V33#6 December, 2021/January, 2022 Full Issue by against-the-grain

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

VOLUME 33, NUMBER 6

DECEMBER 2021 - JANUARY 2022 TM

“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”

ISSN: 1043-2094

The Past, Present and Future of Web Preservation By Joe Puccio (Collection Development Officer, Library of Congress) <jpuc@loc.gov>

that article by noting that no single institution can meet this need but that “an energized consortium of libraries that collect for the long-term can come together and get it done.” My goal was to generate discussion around this topic, which would — I hoped — lead to action. So, when Katina Strauch and Tom Gilson offered me the opportunity to guest edit an issue of Against the Grain about

ver the past few years, I have become increasingly concerned that libraries and other collecting entities are not doing enough to preserve the web of today for future generations of researchers, historians and other scholars. It was that concern that led to my piece, “Web Archiving: The Dream and the Reality,” which appeared in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Against the Grain. I closed

The Internet Archive (IA) has historically done more than any other organization to capture and preserve portions of the web, in addition to providing the continued on page 8

If Rumors Were Horses appy New Year! We hope everyone was able to celebrate with family and friends for the holidays and we all look forward to a day when the pandemic is merely a thing of the past. As announced in November, this will be the very last print issue of ATG. But don’t worry, we are not going away. We will continue to publish, post, and distribute ATG as an eJournal with the same great content that librarians, vendors, and publishers have come to depend on — more topics, increased interviews, additional guest editors, and new opportunities for advertisers. We’d love to hear from you regarding any issues you would like to see covered in ATG, people you would like to see interviewed, anything at all, really. Send your comments to <editors@ against-the-grain.com>. We’re listening!

web archiving, I leapt at the chance. Luckily, several experts agreed to participate and contribute the articles in this issue. The topics line-up nicely into the categories of where we, primarily meaning the library community, have been with web archiving, where we are now and how we should move forward. Arguably, the last subject is the most difficult. Yet, all the contributors in this issue of Against the Grain concur that collaborative action is the path to follow.

What To Look For In This Issue:

2021 Charleston Conference Wrap-Up Another year of the Charleston Conference is behind us, but this year’s hybrid event was the first of its kind for us. Thank you to all the presenters, exhibitors, sponsors, and most of all, the attendees! We were thrilled to see those of you who joined us for the week of November 1-5, whether in person or virtually. We were joined by around 3,000 attendees from 32 countries across 5 continents, including 107 exhibitors and 821 first time attendees. Attendance was roughly 17% in person and 83% virtual. Attendee types were 60% librarians, 17% vendors, 13% publishers, 8% others, 1% consultants, and 1% students. continued on page 8

Comparing Apples to Cumquats: The Past and Future of Library Analytics................................... 40 TOC for ATG Online Articles..... 49 Charleston Conference Recap: A Year of Progress........................ 50 Extracurricular Content in Academic Libraries: Trends, Challenges & Collaboration...... 54

Interviews Joyce Ray................................... 56

Profiles Encouraged People, Library and Company Profiles...................................... 59 Plus more...................... See inside

1043-2094(202112/202201)33:6;1-0

Understand how digital books can drive interdisciplinary research and innovation

Sponsored by

Learn more at books.acspubs.org/ whitepaper

NEW! Project MUSE Books Custom Collections offer libraries ultimate flexibility. Choose from over 70,000 DRM-free titles from more than 200 distinguished university presses and related not-for-profit publishers, to curate a selection that meets your needs and your budget. Contact us at muse_sales@jhu.edu to start designing your custom collection.

Now and Always, the Trusted Content Your Research Requires muse.jhu.edu Built on the Johns Hopkins University campus

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 (Charleston Hub)

Research Editors:

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.................................. 49

FEATURES The Past, Present and Future of Web Preservation............................................ 1

Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)

Building Web Collections: Cooperation Past and Future................................. 11

Assistants to the Editor:

Transnational Collaborative Web Archiving: The International Internet Preservation Consortium................................................................................. 14

International Editor:

A Look Back at the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Resources Collection Program.......................................................................................... 17

Ileana Jacks Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)

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 (Georgia Southern University Libraries) 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)

ATG Proofreader:

Caroline Goldsmith (Charleston Hub)

Graphics:

Bowles & Carver, Old English Cuts & Illustrations. Grafton, More Silhouettes. Ehmcke, Graphic Trade Symbols By German Designers.Grafton,Ready-to-Use Old-Fashioned Illustrations. The Chap Book Style.

Production & Ad Sales:

Toni Nix, Just Right Group, LLC., P.O. Box 412, Cottageville, SC 29435, phone: 843-835-8604 fax: 843-835-5892 <justwrite@lowcountry.com>

Advertising information:

Toni Nix, phone: 843-835-8604, fax: 843-835-5892 <justwrite@lowcountry.com>

Publisher:

A. Bruce Strauch

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

v.33 #6 December 2021 - January 2022 © Katina Strauch

Collecting from the Web: Collection Development Policy in the Born-Digital Universe........................................................................................................... 20 The Dangerous Complacency of “Web Archiving” Rhetoric............................. 22 Back Talk — Rip Van Winkle Returns to Charleston!........................................ 62

REVIEWS Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews.................... 24 Booklover — Timely......................................................................................... 30

LEGAL ISSUES Legally Speaking — Music Modernization Act Follow-Up................................ 32 Questions and Answers — Copyright Column.................................................. 34

PUBLISHING Bet You Missed It............................................................................................. 10 Don’s Conference Notes................................................................................... 36

TECHNOLOGY & STANDARDS AND TEACHING & LEARNING Learning Belongs in the Library — Exploring the Role of the Library in Curriculum Design and Course Technology Support Centered on Affordability, Engagement, and OER................................................................ 38 Library Analytics: Shaping the Future — Comparing Apples to Cumquats: The Past and Future of Library Analytics......................................................... 40 Let’s Get Technical — Subject Heading Prediction........................................... 43

BOOKSELLING AND VENDING Biz of Digital — Library Equipment Lifecycle Planning & The Triple Bottom Line: Initial Steps Towards More Sustainable IT Management at an Academic Library.................................................................................... 46 Optimizing Library Services — Charleston Conference Recap: A Year of Progress........................................................................................................... 50 The Digital Toolbox — Extracurricular Content in Academic Libraries: Trends, Challenges & Collaboration................................................................ 54

ATG INTERVIEWS & PROFILES Joyce Ray – Senior Lecturer and Program Coordinator, Digital Curation Certificate Program in Museum and Heritage Studies at Johns Hopkins University......................................................................................................... 56 Profiles Encouraged......................................................................................... 59

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

A New Type of Transformative Agreement for Research Publishing in Biology “A sustainable path to open publication of biomedical research is a long-sought objective among the many science communication initiatives at Cold Spring Harbor. Our transformational offerings provide a model for any research-intensive institution whose scientists wish to make their articles openly available in these long-established, prestigious, not-for-profit journals.” — Dr. John Inglis, Publisher of CSHL Press, co-founder of bioR χiv and medR χiv

Turn your subscription license into an OA publishing license — Immediate benefits for your authors and no extra cost for most institutions Subscribers to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (CSHLP) journals who renew for 2022 now have the option to adopt a Transformative License Agreement. This allows corresponding authors from your institution to publish unlimited OA articles (once accepted for publication), while giving your users access to the complete collection of CSHLP journals. Transformative license agreements offer a fully OA publishing option for your researchers whose papers are accepted at Genes & Development, Genome Research, Learning & Memory, RNA, Molecular Case Studies, and Life Science Alliance Benefits include: • Unlimited open access publication in CSHLP research journals • Access to the complete collection of CSHLP journals • No additional cost for most current subscribers (some minimums apply) • Life Science Alliance: manuscript transfer option for authors submitting to CSHLP research journals ( JCR Impact Factor = 4.592) • bioRχiv at your institution: ° receive a branded channel on bioRχiv for preprints posted by authors at your institution (includes medRχiv postings) authors can save time when posting to bioRχiv by also transmitting a paper to any of more ° than 180 journals from 50+ publishers Present your institution as an “end to end” open access advocate for the biological sciences.

For complete details, including specifics for your institution, visit https://bit.ly/cshlpressopenw

From Your (bittersweet) Editor: ATG and I have had a long history. I remember starting with the help of Steve Johnson who had a beer newsletter and did a beer tasting at early Charleston Conferences. That was in 1989, the same year that Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston. My family and I (my husband Bruce and son Raymond — my daughter Illeana wasn’t born yet — and our Jack Russell Terrier Cleo) piled into our dilapidated Volvo with two computers, numerous hard drives, a bunch of typed on paper articles, and hundreds of floppy discs and headed for a hotel that would allow us to have a dog. With the help of many sponsors (Ambassador Books and Ballen Booksellers especially) and others we were able to produce our very first issue (four pages). ATG grew with much help from people like you. That was over 35 years ago, give or take. And now, here we are, getting ready for our first digital-only issue, no print. It is both sad and exciting!

This, our last print issue, is guest edited by the awesome Joe Puccio of the Library of Congress and is on the past, present, and future of web preservation. There are five articles from such noteworthy authors as Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Abigail Grotke (Library of Congress), Olga Holownia (International Internet Preservation Consortium), Samantha Abrams (Center for Research Libraries), Jean Park (Macaulay Honors College), Carol Mandel (Council on Library and Information Resources), and Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information). We also have a terrific interview with Joyce Ray — Senior Lecturer and Program Coordinator, Digital Curation Certificate Program in Museum and Heritage Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Whew! Happy New Year, and see you in our next (digital-only!!!) issue! Love, Yr. Ed.

Letters to the Editor Send letters to <kstrauch@comcast.net>, phone 843-509-2848, or snail mail: Against the Grain, Post Office Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. You can also send a letter to the editor from the Charleston Hub at http://www.charleston-hub.com/contact-us/. Dear Editor, Hello! Regarding your email from December 17, 2021 “The Charleston Hub and Against the Grain are seeking a group of 10-12 regular blog post contributors to be published on the Charleston Hub website,” I am interested in becoming a regular or guest contributor. What information do you need from me to be considered? Thanks in advance for the opportunity! Angie Strait, MLIS (Collection & Resource Management Librarian, Assistant Professor, Libraries & Online Learning Budget Manager, Marshall University) <strait@marshall.edu> Dear Angie, It’s good to hear from you. Thanks so much for your interest! What topics or areas would you be interested in writing about? On another note, thanks for all of your help as a facilitator for the 2021 Conference! Best, Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Library Conference) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com>

AGAINST THE GRAIN ADVERTISING DEADLINES VOLUME 34 — 2022-2023

Issue Ad Reservation Camera-Ready February 2022 01/04/22 01/18/22 April 2022 02/17/22 03/10/22 June 2022 04/07/22 04/21/22 September 2022 06/09/22 07/14/22 November 2022 08/11/22 09/01/22 Dec. 2022-Jan. 2023 11/03/22 11/21/22

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT Toni Nix <justwrite@lowcountry.com> Phone: 843-835-8604 • Fax: 843-835-5892 6

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

Dear Leah, Anything to do with Collection Management, Acquisitions, Budgeting hardships, transitional changes in the department, how we have survived thus far, etc. Give me a topic! All the push for OERs, DEI challenges and changes, meeting the needs of todays faculty and students on a shoestring… Our university is getting a new president, provost, athletic director, and maybe more. With all of these changes, I’m fairly sure there will be lots more upper management changes. I see LOADS of changes ahead, and how we meet these challenges with gusto will, I believe, be very interesting, and hopefully thought provoking when shared and discussed. If there is a particular topic that you are interested in showcasing or discussing in the blog, I am more than happy to research and write according to those needs. I can write from a professional perspective or a personal perspective. Whichever you prefer, or as the occasion deems necessary. Side note: I absolutely LOVE being a session facilitator. It’s so much fun!! Have a wonderful holiday!! Angie Dear Angie, All of these ideas sound great, especially the topics surrounding change management with all that’s going on at your campus! Whew! We’ll be beginning with our first post in mid-January, and will schedule new posts weekly on a rolling basis as they come in. Please send your first blog post when it’s ready for review! We look forward to working with you. Happy holidays to you and yours! Leah

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

We Are Now

OSA has a new name: Optica, the Society advancing optics and photonics worldwide. Optica Publishing Group, a division of Optica, publishes the most-cited and largest peer-reviewed collection of optics and photonics content.

opg.optica.org

Ta kelook a closer at.... The CHARLESTON REPORT Business Insights into the Library Market

You Need The Charleston Report... if you are a publisher, vendor, product developer, merchandiser, consultant or wholesaler who is interested in improving and/or expanding your position in the U.S. library market.

Subscribe today at our discounted rate of only $75.00 The Charleston Company 6180 East Warren Avenue Denver, CO 80222 Phone: 303-282-9706 Fax: 303-282-9743

Rumors continued from page 1 Recordings of our keynotes and plenary sessions are available either on the agenda at https://2021charlestonconference. pathable.co/agenda for registered conference attendees, along with the archived attendee chats and any accompanying files and polls, or openly available as videos on our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/CharlestonConference. Other conference content will be posted on YouTube over the coming months, so subscribe for notifications to stay in the loop. Our Conference Blogger, Don Hawkins, has written reports on all the happenings from Charleston again this year in his blog Charleston Conference Notes at https://www.charlestonhub.com/category/blogs/chsconfnotes/. Against the Grain’s “And They Were There” reports, organized by Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Library), will be published in the eJournal beginning with the February 2022 issue so keep an eye out for those coming soon!

Congrats to These Award Winners! The Vicky Speck ABC Clio Leadership Award is given every year to a leader in the Charleston Conference who has made a lasting contribution to the Conference’s mission. The award has been granted annually since 2006. The 2021 award went to Matthew Ismail, one of our Conference Directors whose energetic work and innovative additions to the conference have been continued on page 42

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

The Past, Present and Future of Web ... continued from page 1 tools to allow others to do their part. In “Building Web Collections: Cooperation Past and Future,” Brewster Kahle (Digital Librarian and Founder, IA) provides some IA history with a focus on its collaborative work. The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) was formed in 2003 and now includes members from 35 countries. Abigail Grotke (2021 chair of the IIPC and head of the Web Archiving Team at the Library of Congress) and Olga Holownia (Senior Program Officer for the IIPC) have co-authored, “Transnational Collaborative Web Archiving: The International Internet Preservation Consortium.” It tells the organization’s story and highlights its work in tools development, cooperative collecting, training and other initiatives. The article, “A Look Back at the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Resources Collection Program,” describes an effort initiated in 2017 by the Confederation. It is written by Samantha Abrams (Head of Collections, Center for Research Libraries and formerly the Confederation’s Web Resources Collection Librarian) and Jean Park (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Macaulay Honors College and formerly the Bibliographic Assistant for Confederation). For the topic of where the community should be headed regarding web archiving, Carol Mandel (Dean Emerita, New York University Libraries and currently a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at the Council on Library and Information Resources) and Clifford Lynch (Executive Director at the Coalition for Networked Information) collaborated to write a pair of articles that complement each other, both arguing that “web archiving” is increasingly the wrong way to think about the challenge of harvesting from and documenting the wealth of today’s web content. Mandel’s article is, “Collecting from the Web: Collection Development Policy in the Born-Digital Universe.” It notes the opportunities and complexity of web content collecting and asks one to consider whether the concept of “archiving the web” instills a daunting connotation that discourages libraries of different types and sizes from building selective collections that serve their constituencies. “The Dangerous Complacency of ‘Web Archiving’ Rhetoric,” is Lynch’s contribution. He focuses on the technical and philosophical challenges of capturing and preserving various kinds of digital content that are part of today’s web. The range of content and services that are now accessible via the web go far beyond websites of the 1990s, and Lynch argues that we need a more complex and nuanced understanding of what “archiving” means in this evolving context. These articles provide a foundation for us to jump-start a wide discussion about where we need to head. That conversation should include cultural heritage partners of all types who have yet to make a significant impact in this area. Libraries and allied professions have a long history of collaboration to solve difficult problems in the interest of preserving information and providing enduring access to it. The time is upon us to come together again so that future generations will have access to the valuable born-digital content connected by the web of today.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

One Ivy's "essential homework for getting the most out of COP26" ...but 11 out of 12 reports are published as grey literature

It's striking, isn't it? Ahead of COP26, many leading research institutions—like IEA, Chatham House, Yale, and others—published essential reports on their websites as grey literature.

Until now. Today, Policy Commons brings this critical content into one place—together with state-of-the-art tools, so it's easy to find, simple to cite, and preserved for the long run.

And they're not alone. Every year, policy organizations around the world post tens of thousands of reports, working papers, briefs, and datasets—a vital and growing body of knowledge dispersed across the internet.

Through Policy Commons, grey literature from trusted organizations can now take its rightful place in the scholarly record.

Grey literature is excluded from the scholarly record. It's hard to find, difficult to cite, and at risk of disappearing when links break.

Request a demo: information@coherentdigital.net Source: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/10/12-timely-reports-as-start-of-cop26-nears/

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>

Coffee Table Books … or Not?

Obits of Note

Some claim coffee table books are still relevant, mostly designers and those who sell them. They argue the books are a legitimate way to project the owner’s intellectual passions.

Gary Paulsen (1939-2021) YA reader’s Hemingway won Newberry honors with Dogsong (1985) and Hatchet (1987), tales of an Inuit in the tundra with a dogsled and a plane crash survivor in the Canadian wilderness.

The contrarians says they’re just something to collect dust and other objects including spilled food. While they ought to be regarded as significant repositories of knowledge, mostly they’re used by Instagram influencers as background props. See: Ruby King, “Are Coffee Table Books Still a Relevant Way to Decorate Your Home?” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9-10, 2021, p.D8.

The Zen of Encyclopedia Management Jimmy Wales went to a one-room schoolhouse outside Huntsville, AL. No, he’s not that old. Wales was a co-founder of Wikipedia. His mother ran House of Learning which was an experimental school with four kids in each grade. They all mingled and taught each other. Back before that, at age 3, his mom bought a children’s World Book Encyclopedia from a traveling salesman. He began reading early and a lifelong habit of dabbling in whatever interested him at the moment. Later, it was college, a Ph.D., and futures trading in Chicago. He envisioned Wikipedia as something where he could dabble forever. His childhood encyclopedia set has disappeared. Mom says they sold it; Dad says it’s in a shed. Of course his kids use iPads. See: “House Calls: Educated in a One-Room Schoolhouse,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 8, 2021, p.M8.

Newspaper = Value of Real Estate If America’s press didn’t have enough survival problems, it is being aggressively bought by vulture capital firms mostly based on the sale value of the real estate. The mighty Chicago Tribune Building is sold and the paper now produced on an industrial estate in a space the size of a Chipotle.

A child of violent alcoholics, he would escape into the woods of northern Minnesota. One day, he went into a library to get warm and was given a library card, a notebook and pencil by a librarian. Was told to read everything and write down your thoughts. It was a life-saver. He served in the army, wrote Westerns, lived off the grid, competed three times in the Iditarod. He considered humanity a mess and young adults the only hope. “Name the book that made the biggest impression on you. I bet you read it before you hit puberty.” See: “The young-adult author who told wild tales of survival,” The Week, Oct. 21, 2021, p.35. Robert Bly (1926-2021) went to Harvard determined to devote his life to poetry. He founded an avante-garde literary magazine The Fifties and got a reputation as a poet with fiery anti-war poems in The Light Around the Body (1967). But it was Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) that became a best-seller and made him a cultural phenomenon. He felt men had lost initiation and guidance into manhood because of absent fathers. He drew on Jungian philosophy, myths and religions. This led to weekend retreats where — yes, there was beating on drums. See: “The anti-war poet who launched a men’s movement,” The Week, Dec. 10, 2021, p.39.

The buyers gut the staff, raise subscription prices and run the remnant until it dies.

Editor of Professional Tastes

What I think the article is missing is the Boomers are the last to read print. The natural life of most newspapers is the length of Boomer longevity.

At the age of 4, Robert Gottlieb became an obsessed, crazed reader. His parents made him stand outside their building for an hour each day so he would do something else.

See: McKay Coppins, “The Men Who Are Killing America’s Newspapers,” The Atlantic, Nov. 2021, p.33.

Gottlieb became the legendary editor of Simon and Schuster and then Alfred A. Knopf. In his mid-20s he labored with Joseph Heller over Catch-22 and published The Chosen after persuading Chaim Potok to cut 300 pages. He convinced Toni Morrison to quit her day job. John Le Carré and Michael Crichton all sang his praises.

The Cocktail Geek You’re a Yalie with graduation looming and suddenly are stricken with the terror you don’t know how to drink like an adult. A decade ago, the Elis turned to classmate Brian Hoefling to host a seminar which then led to The Cocktail Seminars (Abbeville, 376 pages, $24.95). Boola-boola. See: Eric Felten, “Here’s to Growing Up,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18-19, 2021, p.C12.

10 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

He reads submissions and answers the author right away, saying it’s “cruelty to animals to keep them waiting.” See: Emily Bobrow, “Robert Gottlieb: A ‘crazed reader’ who became a legendary editor,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4-5, 2021, p.C6.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Meet students’ needs with crucial digital resources

Newly Added Books

Cultivate learning and curiosity with a curated collection from OverDrive Professional: • Millions of ebooks and audiobooks – pleasure reading &

curriculum support

• Libby, the most-awarded library reading app • A variety of access models to best fit your needs and budget • NEW! Databases & Streaming Media services —

Engaging resources to educate and entertain

Make your library the hub for entertainment, deeper curriculum exploration, career planning and student well-being with OverDrive Professional.

Visit company.overdrive.com/academic-libraries to learn more.

Building Web Collections: Cooperation Past and Future By Brewster Kahle (Digital Librarian and Founder, Internet Archive) <brewster@archive.org>

lthough the Internet Archive often receives outsized credit for creating the Wayback Machine and first crawling the web in 1996, the truth is that web archiving has always been a collaborative effort. To build web collections with focus and integrity takes scholars with true domain knowledge. The ever-changing nature of the web demands rapidly evolving tools. Misinformation, now rampant, requires new policies and practices. No one organization can fulfill all these roles. What I’ve learned over the last 25 years is that only by collaborating with hundreds of libraries and organizations, employing thousands of domain experts and archivists, and coordinating with a global consortia of tool builders have we been able to build thousands of web collections and the Wayback Machine, a web archive that has proven useful to researchers, journalists and millions of people. But what about the future? I believe there are lessons from the last 25 years--examples of library-to-library cooperation--that may prove useful when facing the challenges ahead.

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

Lessons From the Last 25 years of Web Archiving

When the Internet Archive website launched in May 1996, the 1996 Presidential Election Web Archive, created in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, was highlighted on the home page.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

One of the first insights into web collecting came by working with David Allison, Senior Scholar at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, who wondered if the presidential campaign websites of 1996 might be the equivalent of the first bumper stickers. Back then, the newly formed Internet Archive worked with the Smithsonian to build a collection of candidate websites that they then featured in their presidential election memorabilia room. Allison’s curatorial experience and focus leveraged a set of new tools to build an evolving understanding of what constitutes Americana.

The number of organizations that could leverage our web archiving tools expanded greatly in 2005 when we launched Archive-It, our web archiving service. Four years later, the Library of Congress saw the need to archive the presidential websites1 of the 2000 election and worked with the Internet Archive to develop and preserve a list of important websites. This “cybertransition” was announced in the Washington Post2 as a positive step forward. These early steps in building collections brought together the web crawling technologies pioneered by the search engines, archival expertise, and librarianship. When the Wayback Machine launched in October of 2001 at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, it created a uniform user interface for patrons to access 10 billion web pages and 100 terabytes of data. What people didn’t see was that underneath that unifying portal were web collections often built by many specialists in different fields. From the beginning, the programs doing the crawling reflected organizational decisions about what to capture and how deep to go. Alexa Internet, a company that I started, did mass crawling of the web in 1996, donating its ongoing crawls to the then-new non-profit library, the Internet Archive. Inktomi also donated an early crawl, and later the company Cuil did as well. Each of these groups had its own goals and users in mind when it set the parameters for its crawls. I share these early examples to highlight the duality in our work: the collaborative nature of archiving the web, on the one hand, and the individual nature of collection criteria used to select the data now housed on the Internet Archive’s servers. Although the Wayback Machine contains data from thousands of individual crawls, they come together seamlessly thanks to the hypertext structure of the web. But it is not just the machines. Having librarians and researchers building collections means that the web pages they preserve are useful, targeted, and hopefully comprehensive.

12 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

In the first year, dozens of partner libraries created their own searchable collections and repositories with their own foci. Meanwhile, some of these same partners helped the ecosystem evolve through joint work with the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC)3 on tools and an open source version to create browsable web archives. We learned there is no singular “web collection,” but rather there are many web collections. In fact, as the web came to be important in every field, web archiving became almost synonymous with archiving. Through these experiences, we learned we build better digital collections by working together instead of separately. We have also developed programs to bring web archiving to smaller libraries and local history organizations just getting started with born-digital collecting. Our Community Webs4 program has helped more than 150 organizations begin preserving their local digital history, from COVID responses to Black Lives Matter activations. Museums have also started collaborative web collecting to preserve everything from online catalogs to artworks. The recently launched Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA),5 led by Internet Archive and the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) includes 24 museums and art libraries working together to collaboratively preserve web-based art resources and expand access to those materials. Working with historical societies and cultural organizations in other countries has become more popular as more organizations realize how relevant web resources are to their missions. More than 800 international organizations are now participating with the Internet Archive through the Archive-It6 program. Sometimes, a shattering global event brings together archivists around the world. Examples include the September 11, 2001, attacks and the Japanese tsunami of 2011, when dozens of organizations collaborated on crawling projects that created important collections in the Wayback Machine. In the case of the Japanese tsunami, we wrote the resulting crawls to a hard drive and presented it as a gift at a special ceremony at the National Diet Library in Tokyo.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

DEVELOP FOUNDATIONAL RESOURCES FOR YOUR LIBRARY

Research from Nobel Prize Winners and Notable Scientists Offering perpetual access to nearly 70 years of groundbreaking discoveries in the physical sciences. This one-time purchase provides researchers with access to impactful findings, published 1929-1998, that supports future discoveries.

CONTACT YOUR SALES MANAGER FOR LICENSING OPTIONS Lorna Vasica, USA West & Canada

Ken May, USA East

lvasica@aip.org | 516.576.2333

kmay@aip.org | 516.576.2291

EXPLORE THE DIGITAL ARCHIVES AT LIBRARIANS.AIP.ORG/DIGITALARCHIVES

Often, new tools have empowered wider collaboration. With the launch of the “Save Page Now” feature in 2013, millions of users became on-the-spot archivists. This free feature allows anyone to initiate the archiving of an URL by keying it into the Wayback Machine’s homepage or bulk submitting a spreadsheet full of URLs, using a free browser extension, or having a program prepend “https://web.archive.org/save/”7 on an URL that should be archived. More than 100 URLs are captured every second through Save Page Now.

What Challenges Do We Face in Building Digital Collections in the Future?

There is much further we all can, and should, go in building, distributing, and leveraging our digital collections. We need to pay special attention to supporting underrepresented communities, making sure their voices are heard and their digital histories are preserved at every step of the process. As a beginning, the Internet Archive sponsored domain crawls for the world’s 50 smallest countries to create the Whole Earth Web Archive.8 We make the Archive-It tools available for free to many colleges and historical societies that cannot afford to pay for the services otherwise. Collectively, we need to expand data mining tools and help researchers to study these and future collections. If our joint efforts are successful then maybe we can help people contextualize what they are seeing on the web and more readily recognize misinformation and ideas that have been widely debunked. One of the biggest barriers to web archiving is that paywalls are increasingly blocking access to news sites. E-books are often not available on the web, and are subject to restrictive licensing terms, so many are not archived or cited in the ways to which we have grown accustomed. Mobile apps and some social networks are often separated from the web and siloed so that information is difficult to preserve. Games, while very popular, are becoming sophisticated information environments, and our page-based web archiving tools are not yet adapted to these new trends. In the 25 years that the Internet Archive has been building web collections collaboratively with thousands of organizacontinued on page 16

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Transnational Collaborative Web Archiving: The International Internet Preservation Consortium By Abigail Grotke (Assistant Head, Digital Content Management Section, Web Archiving Program, Library of Congress, and 2021 Chair of the International Internet Preservation Consortium) <abgr@loc.gov> and Olga Holownia (Senior Program Officer, International Internet Preservation Consortium) <olga@netpreserve.org> “Web archiving is a pretty heavy rucksack but it is full of interesting challenges of all types: scientific, technical, legal and operational.” — John Tuck, From Integration to Web Archiving, 2007

Introduction Even in its early days, the Internet posed challenges for those who recognized the need to capture and archive it for future generations. Effectively tackling the myriad of web archiving challenges was impossible for any one institution to solve by itself. Collaboration was deemed necessary even from the beginning. Archives and libraries began archiving the Internet starting in the mid-1990s. Many are aware of the Internet Archive (IA) and its Wayback Machine. Less well-known is that national libraries, charged with preserving the output of their citizens through legal mandates or legislation, noted the importance of documenting this global resource about the same time that IA began crawling the web. While not at the same scale as IA, and with different missions, approaches and legal frameworks, national libraries and archives began to capture portions of the Internet that were important to them, focusing on preserving entire national domains, for instance, or documenting events such as elections in their countries.

Teaming Up to Preserve a Global Web The first international web archiving collaboration started in 1997 as the Nordic Web Archive (NWA) and involved the National Libraries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In 2003, eleven national libraries — the NWA members plus the British Library, Library and Archives Canada, Library of Congress, National Library of Australia, National Library of France, National Library of Italy (Florence) — and IA signed an agreement that established the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC).

repositories of resources, the IIPC has been providing a forum for the sharing of knowledge about web archiving and raising awareness of Internet preservation issues. Supported by membership fees, the IIPC funds a number of strategic initiatives, including projects, working group activities, training events, conferences and one full-time Senior Program Officer. The consortium structure includes an executive board and a steering committee. Besides the Senior Program Officer, the other officer roles are individuals from member organizations who volunteer their time, and all working group and project leadership roles are performed on top of regular work duties back at their home institutions.

Building Community through Collaborative Projects and Working Groups Collaboration and community building have been at the core of all IIPC activities. The current IIPC member obligations state that “every member is expected to work collaboratively, within its country’s legislative framework, to identify, develop and facilitate implementation of solutions for selecting, harvesting, collecting, preserving and providing access to Internet content.” IIPC members hold a unique combination of expertise. Participants range from program managers and library administrators, to technical staff and curatorial teams that perform a variety of web archiving tasks at their home organizations. Member institutions primarily make contributions to the IIPC by dedicating personnel time to projects. Through working groups, and portfolios that focus on member engagement, partnerships and outreach, and tools development, the IIPC community has been actively involved in organizing a number of technical, curatorial, educational, and outreach projects.

Since its inception, the IIPC has grown five-fold to include members from over 35 countries across the world. About 85 percent are libraries (national, regional, academic), with the rest being non-profit organizations, audiovisual institutes, and services providers. Each is committed to sharing best practices, and developing tools and resources for the global cultural heritage community. To achieve its goals, the IIPC members have formed working groups and task forces to develop and recommend standards for collecting, preserving and providing long-term access, and, more recently, to produce training materials, create transnational web archive collections and offer resources for researchers. Building on the early ideas to create a “web archiving toolkit,” the IIPC has facilitated the development and sustainability of open source software and tools through a number of funded projects led by members. And through its annual conference, various communication platforms, and collaboratively maintained

14 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

The European Society for the History of Science (ESHS) and Brepols announce a partnership to publish the Society’s �lagship journal Centaurus. Journal of the European Society for the History of Science fully in Open Access from 2022 onwards, at no cost to the authors or readers.

Uses existing library relationships and subscriptions to convert gated journals to open access SUBSCRIPTION DEADLINE (31 January 2022)

PUBLICATION DATE (1st issue: Spring 2022)

Background Until 2021 Centaurus. An International Journal of the History of Science and its Cultural Aspects was published by Wiley as the o�ficial journal of the ESHS. As the collaboration ended with Wiley in 2021, the ESHS and Brepols have decided to launch a new Centaurus, with the same editorial team, scope, and principles. Together, Brepols and the ESHS have the aim of publishing Centaurus fully Open Access through the fair and inclusive Subscribe-to-Open publishing model. Subscriptions will be available at a significantly lower rate, together with other benefits for participating libraries.

LIBRARIES SUBSCRIBE CENTAURUS

Deadline: 31 January 2022

JOURNAL SUBSCRIPTION TARGET ACHIEVED OR

JOURNAL SUBSCRIPTION TARGET NOT ACHIEVED

More info: https://bit.ly/CentaurusOA2021 Subscriptions: periodicals@brepols.net

2022 VOLUME (PUBLISHED IN 4 ISSUES) AVAILABLE IN OPEN ACCESS

2022 VOLUME (PUBLISHED IN 4 ISSUES) REMAINS BEHIND PAYWALL

www.eshs.org ‒ www.brepols.net ‒ www.brepolsonline.net

A Foundation in Collaboratively Developed Tools and Standards The consortium began with six working groups which focused on defining metrics for web archiving, access, content management, deep web, creating shared frameworks for web archiving activities, and identifying researcher requirements. Initial projects centered around topics critical to the members: harvesting, access, and preservation, with tools and standards in the forefront. It was clear early on that collaborating would be more efficient and cost effective than each member developing tools in isolation, and we still develop tools collaboratively today. These included crawling tools that could be used by consortium members and others, and standards that would enable long-term preservation of the content being archived, which resulted in the development of the WARC preservation format, now an ISO standard. Projects have also involved development of requirements for access tools that reflected the needs of member organizations and their researchers, including open source web archive replay tools, necessary to provide access to the web archives. These include the development and maintenance of OpenWayback, and more recently support for transitioning to a Python version of the web archive replay tool.

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

Since 2019, the IIPC has funded a series of projects through our Discretionary Funding Program. Each funded project must involve at least two members, and must benefit the larger field of web archiving. The majority of funding has supported the development of tools, although the focus of these new projects is shifting towards use of web archives, easier access, and visualizations.

Collaborative Collections, Training, and Research While the work on tools development is now supported by a dedicated Portfolio and the new funding program, current working groups focus on the consortium’s other strategic goals, which include Content Development, Training, and Research.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

The Content Development Working Group (CDG), formed in 2015, leads an effort to create collaborative collections. It expanded upon efforts that began in 2010 with the first transnational collection, focused on the Winter Olympics. Led by volunteer web curators, the IIPC has developed eight large, thematic collections in the past six years which are “broader than any one member’s responsibility or mandate” and cover topics such as Olympics and Paralympics, climate change, Artificial Intelligence, the European refugee crisis, Intergovernmental Organizations, and, the most recent and largest effort, a Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) web archive. The Training Working Group was formed in 2017 to fulfill the vision of making IIPC the world leader for training on web archiving. Training materials geared toward beginners have been developed collaboratively by IIPC with the Digital Preservation Coalition and are available openly online, along with video case studies from experienced practitioners. IIPC initiated collaboration with researchers shortly after the consortium was created. Research use of web archives has also been one of the recurrent themes at our annual conference and we have collaborated with initiatives such as RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) and the Archives Unleashed Project to promote research use of web archiving. The Research Working Group, chartered in 2018, engages with the key existing networks, CDG and individual members to share information about web archiving research projects and tools, facilitate ways for dissemination and discussion of use cases as well as enabling access and use of our collaborative collections.

Our advocacy work also extends to working with the wider community and researchers, for instance on initiatives such as the earlier mentioned Archives Unleashed Project (https:// archivesunleashed.org), RESAW (resaw.eu), Web ARChive studies network researching web domains and events (warcnet.eu), and the International GLAM Labs Community (glamlabs.io).

Conclusion Although the strategic goals and emphases of work have changed over the years as a result of the interest of members, the IIPC has only strengthened over time with collaboration, and with the incredible generosity of our web archiving community members in their willingness to share their expertise. Even as expertise has grown in our own organizations, we still rely on these external relationships to learn new things, and to tackle challenging problems. The recent year and a half has just refocused the way we work together across our borders, and we have been able to try out new ideas to determine the best ways to continue to engage our community and make it easier for more members (including those who are not from web archiving teams) to be actively involved. It remains reassuring and helpful, nearly 20 years after the founding of the IIPC, to know that we are not alone in tackling the issues of web archiving.

Outreach and Advocacy A major IIPC goal is to “raise awareness of Internet preservation issues and initiatives through activities such as collaborative collecting, conferences, workshops, training events and publications.” We do this in a number of ways, most notably, through our annual General Assembly meeting for members, and a Web Archiving Conference open to all.

Web Archiving Week in London, 2017, a combined WAC & RESAW conference.

Building Web Collections: Cooperation Past and Future continued from page 13 tions and individuals, we’ve navigated many rocky shoals, from policy challenges to new technological hurdles. Working together, I believe we can surmount many of the barriers to building digital collections looming ahead. In fact, only by working together can we succeed in preserving humanity’s online culture in the future.

Endnotes 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20020228175146/http://web.archive.org:80/collections/e2k.html 2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/01/19/transition-onthe-web-the-cyber-house-rules/11a977ad-9b97-4699-be4d-2a6802357d58/ 3. https://netpreserve.org/ 4. https://communitywebs.archive-it.org/ 5. http://blog.archive.org/2021/11/02/24-arts-organizations-join-the-collaborative-art-archive-carta/ 6. https://archive-it.org/ 7. https://web.archive.org/save/ 8. https://webservices.archive.org/wewa

16 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

A Look Back at the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Resources Collection Program By Samantha Abrams (Head of Collections, Center for Research Libraries) <sabrams@crl.edu> and Jean Park (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Macaulay Honors College) <Jean.Park@mhc.cuny.edu>

Introduction The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (https://ivypluslibraries. org) is a “voluntary union of thirteen sovereign academic libraries: Brown University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, and Yale University. Together, and for the benefit of current and future scholars globally, the Confederation leverages its collective assets to improve discovery of, and access to, information and its innovative use at scale for the creation of new knowledge and exercises collective action and leadership in helping shape the discourse around scholarly communication, and the outcome of that discourse.” In 2017, the Confederation launched its Web Resources Collection Program, a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content to support research at participating libraries and beyond. Now in its fifth year, the Program consists of twenty-nine public collections, thousands of preserved websites, and input from over one-hundred and fifty selectors and librarians from across the Confederation.

Similar Collaborative Models Of course, this Program is not the first to tackle web archiving collaboratively — numerous entities have long worked to achieve similar results. Collaborative efforts that served as inspiration to the Confederation include: the Kansas Archive-It Consortium, the New York Art Resources Consortium, and the International Internet Preservation Consortium.

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation Model A Confederation-wide effort, the Web Resources Collection Program is administratively based at Columbia University, with origins that date back to a 2013 grant from the Mellon Foundation. Columbia received funds to “extend the effectiveness of Columbia’s own Web Resources Collection Program, and of the collaborative web archiving work within the United States, by developing and testing models of collaboration with other research libraries, with other web archiving programs, with web content producers, and scholars.” Funding — in part — supported the creation of two collaborative collections: the Contemporary Composers Web Archive (https://archive-it.org/ collections/4019), which preserves “… websites belonging to … notable

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

contemporary composers in order to assure the continuing availability of the important, and potentially ephemeral, content they contain,” and the Collaborative Architecture, Urbanism, and Sustainability Web Archive (https://archive-it.org/collections/4638), which preserves “websites devoted to the related topics of architecture, urban fabric, community development activism, public space, and sustainability.” The two collections — and the work that led to their creation and continued maintenance — built a foundation which, in 2017, became the Web Resources Collection Program. Now in its “The Program fifth year, the Program supports two positions — a full-time Web is designed to Collection Librarian, who performs reach across the operational work of maintaining institutional and growing the Program’s collections, and a part-time Bibliographic lines and bolster Assistant, who provides technical collaborative and administrative support. The collection Program is designed to reach across building and institutional lines and bolster collaborative collection building and thinking…” thinking, and has led to the creation of twenty-nine thematic collections, including: the Global Webcomics Web Archive (https://archive-it. org/collections/10181), designed to preserve selected webcomics and creator websites from all over the world, the State Elections Web Archive (https://archive-it.org/collections/10793), which captures websites of candidates running for office at the state-level in the United States, and the Student and Youth Environmental Activism Web Archive (https://archive-it.org/collections/13447), focused on youth and student engagement in climate change and environmental issues from around the globe. And though the Program’s efforts are guided by an administrative body — the Web Collecting Advisory Committee — rules are minimal; participants are asked to identify and propose collections based on needs and trends in their areas of specialization. A bit more about what makes the Web Resources Collection Program successful: • Tools Since its iteration, the Program has used Archive-It as its main tool to build, maintain, and provide access to its collections. In recent years, the Program integrated Conifer into its workflows, which allows for smoother capture of more dynamic content, like sites built on Wix and Squarespace, and sites built using JavaScript. (It’s worth noting here that Archive-It is a subscription-based service and charges the Program on an annual basis for a set amount of data, while Conifer is a free and open-source tool. But while Conifer enables the Program to capture more dynamic content on an ad-hoc basis, Archive-It — with its ability to schedule and automate several processes — is still used for most of the Program’s work.)

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

• Notifications For web collections created by the Confederation, the default approach is to send notification emails to website owners using contact information found on the websites themselves, informing them of the Program’s intention to crawl their website and provide public access to the archived versions, and allowing them to opt-out if they do not wish to be included. This approach balances the fact that these are freely available websites with the recognition that websites largely contain intellectual property belonging to an individual or entity. • Thematic Collecting Web archiving use cases vary, and can include: personal digital archiving, preservation of the scholarly record (including projects like Perma.cc), institutional archiving and records management, legal deposit (like the British Library’s Non-Print Legal Deposit collection), library collection development (like the Library of Congress Web Archive), research data mining (like work supported and encouraged by the Archives Unleashed Project), and more. In its current iteration, the Program situates itself firmly within the library collection development use case and indirectly supports preservation of the scholarly record. Because all participating Confederation libraries maintain at least one Archive-It account of their own at the institutional level, the Program is neither an effort to centralize the function of web archiving nor replace existing web archiving work, which is often related to institutional archiving and records management. Instead, the Program seeks to identify subjects of mutual interest to build collaborative, thematic collections and, in the process, avoid duplication. Additional content guidelines encourage staff to select: ° Freely available websites, with substantial public content; ° Websites with mostly original content, rather than aggregator sites linking to external content; ° Web content with research value that may be particularly ephemeral or at-risk for other reasons and therefore in more acute danger of disappearing; and, ° Web content that supplements or enhances existing physical collections at participating institutions. • Bibliographic Assistant An undeniable strength of the Program is its ability to support a Bibliographic Assistant dedicated entirely to quality assurance and metadata support. Quality assurance in the scope of web archiving is the review of how successfully sites have been captured — their accuracy, their usability — for future research and scholarship. It ensures that captured sites’ features and content have been preserved

18 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

as completely as possible, including images, multimedia content, and downloadable files. The integrity of collected sites and how effectively they have been captured affects the possibility of future scholarship using digital evidence. The Bibliographic Assistant also plays a huge part in wrangling selector-created metadata, which is crucial to providing context to the user regarding what has been captured. This provenance provides invaluable information for the researcher, giving clues as to the site’s purpose and intended audience — When was the site created? On what platform? In which languages? The Bibliographic Assistant assures that every collection created by the Confederation includes collection-level Archive-It metadata, collection-level records accessible in WorldCat, and some website-level Archive-It metadata.

Lessons Learned and Next Steps As the Program continues into its fifth year, its collections will continue to grow; as its Global Social Responses to Covid-19 Web Archive (https://archive-it.org/collections/14022) illustrates, our lives have moved further online than ever, which means the need to preserve and document its evolution accurately is critical. And the possibilities are many: Archive-It, for instance, has announced a partnership with Archives Unleashed, which aims to “simplify the ability of scholars to analyze archived web data and give digital archivists and librarians expanded tools for making their collections available as data, as pre-packaged datasets, and as archives that can be analyzed computationally” (https://archive-it.org/blog/post/archives-unleashed-partnership/). There are also new tools continually in development: Brozzler, technology from Archive-It that “more closely resembles how a human user would experience the web” (https://support.archive-it.org/hc/en-us/articles/360000343186-What-is-Brozzler-), and numerous offerings from Webrecorder, which “provides a suite of open source projects and tools to capture interactive websites and replay them at a later time as accurately as possible” (https://webrecorder.net/). In addition to new tools, new initiatives — like Archiving the Black Web (https://archivingtheblackweb.org/), “an urgent call to action … with the goal of establishing a more equitable and accessible web archiving practice that can more effectively document the Black experience online,” and Community Webs (https://communitywebs.archive-it.org/), created to “advance the capacity for public libraries and other cultural heritage organizations to build archives of web-published primary sources documenting local history and underrepresented voices” — aim to make web archiving more accessible, opening the field to artists and activists, librarians and archivists, journalists and creators. And it is this work, alongside continued collaboration — the sharing of expertise, of funding, and of labor — that makes our record more complete, a lesson certainly learned in supporting the Confederation’s Web Resources Collection Program.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Direct to Open Add Your Support Today Join the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Johns Hopkins University Libraries, University of Toronto Libraries, MIT Libraries, and more. Support Direct to Open by June 30, 2022 to receive exclusive benefits including access to backlist/ archives and trade collection discounts.

Direct to Open harnesses collective action to support open access to excellent scholarship. When successful, D2O will: • Open access to all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections (~90 titles per year) from 2022 via recurring participation fees. • 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.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open

Collecting from the Web: Collection Development Policy in the Born-Digital Universe By Carol A. Mandel (Dean Emerita, New York University Division of Libraries, and Distinguished Presidential Fellow, Council on Library and Information Resources) <carol.mandel@nyu.edu>

f, before the events of the last two years, there were any lingering doubts that the wild west of the web, despite all its click-bait and conspiracy theories, held a treasure chest of critical documentary content, those concerns have surely been dispelled. The global and personal stories of the COVID-19 pandemic, painful videos exposing racial injustice, and the stunning evidence presented to the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol are but the most prominent examples of the historical, social, and cultural evidence that web archiving will carry to the immediate and long-term future. We, as librarians and as individuals in society, are indebted to the vision and foresight of the Internet Archive and of many national libraries for taking up the challenge of capturing, managing, and providing enduring access to segments of that otherwise ephemeral evidence. What we as librarians have not yet done is fully consider what the vast, complex cornucopia of born-digital content in the web can mean for the concept of our own library collecting and collections. If libraries have a responsibility to ensure society’s access to a world of knowledge, this is not content to be ignored. Librarians have been leaders in the transition from print to electronic resources; in transitioning collecting from “just in case” to “just in time”; in creating libraries that are service-based rather than collection-based;1 in moving to new models of open access; in working to de-colonize our approach to access and collections. The benefits of this work have been strikingly evident in the last two years, when access to the fullest possible range and depth of online content has meant survival for a locked-in world. Yet even as we are immersed in a universe of born-digital content that far expands the bounds of traditional electronic publishing, we have not yet stretched our arms fully around the potential role of that content in libraries. (The idiom “getting arms around” is apt here in all its meanings: embracing, understanding, managing.) It’s time, as the old Apple ads used to say, to think different.

In a paper issued in late 2019, I discussed the need to frame the nature and challenges of born-digital content into issues that, in turn, can lead to strategies for access, collection, and preservation.2 One significant component of that task is to match the opportunities and complexities of web content to areas relevant to the mission, priorities, and capacities of a range of different types of libraries. This issue of Against the Grain devoted to web archiving is a welcome opportunity to begin that considered look. A key step is to consider whether the concept of “archiving the web” has created a too daunting connotation, one that implies a vast archival task that falls only into the realm of a national library. “The web” can be viewed as an overarching, if messy, entity. But as my friend and colleague, Clifford Lynch, describes so well in his companion article in this journal, “the

20 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

web” is not what most of us casually think it is, and not what it used to be. It is not a monolith, but rather more than a billion disparate sites, many containing ever more items in ever more forms, accessed through the portal of a web browser. From a content perspective, a web portal can be viewed as the world’s largest third-party distributor. It is the pointer to most networked born-digital content — the good, “Collecting the bad, and the ugly. And much strategies have of the good content is worthy of consideration for library collecting. never remained For libraries, web harvesting is an stagnant as important tool by which valuable — new forms of in fact, essential — born-digital concontent and tent can be targeted and collected.3

new distribution A small number of libraries have begun to add web collecting to their models have development of special collections emerged. It is strength. 4 If a library has deep time to embrace strength in, say, 20th century student protest movements, collecting a new phase.” from the web is essential to continue that collection into the 21st century. But how “special” need a collection be to merit the addition of digital-only content? In a century when so much substantive and valuable material is available by harvesting it from the web, the red-line distinction between “general” and “special” is not meaningful as a collecting determination. Special collections grew up as separate entities because of the need to physically segregate and safeguard rare material.5 Brilliant and active special collections librarians have expanded the reach and function of their work, but web collecting need not — and should not — be bounded by the special collections realm. This is not to say that collecting from the web is, as yet, as efficient as core collecting streamlined by processes such as approval plans and demand-driven acquisitions. Web collecting requires selector time and expertise to establish and monitor profiles (as do many approval plans), along with (relatively modest) operational support to participate in a program such as Archive-It. But for any library that serves its community by shaping collections — at least around the edges of a “readymade” plan — selector expertise is always part of the picture. And on the support side, libraries have triumphed in the 21st century through their ability to retool operations. Over the last 50 years, libraries have adapted to many new forms of collecting, adding images, video, databases. Selectors have grappled with, to use some now dated terminology, grey literature, technical reports, government documents, and more recently open access publications. Shared content has been expanded through microfilming and then digitization, and through

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

collaborative acquisition. Collecting strategies have never remained stagnant as new forms of content and new distribution models have emerged. It is time to embrace a new phase. Here are just a few examples where collecting from the web enables rich opportunities for materials that strengthen and enhance collections. • The Arts. If your collections include interest in contemporary artists or music, the websites of artists and composers are a treasure trove. Regional collecting often includes capturing information about the work of local artists, composers, theaters, etc. and there is no better source than the web. • Poetry. Only a handful of well-known poets publish on paper. Poetry journals are almost entirely online and open access — and as labors of love by their editors, their sites are susceptible to “going out of print.” If your library collects poetry, it is not possible to ignore web harvesting. • Area studies. Area studies librarians have long struggled to capture ephemeral and hard-to-find publications. Today web content illuminates countless aspects of society and culture. As older area studies documents are being digitized and shared on the web,6 are not the online only statistical documents of 2021 as valuable, in the near and long term, as the statistical records of 1911? • Hyper-local. Public libraries, and many other institutions, have long taken responsibility to serve as a source of current and historical town and regional information. From hometown newspapers, to local exhibition catalogs, to community cookbooks, such local content has been invaluable both as a community resource and as essential historical and cultural documentation. Most of this content is now published via the web, and will be ephemeral without local/regional library intervention. • Partnerships with scholars. Scores of exceptional digitization projects have resulted through partnerships between scholars, whose research and expertise exposes important content, and libraries that have translated that content into widely accessed online collections. From medieval manuscript collections to ethnographic video, a world of rich and now widely studied content has been delivered through these collaborations. Today there are scholars in social and cultural studies who know where the web treasure resides for their field; partnerships with those scholars today can transform teaching and research for the future. • Diverse perspectives. Web content offers an unprecedented source of grass-roots contributions and unfiltered voices. Community archiving and story-telling projects are creating extraordinary resources of past and present experience and cultural perspective — content that we now recognize must be represented in library collections. Given the content value that lies just within these few examples, why then has web collecting not become a widespread practice? Has initiating and integrating the practice into oper-

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

ations seemed too daunting? Have time pressures on selectors caused them to avoid any handcrafted selecting? Adopting web collecting is non-trivial, but our track record clearly demonstrates that barriers can be addressed if there is a will to collect this material. Wrangling grey literature and government documents was non-trivial. Creating institutional repositories was non-trivial. The transitions to electronic licensing and to digitization were non-trivial. At each stage in our transformations there has been help from collaborative projects, grant funds, regional hubs, centers of excellence, consortia, and sheer mission-driven enthusiasm. We are not prepared, yet, for all of the complex content that Clifford Lynch describes, but we are ready for next steps. Thanks to pioneering work by the Internet Archive, national libraries, and many forward-looking others, tools and services for collecting important born-digital resources are available now. It’s time to recognize — and address — the born-digital gap in our ability to deliver today’s knowledge to future generations.

Endnotes 1. Dempsey, Lorcan and Malpas, Constance (2018) “Academic Library Futures in a Diversified University System,” in Higher Education in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, ed. Gleason, Nancy. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 65-90. Dempsey and Malpas characterize the shift in academic libraries away from describing themselves in terms of collections and instead in terms of the research and teaching needs of their parent institution. 2. Mandel, Carol (2019) Can We Do More? An Examination of Potential Roles, Contributors, Incentives, and Frameworks to Sustain Large-Scale Digital Preservation. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources. Accessed at https://www.clir.org/can-we-do-more/. 3. The groundbreaking strategy for collecting digital content developed by the Library of Congress in 2017 sets out this conceptualization clearly and well. See Library of Congress Collection Development Office, Collecting Digital Content at the Library of Congress, accessed at https://www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/CollectingDigitalContent. pdf. The plan has been successful and is now entering a new phase; see Puccio, Joe, Developing a New Digital Collections Strategy at the Nation’s Library, accessed at https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2021/05/new-digitalcollections-strategy/. 4. The libraries participating in the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation offer a good role model as described by Samantha Abrams in this issue. Abrams recently held the position of Web Resources Collection Librarian for the Confederation while administratively based at Columbia, a position other libraries may well want to institute. 5. Joyce, William L. (1988) “The Evolution of the Concept of Special Collections in American Research Libraries.” Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship 3(1): 19-29. 6. See, for example, the excellent work of the South Asia Open Archives, accessed at https://www.jstor.org/site/ saoa/, and the Digital South Asia Library, accessed at https://dsal.uchicago.edu/. The contemporary counterpart of much of this material is now “published” as websites.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

The Dangerous Complacency of “Web Archiving” Rhetoric By Clifford Lynch (Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information) <clifford@cni.org>

he World Wide Web turned 30 years old in 2021. During the past three decades, it has vastly evolved and changed in character. A huge number of information resources and services are accessible through the web, but not genuinely part of it; they share few of the characteristics typical of web sites in the 1990s. Indeed, “the web” has become a sloppy shorthand for a hugely diverse universe of digital content and services that happen to be accessible though a web browser (though more and more of these services are used through custom apps, particularly on mobile devices). We no longer genuinely understand the universe this shorthand signifies, much less what “archiving” it means or what purposes this can or cannot serve. This brief article will expand these themes in a little more depth; I hope to do a more extended examination of the issues elsewhere in future. My friend, Carol Mandel, has contributed a companion paper in this issue that makes a powerful and optimistic case for approaching this new digital universe from a collection development rather than more mechanistic archiving perspective: first decide what institutions want to collect and why, only then beginning to work out how to manage the mechanics of acquisition, access, and preservation. She provides a great inventory of some of the potential treasures waiting there. I hope this will complement Carol’s argument by providing some insights into the variety of the materials that might be considered by collectors, their technical characteristics, and how these might shape both the goals and the limits of the collecting efforts. The early web consisted of relatively static sites containing interlinked HTML files (both within a site and from site to site), plus links to other files such as graphic images, PDFs and the like. Two users coming to a site at the same time had the identical experience. Rapidly, sites expanded to include forms-based interfaces to the so-called “deep web” (basically databases), so that one might look up transit schedules, descriptive records for books, news articles, court records, or any number of other databased records. Already, with that early development, we saw that trying to capture the look of sites providing access to databases was entirely different than capturing the databases behind the sites, setting up the first of many gaps between “web archiving” and the much broader issues of collecting and preserving content and services accessible through the web. It’s critically important to understand that there are still a large number of important web sites that are conceptually consistent with the early web. We know what to do with these. The Internet Archive, various national libraries, and more tightly targeted web capture programs based at many universities (most commonly in collaboration with the research libraries there) have been, and continue to, collect, capture, and preserve these sites. This is important, essential work and it is being done quite well. In recent years, we’ve seen the evolution of an infrastructure for distributed, collaborative web archives developing, and a growing body of studies analyzing the properties of this infrastructure and the archives that exist within it (see, for example, the work on the Memento system and the work of Michael Nel-

22 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

son and his colleagues). This work must be supported, and it must continue. It’s absolutely necessary. In fact, there’s good news here: a substantial amount of the material institutions will want to collect resides in this neighborhood of the web. In particular, much of the modern “grey literature” essential to so many scholarly disciplines resides in these web sites and files such as PDF documents linked to them. It would be very valuable to try to map, measure or quantify this. But we must understand that this work is far from sufficient to address the collection development and preservation challenges offered by the universe so casually thought of as “the web” today. In fact, one of my concerns is that the success of these organizations in what we might think of as “traditional” web archiving has given rise to a good deal of complacency among much of the cultural memory sector. And “Indeed, ‘the web’ much worse: the broader public has a sense that everything is being has become a taken care of by these organizations; sloppy shorthand no crisis here! This is particularly for a hugely troublesome because we will need the support of the broad public in diverse universe changing norms and perhaps legal of digital content frameworks to permit more effective and services … collecting from the full spectrum of participants in this new digital We no longer universe. genuinely

Before looking at the range of understand content and services that are now the universe accessible through the web (but this shorthand are not part of the web as we’ve historically understood it), I want signifies, much to highlight a few additional techless what nical shifts in how people interact ‘archiving’ it with the web. While historically means or what web pages were static, today they are assembled dynamically through purposes this can complex JavaScript computations or cannot serve.” that interact with various remote sites and services, and the viewing of a page from one second to the next is typically non-repeatable, not because the base content has changed, but because all of the surrounding advertising, scaffolding, running heads, lists of other interesting articles, etc., have changed. When archiving a copy of a page today, there are delicate, complex technical decisions embedded in the archiving processes about when to store the results of these computations, and when to store instructions for computations that would be done as part of rendering the archived page during retrieval from the archive. Perhaps the most game-changing new technology, however, is personalization, which is now pervasive in webbased services. This can be explicit, based on who you are, the preferences you declare, and your past history with the service you are interacting with, or it can be extremely opaque

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

and unpredictable, based on who the service thinks you are, what demographics it thinks you match, what it thinks your history is interacting with other sites, and even perhaps based on matches to data such as your credit history, voting records, or the like. Facebook is perhaps the poster child for this latter kind of personalization. Think about this: if you are trying to collect or preserve Facebook, or even a news site, what are you trying to do? You could try to collect content that a specific individual or group of people posted or authored. You could try (though this is probably hopeless, given the intellectual property, terms of use, and privacy issues) to capture all the (public) content posted to the site. But if the point is to understand how the service actually appeared to the public at a given time, what you want to know is what material is shown to visitors most frequently. And, with personalization, to genuinely and deeply understand the impact of such a service on society, what you really need to capture is how the known or imputed attributes of visitors determined what material they were shown at a given point in time.1 These challenges are at the core of current debates about the impact of social media on society, the effects of disinformation and misinformation and the failure of social media platforms to manage such attacks, and related questions. It is clear, though, that both laws and terms of service are aligned to prevent a great deal of effective and vital work here, both in preservation and in researching the impact of these services; many social media platforms seem actively hostile to the accountability that preserving their behavior might bring. Part of the challenge will be to shift law and public policy to enable this work. Let me conclude this survey with a look at some of the diversity of content that is broadly and sloppily considered part of “the web” but diverges in some crucial senses from the early web that I previously described. All of this content, all of these services, need to be carefully examined by collection developers rising to Carol Mandel’s challenge to thoughtfully and selectively collect from the web, and also by digital archivists, scholars, preservationists, and documentalists seeking to capture context, presentation, disparate impacts, and the many other telling aspects of the current digital universe. Today’s “web” includes the following content services (and this is only a selective and incomplete list). It’s interesting to note how many are now only secondarily accessible via web browser, with preference given to apps, including apps that live on “smart TVs,” “smart cars,” “smart phones,” and the like. It is also worth noting that there is a new generation of content services emerging that are increasingly less accessible via web browser, even on a secondary basis, and are even more sequestered gardens. These will present new challenges for collection and for preservation. And we don’t have author-

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

itative data collection services drawing timely maps of this volatile landscape. • Social Media services: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, etc. • Shopping services: Amazon, but also a myriad of specialized sites for other materials, as well as Amazon competitors like Walmart. • News sites: Note this includes not only “traditional media” like NBC, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, etc., but also services that just select pointers to traditional media (“news arrangers”), e.g., Google News, Apple News, etc. The selecting and indexing services are part of tracking impact of the news on society. And the division between streaming news and broader streaming services has blurred, particularly around major sports events or news broadcasts. • “Content creator” driven sites, offering a wide range of subscription-based materials, such as OnlyFans, Substack, Patreon and the like. • Streaming services: Music (Apple, Pandora, Spotify, etc.) and movies and video (Netflix, HBO, and a horde of other competitors). Understanding how to think about documenting and preserving these services and their content is a poorly examined problem, particularly when juxtaposed against the constantly shifting libraries of materials that they can offer their customers for streaming. Almost all the services mentioned above are immense corporate projects and products, many of which are not friendly to memory organizations; it will often be genuine and challenging work to acquire these materials. Creators, would-be public intellectuals, activists, and journalists/documentalists of all sorts are also flocking to digital environments (perhaps the traditional web, perhaps not); what these people and groups are actually doing in this environment is not well understood or well tracked, as far as I know. William Gibson’s observation that “the street finds its own uses for things” resonates here. These developments should be of great interest to collection developers and others looking to the now and to the stories critical to the future.

Endnotes 1. Clifford A. Lynch, “Stewardship in the ‘Age of Algorithms,’” First Monday 22, no. 12 (2017). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/ index.php/fm/article/view/8097/6583

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman Column Editor’s Note: So … it’s the holidays and the new year. We know that because the students are finishing up exams, final projects and the campus is getting quieter than normal. I hope that everyone was successful this fall in providing services to your students, faculty, staff, community and other users, be they in person, remote or hybrid (where just about everything is). I also hope that through this all, you are able to balance out the goods and bads that life is throwing at all of us right now. It is difficult to see that when you are in the midst of a tricky time, but hopefully things will get better sooner rather than later.

examples from within actual libraries that illustrate when the term is used appropriately.

If that sounds like a previous column, it is because of the strange “Groundhog Day” vibe that we seem to have on campuses. So if we really just focus on what we are here to do, you will have an opportunity to consider some new works on the library and information sciences field as well as new works for library reference. These reviews are ones you are going to want to read if you are building a library, trying to understand copyright or trying to develop an escape room (no that is not for staff meetings — but it is tempting). The reference work included here explores conspiracies — as if we have not had enough of those these past two years.

I am not proposing that you only read Chapter four, but Anderson opens the chapter by stating, “If you only read one chapter in this book, let it be this one.” She is not wrong. Chapter four devotes itself to defining and explaining the “library marketing funnel.” Anderson writes that the marketing funnel concept was created in 1898 and describes the four stages of a customer’s relationship with an organization. The marketing funnel has evolved over the years, and additional stages have been added, bringing the number of stages up to nine. Anderson gently shares with her readers that libraries have not applied the “marketing funnel” to their work with their customers and that, in fact, libraries have built up roadblocks to using libraries. Not to worry, Anderson follows up Chapter four with a chapter on how to fix this problem. Again, she has plenty of real life examples and practical suggestions to illustrate how this can be done.

Reviewing in this issue are: Joshua Hutchinson (University of Southern California), Jennifer Matthews (Rowan University), Rachelle McLain (Montana State University), Mary Catherine Moeller (University of Michigan), John Novak (Fairfield University), Jessica Shuck (Cornerstone University), and Sarah Thorngate (North Park University, Chicago). Thank you everyone for being great partners in this endeavor. If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain, please write me at <cseeman@umich.edu>. If you are a publisher and have a book you would like to see reviewed in a future column, please also write me directly. You can also find out more about the Reader’s Roundup here — https://sites.google.com/view/ squirrelman/atg-readers-roundup. Happy reading and be nutty! — CS

Anderson, Cordelia. Library Marketing and Communications: Strategies to Increase Relevance and Results. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2020. 9780838947999, 157 pages. $54.99 Reviewed by Rachelle McLain (Collection Development Librarian, Montana State University Library, Montana State University, Bozeman) <rachelle.mclain@montana.edu> Inspired by a keynote address she gave at the 2018 Library Marketing and Communications Conference, Cordelia Anderson wrote an outstanding book about how to successfully and strategically launch marketing and communication plans from within libraries. Anderson is a consultant who provides marketing and communications services to community-serving organizations. She begins the book with a detailed, yet easy to understand, description of public relations, marketing, and promotion and how these three terms are very different from each other. Beyond just defining what the terms mean, the author gives very clear

24 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

Anderson also connects this effort to the broader library mission and direction. I don’t think I can capture how Anderson emphasized this enough except using her own words: a library needs a strategic plan. A library needs to do their research. A library needs a “strategic mindset.” Marketing and communications should ideally be the focus of a staff member(s) work, not necessarily assigned as an afterthought or tacked on to an employee’s list of duties.

Writing a book about marketing and communications would not be complete without a chapter on branding. Chapter six not only wraps itself up by detailing ways to create a brand, it begins by sharing the history of branding and libraries. Anderson shares stationary and bookplates from a former library she worked at, illustrating in this one instance how branding and the library changes over a period of time. The second half of the book focuses on the importance of libraries and the partnerships they can create; the need for advocacy planning; and the critical importance of reputation management and crisis communications. All three of these chapters emphasize the importance of relationships as they relate to these topics. Anderson has examples from her work in libraries over the years that show how the relationships libraries make and build are critical to their success. The final chapter, titiled Staffing and Organizational Structure, takes all of the information presented in the preceding chapters and does a great job of outlining how libraries can get all of it done. Anderson begins the chapter by sharing how to hire professionals from the get go; how to align their work with the library’s priorities; the importance of placing marketing and communications work within a leadership role and then staffing and managing the roles within that department; creating a culture that advocates for diversity and inclusion; and lastly, the importance of library leadership embracing and investing in their marketing and communications. I want to re-read this book already. The real life stories shared by Anderson throughout the book as she illustrated the successful and sometimes not so successful ways that libraries

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

market themselves are engaging and inspiring. I have long felt that libraries, generally, struggle with being able to tell their stories (their events, their struggles, their wins) consistently and effectively. This book will inspire you to look at the marketing and communications strategies within your own library, or, if you don’t have one, create one! ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Chase, Darren, and Dana Haugh, eds. Open Praxis, Open Access: Digital Scholarship in Action. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2020. 9780838918678, 275 pages. Reviewed by John Novak (Associate Dean for Technical Services and Budget, Fairfield University) <jnovak@fairfield.edu>, ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4761-5400 As the open access movement matures, the benefits of open access are a universally accepted truth — at least among librarians. As anyone who promotes open access in a higher education setting can attest, there is a wide gulf between theory and practice. The subtitle of this book of collected essays accurately describes the purpose of this book. Nearly each book chapter deals with attempts to accelerate the adoption of open access, amidst setbacks and obstacles, among their respective library community. The book is a collection of sixteen chapters divided into five sections: overview of open praxis, open access publishing, repositories, open educational resources (OERs), and open data. The opening chapter sets the table by providing an overview of openness, with the following three chapters focusing on global open access with chapters on Canada, Asia and a chapter on open access and intersectionality. The next four parts contain chapters in which open access is put into practice. Many chapters can be read as case studies

Guide to the ATG Reviewer Ratings The ATG Reviewer Rating is being included for each book reviewed. Corey came up with this rating to reflect our collaborative collections and resource sharing means and thinks it will help to classify the importance of these books. • I need this book on my nightstand. (This book is so good, that I want a copy close at hand when I am in bed.) • I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.) • I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.) • I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.) • I’ll use my money elsewhere. (Just not sure this is a useful book for my library or my network.)

26 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

that detail the opportunities and challenges of implementing a specific aspect of open access in the academy. For example, Paul Royster pens a chapter about the history of the institutional repository at the University of Nebraska while Mary Jo Orzech and Kim L. Myers detail their work in the chapter entitled “Adopting an Open Access Policy at a Four-Year Comprehensive College.” Other chapters deal with implementing OERs within a consortia, cataloging protected research data in order to improve discoverability, and working with 3D repositories. Early in his chapter, Royster informs the reader that the path University of Nebraska took to establish its IR should be read as “descriptive, not prescriptive.” I believe that many of the chapters in this collection can be read in the same way. With chapters from libraries of different sizes serving a university, college or the public, a reader is best advised to take strategies that would work at their own institution instead of interpreting each chapter as a roadmap to implementing open access. The breadth and variety of chapters allow those who have worked primarily in scholarly communications to encounter a new aspect of open access. Essays on a pilot data catalog to improve the discoverability of restricted data and 3D open repositories fell into this category for me. Another strong chapter took an argumentative stand. Heidi Zuniga and Lilan Hoffecker, in their chapter entitled “Challenging Library Support of Article Processing Charges,” discuss their experience of the University of Colorado’s Health Sciences Library’s article processing charge (APC) program and the criteria used to evaluate this program. In their final analysis, they stopped their APC program for it was not sustainable and it did not effectively support their open access mission. This book is recommended, in particular, for the open access advocate and scholarly communication expert to read. The book lacks an introduction and I believe that the reader would benefit from hearing about the intellectual choices the editors made, such as article topics they excluded from their book, how each chapter relates to one another, or how this book adds to the robust literature that already exists open access. Given that, this book is a strong collection of institutions attempting to expand open access for their community. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Cornish, Graham P. Copyright: Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services. Rev. 6th Edition. London: Facet Publishing, 2019. 9781783304233, $150.57 Reviewed by Jennifer Matthews (Collection Strategy Librarian, Rowan University) <matthewsj@rowan.edu> In Copyright: Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, Graham P. Cornish aspires to explain United Kingdom (UK) copyright law as it pertains to galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). As written, Cornish’s work is meant as a desktop reference work to aid those working directly with users and should be useful to those “in all types of library and information service, whether public, academic, government or private” (p. ix). This book was compiled prior to the completion of the exit negotiations for the UK leaving the European Union (e.g., Brexit) and, therefore, the author has included a disclaimer at the beginning of the work that this could affect some of the guidance in terms of geographical interpretation. Cornish advises users

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

to check the Statutory Instrument prepared by the UK government which goes into effect on the day Brexit takes effect (p. x). As with many books on copyright, there is a list of abbreviations in the front for common reference throughout, a list of useful address and contacts in the back, and an appendix of suggested declaration forms. The book itself is divided up into twelve sections that each take on the standard format of definition, authorship, ownership, duration of copyright, exceptions, and then other variances such as educational copying and library copying as applicable under UK law. The very first section of the work helps to define copyright and the law, Section Two defines what is covered, and Section Three focuses on the rights and limitations one is entitled to under copyright law in the UK. For those working in GLAM institutions under UK copyright law, this is a relatively easy work to manage and find information. Sections are clear as to what aspect of the law they refer (databases versus literary works versus sound recordings) and when aspects are not clear, Cornish indicates such in the entry. For instance, in Section Four, Literary, Dramatic and Musical Works, heading Material open to public inspection entry 4.317, “Does this also apply to statutory registers such as registers of voters?” states: Apparently not, because no mention is made of statutory registers in the relevant section of the Act. However, the SI refers specifically to statutory registers in this section, so it is unclear just what is allowed. (pp. 78-79) Once library staff become comfortable with the format of the book, it should be easy to find what one is looking for under each copyright section. The lists of contacts in the back should also prove useful for those that may not have as much experience in certain areas of copyright. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

Kroski, Ellyssa. Escape Rooms and Other Immersive Experiences in the Library. American Library Association, 2019. 9780838917671, 188 pages, $68.00. Reviewed by Jessica Shuck (eResources Librarian, Cornerstone University) <Jessica.shuck@cornerstone.edu> Escape Rooms as attractions have been increasing in popularity since the first recorded one in Japan in 2007 (Kroski 5). With influences of live action role play games, puzzles, and video games, escape rooms are immersive experiences that require players to solve problems in order to escape a room or unlock something in the allotted time. They can range in number of players, level of difficulty, and many other requirements. Libraries have joined amusement firms in escape rooms as a way to engage patrons. They’ve been used as tools for outreach, information literacy, instruction, training, and curriculum support. Escape Rooms and Other Immersive Experiences in the Library by Ellyssa Kroski describes the history of escape rooms, ways in which they have been and can be used in the library, and specific examples from real libraries. Kroski continues with more practical applications in Part II of the book. Here, the author details eleven different escape room projects and how to design and implement them. Each chapter in this section describes a different type (such as pop-ups, digital breakouts, and staff-training, etc…). She walks readers

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

through many of the things that should be considered, whether creating an event from scratch or using a pre-designed option. She even provides specific websites and products that could be used in the process. The author also addresses ideas for marketing the events. Kroski gives recommendations for the pre-game preparation and experience, as well as what items to have on hand for troubleshooting during the game. Each chapter is filled with detailed and very practical advice which is guaranteed to help readers as they plan their own immersive experiences. The book finishes with a case study, start-to-finish model, templates for creating your own experience, and a long list of helpful resources. Libraries have such a wide range of resources available, so it seems fitting that escape rooms can be customized according to the library. The author does a great job of providing multiple options to fit a variety of scenarios. As a librarian working with limited time and staff, I appreciate that she devoted an entire chapter (Chapter 11) to escape room board games. She provided names, reviews and where to purchase, as well as information on how to collect and maintain board games in the library. Ellyssa Kroski has a lot of experience when it comes to library outreach. She is the Director of Information Technology and Marketing at the New York Law Institute, an adjunct faculty member at Drexel and San Jose State Universities, a librarian, and an author of over 60 library related titles. She has received numerous awards, including the 2020 Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award from the American Association of Law Libraries and the 2017 Library Hi Tech Award from the American Library Association. Kroski’s interest in cosplay and gaming makes her a great resource in this area. She has posted more information about escape rooms as well as links to talks and webinars at https://ekroski.wixsite.com/webinars. While Escape Rooms may not be necessary for every library to own, it is a helpful resource for anyone hoping to create an immersive experience in their library. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

McLeish, Simon (ed.). Resource Discovery for the Twenty-First Century Library: Case studies and perspectives on the role of IT in user engagement and empowerment. London (UK): Facet Publishing, 2020. 9781783301386, 203 pages. £64.95 / $84.00. Reviewed by Joshua Hutchinson (Head, Acquisitions and Cataloging, University of Southern California Libraries) <joshuah8@usc.edu> Resource discovery has experienced significant changes over the past few decades; from the move away from the OPAC, which was a digital reflection of the card catalog, to more modern discovery layers, patrons and librarians have experienced dramatic change in the way they search for and discover library materials. This collection of essays contains 12 chapters that examine the state of resource discovery in libraries. Without exception, the contributions are excellent, and the book as a whole feels like a master class in the issues that surround resource discovery. With chapters that include case studies as well as theoretical treatments, this book provides a good introductory treatment of issues surrounding resource discovery including (but not limited to) searching using discovery layers; potential strategies

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

for integrating resource discovery across formats and discovery systems; research into resource discovery needs; and considerations about the semantic web and resource discovery. Lorcan Dempsey (Chief Strategist at OCLC) wrote the illuminating foreword which breaks out some of the ways in which resource discovery has recently changed, including redefining the “local collection,” discovering full library resources (beyond what’s in the library catalog), and making library search tools available to those outside of the institution. Simon McLeish, who edited the volume, wrote or contributed to four of the chapters, and also wrote the editorial afterward. McLeish is Resource Discovery Architect for the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. While the contributors are predominantly from the UK — including a number of contributions from McLeish’s home institution — there are also contributors from the National Library of Singapore, the University of Göttingen and the University of California, among others. The chapter by Chris Awre and Richard Green entitled “Open source discovery using Blacklight at the University of Hull” is a fantastic overview of the development of the Blacklight discovery tool, including a brief history of its development at the University of Virginia, as well as its adoption at the University of Hull as an interface for that institution’s digital repository, library catalog and archives catalog. The inclusion of chapters such as this, which read almost like how-to guides for creative and efficient use of an open source discovery tool. The chapter by Masha Garibyan and Simon McLeish entitled “Exposing collections and resources effectively” is, much like the rest of the book, well formulated and structured. It includes a brief potted history of the search engine, and follows that up with considerations to keep in mind when planning to improve exposure. The chapter devotes significant space to the importance of metadata, without which accurate and optimized resource discovery is impossible, and finally includes considerations for using engagement and social media to expose collections — including practical examples from libraries in the UK and U.S. This is an important work, and should be consulted by anyone involved in configuring library discovery tools. McLeish has curated an excellent collection of chapters that together create a useful work for anyone working with library resource discovery. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Murphy, Maggie with Adrienne Button. Teaching First-Year College Students: A Practical Guide for Librarians. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 9781538116982, 187 pages. Reviewed by Sarah Thorngate (Associate Professor of Information Literacy, Brandel Library, North Park University, Chicago) <scthorngate@northpark.edu>

students. “The goal of this book,” they write, “is to help librarians connect research and theory about first-year students with practical approaches to designing, teaching, and assessing firstyear library instruction.” (5) Murphy, first-year instruction and humanities librarian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Button, library instruction coordinator at Georgia Gwinnett College, met as students in Kennesaw State University’s master’s program in first-year studies. They bring knowledge of the research on first-year students and a wealth of experience in first-year library instruction to this topic. The book consists of two main parts. The first three chapters contextualize first-year library instruction within the empirical data, theories, and practices connected to first-year experience initiatives. The remainder of the book lays out the fundamentals of teaching and learning for academic librarians, with examples and sample lesson plans addressing typical first-year library instruction scenarios. This second part is where the book truly shines. Murphy provides a first-rate introduction to teaching as a librarian, somehow managing to be both comprehensive and concise. It pulls together the smorgasbord of skills and practices that go into library instruction: faculty outreach, lesson planning, graphic design, assessment, online learning, instructional design, and advocacy. For each topic, she offers a succinct overview of current theory and practice, detailed examples of ways one might apply this knowledge, and a well-curated list of additional resources. While very little of this information was new to me as an experienced instruction librarian, that points to a key strength of this book — the various bits of knowledge that I’ve gleaned over the years from workshops, listservs, books, and more trial and error than I care to admit are packaged into a single well-researched and highly readable volume. I would have benefited greatly from this book earlier in my career and will likely use it as a roadmap for training new instruction librarians in the future. As much as I admire this book as an introduction to library instruction, I do find it a bit odd because that was not what the title or introduction led me to expect. The bulk of the book is less about teaching first-year students and more about being an effective instruction librarian in general, with examples applicable to topics one might cover in first-year courses. The detailed overview of best practices for teaching comes at the expense of deeper elaboration of how first-year students’ transition into college impacts library instruction. In particular, I would have liked to see more attention to the changing demographics of college students in terms of race, ethnicity, nativity, class, age, and gender. Murphy stresses the important point that first-year students are not a “monolith” and urges librarians to take stock of their own student bodies. Fair enough, but a survey of research on how members of these various groups tend to experience the transition to college would have been a worthwhile addition to this book, and a helpful starting point for librarians attempting to learn more about their own student bodies.

The first year of college is a critical transition point for undergraduates, requiring them to adjust academically, culturally, and socially to a new educational community. Navigating this transition successfully is key to individuals’ life chances, as most students who drop out of college do so in their first year. In response, colleges have developed a constellation of programs and support services aimed at retaining first-year students.

That said, the book provides a persuasive, well-documented argument for a specialized approach to teaching first-year students alongside a thorough introduction to the work of teaching librarians more broadly. Early-career librarians will find an excellent primer on the craft of instruction librarianship. Mid-career librarians will find creative lesson plans and ideas for active learning to refresh their teaching practice.

In Teaching First-Year College Students, Maggie Murphy and contributing author Adrienne Button situate first-year library instruction within these broader efforts to support first-year

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

28 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Plath, James. Critical Insights: Conspiracies. Grey House Publishing, 2020. 9781642653731, 297 pages. $105.00

Schlipf, Fred. Constructing Library Buildings That Work. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2020. 9780838947586, $49.99.

Reviewed by Mary Catherine Moeller (Assistant Librarian, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) <mcmoelle@umich.edu>

Reviewed by Jennifer Matthews (Collection Strategy Librarian, Rowan University) <matthewsj@rowan.edu>

Conspiracies have been a topic of interest to our society for nearly as long as we have existed. Truth-seeking is in our nature as humans and so it is only natural that we sometimes suspect scheming. When one thinks of conspiracy theories it is easy to picture tin foil hats and wild leaps of logic, but this book focuses instead on logical questioning of the historical, political and literary. It encourages readers to see conspiracy theories not only as a literary theme but also as a critical thinking tool. Editor James Plath is the R. Forrest Colwell endowed chair and professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University where he teaches American literature, journalism, film and creative writing. Every chapter in Critical Insights: Conspiracies is an essay written by a different author, all centering around conspiracies present in novels, films, plays and graphic novels. The pieces each author writes about are either ones that are commonly used in high school AP classes or found on syllabi for undergraduate coursework. Each author’s dissection of their instance of conspiracy is unique and opens the readers eyes to the many ways in which conspiracy is and has been present in written media. The “Critical Contexts” section consists of four chapters that introduce readers to a few of the different bases upon which conspiracy theories might build. It covers religion, politics, race and economics. This section provides a warm up for “Critical Readings” which dives into 10 essays based on incredibly varied texts from Shakespeare to Nineteen Eighty-Four to The Shining. It is a truly varied and well-rounded sample of scholarly analysis of conspiracy. The most thought provoking chapter was the one written by M. Katherine Grimes that centered around contemporary young adult fiction. She draws on commonalities in young adult literature and finds that conspiracy is inspirational in these texts. For young people in these books, they are “inspired to conspire” as a way of fighting against injustices perpetrated by adults in power. She makes connections between this theme and current events; particularly the involvement of young adults’ in various social justice causes. Her chapter sees conspiracy not as an overt theme but rather as an undercurrent that promotes critical thinking in young people. Critical Insights: Conspiracies would serve as an excellent tool for English teachers at the high school and undergraduate level. It is thought-provoking and features essays that would be for great supplementary materials to compliment the original works that students might study. Overall, I would want to have this book around to reference if ever I needed to further explore any of the works featured in it. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

Over the course of any librarian’s career, one is bound to experience the renovation or construction of a library. (Editor’s Note: For your sake, let’s hope it is not a repurposing). The renovation of a space leads to a rebirth of tired spaces while the creation of a brand-new library building can reinvigorate an entire community around the fresh structure and programming created to launch the opening. In Fred Schilpf’s Constructing Library Buildings That Work, the reader is methodically taken through the various steps of any library renovation or building project from considering the shape of the building, hiring architectural firms, and funding, to the materials used, staff spaces, and even a final word about the “good and bad ideas of library architecture” (p. 65). Schilpf’s work is based on his earlier work with John A. Moorman, The Practical Handbook of Library Architecture: Creating Building Spaces That Work (2018) and is not meant to be read from cover to cover. Rather, the user is meant to select sections as necessary to assist with the overall experience of renovating library spaces. This means that Schilpf covers such projects such as the selection of a possible site for building to the completion of the project. For experienced librarians on their third or fourth renovation project, this work would be a handy item to share with members of the renovation planning committee who may not have as much experience in this area or need to become familiar with why libraries are structured with cantilever shelving and sound absorption properties. Schilpf advocates heavily for the role of librarians throughout the book, and he particularly advocates for building programmers with librarian backgrounds on these projects. He provides directions on how to find these building programmers for your projects as well as how to best use these individuals to the benefit of your project. The book itself is divided into two sections with the first half covering the essentials of library construction such as the who, what, how, and why while the second half covers how to construct a successful building. Of note is the coverage of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance aspects in library buildings, and general security issues. As Schilpf describes, his chapters are structured like outlines with bullet points rather than long paragraphs to aid readers in discovering information (p. xi). Schilpf also does not fail to disparage to continuous creation of “spectacularly foolish library building designs” that he wishes would fade away (p. xi). Perhaps with this work, and the sharing of its contents with library construction committees, fewer of these buildings can be created such as libraries where portions of the collection can only be reached by stairs, steel grating floors, and inadequate elevators even in light of ADA compliance. Constructing Library Buildings That Work contains many facets that should inform both the veteran library renovation committee member as well as the novice member. Librarians in both public libraries and academic libraries will find information that can inform their pursuit of a more pleasing library space for themselves and their patrons. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

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

qualor. Shame. Societal Struggles. Sodomy. Senility. Self-esteem. Scholarly Success. Shadows. All are subject threads in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 1987 debut novel, Memory of Departure. A coming of age story set on the coast of Gurnah’s native continent of Africa. And yes, once again, this Booklover is enchanted with how these varieties of subjects, some quite intense, are delivered in such a lovely literary fashion to make the novel a page-turner. Read it in two sittings. Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” When interviewed about the award, he thought the phone call was a prank. Born on the island of Zanzibar in 1948 he fled the persecution of the citizens of Arab origin under President Abeid Karume’s regime that occurred after the liberation from British colonial rule in 1963. Gurnah’s refugee journey took him to England where he “stumbled into” writing as a mechanism for him to wrap his head around his emigrant experience. Gurnah recently retired from his position as Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury. One of the authors that he focused on in his lectures was Wole Soyinka, the first African author to become a Nobel Laureate in 1986 and the subject of a Booklover column two years ago. In Memory of Departure, Gurnah’s first novel, the author uses a simple story to illustrate his emotional emigrant journey. Broken family living in a broken society. The young man of the family does well in school. Young man’s family has no resources to pay for further formal education. Young man journeys to a wealthy relative to petition for assistance. Young man falls in love. Young man is humiliated. Young man journeys to sea to find himself and hopefully a future. Nothing simple, though, about the way Gurnah weaves the words to tell the story. To quote without story context would leave one feeling confused — so here goes an attempt to quote with context. Best to read the novel in entirety and enjoy the memory. Hassan is finishing his schooling: “Manhood arrived largely unremarked: no slaying of a ram, no staff and scroll and the command to go seek God and fortune.” He knew independence was close yet “I think we knew that even as we deluded ourselves with visions of unity and racial harmony. With our history of the misuse and oppression of Africans by an alliance of Arabs, Indians and Europeans, it was naïve to expect things would turn out differently. And even where distinctions were no longer visible to the naked eye, remnants of blood were always reflected in the division of the spoils of privilege. As the years passed, we bore with rising desperation the betrayal of the promise of freedom.” After graduation, Hassan needs resources for further education. While traveling by train to Nairobi for an audience with the wealthy relative who might provide said resources, Hassan shares a train car with Moses, a young man who claims to be a student at the university. Moses relates how he was such a great student he went right to university: “‘So it is easy for me. I’m do-

30 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

ing Literature. I can take it or leave it, you know, this Literature. I did well in it at school, and I knew my teacher wanted me to do it. The headmaster thought it was a good idea too. Literature is life, he “What is used to say. (GREAT line!) What did he know about life?’” the point of Arriving in the big city of Nairobi, Hassan navigates the train station: “It was what more romantic travellers would have described as the zest for life that was unmistakably African, the dance that was part of the natural rhythm of life. I found the crowd confusing and frightening.”

In the home of the wealthy relative, Bwana Ahmed, Hassan meets his cousin, Salma, for the first time. She immediately captures his attention both by her beauty and by her concern for him.

literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway.” — Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart

“‘Discrimination?’ she asked. The word sounded innocent, spoken by somebody who had not yet experienced its full squalor. I sensed some skepticism in her tone, some reluctance to credit the response that she expected me to make. ‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘Like what?’ she asked, frowning. ‘Like….yes. There is discrimination. People are victimised because they don’t have a black skin. It’s revenge. They are paying back what they owe. People are afraid. Harsh things happen. Cruel things are done. I think it hurts everybody in the end. I think it’s bad for everybody. We all end up being a little less human.’” The simple gesture of the offer of bread, called Boflo, creates a memory. “Boflo. The word suddenly brought back a memory of home. The fishermen cleaning their dugouts and watering their nets, punching holes in the water which flashed up like fragments of light. Wavecrests rearing out of the green sea. Weeds washed up on the beach like sunburnt dreams, washed and left, sinking into the wet, porous sand. In the distance a tiny boat bobs and bucks on the surface, frantic and purposeless. A log of sea-salted wood lies rotting, disembowelled, on the beach, laid open like the belly of a dolphin.” And although the world has been open somewhat to Hassan, nothing good comes of his attempt for resources, family awareness, or a budding relationship with Salma. He returns home empty handed to a degenerating family situation. He takes a position on a ship as a medical orderly as a way to flee his situation. In the final chapter he writes to Salma, a love letter of sorts. Maybe sometime in his future there will be no more departure, only its memory.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

LEGAL ISSUES Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University) <jack.montgomery@wku.edu>

Legally Speaking — Music Modernization Act Follow-Up Column Editor: Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University) <Anthony.Paganelli@wku.edu>

uring my brief tenure as a newspaper journalist, I remembered a conversation with my editor regarding follow-ups to trending or popular stories, such as major criminal stories or big announcements. We found it interesting that people become fascinated and even obsessed with a story, but only to quickly loose interest. This could be due to the oversaturation of media coverage or the story was not as interesting as people anticipated. Regardless, this made me reflect on the Music Modernization Act (MMA) that was to ease copyright and licensing issues and benefit copyright owners within the music streaming business.

The Act was constructed with three elements that includes the Musical Works Modernization Act, the Classics Protection and Access Act, and the Allocation for Music Producers Act. The most impactful element is the Musical Works Modernization Act, which addresses the musical digital downloads and streaming services that “replaces the existing song-by-song compulsory licensing system for digital music providers to make and distribute digital phonorecord deliveries (e.g., permanent downloads, limited downloads, or interactive streams)” (U.S. Copyright, Musical Works Modernization Act, 2021).

As of January 1, 2021, music copyright owners are required to register their copyrighted works with the Mechanical Licensing Collective, Inc. (MLC) in order to receive licensing fees for their works. In accordance to the Music Modernization Act, a public accessible database was created for those seeking to locate music copyrighted works for licensing agreements. The database provides information on the writers of the musical works, publishers, and other information regarding the work.

Huffman (2020) stated that “Congress recognized the infringement models some streaming companies were operating under and proposed the MMA, creating a blanket licensing system, a copyright royalty board, and a collective body to amass mechanical royalties from streaming companies on behalf of the musical publishers and songwriters” (p. 539). Of course, the Act remains a complex system that involves numerous entities.

Due to the rise in streaming music consumption, subscription-based companies are instrumental in providing access from the copyright owner to the consumer. It is also these companies that have been and continue to make substantial profits from music copyrighted works. Dahooge (2021) noted that “Spotify is the clear frontrunner for on-demand services, with 87 million paid subscribers and 191 million monthly users as of November 1, 2018” (p. 200). According to Huffman (2020), Spotify is worth $28 billion. Other music streaming companies include Apple Music, Tidal, Pandora, and Amazon Music. It is also due to these companies that the Music Modernization Act was created, because copyright owners claimed that they did not receive the proper payments for royalties from the music streaming companies.

For instance, the Mechanical Licensing Collective was established to “receive notices and reports from digital music providers, collect and distribute royalties, and identify musical works and their owners for payment” (U.S. Copyright, Musical Works Modernization Act, 2021). The Mechanical Licensing Collective administers blanket licenses to streaming companies and is funded by musical streaming companies (Huffman, 2020, p. 544). In addition, the Act allows the Librarian of Congress to appoint three Copyright Royalty Judges with the consultation of the Register of Copyrights. Their purpose is to oversee copyright royalties regarding digital musical content. (U.S. Copyright, Proceedings by Copyright Royalty Judges, 2021).

These changes to the U.S. Copyright Law was designed to be beneficial to music copyright owners as the music industry has documented an increase in digital music streaming. According to Dahooge (2021), the “Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) submitted an annual report in 2019 stating that streaming generates 75 percent of the music industry’s revenue due to generational change and the found popularity in music streaming applications” (p. 200).

According to Victor (2020), the process for streaming music requires the streaming service company to secure the mechanical license. “When music distributors like Spotify or Pandora want to obtain licenses in order to disseminate a song, they can sometimes take advantage of the compulsory licenses provided by the Copyright Act. Although these schemes are notoriously complex, their basic function is to allow anyone to license a work without permission of the copyright owner for a predetermined royalty rate, set periodically by a regulatory body known as the Copyright Royalty Board” [CRB] (p. 918).

Dahooge (2021) also provided an example of how Spotify pays artists through a typical streaming agreement. “On average, Spotify pays $0.00437 per average play, meaning that an artist will need roughly 336,842 total plays to earn $1,472. While in comparison, Spotify has an annual revenue of $4.99 billion through its paid subscribers” (pp. 212-213).

Victor (2020) stated, “in the case of the mechanical license, the CRB is instructed to ‘establish rates and terms that most clearly represent the rates and terms that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller,’ but also to consider ‘the relative roles of the copyright owner and the compulsory licensee in the copyrighted

32 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

work and the service made available to the public with respect to the relative creative contribution, technological contribution, capital investment, cost, and risk” (p. 988). Regarding the numerous copyright lawsuits prior to the MMA in 2018, Dahooge (2021) added that “Due to the new provisions in the MMA, if the lawsuit was not filed by December 31, 2017, then plaintiffs could not receive profits deriving from willful infringement, along with statutory damages or attorney’s fee — instead receiving only the royalty fees they are owed. This provision was created with the objective to modernize the process for royalty payments and clear the courts of voluminous royalty-based litigation” (p. 226). Another complexity is identifying the difference between an Interactive and Non-Interactive Service business model, which impacts the royalty payments. “An interactive streaming service is required to obtain both a public performance license and a mechanical license because copyright owners of musical works and sound recordings have a right to ‘exclusive distribution and reproduction rights.’ An interactive service reproduces and distributes the work — when the service allows users to select music to play imminently — thus needing to obtain both licenses” (Huffman, 2020, p. 541). Huffman also noted that “interactive services cannot obtain public performance licenses through the same statutory scheme — 17 U.S.C.A. § 114 — because an interactive service must negotiate with the copyright owner or a sound recording performance rights association” (p. 541). Therefore, the streaming companies “have to negotiate with the copyright owner — or a sound recording performance rights association — twice to obtain the appropriate licenses to abide by the U.S. Copyright Act” (Huffman, 2020, p. 541). Huffman (2020) stated that “A non-interactive streaming service — Pandora for example — is required to obtain a public performance license for the sound recordings and musical works it plays for subscribers” (p 540). The non-interactive streaming service is only required to obtain one license, because it is regarded as a “digital audio transmission.” (Huffman, 2020). Due to this need for two negotiated licenses, the Music Modernization Act creates the blanket licensing system. It is due to this blanket licensing that Huffman (2020) suggested that the Act is inadequate in providing proper compensation to the copyright owners. Huffman noted that streaming companies obtain a blanket license, which ensures that funding is available to the music publisher and the copyright owner, but how the funds are distributed from the record company or label to the artist is not clear. Huffman mentioned the agreements between the streaming services and the record labels that also undermine the proper royalty distributions to the copyright owner. Due to this lack of agreement between the record labels and the copyright owners, Huffman recommended copyright owners secure agreements with record labels and publishers that include streaming services. Huffman’s (2020) example of this type of agreement is the deal Taylor Swift made with Universal Music Group, which she “negotiated for any sale of their Spotify shares [to] results in a distribution of money to their artists, non-recoupable” (Huffman, 2020, p. 546). The agreement indicates that royalty-driving artists can support other artists within the record label. This is a major message to streaming services that seek to pay less for licensing fees by collaborating with record labels, such as Spotify’s incentive to record labels to lower royalty payments for equity in Spotify. Both, Huffman (2020) and Dahooge (2021) mentioned Spotify’s unwillingness to fully support copyright

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

owners’ royalty payments. In fact, Dahooge (2021) stated, “Although Spotify is the most popular service, it is ranked as having one of the worst payouts” (p. 202). And, Huffman (2020) has noted that Spotify’s business model is to “Infringe Now, Pay Later.” Dahooge (2021) reiterated that Spotify and other streaming services’ business models have a practice of infringing on copyrighted works until it becomes a litigating matter. In addition to Taylor Swift, artist Eminem’s publishing company Eight Mile Style sued Spotify for not paying the proper royalties to copyright owners. Dahooge (2021) detailed the case by describing the methods used by Spotify to avoid payments to the publisher Eight Mile Style. The lawsuit included the argument “that Spotify took bad faith steps in locating the rightsholders to Eminem’s works and streamed his work without obtaining the proper licenses” (p. 228). Also mentioned was the MMA’s liability provision, which the publisher argued that Spotify did not meet the provision’s requirements “to make commercially reasonable efforts to locate copyright owners no later than 30 days from originally streaming the music in question” (Dahooge, 2021, p. 228). It is based on the streaming services’ current practice of not making a better effort of contacting copyright owners to obtain the proper license that Dahooge argues is the issue with the Music Modernization Act. Dahooge (2021) also requested that more copyright ownership information needed to be added to music that is uploaded by the publishing company to clearly show the identity of the owners. As for the streaming services and mechanical licenses, Victor (2020) suggested that the rate setting for licenses is beneficial for both the streaming service companies and the copyright owners. Victor (2020) stated “The willing buyer-willing seller standard is thus potentially capacious enough to accommodate a more nuanced conception of copyright markets that is sensitive to the incentives/access tradeoff, and in particular the value of access-expanding technology, and the realities of market power in licensing markets” (p. 989). Currently, the Act is still new and will continue to be debated for several years. While there are still issues with resolving digital music and copyrights, the Music Modernization Act has provided opportunities for streaming companies, publishers, record labels, and artists to assess the potential issues with the legislation and work towards strengthening the issues that are currently surrounding the Act. As for another article regarding the Music Modernization Act, we will have to wait and determine how the legal system resolves many of these recent issues or if other issues arise.

References Dahooge, J.J. (2021). The real Slim Shady: How Spotify and other music streaming services are taking advantage of the loopholes within the Music Modernization Act. Journal of High Technology Law, 21(1), 199-241. Huffman, A.S. (2020). What the Music Modernization Act missed, and why Taylor Swift has the answer: Payments in streaming companies’ stock should be dispersed among all the artists at the label. Journal of Corporation Law, 45(2), 537-556. U.S. Copyright Office (2021). The Musical Works Modernization Act. Retrieved from https://www.copyright.gov/ music-modernization/115/. continued on page 35

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

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: An academic publisher asks, “What new works are entering the public domain this year?” ANSWER: After a two-decade hiatus due to the Copyright Term Extension Act, we have had the pleasure of welcoming a new “graduating class” of works into the public domain on January 1 for four years and counting. This year, works first published in 1926 enter the public domain in the United States including A.A. Milne’s classic children’s book Winnie the Pooh, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Dorothy Parker’s debut poetry collection Enough Rope. They are joined by thousands of other works as they graduate from copyright’s monopoly and become available for everyone to read, watch, and build on. In honor of this new class, The Public Domain Review created a Public Domain Advent Calendar highlighting their top picks of what lies in store for 2022. You can see the full calendar and learn more about the latest crop of works here: https://publicdomainreview.org/features/entering-the-publicdomain/2022/. This year the public domain also gains an unusual new set of works due to the Music Modernization Act (MMA). Because sound recordings were not protected at all under the 1909 Copyright Act — only the underlying written scores, scripts, and so forth — early sound recordings were often covered instead by local laws with a variety of terms including some common law protections which never expire! While the copyright term for sound recordings from 1972 and forward was addressed by the Sound Recordings Act of 1971 and the Copyright Act of 1976, earlier recordings remained in this limbo of local laws until the recent passage of the MMA. Under this new law, not only do all pre-1923 sound recordings enter the U.S. public domain in 2022, recordings from 1923 will enter in 2023, those from 1924 in 2024, and so on, up to and including 2046. As a result, the new books, films, and visual artwork discussed above will be joined by recorded songs from Scott Joplin, the first recording of Swing Low Sweet Chariot, and thousands of other sound recordings. You can view a huge selection of these materials on the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress is also celebrating this milestone with the opening of most songs in the National Jukebox (www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/). The Library of Congress will also be supporting the creation of new works that remix and build on these newly-freed materials with the Citizen DJ project (https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/publicdomain-2022/). Check out these sites to explore some amazing new materials that are free for anyone to use beginning in 2022 and share your own remixes with the world. QUESTION: An academic researcher asks, “How can I get access to the written judicial opinions of cases I read about in the news?”

34 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

ANSWER: Access to the law is a fundamental component of the U.S. legal system and a critical predicate for the rule of law more generally. After all, how can anyone be expected to follow the law — much less work to make it better through the democratic process — if they cannot even read the law? Last year in this column we covered the case of Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. where the Supreme Court considered the copyright status of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA). In that case, the Supreme Court held that the laws of the state of Georgia, as well as annotations created by a Georgia state entity called the Code Revision Commission, “fall within the government edicts doctrine and are not copyrightable.” This was wonderful news for access to statutory materials, but access to judicial opinions remains a challenge in large part because many opinions are made available to the public primarily through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. While PACER provides an important service in making judicial opinions available online, it is costly and can be challenging to use. As a result, advocates have worked for years to remove the socalled “PACER Paywall.” Media outlets as diverse as the New York Times and Reason have documented the challenges of the system and advocates have filed class-action lawsuits alleging that PACER overcharges users for access. A team from Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and Harvard University’s Berkman Center have also created a tool called RECAP (available at https://free.law/recap) that allows users to automatically search for free copies of documents during a search in PACER. Advocates for access to legal information have also lobbied for federal action to update PACER and remove the paywall. In December of 2021, they had cause to celebrate as the House of Representatives passed the Open Courts Act, marking the first time that a chamber of Congress has voted to eliminate the federal judicial system’s court records paywall. A companion bill has been proposed in the Senate with some critical differences, particularly focused on potential fees for “power users” that accrue many thousands of dollars in fees under the current system. In 2022, Congress will take up this legislation and hopefully pass it into law. Doing so would help assure that everyone — from academic researchers and journalists to pro se litigants and curious library patrons, have more complete and equitable access to the law. QUESTION: A copyright librarian asks, “Are there any tools to help me understand how well people at my institution understand copyright?” ANSWER: Copyright law is central to so much of the work done in higher education, but it often feels like one of the most misunderstood areas as well. In a given day you may speak to an

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

educator who thinks that any use in the classroom is permitted (not true), a student who fears that copying a single page from a book for private study can land them in jail (certainly not the case), and an administrator who wonders if the library has ever considered offering any workshops on copyright issues despite years of sustained outreach from your office on a host of copyright topics. Given the fact that copyright knowledge can run such a wide gamut, it can be helpful to have some resources to understand where members of your community are in their own understanding and practices. One exciting new resource in this area is the Copyright Anxiety Scale. Created by Amanda Wakaruk and Céline Gareau-Brennan, two Canadian copyright librarians working at the University of Alberta, the Scale is designed to identify and measure copyright anxiety and, potentially, copyright chill: the phenomenon “when legitimate actions are discouraged or inhibited by the threat of legal action, real or perceived.” Wakaruk and Gareau-Brennan developed the Scale in response to conflicting reports about the behavior of educators working in higher education. While on the ground they generally saw careful and often overcautious behavior based on what was permitted under the law, they report that Canadian Copyright Act review of 2018 featured many submissions that complained about mass infringement by educators. So, they wondered, which was correct? Was confusion about copyright law and its exceptions really encouraging mass infringement or was copyright misunderstanding actually discouraging legitimate uses? Was copyright, in their words, “charming or chilling?” To answer that question, they developed the Scale, a set of 18 questions that asked respondents about their confidence, comfort, concerns, and worries about various copyright concepts and scenarios. Using this Scale they surveyed individuals living in the U.S. and Canada and found that, for those individuals, copyright anxiety and chill is a real and pervasive phenomenon. You can read more about their results and find the Scale itself (both openly-licensed) in their recent article published in the Journal of Copyright Education and Librarianship: https://doi. org/10.17161/jcel.v5i1.15212. The report offers a fascinating overview of copyright chill in one community as well as a method for understanding the issue in other communities. It may also be worth your time to see whether copyright is charming or chilling members of your own community. QUESTION: A library director asks, “What do you expect the major copyright issues will be in 2022?” ANSWER: The end of one year and beginning of another is a good time to take stock. While 2022 appears to be a lighter year for copyright cases at the Supreme Court — at least compared to the recent spate of major decisions we have seen — there are plenty of significant copyright issues on the horizon. In a previous column, we covered state and federal action around eBook pricing, including SB432, passed in Maryland that requires any publisher offering to license “an electronic literary product” to consumers in the state to also offer to license the content to public libraries “on reasonable terms” that would enable library users to have access. Since that column, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) has sued to challenge the law, arguing that the federal copyright law preempts Maryland’s ability to require reasonable terms for library access. While this

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

case is in early stages and may end out focused primarily on business regulation law, it is a sign that questions about library access to eBooks — which have also been raised by the Senate Finance Committee in questions to the Big Five publishers — are likely to drive many of the copyright conversations this year. The Maryland eBook case and questions from the Senate Finance Committee are also early returns on investment by the new Library Futures advocacy group, which was named one of the Top Ten Library Stories of 2021 by Publisher’s Weekly. Library Futures has already made a significant impact on several issues in copyright law and has been a major proponent of a second major copyright issue in 2022: controlled digital lending. CDL has been used for many years, but in the wake of the ongoing pandemic applications of the practice have expanded significantly. Whether centered on individual libraries relying on CDL to expand access to rare, out-of-print works or the practices of the Internet Archive at issue in the ongoing lawsuit that grew out of the National Emergency Library, CDL will be at the heart of many copyright innovations and disputes in 2022 and beyond. A third major copyright issue to follow in 2022 is the implementation of the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020 (the CASE Act). Debated with much fanfare and then passed quietly as part of the omnibus spending bill in the heart of the pandemic and final months of the Trump presidency, CASE has been in the process of implementation by the Copyright Office for the past year. In 2022 the Copyright Office is expected to roll out the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) which will act as an alternate tribunal to hear small claims copyright cases. Libraries and publishers have already responded to a series of Notices of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and will likely continue to do so in the spring. Institutions will also be preparing to respond with local policies and training. Throw in a potential constitutional challenge to the law, and CASE should be a major driver for copyright law, policy, and practice. Finally, the Supreme Court is hearing at least one major case this term, Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P. In this case the Court is considering a relatively technical issue related to copyright registration raised by a lawsuit filed by a fashion design company. Oral arguments were heard in November of 2021 and an opinion is expected in the spring. The Andy Warhol Foundation has also applied for Supreme Court review in light of a decision from the previous term dealing with the standard for transformative fair use, so there may be more from the Supreme Court as well. Check back in this column for coverage of those cases as they proceed.

Legally Speaking continued from page 33 U.S. Copyright Office (2021). Proceedings by Copyright Royalty Judges. Retrieved from https://www.copyright.gov/ title17/92chap8.html. Victor, J. (2020). Reconceptualizing compulsory copyright licenses. Stanford Law Review, 72(4), 915-994.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

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

Preprints vs. the World • What are the headwinds facing preprints as a new form of communicating research? • What are the problems and shortcomings in preprints as they exist now? An obvious shortcoming today is trust.

New Directions in Scholarly Publishing: An SSP Virtual Seminar

The reason that preprints have become prominent is because the publishing system has failed to communicate research in a timely way.

This virtual seminar organized by the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) occurred on October 5-6, 2021 and was entitled “How to Move Fast and Not Break Things: Balancing High-Speed Outputs at the risk of Slamming on the Brakes.” According to its announcement, the seminar was, “a deep dive into the breakneck speed in which our industry is currently transitioning, transforming, and evolving, while also recognizing and highlighting the limits (and uncomfortable consequences) of moving too quickly.”

A complete disruption and paradigm shift is coming. We do not need to wait until publishers change their ways of doing things. We must get accustomed to a system where not everything is peer reviewed.

A Whole New World and Scholarship Under Fire It is our responsibility to control misinformation. 93% of the respondents to a recent poll think we are suffering from an infodemic. Toby Green, Managing Director, Coherent Digital LLC (https://coherentdigital.net/), said that many people are not familiar with the scientific process in which it is not possible to reach a conclusion until many articles have been read. Many journals publish great content but have limited visibility. Publishers usually do not get involved with recasting knowledge into a format for the Web2.0 world. We need to translate scientific data into an interface that the public can use. Sometimes research exists but is not in the journals, only in research reports which can be difficult to find. How can we merge this content with that published in journals and make it accessible? Scholarly publishers are not generally involved in finding large audiences. We can learn by looking at other media companies on the internet and seeing how they do their business. Rachel Martin, Global Director of Sustainability at Elsevier, said that the infodemic is about the challenge of finding relevant research; interdisciplinary research is critical. Trust is important when we disseminate our content. The emphasis is now on open science.

Preprints and New Content Alexandra Freeman from the Winton Centre at the University of Cambridge noted that peer review is a type of publication and an integral part of the platform. Joy Owango, AfrikArxiv (https://info.africarxiv.org/) and University of Nairobi, said preprints have been a game changer in helping researchers to improve their output. We must be realistic and understand why we need print repositories. Michele Avissar-Whiting, Editor-in-Chief, Research Square (https://www.researchsquare.com/) said preprints and their platforms operate in a parallel track to traditional publishing. An Editor-in-Chief of a preprint platform thinks about operations and maintaining academic integrity.

36 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

Today, writing is incentivized, not reviewing what other people have done. Critiquing someone else’s work constructively is a skill that we rely on. Preprint singularity: Are we moving toward a preprint/journal convergence? Preprints and journals are now converging because journals are using preprint servers as a submission platform. How do preprint servers become sustainable? How do we fund them and make that funding sustainable, equitable, and fair? Build the community and see how it can function with a moderate fee for submission. Revenue can be generated by leveraging the services offered such as helping with manuscript preparation. In the description of this panel, we said that the question is no longer if you will upload a preprint of your work, but when or how quickly you will be able to do it. Is this true or false? During the pandemic we had to publish results quickly, but now we have stepped back and are reconsidering. Because there are cultural differences in how we share research, many people are still wary of preprint servers.

New Directions in Open Access Three pairs of attendees each had a conversation about OA. John Sherer, Director, University of North Carolina (UNC) Press, and Kamran Naim, Head, Open Science, CERN UNC Press is experimenting with a digital production process. Many authors have a perception that OA is a different level of scholarship. A strong preference for print still exists, especially with large books. What happens to print in the long term? Does it take a big hit when an OA version appears? CERN hosts the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3, https://scoap3.org/), which has been studying the transition of textbooks to OA. Many publishers objected to a loss of revenue from sales of leading textbooks in their discipline. Creating an OA version does not mean dropping print. Martin Eve, Professor, Literature, Technology, and Publishing at Birkbeck and the Open Library of Humanities, University of London, and Susan Doerr, Associate Director, University of Minnesota Press Publishers need to determine what should be digital to reach the most readers globally. Researchers may think that after a platform has been built they are forced to adapt their work to it.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Sara Rouhi, Director, Strategic Partnerships, PLoS and Raym Crow, Managing Partner, Chain Bridge Group (http://www.chainbridgegroup.com/). So far, there has been no open model for publishers to reach libraries. They will benefit by working with consortia because of the reach they get. The broader the base of subscribers, the harder it is to get everyone to subscribe, which may result in a reversion to a subscription model. Let’s Get Spicy! What about the expense we invest in making physical products? Much engagement is around digital, and the print is an afterthought. What type of scholarship can be published digitally first?

What’s the Issue? Impact and Metrics Updates Perspectives on Metrics Marie McVeigh, Head, Editorial Selections, Clarivate (https:// clarivate.com/) said that metrics are not a substitute for judgement but are a tool to guide it. Rebecca Kennison, Principal, K|N Consultants (http://knconsultants.org/): In the humanities, metrics are all we have. Constraints are critical; context is also important. Josh Nicholson, Co-Founder and CEO, scite (https://scite.ai/): Metrics are diverse, and we should be cautious about using them for everything. We need context. How can we make best use of metrics? Some articles never get cited; does that mean they are not useful? A work might be cited even though it is not part of the traditional publication record. Impact means many things to people, so we may start to use metrics in new ways. Merriam Webster’s definition of impact: the moment when you have changed your environment, or when you make people think a different way. If one metric is not perfect for something that does not mean all metrics are not appropriate. Where is the impact factor being used? The impact factor (IF) lets us see the whole picture. Not all impact is the same. We talk about the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as if it is the only data point we publish. Metrics do not stand alone; we must look at them in the context in which they are provided. What about data citation? There are different DOI registries. Data is treated differently than articles. Do data citations count in a researcher’s output? How easy is it to use and understand the data? Much of it lives on GitHub (https://github.com/).

Funds, Funders, and Funding The Wellcome Trust (https://wellcome.org/who-we-are) is politically and financially independent and does not receive any funds from the public. Nearly 80% of Wellcome’s publications are openly accessible, and since the OA policy was introduced, there has been an average 5% annual increase in the proportion of OA articles. Researchers working in different fields are very interested in OA; therefore, funders should recognize that one size does not fit all. Librarians have been very helpful to researchers in keeping track of the rules and regulations for receiving funding. OA is not

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

just a requirement; it should be a right! We should all have the opportunity to publish OA. Senior Research Officers (SROs) have an increasingly centralized role in looking after research, and it is a big job, encompassing titles and reporting, academic and administrative functions, and successful scientists. They have a revenue role in some universities and have a lot of power and influence on budgeting, space allocation, and convening authority. There have been downward pressures on revenue sources, but grants have been stable. To support research, some funders provide funds in addition to the direct costs of the research, but even so, many universities have had to reduce their general funds because of revenue constraints and budget cuts. On balance, research does not pay for itself. The function of publishers is becoming more important; they must view themselves as compliance partners for authors, librarians, and funders in a progressive journey that is good for research and its impact.

New Directions in Tools for Discoverability, Findability, Shareability, and Impact There are limited funds to spend on new technology. Will this come back to haunt us? We must have a lot of integrity and not invest casually in new technology. Our industry has taken a long time to adopt things that many of us think are common sense. Do we have the ability to be agile? What portion of a strategic plan should be devoted to innovation? Innovation permeates every area of a company and is a mindset with processes around it. Organizations lose sight of the problem they are trying to solve and who they are trying to serve. Inefficiencies are not necessarily bad because we are figuring things out as we go along. If we move collectively, how much stronger would our industry be? Continuous development of a core business will lead to innovation. Should the main product of a company be the technology? Are large publishers buying technology companies because they don’t want to be in the content business? We have siloed ourselves and criticize what we do not understand. Our community needs to be more open. We should dare to do things, make mistakes, and move to things that are successful. Read the full report at https://www.charleston-hub. com/2021/12/dons-conference-notes-new-directions-in-scholarly-publishing-an-ssp-virtual-seminar/.

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.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Learning Belongs in the Library — Exploring the Role of the Library in Curriculum Design and Course Technology Support Centered on Affordability, Engagement, and OER By Column Editor: David Parker (Publisher and Consultant; Phone: 201-673-8784) <david@parkerthepublisher.com> and Andrea Eastman-Mullins (Founder/CEO West End Learning; Phone: 336-448-3327) <andrea@westendlearning.com> and Joel Nkounkou (Founder/CEO Ecotext; Phone: 603-969-1926) <jnkounkou@ecotext.co>

n the November 2021 installment of this column, I focused on regional variation in library etextbook acquisition across North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia/New Zealand and the impact of workflow solutions and university policy. I noted that affordability and the use of open access/ open education resources (OER) in curriculum design is of critical importance to libraries and that I would address this topic specifically in a future column. Over the past several months I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion concerning the place of the North American library and librarians regarding the adoption of OER with two leaders active in the space: Joel Nkounkou, CEO of ecoText: https://ecotext.co/ and Andrea Eastman-Mullins, CEO of West End Learning: https://www.westendlearning.com/. The central theme in our discussion has revolved around the many ways in which librarians have supported the adoption of OER in an institutional context that generally places OER on the periphery. To refer to OER as on “the periphery” may strike some readers as unfair given the growth of OER over the past decade plus; however, from the vantage point of administrative strategic direction concerning materials and curriculum, OER gets thin attention as compared to the role of the campus bookstore and the physical and digital learning materials there vended. One can make a credible argument that university leadership is simply responding to the faculty and its closely guarded prerogative to individually select course materials; the vast majority of faculty select traditional digital textbooks and courseware, not OER. Therefore, the university bookstore, the center for teaching and learning, and the campus technology center primarily exist to support faculty in its use of materials produced by the major textbook and learning technology companies. Were faculty to move in significant numbers toward OER, the senior university leadership would adjust its strategic emphasis and support in favor of OER. It is in this context that we then can view the place of the library in supporting the development and deployment of OER in course design. The executive leadership of the university has a potentially determining/driving role in supporting an “ecosystem” of OER adoption, but rarely does so (although there is more senior-level support for OER in the community colleges). The library leadership can emphasize the role of the library in delivering content in support of affordability, be that OER or advocacy for library-held content that can be used in course design at no incremental cost to students. Instructional designers and staff in the center for teaching and learning help faculty design courses that may, or may not, be inclusive of OER, but are typically disconnected from content resources in the library. And campus technology centers pull everything together for learning management system integration but, like instructional designers, are task and faculty support driven, and

38 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

are not considering content beyond that selected and delivered by the faculty member. This may appear a bleak view for OER. The administration rarely pushes for broader use of OER, with the notable exception of community colleges. The library increasingly supports OER and other routes to course content affordability. The instructional designers, teaching and learning staff, and the technology center work at a distance from the library. But, in increasingly common occurrences, actors from these various poles in the university ecosystem are aligning to support “Libraries are an individual faculty request with championing the the goal of broadening OER usage. use of affordable Two such examples follow from the experiences of EcoText and West resources and End Learning.

OER, and they

West End Learning was founded need help to to better connect faculty to affordsupport more able teaching materials available openly or via the library. Libraries faculty.” are championing the use of affordable resources and OER, and they need help to support more faculty. There is impressive open material available from scholars, associations, museums, and libraries waiting to be discovered. OERs are important for reuse and remixing, but the spectrum of affordable content is much broader. The first question at West End Learning was why faculty weren’t making better use of these materials. The West End Learning team began working directly with faculty to design courses using low-cost materials. The best outcomes were achieved when there was collaboration between faculty, the library, the center for teaching and learning, and instructional designers. At Salem College, for example, a private liberal arts college for women, the provost sponsored an initiative on instructional innovation, supporting 10 selected faculty from a variety of disciplines to convert their courses to use OER or affordable content. The faculty received small grants and support from the College. The group included the Director of Libraries, Elizabeth Novicki, and the head of the center for teaching and learning, Paula Young. Salem College didn’t have an instructional designer, so West End Learning provided this service. The library helped with eBook selections, textbook reserves, and laptop access to support courses. This was primairly a faculty-led effort, but it proved more useful when the library collaborated. It also gave the library a clearer line of vision into what was being taught on campus, which could inform collection development. West End Learning also worked with Christina Elson, Executive Director of the Wake Forest University Center for the Study

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

of Capitalism. She wanted to develop a fully asynchronous course, Introduction to Business & Society, for the Master’s in Management program. She had already built the learning objectives and written some of her own content, and she needed help pulling together effective resources and activities. She wanted to be mindful of student costs and develop a menu of resources so other faculty could deliver the course using their own styles. West End Learning engaged with Christina to manage the project and provided instructional design guidance. West End Learning brought in the business librarian, Summer Krstevska, to recommend open content that would supplement the modules. In this case, the library provided the role of content curator. Summer found videos, podcasts, articles, and eBooks, including those available in the library. She helped ensure links from the LMS connected seamlessly with library content, eliminating the need to post PDFs or paid links to the content. The library was also able to acquire eBooks based on the recommendations in the course.

on campus, and continuous product iteration that incorporates feedback from students. If the faculty see teaching materials as dynamic resources, they will be more open to leveraging open resources, and by consequence, creating an experience that does not end with students facing an expensive textbook or courseware bill. Librarians, by their nature, do tend to view learning resources as dynamic.

While the courses at both colleges were stronger due to the collaboration between campus groups and the library, the projects took more to create custom courses rather than adopting a textbook and its supporting publisher-produced resources. Coordinating and facilitating course design between librarians, instructional designers, and faculty, while keeping the learning objectives central, is work that most faculty and librarians do not have time to address. Yet making space for it enables the library to contribute to the core of the institutional mission to educate. Retention rates are shown to improve if the campus is using open resources, and libraries can play a significant role curating the highest quality OER. Yet it is a struggle, because most faculty don’t think of the library when designing courses. As we move into a world that focuses more on curating content than collecting it, libraries will play a critical role.

At Kent School, ecoText was paired with the open resource title: Liberty, Equality and Due Process: Cases, Controversies, and Contexts in Constitutional Law (https://open.umn.edu/ opentextbooks/textbooks/liberty-equality-and-due-process-casescontroversies-and-contexts-in-constitutional-law). The teacher led the class through readings, asking students to respond to prompts and reflections via social annotations directly in the margins of the text via the ecoText reader. The instructor that led this effort also serves as the school’s head librarian. The library was in a unique position to serve as the connective tissue, developing curriculum design while also supporting universal accessibility for students and a collaborative learning experience via the ecoText reader.

ecoText was founded to address affordability, accessibility and to deliver a dynamic and engaging student experience by fostering collaborative reading, discussion and study in the reader. Providing a digital backbone for both students and educators to actively participate has unlocked an opportunity for ecoText to affect the existing culture around textbooks, moving from passive, individual engagement to collective, active engagement. OER is foundational to the ecoText mission to support affordable access, but delivering an exceptional student experience requires thoughtfulness, strategic coordination with leadership

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

Trenholm State Community College had a mission to migrate to an OER-based curriculum. Goals this ambitious require campus-wide cooperation: support from the president, training sessions to support the search and identification of appropriate content, support from the instructional designers, and in-person visits from the technology team at ecoText. The ecoText team observed firsthand the impact of the library’s contributions. In fact, the leadership in the library at Trenholm State Community College led the critical operational efforts in allocating the student licenses for access to the ecoText reader as a tool for organizing the selected course content.

Learning belongs in the library. With an ever-growing set of library-held resources available for course design and a growing focus on curating OER, the library is ideally suited to work with faculty in partnership with the center for teaching and learning to design affordable and high-quality learning experiences for students. Reading platform options like ecoText that spur collaboration can be part of the library and the instructional design toolkit. And services such as West End Learning provides can help interested parties across the campus bring together a solution that captures the very best input of faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and educational technology support.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Library Analytics: Shaping the Future — Comparing Apples to Cumquats: The Past and Future of Library Analytics By Andrew White, PhD (Director, Library Information Services, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) <whitea9@rpi.edu> Column Editors: Tamir Borensztajn (Vice President of SaaS Strategy, EBSCO Information Services) <tborensztajn@ebsco.com> and Kathleen McEvoy (Vice President of Communications, EBSCO Information Services) <kmcevoy@ebsco.com>

he collection and use of analytics for libraries is not a 21st century innovation. Numbers that are associated with library operations and services such as gate counts, circulation transactions, community programs, total bound volumes, individual book titles, reference questions answered, as well as linear feet of shelving represent some subset of the types of analytical data libraries have been collecting for some time. What analytics should be and are collected can vary by library type. But regardless of whether the library supports elementary or secondary education, a public community, an institution of higher education, a hospital, a law firm, or a corporation, gathering analytics have been and are still part of library operations. The aforementioned analytics examples address data about the physical library, in terms of both collections and services. But clearly, the rise and adoption of computer technologies and networks has shifted both the focus and emphasis on what types of data libraries gather for analysis. Some fifteen years ago, I wrote about the then evolving discipline of e-metrics for libraries. Certainly, much has changed since then, including the methods, variety, and details of e-metrics and analytics. Many of these changes have been for the better. For example, Project COUNTER has greatly improved the ability for libraries to assess the usage and financial value of digital information formats within their respective collections. Yet, some of the challenges that existed even prior to the digital transformation still persist while other potential analytics options have perhaps increased due to conditions catalyzed by the global COVID-19 pandemic. But first, why do libraries gather and analyze data? Most likely, libraries use analytics to assist in understanding and improving the utilization of services and collections. And such data is also likely to be used to demonstrate library impact, value and return on investment to a parent organization or governing body. But with the majority of library analytics initiated and evolving as quantitative information for the purposes of developing operational excellence, how are these same analytics leveraged to tell the story of library impact? To put this question in context, let us consider a comparison between pre- and current pandemic scenarios for a library. Under relatively stable pre-pandemic operating conditions, a library is able to provide physical and virtual access simultaneously to a spectrum of services and collections. Various analytics for gate counts, book and media circulation, and reference transactions can serve as indicators of activity volume. By extension, the same data acts as proxies for illustrating some degree of library value with an assumption that more activity is indicative of increased assigned value. However, what if those same quantitative analytics were interpreted by the library’s parent organization or governing body during pandemic conditions? Under pandemic requirements for social distancing or the quarantining of materials, along with various restrictions to the physical library, the analytics for physical services and collections would show a dramatic

40 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

decrease. Meanwhile, examples of current library virtual services analytics, such as numbers of virtual chat reference questions, library website sessions, and full-text downloads of online journal articles would exhibit an increase. Yet the combination and comparison of these two different service analyses and the disparity between the numbers could easily support administrative conclusions for cost-saving or budget reallocations. With reduced activity associated with the physical library, why not reduce library funding, cut staffing “… should through furloughs or lay-offs, and libraries be shrink other services that appear as developing non-critical in the analytics? The an analytics potential danger here is that quantitative library performance analytics portfolio … without broader context can lead to for achieving detrimental decisions.

operational

In the above pandemic scenario, excellence and supplemental non-library analytics are the missing elements for better another analytics administrative decisions. And adset to address ditional non-library analytics are … return on needed to paint a more compreinvestment hensive picture of library impact. For example, libraries gather quite narratives?” a bit of quantitative information for collection development purposes as a way to maximize finances while supporting a diversity of topics, subjects, and information formats available and relevant to their respective user community. And even the previously noted examples of library service analytics, while excellent quantitative indicators of activity, fall short of providing concrete qualitative evidence of impact and value. There are numerous efforts devoted to assembling library value and impact analytics that are already underway. Return-on-investment calculators and large-scale user surveys are some of the methods that have utilized analytics to demonstrate the value of academic, public, and corporate libraries. In order to illustrate the effect that library operations have on the outcomes or performance of the parent organization and associated stakeholders, such methods require combining various analytics and data. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, for example, the university “...examined the use of citations drawn from library resources in grant proposals, the success rate for proposals, and the average grant award. The university provided institutional data on the percent of faculty who are principal investigators, their success rate with grant proposals, the amount of university grants, and the library budget. A survey was conducted with UIUC faculty that validated assumptions in the model and provided measures that confirmed the importance and frequency of citations in

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

grant proposals, and the likelihood that the citations used in grant proposals were drawn from library resources.”1 This academic library example shows how quantitative and qualitative analytics are not mutually exclusive and are useful in understanding both library operations and impact. The example also demonstrates that when it comes to showing library impact, the data that evolved for collection development purposes now must be re-contextualized to become proxies for qualitative conclusions when combined with other types of non-library analytics. Even in this example, we spot the well-established reporting habits in the larger information ecosystem that ultimately contribute to a continued reliance on quantitative data by libraries. The various citation impact metrics used by both publishers and authors are a prime example of how quantitative analytics are applied as approximations for determining and assigning value. Generally speaking, from a library collection development perspective, and frequently from a promotion and tenure perspective, more citations is assumed to equate to greater value and, in some instances, justification for higher costs of information access. In public libraries, the library value calculations also tend to focus on the amount of money spent on library collections and services compared with the amount of money generated or saved in the library’s geographic service area. A review of the 20172018 Division of Library and Information Services Library and Data Statistics from the Florida Department of State illustrates such a foundational reliance on quantitative data. What follows is a portion of the information found in Table 22 — Collection Expenditures Per Capita — FY 2017-18. In this table the service area population data was provided by the Florida Estimates of Population, published by the University of Florida, Bureau of Economic and Business Research. This population data is then combined with library collections budget data from the Division of Library and Information Services.2

Taking these numbers at face value, the table shows that Miami-Dade serves more individuals than Palm Beach, and that Miami-Dade spends less on collections than Palm Beach. But does this comparison illustrate that one library is more or less cost effective for its respective service population? The Collection Expenditures Per Capita was calculated by dividing the Total Collection Expenditures per library by its respective Service Area Population. But is there a certainty that every individual in the population of a respective service area is a user of their associated library system? When viewed as annual statistics over the period of a few years, such analytics have been very useful in identifying various trends, such as library collection expenditures, increased dependency on digital content, and adaptations in staffing titles and duties. However, it is not uncommon to see analytics comparable to the above table used for the purposes of rankings and peer comparisons. Maybe you have been asked to provide analytics data that is initially intended for national surveys, only later on to refer to that same national survey data in a larger aspirational peer comparison. Such comparisons can serve administrative lobbying efforts for more financial resources, reallocations or reductions in staffing or space, or modifications to hours and

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

services. In such cases, the analytics standardizations needed for national surveys obscure some of the variability and peculiarities inherent in library peer comparisons. In the previous Florida public libraries example, does the table indicate that Miami-Dade should have an increase to its collections budget because its population is almost 2.5 times that of Palm Beach’s? How comparable are the collections of libraries in small private universities when there is only moderate commonality in the overall academic programs offered and research conducted at the schools in the comparison? Perhaps the problem is that various library analytics are being presented to two different audiences with the hope that these same analytics will serve two different purposes. And unlike the analytics and data standardization that exists in various national surveys, there appears to be less agreement on what is to be counted and why when it comes to collecting and reporting data intended to illustrate library value. So if the analytics needs, purpose, and application differ depending upon the consuming audience, should libraries be developing an analytics portfolio designed specifically for achieving operational excellence and another analytics set to address the value, impact, and return on investment narratives? To date, most library service analytics lack details that could illustrate use and impact at a user, customer, patron, or stakeholder level. Website visits, gate counts, COUNTER usage statistics, reference transactions, along with attendance at community programs and movie showings are some examples that tend to report activity numbers in terms of volume.The aforementioned UIUC example of assessing library value tries to supplement the quantitative activity tracking analytics by correlating the expenditures for library collections with faculty success, still relying on other homogeneous analytics in asserting positive library return on investment for the university. Yet we are seeing some other citation initiatives, like alternative metrics to impact factors, that aim to assess societal impacts of research through mentions in the news, blogs, tweets, posts, or policy. I recall a conversation with one academic vice president and former editor of a prominent peer-reviewed journal, in which he challenged the various citation metrics as impact indicators. While he acknowledged that citation metrics provided some gauge of research impact, he indicated that he was more interested as an administrator in knowing which research outcome from a given author had the most significant contribution to innovation and new discovery, value factors not necessarily captured by counting the frequency of citations. The increased reliance on networked access to cloud-based services and platforms can offer new opportunities for libraries to gather and collect data that provide greater understanding of library impact. As part of the larger shift to remote work and education activities, evidence suggests that pandemic conditions have stimulated greater interest in a combination of necessary increased cybersecurity and simpler user authentication systems. Such a combination perhaps offers user demographics analytics via library network authentication strategies now transitioning towards multi-factor and federated infrastructures. By contrast, a significant portion of Internet commerce and social media companies have leveraged for some time their ability to report activities at demographic levels, providing opportunities to analyze and understand value and impact. But with any technological innovation, libraries have good reason to be concerned about the potential pitfalls when ensuring adherence to privacy and security of such data. There are numerous examples where such user level data has been misused, compromised, or sold

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

without user knowledge or approval. So as part of the continued commitment to and interest of patron privacy, libraries should have a seat at the table in order to shape and define the types of user level information that is being shared, gathered, and reported for the purposes of both service improvement and demonstrating value. Still, libraries could begin rethinking the types of value-centric data that can be gathered and reported from existing systems and data sources. Even the development of some basic demographic level service analytics from patron categories which are initially intended as evidence of value could provide a secondary function of feeding back into service improvement analyses. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, our library has gathered and reported inter-library loan activity at both demographic and material format levels. Such analytics helped to demonstrate library value and productivity during a period when the physical library was off-limits to all but library staff. The data also revealed trends in preferred and available information formats as well as subject interests, analytics that can contribute to improvements in collection development, interlibrary loan services, and consortially-based reciprocal borrowing/lending agreements. Our hope is that reporting inter-library loan activity

at the demographic level helps to dispel some of stereotypical notions of libraries and their staff being less productive when they are physically unavailable to the public. So if history is any indication, the advancement of both information technologies and information management will continue to increase our reliance on analytics as tools for data-driven decisions. And as information formats, methods of digital access, and standards for authentication evolve, libraries will need to re-imagine how best to develop new and existing analytics in order to more accurately demonstrate their continued importance and value to many facets of the global society and economy.

Endnotes 1. http://www.informedstrategies.com/wp-content/ uploads/2015/10/lcwp0101_1_.pdf, p.3 2. https://dos.myflorida.com/media/702236/table-22collection-expenditures-per-capita.pdf

Rumors continued from page 8 so appreciated over the years. Matthew is Editor in Chief of the Charleston Briefings: Trending Topics for Information Professionals and has served in that role since 2016. He is a frequent contributor to interviews for ATG: The Podcast as well as articles for the Charleston Hub. He is also a Meditation and Yoga Teacher at Dost Meditation and led two yoga breaks at the 2021 Charleston Conference. Liz Rhaney, Library Collections and Programming Manager at the Maine College of Art and Design, was the 2021 recipient of the Cynthia Graham Hurd Memorial Scholarship, sponsored by Springer Nature. An excerpt from her award nomination says, “Liz was instrumental in the launch of the Materials Collection space and has been an active, contributing member of the community through participation in important fundraising and diversity efforts (e.g., the Fashion Show and Resilience Week). Liz also has helped to shape the FYE Common Read program in important ways, both related to selection of texts and programming ideas. In my opinion, Liz’s biggest accomplishment is her ability to help us reorient what it means to be a library and research support department in 2021.” Cynthia Graham Hurd, in whose name the scholarship was established, was a librarian for over 31 years in Charleston public and academic libraries. In June 2016, her life was tragically ended when a lone gunman entered the historic Emanuel AME Church and killed nine people during a prayer meeting. We were thrilled when Springer Nature approached the Charleston Conference with the idea to start a scholarship in

42 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

her name in 2016, and we’re thankful that they’ve continued the award each year since then. Moderated by Darrell Gunter, President and CEO of Gunter Media Group, the ever-popular Charleston Premiers session features 5-minute previews of new and noteworthy products, platforms, or content. The contestants selected to participate in 2021 were: • • • • •

Cadmore Media Ground News Lean Library OverDrive Academic Technology from SAGE

The audience voted on three categories. The winners were: • Best Design: Ground News • Most Impactful: Tie between Lean Library and Ground News • Best New Product: Ground News

continued on page 49

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Let’s Get Technical — Subject Heading Prediction By Tris Shores (Developer, PredictiveBIB project) <trishores@gmail.com> and Alisha Taylor (Monograph & Media Cataloging Coordinator, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and former cataloger at Ingram Books) <alisha@illinois.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>

Introduction One of the most labor-intensive aspects of original cataloging is Library of Congress subject heading (LCSH) assignment as it requires familiarity with subject area terminology, interpretation of subject authority records, and construction of compound subject headings with subdivisions. Since LCSH vocabulary numbers are in the hundreds of thousands and can be quite esoteric/specific/ dated, catalogers may find it easier to categorize a book’s content using terms (aka descriptors) drawn from a simpler and more contemporary controlled-vocabulary relevant to a collection’s subject areas. Descriptors (from a custom vocabulary) and LCSH for two books are shown below:

The following Map fragment, portrayed as a concept map, shows the descriptors ‘Combat’, ‘Paranormal’, and ‘Outer space’ individually mapped to various LCSH: A Boolean AND search for LCSH associated with the descriptors ‘Comb a t’ a n d ‘ P a r a normal’ returns: ‘Women superheroes’ and ‘Yoda (Fictitious character from Lucas)’. Another Map fragment, portrayed as a Venn diagram, shows the descriptors, ‘People’, ‘Young’, ‘Animals’, ‘Relationship’, ‘Paranormal’, and ‘Religion’ individually mapped to various LCSH:A Boolean AND search for LCSH associated with the descriptors, ‘People’, ‘Animals’, and ‘Relationship’, returns ‘Human-animal relationships’ and ‘Aviculture’.

Assuming it’s faster for catalogers to come up with descriptors than LCSH terms, this article describes a technique for automated prediction of LCSH based on a cataloger’s selection of book descriptors. At first glance, the extra step of assigning descriptors appears to slow down the cataloging process, but in reality the extra step is akin to taking the time to chop up a potato before eating it. This technique is especially relevant to organizations that create original bibliographic records in a production environment where time-savings and reduced complexity are important considerations.

Predicting LCSH using a Descriptor-LCSH Map At the core of this technique is a descriptor-LCSH map (Map), which associates book descriptors with LCSH. Not only are descriptors drawn from a controlled vocabulary, they should individually have a one-to-many relationship with LCSH (in other words, be a more generalized vocabulary).

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

A mature Map is likely to contain hundreds of descriptors mapped to thousands of LCSH, but can be rapidly queried by a computer to extract the associated LCSH for a given set of descriptors (using a Boolean AND search). One implementation strategy is to incorporate the Map in a cloud API service. Catalogers would utilize the cloud service by making an API request call sending the descriptors for a book and an LCSH type (main topic, subtopic, geographic, or chronological), and in return receive a list of auto-suggested LCSH (of the requested type) ranked by LCSH usage popularity. Optimally, cataloging software will automate the cloud API calls on behalf of catalogers.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Just as important, catalogers may enrich the Map by making an API feedback call on completion of each book cataloged to report the book’s assigned descriptors and LCSH (complex subdivisions must be separated and tagged by LCSH type). Consequently, as books are cataloged the Map grows organically using crowdsourced cataloger-generated metadata. Crowdsourcing allows the map to expand more quickly, but requires contributing catalogers to use a common descriptor vocabulary. Different collection types (e.g., medical, legal, public library) would have different descriptor vocabularies and the Maps would be very different. Some institutions or consortiums may prefer to adopt a private descriptor vocabulary and a private Map (internally crowdsourced) to retain control over those components.

Automated Construction of the Descriptor-LCSH Map The following steps outline how automated processing of cataloger-assigned descriptors and LCSH terms can extend the Map and enhance LCSH prediction. On receipt of a cataloged book’s descriptors and LCSH terms, a computer will: 1. Increase the set of LCSH terms to also include variant terms. 2. Identify all possible descriptor-LCSH pair combinations by pairing up each descriptor with each LCSH term. 3. Mark all descriptor-LCSH pairs as tentative since the validity of each pair is conditional on a semantic association between a descriptor and its paired LCSH term. 4. Use a word/phrase thesaurus to help evaluate the validity of each descriptor-LCSH pair. For a book with descriptors ‘Outer space’, ‘Combat’, and ‘Romance’, and the LCSH term ‘Space warfare’, semantic analysis would assess the pairs as follows: a. Descriptor ‘Outer space’ and LCSH term ‘Space warfare’: valid pair due to a common word with same contextual meaning. b. Descriptor ‘Combat’ and LCSH term ‘Space warfare’: valid pair since combat and warfare are synonyms.

7. A usage counter for each validated (and invalidated) descriptor-LCSH pair is incremented to assess occurrence frequency and facilitate future consistency checks. 8. A usage counter for each LCSH term is incremented to track LCSH usage frequency (popularity). Since the Map auto-updates in real-time, newly added LCSH terms are immediately available as candidates for auto-suggestion. As a quality control measure, an updated map can be scoped to the cataloging institution that effected the change pending a manual review and approval for general release (analogous to a Git pull request). It is also prudent for participant institutions to restrict API feedback calls to experienced catalogers so that inexperienced catalogers are prevented from modifying the map but are still able to request LCSH and leverage the knowledge of more experienced catalogers.

Self-Evolving Prediction Algorithm This technique for auto-suggesting LCSH is a prediction algorithm, with the Map as its core component. Since the Map auto-updates following API feedback calls, the prediction algorithm is self-evolving. With periodic manual review of auto-validated Map pairs, the algorithm’s evolution is semi-supervised. PredictiveBIB, an experimental desktop cataloging app that generates MARC & BIBFRAME records, connects to a cloud API service for LCSH prediction as described above. The app was used to catalog 373 public library books. The Map has 574 unique descriptors (drawn from a custom vocabulary), 1030 unique subject headings, and 4087 descriptor-LCSH pairs, indicating that each descriptor is associated with on average 7 LCSH terms. 14% of the LCSH terms were not assigned by catalogers, indicating that these are variant LCSH terms that the prediction algorithm injected and associated with at least one descriptor.

LCSH Prediction Examples The auto-suggested LCSH terms (drawn from the Venn diagram Map fragment) for each descriptor combination are:

c. Descriptor ‘Romance’ and LCSH term ‘Space warfare’: invalid pair since they are unrelated semantically. 5. Use pattern matching to help evaluate the validity of each descriptor-LCSH pair by looking for consistent usage of the pair across a large dataset of bibliographic records (see step 7). Using the preceding example, pattern analysis might assess the pairs as follows: a. Descriptor ‘Outer space’ found in 98% of records that contain the LCSH term ‘Space warfare’: valid pair due to high consistency. b. Descriptor ‘Combat’ found in 95% of records that contain the LCSH term ‘Space warfare’: valid pair due to high consistency. c. Descriptor ‘Romance’ found in 42% of records that contain the LCSH term ‘Space warfare’: invalid pair due to low consistency. 6. Only validated descriptor-LCSH pairs are added to the Map. LCSH type tags (main topic, subtopic, geographic, or chronological) are preserved.

44 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

NOTE: This is the version without the landing page URL

8 Library Services That Will...

Make You Smile. 1) Publishing Sources - Almost 200,000 at our disposal 2) New Title Selection Plan - Immediate notiﬁcation 3) Electronic Ordering - Simple online ordering system 4) Early Release Program - Immediate availability guarantee 5) Cataloging - We do the busy-work for you 6) Comprehensive Reporting - Up-to-the-minute

“ Things always go smoothly with Emery-Pratt. Their people are knowledgeable, and always provide friendly, rapid service.” Cameron University Lawton, OK

order status

7) Duplicate Order Alert - We’re on guard, you avoid hassles

8) Paperback Reinforcement & Binding Avoid expensive wear & obsolescence

For more details, visit: emery-pratt.com

Dependability. Reliability. Smileability. 1966 W M 21, Owosso, MI 48867-9317 Phone: 800 248-3887 • Fax: 800 523-6379

emery-pratt.com

Alternative Descriptors Uses

Conclusion

A static descriptor-LCGFT lookup table can be used to predict Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms. For example, the descriptor ‘Paranormal’ is related to the following three LCGFT:

Automated LCSH prediction empowers inexperienced catalogers to take on one of the most challenging areas of cataloging and accelerates cataloging. However, the quality of predicted LCSH is dependent upon accurate book assessment and descriptor selection by contributing catalogers, as well as automated & manual Map review processes. Subject heading prediction is independent of bibliographic record format, material-format, language, organization type, subject heading vocabulary, or collection subject area.

Resources Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, Concept Maps. Auto-suggestion of LCGFT based on a cataloger’s selection of descriptors will reduce the likelihood that inexperienced catalogers will omit applicable genre/form terms. Descriptors, if added to a bibliographic record, lend themselves to a simple human-readable public-domain classification scheme and can also be leveraged by an ILS-based readers’ advisory service. Using a MARC example, descriptors that are hierarchically organized (e.g., ǂa for book type, ǂb for book categories, ǂc for book sub-categories, ǂd for mood terms, ǂe for tempo terms) might look like:

Lang, Ruth Emmie. Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. PredictiveBIB website, https://predictivebib.org. Accessed 26 June 2021.

907 __ ǂa Novel ǂb Suspense ǂc War ǂc Spy ǂd Grim ǂe Fast-paced

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Biz of Digital — Library Equipment Lifecycle Planning & The Triple Bottom Line: Initial Steps Towards More Sustainable IT Management at an Academic Library By Carolyn Sheffield (Associate Director of Library Technology and Digital Strategies, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-2964) <csheffield@umbc.edu> Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Acquisitions and Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-6754; Fax: 410-455-1598) <flinchba@umbc.edu>

Abstract Environmental sustainability, while not new to the library profession, continues to warrant more focused planning, particularly as climate change accelerates and has increasing impacts in both local and global contexts. These impacts include several extreme weather events already this year that have damaged homes, businesses, and communities, and can contribute to food insecurity, making climate change as much a social issue as an environmental one. Indeed, as part of the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) adoption of sustainability as a core value of librarianship,1 ALA committed to the “triple bottom line” framework which calls for measuring impacts of business decisions not only on the financial bottom line (i.e., profit) but also on social equity (i.e., people), and on the environment (i.e., planet). (https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2019/05/ ala-adding-sustainability-core-value-librarianship) This article presents recent efforts to incorporate the triple bottom line philosophy into equipment lifecycle planning at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). The author shares resources identified and incorporated into workflow planning for equipment lifecycle management, focusing on low-to-no-cost and low effort opportunities for other libraries to pursue similar initiatives, and challenges identified for further enhancing incorporation of environmental and social sustainability considerations into IT & Digital Strategies planning.

Background The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is a public research university serving a student body of approximately 13,600 and employs over 800 faculty members. UMBC is committed to environmental sustainability and was one of five recipients of the 2021 Maryland Green Registry Sustainability Leadership Award https://mde.maryland.gov/ marylandgreen/pages/leadershipwinners.aspx. The Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, where I serve as the Associate Director of Library Technology & Digital Strategies, serves all UMBC faculty, staff, and students, as well as scholars from other University System of Maryland campuses and the surrounding community. In my role, I am exploring and implementing strategies to incorporate environmental sustainability into our IT planning. I want to share what I have discovered here because I believe it is important that the library profession collectively think about and address sustainability. This article will outline how I perceive the triple bottom line in relation to libraries, introduce some easy-to-adopt strategies I have begun to implement in my own planning, which I see as low-barrier opportunities for others to consider adopting; and

46 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

it will also highlight some of the remaining challenges I have encountered in my planning.

Triple Bottom Line & Libraries The triple bottom line is a framework that calls for the social and environmental impacts of decisions to be given the same weight and consideration as financial returns. Attributed to sustainable business author John Elkington,2 the framework is often distilled as the three Ps: People, Planet, and Profit. Below, I outline the core concepts of each along with my perspective of how these apply in the context of academic libraries. People: The employees, customers, partners, and community members that will be potentially impacted, positively or negatively, by decisions being made. In an academic library, this would include library employees, library users (physical and remote), employees of the parent institution, internal and external partners, and the surrounding local community. More broadly, it can also include people in different parts of the world impacted by supply chain decisions and methods of businesses with which libraries work. Planet: This refers to any environmental impact that decisions may have. For libraries, the most obvious ones might be the local impact in terms of waste management or electricity use. Less obvious ones might again include the impacts of decisions made by vendors within the library’s supply chain for collections, technology, office supplies, or other materials. Our day-to-day operations contribute to overall greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to impacts on the planet overall. Profit: In a library or other non-profit driven organization, profit can be reframed to think about services and goals. Even if our end goal is not to make a profit, the decisions we make should still be guided to ensure we continue to successfully provide the services that enable us to achieve our mission. With the limited budgets available to most libraries, seeking economical options, assessing cost-benefit ratios, and focusing on return on investment are already familiar to many librarians with purchasing and other decision-making responsibilities. In identifying opportunities to more prominently center the people and planet bottom lines, it is important to recognize that most libraries operate under the auspices of larger entities. Some parent organizations, such as universities for academic libraries or county governments for public libraries, may provide both high-level guidance on or direct support of sustainability (e.g., energy efficient practices) and access to specific resources (e.g., recycling services or other enterprise-level solutions). Using the technology purchasing phase of equipment lifecycle planning at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery as a case study, I will share examples of some of the resources and guidance available to

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

UMBC units, present strategies adopted or in-progress at the library, and describe some remaining challenges and next steps.

The Triple Bottom Line Strategies for Technology Purchasing Equipment lifecycle planning encompasses four main stages: planning, purchasing, use (including operation and maintenance), and disposal. For a practical introduction to IT planning, Silveira’s (2018) “Library Technology Planning for Today and Tomorrow”3 offers an excellent starting point with step-by-step guidance and helpful templates that also touches on many of these areas. For this article, I will focus primarily on purchasing, including a brief overview of the context at my institution, a sample of current and in-progress efforts towards incorporating the triple bottom line, and next steps. I will also highlight some considerations at the purchasing stage that support sustainability at the later stages of use and eventual disposal. Technology purchases for both the public and employees are at the discretion of the library and are my responsibility to select. I work closely with the Library IT Operations Manager to research and select from various options. At UMBC, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) serves as the central IT unit for the campus and, among many other services and support, provides recommended computer (Dell and Mac) configurations for faculty and students, including for institutional and personal purchases. Recommendations from DoIT and vendors that have a proven track record with the University are not always final deciding factors but are taken into consideration when choosing between options. The economic or “profit” component of the triple bottom line is already well-established and familiar to most librarians and library IT staff having responsibility in this area, and is generally the most straightforward to navigate. Most functional features and costs are either readily available online or quickly attainable by requesting quotes from vendors. Vendors are increasingly also providing data about their sustainability efforts and commitments, although these are often inconsistent and difficult to compare across vendors or sometimes even across products for a given vendor. For incorporating environmental and social considerations into the technology purchasing process, I started by reviewing the EPA’s guidance on identifying greener electronics (https:// www.epa.gov/greenerproducts/identifying-greener-electronics). This provided pointers to a number of helpful resources, most notably the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT). EPEAT applies tiered rankings of Bronze, Silver, and Gold for a wide range of commonly used electronic products and models from well-known vendors. The rankings are assigned by the General Electronics Council in accordance with ISO 14024:2018 Environmental labels and declarations — Type I environmental declarations — Principles and procedures. The EPEAT website provides a searchable, sortable database of computers and displays (e.g., laptops, desktops, monitors), imaging equipment (e.g., printers, and scanners), servers, network equipment, and more. Users can search for specific models, which can be beneficial in choosing between a few models under consideration or a specific model that has already been recommended. Search results are sortable to allow for easy comparisons across various models. Results are also exportable and, with the advanced option, it is possible to view all criteria that were used in reaching the assigned ranking. Within the exported results, the criteria are presented as numbered columns; to see the criteria corresponding to those numbers follow the link to the

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

Advanced Filter Options on the search page for a given product type. In addition to several criteria related to the environmental sustainability of production practices for a given model, section 4.4 of the EPEAT criteria covers Product Longevity / Lifecycle Extension which can be helpful for planning for the use phase of equipment lifecycle management (e.g., maintenance and repairs). Examples of longevity sub-criteria for the computers/ monitors category include (4.4.2.2) Publicly available service information, (4.4.2.5) Product upgradeability and repairability, and (4.4.1.2) Long life rechargeable battery. Some common library technologies (e.g., self checkout machines) may not have a third party assessment with comparative data such as that provided by EPEAT, thus making assessments more challenging and time-consuming. To help address this, my next steps will be to create a tracking sheet using EPEAT criteria and populate it with information on vendor websites and, when unavailable, to request information from vendors on if/how their product(s) meet those criteria. I will admit I am concerned about the time requirement, but the hope is that if more requests for this information continue to reach vendors, it will motivate them to share it more proactively and transparently on their websites or perhaps even to investigate opportunities to make their products more sustainable. Although EPEAT focuses primarily on environmental sustainability, it is important to acknowledge that there are some criteria specifically related to social issues. Within the Computer & Displays category, for example, criteria include (4.10.1.1) Socially responsible manufacturing: Labor; (4.10.1.2) Socially responsible manufacturing: (Occupational Health and Safety); and (4.10.2.2) Participation in an in-region program that advances responsible sourcing of conflict minerals. The ability to filter results by these criteria could be particularly helpful for any libraries, or their parent organizations, which have set targets for improving in any of these areas. The social bottom line of technology purchases is also guided by the eventual use of the equipment. Libraries making computers and other devices available to their target audiences is in itself a contribution to the social bottom line and much should already be available in the literature on the positive social impacts of these efforts. In terms of specific considerations that can inform purchasing, I would emphasize the importance of considering accessibility of a given technology. For a little over two years, I have served on the University’s IT Accessibility Working Group comprising representatives from departments including DoIT, the Office of Accessibility and Disability Services, Procurement, the Office of Advancement, and of course the Library. The Working Group’s charge is to develop a three-year IT Accessibility Plan including setting targets for improving accessibility across our IT infrastructure. For the Library, our targets related to my areas of oversight include adding and maintaining specific assistive technologies in collaboration with UMBC’s Office of Accessibility and Disability Services; improving the accessibility of scanners available to the public and as part of our Interlibrary Loan and E-reserves workflows; and leveraging a campus-wide license for software that assesses the accessibility of websites. In our case, the Library had primary responsibility for selection of hardware and software for accessible scanning. The publicly available scanners already had OCR software implemented and some of the scanners used in the ILL and E-Reserves workflows did as well, but there was not consistency in the type or availability of software for those. Our goal was to establish a baseline level of consistency to facilitate workflows and support, a reasonable price, and high quality OCR. As part of our review process, we reviewed the Voluntary Product

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Accessibility Template (VPAT) of the option with the best price and felt it met our needs well. Although VPATs are voluntary and are generally self-assessments from vendors, they can be a useful tool for getting a sense of a product’s accessibility.

Challenges and Next Steps Among the remaining areas for which I would like to investigate potential improvements are the Library’s use of cloud solutions and the sustainability of emerging (or recently emerged) technologies. Each of these present challenges for selecting sustainable solutions. Although my plans for these areas are in a more formative stage, I hope sharing them will help provide ideas for others to build on or inspiration to share solutions already in place at other institutions. Cloud-based services and platforms are becoming increasingly instrumental to the way that many organizations, including libraries, manage both day-to-day operational documents and for elements of digital preservation strategies. In Archivists Against the Climate Crisis (Season 2, Episode 2 of CLIR’s Material Memory podcast),4 https://material-memory.clir.org/wp-content/ uploads/sites/28/2020/11/S2-E2-transcript-1.pdf Nicole Kang Ferraiolo reported, “Even digital collections have a carbon footprint. If you add up the energy consumption of the world’s data centers it amounts to 2% of global emissions, about on par with the UK. And data centers are on track to account for 14% of the world’s carbon footprint by 2040, about equivalent to that of the U.S.” Although the size of a digital collection stored in a given cloud repository may seem the most obvious contributor to its carbon footprint, the easiest way to control for that would be through collection development policies which are out of scope for this paper. Another key factor, and more relevant here, are the carbon emissions of the particular cloud solution chosen. At UMBC, the majority of the cloud solutions used by the Library are managed as part of enterprise-level licenses through DoIT. Of these, the Library makes extensive use of the Google suite and Box for day-to-day document management and AWS S3 Glacier as part of the offsite storage component of our digital preservation strategy; the Library also maintains digital materials hosted by ContentDM and Omeka. Each of the three major cloud solutions used at UMBC provides information on their environmental sustainability efforts on their websites. Google and AWS also post easy to find reports on progress towards their sustainability efforts. Although I was unable to locate a report for Box, they do include quantitative information on their progress prominently on their website. • Google: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ google_2019-environmental-report.pdf • Box: https://www.box.com/about-us/esg/protecting-ourplanet • AWS: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/ pdfBuilderDownload?name=amazon-sustainability2020-report As grateful as I am for this information, and for the increasing availability of comparative analyses between solutions in popular technology magazines such as that in a recent Wired article5 https://www.wired.com/story/amazongoogle-microsoft-green-clouds-and-hyperscale-data-centers/, calculating a library’s carbon footprint remains complex and requires a level of expertise that is not commonly held by most librarians. In Khalid et al’s 2021 Sustainable development challenges in libraries: A Systematic Literature Review (2000-2020)6

48 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102347, one of the primary challenges facing our profession was that LIS programs do not currently provide adequate or perhaps any sustainable development education and environmental literacy in their curricula (p. 7). Among their recommendations were to both increase coverage of these topics in the curriculum and for libraries to establish positions for Sustainable Librarians to help inform effective planning and development of programming for library users to empower them to make better informed decisions. While many libraries currently face significant fiscal challenges that will likely hinder the creation of new positions, shorter term solutions may entail seeking guidance from and forming partnerships with those within our parent organizations. I am currently in the process of reaching out to the UMBC Office of Sustainability to work with us on a library-wide Green Office assessment and, longer term, hope to pursue ongoing conversations with them and others around some of these more complex considerations.

Conclusion Incorporating the triple bottom line into library technology purchasing can help improve the sustainability of future stages of equipment lifecycle planning including use and eventual disposal. Likewise, there are excellent resources and notable challenges for each of those stages as well. For those interested in exploring further, I would recommend the States Electronic Challenge https://www.stateelectronicschallenge.net/about.html which is a program providing detailed guidance on actions that can help improve environmental sustainability and showcases state agencies across the nation that excel in one or more phases. Although in many ways these efforts remain preliminary and incremental improvements are still being made, I wanted to share these strategies because I believe it is so important that we each continue to move forward in responsible, sustainable ways. I hope that this provides one or two ideas that can help move efforts at other institutions forward, sparks inspiration for other things to try and other groups to collaborate with, or motivates others to share examples of sustainability strategies that they have adopted.

Endnotes 1.

2. 3. 4.

Macey Morales, “ALA adding sustainability as a core value of librarianship,” ALAnews (press release) May 14, 2019. https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2019/05/ala-addingsustainability-core-value-librarianship John Elkington, Cannibals with Forks: the triple bottom line of 21st century business (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1998). Diana Silveira, Library Technology Planning for Today and Tomorrow: A LITA Guide (Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018). Nicole Kang Ferraiolo, “Archivists Against the Climate Crisis,” CLIR’s Material Memory, Season 2, Episode 2 (podcast), November 9, 2020. https://material-memory.clir.org/wpcontent/uploads/sites/28/2020/11/S2-E2-transcript-1.pdf Daniel Oberhaus, “Amazon, Google, Microsoft: Here’s Who has the Greenest Cloud: A WIRED report card on the top three cloud providers shows how their enviornmental claims stack up,” WIRED, December 10, 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/ amazon-google-microsoft-green-clouds-and-hyperscale-datacenters/. Ayesha Khalid, Ghulam Farid, and Khalid Mahmood. “Sustainable development challenges in libraries: A Systematic Literature Review (2000-2020)” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47, May 2021. 10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102347

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

6180 East Warren Avenue • Denver, CO 80222 Phone: 303-282-9706 • Fax: 303-282-9743

Subscribe to The Charleston ADVISOR Today!

The Charleston

ADVISOR

Critical Reviews of Web Products for Information Professionals

comparative reviews...reports from “The Charleston Advisor serves up timely editorials and columns, the field...interviews with industry standalone and comparative reviews, and press releases, among other features. Produced by folks with impeccable library and players...opinion editorials... publishing credentials ...[t]his is a title you should consider...” comparative reviews...reports from the field...interviews with industry players...opinion editorials... — Magazines for Libraries, eleventh edition, edited by Cheryl LaGuardia with consulting editors Bill Katz and Linda Sternberg Katz (Bowker, 2002).

• Over 750 reviews now available • Web edition and database provided with all subscriptions • Unlimited IP filtered or name/password access • Full backfile included • Comparative reviews of aggregators featured • Leading opinions in every issue

$295.00 for libraries $495.00 for all others

✓Yes! Enter My Subscription For One Year. ❏ Yes, I am Interested in being a Reviewer. ❏ Name_____________________________________________ Title_________________________________________ Organization___________________________________________________________________________________ Address________________________________________________________________________________________ City/State/Zip__________________________________________________________________________________ Phone_____________________________________________ Fax_________________________________________ Email_________________________________________Signature_________________________________________

Table of Contents for Against the Grain Online Articles on Charleston Hub — www.charleston-hub.com Don’s Conference Notes New Directions in Scholarly Publishing: An SSP Virtual Seminar by Donald T. Hawkins — see https:// www.charleston-hub.com/2021/12/dons-conference-notesnew-directions-in-scholarly-publishing-an-ssp-virtualseminar/ Internet Librarian Connect 2021 by Donald T. Hawkins — see https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/12/donsconference-notes-internet-librarian-connect-2001/

Charleston Conference Notes 2021 Charleston Conference Post Event Wrap-Up by Leah Hinds — see https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/12/2021charleston-conference-post-event-wrap-up/

The Innovator’s Saga An Interview with Jake Zarnegar (Hum) by Darrell W. Gunter — see https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/09/theinnovators-saga-an-interview-with-jake-zarnegar/

Rumors continued from page 42 2020 Charleston Conference Proceedings

Local(ish) News

Hooray! The 2020 Charleston Conference Proceedings, edited by Beth Bernhardt, Leah Hinds, Lars Meyer, and Katina Strauch, have been published and are available open access through the Fulcrum platform at https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/ monographs/p5547t67n.

The Georgetown County Historical Society received a Growth Grant from South Carolina Humanities for the Georgetown County Oral History Project in partnership with the Georgetown County Digital Library. Funding for the Growth

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

continued on page 58

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Optimizing Library Services — Charleston Conference Recap: A Year of Progress Publishers and Libraries Collaborating in Crisis Times and Planting the Seeds for Sustainable Ecosystems By Ms. Cheyenne Heckermann (Marketing Assistant, IGI Global) <checkermann@igi-global.com> and Ms. Brittany Haynes (Assistant Director of e-Collections, IGI Global) <bhaynes@igi-global.com> Featuring Dr. Antje Mays (Director of Collections, University of Kentucky Libraries) <antjemays@uky.edu> Column Editor: Mr. Nick Newcomer (Senior Director of Marketing and Sales, IGI Global) <nnewcomer@igi-global.com> Column Editors’ Note: Following up on the presentation at the Charleston Conference in November 2021 from Dr. Antje Mays, Director of Collections from University of Kentucky Libraries and Ms. Brittany Haynes, Assistant Director of e-Collections, titled “A Year of Progress: Publishers and Libraries Collaborating in Crisis Times and Planting the Seeds for Sustainable Ecosystems,” please find below a recap of some of the topics covered and feedback presented during the presentation. — CH

Librarian’s Challenges: Crisis Times & Beyond Recognizing the ongoing impact and concerns of COVID-19, libraries have had to continually adapt to changes brought on by concerns of health and safety and the limited access for in-person learning and research environments, which has also altered the evolving relationships between libraries and publishers to sustain the nature of these scholarly communities, requiring libraries’ challenges to be addressed. For example, some librarians find “budgets overall are a source of concern ... [C]hanges in technology and user needs often require additional funding, but academic libraries don’t see that happening in the next five years” despite immediate need for change, exacerbated by the fact that “budgets will either stay the same or decrease,” locking scholarly material behind walls while health concerns remain (Rea 2021). This differs from other economic crises libraries have faced, because “[t]he pandemic has affected every aspect of the people, place, and platform value proposition,” removing the physical aspect of many libraries out of the equation (Jones, 2020). The addition of rising costs due to inflation further challenges libraries’ power to acquire research, and inflexibility in the publishing industry will only continue to darken the prospects of moving forward from these trying times. Several issues have surfaced within present business models, in addition to other necessary industry shifts.

Digital Rush These shifts have required libraries to pursue digital content at a much higher volume and increased rush than previously anticipated. This includes acquiring print-to-electronic conversions, which can require libraries to pay for access to the same content twice (sometimes without a discount taking into account the ownership of the title in print) in order for students and faculty to have access to much-needed research. However, Dr. Mays says that there is a challenge in accessing eBooks due to a combination of “geographic license restrictions” and a “dearth [of eBooks] in some disciplines.” Some had been prepared for

50 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

digital shifts, as some “libraries have spent the last two decades increasing and expanding their digital collections” that have enabled them to “nimbly shift resources from print to digital” with the system changes they had already committed to (Jones 2020). Unfortunately, not all libraries have previously been able to shift towards digital content. Due to the “To overcome pandemic, marginalized communithe budget ties around the world face a lack of challenges affordable or open resources that provide broad access to content. caused by the Because of this, many contend with pandemic, an evolution that requires virtual publishers must and hybrid methods for accessing content. Alternatively, they are be willing to presented with the challenge of discuss and listen finding other innovative methods to a libraries’ for providing students and faculty access to research materials. needs and With these digital shifts, availlimitations.” ability of additional formats also needs to be addressed. Beyond eBooks, there has been a need for video streaming, though there have not been as many great strides in market solutions. Purchase options are often limited to the individual, libraries struggle with rights holders, and “other than YouTube, whose content unpredictably can be purged without notice, libraries have little availability to a growing portion of today’s critical video resources,” which also face regional barriers for access (Herther 2020). It is common for educational purchase gateways to not offer needed films and the challenges of accessing new films due to movie theatre restrictions create obstacles. These compound the issues that communities with limited budgets and access face.

Inflexible Pricing Price rises continue to occur due to inflation from global supply chain issues and for various other reasons. Instead of accommodating the limitations in library budgets, legacy pricing and publishing models that increase the challenge for libraries to acquire new research or keep up with continuing resources are still in place, resulting in a choice between short-term benefits that pose risks to long-term development and library-publisher relationships. Subsequently, libraries seek new methods, as options like DDA do not always appeal to them based on feedback from Dr. Mays during the presentation, and due to short-term price hikes and lack of flexibility. EBAs have essentially replaced

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

DDAs, as these put the power in the hands of libraries. Libraries can then choose resources they want based on evidence provided in usage reports and other criterion. They also have access to upfront costs, so they know what they are spending. They actively choose to pay more for additional content to fulfill their needs. EBAs have gained prominence because they provide affordable, low-cost options and offer access to large quantities of content that helps ease the impact of the pandemic on limited library budgets and marginalized communities globally. Forced bundling is additionally challenging on a limited budget to access one needed or particularly in-demand resource, leaving these as low-value options that force libraries to search for alternatives that truly meet their needs. Notably, IGI Global, Cambridge University Press, and Michigan University Press do not partake in this practice, as they offer all titles individually in print and electronic or within e-Collections. With many publishers neglecting libraries’ true needs, some libraries turn to OA as an answer. While the OA movement provides an option to access free content, it remains in its youth and is imperfect with concerns about predatory publishers and improperly vetted research. However, there is “growth in options for OA publishing as reputable publishers expand support options” according to Mays for OA research, including different models for OA research to grow and thrive. These can also provide opportunities for libraries to support research from their institution’s faculty as OA resources. Similarly, libraries, universities, and library-publisher collaborations are also able to curate licensed content created by experts to be Open Educational Resources (OER). Instead, some publishers and services have begun offering solutions to better suit library needs. One of these solutions includes transformative models, like Read and Publish initiatives that Cambridge University Press and IGI Global both offer among others. With Read and Publish initiatives, a library that invests in a publisher’s collection receives discounts or waivers for article, chapter, and book processing charges to help their faculty publish in OA.

Publisher Solutions in Crisis Times Despite the challenges libraries have experienced in collaborations with publishers and aggregators during the pandemic, certain services and publishers were able to adapt quickly and provide access to content. Dr. Mays lists EBSCO, JSTOR, Great Courses, and VitalSource Helps as examples of services that offer simple-to-use temporary access or free trials to content. Meanwhile, Mays also lists some reference publishers that have been providing the much-needed online access to free content at the onset of the pandemic, including Cambridge University Press, IGI Global, Sage, and Springer. Options that failed included resources that “[prompt] for personally identifying information for free access” that are incompatible with FERPA rules, non-functional third-party access, and advertisements veiled as eBook access (Mays, Haynes 2021). Successful solutions involve flexible purchase options and pricing models, high discounts on print-to-electronic conversions, flat or sustainable agreement options, and more. Individual title acquisitions, customized collections, specialized collections by subject or publication date, and evidence-based acquisitions (EBA) are all examples of the flexible options that publishers and libraries can collaborate on to provide the value and flexibility that libraries need. Their pricing models often include multi-user licensing, no DRM on publications, differential pricing, and flat-rate purchase pricing for research. Ms. Haynes covered additional publisher solutions that libraries benefit from, including discounted print to electronic

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

conversions, increased and extended discounts on digital content, and discounted renewals and updates for current e-Collection customers that can be managed in the short-term that IGI Global, for example, provided at the onset of the pandemic and for sustainable, long-term solutions. Publishers can also maintain constant contact to monitor any manufacturing disruptions at print-on-demand facilities for those who do need physical copies. As IGI Global is print-on-Demand, like some other publishers, we find it necessary to remain in constant contact with the printing facilities around the world to ensure no disruption of flow. Additionally, disseminating timely research on COVID-19-Related Publications and more with an agile publishing process means that there can be fewer delays in researchers and practitioners receiving crucial research to further their fields and learn new methods. Flexible long-term practices are also a focus within publisher solutions in the name of satisfying library needs while sustaining the future of scholarly publishing. Some publishers provide OA support, including covering matching funds towards OA publications. For example, IGI Global’s OA Fee Wavier (Read and Publish) Initiative offers flexible agreements to increase research accessibility with support for Gold OA journals and books, and even Diamond OA publications, while bringing a greater focus to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) effort, as Diamond publications do not require waivers from contributing authors. This allows researchers from places that may not have been able to afford the waivers to enter OA agreements, or from departments that lack OA funding support to publish research that will be widely viewed and garner citations. These agreements place the power of funding research in libraries’ hands and subsequently provide all with free access to research via the OA movement regardless of geographic location. Discounted print-to-electronic conversions and remote access ease the necessity of converting to digital content while learning remains remote due to the risks brought on by the pandemic. Lastly, flexible acquisition options and multi-year agreements that come with locked-in pricing mean no further costs can be added regardless of the amount of content the agreement provides in the future while staying suitable for present-day library budgets.

Live Poll During Dr. Mays’ and Ms. Haynes’ presentation, they ran a live Q&A poll for their 50+ attendees—a blend of academic librarians, publishers, and more—to share some of their own challenges, needs, and solutions to further the discussion on library-publisher collaborations. Examples of answers provided by the audience are below.

Industry trends & priorities: How have your priorities shifted since the pandemic? Some answers included were: • Electronic format • Shift to OA • Remote access and work options

Resulting from the pandemic, in what priority order would you currently rank the following industry trends? Based on the results, options were ranked in the following order by the attendees: 1. Open Access / Open Educational Resources, and Scholarly Communication 2. Remote work, online access, and technologies

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

3. Flexible purchasing models 4. Diversity, equity, inclusion 5. Consortium / Library system deals 6. Digital scholarship / digital media proliferation / shift to e-resources 7. Publisher packages and e-collections 8. Licensing frameworks 9. Access vs. ownership 10.Other a. Workload, staffing levels, collection budget reduction’ b. Innovation for publishing multimedia and multimodal scholarship

Regarding library-publisher collaborations, what are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve faced? Some answers included were: • No pricing flexibility • Lack of e-access and multi-user licenses • Support for OA that is budget-friendly and inclusive of smaller institutions

In library-publisher collaborations, what good and most impactful & positive outcomes have you seen? Some answers included were: • Increased collaboration with libraries • Flexible pricing models • Publishers opening resources • Lower annual Read & Publish costs & additional OA support

Conclusion To overcome the budget challenges caused by the pandemic, publishers must be willing to discuss and listen to a libraries’ needs and limitations. Flexible purchasing, OA options, and trials have become necessary to both accommodate and further the academic research community. Without these options, publishers are only harming the libraries that depend on them, as library-publisher collaborations are key to the survival of both. These evolving challenges can only be resolved with healthy collaborations and relationships between libraries, consortia, and university systems with their publishers to not only provide much-needed support, but also to foster the creation of new research endeavors. For this to happen, small and medium-sized publishers need to be involved in these discussions as groups who can understand and accommodate library needs with specialized solutions, as they recognize the necessary collaboration and symbiosis that libraries need in times of crisis and beyond. There are steps being taken, such as IGI Global’s efforts, to provide open resources across the globe, as well as products enabling affordable access to research and OA opportunities for marginalized communities. These actions create hope for the western world to adopt these models in order to provide affordability and accessibility to research for everyone around the globe. The presentation video and slides are available to view. https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/ gto8C7pE8LTYQxnGk

52 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

References Asai, Sumiko. 2021. “Collaboration between Research Institutes and Large and Small Publishers for Publishing Open Access Journals.” Scientometrics 126 (6): 5245–62. doi:10.1007/ s11192-021-03949-4. Dinkins, Debbi. 2021. “The Trials and Tribulations of Providing EBooks: A Small University Library Perspective.” Against the Grain 33 (4): 9–11. Elwell, Jon T., and Ashley Fast. 2021. “Library Analytics: Shaping the Future - COVID-19 One Year Later: Trends in Library Book Acquisitions.” Against the Grain 33 (3): 56–57. Farley, Ashley, Allison Langham-Putrow, Elisabeth Shook, Leila Belle Sterman, and Megan Wacha. 2021. “Transformative Agreements: Six Myths, Busted: Lessons Learned.” College & Research Libraries News 82 (7): 298–301. doi:10.5860/crln.82.7.298. Ferris, Lorraine E., and Margaret A. Winker. 2017. “Ethical Issues in Publishing in Predatory Journals.” Biochemia Medica 27 (2): 279–84. doi:10.11613/BM.2017.030. Fund, Sven. 2021. “Stop, Look, Listen - New Wilderness in Orderly Markets: Academic Publishing in Times of APCs and Transformative Deals.” Against the Grain 3 (4): 33–34. Gatti, Rupert, and Marc Mierowsky. 2016. “Funding Open Access Monographs A Coalition of Libraries and Publishers.” College & Research Libraries News 77 (9): 456–59. doi:10.5860/ crln.77.9.9557. Gerberi, Dana, Julie M. Taylor, and Cynthia J. Beeler. 2021. “Educating Authors and Users of the Literature to Increase Vigilance of Predatory Publishing.” Journal of Hospital Librarianship 21 (3): 207–16. doi:10.1080/15323269.2021.1942691. Herther, Nancy K. 2020. “ATG Original: Streaming Changes the Rules of Video Distribution-Will Libraries Win or Lose?” ATG News Channel. https://www.charleston-hub.com/2020/08/ atg-original-streaming-changes-the-rules-of-video-distributionwill-libraries-win-or-lose/. Jones, Sara. 2020. “Optimizing Public Library Resources in a Post COVID-19 World.” Journal of Library Administration 60 (8): 951–57. doi:10.1080/01930826.2020.1820281. Mays, A. & Haynes, B. (2021). A Year of Progress: Publishers and Libraries Collaborating in Crisis Times and Planting the Seeds for Sustainable Ecosystems. 2021 Charleston Conference. https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/ gto8C7pE8LTYQxnGk Ojennus, Paul. 2017. “Open Access and the Humanities: The Case of Classics Journals.” Library Resources & Technical Services 61 (2): 81–90. doi:10.5860/lrts.61n2.81. Rea, Amy. 2021. “LJ ’s State of Academic Libraries Survey Reveals Challenges, Priorities.” Library Journal 146 (10): https:// www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=LJs-State-of-AcademicLibraries-Survey-Reveals-Challenges-Priorities. Rosato, Steve. 2021a. “The Digital Toolbox: Case Studies, Best Practices and Data for the Academic Librarian — How Consumer Behavior Is Driving Change During the Pandemic.” Against the Grain 33 (1): 45–46. Rosato, Steve. 2021b. “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.” Against the Grain 33 (2): 52–53. Sariola, Salla. 2021. “Editorial: What Does Openness Conceal?” Science & Technology Studies 34 (2): 2–5. doi:10.23987/ sts.107722.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Slutskaya, Sofia, and Alexis Linoski. 2020. “E-Books: Access vs Ownership.” Serials Librarian 78 (1–4): 79–85. doi:10.1080/ 0361526X.2020.1716927. Tran, Clara Y., and Jin Xiu Guo. 2021. “Developing User-Centered Collections at a Research Library: An Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA) Pilot in STEM.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 47 (5): N.PAG. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102434. Vogus, Brad. 2020. “Ebooks in Academic Libraries.” Public Services Quarterly 16 (3): 182–85. doi:10.1080/15228959.202 0.1778599. Warren, Jalyn E. 2021. “Open Educational Resources (CLIPP 45): Edited by Mary Francis, Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries, A Division of the American Library Association, 2021.” Journal of Access Services 18 (2): 63. doi:10.1080/15367967.2021. 1911661. Zhang, Mei. 2020. “Decision-Making Processes in Academic Libraries: How Did Academic Librarians Purchase e-Book Products?” Journal of Academic Librarianship 46 (6): N.PAG. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102252.

Recommended Readings Adomi, Esharenana E. and Gloria O. Oyovwe-Tinuoye. “COVID-19 Information Seeking and Utilization Among Women in Warri Metropolis, Delta State, Nigeria.” IJLIS vol.10, no.2 2021: pp.1-16. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJLIS.20210701.oa6 Awoyemi, Robert Akinade and Richard Oluwadolapo Awoyemi. “A Mediated Approach to the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE): Implications for Academic Libraries in the 21st Century.” IJLIS vol.10, no.2 2021: pp.1-10. http://doi. org/10.4018/IJLIS.20210701.oa5 Ekoja, Innocent Isa,et al., editors. Handbook of Research on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Librarianship. IGI Global, 2022. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-9094-2 Kaushik, Anna,et al., editors. Handbook of Research on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Library and Information Science. IGI Global, 2020. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-9825-1 Holland, Barbara Jane, editor. Handbook of Research on Knowledge and Organization Systems in Library and Information Science. IGI Global, 2021. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-7258-0 Holland, Barbara, editor. Handbook of Research on Library Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. IGI Global, 2021. http:// doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-6449-3

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

Khan, Nadim Akhtar and S. M. Shafi. “Open Educational Resources Repositories: Current Status and Emerging Trends.” IJDLDC vol.12, no.1 2021: pp.30-44. http://doi.org/10.4018/ IJDLDC.2021010103 Liu, Congming,et al. “Library Service Innovation Based on New Information Technology: Taking the Interactive Experience Space “Tsinghua Impression” as an Example.” IJLIS vol.10, no.1 2021: pp.71-81. http://doi.org/10.4018/ IJLIS.2021010106 Management Association, Information Resources, editor. Digital Libraries and Institutional Repositories: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice. IGI Global, 2020. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-2463-3 Management Association, Information Resources, editor. Research Anthology on Collaboration, Digital Services, and Resource Management for the Sustainability of Libraries. IGI Global, 2021. http:// doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-8051-6 Mani, Nandita S.,et al. “New Data-Related Roles for Librarians: Using Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization to Increase Visibility of Research Impact.” Handbook of Research on Knowledge and Organization Systems in Library and Information Science, edited by Barbara Jane Holland, IGI Global, 2021, pp. 317-345. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-7258-0.ch017 Rosenblum, Jason. “Best Practices in Project-Based Learning: Online Instructional Technology Courses and Emergency Remote Teaching.” IJDLDC vol.11, no.1 2020: pp.1-30. http:// doi.org/10.4018/IJDLDC.2020010101 Zhang, Kai. “Design and Implementation of Smart Classroom Based on Internet of Things and Cloud Computing.” IJITSA vol.14, no.2 2021: pp.38-51. http://doi.org/10.4018/ IJITSA.2021070103 Zhang, Qi,et al. “Open Data Services in the Library: Case Study of the Shanghai Library.” IJLIS vol.10, no.1 2021: pp.1-17. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJLIS.2021010101 Column Editors’ End Note: Understanding the necessity for library-publisher collaborations, Dr. Antje Mays can be contacted at <antjemays@uky.edu> and Brittany Haynes can be contacted at <bhaynes@igi-global.com> if you have any questions or are interested in having additional discussion concerning this topic. If you attended the conference, the recording of this event and its slides are available at the following links — Video: https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/ gto8C7pE8LTYQxnGk — Slides: https://2021charlestonconference. pathable.co/meetings/virtual/ gto8C7pE8LTYQxnGk.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

The Digital Toolbox — Extracurricular Content in Academic Libraries: Trends, Challenges & Collaboration By Jason Tyrrell (General Manager, Kanopy, San Francisco, CA 94109) <jason.tyrrell@kanopy.com> Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director and Business Development Executive, OverDrive Professional, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>

n fall 2020, Kanopy, the leading provider of high-quality films for academic libraries, conducted an informal survey of more than 800 academic librarians to better understand their streaming video needs and identify trends. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, many participants expressed concern that their digital resources, namely streaming video, were being used for entertainment purposes, stretching already tapped budgets. But at the same time, 28 percent said they believe it is their responsibility to provide students with content for entertainment, and another 20 percent were unsure.

1. Do you feel it is your library’s responsibility to meet the extracurricular content needs of your students?

To dive deeper and explore if and how libraries are serving the extracurricular content needs of students and non-faculty staff, Kanopy conducted a follow-up survey in October 2021. More than 475 librarians participated, primarily in North America. The informal survey was created in Qualtrics and delivered to Kanopy’s library partners via email. Pre-register for the forthcoming whitepaper at go.kanopy.com/extracurricular-2021.

Key Findings 1. Support the “whole person.” According to the 2021 survey, there is a growing need among academic libraries to support the content needs of the “whole person,” not just their class assignments and research.

2. Do you believe it is your library’s responsibility to meet the content needs of your institutions’ staff (non faculty)?

“Libraries exist to engage and educate the whole person, not just to support the research and instructional mission of the institution, so I do think libraries have a responsibility to support extracurricular reading/ listening/viewing to the extent that they can,” explained one participant. “The demarcation between education and recreation is blurred if not a fallacy. While a library cannot collect/ subscribe to everything, I believe there is a responsibility to support the ‘whole person’ even in academic settings,” wrote another. 2. Meet students’ extracurricular needs. 77 percent of academic librarians feel it is at least somewhat their responsibility to meet the extracurricular content needs of students. In comparison, 91 percent believe it is at least somewhat their role to support the extracurricular content needs of non-faculty staff.

3. What extracurricular topics do you believe are most important to your students? (check all that apply)

“We see the library as supporting the informational needs of our students, staff, and faculty. We do not differentiate between the groups,” one participant explained. See chart 1 and chart 2 on this page. 3. Entertainment is a priority. While entertainment-focused content was noted by participants as the top priority to provide to students, it was not a leading priority for non-faculty staff. See chart 3 on this page and chart 4 on the next page.

54 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

4. What content would you like to provide to your institution’s staff (non faculty)?

6. Streaming video meets student needs best. Streaming video was indicated as the most important content to meet users’ needs for extracurricular content followed by print books and eBooks. See chart 6 below.

6. What types of non-curricular content do you think is most important to serving students’ extracurricular needs?

4. Increased demand for DEI content. Students are transitioning from traditional academic clubs to groups focused on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) topics and issues, sparking demand for new types of supporting content not necessarily tied to the curricula. “We have purchased many DEI resources and other types of resources that have an academic fit but aren’t specifically required by curricula (e.g., prize winning fiction, diversity fiction, etc.).” 5. Librarians collaborate with student services departments. To provide students with extracurricular content and other services, more than half of survey participants said they are collaborating with student services departments on their campus (e.g., student success center, alumni resources, career center, athletics) or plan to in the near future. “Student service departments have liaison librarians, and we work to support their needs, especially when they align with our mission and policies,” wrote one participant. “The Student Association advises us on how to spend the student fee money we get. They also gave us a one-time grant of $80,000 for digital resources,” stated another. See chart 5 below.

5. Are you currently collaborating with other student services departments on your campus (e.g. student success center, alumni resources, career center, athletics)?

Conclusions The pandemic fundamentally changed students’ expectations and demand for streaming video and other electronic resources beyond the classroom, as libraries faced shutdowns and sheltering in place led to a spike in usage for entertainment purposes. At the same time, students are transitioning from traditional campus clubs to groups centered around DEI issues and topics, creating a demand for content that does not necessarily tie to the curricula. According to a 2020 Kanopy survey (https://lib.kanopy.com/ white-paper-streaming-video-trends-in-academic-libraries2021/?utm_source=web) of more than 800 academic librarians, 78 percent said DEI topics are “extremely” to “very” important to their streaming video collection. While the vast majority of libraries feel it is their responsibility to at least somewhat provide their students and non-faculty staff with extracurricular content, budget remains a major barrier, and there is some debate whether this content should be purchased or licensed by the library or student affairs and related campus services. Most libraries are currently collaborating with such services to provide students with the extracurricular materials they require or plan to in the near future. To help libraries support this growing demand for extracurricular content, vendors like Kanopy need to collaborate with publishing partners and suppliers to ensure such content is available under flexible pricing models that make it affordable and sustainable. Vendors should also serve as a library’s strategic partner to drive value by curating collections that address their specific goals and help identify areas for collaboration with other groups on campus. Together, we can enable academic libraries around the globe to serve “the whole person.” Pre-register for the full report at go.kanopy.com/ extracurricular-2021. Explore Kanopy’s website at www.kanopy. com.

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

ATG Interviews Joyce Ray Senior Lecturer and Program Coordinator, Digital Curation Certificate Program in Museum and Heritage Studies at Johns Hopkins University By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> ATG: Joyce, prior to your work in museum studies, you had a highly successful career in archives and libraries working at the National Archives and Records Administration, IMLS, and then as a library and information studies educator. How did you transition into your current duties as Program Coordinator, Digital Curation in Museum and Heritage Studies at Johns Hopkins University? JR: I started out as a librarian with an MLS degree from The University of Texas at Austin, but I quickly got involved in archives and special collections, which led me to NARA for ten years and then to IMLS. At IMLS, I directed the competitive grant programs for libraries, archives, and library-museum collaborations, so I had an opportunity to learn more about all three professions and to see how technology and the digitization of physical collections, as well as born-digital content, were increasing the need for libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) to work together to make it easier for online users to find cultural heritage content online no matter where it originated. When IMLS received additional funding from Congress to support library and information science education, we directed some of those funds in the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarians program to create digital curation programs, which was just emerging as a cross-disciplinary field. This gave graduate schools of library and information science in the U.S. a boost in digital curation education, which I think has continued to have an impact. The Laura Bush program funds were limited to schools of library and information science, so museum studies programs didn’t benefit from this funding, but the MA in Museum Studies program at Johns Hopkins University, which has had a technology focus since its inception in 2008, was interested in it. I met the director, Phyllis Hecht, at conferences, which led to my developing and teaching a course on digital preservation. We then received approval for a graduate certificate in digital curation, which I’ve directed as program coordinator since it started in 2014. In 2017, a new MA in Cultural Heritage Management was created, and that has also been approved as a combined credential, so the digital curation certificate can be earned as a stand-alone certificate or combined with either the MA in Museum Studies or MA in Cultural Heritage Management. ATG: Please tell us more about graduate certificates. Is a masters necessary to qualify to get a graduate certificate? Does this make the degrees more or less siloed? JR: Applicants for the graduate certificate in digital curation must have a relevant master’s degree, a bachelor’s degree and at least three years experience working in a museum or other

56 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

cultural heritage organization, or be enrolled in the JHU MA in museum studies or cultural heritage management programs. Some have master’s degrees in library and information science, but it can also be in another academic discipline, such as art history, archaeology, or one of the sciences. These are degrees typically associated with professional museum work, in addition to the master’s in museum studies. I don’t think it’s siloed at all; most of our alums are employed doing digital curation work in museums, and some are working in university archives and special collections. Since many of our students are already working in museums, the digital curation credential gives them a chance to move up to a new position or take on additional responsibilities that they otherwise wouldn’t be prepared for. ATG: What knowledge and skills developed during your archive and library career were most helpful in making this transition? In what way? JR: I think of archives as a bridge between libraries and museums. Archives are often part of library special collections, and many museums have archival collections. Also, museum archives are unique in that they relate to the main institutional collections and mission, so they add important context to museum holdings. With the ever-increasing volume of born-digital content, archives have been on the frontline for accessioning and managing digital files. Archivists at the National Archives helped to develop standards and protocols for preserving digital records, beginning with magnetic tape, and they have continued to influence current practices that have been adaptable by libraries and museums. In fact, NARA and the Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum in 2019 to federal agencies, “Transition to Electronic Records,” stating that beginning in January 2023, NARA will no longer accept the transfer of permanent analog records, so federal agencies with paper records that have been designated as permanent will have to digitize them before they can be transferred to NARA. (See: https://www.archives.gov/files/records-mgmt/policy/m19-21-transition-to-federal-records.pdf) This transition to born-digital content is obviously also affecting libraries in their increasing acquisition and creation of digital content from e-journals to databases, Institutional Repositories, and so on, and museums in the form of digital media art, scientific data, digitization of physical objects, etc. The fact that more and more users prefer to access information online, and that collections in LAMs are being brought together online through aggregations such as statewide digital libraries

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

and the Digital Public Library of America, and by Linked Open Data initiatives, makes it even more imperative that cultural heritage institutions think of themselves as part of a connected online resource. ATG: How can NARA hope to keep up with all this digitized content? Are more people or interns or volunteers being hired? Can cataloging and metadate keep up? JR: I doubt that they’re getting any new staff, but they will be able to stop doing the processing of physical files, so I think it’s a tradeoff. And it saves NARA from having to digitize the files themselves, so it’s forcing agencies to take on some of that work, including supplying metadata. ATG: Do you currently have a formal role with NARA? Does your certificate program have any type relationship with NARA? JR: Well, we have one faculty member who works in digital preservation at NARA and teaches in the digital curation program. We haven’t had any interns there yet, but I hope we’ll have some in future. We’ve had a number of interns in the Smithsonian Digital Archives and other departments. ATG: Before we talk about your current responsibilities in museum studies, can you talk to us a little bit more about your archive and library related career? What do you view as your top accomplishments? JR: Oh, gee. Well, I mentioned the brief timeline above. I’m not sure about accomplishments, but I’ve really enjoyed the opportunities I’ve had to work across the spectrum of libraries, archives and museums internationally as well as nationally. ATG: How would you describe the Digital Curation in Museum Studies program at Johns Hopkins University? What is your role as program coordinator? What is the program’s focus? How would you characterize your student base? What kind of job opportunities can a graduate of the program expect? JR: It’s modeled on the digital curation courses and programs developed by many schools of library and information science but with a focus on the unique perspective of museums, which deal largely with 3D objects with little or no embedded documentation and thus depend on external information for their meaning. There are six courses, one of which is an elective. For museum studies students in the digital curation program, the elective is usually Collection Management, and for cultural heritage management students it is Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age. The remaining digital curation courses are: Foundations of Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, Managing Digital Information in Museums and Archives, a required internship of at least 120 hours working in a museum or related cultural heritage organization, and a research paper. These last two courses, respectively, enable students to gain handson experience working with digital assets and to investigate a topic in digital curation that’s of particular interest to them. Most of our students are in the dual museum studies/digital curation track, although some come only for the certificate, and an increasing number are in the cultural heritage management/ digital curation program. Most are already working or have experience in museums or cultural heritage, or are transitioning from another career, so their educational goals are to acquire new skills and knowledge and give their careers a boost. I’m very pleased that a number of the digital curation research papers have been selected for archiving in the JHU Institutional Repository JScholarship, which gives the students a publication to put on their resumes and also serves as a resource on current

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

topics in digital curation in museums and other cultural heritage organizations, which is sorely needed. (See: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/40426) The great majority of our graduates are working in digital curation-related jobs in museums or universities, such as library archives and special collections. My job is to advise the approximately 100 digital curation students currently in the program, recruit and mentor the six other faculty members who teach in the program, and of course teaching. I teach the Foundations of Digital Curation course and have variously taught Digital Preservation, the internship and research paper courses, and Introduction to Archives (an elective in the museum studies program). ATG: We assume that LAMs is an accepted acronym linking “Libraries, Archives and Museums,” but we were wondering if you offered a specific course that focuses on their key commonalities, and in a sense, forming an identifyable discipline? JR: Yes! We have a course called Museums, Libraries and Archives: Issues of Convergence for Collecting Institutions, and another on Introduction to Archives, which I’ve taught. I was surprised not only by how many students are interested in archives but also how little many of them know about the difference between libraries and archives! They take the course not because they already know about archives but because they want to learn more about them. I think this helps them be better prepared even if they go to work in a museum because they learn how relevant archives and library special collections are to researching museum objects and collections. ATG: In 2014 you wrote a book as part of the “Charleston Insights in Library, Archival, and Information Sciences” series entitled “Research Data Management: Practical Strategies for Information Professionals.” What major changes have occurred in research data management since the publication of your book? And what do those changes mean for today’s information professional? JR: I think that volume is still useful as a basic primer with a lot of good contributions from expert practitioners. Now there are many more resources available, much more of an infrastructure to support researchers, from the latest Data Management Planning tool (DMPTool) to institutional and disciplinary repositories for publishing and archiving research data. Of course, the JHU Sheridan Libraries has been a leader in research data management for years, so its data services consultants and web site are a great way for our students to get an understanding of everything related to managing research data and other digital curation topics. Even though digital curation sounds like a niche topic, it’s so broad that no one can be an expert in everything. I think one of the the most important things digital curation students need to learn is the scope of what it entails; the principles of good practice, legal requirements such as copyright, and ethics; and the vocabulary to be able to communicate with the many experts out there in their different capacities. (See: https://dmptool.org/) (See: https://dataservices.library.jhu.edu/) ATG: We understand that currently you are co-editing a book entitled “Economic Considerations for Libraries, Archives and Museums,” to be published by Routledge Press (UK). Can you give our readers a heads-up on what to expect? JR: Sure! I co-edited it with my colleagues Lorraine Stuart, head of special collections at the University of Southern Mississippi, and Tom Clareson, senior consultant for digital and preservation services at LYRASIS, and it’s due out this year.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

It grew out of a series of sessions we organized in 2018 at the American Library Association, the Society of American Archivists and the Museum Computer Network, respectively. The sessions were all well attended, I think because people are always interested in hearing about collaborative projects across LAMs. As a result, we were contacted by an editor at Routledge that eventually led to our submitting a book proposal. It takes a big picture perspective on the economic issues affecting LAMs and how they are being addressed by current trends and exemplary initiatives that can serve as models for individual institutions as well as local, national and international collaborations. Our contributors represent libraries, archives and museums across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the UK, and they share a lot of ideas for enhancing the impact of LAMs, especially through collaborations based on shared resources and economies of scale, not just at the national and international level but also locally and not exclusively digital. We hope it will be inspiring for all LAM professionals, and especially new professionals who may not have travel support. It would be great to see more local organizations representing LAMs in their area, as this can lead to important collaborative projects and network-building.

addition to reviewing the evolution of digital curation in LAMs, we look at our respective curricula, comparing what they have in common and what is unique to each, which I think illustrates the respective voices of libraries, museums, archives and cultural heritage sites and organizations, all of which have a role in digital curation. ATG: When not writing books, coordinating programs, and working with students, what fun activities and hobbies do you enjoy pursuing? JR: I don’t feel like I have that much spare time! But I do enjoy reading, museums, movies, and the restaurants in New York City. Oh, and saving democracy, hopefully. Of course, the museums and theaters were closed during the height of the pandemic (which is still not over, unfortunately), but we’ve loved the increase in outdoor dining and I’m glad that’s continuing. I hope to see Lower Manhattan, where we live, become much more pedestrianized, which had been talked about even before the pandemic and now seems even more likely. ATG: Joyce, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us, we really appreciate it!

I have a chapter in the book on digital curation education, co-authored with my colleague Peter Botticelli at Simmons. In

Rumors continued from page 49 Grants has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Act of 2021 and the NEH Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) initiative. Congrats!

Retirement Celebrations and Other Job Transitions • Christine Stamison has announced her retirement from the NERL Consortium after serving over 8 years as Director. • Fiona Godlee has retired as Editor in Chief of the BMJ after 16 years. • Michelle Kuepper is leaving her role as Head of Communications at Morressier to spend more time with family. • R. David Lankes, previously the Director of the University of South Carolina School of Information Science, has taken a new role as the Virginia & Charles Bowden Professor of Librarianship at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information. • Lars Bjornshauge is stepping down as Managing Director for DOAJ, and Joanna Ball will serve as the new Managing Director. Lars plans to stay on to help during a transition period. • After 14 years, Andrew Pace is moving from Executive Director of Technology Research at OCLC to be Executive Director for the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) beginning February 1, 2022.

Speaking of Podcasts … Do you listen to podcasts, and if so, what are your favorites? Do you subscribe to the ATG Podcast? You should! New episodes are published weekly on Monday mornings featuring conversations and interviews with thought leaders in the library, publishing, and scholarly communication spheres. Visit https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/podcasts/, or you can subscribe wherever you get your podcast feeds.

Hybrid Events Webinar Did you catch the recent webinar hosted by CISPC and Research Information called “Are Hybrid Events Here to Stay?” The session was chaired by Warren Clark, managing director, Europa Science, and featured a panel consisting of our own Leah Hinds, Executive Director of the Charleston Hub; Simon Inger, Co-founder, Cadmore Media; Ben Kaube, Co-founder, Cassyni; and Athena Hoeppner, Discovery Services Librarian, University of Central Florida. You can register to watch the recording here if you missed it: https://event.webcasts.com/viewer/share.jsp?ei=1511532&tp_ key=17a202602f.

That’s a wrap! As always, if you have any “Rumors” you’d like to share send them to us at <editors@against-the-grain. com> for inclusion in our next issue.

• Lauren Kane is the new President and CEO of BioOne as of January 1, 2022. Check out her interview on ATG: The Podcast, with Leah Hinds and Tom Gilson, at https://www. charleston-hub.com/podcast/atgthepodcast-140-interviewwith-lauren-kane-incoming-president-ceo-of-bioone/.

58 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED Clifford Lynch Executive Director Coalition for Networked Information <clifford@cni.org> Professional career and activities: Prior to joining CNI in 1997, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. He is both a past president and recipient of the Award of Merit of the American Society for Information Science, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization. He served as co-chair of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) from 2011-16, and he is active on numerous advisory boards and visiting committees. His work has been recognized by the American Library Association’s Lippincott Award, the EDUCAUSE Leadership Award in Public Policy and Practice, and the American Society for Engineering Education’s Homer Bernhardt Award. In 2017, Lynch was selected as an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow. Carol A. Mandel Dean Emerita New York University Division of Libraries Distinguished Presidential Fellow Council on Library and Information Resources <carol.mandel@nyu.edu> Professional career and activities: I have had leadership roles at the libraries of New York University, Columbia University, and University of California, San Diego, as well as at the Association of Research Libraries. My professional work has included serving as president of the Association of Research Libraries and of the Digital Library Federation (when it was an independent organization) and serving on committees and boards of many groups concerned with access and preservation, including the Digital Preservation Network, HathiTrust, Ithaka Harbors, the Council on Library and Information Resources, OCLC’s Research Library Partnership, the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, Portico, and the Digital Library Federation. Concern for enduring access to resources for research and cultural memory has been an important area of focus throughout my library career, from the development of preservation microfilming to the challenges posed by today’s world of vast digital information. My work as a CLIR Distinguished Presidential Fellow focuses on issues and strategies related to collecting and maintaining the many new forms of valuable content that are digital only, and that are eluding traditional approaches to collection and stewardship. My goal is to stimulate wide engagement and shared problem solving to address the digital disruption of our traditions of preserving knowledge and cultural memory. How/where do I see the industry in five years: In five years, libraries of all types will have fully and seamlessly integrated the functions of collection, management, and sustainable access for born digital con-

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

tent of many kinds into their operations and services. Scholarly researchers and any inquiring member of the public will have ready access to the born digital content produced in the first quarter of the 21st century. Joyce Ray Senior Lecturer and Digital Curation Program Coordinator Johns Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Advanced Academic Programs, Museum and Heritage Studies 1717 Massachusetts Ave., NW Washington, DC 20036 <jray16@jhu.edu> http://advanced.jhu.edu/digitalcuration Born and lived: United States.

Early life: I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, which used to be a kind of sleepy small city. Fortunately, that allowed it to preserve many of its historically and architecturally significant buildings, which gives it its charm today. I got my undergrad degree from the University of Houston and a master’s in library science and Ph.D. in history from The University of Texas at Austin. Professional career and activities: My first professional job was Technical Services Librarian at Tusculum College, a small liberal arts college in Greeneville, Tennessee. I took on the archives because the college, which is the oldest college in Tennessee (now Tusculum University), wanted to prioritize the archives, which were then disorganized. I wrote a grant proposal that was funded by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission, and I’ve stayed in special collections and archives since then. From there, I moved back to San Antonio, where I was head of special collections at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio Library. Then I moved to Washgton, DC, and worked at the National Archives and Records Administration from 1988-1997. I moved over to the newly created Institute of Museum and Library Services in 1997 and worked there until 2011. My experience at IMLS, overseeing competitive grant programs for libraries, archives and library-museum collaborations, gave me a great opportunity to see how these institutions all needed to work together in the emerging digital environment to meet the demands of the increasingly voracious consumers of online cultural heritage. In 2011, I took a position as visiting professor in the iSchool at University College London, and then had another visiting professorship in the ISchool at Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2014, I returned to Washington, DC, for my current position at JHU. In 2018 we moved to New York City, where we live now. Family: My husband, F. G. (Skip) Gosling, was the chief historian at the Department of Energy before retiring in 2011 (and later returning to DOE as a consultant) when we moved to London. We enjoyed living in London and Berlin, which allowed us to make good friends there and also travel around Europe. Now we want our friends there to visit us! We live in Lower Manhattan, and our son lives in Brooklyn, so it’s great to have our family reunited in the same city. Favorite books: My current very favorite is The Island at the Center of the World: the Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America, by Russell Shorto. I knew very little about the early history of the city when we moved to New York, so this history of New Netherland, which was to become New York City, was eye-opening. It’s based on archival records discovered (or re-discovered) in the State

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Archives in Albany, the originals having been sent back as reports to the Dutch East India Company — the corporate sponsor of New Netherland — which sold them as scrap paper in the 19th century. That book inspired me to read more about the struggle between the English and Dutch over control of New York City, and about the American Revolution and the early Republic, including biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Pet peeves: Too many to mention! Philosophy: I like to tell my students that no experiences are wasted. They build on each other and eventually give you some perspective on life and history, at least that’s how it seems to me. Most memorable career achievement: I loved living in London and Berlin, I think it gave me a wider perspective on the field of information science, cultural heritage and history that you can’t get from traveling (although of course that’s great, too). I was lucky that I got to travel quite a lot when I was at IMLS, not just in the US but also to Europe and Asia. I’m also grateful for having the chance to transition from an administrative job to teaching. It’s so rewarding to have the chance to give back to the profession and encourage the next generation. I love it that students are interested in knowing the background of how the current state of digital curation has evolved, which is hard for them to acquire without the personal stories of those of us who were there! Who else would be interested in our stories? I also feel like I have a mission to inspire museum studies students to learn about digital curation and consider going in that direction if they’re interested in collection management. There are some exciting things go-

ing on with the use of technology (such as Linked Open Data) to open up archives and other special collections content to online research. The implications for museums and museum archives are particularly exciting, given that museum objects, unlike books, usually need external documentation to reveal their meaning. That documentation may be discovered over time in archives, exhibition catalogs, inventories, etc., which has tremendous value for an expanded view of provenance research, going beyond ownership of individual objects to a larger cultural significance. I’ve found that many museum students are interested in archives and their capacity for storytelling, so this fits well with museums’ educational mission. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Maybe being retired? How/where do I see the industry in five years: I’m not a very good visionary, but I hope to see more collaboration in curating and preserving digital content across all sectors and geographic boundaries within an ever more interoperable cyberinfrastructure, as well as more innovative uses of that content. The extent to which this has already developed over the past couple of decades is amazing, so it seems likely to continue, especially with the increased focus on digital collections resulting from the closure of museums and libraries during the pandemic. I hope this will lead to more global cooperation and understanding, at least in the area of cultural heritage and shared human experience. I’m particularly interested in the documentation of heritage and archaeological sites, especially with the tools now available to identify buried and undersea structures and artifacts.

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Coalition for Networked Information 21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 296-5098 https://www.cni.org/ Affiliated organizations: CNI’s member organizations are from higher education, publishing, information technology, scholarly and professional organizations, foundations, libraries, and library organizations. See https://www.cni.org/about-cni/membership/members. Number of employees: 5 – 10 History and brief description of your organization: The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE, is dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of digital information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of

60 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

intellectual productivity. Over 200 institutions representing higher education, publishing, information technology, scholarly and professional organizations, foundations, and libraries and library organizations make up CNI’s members. In establishing the Coalition under the leadership of founding Executive Director Paul Evan Peters in 1990, these sponsor organizations recognized the need to broaden the community’s thinking beyond issues of network connectivity and bandwidth to encompass digital content and advanced applications to create, share, disseminate, and analyze such content in the service of research and education. Reaping the benefits of the Internet for scholarship, research, and education demanded — and continues to demand — new partnerships, new institutional roles, and new technologies and infrastructure. CNI seeks to advance these collaborations, to explore these new roles, and to catalyze the development and deployment of the necessary technology base.

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

LIBRARY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Advanced Academic Programs, Museum and Heritage Studies 1717 Massachusetts Ave., NW Washington, DC 20036 Website: https://advanced.jhu.edu/academics/fields-of-study/museum-and-heritage-studies/ Certificate in Digital Curation: https://advanced.jhu.edu/academics/certificates/digital-curation/ Background/history of the school: The JHU MA in Museum Studies program, established in 2008, is an innovative online program focusing on technology and global perspectives in museum practice and management, which now has more than 1,000 alumni. The Graduate Certificate in Digital Curation was added in 2014. In 2017, an MA in Cultural Heritage Management was approved, creating the new suite of programs in Museum and Heritage Studies. Students can earn the digital curation certificate alone or combined with the MA in Museum Studies or the MA in Cultural Heritage Management. Number of faculty: 7 in digital curation, 60 in museum studies, 12 in cultural heritage management. Curriculum tracks; key courses: Digital curation is an additional credential in both the museum studies and cultural heritage management programs. Digital curation courses include Foundations of Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, Managing Digital Information in Museums and Archives; Internship; Research Paper on a topic in digital curation, and one elective from either museum studies or cultural heritage management.

Unique programs: The JHU digital curation program is one of the earliest programs integrated into a museum studies or cultural heritage management degree program. Primary areas of research: All students in the digital curation program complete a research paper on a topic in digital curation; selected papers are published in the JHU Institutional Repository JScholarship. My own recent publications have focused on digital curation education. Available Internships/residencies: Digital curation students complete an internship of at least 120 hours in a museum, library, archive or other appropriate setting — which has included everything from a university press to an academic department that manages biological specimens. Partnerships with other professional programs: The museum and cultural heritage management programs have extensive relationships with many museums and other cultural heritage organizations, which provides numerous internship and networking opportunities for students and alums. What do you think your school will be like in five years? We have seen an increase in enrollment in the digital curation program as a result of the pandemic, I think in part because museums realized how important it is to have a robust online presence if the museum must be closed, and how eager online users are for authentic cultural heritage content. We also have had an increase in digital curation students coming from the growing cultural heritage management program. I would love to see more involvement with web archiving, heritage sites, and more implementation of tools to identify and document archaeological sites, among other digital curation tools.

Back Talk continued from page 62 for the humanities in American society and the kinds of efforts librarians can participate in to support progress in challenging times. The last morning was the most familiar, as everyone — it’s almost true to say — crowded into the Carolina Ballroom at the Francis Marion hotel for my alter ego Ann Okerson’s 12th annual “Long Arm of the Law” session, this time featuring Kevin Smith from the University of Kansas reporting on percolating state laws that mandate reasonable access to eBook for users of public libraries (yes!) and Lila Bailey of the Internet Archive, who brought folks up to date on the state of Controlled Digital Lending in the midst of the — I think — bizarre lawsuit against the Archive, where she’s up to her ears in discovery and depositions. (Her most sobering and interesting message? Suits like this take a very long time, so maybe ten years?) Some of us had heard in an earlier conference session, featuring Chris Freeland of the Archive, of the many ways in which organizations in many

Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

places are moving rapidly to put controlled digital lending into practice. Will the lawsuit be overtaken and made irrelevant by the march of progress? There was a lot more, of course, and the good news is that registered attendees can go back and review all the sessions they attended and all the sessions they missed in the videos archived on the conference website. The airport wasn’t quite as full of familiar faces on Friday afternoon as it was in my past experiences, so as our plane left miraculously on time I decided to set that as a measure of growth and success — filling the airport as well as cyberspace with the smart and funny and friendly and imaginative people you can only meet at a Charleston Conference. Unless I doze off again, I plan to return next year for my combo of intellectual treats and stomach-pleasing sweets!

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

Back Talk — Rip Van Winkle Returns to Charleston! Column Editor: Ann Okerson (Advisor on Electronic Resources Strategy, Center for Research Libraries) <aokerson@gmail.com>

ello, there, it’s me again: Rip, Rip van Winkle! I gave you a little backtalk earlier this year, when I had just awakened to find this whole pandemic thing roaring along, but I must have dozed off again. This time when I woke up, everybody around me was talking excitedly about a major event called the Charleston Conference. I remembered it from the Times Before (my long nap, you know), and I thought I might as well go along with them to see what it was up to — maybe it had a long nap as well! Now exactly where I woke up is a bit of a puzzle, because I was in a car rattling along I-95, and the people I was with were plotting their course for a Chocolate Library. I thought that was a very confusing idea because I’m so old that I can remember when they wouldn’t let food into a library, much less make a whole one out of chocolate. Suddenly, there we were, pulling into Savannah and driving around gardens of good and evil by Bull Street, when one of my colleagues exclaimed, “There it is!” and we veered to a stop. Sure enough it was a Chocolate Library of sorts (http:// www.chocolatat.com/locations) – shelves with fine chocolates arrayed in neat librarianish order, mixed in with shelves full of, well, you’d have to say books, but really, did they all need to be hardcover encyclopedia volumes from before I was born, and in rather bad shape at that? And the large scale models of the Eiffel Tower and the Tower of Pisa over by the entrance? The nice lady gave customers wooden trays that looked like card catalog drawers to use in going around and collecting their choice of chocolate, which was rather amusing, but dear me, strangest library I’ve ever been in. Now, I’m telling you all this not only because I’m sure you like to read about all kinds of libraries, but because the Savannah Library has a sister shop right in, yes, downtown Charleston,

ADVERTISER’S INDEX 2 13 63 15 49 8 9 5 45

ACS Publications 25 AIP Publishing 19 American College of Physicians 64 Brepols Publishers 7 The Charleston Advisor The Charleston Report 11 Coherent Digital 3 Cold Spring Harbor Lab Press 31 Emery-Pratt

INFORMS The MIT Press MLA Optica Publishing Group (formerly OSA) OverDrive Project MUSE Royal Society of Chemistry

FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION CONTACT

Toni Nix, Advertising Manger, Against the Grain, Charleston Hub <justwrite@lowcountry.com> Phone: 843-835-8604 • Fax: 843-835-5892

62 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022

on King Street a block before you get to Ben Silver — only there it’s called an Orangerie, not a library, with lots of bird cages and the same chocolate. Actually the chocolate in both places is very good and is made by a fine young man named Adam Turoni, and I was glad to have been hauled around to explore his shops! OK, as you can already see, eventually we got to Charleston, that lovely city you remember from the Days Before COVID. Nice people, nice hotels, nice cafes, another totally excellent chocolatier who’s been there for some years and seems to have opened a second shop out in West Ashley of all places (“Christophe Artisan Chocolatier” on Society Street, just five minutes from the Francis Marion https://christophechocolatier.com/), History was in the air. I hadn’t been there since the Days Before, and the pleasure of going back to favorite places now is one of the few blessings this evil bug has brought us. Oh, there are changes: more new hotels and cafes, but a lot of empty shops on King Street waiting for the waves of visitors to return, as they should. I was pleased to see that the Cat Cafe on Meeting Street was still around and busy. The colossal pillar in Marion Square that had the statue of a rather unpleasant man on it has been completely torn down and carried off — and in its place is a large work of art forming the word JOY with a South Carolina pineapple playing the part of the second letter. I couldn’t tell if this was a message to replace the old statue or a highly premature Christmas decoration or — my vote — a tribute to one of the conference’s keynote speakers. But we all were back. The Conference itself was just as I remembered it, with a huge buffet of rich intellectual fare spread over three days. In the Days Before, something like 1800 people would come to the city for the buffet, but then last year, when the whole thing apparently went virtual, the number hit 3000! The total number this year was a bit less, but now it was a mix of online and presence and a great experiment — the first one I’ve seen personally — in how to manage that combination. There’s a lot to be learned about making such things go smoothly, but perhaps even just five years from now we’ll be standing on the rooftop terrace of the Dewberry (thank you, Stephen Rhind-Tutt for the treats!) boasting about how we were there for the first hybrid conference and now, we will say, look what a huge and roaring success this new format has turned into. The issues of the day included the new focus on post-COVID realities and the renewed challenges of inclusiveness and equity, and I learned a lot about what I’d missed during my long nap. Keynote speaker and futurist Paul Saffo — entirely virtual, beamed in from, where else, Silicon Valley, talked about how librarians can learn to think like a civilization, while Joy Connolly — the one with her first name up in lights in Marion Square — came from the American Council of Learned Societies to tell us to think different and reviewed the opportunities she sees continued on page 61

<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>

The MLA’s Trusted Guide Goes Digital The MLA Handbook is now available as a subscription-based digital resource. Students and instructors can get online access to our ninth edition through their school’s library.

MLA Handbook Plus is Trusted

Dynamic

The only authorized subscription-based digital resource featuring the MLA Handbook will be available for unlimited simultaneous users.

Features an easy-to-search interface, cross-linking of related material, and a split view that lets students see illustrations while reading corresponding content.

Evolving

Flexible

Get the same content as the print edition, plus seamless annual updates and forthcoming additional resources such as videos and companion titles.

Whether on campus, at home, or in a coffee shop, students can access the platform from anywhere—perfect for remote or hybrid learning environments.

Accessible

Affordable

Meets WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards—ensuring that learning MLA style is available to all.

Tiered pricing model based on full-time undergraduate enrollments.

mlahandbookplus.org

V33#6 December, 2021/January, 2022 Full Issue

Articles inside

at an Academic Library

Back Talk — Rip Van Winkle Returns to Charleston

Let’s Get Technical — Subject Heading Prediction

Curriculum Design and Course Technology Support Centered on Affordability, Engagement, and OER

Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews

Questions and Answers — Copyright Column

The Dangerous Complacency of “Web Archiving” Rhetoric

Booklover — Timely

Bet You Missed It

Don’s Conference Notes

Collecting from the Web: Collection Development Policy in the Born-Digital Universe

Transnational Collaborative Web Archiving: The International Internet Preservation Consortium