c/o Katina Strauch Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482
VOLUME 34, NUMBER 1
FEBRUARY 2022 TM
ISSN: 1043-2094
“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”
eBooks in Academic Libraries, Part 2 Guest Edited by David Gibbs
(University Library, California State University, Sacramento) Begins on Page 11
If Rumors Were Horses
W
elcome to the first all-digital issue of Against the Grain! After 33 years of print publication, Against the Grain is excited to be moving to an all-digital format. The December 2021 - January 2022 issue was the final issue sent by mail. Subscribers will still receive all the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents, but as an easily accessible electronic publication. This will allow ATG to reach its readers in a quick and streamlined manner. Now, on with the Rumors!
Do You Wordle? The daily word puzzle game Wordle has taken the world by storm. I started seeing green, yellow, and black boxes pop up all over social media back in December, but things really took off in January to the point of memes declaring Wordle to be another phase of the pandemic, along with Tiger King and bread baking! On January 31, 2022, The New York Times Company, the parent of The New York Times, acquired Wordle from the game’s creator Josh Wardle for “an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures. https://www.nytco.com/press/wordle-newyork-times-games/ Fans speculated this would move the game behind a paywall, or change continued on page 8
WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN THIS ISSUE: eBooks in Academic Libraries: The Publisher/Aggregator Perspective................................. 11 eBooks in Academic Libraries: Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Opportunities....... 12 Evolving as a STEM Publisher to Meet Changing Library Needs........................................... 15 Sustainable eBook Acquisition and Access: The not-for-profit Perspective................................. 17 The State of eBooks in Academic Libraries: Acquisition and the User Experience.......... 19
REGULAR COLUMNS Bet You Missed It....................... 10 Reader’s Roundup..................... 22 Booklover.................................... 25 Legally Speaking....................... 26 Questions and Answers............ 28 And They Were There............... 30 Learning Belongs...................... 34 Let’s Get Technical..................... 36 Optimizing Library Services.... 38 The Digital Toolbox.................. 41 Biz of Digital............................... 43 Back Talk..................................... 56
INTERVIEWS Jared Oates................................. 47 Marjorie M K Hlava................... 49
PROFILES ENCOURAGED People, Library and Company Profiles........................................ 51 Plus more...................... See inside
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Against The Grain – ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) (USPS: 012-618), Copyright 2022 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. Subscribe online at https://www. charleston-hub.com/membership-account/membership-levels/.
Editor:
v.34 #1 February 2022 © Katina Strauch
ISSUES, NEWS, & GOINGS ON Rumors............................................................................................................... 1 From Your Editor................................................................................................ 6
Katina Strauch (Retired, College of Charleston)
Letters to the Editor........................................................................................... 6
Associate Editors:
Advertising Deadlines........................................................................................ 6
Cris Ferguson (Murray State) Tom Gilson (Retired, College of Charleston) Matthew Ismail (Charleston Hub)
Research Editors:
Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)
Assistants to the Editor: Ileana Jacks Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)
International Editor:
FEATURES eBooks in Academic Libraries: The Publisher/Aggregator Perspective............................................................. 11 eBooks in Academic Libraries: Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Opportunities................................................................................................... 12
Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino)
Evolving as a STEM Publisher to Meet Changing Library Needs...................... 15
Contributing Editors:
Sustainable eBook Acquisition and Access: The not-for-profit Perspective..... 17
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>
The State of eBooks in Academic Libraries: Acquisition and the User Experience....................................................................................................... 19 Back Talk — My Glorious Library Career: Part 2.............................................. 56
REVIEWS Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews.................... 22 Booklover — The Sound of Words.................................................................... 25
LEGAL ISSUES Legally Speaking — Antitrust Lawsuit: Penguin Random House Publishers and Simon & Schuster..................................................................................... 26 Questions and Answers — Copyright Column.................................................. 28
PUBLISHING Bet You Missed It............................................................................................. 10 And They Were There — Reports of Meetings.................................................. 30
TECHNOLOGY & STANDARDS AND TEACHING & LEARNING Learning Belongs in the Library — On Critical Race Theory and Book Banning, Publishers Speak Up!............................................................... 34 Let’s Get Technical — “Bridging the Gap: MARC and Non-MARC Workflows in Technical Services Departments”................................................................ 36
BOOKSELLING AND VENDING
Advertising Information:
Toni Nix, phone: 843-835-8604, fax: 843-835-5892 <justwrite@lowcountry.com>
Optimizing Library Services — Open Access Resources: “Supporting Language Learning with OERs and Open-Authoring Tools”............................ 38
Publisher:
The Digital Toolbox — Lessons and Trends in Digital Lending in 2021........... 41
Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to:
Biz of Digital — Coordinating Coordinates: Adding Plat Books and Plat Maps to Our Digital Repository................................................................ 43
A. Bruce Strauch Katina Strauch, Editor, Against the Grain, LLC Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482 cell: 843-509-2848 <kstrauch@comcast.net> 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 ©2022 by Katina Strauch
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Against the Grain / February 2022
ATG INTERVIEWS & PROFILES Jared Oates – Co-Founder and COO of Niche Academy................................... 47 Marjorie M K Hlava – President, Access Innovations ...................................... 49 Profiles Encouraged......................................................................................... 51
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From Your (relieved) Editor:
W
HEW! I am relieved because we have finished with the final print issue of ATG and with this issue are moving to virtual only issues. I am here to tell you that it was not as easy as I thought it would be. Learning something new is fun and all that, but there are a lot of strange hoops to jump through and new processes to learn! This issue is about eBooks in Academic Libraries, Part 2. It is guest edited by the incredibly flexible David Gibbs (Sacramento State University). Our feature articles cover the Publisher/ Aggregator perspective and are by Kara Kroes Li (EBSCO, about challenges and opportunities), Melissa Fulkerson (Elsevier, about evolving as a STEM publisher), John Lenahan (JSTOR, about the not-for-profit perspective, and Andrea Ferro (Casalini Libri, about acquisition and the user experience). Corey Seeman has come up with some great reviews, and Donna Jacobs is intrigued with the sound of words and takes us back to the very first “Booklover” column!
President of Access Innovations. Margie started the business in 1978 and is still on the cutting edge of technological innovation today! She’s a frequent industry presenter, and says about attending conferences and meetings, “Attending builds your network faster than any other way. It is far better than just social media… You are also much more focused and less distracted at a conference — you’ll learn more. The serendipitous conversations are priceless. It is an opportunity to learn and to contribute to the profession.” We hope many of you are able to return to Charleston for the conference this November for those reasons and more! And if you need more reasons, the Francis Marion Hotel recently published a blog post with some delicious looking new restaurants and bars within walking distance of our conference headquarters: https://www.francismarionhotel. com/new-sights-bites/
We have two fascinating interviews in this issue as well. Jared Oates, Co-Founder and COO of Niche Academy, talks with us about their learning management system that delivers training packages, and what that looks like in the academic library environment. We also have a conversation with Marjorie Hlava,
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time! Love, Yr.Ed.
Last but not least, don’t miss Jim O’Donnell’s “Back Talk” column, the second installment of “My Glorious Library Career.” Jim reminisces about a college work study job with Professor Fine in the Classics Department for a whopping $2/hour! Wow!
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 Charleston Conference and Leah Hinds: Just a little note to tell you how much I appreciate the folding calendar 2022 from the Charleston Conference. They are my favorite. I use it the entire year on my desk by my laptop. Such a convenient size and shape and so useful. I actually thought sadly with the virtual Charleston, no more
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Against the Grain / February 2022
calendar! And when I opened it up this week I was so surprised and thankful. Greatly appreciated! Sincerely, Michelle Michelle Brewer (Librarian/Market Intelligence Manager, Wolters Kluwer) <michelle.brewer@wolterskluwer.com> Dear Michelle, Thank you for the lovely thank you note! I’m so glad to hear that you find the desk calendar useful and that it was a nice surprise for you in the mail. I have to give full credit to our colleagues at SAGE Publishing for sponsoring the calendars and for making sure that the virtual attendees were included. I forwarded your note to them as well! Best, Leah Dear Camille, Luke, Amy, and Stephanie, Just wanted to share this lovely thank you note we received about the desk calendar from a virtual attendee! We are very grateful to SAGE (https://us.sagepub.com) for your sponsorship of the calendars and for making sure all our virtual attendees were able to receive them as well. Best, Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Library Conference) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com>
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One Ivy's "essential homework for getting the most out of COP26" ...but 11 out of 12 reports are published as grey literature
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Grey literature is excluded from the scholarly record. It's hard to find, difficult to cite, and at risk of disappearing when links break.
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Rumors continued from page 1 the nature of the game somehow, but so far the only change has been cosmetic with an updated look to the page. Although they claim they haven’t changed the word list from the one Wardle used, I swear things have gotten more difficult!
Job Changes, New Hires, Retirements, and More! Congratulations to Jenni Wilson on joining Coherent Digital — she just came aboard as Sales Manager for the Midwest, Central Plains, and West. Stephen Rhind-Tutt and Eileen Lawrence worked with Jenni at Alexander Street for many years. She most recently has spent time at ProQuest and SAGE. From Eileen: We’re so excited to be working with her again! A lot of librarians know her, as she’s been part of our community since the early 1990s. Her customers love her — she’s smart, meticulous, caring, and has a sharp sense of humor. She also brings her MLIS degree and her decades of sales experience (Buzzy Basch and Jenni and I worked together in 1994 at what was then Turner Subscriptions). Jenni lives with her husband in Chicago where, she says, they’re lucky to have access to the world’s best music, the greatest lake, and wonderful food, all of which make her happy. About joining Coherent Digital, she says, “I’m over the moon thrilled to be back in a space where I can share stories about important and inspirational collections, working with important and inspirational colleagues.”
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Against the Grain / February 2022
From Brad Warren, currently Associate Dean of Library Services at University of Cincinnati: “I will start March 1st as the inaugural Dean of Libraries at Augusta University in Augusta, GA. I am so happy to return to the south and begin this next opportunity in my career.” A round of applause for David Parker in his new position as Senior Director Product Management at Infobase! “My focus is on media and content across streaming video, databases, and eBooks and the winnning brands of Films on Demand, Credo Reference, Facts on File, and more,” says David. AIP Publishing announced last month that Ann Michael has joined the organization in the new role of Chief Transformation Officer. She will report to CEO Alix Vance as part of AIP Publishing’s executive management team. “I am convinced that AIP Publishing can impact the evolution of scholarly communications and has the intent and resolve to rethink how it interacts with researchers. They are committed to delivering value to them as individuals and key members of the physical sciences community,” Ann said. “I couldn’t be more excited about being part of the AIP Publishing team.” https://publishing. aip.org/about/news/ann-michael/ Jayne Marks has joined the Maverick Publishing Specialists team as a Senior Associate. Jayne has 40 years of experience in senior roles helping some of the industry’s major publishers devise and deliver on global business strategies in various facets of the STM markets. Most recently, she served 10 years as Vice President, Global Publishing for Wolters Kluwer Health where she oversaw a broad portfolio of journals and diversified traditional revenue streams. https://www.maverick-os.com/ news-events/news/publishing-industry-executive-jayne-marksjoins-maverick-publishing-specialists/ IGI Global has appointed Lindsay Wertman as its new President. “These are exciting times in our industry, the way that content is being shared and accessed paired with the level of innovation and collaboration that we are seeing take place is astounding. I feel honored and privileged to have the opportunity to serve the academic community. We at IGI Global have always been deeply committed to ensuring that researchers have a trusted outlet for their work and that we as an organization remain agile as content needs evolve. I’m looking forward to launching many new initiatives in the years ahead,” said Lindsay. Keep an eye (or an ear) out for an ATG the Podcast interview with Lindsay to come in March! Bob Nardini turned in his ProQuest badge on New Year’s Eve, retiring after nearly 40 years in the field. His departure will not only be felt at the company, where he last served as Vice President of Library Services, but from every corner of the industry. “Bob has made a tremendous impact in the academic library space during his 15 years with us and throughout his entire career,” said Oren Beit-Arie, who led the ProQuest books business. “I’m excited for Bob’s next journey, but will also miss him dearly.” Read all about it in this blog post by Alison Roth: https://about.proquest.com/en/blog/2022/library-thoughtleader-bob-nardini-retires-after-40-year-career/. Congrats to Bob on his retirement!
On the Blog Have you been keeping up with our new weekly series of ATG blog posts? On topics ranging from the death of proofreading, collaborative marketing efforts, eliminating student transcript holds for library fees, defining “open” for open access, and podcast recommendations, there’s something here for everyone
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Save the Date(s)! The Charleston Conference is planning a very special Charleston In Between virtual conference event May 11-12 to explore important late-breaking developments that can’t wait til November for discussion. Topics to be covered include: • An update on the Clarivate/ProQuest acquisition from last year’s Charleston In Between,
Watch for our call for preconferences and papers which will be announced shortly. Conference registration will open in early June, along with hotel guest room blocks. Sign up to receive the latest news and announcements by creating an account at https://www.charleston-hub.com/membership-account/ membership-checkout/ and clicking “Information about the Charleston Conference,” or follow the Charleston Hub on your favorite social media platform.
Rumors, Rumors, and More Rumors!
• Exploration of consolidation and competition within the industry at large, and
Coming soon! We’ve heard from our readers that you want more frequent “rumors” updates, so we’ll be posting them on the Charleston Hub website between issues of ATG. Keep up with the latest at https://www.charleston-hub.com/category/rumors/.
• Efforts by ResearchGate and Elsevier to host the content of other publishers.
That’s it for now, but as always, please send updates to us at editors@against-the-grain.com for inclusion!
We have a stellar line-up of panelists in the works, with Roger Schonfeld (Director, Libraries & Scholarly Communication & Museums, Ithaka S+R) and Ann Okerson (Senior Advisor, CRL) as panel moderators. Watch for registration and more details coming your way soon! And the 2022 Charleston Conference will take place October 31-November 4. We are planning a hybrid event with in-person attendance in lovely historic Charleston, SC. The Gaillard Center, Francis Marion Hotel, and Marriott Courtyard are expecting us! We will also have a virtual component available for those who are unable to join us in Charleston. https://www. charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/
Against the Grain / February 2022
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Bet You Missed It — Press Clippings — In the News Carefully Selected by Your Crack Staff of News Sleuths Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com>
Women Writers of WWII
Yes, I’d Call That Indefatigable
(1) Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (1959) (Hemingway’s third wife covered both Spain and WWII in Europe and later Vietnam); (2) Virginia Cowles, Looking for Trouble (1941) (early days of the war — Finland and the fall of Paris); (3) Iris Carpenter, No Woman’s World (1946) (one of the few accredited to the front lines); (4) Anthony Penrose, Ed., Lee Miller’s War: Beyond D-Day (2014) (Condé Nast model, muse and mistress of Man Ray, NY celebrity photog who went to war); (5) Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1948) (novel of London in the Blitz where Elizabeth was an air raid warden).
Danielle Steel has written 190 best sellers, been married five times, and had nine children. When on a roll she can write for 22 hours a day. She’s sold 900 million copies and often doesn’t remember the plot after she’s finished a book. Has to call her agent to be briefed for interviews.
See: Judith Mackrell, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18-19,2021, p.C8.
Obit of Note Jason Epstein (1928-2022) was a 25-year-old trainee at Doubleday when he suggested selling highbrow literary fiction in paperback. It had only done pulps before. His imprint Anchor Books took off. He was editorial director at Random House for decades editing Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, W.H. Auden, and Norman Mailer. In 1963, he was the driving force behind launching the New York Review of Books, and in the ’70s, he helped create the Library of America. He called his life in the book trade “sheer luck.” See: “The publishing pioneer who elevated paperbacks,” The Week, Feb. 18, 2022, p.35.
Quit Our Day Jobs? Forbes lists the highest YouTube plutocrats with MrBeast coming in tops at $54 million last year. His income had jumped from a mere $24 million the previous year. He is a former Boy Scout who specializes in elaborate stunts like being buried alive for 50 hours and paying a volunteer $10,000 to sit in a bathtub filled with snakes. And the list runs down to No. 5 at $28.5 million. It’s somebody playing Minecraft. We went to college why exactly? See: “Numbers of the Beast,” Forbes, Feb/March, 2022, p.23.
Let’s Thoroughly Read the Mitfords Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford (1975) (famous aesthete, contemporary with Nancy M); (2) Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels (1960) (Jessica relates their childhood; became a communist and investigative journalist); (3) Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love (1945) (the most famous sister through her marvelous novels); (4) David Pryce-Jones, Unity Mitford; A Quest (1976) (the Nazi who adored Hitler); (5) Deborah Mitford, Wait for Me! Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister (2010) (wrote a dozen books herself). See: Rachel Johnson, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 22-23, 2022, p.C8. Rachel is the author of “Rake’s Progress: The Madcap True Tale of My Political Midlife Crisis.”
10 Against the Grain / February 2022
She gave up caffeine years ago and starts each day with a virgin mojito and a piece of toast. She admits to smoking and says this gets you aggressively insulted in California. See: Lane Florsheim, “Danielle Steel,” WSJ Magazine, Spring Fashion Issue, p.105.
Let’s Read Dog Stories Willie Morris, My Dog Skip (1995) (Willie Morris defines his youth through his dog); (2) Jack London, Call of the Wild (1903) (check out the great Youtube documentary on London’s life); (3) Fred Gipson, Savage Sam (1962) (sequel to the classic Old Yeller); (4) Dean Koontz, Watchers (1987) (monster, assassin, woman stalked by cretin, depressed ex-soldier … oh, and a dog); (5) Ed Martha White, E.B. White on Dogs (2013) (life of dogs in NYC). See: Rick Bragg, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11-12, 2022, p.C8. Rick’s most recent work is “The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People.”
Banishing Amenity Warfare and Slave Adjuncts in Higher Ed Pano Kanelos was expected to take over the family diner, but he went to Northwestern instead. He earned a Ph.D. in literature and taught at prestige colleges. As president of St. John’s, he cut tuition from $52,000 to $35,000. He decries runaway spending on administrators and student sushi bars. Now he is president of the new University of Austin in Texas (UATX). His chief financial backer is Joe Lonsdale, founder of Palantir Technologies. A large motivation is to escape the radical campus group-think that has 6 in 10 students saying they’re afraid to express their beliefs. But he insists it is not an anti-woke university. Cost-containment is a primary goal with no administrators in offices on campus. But he will not exploit adjuncts the way most colleges do to cut corners. Says you can’t be an independent-minded professor if you’re working for peanuts on semester-to-semester contracts. See: Emily Borrow, “Weekend Confidential,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 29-30, 2021, p.C6.
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eBooks in Academic Libraries: The Publisher/Aggregator Perspective By David Gibbs (Interim Associate Dean, University Library, California State University, Sacramento) <david.gibbs@csus.edu>
I
n the September 2021 issue of this publication, librarians shared their experiences with the challenges and opportunities of acquiring eBooks for academic libraries, twenty years after this format first appeared on the scene. As promised, this issue offers publishers and aggregators an opportunity to respond. Our first two articles address lessons learned from COVID-19 and the abrupt shift to online learning. EBSCO’s Kara Kroes Li writes about the COVID-driven transition toward eBook course reserves and “curriculum-driven acquisition,” as well as the aggregator’s role in educating publishers and pushing them to adopt more open eBook models and more reasonable pricing. She observes that COVID seems to have accelerated users’ preference for eBooks over print. When Elsevier opened up its catalog during the first year of COVID, Melissa Fulkerson was surprised by how much of the increase in STEM eBook usage could be attributed to undergraduates, which the publisher had never considered a core market. She now has a more expansive idea of what can be considered STEM “reference” content and who counts as a researcher.
Against the Grain / February 2022
John Lenahan explains how JSTOR has expanded access to eBooks by surfacing content at the chapter level, pushing publishers to expand unlimited DRM-free access, and facilitating the inevitable move toward Open Access. Finally, Andrea Ferro of Casalini takes a historical look at the evolution of eBooks over the past twenty years, from mostly backlist print supplements sold in packages to today’s complex patron- and evidence-driven acquisitions models and multiple pricing options. He lays out the challenges of an aggregator specializing in niche content in trying to meet the needs of multiple and diverse stakeholders. All of these publishers and aggregators clearly understand the frustrations expressed by the librarians in the September issue. It is reassuring to see that they are addressing the shortcomings of eBooks in the academic marketplace and advocating for libraries and users to their publisher clients. I come away optimistic that the next 20 years will see continued improvements in the eBook experience for librarians and users alike.
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eBooks in Academic Libraries: Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Opportunities By Kara Kroes Li (Director of Product Management, Ebooks, EBSCO) <KKroes@ebsco.com>
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he pandemic thrust a spotlight on eBooks in libraries, and in doing so highlighted their wondrous conveniences and maddening limitations in almost equal measure. Many of the challenges experienced by libraries — in acquisition, collection management, and the user experience — have seen great progress over the last few years. However, despite the dramatic growth of eBooks in academic libraries, the institutional eBook ecosystem is still constrained by availability and pricing, frustrated by user experience limitations, and burdened by collection management challenges. As an aggregator with a vantage point between libraries and publishers, I share thoughts on where we’re headed, which challenges are likely to be solved, and which might hang around over the long term.
Availability and Pricing Earlier this year, EBSCO surveyed approximately 400 academic libraries to learn what pandemic-induced changes they felt would be permanent. Libraries reported that one of the most universal permanent changes was shifting titles purchased for course reserves to eBook format. Curriculum support, or “curriculum-driven acquisition,” had been a growing trend in response to textbook affordability issues, but its expanded use drove an even greater need for titles in eBook format and expanded access models such as unlimited user and DRM-free. Unfortunately, many publishers withhold their highest-demand content (content with the greatest potential for sales to individuals, like course adoptions) from libraries, so libraries have been unable to transition all of their course reserves to digital. In some cases, if there is a library option available, the cost is prohibitive. To combat this issue, EBSCO has focused on encouraging publishers to make their full catalog available for institutional purchase (in some cases helping them select backlist titles for digitization) and, where possible, to offer unlimited user DRMfree versions. According to GOBI’s data, 74% of titles profiled (relevant to academic libraries) are available as an eBook for libraries, which is up from 50% in 2016. Since EBSCO introduced the aggregator DRM-free eBook model in 2018, with 70,000 titles, the offering has grown to 325,000, including more than 55,000 frontlist titles. We have also seen some gross excesses in eBook pricing, as evidenced by the #ebooksos hashtag. We have worked to educate publishers on the real risks and benefits to library sales, and we encourage them to make, at a minimum, a perpetual single user license available to libraries. Over the last two years, we’ve seen the average unlimited user price drop 13% from a peak in 2019, and the average single user price drop 10% from a peak the same year. Even though we’ve seen a lot of experimentation with pricing by publishers, I believe we will reach an equilibrium for most content — for single-user access at least — that is more acceptable to libraries. The struggle for library availability is coming to a head with new laws passed (and challenged) in Maryland (Albanese), New York, and Rhode Island, as well as with a recent U.S. Senate investigation (Wille) into pricing and licensing terms for libraries. The new laws, which require publishers to sell eBooks to libraries “on reasonable terms” if they make an eBook available to consumers,
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are being challenged by publishers concerned about the government regulating their ability to profit from copyrighted works. A similar law is being contemplated in Massachusetts (Bray), so this is a growing trend. While this has more to do with public library sales and expiring acquisition models, the tide seems to be turning in favor of libraries seeking eBook terms that align more closely with those of print. While there is likely to be some thrashing as we update our legal system in terms of copyright laws and first sale doctrine for eBooks, I anticipate positive developments for academic-library availability as a result. This means that libraries should be able to procure digital reserves for most content, but probably still won’t be able to purchase inexpensive unlimited-user versions of all requests to relieve students from purchasing their course materials. Even today, publishers are increasingly willing to offer content and models to libraries provided that certain protections are in place either in the form of limited-access models or digital rights management (DRM). At the risk of stating the obvious, any model that directly or dramatically undermines the number of units a publisher can sell will be looked at with scrutiny. If DRM-free unlimited user is not an option (which will always be off the table for certain content), we encourage publishers to at least “Students offer single-user access. There is are accessing very little risk to publishers offering almost double single-user licenses to libraries, because this model approximates the number of the inherent limitations of print. unique titles Penguin Random House is a great as they did example of this compromise — they agreed to sell their full catalog to pre-pandemic academic libraries via EBSCO, but ... This likely we impose limitations to ensure corresponds to that checked-out titles expire and become inaccessible, rather than eBooks being infinitely sharable without DRM. used more We’ve replicated this success prouniversally as curing a perpetual-license option course materials.” with a number of other publishers, including Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and numerous independent trade publishers through the Independent Publishers Group. In fact, we now offer more than 180,000 trade titles, which have become a growing percentage of our sales to academic libraries. Maximizing availability for libraries unfortunately requires some tradeoffs in the user experience. Fortunately, as a large aggregator, we can offer a variety of levers for content protection in order to maximize the number of titles available for library purchase. We can control downloading (e.g., none, partial, full, as well as the duration), copy and paste, and of course, simultaneous users. I do foresee us continuing to close the gap in terms of eBook availability, perhaps getting close to 100% of titles in print. Some titles, such as large art books, might be challenging, but most titles should be available with little risk to publishers. But in order to do this, I expect to see variability in content delivery (user experience) over the long term.
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User Experience We often hear from libraries about users’ challenges when different platforms offer different functionality, or when different titles on the same platform offer different functionality. But users actually tell us that as long as it’s clear to them what they can and can’t do with the content, they are pretty resilient.1 While last year, many users had no choice but to access content online, this year most of them do, and they still often choose “e” over print. Overall usage on our platform increased more than 40% when schools went remote, but we’ve stayed at nearly that level of usage even with the renewed availability of print options. Students are accessing almost double the number of unique titles as they did pre-pandemic (we saw a greater than 40% increase two years in a row), suggesting that they are leveraging eBooks for a broader range of research and reading than they have in the past. Also remarkable is the increase in “interactions” with eBooks. From 2019 to 2020, we saw a 34% increase in section interactions (chapter downloads, print/save/ email) and a 26% increase in full eBook downloads. But when we look at 2021 compared to 2020, we saw an additional 66% increase in section interactions, an additional 52% increase in full eBook downloads (buoyed in part by our mobile app), and a 112% increase in the number of times users copy and paste text. This likely corresponds to eBooks being used more universally as course materials, so students are using eBook content more deliberately as opposed to as quick reference. We also saw users spending a minute more in each eBook on average online. Although we expect DRM and user limitations to persist in some form, we have made good progress in the user experience. We’ve seen publishers modernize their workflows to ensure they can produce eBooks in EPUB format, which meets accessibility standards for print-disabled students. Not only does EPUB offer the best option for screen readers; it also allows all users to jump to and from endnotes in the text, to link between chapters and figures, and to customize the text size and have it reflow. We’ve actually seen the percentage of WCAG-compliant titles double over the past two years. (EBSCO assesses all incoming EPUB content for best practices and accessibility standards using a custom tool.) That said, many small publishers report to us that they simply don’t have the resources to produce accessible EPUBs. Therefore, I expect accessibility and usability to continue to improve for publishers with sufficient financial resources, but for a subset of publishers, the most accessible option that they could provide will be a DRM-free title, at least in the medium term, which will enable basic screen reader compatibility but will not provide true accessibility.2 Another challenge for eBook users is the persistence of Adobe DRM — both the additional software and the additional log-in requirement. Some libraries have urged EBSCO to abandon Adobe DRM, but when presented with alternatives, most of our libraries preferred the universality of Adobe to a custom solution, despite its limitations. We decided to take their advice and build unique code beyond the Adobe software development kit (i.e., a collection of tools, code, and a documentation library) to transfer the burden of DRM from the end user to our systems.
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So far, we’ve eliminated the need for an Adobe ID within our mobile app, and we are working on other improvements to make downloading full DRM-protected eBooks more like the public library experience in terms of usability (e.g., using a single library log in), mixed with the more academic features our mobile app already offers, such as browsing eBooks alongside journals, supporting DDA and other usage-based acquisition models, taking notes within a title, and synching research with a desktop experience. (It’s worth noting here that we’ve also made the app much more accessible to print-disabled users than the existing Adobe code facilitates.) To optimize the user experience, we encourage publishers to relax restrictions wherever possible. But, because of the variety of content we make available (everything from niche academic subjects to broadly popular trade books), and the need to implement different levels of protection, I do not foresee the user experience converging into a single mode of access, or, as some have proposed, a vendor-neutral platform. A single mode of access would dramatically limit the universe of available content, for reasons I outline above, and a vendor-neutral platform would undermine usability, because it would take away the ability for technology companies to differentiate and innovate (which is, frankly, what gets us out of bed in the morning). Instead, I anticipate the large number of eBook platforms available today to shrink, as publishers realize the enormous overhead of platform management and all the associated headaches with security, authentication, reporting, order management, etc. Today we have a plethora of eBook platforms, and our libraries tell us they value this choice and are purchasing from more providers (even though it leads to more variety in the user experience), but I do expect that in the future we’ll see fewer, and the user experience will be more streamlined as a result.
Collection Management With decreasing staff, and increasing requests for and usage of eBooks, many of our libraries struggle with the burdens of collection management. The most common workflows our libraries have asked us to improve are purchasing content for course reserves, managing titles going on and off reserve, and upgrading content to meet surges in demand. Libraries also report that they are responding to more turnaway alerts than ever before as users take more advantage of eBooks in the library. EBSCO is releasing a new module called eBook Manager to streamline these particular workflows. Libraries will be able to quickly reference a requested or turned away title, see how that title is owned and how it has been used, and complete an upgrade to support the course use case. We also introduced a new daily turnaway summary report so that libraries can see which titles received usage in excess of their availability, and when and why users were turned away. Of course, libraries that want to minimize turnaways can turn on “Automatic Upgrades,” which provides immediate access to a title by triggering a purchase of the next-highest access model, with the library only charged the difference in price. More and more libraries are leveraging this feature to provide a better user experience when the demand for a title increases unexpectedly. To manage digital reserves, which we believe is a permanent fixture in academic libraries, librarians will be able to create and manage custom lists of eBooks (think “Spring 2022 Reserve List”) — activating strict controls during certain semesters and then opening them back up for normal use during other periods.
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Conclusion As technology marches on, we look forward to further advances in the usability and accessibility of eBooks, as well as continuous improvement in collection management as companies like ours work to keep up with library workflow needs. I see publishers, “encouraged” by evolving legal frameworks, continuing to improve the content they make available to libraries and offer more reasonable pricing. Impending laws governing the accessibility of content will eventually have a positive effect as well. We are now experiencing yet another pandemic surge, which could mean even more remote schooling and an extended reliance on eBooks before we reach a more permanent equilibrium. Whatever the future holds for academic libraries, we will continue to hustle to keep up with their changing needs.
References Albanese, Andrew. “Maryland Library E-Book Bill Becomes Law.” Publishers Weekly, June 1, 2021. https://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/ article/86528-maryland-library-e-book-bill-becomes-law.html
Bray, Hiawatha. “Libraries Demand a New Deal on E-books.” Boston Globe, December 31, 2021. https://edition.pagesuite.com/ popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=7ce21134db4a-4491-bfd5-1d0a58d93d81&appid=1165 Wille, Matt. “Ebook lending libraries’ sketchy contracts face scrutiny from lawmakers.” Input, November 19, 2021. https:// www.inputmag.com/culture/ebook-lending-libraries-sketchycontracts-face-scrutiny-from-lawmakers
Endnotes 1. There is one notable exception — users and libraries almost universally tell us they want the option to download the entire book, and not be limited to chapter-by-chapter downloading. 2. For curious libraries, EBSCO provides data on accessible publishers via GOBI or EBSCOhost Collection Manager.
Save the Date: May 11-12, 2022
CHARLESTON IN BETWEEN A mini virtual "in between" conference An update on the Clarivate/ProQuest acquisition from last year’s Charleston In Between, Exploration of consolidation and competition within the industry at large, and Efforts by ResearchGate and Elsevier to host the content of other publishers.
Visit https://bit.ly/chs-in-btwn for details!
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Evolving as a STEM Publisher to Meet Changing Library Needs By Melissa K. Fulkerson (Vice President, Research Reference, Elsevier) <m.fulkerson@elsevier.com>
Introduction Late in 2019, I took on leadership of the global STEM books portfolio at Elsevier. This encompasses all channels libraries use to access and acquire books: print, all major aggregators, and consumer electronic channels, but most notably our own institutional platform, ScienceDirect, where our roughly 40,000 pieces of reference content live alongside our journals. This article is not intended to promote ScienceDirect or Elsevier books specifically, but rather to share and reflect on what I’ve seen as we have all worked through the last 22 months and all the uncertainty, challenges, and unexpected opportunities that have come with the pandemic. As mentioned in the September 2021 issue of Against the Grain on eBooks from the academic library perspective, the print to electronic migration for eBooks began over two decades ago (Gibbs, 2021). At the time, publishers were trying to understand the best way to deliver content electronically. What readers most often got was a flat PDF, and over time the more interactive EPUB format took hold in consumer channels. A version of this is often what readers will get if downloading an eBook from a retailer for personal use today. But in the academic library market, what we all hoped would be simple ultimately became complex, due to the large number of publishers and vendors all having slightly different views on how electronic content should be delivered and priced. And now, many years later, our industry asks our librarian community to play a significant role in ensuring that eBooks are requested, acquired, promoted, and used by stakeholders inside academic institutions. Again, as mentioned in the librarian viewpoints issue, “managing eBooks is mentally challenging” (Dinkins, 2021). Indeed, it has become so. Access is inconsistent, with some platforms offering DRMfree eBooks and others limiting concurrent usage. There are proprietary readers and PDF downloads at the full-book or, more often, chapter level. There are many, many business models, from EBA/DDA to ownership to subscription, which are intended to serve the wide and varied needs in different global markets but make offerings more complex. The challenge for publishers and vendors in this space is to deliver an increasingly useful and meaningful body of content in a way that makes it as easy as possible for librarians to ingest and derive value within their limited budgets.
COVID-19 and its Impacts I came into my new role with many ideas about how our eBooks were going to become a stronger part of the research community. Exactly 100 days after starting this job, the world shut down. Our employees went home from their offices, our customers shuttered their libraries, and the patrons we both aim to serve were left, at least at first, with few options for continuity of access to the print materials the libraries had spent decades acquiring and maintaining. I don’t want to belabor the point, except to say it was a herculean effort by librarians, faculty and administrators to shift from in-person to virtual learning and
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research on such short notice. As a publisher/vendor that was anxiously watching to figure out how best to help, it was remarkable to witness and reinforced how important libraries — and librarians — are to the successful outcomes of their students and researchers. As a publisher, we worked swiftly to ensure access to our textbook content in the short term. We fully empathized with librarians who gave feedback that the temporary free eBook access offers from various publishers, while appreciated, in some cases caused logistical headaches with the communications needed to let patrons know the content was available — and when it was no longer available. We take that feedback and, though we hope to never be in this dire a position again, will use it to evolve for the future. The biggest takeaway I had from that first six-month period was that this content was being used, often and at high volumes. Through survey data, we could see that much of the traffic to this textbook content and our ScienceDirect Topics (which are created from foundational reference content) were largely driven by undergraduate students. For years we hadn’t considered undergrads, or any non-research users, a true core market for our STEM books, outside of the small number of true textbooks we published. But the use of our textbooks and reference materials alike opened our eyes to the demand that exists for foundational reference content in STEM fields, in electronic format that can be accessed anywhere.
Looking to the Future So how does a large STEM book publisher take the lessons from these unprecedented events and pivot to ensure we are providing what our community needs? As I look to the future, the following questions arise: • How can we provide librarians better insights into how our content is being used to ensure user needs are being met? • How can we help our librarian customers serve a wider patron base — not just researchers, as our content has historically been assumed it was limited to, but undergraduate students as well? • What is our role in ensuring scientific literacy for an emerging generation of learners? I’ll take these three items each on their own, with the caveat that we are constantly learning and evolving, and we actively seek feedback to ensure we are addressing the right problems in a meaningful way.
Providing Better Insights Our team at Elsevier spends numerous resources identifying and delivering insights into our content that can be shared with customers to aid in decision-making. Simple data points like usage and turnaways are standard at this point across vendors, but we are also providing tools to look at the overall ScienceDirect landscape and identify where library investments might be best targeted to ensure the strongest ROI on both books and journals. For example, in disciplines that show high co-usage
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(usage across books and journals), we can identify trends or potential opportunities for libraries to strengthen their offerings. In addition, we are learning more about the impact books can have on research, and we can use the data we have available to illustrate the landscape at a particular institution. Globally, we see through our internal analysis that journal articles that cite books (from any publisher) have a 25% increased Field Weighted Citation Impact than those that only cite other journals. This type of insight can help a librarian buyer understand where they might need to target their eBook acquisition to better support the research needs at their institution. We are also looking to provide better insights at the business-model level, and to help librarians make the tough decisions about how to invest their book budgets to ensure the widest possible access based on their needs. It could mean the difference between a subscription to one collection or the full catalog; or acquisition at the collection or title level versus an evidence-based model that allows the data to drive the purchase but still keeps the librarian in control of the budget and the decision-making process. The options are plentiful, but we can’t expect our librarian customers to be well-versed in all the nuances across dozens of vendors, so our team aims to help make it easier and tailored to what customers need.
Serving a Wider Patron Base The biggest question that has emerged for me from the pandemic and the increased usage of our content is the question, what is a textbook? And for that matter, what is a reference book? We identify foundational reference content by its most prominent use case, which is “getting up to speed,” as compared to journals, which help users “stay up to date.” The combination of these two content types on a single platform helps ensure we are providing the full view on any given subject within the scientific disciplines.
per-download as a primary measure of value. While we are developing insights that demonstrate the impact of books on research as noted above, if “cost-per” metrics are important, as they are to most libraries, expanding the user base expands the potential for use and value to be gleaned from the investment in books.
Supporting Scientific Literacy If we ask the question “what is a textbook,” we also need to ask “what is a researcher” and “what is a student.” Everyone in academia had to start somewhere, and that somewhere is usually in a classroom, learning about a new topic that sparks curiosity and passion. But not all students are equipped early on with the tools to embark on this journey into the scientific landscape in a meaningful way. All students should be equipped with the ability to understand “the problem-solving nature of scientific inquiry” (Zen, 1990), but students in scientific disciplines have a particular need to do so early on. I think about the undergraduates majoring in STEM disciplines as early-early career researchers. They will specialize as they get deeper into their undergraduate studies, and many will go on to grad school or join the workforce. An understanding of scientific literacy will serve them well whether as citizens trying to understand the world around them or specialized researchers trying to make the world a better place through their work. If we expand the role of foundational reference content to reach undergraduate students earlier in their careers, we can play a role in ensuring they get up to speed on the topic at hand. By becoming more comfortable with the foundational scientific literature earlier on, they will be more confident researchers as they grow into their fields.
Conclusion
But what is “getting up to speed” if not another name for learning? Should student learning be confined to a classroom, with students reading from a pedagogical text they may or may not have purchased, and just as often may have chosen to avoid altogether (Lumpkin, 2020)? Or does learning happen via multiple types of content, provided in multiple ways? Can learning primarily be done through materials sourced through libraries? If we expand our view of what learning materials are, the potential benefits are many:
Greek philosopher Heraclitus is quoted as saying “change is the only constant in life.” If there is anything we have learned in the past two years, it is the rapid pace at which our customers’ needs are evolving. Just as science moves fast, we need to move fast with it if we want to continue to build value and trust with our customers that eBooks will help them solve their most pressing challenges and fulfill their missions more completely.
• Librarians can generate stronger relationships with faculty. Many librarians have shared with us that during the height of the pandemic, faculty were often unaware of what library resources were available. Many course-adopted texts are still print-preferred; if faculty were aware of the many resources their library invests in, would they be more inclined to change their syllabi?
Bangert, S. R. (2006). Thinking boldly! College and University Library Mission Statements as roadsigns to the future. Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/ nashville/bangert
• Libraries can use their budget to support a well-documented student pain point, which is the cost of textbooks (Lumpkin, 2020). If a student can get most of the foundational content they need on a given subject through library materials, it would directly impact their experience. • Libraries can better fulfill their missions to support research and the curriculum and to promote access (Bangert, 2006). • By expanding access and serving a student population with foundational STEM content, librarians can stretch their budgets further. Many customers still use cost-
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References
Dinkins, D. (2021, September). The Trials and Tribulations of Providing eBooks: A Small University Library Perspective. Against the Grain, 33(4), 9-11. Gibbs, D. (2021, September). eBooks in Academic Libraries: The Librarians’ Perspective. Against the Grain, 33(4), 1. Lumpkin, L. (2020, January 17). Textbooks are pricey. So students are getting creative. The Washington Post. Retrieved December 31, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/ local/education/textbooks-keep-getting-pricier-so-studentsare-getting-creative/2020/01/17/4e1306b8-30b9-11ea-91fd82d4e04a3fac_story.html Zen, E.-an. (1990). Science literacy and why it is important. Journal of Geological Education, 38(5), 463-464.
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Sustainable eBook Acquisition and Access: The not-for-profit Perspective By John Lenahan (Associate Vice President, Published Content, ITHAKA) <John.Lenahan@ithaka.org>
O
ver the past decade, eBook acquisition and access practices have evolved significantly, including a shift to usage-based acquisition strategies, the expansion of DRM-free access, and the development of new Open Access approaches. With many models and platforms available to support Open Access publishing, it is important to understand how this content is being used across the globe and to have assurances that the models and access to the content are sustainable for the future. The pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of the monograph, and supporting users with electronic materials is now more important than ever. As we look to the future, how can we expand access to high-quality eBook content while improving the experience for both librarians and researchers? As a not-for-profit organization, JSTOR works closely with libraries to understand their needs and collaborates with publishers on new solutions. In this article, we will provide background on our collective efforts to increase access to monographs over time, discuss existing models to support the publishing of Open Access content, review usage data of Open Access eBooks on the JSTOR platform, and share our perspective on ensuring long-term value, impact, and sustainability.
eBook Model Evolution We launched the Books at JSTOR program in 2012, when just 7% of academic library budgets were used for eBooks (Schonfeld and Long, 2014). Since then, libraries have steadily expanded eBook acquisitions, with over 12% of budgets being spent on eBooks in 2019 (Frederick and Wolff-Eisenberg, 2020). During that time, shifts in teaching, learning, and research needs led us toward a more open, barrier-free eBook market. This trend is consistent with the mission and aims of not-for-profit publishers, libraries, and JSTOR. We want more people to have access to more books, with resources invested in ways that will yield the greatest impact. Thus, we have worked closely with our partners to learn together and make improvements to our program to maximize the discovery and impact of important scholarship, and on new models to expand access to more users. The most significant changes have included:
DRM-free Access When Books at JSTOR first launched, we offered both unlimited, DRM-free access and single-user, DRM-restricted access. We included the single-user model to provide access to more eBooks from publishers, including new and course-adopted titles that publishers did not offer in unlimited models. In 2015, we decided to offer the unlimited, DRM-free model exclusively to ensure that every eBook would be as easy to use as journal articles on our platform. We discussed this change with our publishing partners, who agreed to convert
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thousands of titles to the DRM-free model. While some publishers continue to hold back selected titles with course-adoption potential, we have been pleased to see movement across the community toward expanding DRM-free access. In a survey of our participating publishers, most said they have put more eBooks in unlimited, DRM-free models due to the demand from both libraries and users. Fred Nachbaur, Director of Fordham University Press, put it succinctly: “We like to make our content available in formats that libraries and patrons want to access it” (Nachbaur, 2021).
Chapter-level Discovery We first believed the best way to discover eBooks was through preserving the integrity of the whole eBook and displaying them alongside articles in search results. Data showed us that while users were clicking on the table of contents pages as expected, they were not going to the chapter level. Our user experience research group began exploring the barriers to students using eBooks in their research workflow. A key barrier was that eBooks were too long, and it took too much time and effort for students to find what was most relevant. This led us to begin surfacing chapters instead of full eBooks in our search results. Since many of our publishers only provided book-level metadata, this required us to create our own specifications for dividing eBooks into chapters and applying this consistently across publishers. We also developed our own internal systems to support chapter-level search and discovery, display, and metadata feeds to discovery-service providers. We saw an immediate spike in usage. We also began to see more library participation in our program, and sales increased 600% the following year. This was driven mainly by the increased discoverability of backlist eBooks, which accounted for 70% of sales.
Usage-based Acquisition Models Libraries are offering broader sets of eBooks to their users than ever before, allowing discovery and access across titles from a wide range of publishers, yet only paying for the materials that are used the most. We worked closely with libraries and consortia to develop our versions of Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) and Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA) to ensure that we addressed common challenges of eBook acquisition. Importantly, these usage-based models were designed to be sustainable for publishers as well, and we have seen consistent growth in publisher sales and participation.
Developing Sustainable Open Access Models Even as the shifts described above were taking place, we were exploring the potential of Open Access (OA) models for eBooks. We launched an OA eBook program in 2016 that has grown to include more than 7,700 titles. Libraries can use free MARC records or activate the OA titles in their discovery service, and
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users can cross-search all OA and licensed eBooks with all other content types on our platform. The ease of discovery on JSTOR has led to strong usage of the OA titles. In 2021 alone, there were more than 11 million uses of the OA eBooks worldwide.
A Learning Journey While some publishers have eagerly experimented with OA models, others fear being left behind. These publishers share the mission to make scholarship more accessible but worry that the lack of grant support and viable business models are not well understood by the government agencies and funders that are creating OA mandates. The potential for libraries converting to models such as “subscribe to open” could alleviate these concerns, but few of our smaller and medium-sized publishers have the ability to undertake such a change themselves. They lack the resources and bandwidth to design new business models and advocate for funding. We have been working on various Open Access models in support of our publishers and to meet the demand from libraries and researchers for more OA content. First, in our “Convert to Open” model, publishers have identified eBooks already available for sale on JSTOR to convert to OA without incurring any additional costs to do so. The usage data for these titles shows the strong impact of opening up backlist scholarly content and making it discoverable to researchers around the world. We reviewed 336 titles from 30 publishers that were converted from licensed eBooks to OA in 2019 and 2020 and documented the usage for each title one to two years prior to being converted to OA and an equivalent one to two years after. The usage for these titles increased by 3,279% after being converted to OA. We have also developed a “Publish as Open” model in collaboration with libraries and publishers to support the publication of new titles directly as OA. In 2019, the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP, a CRL initiative) approached JSTOR to support a low-cost OA pilot for new titles from Argentinian publisher CLACSO, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences. To date, this collaboration has made 340 CLACSO titles freely accessible on JSTOR. The titles have been used more than 940,000 times by users across 195 countries. Sócrates Silva, Latin American & Iberian Studies Librarian for Columbia and Cornell and President of SALALM, described the project’s importance for bridging a critical gap in the scholarly communications system. “Despite established OA publishing models for scholarly works in Latin America, monograph discovery and preservation infrastructure for this important content in U.S. libraries is virtually nonexistent. This multi-partner, horizontal, and librarian-led pilot is testing out sustainable partnerships that take into account the monograph lifecycle from publisher to library” (JSTOR, 2021). Based on the success of this pilot and ongoing support to fund future OA titles for CLACSO, we are working with LARRP to expand our collaboration and support other selected Latin American publishers. In the coming years, we plan to expand this model to other publishers in partnership with the academic community.
Meeting Pandemic-driven Needs for Access Through the generosity of 92 publishers, a large set of eBooks was made available from March to August 2020 to support institutions affected by library closures due to COVID-19. A total of
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38,000 titles were made freely available to 4,500+ institutions who signed up for access. This program helped libraries meet an immediate need during the sudden shift to online learning; in fact, these eBooks were used more than 7.8 million times. This demonstrates not only not-for-profit publishers’ commitment to supporting the academic and library communities but also a shared trust and willingness to adapt quickly to the changing environment.
Supporting Community Initiatives for Increasing Open Content We collaborated with publishers and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to make scholarship related to its Black Liberation Reading List accessible to teachers, researchers, and the public. For each of the 95 books on the Schomburg Center’s list, JSTOR identified related journal articles, book chapters, and other content and provided unrestricted access throughout 2021. This initiative aimed to deepen engagement with this vital scholarship, and these items have generated 1.4 million item requests since the launch of the project.
Planning for the Future of eBooks We have been greatly encouraged by the data showing that when content is made openly accessible on JSTOR, it gets a high amount of global usage. This holds true across frontlist and backlist titles, across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and across publishers large and small. The impact we have seen confirms to funding libraries that they are investing in content that not only has strong value for their own institutions, but also fills a global need. Publishers and authors can see that their scholarship is reaching more readers than ever before. When discussing the future of the monograph, given the events of the last couple of years, several of our participating publishers talked about strategies to increase discoverability and to publish more OA books. Charles Watkinson, Director of the University of Michigan Press, said, “I think the future of the monograph is open access. If it is not, then monograph literature will not be as influential as journal article literature and that will be bad news for the humanities and qualitative social sciences” (Watkinson, 2021). It is our ambition to continue to explore innovative, cost-effective models to support the sustainability of our publishing partners and to increase the open content available to researchers around the world. We are grateful to our publisher and library partners and look forward to building on the progress we’ve made toward our shared goals of serving the scholarly community and improving access to knowledge and education.
References Frederick, J. K., & Wolff-Eisenberg, C. (2020, April 2). Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2019. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.312977 JSTOR. (2021, June 9). Open Access pilot for Latin American monographs expands [Press release]. https://about.jstor.org/ news/open-access-pilot-for-latin-american-monographsexpands/ Nachbaur, Fred. (2021). Interview by Cristina Mezuk. December 10. Ann Arbor, MI. Schonfeld, R. C., & Long, M. P. (2014, March 11). Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013. Watkinson, Charles. (2021). Interview by Cristina Mezuk. December 7. Ann Arbor, MI.
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The State of eBooks in Academic Libraries: Acquisition and the User Experience By Andrea Ferro (Global Account Development, Casalini Libri) <andrea.ferro@casalini.it>
C
asalini libri — along with its recently acquired partner Companies Erasmus Boekhandel and Houtschild International Bookseller — is one of the leading suppliers of publications in print and e- format — from across Europe and beyond — to libraries and institutions worldwide. Being an e-content aggregator with a longtime expertise in Romance-language publications in the humanities and social sciences, our experience may differ from that of Anglo-American vendors. Our content is mostly “niche,” and this certainly affects — at least to a certain extent — acquisitions patterns, usage numbers, etc. That said, I think common trends can be found and our perspective, albeit partial, can be quite interesting. We at Casalini Libri have been able to observe the progress of eBook acquisitions in academic libraries from a privileged vantage point, being, since 2000, an e-content aggregator serving libraries worldwide. From the first release of our Casalini digital library to the current iteration of our Torrossa full-text platform (access.torrossa.com), we have seen different approaches to eBook acquisitions, different user behaviors, and different publisher strategies. Ultimately, we’ve seen how things have gradually changed, with accelerations and setbacks, over the course of two decades. Libraries’ challenges and frustrations were Casalini’s challenges and frustrations, and all of our projects involving eBooks were community-driven initiatives. We have always tried to listen to the community and to interpret and address libraries’ and publishers’ different (and sometimes conflicting) needs and expectations, in a constant and productive dialogue with all the stakeholders. Not every library was created equal, and publishers and vendors should always be as creative as possible to address each and every need. One thing that has certainly changed since we first launched the Casalini Digital library is the role eBooks play in the larger picture of library acquisitions. Back then, eBooks were just an “accessory,” a complement to existing print collections. Therefore, it wasn’t actually a matter of “choosing between the two” formats: they just coexisted and showed different usage patterns. While print was intended for current, frontlist content, digital was mainly used for bringing back to life (and to circulation) older materials, making them available again through digitization. This was especially true in our subject areas, the humanities and social sciences, where content tends to stay relevant longer. In the early 2000s, eBook collections were basically archives of retrospectively digitized content. Publishers didn’t release a “native” e-version of their publications at the same time as the print, therefore the number of titles made available was only a matter of how technologically sound the publishers were and how many resources they were able to devote to the digitization of their books. Only a few publishers were able (or visionary enough) to invest in massive digitization projects and in workflows that allowed them to release the print and the e- at the same time. There was also a sort of hesita-
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tion about what the best strategy would be: many publishers feared that eBooks could “cannibalize” print sales, and piracy was a concern as well. For many years libraries continued to buy eBook packages, either multi-publisher collections or subject-based ones. Pricing was favorable, with collections costing a fraction of the sum of the prices of the individual titles included therein. Customization of the content wasn’t much of a need, either. But as soon as the collections started to grow and to include even more current content, prices gradually increased, and a new trend emerged: custom “Users nowadays or tailor-made collections, where are extremely selectors and librarians alike played an important role. demanding Budgetary constraints forced many universities to review their spending, and that process moved along two parallel lines: the departure from a packages-oriented model and the implementation of metrics.
and impatient ... When a subpar experience lets users down, it’s extremely difficult to gain their trust back and retain them.”
While the departure from a model of acquisitions based mainly on packages was quite easy to manage for libraries, publishers and aggregators alike, the increasing importance of metrics and usage statistics in the decision-making process was difficult to deal with, especially for an aggregator like Casalini, specializing in “niche” content and in “minor” languages. Measuring the importance or relevance of a book published in Italy in 1960 about Dante’s philology against the same parameters used for an engineering or medicine title can bring unintended results. All these factors, combined, led to a new development, the rise of new, more flexible acquisition models: custom collections, PDA, DDA, EBA and the like. We at Casalini were able to quickly adapt to these new models, mainly because of our robust inhouse bibliographic department and our highly skilled approval selectors, who were key in helping libraries create tailor-made collections based on their budget and subject requirements. Also, our in-house software development department was instrumental in supporting the various new services and features of our eBook platform, especially the PDA programs. Soon enough another issue emerged: libraries were increasingly interested in more current content, which wasn’t always available at the same time as print — in many cases a deliberate choice on the part of the publishers. Therefore, new business models started to emerge, from embargoes to tiered pricing, from stricter user permissions to limitations on the number of concurrent users. The eBooks market became harder to navigate, and in our capacity as aggregators of multiple publishers’ content, we had to be extremely careful to try to find a common denominator, in terms of licensing and usage permissions
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of the eBooks hosted on our platform, that allowed libraries and patrons alike to find a way through the complexities. We eventually managed to have around 90% of the publishers — and their eBooks — on Torrossa sharing the same license and usage permissions. We all know how frustrating it can be to use a platform with multiple usage permissions and licensing terms. The licensing side of things too has become an increasingly complex and time-consuming part of any eBook negotiations, for libraries and vendors alike. Often the licensing paperwork is now taken care of outside the library, through the university’s legal office. This means that it may take several weeks, if not months, to get through all the approval steps, and in the meantime access to eBooks can’t be activated. On our end, we adopted a very simple and straightforward one-license-fits-all model, with the goal of making the approval process as easy and fast as possible. The overall user experience of an eBook platform, too, is multi-faceted and complex. It involves technical and design decisions: users nowadays are extremely demanding and impatient, and a good UX design must help them quickly find the information they seek, with the least number of clicks possible. When a sub-par experience lets users down, it’s extremely difficult to gain their trust back and retain them. For this reason, any e-content aggregator has to invest time and resources to constantly update, refine and streamline their platform’s UX. We think the new Casalini Torrossa platform, which was completely redesigned and reengineered in 2019, is a giant leap forward in terms of usability, but it is, of course, a work in progress with evolutionary rather than revolutionary developments. Another key factor of the overall user experience is DRM. Digital rights management hasn’t evolved at the same pace as other technologies in our industry and often has created usability issues. As an aggregator hosting more than 340 publishers and over 200,000 eBooks on our platform, we have been working to develop lighter and less-intrusive DRM protections, and we are currently working on new, more flexible and “transparent” content protection, due to be released shortly. Tightly interconnected with the overall user experience is accessibility. Casalini has recently partnered with Fondazione LIA (a spin-off of the Italian Publishers Association) that aims to promote the creation of an accessible digital publishing ecosystem. Over the years, LIA has also activated a series of partnerships with international entities for the creation of innovative and social projects. The goal of this new partnership is to assess, evaluate and improve the accessibility of our websites and our e-content in order to make Torrossa compliant with North American accessibility standards and the newly released European Accessibility Act. It is a project that has already been implemented on our e-commerce website torrossa.com and will be rolled out on the institutional access.torrossa.com website soon. This is another step in the direction of improving the user experience for all.
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As we all know, COVID made every library user a remote user almost overnight, and platforms and publishers alike had to adapt rapidly to the new normal. Many in our industry would have expected a tenfold increase in the usage of e-resources during the lockdown, but the truth is that this just didn’t happen. Quite the opposite: it turned out that many remote users encountered so many technical difficulties and hurdles to accessing their university’s network that they just stopped trying, and only the platforms with a robust federated authentication system thrived during this period. Last but not least is discoverability. MARC records for all titles included in the Torrossa collections are automatically sent to the library, which can upload them into their OPACs, and to a variety of discovery services. Making our content highly discoverable worldwide is truly crucial: the harder the information is to find, the less relevant it becomes, and for “minor” languages such as Italian and Portuguese, that’s a risk we can’t afford. In many cases, though, discovery services’ knowledge bases are not as accurate or up to date as would be desirable: there’s room for improvement in this area, too. After this excursus through eBooks’ recent history from a vendor’s standpoint, how can we improve the adoption and overall user experience of eBooks? This is a million-dollar question, but we can try to answer it by saying that flexibility and customization are key. As I said, not every library was created equal, and the ability to create tailor-made solutions to meet any and every library’s needs is crucial. Similar to what has happened in other industries, where we witnessed a paradigm shift from mass production to mass customization, our industry should adopt technologies and solutions that make the eBooks acquisition experience as seamless as possible. One example of this could be the e-learning and e-textbooks ecosystem: during COVID — especially in Italy — we have seen a growing demand for e-textbooks — a completely new experience for us. We had to rethink our workflows and create new business models. In 2020 we signed, with many Italian university libraries, several ad hoc e-learning deals and implemented a whole new set of tailor-made usage policies for e-textbooks, thus adding even more flexibility to our platform and pricing model, which is now increasingly based on the actual usage permissions needed by the library (temporary access, short-term lease, etc.). These deals required lengthy renegotiations, with the publishers adapting the existing contracts to meet the needs of e-learning eBooks. The future (hopefully COVID-free soon) looks brighter. We are sure that eBooks will continue to play a crucial role in academic libraries, and that patrons’ experience will be positively affected by all the innovations — both technological and contractual — that are currently being experimented with and developed in our industry.
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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
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: I am trying to think of something to write about libraries that does not continually reflect the weird world that we live in. Maybe I should stop digging and just go with the flow and enjoy the weird. In many ways, our world is moving forward and we are continuing to do the work that is needed in our communities and universities. We are buying books, we are showing people how to use databases and we are helping researchers find data. To that end, we are also looking for jobs, learning new technology and trying to help students figure out the dynamics of the economy. What a coincidence that those are the exact subjects of the three works we feature in this column. Special thanks to Julie Huskey (Tennessee State University) and Michelle Polchow (University of California, Davis) for the reviews appear in this issue. We have a much bigger column setup for the next issue with more works on librarianship and reference. 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! — Corey
Burke, John J. Neal-Schuman Library Technology Companion: A Basic Guide for Library Staff, Sixth Edition. Chicago: ALA Neal Schuman, 2020. 978083891866-1, 192 pages. $64.99. Reviewed by Michelle Polchow (Electronic Resources Librarian, University of California, Davis) <mpolchow@ucdavis.edu> For nearly 20 years, this enduring guide has delivered a timely and comprehensive overview of evolving technologies used in libraries. Given the relentless pace of change in the world of information technology, this convenient format readily supports library managers, new librarians, support staff members and library students with a guide to stay informed and remain current. Author John Burke worked in the library ranks gaining extensive experience with technology and is now a library director at Miami (Ohio) University’s Middletown campus. His writing style delivers a succinctly written resource, avoids technical jargon, is accessible and applicable for a wide audience. As a basic reference, the short seventeen chapters incorporate historical context, general topic overviews, as well as a glossary of useful terms. Each of these chapters serves (in the author’s words) to “…make library staff members more comfortable when speaking with colleagues or interacting with patrons” involving a diverse array of technologies that impact library work. The book
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covers a wide spectrum of technological applications and uses, implementation issues and troubleshooting. New to the Sixth edition are case studies involving interviews with twelve librarians and library staff who share their relevant experiences about specific technologies used in their institutions. Burke also includes results from his fourth survey of technology skills and tasks among library staff members. Each chapter closes with review questions and resources for further information. Building and maintaining the library technology environment receives the most attention, including the growth in inclusion of free information resources, issues of copyright and licensing as they pertain to use of digital material, and new opportunities to support users’ ease of access and discovery. As to newer technologies, the reference resource includes guidelines for libraries using social media for marketing. Other trending topics in the library services domain include patron privacy, online learning, technology lending, makerspaces, virtual and augmented reality technologies, computing safety and security and the evolution of retiring technologies. The guide keeps professionals up to date by covering the latest library technologies, including trends and the author’s future predictions. Although technology books like this might yield a short shelf life over the long run, as a series, readers truly benefit from these new editions. Library science graduate students may find this too general for their studies, but it is a recommended guide for new librarians as well as those going through career transitions. As professionals constantly anticipate the future, the collection of editions (taken as a whole) reflects both current and former achievements supporting strategic planning and policy considerations. The series adds another significant contribution by preserving these historical trends and important initiatives in information technology services. 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.)
Foxworth, Deloris Jackson. Landing A Library Job. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 9781538116999, 195 pages. $37.00. Reviewed by Michelle Polchow (Electronic Resources Librarian, University of California, Davis) <mpolchow@ucdavis.edu> As COVID-19 disrupted employment opportunities in all fields, library and information sciences jobs were no exception. With very low hiring during the beginning of the pandemic in higher education, new graduates with library degrees were not seeing the types of opportunities that were available to those graduating just the year before. During the last year, that tight job market has gotten better, enabling recent grads and others
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impacted by the pandemic to find new opportunities. But as author Deloris Foxworth notes, the average person changes jobs 11.9 times between the ages of eighteen and fifty. Given many reasons for job change, this insightful vocational guide further recognizes our societal shift from an industrial society to an information society that produces a variety of new jobs inside and outside of libraries. This fundamental aspect dramatically changes how to go about finding and applying for jobs. The book is packed with useful resources in support of both landing the next job as well as staying relevant in the field. Foxworth has included a great deal of information to help the librarian seeking employment. Content includes detailed guidance, ranging from how to read job descriptions for interpretation of key elements, to writing and adapting resumes to fit different positions, through organizing and retaining relevant position documents and tracking datapoints when applying to numerous positions. Insights include finding relevant listservs and job boards and maximizing use of popular online apps. Foxworth details how to use these tools to find positions ranging from administrative to paraprofessional positions, management directorships to information jobs outside of libraries. The appendix includes a compilation of relevant professional associations to support job hunting as well as knowledge building and continuing education opportunities. Coverage includes the etiquette of technology assisted interviewing as well as tips for a successful face-to-face exchange. Obtaining a job offer might be the book’s closing chapter, but negotiating a job offer provides universally useful tips on personal and emotional reflection on challenging topics such as the prospect of relocating, financial realities, and even learning from the rejection process. Given the breadth of career topics and interactive exercises, this resource broadly supports job seekers to recognize the ultimate goal is not merely getting a job but identifying the best match possible for both the applicant and the employer. In reviewing this book, there are a couple of shortcomings in the context of contributing to the overall library and information science literature. First, job positions are frequently referenced using hyperlinks. Given the ephemeral nature of job postings, this content will be difficult for future scholars who wish to examine jobs typical of this era. Second, as the author is an undergraduate instructor for the University of Kentucky, state level resources are primarily limited to this one state. But all in all, Foxworth delivers an effective combination of relevant job-hunting resources, provides applicable personal reflection throughout the process, gives solid career guidance, and produces an inviting book supporting a broad applicant pool to join the field. 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.)
Shally-Jenson, Michael, editor. Defining Documents in American History: The American Economy. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2021.9781642657562. 2 vols., 864 pages. $295.00. Reviewed by Julie Huskey (Head of Cataloging, Tennessee State University) <jhuskey@tnstate.edu>. The premise of Defining Documents in American History: The American Economy will be familiar to most reference or collection
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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.)
development librarians: it reprints, usually in their entirety, eighty-nine documents, providing a summary and analysis. Additionally, there is a short glossary and bibliography added to each document. In this volume on the American economy, the editor featured documents created between 1748 and 2020, and range from official documents to excerpts from feature films. Each of these works illustrates a major event, movement, or idea within American economic history. Dr. Michael Shally-Jenson, a professional writer and editor, opens the work with a nine-page essay on economic history, providing some much-needed broader context to the selections. He also co-authors the essay on the dialog excerpt from the film “Wall Street.” The work is divided into five sections: “Commerce & Controversy in Earlier Times,” “Booms & Busts in a Growing Economy,” “Crash, Burn and Recovery in the Great Depression,” “Mid-Century Modern,” and “Business and Economics in Recent Decades,” although recent works dominate the two-volume set. Coverage of each document starts with a “Summary Overview” of a few sentences, followed by a “Defining Moment” section, which places the document in its immediate context, an author biography, a “Document Analysis” (which touches on stylistic, organizational, and factual aspects) and “Essential Themes,” which further places the document within its historical context. The words chosen for the short glossary — such as “revenue” and “matriculation” — suggest a high school or undergraduate audience. The “Bibliography and Further Reading” section includes approximately four to six widely-available and relevant works. Most entries include a reproduction, often in color, of an early version of the document. Not everyone would agree on the selection of documents on the topic, but Dr. Shally-Jenson has included some of the more obvious choices, such as the reports by both Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton on the desirability on a national bank, William Jennings Brian’s “Cross of Gold” speech, and the Sherman Anti Trust Act. There are a few more surprising, but no less
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interesting, selections as well: for instance, a sharecropping contract and an excerpt from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. The accompanying essays, despite being the work of twenty-seven contributors (most of whom have PhD or JD degrees) are remarkably consistent in style. As always, one might find reason to quibble: Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism is largely dismissed, and the analysis of Nancy Pelosi’s defense of the H.R. 8406 (the COVID-19 relief bill) contains the rather broad statement, “The Republican Party is generally against nonmilitary government spending.” The greatest obstacle for the work, however, may be simply finding
an audience: its scope is too selective to make it an obvious place to look, so it may be of little use as a freestanding, tangible reference work, although it will be useful for students and teachers brainstorming for ideas. Integrated into a larger database or reference collection, where would be greater opportunities for discovery, it would be a welcome addition. In particular, it would be valuable to libraries that support high school and college students. 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.)
Check It Out!
CHARLESTON BRIEFINGS The Charleston Briefings are a series of short books (12,000 to 20,000 words) on the topic of innovation in the world of libraries and scholarly communication. Stay up to date!
charleston-hub.com/media/briefings/
24 Against the Grain / February 2022
“Faced with so many changes to their roles and responsibilities, librarians concerned with scholarly communications issues are desperately in need of concise and practical professional development resources. The Charleston Briefings are perfectly adapted to meet our needs and fill a gap in a market dominated by expensive edited volumes and densely written, narrowlyfocused journal articles.” -Charles Watkinson Associate University Librarian, University of Michigan Library
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Booklover — The Sound of Words Column Editor: Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425) <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com> A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre edited by Lewis Hyde is a real gem. Fifteen translators present 68 poems and three works of prose to the reader in a bilingual format. Discovering this book took me back 12 years to an early “Booklover” column entitled “First and French” describing my experience with the first Nobel Laureate in Literature, Sully Prudhomme. He received the award in 1901. Sully Prudhomme’s (nom de plume for René François Armand Prudhomme) work was only available in his native language, French — a language with which I have a minimal relationship. At the time, I engaged a friend of mine that was fluent in French to read a few select poems to me and tell me what the poems where about. It didn’t take but one poem for me to realize that the sounds revealed the subject matter — I called it “subject-appropriate sounds.” I reread the column in preparation of writing this one. The closing line defined the experiment that became an experience to which I often relate: “As we end our literary experiment I am anxious to plan another, lost in the sounds of words, listening for the subject, and thinking with my heart and my head.” Since I studied Spanish as a young girl, I could run the experiment again thanks to Lewis Hyde’s editorial skills and Vicente Aleixandre’s literary achievement. Hyde reveals the inspiration for the title in his “Introduction.” Aleixandre’s poems are surreal, sad, deep, dark, and many are metaphorically connected to the sea. Hyde shared that Aleixandre felt “that the poems are best understood when seen in ‘rainbow light’” — describing the work as “una aspiración a la luz, a longing for the light.” The collection is laid out with the Spanish version on one page and the translated English version on the facing page. Beautiful formatting. For all the power of his poems and the acclaim of the Nobel Prize, information and biographic background for Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo is in short supply. He was born in Seville, Spain; studied at the University of Madrid; chose to follow his passion for literature instead of a career in law or economics; poetry stole his soul after being introduced to the work of Rubén Darío; he belonged to the Generation of ’27; and won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature “for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man’s condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars.” Aleixandre opens a window into his poetic conversion in the “Prologue to the Second Edition of ‘La destrucción o el amor’” included in this collection. “So at eighteen I was a young man saturated with reading, enthusiastic to the point of obsession about literature and its world of fantasy and passion; and ignorant, even wary, of poetry. When it made its sudden appearance, then, it was as something pure and untouched, something that grew and burned in a soul already experienced in the beauties of literature, but still innocent of the flash, sudden and complete, of poetic illumination…. Do they coincide, the moment a young man begins to write and the awakening of his creative life?” His words and stanzas answer for us.
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English version teasers from “Sea and Sunrise,” and “The Jungle and the Sea” — both versions for “The Poet”/“El poeta.”
“Sea and Sunrise” “Before sunrise, still in darkness, the uncovered waves keep watch. In the east, the day begins to lift Its sharp and timid advances. Long tongues feel their way over the heavy water, the taut metallic plate, cold and rough to that soft stroking.”
“The Jungle and the Sea” “Over in the distance near the lights or the knives that are still new, there are tigers as big as hate and lions like a heart covered with hair and blood like weary sadness and all of them are fighting with the yellow hyena who disguises himself as the greedy, greedy sunset.”
“El poeta/The Poet” “Para ti, que conoces cómo la piedra canta, y cuya delicada pupila sabe ya del peso de una montaña sobre un ojo dulce, y cómo el resonante clamor de los bosques se aduerme suave un dia en nuestras venas; para ti, poeta, que sentiste en tu aliento la embestida brutal de la aves celestes, y en cuyas palabras tan pronto vuelan las poderosas alas de las águilas como se ve brillar el lomo de los calientes peces sin sonido: oye este libro que a tus manos envío con ademán de selva,…” “This is for you who have seen how the stone sings, who found out how heav y a mountain weighs on a delicate eye, and how, one day, the windy cry of the forest gently falls asleep in our blood; in your breath, poet, you have felt the animal attack of the birds of heaven, and powerful eagle wings flash in your words the way the bellies of hot fish gleam without a sound: listen to this book I put in your hands with my forest gestures, ….” May there be another “subject-appropriate sounds” experiment in my future.
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LEGAL ISSUES Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Jack Montgomery (Georgia Southern University) <jmontgomery@georgiasouthern.edu>
Legally Speaking — Antitrust Lawsuit: Penguin Random House Publishers and Simon & Schuster Column Editor: Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University) <Anthony.Paganelli@wku.edu>
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n November 2, 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Penguin Random House Publishers and Simon & Schuster in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. This agreement between the two major publishers in 2020, when it was announced that the Penguin Random House Publishers purchased Simon & Schuster for approximately $2.175 billion. Simon & Schuster was listed for sale in March 2020, as noted in the complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice (2021). The reason Simon & Schuster was for sale was the parent company ViacomCBS wanted to use the revenue to pay off debts and invest more into streaming content. This shift for the company was to support the transition from CBS to Paramount+ for streaming (Limbong, 2020). The trial will begin on August 1, 2022, as the discovery began on December 15, 2021 and to conclude on June 21, 2022 following the expert discovery. The pre-trial briefs are to be submitted on July 15 and the pre-trail conference is set for July 25. The trial is a major factor in book publishing that will ultimately impact numerous industries. In the meantime, this document will provide some information regarding the lawsuit.
Plaintiff’s Statements The merger agreement has raised an issue because Penguin Random House Publishers is the top publisher and Simon & Schuster is third of the top five publishers of books in the U.S. (Limbong, 2019). According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s complaint (2021), “The other three Big Five publishers are HarperCollins Publishers (which recently acquired Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade publishing business for $349 million), Hachette Book Group (which recently acquired Workman Publishing, one of the largest independently-owned publishers in the U.S.), and McMillan Publishing Group, LLC.” From the Department of Justice’s point-of-view, a person can understand the concern to have two of the top three book publishers merging together as one major publisher. The Department of Justice also noted that the merger would allow Penguin Random House two-thirds of the market that would leave few options for authors to negotiate and enter competitive agreements. In other words, the smaller publishers do not have the resources to provide higher advances, therefore the merger
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would prevent further authors from achieving a book deal, because the larger publishers can recoup losses from advances by their large catalogs. The Department of Justice’s complaint (2021) also stated, “Penguin House is the world’s largest book publisher, and Simon & Schuster is the fourth-largest U.S. book publisher. Together their U.S. revenues would be twice that of their next closest competitor.” The complaint mentioned the potential impact of the merger on authors that read, “this merger would likely result in substantial harm to authors of anticipated top-selling books and ultimately, consumers.” The Justice Department claimed that the merger would not allow authors that were turned down from the larger publishers to enter agreements with other publishers, therefore this would reduce the number of authors and a diverse literature. In addition, the Justice Department provided data to indicate that as the two companies were previously rival publishing companies they provided substantial competitive agreements and benefits to authors due to their competition with each other. The compliant described this as “head-to-head competition” between Random House and Simon & Schuster, which provided several examples of how the head-to-head competition was significant in increasing advances for authors through auctions. In response to this, the publishers stated that they will continue the head-to-head competition for an unlimited amount, which the defendants added in the complaint (2021), “This proposal defies economic sense, can be evaded or violated without detection, and is unenforceable.” Further information to support the Justice Department’s case was a previous lawsuit in 2012 against the five major publishers in a price-fixing case in an attempt to establish a pattern of collusion with Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster and Apple, Inc. In the 2012 case against the five publishers and Apple regarding an increase of eBook prices, a District Judge ruled against the publishers and Apple noting that they were in violation of the Sherman Act. Additional support of the Justice Department’s lawsuit was provided by other stakeholders that have commented on the merger. For instance, the American Booksellers Association responded to the news of the merger in a statement that would “be calling on the Justice Department to challenge this deal and to ensure that no further consolidation of power be allowed in
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the U.S. book publishing industry” (Hill, 2020). The ABA also included a statement by co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Stacy Mitchell that stated “Antitrust enforcers should block this deal. There’s ample evidence that concentration in the book industry is already harming readers and authors. Allow more consolidation among the big publishers will further reduce the range of books and ideas that find their way into print and into the hands of readers” (Hill, 2020).
Defense Statements Milliot (2021) noted the attorney for the defendant, Dan Petrocelli stated that “the DOJ wants to block the merger on the misguided theory it will diminish compensation to the highest paid authors. This is not legally, factually, and economically wrong, but it also ignores the vast majority of authors who indisputably will benefit from the transaction. We are fully confident that this merger will only enhance competition across the entire spectrum of the publishing industry.” In addition, Harris and Alter (2021) argued the purpose for filing an antitrust suit was not aligned with the Justice Department’s intent of the law. The authors stated, “By focusing on authors’ pay, the Justice Department signaled that it is taking a more sweeping view of antitrust law. For decades, it has been used to block deals on the grounds that consumers can be harmed when big companies with few competitors can raise their prices. But in its suit to block Penguin Random House, the government does not claim that the prices for books will rise for readers or for booksellers, but instead argues that if Penguin Random House gets even larger, it will have more leverage over authors.” Harris and Alter (2021) reiterated the concept that the antitrust suit does not focus on the consumers’ impact through a statement from New York University School of Law professor, Eleanor Fox that stated, “It’s somewhat unique in this time to focus on the supply market and argue that the suppliers will be exploited. They have a much weaker case about consumer pricing.” Harris and Alter also noted through the interview that the “government’s argument was unusual in that it focused on top author earnings rather than harm to consumers or the market as a whole.” While these two publishers are a few of the largest publishers of books, Penguin Random House noted that several publishers outside of the big five are highly competitive, in fact some smaller publishers have been successful. For example, “smaller publisher(s) will often compete, and some of the country’s highest-selling authors, including J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) and Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), are published by companies outside the big five” (Harris & Alter, 2021). Penguin Random House added about authors’ benefits of the merger stated that authors “would stand to make more money as a result of the deal. Authors now published by Simon & Schuster would be brought into the Penguin Random House supply chain, widely considered to be the best in the business, which would make their work more visible and available. The company’s supply chain and distribution network also helps neighborhood bookstores compete with Amazon” (Harris & Alter, 2021). Even as the Justice Department claims that the merger will disrupt the competitive market, Penguin Random House has mentioned their previous merger in 2013 (Penguin and Random House) has not changed the competitive market. The company stated “that since 2013, competition has grown. More titles are
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published every year, it said, and more than half of the dollars spent on hardcover and paperback books in the Uniter States now go to publishers outside of the big five, a higher percentage than before the 2013 merger” (Harris & Alter, 2021).
Closing Clearly there is a strong divide between the big publishers and the Justice Departments’ attempt to block the merger. There is a lot at stake in the book publishing industry as the industry waits the trial. This is evident as Penguin Random House has mentioned that the company may lose millions should the merger not be completed. Due to a clause in the merger agreement, which is a termination fee owed to the seller (Simon & Schuster), Penguin Random House could pay approximately $200 million if the deal is not completed to Simon & Schuster (ViacomCBS) (Harris & Alter, 2021). As for long term effects of a possible merger, the industry and others will have to wait the results of the trial in August. Of course, the industry is already effected by the impact that Covid-19 has placed on the economy through inflation and other variables, such as the numerous supply chain disruptions and changes in business practices. Regardless of the results, the industry is apparently being carefully monitored in their business endeavors.
References Harris, E. A. & Alter, A. (2021). Penguin Random House defends effort to buy Simon & Schuster. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/books/ penguin-random-house-simon-schuster.html Hill, A. (2020). ABA to call on Justice Department to challenge Penguin Random House Purchase of Simon & Schuster. American Booksellers Association. Retrieved from https://www. bookweb.org/news/aba-call-justice-department-challengepenguin-random-house-purchase-simon-schuster-1624418 Limbong, A. (2020). Book publisher Simon and Schuster sold to rival. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr. org/2020/11/25/938919530/book-publisher-simon-schustersold-to-rival Maher, J., Albanese, A., & Miliot, J. (2021). Justice Department sues to block Penquin Random House Acquisition of S&S. Publishers Weekly. Retrieved from https://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publishernews/article/87783-doj-sues-to-block-prh-acquisition-of-s-s. html Milliot, J. (2021). August 1Trial Date Set for DoJ case against PRH to begin. Publisher Weekly. Retrieved from https://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publishernews/article/88136-august-1-trial-date-set-for-doj-caseagainst-prh-to-begin.html#:~:text=In%20a%20hearing%20 on%20December,PRH’s%20acquisition%20of%20Simon%20 %26%20Schuster Ulaby, N. (2021). The U.S. Department of Justice seeks to block a book publishing ‘behemoth.’” NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2021/11/02/1051471349/department-ofjustice-penguin-random-house-lawsuit U.S. Department of Justice. (2021). Justice Department sues to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Rival Publisher Simon & Schuster: Merger would create publishing continued on page 29
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Questions & Answers — Copyright Column Column Editor: Will Cross (Director of the Open Knowledge Center and Head of Information Policy, NC State University Libraries) <wmcross@ncsu.edu> ORCID: 0000-0003-1287-1156 QUESTION: An academic publisher asks, “Are there any copyright issues with linking to or embedding materials in a digital publication?” ANSWER: One of the bedrock ideas in U.S. copyright law is that linking to resources, rather than copying them, is generally lawful and safe. After all, simply pointing to a resource on the open web arguably does not implicate any of the exclusive rights granted to a rightsholder and would seem to be an overwhelmingly strong fair use claim as well. Outside of knowingly sharing a link that led to clearly illegal materials, the legal risk of linking is minimal. The question of embedding materials into a new resource can seem more complicated technically and economically, and there has been a somewhat open question as to whether it was also legally different as well. The two leading cases — Kelly v. Arriba Soft, 336 F.3d 811 (9th Cir. 2003) and Perfect 10 v. Amazon, 508 F.3d 1146 (9th Cir. 2007), focus on search engines but are generally understood to support the idea that both linking and embedding are permitted under U.S. law. Both of those cases recognized the legal principle — sometimes called the “server test” that, because the copyright-protected content is stored on the plaintiff’s server rather than that of the linking or framing person, there is typically no infringing “copy” made by the defendant. Because both of those cases came out of the Ninth Circuit and were not decided by the Supreme Court, however, some doubt remained and a 2018 case dealing with a tweeted photograph of recently-retired NFL quarterback Tom Brady seemed to suggest that the law was not so settled after all. In Goldman v. Breitbart, the Southern District of New York found that a webpage publisher who embeds a tweet containing a copyrighted photo is “displaying” the photo within the meaning of the Copyright Act. Significantly, this case explicitly rejected the server test in favor of a much broader reading of the exclusive right to display a work protected by copyright. This question was raised again recently in a case where a group of photographers sued the image-based social media site Instagram for providing a tool to embed photographs such as theirs. In Hunley v. Instagram, the Northern District of California considered whether the server test was still good law, especially when applied to services beyond search engines. Writing for the court, Judge Charles Breyer reaffirmed the server test as grounded in the “plain language of the statute” and thus applicable in all cases not just the narrow context of search engines, which the plaintiff photographers had argued reflected a “highly fact-driven ... policy judgment.” Instead, the court made it clear that, at least in the Ninth Circuit, because services like Instagram do not store the images and videos, they do not “fix” the copyrighted work in any “tangible medium of expression.”
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As scholars, publishers, and educators, we should always be careful about reliance on links and embedding for a variety of practical and ethical reasons. Linkrot remains a significant issue. A recent study found that 50 percent of the links embedded in Supreme Court opinions since 1996, when the first hyperlink was used, no longer worked. Similarly, 75 percent of the links in the Harvard Law Review no longer worked. Linking out also creates challenges to accessibility and leaves materials vulnerable to recontextualization — as when a link included in an opinion by current Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was changed to load a website displaying the message: “Aren’t you glad you didn’t cite to this webpage … If you had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would have long since disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the domain in order to make a comment about the transience of linked information in the Internet age.” So, there may be many reasons not to rely on linking. But for now, at least, we can rest easy on questions about copyright. QUESTION: A researcher asks, “Am I bound by the terms and conditions of a website I use as part of my research and teaching?” ANSWER: The obligation to comply with the terms of service or terms and conditions of a website illustrates the way that copyright and contract law come together, particularly when working online. A recently released resource from the Pennsylvania State Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright does an excellent job of walking through the issues: https://psu.libanswers.com/faq/362457. As described in that resource, website terms of use are generally designed as a contract between the user and the entity running the website but those terms don’t always create a binding contract and some terms may not be enforceable even if the terms themselves are generally binding. As a result, the document describes the likely consequences of violating website terms, starting with a suspension or ban from the site itself, which does not require any legal basis since most websites can choose who is and is not allowed access. Significantly, these consequences may impact not only the individual user but an institution as well. Particularly for library-licensed databases and resources, institutions may be expected to take steps to remedy unauthorized access and use and vendors may turn off access for the entire institution. In some cases, a website owner or vender might also choose to bring a lawsuit. As this resource is careful to note, however, the consequences for breaching a contract are different from the consequences of violating copyright, which can carry statutory damages which range from $200 per work for “innocent” infringement to $150,000 per work for “willful” infringement regardless of the actual harm done to the rightsholder. In contrast, contract damages are typically limited to actual damages caused by the breach. As such, the financial risk of violating terms of use can be very different from infringing copy-
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right. One risk that users do not need to fear is violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a once-common concern that the Supreme Court rejected in the 2021 decision in Van Buren v. United States, 593 U.S. __. Scholars and educators concerned about violating terms would be wise to consult the PSU site, which includes links to several other useful resources related to the application of terms as well as remedies for violations. As the resource notes, “It is generally a good idea to follow the terms of use ... of websites you use. In some cases, following terms of use would make vital research or teaching impossible, so it is helpful to consider whether following them is truly necessary.” QUESTION: An archivist asks, “Is VHS considered an obsolete medium so that librarians are free to make preservation copies? ANSWER: As has been discussed in past columns, libraries are permitted to take a variety of steps in order to meet their mission based on the copyright exceptions described in Section 108 of the Copyright Act. This is the basis (though not the only legal justification) for core activities including interlibrary loan, creating personal copies for patrons, and creating preservation copies when materials are, in the language of the statute, “damaged, deteriorating, lost, or stolen, or if the existing format in which the work is stored has become obsolete.” The statute specifies that “a format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or device necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.” As individual formats from the phonograph to the 8 track player fall out of use, libraries have attempted to understand when a format is legally “obsolete” and thus eligible for copying under 108(c). This question about obsolete formats has often centered on VHS tapes. The baseline question about the VHS as a format was answered by a report from the Academic Libraries Video Trust (ALVT), which documented the end of VHS manufacturing in 2016: www.videotrust.org/background-alvt. As the report makes clear, however, “a library cannot simply begin digitizing all of their VHS tapes. Section 108 requires that, prior to duplication, a reasonable search be conducted to determine that a non-obsolete, unused copy of the title is not available at a fair price.” In order to support this effort, ALVT offers a catalog (www.alvt.videotrust.org) that includes search information related to thousands of VHS holdings in library collections that can be leveraged by other organizations to assist in their VHS preservation efforts.
In addition to this information about the availability of an unused VHS copy, librarians considering digitization based on Section 108 should also remember that the content on a VHS cassette is routinely different from the content on a DVD or other source. It might be edited or framed differently, and even worn and faded. The specific “work” at issue on the VHS may be sufficiently different from the version of a similar title available on DVD, so that the DVD version is not a genuine replacement. In light of the format’s obsolescence and the often-unique materials stored on VHS tapes, librarians have a professional obligation and the legal backing to preserve the cultural record in a variety of situations. QUESTION: A legal scholar asks, “How can I research copyright records of registration?” ANSWER: Despite the clear need to understand which works are and are not protected by copyright, it remains surprisingly challenging to identify which works have been registered and renewed where required under the pre-1976 rules. While the Copyright Office keeps records about materials which have been registered and renewed, access to those records has historically been limited to those who are able to come to the Office in Washington D.C. or who were able to pay for a professional to research on their behalf. Some external services like the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database (library.stanford.edu/collections/ copyright-renewal-database) offer additional support, but getting clear answers about whether a particular work is still under copyright remains challenging, as does accessing historical information about copyright records that has been used by scholars in a variety of academic fields. In recent years, however, the Copyright Office has taken great strides to modernize access. The Copyright Public Records Portal (www.copyright.gov/public-records/) provides resources to search the COs online records, learn about their searching and retrieval services, and view educational videos and materials. In February, the Copyright Office also launched the first release of the digitized Copyright Historical Record Books Collection. This collection is a preview of digitized versions of historical record books that the CO plans to incorporate into its Copyright Public Record System (CPRS), currently in public pilot at: www.publicrecords.copyright.gov. The collection will eventually include images of copyright applications and other records bound in books dating from 1870 to 1977. As these projects continue to develop, they will be a tremendous resource for rightsholders and users to understand the copyright status of works as well as for historical research.
Legally Speaking continued from page 27 behemoth, harming authors and consumers. Office of Public Affairs. Retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justicedepartment-sues-block-penguin-random-house-s-acquisitionrival-publisher-simon
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U.S. Department of Justice v. Bertelsmann SE & Co, Penguin Random House LLC, ViacomCBS, Inc., and Simon & Schuster, Inc. Case 1:21 U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (2021). https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1445916/ download
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And They Were There — Reports of Meetings 2021 Charleston Conference Column Editors: Ramune K. Kubilius (Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> and Sever Bordeianu (Head, Print Resources Section, University Libraries, MSC05 3020, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001; Phone: 505-277-2645; Fax: 505-277-9813) <sbordeia@unm.edu> Column Editor’s Note: Thanks to the Charleston Conference attendees, both those who attended on-site and virtually, who agreed to write brief reports highlighting and spotlighting their 2021 Charleston Conference experience. The conference moved to a hybrid format in 2021 and that presented both opportunities as well as challenges for registered attendees. All registrants had the opportunity to view recordings, to re-visit sessions they saw “live,” or to visit sessions they missed. Without a doubt, there are more Charleston Conference sessions than there were volunteer reporters for Against the Grain, so the coverage is just a snapshot. In 2021, reporters were invited to either provide general impressions on what caught their attention, or to select sessions on which they would report. There are many ways to learn more about the 2021 conference. Some presenters posted their slides and handouts in the online conference schedule. Please visit the conference site, https:// www.charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/, and link to selected videos, interviews, as well as to blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins, https:// www.charleston-hub.com/category/blogs/chsconfnotes/. The 2021 Charleston Conference Proceedings will be published in 2022, in partnership with University of Michigan Press. — RKK
GENERAL REPORTS What I Learned After Viewing the 2021 Charleston Conference Posters Reported by Selena Chau (UC Santa Barbara) <selenachau@ucsb.edu> As a remote, first-time attendee to the hybrid Charleston Conference, reviewing the Event Orientation [https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/ss47zFhkScpzHNZJA] was time well spent. There were various ways to interact with poster presenters: attendees could post chat questions to be answered by the presenters or view posters and videos at any time during the conference. I had questions for presenters who were not at the Virtual Poster Presenter Q&A [https://2021charlestonconference.pathable. co/meetings/virtual/wxxsuLv8caXBL6sLQ] so I sent direct messages through the Pathable event platform to set up video meetings. This helped recreate the face-to-face interaction of an in-person conference. Although the topics were vast — diversity of collections, open access, scholarly communication — I focused on the collection strategies. An array of collection strategies were presented which I could appreciate in the context of another university library’s needs and policies. Michael Rodriguez used HathiTrust ETAS data to support additional eBook acquisitions.
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HathiTrust ETAS: Analyzing Usage, Developing Collections — Presented by Michael Rodriguez (University of Connecticut) https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/mAy5vt5kAEgyB29ZG Western University Library expanded from 2 to 12 EBA agreements in 2 years and agreed with attendees that coming up with initial EBA funding and keeping funds outside the EBA agreement for additional purchases were big challenges. Stepping up your EBA Game: Tips for Managing your EBA Program — Presented by Shawn Hendrikx (Western University); David McCord (Western University) https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/Hzh8GQGQaixDCYPmX Matthew Grannell’s poster highlights the time-consuming process of reviewing usage data and provides his choice to focus on SUSHI/COUNTER and the perspective of usage per vendor when communicating to administration. One conference attendee suggested LC class would be more helpful for communicating with librarians, and I agree. Analyzing Library Resources: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze? — Presented by Matthew Grannell (Liberty University) https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/bMFjeZX4yJJ3YbDJ4 The posters on collection development strategies contribute to the ongoing conversation among librarians like me faced with meeting user needs with specific budget and policies.
What I Learned After Viewing the 2021 Charleston Conference Posters Reported by Linnea Shieh (Stanford University) <laiello@stanford.edu> https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/ meetings/virtual/q2ErheqB3J8Papmsp The Virtual Poster Session is, in my opinion, the top opportunity for virtual conference attendees to engage in purposeful conversations with colleagues. It was my favorite event of the conference and the most effective virtual networking event available at the 2021 conference. However, even those who missed the chance to interact with their creators directly would benefit from a perusal through the posters. I will highlight three whose authors I was grateful to meet and whose work I found inspiring and actionable. First is “HathiTrust ETAS: Analyzing Usage, Developing Collections” out of UConn, which echoed another session I attended about the ETAS program’s impact on a participating campus. Both commendably used ETAS not just as stopgap but as a collection development tool by purchasing available elec-
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tronic versions of items that had gotten high ETAS use. It is rare that we get usage data for a book before buying it. HathiTrust ETAS: Analyzing Usage, Developing Collections — Presented by Michael Rodriguez (University of Connecticut) 2021 Charleston Library Conference: Virtual Meeting Details (pathable.co) Next is “Incorporating Student Voices: Assessing Library Collections to Support Student Success” by a group from Illinois State who surveyed students and faculty on the benefits and challenges of using library-provided eBooks for coursework instead of traditional textbooks. While it seems obvious that students would prefer to get books for free, their quotable comments highlighted how the offerings improved their lives in meaningful and nuanced ways, which could go a long way towards generating financial support for such a program. Incorporating Student Voices: Assessing Library Collections to Support Student Success — Presented by Mallory Jallas (Illinois State University); Julie Murphy (Illinois State University); Rachel Park (Illinois State University); Rachel Scott (Illinois State University); Anne Shelley (Illinois State University) 2021 Charleston Library Conference: Virtual Meeting Details (pathable.co) Lastly, “Bespoke data gathering to meet your institution’s needs” from Notre Dame tackles an important step in creating institutional scholarly communication strategies: understanding where/how/with whom/at what expense your community is already publishing. The authors create a succinct breakdown of strengths and weaknesses for data sources that track scholarly publishing. Certainly, the final solution will require using multiple sources, but here we have insight on where to start.
2021), visits and chats with vendors required a bit more planning and scheduling in the online realm. It was fun to again be on-site in 2021, free to stop at various tables to learn about the latest products, even if they were slightly out of scope for my library. Some casual exchanges yielded interesting tidbits, news to share with colleagues back home. If anything, I reached a greater appreciation that many of the account managers and representatives really know their client bases (without referring to lists) and can often remember any special requests or inquiries they may have had from our institutions. Sometimes those encounters occur outside of the traditional library communication loop (as is sometimes the case these days with special data set requests that go directly from academic faculty researchers to publishers and vendors, for example). One publisher representative who stayed on for the conference later shared (in a walk down the street from venue a to venue b), that she enjoyed the 2021 vendor showcase because it was her first return to Charleston after an absence of several years. To her, it was a networking opportunity with other colleagues on the showcase floor. Confirmation that I indeed stopped at some “cutting edge” vendors’ tables occurred later in the conference, at the Charleston Premiers, when I saw what was presented there, and what products won the audience vote. Charleston Conference blogger, Don Hawkins, was a virtual attendee and he reported on the vendor showcase in photos: https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/11/the-vendor-showcase-5/ Read more about Charleston Premiers in the blog posting of Don Hawkins: https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/11/afternoonplenary-charleston-premiers/
Bespoke data gathering to meet your institution’s needs — Presented by Jessica Morales (University of Notre Dame); Monica Moore (University of Notre Dame)
Top 3 Things I Learned
2021 Charleston Library Conference: Virtual Meeting Details (pathable.co)
Reported by Jacey Kepich (Case Western Reserve University) <jacey.kepich@case.edu>
What I Learned After Visiting the 2021 Charleston Conference Vendor Showcase Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine) <r-kubillius@northwestern.edu> Not everyone realizes that the vendor showcase is really an “add-on” to the Charleston Conference. Vendor and publisher team members one meets in the showcase may be the same or may be different from those who register to stay in order to participate (and present) in the conference sessions. It all depends on their role in the landscape, and how relevant the conference itself is to their role. Being in the minority (as a 2021 on-site conference attendee), what was confirmed after the virtual 2020 conference, is that I appreciate the whimsical nature and value of in-person chats with vendors, as well as networking with scholarly publishing colleagues (publishers, vendors, and other librarians) that I encounter in the vendor showcase space. At the 2020 conference (and for virtual attendees in
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Charleston is more than acquisitions Having watched my institution’s acquisitions librarian make the annual “pilgrimage” to Charleston, I’d previously assumed the conference was relevant to a very small community. But, as I discovered, session content covered broad ground, and the variety of presentation formats kept the agenda lively. I particularly enjoyed Wednesday’s Hyde Park session, and I recognized the moderator as a fellow member of the Music Library Association. I suspect we will continue to see more crossover of librarians attending conferences outside their “norm,” due both to changes in the field that require more versatility in our roles, as well as possibilities opened up by virtual attendance. Hybrid conferences can be done well My attendance at Charleston was made possible by the fact that the conference was offered in hybrid format. Because of this, my institution could sponsor multiple remote registrations, much less than the cost of sending everyone in person. Did everything work seamlessly? No. But speedy tech assistance came through multiple times, and thanks to chat, participants were able to provide real-time feedback while awaiting updates.
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No matter where we come from, we all love a good story While there’s no doubt the publishing landscape includes complex topics concerning a variety of stakeholders (Controlled Digital Lending, anyone?), if there’s one common thread, it’s most likely a love of reading that introduced us to libraries. By indication of the chat box, I imagine the audience listened with delight as Lila Bailey described how she became enchanted with C.S. Lewis’ Narnia as a child, courtesy of her local library. As keynote speaker Paul Saffo reminded us, libraries encourage us to look deeply and look at the long-term. They are full of stories, and it is the sharing and retelling of those stories that shape our culture and civilization.
My Three Favorite Concurrent Sessions/Presentations from the 2021 Charleston Conference (and why) Reported by Lauren Byl (University of Waterloo) <lrbyl@uwaterloo.ca> The Unusual Suspects — Collaborating for improvement with the pure OA publishers Adrian Stanley (JMIR), Olaf Ernst (KU), Mathew Willmott (California Digital Library), Katrin Seyler (Univ ErlangenNuremberg) https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/a9AD8hsE28RcP9JfD This session did a good job highlighting one of the central issues of managing open access agreements — trying to create new workflows. Katrin made it clear that the author is the central figure around which libraries, funders and publishers need to collaborate to create an architecture that “accommodates a multitude of needs from all sides.” Mat (California Digital Library) and Adrian (JMIR) furthered this point by demonstrating how their organizations use OA Switchboard to ensure that the process is as simple as possible for everyone involved. Adrian raised an interesting point that libraries weren’t considered when designing JMIR’s original processes (no paywall to navigate); this will be key for libraries to keep in mind as we think about what we need to communicate when working with fully OA publishers.
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Using Data to Drive Decisions: Libraries, Publishers and the New Open Heather Staines (Delta Think), Adam Der (Max Planck Digital Library), Melissa Junior (Amer. Soc. Microbiology), Mathew Wilmott (OA Coll Strat, California Digital Library) https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/bBoj48w3qeJzqfa3b California Digital Library and Max Planck Digital Library shared helpful information about their use of data to understand which open access deals to enter and to understand how well those deals perform. Mat and Adam discussed the importance of understanding where the researchers they represented published and talked about the impact this data can have on negotiations of new deals. It’s key to keep in mind the amount of time and effort that goes into tracking and analyzing this data — Mat points out two FTE are needed to deliver the kind of analysis that happens at California Digital Library. Our Work Impacts Your Work: Outreach Strategies to Promote “Invisible” Library Operations Rachelle McLain (Montana State University), Hannah McKelvey (Montana State University) https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/ virtual/Z8Q2SnmeBDH3A9j7k This was one of those sessions that had you leaving the conference wanting to make things happen at your library. Even though the presenters described a difficulty getting attendance numbers as high as they’d like, the overall planning and implementation of a multi-module series on how library operations work was thought-provoking. It made me think about what story we’d want to tell at our library and what institutional partners we could engage to help the message hit home. This concludes the General Reports we received from the 2021 Charleston Conference, however, watch for Session Reports from the 2021 Charleston Conference to begin appearing in upcoming issues of Against the Grain. Presentation materials (PowerPoint slides, handouts, etc.) and recordings of most sessions are available to Conference Attendees on the Charleston Conference event site at https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/. Or visit the Charleston Hub at https://www.charleston-hub.com/ the-charleston-conference/. — KS
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Learning Belongs in the Library — On Critical Race Theory and Book Banning, Publishers Speak Up! By Column Editor: David Parker (Publisher and Consultant; Phone: 201-673-8784) <david@parkerthepublisher.com>
T
he impetus to my column, Learning Belongs in the Library, grew from my view that the university library should be a more central resource to faculty in selecting materials from which to design their courses. The abundance of digital content owned or subscribed to in the library collection, along with the library’s focus on the curation of open access content and open educational resources, provides an alternative to student-purchased textbooks and courseware that is the typical “stuff” of most college courses. But in the past year I have come to realize there is a much more fundamental and profound argument regarding learning belonging in the library to which I must lend my voice and this column. Efforts to limit, curtail, or remove critical race theory from curriculum, supported by campaigns to ban or remove books from libraries, need to be loudly opposed by publishers. Critical race theory (CRT) emerged in the 1980s from and in response to the critical legal studies movement of the 1970s, which challenged the premise that laws and the legal system were neutral and equal before all, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, disability or any other marker of difference. The promise and gains of the 1960s civil rights legislation were under attack, and proponents of critical legal theory and critical race theory were fighting back. For all the (current?) vilifying of critical race theory, at its core, CRT seeks to fulfill a promise that should be without debate for all who have been raised on the promise of the American democratic experiment; that is, we are all presented with a relatively equal opportunity to achieve success as we define it. Critical race theory asks us to “… pay attention to what has happened in this country and how what has happened is continuing to create differential outcomes, so that we can become the democratic republic we say we are.”1
Teachers who integrate CRT into their courses are asking students to consider how the disparate histories of the many different peoples and races that make up our present community have impinged on their current opportunities. Why is this so threatening? It is a competing perspective on history and engaging with competing perspectives on any course of study is essential for students of all ages. Without the interplay of competing perspectives, and without CRT in the curriculum specifically, we are asking students to accept a static view of American history that fails to offer a sound explanation for the differential present experience of black and brown people.
indeed, we often celebrate their wealth and their philanthropic donations. But we cannot help but admit the massive leg up this provided our friends. Similarly, many of us know or are familiar with families from the opposite side of the economic spectrum. These are present-day folks struggling to survive on minimum wage and side hustles, whose great grandparents were slaves or the children of slaves. Or these current day laborers are the grandchildren of itinerant farm workers brought from Mexico or Central America during World War Two under US government sponsored programs “We place like the Bracero program.2 The fundamental point of critical race theory, from my vantage point, is that just as generational wealth accrues obvious benefit to people today, generational disadvantage, discrimination, absence of access to education, and on and on, accrues a debt carried by many working and living among us today. Critical race theory asks that we acknowledge this fact and seek to remedy it. Why would we not teach this to students?
librarians in the position of curating knowledge for the collective precisely so that the collective of us, in all our diversity, is represented in the catalog of resources for our collective access.”
The unfortunate corollary to efforts to remove critical race theory from school curriculum is the effort to undo the collection development practices of librarians. Librarians, be they working in public schools, public libraries, universities, or other institutions of knowledge curation, are highly trained in and deeply committed to preserving (and expanding) the record of knowledge. I assume this often means collecting works that individual librarians find personally objectionable but worthy of the collection. We place librarians in the position of curating knowledge for the collective precisely so that the collective of us, in all our diversity, is represented in the catalog of resources for our collective access. Some of the books we will “like” and some of the books we will find “objectionable.”
Many of us know or are familiar with families that have accrued generational wealth. I count among my friends and colleagues several people that I am certain are, or will be upon inheritance, millionaires. And those millions of dollars were cultivated and expanded, over time, through wise investment of family assets owned by grandparents and great-grandparents that were passed down. We do not vilify these fortunate individuals and,
From my window at the desk where I write, I can see banners and proclamations to which I object. When I turn on the television, or open my newsfeed, I see perspectives I do not support. I do not shield my 11 year old son from these views; in fact, I enjoy the discussion they provoke. He is cultivating his worldview as a Latinx. The least of my concerns are the books in the library. When our children have questions to explore regarding their identity, developing personal beliefs, understanding of their sexuality, and their core questions of identity and ideology, we must trust the librarians and the library collection to be the resource of first resort.
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I am a publisher, a writer, and an adviser to companies and organizations in the development of and delivery of content for education. Our publishing, distribution, and library systems work, and work well. I also serve on the educational technology committee of our school district and in this role, I see that our teachers and the curriculum they develop and deliver works. Critical race theory and books that expose different perspectives on race, gender, sexual orientation and identity are necessary and provide a different perspective that challenges a dominant narrative. We publishers, regardless of our personal perspective and the themes of the content we publish, must be outspoken in our support of competing historical narratives and access to books that our faculty and our librarians support.
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Endnotes
1. Crenshaw, Kimberle W., [quoted in] What is Critical Race Theory and Why is Everybody Talking About it?, Columbia News, July 1, 2021. 2. Library of Congress Research Guide: https://guides.loc. gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program
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Let’s Get Technical — “Bridging the Gap: MARC and NonMARC Workflows in Technical Services Departments” By Alex Whelan (Metadata Strategist, New York University, Division of Libraries) <ajw9744@nyu.edu> ORCID: 0000-0002-5551-8232 Column Editors: Kyle Banerjee (Sr. Implementation Consultant, FOLIO Services) <kbanerjee@ebsco.com> www.ebsco.com www.folio.org and Susan J. Martin (Chair, Collection Development and Management, Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University) <Susan.Martin@mtsu.edu>
The Balancing Act The academic library’s long road towards linked data and digital browsing environments has seen many technical services departments splitting staff time between describing physical resources for the public catalog in MARC and describing digital collections in non-MARC schemas. Trends in collection development such as the increased focus on electronic resource acquisitions and the possibilities of open access publishing have arguably impacted users to perceive library resources as more than mere physical collections stacks. This is to say nothing of the recent infrastructural demand for remote work, teaching, and learning, all of which have reprioritized which types of materials staff are practically able to describe. At times, I have observed divisions among technical service departments and expertise between those working with traditional MARC cataloging knowledge and those carrying out nonMARC workflows. The pressure for academic institutions especially to keep up with new and emerging trends like BIBFRAME and linked data can unintentionally emphasize recruitment and professional development around non-MARC expertise, even as fluency with MARC continues to be a necessity for library management systems and the organization of print resources. Attempting to balance these different methodologies in the workplace calls into question issues of staff communication, professional support, and the allocation of time and labor to cataloging and metadata creation. This blog post will explore the natural tensions that might arise between technical services colleagues, leadership, and institutional priorities as libraries learn to bridge the gap between MARC and non-MARC workflows.
Identity Crisis My first exploration into this topic came during the June 25, 2021 session of the Cataloging Norms Interest Group at the American Library Association Annual Conference. Facilitating a 30-minute virtual discussion, I posed questions related to my perception of a MARC and non-MARC identity crisis within technical services. The session invited live participation via voice and chat from the 300 session attendees. The discussion began with a survey of how MARC and non-MARC workflows are defined institutionally. A broad consensus formed among participants that “MARC workflows” referred to cataloging processes for resources in the public catalog, while “non-MARC” meant any other schema including but not limited to: MODS, Dublin Core, RDF, BIBFRAME, and Wikidata. Moreover, several participants expressed a strong correlation between institutions employing MARC workflows for physical materials and resource discovery through an Integrated Library System, as opposed to non-MARC workflows which had a strong correlation with resources in
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digital collections and institutional repositories made available through digital browsing environments. The discussion turned towards library software and types of patron-facing tooling, such as BiblioBoard, which often use proprietary schemas incompatible with MARC or even a system of loosely structured labels such as the Dublin Core schema. The most revealing part of the Cataloging Norms discussion followed a question about responsibilities around metadata maintenance and how workflows are divided up among technical services personnel. Namely — are there distinct areas of staff expertise that are supported through professional development and resource support, or are staff expected to handle all types of cataloging and metadata processes? Participants generally expressed that their institutions do have a standard division of labor and knowledge between “Cataloging as a traditional MARC cataloging and skill set will only non-MARC metadata creation. become more Several participants made the important for point that a third area of technical services staffing pertains standardization to information technologies and interoperability and systems, as well as the need as linked data for cross-training across units on how to handle complex data becomes a wider transitions such as linked data practice.” or systems migrations. This naturally led to another question about those in power of such decisions: does library administration understand the meaningful differences between MARC and non-MARC? One participant made the point that MARC is a standard built for interoperability, with consistent data encoding and extensible field / subfield structure meant to accommodate all types of resource description. They argued that proprietary vendor metadata schemas such as BiblioBoard present a significant obstacle because they lack the internal consistency of MARC encoded data. The discussion ultimately coalesced around the notion that library administration holds the perception that staff with non-MARC expertise have the freedom to accomplish data projects in ways that circumvent a formal cataloging department. Several concerns were subsequently voiced about the future of non-MARC metadata control, such as faculty and students contributing directly to institutional repositories by creating their own Dublin Core metadata without mediation. Another concern raised was about the tendency to reduce cost and time by creating and funding distinct digital projects each with their own set of deadlines, production criteria, and cross-departmental workflows, resulting in disparate standards for metadata across
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time and temporary project-bound staff. Yet another concern was that as nonMARC digital collections become larger and draw on a variety of sources with individual standards of consistency (e.g., users publishing under variable names and generating multiple ORCID identifiers over time), catalogers are then brought in to exert authority control in advance of data clean-up projects or systems migration efforts where inconsistencies can result in critical data loss. One participant summed up these challenges by reminding the discussion facilitators that cataloging doesn’t simply mean MARC. Instead, the participant expressed that cataloging has been a practical skill set long before machine-readable encoding was ever developed, and that cataloging as a skill set will only become more important for standardization and interoperability as linked data becomes a wider practice.
Bridging the Gap Based on the Cataloging Norms Interest Group discussion alone, it’s tempting to generalize the difference between MARC and non-MARC workflows in stark, irreconcilable terms: the traditional versus the modern; precise versus erratic; rigid versus flexible. Yet if we zoom out and consider the possibilities for strategic application of either approach, the asserted differences between these workflows reflect the dysfunction between administrative priorities about information accumulation and the labor it takes for data can be reasonably managed. The question is not whether contemporary technical services departments are experiencing an identity crisis. The question is whether that crisis is predicated on MARC vs. non-MARC at all. Much of the discussion’s consternation over non-MARC metadata might instead be considered in terms of re-asserting how a well-rounded technical services skillset is contingent on certain standards of professional support and the opportunity to develop experience over time. The tight deadlines of grant-funded library projects, for instance, may pair well with self-contained digital collections where the result might be a custom public-facing web page that can stand on its own within an institutional press release. However, as library administration increasingly organizes their budgets around project-based processing and digitization work, there is invariably some discontinuity between approaches and even standards for metadata creation. In my own experience with term-based employment, sometimes this simply comes down to the revolving-door nature
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of project work wherein dedicated staff are expected to enter a project plan, immediately start producing records and/or description with little to no institutional knowledge, and are often not renewed long enough to measure the quality and interoperability of their work. In this scenario, the divisions within technical services departments seem less the result of choosing a particular schema than a miscalculation of how challenging data management becomes without permanent, professionally diverse staff to steward traditional cataloging standards into digital collections workflows. Of course, even an adequate valuation of professional labor would not fully resolve the extent to which new library data is simply more voluminous and disparately sourced than ever. As a means of reckoning with this scale of resources, academic library systems seem to be changing in real-time to support the user trend towards keyword searching as a functional alternative to browsing. Depending on who you ask, this trend towards complex faceting and the development of predictive discovery layers either supports or supplants the traditional reference model of directing users towards call number groupings. Perhaps there’s the sense from administration that traditional cataloging description can be circumvented if library users are largely looking for targeted metadata values such as subjects, genre, and electronic access to make sense of this vast sea of eBooks and externally-curated databases. Even if this is the case, the efficacy of providing facets for thousands of results still relies on a keen eye for controlled vocabularies and internal best practices for describing local resources clearly and intuitively. Whether using MARC or non-MARC schemas, the usability of library resources can only grow if technical services departments are given the support and personal power to make the underlying data conceivable to a broad library community. To many early-to-mid career professionals (including myself), there is an inclination to parse technical services workflows into “traditional” and “modern” given the increasing visibility of technologies such as linked data and a broader shift in how library users relate to resources in the post-pandemic digital age. Such perceived divisions are unlikely to disappear from professional discourse any time soon. Even so, it is helpful to recognize how external pressures and demands on technical services departments contribute to a sense that cataloging and metadata staff are somehow in conflict with one another instead of with the outsized expectations of their work.
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Optimizing Library Services — Open Access Resources: “Supporting Language Learning with OERs and Open-Authoring Tools” Featuring recent research from Prof. Christine Scott (Oregon State University, USA) and Prof. Nadia Jaramillo Cherrez (Oregon State University, USA) Column Editors: Ms. Brittany Haynes (Assistant Director of e-Collections, IGI Global) <bhaynes@igi-global.com> and Ms. Cheyenne Heckermann (Marketer, IGI Global) <checkermann@igi-global.com> Column Editors’ Note: Recognizing the growing interest and benefits of the Open Access movement with the current challenges libraries face, please find a sample of “Supporting Language Learning with OERs and Open-Authoring Tools” in “Policies, Practices, and Protocols for the Implementation of Technology Into Language Learning,” edited by Profs. Abir El Shaban (Innovate Your Classroom (IC) Consulting, Canada) and Reima Abobaker (Savannah College of Art and Design, USA). This chapter has been converted to Open Access thanks to Oregon State University as part of our Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement. As an Open Educational Resource, this chapter and other Open Access research can be fully integrated into your system from the IGI Global Open Access Collection. Visit https://www.igi-global.com/e-resources/ecollections/open-access-collection/ to learn more about this collection. Additionally, if you are interested in learning how you can support your faculty in OA publishing efforts and IGI Global’s Transformative OA Initiative, visit https://www.igi-global.com/eresources/read-publish/ to learn how to collaborate on receiving OA funding through Publish & Read or Read & Publish models. — CH
Abstract Open educational resources (OERs) in language learning have recently captured the interests of language educators, curriculum developers, and researchers as these open-source materials serve as an alternative to traditional textbooks and costly web-based learning resources. OERs offer several benefits for language learners, including access to controlled language practice, self-study, engagement, and learning satisfaction. These resources can also promote innovative instructional practices that respond to constructivist and interactionist perspectives of second language acquisition. However, widespread use of open resources remains low among language teachers for several reasons, including a lack of awareness of how to develop and use them, overreliance on commercially produced textbooks, scarcity of resources, and guidelines for developing original open resources. In this chapter, the authors explore how to best approach the process of creating and using open resources in order to develop and promote OERs among language educators. Supporting Language Learning With OERs and Open-Authoring Tools.
Introduction The use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in language learning has become more prominent in recent years as an alternative to traditional textbooks and costly web-based materials in blended and online learning. According to UNESCO, “Open
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Educational Resources are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt, and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video, and animation” (2012). Despite the increased interest in OERs for language learning, its integration into the language classroom is still limited and presents challenges. Some of the challenges in the development and use of OERs relate to its structure — scope and sequence of linguistic content, and the practice of language skills. When creating an OERs, language teachers also need to consider the resources available including material designers, technology tools, media content developers, and assessment practices (e.g., formative, summative, form-focused, context-based). In addition, language teachers may seek to build activities that provide students with ample opportunities to use the language in meaningful tasks and activities. At the same time, teachers may also want to give students opportunities to develop autonomy and agency in the access and use of language learning materials. Thus, all of these considerations, coupled with our background and expertise in designing language learning experiences, led us to explore how to best approach the process of creating and using open resources in order to develop and promote OERs among language educators. One strategy to support the creation of original OER content is through the use of an open authoring tool that allows educators to create, share, and reuse content. This chapter presents such a strategy along with a sample lesson plan outline and discusses the practical insights and limitations of creating interactive OERs and OER content.
Background The rising popularity of OERs began around 2001 when the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative promoted the development and use of educational and research resources under an intellectual property license or public domain that allows others to reuse and repurpose these resources for free (Adams et al., 2013; Weller et al., 2015). Research and initiatives on the use of OERs have identified compelling reasons to promote their use including a considerable reduction in the cost of learning materials, affording equal access to content and knowledge to a wider audience, enhancing instruction and pedagogical strategies, and improving student engagement (McGill et al., 2013; Weller et al., 2015). In addition, OERs facilitate the adaptation of learning resources at varying levels (e.g., create own material, aggregate elements, contextualize materials) as well as lead to more reflective practice on the part of instructors (Weller et al., 2015) and encourage learner-driven learning (Conole, 2013).
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The use of OERs also enables educators to “learn from and contribute to their professional practice” (Littlejohn & Hood, 2017, p. 1-2) allowing them to expand their range of knowledge and expertise in educational innovations. The use of OERs is also well perceived by students who largely regard the quality as similar to traditional publisher textbooks (Bliss et al., 2013).
Open Educational Resources for Language Teaching and Learning There is a growing interest in language teaching and learning for creating, using, and evaluating OERs. However, little is known about how these resources can best be combined with other learning materials and instructional practices (Blyth, 2012). In language learning, there remains a lack of awareness of the value and use of OERs. While the use of online dictionaries and spell checkers is high, general interest in the use of open resources broadly remains low among language teachers despite the many benefits OERs offer language learners, instructors, and institutions (PérezParedes et al., 2018). The use of OERs has been shown to positively impact student satisfaction and performance significantly (Weller et al., 2015). The low cost and open access of these materials for students taking required foreign language courses increases motivation. Because open resources can be made available for self-study after courses end, students’ interest in language learning is more likely to extend beyond the scope of the course (Goodwin-Jones, 2017). OERs can foster students’ opportunities to develop autonomy through self-check quizzes and other student-focused activities to monitor their own progress, notice language gaps, draw attention to linguistic features and accuracy, engage with language use, access authentic models of the target language, and increase interest in language activities outside the classroom. The increased autonomy also provides opportunities to access controlled practice of difficult language features which can improve students’ ability to selfmonitor their learning while also providing instructors with formative assessment and—if integrated into a learning management system (LMS)— analytics they can use to guide instruction, provide feedback, and modify assessments. The integration of interactive and meaningful OERs in the language classroom can also promote innovation in instructional practices that respond to constructivist and interactionist perspectives that support second language acquisition (Dixon & Hondo, 2013). According to Blyth, in our highly technological world, many more students enrolled in language classes are blending their formal education by combining OERs with the publisher’s materials. Thus, language educators need to familiarize themselves with the resources and technologies available that will enable them to embrace the use of OERs in their language classrooms. OERs offer pedagogical advantages and control over course materials for instructors. Freedom to choose content fosters innovation and reduces the need to rely on textbooks which often present a narrow view of the countries in which a particular language is spoken. As popular culture typically informs the context of language courses, many texts become outdated quickly. Unlike publisher texts, OERs can be continuously updated, giving instructors the ability to tailor content to be culturally relevant and responsive to their students’ needs and interests. Instructors may choose to adapt authentic materials to suit the level of language proficiency, create original content around selected themes, or even include student-generated content representative of the complex identities of a group of language learners. Instructors who create rich and instructionally sound
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OER content available for use broadly and freely can not only increase their reputation and credibility as academics, but they can also raise the profile of the institution as a source of high-quality content for language teaching and learning (Weller et al., 2015). Despite the several benefits that OERs offer, Blyth (2012) identifies three concerns that instructors have for integrating these resources: quality control, copyright, and sustainability. Many instructors can limit the use of certain resources on the internet labeling them as unreliable and inaccurate, such as Wikipedia, and for language learning Google translate. Creating and using OERs should not be conceived as an ill-structured process; to the contrary, Plotkin (2010) presents two methods to ensure the quality of OERs: (1) vetted and top-down with the support of institutional resources, and (2) open collaborators and authors. While these concerns are valid and need to be addressed upfront in the process of creating open resources, embracing OERs can lead to creative ways to teach and learn languages.
H5P As An OER: Sample Lesson Format There is an extensive array of digital tools available that can be used to create rich, engaging, and interactive content for meaningful language learning in an open format. One of these tools is H5P (h5p.org), an open-source authoring tool for creating a variety of custom content types including multiple choice, hotspots, dictation, branching scenarios, timelines, interactive presentations, to name a few. This authoring tool facilitates the creation of digital content more efficiently without having to rely on sophisticated software programs or coding applications. H5P is versatile, generally accessible, and easy to use. The H5P tool affords teachers and students options to create, share, and reuse content through websites, browsers, and integration into an LMS. Several practical insights of this digital tool include: • Creating interactive activities more effectively and efficiently by using a web browser and plug-in. • Accessing the activities in multiple devices as it offers mobile-friendly options. • Sharing and adapting content easily in a browser, allowing easy import and export of a variety of activity types. • Integrating the activities into websites and an LMS by embedding the activities or using Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) plug-ins. • Immediate feedback and options to retry each activity multiple times. Instructors might integrate focused practice activities throughout a lesson sequence for reinforcement and informal assessment or create tasks for language practice taking a “chunking” approach by presenting language in context. Another option would be to create a series of modules designed to isolate particularly difficult language points that students may struggle with to provide additional practice and reinforcement. Because this application can be decontextualized from any specific curriculum, it has the potential to be shared widely across institutions and among independent language learners. In this section, we offer a model language unit followed by examples of H5P activities that might be used to support the language presented here (Table 1). For the purpose of this introduction to H5P, we have integrated only a few of the more than 50 H5P content types available. Figures 1-7 present the types of activities for our sample unit.
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Limitations Overall, OERs can have a great impact on pedagogical innovations and expand teaching and learning resources beyond a textbook. However, the use of OERs presents some challenges that may limit the efforts to integrate them into some educational contexts and should be considered before undertaking authoring projects. Challenges include reluctance to reuse material created by others and share resources more broadly (Rolfe, 2012; Weller, 2011); lack of guidelines on the use and evaluation of OERs for quality and accuracy of content (Adams et al., 2013; Baker, 2012); technical difficulties in access, development, and delivery of content; need for a sustainable team for development and authoring; and compliance with accessibility standards (Baker, 2012). Other challenges that were identified relate to the limited pedagogical guidelines that exist to assist in the development of our own OERs. For example, OER developers may have a steep learning curve while creating authentic materials, repurposing existing content to fit the curricular needs of their students, or collaborating with subject matter experts. When implementing an OER to replace a large amount of content, such as a published textbook, extensive coordination is required. Programs need to determine the appropriate scope and sequence for the course and consider its place in the larger curriculum, author rich and creative original content around a theme, and produce media objects or search for existing media and images in the public domain. While creating rich and interactive OERs through the H5P tool appears to be simple, this technology may require some costs associated with its integration in a learning management system and hosting services, limiting access for many teachers and students. Creating open interactive language activities in H5P requires a clear understanding that these activities will support the scope and sequence of language content in a cohesive unit of study (unless the activities are purposefully created as isolated and decontextualized language drill exercises). Another limitation that we encountered is the extent to which some of the H5P activity types can offer all content in accessible formats. While most of the activity types are accessible per the website description and comply with the WCAG 2.1 AA standards, a few of the content types do not have the H5P core team support, have browser limitations, and are unavailable for integration in the LMS. If you are interested in reading the rest of the chapter, including the table and figures, visit: www.igi-global.com/ chapter/291787
Works Cited Bliss, T., Robinson, T., Hilton, J., & Wiley, D. (2013). An OER COUP: College teacher and student perceptions of open educational resources. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1(1), 1–25. doi:10.5334/2013-04 Blyth, C. S. (2012). Opening up foreign language education with open educational resources: The case of français interactif. In F. Rubio, J. Thoms, & S. K. Bourns (Eds.), Hybrid language Teaching and learning: Exploring theoretical, pedagogical and curricular issues (pp. 196–218). https://scholarspace.manoa. hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/69716/2012_10.pdf Conole, G. (2012). Designing for Learning in an Open World. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-8517-0_12 Dixon, E. M., & Hondo, J. (2014). Re-purposing an OER for the online language course: A case study of Deutsch Interaktiv
by the Deutsche Welle. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 27(2), 109-121. doi:10.1080/09588221.2013.818559 Godwin-Jones, R. (2017). OER use in intermediate language instruction: a case study. In K. Borthwick, L. Bradley & S. Thouësny (Eds), CALL in a climate of change: Adapting to turbulent global conditions — short papers from EUROCALL 2017 (pp. 128-134). doi:10.14705/rpnet.2017.eurocall2017.701 Littlejohn, A., & Hood, N. (2017). How educators build knowledge and expand their practice: The case of open education resources. British Journal of Educational Technology, 48(2), 499–510. doi:10.1111/bjet.12438 McGill, L., Falconer, I., Dempster, J. A., Littlejohn, A., & Beetham, H. (2013). Journeys to open educational practice. UKOER/SCORE. https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/ page/60338879/HEFCE-OER-Review-Final-Report Pérez-Paredes, P., Ordoñana Guillamón, C., & Aguado Jiménez, P. (2018). Language teachers’ perceptions on the use of OER language processing technologies in MALL. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 31(5-6), 522–545. doi:10.1080/0958822 1.2017.1418754 Plotkin, H. (2010). Free to learn. An open educational resources policy development guidebook for community college governance officials. Creative Commons. https://wiki. creativecommons.org/wiki/Free_to_Learn_Guide Rolfe, V. (2012). Open educational resources: Staff attitudes and awareness. Research in Learning Technology, 20(1), 1–13. doi:10.3402/rlt.v20i0/14395 Scott, Christine and Nadia Jaramillo Cherrez. “Supporting Language Learning With OERs and Open-Authoring Tools.” Policies, Practices, and Protocols for the Implementation of Technology Into Language Learning, edited by Abir El Shaban and Reima Abobaker, IGI Global, 2022, pp. 186-198. https://doi. org/10.4018/978-1-7998-8267-1.ch010 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2012). What are open educational resources (OERs)? Paris: Unesco.org. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/ communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/openeducationalresources/what-are-open-educational-resources-oers/ Weller, M., De los Arcos, B., Farrow, R., Pitt, B., & McAndrew, P. (2015). The impact of OER on teaching and learning practice. Open Praxis, 7(4), 351–361. doi:10.5944/openpraxis.7.4.227
Recommended Readings El Shaban, Abir and Reima Abobaker, editors. Policies, Practices, and Protocols for the Implementation of Technology Into Language Learning. IGI Global, 2022. https://doi. org/10.4018/978-1-7998-8267-1 Jain, Priti,et al., editors. Open Access Implications for Sustainable Social, Political, and Economic Development. IGI Global, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-5018-2 Koutras, Nikos. Building Equitable Access to Knowledge Through Open Access Repositories. IGI Global, 2020. https:// doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-1131-2 Mills, Michael and Donna Wake, editors. Empowering Learners With Mobile Open-Access Learning Initiatives. IGI Global, 2017. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-2122-8 Railean, Elena. Metasystems Learning Design of Open Textbooks: Emerging Research and Opportunities. IGI Global, 2019. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-5305-2 continued on page 42
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The Digital Toolbox — Lessons and Trends in Digital Lending in 2021 Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director and Business Development Executive, OverDrive Professional, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>
A
s 2021 concluded, OverDrive Academic took a deep dive into data points that emerged over the course of the year from our academic library partners. Here we’ll examine digital trends we expect to continue to be impactful in 2022: the growing use of audiobooks by students, how new digital lending models are quickly being adopted, the most popular genres and the most popular titles.
Audiobook Popularity Continues To Surge As I previously detailed, audiobooks continue to gain traction with students. A telling data point that always amazes me is how well audiobooks circulate in comparison to eBooks. Most colleges and universities have 8x-10x as many eBook titles in their OverDrive digital collections as they do audiobook titles, yet despite that disparity in selection and availability, eBooks outcirculate audiobooks by a relatively small margin (1 audiobook circs for every 1.2 eBooks). Let’s dig in a bit more on how the most popular audiobooks compare to the most popular eBooks. The previous paragraph compared circs by format for eBook and audiobook collections in hundreds of colleges and universities across the OverDrive Academic network. We also compared the difference in circs when looking at the same title in both formats as well as the top 20 and top 50 most popular circ’ing titles in both formats, and audiobooks still dominate in terms of circulation. For the top 20 most popular titles in 2021, audiobooks had 28 percent more circs than eBooks. For the 50 most popular titles, audiobooks outperformed eBooks by 24 percent. There were 10 titles on both the audiobook and eBook top 20 most popular titles list. Matching up head-to-head with the option of audiobook or eBook, audiobooks outcirc’d eBooks by 21 percent for the same titles. For academic libraries, there is little difference between fiction and nonfiction audiobook circulation. Nonfiction represented 53 percent of circs compared to 47 percent for fiction in 2021. However, looking at the top 10 BISAC subjects by circ, it’s totally dominated by fiction, with the lone exception being Biography & Autobiography/Personal Memoirs. An incredibly interesting fact that speaks to the pull of fiction in the audiobook format is that the 20 most popular audiobook titles included all seven Harry Potter titles, and none appeared among the 20 most popular eBook titles.
Lending Model Options Expand Efficiency While audiobook as a format is bringing more students to digital collections, having options for lending models is making it easier and more cost effective for academic libraries to expand what they can offer. OverDrive advocates for our publishing and supply partners to make their titles available in multiple lending models. Doing this empowers our academic library partners to use their budget efficiently and confidently by adding new and diverse content with minimal investment and risk if it’s not used as anticipated. When it comes to lending models, academic libraries strongly prefer two things: simultaneous use (SU) and perpetual access
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(two different, and separate lending models). In 2021, OverDrive saw circs of SU titles grow by 33 percent. There are many valid reasons why colleges and universities value these lending models, as they can be an inexpensive way to provide unlimited access to specific content that can support specific courses or, with the single title example, a way of offering an all-campus read for an incredibly reasonable price. However, the SU must be offered not with perpetual access but with specific time period access to provide more financial certainty for publishers. Fortunately, there are lending model options that bridge the divide, giving institutions the flexibility and access that SU provides while still being acceptable for publishers. Below I’ll provide “From titles on OverDrive-specific examples, while noting other platforms will have contemporary similar options. Learning the availwomen and able options from your vendors will thrillers to help your library best serve students and faculty while getting the most historical fiction out of your budget dollars.
and family
One option OverDrive offers is life, more and the ability to select from SU titles more academic organized by individual publishers that work like a subscription. These libraries are titles are bundled by participating meeting the publishers for a flat annual fee based holistic needs on the size of the academic library’s of students user population. An example from the OverDrive catalog of one puband cultivating lisher-aggregator that represents learning and 600+ quality publishers: Unlimited curiosity with SU for any 25 titles selected from a catalog of 24,000 titles for an annual eBooks and cost of $749 for Tier 1 schools, which audiobooks. ” serve up to 2,000 students. Another publisher has a uniquely innovative approach in which they offer a collection of 2,000 titles with SU for one month and the cost ranges from $3.98-$110.00 per title. This applies to a Tier 1 school, with larger schools receiving different rates. OverDrive has also seen an increase in popularity in the Cost Per Circ (CPC) lending model, with use up 52 percent in 2021. CPC titles can be added to a college or university’s digital collection, and they only pay a low fee (on average of $2-$4 per circ) when a title circs. This means an academic library can add hundreds or even thousands of titles at no up-front cost. An example to illustrate the power of CPC: 1,000 management titles could cost $50,000-$75,000 to purchase under traditional lending models. Those 1,000 titles in a digital collection used to support a business program may only circ 200-300 titles in a semester. In that case, with the average CPC price of $3 per circ, the cost would only be $600 -$900 to provide students and faculty access to more than 1,000 titles. OverDrive enables colleges and universities to limit the amount of spend for CPC, so budgets remain fixed and predictable.
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Lastly, OverDrive offers another option that has surged in use: Metered Access/Concurrent Use (MACU). This lending model puts a premium price on a title but allows up to 100 circs concurrently. A title may cost $85 for perpetual access for one user at a time (OverDrive terms this One Copy/One User or OC/ OU), while under MACU it would cost 125-200 percent of that OC/OU price. At 150 percent, the title would cost $127.50 and be available to 100 students simultaneously. This can support core class reading by providing wide access without having to purchase dozens or more copies of the same title while delivering significant savings.
Student Interest in Broad Variety of Genres Students borrowed a wide range of genres from their college or university’s digital collection in 2021, as illustrated in the list below. From titles on contemporary women and thrillers to historical fiction and family life, more and more academic libraries are meeting the holistic needs of students and cultivating learning and curiosity with eBooks and audiobooks. Academic libraries of all shapes and sizes are also extending beyond eBooks and audiobooks to better engage students. Digital magazines and streaming video are now available to offer as part of existing digital collections, and colleges and universities are leveraging this exciting advancement to support curriculum and offer unique entertainment and cultural experiences. From crafting courses and guitar lessons to personal and professional development resources, libraries are embracing this new world of content and further establishing themselves as crucial resources for all aspects of student life. Happy reading in 2022!
Top 10 Circing Genres (of Digital Books) from Academic Libraries in 2021 1. Fiction / Literary 2. Fiction / Contemporary Women 3. Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense
Top 10 eBook Titles Borrowed from Academic Libraries in 2021 1. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett 2. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig 3. A Promised Land by Barack Obama 4. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens 5. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab 6. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson 7. The Guest List by Lucy Foley 8. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb 9. Educated by Tara Westover 10. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Top 10 Audiobook Titles Borrowed from Academic Libraries in 2021 1. Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling 2. A Promised Land by Barack Obama 3. Atomic Habits by James Clear 4. Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell 5. Becoming by Michelle Obama 6. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig 7. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens 8. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi 9. Educated by Tara Westover 10. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson Bolding indicates titles that were in both the top 20 eBooks and audiobooks lists. These lists are based on calendar year 2021 data from the OverDrive network of academic libraries.
4. Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs 5. Fiction / Historical / General 6. Fiction / Classics 7. Fiction/ Family Life / General 8. Fiction / Coming Of Age 9. Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / General 10. Fiction / Action & Adventure
Optimizing Library Services continued from page 40 Stevenson, Carolyn N., editor. Enhancing Higher Education Accessibility Through Open Education and Prior Learning. IGI Global, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7571-0 Zhou, Molly Y., editor. Open Educational Resources (OER) Pedagogy and Practices. IGI Global, 2020. https://doi. org/10.4018/978-1-7998-1200-5 Column Editors’ End Note: Understanding the increased demand for electronic resources as well as budget constraints during this time, and as a reminder, the IGI Global Open Access Collection
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can be fully integrated into your system. Visit https://www.igiglobal.com/e-resources/e-collections/open-access-collection/ to learn more about this collection. If you are interested in learning how you can support your faculty in OA publishing efforts and IGI Global’s Transformative OA Initiative, visit https://www.igi-global. com/e-resources/read-publish/ to learn how to collaborate on receiving OA funding through Publish & Read or Read & Publish models. For questions or assistance on fully integrating IGI Global’s Open Access Collection or other collections into your system, contact eresources@igi-global.com.
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Biz of Digital — Coordinating Coordinates: Adding Plat Books and Plat Maps to Our Digital Repository By Nicole Smeltekop (Special Materials Catalog Librarian, Michigan State University Libraries, 366 W. Circle Drive, Room W108C, East Lansing, MI 48824; Phone: 517-884-0818) <nicole@msu.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 In 2019, the Michigan State University Libraries Map Library identified a collection of plat books published by W. W. Hixson as a good candidate for our digital repository. Published in the 1920s-1930s, the MSU Libraries collection of these plat books covers nearly every county in Michigan. In addition to adding the books to the digital repository, the Maps Librarian was very interested in adding the page-level township map metadata into the Big 10 Academic Alliance Geoportal. This presented the digital repository team with various challenges; mainly, how to parse book-level MARC metadata for the book as well as page-level metadata in spreadsheets into functional MODS and Dublin Core (DC) records. This paper details our decision process and workflows for handling the complexity of page- and book-level metadata in preparing the plat books not only for our local digital repository, but also for the consortial geoportal. The XSL stylesheets described in this paper are available here: https://github.com/MSU-Libraries/PlatMapMetadata
Overview The MSU Libraries Digital Repository provides access to born-digital and digitized library material, including newspapers, books, journals, images, and maps. The repository is a local instance of Islandora 7, an open-source digital repository software that combines Drupal, Fedora 3, and Solr.1 In 2018,the digital repository team (RepoTeam) began adding digitized sheet maps to the repository. The following year, the Map Librarian selected a set of plat books published by W. W. Hixson for the digital repository. The Hixson plat book collection spanned most Michigan counties and included townships (or portions of townships) on each page. Rather than only including book-level metadata, the Map Librarian also wanted to include page-level metadata, so that each township was described as well as the overarching county. This would allow each township map to be findable in the Big 10 Academic Alliance Geoportal, a collaborative geoportal that utilizes coordinates in the metadata for finding resources from across the thirteen Big 10 universities.2 The digital repository utilizes both Metadata Object Descriptive Schema (MODS) and Dublin Core (DC) records to populate item pages and provide data for searching. We also use both metadata standards because the Michigan DPLA hub requires MODS records, while our library discovery layer requires Dublin Core. To create both metadata types, team members write Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) stylesheets that convert various source metadata into MODS. Then, a standard XSL stylesheet, used for all the repository collections, converts the MODS to DC. Typically source metadata begins as MARC records or Excel spreadsheets that the team converts to XML. The XSL to create page-level MODS records needed to pull information from
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both the book-level MARC record and the page-level metadata spreadsheet to make page-level metadata. RepoTeam made decisions for how to best provide access, considering the plat books needed to be described as both books and individual pages. Because the covers did not contain information beyond the title of the book, the team decided to not create metadata and not display the covers of the books as individual items; instead, the covers were included in a downloadable PDF of the entire book (excluding blank pages). The link to the full downloadable PDF was available on each township page description.
Workflow RepoTeam requires stakeholders to coordinate and complete the creation of digital images and metadata prior to taking a project. For the Hixson plat books, the pre-work was divided between the Map Library staff and the cataloging team. Map Library student employees scanned the book pages and added page-level metadata to a shared Google spreadsheet. The students added the following information: • County covered by the book • OCLC number • Call number • Page title • Township • Range • Bounding coordinates of township map (acquired systematically using a tool in ArcGIS called “Add Geometry Attributes” that quickly calculates the min/max X and Y data for a polygon) • Map library filename • Barcode • Item record number (from the catalog) • Scanner initials The Map Librarian and I devised instructions for various irregularities, such as if a page did not include a title or if the page contained advertisements rather than a map. While the Map Library employees completed the page-level metadata and scanning, the cataloging team undertook cataloging the plat books. There are many Hixson plat book catalog records in OCLC, but the records lack many details to correctly identify the edition (such as descriptions or date ranges). This is largely because the Hixson books themselves lack differentiating details between various editions — most importantly the date of publication. The catalogers estimated the date of publication by researching the history of roads depicted in the maps . With no way to verify
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whether the OCLC records described the same edition as the piece held by MSU, catalogers opted to create new records in OCLC. These new records were described using RDA and catFigure 1: Note on publication date estimation from the catalog record. alogers added notes detailing how they arrived at the date estimation listed in the catalog record. This also ensured that the dates listed in the Figure 2: xsl variable that matched the filename against the OCLC number. repository would be more granular and the metadata more robust to better aid in faceted searching. • Subjects (650, 655 fields) See Figure 1. • Original description standard used (leader field) Although each plat book depicted a different area, the catalog records included very similar data, such as publisher location, publisher, subject headings, genre headings and creator names. Because of this, cataloging was handled by deriving records from OCLC one after another. As mentioned above, notes were added to detail date estimations. Additionally, subject headings and genre form terms were added to reflect if the book contained advertisements. Because the work was quite repetitive, once complete, the workflow incorporated generating a file of records to review in MarcEdit to catch any inconsistencies in data that should have been the same.
XSL The RepoTeam had previously created a MARC to MODS XSL to handle standard sheet map metadata creation. Creating the MODS metadata for the book could utilize the same XSL and required minimal editing. However, the page-level metadata required data from both the shared spreadsheet and the MARC record for the book. It also needed to accommodate whether a page displayed a map or advertisements, and various irregularities, such as if the title field was blank, or if the page included township and range information. Because no MODS needed to be created for the cover pages, I first ran a simple XSL and removed the cover metadata from the source XML. To create the source XML from the shared Google Spreadsheet, I used FreeFormatter.com’s CSV to XML converter.3 See Figure 2.
• Institution that created the original MARC record (040 field) • Record creation date (005 field) • Language of cataloging (040 field) We also decided to include a note in the MODS record that stated the larger book that included the page described. This note pulled the title of the book from the 245 field. We also included a related item link to the book-level catalog record for the print book in our local catalog. See Figure 3. Adding subjects from the book level meant that the subjects describe the county rather than the individual townships shown in the township map. This is not a perfect solution, but we agreed that since it is clear the page is from the larger book and the township is included in the larger county, it was an acceptable generalization. The data pulled from the page-level spreadsheet were unique to each page-level MODS record. This included the title, township, range, and coordinates. Although the subjects were not granular enough to provide access to the individual township, the township names were accessible using a keyword search of the repository. Additionally, the Map Librarian agreed that if a researcher was searching for a particular township, it is a logical step to search for the county, since maps of counties inevitably show townships included in the larger jurisdiction.
For the page-level XSL, I queried the book-level MARC record by creating a variable for the MARC record. The filenames for the MARC records were the corresponding OCLC number for the book-level catalog record. The variable in the XSL matched the filename against the OCLC number listed in the spreadsheet metadata to pair the two together. I ran the XSL stylesheet over the page-level XML document and pointed to the directory of MARC records for the variable. Data pulled from the MARC record included information that applied to all the pages within the book, such as: • Publisher (264 field, subfield a) • Edition statement (field 250) • Date issued (pulled from the 008 field) • Scale and projection information (255 field)
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Figure 3: Code to add “Page from” note in the MODS record.
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The XSL also checked whether the page depicted advertisements instead of maps based on the title field labeled “Advertisements” in the page-level XML file. For those pages, the MODS records included subjects for small businesses in the county instead of the map specific information of scale and coordinates. Since running the XSLs required setting up a directory of MARC records in the directory of the page-level XML file, I created a README outlining the workflow to create the MODS records for the book-level and page-level metadata. This was very helpful for other colleagues when they needed to update the metadata to a newer version of MODS. We also anticipate that more plat books and atlases will be added to the digital repository in years to come and writing down the established workflow will save us time and energy when we inevitably forget some of the details in the process.
Geoportal Typically, the BTAA Geoportal team crosswalks various metadata schemas from partner institutions to the Geoblacklight schema. The Geoblacklight schema mainly uses elements from Dublin Core, but also includes some unique cartographic elements not typically included in standard Dublin Core. Although our digital repository includes Dublin Core records, the coordinates are stored in the MODS records. Additionally, the persistent URLs are added to the MODs records after the local records have been uploaded to Fedora and only stored in Fedora. Thus, we needed to export the MODS records from Fedora for the Geoportal team to crosswalk to their Geoblacklight schema. To retrieve the MODS records as a batch, a team member queried Fedora using Solr to pull the modified MODS records and then ran a simple XSL to exclude any advertisement pages. Because the geoportal includes records for both the plat books and individual maps within the books, both page and book-level metadata were sent. Figure 5: Item page for a map: https://n2t.net/ark:/85335/m5h990r4w
Conclusion As a result of this work, 40 plat books containing over 600 maps were added to our digital repository and the BTAA Geoportal. Additionally, this workflow has given the digital repository team a path forward for handling books where page level information is also important for discoverability and access. We look forward to utilizing this workflow in the future for more unique and interesting atlas collections held in the MSU Map Library. See Figures 4 and 5 on this page, and Figure 6 on the next page.
Endnotes 1. Islandora. 2021. “Islandora: Open source digital asset management.” Accessed May 26. https://islandora.ca/ 2. Big 10 Academic Alliance Geoportal. 2021a. “About the BTAA Geoportal.” Accessed May 26. https://geo.btaa.org/ 3. FreeFormater. 2021b. “CSV to XML Converter.” Accessed May 26. https://www.freeformatter.com/csv-to-xmlconverter.html
Figure 4: Item page for an advertisement page: https://n2t.net/ark:/85335/m55x26r1c
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Figure 6: Item in BTAA Geoportal: https://geo.btaa.org/catalog/ark-85335-m5h990r4w
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ATG Interviews Jared Oates Co-Founder and COO of Niche Academy By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> ATG: Jared, for those of our readers who might be unaware, can you tell us what Niche Academy is all about? JO: Sure, Niche Academy is a learning management system that delivers training for very specific audiences. We create training packages that include a delivery platform so that learners can immediately begin to use the training where and when they need it. In the context of academic libraries, we’ve created high-quality info lit instruction and database introductions with a student audience in mind. The Niche Academy platform lets academic librarians customize this training and deliver it as an assignment in the campus LMS, or embedded in the library’s website, or within a LibGuides page, or even right inside an EBSCO discovery interface, for example. Wherever it’s delivered, the teaching librarian retains the ability to interact with student learners and report on learning outcomes. Having solid evidence of learning outcomes helps those librarians highlight their direct contributions to student success. ATG: What level of input do librarians have in customizing the final instruction package? Do they play an active role in helping create the instruction? If so, how? JO: Librarians have full control of the final instruction package. They choose which training to present and how to organize it. They can customize the tutorials Niche Academy provides by inserting their own training elements like lessons, quizzes, and activities. They can also copy and adapt the training Niche Academy provides so it always feels like it’s coming from a local librarian. Both the Niche Academy platform and the training are completely white labeled, so it always feels local. We’ve also taken pains to keep the platform clean and simple so there’s very little learning curve involved in creating your own training. Librarian input and feedback are also the primary driver behind the training Niche Academy creates. Our content development queue is prioritized based on requests from our customers. ATG: Although you now work with numerous academic libraries, we understand that Niche Academy started working with public libraries. Can you tell us about those initial efforts? JO: Niche Academy’s founder, Jeromy Wilson, and I had both worked with libraries at SirsiDynix for many years. Our idea spark with public libraries began with a frustration we heard at almost every library we visited: they were spending a lot of money on eResources, but usage of those resources was disappointing. As we studied the problem, we realized that usage was low because public awareness was low and there were also technical barriers patrons consistently encountered. We experimented with social media tools and signage solutions that didn’t move the needle much on the awareness problem,
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but finally found two things that really made a difference: 1.
Training all public facing staff, not just a few eResource “experts,” how to introduce people to the eResources and match the resources with patron needs and interests.
2.
Embedding appealing intro videos right within the library website.
For the technical barriers, the most impactful solution we found was to offer always-available video tutorials in obvious places on the website and then keep those tutorials up to date. The tutorials needed to give people enough information to have a satisfying first experience with the resource. A good first experience makes it likely they’ll come back. I think the eResource problem helped us see how the combination of a learning delivery platform with training content for a specific audience can solve real-world problems. We’ve been pleased with the results. We’ve seen libraries struggle with marketing and promotion efforts for years only to see marginal single digit percentage point gains in usage. We’ve seen those same libraries begin using the Niche Academy process and realize 70% overall usage gains in their first year. So that’s how we started with public libraries. As time has gone on, we’ve added a lot of professional development for librarians. Lots of libraries also use the platform now to deliver storytimes and other programs online. But we started with eResources. ATG: What gave you the inspiration to expand your offerings to academic libraries? In what ways did you see Niche Academy enhancing academic library instruction? JO: It started in a similar way with a pervasive problem we saw as we listened to academic librarians: job security and job satisfaction seemed to be on the decline. The most common issues behind the decline seemed to be budget cuts and increased workload occasioned by departing colleagues. Credentialed librarians are being asked to wear more hats and it’s often hard to communicate the value of their work. We saw that we could save time for library instructors by creating ready-made tutorials on core information literacy topics as well as regularly maintained introductions to research databases. Using the Niche Academy platform to deliver that instruction, librarians can then spend a greater portion of their time actually giving feedback to individual students. They also have better measures of learning outcomes, which make it easier to communicate their contribution to student success. They can show, for example, how students in a specific class now demonstrate mastery of concepts like “causation vs. correlation,” or skills like how to use appropriate in-text citations.
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The platform lets librarians deliver this instruction through the campus LMS as an assignment within a regular academic course. Being able to offer library instruction this way is a key tool to building relationships with teaching faculty in other departments. Those faculty generally want to spend their instruction time on their own subject matter instead of research skills. Niche Academy tutorial packages help librarians come to the relationship with something valuable to offer that doesn’t require class time or add instructional overhead. The training package also includes templates and best practices training to help librarians build relationships across departments. ATG: While Niche Academy’s instruction is delivered online, are there examples where libraries are using it in combination with in-person teaching and creating a hybrid form of library instruction? If so, what does that look like? JO: Yes, one great example of hybrid training is the traditional “one-shot” session that’s often part of a first-year experience. We have libraries that offer research essentials instruction online about things like authoring research questions, better search techniques, and in-text citations. That lets them use their in-person time to build relationships, answer questions, or give a physical tour of the library. Another example is with makerspaces. We have libraries that require a general makerspace certification to be completed online. That makes in-person time much more effective because they can focus on equipment training that’s best done handson without worrying about the “rules of the road” stuff that’s already been covered. ATG: Increased interactivity with students and faculty seems to be a key advantage of using Niche Academy software for libraries. Can you give us examples of how your academic library clients have used Niche Academy to increase such interactivity? What impact, if any, has this increased interactivity had on the library’s role on campus? Again, can you cite specific examples? JO: Most online library instruction is currently not interactive. It’s a YouTube video, or content on a web page, or a LibGuide. When you introduce interactive elements like quizzes, response prompts, activities, or discussions, you give a skilled librarian insight into the progress of individual students and the opportunity to offer feedback. It takes relevant reference conversations directly to students, wherever they are. The impact of librarians (and by extension, the library) on student success becomes obvious and measurable.
clarify a question the student missed in the quiz. A librarian might also send a student an email when a response prompt indicated misunderstanding of a concept. An “activitiy” in the Niche Academy platform provides a mechanism for a library instructor to accept or reject with feedback something a student has submitted for review ATG: It seems to us that Niche Academy would have application for libraries in their own staff training programs. Are we on target? Are academic libraries using Niche Academy for staff training? If so, how? JO: Yes, interestingly, staff training was actually the first use of Niche Academy in an academic library context. Utah State University used Niche Academy to train the student employees who operated their Borrower Automated Retrieval Network, the “BARN.” The staff training offerings on Niche Academy have expanded over the years and now include training series on topics like grant writing and diversity, equity, and inclusion. ATG: On your website you claim that you are “helping to build the future of online resources and e-learning.” From your perspective what does that future look like and how do you see Niche Academy partnering with academic libraries to make that future a reality? JO: In general terms, we see academic libraries shifting from a collections focus to a focus on services. Information literacy instruction is a service that has a big impact on student success and librarians are uniquely positioned to provide that service. We see ourselves giving librarians tools like interactive tutorials, reports, and LMS integrations that extend their reach and highlight the value of their expertise. We also see budget tightening as a trend that will extend into the foreseeable future. This means more student and paraprofessional employees and fewer trained librarians to service the student population. Niche Academy helps trained librarians get more value out of the time they spend and have better measures of their impact. We also help student and paraprofessional library staff to become more capable. In the reality we’re working towards, there may be fewer academic librarians, but they will be more highly valued within the institution. Library collections may have a smaller footprint overall, but the perception will grow of the library as a welcoming and inviting space and the beating heart of a scholarly institution.
Troy University is a good example of this pattern. The library provides detailed instruction on using APA citations that is part of a specific graduate-level program. The instruction includes a series of quizzes that allow students to achieve and demonstrate mastery of this skill. The library is thereby solving an important problem for the program and saving time for faculty in that other department. ATG: In a case like this, how does the librarian provide feedback to students? Is it primarily via quizzes? Or are there other tools that enhance librarian — student interactivity? JO: Quizzes, response prompts, knowledge checks and activities are all examples of feedback mechanisms within Niche Academy. Our feedback mechanisms are based on the concepts of “formative” and “summative” assessment. A summative assessment helps a student evaluate their mastery at the end of an instructional session. A formative assessment is part of the flow of instruction and helps to reinforce concepts or identify gaps in understanding. Some examples: a librarian might email a student in response to a knowledge check or quiz to
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ATG Interviews Marjorie M K Hlava President, Access Innovations By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> ATG: Margie, for those readers who are unfamiliar with Access Innovations, can you tell us what you and your team do as it relates to the information industry? MH: We change search to found. What does that mean? Studies have shown that knowledge workers spend a third of their time looking for information. That information could be in house only or from external sources such as libraries or discovery platforms. And half of that time they spend looking, they do not find what they need. The value of a collection is worthless to patrons, if they cannot find what they need. We solve that challenge by adding conceptually appropriate words from controlled vocabularies. The control is needed so that words with many synonyms or that are ambiguous can be clearly delineated to the user. ATG: What inspired you to start Access Innovations? Was there something about the market for knowledge management and information services in 1978 that made you think, now is the time? Did you ever think that over 40 years later, you would still be on the cutting edge of technological innovation? MH: Databases were just beginning to be built. The combination of newly available budding technology and the clear need for broader distribution seemed like an excellent thing to become involved in. We were searching a few databases but many people were asking how to build ones for their own collections and put them up online for broader access. Some 600 databases later and thousands of engagements have proven that to be a good model. ATG: The Data Harmony (DH) software is at the core of Access Innovation and its services. Your website describes Data Harmony as “a suite of software modules designed to maximize precise, efficient information management and retrieval.” What does that mean exactly? What do these software modules do, and how do they interact? MH: Big question! Solving knowledge workers’ frustrations with finding what they need requires enriching the article of record with additional metadata beyond what is typically found in, for example, book or article metadata from publishers. DH analyzes what the content is about using “explainable AI.” It starts with DH analyzing an existing corpus in order to develop a thesaurus that conceptually describes the content. DH provides for human review. Next, each digital object in the corpus is automatically labeled (tagged) with the most conceptually appropriate thesaurus terms using DH’s M.A.I. module. Another DH module identifies entities (people, places, and things) and other metadata elements. Together, this value-add metadata improves the search and discovery experience. Search results
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are more precise meaning there is fewer items retrieved that are not of interest to the searcher. ATG: You also describe Data Harmony as an “artificial intelligence suite that leverages explainable AI for efficient, innovative and precise semantic discovery.” That sounds complicated to the uninitiated. Can you clarify how it works and why it’s important? And more broadly speaking, what is your view of the overall potential of AI as it relates to information management and services? MH: “Explainable AI” isn’t to difficult to get your head around, but getting there is not easy. All AI/ML/ DL platforms split out results — good, bad, indifferent. Explainable AI is the ability to explain how the AI platform generated its output. This can be critical when the AI output is used to make decisions. As mentioned, DH provides a human friendly window into its workings. These GUIs also provide the ability to intervene and correct. Such interventions do not require IT experience. AI is already having an impact on information management and it will only grow in importance. AI based content services such as DH provides “future proofs” of your information assets. It will improve the flow of information from producers to users. It will facilitate “information finding you.” When it is only a Black box, that is you do not know how the presented answer was derived, it is not safe to implement that information. Again, this is already happening and will only get more pervasive and, hopefully, better. ATG: Can you tell us how you developed Data Harmony and how you keep it updated to meet the everchanging needs of the information industry? MH: With the increase in database creation work, we needed something that would aid the editor and make them faster. Our intention has never been to replace the editor or the librarian but rather to aid their work and ensure that their time is spent doing the intellectual things humans do best and automate everything that is repetitive or clerical. Over time we found more things that could be automated. We built it first for our own use in house but over time customers wanted to use it as well. We did not start out to be a software firm. Our most critical users are still our inhouse editorial team and the software grows by responding to user needs rather than trendy industry unicorns. ATG: Margie - you have said that there are way too many “black boxes “ that don’t explain what they do, are not very accurate, and are too expensive. Can you elaborate? MH: This gets back to explainable AI. If you don’t know how it is happening, then you cannot explain the results. Let me answer in context; libraries have huge collections that are
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very valuable. Beyond their very valuable archival mission, these collections aren’t very valuable to information seekers, if they can’t find what they need. If the OPAC does not serve the patron, well, they go to Google to find the result and then pick it up at the library or JSTOR site. Libraries spend a lot of money adding three LCSH headings which more likely cover the type of information than the content so more terms are needed to give the user enough information to mine and find content. If the library uses an AI platform that is opaque (not explainable AI) to fix the discovery problem, then if the discovery problem doesn’t get much better, they will not be able to determine why and won’t be able to fix it. The AI platform vendor won’t be able to explain what is happening either. Their answer is always that the system needs more training data. This gets prohibitively expensive and doesn’t guarantee a solution. The likelihood that the same search executed a few days or a month later will give the same results plus the newly added information is low which is also very frustrating to the user. Actually, the problems usually get worse as the AI algorithms become increasingly more complex, compounding the problems and can result in very embarrassing and potentially libelous results. ATG: We know that you are a frequent attendee and presenter at the Charleston Conference. How does your work at Access Innovations intersect with the library and publishing world? And what is it about the Charleston Conference that keeps you coming back? MH: Access Innovations DH solutions make collections discoverable. When they are discoverable, they are valuable. Even little used content that is maintained for archival purposes, for example, gets much better usage when enriched with metadata, especially subject metadata. Several years ago, Judy Russell, dean of the libraries at University of Florida, gave a presentation at the Charleston Conference that demonstrated the impact on discoverability of previously little used special collections. This was a challenging but fun project for Florida and us. I continue to attend the Charleston Conference to be able to meet with colleagues; these conversations are as enriching as the program is. The Charleston Conference brings together such a marvelous collection of minds. There are two audiences at Charleston, the librarians and the vendors. For us the mixture is the benefit. Talking to both and the differing needs of the two groups well expressed throughout the meeting keeps our attention and interest. ATG: You are a big proponent of being active in professional organizations and conferences. What would you say to those new to the information professions who might question the value of investing time and resources in such activities? MH: I am active in both organizations and their conference as well as standards organizations. One points out the needs, the other ensures that interoperability of information happens at all levels. You don’t learn while talking, you learn while listening. Attending builds your network faster than any other way. It is far better than just social media. Social media is great for staying connected post conference, but it is not as rewarding nor as long lasting by itself. You are also much more focused and less distracted at a conference — you’ll learn more. The serendipitous conversations are priceless. It is an opportunity to learn and to contribute to the profession. And as a bonus, Charleston is a great place to visit. You really do need to get out of the office (assuming you’re back in the office!) once in a while.
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ATG: You have also been intimately involved in the standards process for much of your career. Why has that been so important to you? How has this involvement contributed to your career and to the success of Access Innovations? MH: Again, answering in context, standards are critical for discoverability. Where would we be without MARC? AACRII? I learned a great deal by being involved in standards. This has helped inform the development of DH. I have made many great friends; some have become clients, and all have remained great colleagues. While I have served on many standards development committees and been a voting member of NISO in some capacity for most of my working life, I am proudest of my involvement in the Dublin Core, the DOI Syntax, the DOI Contributed Metadata Set, The controlled vocabulary (Previously Thesaurus) Standard for both NISO and ISO, Credit (Author contributor roles) and now the SSOS (Standards Specific Ontology Standard) ATG: What new technologies and services can current and potential customers expect from Access Innovations? MH: So far ontologies and knowledge graphs have over promised and underperformed but I think there must be ways to leverage those ideas into much improved search and information connectivity. We are working on that. The search system must be able to work seamlessly with the data and its metadata. Too often the system is built and then nature of the information in the database and how to best search it is thought of as an addon. I would like to flip that to users and data first, technology just used to enable their needs. ATG: Margie, before we let you go; we were wondering how you maintain the energy level needed to run a company like Access Innovations? Are there any fun activities that help reenergize and get ready to tackle the next big challenge? MH: Having a great staff is essential. What energizes me is getting to tackle and solve interesting challenges I encounter in providing intelligent content services. I love solving those puzzles! I was brought up with a strong work ethic — “idle hands are the devils plaything.” The best relaxation for me is doing something completely different to clear my head. Like digging in dusty archives for snippets of information on the past or traveling to new places digging into what’s there from the local perspective, watching birds or creating a new item from cloth. I do not watch TV. I would rather read the news from many sources and then make up my own mind on issues than listen to the talking heads. I am not very good at sitting around. Patience may be a virtue but it is not one of mine! ATG: Thanks so much! Margie, we’ve really enjoyed talking with you, and needless to say, we’ve learned a lot.
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ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED Andrea Ferro Global Account Development Casalini Libri Via B. Da Maiano 3 Fiesole, Italy Phone: +39 - 055 50181 Fax: +39 - 055 5018201 <andrea.ferro@casalini.it> www.casalini.it Born and lived: La Spezia, Liguria, ITALY; Florence, Tuscany, ITALY. Professional career and activities: I joined Casalini in 2009, after more than 12 years spent in marketing roles at an IT Company. In my spare time: I take black and white photos with my rangefinder camera and my iPhone. Favorite books: Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar; The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck; The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov; The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino. Pet peeves: Egomania, hypocrisy. Philosophy: Happiness is not doing what you want but wanting what you do. Most memorable career achievement: Opening new markets for my company. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Continue to grow Casalini’s customer base and expand our presence — especially on the digital front (Torrossa digital library) — in new territories. How/where do I see the industry in five years: A profound digital transformation of our industry has certainly begun and it will continue but I neither expect a radical shift from the printed book to eBooks nor the end of libraries as we have known them so far. Libraries will remain — and it is important that this be so — physical places for meeting, socializing, exchanging ideas, as well as learning. The new technologies will play a decisive role in how content (in whatever format) will be used by people, so I expect a great development of research and discovery tools, artificial intelligence, data mining, textual analysis etc.
Melissa K. Fulkerson Vice President, Research Reference Elsevier 50 Hampshire Street, 5th Floor Cambridge, MA 02139 Phone: (781) 663-5241 <m.fulkerson@elsevier.com https://www.elsevier.com/connect Born and lived: I’ve lived in Massachusetts, USA my entire life! Professional career and activities: I’ve hovered around the media industry almost my whole career. I began working in record stores while going to school, and after a stint at a window and door manufacturer that taught me I love marketing, I moved into a marketing role with Borders bookstores in New England. I joined Elsevier as a marketing manager in 2009, and have spent the last 13 years contributing to our books business through various marketing and sales roles, culminating in my current role as Vice President, which is a general manager role for our global STEM books business unit.
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Family: My husband Bill and I have a 10-year-old son Travis, and our family dog is Bark Wahlberg. In my spare time: I am a semi-retired marathon runner, but have recently taken up kickboxing as a new sport. I love to read, cook/bake (the exercise helps offset that), and am eagerly awaiting the ability to travel again so I can fulfill my wanderlust. I’m also currently the assistant treasurer for Friends of Beebe Library, an all-volunteer nonprofit fundraising organization supporting my hometown’s public library. Favorite books: My favorite authors are Haruki Murakami and David Sedaris; anything by either of these authors will be on my ongoing reading list. Pet peeves: Lack of self-awareness.
Philosophy: I believe deeply in the power of curiosity, empathy, authenticity, humility and diversity. Through these values, all things are possible and businesses — and people — are stronger. Most memorable career achievement: Becoming a Vice President before my 40th birthday. Despite not having a library or scientific background, I have been able to build a strong career and grow within Elsevier based on just the strength of my own skills and desire to learn, and that has been the most satisfying achievement. A close second is finishing my bachelor’s degree in 2020 after attending part-time for a few years. Being an adult learner has helped me be a better business leader and also a better student! Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Professionally, I want to continue to build the profile of Elsevier’s book portfolio in our served markets so we can be an increasingly better support to the research and academic communities through the content we publish. Personally, I just want to continue learning more and making a difference in whatever ways my skills and experience are best suited. How/where do I see the industry in five years: If I think specifically of books, I believe we will see a continued evolution of how books are impacted by — and impactful to — the research and academic communities. The concept of what a book is, and the concept of what learning materials are, will continue to evolve. We’ll deliver our content in new ways — shorter form, data rich, more interactive/video content. As younger students become researchers and faculty, they will continue to require access to content that supports the ways they naturally communicate. Marjorie M. K. Hlava President, Chairman, Chief Science Officer, Founder (although just President will do fine!) Access Innovations, Inc. 6301 Indian School Road NE, Suite 400 Albuquerque, NM 87110 Phone: (505) 998-0800 Fax: (505) 265-1080 <mhlava@accessinn.com> www.accessinn.com Born and lived: Manistee, Michigan. Moved to California and then to Wisconsin, where she grew up. Went to college in Madison, WI, River Falls, WI, Minneapolis MN, and then moved to Albuquerque, NM. Early life: Margie’s early life was centered around logging and farming. Her father was a lumberjack in California, and the family later moved
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to Wisconsin, where they had chickens, goats, and a donkey. She attended a one-room school with her sister and two brothers for grades 2 – 8. Professional career and activities: Margie’s career in
information science started when she took a job with a NASA tech-transfer (Technology Application Center or TAC) facility in the 1970s, while pursuing a masters in Botany. There, she became an early and expert searcher and was responsible for the entire
process from data acquisition to marketing and shipping of information products and services. She directed the production of five quarterly-published bibliographies on solar-thermal energy, heat pipes, hydrogen, wind, and remote sensing. She also directed searching and editorial staff of nine people and performed extensive online searching on nine different database systems, including Medline, Dialog, Orbit, and NASA Recon. She was responsible for document delivery operations, a staff of seven, and marketing of publications. She was concurrently hired as Information Director at the National Energy Information Center Affiliate (NEICA), a Department of Energy operation for energy information statisitics. Her responsibilities included hiring and training staff, and organizing and supervising the information dissemination program including the design of products. She facilitated vocabulary development for the NEICA database, and setting up all production time tables and telecommunications interface with the Washington, DC office. This project was on a six month “loan” from TAC. In October of 1978, she founded Access Innovations with five partners. She holds the positions of President and Chairman of the Board. As such, she is responsible for directing overall corporate operations, especially production and marketing activities. These involve extensive public relations, contract negotiations, analyzing and transacting acquisition and joint venture negotiations, hiring and training personnel, purchasing equipment and participating in short-term and long-range planning. She also does professional consulting in the areas of efficient production work flows and database design and development. Consulting has included projects design, workflow analysis, project administration, database design, software development and problem solving in all areas of corporate activity. She is a popular presenter at conferences and meetings. She continues to do research in areas of making database production more efficient, such as machine aided indexing, multi-lingual access for databases, and machine translation. Family: Margie has been married to Paul since 1967. She has two daughters who are married and have children of their own: Heather, married to Paul Kotula, with daughter Alison; Holly, married to Ryan Cook, with son Jacob. Margie has one sister and two brothers, Kitty, Larry, and Glenn. In my spare time: Margie is active in the Hubbell Society Museum and Library, and enjoys tracing the geneaology of her cousins and ancestors. She also enjoys gardening, travel, weaving, sewing, scrapbooking, and bird watching Favorite books: Margie is an avid reader and enjoys many genres. Among her favorites are The Catalog of Shipwrecked Books. She is particularly interested in biographies, history, archaeology, and fiction by authors including Dick Francis, Ellis Peters, Dorothy Gillman, Simon Winchester and is currently reading The First Signs by Genevieve Von Petzinger. Pet peeves: Distribution of misinformation, negative people (which she calls “negatrons”). Philosophy: In data, trust but verify. In life, expect the best from people. Most memorable career achievement: Margie’s most memorable career achievement was either delivering the NFAIS Miles Conrad Lecture or winning the ASIS&T Award of Merit.
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Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Margie hopes to see widespread implementation of controlled vocabularies to ensure widespread, precise search results to users. How/where do I see the industry in five years: Margie sees there will be more direct user access to information products and services. She thinks there will be a diminishing role of libraries in the traditional sense and that the skills sets required to support those users will change considerably. Kara Kroes Li Director of Product Management, eBooks EBSCO 10 Estes Street Ipswich, MA 01978 Phone: (800) 653-2726 Fax: (978) 356-5640 https://www.ebsco.com/products/ebooks Born and lived: Born in Detroit, MI; Lived in Fremont and San Luis Obispo, CA, London, U.K., Boulder, CO, Boston, MA, Washington, D.C. Early life: Grew up in California, spent summers with family in Michigan. Professional career and activities: Earned a BA in English from Cal Poly and an MA from CU Boulder. I started working on eBooks at NetLibrary / OCLC in Boulder, Colorado in 2005, and then EBSCO with the acquisition in 2010. My work focuses on the end-user experience and also on librarian workflows to procure and manage them. I am passionate about pursuing better accessibility in academic publishing/information products. Family: Married with 3 children, ages 5, 3, and 4 months. In my spare time: Besides crafting and reading with my kids, I enjoy traveling, hiking, learning how to tend my urban garden, and quality time with friends and family. Favorite books: Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer, Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. Philosophy: You’re only given a little spark of madness, and if you lose that, you’re nothing. — Robin Williams Most memorable career achievement: Defining and launching an aggregator DRM-free model for eBooks was a highlight, as was my first Charleston presentation. I collaborated with a librarian and a publisher and developed friendships with both that I still value today. How/where do I see the industry in five years: I am looking forward to advancements in technology that create smarter and more personalized user experiences and that remove barriers to content for users. Specifically, I think improvements to authentication, mobile access, and collaboration tools will create a rich environment for book publishing to thrive. John Lenahan Associate Vice President, Published Content ITHAKA 101 Greenwich Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10006 Phone: 212-358-6409 <john.lenahan@ithaka.org> www.jstor.org Born and lived: I was born in Redondo Beach, CA and and went to high school at Westlake High School in Westlake Village, CA.
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Early life: Searched for my path by living in Mammoth to snowboard, the Navy and eventually through college in the redwoods in Northern California. Professional career and activities: Worked with children in special education, an instructor for psychology and developed an online teaching program. Eventually moved to the East Coast and worked at Softline to support bringing online resources to colleges and universities, ProQuest and JSTOR over the last 10 years.
Jared Oates Chief Operating Officer Niche Academy 139 N. Hunters Grove Lane #308 Lehi, UT 84043 Phone: 801 331 5981 <jared@nicheacademy.com> https://nicheacademy.com
Family: My wife Ginny and daughter Audrey, who is just about to graduate from college in Maryland. Still having a hard time grasping that.
Born and lived: Born in Provo, UT. Grew up in Colombia, Germany, Japan, and Washington DC.
In my spare time: Snowboarding, playing bass, kayaking road trips and hiking.
Early life: Growing up overseas gave me a lifelong love of travel and languages. It also gave me the ability to find common ground with almost anyone.
Favorite books: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, The Stand by Stephen King, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Pet peeves: Lack of follow through.
Philosophy: Be kind, respectful, and accountable for your actions.
Most memorable career achievement: Being part of a team at JSTOR for the successful launch and continued growth of our Books at JSTOR program. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: In collaboration with libraries and publishers, significantly increasing the amount of open access scholarly content to users around the world via a sustainable business model. How/where do I see the industry in five years: New business models are in place that take into consideration the costs of publishing and the need for access to underserved populations, and a significant increase in scholarly content is available to users around the world. Library funding will shift to supporting these sustainable business models and publishers will continue to find ways, through partnerships, to lower the costs associated to publishing.
Professional career and activities: I finished college with English degrees and an intent to join the Foreign Service. As way led on to way, though, I found myself doing writing in Utah’s tech sector. I taught myself to program and worked as an engineer, a product manager, and, intermittently, as an entrepreneur. Niche Academy is the 3rd startup I’ve helped to found and the first to succeed sustainably. Family: My wife and I have five children and one grandson. They are the root reason I go to work every day. In my spare time: I read, take walks, and make music.
Favorite books: The Book of Mormon, Little Women, John Adams (McCullough). Pet peeves: Hmmm… I don’t really do peeves.
How/where do I see the industry in five years: Libraries succeed when they provide educational services to their communities and parent institutions. Many librarians think of themselves as keepers or guardians of a collection. This perception will, of necessity, receed as budget cuts and funding priorities require a renewed focus on the problems libraries can solve for the people who provide their funding. Academic libraries, for example, are in a unique position to teach essential information literacy skills. They will need to improve their ability to provide this service and expand the reach of this offering.
COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Access Innovations, Inc. 6301 Indian School Road NE, Suite 400 Albuquerque, NM 87110 Phone: (505) 998-0800 Fax: (505) 256-1080 www.accessinn.com Officers: Marjorie M. K. Hlava, President; Jay Ven Eman, CEO. Association memberships, etc.: NISO, ASIS&T, SLA, ALPSP, STM. Key products and services: Content Analysis, Data Classification, Abstracting and Indexing, Taxonomy/thesaurus/ontology Building, Metadata Enrichment, Controlled Vocabularies, Content Conversion, Data Harmony software, streamlining workflows. Core markets/clientele: Learned and Scholarly publishing, Corporations both profit and not for profit, University special collections. We do have government clients as well but government contracting is ex-
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pensive so we prtner for those engagements with organizations who can provide the overhead personnel to match the requirements. Number of employees: 12 after covid, 18 before – which is the same size as Craigs list. History and brief description of your company/publishing program: Incorporated in 1978, Access Innovations, Inc. is now in its 43rd year of providing information management services. Established in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the organization maintains its corporate headquarters there. The organization’s services are provided to a broad range of public and private organizations in the United States as well as in international locations. Employing a core staff of information professionals, Access Innovations is a small company but highly regarded in the information services and software industry. Access Innovations has won many awards, including being listed several times in both KMWorld’s prestigious “List of 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” and KMWorld’s annual list of “Trend Setting Products.” In 2009, Access Innovations was named to eContent’s prestigious Top 100 list, in the Taxonomy and Classification
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category, as well as KMWorld’s “AI Trailblazer” in 2020. Key personnel are extremely active and well known in information management professional and standards organizations. Marjorie has been named a “women of influence in technology.” Access Innovations has set up work flow analysis and production guidelines modeled on the Baldrige and Six Sigma quality management methodologies. The organization has won recognition from Quality New Mexico, an organization dedicated to promoting organizational excellence. Access Innovations is a closely held, woman-owned business. Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers? Metadata, especially rich subject metadata is key to changing search to found. In order for libraries to survive they must embrace the notion of making their information findable not just being store houses of documents. Dumping documents into digital store houses is like previously copying them to microforms, an unfindable inaccessible cemetary for data. Casalini libri Via B. da Maiano, 3 Fiesole, Italy Phone: +39 055 50181 Fax: +39 055 5018201 Websites: www.casalini.it; www.ilibri.com; https://www.casalini.it/digital_library.asp
EBSCO Information Services, LLC Main Office: 10 Estes Street, Ipswich, MA 01938 Headquarters: 5724 US-280, Birmingham, AL 35242 Remittance: Payment Processing Center, PO Box 204661, Dallas, TX 75320-4661 Phone: (800) 653-2726 • Fax: (978) 356-5640 https://www.ebsco.com Affiliated companies: EBSCO Industries, Inc. Officers: President: Timothy R. Collins. Vice Presidents: Allen Powell, Sam Brooks, Alex Saltzman, Bowen Thagard, Patricia Carroll, Mandy Catrett, Heather Moore. Secretary: Tyler Novak. Assistant Secretary: Elise Stearns. Treasurer: Jay Mark. Key products and services: • • • • • •
Affiliated companies: Erasmus Boekhandel, Houtschild International Booksellers, AtCult.
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Officers: Michele Casalini (CEO).
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Key products and services: Books, journals, e-content, cataloging services, approval plan selections, shelf ready services. Core markets/clientele: University, Research, National and Public Libraries worldwide. Number of employees: More than 100. HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY: Established by Mario Casalini in 1958, Casalini Libri is recognized as one of the leading suppliers of publications from across Southern Europe to libraries and institutions worldwide.
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EBSCONET journal subscriptions and management EBSCOhost online databases EBSCO eBooks and Audiobooks GOBI Library Solutions from EBSCO (for academic print and eBook acquisitions) Flipster digital magazines LearningExpress skill-building, test prep, student and career resources Licensed secondary databases, such as Rosetta Stone, MyHeritage Library Edition, ABC-CLIO NoveList readers’ advisory solutions Point-of-care and clinical decision support tools Software-as-a service, including EBSCO Discovery Service Stacks for website design and content management FOLIO Services from EBSCO (implementation, hosting and support for the FOLIO OS-LSP) OpenAthens authentication support
Core markets/clientele: Academic, Public Library, K-12, Corporate, Government, Medical Number of employees: 2,900
We currently work with over 3,000 libraries and institutions, and more than 5,500 publishers from over 40 countries. We provide an efficient and personalized service for libraries, combining the supply of publications with a range of solutions that facilitate selection, acquisition and processing workflows. Our dedicated services for publishers range from subscription management to coordinated sales for print and electronic editions. The Torrossa platform aims to offer institutions a resource that gives access to scholarly eBooks and ejournals, at the same time simplifying acquisitions, licensing and integration with the library catalog. We firmly believe in communication, cooperation and collaboration to optimize new opportunities such as BIBFRAME, Linked Data and Open Access. We are involved internationally with projects and conferences.
EBSCO supports a large number of associations and other specialty groups within the library, information and publishing industries. While EBSCO may not always enjoy corporate membership to all of the below, it tends to support these organizations through conference attendance, sponsorships, speaking engagements and other means, adding value to these associations and their members. Additionally, many EBSCO employees are members of various associations and participate in various capacities individually — chairing committees, leading programs and, in some cases, serving as chapter presidents.
In 2020, Casalini Libri joined forces with Mr. Dirk Raes to acquire Erasmus and Houtschild, to combine the experience and expertise for which we are known, and with its historic partner @Cult, strengthening and furthering our mission to provide increasing advanced services to libraries and publishers.
• National Information Standards Organization (NISO) • North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) • National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS) • International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) • EDItEUR, an international group coordinating development of the standards infrastructure for electronic commerce in the book, eBook and serials sectors
54 Against the Grain / February 2022
In addition to many subject-focused associations around the world, as well as state, provincial and local associations, the following are some of the larger associations to which EBSCO provides support:
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Medical Library Association (MLA) American Library Association (ALA) Special Library Association (SLA) Public Library Association (PLA) International Association of Music Libraries (IAML) American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) American Academy of Nurses (AAN) European Council of International Schools (ECIS) Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Association for Christian Libraries (ACL) Canadian Library Association (CLA) Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) European Association of Health Information libraries (EAHIL) The DAISY Consortium (Inclusive Publishing Partner) ITHAKA
101 Greenwich Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10006 Additional offices in Ann Arbor, MI and Princeton, NJ Phone: 888-388-3574 • Fax: 212-358-6499 • www.ithaka.org Officers: Kevin Guthrie, President. Association memberships, etc.: We participate in a wide range of industry associations to ensure that we learn from others’ expertise and experiences as well as sharing our own progress. We’re grateful for the engagement and collaboration of librarians, publishers, technology developers, and scholars represented in these organizations: ALA and ACRL, ALPSP, American Alliance of Museums, ARLIS/NA, AUPresses, BISG, CNI, COAR, College Art Association, COUNTER, CrossRef, Digital Library Federation, Digital Preservation Coalition, EdItEUR, EDUCAUSE, IIIF Consortium, National Humanities Alliance, NISO, OASPA, ORCID, SSP, STM, and UKSG. Key products and services: Our organization’s not-for-profit mission to expand access to knowledge and education is advanced through four services: JSTOR, Artstor, Portico, and Ithaka S+R. JSTOR and Artstor are digital platforms that make millions of journal articles, eBooks, images, and primary sources available to researchers and learners around the world. Portico is a digital preservation service for scholarly content. We work closely with libraries and publishers to ensure that academic resources will be accessible to researchers in the future.
Against the Grain / February 2022
Ithaka S+R provides strategic advice and support services to help institutions improve their performance and further their missions. We generate action-oriented research for institutional decision-making and act as a hub to promote and guide collaboration across the communities we serve. Core markets/clientele: Academic libraries, museums, secondary schools, and independent researchers. Number of employees: 350 Niche Academy 139 N Hunters Grove Lane #308, Lehi, UT 84043 Phone: (801) 903-2663 https://nicheacademy.com Key products and services: Training and online learning platform for students, patrons, and librarians Core markets/clientele: Academic and Public Libraries Number of employees: 34
History and brief description of your company/publishing program: Niche Academy’s Founder & CEO, Jeromy Wilson, was only 4 years old when his dad helped start Dynix, a company responsible for the software system that replaced library card catalogs. Growing up, Jeromy tagged along to countless library conferences and events. After graduating from college, Jeromy also took a job at Dynix. After a few years, he began to notice a different problem: despite the increase in available online resources, they just weren’t being used to their potential. So in 2013, Jeromy set out to find a better way to engage communities digitally, and that’s where the idea for Niche Academy was born. He started out on his own but soon recruited the help of former Dynix co-worker Jared Oates. Together, they were able to get Niche Academy off the ground. It wasn’t long before they found a whole team of people who believed in their idea and its cross-industry potential. Seven years later, we are now a team of 34 (and counting!) and are trusted by over 1,000 communities (including libraries, IDD service providers, parks & recreation departments, and more!) across the world. After getting our start with just a few short library tutorials, we’re now helping to build the future of niche training and community engagement. Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers? Our focus with academic libraries is to create tools that help librarians increase job satisfaction and job security by providing better measures of their impact on student success.
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55
Back Talk — My Glorious Library Career: Part 2 Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>
F
ew things have been as magical in my life as my introduction to a serious academic library. A bookish kid, I’d always haunted the libraries within reach, but in the desert southwest those were few and modest: Quonset hut on an army base, a neighborhood public library in El Paso, our high school library (where my library career began, as I wrote a few months ago), and, when I was a senior in high school, the main downtown El Paso Public Library. I went to the downtown branch to write a Shakespeare paper in senior English class and there found books of a kind I’d never imagined — like the one that explained carefully that Shakespeare’s plays were all written by Queen Elizabeth herself, including the ones first published and performed in the years after she died. Even at age 17, I found the argument for that a little sketchy. This was in a city whose best bookstore had a special section reserved for the publications of the John Birch Society.
But then I went off to college and found myself in the open stacks of a library about to buy its three millionth book, and I was enraptured. In graduate school I would study with the real life model for the Nowhere Man in the Yellow Submarine film, but before I ever met him I knew the power of his mantra: “ad hoc, ad loc., quid pro quo, so little time, so much to know!” I wandered the stacks endlessly, stuck my nose into disciplinary reading rooms, and realized that the world I had imagined was a pale shadow of what was really there. But it was my senior year when things got serious. I was eligible for work-study jobs and did a couple of years as “administrative assistant” in various university offices, but senior year I discovered that Professor Fine in the classics department, who had just been teaching me Herodotus, had a research assistant job that I applied for and got. The nature of the job was essentially assistant classics bibliographer/selector. These were the old days, and it had transpired that Professor Fine volunteered his time to serve as the classics selector, with an essentially unlimited budget. He could order anything he thought worthy, which in practice meant that he didn’t order popularizations in foreign languages or translations from Greek and Latin into languages other than French, German, and
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Italian, but beyond that he could be voracious. (In those days our library had its unique local cataloging number system, as a few universities still did. When the time came to convert the collection to LC, Professor Fine in retirement was still doing the selecting work, and he insisted that until he gave up the task, the classics books would still be cataloged the old way. He thought — rightly, I still think — that the local system was superior to LC for handling classics disciplines. He at least could play the role of King Canute facing the tide for a while, but of course the tide has now long since rushed in and the coherent classics collection has been scattered among the Cs, Ds, and Ps of LC’s arid taxonomy.) My job? Well, Professor Fine would review publishers’ catalogs and a German journal that published detailed bibliographical updates of new books, and he ticked with a pencil the things he thought we should have. I took those notes, sat down at my typewriter with the small three-part carbon copy order slips that the library used, and typed them up one at a time. Since typing was and still is my only truly marketable skill, I could make efficient work of it. In a way, I was like a medieval scribe, copying out the Bible and imbibing as I did the wisdom of the text. In this case, it meant I was getting a pre-graduate school crash course in the history and state of current scholarship in the field. I remember most vividly learning first of the Thracian “rider gods” worshipped in what is now Romania and Bulgaria — gods on horseback, unique to that region and known only from archaeology. In the decades since, they have only marginally come back into my view, but I was the better then and now for knowing something about how complicated and rich the ancient worlds around the Mediterranean could be. As I did the work, I had the pleasure of seeing my carbon copy slips appear in the drawers of the card catalog indicating a book on order, and even by the end of the year I got to see volumes I had typed up appearing on the new book shelf in the classics reading room. As jobs go, it was pretty ordinary and just fine, and I got my $2/hour for it. What interests me now is that the job itself was an artifact of the cutting edge technology of that age — the need for ten fingers to recreate data to make the book order happen. Automation long since has made that job obsolete in a variety of ways — not least by the outsourcing that came with approval plans and ordering profiles. But in that historical moment, it was a job that was immensely educational for me and laid down a part of the foundations of my career. We were all closer to the physicality of books, to the geography of their publication, and — when far fewer books were published than nowadays — more readily able to get a direct sense of a wide field of knowledge from the mechanics of selection and acquisition. Now the books flood in magically, when we still get them in print. When we get them electronically, they never even really appear in our spaces or minds unless we go look for them, because the records, silent and invisible, are just added to the overwhelming database. Books didn’t disappear so easily in those days, and I’m glad they didn’t. Almost everything is easier for the young nowadays, but some important things are harder.
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