Against the Grain V35#3 June, 2023 Full Issue

Librarian Futures in a Time of Transformational Tech

Guest Edited by Martha Sedgwick

(VP Innovation –Research & Learning, Sage Publishing) and Kimberley Simpson (Head of Brand Marketing, Technology from Sage)

Begins on Page 12

If Rumors Were Horses

By Katina Strauch with Contributions from Leah Hinds

It’s finally getting to feel like summer here on Sullivan’s Island. Mind you I am not complaining but it has been unseasonably cool and breezy over the past months. Sometimes it was even like February. But now the heat is here and let’s hope the breezes keep up anyway!

Cough Cough

Dr. Brian Fors, curator of MUSC’s Waring Historical Library, is interested in the future of historical medical collections and is beginning a campaign to update the facility. How about this 1834 “recipe for a cough” which calls for 60 grains of saltpeter, which was one of the components of gunpowder. (See Reclaiming history by Tom Corwin, October 3, 2022, Post and Courier.com) Waring is a special collections and rare book library of the Medical University of South Carolina

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Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) (USPS: 012-618), Copyright 2023 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-options/

Editor:

Katina Strauch (Retired, College of Charleston)

Associate Editors:

Cris Ferguson (Murray State)

Tom Gilson (Retired, College of Charleston)

Matthew Ismail (Charleston Hub)

Research Editors:

Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)

Assistants to the Editor: Ileana Jacks

Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)

International Editor:

Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino)

Contributing Editors:

Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University) Deni Auclair (De Gruyter)

Rick Anderson (Brigham Young University)

Sever Bordeianu (U. of New Mexico)

Todd Carpenter (NISO)

Eleanor Cook (East Carolina University)

Will Cross (NC State University)

Anne Doherty (Choice)

Michelle Flinchbaugh (U. of MD Baltimore County)

Joyce Dixon-Fyle (DePauw University)

Michael Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC)

Chuck Hamaker (Retired, UNC, Charlotte)

Bob Holley (Retired, Wayne State University)

Donna Jacobs (MUSC)

Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University)

Myer Kutz (Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.)

Tom Leonhardt (Retired)

Stacey Marien (American University)

Jack Montgomery (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)

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Publisher:

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Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to: Katina Strauch, Editor, Against the Grain, LLC Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482 cell: 843-509-2848 <kstrauch@comcast.net>

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 CC software under Mac OS Monterey. Against the Grain is copyright ©2023

by Katina Strauch

ATG INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

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From your “Enjoying the Summer Sun” Editors

Katina Strauch and Leah Hinds:

Bring on the sunshine! The weather has finally caught up with the calendar here after a cooler-than-usual spring, thank goodness.

This June issue of ATG, guest edited by the awesome Martha Sedgwick (VP of Innovation, Research and Learning at Sage Publishing) and Kimberley Simpson (Head of Brand Marketing at Technology from Sage) is especially eloquent as it looks at the changing future of the library and gosh is it changing! We have articles by Steven Witt (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and Editor of IFLA Journal), Danielle Duca (Head of Product Innovation at Sage Publishing), Raymond Pun (Alder Graduate School of Education), Matthew Weldon (Technology from Sage), Kimberly Simpson (Technology from Sage), and Tony Zanders (SkillType). We also have the final installment of a three-part series on retractions, “To Err is Human,” by Daniel Dotson (The Ohio State University). And there’s a Special Report from Lesley Montgomery, Catalog Librarian from Tulane University’s Technical Services Department, on content analysis to promote unbiased resources. (See more about this good news in Rumors!)

Letters to the Editor

We have two exciting interviews in this issue: Darrell Gunter (Gunter Media Group) hosts a conversation with Paul Gerbino (Creative Licensing International) on his company’s new name and rebranding from Triumvirate Content Consultants. And Leah Hinds and Tom Gilson conducted an “ATG Interview” with Matthew Ismail, Editor in Chief of the Charleston Briefings and Owner/Founder of Dost Meditation. I guarantee you’ll learn something about each of these fascinating people by reading their interviews!

The always-astute Jim O’Donnell brings us “A Lesson from the Middle Ages about Digital Preservation” in this issue’s Back Talk column. He talks about lessons learned with the digitization of Patrologia Latina by Chadwick-Healy in the 1990s.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy this issue! Thanks to all of our contributors, featured authors, and especially Martha and Kimberley our guest editors. Enjoy the sunshine! And I say welcome to summer!

Love, Yr.Eds.

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 Leah and Tom:

As you both know I am very keen that the Charleston Hub should be useful to readers but as a reader/user I can tell you that in this instance it was not. In particular in this case the April issue, curated by Sven Fund, is of a remarkably high standard. I have started reading through the introduction and the various separately written contributions. I do not want to read print and indeed I can read it online

VOLUME 35 — 2023-2024

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT

Toni Nix <justwrite@lowcountry.com> Phone: 843-835-8604

but (alas) there is no proper link between the various items and when I finish one of them it is very difficult to get back to the next item or even the list of contents without going out and coming in again. It is very off-putting especially as I was intending to direct people I know to the group of articles.

Anthony Watkinson (Principle Consultant, CIBER Research) <anthony.watkinson@ btinternet.com>

Dear Anthony:

Thank you for the feedback! We’ll work on how to incorporate this into our next issue to improve readability. In the meantime, please feel free to share this link to your colleagues: https:// www.charleston-hub.com/2023/05/v352-april-2023-table-ofcontents/

The table of contents contains links to each article, then they can jump back to the TOC to read the next article more easily than they can with the email newsletter links. There is also a link here to read the PDF of the full issue in a flippable, magazine-like format. The featured articles from this issue are open access, so it is perfect to share with others.

Thank you, Leah Hinds

(Executive Director, Charleston Conference, Charleston Hub) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com>

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Rumors continued from page 1

(MUSC) named for Joseph I. Waring, Jr., the first director of the Historical Library.

Charleston Conference Memories and Intrigue

Have you been to The Ordinary restaurant on King Street in downtown Charleston? It’s billed as a “fancy seafood oyster bar.” It was once a Bank of America building where, when I first moved to Charleston, I made my very first bank deposit into my first Charleston Conference checking account.

Reading a biography of Robert Maxwell, The Fall by John Preston. The things we don’t do for the Charleston Conference! It was winter in Oxford, England. We had just gone to Blackwell’s Bookshop. We decided to visit Headington Hill Hall in the east of Oxford. It was built in 1824 for the Morrell family, who remained in residence for 114 years. It became the home to Pergamon Press and to media tycoon Robert Maxwell. It currently houses Oxford Brookes School of Law

Anyway, I went to Pergamon Press trying to meet Robert Maxwell and ask him to speak at the Charleston Conference. Talk about young and naïve! At least I saw the magnificent place and had lunch with Brian Cox! Moving right along, the Charleston Conference was in session when the news broke that Maxwell had died on his yacht. Did he jump or was he pushed? Many publications have been filled with speculation. I have been reading FALL: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain’s Most Notorious Media Baron (Harper, 2021). Many years later I also made another unsuccessful attempt to get Jeff Bezos as a speaker at the Conference! Oh well. Fun memories!

Serendipitous Book Finds

Caroline Goldsmith, our Associate Director at the Charleston Hub, wrote to me recently about a find at a local bookstore in Greenville, SC. “Look what we came across today in one of our favorite book stores (Mr. K’s Used Books) in their “local” section! We had to buy it, of course.” This history of the College of Charleston was written by my daughter Ileana and me back in 2000!

Trends and Insects at SSP

Were you at the recent SSP 2023 annual meeting in Portland, Oregon? Leah Hinds and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe led the Charleston Trendspotting session, forecasting the future of trust and transparency. This was the sixth time the Charleston Trendspotting session has been held in different versions and settings. It’s designed to offer a chance to proactively examine trends and issues facing the library and scholarly communications world, and it featured a “Futures Wheel” activity to get the creative juices flowing

and allow attendees to work together in small groups to come up with trends and their impacts. The session had many attendees despite the fact that they were scheduled opposite several sessions like Heather Ruland Staines’ incredibly clever musical on metadata. This was a re-telling of The Ant and the Grasshopper, with a huge cast of insects complete with costumes and cleverly written spoofs of well-known songs, including “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Metadata” and “Welcome to the (Metadata) Jungle.” They even had printed programs with bios of all the characters. I was privileged to hear a few previews of the songs from Heather, and I can’t wait to watch the video recording for this one!

Make Mine Music!

Have y’all visited CMUSE music news and entertainment website? Am I repeating myself? This is a very wonderful place to belong to especially if you are a music junkie like myself!

Speaking of music, have y’all noticed the section Above the Fold on the Charleston Hub? These are snippets posted weekly on Fridays featuring music/album/concert reviews, pop culture, food/restaurant reviews, new initiatives, games, and much more! Topics not necessarily related to librarians, publishers or vendors, but interesting and engaging for everyone! If you’d like to contribute an article for this new online column, please contact us at <info@charleston-hub.com>. Marcie Cohen just posted news recently about British singer Jesse Ware’s new album That! Feels Good!, … “a collection of odes to pleasure heavily steeped in disco aesthetics.”

NARA News

Dr. Colleen Shogan assumed the role of Archivist of the United States today and, immediately after taking the oath of office, began her work as the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

Shogan is the 11th Archivist of the United States and the first woman to hold the position permanently. She was nominated by President Biden on August 3, 2022, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 10, 2023. She succeeds David S. Ferriero, who retired as Archivist in April 2022. Prior to her appointment, Shogan most recently served as senior vice president of the White House Historical Association. She previously worked for over a decade at the Library of Congress in senior roles as the Assistant Deputy Librarian for Collections and Services and the Deputy Director of the Congressional Research Service.

Earlier in her career, Shogan worked as a policy staff member in the U.S. Senate and taught at Georgetown University and George Mason University. She earned a BA in Political Science from Boston College and a Ph.D. in American Politics from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Order of the Cross and Crown, and the United States Capitol Historical Society’s Council of Scholars.

ATG and Conference Updates

ATG and the Charleston Conference are ecstatic to welcome Lesley Montgomery to our group. Lesley worked hard to get her library degree and lickety split was hired as a cataloger at Tulane University. Lesley has written a Special Report for this issue of ATG that brings us up on what’s happening in the cataloging and classification world! Many of you remember Jack Montgomery, Lesley’s husband, in his role as a Charleston Conference Director for many years. We jokingly called Jack “The Voice of God” for his wonderfully deep radio voice coming

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through the speakers to the Carolina Ballroom from upstairs in the overflow seating in the Gold Ballroom of the Francis Marion, back before the days of the ample seating in the Gaillard Center. Lesley and Jack are also in a band that played several times at conference receptions in the past. We’re happy to have the other half of this dynamic duo working with us now that Jack has retired!

Charleston Vendor Showcase booth registration opened recently, and over 70% of the booth space was sold out within just a few hours. Gosh! This is an exciting and encouraging start to the year for sure!!! Attendee registration is also open now, so be sure to take advantage of the “Extra Early Bird” rate to save by registering before July 12. Conference hotel guest room blocks are also filling up quickly, so reserve your rooms and don’t miss out!

The Call for Papers is open through July 10 for conference session proposals. The committee will be meeting at the home office on Sullivans Island to go through the hundreds of proposals submitted, hopefully all in one day. Whew, I’m tired just thinking about it! Thankfully we have a great group that makes the time pass quickly when we’re having fun. And a toast at the end of the day to celebrate being done with the review process doesn’t hurt, either!

In Other News

This is from Choice Reviews (5-12-23): Open Access Publishing Donations and Collaborations “This week, the

MIT Press received a generous $10 million donation from nonprofit and open access supporter Arcadia. Deemed the Arcadia Open Access Fund, the gift aims to increase open access publications in STEM and HSS fields and further the accessibility of research. Commenting on the endowment, Amy Brand, Director and Publisher of the MIT Press, noted, “With this enduring support for open books and journals, we can use our power as an academic publisher to expand public understanding of scholarship and science and to democratize participation in research.” Next up, Taylor & Francis (T&F) is extending its collaboration with Wiley’s Knowledge Unlatched Under the partnership, T&F will continue to convert its titles to OA via the support of research libraries and plans to switch over more than 50 books this year.”

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced the results of its recent Board elections for the term beginning July 1, 2023. Karim Boughida (Dean of University Libraries, Stony Brook University) will transition to the role of Chair of the NISO Board, having served as Vice Chair for the past year. He is replaced as Vice Chair by Robert Wheeler (Director, Publishing Technology, American Society of Mechanical Engineers), who will assume the role of Chair for 2024–25 next July. Maria Stanton (Director of Production, Atla) rotates to the position of Past Chair, having served as NISO Chair for 2022–23. See the full press release for details!

continued on page 22

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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>

Let’s Read Obsessions

Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (1981) (account of building a computer so engrossing that it won a Pulitzer); (2) Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood (2009) (not a book about obsessions, but an obsessive book; if that makes sense); (3) Deborah Moggach, Tulip Fever (1999) (Dutch Tulipmania with love, betrayal, and big money mixed in); (4) Travis Elborough, The Bus We Loved (2005) (the famous red London double-decker bus with the conductor to give you a ticket); (5) Fred and Judy Vermorel, Starlust (1985) (obsessive fan mail for pop stars).

See: Simon Garfield, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, March 4-5, 2003, p.C8. Garfield is the author of “All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia.”

To AI Or Not

Charles Li owns the Chinese fortune cookie factory Winfar Foods, Inc. With his 80-year-old father, he draws on Chinese proverbs to write the thousands of messages that go inside the cookies.

With 11,000 restaurants to supply with cookies, he has brought in outside writers. And now they are threatened by machines.

OpenFortune Inc. supplies the printed messages to a dozen cookie factories around the world. And they use ChatGPT to generate the messages. Needless to say, this offends purists. They point to often garbled or overly cryptic messages that are generated artifically.

Mr. Li, however, believes in the software despite his fond memories of the thousands of fortunes he’s written. In a historical footnote, fortune cookies are unheard of in China. They were brought to America by Japanese immigrants and adapted by Chinese restaurants.

See: Angus Loten, “Upheaval Hits Fortune Cookies,” The Wall Street Journal, April 8-9, 2023, p.A1.

Serif Wars

The UK and U.S. governments are dictating the use of Calibri rather than Times New Roman on documents. They claim it improves legibility. New Roman has the wings and feet on letters known as serifs.

Lawyers, bureaucrats, and academicians are celebrating or raging depending on their preference. Studies favor both serifs and sans serifs. Some claim Times New Roman embodies “trustworthy” values. Others say Calibri is “confident.”

See: Katie Deighton, “New Government Typeface Rules Trigger War of Words,” The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2023, pA1.

Roaming Literary England

Everyone knows Dorset is Hardy Country, that Wordsworth wandered the Lake District, Warwickshire is Shakespeare’s England, and Exmoor is Lorna Doone. But every county of England has a wealth of author associations, some obscure, some unlikely. John Steinbeck, for example, spent a half year in Somerset seeking Camelot.

Two recommended helpful guides: Great British Literary Map and Oliver Tearle’s Britain by the Book: A Curious Tour of Our Literary Landscape.

See: Rory Knight Bruce, “Discovering Britain by the Book,” The Field, March, 2023, p.80.

King of the Graphers

There are an estimated 500 graphers (professional autograph hunters) worldwide with 150 in New York, the graph hunting capital. The king is Craig Castaldo aka Radio Man. You or I might scarf one signature, but Radio Man has wooed an army of celebrities into accepting FedEx envelopes of photos which they sign at their leisure.

Radio Man looks like a derelict, which is where his tale of graphing success begins. He mistook Robin Williams, who was in town filming The Fisher King, as a fellow bum and offered him a beer. They became pals, and Radio gave Robin Skid Row acting tips. Radio also got a job as an extra. And multiple bit parts later. Ransom, Zoolander, The Departed, The Irishman, and more. He always plays the bum on a bicycle with a boombox around his neck.

He’s not real Internet savvy, so he sells his graphs through a dealer in Florida who also provides the photos. A package of signed George Clooneys worth $18,000 might net him $300.

See: “King of the autograph hunters,” The Week, April 21, 2023, p.36.

Must-Have Oenophile Companion

You don’t trust the relevancy of Internet wine advice, and you’ve long outgrown your beginner wine books. Nothing is more reassuring than the BIG WINE BOOK — comprehensive and just plain hefty. The author recommends:

(1) Jancis Robinson et al., The Oxford Companion to Wine; (2) Kelli White, Napa Noted (1,255 pgs. Now that’s a comprehensive guide.); (3) Jancis Robinson et al., Wine Grapes (thousands of grapes both minor and major); (4) Larousse Wine (color photos and maps); (5) Peter Liem, Champagne: The Essential Guide to the Wines, Producers and Terroir of the Iconic Region (full color maps made by French publisher Louis Larmat in the 1940s); (6) Jon Bonné, The New French Wine (two vols.).

See: Lettie Teague, “The Enduring Relevance of the Big Wine Book,” The Wall Street Journal, April 15-16, 2023, p.D9.

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Obit of Note

As a teenager in New Zealand, Juliet Hulme had a neverquite-explained obsessive relationship with a girlfriend. When the friend’s mother tried to send her daughter to England to school, the pals murdered her with a brick in a stocking.

As they were under 18, they were not hanged. Juliet spent five years in prison, moved to America and became a mystery writer under the name of Anne Perry.

In 1979, she published The Cater Street Hangman, beginning a series on a Victorian policeman and his wife. A second series featured private detective William Monk and a nurse Hester Latterly.

A 1994 Oscar-nominated movie “Heavenly Creatures” with Kate Winslet depicted the murder.

After 120 books, best seller lists, and an Edgar, she died aged 84.

See: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11968113/ Crime-author-Heavenly-Creatures-killer-Anne-Perrydies-aged-84.html

New Angle on College Rip-off

It’s all allegation, we emphasize, but JP Morgan claims they were bilked by a millenial Wharton grad into paying $175 million for a college financial planning startup called Frank. The owner, Charlie Jarvice, seemed a b-school wunderkind having slots on Forbes 30 Under 30 and Fast Company’s Most Creative People.

Morgan alleges Jarvice claimed 4.25 million students had registered to use Frank, but the number was closer to .25.

Higher ed experts wonder why Morgan wasn’t aware that only 2 million kids a year go to college. What sort of due diligence do they have?

Frank was, however, in a space ripe for development. Financial aid forms are a nightmare with every college having different forms akin to doing your income tax. And the parents are in a panic about the staggering cost of college on the one hand and the fear of ruining their childrens’ futures on the other.

See: Nicole Laporte, “The College Money Grab,” Town & Country, April, 2023, p.94.

Librarian Futures in a Time of Transformational Tech

By Martha Sedgwick (VP Innovation – Research & Learning, Sage Publishing) <martha.sedgwick@sagepub.co.uk>

The launch of Chat GPT at the end of 2022 has turbo charged what was already a hurtling pace of technological change that we have experienced throughout the research and learning ecosystem over the past decade or so. It feels timely for this issue of Against the Grain to be focussed on emerging technologies in libraries and we hope you enjoy the thoughtprovoking suite of articles commissioned and curated around this theme, discussing the threats, opportunities and critical role libraries will need to play, particularly in relation to the arrival of a new suite of generative AI tools.

Steve Witt, in his piece on Global Trends in library and information services, coins the term the 5th Industrial Revolution. Steve is editor of the journal of the International Federation for Library Institutions & Associations and analyses the themes emerging from research produced by librarians around the globe who highlight technological change as a particular challenge, as well as an opportunity.

I always like to keep an eye on the start-up space as it’s where I believe we see the most exciting experimental works that give us signals of changes to come. Sage’s Daniela Duca lives and breathes the start-up world, and her piece is an insight into the views of a few founders of some really exciting startups using emerging technology, big data, AI and VR in new ways for research and learning.

Whilst AI is not new, there has been a step change in the technology with the launch of ChatGPT that I believe is really game changing and likely to have a profound impact on the way we work, and the way library patrons work too. Raymond Pun from the Alder Graduate School of Education, California, writes an excellent thought piece on ChatGPT in this issue, addressing some of the very real threats the tech poses for student research practice as well as the opportunities for libraries.

One of the things I have been excited about for my own work is the productivity opportunities ChatGPT can grant me (although

I didn’t use it to write this article — I promise!). Pun also references examples emerging of productivity gains for libraries — one example is use of ChatGPT in MARC record creation. I look forward to seeing what other ideas emerge. I’m sure there will be much to share at Charleston this year!

I am of the view that for technology to be used well, it needs to be augmented by talent. There is a social and behavioural angle to this new tech and libraries are uniquely positioned in the institution to play a key role in developing the skills, the technical literacy, to build the critical thinking necessary to use this technology critically, ethically, intelligently. A number of articles, including Witt’s and Pun’s, discuss aspects of this with some nice examples of new courses emerging on campus.

Discussions of AI inevitably lead to discussions about job displacement; however, I am firmly of the belief that the power of technology augments human skills and talent. I loved reading Tony Zanders’ interview with Dr. K. Matthew Dames (Chief Exec of the Hesburgh Libraries, Notre Dame) where they discuss librarian skills. As well as an in-depth analogy of the role of librarian with the role of DJ (I learnt new things!) Dr. Dames says this: “library communities and ecosystems always have really skilled, talented people who are managing the technology that is streamlining and simplifying some of the tasks … it’s the skilled librarians who are connected with stakeholders that are able to preview changes in curriculum or community needs. They then put that data into the formula or algorithm, at the appropriate time, to ensure that access to knowledge is calibrated in the best interests of the community.”

So, let’s explore and experiment with emerging technology; let’s talk to the founders thinking about how we might use it tomorrow. But, let’s do it critically and intelligently. Let’s build our own skills so that we choose and use our technology well to augment our very human intelligence. And what a critical role librarians play guiding us through this all.

It has been a pleasure to guest edit this issue. I hope you enjoy reading the articles as much as I did.

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“There is a social and behavioural angle to this new tech and libraries are uniquely positioned in the institution to play a key role in developing the skills.”

From managing resource lists to discovering online resources and reference management. Whether used individually or in combination, our technologies amplify the value of your library on campus, prepare your library for the future and are backed by the Sage name you already trust.

Find out more at:

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Sensemaking in An Era of Crisis and Change: Global Trends in Library and Information Services

By Steven Witt, PhD. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Editor, IFLA Journal)

Introduction

During February 2023 SLA members gathered at the 8th International Conference of Asian Special Libraries (ICoASL 2023) in Cibu City, Philippines to discuss the ways in which the library profession is striving to meet the post-pandemic technological demands and needs that are being called the 5th Industrial Revolution (IR5). Like many in the field, the notion of the 4th Industrial Revolution is still something new to grapple with, so the transition into what’s being referred to as the 5th can bring on a keen sense of vertigo. Indeed, it is this sense of accelerating change on the ecological, social, and technological levels that drives IR5 rhetoric towards harnessing big data and algorithmically driven technologies of the IR4 as human collaborators that can help address the collective problems humanity faces (Gauri and Van Eerden 2019). The idea of the IR5 is thus one of sensemaking and attempting to project a positive future in the aftermath of a global pandemic and multiple crises that grip the world. As a profession that has always been called upon to both reflect society and support the resolution of social problems, librarians are not immune from participating in making sense of the world and also helping to address the challenges people face at local, regional, and global levels — increasingly in simultaneous and synchronous manners. In fact, the profession has been working to address these problems for many years.

Looking at trends in the field through publications with a broad scope and global perspective, such as IFLA Journal, provides a vantage point from which to see how the library field is responding to these challenges. The trends mainly fall under four broad categories — none of which are mutually exclusive as they all interact with one another and interrelate to form a pattern that should be familiar to the profession as a whole. This pattern of course is one reflective of professional values expressed by Ranganathan nearly 100 years ago: focus on the needs of the user, the constant evolution of the library as an organization, and challenges being addressed by our societies (Ranganathan 1931). In contemporary terms, these laws are now associated with the profession’s attempts to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development goals: building practices that strive towards social justice and are inclusive of indigenous communities and knowledge systems, addressing the growing problems of disinformation, and preparing both new and seasoned professionals for future waves of technological change.

Libraries and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

One of the broader and overarching activities of libraries globally is support for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, also known as the UNSDGs. On an international level, IFLA worked within the UN system to advocate successfully for the inclusion of libraries and issues of information access such as literacy in the discussions of the UNSDGs that concluded in 2015 with the establishment of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As detailed by

Fiona Bradley in 2016, these labors insured that libraries globally would have a voice in advocating for access to information as these efforts were undertaken at local and regional levels (Bradley 2016). Efforts to support the realization of UNSDG goals have since been a major emphasis of many academic, public, and special libraries.

This year, a research team from OCLC produced a major study that surveyed over 1,700 library staff globally to measure the ways in which libraries contribute to the UNSDG goals. The survey demonstrates a broad awareness amongst librarians of the sustainable development goals and describes that manner by which libraries can leverage expertise and resources in support of goals such as Quality Education (SDG 4), Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8), and Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10) (Connaway et al. 2023). These trends are further reflected in other national and institutional level studies of libraries and sustainable development.

The role of libraries in supporting SDGs that contribute to both education and quality of life within society is examined and promoted in the public library sector through the work of Marc Kosceijew, who provides a substantial framework through which libraries can partner with communities towards achieving the SDGs (Kosciejew 2020). These strategies are further demonstrated in Hamad and Al-Fadel’s study of advocacy for sustainable development goals within academic libraries in Jordan. Similar to the OCLC study, this work suggests ways in which the combination of access to information and training in areas such as information literacy work together to contribute to society on multiple levels (Hamad and Al-Fadel 2022).

Beyond education and social change, libraries are also making contributions in the area of environmental sustainability. Several recent articles make clear that libraries are increasingly engaged in both promoting knowledge of sustainability and adopting green practices to contribute directly to environmental efforts. Beutelspacher and Meschede’s 2020 study documents the ways in which public libraries in Germany use collections and programming towards educating communities around themes such as urban planning, consumption, energy use, and climate. Additionally, the library provides services such as loaning energy meters and thermal imaging cameras to help individuals address concerns about energy efficiency (Beutelspacher and Meschede 2020). Similarly, libraries in Kenya are increasingly adopting “green practices” to improve sustainability efforts through both services such as those described above and taking advantage of eco-friendly building practices as a “strategy for supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals” (Mwanzu et al., 2023: 13). These activities, and other research that investigates predictors for sharing knowledge on the sustainability goals, demonstrate the extent to which libraries can use their skills and resources to support communities as they address this important issue (Igbinovia and Osuchukwu 2018).

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The role of libraries to support the educational, social, and environmental aspects of the SDGs is also reflective of related global trends in the field. These are clearly manifested in promoting social justice, countering disinformation, and the constant struggle to maintain skills and services amidst advances in technology.

Social Justice and Inclusion

In 2021 and 2022, IFLA Journal published several issues that reflect ways in which libraries are focused on inclusive practices aimed at promoting social justice goals through the library’s role as a cultural and memory institution. The special issue to mark the 25-year anniversary of the IFLA Statement on Libraries and Intellectual Freedom exemplified the role of libraries in promoting intellectual freedom as a human right and central obligation of the library profession (Byrne 2022). The 2021 special issue on Indigenous Librarianship further explored the growing consciousness of the profession’s responsibilities toward inclusiveness and reparative practice by focusing attention on the ways in which “libraries and librarianship [are] conceived different when seen through the lens of indigenous librarianship (Stratton & Callison, 2021: 291). This special issue reveals the extent to which matters of reconciliation and justice are being addressed through libraries via programs such as James Cook University library’s participation in campus wide reconciliation activities (Mamtora, Ovaska, and Mathiesen 2021). Other examples of the ways libraries leverage their role as memory institutions includes work toward transitional justice in the library at the University of the Philippines (Buenrostro and Cabbab 2019). Overall, these cases point to the evolving role of libraries as vehicles for societies to promote restorative justice and social change — this area seems to have grown in priority during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Post-pandemic Disinformation

The pandemic also exposed the need for libraries to redouble efforts to address the critical problem of misinformation. This is a key aspect of the type of literacy and access efforts promoted through the UN SDG process. The need to critically assess information and distinguish truth from falsehood has grown with the widespread use of social media to disseminate unmediated information. Research on the prevalence and extent of misinformation during the pandemic shows both the global scale and distribution of misinformation but also the critical importance of delivering accurate information during peak times of information need and social attention on a problem as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Al-Zaman 2022; Khosrowjerdi, Fylking, and Zeraatkar 2023).

The nature of disinformation and ways to combat it are thus another trend that libraries are addressing globally. As Mercer et al. describe, “librarians are in the centre of this maelstrom of information and are obligated to help people learn to be critical of information” (Mercer et al., 2022: 399). The spread of misinformation and tools for combating it are increasingly important topics of discussion in the LIS literature. Taking a view from a Global South perspective, Das and Tripathi document efforts in India to combat fake news and misinformation at both national and state levels, demonstrating the role of local library associations in supporting these important efforts. Other national studies show both the impacts of misinformation on society and ways in which it is being combated by libraries and governments (Basurto, Martínez-Camacho, and Calderón-Swain 2022; Beebeejaun 2022; Begum, Roknuzzaman, and Shobhanee

2022). In a preponderance of these studies on library reactions to both disinformation and the COVID-19 pandemic, the role and speed with which new technologies and media platforms are being adopted by societies intersects with the central aims of libraries to provide access and impart critical skills towards the ethical use of information (Dobreva and Anghelescu 2022).

Adjusting to Technological Change

Undergirding much of the research and discussion in the field on topics like the SDGs and misinformation is the use of technology both within society and throughout LIS. A perennial trend we see is the imperative to continually retrain library professionals to adapt to new information technologies and how to best prioritize this training in university programs teaching the next generation of librarians. Throughout the field, there are anxieties about how to stay current on new technologies and also the ethical implications of new tools, such as artificial intelligence, as they are widely adopted across societies (Smith 2022).

Continuing professional development as it pertains to rapidly advancing technologies is a constant struggle found across the LIS community. Recent studies document the barriers to training that include not only access to technologies but also infrastructure and organizational capacity at local and regional levels (Jayasuriya and Majid 2022). The fact that jobs in LIS are growing increasingly complex and changing rapidly during an individual’s career adds further layers of complexity to the imperative to stay current with the technologies being used in libraries but also within society (Oladokun and Mooko 2023). As these noted studies in Botswana and Cambodia suggest, there are globalized problems regarding the impacts of constant technological changes, but the solutions are localized and context sensitive just as we see with both the SDGs and misinformation.

Regarding training new librarians, there are clear trends and points of local divergence in relation to how best to develop both shared professional values and the capacity to respond to the technological imperatives brought about by what is described as the 4th and 5th industrial revolutions. For example, comparisons between professional training programs in the United States and Croatia demonstrate the differences in emphasis between technical skills and “soft” and managerial skills required of librarians (Davis et al. 2023). Finding the correct balance between skills that might be considered traditional to the profession with the need to meet new technological trends is also apparent. Kassim et al. assess the match between recent LIS graduate skills and contemporary demands of positions (Kassim, Katunzi-Mollel, and Mwantimwa 2022).

Conclusion

The balance between training in data and digital technologies and collection building, cataloging, and asserting the values associated with information access and use is an important issue in light of the significant needs to bolster technological training. Chaka’s broad review of skills and competencies associated with the IR4 bring to focus the need to approach technological training needs in a wholistic manner to ensure that all of the skills required for adapting to disruptive technologies are integrated into our training programs and ensure the field’s ability to contribute to key social needs ranging from those exemplified by the SDGs and problems such as disinformation. Chaka’s work reminds us that skills for the 4th and 5th industrial revolutions include both soft skills associated with “communication (skills), innovation, creativity, problem solving, collaboration, critical

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thinking, and decision making” (Chaka, 2020: 391) in addition to skills we might associate more with technological change such as programming. The literature expressed in IFLA Journal makes it clear that, on a global level, the conversations about 21st century skills for librarians are as much about our ability to address and solve each society’s problems as the need to reskill to adopt to globalized technologies.

Bibliography

Al-Zaman, Md. Sayeed. 2022. “Prevalence and Source Analysis of COVID-19 Misinformation in 138 Countries.” IFLA Journal 48, no. 1 (March): 189–204. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352211041135

Basurto, Lourdes Feria, Humberto Martínez-Camacho, and Alejandra Calderón-Swain. 2022. “Technological Scenarios for the New Normality in Latin American Academic Libraries.” IFLA Journal 48, no. 4 (December): 538–47. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352211035412

Beebeejaun, Ambareen. 2022. “Spread of Misinformation during COVID-19: The Case of Mauritius.” IFLA Journal , November (November), 03400352221134347. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352221134347.

Begum, Dilara, Md Roknuzzaman, and Mahbub E. Shobhanee. 2022. “Public Libraries’ Responses to a Global Pandemic: Bangladesh Perspectives.” IFLA Journal 48, no. 1 (March): 174–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352211041138

Beutelspacher, Lisa, and Christine Meschede. 2020. “Libraries as Promoters of Environmental Sustainability: Collections, Tools and Events.” IFLA Journal 46, no. 4 (December): 347–58. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0340035220912513

Bradley, Fiona. 2016. “‘A World with Universal Literacy’: The Role of Libraries and Access to Information in the UN 2030 Agenda.” IFLA Journal 42, no. 2 (June): 118–25. https://doi. org/10.1177/0340035216647393.

Buenrostro, Iyra S., and Johann Frederick A. Cabbab. 2019. “Libraries and Their Role in Transitional Justice in the Philippines.” IFLA Journal 45, no. 1 (March): 5–15. https://doi. org/10.1177/0340035218805769

Byrne, Alex. 2022. “A Declaration for All Seasons: The IFLA Statement on Libraries and Intellectual Freedom.” IFLA Journal 48, no. 3 (October): 373–82. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352221106801

Chaka, Chaka. 2020. “Skills, Competencies and Literacies Attributed to 4IR/Industry 4.0: Scoping Review.” IFLA Journal 46, no. 4 (December): 369–99. https://doi. org/10.1177/0340035219896376.

Connaway, Lynn Silipigni, Brooke Doyle, Christopher Cyr, Peggy Gallagher, and Joanne Cantrell. 2023. “‘Libraries Model Sustainability’: The Results of an OCLC Survey on Library Contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals1.” IFLA Journal, February (February), 03400352221141467. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352221141467

Davis, Angela R., Stephanie A. Diaz, Russell A. Hall, Margita Mirčeta Zakarija, and Irena Urem. 2023. “Comparison of Library Studies Programs in Croatia and the USA.” IFLA Journal 49, no. 1 (March): 74–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352221103894.

Dobreva, Milena, and Hermina Anghelescu. 2022. “Libraries and COVID-19: Opportunities for Innovation.” IFLA Journal 48, no. 1 (March): 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352221077748

Gauri, Pratik, and Jim Van Eerden. 2019. “A 5TH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION? (WHAT IT IS, AND WHY IT MATTERS).”

World Economic Forum. https://sdgcircle.org/wp-content/ uploads/2019/06/A-5th-Industrial-Revolution_-What-It-Is-AndWhy-It-Matters_05.03.19_vX.pdf

Hamad, Faten, and Maha Al-Fadel. 2022. “Advocacy of the Sustainable Development Goals in Jordanian Academic Libraries.” IFLA Journal 48, no. 4 (December): 492–509. https:// doi.org/10.1177/03400352211038300

Igbinovia, Magnus Osahon, and Ngozi P. Osuchukwu. 2018. “Predictors of Knowledge Sharing Behaviour on Sustainable Development Goals among Library Personnel in Nigeria.” IFLA Journal 44, no. 2 (June): 119–31. https://doi. org/10.1177/0340035218763445

Jayasuriya, Gina de Alwis, and Shaheen Majid. 2022. “Continuing Professional Development in Cambodia: Perspectives of Different Stakeholders.” IFLA Journal , November (November), 03400352221130776. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352221130776

Kassim, Mohamed, Kokuberwa Katunzi-Mollel, and Kelefa Mwantimwa. 2022. “Assessing Library and Information Science Graduates’ Skills and Knowledge against 21st-Century Employability Demands.” IFLA Journal, September (September), 03400352221118695. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352221118695.

Khosrowjerdi, Mahmood, Cecilia Black Fylking, and Neda Zeraatkar. 2023. “Online Information Seeking during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Country Analysis.” IFLA Journal, January (January), 03400352221141466. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352221141466.

Kosciejew, Marc. 2020. “Public Libraries and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” IFLA Journal 46, no. 4 (December): 328–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035219898708.

Mamtora, Jayshree, Claire Ovaska, and Bronwyn Mathiesen. 2021. “Reconciliation in Australia: The Academic Library Empowering the Indigenous Community.” IFLA Journal 47, no. 3 (October): 351–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035220987578.

Mercer, Kate, Kari D Weaver, and Khrystine Waked. 2022. “Navigating Complex Authorities: Intellectual Freedom, Information Literacy and Truth in Pandemic STEM Information.” IFLA Journal 48, no. 3 (October): 399–409. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352211048915.

Mwanzu, Arnold, Emily Bosire-Ogechi, and Damaris Odero. 2023. “Green Initiatives towards Environmental Sustainability: Insights from Libraries in Kenya.” IFLA Journal, February (February), 03400352221135012. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352221135012.

Oladokun, Olugbade, and Neo Patricia Mooko. 2023. “Academic Libraries and the Need for Continuing Professional Development in Botswana.” IFLA Journal 49, no. 1 (March): 117–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352221103901

Ranganathan, Shiyali Ramamrita. 1931. The Five Laws of Library Science. Madras Library Association. Publication Series. 2. Madras: The Madras Library Association.

Smith, Catherine. 2022. “Automating Intellectual Freedom: Artificial Intelligence, Bias, and the Information Landscape.” IFLA Journal 48, no. 3 (October): 422–31. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352211057145

Stratton, Stephen, and Camille Callison. 2021. “Editorial.” IFLA Journal 47, no. 3 (October): 291–92. https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352211031739.

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Libraries and Technology: A Dynamic Partnership for Advancing Learning and Research

By Daniela Duca, PhD. (Head of Product Innovation at Sage Publishing) <daniela.duca@sagepub.co.uk>

Every few years, there are hopes of a groundbreaking technology that can transform higher education, often leaving many of us skeptical that it would ever materialize or change our practices as much as the technologists predict. However, just as doubts begin to settle in, structural improvements emerge. From MOOCs to adaptive learning platforms and even augmented, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, these new tools have transported students and researchers to uncharted territories and helped them rethink traditional approaches. With each wave of innovation, the question lingers: do you dare to seize the opportunity and take a leap of faith, or will you play it safe and wait for others to make the first move?

While no technology has completely revolutionized higher education as predicted, incremental changes continue to mold and improve the research and learning experience, with libraries leading on several of these. In recent years, the skyrocketing demand for video content has prompted libraries to expand their role by having to curate digital media content. The diversity of formats and the volume of scholarly publishing and teaching content have been a big challenge. However, “technological advancements over the past two decades have enabled libraries to become very sophisticated when it comes to managing their collections,” says Tony Zanders, Founder and CEO of Skilltype. Libraries are caught in a paradox. On the one hand, the amount of information available is increasing rapidly, making it difficult for individuals to find what they seek. On the other hand, younger generations who have grown up with technology may struggle with the necessary technological skills to navigate this vast amount of information. Even the most advanced search tools can’t always keep up with the pace. It’s a constant battle to bridge the gap between the ever-expanding world of knowledge and those who seek to explore it.

As superusers of content and discovery tools, librarians contribute to developing many technologies their patrons use and continue to teach students and researchers how to use them, working with faculty to incorporate newer media and technologies within their courses.

We talked to five different start-ups that use technologies to improve higher education experiences about their goals and how they work with libraries that take the leap and try them out.

Dynamic Partnerships

Jungwon Byun and her co-founder at Ought developed Elicit.org to help the “power users of reasoning coax insights out of complex sources.” Their approach is to use AI to extract information like experiment details and key findings from research papers. From the get-go, Byun has been collaborating with librarians, insisting on learning from the “methodological experts [librarians] to guide how AI tools can assist in the research process and what best practices these tools should emulate.”

When Alex Tarnavsky Eitan and his co-founders decided to develop Connected Papers, they knew they had to partner with librarians to improve literature searches and review best practices with new technologies. “By teaching students how to conduct effective literature reviews, the library is essential to our mission of making literature review quick, fun, and accurate,” emphasized Alex. The founders used their experiences and challenges as researchers when building the technology. As students, the founders attended many tutorials on search operators, keywords, and filters run by their libraries, which they found incredibly useful. Connected Papers’ technology starts with an origin paper uploaded by the researcher on the platform. The team uses network analysis to support the researcher’s journey of discovering similar papers while also enabling visual exploration of the topics.

To help researchers cope with the growing number of cited papers, scite evolved out of the challenges of reproducibility and supports researchers to navigate through cited papers by categorizing the reasons for that citation. The scite team “wants to change citations from a superficial metric into a rich information source for people to understand topics, articles, researchers, and the world better.” Josh Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of scite, emphasized the importance of libraries in educating students, researchers, and the general public on how to search for and utilize information effectively. As scite also shares this mission, working with libraries is crucial. The scite team describes the tool as a collaborator and a support system for librarians to ensure their patrons can access necessary resources, such as databases, articles, books, and more.

As content curators, libraries are expanding beyond text into immersive technologies that enhance the students’ experiential learning and researchers’ opportunities for experimentation. Many academic libraries have already purchased hardware and headsets, making the library space the primary locus of VR within the institution. For immersive experiences to work, librarians play a crucial role in “signposting the right resources and facilitating adoption,” says Christophe Mallet, co-founder of Bodyswaps. Bodyswaps is akin to a “flight simulator for soft skills.” The team joined forces with Sage to offer several immersive experiences for nursing students to practice their skills of interacting with patients, something they don’t get to do during their courses and can struggle with during their first job. Together with Bodyswaps, we are also working on a similar experience to support business students, to be launched later this year.

The reason Bodyswaps’ technology works is inherent in their name. When you swap bodies in VR, which is almost impossible in real life, and watch your avatar being animated, you are provided “a unique self-reflection experience, as you are sitting across from yourself,” says Mallet; you genuinely learn how others perceive you. And you can practice this as often as you need to, without the risks of trialing your approaches in real life when your actions can impact others.

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All these technologies require careful assessment, testing, and “not putting the technology ahead of the pedagogy,” argues Mallet, while also considering the ethical aspects and any evidence of perpetuating biases that we all have been working so hard to reduce. This requires tremendous skill and knowledge that goes beyond curation and referencing.

For libraries and librarians to deliver on these aspects and to reach their potential, Zanders of Skilltype believes that “the individuals in the library — not the information — need more investment in their personal and professional development as opposed to the collection’s development.”

Skilltype launched in 2020 stemming from an interest in “how software and data could help libraries better manage their organizations in light of a growing talent shortage,” and now offers more than 5,000 trainings that can be tailored and personalized for each librarian, depending on where they are in their journey. Skilltype also partners with iSchools worldwide to support those looking for a career in the library space.

Challenges and Priorities

Building new technologies doesn’t come without challenges. Some of these are people challenges: for Skilltype, it is about understanding and changing the perception of librarianship as a profession; scite works with publishers to obtain full access to the text; Bodyswaps continuously engages stakeholders to ensure their solution is safe. Others are technical: Elicit is built around large language models, a rapidly evolving technology. Connected Papers adapted to generate graphs quickly even during sudden traffic spikes, such as when a viral TikTok video led to a night of intense coding and scaling efforts.

Innovation and sustainability are top priorities for all five start-ups working closely with libraries worldwide to support students and researchers in their academic journeys. Bodyswaps and scite are integrating the advances in generative AI into their solutions. Elicit is expanding to support other research workflows beyond the methodical literature review, aiming to help students and researchers find literature gaps or summarize concepts across papers. Connected Papers is looking to integrate with other researcher tools, making the graph technology part and parcel of the researcher workflow. Skilltype focuses on supporting libraries to manage their talent pools and find and nurture the next generation of information science professionals that can work with and maximize the potential of new technologies for their patrons.

The World in 2045

All five founders envision a future where technology is critical in advancing higher education. Connected Papers, Elicit, and scite will focus on providing researchers with tools to navigate and stay up to date on the latest developments in their fields by integrating within the researcher workflow, providing better answers to questions, and building causal maps of scholarly knowledge.

Skilltype founder predicts that in the very near future, even before 2045, “the library ecosystem will have collectively upgraded the way we connect both online and offline.” Barriers will be removed, and anyone will be able to find qualified experts easily.

Soft skills will be even more critical as we go through another rapid technology development cycle. “Future-minded education institutions will look to develop their students’ soft skills throughout their journey, offering continuous, flexible, and hyper-personalized modalities,” argues Mallet of Bodyswaps.

The companies’ visions all share a common thread of utilizing technology to make research and education more accessible, efficient, and personalized. They recognize the need for innovative solutions to address higher education’s challenges, such as the increasing volume of information, the need for soft skills development, and the demand for evidence-based decision-making. By leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies, these companies, along with many others, are paving the way for a future where higher education is more inclusive, collaborative, and impactful, and they can do that by working closely and dynamically with academic libraries worldwide.

In the ever-evolving landscape of higher education, it’s easy to get caught up in the latest buzz around new technologies. Nonetheless, as we look ahead, it’s important to remember that not all innovations will live up to their hype. While some technologies may fall by the wayside, others will prove to be genuinely transformative and slowly become part of the research process or teaching curriculum. The key is to approach these new tools with an open mind and a willingness to experiment, to work with start-ups, and enable them to find better ways that their technologies can be used to solve the questions your patrons already struggle with. After all, the next breakthrough in education, which could involve the integration of AI, is happening as I write this article and is engaging those willing to take the risk and try it out and even those who don’t but must respond to its broad adoption. So, let’s embrace the possibilities of the future and continue to push the boundaries of what’s conceivable in higher education.

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank Christopher Mallet, Tony Zanders, Josh Nicholson, Jungwon Byun, and Alex Tarnavsky Eitan for their time and effort in answering all my questions and providing input for this article.

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“With each wave of innovation, the question lingers: do you dare to seize the opportunity and take a leap of faith, or will you play it safe and wait for others to make the first move?”

Generative AI Tools Transforming the Library? Rethinking Possibilities and Questions

By Raymond Pun (Academic and Research Librarian, Alder Graduate School of Education, California)

In the past few months, there have been intense discussions and anxiety (rightfully) over the usage, impact, and effects of ChatGPT on our library services and academic learning. Based on large language models (LLMs), ChatGPT is a chatbot that performs tasks of predicting and generating the next word in a sequence of words. The tool draws on various content and textual data from the Internet, including from Wikipedia, academic journals, magazines, books, etc., to generate an essay, poem, joke, story, etc. based on the user’s request.

ChatGPT has become an increasingly popular tool even though it is an inherently biased system since its sources are all from the internet. Artificial intelligence (AI) is also not going away, and some libraries and academic publishers have even started integrating various AI programs into their practices and services, and some applications can be benign.1 For example, Stanford University Libraries’ Research Data Services Division is experimenting with HCR (Handwritten Character Recognition), where it turns handwritten documents such as manuscripts into text and data. This has enabled researchers, especially digital humanists, to engage and analyze the data of archival materials. 2 Another example is Adam Matthews (AM) Digital which uses handwritten text recognition (HTR) to digitize content at several university libraries.3

For ChatGPT, the learning impact is immediately felt. Plus, it’s not a surprise; as my colleague, Andrew Carlos, head of research, outreach, and inclusion at Santa Clara University Library, noticed and shared on Twitter in February 2023: “A student asked me for help finding the full text for two articles both of which had the same exact title. Immediately alarm bells were ringing and yup, they were ChatGPT references.”4

As he observed, ChatGPT can generate false citations and information — also referred to as a “hallucination,” a bug that developers are working to rectify.

Peter Bae, Assistant University Librarian for scholarly collections access, fulfillment & resource sharing, described in a social media post how challenging some of these fake citations (including digital object identifiers known as DOIs) can create additional labor for him and his Resource Sharing and Interlibrary Services department. Peter noted that this issue is global, “It is an issue not only in English-speaking countries. I have heard the same story from colleagues in Korea.” These “hallucination citations” can create additional labor for high-

demand services and the staff for any library, such as reference and research services, as well as technical services such as cataloging. Students are already utilizing ChatGPT to identify and recommend sources for their writing and research assignments, all without realizing that the information can be inaccurate and falsified. There’s a more overt impact on public services work in libraries as I shared.

In the world of cataloging, ChatGPT can also create authority records. Janelle Zetty, head of Cataloging at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, tweeted the following ChatGPT query: “Create MARC authority record for Zydeco musician Jeremy Fruge.” As Janelle posted, “The person doesn’t have a name authority record in LC yet,” yet ChatGPT created an example of a MARC authority record for him.5 With these types of activities generated by ChatGPT, we need to rethink, pause, and reflect on this tool and its implications in many aspects of our work.

Across the United States, many pre-K-12 schools have banned using ChatGPT, fearing students might evade schoolwork, may not develop their critical thinking, writing, and reading skills, and may ultimately “cheat” and become codependent on the tool in their academics. (As an aside, while I wrote this post, it very well could have also been composed by a similar ChatGPT request). For higher education, there has not been consensus or consistent policy formation addressing ChatGPT, nor on its alignment with the academic honesty policy or the honor code, such as having students disclose their use of ChatGPT for an assignment — if that is permitted. There are also tools such as GPTZero developed by Edward Tian, a Princeton University student, which can identify and spot check passages that could have been generated by ChatGPT.6 For faculty, ChatGPT might be used to write recommendation letters, reports, and even their own academic effort.

This is our moment to rethink what plagiarism and cheating means for both students and faculty. This is also an opportunity to ask ourselves what it would take for a tool like ChatGPT to be harnessed in a reasonable and ethically responsible way that reflects the parameters of its application and impact in the library world, on the profession at large, and for the communities we serve. There are other factors to consider regarding this tool, based on my own experiences speaking with library workers on its impact towards our services.

Looking Back to Look Forward

When I worked at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University as the Education and Outreach Manager in early 2022, there was a chatbot that was being piloted to make connections among archival collections. It was programmed by Dr. Kirill O. Kalinin, a political methodologist and comparativist with expertise in statistical analysis, machine learning, and natural learning processing. I remember engaging in multiple conversations with Kirill on the potential of this chatbot to

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“Students are already utilizing ChatGPT to identify and recommend sources for their writing and research assignments, all without realizing that the information can be inaccurate and falsified.”

support research and access for special collections. In my role, I uploaded many lines of content into the chatbot that were sourced on research and subject guides that I had managed and co-created. For example, if researchers used the chatbot and wanted to know about African American collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, the chatbot would recommend the Dr. Condoleezza Rice Papers (the 66th United States secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution), Civil Rights Movements in Alabama Pamphlet Collection (1965-1966), and other relevant collections. This tool showed great potential in generating discovery and connections and access for the extensive and disparate archival collections from a major institution, even prior to the launch of ChatGPT-3.

On Privacy

For students, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, questions of privacy arise. In February 2023, I presented a webinar for the Lifelong Learning Information Literacy’s (LILi) Show & Tell Webinar entitled, “Using ChatGPT to Engage in Library Instruction? Challenges and Opportunities.” Many of the 300 registrants asked about privacy. Attendees asked if students should create a ChatGPT account to experiment with it, which can create potential issues in terms of tracking what users are asking, tracking usage data, and creating data profiles. This could lead into privacy surveillance and potential data brokering issues, reminiscent of an incident in which LexisNexis provided personal information and data to U.S Immigration and Custom Enforcement.7 The concern for privacy is very valid.

In a blog post, Autumn Caines, an instructional designer from University of Michigan-Dearborn, has recommended ways to mitigate potential harms that the tool may cause. 8 Caines suggested that students should not create their own ChatGPT accounts, but that the instructor can demo it either live or include a copy/paste prompt in a presentation slide for them to observe. Caines suggested students could use burner email accounts, which could reduce personal data collection and surveillance if they use this account when using the tool.

On Information Privilege

In March 2023, the University of San Francisco Gleeson Library’s Annie Pho, head of instruction and outreach, invited me to facilitate a session on ChatGPT in connection to teaching and learning. Dr. Shawn P. Calhoun, university library dean, raised an important question about information privilege and who can actually access this tool for academic success. ChatGPT now has a free version and fee-based premium version, which may stratify users in those who can afford it and those who cannot. Information privilege is an LIS concept that focuses on “the affordance or opportunity to access information that

others cannot.”9 Information privilege is a critical concept in this context, with well-resourced major research universities better able to apply the tool in teaching and learning settings than less-resourced institutions. Like many costly library databases and tools, paid versions become difficult to sustain due to the ongoing subscription cost. We know that there will be new versions of ChatGPT (an updated version known as GPT-4 will be out in the summer and currently in beta mode where it has been able to perform successfully on the American Bar Exam, Law School Admission Test, and Graduate Record Examinations with the exception of Advanced Placement English Literature, Language, and Composition exams)10 and other alternatives to this tool, but we need to acknowledge that there are cost implications for both individuals and institutions.

As an academic/school librarian, I work in this unique setting where I collaborate with teacher educators/faculty on curriculum development and support and teach preservice teachers/graduate students. One area that I’ve been looking at is how we can use this tool to critically engage with its many applications. There are ways to foster critical thinking and to interrogate ChatGPT’s responses, especially its hallucination citations. Another activity is to identify ways to improve a generated passage, such as by searching for appropriate scholarly sources and questioning the information produced by ChatGPT from an ethical framework based on core values and guiding principles such as transparency, privacy, and data governance.

This is also an opportunity to teach algorithmic literacy, the awareness and understanding of the use of algorithms in online systems, and to critically analyze and evaluate algorithms and their biases. For example, Ashley Shea, head of instruction initiatives from Cornell University Library, created a LibGuide highlighting this learning outcome in the library instruction program: “Students,” she wrote, “will be able to articulate how the automation and embedded biases of algorithms lead to personalization, sorting and discrimination.”11 There are many future opportunities to consider, but it is also important to note how ChatGPT is already affecting library services, personnel and our researchers.

I will conclude this piece by quoting Dr. Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies at Princeton University, regarding emerging technologies and questions on ethics: “The key thing for me is it’s not simply about making the technologies better at doing what they say they’re supposed to do, but it’s also widening the lens to think about how they’re being used, what kinds of systems they’re being used in, and bring the question back to society, not just the designers of technology.”12 There are lingering questions to ask but it’s critical to acknowledge the immediate impact on us and the long-term changes.

see endnotes on page 22

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Endnotes

1. Loida Garcia-Febo, “Exploring AI,” American Libraries. Last modified March 1, 2019, https://americanlibrariesmagazine. org/2019/03/01/exploring-ai/

2. Catherine Nicole Coleman and Michael A. Keller, “AI in the Research Library Environment,” in Artificial Intelligence in Libraries and Publishing, eds. Ruth Pickering and Matthew Ismail (Ann Arbor: The Charleston Conference-ATG Media, 2022), 27-32. https:// doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12669942

3. AM Digital, “Universities and colleges,” Last modified March 17, 2023, https://www.amdigital.co.uk/create/universities-andcolleges

4. Andrew Carlos (@infoglut), “A student asked me for help finding the full text for two articles, both of which had the same exact title. Immediately alarm bells were ringing and yup. They were chatgpt references,” Twitter, February 27, 2023, 7:08 AM., https:// twitter.com/infoglut/status/1630223245273346049

5. Janelle Zetty (@jazetty), “Here is an example of an authority record created with ChatGPT. The person doesn’t have a name authority record in LC yet,” Twitter, March 6, 2023, 6:06 AM., https://twitter.com/jazetty/status/1632744388798586880

6. Emma Bowman, “A college student created an app that can tell whether AI wrote an essay.” NPR. Last modified January 9, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/01/09/1147549845/gptzero-ai-chatgpt-edward-tian-plagiarism

7. Sam Biddle, “LexisNexis to Provide Giant Database of Personal Information to ICE.” The Intercept. Last modified April 2, 2021. https://theintercept.com/2021/04/02/ice-database-surveillance-lexisnexis/

8. Autumn Caines, “ChatGPT and Good Intentions in Higher Education.” Is a Liminal Space Blog. Last Modified December 29, 2022. https://autumm.edtech.fm/2022/12/29/chatgpt-and-good-intentions-in-higher-ed/

9. Sarah Hare and Cara Evanson, “Information Privilege Outreach for Undergraduate Students,” College & Research Libraries 79, no. 6 (September 2018): 726, doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.6.726

10. Rumman Chowdhury (@ruchowdh), “Many nuggets of insights into this GPT-4 paper but this is one of the most compelling — across the board GPT performs poorly at AP English — it’s incapable of abstract creativity. Same with complex leetcode which is ultimately an abstraction codified. Humans aren’t replaceable,” Twitter, March 14, 2023,11:47 AM., https://twitter.com/ruchowdh/ status/1635714392372449282.

11. Ashley Shea, “Mann Instruction Materials for Faculty, Staff and Librarians,” Cornell University LibGuide. Last Modified August 10, 2022. https://guides.library.cornell.edu/InstructionResources

12. Ruha Benjamin, “Princeton University’s Ruha Benjamin on Bias in Data and AI,” The Data Chief. Last Modified October 20, 2022. https://www.thoughtspot.com/data-chief/ep25/princeton-university-ruja-benjamin-on-bias-in-data-and-ai

Rumors continued from page 9

Lyrasis recently announced the upcoming retirement of Michele Kimpton, Global Senior Director of the Palace Project: With Gratitude for Decades of Vision and Leadership: Announcing Michele Kimpton’s Retirement Congratulations and best wishes on your retirement coming up at the end of June!

And ACRL has announced upcoming leadership changes. “Current executive director, Robert “Jay” Malone, who came to ACRL in September 2021 after previously helming an academic society for over twenty years, will depart ALA on Friday, June 9. During his time at ACRL, Malone supported the repositioning and improved profitability of Choice, a publishing unit of ACRL and worked with ALA’s Development Office to raise the association’s GuideStar (Candid) nonprofit ranking to “platinum,” the reviewer’s highest level.” Malone will be succeeded by interim ACRL executive director Allison Payne, who will step into her new leadership role on Monday, June 11.

Award Winners

Congratulations to the ALPSP’s shortlist of finalists for the award for innovation in publishing! The ALPSP Impact Award finalists for 2023:

• Africa Commons

• eLife’s new publishing model

• IOP Publishing double anonymous peer review and transparent peer review

• Original Études for the Developing Conductor

The ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing finalists for 2023:

• BMJ Impact Analytics

• Cassyni Journal Seminar Series

• Bilingualism from submission to publication from Medwave and Kriyadocs

• Schol-AR

Congratulations, also, to the award winners announced at the SSP Business Luncheon at their recent annual meeting in Portland.

Appreciation Awards:

• Lori Carlin (Delta Think) for her service as co-chair of the Annual Meeting Program Committee.

• Lettie Conrad (Outsell Inc.) for her service as the North American Editor of Learning Publishing.

• David Myers (Data Licensing Alliance, Inc.) for his extended service emceeing the popular Previews Sessions at SSP’s Annual Meeting.

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Librarian Futures Part II: Author and Researcher Commentary

By Matthew Weldon (EdTech Success Consultant, Technology from Sage) <matthew.weldon@talis.com>

and Samantha Sharman (Student Researcher at University of Lincoln)

Introduction

We’re thrilled to have published our latest Librarian Futures Part II report, investigating the knowledge gap between staff and students. We first flagged this knowledge gap in our 2021 report, Librarian Futures Part I, and observed that the knowledge gap is reciprocated both ways: we found that students are unaware of the full amount of support available to them through the library, while librarians are broadly unaware of the emerging needs of students.

In our latest report, we examine this knowledge gap more closely, highlighting areas where students are in the greatest need of additional support and offering solutions. We are able to do this thanks to the generous participation of almost 600 students from institutions across the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Canada.

As we consider the future of the library, we must involve students at every level. In 2022, Technology from Sage were fortunate to work with Samantha Sharman, a student from the University of Lincoln, who carried out research into student attitudes to reading lists which has helped inform our recent report. We are grateful to include Samantha’s commentary here, to give a student perspective on the challenges raised by Librarian Futures Part II.

Findings and Reflections

We asked students to respond to questions across four broad themes: discovery, literacy, scaffolding, and engagement

Discovery

Google is the most popular starting point for students searching for resources, and the majority of students will use Google at some stage during their search. This is likely not a surprise for librarians, although the following may be: most students will not use either the library website or building at any stage of their search for resources.

Librarians looking to drive student usage of library resources might take one of two approaches. The first is to fundamentally change the behaviour of students, moving them away from Google as a discovery tool and embedding the library website and collection in their workflow. Early intervention, as students form academic habits upon arriving at university, might go some way towards achieving this.

However, student behaviour is difficult to change. The second approach, therefore, is to meet students where they already are by placing the library within the pre-existing student workflow. Our data suggests that students would be open to this approach. In our present research, very few students reported feeling as though the library has no role in supporting their studies. In Part I of our Librarian Futures series, we found that 89% of students were positive about the idea of embedding the library discovery process in their workflows.

Student Commentary

One thing I have learnt at university is how absurdly stubborn some students can be, and so the battle to adapt student behaviour resonates with me a lot. There is a sense of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” amongst many students — unless they fail an assessment, they don’t see an immediate reason to develop their skills or approach. Ergo, the only time some students use the library is when Google does not present relevant materials — and thus, in this regard the library is a ‘last resort’ in the eyes of these students.

There is still great value in early intervention of student behaviours. The main reason I myself have been able to confidently engage with resources from the library is because of an incredibly useful talk from our Subject Librarian at the University of Lincoln (Dr. Hope Williard) in my first week of university. This talk primed us on how to use the search tools on the library website, the value of these resources, and other databases our university has access to. It was an invaluable session and helped me and many peers successfully adjust and adapt to learning at university.

Literacy

We found that there were significant intergroup differences in confidence with academic reading, digital skills, and courserelated work. Younger and middle-year students tended to identify as “very confident” fewer times than older and final years students did across categories.

There were also significant differences between firstgeneration students and students who were not first-generation. Non-first generation (non-FG) students identified as “very confident” in academic reading, digital skills, and doing courserelated work significantly more than first-generation students did.

Much of this might not be a surprise – after all, is it not quite natural that younger students would be less confident than older ones, given that older students have had the time needed to develop skills and confidence? However, this data might be informative for librarians considering at whom they should aim

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“We found that students are unaware of the full amount of support available to them through the library, while librarians are broadly unaware of the emerging needs of students.”

their outreach. Understanding who needs the most support, and who stands to gain the most from librarian efforts, will allow for more tailored and effective interventions.

However, we also found that very few students identified librarians as people they would approach for help with academic reading. Furthermore, students placed librarians in the minority when asked to identify who had helped them to grow in the following areas;

• Identifying a good research question or assignment topic

• Preparing an effective search for relevant resources

• Working in a digital environment

• Finding good information

• Getting access to resources

• Reading academic literature

• Understanding data charts and tables

• Referencing and citing academic works

• Thinking critically about the subject

• Writing at a university level.

Librarians could, and perhaps should, put their efforts into outreach – but, if students don’t see librarians as having much to offer in this regard, uptake is likely to be limited. To aid librarian outreach to as many students as possible, we further asked students to report what “extracurricular” training they have undertaken and how they discovered it.

Student Commentary

Learning through trial and error is a key part of university, as students are constantly reminded that we need to be “independent learners” in our studies. This may also explain why students in later years of study are more confident — they’ve had more opportunities to develop their approach.

It’s important to consider that students who have had a positive experience of library outreach may speak to their peers about their encounter and encourage greater interaction that way. Perhaps refining or promoting existing outreach efforts further, as opposed to simply creating several new outreach opportunities, may improve student experiences and encourage this word-of-mouth advocacy of librarian support.

Scaffolding

Most students are aware that there are opportunities for “extracurricular” training available to them, though relatively few actually take advantage of this. A quarter of the students we surveyed did not engage with any additional training, and full-time students reported not participating in any such training significantly more than part-time students did.

This does not seem to be a problem in terms of students not realising “extracurricular” training is available. Most students were aware that additional opportunities for learning exist. Almost half of students discovered this training via email, and recommendations from students and staff were also particularly important for making students aware. Librarians looking to reach students may find this especially useful for driving uptake.

It is useful to understand further the areas where students identified particular difficulties. “Managing time” and “keeping focused on task” were areas of difficulty identified by our research. Additionally, whilst a majority of students reported that “finding relevant resources” is easy, the majority was very slim — meaning just under half of students were either neutral on the issue or reported it was difficult. Notably, across categories, students who identified as disabled reported significantly higher levels of difficulty. Measures taken by librarians to reach students must acknowledge this to help ensure equity of outcome.

Student Commentary

Difficulties with “managing time” and “keeping focused on task” were common sentiments expressed by students in the research when they were asked to elaborate on their approach to digital resources and reading lists. Time and time again, students expressed that they were often “overwhelmed” with the tasks at hand and were often distracted because they didn’t find the material to be engaging.

It is valuable to consider that perhaps, due to already feeling overwhelmed with their workloads, students aren’t engaging with additional training as they feel they simply do not have the time to do so. The issues students are facing all feed into one another, meaning factors beyond the direct sphere of influence for librarians (such as student workload) need to be considered if improving student engagement with the library and its resources is the ultimate goal.

Engagement

Our data shows that most students are relatively engaged with their studies — with generally high confidence when doing course-related work, and generally high levels of student satisfaction. When we asked students to place themselves on a spectrum between “procrastinator” and “planner,” or “distracted” and “focused,” we saw more variance. Efforts to address these are likely to boost engagement and improve satisfaction further.

We asked students “for a typical assignment, how long will you continue searching for a relevant resource until you move on to something else?” The responses were approximately evenly split between “less than 15 minutes,” “15-30 minutes,” and “3060 minutes.” Though librarians may seem the natural group to approach for help with searching for resources, as summarised above, very few students do. Librarians ought to take steps to understand why students fail to identify them as helpers in this regard before taking action to address this.

Crucially, our research found that students who do not identify as disabled use the library significantly more than students who do identify as disabled. Likewise, students who do not identify as disabled also see the library as a place to collaborate significantly more than students who identify as disabled. Again, as mentioned above, to ensure that all students have an equitable experience with the academic library, librarians must work to understand why this is the case and make adjustments to their approach accordingly.

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Student Commentary

As mentioned above, during the research it became evident that students struggle significantly with balancing their workload and finding time for all their commitments. Specifically, many expressed an awareness that their personal approach to reading means they spend a disproportionate amount of time on reading certain resources. In addition to understanding why students don’t see them as helpers, librarians need to consider the holistic factors that could be impacting student perceptions and engagement with the library.

Additional Considerations

Our research highlights additional points of interest that do not appear above. We found that a very small fraction of students we surveyed had taken part in training on information literacy. Since this data was collected, there has been an explosion in the field of generative artificial intelligence, with the emergence of tools like ChatGPT. Is it now more important than ever to reach students with training in information literacy? And where might librarians fit in to this?

Mentioned briefly above, our findings also reflected consistent significant differences between first-generation and non-first-generation students across categories. We think these results will be informative for librarians in deciding where to focus their support, as they seem to suggest that students from different backgrounds are having fundamentally different university experiences.

Student Commentary

ChatGPT is currently a huge topic of conversation at university. It’s seen as an easy way to research and write assessments, and many students seem willing to take the risk and use it for official assignments. Exploring how librarians fit into this world of artificial intelligence, and how they can promote good academic practice is a valuable topic to explore in future research.

As a first-generation student myself, I feel like there’s been many barriers I’ve had to overcome when adapting to university. I would love to see more support from librarians for students from widening participation backgrounds, as it would help to improve the university experience of so many students.

The Future

This series of reports is called Librarian Futures. Though our most recent report, as well as its predecessor, highlights significant challenges facing libraries and librarians alike, we are optimistic about the future. Librarians are knowledgeable, resilient, and adaptable. By presenting our findings through these reports, we aim to equip librarians with as much insight and understanding as possible. At Technology from Sage, a vendor of digital services for libraries, the academic library is our North Star. We will continue to work with librarians to understand their needs, and the needs of their patrons, so that together we can meet that future head on.

Rumors continued from page 22

• John Warren (George Washington University) for his service in fostering collaborations between SSP, AUPresses, and GWU.

Emerging Leader Awards:

• Erin Foley (Copyright Clearance Center) has been an invested and dedicated community member since beginning her scholarly communications journey 11 years ago. She has actively served on several SSP committees, including the DEIA committee and the Annual Meeting Program Committee, where she serves as the incoming co-chair.

• Rebecca Kirk (PLOS) has been an integral part of the DEIA committee since 2020, as co-chair since 2022. Her commitment to driving sustained and meaningful change within SSP is commendable, particularly her integration of DEIA liaisons into every committee this year, resulting in significant positive feedback.

• Dianndra Roberts (Royal College of Psychiatrists) has significantly impacted the scholarly publishing

community through her platform and expertise. Her authenticity and courage in sharing the human elements of her journey have inspired industry professionals to bring their whole selves to their work.

And last but not least, the 2023 Distinguished Service Award . “This year, Lisa Hinchliffe (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) received this prestigious honor for her long history of extensive contributions to SSP and the wider community as a Scholarly Kitchen Chef, former Board Member, engaging leader, and guest speaker in many webinars and seminars, including the very popular Introduction to Open Access. She most recently chaired the Learned Publishing North American Editor Search Task Force.”

That’s all, folks! Tune in next time for more tidbits, hearsay, and rumors straight from the horse’s mouth. Send your rumors to us for future publications at editors@against-the-grain. com.

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Library Leader Perspectives on Global Changes in the Knowledge Landscape

By Kimberley Simpson (Head of Brand Marketing, Technology from Sage) <Kimberley.simpson@technologyfromsage.com>

Contributing Authors:

Elaine L Westbrooks (Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, Cornell University);

Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata (University of Lesotho);

Elizabeth Speer, MLS, M.Ed (Copyright & OER Strategist, Gibson D. Lewis Health Science Library, University of North Texas Health Science Centre);

Dr. Sarah Pittaway SFHEA (she/her) (formally Head of Libraries, University of Gloucestershire, currently Director of Library & Learning Resources, Birmingham City University);

Bethany Logan (Research & Open Scholarship Senior Manager, Library Professional Services, University of Sussex)

Since the pandemic, there have been so many global changes in the research and knowledge landscape that is has often been a challenge for academic and research libraries to keep up. In this article, I’ve interviewed five library leaders from across the globe to get their insights on what changes have been most significant over the past few years, what their priorities are for this year, and their thoughts on open access, OER initiatives and AI and the role these have to play in the future of their libraries. —

Kimberley Simpson

Q1: In your opinion, what has been the most significant change in the global research landscape over the past few years? What do you see on the horizon for research?

Elizabeth Speer: In my opinion there have been two. Firstly, the push for equity, diversity, and inclusion within the research landscape. We are seeing more diversity in the subjects of research and in researchers. Secondly, is the shift towards open access, especially in medical research. With more grants requiring results and data sets to be published open access, we have seen a real shift in thinking about the quality of OA materials. I believe these areas are going to continue to grow and be a priority, so much that it will necessitate a shift in thinking about library purchasing, staffing, and services.

Dr. Sarah Pittaway: I asked Twitter this very question [i.e., about recent change], and Bethany Logan at Sussex said, “it’s the move from open access as a process to Open as a mindset.” I think this beautifully encapsulates changes in the landscape. We’re no longer thinking about processes but principles, for example, with smaller universities like the University of Gloucestershire (UoG) supporting publisher negotiations on the principle of open scholarship. In terms of what’s next, I’m not sure this on the horizon — perhaps just over the next hill! — but the hot topic in libraries at the moment is rights retention strategies and gaining institutional buy-in to support our academics in retaining their rights when publishing.

Bethany Logan: I think I’ll stick with what I said to Sarah on Twitter, it’s the move from open access as a process (with compliance as a big driving force) to “Open” as a mindset, something embedded in everything we do. So, there’s been this expansion of what is included, it’s not just research articles, but we are also talking about data, scholarship, textbooks, lab notes, code, and creative practice. I am sure this will continue to grow, research is always evolving and that means that the infrastructure, policies, and processes that support research have to evolve too — it’s one of the things that makes working in this sector so rewarding.

I am not sure what the future holds. I hope that we’ll see more and more decision making driven not by traditional metrics but by considerations around ethics and integrity. Current big deal negotiations, and initiatives such as rights retention, show a willingness from the sector to go down this route. However, we are also seeing a squeeze on funding and institutional budgets which is going to make things harder and could push us back towards a compliance-led approach.

Elaine L. Westbrooks: The adoption and evolution of Open Access publishing. Plan S, U.S. Federal mandates, federal and philanthropic funder requirements, and the proliferation of transformative agreements in the U.S. have collectively catapulted OA to the forefront in deeply impactful ways. Yet, we are far away from realizing a transparent and fair pricing model for Open Access academic publishing. As for the horizon, despite their flaws, I expect that data science, AI, language processing, and machine learning will continue to transform how data and information are created, consumed, analysed, and interpreted.

Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata: The notions of sustainability, diversity, equity, and inclusion significantly impacted the global knowledge arena. Research processes had to be inclusive of other ways of knowing. Research had to be equitable and sustainable. A convergence of ideas around equitable production of knowledge and access to information and knowledge led to strategies and pathways that center inclusion.

The following processes are major components of the research landscape going forward:

a) Open Science (which include open access publishing, OERs, open citizenship, open scholarship and Research data management),

b) A redefinition of the meaning of research impact, and research assessment,

c) De-colonization of knowledge and the mainstream of other knowledge forms. Particularly notable in this category in alternative publishing as avenues for publishing research.

Q2: What is your biggest priority for your library community in 2023?

Elizabeth Speer: The biggest priority for us is to educate and facilitate conversations around open access, open data, and open educational resources. The graduate medical community has been slower to embrace OER and we are working to educate our immediate community around OER and how they can be used to support students and continuing education learners on our campus. Open data has become immediately important with

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new NIH grant requirements, so that has taken a huge leap to the front of the line as a priority.

Dr. Sarah Pittaway: I’m about to change roles, so this is a challenging one to answer. However, one of my big priorities at UoG has been the new city campus development, specifically the partnership with the public library who will also be in the building. I’m a great believer in the value of these kinds of partnerships. Having moved institutions recently and being about to move again, what’s apparent to me is that although we are all grappling with the same issues, institutional context means they impact on us differently. For example, as I noted above, UoG has supported the Springer Nature negotiations despite the fact that some aspects of the negotiation like APCs will have less impact on us as a teaching-led institution.

Bethany Logan: Research culture and student belonging are huge priorities for universities right now, and how these issues are handled will have a huge impact on the future of higher education. We can’t afford to get this wrong. The library has a big role to play, and it is work that will touch on every strand of the profession. This is about welcoming and functional physical spaces, diverse and accessible collections, the right support and training, fostering an inclusive environment for staff to develop and grow, as well as empowering researchers to change the world around them with open and impactful scholarship. I heard Dr. Lizzie Gadd say recently that “research culture is defined by the worst behaviour you’re prepared to tolerate” and her words have really struck a chord with me. There are plenty of research behaviours outside of the library’s purview, but we absolutely have a role to play in demanding fair access to research and the development of sustainable infrastructure for scholarly communication. Open research and scholarship contribute to positive research culture, and a positive research culture impacts student belonging — it is all connected.

Elaine L. Westbrooks: I have been in my role since July 2022, so this is the time to bring clarity and alignment to the organization that is poised to continue doing great work for the campus and beyond. This means embarking on strategic planning and building my leadership team to foster collaboration, well-being, equity, and trust. Other priorities include learning what the campus wants and expects from the Cornell library community. The curriculum continues to evolve and the ways in which researchers engage scholarship for teaching and learning is a moving target that we must be prepared for as a key partner and facilitator.

Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata: Getting other voices into knowledge spaces is a priority. Alternative publishing of locally published research is essential. Strengthening channels for disseminating locally published research will be crucial, while also ensuring the existing knowledge is preserved. This is important for the African institutions.

Q3: How is open access to research going to change things for your library in 2023?

Elizabeth Speer: Firstly, we have entered into several transformative or read and publish agreements where we will either pay the APC entirely or provide a discount for our researchers to publish their work open access. Secondly, the library created my position of Copyright & OER Strategist that specifically educates about and supports open on campus. Thirdly, the library has become involved more in the support of researcher’s data management since a large majority of the university’s grant funding comes from the NIH and open is now a requirement of those grants.

Dr. Sarah Pittaway: Open access to research doesn’t make things easier from an administrative perspective! As UoG’s research community grows, the ongoing move to open scholarship will, I hope, help make a case for more staff to work alongside our researchers supporting them to understand it all. As “the university for Birmingham,” Birmingham City University (BCU) is actively engaged with the local community. I hope open access to research will help facilitate more public engagement and really making plain the value of open scholarship to a wide community of users.

Bethany Logan: While the evolution is exciting, it can sometimes feel slow. We’re awaiting the outcome of some big deal negotiations and further clarity on funder policy exceptions before we can move forward in terms of decision making and, to some extent, service design. So, we know that things are going to change, but we don’t necessarily know how; being agile and able to adapt in a fluid situation is more important than ever. Something that has become increasingly clear is that “open” is not just the remit of the research support and repository teams. Everyone working in an academic library acquisition, inter-lending, teaching and customer service colleagues should have some knowledge of what open research and scholarship means. Investing in staff development around open needs to be a priority.

Elaine L. Westbrooks: OA is a complex and complicated topic that we think about daily as one facet of open science. As for 2023, The OSTP Whitehouse Memo which was designed to make federally funded research freely available without delay and the NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing have led research libraries to double down on providing important services to researchers. We are beginning to define our values so that we have a framework for deciding how we invest in OA. We are interested in starting a campus discussion about OA, transformative agreements, and infrastructure.

Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata: Open Access is an avenue for opening up channels for communication of research findings. However, the issue of Author Page Charges (APC) needs attention. The current costs of APCs delays the success that Open Access promises.

Q4: Is your library involved in any OER initiatives? What can you share about your involvement?

Elizabeth Speer: UNT Health Science Center is in the beginning stages of our OER journey. Last year I was part of the SPARC Open Education Leadership program which provided me with a strong foundation around OER and gave the library a network of experts for support and brainstorming. This year, I transitioned to the Copyright & OER Strategist role so that we can begin building what OER will look like for University of North Texas Health Science Centre (HSC). We are also creating an OER interest group for other medical libraries who are in the same boat that we are when it comes to OER, which is building one.

Dr. Sarah Pittaway: At UoG, no, we don’t really have capacity for this kind of work at the moment, though we do have examples of librarians working in partnership on research projects around e.g., decolonising the curriculum. I’m yet to find out what BCU are doing in this space.

Bethany Logan: At Sussex we have just come to the end of a pilot project to produce an open textbook. This is part of our ongoing commitment to open and our belief that open isn’t just about research, it has just as much value for education and scholarship. We worked collaboratively with authors from Sussex and other institutions, as well as a very talented science

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illustrator, to produce a textbook for use by our undergraduate Psychology cohorts. We hope that the book will be adopted by teaching faculty at other institutions, too. The cost of textbooks has become unsustainable for libraries, so our textbook represents quite an exciting new approach. We’re investing in our scholarship and pushing for a more sustainable and equitable approach to textbook creation.

Elaine L. Westbrooks: There is an OER affinity group in the Ivy Plus Library Confederation in which we participate, and we have followed the work of the SUNY OER Initiative. We are also working on a grant with a small OER component which we hope will get funded. Fundamentally, I don’t foresee Cornell University Library making a big investment in this area right now. We intend to invest our energy into building awareness around the unaffordability of other scholarly resources and how we build collections in a scholarly communication ecosystem that we know is unsustainable.

Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata: OERS are a teaching faculty competency. OERs are thus managed by the Center for Teaching and Learning. The convergence with the library is at Open Science Policy level where OERS and open access publishing are components of the Open Science Policy.

Q5: Do you see the library taking a leading role in helping your university navigate the challenges and opportunities that AI in education and research offers?

Elizabeth Speer: AI is being discussed in my library. We are looking at implementing a chatbot to answer simple library and research questions. We have facilitated the setup of tele-health stations at public libraries in the area. What the future holds for us is unknown. However, the campus has recently opened a regional simulation center which uses AI in amazing ways to help educate our students, faculty, and surrounding medical community. What they can do within their labs is truly amazing.

Dr. Sarah Pittaway: We’re a converged IT & Library service at UoG and have already been approached by our exec to feed into conversations about what AI developments mean for our students. There’s an immediate impact on information literacy, the references it pulls back — or makes up! — and issues of bias for example. There’s also a conversation about how we frame teaching and assessment so that students can understand both the limitations of these tools and where they can help.

Bethany Logan: At the moment, this is more of a priority in the learning and teaching space, which is not my area of expertise. I understand that the university has been quick to respond to concerns around plagiarism and broadened their definition of misconduct around personation to include AI software. There is also a newly formed working group looking at the institutional response to AI in a learning and teaching context, and the library certainly has a role to play here. Libraries have significant expertise to offer, and are perceived as an authority, on digital literacies and we should certainly play a central role in the upskilling of academic and professional service staff as well as the delivery of training to students. I would say this is a collaborative role, there are expertise in IT Services and Educational Enhancement to draw on, too.

Thinking about challenges and opportunities in a research space, like open research, this is something that’s bigger than an individual institution. AI is just another way that research is evolving, and we’ll see exciting things when librarians, publishers and researchers innovate collaboratively.

Elaine L. Westbrooks: Not quite yet. I would like research libraries to take a leading role. Several libraries have already begun investigating how AI might be applied to metadata creation such as automatic captioning of images. We are already seeing that ChatGPT generates fake citations. Students are looking for articles that do not exist. We have an opportunity to teach AI literacy skills just like we have done with information, media, digital and data literacy. It would make sense for libraries to use AI with all its flaws to educate our constituents who already trust the expertise that we provide for our campuses.

Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata: AI requires a team effort in higher education. The library subscribes to anti-plagiarism software. With the advent of ChatGPT, the ability to detect originality becomes crucial. The library and faculty will need to collaborate in harnessing AI for the good of research and teaching and managing challenges. The library has a chance to lead the conversations.

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Libraries as Organizations: A Conversation with Dr. K. Matthew Dames

By Tony Zanders (Founder and CEO of Skilltype) <tony@skilltype.com>

and Dr. K. Matthew Dames (Chief Executive of the Hesburgh Libraries, Notre Dame) <libdean@nd.edu>

In this article, Tony Zanders, Founder and CEO of Skilltype interviews Dr. K. Matthew Dames, Chief Executive of the Hesburgh Libraries, Notre Dame on the future of the academic research library.

TZ: Looking back, there’s been a five-year dialog between us on the future of the academic research library. How did it begin?

KMD: The conversation between us really began in fall 2018. I’d just begun as the university librarian at Boston University, and I was attending my first Boston Library Consortium (BLC) meeting in the DuBois Library on the campus of U. Mass Amherst. BLC had invited Tony to discuss Skilltype, and I was impressed with Tony’s thoughtfulness about the importance of talent and how to raise skill levels within library organizations. We ended up driving back to Boston together after the board meeting, having dinner, and talking about the future of libraries. We’ve been engaged in that conversation on an almost daily basis ever since.

TZ: A key concept we always come back to is conceptualizing the library as more than the collection. While working together at Boston University Libraries, this became much more than an idea when the pandemic required us to provide all of our services digitally. Describe why this orientation has been central to your leadership style over the course of your career.

KMD: Some of my views about libraries being so much more than just collections relates to my personal background. I am not what one would call a “native” librarian. Librarianship is probably my fourth career. I bring to librarianship my experiences as a scholar, my experiences as a lawyer, even my experiences as a DJ. I think the music reference is a good analogy: I own thousands of pieces of music, but no one really cares about that unless I can use some of that music to rock a party. You want to go to a party to feel something positive, and typically to do so in community with others who are perhaps feeling the same thing, in the same way, at the same time.

So, when I think about libraries, I think about more than collections. Sure, the collections are one part of the equation. But, I’m thinking about libraries as communities, as ecosystems, as centres of intellectual and social energy where one can give and get as much as one wants at any given time. So much of what a really elite DJ does is about crowd control. I get it: the terminology of “crowd control” has, to some, negative connotations. However, what if you said “harnessing energy” instead of “crowd control”? To me, a really great library alchemizes all that intellectual, social, imaginative, scholarly, and physical energy and helps harness it in really productive and beneficial ways — some which can be measured, some of which cannot be measured, but which still can be acknowledged as interstitial value.

I think that it is critical for us to measure all this value, now more than ever, for several reasons. Firstly, so much of today’s paradigm — in higher education, government, the for-profit sector, the non-profit sector — is about return on investment. “What have you done for me lately?” Like it or not, we need to show and prove, justify our existence, perhaps now in ways that we’ve never had to before. Secondly, measuring this value can help us tell better stories, not just about value, but about impact and utility. Then we can use this information to improve upon our communities and service to community stakeholders.

TZ: The idea that the library organization is more strategic than the library collection became apparent to me during a lunch conversation with Dr. Sylverna Ford, now retired dean of libraries at the University of Memphis. But, I still come across leaders who view managing its talent as the job of campus HR. What are the risks with this perspective, and how would one justify becoming a people manager instead of a knowledge manager despite having an MLIS rather than an MBA?

KMD: Let me just make it plain: if in 2023, you are at the head of the organization chart of any kind of library, archive, museum, or gallery organization, and you think that you can outsource your entire talent continuum — whether recruiting, hiring, onboarding, or retention — to someone outside your organization, then … I mean, to me, this is just the epitome of hustling backwards.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of chief librarians who continue to hustle backwards. Some of this is fear of the human element: you deal with collections; you avoid the human element. You deal with renovations; you avoid the human element. Working with talent is messy, or at least messier than dealing with inanimate objects like books and buildings, which don’t have opinions, motivations, ambitions, myriad skills, and ideas.

To answer your direct question, here are some of the risks. For one, despite how technology streamlines and simplifies a lot of tasks, the elite library communities and ecosystems always have really skilled, talented people who are managing the technology that is streamlining and simplifying some of the tasks. For example, we have formulas and algorithms that can help choose and catalogue the books in our collection. However, it’s the skilled librarians who are connected with stakeholders that are able to preview changes in curriculum or community needs. They then put that data into the formula or algorithm, at the appropriate time, to ensure that access to knowledge is calibrated in the best interests of the community.

Nevertheless, that means you actually have to select that talented librarian and do so in a way where you’re hiring for the work that is occurring three years from now as much as right now.

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As for our human resources partners, I respect what they do. I value what they do, but there’s a difference between finding and managing talent and managing a human resources function. By virtue of my experience and legal training, I know something about human resources and its essential and necessary focus on compliance. I can’t say that I really know human resources. In contrast, I know talent in my current industry of higher education, and more specifically, research librarianship. If you look at the nodes on the talent continuum framework that we developed at Boston University, which I have advanced and polished since then, I literally manage hundreds of talent transactions per year. That expertise and skill set is integral to how I collaborate with others to position our stakeholders for success.

TZ: At Skilltype we have a unique lens into the supply and demand of expertise across the global library community. When libraries complete needs assessments on Skilltype, they are no longer identifying competencies we would associate with traditional librarianship, but skills more akin to a software company, albeit a non-profit one. Something I’ve been curious about is as the skills landscape evolves towards a digital-first library, should our recruitment and training efforts evolve as well. And if so, how?

KMD: Let me begin by responding with what I believe is obvious: the age of “post and pray” is over. The notion that any library organization nowadays is just going to write a position description, post that position description on a couple of listservs, holler at a couple of your friends, and expect elite talent to apply to your job is ridiculous. The ironic thing is that librarianship has very well-developed skills and competencies frameworks that we can reference to guide a baseline assessment of how our organizations, departments, roles, and librarians fare relative to what we need to do. Even if those frameworks are outdated, they provide us a strong starting point for analysis.

Next, we can take that baseline data and compare it to where and how mission and vision require us to evolve. Usually, folks will see a gap between where we are and where we need to be. Then, we can take that gap analysis data and hire not only to fill current gaps but hire to exceed current mission and vision. The beauty of this approach is that this is all configurable and customizable to local conditions and audiences. What we do now at Notre Dame is going to be different from what, say, my colleague Torsten Reimer faces at University of Chicago or what the New York Public Library needs to do at a branch in the Bronx.

This process helps provide actionable quantitative and qualitative data that we not only can use to improve our communities, but also to hire, equitably compensate, professionally develop, and retain librarians who advance our respective organizational missions.

TZ: While many choose to wear the hat of Chief Information Officer during their tenure as Library Director, you’re one of the first library executives I’ve met who have focused more on your role as a Chief Talent Officer. Was this an intentional decision, or accidental? And what advice would you give to current or aspiring library leaders who are still trying to find their voice and style?

KMD: It was a necessary decision, but it also was something I really wanted to do. First, let me explain the necessity. When I got to Boston University Libraries in summer 2018, that system had not kept up with even the most rudimentary hiring. Therefore, I started at a deficit. Furthermore, let’s face facts: not only was Boston University behind in the most rudimentary hiring, BU is in a market competing for talent against Boston College, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I couldn’t go head-to-head with anyone in that line-up, whether it be solely on compensation, or on opportunity, or simply on prestige. I had to find other ways to compete and succeed. I had to sell candidates on a total value proposition. I had to sell candidates on opportunities. I had to sell candidates on how I could advance their careers. I had to put my reputation on the line, even before I arguably had the type of reputation that could be put on the line in ways that would matter to folks.

So, that was the necessity portion of the equation. Beyond that, it was just something that I wanted to do. I like to see people succeed. I feel comfortable enough with my talents that I know I’m going to get my buckets when I need to get my buckets. For me, the true joy is setting up someone else for success, getting the assist so they can get their buckets.

TZ: You’ve recently completed your appointment as president of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), where you focused your platform on Talent Management in Academic Libraries. You also received grant funding from the Mellon Foundation to develop 21st century talent initiatives in the library. Have your perspectives changed after these two initiatives? I’m also curious what advice would you have for the community on the importance of engaging other partners in the ecosystem to assist this work rather than relying solely on our campus resources?

KMD: I think these experiences have just reinforced that this is an essential part of my leadership approach and part of the value I bring to the organizations with which I work. Even beyond that, I am convinced that talent, along with the financial resources, are the two most important things a library leader needs to excel in to be an effective leader. The time where you could sit up and pretend to be interested in talent and people’s success, yet not actually do anything substantive, is over. I think this is especially true after, and maybe because of, the COVID-19 pandemic.

As for engaging other partners, I think it’s critical. It’s critical to engage your professionals and partners in human resources. It’s critical to engage with your provost’s office. I think it’s critical to engage with your fellow leaders throughout the academy. I think it’s critical to engage with leaders at other, similarly situated universities. We don’t really have this right now, but I really want to develop a forum where people who are really serious about talent and how to move the profession forward through talent can convene and talk shop. I’m hoping to develop something soon and bring it forward by the end of the year.

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and Editorials

Op Ed — To Err is Human: Part 3

Citing the Errors

By Daniel S. Dotson (Professor, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210) <dotson.77@osu.edu>

Introduction

Mistakes happen. We all make them from time to time. But what does it say when our most scholarly sources — peer reviewed journals — publish mistakes? This is the third in a series of three articles on issues related to errata and retractions in scholarly journals. This article will focus on the citation rates of errata and retractions.

Methodology

Scopus was chosen for its wider title coverage than Web of Science and its ability to export data for analysis. In order to find these errata and retractions, all that needs to be done is to enter Scopus and conduct search for the source title and then limit to the document type “Erratum” or “Retracted” for each type. Finding these across all publications is a bit more work, but a search for all fields using the following search should get every document indexed:

a* OR b* OR c* OR d* OR e* OR f* OR g* OR h* OR i* OR j* OR k* OR l* OR m* OR n* OR o* OR p* OR q* OR r* OR s* OR t* OR u* OR v* OR w* OR x* OR y* OR z*

For the purposes of this study, the items were limited to 2012-2021 content prior to search. After search, source type of journal was applied as a limit. Then the appropriate document type limit was applied. Note Erratum is used for all errata types.

There were over 229,000 total errata. Due to the output limits for Scopus, the data for the 20,000 most cited errata were downloaded. Items with ten or more citations were examined closer. On examination of citations, it appeared that only 2,809 (1.2%) of the total errata had 10 or more citations. This means considering all of the errata from 2012-2021, only this small amount are getting 10 or more citations. So, while errata are getting some citations, they’re not getting cited at overwhelmingly larger numbers. As outlined in Table 1, less than 9% of errata see more than 50 citations.

Comparing some highly cited items, original articles are most often cited far more often than corresponding errata. For example, the biggest difference is an errata cited 200 times, but the original article is cited 48,386 times. However, some errata have higher citation counts in Scopus compared to their original. In one case, an errata (in this case, a corrigendum according to its title, since Scopus does not separate errata type) had 427 cites with the original cited only 22 times.

A similar method was used to isolate retractions and examine their citation rates. The same set of 6,791 retractions from my second article in this series were examined close. Retracted items get citations, in this group as high as 1,270. While this study did not examine retracted articles to determine if citations were done before or after the retraction, the citations are nevertheless to an article that has been retracted. But they are not seeing high citation levels, with most having 6 or fewer citations and only 6.57% of citation counts being 50 or more citations. Many (13.72%) have thus far seen no citations. See Table 1.

Takeaways

In summary, examining the data for these highly cited retractions and errata published 2012-2021 revealed:

• Retracted items and errata are getting cited, but usually not heavily.

• Errata are almost always less cited than their original article.

What cannot be determined via the data for this study, or were not examined closer, but are potential areas to explore further:

• Are people citing a portion of an article where an error is and missing the erratum related to that error?

• Why are people citing an erratum rather than the original?

Are these citations sometimes citing authors’ error?

Is the database incorrectly attributing citation to the wrong item?

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Table 1: Errata Citation Distribution for 10+ Citations Only

Table 2: Retractions Citation Distribution

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• Are cites of a retracted article occurring mostly before retraction or do they continue and are mostly after the retraction has occurred?

Are those citing the item knowingly citing a retracted item and does their citation indicate that?

Can publishers and databases do anything different to make it clearer items are retracted?

Final Thoughts on Errata and Retractions

This article concludes a three-part series on error and retractions. What had let me down this route was seeing several errata when examining search results for another line of research. My curiosity led me to try to find how prevalent these were. I have also been telling students for quite some time that despite peer review, issues like errors and plagiarism still occur in our most quality-checked literature. This issue speaks to multiple themes of information literacy, such as those related to evaluation, authority, information creation, etc.

These three examinations drive home the point librarians make about evaluating your sources in all cases, that no information format is perfect. Never assume an item is perfect because it is peer reviewed, from top scholars in a discipline,

or in one of our highest quality journals. The evidence here illustrates the major importance of evaluation of one’s sources and the non-foolproofness of peer review.

Use these links to read Part 1 and Part 2 of Daniel’s Op Ed

Daniel Dotson’s “Op Ed — To Err is Human Part 1: Errata in Scholarly Journals?” which appeared in our February 2023 issue (v.35#1, pgs. 28-30) is available on the Charleston Hub here: https://www.charleston-hub.com/2023/03/op-ed-to-erris-human-part-1/.

Daniel Dotson’s “Op Ed — To Err is Human Part 2: Retractions in Scholarly Journals” which appeared in our April 2023 issue (v.35#2, pgs. 26-28) is available on the Charleston Hub here: https://www.charleston-hub.com/2023/05/op-ed-to-err-ishuman-part-2/

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ATG Special Report — The Use of Content Analysis to Promote Discovery of and Access to Unbiased Resources

Introduction and the State of the Art

Recent developments in the field of cataloging and metadata such as the thoughtful use of textual content analysis can positively impact the policies and processes that professional catalogers use to facilitate discovery of and access to relevant, useful, and unbiased university library resources. This article will focus on the use of content analysis by university library catalogers, but to fully describe this complex topic, it is necessary to give an overview of cataloging processes and describe how these fit into the overall standards of the modern information industry. One first must ask, “What is the relationship between a data catalog and metadata management?” Succinctly put, data catalogs are tools that support and enable metadata management, whereas metadata management can be defined as a strategy. “An organized inventory of data assets in the organization… uses metadata to help organizations manage their data. It also helps data professionals collect, organize, access, and enrich metadata to support data discovery and governance” (Oracle, 2023). Information specialists would be well-advised to explore how the university online public access catalog (OPAC) and online databases can be structured in ways that will support effective metadata curation and flexible search and discovery options (Oracle, 2023). To make a comparison to other information providers, Google’s distributed storage systems and Amazon’s catalogs of products are not just acquired and assembled out of thin air. As with a library catalog that enables patrons to discover whether the library holds a book, describes its location, and provides a description of a specific edition that is available, many object stores and data warehouses offer catalogs that provide deep visibility into all the data. Managing large volumes of structured datasets that grow exponentially over time – or big data as it’s currently called – allows for immense amounts of varied data that can be recalled with alacrity and incorporates speed and confidence in the user experience (Kanade, 2022; Taylor, 2023; Wells, 2023). In the modern world of big data, both data access and data governance are increasingly challenging. Challenges to locating and retrieving relevant and useful data include difficulties in capturing missing knowledge; wasted time when searching for and retrieving data; a lack of common

vocabulary or cataloging standards; and difficulties when assessing provenance, quality, and credibility (Oracle, 2023). Big data analytics and catalogs that reside in the cloud have changed the way institutions manage, access, and fully use information, which in turn contributes to cost savings, operational efficiency, and a better user experience (Oracle, 2023; Wells, 2023).

Qualitative Content Analysis: Why It’s Important

Large companies like Amazon use well-established procedures for mining relevant information, such as qualitative content analysis, which is a useful tool that allows researchers to derive the presence of keywords, themes, concepts, and relationships from qualitative data. Academic catalogers, archivists and other information specialists can use these processes to inform the OPAC and to help patrons discover and access the university’s online databases. Open access libraries’ holdings that provide digital editions of single-authored scholarly titles and primary source documents should be cataloged with controlled subject headings. A thoughtful, holistic assessment of an author’s work will aid information professionals who are gleaning keywords to allow users to access, retrieve and use data that is relevant and useful for their teaching, learning and research needs. All the while, one must keep in mind the essential idea that a catalog is not a distinct entity from the metadata. Rather, the two are intertwined. That is, the access points for authors’ works, museum items, archival records, and digitized historical manuscripts, are both composed of and interact with the entirety of the metadata that is incorporated in the catalog or online databases.

Researchers may investigate contemporary cultural, political, and social issues via the study of keywords. The Library of Congress Authorities site provides free and easy access to catalogers who wish to use authorized phrases called search strings that can name issues or concepts that typically refer to or impact vulnerable members of society, like “social exclusion,” “social isolation,” “marginal peoples,” and “culture conflict” (Library of Congress, 2019). In this era of information being promoted and accessed on a global scale, it is of paramount importance that keywords, search strings, and controlled subject headings are informed by the best practices of the modern information industry. Being mindful of the ethical implications of cataloging and classification standards is part of a process called critical cataloging. This thoughtful focus on how one chooses and uses library metadata “…can lead to a more inclusive approach by sharing, collaborating, and enhancing collections information based on user needs” (Collections Trust, 2023).

Who Benefits?

Who will benefit from the modern developments of enhanced metadata user access and retrieval standards? In the academic setting, ultimately the exemplary enforcement of

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“A thoughtful, holistic assessment of an author’s work will aid information professionals who are gleaning keywords to allow users to access, retrieve and use data that is relevant and useful for their teaching, learning and research needs.”

Column Editor: Lesley Rice Montgomery, MLIS (Catalog Librarian, Tulane University Libraries’ Technical Services Department) <lesleylrmontgomery@gmail.com>

best cataloging processes that incorporate a holistic approach will assist students, faculty, and researchers hunting for peer reviewed journal articles. Examples include instructors who are assigned to teach freshman experience courses at university libraries; reference librarians who, due to the proliferation of distance learners over the past several decades and recently by constraints brought about by the pandemic, primarily are offering information services online via chat reference; as well as members of exhibits committees who are adding value to the learning experiences of university stakeholders by assembling interesting and educational displays of special collections artifacts and library print collections. Patrons may be relying on search terms that were added to bibliographic records prior to the American Library Association’s (ALA) incorporation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) terms into its glossary. This emphasizes the need for well-constructed data catalogs. It is crucial to help users find, inventory, and analyze diverse data assets that will provide unbiased information and data that is clear and precise (Gartner, 2019).

DEI: An Example

Many scholarly endeavors have a focus on DEI initiatives and on numerous factors that build information literacy skills like critical thinking. How might one define DEI and how does the DEI paradigm apply to the cataloging and metadata standards within the academic library setting? Tuskegee University’s Cooperative Extension provides a thorough description of diversity as being “the presence of differences that may include race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, language, (dis)ability, age, religious commitment, or political perspective” (TUCE, 2022). Equity is the promotion of “justice, impartiality and fairness within the procedures, processes, and distribution of resources by institutions or systems.” It is imperative that catalogers and other library stakeholders gain an understanding of underlying factors that produce outcome disparities within society. Issues like the digital divide that impact school children who live in impoverished communities continue to plague populations on a global level. The digital divide prevents our vulnerable underage learners as well as many college students from gaining easy access to modern technologies that allow the discovery and use of digitized library collections. The sad truth is that societal inequities do tend to hinder a fair and impartial distribution of learning resources. The third aspect of the DEI paradigm, which is inclusion, constitutes “an outcome to ensure those that are diverse actually feel and/or are welcomed” (TUCE, 2022). As with the principles of diversity and equity, it is critical that catalogers add this DEI vocabulary to academic glossaries and to OPACs. Again, this will encourage educators and researchers to gain an in-depth understanding of how to discover unbiased resources that will promote impartiality and fairness in the academic community, as well as inspire students to behave with civility and to gain a sense of responsibility for promoting justice in the greater community when they graduate from the university. Therefore, the subject headings available in the OPAC should follow ALA-approved policy standards, and catalogers are advised to carefully analyze resources’ content to produce search terms that promote DEI principles, as well as provide easy access for works and for general information that is relevant and useful for university patrons.

The ALA’s Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services maintains a glossary of terms that are meant to provide guidance and start open discussions “in the spirit of creating a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive society,” given that “language

can both contribute to oppression and be a tool of liberation” (ALA, 2022). Terms, some of which were added as recently as 2021, include “racial justice,” “social justice,” and “systemic vs. individual bias” (ALA, 2022). Occasionally a patron wants to locate unbiased and culturally sensitive resources but is impeded by cataloging that predates the addition of DEI terms to OPAC indexes. An example is print books that primarily are listed under the topical heading “social life and customs,” but in fact discuss DEI issues. These materials may be difficult to find, not having had the terms “racial justice” or “social injustice” added to the bibliographic records. Instances of these phrases may be rare in current catalogs, with “racial justice” tending to retrieve only items that have these words in the title. While time and money restraints make it impossible to retrospectively catalog entire collections, these examples illustrate how DEI outcomes will be successfully met only when the cataloging and metadata standards are inviting to all and diverse individuals can participate fully within the organization. In short, the processes and procedures of cataloging going forward must fully incorporate equitable search terms and subject headings that eschew societal disparities (TUCE, 2022).

Content Analysis: How it Works

Content analysis provides a specific example of a data management trend that enhances unbiased research outcomes and offers implications for promotion of new and creative research activities. Textual content analysis of a single-authored work is “a method that may be used with either qualitative or quantitative data and in an inductive or deductive way” and the analysis processes are represented by three phases of preparation, organization, and reporting (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008). Inductive content analysis is mainly used for the topical study of phenomena for which there is scant previous research data, and the deductive approach generally is used to test previous theories or to compare categories of data from varying time periods (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008). The topics to be investigated are endless, but one pertinent example is the content analysis of library and information science literature (LIS), whereby researchers in the LIS field could perform a qualitative keyword or thematic content analysis of journal articles that discuss nontraditional students and lifelong learning. In this instance, researchers might conduct a study on LIS education journal articles published during a specific period, potentially from the increased growth of online learning in the early 1990s through today, to see if or how LIS education literature has discussed nontraditional students over time. Investigators would formulate relevant questions in order to randomly retrieve an appropriate sample of online sources; would design a study that incorporates approaches that are typically used for analyzing the retrieved qualitative data; and then would compile an index of keywords and themes that would mine pertinent information from the peer reviewed online documents. This then would allow the investigators to effectively code and qualitatively analyze the data from LIS journal articles. A thoughtful interpretation of the results of the content analysis could provide useful suggestions on how to enhance learning experiences for nontraditional students who are pursuing programs via distance-based formats.

Business entities typically utilize software to compile indexes of keywords and employ certified professional coders to perform a deep analysis of themes derived from the datasets. The processes of qualitative content analysis can be used by university library catalogers who become familiar with textual resources, discern patterns and connections, interpret the data, and draw conclusions when they are working with subject

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headings. Additionally, these processes can promote the incorporation of DEI principles into the cataloging workflow. Ultimately, a well-considered application of traditional qualitative data analysis that adds DEI subject headings into the OPAC and online databases will positively shape library reference pedagogies and will aid the retrieval of information by library access services.

The Role of Librarians

The DEI paradigm has never been more important than during the current age, when cultural norms are being strained on a global level by economic and sociopolitical factors that typically widen the digital divide and negatively impact our most vulnerable citizens. Modern university librarians might struggle to devise online or in-person workshops or to create first-year experience seminars that will address the mission, values, and vision of the home university, but it is possible to reflect core ethics while meeting the goal of transforming institutional practices to build a stronger and more equitable organization. The techniques are varied and can include collaborative efforts among library liaisons and student outreach, marketing, and display committees, and the university’s office of inclusive excellence. Collaboration among university library departments is necessary if administrators wish to foster empathy and to promote standards of good citizenship within the academic institution’s student body.

Library catalogers play a crucial role in the promotion of unbiased and authoritative resources that will add value to these endeavors. Using the tool of content analysis to discern important concepts, themes and relationships within textual materials will serve to enhance the OPAC and will make university online databases more accessible and useful for all library patrons. Enhancing search and explore options and managing the textual glossaries will enrich the user experience by allowing patrons to gain a holistic overview of the academic library’s data assets (Oracle, 2023). Acknowledging the expertise of regular faculty and engaging colleagues when working toward the shared objective of embedding DEI principles into the academic curriculum will improve the quality of literacy instruction and research; will encourage the development of a more civil and inclusive environment; and ultimately will enhance student success rates and persistence toward completion of their academic programs.

References

American Library Association (ALA). (2022). ODLOS glossary of terms [ALA’s online dictionary]. https://www.ala.org/aboutala/ odlos-glossary-terms

Collections Trust. (2023, April 4). Museum makers – People centred cataloging [Blog]. https://collectionstrust.org.uk/blog/ museum-makers-people-centred-cataloguing/

Elo, S., & Kyngäs, H. (2008). The qualitative content analysis process. Jan, 62(1), 107-115. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2007.04569.x

Gartner. (2019, September 12). Augmented data catalogs: Now an enterprise must-have for data and analytics leaders [Industry research paper]. https://www.gartner.com/en/ documents/3957301

Kanade, V. (2022, April 27). What is a data catalog? Definition, examples, and best practices . spiceworks. https://www. spiceworks.com/tech/big-data/articles/what-is-a-data-catalogdefinition-examples-and-best-practices/

Library of Congress. (2019, September 25). Library of Congress Authorities [Authorities file]. https://authorities.loc.gov/

Oracle. (2023). What is a data catalog and why do you need one? [Industry article]. https://www.oracle.com/big-data/datacatalog/what-is-a-data-catalog/#:~:text=Simply%20put%2C%20 a%20data%20catalog,Discover%20OCI%20Data%20Catalog

Taylor, D. (2023, March 11). What is big data? Introduction, types, characteristics, examples. Guru99. https://www.guru99. com/what-is-big-data.html

Tuskegee University Cooperative Extension (TUCE). (2022). What is diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)? https://dei. extension.org/

Wells, D. (2023, May 2). What is a data catalog? Data catalog features & benefits [Blog]. Alation. https://www.alation.com/ blog/what-is-a-data-catalog/

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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 need to be brief this issue, so we will cut to the chase!

This issue is more focused on library-related monographs with a wide range of works including coverage of working with nonprofits, working with Google and working through disasters. I very much appreciate the work of the reviewers who really dig into the work and provide context that may be missing elsewhere. Thank you to my reviewers for this issue: Kelly Denzer (Davidson College); David Gibbs (California State University, Sacramento); Shanna Hollich (Guthrie Memorial Library, Hanover, Pennsylvania); and Jennifer Matthews (Rowan University). As always, I want to thank them for bringing this column together.

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 (new site name) — https://www. squirreldude.com/atg-readers-roundup.

Happy reading and be nutty! — Corey

Bryant, Tatiana and Jonathan O. Cain (editors). Libraries and Nonprofits: Collaboration for the Public Good. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2020. 9781634000574, 259 pages.

$35.00

Reviewed by Shanna Hollich (Director, Guthrie Memorial Library, Hanover PA) <shollich@gmail.com> Note: Shanna is also an instructor for Library Juice Academy, a partner company of Library Juice Press.

Libraries and nonprofit organizations have been collaborating for decades to better serve their communities. We have seen the scope of library work continually grow and evolve over the ages, and libraries of all types are now responsible for providing an ever-increasing array of programs and services for their target populations. Information comes in all forms, and libraries must adapt to continue connecting people with the resources that they need, regardless of whether those resources are printed books, online, or provided in a community resource center down the street. Working together with other mission-driven organizations, libraries are able to better deliver high-quality services and opportunities for their patrons.

Editors Tatiana Bryant and Jonathan O. Cain are both academic librarians with backgrounds in research, nonprofit management, community organizing, and outreach. This makes them particularly well-suited to their editorial role here, in a collection that emphasizes the need for librarians to focus on community and outreach. Libraries and Nonprofits is organized as a series of 16 case studies, each written by library and nonprofit professionals with direct involvement in the projects that they’re writing about.

The case study approach is an appropriate one for this topic, and it makes for a versatile book. There’s value both in reading the work from cover to cover, as well as in scanning the table of contents to focus specifically on chapters that seem most relevant to whatever projects and partnerships the reader is especially interested in. There is a good variety here in terms of both the types of projects that are represented but also the types of libraries and organizations, with a mix of academic, public, and community institutions. The case studies here represent both urban and rural communities, including one case study from outside the United States. Each case study follows generally the same format but with variations that provide interest for the reader and also allow each author to focus on the aspects of their projects that they found to be the most worthwhile.

Overall, this volume is approachable and readable, making it useful for any library worker who is looking for practical examples of community partnerships that they might be able to replicate. Unfortunately, there are a few minor issues that detract from the work as a whole, including what appears to be some lack of detail on the part of the publisher. The index is not particularly usable — including entries as generic as “grant[s],” as less useful as “Google Docs,” and as confounding as having both “board of directors” and “board of trustees” listed separately. By page 5, there were multiple typos, including an unfortunate reference to “Libaries” in the Table of Contents. Both of these are signs that the volume needed better copyediting, which can make readers concerned about quality.

Additionally, this book would have been enhanced with the addition of a few chapters that were more grounded in theory. These case studies are useful, but there’s no overarching framework to help contextualize the work that is portrayed here. There is no acknowledgement, for example, that both libraries and nonprofit organizations are generally underpaid and understaffed, which makes collaborations like the ones shown here even more difficult. Many of the libraries and organizations included here are large and operate on city-wide, county-wide, or even national scales. This can make it hard for smaller libraries and organizations to imagine how to take these initiatives and scale them down to work within their own particular constraints. Bafflingly, the final case study (Case Study 16: Growing Access to Books: Supplementing Library Services to Rural Students) has no library involvement at all.

Despite these shortcomings, there is a lot to love about this book, particularly for those who are willing to look past the minor quality control issues. The readers will find a practical handbook with real-world examples of how libraries can partner with other nonprofit organizations for the betterment of their communities. There are many useful examples here for library workers of all types who might be looking for better ways to engage and partner with the other organizations in their area.

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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.)

Drake, Kimberly, editor. Richard Wright. (Critical Insights series) Ipswich, Massachusetts: Salem Press, 2019.

9781682179178, 260 pages. $105.00

Reviewed by Kelly Denzer (Collections Strategist and Discovery Librarian, Davidson College, Davidson, NC.) <kedenzer@davidson.edu>

The Critical Insights series explores popular and complex works of literature and its author that provide students new ways of approaching the subject matter. Critical Insights: Richard Wright provides an introduction to the author’s life and writing in the traditional Critical Insights format including an outline by the editor on the focus of each essay followed by the editor’s own discussion on Richard Wright. This volume includes four essays on the critical context of Wright’s work, with the bulk of the volume being critical readings of Wright’s work. Included at the end is a chronological outline of Wright’s life and his literary work followed with the bibliography and suggested further readings.

Many of the included essay’s focus on Wright’s two most well-known writings, Native Son (1940) and his autobiographical novel Black Boy published in 1945. Volume editor Kimberly Drake, chair of the Writing and Rhetoric major at Scripps College (Claremont, California), contributes essays around Wright’s early work and his focus on social justice as the FBI was creating their composite of the author. She also discusses Native Son and Black Boy using interpretations of feminist theory and psychoanalysis. Student’s of Wright’s work will appreciate the introduction to the author through this lens as a way of further understanding his interest in Freud’s writings and what he saw as the activist

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.)

association with psychoanalysis. This interest eventually led Wright to partner with psychiatrist Frederick Wertham to open a clinic in Harlem (New York City) in 1946.

Another focus throughout the volume is his interest in Communism from 1933 through 1942, shortly after the FBI began investigating Wright. In 1944, Wright wrote an essay for the Atlantic Monthly titled “I Tried To be a Communist” in which he describes his early interest in Communism and his eventual disillusionment with the movement. Readers of the Critical Insights series will recognize the author of two essays written around this article, Robert C. Evans. Evans is a Distinguished Teaching Professor at Auburn University at Montgomery and editor of several volumes in the Critical Insights series. In this volume, Evans offers a Critical Contexts essay and Critical Readings essay discussing the context and critical responses to “I Tried To be a Communist.” The complexity of an African American male embracing Communism, and later rejecting its authoritarian thinking is addressed in these essays in such a way that students looking for clarification or context will find the writings and references in this volume helpful.

This collection of essays begins with Drake quoting from a “Synopsis of Facts” as compiled in the FBI file on Richard Wright in 1943, and points out the inaccuracies of the “facts.” What follows are discussions of Wright in the context of a writer finding their voice through experimenting with the scientific and literary developments of their time, establishing a following among other significant writers, including Ralph Ellison, and animosity among others, including James Baldwin. Drake’s concluding essay addresses the split created by Baldwin when he published Notes of a Native Son (1955). In Notes, Baldwin criticizes Wright’s stereotypes in Native Son involving the violent, black male charter Bigger Thomas, who murders two female characters. The diverse viewpoints taken up in the essays makes it an important addition to the undergraduate library in particular, but this would be a welcome volume in any academic research library.

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.)

Flaherty, Mary Grace. The Disaster Planning Handbook. Chicago, IL: ALA Editions, 2022. 9780838937990. $54.99

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

Disaster planning is one of those topics that many librarians would like to avoid, but each of us knows we cannot. Events that can affect the daily business of a library can be due to natural disasters or other events, such as the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995. The critical element throughout Mary Grace Flaherty’s handbook is that libraries not only address the possibility of disasters but also know what agencies to coordinate with when the disaster occurs.

The Disaster Planning Handbook is a resource to aid librarians in developing, or updating, a plan for their emergencies. Throughout seven chapters, the author guides the reader through tools, templates, and activities on how to develop a plan, what organizations to build relationships with, how the library can serve its community during a disaster event, and what to consider throughout the preparation for such an event. Additionally, the handbook is clear on what it also does not cover.

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Events such as technological security challenges and war are listed as outside the purview of the handbook.

The writing throughout the handbook is quite approachable and includes the perspectives of multiple libraries (public, academic, private, and special). The focus is truly on how to look at the human element in disaster planning and consider various elements in advance of the unforeseen event. There are various tables and case studies throughout to demonstrate to the reader what is being discussed and how to plan for that day all libraries hope to avoid. For instance, in Chapter four, which covers natural disasters, Flaherty has included a field report from a flooding incident at Grace A. Dow Memorial Library in Midland, Michigan, to illustrate some points within the chapter. A template memorandum of understanding for preparedness support that a library could adapt appears in the appendix. A sample interior building inspection schedule that a library could modify to their specific building needs can be found in Chapter five, that covers physical facilities.

At the end of each chapter, the author provides a list of relevant references that relate to the topic, allowing the library to further research and expand on what Flaherty has presented. Flaherty also included a final chapter on future considerations as this handbook could not cover every possible event and situation. While each of us in the field of librarianship hopes to never need a handbook about disaster planning, or a disaster plan itself, we also all know that it is an unfortunate necessity these days. The Disaster Planning Handbook makes the topic approachable and manageable for either beginning or reviewing such a plan.

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 its not checked out).

Marcum, Deanna and Roger C. Schonfeld. Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. 9780691172712, 214 pages. $29.95.

Reviewed by David Gibbs (Associate Dean, Collections & Discovery, California State University, Sacramento) <david.gibbs@csus.edu>.

In this slim volume, library heavyweights Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld offer up a highly readable account of the Google Books digitization project. It’s the story of a vision deferred, an attempt at an alliance between commerce and the academy that ultimately fell victim to mistrust, conservatism, and inertia.

U.S. Copyright Law has not kept pace with technological innovation. The photocopy machine allowed for nearly instantaneous reproduction of text, and then the Internet allowed it to be shared without any barriers of time or space. When something is easy to do, people will do it, especially when they are either unaware that they are causing damage to another party, or their part in the damage seems insignificant. The age of illegal music piracy evolved into a legal, subscription-based ecosystem, albeit one that seems to have worked out better for consumers of content than producers. With the Google Books project, the company saw an opportunity to create a similar model to enable expanded access to books.

Google sought partnerships with both publishers and libraries on what was then known as Google Print. Publishers, Google realized, were not well-positioned to monetize the long tail of their own backlists. Google saw itself as able to solve at least three problems: the lack of a digitization infrastructure among publishers, the expense of warehousing backlist titles, and the difficulty of tracking down copyright for orphaned works. If Google could offer a pay-per-use or subscription model that would funnel money to content owners (like iTunes and Spotify would do in the realm of music), it would seem to be a win for Google, the publishers, and the reading public. But publishers were enraged when they learned that Google had been secretly working with libraries and had already started digitizing in-copyright works. They were offended by what they saw as the brazenness of the company’s opt-out takedown policy, putting the burden on publishers to remove content rather than Google seeking permission to post it.

Less well known, perhaps, was the resistance of some libraries and librarians, who either mistrusted the motives of a commercial partner, had concerns about the quality of the scans, or were blinded by parochial jealousy of their peers. Some European entities criticized the project as imperialist and Anglophone, perhaps underestimating how broad, deep, and multilingual large American research libraries’ collections are.

In 2005, both authors (in Authors Guild v. Google) and the American Association of Publishers (in McGraw Hill v. Google) sued the company for systematic copyright infringement. Nevertheless, Google continued to work with publishers and libraries while the lawsuit played out. In 2008, after two years of negotiation, a settlement was reached between Google and the publishing industry. Widely considered a win-win for both sides, the settlement would have compensated authors and publishers for Google’s previous digitization efforts, provided them a revenue stream for orphaned works, and presumably encouraged sales of in-copyright books (since readers could only see snippets on Google). Unfortunately, the settlement was rejected. The Department of Justice voiced antitrust concerns, and opponents of the settlement (among them Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and

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The best place to find books or squirrels at Northwestern University is the Library. Here is an Eastern Grey Squirrel in front of Deering Library, May 10th, 2023.

even some librarians and scholars) objected to Google’s having a monopoly over such a large body of content, along with the ability to monetize it. Others, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, worried about user privacy protection.

Although it failed to deliver an online consumer marketplace for digital books, the Google Books digitization project was hardly a failure. The public can now search the full text of a vast corpus of published works, allowing for previously unimaginable discoveries and scholarship via text mining, word frequency analysis, etc. And those lucky enough to have a subscription to Hathi Trust have access to even more of the text, unrestricted by copyright limitations. Much credit is due (and given) to the University of Michigan’s visionary Provost (and later Dean of Libraries) Paul Courant, who had the foresight to insist that contributing libraries receive their own copies of the digitized files, thus ensuring their preservation beyond the lifespan of a single private company.

A shared repository is not a universal library, but it is much closer to one than anything we had just twenty years ago. Other efforts, such as the Internet Archive, the Digital Public Library of America, and Europeana, have emerged, leading to what our authors call a “potpourri of digital collections, with greater or lesser access, as well as libraries that have individually become digital, more or less” (189). University of Michigan’s Collection Development Officer Mark Sandler speculates on what the scholarly community lost by the Google Books project’s failure to launch when he says, “It could have been a way better world

to have in-copyright and out-of-copyright materials, publishercontributed material and library-digitized material, in one centrally managed space, operated at scale by people who actually know something about discovery and could improve it continuously based on user behavior” (153).

The book does assume prior knowledge of the Google Books project and the legal wrangling that ensued. There are many players to keep track of. This reviewer had to consult Wikipedia to piece together a full account of the lawsuits and settlements. The reader would have benefited from a timeline or simple onepage summary of what transpired: the who, what, and when. It also doesn’t seem as though the authors were able to find many participants from Google to interview, which would have enriched their account.

One wonders whether a successful settlement could have done anything to stem the tide of misinformation and disinformation that has flooded the Internet in the past decade. Would highly vetted published content have risen to the top of not just Google’s own search results, but also those of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites? Would users have chosen fresh, green, healthy factual information over the sugar rush of clickbait, bots, and trolls? It seems unlikely, but we’ll never know for sure.

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.)

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Booklover — Writing a Novel

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

Death by Water was the only offering at the Charleston County Library by the Japanese author Kenzaburo Ōe “who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today,” was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two other Japanese authors have received this prestigious award: Kawabata Yasunari in 1968, and Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017. Searching the stacks for Nobel Laureates and their literature is getting harder and harder as I work through this bucket list idea of reading one piece of work from each prize recipient. And yet, this is a captivating title as I have just recently learned of the passing of Ōe from several news sources. I take the book from the shelf and ponder where this story will take me.

“Disconcerting picture” is the perfect description for this offering by Ōe. The main character, Kogito Choko, is considered by many to be Ōe’s literary alter ego and thus an author himself. The storyline involves a dilemma for Choko about a novel that he has always wanted to pen about his father’s drowning. Choko has put off writing this novel, as he believes that a red leather trunk, in his mother’s possession, contains documents that will help him divine the reasoning behind not only his father’s death but also his life. He comes into possession of the trunk after his mother’s passing and, from this event, Ōe delivers to the reader a book about a book that takes one on quite a journey (I’m transported to another book about a book with a fantastic journey: Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life). There are so many layers in this story that mirror Ōe’s life. I came to appreciate this after reading the news articles once I had finished the novel and was preparing to write this column. The timing of this was not lost on me and I was glad I had waited to background myself.

Ōe was born in 1935 on the island of Shikoku, which is also the setting for this work of fiction. After his father died in

the war, his mother took on the task of educator. In one biographic sketch, he recalled how his mother exposed him to a variety of novels. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was one example of a book that particularly influenced him. His alter ego, Choko, also reflects: “Seeing those old journals again reminded me of my mother’s system of keeping me supplied with reading material during the war…. That is how I came to discover The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a transformative book that became the cornerstone of my personal Great Wall of Literature.” One might argue that the book’s influence is felt in Death by Water, but I will leave this to the scholars. Another tidbit from Ōe’s biographic sketch is that he published a series of works incorporating sexual metaphors for the occupation of Japan in the years between 1958 and 1961 and though Death by Water was published in 2009, it also incorporates a sexual overtone as well as internal storylines that include rape.

In addition, there is a constant juxtaposition between the forest and the river even to the detail of dissecting the subtle differences in the water-related vs the woodsy kanji (Kanji is the system whereby Chinese characters are incorporated in Japanese writing). The reader experiences this in the lines engraved on the monument stone installed in Choko’s father’s memory:

“You didn’t get Kogii ready to go up into the forest

And like the river current, you won’t return home

In Tokyo during the dry season

I’m remembering everything backward,

From old age to earliest childhood.”

In the end one might find all this “disconcerting,” but I found the novel oddly captivating.

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“It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.”

— Kenzaburo Ōe

LEGAL ISSUES

Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com>

Jack Montgomery (Georgia Southern University) <jmontgomery@georgiasouthern.edu>

Legally Speaking — Book Bans

Column Editor: Ashley Krenelka Chase (Assistant Professor of Law, Stetson University College of Law) <akrenelk@law.stetson.edu>

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to write about this topic. I could have watched these ludicrous bills being introduced around the country and ignored them because who in their right mind would want to ban books? I would have watched as legislators and governors laughed these bills off the floors of state legislatures and then went about my business, knowing that any and all books remain accessible to all.

But this isn’t a perfect world — far from it — so I’m writing about book bans. Texas, alone, has introduced 25 problematic bills in 2023, all of which have been referred to committee and none of which have died on the floor.1 Nationwide, over 100 bills relating to book bans or criminalization of librarianship have been introduced, and most states have at least one bill to contend with. And is the case with legislation in almost every state, statutory language about book bans isn’t just being placed in standalone bills, but being forced into bills for things like sexual assault survivors’ rights.2

This example may seem extreme, but it happened. In Missouri, Republicans in the state senate forced language that banned educators from reading books to minors. The language of the bill was alarmingly broad, and forced hundreds of books off of shelves due to vague objections to their content. Books that are typically targeted in these bans were targeted in the Missouri bill, including books by Mark Twain, Margaret Atwood, and Lois Lowery, but some works of Shakespeare, the Gettysburg Address, and Reader’s Digest’s Complete Guide to Drawing & Painting were banned, too.

I have young kids, and I am not at all bothered by the thought of them accessing books by any of these authors, or learning to draw from a Reader’s Digest book. Even if I were bothered, what my children can or cannot read should not be left in the hands of the state. Even if you don’t have children, I’m sure we can all agree that access to books is important, and these book bans are not only outrageous, but completely archaic.

While we should all be concerned about the number and breadth of bills being introduced across the country, we should also be tracking the lawsuits challenging these bans. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is, as usual, at the forefront of fighting this censorship. The ACLU is using a “mixture of lawsuits, public records requests and legal letters alleging the right-wing rules violate the First Amendment and other constitutional protections.”3

At the end of 2022, the ACLU had challenged censorship in 10 states, including Idaho, Missouri, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi. In Florida, the group filed a lawsuit challenging

a statewide censorship bill. In Missouri, they filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s book ban. In Idaho, Montana, and Tennessee, they’ve filed records requests in response to state book bans. These efforts are just a start, and many more groups are challenging these bans, as well.

In my home state of Florida, the Florida Education Association, Florida Freedom to Read Project, and Families for Strong Public Schools filed a Petition against the Florida Department of Education to determine the invalidity of the State’s rules regarding censorship and book bans. The bill in question, HB 1467, requires public school districts in Florida to be transparent in the selection of instructional materials, including books in not only school libraries, but classroom libraries, as well.4

The bill requires every book on school shelves to be cataloged (ok!) and create a formal review process for complaints (wait ... what?). As soon as the bill was signed into law, parents began asking for books to be removed from schools. The justification for this “transparency” bill? According to Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson, the “legislation makes sure that we have a transparent and consistent process for public participation in the review of books and other materials used in school lessons and in the school library.” He also said that “[w]hile teachers, school administrators, and school board members have a tremendous amount of authority over what and how our kids are taught in school, at the end of the day, parents — not schools — are responsible for raising children.”

On the one hand, I agree. As a parent, myself, I am responsible for raising my children. When my spouse takes them to school in the morning, I say “be kind, be respectful, be good listeners” and I trust that, when they arrive at school, they are doing just that. I expect them to behave with integrity, to do their best, and to navigate difficult situations they may find themselves in based on the value systems we set up at home. That being said, I believe that the best approach for determining what my kids — AND MY KIDS ALONE — can or cannot read is to have them bring any and every book that interests them home so we can talk about the book in any way we need to.

And I acknowledge that because my children are little, these conversations have yet to crop up in a way that may throw me

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off my parenting game. My kids bring home books about space and puppies and dragons that are too hot to hug. We read about monsters and aliens and Paddington Bear. But I want to be the kind of parent who is, if not comfortable, open to having difficult conversations with my children, whether they stem from watching the news (likely!) or reading a book (probably less likely). Additionally — and this is key — I don’t want other people telling my children what they can or cannot read. Or access.

In the last year I have had the opportunity to work closely with the librarian at my children’s school. As a law librarian (and now law professor), I’m pretty far removed from the reality of K-12 libraries, public libraries, even academic libraries. But to say I stand with all of my librarian colleagues around the country who are dealing with censorship, book bans, criminalization of the ability to do our jobs, and defunding of our libraries — would be an understatement. Dealing with the politics of librarianship is hard enough without these regular attacks on our jobs and our institutions.

So what can we do to fight back? Be prepared to attend local school board, library board, city council, county board, and other governmental meetings. Here in Florida, there are lobby days in Tallahassee where people travel from around the state to participate in lobbying for causes that are meaningful. Things like book bans are ripe to be taken up by massive groups lobbying state legislatures in organized ways.

This is an interesting time in American politics and with interesting times comes the need to vote; to vote in not just federal elections but — even more importantly — state and local elections. We need to fight these efforts from the micro to the macro level, and that starts with voting in our local communities.

Talk, talk, talk — to journalists, to newspapers, to colleagues, to friends and family. I come from a family that is decidedly conservative, and so I talk. I talk with them about things

that are important to me, that I think they should know more about: the criminal legal system, funding of libraries and public institutions, and book bans and censorship being core among them. These conversations may not change anyone’s mind in a moment, but over time they can make a world of difference.

Pay attention to the news and file public information requests when possible. Use that information to fuel and guide the conversations you have and the way you vote. If you notice a local library isn’t purchasing materials, pay attention and ask why. If your child, sibling, niece or nephew, or neighbor tells you they’re unable to bring a book home from school or access certain materials in their classroom, pay attention. Ask the teachers, the principal, the superintendent why, and then ask for documents to back it up.

We need to use our voices, and we need to get together in an organized way to fight back against this censorship and attacks on our profession. I fear that things will get worse before they get better, but we can make a difference in the long run by paying attention, talking, voting, and showing up. We will take this one day at a time, and we will come out on the other side.

Endnotes

1. https://www.everylibrary.org/billtracking2023

2. https://www.everylibrary.org/reader_s_digest_is_now_ considered_too_extreme_for_children_to_read_in_ missouri

3. https://www.the74million.org/article/the-aclus-fightagainst-classroom-censorship-state-by-state/

4. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1467

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Questions & Answers — Copyright Column

Column Editor: Kyle K. Courtney (Copyright Advisor, Harvard University) <kyle_courtney@harvard.edu>

ART LIBRARIAN ASKS: I heard that the U.S. Supreme Court recently decided a new fair use case about Andy Warhol’s appropriation art that was based on an earlier photograph of Prince, taken by another photographer. Apparently the photographer and Warhol’s Foundation for Visual Arts were involved in litigation. The Court found this use to be infringement, not a “transformative fair use.” What did the Court say and should libraries, museums, archives, be concerned about this decision?

ANSWER: Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts Inc. v. Lynn Goldsmith was the first time the Supreme Court has granted cert in a creative art fair use case since Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music in 1994 — so, undoubtedly, much attention has been focused on this case. And unlike Oracle v. Google, where the Supreme Court found fair use in the limited copying of software code, the Court found the use in this case to be infringement. However, any concerns about collections of appropriation art that we might have in our libraries, archives, and museums are most likely safe from default findings of infringement.

The Warhol case concerns a series of silk-screen portraits of the rock star Prince, created by Andy Warhol, which were based on a photograph of Prince taken by photographer Lynn Goldsmith, a celebrity photographer. Goldsmith took the original photograph of Prince in 1981. The photograph depicts a black-and-white portrait of the musician, shyly standing in front of the camera with his hands in his pockets. Warhol created the subsequent images in 1984 as part of a project for Vanity Fair magazine, which paid Goldsmith a $400 licensing fee so Warhol could use her black-and-white photo as an “artist’s reference.”

Warhol’s depictions of Prince, like much of his famous art, added visual elements and alterations to the photograph. The new work at issue in this case zoomed in on Prince’s face, altered the color scheme to orange, and gave the whole composition a posterized look. After Prince’s death in 2016, the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts licensed this work, titled “Orange Prince,’’ for use on the cover of a Conde Nast magazine celebrating the artist’s legacy.

Goldsmith claimed that she didn’t find out that Warhol had used her image until Prince died and it appeared on the cover of the Conde Nast publication. The Andy Warhol Foundation then initiated a lawsuit in 2017 to preempt any allegations of infringement from Goldsmith.

The district court judge initially found that Warhol transformed the image from a “vulnerable, uncomfortable person” into “an iconic, larger-than-life figure” and therefore that the new work was a transformative fair use. However, the Second Circuit overturned the ruling in March 2021, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Essentially, fair use allows someone to use existing copyrighted works, without permission, in new and creative ways, which has allowed a wide range of artistic expression throughout the decades. The Copyright Act of 1976 codified fair use into statute — Section 107 — and outlined a four factor test for determining whether the use of a work is fair. Essentially, fair use. This statute acts as a safety valve over total control over a

particular work, allowing new and different uses that, if falling within the scope of the four factors, will not be considered infringement.

The Warhol case focused on only the first factor in the four factor test, which examines the “purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature.” When courts analyze the first factor, they consider whether a work is “transformative.” The Supreme Court case Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music first established the idea of “transformative fair use” in 1994. When examining the first factor in Campbell (which involved music parody and sampling), the Court stated that “[t]he central purpose of this investigation is to see … whether the new work merely ‘supercede[s] the objects’ of the original creation, or instead adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message.” This phrase became the core for finding “transformativeness” in the first factor, and has been quoted dozens of times to determine transformativeness in many fair use cases over the last thirty years.

The Andy Warhol Foundation argued that Warhol’s artworks were clearly a transformative use of Goldsmith’s photo because Warhol gave new meaning and message to the previous work by transforming it from the black and white photo of a reluctant and shy musician to the iconic rock god in the “Orange Prince” illustration. But the majority of the Court was unpersuaded by this argument, and stated that “new expression may be relevant to whether a copying use has a sufficiently distinct purpose or character,” but was not enough on its own to rule on this factor.

In fact, the Court noted that this transformative fair use analysis could not necessarily be applied to all works so broadly. As a result, Court found that the Warhol Foundation’s licensing of “Orange Prince” to Conde Nast didn’t have a sufficiently different purpose as the photo taken by Goldsmith. According to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote the majority opinion, both images were merely “portraits of Prince used in magazines to illustrate stories about Prince.” The Court also emphasized that both of these uses were commercial in nature. The Warhol print, the Court stated, was used as “a commercial substitute” for Goldsmith’s original photograph.

In a fiery dissent, Justice Elena Kagan and Chief Justice John Roberts criticized the majority’s “lack of appreciation” for the way Warhol’s works differed from the photo taken by Goldsmith. The dissent reminded the majority that, in its previous term, the Court in Google v. Oracle even cited to Warhol’s paintings as a “perfect exemplar” of a transformative fair use.

The case almost certainly muddies the fair use waters for appropriation artists, especially when their new work is based on commercial use of the earlier work. However, while the new ruling might make it harder for artists to determine whether their works are transformative or potentially infringing, the cultural institutions that collect and display these works have less to be concerned about. The Court did not declare that it is

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illegal for libraries, archives, and museums to collect, use, and display works by modern appropriation artists.

In its language, the Court limited its analysis to the fist factor, and the specific and narrow allegations in the context of the commercial license to Conde Nast. The concurring opinion, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, echoed this conclusion even more strongly, suggesting that “[i]f, for example, the Warhol Foundation had sought to display Mr. Warhol’s image of Prince in a nonprofit museum or a for-profit book commenting on 20th-century art, the purpose and character of that use might well point to fair use. But those cases are not this case.”

A STAFF COORDINATOR ASKS: As part of our work, we regularly put on in-person “film nights” for students. Recently, it was brought to our attention that we might be violating some kind of copyright in doing so. I tried looking online, and a few resources mentioned checking in with the library if it’s a University context. We usually stream from Netflix or Amazon and the events are open only to graduate program students.

ANSWER : Certainly, film companies have always been protective of their copyrights. At one point in time, in order to show a film as a “public performance” — whether a class, a student group, or an entire neighborhood — you had to procure a copy of the work that was suitable for projection and arrange for an appropriate license. Today, all you have to do is log in from your personal streaming account, so it feels almost churlish to be forbidden to share Blade Runner 2049 with a group.

Unfortunately, when you have a streaming account, you agree to licensing terms. Whenever the streaming company prompts you to check the box that says you’ve read the updated licensing agreement, you’ve promised not to use the films on their platform for public performance (which means showing the movies to any group beyond a small set of family or friends).

However, regardless of whether you’ve agreed to that license or if it even exists, “public performance” requires permission. This applies to DVDs, videos, and other audiovisual formats.

So, can you show Top Gun 2 in your dorm room to the people in your dorm suite? Yes. Can you show it in a meeting space open to everyone and advertise it to your entire department? Unfortunately, not really — not without a public performance license or a clear exception.

Are there exceptions to this rule? Sure! As we like to say in the copyright space: It depends! If you are not streaming the material via a streaming platform and any one of the following are true, then you are most likely covered by the exception to this rule:

• Your copy of the material comes with a public performance license

• The material is in the public domain or otherwise freely available (see the guide link below)

• You are using the material as part of face-toface teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom, or similar place devoted to instruction.

We’re seeing a rise in the use of popular films as course materials and even key elements in a lesson plan. As usual with course materials, the simplest, fastest form of delivery is what’s best for the students and staff. Unfortunately, the simplest, fastest form of delivery doesn’t comport with streaming licenses — unless you are streaming video paid for by the institution/ library (platforms like Kanopy, Swank, Alexander Street and more), which is intended for individual and course use. For other (legally obtained, legitimately produced) formats and platforms, a fair use assessment is needed.

However, what if the “film night” was done at the university, library, or other educational institution, and was a part of a learning discussion series at your organization?

In this scenario, one of the key exceptions to copyright (beyond fair use) is the face-to-face teaching exception, found in Section 110 of the Copyright Act. This section allows the “performance or display of a work by instructors ... in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction.” So, if a non-profit entity has a goal of showing and discussing (e.g., teaching) in a library, auditorium, or other “place devoted to instruction,” it can most likely host the film night.

The legislative history of the face-to-face teaching exception in Section 110 gives us some guidance about the conditions under which this “instruction” activity must take place for the exception to apply. The performance can’t be for “recreation or entertainment” — meaning no pure “movie nights” without any tie-in to learning, course, or Q&A. However, for “systematic instruction” or “enrolled members of a class,” instruction using the film may be covered under the exception. Further, the legislative history even includes libraries in the definition of “similar place devoted to instruction.”

Many libraries have interpreted §110, and the notes from its legislative history, to permit showing a film as long as doing so is clearly tied to some pedagogical basis as illustrated by a curriculum or some other method revealing that the film is part of “systematic instruction.” Once again, like most questions of copyright and risk, you must do your own assessment of the facts and decide whether the use falls within the §110 face-to-face teaching exception — or perhaps other exceptions, like fair use.

In my travels across the web, I’ll note that the University of Florida Smathers Libraries has an excellent “Copyright on Campus” guide, “Showing Videos in Class and on Campus,” that outlines some of what we’ve talked about here. Check it out for more guidance!

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And They Were There — Reports of Meetings 2022 Charleston Conference

Column Editor: Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center) <r-kubilius@northwestern.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 2022 Charleston Conference experience. In 2022, the conference moved to an asynchronous format: the inperson conference (November 1-4) was followed two weeks later by a virtual week (November 14-18) that included online-only sessions and presentations as well. Conference registrants had the opportunity to view recordings and see slides (if available), to re-visit sessions they saw “live,” or to visit sessions they missed. Without a doubt, there were more Charleston Conference sessions than there were volunteer reporters for Against the Grain, so the coverage is just a snapshot. In 2022, reporters were invited to either provide general impressions on what caught their attention, or to select individual sessions on which they would report.

There are many ways to learn more about the 2022 conference. Please visit the Charleston Conference YouTube site, https://www.youtube.com/user/CharlestonConference/ videos?app=desktop, for selected interviews and videos, and the conference site, http://www.charleston-hub.com/thecharleston-conference/ for links to conference information and blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins, http://www.charleston-hub.com/category/blogs/ chsconfnotes/. The 2022 Charleston Conference Proceedings will be published in 2023, in partnership with University of Michigan Press.

The first series of reports (published in our February 2023 issue v.35#1 ) featured reporters’ general impressions and memorable moments. The next series of reports on individual sessions appeared in our April 2023 issue v.35#2. In this issue we have included the final series of individual session reports that we received. — RKK

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3 AND NOVEMBER 17, 2022 NEAPOLITANS

The Psychology of Metrics (report #1)

Reported by LeAnne Rumler (Hilldale College) <lrumler@hillsdale.edu>

Presented by Daniel Hook (Digital Science) and Violeta Ilik (moderator, Adelphi University) — https://chsconf.cadmore. media/Category/9b66be50-cae2-4947-9a2f-c777a9706bcb

The presenters used a question-and-answer format to discuss the psychology of metrics and why we, as humans, are drawn to and rely so heavily on metrics. In response to questions posed by Ilik, Hook described humans as competitive, order-makers. The act of ordering and grouping helps humans contextualize their world. Metrics are orderable, understandable, and relatable to humans. Rankings are attention-based metrics and an extension of making order in academia. Rankings put a number on

concepts, which makes them look scientific, however, this attentionbased structure is cyclical and self-perpetuating; the higher the ranking the more attention it is given. The ranking (reward) system in academia has led to a metric/ impact-driven structure where impact = popularity, not necessarily quality. Academic metrics, including rankings and citations, drive what to read, where to publish, whom to hire and fund, and where to study, work, and collaborate. The rankings in all of these areas are the lens through which academics are focused (and narrowed). Hook recommends a second system be developed in academia, using responsible evaluation, i.e., non-attention-based metrics.

The Psychology of Metrics (report #2)

Reported by Jennifer Sterling (University of North Texas) <jennifer.sterling@unt.edu>

Presented by Daniel Hook (Digital Science) and Violeta Ilik (moderator, Adelphi University) — https://chsconf.cadmore. media/Category/9b66be50-cae2-4947-9a2f-c777a9706bcb

As academics, we enjoy putting things in order and we are primed to respond to metrics. As a librarian, I feel very driven to make decisions based on metrics and it’s easy to conflate use with quality so I was very interested in this session. Daniel Hook explained how metrics appeal to us and how they are failing us and our institutions. Our brains desire metrics that are understandable, look scientific, and are verbable (Zoom, Google). University rankings and the impact factor were two examples of these metrics Daniel referenced. AI has the potential to create a feedback loop that convinces us that popular research is good research.

Whole eBook ILL Redux

Reported by Leigh Ann DePope (University of Maryland College Park) <ldepope@umd.edu>

Presented by Allen Jones (the New School), Whitney Murphy (ProQuest), George Machovec (Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries) , Sylvia Bonadio (Brill), and Lisa Nachtigall (Oxford University Press) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/ Category/7f7a18c3-396a-4929-9cca-7fcda3e052c6

This Neopolitan session was a follow-up to a session from the 2021 Charleston Conference. The presenters participated in a pilot project for whole eBook lending using the ProQuest Ebook Central platform. The pilot allowed the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL) and the New School to lend whole eBooks from their owned content. The borrower received a tokenized URL to access the content using the ProQuest platform

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interface. The publisher representatives on the panel expressed optimism about the pilot and how it exposed their content to a broader audience. The library representatives also expressed optimism but pointed out the increased workload it created for their staff. There were a few data packed slides analyzing the impacts of the pilot but it was too much information to digest in this setting. Audience members asked about the security of the tokenized URL and panelists admitted that it could be shared with others but that the publisher and library would see the use if that happened. Another audience member voiced concerns that this type of service could erode the gains made in licensing terms for whole eBook lending and removing digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. Overall, it was interesting to see publishers exploring whole eBook lending avenues with libraries.

Data Mining & Delivery via API: Challenges & Strategies for Future Collection Development

Reported by Jen Ferguson (Northeastern University) <j.ferguson@northeastern.edu>

Presented by Kelly LaVoice (Vanderbilt University), Dan Hickey (New York University), and Erin Wachowicz (Yale University) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/ a5a22e8b-3f01-422e-8c9e-6f4a0c4bbf97

This dynamic session was presented by three academic librarians, all subject specialists in business areas, to a standing room-only audience. Their remarks framed the topic through three lenses: 1. foundational challenges, including issues with slow APIs and months-long lead times to gain access to content; 2. conceptional challenges, such as that data mining sources are not so much static datasets as continually updating streams; and 3. strategies and solutions to address these challenges. Strategies included acknowledging the need to advocate for and adopt new workflows to mitigate sustainability issues, recognition of the role of liaison librarians as linchpins for understanding the perspectives of the various stakeholders involved, and a readiness to explain to patrons how and when to move beyond library collections for their data mining needs (including a shout-out to MIT’s guide of freely available resources and tools).

Historians and Librarians Unite!: 25 Years of Collaborations

Reported by Shannon Tennant (Elon University) <stennant@elon.edu>

Presented by Cindy Ingold (University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign), Kelly Blessinger (Louisiana State University) and Tammie Busch (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/f96a1636-9ff441ce-a198-d97ece02e66a?returnautoscroll=%23itemf96a16369ff4-41ce-a198-d97ece02e66a

The presentation began by commemorating the Women and Social Reform Movements website, now part of Alexander Street, which was begun in 1997 by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin. Dublin presented video remarks about the work. Ingold described her research on librarians as social activists. She has studied women’s groups in ALA and their activism around women’s issues in the 1970s. She is now looking at the WGSS section of ACRL in 1980s and conducting interviews

with the participants. Blessinger and Busch talked about their contributions to the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States. Hundreds of volunteers all over the country researched women who had been lost to history and wrote entries for the website. Busch served as a state coordinator, overseeing dozens of volunteers. Blessinger also mentioned other crowdsourced history projects.

Making Preservation Inevitable

Reported by Jennifer Kemp (formerly at Crossrref)

Presented by Alicia Wise (CLOCKSS), Gaelle Béquet (ISSN International Centre), Jason Colman (Michigan Publishing), Mikael Laakso (Hanken School of Economics) — https:// chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/8f1663a2-5629-47d9-8d194095ebca74db?returnautoscroll=%23item8f1663a2-5629-47d98d19-4095ebca74db

Wise began with the stated aim of persuading attendees not already convinced of the need for digital preservation.

Outputs from a recent working group highlighted collaboration as a key theme:

1. Template language to address problems with commonly used language in electronic licenses that leave responsibilities and parameters around preservation unclear

2. A companion negotiation guide

Colman focused on audio/visual and other non-traditional materials, including interactive books.

He questioned whether or to what extent the reading experience should factor into preservation planning (another central theme). It might be a trade off for preserving the core of the content, i.e., planned obsolescence.

Béquet continued these themes, noting the pace of journal publishing at an annual increase of about 3.5%. She discussed the Keepers Registry, a free monitor of journal archiving and Project Jasper, a shared journals preservation effort.

Laakso concluded with an analysis of preservation of ~400,000 unique OA book items. A range of 9-45% of represented titles are preserved. He noted that it’s early days for settled practice and that there are opportunities for improvement, for example, defining the terms OA and academic.

Stopwatch Session 6

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

Presentations:

Putting the You Back in Universal Access: How the Alabama Virtual Library Partnered with Springer-Nature to Facilitate “Affordable Learning” for All Persons in Alabama —

Presented by Ron Leonard (Alabama Commission on Higher Education) and Joseph Herrmann (Springer-Nature)

Starting to Happen: NISO’s Audio & Video Metadata Recommendations — Presented by Nettie Lagace (NISONational Information Standards Organization)

Never stop innovating: an integrated model for the digital library — Presented by Scott Warrenn (Syracuse Univ. Libraries)

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Whose Responsibility is it Anyway? An introduction to the Vetting Research Project — Presented by Willa Tavernier (IU Bloomington), Amy Minix (IU Bloomington) and Caroline Allen (University of Iowa)

Establishing the OA Monograph Publishing Infrastructure: Metadata, Promotion, and Consumptio n — Presented by Rachel Fox Von Swearingen (Syracuse University) and Dylan Mohr (Syracuse University)

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NOTE: A re-ordering of presentations was announced by moderator Kubilius at the beginning of the session. All presenters were live on-site except co-author Mohr who was remote and joined the session virtually for the discussion portion (the virtual week featured the pre-recordings).

Stopwatch sessions are fun and this one did not disappoint. All presenters (except one co-author) were on-site and each presentation offered varied insights: into the sincere efforts of librarians to inform their users about questionable journal practices (Tavernier, Minix, Allen), NISO’s forthcoming metadata recommendations for audio and video (Lagace), the Alabama state consortium’s initiative to expand scientific information content and access (Leonard, Hermann), a partnership with a digital content platform provider, Adam Matthew, to improve the work of digital library management (Hermann), efforts to make more OA books discoverable (Fox Von Swearington, Mohr). A comment by Lagace resonated. As NISO takes “bite sized pieces” of a hugely scoped vision, conference stop watch sessions likewise are “bite size” views into various parts of our information landscape. Since a number of the initiatives described in this session are still underway, future presentations may be warranted to present updates...

One post-conference addendum is that NISO announced publication of the practice described by Lagace, as posted in ATG News & Announcements for 2/14/23.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4 AND NOVEMBER 18, 2022

Open Book Collective: A Community Led Project for Funding OA books

Reported by Shannon Tennant (Elon University) <stennant@elon.edu>

Presented by Livy Onalee Snyder (punctum books) and Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy (punctum books) — https://chsconf. cadmore.media/Category/cd60addf-198c-45d1-9e5f-47002af 4a7dd?returnautoscroll=%23itemcd60addf-198c-45d1-9e5f47002af4a7dd

The Open Book Collective is seeking to create a new model of open access monograph publishing and distribution for small publishers. This model will not be reliant on BPCs (Book Processing Charges) and will create a community of publishers, librarians, service providers, and OA experts. They value open infrastructure, a not-for-profit model, and being community-led. They have an inclusive international governing board. The funding model will include financial support from libraries, who can choose which publishers to support. Publishers will also give back some profits, and there will be relationships with organizations such as Lyrasis and Jisc. Their digital platform will allow institutions to learn about and

compare OA book initiatives. They will be utilizing Thoth, an open source metadata management and distribution platform. More information can be found on their website https://copim. pubpub.org/open-book-collective.

Research Data: IT MATTERS! How Generalist Repositories enable discovery and reproducibility in Biomedical Research

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

Presented by Lisa Federer (National Institutes of Health), Eric Olson (Center for Open Science), Frank Semancik (Figshare), Holly Falk-Krzesinski (Elsevier) — https://chsconf.cadmore. media/Category/c2f8fe37-938b-4312-a851-7381bc6bc966

NOTE : Lisa Federer did not present; John Chodacki (California Digital Library) provided the introductory overview in the on-site presentation.

Chodacki reviewed the NIH’s goals that began with a 20192020 pilot (with figshare), the ODSS (Office of Data Science Strategy) assessment that led to presentations such as the one in Charleston. Generalist repositories have a role, in coopetition, since authors (from their publications) link to them, based on the different needs ... In describing the repository each represents, speakers also made observations that resonated, e.g., data shared without metadata is not open (Olson); federal agencies will continue mandating and researchers will continue wanting to show impact; also that a co-opetition network encourages innovation (Falk-Krzyenski). The mix of repositories represented in GREI, and its working groups, address various aspects of the landscape (and resonate with those from the library and information world), from metadata, search, training and outreach, and open metrics.

NEAPOLITANS

The Places We’ve Been: NISOs Interoperable System of Controlled Digital Lending Update

Reported by Victoria Peters (DePauw University) <victoriapeters@depauw.edu>

Presented by Allen Jones (moderator, New School), Nettie Lagace (NISO), Robert Cartolano (Columbia University), Sebastian Hammer (IndexData) — https://chsconf.cadmore. media/Category/002d3d87-92cb-4106-9116-26f3c1b9d1d1?retu rnautoscroll=%23item002d3d87-92cb-4106-9116-26f3c1b9d1d1 NISO’s working group (sponsored by the Mellon Foundation) presented an update on their creation of standards for an Interoperable System of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). The working group represents a diverse group of librarians, publishers, and vendors. The session included a brief history of CDL and how the working group came to be. They are seeking to answer the question “How can we achieve something like Interlibrary Loan (ILL) where two CDL applications would be able to talk to each other?” so that libraries are not creating silos for CDL systems in a single institution or group. The working group reported that they hope to publish a guide for various models of CDL that would represent their standards in July of 2023. The presentation ended with an activity used by the working

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group to clarify their own definitions of CDL. The conference attendees used red, yellow, and green construction paper to vote if the example on the slides was CDL, Not CDL, or CDL adjacent (for example, from the same delivery channel but represented a different function from CDL). I believe this activity strongly resonated with the attendees and sparked a lively discussion about the reasoning behind the leaders’ categorizations of the examples.

VIRTUAL WEEK (ONLINE ONLY SESSIONS) MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2022

Collaborating on Open Access Books Analytics – An Interactive Session

Reported by Eva Murphy (West Virginia University Libraries)

<eva.murphy@mail.wvu.edu> [virtual conference reporter]

Presented by Niels Stern (OAPEN), Leah Dunn (Columbia University Libraries), Esther Jackson (Columbia University Libraries), Katherine Brooks (Columbia University Libraries)— https://chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/fd21f816-e30a-4633a360-57e6ae11b207

During the first part of this session, OAPEN Foundation director Niels Stern brought awareness to the organization’s services. In 2022, OAPEN created a usage statistics visualization dashboard. This dashboard is utilized in OAPEN’s newest initiative, Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) Demonstration Project. This project, which will run through 2025, is focused on creating a sustainable OA book-focused analytics service that works to support diversity. BAD incorporates many types of metrics, but Stern stated that OAPEN is interested in receiving feedback from libraries regarding what type of data is needed to make informed OA acquisition decisions.

The latter half of this session featured representatives from Columbia University Libraries sharing the work undertaken by their OA Taskforce to develop a rubric for evaluating OA offers. Six criteria are evaluated on the final version of the rubric, including author’s rights, financial sustainability, and use of open licenses. Katherine Brooks, Collection Analysis Librarian, noted that educational institutions have the opportunity to influence the type of metrics provided by communicating needs to OAPEN. However, work is still needed to discover methods for converting the qualitative data captured by Columbia’s rubric into quantitative data that publishers can provide as metadata.

and followed by a live Zoom Q&A session with the presenters. The presentation covered how the presenters collaborated to address problems arising from outdated fund codes. The presenters emphasized the importance of collaboration within the organization and overcoming jargon to develop a new fund structure compatible with the university’s budgetary reporting and the library’s needs. The Q&A session addressed questions about the uptake of new fund codes by the library staff, updating old orders, how to code EBA within the new structure, and whether a more granular subject-specific approach was ever considered.

A Science Librarian in Africa

Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center)

<r-kubilius@northwestern.edu>

Presented by Mary Ellen Sloane (Middle Tennessee State University), Joy Nieman (San Jose State University), and Hilary Meehan (San Jose State University) — https://chsconf.cadmore. media/Category/4490fbb2-de26-4680-86b8-7b165958dea8?retu rnautoscroll=%23item4490fbb2-de26-4680-86b8-7b165958dea8

Virtual only sessions such as this one provide an opportunity for attendees to learn about new things, particularly in the global arena. Sloane, connecting from Rwanda, provided insights into her search for a Fulbright Scholar project that matched her interests and skills, and the resulting project, working with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Kinigi, Rwanda has been a good match. MLIS students Nieman and Meehan talked about the enrichment that involvement in this “real world” experience provided for them. Discussion was lively with questions about Fulbright opportunities for librarians, and about the nature of working globally with a research center that doesn’t (yet) have a library or librarian project partner, but rather, a motivated researcher partner. This was a true example of an e-only library in the making, as Sloan and the students set up a series of sites to store project management and research (publication output) evaluation. They used technology and tools such as Slack, Google Drive, Monday, and Zoom, and practiced project management, including documentation, and collection development skills.

Journal Perpetual Access Tracking - An Open Source New System

Reported by Erika Boardman (UNC Charlotte) <eboardman@uncc.edu> [virtual conference reporter]

Presented by Melissa Belvadi (University of Prince Edward Island) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/43401276a3d8-42fa-ba51-c873349bb997

Reported by Kalvin Van Gaasbeck (Santa Clara University) <kvangaasbeck@scu.edu> [virtual conference reporter]

Presented by Cara Calabrese (Miami University) and Elissa Martin (Miami University) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/ Category/c68b2254-a043-4f3b-845a-654799c262e2?returnauto scroll=%23itemc68b2254-a043-4f3b-845a-654799c262e2

This presentation was during the first time slot for virtualonly Conference sessions beginning at 6:00 AM PST and, like all sessions for the virtual conference experience, was prerecorded

Keeping track of perpetual access entitlements can be a cumbersome task and quickly turn into a disorganized mess. Documents about institutional subscriptions and purchases can be easily misplaced or lost, causing confusion amongst librarians and possible heated disputes with related parties. Belvadi presented on the creation of an open-sourced journal entitlements tracking software used to record perpetual access rights for serials that are covered by CRKN (Canadian Research Knowledge Network) consortium licenses. The presentation included a general project overview, an explanation of the files and templates, a demonstration of the client, and ideas

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How the make-up of a Collection differs by job description: Updating and future proofing a fund structure from the perspectives of a Librarian and Accounts Payable

for the future. While the presentation had an overall focus on the software’s use for “Big Deals” at the consortium level, it was emphasized that the software can be used for other serial subscriptions outside of your “Big Deals” and consortium. You can also choose to just use the spreadsheet template for local tracking within a shared drive. As someone who appreciates an organized record-keeping system and is constantly sifting through shared folders, the presentation was exactly what I expected it to be and the forward-thinking approach behind this project will get your gears turning on how you can finetune your department’s document control workflows.

NOTE: This is the link on GitHub to the open-source software that Belvadi mentioned: https://github.com/mbelvadi/libraryjournal-entitlements-project

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2022

OA in Practice: Implementing a Successful Transitional Agreement

Reported by Jennifer Walker (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) <jennifer.walker@nrel.gov> [virtual conference reporter]

Presented by Teri Gallaway (SCELC), Matthew Goddard (Iowa State University), and David Fisher (moderator, Wiley) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/c8f3df69-3e42409a-b179-2bd35b81515c

NOTE: This presentation was pre-recorded with the speakers joining a live Zoom discussion afterwards.

More than eighty conference attendees gathered on the morning of November 15, 2022 to discuss the lessons learned by the speakers regarding implementing successful Transitional Agreements (TAs) in a library or consortium setting. The main takeaway I gathered from this lively discussion was that TAs are still in their infancy — a work in progress for both libraries and publishers alike. We, as librarians, have an opportunity here to help shape the future of this paradigm shift in collection development. When beginning to develop TAs, our primary goals should be: (1) Cost containment. Focus on moving budgets away from subscription-based to open access (OA) in a sustainable way; (2) Pursue those agreements that demonstrate a transition to full OA over time. This will help guide the change we want to see; (3) Tweak workflows over time. Work with publishers to create successful author experiences and improve staff workflows. Overall, this session was an informative overview of the existing landscape of TAs and a view into their potential future. I would encourage anyone starting down this path to view this presentation and reach out to the speakers with any questions.

Asking the Right Questions: An Analysis of Ask-A-Librarian Transcripts

Reported by Dana Laird (SUNY Brockport)

<dlaird@brockport.edu> [virtual conference reporter]

Presented by Pauline Bickford Cline (University of Florida), Doug Kiker (University of Florida), Christy Shorey (University of Florida) — https://chsconf.cadmore.media/ Category/9605343d-b5d5-4822-9454-41b9af84ecc9

How well are patrons’ inquiries resolved with Ask-A-Librarian service? That is the question tackled by the presenters at this session. A subcommittee of the library’s Assessment Committee analyzed a year’s worth of Ask-A-Librarian transcripts to determine whether patrons’ questions were satisfactorily answered. Ratings were assessed by the subcommittee of which few to no members were part of the Ask-A-Librarian team. Ratings were not intended to be judgmental but to look for areas to provide additional training. An outcome of this assessment included making updates to the library’s FAQs and room reservations webpages. Recommendations included offering yearly focused Ask-A-Librarian training sessions, avoiding jargon and using inclusive, positive language in chat, and providing Permalinks rather than using a browser URL to share articles and other resources. A future subcommittee may look into utilizing artificial intelligence in chat or evaluating the effectiveness of changes made by this subcommittee on characteristics of patron interactions.

Co-pilots or Backseat Drivers?: Perspectives of Vendors & Library Workers on Vendor Services

Reported Kalvin Van Gaasbeck (Santa Clara University) <kvangaasbeck@scu.edu> [virtual conference reporter]

Presented by Erin Gallagher (University of Florida), Jonathan Harwell (Georgia College), Amy Pham (SCELC), and Shannon Spurlock (Kanopy, an OverDrive company) — https:// chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/dc7ee7d3-f6ae-4862-b90b6e229400ff4f?returnautoscroll=%23itemdc7ee7d3-f6ae-4862b90b-6e229400ff4f

This panel brought together speakers from libraries, a consortium (SCELC), and a vendor (Kanopy) to discuss the findings of a global survey on the perspectives of vendors and library workers. One of the main goals of the project was to test the long-established assumption that library workers’ and vendors’ values and goals are not aligned, but survey results revealed similar themes were priorities to all groups. The post-session Zoom Q&A included discussions of reworking the survey for vendor and consortia responses, how libraries can best respond to vendor offer communications when money is an issue, how libraries work together on new products and features, and what consortia can do for libraries beyond making deals and pricing negotiation.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2022

Class of 2021: Recent Library School graduates discuss the impact of Covid-19 on their collection development outlook

Reported by Vanessa Garcia (University of Connecticut) <vanessa.garcia@uconn.edu> [virtual conference reporter]

Presented by Georgette Nicolosi (Penn State University) and Margaret Mahoney (Penn State University) — https://chsconf. cadmore.media/Category/61fcda66-52c3-4f80-a3da-6bdcbd0 e7590?returnautoscroll=%23item61fcda66-52c3-4f80-a3da6bdcbd0e7590

NOTE: The virtual session consisted of a recording of the on-site presentation followed by a live Q&A on Zoom with both speakers.

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Presenters spoke about their challenges transitioning from being MLIS students to full-time professionals and how these difficulties were exacerbated by the pandemic. Striving to be business liaison librarians, they embarked in virtual schooling — which neither presenter was keen on — and found collection development courses oriented towards public librarianship and a lack of subject specific coursework. Opportunities to complement their schooling with field experience were inadequate in the face of insufficient internships, many virtual and open to non-MLIS students and few dedicated to collection development. Despite obtaining their “golden ticket,” finding a position was not easy and once there they relied on adaptability and colleague support to fully grasp new trends — renewed focus on DEIA and sustainability practices — and intricacies their program did not suitably prepare them for — managing increasing subscription costs and shrinking budgets when their course models used single time funds, the divide in collection outlook between library staff and faculty and how to manage different preferences, and more — all at once. They concluded their talk by discussing ways for improved support for entry-level librarians via learning opportunities and community building, such as increased internship and mentoring opportunities and the inclusion of new librarians in important collection development conversations.

Values and Issues that Unite Us: The imperative for publishers, libraries and research institutions to join forces

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

Presented by Caroline Sutton (STM) — https://chsconf. cadmore.media/Category/8ee49aa0-97fc-4000-b6ce-0d52ea6 d132a?returnautoscroll=%23item8ee49aa0-97fc-4000-b6ce0d52ea6d132a

Due to unforeseen circumstances, keynote speaker Sutton was not able to come to Charleston, and her pre-recorded presentation (without a live online Q&A with attendees due to the time difference) became available only during virtual week. She began by introducing herself as an American who has lived in Norway for 30 years and remarked that she was departing from the expectations some might have that she would primarily speak about open science (all things open). Instead, her comments (and hopes) that she summarized as “trust in science” (things we don’t want to neglect) were compressed into a “top 5” list that spotlighted what she felt are important priorities. This included: formalizing communication training for PhD trainees; stamping out predatory publishers and conferences; supporting researchers in open research priorities; the importance of standards and persistent identifiers; research integrity. She acknowledged that also important are data, intelligence, technology, and she mentioned initiatives such as the STM Integrity Hub stm-assoc.org/stm-integrity-hub and a collaborative project with COPE (along with Maverick Publishing Services) researching paper mills https://doi.org/10.24318/ jtbG8IHL. Plans are underway to address peer review next. (The speaker also expressed hopes that she will be able to attend the Charleston Conference in person sometime soon.)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2022

Into the Streaming Verse: Where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going

Reported by Marianne Foley (California State University, Fresno) <mf09@mail.fresnostate.edu> [virtual conference reporter]

Presented by Winifred Metz (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Danette Pastner (Duke University Libraries), and Brian Edwards (Swank Motion Pictures) — https:// chsconf.cadmore.media/Category/745ac0db-c749-4e78-a75eab1100c43388

The speakers posed unrehearsed questions to each other, which made for a dynamic presentation. They began by summarizing past developments before moving on to the current streaming environment. While libraries have been transitioning to online content for some time, the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown dramatically escalated this trend. The majority of libraries mediate streaming video requests to control spending as library budgets continue to decline. Swank Motion Pictures entered the higher education market around 2008, after a long history of licensing theatrical films for public viewing. SWANK’s academic selections consist of requests from universities and new releases that have significant relevance to higher education. Costs are determined by many factors including infrastructure and bandwidth expenses, royalties, and market pricing. Recently, SWANK has seen more demand for short-form and obscure content. Libraries believe current pricing models are unsustainable, particularly those based on campus FTE because films are rarely viewed by entire campuses. This year SWANK introduced a “Top 1000” database of its most-requested titles. This appeals to libraries because it offers reliable content, saves staff processing time, provides titles that will be used, and moves away from the unsustainable model of paying per-film fees. In the next three years, the speakers foresee moves to ownership of digital sight licenses, more OA streaming resources, demand for diverse voices, and multipronged approaches with subscriptions, short-term access, and individual use of directto consumer platforms. The audience expressed concerns over costs to license TV series and user expectations based on directto-consumer platforms.

Well, this wraps up the reports from the 2022 Charleston Conference. We’d like to send a big thank you to all of the attendees who agreed to report on the conference, both general reports (published in February) and those who wrote short reports that highlighted individual sessions they attended (published in April and June). Be sure to visit the Charleston Conference YouTube site for selected interviews and videos, and the Charleston Conference site for links to conference information and blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger Donald Hawkins.

See you at the 2023 Charleston Conference!

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Let’s Get Technical — Did the Academic Library Reach its Peak Effectiveness in the Late 1990s?

Part 3: The Library Building and Budget

By Mark Dahl (Director of the Aubrey Watzek Library, Lewis and Clark College) <dahl@lclark.edu>

Column Editors: Kyle Banerjee (Sr. Implementation

Consultant, FOLIO Services) <kbanerjee@ebsco.com> www.ebsco.com www.folio.org

and

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

Column Editors’ Note: In this issue we’re pleased to submit the final article in our three part series. Part one appeared in ATG’s February 2023 issue (v.35#1, p.44); Part two appeared in ATG’s April issue (v.35#2, p.45). We hope you found the series insightful and informative. — KB & SM

As observed in the previous article, the 1980s and 1990s were a time when an academic library could successfully apply technology to improve access to its local collection. The library building also contributed to information access as it evolved into an “information commons” that both held collections and connected users with networked technology. Furthermore, as academic libraries invested in technology that improved access, colleges and universities supported those investments through growing budgets for personnel and acquisitions.

First opened in 1967, Lewis & Clark College’s Watzek Library is a striking piece of modern architecture designed by Seattle architect Paul Thiry. Despite its appealing design, by the early 1980s the college was already beginning to outgrow the building. In the 1984 Public Services Annual Report, librarian Vicki R. Kreimeyer states, “If one theme resounds throughout our daily conversations and the texts of the attached reports, it is the concern for space — space for collections, space for users, and staff workspace in general.” A memo compiled on behalf of eight students (Locatell) who found the library unacceptably noisy in 1989 makes a plea to the college administration for “a serious, quiet and safe study area.”

In the early 1990s, the college administration led a campaign to raise funds to renovate and expand the library and build a number of new academic buildings on the undergraduate campus. A 1994 letter from the Lewis & Clark President Michael Mooney to the Murdock Trust, written just months after he requested funds for an integrated library system, asks for $1.8 million to support the expansion and renovation of Watzek Library.

In making his case for the expansion, he first poses the question: given technological advances, is a physical library even needed for a college anymore? He goes on to explain that on a liberal arts campus the library remains an essential part of the “academical village.”

“The library building provides a reliable and consistent atmosphere for study at any hour of the day. It encourages

sustained reflection and intellectual concentration that is often hard to come by in busy households, apartments, residence hall rooms and lobbies or public places.”

Mooney argues that even with the increasing prevalence of networked technology, an updated library is essential as an “onramp” to the “information highway.” He argues that the library should evolve from being solely a repository of materials to an information, communications, and teaching technology center. In many ways, this description aligns with the “information commons” model of academic libraries that was taking hold in the 1990s, which took a more integrated approach to library and computing resources and services (Beagle, 1999). Reflecting the continued centrality of the local collection, he also argues for a moderate expansion of the library collection space.

Lewis & Clark College broke ground on the library construction project on May 20, 1994, and the renovated building was formally dedicated in the fall of 1996. The renovation doubled the square footage of the existing structure including extensive spaces for information technology equipment and staffing, computer labs, a variety of study spaces including private study rooms, and 40% more stacks space (Watzek Zone, October 1996).

The 1996 Watzek Library renovation was expansionary in nature. By contrast, most academic library renovations done today repurpose space rather than expand it. Space for general collections is often reallocated to other applications such as study and collaboration areas, enhanced archives and special collections, and academic support services. In today’s mobile and cloud-based computing environment, technology spaces have moved away from general purpose computer labs towards more specialized features such as multimedia production labs.

By 1996, Watzek Library had an automated library system, membership in a regional consortium, and a newly renovated building. These investments were accompanied by increasing support for library staff and collections. Organizational charts from 1982 and 1998 reveal that over that 15-year span, the library expanded its staff headcount (excluding student assistants) from 16 to 23 people in administration, interlibrary loan, circulation, cataloging, serials, and computer support. In FY 1980/81 the acquisitions budget stood at $158,000 (Aubrey R. Watzek Library. Comparative Statistics 1980/81) and by FY1996 it had risen to $714,000 (Lewis & Clark College, 1995).

Colleges and Universities in the United States broadly increased expenditures on academic libraries over this time,

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though not as drastically as Lewis & Clark. Expenses per student in U.S. academic libraries increased from $371/FTE in 80/81 to $450/FTE in 1997/98 dollars, about a 20% increase (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002). These enhanced investments in library services and resources likely reflect a growing confidence in academic libraries to deliver improvements in access to information.

In the twenty-first century, as digital resources have become more dominant, academic library expenditures have waned. Between 1998 and 2016, funding per student FTE at US academic libraries decreased by an inflation-adjusted 25% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016, 2017).

On reflection, the academic library of the late twentieth century was positioned in a number of ways that allowed it to be an effective provider of information to the community it served. First, it still had a near monopoly on academic information resources with its local collection and the collections it was connected to at other libraries. Second, the library had the ability to make impressive improvements to information access by applying technology and engaging in cooperation with other libraries. Third, libraries enjoyed strong fiscal support from their institutions, probably because of their essential role as an information provider and the position they were in to invest in technologies and workflows that made a difference.

The academic library of today is positioned somewhat differently. First, as an information provider, the library competes with a huge universe of information resources available openly on the Internet from Google Scholar, to Wikipedia, to open access materials. Second, in today’s mostly digital environment, the library connects users to resources but often does not actually control and manage the distribution of them, so improvements to access are mostly out of the library’s control. The library can point users to online sources and provide guidance in their use but the demand for this guidance is somewhat limited compared to earlier times.

Third, because avenues of access to information have expanded, with older means of access such as print books and physical media remaining important alongside newer ones, library time and energy can be spread thin. The library must support legacy services around print collections as well as newer digital services and collections. Finally, the library competes for funding in a college and university environment with a different set of needs and expectations than in earlier times. These vary by institution but might commonly include more extensive student services and offices that support regulatory compliance.

On the upside, students and faculty now live in an age of information abundance and enjoy a much broader range of information resources than they did twenty years ago. The academic library era that we find ourselves in now is, like that of the late twentieth century, an exciting and transformational one. In that earlier time, library expansion seemed almost linear with more collections, more technology, more staff and bigger spaces leading to better access to information. The era we are in now is more complex. Some functions that the library used to provide have receded in importance or have been replaced. New services and resources, many of which support education and scholarship in ways that extend beyond the basics of providing books and articles, are being tested and evaluated.

The Watzek Library of 2022 has a smaller staff than it did twenty years ago but provides access to a larger collection of print books than ever (and even more eBooks) and has a comprehensive reserve textbook program. It also provides

expertise on advanced research questions through research consultations. Hundreds of students a year visit its special collections to interact with manuscripts and archives. The library runs a digital and data services program that supports the college’s data science program as well as other curricular initiatives.

Did the academic library reach its peak effectiveness in the late 1990s? In that earlier time, the library played a more significant role in providing information to students and faculty than it does today. But if one considers the broader portfolio of services and resources that an academic library now can provide, today’s college or university library has the potential to be highly effective in new and different ways.

Works Cited

Aubrey R. Watzek Library. Comparative Statistics 1980/81. 1981. In Folder: Consortial Activity From Watzek Library Archive. Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections and Archives.

Beagle, Donald. 1999. “Conceptualizing an Information Commons.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 25 (2): 82–89.

Kreimeyer, Vicki R. 1984. Public Services Annual Report. Aubrey R. Watzek Library 1983-1984. From Watzek Library Archive. Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections and Archives. Lewis & Clark College. 1995. VII (accreditation report). In Folder: Accreditation. From Watzek Library Archive. Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections and Archives.

Locatell, Kim. 1989. Memo to Academic Affairs. October 24,1989. In Folder: Suggestions. From Watzek Library Archive. Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections and Archives.

Mooney, Michael. February 18,1994. Michael Mooney to Neal O. Thorpe. In folder: Building Expansion/Renovation. From Watzek Library Archive. Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections and Archives.

National Center for Education Statistics. 2001. 2002 Tables and Figures. Table 420. Collections, staff, and operating expenditures of college and university libraries: 1976-77 to 1997-98. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d02/dt420.asp

National Center for Education Statistics. Fall 2016. Twelve-month full-time-equivalent enrollment at Title IV institutions, by student level and institution sector: United States, 2015–16. https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ Search?query=&query2=&resultType=all&page=1&sortBy= date_desc&dataYears=2015-16&overlayTableId=25050

National Center for Education Statistics. Spring 2017. Expenditures and interlibrary services at Title IV degreegranting institutions reporting greater than $100,000 in library expenditures, by level and control of institution and type of expenditure or interlibrary service: United States, fiscal year 2016. https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ Search?query=academic%20libraries&query2=academic%20 libraries&resultType=all&page=1&sortBy=relevance& overlayTableId=25305

Watzek Library. March 1998. Aubrey R. Watzek Library Organizational Chart. In Folder: Organizational Charts. From Watzek Library Archive. Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections and Archives.

Watzek Library. April 1982. Aubrey R. Watzek Library. Lewis & Clark College. In Folder: Organizational Charts. From Watzek Library Archive. Lewis & Clark College, Special Collections and Archives.

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Learning Belongs in the Library — An Interview with Pragda Founder Marta Sanchez

Why We Need More Film From, By, and About the Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx People

Column Editor: David Parker (Publisher and Founder, Lived Places Publishing; Phone: 201-673-8784) <david@livedplacespublishing.com>

The most recent U.S. census data reports that the Hispanic population 25 years and older has the lowest attainment rate of a bachelor’s degree at 20.9 percent. Compare this to the Asian population at 59.3 percent, the white population at 41.8 percent, and the Black population at 27.6 percent. Yet Hispanics are the fastest growing population group in the United States and Spanish is the most studied language in U.S. universities. As educators, librarians, publishers, and educational content distributors, we are confronted with, and presented with, an opportune moment to present new content that empowers, emboldens, and enriches the learning experience of Latinx students and those seeking to learn the languages and the cultures of the Hispanic world.

Marta Sanchez is the founder and Executive Director of Pragda, the leading educational distributor of movies from Latin America, Spain, and the North American Latinx community. Marta has been on a twenty-year-long mission to raise the profile of film and filmmakers from this unique yet vast source of filmmaking. What follows is an interview conducted with Marta.

Marta, when did you launch Pragda and why did you focus on films from Spain, Latin America, and the Latinx community?

In the mid 90s, I left my job at the multinational 20th Century Fox and moved to NYC from Spain with the intention of learning how independent producers and distributors worked with independent films, and to bring this knowledge to Spain and start working with independents in Spain. I enrolled at NYU in a Business of Entertainment course. Once there, things started to evolve, and a wide world opened to me. Until then, I had not been exposed to the rich narrative coming from Latin America, and the power of the Latino community. I worked in several associations and independent distributors, such as Women Make Movies, where I learned a lot. In 2005, I decided to start Pragda and dedicate myself to what I love the most: opening doors, giving light to the different voices of the artists coming from these communities and territories, and providing visibility to a community that is underrepresented in the artistic field in the United States.

What have you seen as the most compelling changes in streaming in Higher Education in the past ten years?

Ten years ago, streaming was almost non-existent. When we developed our Spanish Film Club grant program in 2012,

we envisioned streaming as the main screening method. It was highly innovative at the time. A week before the first festival took place, we realized that the professors were very nervous about this kind of technology and we quickly produced the DVDs for all our films and mailed them as a backup. At the end of the semester, we learned that not a single professor used our brand-new streaming website, and that everyone felt more comfortable using the DVDs.

We were pioneers, albeit too early! Five years later, Kanopy and Alexander Street Press were bursting onto the market. Those were exciting times because the platforms really wanted content with high educational value standards. And finally, access to this content was multiplying, giving teachers and students choices they did not have before.

Today the situation has evolved further. On the one hand, streaming access continues to expand, and it is phenomenal. On the other hand, these platforms have been bought by large conglomerates, and they are very concerned about the volume of content, releasing up to 100 titles per week. The issue we see with this approach is that content has lost visibility; it is more difficult to discover and find titles if they are not specifically highlighted. Also, the content is very Anglophile, and anything else is simply secondary.

DEIB initiatives in businesses, universities, and libraries have been on a significant rise in the past many years. How has this impacted Pragda?

This is a very important change, and there is a lot of improvement. For example, with inclusion, it is very important, and we see it every day, that films are adapted for people living with disabilities. In our case, we are working with an organization called Dicapta, who makes media accessible for people with sensory disabilities and/or language barriers. It’s a long road because it’s very expensive to make a movie accessible. From the point of view of diversity, this wave has been effective at a political level in universities. That is, universities must comply with providing targeted numbers of content in Spanish, and from other language and cultural origins. It is important, but it is the minimum and it is still not a priority. It is the same for educational platforms. Spanish content is buried and there is no marketing or promotion. That’s why we are launching our own educational platform with more than 600 titles in the first phase. We know that libraries don’t have that much money for subscriptions to all the existing platforms, but we understand that content in Spanish, subtitled in Spanish and English, should be a priority. And NOT just because we say so. I always suggest a very funny game, which is to challenge whoever questions our approach to the following experiment: to count how many people from Latin America or of Latin heritage they come across on any given day. And you know what? In the end, everybody agrees with me! It is our job at Pragda to make universities and public libraries understand that they must serve this less visible and growing population.

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“By distributing titles from diverse Latin American countries, we want to assure each specific region, cultural tradition, tribe, customs are represented in all their differences.”

What has been the most viewed Pragda film at universities and why?

The most viewed film has been Pelo Malo, a wonderful movie from Venezuela directed by Mariana Rondón, about an afro Latin American boy who is obsessed with straightening his hair. The film deals candidly with racism, homophobia, and macho culture. It is a film produced in 2013 that to this day is still the most watched and sold film. It has the magic of making us understand transcendental and very important issues with candor through its beautiful characters. Other title worth mentioning, Guie’dani’s Navel, a coming-of-age drama about a Zapotec girl who rebels against the racism inflicted on indigenous people in Mexico. A striking contrast to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which portrays the empowerment of a new generation that refuses to accept its plight silently. A very exciting one is our new release This Stolen Country of Mine, about China’s massive hunger for natural resources in Ecuador. The film sets the stage for an epic battle between eco-guerrillas and a corrupt government. I could go on and on, not only with the bestselling, but others equally important.

Pragda is much more than a distributor. Please describe your approach to curation and selection?

For us, it is very important to have a catalog that shows the narrative tradition in each of the countries and communities. We also value the adjacent languages other than Spanish and Portuguese, such as Catalan, Basque, Guarani, Zapotec and many other indigenous languages. It is important for us that the realities are told by members of these communities, that is, that a film about the FARC is directed by a Colombian. We positively evaluate that the stories move away from clichés, and that they give voice to invisible or silenced realities. We work with fiction, animation, and documentary and any genre that says something of value, even if it is minority. Our selection is never based on how many films we will sell, but on what counts. On numerous occasions, we come across very small stories that are incredible, and we support these projects. Sometimes we don’t work with big productions because we believe they perpetuate a cliché. We also consider that we cannot value with the same yardstick a film from Mexico, Brazil or Spain, countries with great film production and tradition, with one from Nicaragua for example, with a very small production budget and little trajectory. We do not work with genre films, nor films with high sexual or violent content. That is what Netflix is for.

Thinking about the different needs of students learning Spanish versus students who are fluent in Spanish, how does Pragda help faculty select appropriate films for language learning specifically?

Now that we are in a process of growth with the new streaming platform, we are developing areas that facilitate language instruction. Within a year, we are hoping to have our collection of Spanish titles not only with English subtitles, but also with Spanish transcription. We are planning to add an interactive transcript tool that will allow teachers and students to revisit the dialogue for better comprehension.

Pragda supports campus film festivals through its Spanish Film Club Matching Grant Program. Please describe how a campus is selected for participation.

Universities must apply to be considered for this program. We have two deadlines a year. When reviewing the application, our grant selection committee considers different aspects of the proposal. We highly value collaborations between different academic departments, or groups within the university. Most of the applications come from Spanish or Latin American

departments, but we encourage professors to partner up with the gender department when showing an LGBTQ+ film; with the Environmental Studies Department if screening a film about the sustainability of the Amazon Forest, or with the Women Studies Department if the subject matter of one of the selected films is women.

We also value the universities interest in including presentations or Q&A’s around each screening, which could be performed by students, professors or even the filmmakers. We have a whole system set up to help Universities reach out to the filmmakers.

We also look at the use of the festival for academic purposes in addition to entertaining purposes. We encourage professors to assign films to their students for a specific class or as extra credit. Many faculty also require full reviews and/or essays about the films screened.

Basically, what we like to see is that there is an effort to create community and to generate discussion among the student population.

What do you see as the most significant misconceptions U.S. students have about Spain, Latin America, and the wider Hispanic world and how does film counteract these misconceptions?

Incredible as it may seem, the general thinking among students is still based on the clichés perpetuated by the media in general: undocumented immigration, violence, drug trafficking, and poverty. It is striking that audiences are surprised to see well educated middle class and bourgeoisie characters, with a lifestyle like their own, in our films. For us it is tremendously urgent to change these cliches.

Another misconception we see is the perception that all Latin American countries are the same, which could not be farther from the truth. By distributing titles from diverse Latin American countries, we want to assure each specific region, cultural tradition, tribe, customs are represented in all their differences.

Beyond language and culture, what are major themes represented in the Pragda catalog?

We have a wide variety of topics ranging from history, politics, human rights, gender, art, environment, indigenous studies, Afro-Latin, etc. We make sure that our titles have a significant educational value, which is not to say that they are boring. Our goal is that the audience will gain new knowledge, experience new cultures, and understand different socio-political contexts while watching engaging cinema.

What access and purchase models are available for faculty and librarians to purchase from Pragda?

You can buy digital site licenses for one year, three years and for the life of the file. For specific titles, we still have DVDs, although for new titles, we are no longer producing in this format. On the other hand, we are launching our own streaming platform. We are using the same technology used by Docuseek, our platform will offer everything librarians need such as MARC records, subtitles, OMCD, and analytics. Our platform can be accessed through a subscription, or you can also purchase specific collections with a specific number of titles per collection. To give you an example, the women’s cinema collection currently has 100 titles, which can be acquired stand-alone. Also, to facilitate budgeting, we have the option to offer tokens that allow librarians to purchase a specific number of films in advance and then deploy the tokens in response to faculty requests.

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Biz of Digital — The Carpentries

Meeting Researchers’ Needed Skills through Open Community

By Jennifer Stubbs (Instruction and Outreach Librarian, Cullom-Davis Library, Bradley University, 1511 W Bradley Avenue, Peoria, IL 61625; Phone: 309-677-2841) <jastubbs@fsmail.bradley.edu>

Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-3544) <flinchba@umbc.edu>

Looking for some professional development or service opportunities (especially in pedagogy or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, data, or globally)? Tired of DIY MOOCs to learn coding or computing? Allow me to bend your ear for a few minutes because there is an answer to these concerns: The Carpentries.

The Carpentries offer Creative Commons licensed lesson plans in data, technology for libraries, and programming. The lesson plans can be used by anyone for individual learning or reused in presentations or their own workshops. The Carpentries also provide Carpentry workshops led by trained instructors for a minimal fee (the cost of travel and lodging for instructors). A list of The Carpentries lesson plans is here: https://carpentries. org/workshops-curricula/.

The Carpentries is a non-profit organization of openly and collaboratively designed lesson materials for peer-led, handson, intensive workshops addressing the training gaps for data, software, and computing. Ninety-two institutional memberships and fundraising (Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Software Sustainability Institute, among others) maintain the infrastructure. It supports the local and global communities’ efforts to expand capacity to teach data skills. View a map of members. There are free means to participate through several universities, so don’t let funding deter you. You can locate a list of current and upcoming workshops, some of which offer a few spots for external attendees. Recommend your administrators join as an institution with this slidedeck (https://docs.google.com/ presentation/d/1fYTlCSQAkVPSalyFAcFxwqRIQ2Ez7YvQDIwOExy g5ts/edit#slide=id.gbb4b4a1d79_0_224). Propose volunteering for your service requirement or professional development.

The Carpentries oversee three flavors of workshops: Data, Software, and Library. These allow for domain-specific content examples which improve learner retention and activate skills concretely. For example, Data Carpentries offer Astronomy, Ecology, Genomic, Geospatial, and Social Science tracks. Workshop sequences are adjustable and open access to start where your learners are, from zero well into advanced computing experience. Most begin with an introduction to the UNIX shell (or command line) to learn about file folder structure and address anxiety about breaking the computer. Lessons continue for applying Tiny Data principles to bring best practices to any flavor of spreadsheets in order to move researchers into Open Science, data management plan compliance for major grants, and bridging the gap between principal investigators and on-campus data services offices. Some tracks move through Open Refine, version control with Git, and then split for Python, R, or SQL.

Lessons evolve over time. Most are fairly stable after years negotiating cognitive load, welcoming novices with zero command line experience, and user review. The curricula

are also expanding to cover new tools, support accessibility including translations or offline options, and advanced features, which are kept separate from introductory modules. The optional modules range from reproducible science to plotting (analysis and visualization) to automation. Future workshops include economics or image processing. Some lesson titles:

• Cloud Computing,

• Data Wrangling,

• Webscraping, or

• Regular Expressions (RegEx).

Upcoming lessons grow in The Incubator, which currently lists projects on The Internet of Things, XML, or FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Lesson Development is curated and communal — perhaps you will find a topic you are interested in joining. These alpha and beta stage plans live in Community Developed Lessons. “CarpentriesStyle” lessons follow a similar pedagogy, are open to peer-review, but not yet complete; you may find inspiration for the workshop your campus needs now. Current topics include:

• Digital Humanities,

• R for Artists,

• Java,

• Markdown,

• LaTeX,

• Julia,

• Neuroimaging, and

• Statistical Thinking.

Additional disciplines now range from Business to Oceanic and Atmospheric Science, Public Health to Machine Learning.

Faculty and data science services departments find students require training in the command line or what directory structure means for saving a file. These are now foundational skills to work with big data in Python or R. Researchers often request training or support on scraping, APIs (application programming interfaces), or HPCs (high performance computing) because they see the terms in presentations and articles. Partnering with The Carpentries bridges the gap through pre-workshop assessment surveys. If attendees have not used the shell or command line or only work with data in Excel, you may want to start with introductions to Shell and Best Practices in Working with Data. These introduce the differences between touchscreens and locating a file as well as tidy data principles and the risks of over-reliance on Excel.

The workshop outcomes may range from faculty who better understand what to ask of teams in terms of 21st century skills, especially to support data management and open science requirements of major grants. Another major outcome is

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confidence to continue self-paced learning, having seen the expert instructor recover from errors at tempo-de-learno, including voicing the thought process and steps to troubleshoot, so often hidden or rushed in bootcamps or less-pedagogically rigorous IT workshops.

Your institution can host workshops. Some find the savings of institutional membership (which allows unlimited selforganized workshops) more effective. Anyone can become a Carpentries Instructor through their Instructor Training , which focuses on educational pedagogy generalizable for all Carpentries workshops, and teaching generally. Onboarding for instructors begins with a 16-hour workshop, and continues with mentoring, voice, text, and video community lists and discussion calls, and practice sessions.

Dreading another season of introduction to R (any software package or computing concept)? Consider the Carpentries with their alternative train-the-trainer structures. Bringing in graduate students adds to their CVs and provides practicum opportunities. Have you, yourself, hesitated to support a new initiative because you were uncertain of the skills needed or your capacity to learn on your own? Check out The Carpentries! Whether the topic is data migration, faculty research projects, scholarly communications, or opening an institutional repository, Carpentries’ workshops can both train you and help you train your audience. With new federal regulations about NIH grants requiring FAIR data access and data management plans, you need not feel alone. Workshops are in constant rotation around the globe, online and in person. Someone in your institution or state may already have a connection. You are welcome to collaborate with the Carpentries as the lead organizer of a workshop or pre-conference. You do not need to be a certified instructor to participate as a helper in a workshop, which can be a low-cost (only your time) way to experience the content, but more importantly, the pedagogy. Helpers are very important in fully online workshops because we need a higher ratio of helpers to learners in order to move into breakout rooms to share screens to troubleshoot a peculiar setup or undocumented features, or to simply review the steps up to this point in the lesson.

I joined The Carpentries for three reasons: International scope (local data and language customization), the Code of Conduct, and the pedagogy. First, working abroad, I benefitted from the privilege of English fluency. I now appreciate the privilege of learning in one’s own language. I also saw a

disconnection between lesson plans built around the USA’s language, data, and date formats; I saw the quantity of codeswitching so many colleagues provided for me in converting date formats or codeswitching cultural idiom. The Creative Commons license removes barriers from instructors worldwide looking for materials to translate and contribute to for their professional development and review process.

Second, the Carpentries adopted a Code of Conduct. At a time when conventions and conferences were starting to adopt these, I wanted to support a leader, an innovator. Every Carpentry event begins with the Code of Conduct. Learning data skills raises anxiety in me to an almost prohibitory level. I respect the power R or Python can bring to data visualization, but I could not troubleshoot installation or decipher the bash script in instructions. I finally felt safe in the Carpentries’ community of instructors and learners. Working alone did not help, because, as a novice, I did not know when to accept an error in code as a failing of the lesson. The empowerment for me as a learner to hear that as the first order of business is profound. Gaining empathy for myself as a learner, adding additional lessons to my repertoire, leads into my third and final reason.

Finally, The Carpentries’ pedagogy is humanizing for the learner. It helps the self-taught, time-honed expert step back and remember those first struggles. The lesson plans scaffold early. There are many opportunities for the instructor to show feet of clay. They share what happens when a typo displays an error message, narrating through their thought process to resolution. From sympathizing over hasty typing or sharing a personal choice to have a print out of the command shortcuts ready (because it is not something we all memorize at first), the lesson plans help the expert see opportunities to connect with students, empower learners, and open the curtain about what is happening in our laptops. Working with computers and data can be very frustrating. The Code of Conduct reminds me as an instructor to bring humility, ask for feedback, and practice receiving feedback that is well intentioned. The last may be the hardest part for me to learn — and that’s saying something! Just ask anyone who has helped me troubleshoot the shell or GitHub. You’d think by the third and fourth time it would click. Empowering the learner to face the frustration, shake it off, take a break, and troubleshoot the error message with a supportive community is why I will continue to serve the Carpentry Community. I hope you’ll join me!

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The Digital Toolbox — How Licensing Models and Other Vendor Metrics Influence Crucial eBook & Video Purchasing Decisions

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

According to “The State of Ebooks in Academic Libraries” report published by CHOICE and OverDrive Academic in 2022, 44 percent of responding academic libraries saw their budgets slashed over the previous two years. In addition, more than half have been forced to make cuts to their services and/or collections materials.

With finances looking to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future, vendor evaluation has never been more critical.

What criteria are most important when determining new vendors? What are the preferred licensing models? How do Open Access Resources come into play? Stephen McMinn, Director of Collections & Scholarly Communications at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and Jessica Tagliaferro, Assistant Professor & Department Chair at Westchester Community College (NY), shared their insights into these key questions impacting purchasing.

Evaluating Vendors

OverDrive Academic: Colleges and universities typically offer a large list of research materials and digital resources through the library. With budgets under increasing scrutiny, what 3-5 criteria are most important when determining new vendors to add or current vendors to maintain or renew?

Stephen McMinn: The question of renewals has been made easier when there is good use data available where libraries can look at cost per use for all resources to determine which ones are preforming worse or less good than others. One would assume heavily used resources are valuable and should be maintained. The ones that are exhibiting high cost per use due to either low use or high cost should be reviewed more thoroughly. The cost-per-use data must be tempered with several factors such as cost of similar resources or the overall cost of materials in the subject area as well as the importance of the resource to the discipline and the faculty and students served.

In terms of which vendors or new resources to add, many of the same criteria apply, especially the importance of the resource to the discipline, although this is often tempered by factors such as whether the department or subject is maintaining or growing enrollment. As there is no use data for new resources, benchmarking with similar programs can be helpful in order to determine if the resource is needed for the university or program to remain competitive. As budgets

tighten, additional criteria may be applied, such as if there is an existing resource which is less important to the direction that the department or program is going, which can offset the cost of the new resource. Likewise, hard questions needs to be asked as to where does this new resource fit into the curriculum? Will there be assignments built around the resource? What learning objectives will this resource help accomplish and how?

Jessica Tagliaferro: The Harold L. Drimmer Library at SUNY Westchester Community College Library uses a combination of factors to assess digital resources, including:

• Cost per use

• The existence of a “SUNY”, “Lyrasis” or State contract deal

• Connection to our teaching or to a specific assignment at the college

• Resources for accredited programs, including nursing, paralegal, EMS, radiology and vet tech

• Specialty interest. We have multiple programs at the school such as common read, faculty committees and book clubs that will request a title

• Streaming films are a growth area, and they are expensive to sustain. Faculty tend to build them into the syllabi and request year to year

Vendor Relations

OD/A: Academic libraries work with hundreds if not thousands of vendors to provide access to specific specialized content to support curriculum, research or other mandated needs. What are some of the key requirements do you have in working with your vendors?

SM: Trust and honesty are two of the main qualities or requirements that are important to me when working with vendors. Of course, this is a two-way street as you need to be open and honest with vendors. Consistency is also important in that they deliver the product as advertised, e.g., they don’t oversell or make promises or claims that turn out to be half true at best.

Other important aspects of working with vendors is strong communication, availability and the ability to assist even outside their areas of expertise even if is as simple as referring one to the right person. Promptness is also an important element of the communication element with vendors. Much like our users when they report a problem, I do not expect an immediate resolution or answer, but communicating that the request, question or problem has been received and is getting the attention it deserves. All the elements of exceptional public service that we strive to provide for our users is essentially what we expect from our vendors. One last thing is that I expect them to have

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“Each licensing model for electronic resources has its advantages and disadvantages, and this decision is often determined by the type of materials and the subject area it supports.”

a depth of knowledge regarding their products or the ability to refer users to the appropriate person in training, technical support or other product specialists.

JT:

• Being on the state contract is becoming more and more critical due to purchasing and county regulations

• Ability to proxy for our users

• Price

• Ease of interface

• Full text availability

Access Model Preferences

OD/A: For digital resources (eBooks, audiobooks, periodicals, streaming media), is your preference to offer multiple or concurrent access or to own resources under a perpetual use licensing model?

SM: Each licensing model for electronic resources has its advantages and disadvantages, and this decision is often determined by the type of materials and the subject area it supports. For example, eBooks supporting computer science and practical computing generally have high use for a short period of time before being replaced by more current resources. Streaming media is also a particularly tricky area where perpetual licensing may not be the most cost-effective model. Again, this is dependent on the media, film or documentary and the department or faculty using the media. In some cases, the long-term savings for perpetual licensing can be worth the initial higher expense, but we generally license for current access unless there is a track record of use.

I would say in our case that audiobooks and eBooks are similar to streaming media. There are some works which will be used over and over again, and perpetual purchasing for these resources makes sense, but for most of these titles, multiple concurrent access is the preferred purchasing or licensing model. In terms of periodicals, there are very few titles that we would subscribe to that don’t provide archival rights or perpetual access for subscribed content after cancellation, but in some cases, the importance of the titles is such that we don’t anticipate cancelling, so this is something preferred but not required for this limited set of titles.

JT: Multiple concurrent.

Funding for OAR

OD/A: Open Access Resources (OAR) are becoming increasingly popular and widely used across various academic and research fields. What do you think is a sustainable approach for funding OAR resources?

JT: Our library receives some OAR that is catalogued at the SUNY system level. We have an Open Access/course designer who reports to our Dean of Online Learning. I do know she accesses the library’s paid resources, but the Online Learning development is separate from the library at our institution.

Video Licensing Models

One of the leading providers of streaming video to academic libraries, Kanopy, provides 30,000 inspiring and educational films to thousands of colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes. Kanopy embraces an effective approach for strategic catalog growth by offering flexible and sustainable models. Their team of collection development experts works hand-inhand with library partners to select from a variety of flexible acquisition models to achieve the greatest value for their institution and meet curricular needs.

An institution can build out a compelling and dynamic video catalog with the following strategy:

• Use Patron-Driven Acquisitions (PDA) can serve as the foundation to meet campus needs. In this model, libraries only pay when videos are watched.

• Subscribe to Kanopy BASE and provide libraries up to 10,000 titles with 55 percent exclusivity — all with little upkeep.

• License upfront affordable, curated collections for one or three years from key suppliers like The Criterion Collection, Kino Lorber and more with unlimited access.

• Firm order individual films and curated packages in high-use subjects like DEI, media studies and activism — renewable each year with no commitment.

• Purchase essential titles outright from suppliers like BBC, Film Movement, Oscilloscope, Umbrella Entertainment and PBS and own them in perpetuity. With budgets tight — and/or shrinking — librarians are leveraging their invaluable skill sets to ensure their collection development strategies are meeting the reading and learning needs of their campuses. Academic libraries are keeping a closer eye than ever on their vendors and how they’re evaluating them, and one of the most important factors is the digital licensing models offered.

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Looking Over the Edge — A Case of Fake Peer-review and Findings of An In-house Investigation

By Kazuki Ide (CiDER, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan) <ide-k@cider.osaka-u.ac.jp>

Column Editor: Dr. Sven Fund (Managing Director, Fullstopp GmbH, Berlin, Germany; Phone: +49 (0) 172 511 4899) <sven.fund@fullstopp.com> www.fullstopp.com

Division of Scientific Information and Public Policy, Center for Infectious Disease Education and Research (CiDER), Osaka University, Osaka, Japan; Research Center on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan; National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP), Tokyo, Japan.

Peer review of scholarly articles should be conducted by independent peers, and communication between authors and reviewers of articles can break down the gatekeeper role of reviewers. Moreover, when authors take on part of the role of reviewing their own papers, they diminish the possibility that their research findings will be enriched by the new perspectives originally provided by the reviewers.

In July 2022, an article published in 2020 has been retracted according to the fake peer-review.1 The publisher mentioned that “the acceptance of this article was partly based upon the positive advice of an unreliable reviewer report” in their removal notice.2 Not only that, but another paper also published from the same research group in 2021 was retracted in December 2022.3 In the retraction notice, the situation was explained as follows.4

“The above from Human Brain Mapping, published online on 16 July 2021 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary. com ), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal Editor-in-Chief, Simon B. Eickhoff and Wiley Periodicals, LLC. The retraction has been agreed given the journal has received evidence confirming that the peer review process of this paper was manipulated. As a result, the conclusions reported in the article are not considered reliable.”

The issue was firstly reported by the Mainichi Shimbun (The Mainichi) in June 20225 and covered by the Retraction Watch.6 In the report by The Mainichi, it was noted that the university related to this issue has established an investigating committee and is conducting an in-house investigation.

In December 2022, the results of the in-house investigation have been published by the University of Fukui.7

The investigation committee had been established in February 2022 based on a claim from another university in January 2022. It finally identified six peer-review manipulations by an anonymized professor and two co-authors. They had prepared a draft of the peer review comments for their own paper. According to the report, one of the two papers mentioned above was retracted by the publisher after the authors did not respond to a proposal from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to voluntarily retract the paper. However, the investigation committee concluded that there was no encouragement or planning from the professor in the peer-review manipulation, that there was no falsification of research data, and that the results of the study were not distorted.

In addition, because it does not violate the specific research misconduct (Fabrication, Falsification, Plagiarism, FFP) 8 — although it is not prohibited to reveal names and affiliations — professor and co-authors are consistently anonymous in the report. Several other universities with faculty members involved in the issue have also not released their names. It is one of the reasons why the people involved have not even provided an official apology comment through the university. This is problematic from the perspective of enhancing the quality of research integrity.

The anonymized in-house investigation report may also have caused several problems. There is no information on the remaining four other papers in the report, and so far, we have not been able to identify the papers that were subjected to peer-review manipulation by referring to search results in the database such as the PubMed and the Web of Science. To minimize the impact of the fake peer-review on scientific communities, it is important that the detailed information be shared in a timely manner. While there may be hesitation on the part of that professor or university, information sharing would be the first step toward restoring trust in the future.

In this case, the retraction notice for one of the two papers was not displayed because it was published as “Published Erratum” in PubMed. This point was considered to have room for improvement as a specification of the article database.

This issue also suggests that peer review activities are becoming a burden for researchers as more and more papers are published each year. In fact, the professor had asked co-authors to draft review comments for their own papers at the request of the reviewers.7 In conducting peer review, it is necessary to obtain information and carefully read not only the papers to be reviewed, but also the related knowledge. This process takes a lot of time and effort. Currently, there are remarkable developments in generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT (which uses Large Language Models, LLM),9 and there may be a way to reduce the burden on reviewers while improving quality and integrity by supporting reviewers through co-creation of these technologies and the scientific community.

Acknowledgement

This work was conducted as part of “The Nippon Foundation — Osaka University Project for Infectious Disease Prevention,” and also supported by Inamori Foundation and a Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (23K12845, KI). The authors have no potential conflict of interest relevant to this article.

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Endnotes

1. Hiraoka D, Nishitani S, Shimada K, Kasaba R, Fujisawa TX, Tomoda A. Epigenetic modification of the oxytocin gene is associated with gray matter volume and trait empathy in mothers. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2021; 123: 105026. doi: https://doi. org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2020.105026. [Retracted]

2. Hiraoka D, Nishitani S, Shimada K, Kasaba R, Fujisawa TX, Tomoda A. Removal notice to “Epigenetic modification of the oxytocin gene is associated with gray matter volume and trait empathy in mothers”, Psychoneuroendocrinology, Volume 123 (2021), 105026. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2022; 144: 105860. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2022.105860

3. Sakakibara N, Makita K, Hiraoka D, Kasaba R, Kuboshita R, Shimada K, Fujisawa TX, Tomoda A. Increased resting-state activity in the cerebellum with mothers having less adaptive sensory processing and trait anxiety. Hum Brain Mapp. 2021; 42: 4985-4995. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25594. [Retracted]

4. Retraction Statement: Increased resting-state activity in the cerebellum with mothers having less adaptive sensory processing and trait anxiety. Hum Brain Mapp. 2022; 43: 5681. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.26028.

5. Torii S, Nagira M. Professor at Japan’s Univ. of Fukui accused of bogus peer review scheme. Mainichi Shimbun (The Mainichi; June 11, 2022). URL: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20220611/p2a/00m/0na/021000c. (Accessed March 16, 2023)

6. Banks M. University of Fukui professor called out for fake peer review, loses “love hormone” paper. Retraction Watch (July 27, 2022). URL: https://retractionwatch.com/2022/07/27/university-of-fukui-professor-called-out-for-fake-peer-review-loses-lovehormone-paper/. (Accessed March 16, 2023)

7. [Results of investigation into suspected misconduct in research activities at the University of Fukui] URL: https://www.u-fukui. ac.jp/news/86494/. [In Japanese]

8. Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Guidelines for Responding to Misconduct in Research. URL: https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/jinzai/fusei/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2015/07/13/1359618_01.pdf. (Accessed March 16, 2023)

9. Lund BD, Wang T, Mannuru NR, Nie B, Shimray S, Wang Z. ChatGPT and a new academic reality: Artificial Intelligence-written research papers and the ethics of the large language models in scholarly publishing. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol. 2023; 74, 570–581. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24750

Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Paul Gerbino

Column Editor: Darrell W. Gunter (President & CEO, Gunter Media Group) <d.gunter@guntermediagroup.com>

DARRELL GUNTER: I am so happy to have in our studio a very dear friend of mine, who is a phenomenal businessman who is going to impart a lot of knowledge to us today, Mr. Paul Gerbino, who has just rebranded his company as Creative Licensing International. Paul, welcome to the program.

PAUL GERBINO: Well, thank you very much, Darrell; it’s great to be here.

DG: You know, before we jump into Creative Licensing International, it would be helpful for you to share with our audience a little bit about education and background and exactly how we came to know each other.

PG: Yeah, well, you know, it’s funny. My educational background was, I was a musician. And I was studying music in college, and I came to a realization at one point that I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, and realized I had to get a job. So I ended up starting out in the hotel business where I eventually became Director of Sales and Marketing for a couple of four- and five-star hotels, buying a lot of advertising, got to know the publisher of a business travel magazine. He talked me into publishing. And here I have been in media for over 30 years. So it’s been a really interesting journey, especially coming from the media world, where not only did I start out selling advertising, but work through to actually running publications, and in 1998, building my first website.

DG: Wow, Huge. And so, we met. We both served on the Content Board of the SIIA — for those who are not familiar with it, the Software Information Industry Association — and that’s where our great friendship blossomed from the beginning.

PG: And I tend to gravitate to very smart people. So there, I’m buttering up the interview. But the reality is that yeah, it was SIIA. We were on the board of the content division, which now has gone through many different permutations. And it was probably the first time — because I was again a publisher at the time — the first time that I started to see my content as business information.

DG: Okay.

PG: Not just articles, serving in the markets that I was serving, but actually as information that can be used by anybody who has an interest in the topics. So it was an eye-opening experience for me. And then being around people like you, who understood that. I learned a tremendous amount around, you know, just understanding what my content could be in this environment of the information industry.

DG: All right. So tell us about the business that you’re in because we were talking earlier, and I said to you, I said, “Well, you used to be a publisher. Now you’re in the content licensing business. But you’re helping publishers to further publish the already published information.” Tell us about that.

PG: Well, and it’s funny. The focus of what we do is really based on a three-legged stool, and the original name of the company was Triumvirate Content Consultants. You know, it was funny, we really didn’t consult on content. We licensed content. And Triumvirate was a word that a lot of people have difficulty spelling, including me.

DG: Including yours truly.

PG: Exactly. So it was time to change the name. And so, really, it goes to the principles by which I work, and my team works, in that for content licensing to be effective, it needs to fulfill three points. One, it needs to be able to extend the brand reach of the content, the owner or the content creator, the author. It needs to be able to get their name and their presence out into the world. The second is that by getting it out to the world, they often find new audiences for their content. And when I talk about that, my first experience in licensing content, I was doing news on sludge pumps and flusher meters. Now an engineer said to me, “Well, it’s actually pronounced flushometer.” But I said “flusher meter gets a lot more laughs.”

DG: [Laughs]

PG: But if you asked me then, the readers of my content were people with grease under their fingernails, the manufacturers and people in the workshops, who were learning about new products to help them do business. And by licensing, I found patent attorneys, professors, a lot of other kinds of users pouring over this content, which made me realize that by licensing this content, I can find new audiences. And that’s the second leg. The third leg is revenue. You know, with a lot of publishers, they have content that sits in an archive, that they’re hoping gets some usage through long-tail searches.

DG: Right.

PG: But again, otherwise, it’s just sitting there. And if you can monetize that content, if you can get a usage of that content, that turns into new revenues for you, brand reach for you, new audiences for you, why not?

DG: Mm-hmm.

PG: So that’s what we do. We help our publishers and content creators to get their content out there into the marketplace.

DG: And do you find, Paul, that sometimes they just haven’t thought about it? I mean, it’s just there.

PG: Yeah, it’s funny. And if I understand your question correctly, I think a big part of what I do, when I talk to publishers, is educate them on content licensing.

DG: Mm-hmm.

PG: Because they’re not thinking about it, especially in the B2B space. They’re caught up in the tyranny of the urgent.

DG: Okay.

PG: And the urgent could be advertising revenues, could be subscription revenues, could be traffic to their websites. All those kinds of things that drive what they perceive as their bottom line. And it’s very much a big part of what they do. So they don’t think about incremental revenue.

DG: Okay.

PG: Especially incremental revenue that is so profitable because the content was already paid for...

DG: Right.

PG: ...for its primary use. That revenue coming in from content licensing falls right to the bottom line. So it is definitely

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one that you spend a lot of time really educating, especially in the B2B space, what content licensing is. Now other industries like Scholarly, they’re more used to this kind of business model. But even then, they may be used to it, but do they understand it fully? So part of our job is to educate.

DG: And so with that, I mean, recently, you and I have had the opportunity of working together on a particular deal. But the vendor that I represent is new to the marketplace.

PG: Right.

DG: And which means that they don’t really have subscribers yet, but they will.

PG: Yes.

DG: How do you manage the expectations of your clients to see the vision for it?

PG: Yeah.

DG: And the investment of their time with their content upon new markets.

PG: So there’s a couple aspects to licensing that, you know, when I explain to my clients what to look for or what to expect, to level set their expectations, and I said that there are some licensing deals that you’ll do that will within six months produce revenue.

DG: Right.

PG: There are others that are like mining gold, that you’re going out there and you’re digging a lot of holes until you find that gold vein. And so you look at the business model, like the one you’re talking about. You look at their business model. Does it make sense? Does it have the right reach that can expose the publishers’ or the creators’ content in the right places? You know, what is the potential universe of users of that model?

DG: Right.

PG: And then you go in there as a speculator, and you use content. And you make sure that you put the right protections on the content, so it can’t be abused.

DG: And what are those protections, Paul?

PG: Yeah, so that’s a great question. We actually have a document that we call Licensing Best Practices. It’s an internal document that we use every time we do a contract. And we literally go through every licensing agreement and go through the check-offs. Yep. Doesn’t have this, wait, this is out. Oh, they have sublicensing in there. All right. Well, who’re they sublicensing to? Where is the content going? I mean, I had a former partner when I first started this business who used to use a phrase content gone wild

DG: Oh!

PG: I mean, think about it. When you have an ambiguous sublicensing clause, it doesn’t tell the publisher where the content is going, who’s using it, how it’s being used. And I once found, it was interesting when we took over a client, we were doing some investigation. And when we talked to an aggregator, they said, “Oh no, we’re already getting that content.” What do you mean you’re getting it?

DG: [Laughs]

PG: And so we started to do the money trail, a little forensic accounting, and we found that there’s an original licensing agreement with another group...

DG: Oh, my goodness.

PG: ...that had sublicensing in the agreement. And then, you start to go, you start to realize, “Well, geez, if I don’t put a stop to that or get some controls over that, it’s content gone wild.”

DG: Wow. And once that horse has left the barn...

PG: It’s hard to get it back. It is hard to pull back, because the contracts themselves don’t always allow for a legal route to force that aggregator to pulling it all back. Plus, once it’s out, you have no way of getting it removed from databases. I mean, the other best practice that we have is, when an agreement ends, there has to be a purge of the content from the database.

DG: Right.

PG: Because again, you want to know where it is, how it’s being used and when, so...

DG: Let me give you a case study.

PG: Oh, go for it.

DG: Now, I’m going to leave the name of the publisher out.

PG: Go ahead.

DG: But if there was a publisher that has been around since 2013, and they have their database 20,000 items of which I think there’s like 13,000 articles, but the other 7,000 a different type of artifacts, and their information is global. Global news that’s translated from local language into English from a local cultural perspective.

PG: Right.

DG: Now, I know that previous conversations with another particular vendor, their hypothesis sounded great, but they just didn’t have any content. What is the minimum number of articles you think represents enough to represent your time to go pitch their service?

PG: Well, and that’s another great question in that, when we evaluate a content creator, (A) can we help them? And (B) is the amount of work worth it on both sides, both for the publisher or the creator and ourselves?

DG: That’s right.

PG: And it’s funny, we have clients that have one book that we have done deals for, that was definitely worth it from both parties’ standpoint. We have other clients that do, you know, 1,000 articles a year, that don’t produce a lot because the topics of their articles tend to be very thin and don’t have a lot of depth. So, you know, it really stems from what we always say is you need to do a content audit.

DG: Okay.

PG: You need to audit what you have. Not only in quantity, but the quality.

DG: Yes.

PG: You can have a single book that can do gangbusters, or you can have 1,000 articles that does very little.

DG: Ah.

PG: It’s really around what the content offers the marketplace. Again, you know, you and I talk about this all the time with metadata and search. If your articles are thin, there’s not a lot of content in them, and the metadata is thin, well, they’re not going to be discovered. I don’t care what platform you’re on.

DG: Mm-hmm.

PG: So what we always do with a client is we usually start off with somewhat of a content audit and developing descriptions for all their content assets, so that they can look at it differently than they usually do. Most publishers don’t look at their content through the lens of the value beyond their core audience.

DG: Mm-hmm.

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PG: And the other thing is these content description documents that we do, and it’s literally where we have a standard template for questions that we ask about a piece of content, a journal, a B2B magazine, or book, or whatever, that are usually the questions that we get from licensees.

DG: Right.

PG: And one publisher that we worked with was so happy with the descriptions that we did, that every time they bring on a new employee, that’s the document they hand them. “Here, read this. It shows you exactly what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.” But again, that content audit is a very critical component that every content creator, every random content owner should do on an annual basis. You know, (A), what do we have? (B), what do we add this year?

DG: Wow. So I want to switch gears a little bit. So let’s talk about AI. And what we’re learning about ChatGPT and all of these AI tools is that they need information to build their intelligence about. Where does content licensing come into that? Because if someone is paying for access to your database, but then they’re putting it into like a ChatGPT or whatever the latest flavor is, and they’re creating something new...

PG: Yeah, yeah. And it’s funny because I just posted on to the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting website, an article that had appeared in The Wall Street Journal, and the headline was this. “Chatbots Are Digesting the Internet. The Internet Wants to Get Paid.”

DG: I love it.

PG: Yeah. And here’s the thing, it was funny. Since I started the business in 2015, I’ve been very aware that a lot of machine learning has been going on with publishers’ content, both in front and behind the paywall. But since 2015, I’ve been talking to publishers saying, “Guys, you need to be aware that there is scraping going on of your content, even behind your paywalls. And it’s being used for machine learning, whether it’s financial analysts on stock trades that want to know what industries are doing, whether it’s media monitoring companies, and by the way, all this machine learning that’s going on, they’re making money on your content.”

DG: Right.

PG: Well, for years, it fell on deaf ears because it was out of sight, out of mind. We weren’t dealing with it. I’ve got the tyranny of the urgent. I don’t care about that. It wasn’t until ChatGPT and all the press about how it’s learning on all the content on the web did publishers finally go, “Wait a minute. That’s my content they’re using. I want to get paid for that.”

DG: That’s right, that’s right, that’s right!

PG: So it has definitely been... ChatGPT was the tipping point for publishers to start being concerned and start being aware.

DG: And so being that they’re concerned, and being that they’re more aware, I guess we probably will see publishers be more open to embrace these technologies and maybe invest in these technologies?

PG: Well, I think it’s a couple of things. One is yes, a smart publisher will invest in this technology to help streamline their operations, whether it is to help young journalists who are writing articles for the first time, get an article started, to do research using it because I think AI as a research tool is actually a great tool. I think that they’ll look at streamlining some of the things they do today from an operational standpoint, and how AI can assist that, especially in the area of SEO and those types of things. I think from the standpoint of AI using their content,

I think they’re starting to say no, wait a minute, we should get some benefit from this. And part of that is... and one thing we don’t have in this country, like for example, where media monitoring companies in Europe need to pay by role, need to pay the publishers for use of that content. And they do that through collective organizations, re-productions rights organizations, things of that nature. In the U.S., the laws aren’t similar to the EU. So right now, they’re doing a little bit unchecked.

DG: Okay.

PG: So one of the things that we’re going to have to do in this country is, (1), we need to get the laws updated so that copyright means something. And (2) is whether it is an existing organization or development of an organization, a collective rights organization to... because it’s going to be impossible for machine learning to do deals with every single publisher, just too many of different sizes. I mean, yeah, if you’re doing the New York Times, it’s easy to do that deal. But if you’re doing a small B2B publisher who has good content, well, it’s just a lot to manage. But I think that smart publishers are going to take advantage of the technology, and also start to benefit from the use of that technology of their content.

DG: Right. Wow, wow. And so Paul, your business, of course, is international.

PG: Yes.

DG: A majority of your clients, do they come from outside the U.S., or Europe, or is it like 50-50 or a third, a third, and a third?

PG: Yeah, I think, well, most of our clients are U.S. based, but we have publishers in different countries. We are, you know, international. So, again, really a lot of our licensing deals, if you look at licensing, I put it in two buckets, wholesale licensing and retail licensing. Wholesale being your big aggregators and things of that nature. Retail being individual licensing deals with publishers in different countries, or companies that do medical conferences, that need content for those conferences, more of that kind of individual-type deals. The other thing, too, is we’re not just content. I mean, we’ve done licensing or theme parks in different parts of the world.

DG: Wow.

PG: And yeah, unfortunately that one didn’t work out, but we were very much involved with that. As well as licensing a brand, because a publisher or content owner has a brand. And that brand alone can be licensed to an event in, say, India or Singapore.

DG: Because it gives that event that credibility.

PG: Exactly.

DG: You know, it’s funny you should mention that. I just finished watching the movie Air on Amazon Prime.

PG: Yep, I haven’t seen it yet. But yes.

DG: And the guy who designed the actual first shoe, two things he did. He came up with the name Air Jordan. Then he saw the picture of Michael Jordan slamming with the legs.

PG: Yeah.

DG: He designed that logo. When you see that logo, you know that logo means champion, you know that logo means quality. It’s amazing.

PG: Well. And it’s funny, I think, that whenever I get into a discussion about brand and I get into a little bit of a disagreement with the person discussing it, I always go, “I got 28 books on branding on my business shelf right now.” Because people don’t realize the importance of brand.

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DG: Right.

PG: I don’t care what industry you’re in. People buy from companies they know, that they trust or perceive as thought leaders.

DG: Yes.

PG: So whether it’s in the industrial space, or it’s in the consumer space, or in the scholarly space, a brand can have great power.

DG: Yeah. I’ve got a question for you. I was thinking, I know you go to the Charleston conference every year.

PG: Yes.

DG: Have you been approaching universities about content licensing? They have so much different content that they create. They got the institutional repositories. Have you found that to be a source of revenue for universities?

PG: Yeah, I mean, we’ve done some work for some university presses over the years. And yes, I think that university presses can generate revenue for their universities or even their own division to create more content and develop more. Again, for me, content, whether it’s university press or B2B or B2C, it’s content. It is information that can be used. And I often equate content like water. The information — the content — will take the form of whatever container you put it in. Yeah. And I stole that analogy from Anthea Stratigos from Outsell who taught me that in 2004 oh, my God. It must have been 2008, my first Outsell Conference.

DG: Of course.

PG: But it stuck with me because if you look at content as information that can be crunched and manipulated and moved, and take the form of any bucket you put it in, now you’re no longer thinking well, this is university press content or this is a newspaper content, this is data. It’s not defined by the bucket where it came from. Let it define itself in the use of by industry and by the marketplace.

DG: That’s a phenomenal point, Paul. Paul, believe it or not, we’re running out of time. I tell you...

PG: Oh, no!

DG: Yeah, time goes fast. I did want to ask you about what companies like Underline are doing with video content.

PG: Yeah.

DG: It’s early days. What is your prediction about video, scientific conference lecture video content?

PG: Yeah. So first of all, I think Underline’s business model is a great business model. And for spirit of full disclosure, I licensed some of my clients’ content to Underline. I think that the concept of creating a platform that is searchable, that is viewable, that can be licensed to libraries and universities for use by the students and professors, and things of that nature, are important. I think, video content, we’re doing a lot of work in that space, especially if you get to create transcripts on your videos.

DG: Yes.

PG: It creates a whole new opportunity. It broadens out the usage, both in its discoverability with search and the ability to translate, especially if timestamped transcripts, closed captioning, could be used in China or other parts of the world in local languages. The other thing, I think, about content and why video and podcast, by the way, are so important is everybody learns differently.

DG: Yes, yes, yes.

PG: Everybody has a learning style. Some people can read and learn. Some people have to hear it to understand it and to digest it. Some people need the visuals to help them and hearing it to help them process it. So creating the different formats of video or content to get your information out there, I think, is critical.

DG: Wow. And so what is your thoughts about the remainder of the year that we see here with ChatGPT. There’s a lot of concern in scholarly publishing, about authors who are creating articles using ChatGPT. And I recently saw a publisher, Anderson Publishing, add to their, not disclaimer, but their rules that the authors must disclose if they use ChatGPT, where did it reside in the article. Well, what are your thoughts about using ChatGPT to create articles?

PG: Yeah, and this really goes to a bigger, broader question about journalism and scholarly publishing. Somebody once said to me, just because somebody is an influencer or puts content on the web, doesn’t mean that they’re a journalist and the reality is that a lot of people are not journalists. Frank Bilotto, who does some legal work for me, speaks about the issues of people who write about topics but are not experts.

DG: The 360 guy!

PG: The 360 guy. He said on a video of his own that, if you were a mediocre or worse journalist, you got a lot to be worried about. If you’re a great journalist, you don’t.

DG: Right.

PG: And the reason being is that, (1), people should know who’s writing the article. So you should have a byline. And if it’s AI, then the AI should be defined as a byline. Second of all, again, if you think about the fact that content from the ChatGPT has been created off of content it scraped off the web.

DG: Right.

PG: So the attribution of all the places ChatGPT got the information to create that should be at the end of every article.

DG: Right.

PG: Right?

DG: Patience, right?

PG: Oh, I’m telling you. So the point being is that I think, ChatGPT is going to change the way we do business, especially in writing content.

DG: Okay.

PG: You know, I wrote my first press release on ChatGPT.

DG: Oh, wow.

PG: Now, I had to change it, and I had to adjust it and I actually gave it to Reed Griffin, who’s a writer I work with, who is really great, to really make it look good. But it was good enough for me to get away with, if I handed it to you. But I think that it’s going to challenge scholarly journals, especially, because the ease of creating content, the barriers to entry of becoming a content creator has dropped tremendously.

DG: Okay. Believe it or not, we have come to the close of our interview. Thank you for being a guest on The Innovators Saga!

PG: Darrell, thank you very much for having me.

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Transcribed from the radio interview Leadership with Darrell W. Gunter.

Matthew Ismail

Editor in Chief, Charleston Briefings; Founder, Dost Meditation

By Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Hub) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com>

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

ATG: You’ve had a varied career in many parts of the world. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional background?

MI: Well, let’s see…I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. My father, Yuksel Mehmet Ismail, was an immigrant from Syria who came to the U.S. in the late 1950s to get a BA. (He spoke Turkish, Cicassian, Arabic, French and English, if that gives you a sense of the cultural environment in which he grew up.) He started in Engineering and finished with a PhD in French and Comparative Literature and taught for many years at Hiram College, in Hiram, Ohio. My brother and I grew up with a father who quoted Montaigne and laughed with delight as he read outrageous passages to us from Rabelais. He also told us wonderful stories about growing up in Damascus. My mother, Judith Walker, was born in Boston and was the daughter of Salvation Army officers. I was actually born in Booth Memorial Hospital, which was run by the Salvation Army. My mother elected not to become a Salvation Army officer, herself, and instead studied French in college and embarked upon a lifelong spiritual quest thereafter (with time out to be the Registrar at Hiram College). It was a pretty interesting home.

Like many kids who respect their parents, I decided that I wanted to be a professor, like my father. After the ups and downs of an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern History (Ohio State), an MA in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society (Minnesota), and an AM in Modern European Intellectual History (University of Chicago), I decided that I didn’t want to be an academic. I loved reading and writing, doing research — but not academe. So, suddenly I was faced with the need to make a living by means other than being a professor, which is something I had not previously considered. At the suggestion of the library director at Hiram College, I got an MLS in 1994 and spent the next twenty-some years as a collection development librarian. I worked six years in the United Arab Emirates and six years in Egypt at the American University in Cairo. We left Cairo in 2011 when the Mubarak regime collapsed and I was concerned for the wellbeing of my children in the disorder that resulted.

ATG: You’ve recently made quite the transition, from being a librarian at Central Michigan University to living full-time in Mexico and starting your own yoga and meditation center, while still keeping a foot in the library/publishing world. Tell us more about that! How did you get involved with yoga and meditation?

MI: Meditation … I could go on about this all day! But I’ll spare you. I began to meditate in 2015 during a midlife crisis. All I wanted to do was relax. I was struggling with all of the

usual midlife crisis questions about how I had botched things so badly in planning my life up to that point. I had always assumed that being a famous (or at least “noted”) historian, writer, scholar, novelist, and speaker would provide the groundwork of a happy and fulfilled life. And yet, here I was, middle aged, divorced, so lost in my books and writing that I had lost touch with living (to paraphrase Nietzsche!), and certainly much more skeptical of the stories I had been telling myself about who I was and what would make a meaningful life.

Meditation, in fact, didn’t just help me to relax — though it did eliminate my insomnia after a couple of months — but gave me a deeper insight into how we structure our lives around stories about who we (and others) are, stories that we pick up from parents, peers, teachers, professors, literature, movies, the media … And how, in meditation, when all of those stories drop away, we are able to rest in a deeper sense of Self that is absolutely free and without limit. We start being able to sit as a patient and skeptical witness to the antics of the conditioned and contingent self, which we no longer mistake as the sum of who we are. We can let go of the baggage of these stories and their associated emotions and get on with living.

At any rate, meditation transformed my life so much that I wanted to teach it. I am a certified iRest Yoga Nidra Meditation teacher and I have been teaching meditation for six or seven years. I did a 200 hour yoga teacher training during the COVID lockdown and I have taught yoga asana, as well, including a chair yoga session at Charleston.

And when I was in a position to do so in 2021, I quit my job in Michigan and moved to Mexico, which I love, and where I live with my beautiful partner, Angelica, who is also a yoga teacher. I have taught meditation in yoga studios in Puerto Escondido and Playa del Carmen in Mexico and am busy establishing a tantric meditation center with another spiritual teacher.

ATG: In addition to Dost Meditation, you are involved with the Charleston Hub in a myriad of ways. Podcasts, the Charleston Briefings, Conference Director, and more. Can you tell our readers about why you decided to stay involved, and what are some of your favorite current projects?

MI: I became involved with the Fiesole Collection Development Retreats when I was working in libraries in the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. I went to meetings, as I recall, in Oxford and Fiesole, and it was there that I came into contact with Katina, Leah, and others associated with the Charleston Conference. When I came back to the U.S. in 2011, I began to attend the Charleston Conference, itself. I have always found

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Charleston to be an atmosphere congenial to new ideas, which matters to me, and I began to examine the process of publishing and the world of scholarly communication with an eye to the future and to transformative technologies. I proposed to Katina a brief book series in 2014, and this resulted in the Charleston Briefings: Trending Topics for Information Professionals, a series of brief books on topics in scholarly communication — the latest of which is Simon Linacre’s very successful briefing called The Predator Effect: Understanding the Past, Present and Future of Deceptive Academic Journals.

I have also been doing podcasts for a few years now, and I really enjoy sitting down and talking to interesting people on ATG the Podcast. It’s wonderful to talk to entrepreneurs and to people who are thinking differently about scholarly communication. These podcasts are so much more than rehearsing a company’s talking points — people open up and really get into the topics and dig into the future of scholarly communications. I love it! The Charleston Hub is really a wonderful place for someone like me. I truly appreciate the people and the environment …

ATG: You’re also a published author and now a publisher through Dost Publications! Tell us about your books, and how you moved into the publishing world.

MI: I published a historical biography of Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, a famous Victorian and Edwardian Egyptologist in the British Museum, called Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo. I did a huge amount of research and writing for this book between 2001 and 2009, reading at home in my study and making research trips to the British Museum, British Library, and Oxford University. The writing of this book was a labor of love, since there was no academic reason to write it (tenure or promotion), and my goal was to write a scholarly work that was also a joy to read. I finally published the book with a traditional publisher in 2011, when eBooks were beginning to make a huge impact on scholarly publishing. The publisher, however, refused to create an eBook because they said there was no market for scholarly eBooks. Instead, the print book was priced at $65.00 (beyond what most individuals would ever pay) and I was expected to be the primary marketer to institutional buyers. I wasn’t particularly happy with this arrangement!

So, after a decade of having no eBook and doing all of the marketing myself, I decided that I would obtain the rights back from the original publisher and establish my own publishing venture, Dost Publishing. I have published a revised edition of Wallis Budge, including a Kindle version, and am considering what else I might publish under that imprint.

I have to say, publishing a book with a traditional publisher and then learning a lot about the transformation of scholarly publishing in my work with Charleston has opened my eyes to the virtues of both traditional publishers and publishing mavericks. I decided to become an independent publisher because I have my own ideas about what I want to achieve, and I didn’t want to spend any more time trying to drag others along for the ride …

ATG: What is your favorite thing about living in Mexico?

MI: Mexico is a wonderful place. Beautiful climate, spectacular places on the Pacific coast, fascinating archaeological and architectural history, fantastic food, easy going and polite people, a culture very different from the U.S. It may be just south of the border, but it is very much a part of Latin America and the culture is very cool and relaxed (for the most part!). I live pretty much as a Mexican these days, in Oaxaca, though I am still trying to learn Spanish, and learning every day all sorts

of things about the people and culture. Oaxaca is an important foodie stop in Mexico and the cuisine is definitely a fabulous attribute of the city. A tlayuda and a Bohemia Clara is a pretty decent Friday night meal at Los Combinados! Sometimes my brother sends me some money for a birthday and Angelica and I eat at restaurants we couldn’t otherwise afford — and this is also pretty great.

My favorite places in Mexico are Puerto Escondido and Mexico City, which are very different places, of course. Mexico City is a world city — you walk around Colonia Roma or the Zocolo and feel as if you were in Europe. Very cosmopolitan. Puerto is a surfing town on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, and it attracts a very casual, adventurous, curious brand of world and Mexican traveler. I would love to live in Puerto, but its popularity makes it prohibitively expensive for a dropout like me …

ATG: What future do you see for librarians and publishers in a world of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT?

MI: To the extent that I am qualified to answer this … The greatest strength of AIs, at the moment, is in addressing structured and routine tasks. Things that are repetitive and rule-based and thus amenable to the strengths of a machine powered by a computer.

Frankly, I think that in libraries there are too many people doing routine work that can be effectively automated through various AIs — and too many peoples’ eyes are opening to this fact too late. The notion that teaching information literacy was going to be the raison d’etre of libraries in the age of open access and outsourced collections will not, I suspect, prove to be the savior people were hoping for. I’ve talked to a variety of clever entrepreneurs on the podcast who will continue to find innovative ways to support faculty and student research in this networked age — innovative technologies such as iris.ai, TooWrite or Yewno that are online and very well integrated into the workflows of the present-day faculty or student researcher. There are libraries such as the University of Michigan or Arizona State that are making pretty significant changes to remain relevant, but there are also many libraries in which people are just complaining about change and wishing it weren’t happening. I’m afraid that nimble and innovative entrepreneurs are going to eat the lunch of those libraries that complain and won’t change.

As for publishers … It seems to me that AI isn’t the immediate problem for them since they will restructure and integrate AI much more readily than will academe. The obsession with open access among librarians and some very vocal researchers and funders has, I believe, left the publishing sector rather vulnerable. As publishers have worked hard to comply with the demand that they be open — and they also strive to remain profitable by publishing as many articles as possible to collect APCs — there has developed a culture of fraud and misconduct among unethical actors such as predatory publishers, paper mills, and authors looking for a shortcut to tenure or promotion. Since there has also emerged a widespread belief in Western culture that there is no such thing as truth, only overtly or covertly expressed political allegiance (“Everything’s political!”) science, itself, has come to be widely regarded as little more than a vehicle to provide a ride for the author’s ideology. This is a recipe for scientific disaster.

The reproducibility crisis — the fact that many (most?) published research findings cannot be reproduced by another researcher — simply deepens the feeling that peer review isn’t continued on page 70

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ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Dr. K. Matthew Dames

Edward H. Arnold Dean, Hesburgh Libraries and University of Notre Dame Press University of Notre Dame

284

Hesburgh Library, Notre Dame, IN 46556

<libdean@nd.edu>

https://www.library.nd.edu/

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: By 2030, those working in librarianship either will have discovered effective ways to (1) truly partner with scholars, (2) add value to the work in the academy, and (3) promote such work and value, or most of us will be looking for employment elsewhere. There now is no place to hide for those without skills or hustle.

Daniela Duca Head of Product Innovation

Sage Publishing

1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London, EC1Y 1SP

<daniela.duca@sagepub.co.uk>

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/home

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: My academic background includes a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry, with handson experience in organic chemistry and molecular biology laboratories. I also ventured into the exciting world of fintech for a while, as I discovered my passion for improving education and research. Pursuing my fascination with corporate innovation strategies, I earned a Ph.D. in Innovation Management. Fortunately, my current position as the Head of Product Innovation at Sage allows me to synergize my passion for higher education, innovation skills, and technological curiosity.

IN MY SPARE TIME: I walk around London, love finding new streets, and being surprised by places where people live or hang out. I paint when I have time, had a few exhibitions, and had some success in selling my art.

FAVORITE BOOKS: From the serious bunch, my favorites are The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, The Secret to Our Progress by Joseph Henrich, Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. From the fun bunch, I love Patrick DeWitt’s novels. PET PEEVES: Getting caught in the rain or needing to go somewhere when it rains. Of course, I should have picked a different country to live in!

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: In the next five years, academic libraries will serve as indispensable intermediaries for the ever-increasing number of generative models developed across private and non-profit sectors. Given their long-standing role as content gatekeepers, librarians possess the necessary expertise and experience in curating credible and relevant resources for academic research and teaching. As such, their role will expand to include nurturing the development of AI technologies, particularly in the realm of generative AI. Academic libraries will steadfastly advance open access for scholarly communications, further fostering collaboration and innovation across institutions via strategic partnerships and consortia. Furthermore, libraries will continue to champion inclusive access, mandating compliance with accessibility standards for all content and tools while also aligning their objectives with institutional goals to support degree attainment. In anticipation of evolving student needs, libraries will proactively engage

with learning technology teams to enhance student retention and success, cementing their role as crucial facilitators of academic excellence.

Martha Sedgwick

Vice President of Innovation, Learning & Research

Sage Publishing

1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road

London, EC1Y 1SP

Phone: 0207 324 8500

<martha.sedgwick@sagepub.co.uk>

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/home

BORN AND LIVED: London and Brighton.

EARLY LIFE: Born in London, went to university in York and then returned to London.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: Martha is VP Innovation – Research & Learning at Sage. She is responsible for the Product and UX functions developing Sage’s library products, the Technology from Sage division, and Sage’s Open Access journals publishing. Martha can be followed on Twitter @sedgwick_martha

FAMILY: In London I live with my partner and my 6 year old son.

IN MY SPARE TIME: I am running a campaign to improve pedestrian safety at our local roundabout in Bow and I’m also chair of the local board for my son’s school.

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Joining Sage.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: More open, more accessible, more automated, but with the same values and made possible through the passion and skill of the talented people working together driven by the mission that education and research make the world better.

Kimberley Simpson

Head of Brand Marketing

Technology from Sage

1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road

London, EC1Y 1SP

<Kimberley.simpson@technologyfromsage.com>

https://www.technologyfromsage.com/

BORN AND LIVED: Surrey, England.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: I’ve always worked in academic marketing at Sage, I started in journals marketing, then moved into author marketing, followed by books marketing, and am currently working in brand marketing for Technology from Sage.

IN MY SPARE TIME: I enjoy long countryside walks with my partner and exploring art galleries and museums in London. I also love the theatre, so often spend a Saturday in the West End seeing a play or musical.

FAVORITE BOOKS: Atonement, Dear Life, Emma, Far From the Madding Crowd, Tender is the Night

PHILOSOPHY: “One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.” — Stephen Hawking

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MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Yet to happen, hopefully!

GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: I’d like to be a Marketing Director one day. Having now worked on several different products and markets I’ve learnt a lot about the needs of academics, faculty, students, reseachers and librarians.

Matthew Weldon

EdTech

Success Consultant

Technology from Sage

Phone: 07565 789364

<matthew.weldon@talis.com>

https://www.technologyfromsage.com/

BORN AND LIVED: Glasgow.

IN MY SPARE TIME: Long walks with an audiobook or a podcast!

FAVORITE BOOKS: I have multiple shelves at home that are filled exclusively with Star Wars novels — so anything Star Wars, I suppose.

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: When I was working at a university, I won a “Best Support Staff” award. The fact that it was voted for by students made it all the more memorable — it was really touching.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: In five years the industry will be rising to meet new challenges we haven’t even thought of yet!

Tony Zanders

Founder & CEO, Skilltype

1116 S 14th Street

Baton Rouge, LA 70802

Phone: (225) 405-1345 <tony@skilltype.com> Skilltype.com

BORN AND LIVED: New Orleans, LA.

EARLY LIFE: New Orleans, LA.

FAMILY: Wife and three kids.

IN MY SPARE TIME: Coaching baseball and flag football.

FAVORITE BOOKS: Shoe Dog, Bonhoeffer, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, and David and Goliath

PET PEEVES: People who don’t take their jobs seriously and siphon space and resources from those who want to.

PHILOSOPHY: The world would be more beautiful if everyone mastered their craft.

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Starting a company during a global pandemic.

GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: To upskill library workers in over 100 countries.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: Library workers of all ranks, roles, and backgrounds will have equal access to opportunities to grow and develop their careers, and libraries of all types and sizes will have equal access to generate revenue and put their organizations onto a sustainable path.

LIBRARY PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Gibson D. Lewis Health Science Library

955 Montgomery Street

Birmingham City University

15 Bartholomew Row

Birmingham B5 5JU, UK

https://www.bcu.ac.uk/library

NUMBER OF STAFF AND RESPONSIBILITIES: ~90

DO YOU HAVE A DISCOVERY SYSTEM? Yes, Alma/Primo. DOES YOUR LIBRARY HAVE A COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT OR SIMILAR DEPARTMENT? Yes.

IF SO, WHAT IS YOUR BUDGET AND WHAT TYPES OF MATERIALS ARE YOU PURCHASING? PRINT OR ELECTRONIC OR BOTH? Both.

Fort Worth, Texas 76107

Phone: (817) 735-2465

https://library.unthsc.edu

BACKGROUND/HISTORY: The library’s initial purpose was to support the privately funded Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine (TCOM), founded in 1970. TCOM began receiving state support in 1975, under the auspices of the North Texas State University (now University of North Texas) Board of Regents. The current library building opened in late 1986 and was renamed the Gibson D. Lewis Health Science Library, after the former Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, in 1993. With the addition of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, also in 1993, TCOM became the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Starting in 1995, a Master’s in Public Health degree was added to the academic programs; the School of Public Health was created in 1999. A Physician Assistant Studies Program followed in 1999 and, most recently, a Physical Therapy program in 2010. Both PA and PT Studies are part of the School of Health Professions. A Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D) degree program, offered by the newly formed UNT System College of Pharmacy, is began in Fall of 2013. And the collaborative TCU/UNTHSC

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Curzon Library, Mary Seacole Library, School of Art Library, School of Jewellery Library

MD School opened in July of 2019 with its first class of 60 students. In 2022, it was announced that the TCU/UNTHSC MD School would sever its relationship and continue on as the TCU School of Medicine. The fall of 2022 an online bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences was introduced to the curriculum. And in the spring of 2023 it was announced that the university was developing the new College of Nursing with a proposed start date in the fall of 2024.

At its inception, the library’s collection consisted of 400 medical texts and a handful of journals. The collection was greatly increased by a National Library of Medicine Resource Improvement Grant obtained one year later. Subsequently, the library’s collection grew substantially to keep pace with the expansion of academic programs on campus. Like its parent organization, Lewis Library has maintained a commitment to community outreach since its founding. It was named a resource library for the National Network of Libraries of Medicine in 1991, and began providing information literacy programming via National Library of Medicine resources to a designated geographic region in North Texas. Over the last decade, the library has turned increasingly to electronic resources to meet the information needs of its users. Beginning in 2011, the library withdrew the majority of its print journal collection and invested in electronic access to older journal volumes. A significant number of print monographic materials, mainly older clinical texts, were also withdrawn. More recently, the library has investigated open access and other alternative publishing models as a means of combating product inflation. It is expected that the conversion to digital content will continue as will the current interest in open access publishing and self- archiving. A further reduction in print volumes occurred in 2019, due to the robust electronic collection held by the library.

NUMBER OF STAFF AND RESPONSIBILITIES: 30 total staff across 3 libraries (Gibson D. Lewis Health Science Library, John S. Marietta Memorial Medical Library, NNLM Region 3, Regional Medical Library).

TYPES OF MATERIALS YOU BUY (EBOOKS, TEXTBOOKS, DVDS, VIDEO STREAMING SERVICES, DATABASES, OTHER): eBooks, textbooks, databases, print materials only if electronic access is not available, limited video streaming.

WHAT TECHNOLOGIES DOES YOUR LIBRARY USE TO SERVE MOBILE USERS? Virtual chat, email.

DOES YOUR LIBRARY HAVE AN ILS OR ARE YOU PART OF A COLLABORATIVE ILS? We use OCLC Worldshare Management Services (WMS).

DO YOU HAVE A DISCOVERY SYSTEM? Yes. WMS includes Worldshare Discovery.

DOES YOUR LIBRARY HAVE A COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT OR SIMILAR DEPARTMENT? No. Collection development is by committee appointment. The committee approvals all major library expenditures. Committee membership is comprised of: Electronic Resources & Acquisitions Librarian (chair), Metadata Librarian, Copyright & OER Strategist, JPS Library Manager, all liaison Librarians, and one member of library administration (by invitation).

IF SO, WHAT IS YOUR BUDGET AND WHAT TYPES OF MATERIALS ARE YOU PURCHASING? PRINT OR ELECTRONIC OR BOTH? 2.5 Million. We purchase mainly electronic materials. Print is only selected if electronic is not an option.

WHAT PROPORTION OF YOUR MATERIALS ARE LEASED AND NOT OWNED? 76% including software and memberships.

National University of Lesotho

Maseru, Lesotho

Phone: +26657889513

https://www.nul.ls/nul-library/

BACKGROUND/HISTORY: Academic Library.

NUMBER OF STAFF AND RESPONSIBILITIES: 37 staff members. OVERALL LIBRARY BUDGET: 500,000-1,000,000.

TYPES OF MATERIALS YOU BUY (EBOOKS, TEXTBOOKS, DVDS, VIDEO STREAMING SERVICES, DATABASES, OTHER): eBooks,textbooks,databases.

DOES YOUR LIBRARY HAVE AN ILS OR ARE YOU PART OF A COLLABORATIVE ILS? ILS.

DO YOU HAVE A DISCOVERY SYSTEM? EDS.

DOES YOUR LIBRARY HAVE A COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT OR SIMILAR DEPARTMENT? Yes.

IF SO, WHAT IS YOUR BUDGET AND WHAT TYPES OF MATERIALS ARE YOU PURCHASING? PRINT OR ELECTRONIC OR BOTH? Both.

WHAT PROPORTION OF YOUR MATERIALS ARE LEASED AND NOT OWNED? Databses leased, e Books bought.

WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR LIBRARY WILL BE LIKE IN FIVE YEARS? We have plans to refurbish the library.

WHAT EXCITES OR FRIGHTENS YOU ABOUT THE NEXT FIVE YEARS? AI development.

ATG Interviews Matthew Ismail continued from page 67

working properly to vet new research and that publishers are not sufficiently careful about the integrity of what they are publishing.

It seems to me that the most crucial issue for scholarly publishing today is not open access, but preserving — or perhaps rediscovering — the integrity of published scientific research in an environment in which many are losing their trust in both science and published research results. If many readers only

believe what reinforces their ideology and publishers acquiesce in this state of affairs, then publishers will become little more than partisan enablers, more like ideological newsletters that update the faithful with “approved” research results than publishers of challenging and objective scientific research. It’s hard to buck broad cultural trends, but publishers, it seems to me, need to stiffen their backs and get back to basics …

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COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Skilltype, Inc

1116 S 14th Street

Baton Rouge, LA 70802

Phone: 1-888-700-8317

Skilltype.com

AFFILIATED COMPANIES: Skilltype, Inc.

OFFICERS: Tony Zanders (Founder & CEO), Christine Quirion (COO), Johnny Boursiquot (CTO)

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: Skilltype talent management platform.

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Academic and public librareis.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 12

HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: Founded in 2018, Skilltype is a talent management platform that uses data to identify a library’s skill gaps and create personalized training plans for every employee. The product launched to nine libraries in summer 2020 and serves more than 150 libraries across five countries and counting. A key feature of Skilltype’s is its global library training database comprised of over 5,000 trainings from over 100 training providers including CNI, Charleston Conference, RLUK, UKSG, Liber, ELUNA, BCALA, and more. In 2023, the company began to receive outside investment from library vendors such as Sage Publishing to expand its reach globally.

Back Talk continued from page 72

We hope that someone else cares by that time to take over the curation of the past that ProQuest has accumulated, but we also have strategies for preservation from our colleagues of the Internet Archive, at LOCKSS, at CLOCKSS, at Portico, and similar initiatives to fall back on. We can hope.

The scary lesson I learned from this experience is that it’s not all about preserving the 1s and zeroes in the right order. The reason digital Patrologia could be so useful was that the people who created it understood the print resource they were emulating and took the time and trouble to reproduce its functionality, first in the way they structured the metadata and second in the way they structured the search engine and its interface to its users. Those things also need to be preserved if digital preservation is to be effective, but they require a much more intentional and sophisticated assessment of the data.

I spend enough time already worrying whether folks will continue to learn Latin to pursue studies that I think are important. But now I get to worry about the ownership, the

Technology from Sage

1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London, EC1Y 1SP

https://www.technologyfromsage.com/

AFFILIATED COMPANIES: Sage Publishing

OFFICERS: Matt Hayes, MD.

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: Lean Library, Talis and Sciwheel.

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Academic librarians and students/ researchers in UK, US, EMEA.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 70

HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: Technology from Sage — A suite of library technologies that improve your patrons’ workflow. We believe the right technology can remove barriers to knowledge. So we curated a suite of library technologies that improve your patrons’ workflow — from managing reading lists to discovering online resources and reference management. Whether used individually or in combination, our Talis Aspire, Talis Elevate, Lean Library, and Sciwheel technologies amplify the library’s value on campus, prepare your library for the future, and are backed by the Sage name you already trust.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT YOU THINK WOULD BE OF INTEREST TO OUR READERS? Technology from Sage has collaborated with The Charleston Hub to guest edit the June 2023 issue of their flagship publication Against the Grain. The theme for this issue is the future of the library and it will explore emerging tech, skills, research trends, and more. We hope you enjoy this issue.

management, the transition, the care, and the attention to user experience and user interface that makes the critical difference between having a whole lot of digits on your hard drive, and having a genuinely useful resource.

I began this column hoping I could end by saying we’ll know if we’re successful with digital preservation if we check back in 950 years, but now I’m afraid I have to say, check back in 10 years and let’s hope we get lucky. I’d rather not have to rely on luck.

Endnotes

1. Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey has now published his memoir as a leader in digital publishing: Publishing for Libraries: At the Dawn of the Digital Age (2020).

2. His biography is by Howard Bloch, God’s Plagiarist (1994).

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Back Talk — A Lesson from the Middle Ages about Digital Preservation

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

Ionce wrote about a medieval manuscript copied in the sixth century A.D. and then lost for about 1000 years because somebody had tossed it up on the top of an armoire in their monastery library and just forgot it was there. When they took it down in 1711, it was good as new. The scholar who found it printed it, and it became part of the established record of the ancient world.

That’s one kind of preservation that we all know about, and it can be very successful: do everything by hand, do it on animal skins with durable ink, bind it carefully, leave it in an almost climate-controlled environment, and it’ll do just fine, even for a thousand years.

But I have a different story to tell about preservation in our time. It starts in the early 1990s when the publishing house of Chadwick-Healey saw the opportunity in digital information and began looking for works of established scholarship that could be digitized and made available through libraries to scholars and users around the world.1 They chose a remarkable publishing accomplishment of a former age: Patrologia Latina, a 225-volume comprehensive set of the Latin works of early Christian writers between the years 200 and 1200 A.D. The set was published and priced to sell to village priests in the mid19th century by an obsessive French clergyman, the Abbé Migne, whose career we know best because we have his Paris police dossier to go by.2 This set was for over 100 years the standard place one consulted to find anything written by Christian authorities in Latin before the year 1200. Modern editions have begun to replace and supplement what was in this great set, but on the other hand, some parts of it are still indispensable, and its role as a standard reference for 100 years has given it a continuing canonical authority in many respects.

When Chadwick-Healey digitized Patrologia, many of us were alarmed by publishers taking out-of-copyright, public-domain content and monetizing it by digitization, and we were alarmed because we’d never seen this done before. Now it happens all the time.

But Chadwick-Healey did a very good job on this complicated set of books. The volumes are reprint editions of these authors from as far back as the 16th century all the way to the 19th century, usually with an abundance of other Latin text in them by way of introductions, biographies, footnotes, appendices, and that sort of thing. Chadwick-Healey had the set digitized by double-keying offshore as we are now familiar with, and then proofread the living daylights out of that. I’ve been using this set myself for 30 years and I have to say they did a good job. I can search for unusual words, quotations from authors, authors who quote the Bible, etc.: specialty searches of very high value. I’ve reconciled myself to paying for public-domain content — and by now it’s not very expensive at all.

But publishers come and go. Readers of this column will mostly recognize that Chadwick-Healey sold up a long time ago to Bell and Howell, which in turn was swallowed up by ProQuest in 2001.

When ProQuest took over, it kept Patrologia exactly as it was, and those of us who were used to it continued exactly as we had. But about six months ago, ProQuest decided that it would incorporate the resource into their larger set of databases and make it available under a generic search engine interface that it uses for many of their collections.

When I began to use the new interface, I was mightily frustrated. Searches that should have brought up 1,000 hits came up, empty, but worse than that. The specialty searches were hard and sometimes impossible to do. For example, if I want to search for an unusual theological term in medieval texts, I need to make sure that the search is confined to texts actually written between 200 and 1200. But the complete database is full of all of those introductions, conclusions, etc. In the former Patrologia database, it was easy to do a search, restricted to medieval authors only. In the new ProQuest interface, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible.

Other scholars are equally frustrated, some giving up entirely. Luckily, I am now in the library profession myself and have ProQuest representatives I know and can talk to, so I raised the question. The good news is they are taking the issue seriously, and we have hopes that there will be restoration of functionality sometime soon. Where the searches come up empty, there is a serious glitch in the structure of the database and the searching, and they need desperately to work on that. The specialty searches still need to be reproducible. When a user is doing the searches and getting frustrating results, they have no way of knowing the difference between a bad interface and a glitch, and they just go away, absolutely frustrated.

There are a couple of lessons from this. First preserving digits is possible. Yes, it’s a little scary when an important resource changes owners and we do have to worry about what happens at some future day — it will happen — when ProQuest is no more.

continued on page 71

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