming in many libraries, moved online. To offer the popular and cherished service, some libraries partnered up with volunteer organizations and held live sessions that featured therapy dogs and their handlers. Montana State University Library, for example, invited one of the dogs that had visited the library in the past and streamed a conversation with its owner.6 Other libraries, however, experimented with a new kind of de-stressing activities involving pets. Rather than relying on trained animals, many libraries involved the pets of library staff. There were a variety of formats in which libraries presented students with the chance to relax and enjoy animals. The Fairfield University Library held Zoom meetings featuring the pets of librarians and staff from campus counseling and psychological services; students were encouraged to introduce their own pets as well.7 In partnership with campus psychological and counseling services, Penn
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Libraries organized “Dog Days” during which students could attend Zoom sessions where either trained therapy animals or librarians’ own pets made an appearance.8 Even libraries that could not make arrangements for therapy pet sessions still tried to share with students the stress-relief benefits of interacting with pets. The Manchester Community College Library held virtual sessions with librarians’ pets; the calendar featured pictures of librarians and their pets so that students could choose which meeting to attend.9 The Caldwell University Library,10 the North Carolina State Universities,11 and the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries12 held similar events and invited students to join with or without their own pets. Library staff’s dogs and cats took center stage, not only in live virtual meetups, but also on libraries’ websites and social media channels. To de-stress and engage students, libraries added pet galleries to their finals weeks pages and guides. The Rutgers University Library at New Brunswick created an online gallery where library staff and students alike could upload the pictures of their pets.13 Similarly, the CSU Northridge University Library put together a gallery of library staff’s pets, with each photo accompanied by a brief note describing the pet’s favorite tricks or activities.14 The SUNY Cortland Library, in turn, ran an Instagram contest in which students posted pictures of their pets as a way to momentarily unwind during the exams.15
Virtual Parties and Other Group Activities In addition to virtual group study and pet-oriented initiatives, libraries found other ways to bring students together for breaks from studying. Previously offered in the physical space of the library, stress relief and wellness workshops, games and crafts activities were now offered through live streams. The following examples illustrate the ingenuity and creativity with which libraries approached their online finals programming. At Humboldt State University Library, a virtual Brain Booth replaced the experiential room specifically designed so that students could engage in a variety of relaxation activities as they moved around the space.16 With the library closed, the Brain Booth was hosted live on Instagram instead; student assistants were answering questions and providing suggestions on stress management.17 The University of Tennessee Chattanooga Library ran two “nine-hour relaxation marathons” that invited students to join library staff as they made slime and biscuits, knitted, demonstrated 3D modelling, assembled puzzles, and solved a Rubik’s cube.18 The Alden Library at Ohio University held an online trivia party where students competed with librarians.19 Another festive party was held by the Fairfield University Library that invited students to wear cozy sweaters and sip on their coffee as they joined librarians for a winter trivia game and informal conversation.20
Social Media Finals Campaigns Besides relying on their websites and live streamed events to promote library resources and well-being strategies during Fall 2020 finals, libraries reached out to students through social media. Most often, the posts advertised virtual reference services, recommended specific resources, and offered research tips. Words of encouragement, motivational quotes, funny memes, as well as the aforementioned pet photos were also popular. Some libraries went beyond individual posts and planned more elaborate finals campaigns. “Play it cool and destress online” by the Jerry Falwell Library at Liberty University included posts on breathing and grounding techniques, recipes, crosswords and other word games, a candy jar guessing contest, as well as pet pictures.21 In their “Finals week break time” campaign, Oklahoma University Libraries featured study playlists, coloring pages from the library collections, and interactive contests, such as the best cereal contest where students voted on their favorites.22
Discussion As libraries pivoted their special finals offerings online, they emphasized what makes the academic library so popular with students during exam weeks: library-specific services and resources for learning, the benefits and pleasures of communal study, and the library as a space not only to focus but also to unwind and relax. Reimagined in response to COVID-19, the Fall 2020 virtual finals initiatives demonstrate libraries’ adaptability, inventiveness, as well as willingness and ability to meet students where they are. As it happened, last semester, the students were not on campus. Well before the pandemic, academic libraries worked with large numbers of distance and online students. While they were well served by online resources and reference services, there was an events and programming gap, exemplified by finals events. As a matter of practice, online and distance students were overlooked during finals because the special activities and programs took place on site and relied on in-person participation. And yet, in Fall 2020, with access to campuses restricted due to the pandemic, libraries found multiple ways to reach and engage students virtually. Once libraries reopen, will online finals initiatives accompany in-library and in-person finals events? Looking beyond exams weeks, did Fall 2020 virtual finals expand libraries’ ideas for outreach to online and distance students overall? While it is impossible to speculate about how COVID-19 will transform libraries and the communities they serve, this past semester highlighted both the unique role of the physical library and the importance of a complementary robust online library presence. As we hope for an imminent return to our libraries, ideally in time for Spring 2021 exams, it may be worth considering online library finals offerings as more than a remarkable one-time response to a crisis. Instead, let us be inspired by the examples above to always plan our services, events, and programs for all our students, whether they are on campus or away from it. endnotes on page 46
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Endnotes 1. Meyers-Martin, Coleen, and Laurie Borchard. “The finals stretch: Exams week library outreach surveyed,” Reference Services Review 43 no. 4 (2015): 510-532. 2. UC Sand Diego Library, “Library De-Stress Activities,” https://library.ucsd.edu/visit/de-stress.html (accessed December 2, 2020). 3. Ohio University Libraries, “Finals by Alden,” https://libguides.library.ohio.edu/FinalsByAlden/Home (accessed December 2, 2020). 4. The DNL Report, “Finals Week: Helping Students Find Academic Support, Motivation, and Calm,” https://thednlreport.fairfield. edu/finals-week-helping-students-find-academic-support-motivation-and-calm/ (accessed December 2, 2020). 5. NYU Libraries, “Finals Resources,” https://guides.nyu.edu/finals (accessed December 3, 2020). 6. Montana State University, “MSU Library’s Paws to De-Stress Event is Now Virtual,” https://www.montana.edu/calendar/events/35674 (accessed December 2, 2020). 7. Fairfield University, “De-Stress With DiMenna-Nyselius Library’s Virtual Finals Events,” https://www.fairfield.edu/news/archive/2020/ december/library-virtual-finals-events.html (accessed December 3, 2020). 8. Penn Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania, “Penn Libraries Study Breaks: Dog Days,” https://guides.library.upenn.edu/ studybreaks/dogdays (accessed December 2, 2020). 9. Manchester Community College Library, “Virtual Pet Therapy: Home,” https://libguides.manchestercc.edu/pet-therapy (accessed December 2, 2020). 10. Caldwell University, “De-Stress for Finals!,” https://www.caldwell.edu/title-de-stress-for-finals/ (accessed December 2, 2020). 11. NC State University Libraries, “Virtual Pet Therapy,” https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/events/virtual-pet-therapy (accessed December 2, 2020). 12. The University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, “Good Luck Wishes and Tips for Finals from University Libraries,” https://www. colorado.edu/libraries/2020/11/30/good-luck-wishes-and-tips-finals-university-libraries (accessed December 2, 2020). 13. Rutgers, the State of New Jersey University, “Virtual Pet Therapy,” https://sites.rutgers.edu/books-we-read/pettherapy/ (accessed December 3, 2020). 14. CSUN University Library, “Fall 2020 Finals Study Break,” https://library.csun.edu/events/study-break-fall-2020 (accessed December 3, 2020). 15. SUNY Cortland Library, “Virtual PAWS for Stress Relief,” https://sites.cortland.edu/library/category/stress-relief/ (accessed December 2, 2020). 16. Humboldt State University Library, “Brain Booth in the HSU Library,” https://libguides.humboldt.edu/brainbooth (accessed December 2, 2020). 17. Ibid. 18. The University of Tennessee Chattanooga Library, “Finals Stress Relief,” https://www.utc.edu/library/finals-events.php (accessed December 2, 2020). 19. Alden Library at Ohio State University, “De-stress and Study With Us Virtually: Finals by Alden Fall 2020,” https://www.ohio.edu/ library/about/news-events/all-news/de-stress-and-study-us-virtually-finals-alden-fall-2020 (accessed December 2, 2020). 20. The DNL Report, “Finals Week: Helping Students Find Academic Support, Motivation, and Calm,” https://thednlreport.fairfield. edu/finals-week-helping-students-find-academic-support-motivation-and-calm/ (accessed December 2, 2020). 21. Jerry Falwell Library at Liberty University, https://twitter.com/LibertyULibrary (accessed December 2, 2020). 22. Oklahoma State University Libraries, https://www.instagram.com/oulibraries/ and https://twitter.com/OU_Libraries (accessed December 2, 2020).
Table of Contents for Against the Grain Online Articles on Charleston Hub — www.charleston-hub.com Don’s Conference Notes The Virtual NISOPlus 2021 Conference by Donald T. Hawkins — see https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/04/ dons-conference-notes-the-virtual-nisoplus-2021conference/
Altmetrics Part 1: Celebrating A Decade of Progress – An ATG Original by Nancy Herther — see https://www.charlestonhub.com/2021/03/altmetrics-part-1-celebrating-a-decade-ofprogress-an-atg-original/ Part 2: Celebrating Altmetric’s Decade – An ATG Original by Nancy Herther — see https://www.charlestonhub.com/2021/03/altmetrics-part-2-celebrating-altmetricsdecade-an-atg-original/
46 Against the Grain / April 2021
Unsub Part 1: From Big Deals to Real Deals for Academic Publishing & Libraries by Nancy Herther — see https:// www.charleston-hub.com/2021/04/unsub-part-1-from-bigdeals-to-real-deals-for-academic-publishing-libraries/ Part 2: Jason Priem on the Past, Present & Future of Unsub and Scholarly Publishing by Nancy Herther — see https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/04/unsub-part-2jason-priem-on-the-past-present-future-of-unsub-andscholarly-publishing/
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Biz of Digital — Records Management for Research Data By Janna Avon (Digital Initiatives Librarian, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, 730 High St., Easton, PA 18042; Phone: 610-330-3173) <avonj@lafayette.edu> Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-3544) <flinchba@umbc.edu>
L
afayette College is a liberal arts college in Easton, PA serving a student body of approximately 2,600. We’re home to two libraries, and I serve as the Digital Initiatives Librarian on our Digital Scholarship Services team. While small, we support an institutional repository, extensive digital collections, multiple web publishing platforms, and several digital humanities and humanistic social sciences research projects. Our services often branch from the personal expertise of our team members, and cover technical expertise, infrastructure support, and digital scholarship training. Data management services in our context are currently ad hoc, and responsive to requests for help. We have primarily worked with humanities faculty and students using digital humanities methods as a component of their research projects. This article is a brief overview of a research data management approach I developed while assisting a faculty member develop an organizational system for their research collection of roughly 1,000 images and scanned documents. The collection was large, diffuse, inconsistently organized, sourced from many places, and only partially described in a metadata spreadsheet when they approached me for help. The goals were to unify the collection, streamline and standardize the metadata workflow, and to be able to aggregate subsets of images based on metadata criteria and queries. They had little budget, very specific user needs, and low interest and low skill in computing, programming, or complex software. Ultimately, I leaned very heavily on Records Management theory and practice to build out an organizational system, pulled in free image management software aimed at photographers to embed descriptive metadata into the image files, and used campus provided cloud storage to create a shared working environment for the research team and unified storage of the collection. Pulling from archival theory, and pairing it with the basic functionality of a computer’s operating system, I identified three tools that we could use to impose intellectual control over the collection. I then developed a more generalized seven step approach to creating custom organizational systems, which I have since used to assist other researchers with similar collections and goals.
The three tools are: hierarchical relationships, naming conventions, and controlled indexing terms. Hierarchical relationships are articulated as hierarchically nested file structures. This is the native structural patterns of modern operating systems, and it can be used to form a core organizational structure that articulates the ways in which the materials relate to each other, and their function within the collection. File structures are a top down organizational pattern, and communicate layers of meaning to the materials through their deliberate and explicit groupings. It is visible, relatively fixed, and gives top to bottom drill-down capabilities that segment the data.
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Standardized naming conventions provide a way to visibly embed encoded information at the item level. It’s particularly useful as a sorting tool, and a way to give each item a unique identifying marker. This tool can also describe additional contextual granularity by building on the established context of the file structure. A standardized naming convention also gives a clustering functionality that’s accessed by running searches on encoded name elements and established patterns. Indexing using a controlled vocabulary in embedded keywords is primarily done at the item level. This tool attaches descriptive and administrative details directly to the item files, that then provides a bottom-up aggregation and faceting functionality to help consolidate materials across the collection based on shared attributes. It adds flexibility to the organization, as well as drill-down and faceting functionalities to the data. Tags add details beyond administrative organization and sorting, and are more fluid and flexible than the other two tools. The list of terms is generated from the researchers own preferred terms that they use when describing their materials, and allows them to identify what they find most significant about the image in their research context and attach it to the item. The vocabulary should articulate research related descriptive elements, and be a comprehensive list of controlled terms that are then applied consistently across the materials. With these three key tools in mind, I’ve distilled a roadmap that walks a researcher through developing, documenting, and implementing a customized organizational system.
Step 1. Assess what is. Identify exactly what is considered part of the collection, where it currently lives, what format the files are in, and any dependencies.
Step 2. Consolidate the materials. Based on the researcher’s work habits and personal needs, decide on a central home for the collection. Once identified, move everything identified in Step 1 to that one place so that it can be managed as a cohesive whole.
Step 3. Brainstorm the system’s functionality. This is the most abstract step, and can be the most difficult, but it is vital. The researcher needs to identify all the ways they need to be able to interact with the collection, and how they need the different parts of the collection to relate to and interact with each other. I start with two broad questions: What does the researcher need to know about the materials? Some examples include: citation information, provenance, materiality, content, relationships between materials, research observations, themes, geographic location, etc. Identify what information is needed at a glance, ways to group them and sort materials, and what queries the researcher will have for the collection.
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How does the researcher need to be able to use the materials? What are the natural groupings? What is the researcher’s personal approach to grouping them? How do they want to be able to facet, aggregate, and drill down in the collection? What level of granularity is needed in grouping and sorting? What structures does the system need to reflect? What makes the most sense for the researcher and the way they work?
Step 4. Build out the system’s structures, conventions, rules, and supporting documentation. This is about articulating the ideas of Step 3 into a functioning, usable system, and creating the documentation that supports it. The output of this stage is a suite of documents that explicitly determine and explain every part of the system. This includes a conceptual map of the hierarchy with explanations of each section, rules for how to use it, and how to extend it; a document explaining the naming convention, its principles and its information elements, and how to apply it; a controlled vocabulary of the indexing terms with disambiguation and definitions, and potentially also a code book that explains any acronyms or codes you use.
Step 5. Apply the system. This can be done manually, file by file, and it can also be done with a preferred batch file processor that makes bulk changes. Personally, I have used Adobe Bridge for this work, which is a free digital asset management software. It performs modifications directly to the files. I also like its keyword list, which you can populate with your preferred terms and then add to your items by ticking a box, either individually or in bulk. It also enables bulk renaming and bulk file moving.
Step 6. Use the system. In this context, I mean continually use and apply the system to any collection accruals in order to keep the collection functional and comprehensive, in addition to leveraging the tools described above and applied in the previous steps to use the collection for research.
Step 7. Maintain the system. As the collection grows, expands, and becomes more complex, so too must your organizational structures. Add new elements following the rules established in Step 4, and update the management documents to reflect the growth and changes. A system’s documentation is living, and will quickly become outdated if it isn’t actively maintained. How does this work as a library service? The most vital person in the design and implementation of the system is the
person who will be using the system. As a service provider, that is not necessarily you. Your job is to help the researcher think through their needs, coach them in documenting their decisions, and help them develop the skills and comfort they need to implement their decisions. In practice, for me this has been a consultation service model. I have long and sometimes challenging conversations with the researcher, follow up meetings to coach and mentor them in documenting and applying decisions, and I train the researcher and their assistants on any software or templates they choose to use. This approach, like any, has strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths include: • Operating system and software agnostic approach. • Presuming a networked or cloud environment, this structure supports multiple users. • It is relatively low cost to implement and maintain. • Fully customizable, and researchers can make their systems function to their specifications. • It’s flexible, and can always be changed. • If built properly, it is extensible, always able to grow and respond to changing needs. • After the initial time investment of developing and documenting the system, it’s relatively quick to implement the system, low effort to use, and relatively easy to maintain. • You don’t necessarily have to worry about software obsolescence (just all the other usual digital preservation concerns).
Weaknesses include: • It can be intimidating, especially when first starting the process. • The conceptual learning curve can be high. This can be a very new way of thinking to a lot of the people. • The researcher is ultimately the person responsible for the development and implementation of the system. They can’t offload the intellectual labour or decision making. To do so compromises the utility of the system. • The system is only as good as its implementation and use. The user needs to be committed to using the system as they add materials to their collection. It won’t happen automatically, and there is no software interface forcing system compliance.
Rumors continued from page 41 available — the new metrics were added recently to existing conference data! Registration and more details will be available in June, so keep an eye out for updates at https://www.charleston-hub.com/ the-charleston-conference/. The fantabulous Leah Hinds has just posted the Call for papers for the 2021 Charleston Conference. We are geared up and ready! https://www.charleston-hub.com/the-charlestonconference/call-for-papers/
48 Against the Grain / April 2021
One Last Thing to Mention Have you noticed that we are now including a Table of Contents for Against the Grain Online Articles inside each print issue of ATG? This table of contents will contain a listing of newly posted articles appearing on the Charleston Hub. See p.46 in this issue or visit the Hub at www.charleston-hub.com. And remember, we want to hear from you. Please send us submissions, issues, questions, comments, input, whatever you want to send us! Thanks! <kstrauch@comcast.net>
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Optimizing Library Services — How the Shift to Online Learning Is Changing Content Management and Access Needs for Libraries and Their Patrons By Ms. Brittany Haynes (Sales and Marketing Coordinator, IGI Global) <bhaynes@igi-global.com> Column Editors: Ms. Caroline Campbell (Assistant Director of Marketing and Sales, IGI Global) <ccampbell@igi-global.com> and Mr. Nick Newcomer (Senior Director of Marketing and Sales, IGI Global) <nnewcomer@igi-global.com>
O
ver the past year, it is no secret that there has been a significant shift to online learning for higher education institutions, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This has significantly impacted professors, instructors, students, as well as librarians (as they provide access to resources for others at their institution). With this focus and reliance on online-only and hybrid learning environments, what have been the shifts in the importance and flexibility of online access and its impact on librarians’ roles?
Librarian Services and Roles At the beginning of the pandemic, when lockdowns in the U.S. came forth abruptly, libraries had to work to enhance their contingency plans for their content, creating a need for institutions to collaborate with publishers and aggregators to move pre-existing and newly acquired electronic content to remote access. This occurred with the challenge of everyone working and learning from home with little notice. With the sudden need for remote access to digital resources and with professors hosting courses online, librarians are now expected to provide more of a service-based role that goes beyond or enhances their typical practices, including: • Ensuring proper access is set up and materials are accessible for online courses. • Moving physical materials beyond books and journals (such as DVDs, CDs, and more content) online for use in courses. • Hosting online professional development seminars. • Providing virtual presentations/trainings about available library services as well as how to utilize online platforms and discovery services. Promoting these remote library services to ensure patrons have online support and assistance has become vital (ExLibris 2020), especially during transitional periods such as throughout the pandemic. To better understand this shift and other new access demands for libraries, IGI Global spoke with Dr. Antje Mays, Director of Collections at the University of Kentucky Libraries, who was able to provide further insight of her experience and the impact she has seen so far during the pandemic.
It can often take quite a bit of time for librarians and their teams to work on providing items online, begging the question: would it be more beneficial to invest more upfront in digital resources moving forward so this backend work is no longer needed?
Are Print Materials Becoming Obsolete? “Print [materials] will never be obsolete,” stated Dr. Mays. “Because without them we wouldn’t have access to primary resources in the same way, such as original historical documents.” The need for researchers and students to be able to reference original writings and other historical documents is just one reason why print will never truly go away. There are also accessibility issues to consider. While digital access to materials has helped considerably with remote access during the pandemic, reportedly there have been issues with equitability of access for all, especially for those who may have special needs that digital resources do not always properly support. Additionally, for some, print is just simply preferred or causes less strain on eyes than digital resources. Another issue is that certain disciplines are not currently as fully covered in e-books and e-journals as they are in print materials, and Dr. Mays points out that this leaves print a still very viable option. Some publishers may not offer all of their content in digital format, creating this gap in content. However, new challenges and obstacles are presented for print and physical materials in libraries during the pandemic, such as quarantining materials once they have been returned, according to Dr. Mays. Ensuring safe access to physical and print materials and the handling of them has certainly been made more difficult, as restrictions and lockdowns have eased, and students and instructors are returning part- or full-time to campuses. According to Dr. Mays, “[The] traditional college experience is coming back but online tools, especially asynchronous tools, are here to stay.” She further explained that asynchronous tools are “very powerful in reaching people,” including by giving them the flexibility to finish degrees, especially for those who are considered “non-traditional” university students (e.g., older students, parents, caregivers, full-time workers).
The Rise of Digital Resources
How Acquisitions Patterns Are Shifting and Platform Offerings Are Expanding
One challenge faced by librarians was the need for resources to be immediately available online for their patrons during lockdown and throughout the pandemic. Dr. Mays mentioned some resources had not been available online previously, and she saw a need for online equivalents of resources that were physically at the library.
Though print may never be obsolete, there is no denying the significant demand for digital resources is here to stay as we move forward, as this shift had arguably already started occurring before the pandemic with the development of new digital tools and society’s reliance on technology for research, learning, and everyday activities.
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As has become obvious, the demand for digital resources has drastically increased, but how have desired resource formats shifted? Dr. Mays mentioned there is certainly a growing percentage of their collections budget going toward e-books for their institution, notably in science and information science.
other layer to decisions for librarians as they must assess and identify which resources will require multi-user access. For publishers that automatically provide unlimited multi-user access at no additional charge for the price of the single title, this is not a concern and opens more acquisition possibilities for libraries.
With this demand for digital resources and the shifting of acquisitions patterns, there are plenty of options for libraries to acquire their content. Some prefer to go with publishers who may offer better discounts when purchasing directly, while others go with preferred library providers and services such as GOBI that perform cataloguing and other functions for the institution. At the University of Kentucky Libraries, Dr. Mays said they work with a mix of both publishers directly and other aggregators. Certainly, this allows the University of Kentucky Libraries to be a little experimental in their collections and purchase based on the best options for their institution.
This issue can be especially burdensome with certain aggregator platforms (e.g., ProQuest and EBSCO), where multi-user access for an electronic title includes additional charges, in some cases up to a 50%+ increase on the list price of the single title. Eliminating or lowering the additional charges for multi-user access would help alleviate pressure on libraries, and aggregator platforms can work more closely with publishers and librarians to determine more feasible options.
This mindset has led publishers and platforms to offer more flexible offerings and collaborations, including: A More Centralized Location for Digital Content: Publisher database platforms must successfully work together with other digital resources platforms that host e-books and e-journals to make access more centralized and easier for library patrons. This includes working with services such as GOBI as well as publishers offering their digital resources and collections through preferred library platforms such as EBSCOHost. Remote Access Options: Many publishers offer IP authentication (with the use of VPNs) as well as login usernames and passwords. Proxy servers are among other options available. Some libraries also rely on the utilization of and integration with access management platforms such as Open Athens, Shibboleth, etc. No DRM: Unlimited DRM allows researchers to copy, paste, and print directly from the platform so they can “interact with the content just as they would with printed materials, yet with all of the benefits that a digital format enables—such as greater portability and accessibility” (EBSCO 2019). Several publishers do not impose DRM, and this includes EBSCO, IGI Global, Springer Nature, and others. Multi-User Licensing at No Additional Charge: Providing digital content with unlimited users for no additional cost can alleviate budget constraints for librarians and ensure all patrons can access content at any given time. We discuss the shift of this flexibility in the next section, based on its critical importance to the academic community. Overall, the many flexible access options for digital resources are opening up a lot of doors for libraries, but this also raises further questions about flexible access and infrastructure demands libraries need, especially during this time.
Demand for Flexible Access: Multi-Users, Breaking Down Collections, OA Options, and Beyond With this perspective and the increasing demands on libraries in mind, the way in which digital resources are hosted and accessed can have a significant impact on online learning environments, and flexible access is key for institutions and libraries to maintain their workflows, including multi-user licensing and access. Some publishers, such as IGI Global and Springer Nature (among others), provide multi-user access at no additional cost, ensuring any number of individuals at an institution can access content at any given time when it is needed. On the other hand, some publishers apply additional charges for multi-user access, which can be a heavy burden on library budgets. This adds an-
50 Against the Grain / April 2021
An additional concern is when publishers only offer critical and in-demand resources in large and expensive packages and collections (rather than also offering these resources individually). This practice forces institutions to evaluate if they can or even should invest in a large and oftentimes expensive package if it is the only way to acquire a needed resource. Many publishers forgo this practice to ensure their customers can acquire titles individually as well as in collections (both large and small) or offer flexible acquisitions options such as pick-and-choose models or EBAs which allow libraries to select the titles they actually need. As publishers collaborate directly with libraries and aggregators to ensure more acquisitions options are available and provide flexibility for accessing content, we are also seeing a conscious effort to comply with Plan S mandates and support the OA movement. This is occurring with publishing and converting content previously maintained behind a paywall to OA to permit free access to valuable and critical resources, which recently has included resources specifically on COVID-19 developments and the impact of the pandemic on various industries and fields. Elsevier converting 160 of their journals to OA, IGI Global offering 32 full Gold OA journals, and Springer Nature announcing a new OA pilot program are just a few of the current OA initiatives in the publishing community, which will only continue to lessen the strain on the academic and research community by freely providing access to valuable research content.
Conclusion As seen, the shift to online learning is changing the focus of librarian roles to be even more “service based.” Therefore, publishers, platforms that host digital content, and librarians must collaborate to ensure access to digital resources is more efficient for those utilizing and relying on these resources, including librarians, instructors, students, and others. Further collaboration between publishers and libraries can strengthen this effort, especially as libraries start to utilize more digital hosting platforms for resources. Many publishers offer or are willing to host trainings on utilizing their platforms and accessing their content to ensure resources are able to be properly and efficiently accessed. These types of offerings are just the first step to providing better content management and accessibility options as we all continue to navigate this at-times overwhelming digital terrain.
Resources Durrani, Jamie. (2021). Elsevier Flips 160 Journals to Open Access. Retrieved from www.chemistryworld.com/news/elsevierflips-160-journals-to-open-access/4013038.article. EBSCO. (2019). DRM-Free e-Books Are Now Available. Here’s Why That’s a Big Deal. Retrieved from https://www.libraryjournal.
<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>
com/?detailStory=drm-free-e-books-are-now-available-hereswhy-thats-a-big-deal. ExLibris. (2020). Is your library prepared for remote learning? Retrieved from https://exlibrisgroup.com/blog/coronaviruslibrary-remote-learning-online-learning/. Feldman, S. (2021). Why 2021 Is Setting Up to Be a Pivotal Year for Digital Content in Libraries. Retrieved from https:// www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/ article/85497-why-2021-is-setting-up-to-be-a-pivotal-year-fordigital-content-in-libraries.html. IGI Global. (2021). Freely Access Two Volumes of Content from IGI Global’s 32 Converted Gold OA Journals. Retrieved from https://www.igi-global.com/newsroom/archive/freely-access-twovolumes-content/4723/. IGI Global. (2021). IGI Global Converts Over 30 Journals to Full Gold Open Access (OA). Retrieved from https://www. igi-global.com/newsroom/archive/igi-global-converts-overjournals/4687/. Seltzer, R. (2020). Open Access Comes to Selective Journal. Retrieved from www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/24/natureadd-open-access-publishing-option-2021. Springer Nature. N.d. eBooks. Retrieved from www. springernature.com/gp/librarians/products/ebooks. Springer Nature. (2020). Springer Nature extends digital flexibility in its new eBook offers. Retrieved from https://group. springernature.com/gp/group/media/press-releases/flexible-ebooksolutions/18451446.
Recommended Readings Ciota, R. E., & Barber, E. (2021). A Pandemic at the Library: Lessons From COVID-19 About Technology Needs for Remote Working During a Crisis. In Holland, B. (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Library Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic (pp. 284297). IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-6449-3.ch015.
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Hogan, R. P. (2020). Global Demand for Borderless Online Degrees. IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-8912-9 Holland, B. (Ed.). (2021). Handbook of Research on Library Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. IGI Global. http:// doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-6449-3 Inyang, O. G. (2022). Mentoring: A Tool for Successful Collaboration for Library and Information Science (LIS) Educators. International Journal of Library and Information Services (IJLIS), 11(1), 1-12. doi:10.4018/IJLIS.20220101.oa1 Keengwe, J. (Ed.). (2019). Handbook of Research on Blended Learning Pedagogies and Professional Development in Higher Education. IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-5557-5 Keengwe, J. (Ed.). (2019). Handbook of Research on Virtual Training and Mentoring of Online Instructors. IGI Global. http:// doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-6322-8 Kyei-Blankson, L., Ntuli, E., & Nur-Awaleh, M. A. (Eds.). (2020). Emerging Techniques and Applications for Blended Learning in K-20 Classrooms. IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-0242-6 Sistek-Chandler, C. M. (Ed.). (2020). Exploring Online Learning Through Synchronous and Asynchronous Instructional Methods. IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-1622-5 Wulff, E. (2021). Features and Limitations of Ontologies for Coronavirus Data Management in Libraries. In Holland, B. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Library Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic (pp. 18-40). IGI Global. http://doi:10.4018/978-17998-6449-3.ch002
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*Contact us today for a title list or a price quotation online@brepols.net www.brepolsonline.net <https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/> 51
The Digital Toolbox: Case Studies, Best Practices and Data for the Academic Librarian — Reflecting on a Year of COVID and the Impact that will Carry Forward Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director and Business Development Executive, OverDrive Professional, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>
M
arking twelve months (and counting!) of navigating 2010s. This data is aggregated exclusively from the OverDrive through the COVID pandemic, we are exploring some network of more than 500 colleges and universities worldwide of the changes wrought by the virus that are here to (most of which are located in North America). stay. As one of the leading providers of eBooks to academic libraries, OverDrive Professional data from 500+ Colleges & Universities OverDrive Professional is particularly interested in the impact on physical spaces and librarians themselves. We’re also analyzing circulation data and trends of digital content usage against pre-COVID numbers. As the acute peaks of COVID restrictions subside and there is a return to “normal,” there will be changes to where the work is expected to be done. How will this affect your library and workforce? According to Cushman & Wakefield’s “Workplace Ecosystems of the Future” report, employees’ expectations for increased remote work in the U.S. has reached 72%. The “new” workplace ecosystem will include office, home and third places. • Full-time work remote will double from 5-6% to 10-12% of the workforce • 50% of the workforce will become agile or flex working across the total workplace ecosystem. • 90% of Gen X, millennials and Gen Z prefer flex workspace.
With these new workforce expectations, academic libraries and institutions of higher education now must prepare for an agile workforce, which means having the ability to work effectively on or off campus as well as creating the type of work environment that your workforce needs to be productive. In addition, they must budget for PPE (personal protective equipment) and additional protocols that were not a previous concern. Students are also affected by these new protocols. Academic institutions are still finding a safe balance between remote and in-person learning. As a result, the impact on libraries is obvious. The ability for students to visit the physical library is often limited. On one hand, this provides challenges for the library, of course, but as work-from-home trends continue across various industries, this new balancing act will prepare students for life after college. Many will graduate into a world where these remote work policies dominate in ways they never have before.
Digital Content Usage Data Shows Increased Remote Learning In addition to COVID’s impact on our physical workspaces and workforce, students’ interest and reliance on digital materials have also been profoundly changed. Just as we saw in OverDrive’s other key markets — public libraries and K-12 schools — usage of eBooks and digital audiobooks in academic libraries grew exponentially in 2020, accelerating a trend that began in the mid-
52 Against the Grain / April 2021
The most interesting stat is the increase in eBook growth compared to audiobook, which is counter to the trajectory preCOVID. For the past decade, audiobooks have consistently seen annual growth from all OverDrive-supplied markets of 25 to 35% growth annually. While OverDrive has consistently seen strong double-digit growth in all formats and markets leading up to COVID, the pandemic has expedited both use and adoption across academia. And the trend continues this year. In 2021, the growth in New and Unique Users from last year is translating to increased use. Checkouts are up 22% YoY and Holds are up 29% YoY through the first week of March 2021. New Users continue to flock to the digital collections as evidenced by an increase of 57% YoY from January 1 through March 4, 2021.
Genre Circ Data Reflects Social Trends Digging deeper into the data, we see more of COVID’s impact on the subject matter of the increased digital checkouts. The chart below shows the top 25 circulating genres (BISACs) across all of OverDrive Professional-served academic libraries. It is truly remarkable to note the meteoric growth of the Social Science/Discrimination genre. Increased social awareness around race and diversity was highly topical across media for the past year; still, “Usage of eBooks this type of YoY growth from an and digital already popular genre is almost a phenomenon. audiobooks Interestingly, fiction usage also increased significantly. In one major trend, institutions in 2020 shifted to offer digital campus reads which typically centered on fictional stories corresponding with timely social issues. Fiction also rose because of COVID. In early 2020, colleges were shutting down their physical libraries and access to fiction collections. OverDrive Professional provided a
in academic libraries grew exponentially in 2020, accelerating a trend that began in the mid-2010s.”
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new way for them to offer a robust and deep fiction collection that was not available through other providers that specialize in databases or academic content. Other outstanding performers that might not be expected from academic collections and collectively circulated in strong numbers: Religion-related titles grew 153% and Comics & Graphic Novels were up 283% in 2020.
OverDrive Professional data from 500+ Colleges & Universities
guide, yet it also showed how nimble libraries can be, rising to meet that challenge. Indeed, one of the positive outcomes of the past year’s changes was being able to meet students’ need for content regardless of location, which increased the value and utility of the academic library. Now, what comes next? The overarching lesson from 2020 is clear. Academic libraries will be expected to apply what was learned to the next inevitable challenge, fully prepared with resources and protocols in place. Of course, libraries also must face any new challenge with a higher degree of difficulty caused by the fact that many of their budgets have been cut significantly. With this in mind, libraries have to get more out of the investments they are making in serving their students, both in person or virtually. Based on the significant events of the past year, it is expected that the shift from print to digital content will continue to ensure students have the same access to the materials they need when they need it. The wondrous thing about digital is that it is not dependent on a crisis to meet student needs or provide the most value. Investing in digital is not like a car-boat that serves a highly niche need, nor Y2k prep or hurricane insurance, only useful in a worse-case scenario. OverDrive was seeing strong double-digit growth in digital content adoption for years before COVID for two compelling reasons: it solves access challenges and is cost-effective. Providing a wide range of digital resources for students is akin to having an energy-efficient home: You reap the rewards on both a day-to-day basis and over the long term.
References Looking Back and Looking Ahead COVID is not the first nor the last seminal event to bring about changes that will be delineated by life pre- and postevent. The Internet, 9/11 and the smartphone also each have that distinction. COVID abruptly forced academic libraries to serve students in a virtual state without warning or a clear
Against the Grain / April 2021
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pmc/articles/PMC7467086/ https://fairf ieldct.org/f ilestorage/10726/11008/18105/ 18264/79599/CW_Part_3_Workplace_Ecosystems.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/ colleges-universities/considerations.html
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ATG Interviews Mitchell Davis Founder and CEO, BiblioLabs By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <katina.strauch@gmail.com> ATG: Mitchell, after selling BookSurge to Amazon in 2005 and then working for them for a couple of years, you re-connected with your original BookSurge partners and founded BiblioLabs. What gave you the inspiration to start this new venture? In short, why BiblioLabs and why then? MD: It was mostly an accident. When I left Amazon, we started a publishing company and we were working with libraries to publish out of copyright editions. We worked with the British Library to put up about 80,000 19th Century books in print and developed a very innovative relationship with them in terms of product development (we won a BL Labs Award for this work in 2016 — see https://biblioboard.tumblr.com/post/152906354171/bibliolabswins-british-library-labs-2016-award). When the iPad came out in 2010-2011 we were smitten and asked the BL if they wanted to collaborate on an iPad app to give access to all those same 19th Century books. The iPad let us do it in a way that showed all the original character of the books: notes, scribbles, coffee stains, etc. that were missed in creating print-on-demand versions. BL curators organized the books into popular topics (castles, golf, sailing, etc.) and off we went. The app was a big hit, launching at the Apple WWD conference and being downloaded over 250,000 times in the first week. From that initial success we have self-funded and creatively stumbled our way through almost 10 years of being an innovative company in an industry where innovation is far from the top of the list in terms of ingredients for success. After some trial and error, we have finally found our place. ATG: In a recent interview you said that our industry’s vendors were (and still are) plagued by last generation mindsets and technology. What did you mean by that? MD: A lot of these companies do not realize that if User Experience fails, everything fails. The campus is an isolated world in many ways, and users are forced to use what is in front of them even if they don’t really like it. Because of this the library UX has slipped far behind the rest of the world and is out of step. Being a great software company is hard and is a great deal about the culture of the people doing the work. The culture of most companies that succeed in this industry is one of consolidation, leverage and pressure; not imagination. Imagination is going to ultimately win, but you have to have the culture to turn that evolving focus on User Experience into business ideas that work for everyone involved. We are a group of people that can do that and we are grateful to have the chance to make it happen. ATG: Do you have any tips for other entrepreneurs who are looking to “creatively stumble” their way to success? What are the keys to fostering innovation in what is often a hidebound industry? MD: It is hard to say exactly. Our entire business runs on AGILE and Kanban, so it is easy to break large tasks down into manageable two week increments and change priorities quickly
54 Against the Grain / April 2021
based on the reality of what we are seeing in front of us. You have to find a balance between keeping gas in the tank and having some vision for where you are headed. We are fortunate that the people at BiblioLabs are extraordinary and really enjoy what they are doing. They are super motivated to help libraries in this massive transition that is coming and we have enough evidence that it works to know we are doing the right work. That is also important. ATG: You also said that libraries “face an existential threat of not being competitive for the digital attention required for new user adoption.” Can you elaborate? What strategies should libraries pursue to gain user/reader attention in an increasingly digital world? MD: YouTube is free and (among other things) is arguably the greatest learning tool the world has ever seen. Amazon gives away millions of books for free with an Amazon Prime membership. Facebook, video games, the list just keeps going. There are only so many hours a day to go around in between working, responsibilities and the business of life. Libraries will always serve unique niches in terms of content delivery but trying to compete on selection is a losing battle. Libraries need to focus on something they can be great at, that large media players cannot commodify. We think they can also be hugely successful as a creative and community hub for locally produced content. ATG: What challenges has the COVID-19 pandemic posed for you and BiblioLabs? What challenges has it posed for your library clients? How are you confronting these challenges? MD: We have been evangelizing a message to libraries to engage their local creative communities (see https://createsharediscover.com/beyond-the-bookshelf/), research communities and writing communities. We have focused on a message that puts the library at the center of those communities as a digital hub for the collection, curation and elevation of the best local content in all media. We have helped libraries collect over 15,000 eBooks (see https://indieauthorproject.com/) and tens of thousands of digital photos, pieces of art, oral histories, music, ephemera and more from their local community. We have pushed forward for almost eight years at a very slow pace. This is a new role for the library, and to think about it at scale is intimidating. When COVID hit and the library buildings closed, they began to struggle with how to remain engaged with their patrons. What we do fits very nicely with the transformation of library spaces to digital studios, writing centers, editing studios (we are the repository for that output). But our community engagement software and programs work just as well virtually. Library activity spiked immediately when the buildings closed. The number of projects being produced by libraries to collect things from their own communities nearly tripled in the last 9 months, with over 40 projects focused on COVID-19 time capsules and Pandemic
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related community art projects (see https://createsharediscover. com/pandemic-projects/). We confronted the challenge by having amazing technology and an amazing team of people that love what they do and had been preparing for just such a challenge. We had the work as a distraction from all the trauma we were experiencing in our own lives. ATG: Serving as “a creative and community hub for locally produced content” strikes us as an exciting opportunity for libraries. It appears that the projects you just mentioned are primarily sponsored by public libraries. Do you see a role for academic libraries, above and beyond serving as a repository? MD: Wake Forest has done an amazing job of this under the Library Partners Press (see https://librarypartnerspress.org/) imprint set up and managed by Bill Kane. Bill has created a special atmosphere around this work and it resonates on his campus. LPP will help anyone on campus produce and publish their own works. This is a great model for any library trying to provide a service to their own local students and faculty to help them publish and distribute any kind of content: academic works, OER materials, a geology professor who wrote a romance novel, a book of photos, student bands uploading tracks to be archived by the library, MFA students building portfolios, a creative writing class doing an anthology. All of this is happening and there is a huge need for the library to offer a local service that meets creators where they are at and makes it easy to get their work archived and distributed. WF mixes the LPP locally produced content with local historical materials and other local content. We are eager to work with more higher ed institutions, but public libraries have felt the competitive pinch of major media
Against the Grain / April 2021
and escalating eBook prices more acutely in recent years, and have been more open to change. BiblioLabs provides turn-key software and support to run such a system and we have the experience and people to support higher ed libraries to make sure it succeeds. ATG: How do you see the post-pandemic future evolving for BiblioLabs? Are there any particular growth opportunities on the horizon? Are there any new products in the offing that our readers should know about? MD: We are going to do more of the same. We have found what we are good at and the timing is good to bring this vision for libraries as the center of the creative communities to the mainstream. We still have a long way to go. ATG: What about potential pitfalls? What concerns you most about the way the library market is changing? MD: Honestly, I got into this knowing almost nothing about the library market and just wanting to solve problems and build great stuff. I still mostly feel like that. ATG: On the personal front, we understand that you and your wife recently escaped city life by moving from Charleston to start a farm. Can you tell us about that? What prompted such a major change? MD: I guess we figured we would go all in on “new normal.” Well, it has been a lifelong dream and we planned to do something there. We bought the farm in August 2019 and it was a jungle. We were chipping away on it on weekends, etc. My wife was running a nonprofit she founded (see https://www.heartsc. org/) and had just hired an amazing replacement in January, continued on page 57
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ATG Interviews David Parker Founder, Parker the Publisher Consulting and Lived Places Publishing By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <katina.strauch@gmail.com> ATG: David, after a number of years in the industry you have recently embarked on a new venture and created your own consulting firm. What inspired you to take on this challenge? Why now? DP: Two drivers fueled my decision: First, I deeply missed publishing, original content creation and the community of authors. Curation and aggregation are skills I developed with Alexander Street and ProQuest, but the “publisher” role haunted me almost daily! Second, the demand for learning content, delivered affordably and via the library, has never been more acute than now and I need many outlets to support innovative efforts to drive learning through the library. ATG: We notice that on your website you reference what seems to be two firms: Parker the Publisher Consulting, LLC and Lived Places Publishing, LLC. It looks like you may be starting your own publishing house as well as a consulting business. Or are we misreading things? DP: Lived Places Publishing is live and seeking collection editors, authors and collaborators: https://livedplacespublishing. com/. This is a collaborative effort with a longtime friend of mine who chose the academic faculty path; I like to believe we complement one another perfectly to bring a new publisher of learning content with a library-first business model. My passion is publishing, and Lived Places will be a laboratory, if you will, to introduce new models in support of open and affordable access to learning content via the library. ATG: Will other people/partners be involved in your new endeavors? If so, who will be joining you? And how many people will be involved? DP: The consulting effort is a constrained, solo effort. My hope and dream is that Lived Places Publishing will grow and provide an opportunity for new voices and new faces to enter the editorial ranks. ATG: Is there a specific part of the publishing market that your consulting firm is focused on? What type publishers would benefit most from your services? DP: My consulting practice is designed to support publishers of learning content on three often interrelated dimensions: 1. Licensing strategy, 2. Publisher-direct access models, and 3. Niche publishing strategy.
Getting these three decisions right across a catalogue of content is critical and I have written on this topic extensively: https:// parkerthepublisher.com/content-licensingstrategy-part-5-timing-of-content-releaseaccess-model-selection-and-partner-selection/. Publisher-direct access models refers to the packaging and pricing decisions a publisher must make in delivering content via its own platform to the library market. And niche publishing strategies refers to content publishing decisions made to address perceived holes or gaps in the content currently available. When we launched Business Expert Press, concise, applied eBooks for executive education and MBA programs were in short supply, in our assessment of the market. ATG: There is a lot of interest in video content and video streaming in the current market. Given your background with Alexander Street Press and ProQuest are you positioning your businesses to take advantage of this trend? DP: Yes. I am a board member with the Video Trust: https:// videotrust.org/ whose mission is to advocate for libraries and film. I am especially concerned with supporting specialty video publishers and distributors. It is a pivotal moment for educational distribution of video. The large consumer-direct streaming services are constraining educational licensing rights around some content. And the shifting landscape in library access models is impacting the allocation of revenue back to filmmakers in a mixed manner. It’s a very good time to think innovatively and experiment with new models that provide equitable return to publishers and distributors at a fair and sustainable price for institutions. ATG: David, what specific services is your new firm providing? There are a lot of consultants in our industry. Is there anything unique about the services that your firm offers and the approach that you take? In short, what separates you from the crowd? DP: Great question! By my count there are more than 100 active consultants in the library industry. I spent 10 years in Cengage Learning and Pearson Education publishing textbooks, educational software, and courseware. I followed this with 10 years developing an eBook publishing company, Business Expert Press: https://www.businessexpertpress.com/ focused on library distribution. And then on to Alexander Street and ProQuest. Three aspects of my experience, when combined in current practice, define my unique value as a consultant:
ATG: David, to help our readers to better understand these three interrelated dimensions, can you give us some specific examples of licensing and niche strategies, as well as what you mean by a publisher-direct access model?
1. I have equal experience in the learning industry and the library industry, 2. I have equal experience as a publisher and aggregator, and 3. I have deep experience with educational multimedia content: eBooks, streaming video, streaming audio, periodicals, archives, and yes, even journals!
DP: Licensing strategy refers to answering three questions: timing of release, access model selection and partner selection.
ATG: According to your website, “spurring publisher innovation in pricing, packaging and distribution strategy” to
I have experience with all media types and an especial strength of experience with eBooks, video and streaming audio.
56 Against the Grain / April 2021
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academic libraries is a focus of your services. How do you define innovation in today’s market? Are there specific strategies that a publisher can employ to encourage innovation in their business? DP: Meaty question! I never let a week pass without, at minimum, three conversations with librarians, faculty, or students. Themes emerge, such as a drive toward institutional access of learning content (versus student paid), open educational resources, the need for more expansive electronic inter-library loan, learning-science powered adaptive products, etc. Innovation in today’s market requires a focus on sustainability and affordability; on bringing together paid and open content on equal terms for patron access; and an understanding that the library will increasingly be central to the acquisition of learning content. Specific strategies to encourage innovation … Hire exceptionally curious and irreverent product managers. Empower them to build a product team to pursue the needs of their customers. Establish success measures to monitor their work every three to six months and then, otherwise, leave them alone. Senior business leaders need to ensure product managers understand the business strategy, hold product managers accountable through measurement of performance and then back-off. ATG: You mention the need to hire “exceptionally curious and irreverent product managers” to encourage innovation. But we were wondering, how do you define an irreverent product manager? How do you know when you’ve found one? DP: I guess it takes one to know one! In all seriousness, the characteristics one must search for in a product manager capable of meaningful innovation are insatiable curiosity, unwavering transparency and a stubborn but patient streak. A product manager imbued blessed/cursed with these traits will run up against roadblocks, especially in larger organizations. The way around the roadblocks is gentle irreverence. A person’s resume and life experience will illuminate these traits; most hiring managers will run from these folks while I run to them. ATG: David, you also point to the need to focus on sustainability. It seems like “sustainability” is the buzz-word these days. What does it mean in this context? And why is it important? DP: In this context sustainability means striking an appropriate balance between the need of content providers to survive, platform and education technology businesses to realize a reasonable profit and libraries, all libraries at all budget levels, to afford the product. In my experience many products are built with little concern about return to the publisher/content provider and at price points accessible to all libraries at all budget levels. ATG: Encouraging content and market growth is also something that you seem to emphasize. Can you tell us more about that? In addition, you stress the need for a content licensing strategy. Why is that so important? Can you give us some specific examples of a content licensing strategy? DP: I have written a six-part series on developing a content licensing strategy: https://parkerthepublisher.com/tag/content-licensing-series/. The critical point to emphasize here is publishers need to align content across its sales lifecycle to appropriate business/access models and not get hung up on a concern that one model will cannibalize sales in another model. A specific example of a content licensing strategy is establishing, through sales and usage tracking, the right time to move titles into broad subscription aggregation. I often hear publishers refer to subscription aggregation as a back-list strategy. Many front-list titles belong, at launch, in subscription aggregation and many back-list titles do not belong in subscription aggregation.
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ATG: You have dealt with licensing and product development in several of your past jobs (Business Expert Press, Alexander Street, ProQuest). How is your approach to providing consulting services in these areas informed by your past career experiences? DP: I like to believe I have refined my methods through these various professional experiences to the point that I can head off failure much, much earlier in the product development process. And working in these different businesses: start-up, small to medium-sized growth firm and an established major library vendor has taught me to recognize when the cultural and managerial context is “right for innovation.” I believe deeply in focusing on customers, building solutions that embrace the direction the library wants to move (e.g., OA, OER, electronic ILL) and doing so sustainably. ATG: Throughout your career you have highlighted the role of the academic library as a partner for publishers and distributors in delivering their content. Ideally, what should that partnership look like from the publisher’s side? And what about from the library side? What should libraries expect from this partnership? DP: I have never launched a new product or a major update to a product without a durable and empowered librarian adviser panel. I have never believed, even for a moment, that the needs of the publisher and the needs of the library cannot be realized in a mutually beneficial manner. As unpopular as this might be to say, too often publishers and librarians are constrained in their thinking by the known or by an impractical ideal. My work life has taught me there is no shortage of money to spread around, even in deeply budget-constrained times. But there is a shortage of creative thinking. Publishers and librarians need to work together, closely, and know that the pie can be divided in infinitely different ways and the pie can often be expanded. ATG: David, if you were to look into your crystal ball, where would you see your new venture in two years? How about in five years? DP: I hope to be a catalyst, through my consulting and through Lived Places Publishing, for a better experience of open and paid content; for new business and access models that support broader institutional usage of learning content; and for publishers, especially university presses, small to medium-sized academic houses and society publishers to deliver new, curriculum-oriented content into library access models.
ATG Interviews Mitchell Davis continued from page 55 who hit the ground running. I had a hard time imagining myself not in Charleston and adjusting, but we were thinking about it. When COVID hit, we left Charleston on March 19th in the same state of shock everyone was in during that two-week period, but with no plans to move. As it became clear that business travel was going to stop (a real gift in many ways) and that I could get a decent Internet connection in the country (I have to drive a half hour to get cell phone access) our minds began to shift. Over the course of about 6 weeks we realized we had moved. We have a working farm with goats, chickens and a chunk of Appalachian Mountains in which to wander and get lost. We are building a weekend micro-festival venue (50-75 people) and are just waiting for the world to turn normal to get started. The kids check us on Instagram here: Rare Bird Farm (see https:// www.instagram.com/rare_bird_farm/?hl=en).
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Tribute To Dan Tonkery By Amira Aaron (Academic Library and Vendor Consultant) <A.Aaron@northeastern.edu> Note from the author: I would like to acknowledge the help of Helen Henderson in freely sharing some details included in her profile interview with Dan in the journal, Serials, 23(1), March 2010. — AA
A
t the end of March, 2021, the scholarly information community lost a true giant, Dan Tonkery, whose profound influence and amazing career will long be remembered and respected. Before attempting to describe the great impact of Dan’s life and work on our industry, I’d like to take the liberty of expressing some personal thoughts. From our first meeting in 1979 at UCLA, Dan Tonkery was my good friend, lifelong mentor, wise teacher, super boss (4 times) and advisor. I am still grappling with his loss, as are hundreds who counted themselves among his colleagues and friends. I have so many wonderful memories of adventures that we shared and accomplishments in which we took pride. He guided my career in exciting ways and introduced me to the wonders of library automation before most knew it existed. And he continued throughout my career to constantly be there with sage advice and caring. I will remember him always and be so grateful that he and his wife Linda were part of my life. Dan Tonkery was born in a coal-mining region in West Virginia and attended the local one-room school. Jobs on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and as a Fuller Brush and encyclopedia salesman introduced him to the twin concepts of automation and selling which would figure so largely throughout his career. After pre-med at David Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, he studied library science with a specialty in biomedical communications at the University of Illinois in Urbana and then joined a post-graduate training program in biomedical communications at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) where he stayed for ten years. Dan began his technical services career at NLM with responsibility for selling the concept of Cataloging in Print (CIP) to over 50 major medical publishers and persuading them to include cataloging data in their books. He then was assigned the task of building an online acquisitions system and that started a long career in automating technical services operations. Following the design and implementation of the acquisitions system, he worked on automating other functions including serials and online cataloging. As well, he managed the CATLINE, SERLINE, and AVLINE services at NLM. During that time, Dan won the highest civilian award at NIH for the design and implementation of automated systems for computer management of technical services functions including improved controls on scientific literature. He was also heavily involved in the founding and building of the National Serials Data and CONSER programs with the Library of Congress. He handled the NLM and CLR side of the project and handled negotiations with OCLC to manage the database. Jean Hirons acknowledges in the Summer 1999 issue of CONSERLine: “… Dan Tonkery was instrumental in the development of CONSER during the mid 1970s.” Dan came to UCLA from NLM in 1979 as Associate University Librarian for Technical Services and Automation. I was fortunate
58 Against the Grain / April 2021
to be a young UCLA librarian watching in awe as he proceeded to lay off the entire moribund Systems Department and then successfully assembled a very small team (including one talented programmer and a couple of us technical services folks) to automate the library. During his tenure at UCLA, he was responsible for the development of Orion, an online integrated library system which included one of the earliest serials control modules designed to handle more than 90,000 journals with full predictive check-in and holdings updates, as well as an online public access catalog with over 1,000 hard-wired terminals. Orion was the largest locally developed system in any library and successfully operated for twenty years until January 2000. Dan also served as Adjunct Professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Library Service, teaching the automation of technical and database management services. Through his demonstrated knowledge and innovative leadership, he had a significant influence on the staff of the UCLA library as well as the library school. It was also during this time that he met his beloved wife, Linda, who was Head of Circulation at the library. They were married in May, 1981 and their son, Andrew, was born in 1982, joining his older brothers John and Steve. Linda stayed at Dan’s side and lovingly supported him in all of his efforts until his recent passing. Following his successful tenure at UCLA in the early 1980s, Dan began two decades of work in senior management positions with Faxon (twice), Readmore and Blackwell, all well-known and respected subscription agents. In each case, he brought his library and management expertise to bear on the customer service, marketing/sales and information technology aspects of the business. Always mindful of the needs of his library clients, he understood the importance of personal service as well as excellent technology to serve them better. Dan worked constantly with publishers as well as libraries to improve service and efficiency in the serials industry and he continued to be a great promoter of standards such as EDI, strongly supporting the work of SISAC, NISO, and other standards organizations. Pausing at one point in his career with subscription ve n d o r s i n t h e mid-1980s, Dan founded Horizon, a software development company and CD-ROM publisher. Horizon produced the very
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first Medline product on CD-ROM and was the first to license the NLM database. At that time, Dan also worked with the Library Corporation and helped them to design and build the Bibliofile system which was the first full MARC file on CD-ROM. The Horizon software was used by other vendors, including Ingram Book, NewsBank and Faxon, to produce their first CD-ROM products. Horizon was later sold to EBSCO and the first product produced was the SERIALS Directory. EBSCO bought Horizon in 1986 and that software was the foundation of EBSCO Publishing. A few notable accomplishments during Dan’s tenures at various information companies in the 1980s and 1990s should be mentioned here. In his role of Senior Vice-President and Managing Director for North America at Faxon in the early 1980’s, he divided the company into several successful markets, expanded the SC-10 serials system, including a very early foray into email, and oversaw the initial design of the Microlinx PC-based serials check-in system. As President and CEO of Readmore, Inc., a small subscription service in New York City, Dan successfully grew the company to become the largest and most advanced technologically medical and corporate library subscription supplier. Readmore developed the first real-time online subscription system, ROSS, as well as a standalone serials check-in and routing system used by over 200 corporate libraries. In addition, Readmore offered two early listservs to the community for exchanging print volumes among libraries, BACKSERV and MEDSERV, and produced one of the first online catalogs, READiCAT. Finally, back at Faxon (then owned by Dawson) for the second time, as President, Dan oversaw the development of several innovative new user-friendly systems including Subscription Depot and License Depot, and once again revitalized the company until it was unfortunately sold to Dick Rowe at RoweCom.
and nurtured many in the technical services, medical library and publishing communities who have gone on to make major contributions of their own. Able to cut through bureaucracy (he would use a stronger word) and shield his staff from organizational obstacles, he set firm directions and made important decisions, enabling those who worked with him to concentrate on being highly innovative and productive. He strongly encouraged risk-taking, allowing his staff to experiment and implement new concepts without fear of failure. All along, Dan was a very active participant in the scholarly information industry throughout his career, giving countless presentations, writing a number of important articles, and serving on a number of editorial boards of key publications such as Serials Review. He also worked with major library organizations, including terms as President and Treasurer of NASIG (many of us will never forget his appearance as NASIG president wearing a wet suit and holding a surfboard!). Dan served for over 10 years as a board member and treasurer of the prestigious Council on Library and Information Resources. As well, he served on the Board of the Friends of the National Library of Medicine and fulfilled many committee assignments for ACRL and ALCTS.
Anticipating the financial demise of Faxon/Rowecom in 2001, Dan moved to a position as Vice President, Director of Business Development at EBSCO Subscription Services. Here he continued to have a positive impact on the serials industry with his work on implementing new technologies and developing tools for electronic resource management for libraries. One of his notable development projects was the A to Z service, including MARC records, which was used by over 1,000 libraries worldwide.
It is impressive that Dan managed to be successful and influential in both the academic and corporate sides of the scholarly information industry. The serials community was particularly fortunate to have had a librarian of Dan’s caliber at the helm of many information companies and automation initiatives. While working in the corporate sector he constantly maintained an active role in professional library associations and served on major committees, was a respected and sought-after speaker, and contributed generously to the professional library literature.
Dan retired from EBSCO in 2009 and began a new phase of his career as a very active and sought-after consultant to the publishing and library industries. His consulting enterprise, Content Strategies, Inc., included among its clients notable publishers such as AMA, NEJM, AIP and major libraries such as the New York Public Library. Perhaps the role that Dan relished the most came at the end of his life as he proudly donned overalls and worked on his own family farm, Tonkfarm, together with his son, Andrew. Lifelong hobbies which Dan enthusiastically enjoyed included real estate, golf, travel and family gatherings.
Dan was a very early proponent and implementer of innovation and change management. In his 1983 article, “The transformation of technical services,” Dan concluded: “Our role in the information transfer process by the year 2000 will depend on our ability to change and grow with the technology. Technical services librarians must be innovative, informed, and ready to accept the new challenges coming their way.” He certainly took these words to heart throughout his career. As a leader, a visionary, a mentor and an active participant, Dan made unparalleled contributions to the library, vendor and publishing industries, earning our ongoing recognition, respect and gratitude for his hard work and lasting impact. He will indeed be missed far into the future, both professionally and personally.
In all of his many endeavors, Dan was a tireless discoverer and nourisher of talent with a finely honed ability to see the spark of creativity and talent in people. He encouraged
Against the Grain / April 2021
Upon his passing, Dan’s wife, Linda, was heartened and honored by the heartfelt sentiments expressed by hundreds of colleagues, competitors and friends from various parts of his life who were fortunate to have known, loved and worked with him. It is impossible to capture them all in print, but we have posted online at https://www.charleston-hub.com (ATG Charleston Hub) many reflections and stories which illustrate the lasting impact of the life of Dan Tonkery.
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ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED
Sandra Bozarth Interim Library Dean CSU Bakersfield 9001 Stockdale Hwy Building 60 Bakersifled, CA 93311 Phone: (661) 654-3235 <sbozarth2@csub.ed> https://library.csub.edu/
Born and lived: California Professional career and activities: MLIS
Amanda Grombly Collection Development and Management Coordinator California State University, Bakersfield 9001 Stockdale Hwy 60 LIB Bakersfield, CA 93311 Phone: (661) 654-3259 <agrombly@csub.edu> https://library.csub.edu/
David Parker Founder-Consultant Parker the Publisher Consulting and Lived Places Publishing 9 Amityville Road Sound Beach, NY 11789 Phone: 201-673-8784 <david@parkerthepublisher.com> www.parkerthepublisher.com
Born and lived: Portland, Oregon … Now in Long Island, NY. Early life: I lived for running! Cross country and track distance events in Oregon in my youth were the equivalent of football in Texas; runners were cool in my high school! Professional career and activities: I am most proud of the several first edition textbooks I published at Pearson that are still alive and being revised as recently as 2020. Launching Business Expert Press in 2008 with a DRM-free library collection was also a highlight. And my time with Alexander Street and ProQuest building out the streaming video business was a big thrill. Family: I am married to Ana Patricia Sandoval and we have two kids. Lucas is 10 and Ella is 18 and heading to one of the fine CUNY institutions this fall.
Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Earning the rank of Full Librarian and finishing my doctoral degree in Educational Leadership.
In my spare time: Running, still running! Hot yoga, writing and blogging and collecting wine.
Favorite books: I have read and reread For Whom the Bell Tolls countless times. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison still haunts me and draws me back. Fire from the Mountain by Omar Cabezas, which is a first hand account of the making of a leftist guerrilla gets my repeated attention. I made a commitment long ago to give away every book I read unless I know I will read it again. I think I have 10 books.
Lars Meyer Associate Dean Emory University Libraries 540 Asbury Circle NE Atlanta, GA 30322 Phone: (404) 727-2437 <lars.meyer@emory.edu>
Professional career and activities: BA Anthropology and German, University of California, Davis; MLIS Library and Information Science, University of Texas, Austin. Prior to Emory University, I worked at Columbia Univeristy Libraries and the University of Texas, Austin.
Jeffrey M. Mortimore Discovery Services Librarian Georgia Southern University Zach S. Henderson Library, PO Box 8074 1400 Southern Drive Statesboro, GA 30458 Phone: (912) 478-0102 <jmortimore@georgiasouthern.edu> https://works.bepress.com/jeff_mortimore/
60 Against the Grain / April 2021
Pet peeves: People who do not really listen. Are you forming your thought to express before I finish my thought? The smartest people I know listen deeply, intently and then come back with a fabulous question or observation. Philosophy: Be present. Most memorable career achievement: Launching Business Expert Press and seeing it through to sustainability. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Lived Places Publishing is a thriving forum for new voices across the world. And Lived Places and my consulting clients are changing the way we represent learning content and products in the library. How/where do I see the industry in five years: I believe we are on the cusp of an incredibly innovative period that will see the expansion of new businesses serving the library at the intersection of paid and open, content for learning and content for research and tools and software that drive down the cost of education and access while improving the efficacy of the learning process and the research process. I hope that the big players in the industry begin to take their role as providers of learning products as seriously as they do in providing products for research.
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COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Parker the Publisher Consulting and Lived Places Publishing 9 Amityville Road Sound Beach, NY 11789 Phone: (201) 673-8784 www.parkerthepublisher.com Key products and services: Consulting services for publishers and distirbutors of learning content. Core markets/clientele: Academic and learning content publishers and specialty distributors of multimedia content, especially ebooks and streaming video. Number of employees: 1 History and brief description of your company/publishing program: Just Launched January 29th! VIVA George Mason University 4400 University Dr., MSN 2FL Fairfax, VA 22030 Phone: (703) 993-4652 Fax: (703) 993-4662 https://vivalib.org/ Background/history: VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium, was established in 1994 to create a stronger resource sharing infrastructure in Virginia. Soon after its formation, VIVA began to license and acquire electronic resources and build a shared collection throughout the state. In addition to building and sharing collections, VIVA implements and supports collaborative statewide initiatives on behalf of its members. Key Products and Services: VIVA acquires electronic resources and maintains a core collection that is shared by all 39 of our public institutions. We also have a strong resource sharing program and a relatively new open and affordable course content program. VIVA provides project management support for statewide initiatives across Virginia that are focused on the library needs of the state and educational and training opportunities for our members. Core Markets/Clientele: The 71 nonprofit academic libraries of Virginia, public and private. Number of staff and responsibilities: VIVA has five full time staff members, including a Director, Deputy Director, Budget and Operations Manager, Open and Sustainable Learning Coordinator, and Assessment and E-Resources Program Analyst, as well as one part time person who does usage statistics and technical support, within our central office at George Mason University. We also have a Procurement Officer and Contract Administrator at James Madison University, which serves as VIVA’s fiscal agent. Overall Consortium budget: $20 million, including member cost shares. Types of materials you buy (eBooks, textbooks, DVDs, video streaming services, databases, other): Databases, ebooks, ejournals, streaming media, and occasional print books distributed to member libraries. What technologies does your Consortium use to serve mobile users? This is not a central service for VIVA. Does your Consortium have an ILS or are you part of a collaborative ILS? We do not maintain a shared ILS.
Against the Grain / April 2021
Do you have a discovery system? We maintain a central instance of WorldCat Discovery and have access to a central instance of EBSCO Discovery Service, but those are primarily for internal use. Does your Consortium have a collection development or similar department? We have a Collections Committee made up of representatives from our institutions that recommends new products, renewals, and cancellations to our Steering Committee. If so, what is your budget and what types of materials are you purchasing? Print or electronic or both? We generally only purchase electronic resources, and it is the majority of our operating budget. We have had occasional projects, such as a print OER initiative, where we distributed print books to our members to become part of their local holdings. What proportion of your materials are leased and not owned? We support a number of acquisition models, including subscription, evidence-based, and perpetual access. What do you think your Consortium will be like in five years? Affordability in higher education is important to our state and member institutions, so we anticipate significant growth in support of the adoption, adaptation, and creation of Open Educational Resources. Collaborative collection development and resource sharing will continue to be critical for our members, and they may even lean on the consortial resources more as local resources diminish. Ensuring that consortial licensing and acquisition approaches support the movement towards a more sustainable, equitable, and open scholarly ecosystem is a priority for our members, and we anticipate the development of new models in this arena. We expect that shared initiatives across the state will increase, from rethinking resource sharing services to increased collaboration among our institutions to create a true shared, inclusive, and diverse collective collection of both their print and electronic resources. What excites or frightens you about the next five years? Some of our members are struggling financially, and in a number of cases, the library director positions are not being filled. This will come at a great cost not only for our individual member libraries but the collective community of VIVA. There is also great pressure on libraries and publishers to find solutions that work for everyone. At the same time that we face these pressures, there is an exciting rethinking of traditional collective collection development models that have the potential to transform library collections, making them both more open and inclusive. We hope that we can continue to develop truly sustainable and flexible solutions that maintain broad access to content for our users, increase the diversity of our collections, and open up critical research broadly — this will take creative thinking and bold, collaborative actions. Is there anything else you think our readers should know? We are grateful every day to work with such engaged and thoughtful people at every level of our member libraries.
Back Talk continued from page 62 Mike Morris to an actual restaurant, on our own, the Italian Kitchen (still there in El Paso) to have a 70c plate of spaghetti and meatballs. We were edgy and diffident and excited to be there making as if we were grownups — everybody has that experience. But in that Quonset hut, I’d really been a grownup all along. Everybody in a library is a grownup.
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Back Talk — My First Library Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>
H
A couple of years on, my reading had ave you ever been in a Quonset developed and my parents signaled to the hut? Developed by the army in “Special Services girls” in blue uniforms World War II, they were prefab at the desk that it was ok if I checked out structures in the shape of a half-cylinder books from the adult section. (“Special of corrugated steel, set on a concrete slab Services” was the military branch that did or a wood floor, with doors at the end and recreation and morale and was the orgaperhaps a window somewhere. My first nization not just for librarians but for Carl library was a Quonset hut on an army Reiner, Clint Eastwood, and Pete Seeger, post in the Tularosa Basin of New Mexico, drafted as entertainers.) So I went to work a spreading valley between two mountain A Real Quonset Hut. reading my way through the library. ranges where God had forgotten to put a river. We were off to the right and a ways past the middle of Although I was focused on baseball and outer space, and I nowhere, on a dirt road to Trinity Site, where the first atomic surely didn’t read the Rockwell Kent illustrated Moby-Dick that I found there. I know I was reading the Classics Illustrated version bomb had been tested. Our dads were doing things no human of the story already. I spent a month in a hammock when I was beings in all recorded history had ever done before, but we kids 16 with the real thing and have gone back any number of times just took it for granted. since. In short, the library was a treasure house of immediate We moved there when I was three, and I suppose I benefitted realities and future possibilities. from some children’s books my folks would find on their trips I also learned there, slowly and stupidly, some of the facts of to the library and they probably took me along, but the decisive librarianship. For several years I’d wanted to read 1952’s Mickey moment came the morning at about age five when I looked up Mantle Story and so made a beeline for the small biography secbrightly at the breakfast table and said, “What does ‘homogtion every time we got to the library — and it was never there. enized’ mean?” Startled, my parents correctly inferred that I Lost? Misshelved? No such thing occurred to me, so I kept had figured out how to read and was working my way through looking every week, certain it would appear, too sure of myself the prose of the milk carton. From that point forward I went to ask a librarian for help. (I was rewarded some years later along as a patron of the library in my own right. (My folks were when I found a copy of the book on the 25c table at the Friends immigrants’ kids who grew up poor, were of the Library book sale in Ithaca, NY, and on purchasing opened denied much education, but had made it to find written on the flyleaf: “For Pete: Mickey Mantle” in themselves lifelong ardent readers. I a distinctive hand. I still have the book and still think about still have my dad’s Gibbon and Toynbee.) changing my name to Pete.) That Quonset hut couldn’t have held And various enthusiasms set me on fire there. When Mrs. more than five or ten thousand volumes: Michaels in the fifth grade read us a chapter of a Heinlein novel one range of shelves for children’s one day, I made another beeline and checked out Double Star books, several for fiction, the rest for and Between Planets and read them through that night. I went Dewey Decimal, and in the back was a through a lot of Heinlein after that. seating area with magazine racks. It was .Jim at age seven in always thronged, and not just because So what did I learn in that hut and the rather more approthe school library. some of our GIs were Ph.D. draftee rockpriate larger building that eventually succeeded it? And in the et scientists, because even the hard-drinking young men of the Northgate branch of the El Paso Public Library when we moved base had very few sources of diversion — and the library was a into town a few years later? pretty good one of them. I realize now it doesn’t matter so much what I read, and certainly some of my passions were pointless even then. What mattered was being in a place that rewarded curiosity and that led curiosity on from one book to another, always leaving more ADVERTISER’S INDEX possibilities. We had what seemed plenty of books at home — 33 Emery-Pratt 2 ACS Publications maybe a couple of hundred — but to be in a space where there 63 American College of Physicians 3 GOBI Library Solutions from were already far too many books for me to read in one lifetime EBSCO 23 ASME — that was an empowering revelation. 27 INFORMS 13 ACM And more than that, the Library was a place where I could be 15 ISSN International 11 Baker & Taylor myself. My folks turned me loose at age five in what I think was 64 Midwest Library Service 51 Brepols Publishers the first place where I was ever entirely in control of what I was 19 The MIT Press 55 The Charleston Advisor doing — where I sat, what I browsed, what I read, what I went to 7 OSA – The Optical Society 16 The Charleston Report check out, even soon enough how long I stayed. Within a few 9 Cold Spring Harbor Lab Press 5 Project MUSE years the bicycle, and eventually the car, solidified it as that kind FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION CONTACT of place — where I wasn’t somebody’s kid or somebody’s student or somebody to be embarrassed when my athletic abilities were Toni Nix, Advertising Manger, Against the Grain, Charleston Hub proven nonexistent. It was a place where I was figuring out how <justwrite@lowcountry.com> to be me. When I started to drive, I once went with my friend Phone: 843-835-8604 • Fax: 843-835-5892 continued on page 61
62 Against the Grain / April 2021
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