Against the Grain V35#5, November 2023 Full Issue

c/o Annual Reviews P.O. Box 10139 Palo Alto, CA 94303-0139

VOLUME 35, NUMBER 5

NOVEMBER 2023 TM

“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”

ISSN: 1043-2094

Developing More Inclusive Monograph Collections Guest Edited by Doug Way

(Dean of Libraries, University of Kentucky) Begins on Page 14

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN THIS ISSUE: It Takes a Village: Approaches to Diversifying Monograph Collections.................................. 14 Finding Our Way Forward: A Roadmap for Anti-racist Collection Development.......... 16 Building Bibliodiversity in the Collective Collection through Consortial Acquisition of Small Publisher Content.......... 22 DEI and eBooks: Two Seismic Shifts in Academic Monograph Acquisition.................................. 26 No Single Solution: Increasing Author Equity in Scholarly Publishing and Library Collections.................................. 28 The Calls are Coming from Inside the Library!..................... 32

REGULAR COLUMNS Bet You Missed It....................... 10 Reader’s Roundup..................... 38 Booklover.................................... 44 Legally Speaking....................... 46 Questions and Answers............ 48 Wandering the Web.................. 50 Learning Belongs...................... 51 The Digital Toolbox.................. 54 Biz of Digital............................... 56 Back Talk..................................... 64

If Rumors Were Horses

W

ow! Conference time is almost here as I’m writing.

Hard to believe we’ll be seeing all of our friends and colleagues in beautiful downtown Charleston in just a few weeks. And some of you will be here when you read this! Be sure to find me and say hello while you’re here.

Grandmothering I have six lovely perfect grandkids! Three girls and three boys! This year only three were here — George (8), Porter (6), and Teddy (5)! They swam at the beach! Jumped in the pool in the backyard! Lost a lot of toys in the pool and had to dive deep to retrieve them. When it got cooler, they started drawing and playing games. George loves continued on page 8

INTERVIEWS Cadmore Media Partners......... 51 Peter Der Manuelian................ 60

PROFILES ENCOURAGED People, Library and Company Profiles........................................ 62 Plus more...................... See inside

ACS READ AND PUBLISH UK

41% 94%

published OA pre-agreement

publish OA currently

ITALY

14% 89%

published OA pre-agreement

26% 95%

published OA pre-agreement

publish OA currently

POLAND

7%

published OA pre-agreement

92% publish OA currently

publish OA currently

TÜRKIYE

SPAIN

11% 80%

published OA pre-agreement

SWEDEN

publish OA currently

11%

published OA pre-agreement

87%

publish OA currently

Authors whose institution has a read and publish agreement are more likely to publish open access.

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AGAINST THE GRAIN – ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094), Copyright 2023 by the name Against the Grain is published six times a year in February, April, June, September, November, and December/January by Against the Grain, LLC. Mailing Address: Annual Reviews, PO Box 10139, Palo Alto, CA 94303-0139. Subscribe online at https://www.charleston-hub.com/membership-options/.

Editor Emerita: Katina Strauch (College of Charleston, Retired) Editor: Leah Hinds (Charleston Hub) Manager: Caroline Goldsmith (Charleston Hub) Research Editor: Judy Luther (Informed Strategies) International Editor: Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino) Contributing Editors: Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University) Rick Anderson (Brigham Young University) Sever Bordeianu (U. of New Mexico) Todd Carpenter (NISO) Ashley Krenelka Chase (Stetson Univ. College of Law) Eleanor Cook (East Carolina University) Kyle K. Courtney (Harvard University) Cris Ferguson (Murray State) Michelle Flinchbaugh (U. of MD Baltimore County) Dr. Sven Fund (Fullstopp) Tom Gilson (College of Charleston, Retired) Michael Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC) Bob Holley (Wayne State University, Retired) Matthew Ismail (Charleston Briefings) Donna Jacobs (MUSC, Retired) Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University) Myer Kutz (Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) Tom Leonhardt (Retired) Stacey Marien (American University) Jack Montgomery (Retired) Lesley Rice Montgomery (Tulane University) Alayne Mundt (American University) Bob Nardini (Retired) Jim O’Donnell (Arizona State University) Ann Okerson (Center for Research Libraries) David Parker (Lived Places Publishing) Genevieve Robinson (IGI Global) Steve Rosato (OverDrive Academic) Jared Seay (College of Charleston) Corey Seeman (University of Michigan) Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) Lindsay Wertman (IGI Global) Graphics: Bowles & Carver, Old English Cuts & Illustrations. Grafton, More Silhouettes. Ehmcke, Graphic Trade Symbols By German Designers. Grafton, Ready-to-Use Old-Fashioned Illustrations. The Chap Book Style.

Publisher: Annual Reviews, PO Box 10139 Palo Alto, CA 94303-0139 Production & Ad Sales: Toni Nix, Just Right Group, LLC., P.O. Box 412, Cottageville, SC 29435, phone: 843-835-8604 <justwrite@lowcountry.com> Advertising Information: Toni Nix, phone: 843-835-8604 <justwrite@lowcountry.com> Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to: Leah Hinds, Editor, Against the Grain <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com> Authors’ opinions are to be regarded as their own. All rights reserved. Produced in the United States of America.

Against the Grain is copyright ©2023

4

Against the Grain / November 2023

v.35 #5 November 2023 — © 2023

ISSUES, NEWS, & GOINGS ON Rumors............................................................................................................... 1 From Your Editor................................................................................................ 6 Letters to the Editor........................................................................................... 6 Advertising Deadlines........................................................................................ 6

FEATURES It Takes a Village: Approaches to Diversifying Monograph Collections.......... 14 Finding Our Way Forward: A Roadmap for Anti-racist Collection Development.................................................................................................... 16 Building Bibliodiversity in the Collective Collection through Consortial Acquisition of Small Publisher Content........................................................... 22 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and eBooks: Two Seismic Shifts in Academic Monograph Acquisition............................................................... 26 No Single Solution: Increasing Author Equity in Scholarly Publishing and Library Collections.................................................................................... 28 The Calls are Coming from Inside the Library!................................................ 32 Back Talk — Throwaway Books?....................................................................... 64

ATG SPECIAL REPORTS The Power of Collaboration: How Librarians and Publishers Can Restore Confidence in Research.................................................................................... 35

REVIEWS Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews.................... 38 Booklover — Lost Art....................................................................................... 44

LEGAL ISSUES Legally Speaking — Banning Bans, aka What’s Happening in Illinois.............. 46 Questions and Answers — Copyright Column.................................................. 48

PUBLISHING Bet You Missed It............................................................................................. 10

TECHNOLOGY & STANDARDS AND TEACHING & LEARNING Wandering the Web — Poet Laureate............................................................... 50 Learning Belongs in the Library — An Interview with the Cadmore Media Partners Five Years on from Founding............................................................. 51

BOOKSELLING AND VENDING The Digital Toolbox — From Margins to Mainstream: The Transformative Rise of Audiobooks as Essential Resources in University Libraries.................. 54 Biz of Digital — Supporting Digital Projects through Web Hosting Services.... 56

ATG INTERVIEWS & PROFILES People to Know — Peter Der Manuelian: Excavating the History of Egyptian Excavators......................................................................................... 60 Profiles Encouraged......................................................................................... 62

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From Your (grandmothering) Editor Emerita:

D

id you see the big news? The Charleston Hub, including the Charleston Conference and Against the Grain, have been acquired by the non-profit publisher Annual Reviews. We’re all excited about the new ownership but the transition is bittersweet for me from Editor to Editor Emerita. Leah will stay in her role as Executive Director for the Conference and now Editor for ATG, and we’ll be working together since I’m staying on as a consultant during the transition. So on with the show! And I have my grandkids visiting to keep me even busier than usual! See Rumors for all the details on their time with us here at Sullivans Island.

We have a fantastic November issue for you, guest edited by Doug Way, Dean of Libraries at the University of Kentucky. Doug has pulled together a great group of articles on the important topic of developing a more inclusive monograph collection. A group from University of Minnesota Twin Cities discusses their work towards anti-racist collection development; a group from Virginia discusses building

bibliodiversity through consortial purchases of small publisher content; Jon Elwell (EBSCO) tells us about DEI and eBooks; Kristen Twardowski (Northwestern University Press) reports on increasing author equity; and Nicole Cook (School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina) reflects on soft censorship that sometimes comes from within the library. We have a special report from Emily Singly (Elsevier) about the power of collaboration between libraries and publishers to restore confidence in research.

Matthew Ismail (Editor in Chief, Charleston Briefings) shares a fascinating interview with Peter Der Manuelian: Excavating the History of Egyptian Excavators. And Jim O’Donnell (Arizona State University) gives us the “Back Talk” on throwaway books, based on a concept presented at the Fiesole Retreat this past spring at the University of Basel.

Lots of ground to cover here, so let’s get cracking!

Love, Yr.Ed.

Letters to the Editor Send letters to <editors@against-the-grain.com>, or you can also send a letter to the editor from the Charleston Hub at http://www.charleston-hub.com/contact-us/.

Dear Editor: I’d like to comment on one of your “Tea Time With Katina and Leah” posts.

Your age, or mine, is showing. To me there is a difference between a manual, an electric, and an electronic typewriter.

Mark Twain did use a manual, completely mechanical typewriter.

You bought one that had either Pica or Courier typeface. In 1965, I’m sure electric were available, but manuals were not rare.

Those worked pretty much the same as manual but keys were easier to push and much higher typing speeds were possible.

Authors who could type liked electrics because they could get

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Against the Grain / November 2023

their thoughts onto paper faster. I was in high school in the early 70’s and took a summer school typing class that used an electric while at home we had a manual. Learning to keyboard was so far from universal that I knew someone who said she was not going to learn to type so she could not be stuck as a secretary. High School papers were usually handwritten and college students often hired someone to type their papers. Those IBM Selectrics were miracles. I see they were invented in 1961, but I didn’t see one until the late 70s. The correcting tapes came later, but actual correction was pretty mechanical, backspacing, type the bad letter to replace the black ink with white, and the type the correct word. Their type balls allowed multiple fonts but one still needed to hit the return key so the operation was not completely automatic. When I started as a librarian in 1986, it was all Selectrics with special card platens that held cards against the it. The Wheelwriter and Quietwiters of the late 80s were truly electronic. They “remembered” what you had typed and could do automatic carriage returns. But about the same time, Word Processors were beginning to overtake the typewriters and the computers with Word Processing software were not far behind. Typewriters seem a thing of the past, so now we get hand addressed envelopes that might have been typed in the past, and filling out forms by hand can result in unreadable information. You can see all comments on this post here: https://www.charleston-hub.com/2023/07/ tea-time-with-katina-and-leah-4/#comments.

Comment Submitted From: Barbara Swetman (Acquisitions and Serials Librarian, Hamilton College) <bswetman@hamilton.edu url>

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Rumors continued from page 1 chess and can sometimes beat his dad. Porter is an emerging artist. She draws awesome pictures of her grandma in her wheelchair.

Teddy is mister mischief.

The highlight of their visit was a trip to the Charleston Museum where they saw incredible skeletons of all kinds of dinosaurs. Oh! They got several pumpkins at the pumpkin patch (see photo on p.6)! Halloween is their favorite time. They design fancy costumes with paper mâché.

They will all go trick or treating!

Photos coming soon, I’ll be sure to share them in Tea Time so keep an eye out.

What wonderful people you meet living on the water at Sullivan’s Island! Just met Jake and Ruby and their teenage adult/children. They have come all the way from North Dakota and some of them have never seen the ocean! They have moved their business from North Dakota to North Charleston and their business is called Slime Community. My namesake ten-year-old granddaughter, Katina, is fascinated by slime and she also loves to cook pastries, so I am buying a “baking kit” for her immediately.

There are tons of flavors – strawberry, chocolate, eggs, pastel chip, peach pie kit, gumball machine. I know this sounds crazy but Katina, who will be visiting shortly, will be beyond the moon! I guess we have to go with the flow. Plus my son tells me that she is now into skin creams and beauty creams.

Mergers and Acquisitions Of course, our big news is that the Charleston Hub has been acquired by non-profit publisher Annual Reviews! I founded the Charleston Conference back in 1980 and will remain a consultant for the foreseeable future. Leah Hinds, Executive Director, will retain her role along with the rest of the staff. Everything you know and love about Charleston, under the same team and leadership, will continue with their additional support. Richard Gallagher, President and Editorin-Chief of Annual Reviews, said, “Libraries play a crucial role in ensuring that the research enterprise is impactful and equitable. This acquisition will preserve and extend a conference that addresses topics such as open science,

8

Against the Grain / November 2023

data curation, and the role of artificial intelligence. We are excited to add the conference, Against the Grain, and other key Charleston Hub products to the Annual Reviews portfolio.

It reinforces our commitment to the knowledge community, following our acquisition of The Charleston Advisor last year.”

This news will be discussed in person at the Opening Keynote of the Charleston Conference by Richard Gallagher, Katina Strauch, and Leah Hinds. Be there or be square!

In other mergers and acquisitions news, De Gruyter has acquired Brill for €51.5m! From the press release: “The combination of two centuries-old publishing houses will be branded De Gruyter Brill, signaling the importance of the strong heritage and family background of both companies. Upon the closing of the transaction, De Gruyter Brill headquarters will be in Berlin, Germany, while Brill’s office in Leiden, the Netherlands, will be the second largest office of the new combination and will continue to have material substance, both in number of people and in terms of responsibilities. De Gruyter’s shareholders are dedicated to ensuring the new combination stays independent for many more centuries to come.” Roger Schonfeld wrote a prescient piece on this very topic for the Scholarly Kitchen back in February of this year.

Anniversaries, Retirements, and Honors Wolters Kluwer celebrates 20th anniversary of Nancy McKinstry as Chair and CEO. Under her leadership, Wolters Kluwer has transformed into a leading software solutions company, providing professionals with the information they need to make critical decisions every day. Congratulations, Nancy! https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/ wolters-kluwer-celebrates-20th-anniversary-of-nancymckinstry-as-chair-and-ceo Jake Zarnegar has announced his retirement as Chief Development Officer at Silverchair. “After 24 wonderful years, I’ve made the decision to retire(!) from Silverchair. I joined Silverchair right out of college when it was just a few folks and have been honored and humbled to come along for our multi-decade journey of building a fantastic product and business in scholarly publishing. Silverchair has a topnotch team and a bright future, and I’m excited to see what comes next!” Jake will remain on as an advisor and investor.

Congrats Jake!

Rebecca Vargha, head of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Information and Library Science Library, has been inducted into the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Hall of Fame. Hall of Fame membership recognizes a distinguished professional for service to SLA over the course of her career. Vargha is a Past President of SLA (2006 - 2007). She has served on numerous SLA committees and task forces and taken on leadership roles for Knowledge Management, Leadership Management, the Encore Caucus and the Carolinas SLA Communities. Vargha was named a Fellow of SLA in 2013 and received the association’s Rose L. Volmecker Award in 2015 for her work mentoring students and working professionals.

Rebecca says, “I am deeply honored and humbled by this continued on page 45

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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>

Enduring Prep

Let’s Read Silent Film Era

Sperry Topsiders, cable knits, popped collars on polo shirts, all remain the rage. Nostalgia for a former time; the aspiration of old money aesthetic; a return to decorum — are among the motivations.

(1) Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (1968) (celebration of the technical brilliance of the silents); (2) Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars (1999) (ardent affection for the silent stars); (3) Adela Rogers St. John, Love, Laughter and Tears (1978) (Hearst’s girl reporter and author of screenplay “What Price Hollywood?” became Mother Confessor of Hollywood); (4) William K. Everson, American Silent Film (1978) (one of the greatest general surveys of silent film); (5) Valerie Belletti, Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary (2006) (collection of letters to friends by Sam Goldwyn’s secretary full of fizzy gossip).

Lisa Birnbach’s Official Preppy Handbook was published in 1980 and retailed for $3.95. Now it’s selling on eBay for $1,600 for a hardcover and $80 for a used paperback.

A Facebook group is called “Preppy Life: ‘Look, Muffy, a Group for Us.’” Fans post photos of themselves sporting Lily Pulitzer or debating the merits of tartan.

The Preppy Handbook Fan Club has 30,000 members. It delves into décor, vacations and important fashion issues like socks or no socks with Topsiders.

See: Kathleen Rooney, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2-3, 2023, p.C8. Rooney is the author of the novel “From Dust to Stardust.”

See: John Clarke, “Look, Muffy, A Book For Us,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 28, 2023, p.A1.

Obit of Note

Griots in America

Dorothy Casterline (1928-2023) was born in Honolulu to Japanese-American parents, lost her hearing in her teens to illness. She graduated from Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf, with a degree in English.

Damon Fordham is an adjunct history professor at the Citadel and author of four books on South Carolina black history.

His email is Damonfordham19464@gmail.com.

He has travelled in Togo, Gambia, and Senegal, taking a special interest in the griots, storytellers who keep the folks tales and oral history. They are held in great reverence as keepers of the culture. In Dakar, there is a thousand-year-old baobab tree where they are buried.

The story-telling tradition came to America with slavery.

In 1933, Alice Werner collected stories from West Africa. She particularly noted tales of a wise hare who could outwit stronger animals.

In 1874, Abbie Holmes Christensen of Massachusetts wrote down the stories of Prince Baskin of Nathaniel Hayward’s plantation in Port Royal, SC. One was the tale of a hare who outsmarted a wolf who tried to trap him with a tar baby.

Around the same date in Georgia, Joel Chandler Harris was documenting the stories of “Uncle” George Terrell who was named Uncle Remus in fiction.

See: Damon L. Fordham, “The storytelling connection from West Africa to South Carolina,” The Charleston Mercury, Sept. 2023, p.15.

In 1965, she worked with two other deaf linguists to write the first lexicon of American Sign Language. Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles made ASL a distinct language organized by signs rather than alphabetical order.

In the 1980s, she was credited with helping create deaf cultural identity.

See: “The deaf linguist who helped write the ASL dictionary,” The Week, Sept. 1, 2023, p.35.

Sweet Success Ken Follett was known for wildly successful thrillers but shifted to history writing a few decades ago. Against the firm advice of his publisher.

Pillars of the Earth (1980) is about the building of a cathedral and remains his most popular book. It sells 100,000 copies each year in the US alone.

His latest The Armor of Light concludes an 8-volume run that covers 1,000 years.

This one goes back to his cathedral town but during the Industrial Revolution with all its upheaval.

“When a book is good, people don’t want it to stop. The evidence is in my bank account.”

In total, he has sold 190 million copies of his 36 novels.

“I do know that money and success sometimes makes people unhappy, but not me. I really like it.”

See: Emily Borrow, “Weekend Confidential: Ken Follett,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 23-24, 2023, p.C14.

10 Against the Grain / November 2023

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Whence Goody Two-Shoes?

Obits of Note

The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes was the first children’s book ever, published in England in 1765 by John Newbery.

Margery Meanwell is an orphan girl reduced to such poverty she only has one shoe. As her lot improves, she has a pair of shoes and is so delighted she comes to be called “Goody Two-Shoes.”

William Friedkin (1936-2023), son of Ukrainian Jews who fled the pogroms, started his stellar career in the mailroom of a small TV station. He had moved up to director about the time the hand-held camera was invented. They became “a decisive influence on his style.”

At the time, “Goody” did not mean a super moral person.

“Goodman” and “Goodwife,” stood for “Mister” and “Missis.”

Goodwife was often abbreviated as “Goody.”

Going to Hollywood, he fumbled briefly, then made The French Connection, a mega-hit of the 1970s. He bribed a city official to let him do the famous 26-block car chase through NYC traffic.

The book does not name an author, but some have speculated it was Oliver Goldsmith. Jane Austen loved the book and kept her copy until her death.

The book taught foundational virtues like hard work and generosity. But there was some real “Perils of Pauline” action.

Goody “teaches herself to read, foils a robbery, founds a school, earns her own living, stands up for animal rights, and overcomes accusations of witchcraft.”

Didactic tales had been around since Aesop’s Fables, but Goody launched children’s lit as a genre.

See: Vanessa Braganza, “Beyond Fairy Tales,” Smithsonian, Sept.-Oct., 2023, p.20.

Dr. Johnson in the Highlands James Boswell was an elegant 32-year-old lawyer and Laird of Auchinleck. He greatly admired Dr. Samuel Johnson, a 63-yearold lexicographer, essayist and novellst. They had had two difficult meetings in London. Johnson, author of Dictionary of the English Language, was brilliant, but pompous, abrupt, and probably had Tourette’s syndrome.

But England was going through a fascination phase with wild and romantic Scotland, and Johnson committed to a tour of the Highlands. It began with what must have been a ghastly eight-day coach ride London to Edinburgh.

And off they went on an 800-mile journey through the West of Scotland and several of the isles. They were frequently stranded by weather, and when not guests of Boswell’s wealthy friends, stayed in miserable inns.

Both kept detailed journals, and Johnson’s, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, was published in 1775.

See: Martin Baguley, “A Highland Odyssey,” The Field, Aug. 2023, p.112.

Why Quit When You’re Ahead?

And then The Exorcist, top-grossing movie of 1973.

And after that, flops. But the big two were certainly some laurels to rest on.

Edward Sexton (1942-2023) began as an errand boy in his uncle’s London tailor shop. Working his way up in the staid Saville Row trade, he longed to experiment.

He found a kindred spirit in Tommy Nutter, and the two opened Nutters in 1969. The rock aristocracy went wild for their colorful, boldly sculptured suits with lean bodies and wide lapels. Three of the four Beatles were wearing Nutters suits on the cover of Abbey Road, Mick Jagger donned one at one of his weddings, and Elton John ordered them by the dozen.

The partnership dissolved, but Sexton kept at work. He did the wardrobe for Harry Styles’ 2017 tour and mentored Stella McCartney.

See: “The director who made horror prestigious,” and “The fashion rebel who dressed the Beatles and the Stones,” The Week, Aug. 18, 2023, p.35.

Let’s Read Great Inventions (1) Eric Bruton, The History of Clocks & Watches (1979) (from sundials to waterclocks to hour-glasses and beyond); (2) Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers (1998) (mathematical history in an engaging style); (3) William Aspray, Computing Before Computers (1990) (Blaise Pascal builds an analytical calculator; Charles Burbage an analytical engine, and on); (4) Meryle Secrest, The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti (2019) (Adriano Olivetti built a global typewriter behemoth and followed up with a computing empire including the world’s first desktop computer); (5) Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip (2005) (Robert Noyce founds Fairchild Semiconductor, then Intel, and rounds out his life with the first microprocessor).

See: Keith Houston, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 19-20, 2023, p.C8. Houston is the author of “Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator.”

Starting with The Firm in1991, John Grisham has written one best seller after the next for a total of 300 million volumes sold.

And now the sequel — The Exchange: After the Firm. Mitch and Abby are back, living large in Manhattan, and this time there’s international law themes.

Grisham’s wife Renee reads everything first. He advises aspiring writers to get someone who loves you and you trust to be your first reader and be honest with you.

He recently binged Slow Horses and finds it great writing. His perfect day in Mississippi includes lunch at City Grocery and a book on the terrace of Square Books.

See: OJ Lotz, “On Firm Ground,” Garden & Gun Oct-Nov., 2023, p.48.

12 Against the Grain / November 2023

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It Takes a Village: Approaches to Diversifying Monograph Collections

By Doug Way (Dean of Libraries, University of Kentucky) <doug.way@uky.edu>

F

or far too long, academic library monograph collections have been primarily built with works written by straight, cis-gendered, white males from North America and Western Europe. These collections, which are in many ways reflective of what was published by major mainstream publishers, ignored, excluded, or “othered” voices of individuals from marginalized communities. As academic libraries seek to diversify and decolonize their collections by including and elevating marginalized voices, they must overcome entrenched and systematic structures and barriers. Doing this requires deliberate and concerted efforts and approaches from libraries, consortia, publishers, and vendors. In short, it requires systemic change.

Libraries, consortia, publishers, and vendors all play key roles in getting books into the hands of readers. Yet, too often we don’t understand the perspectives or challenges these different stakeholders are facing, nor do we engage them in dialog or “Collectively, seek to understand the steps they are taking to advance the goal of each of us more diverse library collections. making an This issue of Against the Grain individual brings those voices together and looks at how we can advance this difference is essential work. what can lead to Often, this work starts by looking at what we can do within our own organizations. Kat Nelsen, KL Clarke, Wanda Marsolek, Sunshine Carter, Malaika Grant, Nicole Theis-Mahon, and Pearl McClintock outline the work they did at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities to interrogate their collection development practices with the goal of amplifying diverse and marginalized voices.

systemic change.”

While one organization can have an impact locally, by utilizing coordinated collection development strategies, groups

14 Against the Grain / November 2023

of libraries are able to maximize limited resources and expand the impact of their efforts. Anne Osterman, Kevin Farley, and Peter Potter share how libraries across the VIVA consortium partnered together to provide access to works from small publishers that were focused on publishing works representing diverse viewpoints and experiences, as well as from publishers in Africa and Latin America.

The work done by VIVA was facilitated in large part by vendors. In his article, Jon Elwell explores changes in academic monograph acquisitions and how one vendor, GOBI Library Solutions, has evolved to meet the needs of libraries.

GOBI and other book vendors serve as a key bridge between libraries and presses. In her article, Kristen Twardowski provides us a press’s perspective. She discusses how libraries and presses need to collaborate to advance equity for authors and readers, challenging us to consider what local action could be taken to advance this work.

And while collective effort and collaboration are needed to overcome systemic structures and barriers, Nicole Cooke provides a stark reminder that change starts with each of us.

In her article, she warns about the dangers of soft censorship and articulates the importance of self-reflection, personal transformation, and action as we seek to transform our libraries and our collections.

I hope these articles inspire you, provide you with ideas, and lead to self-reflection. Most of all, I hope these articles lead to action. One person can’t overcome all the obstacles and barriers that we face as we seek to elevate marginalized voices and develop more diverse and inclusive collections, but we each have our own sphere of influence and one person can make a difference. Collectively, each of us making an individual difference is what can lead to systemic change. I hope you’ll join me in that effort.

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Finding Our Way Forward: A Roadmap for Anti-racist Collection Development

By Kat Nelsen (Social Sciences Librarian, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities) <kgerwig@umn.edu> and KL Clarke (Social Sciences Librarian, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities) <clark078@umn.edu> and Wanda Marsolek (Engineering Liaison and Data Curation Librarian, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities) <mars0215@umn.edu> and Sunshine Carter (Director of Collection Strategy and eResource Management, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities) <scarter@umn.edu> and Malaika Grant (Arts, Humanities, and Area Studies Librarian, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities) <grant044@umn.edu> and Nicole Theis-Mahon (Dentistry Liaison Librarian and Health Sciences Collections Coordinator, University of Minnesota Twin Cities) <theis025@umn.edu> and Pearl McClintock (Collections Associate in Archives and Special Collections, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities) <mccli072@umn.edu>

Introduction Traditionally, academic libraries (and by extension, scholarly publishing and academia) supported and promoted whiteness — as evidenced by collections predominantly consisting of Eurocentric knowledge, systems, and voices. Institutions, however, faced a reckoning with the COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and community and global uncertainties.

Libraries and library staff are increasingly demanding that their services, policies, staff, and collections reflect communities they serve. As collections are core to the library, correcting the imbalance in the representation of marginalized and diverse voices, experiences, and perspectives requires addressing structural barriers touching all aspects of library work.

In 2021, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (UMN Twin Cities) Libraries created the Racial Equity in Collections (REiC) group to advance collection development methods and practices to amplify diverse and marginalized voices with a focus on racial minorities, racism, and anti-racism within the United States.

The UMN Twin Cities, located on Dakota lands, is a land-grant research institution in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota with 52,000 students and 4,000 faculty in seventeen colleges and schools. UMN Twin Cities Libraries employs approximately 250 full-time staff. Setting the library on a new course means coordinating efforts across collections management, cataloging, metadata, subject areas, instruction, research, acquisitions, access, e-resources, and interlibrary loan. To coordinate this shift, REiC was tasked with creating a roadmap for anti-racist collection development (henceforth referred to as The Roadmap).

Throughout the UMN Twin Cities Libraries, there are and have been individuals and groups doing anti-racist work and advocating for changes to make the library and its collections more diverse and inclusive. The Roadmap is a way to bring together disparate activities in a cohesive way.

Before creating The Roadmap, a shared understanding of anti-racist collection development was needed. Conner-Gaten et al., defines anti-racist collection development as “the process of identifying and disrupting whiteness and racial inequality in

16 Against the Grain / November 2023

our collections, collection development policies and professional practices.” Collections work permeates all aspects of the library.

The Roadmap touches most areas of the UMN Twin Cities Libraries and recommends areas for further investigation and actionable steps.

Seeking Input from Library Staff To gain a complete picture of what anti-racist collection work looked like across the UMN Twin Cities Libraries, REiC contracted a consultant to gather staff feedback on anti-racist collection development. Twelve, one hour-long, library staff focus groups were brought together over three weeks with over 80 staff participating. Questions were shared in advance to provide time for thoughtful consideration. Additionally, a form gathered anonymous feedback from 24 staff who were not able to attend the focus groups. The consultant provided REiC with a summary report including notes and thematic findings. REiC reviewed all of the information and distilled the responses into ten themes. Concurrently, a paid intern created an extensive annotated bibliography for anti-racist collection development practices.

Ten Themes The ten themes serve as wayfinders on The Roadmap.

Descriptions of the themes are concrete examples and ideas derived from library staff feedback. They provide jumping-off points for consideration and discussion while the full roadmap suggests distinct strategies for moving forward. These strategies are specific to organizational needs and structure of the UMN Twin Cities Libraries and are not included in this article.

Revalue Collections Work Approval plans increase efficiency in selection, acquisitions, and cataloging processes. However, automated collection development has built-in biases which reflect the racism prevalent in academic and publishing structures. The “set it and forget it” approach promoted by approval plans has resulted in devaluing collection development work. At the UMN Twin Cities

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Libraries, this has translated into staff reductions in cataloging and acquisitions, and for some staff, increased expectations for responsibilities unrelated to collection development.

Collections work is time-consuming. Increased efficiencies provided by automation created time that was filled with the development of new services or initiatives. Additionally, antiracist collections work involves retrospective work, which may not be recognized as time well spent.

Meeting academic departmental collection needs requires bespoke CD work outside of approval plans. Approval plans may miss anti-racist and diverse titles. If left to run unchecked, approval plans could create serious content gaps and lead to bias in collections. If the way forward means reducing the library’s reliance on the efficiencies of automation, then more staff will be needed to prioritize non-automated workflows.

Administration must support and empower staff doing antiracist work; it is essential to protect those doing anti-racist work.

This may mean ceasing collaboration with any donor, publisher, vendor, or contractor who demonstrates racist, disrespectful, and harmful actions or speech towards library staff.

Education Library staff need more training on anti-racist topics (e.g., implicit bias, white privilege, racial equity, allyship, etc.) to manage complicated and nuanced processes of anti-racist collections work. Furthermore, anti-racist education and training opportunities relate to the work of all library staff and should be available to all. Professional development and training opportunities may take the form of webinars, courses, and suggested readings.

It must be explicitly communicated where anti-racist collections work fits as an organizational priority, and how it differs from current policies and practices. Anti-racist values and practices need to be integrated throughout collection development policies rather than in separate policy sections.

Advocate for Change in Collection Development Practices The imbalance seen in many library collections — privileging materials written by and for the dominant culture rather than building collections more representative of library user populations — is directly tied to practices rooted in structural and institutional racism. To truly shift priorities for library collections, it is necessary to address the larger systems at play.

To accomplish this, library leaders must advocate with university administrators, vendors, and publishers for increased funding, and changes to policies and practices that support anti-racist collection development. This work needs to be funded and resourced appropriately, to support purchases from BIPOCowned businesses and authors and rely less on systems that do not.

Fund Anti-racist Collection Development

Additional resources for acquisitions, metadata, and cataloging are necessary. Library funding levels need to consider these increased costs and adjust accordingly.

Purchase Materials from Bipoc Authors and Owned Business The University of Minnesota supports and encourages purchasing materials and services from businesses owned and operated by minorities, women, and disabled persons.

Purchasing practices should align with organizational values regardless of processing efficiency or ease. Providing a means to identify BIPOC publishers and vendors is a first step toward prioritizing purchases from these sources.

Revolutionize Approval Plans and Their Use Approval plans (in use at UMN Twin Cities Libraries since 2005) reduced staff time required to select materials. While this shift increased capacity elsewhere, it eroded the perceived value of thoughtful collections work and increased reliance on approval plans. While efficiencies and automations have their place, they are not a panacea and are often dominated by publishers, authors, works, and metadata rooted in structural racism.

Collaborating with vendors can improve how approval plans identify materials; additionally, advocating for improved services, processes, and support for anti-racist collections work is vital. Lastly, it is necessary to empower library staff to purchase materials outside of approval plans regardless of increased costs or decreased efficiencies.

Improve Metadata and Discovery As the diversity in collections increases, so should the discoverability of those materials. Catalogers and library staff are already advocating for more diverse, inclusive, and respectful metadata. Improved methods to identify diverse perspectives are needed. Additionally, algorithms powering search results and relevancy rankings in library databases and discovery layers ref lect “As more libraries biases and inequalities found take steps in other library, publishing, and to dismantle academic systems. Libraries can racism and white press database and discovery vendors for transparency in how supremacy in relevancy rankings are generated their collections, and improved algorithms. a clearer path Additionally, library staff can inform patrons of biases in the forward for all of algorithms powering search us will start to tools.

emerge.”

It is imperative to prioritize increasing access and decreasing harm by describing materials in a manner that is respectful to communities creating, using, and represented in those materials. Work is needed to implement practices to address or remediate offensive and harmful language in metadata, discovery, and catalog systems.

Anti-racist collections work needs appropriate resourcing.

Over time, funds were diverted to support approval plans, leaving less funding for monographs outside these workflows and big publishers/vendors. Additional funds are needed to purchase resources outside of approval plans.

Communicate About Anti-racist Collection Development

Not all disciplines, cultures, and fields of study rely on books and journals as their primary communication venues.

Alternatives to the written record include oral histories, film, ephemera, and music recordings. Libraries must purchase and support these material types. Non-text materials are more expensive and require additional expertise from technical services and cataloging departments to make them discoverable.

Clear communication and advocacy are critical.

Communication systems must be adapted for work across library departments. All staff need to feel empowered to advocate for diversity and inclusion with colleagues, donors, and vendors.

Anti-racist work can only be accomplished in environments where staff can start conversations, are empowered and supported, and can think critically without fear of retaliation.

18 Against the Grain / November 2023

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Communication with institutional stakeholders will ensure collections continue to support the curriculum and research needs of students, staff, and faculty. By leveraging existing relationships, library staff can advocate for use of anti-racist materials.

Increase Use of Anti-racist Materials in Teaching, Learning and Research According to the American Library Association, librarians have an obligation to advocate for material use that reflects the diversity of learners (American Library Association).

When collaborating with faculty there may be discomfort and hesitancy to lead conversations around anti-racist materials; yet, with discomfort comes learning. Ongoing, open discussions build skills and confidence in teaching with materials from underrepresented groups.

Collaborate to Increase and Improve Anti-racist Collection Development Library systems need to change to support anti-racist goals.

Libraries, publishers, vendors, and other institutions must collaborate to improve anti-racist collections work. Consortial relationships and partnerships between libraries can stretch limited resources and add weight when advocating for changes from vendors and publishers.

In addition to collaborating with private and public organizations, libraries must collaborate with their local communities. Meaningful collaborations with community stakeholders require building trust and relationships.

Furthermore, care must be taken to ensure community-centered collaborations are not extractive; ideally, groups are working in concert, on shared goals and receive shared benefits.

Reflections on Our Work The Roadmap is intended to be a responsive document; it is (and will always be) a work in progress. This work requires a very slow approach, and it took REiC time to establish trust to allow for open conversation and debate around difficult topics.

Once The Roadmap was finalized, REiC shared it with library staff and opened it for comment. REiC reviews, discusses, and responds to each comment. Additionally, The Roadmap is a guide for making changes to processes which fit into a larger structure that perpetuates racism and racial inequity. Thinking through this sticky problem is slow going and is an extension of previous work in which library staff have been engaged.

20 Against the Grain / November 2023

As The Roadmap is shared beyond the UMN Twin Cities Libraries, the authors anticipate that colleagues at other libraries will consider their own contexts and have discussions about antiracist collections work. As more libraries take steps to dismantle racism and white supremacy in their collections, a clearer path forward for all of us will start to emerge. To that end, the questions below offer a way to approach thorny conversations around diversifying collections work: • Individually: What does anti-racist work in librarianship look like to you? How can you develop anti-racist skills in your role?

• Departmentally: How do the library’s collections impact your department’s work? What do you know about your collections?

• Organizationally: Is your library ready to do diversity work? What does diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) look like at your library currently? Who participates in DEI work? Who is involved in selection, acquisition, and discovery?

• Institutionally: How can leaders build investment in DEI among staff? Who are the champions of this work? Which campus or community partners could collaborate on DEI initiatives in the library?

Some concepts and library practices championed here may be unexpected and overwhelming. Moving the needle toward engagement in anti-racist library work is challenging but necessary. It is essential that long-established and longstanding harmful processes rooted in structural racism be surfaced, considered, and eliminated. The Roadmap is the story of how one library system is making changes for the better, one slow step at a time.

Works Cited Conner-Gaten, Aisha, Kristyn Caragher, and Tracy Drake.

“Collections Decoded: Reflections and Strategies for Antiracist Collection Development.” LMU Librarian Publications & Presentations, no. 137, 2017, https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/ librarian_pubs/137. Accessed 26 June 2023.

American Library Association. “Diverse Collections: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights.” 2006, http:// www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/ diversecollections. Accessed 27 June, 2023.

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Building Bibliodiversity in the Collective Collection through Consortial Acquisition of Small Publisher Content

By Anne C. Osterman (Director, VIVA) <aelguind@gmu.edu> and Dr. Kevin Farley (Humanities Collections Librarian, Virginia Commonwealth University) <kdfarley@vcu.edu> and Peter Potter (previously Virginia Tech, now Vice President for Publishing Services, De Gruyter, Inc.) <peter.potter@degruyter.com>

R

ooted in the postwar boom of enrollment and the growth of new colleges and universities, the longstanding goal of providing comprehensive holdings within each local academic library collection now contends with the realities of budgetary fluctuations, changing user needs and expectations, and the shift from print to digital resources. For many libraries, the task of building extensive collections was always elusive.

“There was a vision of a distributed national collection,” David E. Jones notes, “... of strategic value, although it was never realized.”1 Yet the constraints that often shape collections also suggest new ways of achieving comprehensiveness and inclusiveness.

Recent national events have refocused our awareness on the need to find ways to ensure that collections include voices too often unheard, that digital and print holdings represent and foster inclusion, diversity, equity, and access.

Such efforts involve retrospective analysis of holdings and gaps, as well as enhancing coverage of contemporary scholarship “Collections and creative works — again, a often reflect challenging goal. While larger publishers have increased their a publishing focus on diversity content, many triad — larger small presses were established university and specifically to address these issues. Collections often reflect a commercial publishing triad — larger university publishers and commercial publishers from from the US, the US, Canada, and the UK — Canada, and the but it is vital that voices from diverse communities themselves UK — but it is are heard within our collections. vital that voices Identifying and locating small from diverse press publications enhances and promotes bibliodiversity in our communities collections. themselves are

heard within our collections.”

Bibliodiversity has many definitions, befitting the complexities it describes. The concept of bibliodiversidad emerges at the end of the 20th Century, in a movement by independent publishers; by 2002, it is emphasized in the founding principles of the Alliance internationale des éditeurs indépendants (International Alliance of Independent Publishers, IAIP). In its definition, IAIP notes that “Bibliodiversity contributes to a thriving life of culture and a healthy eco-social system.”

Independent publishers and their books are “essential to preserve and strengthen plurality and the diffusion of ideas.”2

22 Against the Grain / November 2023

Discussions of bibliodiversity often address the central role of intentionality — the dedicated effort to create a publishing and collections environment that supports and values diversity.

“Intentional steps must be taken to employ equitable methods of publishing and dissemination, and to avoid perpetuating ... uneven power structures and hierarchies ....”3 For libraries, the inclusion in collections of independent small publishers focused on diverse viewpoints and experiences enlarges opportunities for teaching and research — as well as for self-discovery, as readers find voices that speak for who they are, as well as finding their own voice in the process. In this way, the interconnections between societal and personal issues that affect all of us may be explored and questioned. “We might enjoy reading and writing poetry for many reasons,” poet Stephanie Burt writes, “but we need it when we feel we need ... something unavailable in the literal world .... [I]t might be a new face, a new body; it might be a way to make the inward person audible (if not visible) to other people.”4 While ideal comprehensiveness eluded the postwar library, collective collections strategies make it possible now to achieve the kind of presence and representation for diverse voices that Burt describes.

Providing a diverse and inclusive collection is important to VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium, which includes 71 public and private nonprofit members. In an effort to increase the bibliodiversity of VIVA’s shared collections and helping to ensure that small publishers have sustainable and long-term models for partnership with libraries, VIVA’s Steering and Collections Committees created a Support for Small Publishers Task Force, which started its work in Fall 2020.

This Task Force was charged with having deep discussions with small publishers about their challenges in marketing, selling, and distributing their content at scale, as well as investigating ways to enable and streamline consortium-level acquisitions of content from these publishers. From the beginning, there was interest in giving special attention to publishers that have diverse voices represented in their content.

As with all VIVA task forces, representation by institution type (public doctoral, public four year, public two year, and private non-profit) informed the formation of the group. The members at the beginning were Peter Potter (Chair, Virginia Tech), Dr. Kevin Farley (Virginia Commonwealth University), Missy Comer (Tidewater Community College), Greg Snyder (Virginia Wesleyan University), Malia Willey (James Madison University), Dr. Alicia Willson-Metzger (Christopher Newport University), Denise Woetzel (J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College), and Anne Osterman (VIVA). Miguel Valladares-Llata (University of Virginia) joined in Fall 2022 to contribute to the

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area of Latin American small publishers, and Peter Potter left Virginia Tech and the Task Force in May 2023, with Dr. Kevin Farley becoming the new Chair.

ensure that these books would arrive as distinct from other books ordered by the libraries (“VIVA” on the invoice and on the mailing label).

All Task Force members were asked to seek out small publishers fitting the criteria in the charge, and these were compiled in a shared spreadsheet. From this listing, the Task Force contacted a number of publishers to talk with. For example, the Task Force reached out to two independent literary publishers at different ends of the small-press spectrum (Graywolf and Noemi) and distributors (Independent Publishers Group/IPG and Small Press Distribution/SPD) to learn more about their means of operating. One thing that stood out to the group was the variety that exists even within this small segment of publishing. For instance, Noemi, a very small literary publisher, publishes a handful of new titles each year and considers each sale precious. While Noemi is a client of SPD, it also fulfills direct orders from its office at Virginia Tech.

Graywolf, on the other hand, is much larger than Noemi and prefers to work through the most efficient routes of sale, which are generally distributors and aggregators. Some publishers have gone in the direction of scalability and convenience with a focus on print-on-demand, and others see the print book more as art, wanting control over design, layout, and quality.

The pilot group was successful, and additional public institutions were invited to participate in Fall 2022. The program expanded with new participants: Christopher Newport University, Longwood University, Norfolk State University, Radford University, and Tidewater Community College. Following this, the private institution group within VIVA decided to participate as well. They began a plan using their own state-provided and matched Pooled Funds in Spring 2023 with participants: Bridgewater College, Emory & Henry College, Hollins University, Randolph College, Randolph-Macon College, Shenandoah University, and Sweet Briar College. Across all participants — public and private — there continues to be a shared overarching approval plan based on local priorities and balanced among the members to achieve maximum diversity of content.

One of the major considerations in determining how to acquire small publisher content was the question of staff time, both at the consortial and local library levels. The consortium has a small central staff, and there was not the capacity to seek out relevant, individual publishers and pay for their iteratively released new content. Similarly, the member libraries, with reduced technical services staff, needed the books to arrive already processed and with catalog records. Although the Task Force would have preferred the maximum amount of revenue going back to the small publishers, working with a book vendor seemed a necessary component to have this project operate at scale. Following conversations with a number of book vendors, VIVA decided to go with GOBI, as it was the major book vendor for most of the member libraries.

The first group to invest in this model was the public institutions, using VIVA Central Funds provided by the state.

A pilot program began in Spring 2022, with George Mason University, James Madison University, Northern Virginia Community College, and Virginia Tech as the first participants.

It was structured in concept as an overarching approval plan that ensured broad content selection, but, in practice, individual libraries have separate approval plans within GOBI. To determine the distribution of content, participating libraries marked local priorities (high, medium, low) for the full list of available publishers, built from a list compiled by the Task Force through conversations with IPG, GOBI, and research done by Task Force members. Call number groupings were used for the SPD listing, as it was too large to be selected on its own. The plan was designed to capture books from designated criteria addressing IDEA, LGBQTIA+ issues and experiences, women’s studies, and social justice concerns. Following the prioritization, VIVA staff did an initial distribution of publishers and SPD call number groupings, attempting to achieve a similar annual title count among the participants. A number of discussions were held with GOBI staff to set up the new accounts, establish the cataloging and processing preferences of the participants, and

24 Against the Grain / November 2023

As the Task Force was talking with the distributors mentioned above, they were also talking with the African Books Collective (ABC), founded in 1985, which distributes print and eBooks from commercial and academic presses across Africa. This distributor was of key interest to the Task Force, given the interest in both acquiring diverse content and identifying ways to facilitate the purchase of content at scale. ABC brought Baobab Ebook Services, which provides a digital platform, into the discussion early on, as there was eagerness from ABC and VIVA to partner on a new approach that would allow direct sales to libraries and consortia. Previously, the only option for ABC was to sell through aggregators, which took a large portion of the revenue.

In early 2022, VIVA made a direct purchase of ABC’s backlist and the 2020, 2021, and 2022 frontlists with the plan to have them accessed through the Baobab Ebook Services platform, which required adjustments to fit the use case of academic libraries in the United States. VIVA also worked closely with ABC and Baobab on ways to make their titles more accessible to libraries, such as through the creation of MARC records and working toward having a presence in the major knowledge bases.

Following the success with ABC, the Task Force became interested in focusing next on Latin America. Conversations with bibliographers with deep experience in this area showed a complex and varied picture of publishing and distribution, often requiring libraries to work with specific vendors that specialize in individual countries. This is primarily a print book market, with a solid presence of special collections materials, such as libros cartoneros and zines, which often have racial justice and social equity themes. The Task Force is hopeful that there will be ways to incorporate small publisher works from this area into library collections across Virginia in the coming future.

Due to the work of this Task Force and the investment of resources into small publisher monographs, the collective collection of Virginia higher education is now more diverse and inclusive, and many works that may only see one printing are now more protected and available. It is exciting to consider how this program will continue to grow in the coming years and to envision the self-discovery enabled by the content shared among the member libraries. endnotes on page 26

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Open Access from Berghahn BERGHAHN MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES COLLECTION Berghahn Books is proud to be partnering with Knowledge Unlatched to present the Berghahn Migration and Development Studies collection. Every year we will be adding 20 front-list titles to the collection, covering the topics of international migration and movement as well as the social implications of economic and environmental change for communities.

We would like to extend our thanks to the libraries who have already signed up to the package, as their support has allowed KU to ‘unlatch’ a number of Berghahn titles, including the following:

If you would like to find out more about how your library can support the Berghahn Migration and Development Studies collection, visit berghahnbooks.com/open-access/migration-development The Berghahn Open Anthro - Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) initiative in partnership with Libraria, has entered its 4th year of providing full open access to 15 journals in the collection.

Support from the library community has made this initiative possible year after year.

We would like to acknowledge the following institutions who have shown their commitment to this equitable and sustainable model of open access at the multi-year level: • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Columbia University Cornell University Emory University Erasmus University Rotterdam Gothenburg University Harvard University Indiana University - Bloomington Iowa State University Leiden University Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Michigan State University New York University Princeton University

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Southern Methodist University Spanish National Research Council University College London University of Amsterdam University of Bergen University of Bern University of Birmingham University of Bristol University of Colorado - Boulder University of California, Berkeley University of California, Riverside University of California, Davis University of Exeter University of Kent University of Lancaster University of Manchester

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Neuchâtel University of Oregon University of Oslo University of Pennsylvania University of Pittsburgh University of Queensland University of Rhode Island University of Sussex University of Texas at Austin University of Washington University of Zurich Yale University York University (Canada) Anonymous

@BerghahnBooks www.berghahnbooks.com/open-access www.berghahnjournals.com/BOA

Endnotes 1. Jones, David E. “Collection Growth in Postwar America: A Critique of Policy and Practice.” Library Trends 61, no. 3 (2013): 608. doi:10.1353/lib.2013.0002. Jones details the rise of new colleges and universities, the enrollment boom, and the consequent growth of collections in the postwar period.

2. “Bibliodiversity,” Alliance internationale des éditeurs indépendants, June 2, 2023, https://www.alliance-editeurs.org/bibliodiversity-indicators,276-?lang=fr. IAIP indicates that the term was “invented by Chilean publishers, during the creation of the ‘Editores independientes de Chile’ collective in the late 1990s.” For further discussion, see also: Hawthorne, Susan.

Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2014. Accessed June 9, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. “Small and independent publishers contribute to the cultural multiversity through deep publishing of cultural materials (e.g., books that draw on non-homogenised cultural knowledge) as well as producing books that represent a wide range of viewpoints and epistemological positions.” (Hawthorne,14) 3. Kittinger, A., & Vandegrift, M. (2020). A Response to the Call for Bibliodiversity: Language, Translation, and Communicated Scholarship. Triangle Open Scholarship. https://doi.org/10.21428/3d640a4a.48ea4b20.

4. Burt, Stephanie, “The Body of the Poem: On Transgender Poetry,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 17, 2013, https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-body-of-the-poem-on-transgender-poetry/.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and eBooks: Two Seismic Shifts in Academic Monograph Acquisition

By Jon Elwell (Senior Vice President of Books, EBSCO Information Services) <jelwell@EBSCO.COM>

T

he traditional approaches to acquiring academic monographs have been significantly disrupted by two tremendous shifts in the past few years, leaving libraries and publishers navigating an increasingly complex landscape as they seek to adapt to the evolving needs and preferences of the academic community. The first shift is driven by the rapid advancement of digital books. Secondly, with the growing recognition of the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia, there is a pressing need to identify and disseminate content that reflects these principles. Libraries are increasingly focusing on expanding their collections to include a wide range of perspectives and voices, ensuring that the academic literature available to students and researchers represents the diverse fabric of society. This article delves into the paradigm shift from print books to digital formats and explores the growing emphasis on identifying and disseminating content that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion within academic literature. Through an examination of the role played by GOBI Library Solutions in this evolving ecosystem, we uncover the implications of these transformations and the challenges they present for stakeholders.

Academic libraries have long played a critical role in supporting research and education by curating comprehensive collections of books. Traditionally, print materials constituted the backbone of library monograph holdings. Even recently, print works accounted for more than 70% of libraries’ monograph acquisitions annually. However, in recent years, a noticeable shift has occurred inverting that trend, with academic libraries increasingly spending 65-70% of their monograph budgets on digital content.

26 Against the Grain / November 2023

Several factors have contributed to the shift in academic libraries’ book purchasing habits. Primarily, the rapid advancement of digital technologies and the ubiquity of online access have changed the way information is consumed and shared. Digital resources offer numerous advantages, including instant access, remote availability, and enhanced searchability, which cater to the evolving needs of users. Staffing and support constraints, as well as limited physical space, have led libraries to adopt digital alternatives, as eBooks have little to no maintenance cost and are more space-efficient than their print counterparts. Lastly, acquisition models such as Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA) and Evidence Based Acquisition (EBA), which leverage usage information, are allowing libraries to make more data and outcome driven decisions than ever before.

The benefits of the shift to digital come with some downsides. The average digital book costs around $100 for a 1-user version, with multi and unlimited user versions typically costing 1.25-2.5 times that price. Print books on the other hand cost libraries closer to $50 per title on average. Libraries are often facing a decision between the utility of the more expensive digital monograph versus the ability to acquire more unique less-expensive print monographs. Another issue with digital books is availability. Looking at the roughly 70,000 or so titles GOBI profiles annually, which we consider the corpus of English language academic content, only 75% are available for acquisition as a digital book through library channels, including aggregator or publisher-direct platforms. Finally, there are restrictions and vagaries around digital books that libraries

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do not face with print books such as limits around interlibrary loan, preservation, and perpetual ownership.

In recent years there has been an increased awareness regarding the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion, leading academic libraries to increase their focus on creating more inclusive collections. This has highlighted a new series of challenges around how this content is identified by academic libraries for acquisition. Some of the greatest challenges GOBI faces as we look to meet the needs of libraries are: • how do we, through profiling, help libraries identify the right content and what practices need to be updated, revamped, or created; • what forms of scholarship are now seeing new life as they are viewed through this DEI lens; • and lastly, what new publishers need to be identified and pulled into existing acquisition workflows like GOBI. At GOBI, a team of expert profilers describe approximately 70,000 books per year, providing metadata, such as interdisciplinary tags that describe the focus of a book, that allows libraries to make more-informed acquisition decisions.

Tagging is crucial for efficient content discovery and acquisition for academic libraries using GOBI. However, the multifaced nature of DEI content and subjective nature of description necessitates careful consideration and innovative approaches to create meaningful profiling tags. The goal of GOBI profilers is to take complex and evolving areas of acquisition and use definitions created in close collaboration with our partner libraries to assign tagging in an objective and comprehensive manner. To achieve this, GOBI profilers are focused on the process of book profiling with the guiding principle to describe a book based on what it is clearly and compellingly about. By remaining laser focused on the process of description, using the profiling tags and definitions created in conjunction with our library partners, we can ensure the outcomes needed to make DEI content more discoverable and acquirable.

To achieve this goal, GOBI profiling team has been focused on three areas: Collaboration with Academic Libraries: GOBI book profilers recognized the importance of collaboration with academic libraries in enhancing DEI-friendly metadata tagging. Through extensive consultations and partnerships, they actively engaged with librarians to update definitions and guidelines. This collaborative process ensured that the perspectives of diverse communities were incorporated, resulting in more accurate and comprehensive metadata tags that reflect the diverse nature of academic content.

Addressing Inconsistent Tag Use: One of the challenges with DEI-descriptive metadata tagging was inconsistent tag use. GOBI book profilers recognized this issue and implemented measures to identify and reduce inconsistencies. They conducted comprehensive reviews of existing tags and engaged in discussions with subject matter experts to establish clearer guidelines for tag application. This proactive approach has resulted in more consistent and standardized metadata tags, facilitating efficient and meaningful access to DEI-related content.

Reducing Individual Profiler Subjectivity: Metadata tagging can be influenced by individual profilers’ subjectivity, which may unintentionally introduce biases and hinder DEI representation. To overcome this, GOBI book profilers have implemented strategies to minimize

Against the Grain / November 2023

individual subjectivity in tagging processes. By providing comprehensive training on DEI principles and fostering a culture of critical awareness, profilers are equipped to make objective decisions when assigning metadata tags, promoting a more inclusive and accurate representation of content.

The enhanced approach to profiling is increasingly important as we see evolving forms of scholarship. Traditionally, academic works and classrooms placed a strong emphasis on objectivity and detached analysis, distancing personal narratives from scholarly discourse. However, contemporary scholars are increasingly acknowledging that personal experiences can contribute valuable insights and foster a deeper understanding of complex topics. For example, personal book narratives offer a unique perspective, illuminating the lived realities, emotions, and cultural nuances that can enhance scholarly discourse.

The inclusion of personal book narratives in academic works expands the breadth of available knowledge and fosters interdisciplinary engagement. By embracing personal narratives, scholars challenge dominant narratives, explore marginalized perspectives, and uncover hidden truths. This shift in scholarly discourse enables a more nuanced and holistic understanding of social, cultural, and historical phenomena.

Moreover, personal narratives can bridge the gap between academia and wider audiences, making scholarly works more relatable, approachable, and engaging. The integration of personal book narratives in classrooms has transformative implications for pedagogy. By incorporating personal narratives into lectures, readings, and discussions, educators can create a more inclusive and participatory learning environment.

Personal narratives empower students to connect with the subject matter on a personal level, fostering empathy, critical thinking, and self-reflection. This approach not only enriches students’ educational experiences but also equips them with the tools to navigate complex societal issues.

Finally, as libraries seek to develop collections that are more diverse and inclusive, they are seeking content that is coming from a wide range of channels and publishers outside of the existing academic workflows. Working in collaboration with libraries and subject matter experts, GOBI is trying to provide more visibility and discoverability for these nontraditional academic publishers. Presses like Mukana Press, BLF Press and Agate Bolden are recent additions to our enhanced metadata profiling process. This process will allow works from these and other like presses to be more discoverable by academic libraries and to be acquired in automated and streamlined workflows.

In the ever-evolving landscape of academic content acquisition, the one constant is that content is king. No matter the format, technology, acquisition type, source, or a combination thereof, what an academic library and its patrons need is to have support across a diverse spectrum of content in an easily discoverable manner. As a major source providing academic monograph content to top academic libraries, it is critical for GOBI to offer content and associated services as ubiquitous as the researchers’ needs. This article discussed two of the significant changes we have witnessed with academic monograph acquisition in the past few years, but there are numerous others either here or quickly coming in the form of OA books, Digital Interlibrary Loan, Digital Textbooks, AI-generated books, ubiquitous workflow integration and a host of others. It is a pleasure and a privilege to work in such an evolving ecosystem with such lovely partners and we look forward to what the next years shall bring.

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No Single Solution: Increasing Author Equity in Scholarly Publishing and Library Collections

By Kristen Twardowski (Director of Sales and Marketing, Northwestern University Press) <kristen.twardowski@northwestern.edu>

T

his is likely a different article than the one Against the Grain imagined I would write. My mandate was both to explore how publishers can elevate marginalized voices and to identify the challenges of getting that content into libraries. This article’s theme is, thus, large in scope. Over the centuries of its development, academic book publishing has become entrenched in inequitable systems that privilege certain voices over others. The vast majority of scholarly publishing today still functions within these systems with all of the benefits and injustices that implies.1 This leaves us with several questions: how do you publish in an equitable way; and how can libraries support that work through their collection development strategies?

large institutions increased standards. 6 At the same time, 53.5% of institutions reported replacing tenure-track lines with contingent faculty ones,7 and the average full professor made over twice what an untenured instructor did.8 Combined, these datapoints indicate that scholars now have to publish more to secure one of what is, potentially, a dwindling number of tenure-track positions. For a humanities or social sciences scholar, this likely means they need to publish a book to move into a more stable, better paying position. For both adjuncts and for independent scholars with no institutional support, publishing that book can be a tricky process.

This article will not entirely answer either of these questions.

I don’t think any article entirely could. It will, however, provide some background as well as guideposts for thinking through how your institution can support equitable publishing.

Open Access, Limits, and Labor

Because of my own professional experiences, this article largely focuses on US-based university press publishing in the humanities and social sciences. These presses, though less wellresourced than their commercial counterparts, do crucial work advocating for their regional communities and ensuring the continued bibliodiversity of scholarly publishing.2 The people working at them care deeply about their authors and hope their books will be read by as many people as possible. In some cases, this means publishing open access (OA), but in the humanities and social sciences, funding to support open research has not been readily available. Because of this tension, open access serves as a good test case for exploring how publishers and libraries can think together about author equity.

The Problem of the Monograph For scholars in the humanities and social sciences, the book is, to misquote Shakespeare, the thing.3 These academic monographs serve as the space where the “book fields” do their work. For scholars in these fields, the book isn’t just the structure of their research; its publication allows them to continue doing that research at all. As William Germano says in Getting it Published, “you need a book to get tenure, perhaps even to get a job, and in some cases even to get the interview … Writing books, after all, is what academics are expected to do.”4 Barriers to book publication can, thus, be barriers to a scholar’s existence as a scholar, and those barriers are not equitably distributed.

Scholars who work within an academic institution often experience a bifurcated employment structure. There are tenured and tenure-track faculty who typically have long contracts and academic freedom protections, and then there are contingent or adjunct faculty who have much shorter contracts, fewer protections, and less access to resources.5 According to a 2022 report from the American Association of University Professors, 17.6% of all institutions made tenure standards more stringent in the past five years, and a whopping 38.7% of

28 Against the Grain / November 2023

Open access books sit in an interesting place of friction. For under-resourced scholars, being able to read academic books for free is a godsend. They can stay engaged with current research and participate in it regardless of institutional support.

The authors of this open research similarly benefit from the increased access and engagement brought by OA. In traditional publishing, scholarly monographs may only sell a few hundred copies worldwide, typically to academic libraries or to a narrow group of scholars.9 Books with limited sales necessarily have a limited audience, but making research open access drastically expands that potential audience. The University of Michigan Press recently published a blog post about the impact of their open access initiative, Fund to Mission, a program in which 75% of their frontlist monographs are OA. According to their post, Fund to Mission’s open access books saw 11 times more COUNTER total item investigations than restricted access titles did, and open access titles were viewed in a significantly greater number of countries worldwide than restricted titles were.10 For scholars who need to prove that their research has an impact on the field, whether for a job application or for a promotion, this increased readership and any conversation it inspires is invaluable.

But the benefits of open access do not eliminate the costs of publishing a monograph, a process that often takes multiple years of work by numerous staff and can cost upwards of $15,000.11 The question of how to financially support this labor — Via author payments? Grants? Institutional support? — has plagued the scholarly community for years with no simple solutions. In the United States in particular, the question of national funding is at a crossroads.

In August 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published their Nelson Memo, asserting that federally funded research must be made freely and immediately available.12 However, in July 2023, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives released a bill that, if signed, would prohibit the implementation of the Nelson Memo through

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the coming fiscal year with section 552 stating, “None of the funds made available by this or any other Act may be used to implement, administer, apply, enforce, or carry out” the Nelson Memo.13 One interpretation of this language is that though federal funds could still support research projects, those same funds could not be used to make those projects open access.

Funding for that would have to come from elsewhere.

Regardless of where the United States government lands on their official policy, the fact remains that for many scholars in the humanities and social sciences, federally funded grants simply aren’t available. Even prominent fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities cannot support the needs of every scholar or every OA project. According to their 2023 data, the NEH reported a 7% funding ratio with an average of 79 awards and 1,120 applications in the last five competitions.14 To put those numbers into perspective, there were an estimated 157,540 humanities faculty members in the United States in 2015.15 Grants in these fields are competitive to say the least. Asking authors or their nearly nonexistent grants to fund open access books would inevitably privilege the scholars already established in positions to submit impressive grant applications, leaving contingent and independent scholars, once again, unsupported and less able to publish OA. However, libraries can help fill that gap by supporting publishers who do not mandate author-side payments for open access. Publishers like Lever Press, a library collaborative program, and Punctum Books, with its library membership

Against the Grain / November 2023

model, both rely on library support to ensure all authors have the option to publish OA. University presses have also implemented their own library-supported OA programs with Opening the Future from Central European University Press and Liverpool University Press, Direct to Open from MIT Press, and Fund to Mission from University of Michigan Press.16 But not every author is comfortable publishing open access.

Maybe they’ve heard horror stories of tenure committees not “counting” OA when it comes time for promotion, or maybe OA is not well-established in their field. And not every library has the luxury of paying for books that are already free. Not every publisher has the resources needed to promote and manage library memberships or funded collections. With that in mind, how can libraries decide which open access programs fit their specific institution’s needs? And how can they identify which restricted access programs still support author equity?

In response to these questions, I advocate for leaning on the power of consortia and scholarly societies. In both the cases of open and restricted content, these partners can offer collection development support. To name just a few excellent allies in this space, in addition to its list of restricted content programs, Lyrasis shares OA news through its LYRopen listserv and collates vetted OA initiatives in its list of open access programs.17 The Open Book Collective also enables the support of open access and open infrastructure projects in a streamlined way through their available packages.18 Project MUSE has worked with scholarly societies and academic libraries to provide access to

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29

both closed and open content for years.19 The list of possible support partners and recommend programs is long, but alone, their existence may not be enough to help you decide how your institution should dedicate its resources.

For that, you still need a strategy.

Developing Your Strategy As the complexity of the realm of humanities and social sciences suggests, there is no single solution for increasing equity for authors or for diversifying collections. With that in mind, I recommend something not entirely groundbreaking: that institutions prioritize a manageable number of activities and adequately resource them. The greatest threat to achieving goals is, as organizer Joshua Virasami says in How To Change It: Make a Difference, having no strategy.20 I am no expert in strategic planning but I am pragmatic, especially when it comes to resource distribution. It’s through that lens that I suggest using the following questions to create a strategy that works at your institution.

Questions • What activities does your institution currently do to support author equity and/or collection diversification?

If you are creating a new initiative, what action would be most meaningful to the communities you serve?

• What resources are allocated for these efforts? Are they sufficient for achieving your goals? If not, how could you get access to more resources?

• Who will have to do the work to implement these initiatives? Do they have the capacity in their workload to take on these efforts? Does the work disproportionately fall to one person or one group?

• How will you ensure that your activities have a long-term impact and are sustainable, flexible, and integrated into your systems?

30 Against the Grain / November 2023

• What priorities will you drop in order to ensure these projects receive the resources and staff time needed to be successful?

That last question is the most important one. Most libraries and small publishers do not have an ever-growing pool of staff and money. Therefore, if a group isn’t willing or able to move resources away from one type of work, then adding a new project simply means fewer resources for every initiative.

That’s why projects like supporting author equity benefit from a strategy. Being able to focus on one or two areas that you can meaningfully dedicate time, energy, and money to leads to more successful outcomes overall.

Final Thoughts As I conclude this article, I want to return to a point I mentioned in my introduction about the systems in which academic publishers and libraries function. Equity for authors and the diversity of library collections is necessary, imperative, and an overall good for the world. But equity work should happen with an eye to our own communities as well.21 As I write, Lee & Low is in the process of creating its updated Diversity Baseline Survey for the publishing community. If the patterns from the 2015 and 2019 surveys remain consistent, we will find that the book community remains largely white, and that the effort to make the industry more inclusive is “a herculean one.”22 Stories from webinars like ASERL’s series on why BIPOC librarians choose to leave the profession, and its sister series on why they choose to stay, similarly indicate that the work to make libraries more equitable is just that; it’s work. But it’s work with hope.23 Both for increasing equity for authors and for ourselves.

We just have to find the path that works where we are. That’s why when developing strategies, I return to the same questions.

What is our goal? Does it have the resources it needs? Who is doing the work? Is it sustainable? What do we deprioritize to ensure our new goal is a success? endnotes on page 31

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Endnotes 1. Several excellent meditations on the continued inequities in higher education can be found in Clelia O. Rodriguez, Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression and Pain (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2018); Complaint! by Sara Ahmed (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); and Anti-racist scholar-activism by Laura Connelly and Remi Joseph-Salisbury (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

2. For more on bibliodiversity and how university presses help perpetuate it, read Dawn Durante, “AUPresses 2023 Recap and General Themes: Accessibility, Bibliodiversity, and Community,” Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications, The H-Net Book Forum, accessed, June 21, 2023, https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/discussions/12883010/aupresses-2023-recap-andgeneral-themes-accessibility.

3. From Hamlet, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” For humanities and social sciences scholars, it could well be said that the book’s the thing that catches the attention of the hiring committee. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library), https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/.

4. William Germano, Getting It Published, 3rd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5.

5. Notably, many historic protections provided by tenure are no longer in place at some institutions in the United States. When looking to Florida, one report found “the threat from authoritarian politicians who use phrases like “Stop WOKE,” “DEI bureaucracy,” and “indoctrination” to limit academic freedom while imposing their worldview upon institutions of higher education cannot be overstated.” Special Committee on Academic Freedom and Florida, “Preliminary Report of the Special Committee on Academic Freedom and Florida,” American Association of University Professors, May 24, 2023, https://www.aaup.org/file/Preliminary_ Report_Florida.pdf.

6. Hans-Joerg Tiede, “The 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices,” American Association of University Professors, May 2022, https:// www.aaup.org/file/2022_AAUP_Survey_of_Tenure_Practices.pdf.

7. Steven Hurlburt and Michael McGarrah, “The Shifting Academic Workforce: Where Are the Contingent Faculty?” TIAA, TIAA Institute and Delta Cost Project at American Institutes for Research, February 2017, https://www.tiaa.org/content/dam/tiaa/ institute/pdf/full-report/2017-02/shifting-academic-workforce.pdf.

8. IPEDS Faculty Salaries: Full-Time Faculty Salary, by Academic Rank, AAUP Data, accessed June 12, 2023, https://data.aaup.org/ ipeds-faculty-salaries/.

9. Germano, 14.

10. In the interest of full disclosure, I want to acknowledge that I oversaw the team doing this study when I served as the Director of Sales, Marketing, and Outreach at Michigan Publishing. Zhenkun Lin and Kelsey Mrjoian, “Visualizing the Impact of the University of Michigan Press Fund to Mission Initiative,” Tiny Studies (blog), University of Michigan Library, May 23, 2023, https://blogs.lib. umich.edu/tiny-studies/visualizing-impact-university-michigan-press-fund-mission-initiative.

11. Nancy Maron and Kimberly Schmelzinger, “The Cost to Publish TOME Monographs: A Preliminary Report,” Humanities Commons, Association of University Presses, 2022, https://doi.org/10.17613/pvek-7g97.

12. Alondra Nelson, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” The White House. Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy, August 25, 2022. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/ uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf.

13. U.S. Congress, House, Fiscal Year 24 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill, 118 Cong, 1st session, introduced July 14, 2023, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP19/20230714/116251/BILLS-118--AP--CJSFY24CJSSubcommitteeMark.pdf.

14. “Fellowships,” National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, accessed June 30, 2023, https:// www.neh.gov/grants/research/fellowships.

15. “Number of Faculty Members in Humanities and Other Fields,” Humanities Indicators, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, accessed June 3, 2023 https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/number-faculty-members-humanities-andother-fields.

16. For an overview of OA book publishing models, see the excellent article: “Business Models for Open Access Book Publishing,” OA Books Toolkit, OAPEN, June 13, 2023, https://oabooks-toolkit.org/lifecycle/article/10432084-business-models-for-open-accessbook-publishing.

17. “Open Access Programs,” Lyrasis, accessed June 14, 2023, https://www.lyrasis.org/content/Pages/Open-Access-Programs.aspx.

18. “Support OA Initiatives,” Open Book Collective, Open Book Collective, accessed June 14, 2023, https://www.openbookcollective. org/packages/.

19. “The MUSE Story,” Project MUSE, Project MUSE, accessed June 14, 2023, https://about.muse.jhu.edu/about/story/.

20. Joshua Virasami, How To Change It: Make a Difference, (London: Merky Books, 2020), Kindle.

21. I want to acknowledge the incredible work that many, many people have contributed to in exploring equity in scholarly communications via C4DISC (the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications) and particularly would like to shoutout resources like its Toolkits for Equity. “Toolkits for Equity,” C4DISC, C4DISC, accessed June 4, 2023, https://c4disc. org/toolkits-for-equity/.

22. “Where is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey Results,” The Open Book Blog (blog), Lee & Low Books, January 28, 2020, https://blog.leeandlow.com/2020/01/28/2019diversitybaselinesurvey/.

23. To explore the numerous webinars in this series, see ASERL’s archive of event recordings at: “Archive of Webinars & Materials,” ASERL, ASERL, accessed June 25, 2023, https://www.aserl.org/archive/.

Against the Grain / November 2023

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The Calls are Coming from Inside the Library!

By Dr. Nicole A. Cooke (Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and Professor, School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina) <NCOOKE@mailbox.sc.edu> <Scene, 2018: Overheard on an American Library Association (ALA) shuttle bus after the Newbery-Caldecott-Legacy Banquet> Librarian: I don’t care what award it won; I still won’t add it to the collection. It only won because it’s “diverse” and the committee is being “politically correct.” <Scene, 2023: White librarian in a large public library system who dislikes the diverse books being sent to her branch by the centralized collection development department> Librarian: Can you put me back on the list for the white books? <Scene, 2023: The Pinellas County (FL) school district decided to hold 87 titles for “further review.” These books predominately include stories by Black, Latine, Native, Asian, Muslim, and LGBTQIA+ authors. Targeting these titles sets a terrible precedent and message that diverse books need to be further scrutinized and censored, just because they are by and about marginalized creators (PEN America, 2023).> Houston? ALA? Someone? Anyone in librarianship, we still have a problem. Even with an amazing array of diverse books with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC) authors and characters, there are still barriers keeping them out of library collections. And materials currently in collections are being unfairly targeted, scapegoated, maligned, challenged, and not defended. This is absolutely not the way to diversify collections and elevate voices from marginalized communities. And many of these barriers are internal to library organizations.

Even as ALA’s mission statement clearly states: The mission of ALA is “to provide leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all (italics added by author)” the profession is still plagued by soft censorship (or self-censorship).

In an increasingly fraught time, featuring a steep uptick in book challenges and bans (Juarez, 2022), continued discussions about personal library insurance for library workers (Carson, 2006; Texas Library Association, n.d.), and escalating harassment and threats to librarians (Harris and Alter, 2022; Kingkade, 2022), soft censorship is even more dangerous as it weakens the profession and its fights against censorship, racism, homophobia, ableism, religious discrimination, elitism, and xenophobia.

Cooke and Harris (in press) describe soft censorship as: The practice of a library, or library worker, not selecting book titles based on a litany of reasons. These reasons can include but are not limited to the fear of retaliation, potential pressure from publishers, and concerns in determining which titles are age appropriate. Libraries engage in soft censorship by not including or quietly removing books from their shelves because they believe the books have racist, sexual, or homosexual themes.

Rooted in implicit bias, fear, and various levels and types of resistance, soft censorship is an often unacknowledged, yet deeply personal issue for library workers in addition to it being a significant professional dilemma. Soft censorship is in direct opposition to the library profession’s core values, the ALA’s Freedom to Read Statement, and the ALA’s Library Bill of Rights. This opposition is wholly detrimental to library collections and offerings. How can the profession deal with

32 Against the Grain / November 2023

issues that its workers have yet to fully address?

Fear is a legitimate concern; fear of lawsuits, harassment, and mental and physical threats should not be taken lightly. However, they cannot hinder or destroy everything libraries have in place and have achieved over many decades. Other reasons for soft censorship, implicit biases, ignorance, and resistance, cannot be tolerated inside our own houses. They must be addressed internally before they can be addressed with our communities. We must have personal transformations before we can have community and societal transformations.

Chopra said, “unless there’s a personal transformation, there can be no social transformation” (2006, p. 255). And when there are biases and resistance, their progeniture, soft censorship, burgeon when there is a lack of selfreflection, cultural competence, and intellectual and cultural humility. Banning, challenging, and censoring materials is a response to a lack of understanding and/ or feelings of discomfort and fear (Cooke and Harris, in press).

In a series of essays, Cooke (2020a, 2020b, 2020c) discusses the ways in which personal transformation can be achieved; it is a multi-faceted and ongoing process of reflecting inward and putting newfound insight into action. Specifically, library workers should ask themselves: • Can I see myself in my library’s collections and services?

— What other things do I take for granted that aren’t afforded to others?

• Does my library reflect the community it serves?

• Why do books with diverse characters and voices make me uncomfortable?

• Why do I want to keep certain titles away from other people? Do I have that right?

• Why am I hesitant to speak up in defense of diverse books in the collection?

• How can I better diversify and defend a collection that amplifies marginalized voices and narratives?

Library workers, and everyone else, must do the hard work of critical self-reflection (2020c); this is an internal process that involves asking ourselves: • Am I intellectually and culturally humble?

— What do I know and understand about people who are different from me?

— Why wasn’t I taught about others in a substantive way?

• Am I culturally competent?

— Do I celebrate other cultures?

— Do I use my knowledge of others to enhance my life?

• If I’m not, how do I acquire the necessary knowledge and empathy to develop critical consciousness, and how do I remain competent and humble?

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Subsequently, this newfound awareness, competence, and humility must be put into action and used to advocate for those without our voices or privilege. How are we defending our collections and libraries and fighting back against soft censorship? There are many ways to act, and acting comes in a variety of large and small forms. Three ways to move towards action in libraries, especially those with materials being banned and challenged, include 1) complete sensitivity and diversity training at regular intervals, 2) decolonizing the collection and services (Cooke, 2020a), and 3) standing in the gap for marginalized and otherwise oppressed voices and communities (Cooke, 2020b).

The notion of decolonization, which is really a much more nuanced concept rooted in justice for Indigenous communities, applies to libraries as it challenges us to not privilege white voices and Western values (heterosexuality, Christianity; maleness, whiteness etc.) in our collections, services, and staff.

“Rather, we should purposefully look for and prioritize ‘othered’ voices, opinions, and perspectives and add them to our teaching and pedagogy, our bookshelves, and our professional practices” (Cooke, 2020a).

Standing in the gap means to intercede on behalf of others, literally and figuratively using your privilege to shield them from harm.

To be clear, there is no one right way to stand in the gap for a Black person, a person of color, or someone who belongs to a marginalized community. Standing in the gap is an awareness and acknowledgment of inequality

Against the Grain / November 2023

and a commitment to address it. It is not a prescriptive list of ally-like actions. Standing in the gap will vary from place to place, from situation to situation, person to person (Cooke, 2020b).

Actualizing, or operationalizing, standing in the gap in libraries can look like: • Don’t use neutrality as an excuse to censor books and perspectives you don’t agree with (Cooke, Chancellor, Shorish, et al., 2022) • Read and review culturally responsive literature; read them because you want to learn and serve diverse communities, not because you must or because it will make you or the library look good.

• Learn how to write and present book rationales (NCTE, 2023) and position statements (NCTE, 2018) that will enable your defense of challenged or banned materials.

• Support organizations like the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, the Freedom to Read Foundation, and others who can file lawsuits, marshal resources and organize campaigns at a national and international level.

• Organize locally and nationally; attend school board and community meetings and proactively defend the right to read freely.

• Speak up when you hear the censorship, racism, homophobia, ableism, religious discrimination, elitism, and xenophobia around you.

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Eliminating soft censorship is not easy, nor is it immediate, but it is imperative. This is the type of personal transformation that is required for any form of social transformation; this is the type of personal transformation needed to combat banning, challenging, and censorship. If we do not support and diversify and defend our materials and collections, and elevate the voices from marginalized communities, can we really say that we believe in the freedom to read?

Works Cited ALA. (n.d.). Mission Statement. About the American Library Association. https://www.ala.org/aboutala/ Carson, Bryan M. J.D., M.I.L.S. (2006) “Legally Speaking — Do Librarians Need Liability Insurance?” Against the Grain: Vol. 18: Iss. 5, Article 28. DOI: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg/vol18/ iss5/28/ Chopra, Deepak. 2006. Peace is the way: Bringing War and Violence to an End. Harmony.

Cooke, N. A. and Harris, C. N. (in press). The Softer Side of Censorship. Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy.

Cooke, N. A. (2023). Chronicling Collective Change: The Multigenerational Advocacy for Diverse Books. English Journal, 112(5), 79-85.

Cooke, N. A. (2020c, December 14). What it means to decolonize the library. PublishersWeekly.com. https://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/ article/85127-what-it-means-to-decolonize-the-library.html Cooke, N. A. (2020a, December 14). What it means to decolonize the library. PublishersWeekly.com. https://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/ article/85127-what-it-means-to-decolonize-the-library.html Cooke, N. A. (2020b, September 11). Turning antiracist knowledge and education into action. PublishersWeekly.com.

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https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/ libraries/article/84313-are-you-ready-to-stand-in-the-gap.html Cooke, N. A. (2020c, June 19). Reading is only a step on the path to anti-racism. PublishersWeekly.com. https://www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/ article/83626-reading-is-only-a-step-on-the-path-to-antiracism.html Harris, E. A., & Alter, A. (2022, July 6). With Rising book bans, librarians have come under attack. The New York Times. https:// www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/books/book-ban-librarians.html Juarez, Adriane Herrick. 2022, April 28. “Dealing with Book Banning with Tracie D. Hall.” Episode 103. Library Leadership Podcast. Accessed January 6, 2023. https:// libraryleadershippodcast.com/103-dealing-with-book-banningwith-tracie-d-hall/ Kingkade, T. (2022, August 23). Conservatives in Idaho Target 400 library books - but the library doesn’t even own them.

NBCNews.com. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ conservative-activists-want-ban-400-books-library-arent-evenshelves-rcna44026 NCTE. (2023, February 1). Book rationales. National Council of Teachers of English. https://ncte.org/book-rationales/ NCTE. (2018, October 30). Guidelines for dealing with censorship of instructional materials. National Council of Teachers of English. https://ncte.org/statement/censorshipofnonprint/ PEN America. (n.d.). Join PEN America to #FREETHEBOOKS by making your voice heard. PEN America. https://pen.org/issue/ free-the-books/ Texas Library Association. (n.d.). Professional Liability Insurance. Texas Library Association. https://txla.org/ tools-resources/intellectual-freedom/professional-liabilityinsurance/professional-liability-insurance/

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ATG Special Report — The Power of Collaboration: How Librarians and Publishers Can Restore Confidence in Research

By Emily Singley (Vice President, North American Library Relations, Elsevier) <e.singley@elsevier.com>

T

he research landscape has seen significant technological and cultural shifts over the last few years following the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Elsevier’s global Confidence in Research study, these shifts have resulted in a loss of confidence in scientific research among the research community (“Confidence in Research — Elsevier,” n.d.). About 78% of U.S. researchers surveyed believe the pandemic has increased the importance of separating good quality information from misinformation, and 79% believe the pandemic increased the importance of science bodies and researchers explaining and communicating their research better.

A rapidly changing scholarly communication ecosystem is also impacting confidence in research. We have seen the rise of new threats such as paper mills and predatory publishing, which prey on early career researchers who are in the “publish or perish” stage of their careers — and these less-than-reputable actors are muddying the scholarly record with their questionable content. Advancements such as artificial intelligence (AI) hold the promise of boosting productivity and efficiency, but also present challenges we will need to overcome. And the success of Open Access publishing models, while spurring our transformation to a more open, transparent, and equitable society, has also undoubtedly made scholarly communication more complex.

As information providers, librarians are uniquely positioned to help both researchers and the public navigate this rapidly evolving research landscape and restore confidence in research.

The need for information literacy — and especially science literacy — has never been greater.

The State of Information Literacy Academic libraries have long seen information literacy as a core part of their mission. Back in 2016, the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education outlined information literacy as an educational reform movement and called on academic librarians to create a new cohesive and collaborative curriculum (Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, ACRL). According to a recent study that surveyed 189 instruction librarians, 96% said they were concerned about the impact of misinformation, and 79% said they teach misinformation in their library instruction courses (Saunders, Laura, 2023). But the study also found a low rate of collaboration between faculty and librarians on misinformation topics and suggests many are using outdated instruction methods and are not assessing learning outcomes adequately.

And the latest Ithaka S+R Library Director survey found that although most academic library directors (98%) rank information literacy as a high priority function for the library, only 16% of all library directors in the survey sample believe they have a clear vision for futureproofing that considers technological and socio-political trends, and only 17% have a clear vision for redressing the influence of misinformation among their

Against the Grain / November 2023

community members (“US Library Survey 2022” n.d.). Information literacy, as it stands, is not keeping up with today’s needs.

Is it time to reinvent information literacy again? And do we need to think more broadly and consider how to address information literacy not just within our institutions but for our communities and our society?

During the pandemic, we saw libraries begin to take up this challenge and become anti-misinformation warriors. In San Diego, academic and public libraries partnered with both local government and the National Library of Medicine to address the infodemic. Local universities, public libraries, and government agencies collectively created a Toolkit to help stop the spread of health misinformation in their communities (Henderson n.d.). Margaret Henderson, a Health Sciences Librarian from San Diego State University involved in the Toolkit, noted that the inclusive aspect of the project, involving librarians from different backgrounds and with differing expertise, was critical to its success: “it wasn’t just one voice” Henderson said, “all of the different librarians that were collaborating on this gave input to it.”

Scott Walter, Dean of the San Diego State University Library, also emphasized that collaboration is key to addressing social crises rooted in the slackening of public confidence in scientific and scholarly expertise. “Bringing researchers, librarians, policy makers, and community members together may be the ‘next level’ of information literacy engagement that is needed at the present moment,” Walter said. “Any meaningful solution goes well beyond what we have previously thought about when discussing ‘information literacy’ and well beyond the familiar models for collaboration among librarians, faculty members, and publishers. It’s all bigger than that now.”

In South Africa, a review of academic library websites showed librarians responded to pandemic “fake news” by employing various strategies including relying on their empowerment programs (in the form of information and media literacy), provision of quality and credible information to users, and support for research and collection development (Bangani 2021).

The study found South African libraries played an important role as sources of trustworthy health information during the pandemic but that there is more work to be done — particularly around the need for resources to be provided in local languages other than English.

Joyce V. Garczynski, Assistant University Librarian for Communication and Digital Scholarship at Towson University, said she would like to see library workers advocating on the national stage for the need to teach information literacy and critical thinking skills at all levels, kindergarten through adulthood. “If education isn’t seen as a possible solution to misinformation, we will continue to see an erosion of public

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trust in the research process and science,” Garczynski said. “We have seen the impact that information literacy can have in our own classrooms, but we aren’t part of the larger conversation about how to solve problems like mis- and disinformation.

Researchers and scientists need library workers to continue to teach information literacy skills and to advocate on the national stage for the necessity of these skills.”

The Role of Librarians and Publishers In a world where confidence in research is under threat, the role of academic libraries is more important than ever.

But that role needs to evolve — librarians need to go beyond providing lists of resources or evaluation checklists. As Henderson put it, “the big thing is critical thinking — that’s important. It’s not just about teaching information literacy, you have to be teaching critical thinking, teaching the process of science.” Without understanding scientific inquiry, and how it is communicated, the public will be poorly equipped to distinguish fact from fiction. “It’s in everybody’s best interest for citizens to understand how science works,” Henderson said.

Information literacy instruction needs to expand beyond the classroom and be more collaborative. Walter noted that researchers need to be able to not only discern and describe misinformation in their areas of expertise but need to be able to communicate that out to the public, beyond their traditional audience of students and fellow scholars. And he believes that to accomplish this “information literacy, data literacy, media literacy, and scientific communication skills will need to come together in new ways,” adding that this suggests a need for “a deeper commitment to collaboration across academic, public, special, and school libraries.”

Publishers also have a critical role to play in restoring confidence in research. We need to embrace Open Access while maintaining high quality, reliable scientific communication, and collaborate with libraries to educate both scholars and the public about the scientific process. Walter said he believes publishers can help by working to demystify the process of scientific inquiry, peer review, and publication of science and scholarship so that members of the public understand the way

Emily Singley Bio Emily Singley is the Vice President for North American Library Relations at Elsevier. Singley has more than 16 years of experience building sustainable partnerships in academic libraries and an expertise in engaging academic leadership in game-changing conversations. She most recently served as Associate University Librarian, Technology and Technical Services at Boston College. During her tenure at Boston College, she directed the vision, strategic planning, staffing, and resourcing for five key library programs. Emily’s past positions include library technology roles at Harvard University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Curry College.

36 Against the Grain / November 2023

in which scientific knowledge evolves, especially in a quickly emerging area like a pandemic.

Diversification of the scholarly record can also help combat misinformation, and both publishers and libraries need to be actively working towards that goal. As Garczynski points out, publishers need to pay more attention to diversifying what voices they publish: “when information consumers can see themselves represented in what they read, how it impacts them, and they understand the rigorous process that went into creating what they’re reading, I believe that will go a long way to help restoring faith in the scientific research process.”

There is still a lot of work that both libraries and publishers need to do if we are to collectively restore confidence in research, but here are a few ways to start: • Expand information literacy efforts beyond the classroom — Academic libraries and STEM publishers can partner with public libraries, science museums, and local communities to develop curricula designed to equip the public to become better consumers of scientific communication.

• Give workshops in collaboration with trusted publishers to train researchers how to recognize predatory journals, paper mills, and unreliable research — Publishers can partner with academic libraries to host “author workshops” that share information about the publishing process with graduate students and early-career researchers.

• Develop training for researchers and faculty on social media communication — Inform researchers about the risks and benefits of engaging in public dialogue around their research and help them understand not only how to communicate effectively, but also how to deal with comments, backlash, and abuse online.

• Be more open and transparent about the publishing process — STEM publishers can do more to make the work they do on research integrity more visible. Publishers manage a reliable and equitable peer review process, link data and software to articles, ensure compliance with funder and institutional policies, check for plagiarism and image manipulation, make articles machine-readable, and conduct ethics investigations. Publishers should share this work more widely with researchers, libraries, and the public.

• Diversify author voices globally — scientific communication needs to be more globally diverse and equitable. Publisher-led initiatives like the Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing (“Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing” n.d.) and selfidentification of authors upon submission are a good start, but there is more work to be done (Elsevier n.d.).

Conclusion If researchers, libraries, and publishers all work together, we can collectively address the threat of misinformation and restore confidence in research. While it may seem daunting given the speed at which information is created and disseminated, I believe it’s possible. It will take publishers and libraries working together to build a scholarly communication ecosystem grounded in integrity, transparency, openness, and diversity if we are to build a world where information can once

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again be trusted. Collaboration — across institutions, industry, and governments — is key. If we want to go far, we’ll have to go together.

References Bangani, Siviwe. 2021. “The Fake News Wave: Academic Libraries’ Battle against Misinformation during COVID-19.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 47 (5): 102390. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102390.

“Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.”

Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). February 9, 2015. https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework.

“Confidence in Research—Elsevier.” n.d. Confidenceinresearch. elsevier.com. https://confidenceinresearch.elsevier.com/.

Elsevier. n.d. “Paving the Way to Increase Diversity in Journals — and Research.” Elsevier Connect. Accessed August 28, 2023. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/reviewers-update/pavingthe-way-to-increase-diversity-in-journals-and-research.

“Joint Commitment for Action on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing.” n.d. Royal Society of Chemistry. Accessed August 28, 2023. https://www.rsc.org/policy-evidence-campaigns/ inclusion-diversity/joint-commitment-for-action-inclusionand-diversity-in-publishing/.

Saunders, Laura. 2023. “Librarian Perspectives on Misinformation: A Follow-up and Comparative Study | Saunders | College & Research Libraries, v.84, n.4.” Crl.acrl.org. Accessed August 28, 2023. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/ view/25976/33915.

“US Library Survey 2022.” n.d. Ithaka S+R. Accessed August 28, 2023. https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/us-librarysurvey-2022/.

Author’s note: The personal quotes used in this article are from direct conversations with academic librarians. Each individual quoted has given consent to have their commentary published as part of this piece.

San Diego Circuit. (2023, February 10). Library Toolkit for Addressing Health Misinformation. https://libguides.sdsu.edu/ library-toolkit-addressing-health-misinformation.

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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> Visit him at https://www.squirreldude.com/ Column Editor’s Note: We often find ourselves dealing with products, services, people, performances with labels such as the best or the worst. In reviews, we often find that problem as people build up and pull down all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. While I would not be likely to have ever run across the very best or the very worst of just about anything, I believe I have discovered the most useless review ever. Please bear with me.

Recently, I wrote a blog entry on the values of reviews.1 Too often there is way too value to really consider it a worthwhile addition to your knowledge of anything. I was reminded of a review I saw when buying a gas grill back in 2017. I was on the Sears site (that is how old that purchase was) when I saw this review: “Still in the box — I purchased the grill to use when the weather got a bit warmer. Through the month of January it was too cold. We were gone for three weeks in February. Hope to get it out of the box and assemble it in March. It is in the garage acting as a table for miscellaneous objects. I expect it to work well upon assembly.” The reviewer “Valued” gave it one star out of five.

The name should have been “Idiot.” How can you review something you did not use. FWIW, how was the box acting as a table for miscellaneous objects? That would have been at least worth another star.

I did buy the grill and it was quite good. I believe it worked better once you took it out and assembled it. Surprising how that works.

Such is the way with book reviews. We really need to go through the work to have an understanding of what the benefits and drawbacks are. Practically, no book is the best. Practically, no book is the worst. They just live in the middle with the rest of us. Luckily, we have a great set of reviewers who actually look through the content and make an assessment based on the content!

Speaking of which, 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), Sandra Yvette Desjardins (Texas A&M-Central Texas), Carolyn Filippelli (University

of Arkansas – Fort Smith), Peter Hesseldenz (University of Kentucky), and Katherine Swart (Calvin 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

“Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics,” part of Bloomsbury Philosophy Library, Bloomsbury Digital Resources.

Contact Bloomsbury Publishing for trial or pricing information (https://www.bloomsbury.com/).

Reviewed by Kelly Denzer (Collections Strategist and Discovery Librarian, Davidson College, Davidson, NC.) <kedenzer@davidson.edu> “Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics” is a collection on the Bloomsbury Philosophy Library platform. The tagline associated with the collection is “discover new ways of thinking about art and the everyday,” and that is indeed what I found with this collection of resources. The content includes case studies, primary texts and scholarly monographs, an image gallery and videos, and critical readings on global topics around traditional aesthetic theories. The collection contains diverse artworks and images, all with philosophical questions to engage students in deeper classroom discussions or as launching points for research papers.

Exploration of the items within the collection can begin at many different points. Content is organized by material type, subject, period, people, and by Movements and Schools of Thought such as Post-Structuralism, Hegelianism, or Ordinary Language Philosophy. Starting with these broad categories offers the option to further filter by period, people, subjects, etc. to narrow down the results.

Eastern Grey Squirrel at Waterfront Park in Charleston, SC on May 23, 2023. When you are in town for the Charleston Conference – be sure to take some time with the squirrel friends!

38 Against the Grain / November 2023

The eBooks included in the collection include primary texts from publishers such as Princeton and Yale university presses, and Bloomsbury publishing imprints make up the secondary literature.

Each eBook landing page contains a summary and a hyperlinked table of contents to bring the reader directly to the chapter or, alternatively, to go directly to a page number. A researcher can also search within the book for specific words or phrases.

Each chapter includes a full citation

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list with direct links when available and suggestions for further reading. A brief overlap analysis indicates many of the monographs are available in other aggregator subscriptions, so be mindful of that as you consider this collection as a whole at your library.

One of my favorite areas to explore was “Aesthetics and Politics in the Global South” edited by J. Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. This is a collection of writings from non-European, postcolonial Global South thinkers and changemakers that includes the speech given by Gabriel García Márquez upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 and the “Manifesto of the Progressive Writer’s Association in India” from 1936. The collection includes diverse voices aimed at providing students a broader understanding and knowledge of aesthetics outside of Europe.

Contributors to the Case Studies include museum curators, visual artists, and philosophy professors. One example is the study of the Chiapas Tote Bag.2 This article focuses on the concepts of forgeries and appropriation with the Chiapas tote bag as an example, and a similar one produced by an Italian luxury label. The article brings in a variety of philosophical points of view around the consideration of the aesthetics of art forgeries or appropriations. Is forgery an aesthetic issue, or economical/art historical one as Alfred Lessing claimed in 1965? Or is the problem with forgeries the misrepresentation of the achievement of the overall process of creation as Dennis Dutton wrote in 1979? This is a sampling of the philosophical arguments in the field of aesthetics that carry across multiple disciplines including fine arts, art history, dance, theater and beyond throughout the “Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics” collection.

Also included are nearly 300 images selected by philosophers to spark class discussion or research paper topics. The questions accompanying the images delve into aesthetic judgment or the place of art in society. Additionally, the video case studies allow for close analysis of an art installation and an oil painting. The videos provide text that is seen on the screen, so no need for closed captions, however, I did not see an Audio Description option. Bloomsbury does include a full Accessibility Statement on their website and is compliant with W3C standards. Each video also includes a description underneath describing the artwork portrayed and providing deeper context. Researchers signed into the platform can also create clips of the video.

The platform is easy to navigate and includes the features one is looking for when searching multiple pages of online content, including the ability to save, cite, print, or share when logged in to your account. The platform also keeps track of your recently viewed items for easy back and forth navigation. Annual updates are made to the secondary literature and images to include contemporary references, such as Taylor Swift and eBooks including Philosophy of Comics. Having all this information in one portal is a definite benefit to this collection. That, along with the thought provoking philosophical questions around aesthetics to kick start a research query, makes this a worthy collection to explore for a library that serves undergraduates.

“Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics” topics span across disciplines and I would recommend a trial to promote to faculty outside of philosophy to those teaching writing, film, or any interdisciplinary courses taught on campus.

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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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.)

Edens, Patricia Stanfill (Ed.). Principles of Health: Depressions.

Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2021. 9781637000250, 554 pages. $165.00.

Reviewed by Katherine Swart (Collection Development Librarian, Hekman Library, Calvin University) <kswart20@calvin.edu> Principles of Health: Depression is the seventh book to be released in Salem Press’s Principles of Health reference book series. Available in both print and as an eBook, this volume lays out “the fundamentals of depression as a medical condition.”

Intended for students and researchers, the book is easy to understand and is comprehensive. Editor Patricia Stanfill Edens, MS, MBA, PhD, RN, LFACHE is a medical writer who coordinated a team of eighty-three scholars to write the 119 entries in the book.

The first section, “What Is Depression?,” contains twentyseven articles, which collectively cover the basics of depression and what depression looks like in specific populations. Topics include depression in men and women, depression across the lifespan (adolescence, midlife crisis, and empty-nest syndrome), and depression in Black, Hispanic/Latinx, indigenous, and other races/ethnicities.

The second section covers “Types of Depression and Associated Conditions.” Articles such as bipolar disorder, postpartum depression, and seasonal affective disorder talk about causes, symptoms, treatments, and therapies.

The third section discusses how to recognize the signs and symptoms of depression. Sleep disorders, fatigue, social media, suicide, and several other signs each get generous articles devoted to symptoms, interventions, and treatments.

“Screening and Diagnosis,” the fourth section, delves into the Beck Depression Inventory and how doctors diagnose psychiatric disorders. Often depression is found alongside other illnesses, such as chronic pain and eating disorders. These and other

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aspects are considered along with physical and environmental factors.

The fifth section discusses “Treatment and Medications” spanning psychopharmacology to mindfulness. Entries give brief overviews of antidepressants, cognitive-behavior therapy, and counseling, as well as more involved treatments like EMDR, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and electroconvulsive therapy.

The last section covers self-care and how to help others with depression. Articles here are aimed at readers who have depression or know a friend or family member with depression. Topics include family stress, technology, nutrition, spirituality, and government mental health resources. A lengthy bibliography, glossary, list of helpful organizations, and subject index conclude the book.

The book feels refreshingly current, devoting articles to race and ethnicity, homelessness, political polarization, sexual orientation, and social media. It also feels comprehensive, covering types of depression, treatment, and self-care.

Typical of many Salem Press books I’ve reviewed, the book unfortunately has some glaring errors. Most notably the consecutive articles “Understanding Depression” and “Depression: Brain Chemistry, Cognitive and Stress Theories” are almost word for word the same text with just a few minor differences. How could the editors not catch this?

Secondly, the writing is somewhat uneven with some articles taking the expected generic tone of a reference book and other articles taking a more personal tone. For example, the article “Depression and Menopause” lays out the topic in a straightforward way, while the article “Pandemics and Depression” directly addresses readers who may be experiencing depression.

Likewise, the book purports to be for students and researchers, but can’t settle on an audience. The article “Depression in Adolescence: Black Adolescents” is written for a clinician, addressing the reader as “you” and giving suggestions for how a clinician should treat adolescents. The article “Talking to Seniors about Depression” is written for adults with ageing parents or spouses of seniors with depression, addressing the reader as “you” and giving instructions for starting a conversation.

Despite these drawbacks, Principles of Health: Depression makes a decent reference source for undergraduate students looking to get an introduction to the topic of depression and all its facets. The articles have solid bibliographies, and the index makes it easy to find specific subjects within the book.

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.)

Evans, Robert C., editor, Critical Insights: On the Road. Ipswich, Massachusetts: Salem Press, a division of EBSCO Information Services, Inc.; Amenia, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2022.

9781619255258, 389 pages. $105.00 Reviewed by Peter Hesseldenz (Academic Liaison for Literature and Humanities, University of Kentucky Libraries, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky) <phessel@uky.edu> Salem Press has recently issued On the Road, a new entry in its Critical Insights series focusing on Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel. This volume, edited by Robert C. Evans, is, like others

40 Against the Grain / November 2023

in the series, a collection of essays which aims to help students examine frequently studied literary works and place them in historical context. The book, Kerouac’s most famous novel, was credited with establishing and defining the Beat Generation.

Though initially widely panned, it gained a devoted following and proved to be highly influential, eventually paving the way for the counterculture of the 1960s and beyond. The work is a fictionalized chronicle of Kerouac’s series of cross-country road trips in the late 1940s with his traveling partner, Neal Cassady, as they experience a rapidly changing America and search for enlightenment and meaning. Over the years, On the Road has come to be considered an American classic and is now widely studied and often taught in university classrooms.

Beat scholar Matt Theado’s opening essay, “Jack Kerouac, On the Road, and the Myth of the West” introduces the book by placing Kerouac’s fascination with westward travel in the context of the greater urge throughout American history to explore both the real, historical West as well as the mythic version depicted in books and Western movies. Theado considers On the Road to be a romanticized autobiography, featuring thinly veiled portraits of real people like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. He suggests that readers seek out actual biographies of Kerouac, which he feels will help deepen and enrich the reading experience.

Theado’s introduction is followed by several entries which look at On the Road in historical context. A pair of essays examine two of the main charges leveled at On the Road by critics when it was first published — that it promoted juvenile delinquency and glorified drug abuse. These essays, both written by Evans, present thorough looks at the subjects, using primary sources from the time period, to show the basis for each of these accusations. Two essays by Franco Manni look at how historical events converge with Kerouac’s literary and philosophical influences to provide the atmosphere out of which Kerouac produced his novel. Jesse Gripko’s contribution examines the clash between Kerouac’s ideals and those of the majority of Americans at the time of the book’s writing which he sees as ultimately resulting in the characters’ failure to find enlightenment.

Evans contributes a long entry covering the early reviews of On the Road, drawing from a large number of national and regional publications. Though a bit tedious to read since many of the critics made similar points over and over, the collecting and summarizing of this vast number of articles represents a considerable undertaking and includes valuable information.

One point that emerges from that essay is that many of the reviewers found fault with Kerouac’s novel not because they found him to be a poor writer, but because of their concern about the impact his works had on society. In keeping with that idea, Lindsay Sears, working with a committee of several other writers, attempts to appraise On the Road by looking at Kerouac’s considerable skills as a writer. In their entry, they closely examine a single paragraph from the book, commenting on the artistic decisions that Kerouac made, sentence by sentence and sometimes word by word.

Several essays look at On the Road in the context of other books and writers. Michael J. Martin argues that On the Road is a naturalist novel and draws connections particularly to the work of Jack London, a writer who Kerouac admired. David Stephen Calonne looks at On the Road’s debt to William Saroyan, while Evans compares On the Road to another novel about crosscountry travel, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939.

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On the Road’s continuing presence in society is the subject of a few entries — first in S.G. Ellerhoff’s entertaining piece about Cassady’s influence on the 1960s hippie generation via his association with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and then in two essays by Jordan Bailey concentrating on the 2012 film version of On the Road, directed by Walter Salles.

Two other entries, by Jessica Ahn and Eric J. Sterling, summarize earlier collections of essays about On the Road — What’s Your Road, Man? edited by Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton and On the Road edited by Harold Bloom. Though these articles are of debatable value, since readers could simply go to the actual collections, they will certainly be appreciated by students and might even inspire them to track down the original works.

One of the strengths of this volume is that it shows how the reaction to Kerouac’s work has changed significantly over the years, becoming deeper and more nuanced as we move further into the 21st century. While readers must now grapple with issues like Kerouac’s treatment of women and minorities, the greater themes, like the search for enlightenment and the rejection of societal norms, continue to connect with readers.

This volume makes clear that, even as we enter the era of the electric car, Kerouac’s book will continue to inspire road trips far into the future.

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

Against the Grain / November 2023

Hall, Kate & Parker, Kathy. The Public Library Director’s HR Toolkit. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2022. 9780838938393, 208 pages. $59.99 Reviewed by Sandra Yvette Desjardins (Library Specialist III, Texas A&M-Central Texas, Killeen, Texas) <sandra.desjardins@tamuct.edu> Library schools have a limited amount of time to teach students everything they’ll need to know in preparation of their new careers. And while some library programs require a management course as part of their core curriculum, most library students don’t immediately step into a management position. With that in mind, it’s a great idea to have a resource available that can be used as a refresher when they do take on a supervisory or managerial position. This book is one such example of an excellent resource to have for anyone wanting to review or learn more about the hiring process.

The Public Library Director’s HR Toolkit is broken down into three parts: Recruiting and Onboarding, Developing and Retaining, and Departing and Reassessing. In the first part of the book, the authors provide suggestions on ways to create strong job descriptions so that employers can recruit the best, most qualified candidates. “Job descriptions should reflect the needs of the organization, not the skills of a particular individual,” and job ads should include pertinent information about the organization, to include things like work environment and a clarification for the current opening. “By explaining that

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41

the position is open due to a retirement, or that new positions are being added, you alert candidates that there are not a lot of open positions due to high turnover and a toxic environment.”

Next, the authors share before-and-after tips for the interview process. They also provide an overview of unconscious and affinity bias and explain the importance of self-reflection in this regard. “Our job as hiring managers is to create a process that removes bias. We want to bring in people who represent different backgrounds and ways of thinking.” It’s also good to keep in mind that unconscious bias can be a form of unlawful discrimination, and so it’s best to be proactive by incorporating strategies to avoid any incidents before they occur. In terms of salary and benefits, the authors remind managers to “consider also that men tend to negotiate for salaries more than women,” and so it’s good to have a fair salary range prepared beforehand, as well as benefits that are equitable for all.

In Part II, the authors share their insight on developing employees through continual training and career development.

They also speak on the importance of retaining employees by strengthening morale and by actively engaging with them by using effective communication techniques. The authors remind the reader that every employee is different, and so establishing their preferred method of communication is key. Giving the proper type of feedback is also essential. “For new employees, you might need to give more detailed feedback to help them learn. For more established employees, you want to provide feedback in a way that allows them to draw on their past skills and experience to grow.” In terms of goal setting, the authors recommend using SMART goals so that managers offer clear, specific language when providing feedback that incorporates measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals.

Part III focuses on aspects of reassessing staffing needs and managing departing employees. “Many managers and directors don’t want to focus on the more uncomfortable side of HR, discipline and termination, but to effectively lead, you need to know how to do that as well.” This portion of the book provides a wealth of information regarding the progressive discipline model and a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), both useful tools if employers would like to help employees who are struggling with any aspect of their job duties. There is, of course, a very useful section about the termination process, should the need arise to resort to that measure. Conversely, if an employee resigns, there is a helpful section about the best ways to plan for that transition and how to proceed with offboarding departing employees.

The book concludes with a helpful toolkit that includes samples of the following worksheets: job description, job ad, hiring philosophy, hiring checklist, interview question, rubric creation, compensation philosophy, manager onboarding, manager training, communication styles, SMART goals, training framework reflection, core values, director succession planning, when to call an attorney, discipline philosophy, discipline and termination, written warning, and manager offboarding.

This book provides a wealth of knowledge not only for supervisors or managers but for any library staff member. The above review speaks on many of the major key points of the book, while the book as a whole offers many other helpful bits of information that are relevant for anyone, anywhere. With that being said, I recommend having this book readily available for staff members of all varieties, and I especially recommend it for those interested in pursuing supervisory or managerial positions.

Mars, Laura (Editor). Working Americans: 1880-2022. Volume 18 (Health Care Workers), Amenia, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-63700-385-5, 600 pages. $150 Print.

Reviewed by Carolyn Filippelli (Reference Librarian, Boreham Library, University of Arkansas – Fort Smith) <Carolyn.Filippelli@uafs.edu> Health Care Workers depicts the evolution of health care in the United States from the late 19th century to the present through the lives of thirty-one health care professionals. Arranged chronologically by decades, each time period begins with a photo and profile of a health care worker such as a nurse, family doctor, dentist, midwife, or pharmacist. One unusual profile is that of a volunteer who worked in “poison control” with the Food and Drug Administration, often risking his own life to test effects of various additives in food. In addition to stories from health care workers from diverse geographical areas, the evolution of health care is also told through lives of health care workers from other nationalities, immigrants from China, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica, who later became citizens and also health care workers.

Included with each profile are standard sections such as “Historical Snapshot,” “Selected Prices,” and “Timelines.” These sections provide an interesting backdrop of significant political, cultural, and social events for each decade. Illustrations, advertisements, news items, pictures, and statistics add interest to the narrative and make it come alive. Along with developments in health care, the reader can follow changes in the prices of everyday items such as a gallon of milk and note events such as the opening of the first McDonald’s drive-through restaurant and Captain Kirk (William Shatner’s) travel to space on the SpaceX Blue Origin capsule.

The Timelines effectively summarize key events for diverse subjects such as the history of nursing, food and drug laws, and the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. They also focus attention on unusual topics such as the connection with corsets and women’s health. Included are significant advances in medical care such as the Salk vaccine for polio and the AIDS crisis, the growth of the health care industry and medical insurance, and passage of legislation such as the Social Security Amendments Act that included Medicare and Medicaid.

Section Two is reserved for detailed information on health care occupations. There are over 150 pages of detailed statistics and charts on individual occupations, employment and wages.

This volume is useful for students in the social sciences, health sciences, and also as an outstanding general reference source. The research is thorough and impressive, and the overall organizational features make this a very “user-friendly” work.

The Index and the section on “Further Reading” are useful additions for locating more specific information. The many pictures and advertisements also contribute to the volume’s browsability and overall value.

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.)

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.)

42 Against the Grain / November 2023

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Money in Politics. Reference Shelf. NY: H.W. Wilson, 2023.

ISBN: 978-1-63700-494-4, 200 pages. $75.

Reviewed by Carolyn Filippelli (Reference Librarian, Boreham Library, University of Arkansas – Fort Smith) <Carolyn.Filippelli@uafs.edu> Money in Politics is an incisive overview of major controversies on money and the political process. Using documentation from articles, polls, legislation, web sites, and organizations, this work addresses issues in campaign finance and political contributions made through PACs, Super PACS, and nonprofit 501 Cs. Also included are the impacts in the political sphere of ‘dark money,’ foreign contributions, and lobbyists.

The Citizens United v. FEC ruling of 2010 overturned a great number of financial limitations that have been in force in the United States.3 In its decision, the Court ruled that expenditures by corporations and labor unions were protected under the First Amendment. A subsequent Court decision in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission determined that regulation of individual contributions was unconstitutional and an abridgement of free speech. These decisions paved the way for the development of PACs (Political Action Committees) and Super PACs. PACs, Super PACs, and nonprofit 501 Cs became commonlyused vehicles to funnel money into campaigns and influence elections with little or no requirements for regulation or disclosure. Further inflows of money and impacts on the political process resulted from the inflows of cryptocurrency, dark money (funds for which there is no documentation of source and amount), and foreign contributions. An attempt to regulate foreign contributions through the Disclose Act was not successful.

A Pew Research poll in 2015 and subsequent polls have documented concerns of the American public with the effects of money in politics. Although Americans indicate that they are concerned about unregulated uses of money in politics as potential threats to democracy, few practical changes have resulted. Although there have been discussions of a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to repeal the ruling of the

Against the Grain / November 2023

Supreme Court in Citizens United and to allow states to regulate money in elections, little progress has occurred.

This work fills a niche for a current and balanced overview of the issues of money in politics. It presents historical background, development, regulations and legislation, controversies, court cases, polls, and public opinion. Although the work does not propose possible solutions or explanations as to why more reforms have not been made, the impacts of digital media, abundance of misinformation in society, and the current atmosphere of political divisiveness and mistrust of government are suggested as reasons why progress has been difficult.

Features such as a Bibliography, Websites, Index, and a CITE feature add to the usability of this work. The reader is easily able to grasp the impact of PACs and lobbying on public policy.

Sections on campaign finance in the states, corporate PACs, and Trump’s influence on money in politics add further value. This book would be a good addition for ready reference or a current issues section in libraries. It would also be of value to researchers in political science, criminal justice, history, and law.

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.)

Endnotes 1. See my entry “Reviewing Reviews - Do They Even Matter or Help When Traveling?” — July 23, 2023 from On the Seas with Seeman: A Cruise Blog — https:// seaswithseeman.blogspot.com/search/label/Reviews.

2. Atencia-Linares, P. (2021). Chiapas Tote Bag: Artistic Value, Forgeries, Appropriation Art and Cultural Appropriation. In D.H. Hick (Ed.). Case Studies in Contemporary Aesthetics. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved March 17, 2023, from http://dx.doi. org/10.5040/9781350930063.0003.

3. See: https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/ citizens-united-v-fec/

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

W

hen was the last time you put pen to paper, wrote a letter to a friend, addressed an envelope, placed a stamp on that envelope, and dropped the letter into a mailbox? Can you even remember? Letter writing is a lost art — one that saddens me, as I was once an avid letter writer. The hard lesson learned is this art form requires willing participants and these participants have succumbed to the modern communication technology of email, text/emojis and the occasional phone call.

Why the commentary on letter writing? It comes from an increasingly difficult task of finding the reading matter necessary to fulfill the quest of reading one piece of work by each author who has become a Nobel Laureate in Literature. Two years ago, I discovered and read Correspondence, the compilation of letters exchanged between the Nobel Laureate Nelly Sachs and the poet Paul Celan (pseudonym for Paul Anstschel). It was an intimate, yet decidedly different, experience than one would have had if one had been able to read her poetry.

With less than 30 authors left, reading opportunities are becoming slim and the quest to find an available work in English is akin to being on the search for ancient treasure in an Indiana Jones movie. However, I recently obtained a library card for Clemson University and now have a new catalog available for me to explore. The search by author produced a couple of books.

One with this intriguing title: The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell. Volume 1. The Private Years 1884-1914. edited by Nicholas Griffin. Upon receipt of this 553“The proper page book, I wondered what awaited definition of me. A quick look at the Preface gave a man is an me a clue: “I don’t know how many of Russell’s letters are currently animal that in the Russell Archives, but forty writes letters.” to fifty thousand is a reasonable — Lewis Carroll guess, and the number grows every year. While a number of them are perfunctory ... many thousands are interesting, revealing, amusing, or in other ways valuable as part of a record of his life; and many are masterpieces. The most difficult and time consuming task in editing this section of Russell’s letters, therefore, has been choosing which ones to include.” (And for me — which ones to read.) Can we even get our head around forty to fifty thousand letters in edition to his proliferative resume of over 60 books and two thousand articles?

That pen must never have left his hand.

Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell was born in Wales in 1872. He was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” His letters from the private years reveal these attributes, which is fortunate for me in my quest. Griffin organizes this volume in such an intriguing and thorough fashion that one becomes completely immersed in the minutiae of Russell’s daily life.

There is a Preface and Introduction: Some Family Background followed by 6 chapters: 1) Childhood and Youth (1884-93); 2) Engagement (1893-4); 3) “A Life of Intellect Tempered by Flippancy” (1895-1901); 4) New Crises (1901-2); 5) “The Long

44 Against the Grain / November 2023

Task of Thought” (1903-11); and 6) New Love (1911-14).

So you might ask, what was his subject matter, style of writing, form of writing?

(When not composing letters.) Was it literary fiction, politics, novels, creative, mystery, science fiction, non-fiction, or poetry?

The Nobel accolades were given to an author who is renowned in the field of the philosophy of mathematics, just to name one. But what one gleans from Russell’s letters is the intensity by which he approached ALL aspects of the human condition.

From the man who delivered such works as The Principles of Mathematics, three volumes of Principia Mathematica with coauthor A.N. Whitehead and The Problems with Philosophy comes this voluminous archive of letters that are simply love letters.

Love letters filled with passion of every form — passion for life, passion for art, passion for thought, passion for intellect, passion for many women and passion for philosophy and mathematics.

As I was reading, I placed so many tabs in the book that choosing representative quotes to share became quite a task.

Enjoy — as they all “differ by a completely special difference.”

To Alys in 1893 (his first wife — written while they were courting. For context, Alys had Christian beliefs and Russell was agnostic): “I am afraid it is almost necessary we should have a good deal of discussion on theological questions: I am sorry because I shall unavoidably appear in a rather brutal light as I am so utterly out of sympathy with Christianity. It would be no use at all hoping that I shall ever believe that God is a Person: no reader of metaphysics could I think be brought to such a view: it is almost as much discredited in Philosophy as Circle Squaring in Mathematics.”

To Alys in 1894 (Russell’s grandmother did not approve of his relationship with Alys and did everything in her power to come between them. These quotes come from a several page letter written after a particularly bitter argument with his grandmother about their relationship that was headed to engagement.)

“My Dearest Alys, It is a horrid necessity to have to collapse into letters again and I have hardly realized our parting enough yet to imagine the necessity .... I have had the scene with my Grandmother: it didn’t happen the way I had hoped and was I fear rather a failure, though I said all I had contemplated saying and said nothing beyond my intentions.” (several pages later) “My Darling — I have got thy letter and it is heavenly. I don’t know what to say. It seems such an age since it was necessary to find words for the expression of love, that none of them seem good. And yet thee has found lovely words for it: I wish I could too.”

[To Louis Couturat) in 1898 (Griffin mentions that most of the communication between Russell and Couturat is too technical for inclusion.)

“There are one or two questions that I will not discuss in my reply, which will concern itself exclusively with the empirical nature of the Euclidean axioms. The first relates to the antinomy of the point. What constitutes continued on page 45

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Booklover continued from page 44 the antinomy is that, not only are two points different, but they differ by a completely special difference, different from the difference between two other points, and that this difference is what constitutes distance. This difference must, therefore, be the difference between two positions, and yet two positions, in themselves, have only a material difference. The difficulty does not depend entirely on a Leibnizian theory of identity. As for the circle of definitions, these are definitions in the philosophical sense, that is to say, definitions which give what truly constitutes the defined object, and not merely some verbal definition.”

To Helen in 1902 (Russell had several female friends with which he exchanged letters. He was writing while staying at 14 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London) “This place is singularly beautiful. Alone at night in my study at the top of the house, I see far below me the busy world hurrying east and west, and I feel infinitely remote from their little hopes and fears. But beyond, borne on the flowing tide of the river, the seagulls utter their melancholy cry, full of the infinite sadness of the sea; above, Orion and the Pleiades shine undisturbed. They are my true comrades, they speak a language that I understand, and with them I find a home: rest and peace are with the calm strength of Nature.”

Rumors continued from page 8 award from my peers.” Don’t miss Rebecca and Liz Siler’s annual Charleston preconference “Acquisitions Bootcamp” this year — it will be held virtually on Zoom on Tuesday, November 28, from 1:00 – 4:00 pm Eastern. https://library. unc.edu/2023/10/vargha-sla-halloffame/

Food & Beverage October is olive harvest season month in Greece — a tradition that dates back to ancient times! Olives and olive oil are staples in the Mediterranean diet! There’s nothing better than a Greek salad with olives and feta cheese with taramousalata spread! If you haven’t tried it, you are missing something really special!

Oh! For Charleston-interested types, just saw that the historic building that housed one of the peninsula’s famous restaurants, the Hominy Grill, will become an event venue courtesy of another long-time local catering business Hamby Catering. Remember when we used to have receptions at the Customs House downtown for many years? Unfortunately we outgrew the space, but we will never forget the energetic Fran Hamby, the brains behind the catering of so many receptions at the Customs House. Fran is deceased, but her energy lives on in the Hominy Grill Space as the Rutledge Room! continued on page 53

Against the Grain / November 2023

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45

LEGAL ISSUES Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Jack Montgomery (Georgia Southern University) <jmontgomery@georgiasouthern.edu>

Legally Speaking — Banning Bans, aka What’s Happening in Illinois Column Editor: Ashley Krenelka Chase (Assistant Professor of Law, Stetson University College of Law) <akrenelk@law.stetson.edu>

I

’ve written about book bans already during my time writing Legally Speaking. I hate them. You probably hate them!

And if you don’t, you should. Book bans are the antithesis of librarianship, and contrary to the capitalist nature of our colleagues in publishing (can’t sell published materials if they’re banned, am I right?). As it turns out, the people of Illinois are also not great fans of book bans, and the State was the first in the nation to do something about it.

But first, the backstory. In 2022, the State of Illinois claimed 67 attempts to ban books in libraries throughout the state, up from 41 the previous year. If we assume that increase to be standard, we can assume there were roughly 20 the year prior to that, and so on. What started as a handful of attempts less than a decade ago has grown significantly and become increasingly more volatile in public. During the 2021/22 school year, members of the Proud Boys, well-known far-right extremists with a history of violence, attended a school board meeting in Illinois’s Community High School District 99, as the district weighed whether to keep a widely-challenged graphic novel on the shelves. Ultimately the District voted to keep the book in its libraries, but after witnessing the campaign to ban the book and the bigotry with which the ban was discussed, Illinois State Representative Anne Stava-Murray decided to, together with her colleagues, do something about it.

Introduced in February of 2023, the co-sponsored House Bill 2789 made its way through the Illinois General Assembly relatively quickly (by legislative standards). The bill amended the Illinois Library System Act, to explicitly declare that: [t]he policy of the State [is] to encourage and protect the freedom of libraries and library systems [so they may] acquire materials without external limitation and [sic] be protected against attempts to ban, remove, or otherwise restrict access to books or other materials.

A ban on bans! We love to see it! The bill then goes on to formally “adopt the American Library Association’s Library bill of Rights that indicates materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement declaring the inherent authority of the library or library system to provide an adequate collection of books and other materials” as well as prohibiting “the banning of specific books or resources.”

As someone who lives in Florida, this is truly incredible. But my lawyer brain and my librarian brain are in constant battle,

46 Against the Grain / November 2023

so I immediately wondered how will they enforce this wonderful ban on bans? It turns out they thought of that, too! In order for libraries to be eligible for State grants, libraries or library systems “shall adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights,” too, and indicate that materials won’t be banned or removed “because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.”

So it comes down to money, as it always does in these situations, and that makes sense. This is the library equivalent of the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act1 which said that in order to receive State highway funds from the federal government, individual States must prohibit people under 21 years of age from purchasing or publicly possessing alcoholic beverages.

While it would be nice if we could all agree that book bans are terrible, what Illinois is doing is embracing the time honored tradition of putting money ahead of politics, a tactic which has been proven to work time and time again. You want adolescents in your State to be able to enjoy a cold beer on a Tuesday night in a bar? Great! No money for your roads. You want your library to ban Maya Angelou because you’re afraid of [insert something here, I honestly can’t fathom why anyone would ban any book, let alone something by Maya Angelou]? Great! No money for your libraries! It’s simple.

But, as always, it’s not as simple as we in the industry think it should be, and the vote to pass HB 1789 was on party lines, with all 19 Republicans in the Illinois Senate voting against it.

In talking to the media after the bill was signed by Governor Pritzker, those who voted against the bill used the talking points that have become standard dog whistles for those on the far right, accusing Democrats of trying to force extreme ideologies on communities around the state and trying to get publicity.2 Governor Pritzker, of course, pushed back, recognizing that this ideological battle is being waged by the right wing claims to “protect our children,” when their “real intention is to marginalize people and ideas they don’t like.”3 But Senate Republicans went further, arguing that the bill gives the American Library Association too much power and prohibits

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libraries from rejecting donations from the public, including books containing hate speech or directions for making bombs.4 I hate to use the words “dog whistle” twice in one column but I find it necessary, as this is just another way that those who favor (or even love) book bans use to distract logical thinkers from the reasons why a ban on bans is a very good thing.

Illinois’s Secretary of State did an excellent job of pushing back on all of these outlandish excuses to not pass the bill, reiterating that the bill has nothing to do with groups that may use a library or dictate to librarians the materials they have to maintain, and leaves the power in the hands of library professionals to craft collection development policies that make sense for their libraries and their users.

I’m not as optimistic as I’d like to be about the idea of banning bans expanding to other jurisdictions. Certainly it’s a hot-button topic, and perhaps other progressive states will get on board and take up a bill like Illinois’s HB 2789. My concern, as a lawyer and librarian who watches bills be introduced and die in the state and federal governments year after year, is that a ban on bans may seem like a waste of resources. “Our state is safe, they’d never enact book bans here!” they cry as they sit comfortably in their congressional offices. But I never believed I’d live to see bans (that remind many of us of the efforts to

control information last seen in fascist regimes during World War II) become commonplace in my lifetime, and here we are.

History always repeats itself — sometimes for good, sometimes for bad — but we cannot rest on our laurels. If I want one thing to happen in the remainder of 2023 or 2024, it would be to see a nationwide ban on bans. Do I think that has any chance of happening? Absolutely not. Will I try my best to do what I can to pursue meaningful change and advocate against bans? You’d better believe it.

Endnotes 1. 23 U.S.C. § 158 (2022) 2. https://apnews.com/article/book-ban-libraryrepublican-democrat-illinois-8422dbabac75f86ee7aecc bd39ed9a06 3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/05/ illinois-book-ban-libraries-legislation/ 4. https://www.theintelligencer.com/news/article/illinoisbill-blocks-libraries-state-funding-ban-18078571.php

ATG Welcomes a New Columnist in 2024 for Our Legally Speaking Column!

Abby Deese is a dual-degreed law librarian and the Assistant Director for Reference and Outreach at the University of Miami Law Library. She holds a B.A. in Classics from the College of Charleston, a J.D. from the Charleston School of Law, and received her M.L.I.S. from the University of Arizona while completing a fellowship in the Cracchiolo Law Library Fellows program.

Abby joined Miami Law in 2022. She has been working in academic law libraries and teaching legal research since 2015, with a focus on environmental, administrative, and corporate legal research. She is active in AALL and SEALL and has presented on various topics related to legal research instruction and technology.

When she is not contemplating the legal issues facing publishers, vendors, and librarians, she can be found chasing lizards in the Gifford Arboretum.

Join us in welcoming Abby to our editorial team.

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Questions & Answers — Copyright Column Column Editor: Kyle K. Courtney (Director of Copyright & Information Policy, Harvard University) <kyle_courtney@harvard.edu> QUESTION FROM A CIRCULATION LIBRARIAN: The Final Order was issued by the district court in the Open Libraries case, Hachette v. Internet Archive. What did the court say in the order, what are the next steps for the appeal of the case, and what does this mean for libraries and Controlled Digital Lending?

ANSWER: Yes, on August 11th, 2023, after almost five months of negotiations between the parties, District Court Judge Koeltl signed the final consent judgment and injunction.

However, this consent judgment wasn’t finalized until one last round of disagreements between the publishers and the Internet Archive.

Both sides submitted letters to the court arguing about what should be covered in the injunction. The publishers argued that the injunction should apply to all the publisher’s in-print books in IA’s Open Libraries system, which was well beyond the 127 books that were at the heart of the lawsuit.

IA argued that this injunction request was well beyond what was litigated in the case, and therefore only the publisher’s books that are currently available as licensed eBooks should be covered.

The judge agreed with IA’s analysis, and kept the injunction limited to only books where there is a licensed eBook option available. The court stated clearly, “What matters here, however, is that this case did not concern copyrighted works that are not yet available in electronic form and the parties therefore did not brief the legal issues related to such works.

Accordingly, the Court has narrowly tailored the injunctive relief in this case to cover only copyrighted works, like the Works in Suit, that are available from the Publishers in electronic form.”

The injunction further states that the publishers will notify Internet Archive of any commercially available licensed eBooks, and the Internet Archive has agreed to promptly remove them from the Open Libraries lending program upon notification.

Further, there was an agreement that the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade organization which coordinated the lawsuit, will not take further legal action against the Internet Archive for its Open Libraries program if Internet Archive observes the same takedown procedures for any AAP-member publisher with a book that has an eBook license.

To be clear, this court order was limited to the Open Libraries digital lending program; other Internet Archive library services — such as interlibrary loan, making preservation copies, and creating accessible formats of books available to people with qualified print disabilities — will still be functioning. And the Internet Archive will still make its millions of public domain texts available to the public.

Even though this is an opinion that rejected the fair use argument, this final order actually represents CDL’s continued potential for libraries and archives. Many libraires, archives, and institutions employ different versions of CDL. Open Libraries was Internet Archive’s particular flavor of CDL.

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But as we have seen from many filings in the case from the library community, libraries are using CDL in a variety of other ways: reserves programs, textbooks access, remote retrieval, and other new and different uses.

CDL’s legal underpinnings were outlined in “A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books.”1 Published in 2018, the White Paper explores the concept that libraries are in the best position to fill in the “digital book” gap for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of works collected by libraries that never made the shift to a digital eBook format. Nor are many of these works likely to make that shift.

A core theme of the library mission is to provide the public with open, non-discriminatory access to a library’s collections.

This mission is typically free from the whims of corporate interests. Hundreds of U.S. libraries, like the Internet Archive, are non-profit institutions. Accordingly, the public’s needs define the mission. By contrast, many publishers are for-profit companies that answer to stockholders and corporate boards.

This decision, as it stands, implies that commercial entities should be in a position to determine how and when publicly oriented institutions, like libraries, can lend their purchased collections. However, library collections are intended to be immune from market forces, not subject to them.

The Internet Archive formally submitted its appeal in September 2023. The appeal will focus on the district court’s interpretation of the fair use test, and other areas where Internet Archive believes there are significant errors of both facts and law. However, there may be a theme in the appeal that is more significant than just the four factors of fair use.

Congress empowered libraries through the Copyright Act to fulfill their vital function in society by allowing access to their purchased materials. These laws are designed to protect the library mission from the pitfalls of traditional market economics because libraries — unlike any other entity — have a specific mandate to cultivate and share information, allowing them to buy a book one time and loan it to their community of readers. Nowhere is the requirement that libraries must keep repeatedly paying for that book — even if it is an eBook. The appeal might focus on just that argument — that the market of expensive, limited, non-negotiated, and highly profitable eBook licenses should not be the default norm in which libraries are forced to participate.

However, there is a long road ahead. Other fair use cases that were critical to the library community’s understanding of copyright took years to decide on appeal. The famous Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Books case lasted from Sept. 2005 to November 2013. The related case, Authors Guild, Inc. v.

HathiTrust ran from Sept. 2011 to June 2014. And finally,

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Cambridge University Press v. Patton, the seminal fair use case about e-reserves and book chapters, lasted from April 2008 to Sept. 2020. And did libraries stop using e-reserves for the 12 years of the Cambridge University Press v. Patton case? They did not. In this same way, libraries are likely to utilize their own flavor of CDL during this time of the appeals process.

All libraries, publishers, and the public should, however, monitor Hachette v. Internet Archive as it moves through the appeals process because this could shape up to be another key case in the line of fair use jurisprudence.

QUESTION FROM AN ACQUISITIONS LIBRARIAN: I heard part of the Copyright Act that deals with the Library of Congress, book deposits, and copyright was declared unconstitutional. What was the case and its implications?

ANSWER: The case was Valancourt Books, LLC v. Garland, and it was about mandatory deposit requirements and copyright. To understand the case, we need to examine a particular section of the Copyright Act that involves the Library of Congress.

Many may be surprised to hear about this portion of the Copyright Act, but Section 407 of the Copyright Act requires the owner of copyright work published in the U.S. to deposit two complete copies of the best edition of each work with the Library of Congress. Failure to make a deposit can result in fines — some small, some significant. However, failure to deposit does not result in any loss of copyright protection (copyright protection in a work is generally automatic the moment the work is created and fixed).

In many cases, for the rightholders that choose to register their copyrighted work with the U.S Copyright Office, these Section 407 deposits also satisfy the copyright registration deposit requirement under Section 408. The depositor typically includes the copyright registration form and filing fee, along with the Section 407 deposits. But what if a rightsholder doesn’t want to register the work with the copyright office?

In Valancourt Books, LLC v. Garland, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that the Copyright Office’s demands for physical copies of works under Section 407 of the Copyright Act is an unconstitutional taking of property in violation of the Fifth Amendment. How did this happen?

Pursuant to Section 407, the Copyright Office sent demand letters asking Valancourt to deposit two copies of each of Valancourt’s titles with the Library of Congress. After some failed negotiations, Valancourt filed a lawsuit claiming that the authority granted by Section 407 of the Copyright Act to demand the copies (or be fined) is a violation of both the First Amendment freedom of speech right and the Fifth Amendment prohibition against a government taking of private property without “just compensation.” Valancourt stated that since they were a “print-on-demand” publisher, it would cost the business a financial burden to send over 600 “free” copies to the Library of Congress. Valancourt further stated that Section 407 contains an inherent conflict because the mandate in Section 407 is not explicitly a condition for the rightsholder to maintain full copyright protection.

The lower court sided with the U.S. government, but the DC Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Valancourt. The DC Court of Appeals found that Section 407 was an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment (the court punted on the First Amendment claim). The court stated clearly that Section 407’s demand for physical copies is a taking because there is no benefit to the rightsholder by supplying the Library of Congress the free deposit copies. As stated earlier, this deposit copy is not tied to preserving copyright or any other benefit. “A voluntary exchange for a benefit,” the court stated, “does not exist if the purported ‘benefit’ is illusory.”

What does this mean for libraries? Well, unless you are at the Library of Congress, I am not sure it has a significant impact. National deposit has value for the greater good — as the Copyright Office states, Section 407 ensures that the Library of Congress “has an opportunity to obtain copies of every copyrightable work published in the United States.” To protect this unique statute, the government may appeal this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. If not, then perhaps free mandatory deposit to the Library of Congress might end without a judicial or Congressional fix.

Endnotes

Valancourt Books is a specialized “print-on-demand” publisher that finds, revitalizes, and sells rare, neglected, and out-of-print fiction, including Victorian horror novels, early Gothic novels, and works by early LGBT authors. Valancourt has published more than 300 books since their launch in 2005. As part of their business plan, Valancourt Books does not register the works with the Copyright Office.

1. The author of this column is a co-author of the seminal work “A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books” with David Hansen. See A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books (2018), available at https://dash.harvard.edu/ handle/1/42664235.

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Wandering the Web — Poet Laureate

By Rosemary Meszaros (Professor Emerita, Government Documents and Law Librarian, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY) Column Editor: Lesley Rice Montgomery, MLIS (Catalog Librarian, Tulane University Libraries’ Technical Services Department)

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hat do Ada Limon, Juan Felipe Herrera, Robert Penn Warren, Rita Dove, and Joseph Auslander have in common? They are all poets and poet laureates of the United States. Although Britain established the title in the 17th century, Greece and Rome had celebrated their poets with laurel wreaths and crowns in antiquity. The United States instituted a Consultant in Poetry in 1937 during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The current title of Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress was established by Congress in 1985 (Public Law 99-194) during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

poems, not just the “classics” but contemporary ones. The 2018 poem by Noah Blaustein entitled After Party which begins “The Hello Kitty piñata’s head swings from the pepper tree —” was retrieved. Additionally, you will find links to poetry events near you, materials for teachers (lesson plans and a poetry classroom calendar), library book reviews, interviews, etc. This is a fun site and easy to access and use the various online resources.

Landmarks, towns, cities, states, and nations have Poet Laureates. It is a popular feature in many venues. Just explore the term in your favorite search engine to retrieve a wealth of literary treasures.

https://poets.org/national-poetry-month — Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month is a special occasion that celebrates poets’ integral role in our culture and emphasizes that poetry matters. Over the years it has become the largest literary celebration in the world with tens of millions of readers, students, K-12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and — of course — poets, marking poetry’s important place in our lives.

https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/ — This is the official site of the United States program of the Poet Laureate. The term is for two years and is funded by a stipend of $60,000 from philanthropist Archer M. Huntington. The U.S. government does not compensate the position, although the Library of Congress does provide an office in the Jefferson Building.

For a history of the position, see Poetry’s Catbird Seat: The Consultantship in Poetry in the English language at the Library of Congress, 1937-1987 by William McGuire, published by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing [now Publishing] Office, 1988, which is available at most local Federal Depository Library collections. https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-05-019/ — Encyclopedia of the Library of Congress: for Congress, The Nation & The World edited

by John Y. Cole and Jane Aikin, published by Bernan, 2004.

Available through the Library of Congress or Bernan Publishing. https://loc.gov/podcasts/from-the-catbird-seat/index.html — The Library of Congress has a podcast, From the Catbird Seat, featuring Ron Casper speaking with several poets. This link “features archived recordings of poets reading and discussing their work at the Library of Congress, and offers behind-thescenes interviews with special guests.” https://poets.org/academy-american-poets — Founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry — the producer of Poets.org, Poems-a-Day, National Poetry Month, awards, and prizes. You can also sign up for the Academy of American Poets Newsletter and the Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter, as well as following poets.org on a variety of social media sites. https://poets.org/ — This link provides a list of poet laureates going back to Rita Dove in 1995 with additional information about their work, and it also includes a search engine to find poets and poems. The poets do not have to be poet laureates. I searched for a poem on trees and retrieved a full text link to Joyce Kilmer’s Trees as well as links to the texts of over 2,000 other

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https://poemanalysis.com/explore-poets/poet-laureate/ — This site explores poets and poet laureates, not only from the United States and the UK but other countries recognizing their poets. There are also links to poetic genres like Haiku https:// poemanalysis.com/explore-poets/famous-haiku-poets/ and features a section on a dozen African American poets https:// poemanalysis.com/explore-poets/african-american/. https://www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-poets-laureateof-Britain-1789231 — From John Dryden to Simon Armitage, this is the list of poet laureates of the United Kingdom with a brief biography and samples of their principal works included in print and with audio capability. The position was a lifetime appointment until 1999 when it was limited to a 10-year term.

The poet is considered a salaried member of the British royal household at the current annual rate of 6,000 Pounds. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ — Not specifically about poet laureates but an interesting site is the Poetry Foundation in Chicago which recognizes the power of words to transform lives.

They work to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry. Established in 2003 upon receipt of a major gift from philanthropist Ruth Lilly, the Poetry Foundation evolved from the Modern Poetry Association, which was founded in 1941 to support the publication of Poetry magazine. The gift from Ruth Lilly allowed the Poetry Foundation to expand and enhance the presence of poetry in the United States and established an endowment that will fund Poetry in perpetuity. https://www.thefamouspeople.com/greek-poets.php — In this election season if you want to vote early, consider casting a vote for one of 70 Greek poets from antiquity to modern times, from Homer to Dimitris P. Kraniotis. For those who like to make lists, this is a website after your own hearts.

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Learning Belongs in the Library — An Interview with the Cadmore Media Partners Five Years on from Founding Column Editor: David Parker (Publisher and Founder, Lived Places Publishing; Phone: 201-673-8784) <david@livedplacespublishing.com>

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y introduction to academic streaming video occurred in 2013 when I joined Alexander Street Press (ASP).

My earliest career experience was in book publishing where I saw the transition from print to digital. In my new role with ASP, I was to learn firsthand about the migration of video from DVD to streaming. During my tenure with ASP, we supported several publishing partners with their streaming video distribution. I learned that it was one thing to deliver a large subscription video database to thousands of libraries, and quite another thing to meet the unique and specific needs of a publisher client using our video platform to support their customers.

In the latter years of my service to ASP, and later ProQuest after ASP was acquired, I came to know Violaine Iglesias and Simon Inger, founders of Cadmore Media. Cadmore Media had launched with a specific focus of supplying a technology solution and a streaming video platform to publishers and scholarly societies that needed to deliver video to their customers. Here was a business without the conflict of selling a product reliant on aggregating publisher video and supplying a platform solution to those same publishers.

Fast forward to 2023 and Cadmore Media has grown dramatically through the pandemic, but always with its core focus intact of supplying technology and strategic guidance to ensure the success of their publisher clients in supplying educational and research-oriented streaming video. What follows is an interview with Violaine and Simon that dives into where Cadmore is today, five years on from its founding.

It has been five years since Cadmore Media was created.

Why was Cadmore founded?

Violaine: I always knew that I wanted to one day build a small company. After I worked for a small technology vendor, I felt I better understood what it takes to run a company and I found a market need.

Video is a popular communications channel, and I wondered why video was not bigger in the scholarly communication space. I wanted to see more authoritative video content, and that video needed to not only be produced, but it needed to be found — and then used. So, I co-founded Cadmore Media because we saw a need to help societies and commercial publishers become video publishers.

Simon: To do video well requires a lot of investment, which means that by default it is only accessible to a few wealthier organizations. Forming Cadmore presented a unique business opportunity. We focus on scholarly publishing not only because that is our expertise, but because societies and publishers bring together all the best experts in the world, people who need to be heard. These organizations produce compelling video and audio, and we give them the technology and expertise they need to become video publishers without having to invest in their own custom platform, which very few publishers can afford to do.

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Violaine: Simon is too modest. He founded the world’s first online journal platform and is a natural entrepreneur.

Simon: Yes, so I ran that business and once that business was sold in 2001, I basically waited another 17 years to meet Violaine and launch another great idea. And now, with our other founding partner Neil, we have created the world’s first scholarly video and audio platform, which any publisher or society can leverage for their own content.

Where are scholarly and society publishers today versus where you saw them five years ago in terms of generating and distributing video content?

Violaine: The pandemic happened certainly and that got everybody used to operating on Zoom and other video conferencing platforms. And it got people used to the concept of being recorded and gave rise to demand for virtual conferences and on-demand session playback.

The pandemic turned every scientist into a bit of a videographer, a basic one. It was the thing that took us over the hill, if you like, and it got us rolling down the other side; a bit of momentum, and I think there is an increasing realization among societies that the next generation of researchers is here, not coming, This is a generation that is used to consuming information through video more than other modes and the fact that students going through the pandemic, experienced their lectures online, and they stayed online.

Simon: Five years ago, we still had societies and publishers who said: “Video? I do not see that as important.” Now most of them are saying it is important. That does not mean they are all publishing video, but there is an awareness that it is important.

The overnight switch to virtual conferences was a shock to the system. Some societies skipped virtual events, cancelled their annual meetings, and said we are not doing this, but most ran virtual events. Now, some societies switched permanently to virtual, but I think most of them are somewhere in the middle trying to figure out where video and where virtual conferences sit.

Violaine: With virtual events, like conferences, video is born virtual, born digital, and born online. There is then an opportunity for societies to repurpose that video.

Simon: I think the other interesting external pressure is the rise of Open Access. The rise of Open Access is effectively leading to most societies having reduced incomes from their publications program and a need to diversify their income streams.

And many societies are developing e-learning modules, often in video that will allow them to market mostly to individuals, maybe members, and in some cases, it may even be licensable to libraries going forward.

The thing about societies is they have access to the best researchers and academics, much more than a commercial

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publisher ever will have. If anybody has an opportunity of building a brilliant product featuring the very best and latest best techniques performed by the best in their field, it is societies that have access to that.

Many societies and academic publishers first placed their video assets on YouTube and Vimeo. Did this surprise you given the care that is taken with delivering digital scholarship in other formats, i.e., journals, reports, eBooks?

Violaine: A handful of (mostly large) societies and academic publishers have embraced video for a long time, and invested in both content and technology that can be considered on par with what has been developed for books and journals.

But achieving this level of sophistication has invariably needed clear leadership and a unified strategy, as well as significant budgets. Most societies and publishers are creating video “Video is in a more ad hoc fashion, and a popular ownership of streaming strategy is often not centralized within communications a Publishing division like more channel, and established content formats would, I wondered which has led to content and technology silos. I also think that why video was video has yet to be fully accepted not bigger in as a “proper” scholarly format that the scholarly can be used to advance one’s career. communication Hosting content on YouTube (which is a social media platform owned by space. I wanted a large advertising company — it to see more still puzzles me that it would authoritative be considered as a workable video content, option for a content repository in an academic environment) and that video betrays video’s lingering status needed to not as a “consumer” medium. But only be produced, academics — especially younger generations — are regular people but it needed to who increasingly watch and make be found — and video content.

then used.”

Simon: To be fair to societies and publishers, they have not had specialized hosting options in the past. To our knowledge, we are the first company to try and lower this technological barrier.

What changes would you hope to see in how scholarly video is consumed, presented, or published?

Simon: Some of the responsibility for change lies within higher education. It is important that video is accepted for tenure and promotion. Video might appear on an author’s ORCID profile. Because if they get credit for it, if their research that is published via video, it is recognized as proper research, then the submissions publishers receive will be wider ranging.

when we are talking about reproducibility of results, video evidence is powerful.

Violaine: But the submission and peer review systems, the publishing platforms, the preservation systems, the entire ecosystem needs to embrace video technically.

Do you think that distributors of educational documentary film have the same or different challenges as societies and scholarly publishers?

Simon: The main difference is they have video for which they are passionate; this is their entire business. They would not survive 5 minutes if their video was not good stuff, would they? In terms of technology, they might not need the same modules in the platform, but ultimately, they need video hosting and right now they do not have independent and scalable options. Their main revenue source is dependent on external aggregators that control the purse because they can control prices.

Violaine: Aggregated selling requires aggregated buying and so it is down to libraries as to whether independence can be supported, assuming the film makers offer their videos on platforms that meet accessibility requirements and follow other industry standards.

Simon: A librarian once said to me, and it has always stuck with me, that libraries are short of cash, but shorter of time.

Anything that is fast to set up to is at the top of the pile and anything that is slow gets pushed to the bottom of the pile. The products independent film distributors offer libraries just need to be simple to acquire and easy for their users to consume.

Violaine: As a platform provider, this means we need to resolve more than issues around a player. In addition to meeting industry standards for video, we think about how the end user watches video and provide tools to help them enjoy a film and succeed in a class. We allow them to consume video, but, at the same time, we allow them to consume it more efficiently and faster, and to consume the right video, too, because they can check what is in it before they watch it, the same way you would might skim an abstract or an article to say, is this worth mytime? Similarly, having the transcript allows the user to navigate these long form videos very, very quickly, For the documentary distributors, we can make the technology ready for them, but they have got more to consider than just the technology. We hope that we free them up to do that.

What do you perceive to be the most significant challenges today facing distributors of educational documentary and feature film to academic libraries?

Violaine: The biggest change is that there should be more of it, and it needs to be quality content. And then it needs to be better integrated into existing products or designed as new products. All this content was created during the pandemic, but you must think back and ask if the speaker is important, if the speaker is a person that people want to hear from. If you like the content, you need to then ask if the format is engaging, is it navigable, is it searchable, and is it discoverable?

Violaine: I think that much like book publishers, video distributors migrated from physical to digital. But book publishers were relatively quick to develop the products and platforms that allowed them to sell digital and that has not been the case with educational film distributors. Most of the small, independent distributors had to rely on aggregators, large and small. In the earliest days of this shift from DVD to streaming, the platforms were offering generous advances, guarantees, royalty splits, and other incentives to the documentary distributors. This is less the case today and most distributors now would, I would argue, be better served with a mix of “publisher-direct” and licensing solutions deployed across their entire catalog of content

Simon: It is getting societies and publishers to embrace video, which will, in turn, allow researchers to give video evidence. And I think that is important because in this age,

Simon: Documentary distributors need to reach more faculty, more librarians, and more students with their content. This is obvious, and something we know from

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working with society publishers.

But the use case for the streaming of documentary and feature film in current video platforms and players is largely confined to faculty assigning a film. This needs to be enhanced by applying what we know at Cadmore about broader methods of exposure and discovery of content in library discovery and metadata enhancement. This can be bolstered through more film screenings and live events and through increasing awareness of the pedagogical value of the documentary content with faculty.

We think documentary distributors can take a page from the book publisher world and its focus on marketing new titles to faculty based on areas of research and interest.

IMF eLibrary Essential Reading Guides

Can you envision a role for Cadmore in supporting the university library’s needs for storing, hosting, and streaming locally held/locally created content?

Violaine: Of course! We are a technology solutions company focused on the very specific requirements and opportunities presented by media. We have invested, and continue to invest, in a media-first content management system, video and audio player, and in developing media sites that are client-specific for patrons and endusers to access the media. Because our focus is on the academic market, our player and our platform deliver on accessibility and research, teaching, and learning use cases.

With all this in mind, I think we are well-suited to support libraries in the collection, preservation, curation, and delivery of the institutions’ video and audio assets.

Simon: Faculty are always creating content and in need of platforms to share and cite that content. In some cases, it is for the classroom and in some cases, it is in support of their research. In the former, lectures and online courses might need to be preserved apart from the learning management platform. In the latter case, researchers are increasingly multi-media creators for themselves and for their publishers.

Where will the content live? What is the Institutional Repository strategy? These are big questions, but what I can say is at Cadmore, where it is media concerned, our technology is designed with video and audio at the center and we know libraries and librarians.

Curated lists of relevant publications on timely topics eLibrary.IMF.org/essential

Rumors continued from page 45 If you’re planning to attend the Charleston Conference, be sure to stop by the Swamp Fox Restaurant in the lower level of the Francis Marion Hotel. The bartender makes fabulous literary-themed cocktails (or mocktails!) in honor of the conference each year. Last year we had the “One Flew Over the Cosmo’s Nest” and “The Great Gin Fizz,” and before that we had the “Tequila Mockingbird” and a “Sherbet Holmes.”

What fun! I’m partial to a G&T myself, while Leah is an Old continued on page 59

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The Digital Toolbox —From Margins to Mainstream: The Transformative Rise of Audiobooks as Essential Resources in University Libraries Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Senior Manager, OverDrive Academic, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>

D

igital audiobook checkouts across the OverDrive Academic global network of colleges and universities have increased by 53 percent year-over-year (Jan-Aug ’23 vs.

Jan-Aug ’22). Academic librarians, the champions of providing access to needed content, have shifted to continue to meet students where they are and on what format they prefer. And data shows that students are enjoying their reading through the spoken word at a record pace.

With this demand showing no signs of slowing down, what impact has been seen on the collection development processes at academic libraries? Where is this demand originating? Have audiobooks been integrated into the curriculum?

In this Part 1 of a two-part series exploring audiobooks in the academic space, we covered these questions and more with Shannon Tennant, Coordinator of Library Collections and Associate Librarian at Elon University in North Carolina, and Lisa Eichholtz, Head of Collections and Technical Services at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Kentucky.

OverDrive Academic: When purchasing titles for your collection, what factors do you consider when choosing whether the title will be in eBook or audiobook format?

Shannon Tennant: Our library partnered with OverDrive specifically to supplement and ultimately replace our CD audiobook collection. So we are only purchasing audiobooks at this time. However, we are open to purchasing eBook content in the future.

Lisa Eichholtz: Availability and price. We try to use CPC (cost per circ) as much as possible. And with CPC, when available, we get both formats. We quickly noticed that audiobooks circulated more than print; now we consider audio first for our limited purchasing.

OD/A: Audiobooks have seen years of unabated growth for popular fiction and nonfiction. Have you seen similar growth in student and faculty title requests for recreational reading?

For supplemental coursework reading?

ST: We have definitely seen an increase in our demand for popular titles (what my dean calls “reading outside the curriculum”). We use our ILL as a form of demand-driven acquisition. If a title is less than a year old, we will purchase it instead of borrowing it. A significant number of students, faculty and staff have figured out that ILL isn’t just for research, and we’ve seen a big jump in our purchases of domestic noir (e.g., Gone Girl read-alikes), Colleen Hoover, self-help books, diet books and other types of material not typically associated with academic libraries. However, these requests are almost entirely for print books rather than audiobooks. In the past, we did purchase requested CD audiobooks. We have opted to only purchase audiobooks that are CPC format, and most of the newest best-selling titles are not available yet in that purchase model.

54 Against the Grain / November 2023

LE: Since adopting the Libby reading app from OverDrive Academic, we’ve received more faculty and student requests for recreational reading. We have a few special sections of English focused on horror, mystery and LGBTQ; we’ve built Libby collections in those areas for the instructors and students.

OD/A: Have you seen an increase in the use of audiobooks in curricula? If so, in what subject areas?

ST: We have always tried to purchase our campus Common Reading title in an audiobook format if possible. Our Common Reading is a book assigned to all incoming students, and it will be assigned in at least one of the required first-year seminar classes (writing and/or “the global experience”). This year’s book is I Never Thought of it That Way. Since we got OverDrive, we have begun “Data shows that purchasing titles for our literature classes if they are available. For students are example, we purchased Parable of enjoying their the Sower for the “African-American reading through literature after 1945 class.” Some classic poetry I purchased for the spoken word National Poetry Month has been at a record pace.” used by the poetry class, which I think is fabulous, because poetry is meant to be read aloud. We have also purchased books for a mystery fiction seminar — classics by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. The students have the option to read the books or watch the films, but I feel that having the audiobooks gives them another great option to experience the texts.

It’s not exactly “curriculum,” but we have also seen a proliferation of book clubs on our campus. Some are informal, but many are sponsored by academic offices or departments. If we can purchase a CPC-format title for these clubs, we will do so. We want the unlimited simultaneous use that CPC offers, though, so that everyone in the club can listen at the same time.

LE: We recommend audiobooks to our RDG (reading) faculty and ESL faculty as a way to increase fluency and pronunciation.

OD/A: Where is the demand for audiobooks originating?

Does that come from faculty, students or a combination?

ST: Our CD audiobook collection has always had a small but devoted group of faculty and staff who commute long distances. We have been able to transition many of these patrons to our new OverDrive collection. (Though we still have one history professor who loves audiobooks but does not have a smartphone!) Faculty and staff are our biggest group of users. But we have student users as well, many of whom were already familiar with OverDrive from their home public libraries. We have been intentionally promoting our audiobooks to students. For example, the library set up a table of books at the Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month fair in April, and

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we included fliers with the QR code for our OverDrive audiobook collection. Many students signed up or added Elon to their existing accounts.

OD/A: What are the driving issues considered for adding audiobooks? Is it for accessibility, offering alternative formats or supporting different learning styles?

ST: Our audiobook collection has always been focused on recreational materials. We see audiobooks as another opportunity to add diverse perspectives to our collection. We prioritize acquiring works by authors from a broad range of identities and traditions. We are intentional in curating and promoting audiobook collections in addition to print book displays when we celebrate heritage months. We are also aware that we have a significant number of students registered with our Disability Resources office. We welcome the opportunity to provide access to texts in a format that may be more accessible to students who find reading print to be a challenge. And often these texts can function in multiple ways! We purchased access to Parable of the Sower because it was assigned in a class, but it also includes diverse perspectives on race and gender, and it’s a great story (albeit a dark, post-apocalyptic one).

Against the Grain / November 2023

LE: We want our students and college community to read, (so) we offer the formats that they want. By policy, we don’t purchase textbooks, but we do try to purchase materials on recommended reading lists.

The popularity of audiobooks is poised to continue its ascent for the foreseeable future, and as a result, many academic librarians are expected to continue to evaluate their collection development processes to ensure they’re delivering the content and formats readers want. Part 2 of this series will examine how publishers have pivoted in response to the audiobook surge on college campuses, how are audiobooks being promoted and the potential role of AI in the future of audiobook production.

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Biz of Digital — Supporting Digital Projects through Web Hosting Services

By Amie D. Freeman (Scholarly Communication and Open Initiatives Librarian, University of South Carolina Libraries, 1322 Greene St., Columbia, SC 29208; Phone: 803-777-8280) <DILLARDA@mailbox.sc.edu> and Lance DuPre (Digital Repositories Development Librarian, University of South Carolina Libraries, 1322 Greene St., Columbia, SC 29208; Phone: 803-777-5209) <DUPREL@email.sc.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>

Introduction The University of South Carolina Libraries has traditionally supported researchers in the acquisition, navigation, and creation of scholarly work. Fostering the mission of “connecting students, faculty, and community in the exchange of ideas”1 beyond the provision of established research support services, USC Libraries administers a web hosting service, branded Create Digital, in support of the digital scholarship requirements of the campus.

Background In 2018, a small task force was established to explore the digital research needs of the University. Through interviews with three focus groups, ten individuals, and a campus survey, librarians determined that while there were pockets of support for digital scholarship across campus, there was no simple, costeffective mechanism for building and hosting digital projects available to researchers of all statuses.

To partially address this need, the Libraries sought a technology solution to support digital project development and publishing. This needed to be a low-barrier solution both in terms of cost and usability. Researchers with access to grant funds could secure funding for web hosting and development, but the selected solution needed be accessible to those embarking on exploratory or unfunded projects. It also needed to be viable for graduate-level classes that required students to develop digital scholarship as part of their coursework.

Solution The Libraries explored numerous support possibilities, such as self-hosting open-source content management systems for researchers, but found that those required more IT support than the Libraries could provide. Ultimately, the Libraries selected the vendor Reclaim Hosting’s Domain of One’s Own service2 to support the digital scholarship needs of the University. Domain of One’s Own, often abbreviated as DoOO, is a suite of services that, packaged together, provides individuals affiliated with an institution with subdomain registrations, individual cPanel access, and several web applications. With the University of South Carolina’s DoOO package, Create Digital, institutional administrators can offer a customized homepage through which patrons can authenticate using single sign on (SSO) and access comprehensive documentation. DoOO administrators manage the platform through a portal consisting of WordPress, which

56 Against the Grain / November 2023

acts as the patron-facing access point, a web host manager (WHM) that manages the cPanel server, and a web host manager complete solution (WHMCS) that manages patron accounts.

In practice, this platform grants patrons their own subdomains so that they can build websites at selected web addresses. The University’s top-level domain for DoOO is https://usccreate.org, which means that patron subdomains will appear as https:// [selectedsubdomain].usccreate.org.

Besides granting these domains, each registered user is provided cPanel access, which includes useful features such as FTP and MySQL database access and allows users to install popular web applications like WordPress, Omeka, and Scalar in minutes. For patrons, this means that there’s no need to secure external web hosting or domain services. Instead, they can install, create, and host their digital scholarship projects on the Libraries’ DoOO instance at no personal cost.

Workflow To use Create Digital, a patron must supply their university username and password to authenticate through USC’s SSO. Once authenticated, they are required to complete a form describing their patron status, intended use of the platform, and agree to the terms of service. The form is reviewed by a librarian, and if the proposed use is appropriate, the account is activated through the administrative interface. The user is notified that the account is active with instructions for logging in. The first time the user logs into their activated account, they select a unique subdomain name. The user is then transported to cPanel, from which they can fully utilize the offerings of Create Digital. cPanel acts as the “control panel” of the user’s account. Within cPanel, patrons can further manage their subdomains, access the file manager, transfer files through FTP, create databases, and monitor metrics and security. Most importantly, though, is the provisioning of an application area from which patrons can use Installatron to install and manage software such as WordPress, Omeka, and Scalar. While other applications are available, these three content management systems are popular for use in digital scholarship and are the most regularly downloaded through the Create Digital platform. Once installed, the applications can be accessed through Create Digital or directly through the administrative dashboards of the applications.

While Create Digital administrators are available for basic account-related troubleshooting and provide consultations,

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trainings, and workshops for orienting users to cPanel and various applications, administrators do not assist in web development or advanced use of cPanel. Patrons have a great deal of independence and flexibility in creatively using cPanel to develop and publish their digital projects.

Limitations Potentially, the greatest limitation to Create Digital is the 1GB local storage limitation per user account. This is unlikely to be an issue for projects that include just text and web optimized images. For more media-rich projects that include video and/or audio or a large number of images, users may find themselves reaching the storage limit quickly. Fortunately, many of the applications offered, such as WordPress and Omeka, include configurations or plugins that allow the software to utilize external storage. The Libraries has worked with patrons to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for external cloud storage. In this scenario, the user is required to set up an AWS account3 and a storage bucket using AWS Simple Storage Service (S3). For S3 standard, the user is charged for the amount of data stored.

Reclaim Hosting offers good documentation4 to assist in this process. If a user requires more security than having a publicly readable bucket, they have the option to connect the bucket to AWS Cloudfront, a content delivery network.

Once connected to the storage bucket, the application itself handles uploading and managing objects within the bucket. Depending on the application, there are either builtin configurations to connect to the bucket, as with Omeka, or

Against the Grain / November 2023

plugins that need to be installed to provide the connection, as with WordPress. For plugin installation, the user must understand how to install and configure the plugin.

Another potential limitation is an allotment of 650MB of storage for a MYSQL database. In a case where MYSQL storage space would be an issue, an external database server would need to be installed, configured, and secured. The DoOO application would then be connected to the remote server. Users needing a more robust MYSQL server may wish to utilize other options.

The file system used by DoOO is a linux-based file structure.

This may be jarring to a user who only has experience using the Windows operating system. While the directory structure is similar to Windows, there are no “C:” drives. Within cPanel, there is a file manager that helps users navigate their files. The files can also be edited within the file manager.

The final limitation is the sunsetting of applications. When a user leaves the university, they must migrate their content out of Create Digital before they lose access to their account.

Their options are to move their applications to a shared hosting account with Reclaim Hosting or to migrate to another provider of their choice.

Policies Assigning clear policies is necessary to ensure patrons understand how Create Digital may be used. Awareness of the previously mentioned limitations was useful in designating policies. While the University’s policies helped shape click-

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through terms of service, decisions surrounding eligibility, storage, and service levels were more complicated.

The Libraries determined that accounts should be limited to graduate students, staff, and faculty for the purpose of creating digital research and scholarship projects. With over 30,000 students enrolled at the University of South Carolina, the risk of quickly filling the 500 spots provided through the contract was high. To ensure that the available accounts were provided to those with legitimate digital scholarship needs, the decision was ultimately made to exclude undergraduates from eligibility.

However, account holders can grant undergraduates access to installed applications for project assistance.

USC’s DoOO package provides a total of 250GB of storage to be dispensed amongst users. This is a fairly small amount of storage space, particularly shared between up to 500 users, so the Libraries limits each user to 1GB of storage. This is sufficient to install several applications and build sites that aren’t media heavy, but as discussed, external storage is often necessary. It was projected that while some users would approach the 1GB limit, others would use far less, allowing the Libraries to stay within the 250GB cap.

Another key service-oriented policy focuses on levels of support. The Libraries offers the tools to create digital scholarship projects, but, ultimately, patrons are personally responsible for developing and maintaining their sites. While librarians offer guidance through workshops and consultations and resolve basic account issues, they cannot build websites, address application problems, or provide in-depth troubleshooting. This clear service distinction allows the Libraries to focus limited resources on serving all patrons rather than directing attention towards a small number of advanced projects.

Documentation Because of the Libraries’ limited service levels, it is important to provide in-depth documentation for patrons. An advantage of using DoOO is that Reclaim Hosting has developed comprehensive documentation templates5 that can be adapted and used by subscribing institutions. The Libraries has made minor changes beyond customizing names and screenshots, such as inserting documentation for connecting external storage, but having a base from which to develop thorough documentation for patrons was instrumental in supporting account holders.

Librarians also regularly point patrons to the more advanced documentation developed by Reclaim Hosting and other application developers. This documentation covers a huge range of topics, from migrating Scalar books6 to importing databases through phpMyAdmin.7

Future Directions After providing Create Digital to USC patrons for nearly four years, USC librarians are well-positioned to consider future

58 Against the Grain / November 2023

directions for this service. Useful documentation and new resources will be created around Create Digital offerings, such as workshops on digital humanities in the classroom and digital publishing with Scalar. There has also been experimentation with short-term account offerings to undergraduates under the oversight of an instructor. This possibility may be explored with other digital scholarship-oriented courses. The Libraries can also strive to create more robust documentation for users who wish to utilize cloud storage with their Create Digital instances, while investigating more secure options and alternative cloud service providers.

Suggestions If your institutional library plans to develop web hosting services for digital scholarship, there are several suggestions based on the USC Libraries experience using Domain of One’s Own. 1) Consult with your legal department to develop an ironclad terms of service agreement.

By discussing the terms of service agreement with your institution’s legal department, you are ensuring that experts are reviewing patron responsibilities, library responsibilities, legal compliance, and institutional policy compliance. The terms of service agreement can protect you against potential liability if account holders engage in problematic activities.

2) Develop service expectations and clear roles for library staff involved in administering the platform.

Ensure that you have clearly communicated service expectations for patrons. Being upfront with the amount of support you are able to provide is critical in mitigating unrealistic requests, such as hands-on website development.

Be sure that each staff member involved in the management of the hosting platform has clearly defined responsibilities so that no component of administration is neglected.

3) Consider how the tool could be used to spotlight or broaden service offerings.

Beyond offering access to the platform itself, could the tool be used to promote the expertise of your library staff? If you have librarians knowledgeable on web platforms, grant writing for digital humanities, digital pedagogy, or web accessibility?

This awareness can be leveraged to offer related workshops, tutorials, and consultations.

Librarians involved in administering Create Digital have observed many projects progress from the spark of an idea into a robust, interactive digital publication. The Create Digital platform has provided the USC Libraries with meaningful opportunities to support digital scholars and will continue to advance exciting new services into the future. endnotes on page 59

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Endnotes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

“Mission, Values and Vision,” University of South Carolina Libraries, accessed July 5, 2023, https://sc.edu/about/offices_ and_divisions/university_libraries/about/mission/index.php.

“Domain of One’s Own,” Reclaim Hosting, accessed July 5, 2023, https://www.reclaimhosting.com/domain-of-onesown/.

“Account,” Amazon, accessed July 20, 2023, https://aws. amazon.com/account/.

Jim Groom, “Setting Up S3 Storage with Omeka Classic,” Reclaim Hosting Support, last modified 2022, https://support. reclaimhosting.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005621161Setting-up-S3-storage-with-Omeka-Classic.

“Domain of One’s Own Community Docs,” State University, Reclaim Hosting, accessed July 5, 2023, https://stateu.org/ docs/.

Meredith Fierro, “Migrating Scalar,” Reclaim Hosting Support, last modified 2021, https://support.reclaimhosting.com/hc/ en-us/articles/4410721543575-Migrating-Scalar.

Meredith Fierro, “phpMyAdmin – How to Import or Restore a Database or Table,” Reclaim Hosting Support, last modified 2023, https://support.reclaimhosting.com/hc/en-us/ articles/4405266499991-phpMyAdmin-How-to-Import-orRestore-a-Database-or-Table.

Against the Grain / November 2023

Rumors continued from page 53 Fashioned kinda gal. We have a fun tradition with Lisa Hinchliffe (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) to get drinks after the closing session ends on the last day of the conference each year. Cheers!

New from SSP The Society for Scholarly Publishing is excited to launch “The Early Career Chew: Industry Bites for Peckish Publishing Professionals,” a free newsletter summarizing the top industry news, career resources, and events each quarter, available exclusively on LinkedIn. Thank you to newsletter partners ISMTE Headquarters, Council of Science Editors (CSE), and STM Association! The Summer 2023 inaugural issue covers topics such as AI in scholarly publishing, conferences and events to get involved in and resources like SSP’s Career Development Podcast and a Special Issue on Careers in Scientific Editing and Publishing in CSE’s Science Editor. Read and subscribe now!

Well, that’s it for now. Hope to see you at the conference, or online three weeks later for the virtual conference! Hip hip hooray for Charleston!

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59

People to Know — Peter Der Manuelian: Excavating the History of Egyptian Excavators Column Editor: Matthew Ismail (Editor in Chief, Charleston Briefings; Founder, Dost Meditation) <matthew@dostmeditation.com>

T

his column is a bit different. Normally, I talk about issues around technology and scholarly communication. Now I will talk about a publishing project in the humanities that particularly interests me — and I have no need to apologize for my lack of background! This project takes place in an environment that is the opposite of the STEM publishing world, with its $8,000 APCs in a space with enormous technical infrastructure. This column is about a recovery project dear to the heart of a prominent Egyptologist which reminds us that there’s more to publishing than articles and monographs.

Sometimes the story of a publishing project is an essential part of the project, itself.

The discipline of Egyptology has an uneasy relationship to modern Egypt and modern Egyptians. Ancient Egyptians had long been a presence in Western historical awareness. Biblical narratives of Moses confronting Pharaoh and his magicians and the flight of the Hebrew people from Egypt through the parting Red Sea — such biblical stories have been foundational for Western ideas about the ancient world and the origins of the West. Similarly, any Westerner over the centuries who learned Greek and Latin was immersed in depictions of Ancient Egypt in classical authors such as Herodatus, Plutarch, or Pliny, to say nothing of Shakespeare and others who wrote on Anthony and Cleopatra.

Yet it was not until European scholars deciphered Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s — about 25 years after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by French soldiers — that modern Europeans were able to study Ancient Egypt based on its own texts, rather than at one or more removes in Greek and Latin sources. After Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered, European scholars of Ancient Egypt became obsessed with uncovering ever more hieroglyphic texts and artifacts under the soil of modern Egypt — soil upon which, of course, pesky modern Egyptians lived.

The study of Ancient Egypt was, to Westerners, conceived to be a deep dive into their own cultural origins — very much wrapped up in questions about the historicity of biblical narratives — and they pursued these excavations with an energy comparable to the passion with which they sought out Greek and Roman artifacts. The goal of these 19th century Western excavations in Egypt was to export as many of these finds as possible to the great collections at national museums such as the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Western museums competed against each other to build the best Egyptian collections, and a culture of smuggling and deception emerged as a result. These Westerners, having created this international market for antiquities, often turned to Egyptians with no training in archaeology to dig for antiquities.

These local diggers would then sell their collections to Western museums or to international collectors.

And, of course, as the 19th century progressed, and nominal Ottoman rule in Egypt gave way to outright British conquest

60 Against the Grain / November 2023

in 1882, the relationship between the Europeans who studied Ancient Egypt and the Europeans who ruled modern Egypt ominously converged. In short, the study of Ancient Egypt emerged among Europeans in the context of 19th century European imperialism and cannot be separated from it. And, indeed, the relationship of modern Egyptians to Ancient Egypt also emerged in the context of British and French imperialism — a relationship mediated for modern Egyptians by their status as “natives” and supposed cultural inferiors in a conquered nation dominated by Christian foreigners.

Now, it bears repeating that Egyptians for most of the 19th century were not particularly interested in Ancient Egypt.

The system of Muslim education in modern Egypt remained stubbornly traditional for most of the century, centered on memorizing the Quran, learning Classical Arabic, and absorbing the various traditions of Quranic interpretation and the sayings of the Prophet and his closest associates. Ancient Egypt was, among the traditionally educated, a part of what was known as the Jahaliya, or the era of pre-Islamic ignorance, and thus mostly studied in scattered cautionary tales related to quranic narratives and commentaries.

It was at the end of the 19th century, among educated Egyptians (both Muslim and Coptic) who had absorbed Western notions of nationalism and self-determination, that modern Egyptians began to see Ancient Egypt as their own ancient forebears. But when we see that the study of Ancient Egypt was dominated by Germans, Frenchmen, Americans and Englishmen who were closely associated to the British dictatorship, and that Egyptians were excluded from the study of Egyptology for many decades until they managed to seize enough power to demand their place at the table, it’s hard to argue otherwise than that the discipline of Egyptology was an aspect of Western imperialism.

It is in this context that Peter Der Manuelian’s very interesting new project has emerged. Peter is the Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University and the Director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. His newest book is the excellent Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology (2023), an overdue and exhaustive biography of the pioneering American Egyptologist, George Reisner (1867-1942), who excavated in Egypt for about 40 years after the turn of the 20th century.

I came to know Peter a bit because I had also written a biography of an Egyptologist, Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo (Rev. Ed., 2021), and while nothing could be more different than Peter’s position at Harvard and mine as an itinerant independent scholar, we nonetheless have much to say to each other about a topic that is dear to Peter’s heart: recovering the involvement of Egyptians in the emergence of Egyptology.

Egyptians, it turns out, did have a role in the emergence of Egyptology: as laborers and overseers. As Peter discovered while writing his biography of George Reisner, Reisner’s various

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Egyptian overseers over the decades were actually much more important in the success of the digs than people have generally known. Reisner trained Said Ahmed (1890-1926), his first important overseer from the village of Quft, how to do archaeological photography and to manage an excavation carefully and meticulously. Said Ahmed not only recruited and supervised the laborers, did the arduous work of clearing tombs of millennia of sand, and the delicate work of preserving and cataloging artifacts as they were uncovered and removed — he (and his similarly import Qufti successors) also kept an excavation diary in Arabic that tells us much that was not included in the English excavation diary kept by Americans.

Said Ahmed’s competence was no secret at the Harvard Camp.

One of Reisner’s American assistants confessed (not entirely pleased) that Said Ahmed “would have been quite capable of running the excavation by himself, but as he spoke little English, I went along primarily to keep the records and to be the white man ostensibly in charge (which was thought to be essential in relations with the largely British Sudan authorities).”

Manuelian illustrates Said Ahmed’s value to Reisner’s expedition in a letter Reisner sent to the director of The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1918. In this letter, Reisner (who had not mentioned his overseer in his correspondence for nearly twenty years) described how Said Ahmed possessed not only the technical skill and the authority needed to run the excavations but also kept the Arabic diary, “which if it were the only diary of the expedition would be no mean scientific record of our work, illustrated with drawings of tombs and strata of debris, and lists of the finds.”

So, as he was doing his exhaustive research into Reisner’s career, Peter began to wonder: He’d used the English expedition diaries kept in Boston. What had become of those Arabic diaries?

Peter knew that Reisner shared the common Euro-American sense of superiority to Egyptians, so his effusive praise of Said Ahmed can hardly be taken for granted. The diaries must have been quite valuable. But where were they?

While he was doing his research in Egypt, Peter sought out Said Ahmed’s descendents who were still living near Cairo.

He had hoped that they might have photos, letters, even oral histories of their relatives’ work in the Harvard Camp, and as he chatted with some members of the family, one gentleman casually mentioned that there were about a hundred handwritten Arabic diaries on a shelf at his family home. Peter sought permission to study them, which the family immediately granted.

And this was the origin of the Arabic Diaries Project in which Peter is engaged. The diaries are now in Cambridge and being analyzed by historians of the Harvard Expedition and experts in Arabic manuscripts and Egyptian Arabic dialects. Peter hopes to publish both the Arabic text and an English translation to provide firsthand insight into the contributions of Egyptians to the success of the expeditions. It’s not necessarily easy to find funds for such work, but there are some younger Egyptologists who share his enthusiasm for the project and Peter hopes to be able to publish in the next few years.

Projects such as the Arabic Diaries Project differ greatly from the world of STEM publishing, but they are very important on their own terms. I just hope that Peter has the resources to complete a project that is so important to revealing a truer picture of the history of Egyptology.

References Ismail, Matthew, Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo (Rev. Ed., Dost Publishing, 2021).

Manuelian, Peter Der, “The ‘Lost’ Arabic Excavation Diaries of the Harvard UniversityBoston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition,” JOURNAL of the American Research Center in Egypt, v. 58 2022: 129-162.

Ibid., Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology (Oxford, 2022).

Back Talk continued from page 64 Digital Lending, but the concept has merit and at least some prospects. The issue that it addresses remains vital — what Brewster calls the missing 20th century, when large quantities of books published from the 1920s forward, by authors less fortunate than James or Herbert, are slipping from conscious view, because even the Internet secondary market and the worthy libraries can’t help them reach readers and researchers as easily as the technology would allow if we were able to solve the intellectual property problems. (Among other things, a comprehensive collection of digitized 20th century books would be a gold mine for AI-supported research into all sorts of subjects in social, cultural, and intellectual history.)

Against the Grain / November 2023

We’re surrounded by folks these days only too ready to destroy books they don’t like, so I certainly shouldn’t be smug about what I did. But thinking about the way in which the physical copy is not really the book itself and about the ways in which we can ensure preservation and distribution without depending entirely on physical artifacts — that’s work we should be doing thoughtfully and carefully.

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ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED Kevin Farley, Ph.D.

Violaine Iglesias

Humanities Collections Librarian Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, VA 23284 <kdfarley@vcu.edu> www.library.vcu.edu PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: I began my career in collections at the University of Georgia, after receiving an M.S.L.S. and Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I joined VCU Libraries as the humanities collections librarian in 2004. My work involves liaison assistance and the oversight and investment for resources supporting the music program and humanities disciplines.

Since 2010 I have served on the Advisory Board for the VCU English Department digital humanities project British Virginia, published by VCU Libraries and available at VCU’s digital repository, Scholars Compass.

IN MY SPARE TIME: Discovering new jazz artists and finding elusive records.

FAVORITE BOOKS: The list is ever-growing — we’re in an extraordinary period of innovative art and urgent questioning of our past, present, and future. For several years I’ve been re-reading 20th Century history and literature, especially Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, W. G. Sebald, and Ursula K. Le Guin. I’ve greatly enjoyed the recent brilliant translations and reimaginings of Homer.

PHILOSOPHY: At the heart of art and scholarship in the humanities is a dedication to the freedom of re-examination and reinvention — of oneself, of how we see and think about the world we share. Contemporary humanities, like libraries themselves, are diverse, inclusive, and unbounded. Libraries foster this necessary and essential freedom to know and create oneself.

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: In 2020 I was invited to join the newly formed VIVA Support for Small Publishers Task Force, an initiative intended to broaden the presence of scholarly and creative works from small and diverse publishers in academic libraries across Virginia. The Task Force continues to explore ways to diversify member library collections, and this year I was asked to serve as chair. Working in this way with colleagues from around the state exemplifies the values of inclusion and cooperation that drew me to our profession.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: The changes underway in academic library collections reflect the profound transformations taking place in how academic disciplines are taught, studied, practiced, and conceptualized. With the increasing role of digital collections, researchers at all levels are finding connections as well as unanswered questions that are more visible now than ever before.

This work to make visible, to ensure the presence of voices that are too often unheard, is becoming the starting point for how we plan our library spaces, collections, and practices. The economic factors that affect the disparities between institutional collections will continue to challenge our goals and values, underscoring the importance and impact of open access for libraries and the communities they serve.

62 Against the Grain / November 2023

CEO & Co-founder Cadmore Media 4800 Hampden Lane, Suite 200 Bethesda, MD 20814 <violaine@cadmore.media> www.cadmore.media BORN AND LIVED: France – U.S. – France.

EARLY LIFE: Sleepy Parisian suburb.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: I was a translator before I started a career in publishing — first trade, then academic, then technology and video.

FAMILY: 1 husband, 2 kids & 1 Golden Retriever.

IN MY SPARE TIME: I like anything outdoors, preferably with my dog.

Currently reading French classics and experiencing somewhat of culture shock — women and pretty much anybody else are so much better off these days.

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Definitely launching my own company!

GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: Having built a sustainable company that offers must-have services to markets I care about.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: I don’t know what it’s going to be, but my hope is that it doesn’t get consumed

by OA and finds sustainable pathways. Publishers and libraries play a key role in preserving information integrity, especially with AI coming as a disrupting force in society.

FAVORITE BOOKS:

Kristen Twardowski

Director of Sales and Marketing Northwestern University Press 629 Noyes Street Evanston, IL 60208 <kristen.twardowski@northwestern.edu> BORN AND LIVED: Through school and work, I’ve been lucky enough to live in a number of places, but Illinois is my home and has my whole heart. After one particularly long stretch of time away, upon returning to Chicago and catching sight of The Bean, I burst into tears. Mortifying, for someone originally from the state. I like to think I’m too cool to cry at tourist attractions. I am not.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: I started my career as a wee student worker at Oberlin College Libraries where I never did fall through the glass floors of the Carnegie Building’s library storage rooms.

I subsequently worked at Purdue University Libraries before pivoting to publishing, first as an intern at UNC Press, then with the Library Relations team at Duke University Press, and then as the director of several sales and marketing departments, first at the University of Michigan Press and Michigan Publishing and now at Northwestern University Press.

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

Both luck and the luxury of time have allowed me to volunteer for a number of professional organizations. These spaces and the people in them taught me incredible things about librarianship and publishing.

Over the course of my career, I’ve served on committees for NC Serials, NASIG, ALA’s Core, JCLC, and, most recently, CALM (The Conference on Academic Library Management).

FAVORITE BOOKS: I won’t subject readers to my true favorite books — no one wants to hear about what I read when I was 15 — but instead I’ll share a book I once loved, then forgot, then loved again: Gioia Timpanelli’s Sometimes the Soul. The subtitle describes the book as “Two Novellas of Sicily,” which is, I suppose, technically true. But the book is actually, I think, a pocket-sized pair of dreams. It’s a beautiful, lyrical set of writings about a baroness, a parrot, a pirate, a suitor, a beauty, a beast, and a city. I picked up my copy from a used bookstore for $2.50 when I was 20. Sometime in one of my many cross-country moves I put it in a box. I only really remembered it again after unpacking in a new city, in a new apartment, with a new bookshelf this past summer. It still has the bends and creases from whoever owned it before. It’s the loveliest book I’ve ever seen.

PHILOSOPHY: I’m a big believer that people who manage others have a responsibility to help those people grow and develop professionally, even if that growth eventually takes those people to other teams or other organizations. Libraries, academia, and publishing are all spaces that can have a strange, unequal distribution of professional opportunities, but at their best, these fields are also communities. Helping people gain skillsets, build connections, and have room to develop is just being a good community member. When work environments are contending with heritages of racism and continued inequities, it takes more than individual efforts to cause change. It takes looking out for each other.

And I have to give a particular and special shout-out to Kim Steinle, formerly of Duke University Press and currently at Health Affairs. Working with her provided the best possible example of what good mentorship could be in publishing.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: When I think of the future of libraries, academia, and publishing in the U.S. context, I am less concerned with major developments and more concerned about what it takes us to get wherever we are going. The process. The costs.

The kinetic energy of changes like open access and AI is unlikely to stop.

The energy behind the defunding of academic institutions, the banning of books, the erasure of tenure, and more, likewise, will not easily and quickly disappear.

When I think of those changes — of open access, AI, defunding, forcible deprofessionalization — I think of labor. What work is valued. What work is minimized. The people who are always being asked to have more expertise, to take on more tasks, to fill more roles with fewer resources.

(How does that modern battle cry go? Why is it that people do the work while AI creates the art?)

Building the best future for our fields will only happen if we collaborate to build ways of working that respect the ingenuity, brilliance, limits, and humanity of the people doing the labor.

If we’re talking about pie-in-the-sky dreams of reality, in the next five years, this all would coalesce into a larger advocacy movement, one that I know some folks are working towards already, aimed outside of individual institutions, fields, and networks, one that would truly pressure the federal government to fully fund higher education in the U.S., including the humanities and social sciences as well as the sciences. This would, of course, be the overhaul of a number of strategies and funding priorities, but it might just help us escape the terrible ouroboros that is nonprofits that fund nonprofits that fund other nonprofits until somehow we circle back to eating our ever-shrinking tails ad infinitum.

Maybe that advocacy could happen through consortia or professional organizations. Maybe it could happen elsewhere. But it is advocacy that no single library or publisher could do alone. It would have to be done together.

Hey, I said the pie was in the sky. A girl can dream.

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Cadmore Media Inc. 4800 Hampden Lane, Suite 200 Bethesda, MD 20814 Cadmore Media Ltd. Fernhill, Church Lane, Drayton, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4JS UK Cadmore.media

OFFICERS: Violaine Iglesias, CEO; Simon Inger, CRO; Neil Gilstrap, CTO; and Melissa Seserko, COO.

ASSOCIATION MEMBERSHIPS, ETC.: ALPSP, Society for Scholarly Publishing, NISO.

Against the Grain / November 2023

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: Cadmore Media offers a media management and streaming service. Products include Media Embed and Media Site.

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Scholarly and organizations, academic publishers, and film distributors.

professional

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 19 HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: Launched in 2018 by academic publishing experts, Cadmore Media is a streaming technology provider that specializes in hosting educational, professional, and scholarly video content. We help societies, publishers and film distributors develop and grow their streaming offering.

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

63

Back Talk — Throwaway Books?

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

A

t the Fiesole Retreat in Basel this spring, Laurent Romary of INRIA (National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology in France) spoke provocatively of one future for print books in libraries — print them on demand cheaply and throw them away afterwards unless the user you printed them for wants to keep them or a librarian rescues them. I may misrepresent him slightly on that, but it’s how my handwritten notes from the event read, and what I remember is the sharp sense of provocation and recognition.

The idea is not crazy. Print books are expensive well beyond the purchase price, what with the cost of cataloging and housing them. If we really did rely more heavily on POD, moreover, we’d see fewer print books coming in the door and wouldn’t have to deal with them afterwards either. At some point, it’s an arithmetic problem that may very well play out in favor of some form of Romary’s idea.

So why a shock on hearing this? Takes me back to my sophomore year in college, when I spent the summer with my parents in a tiny temporary apartment they had in Springfield MA on their way to a more permanent retirement home on the Connecticut shore. I remember the view of downtown Springfield, with a clock that always read 12:30. Cramped quarters, where everything got in the way of everything else and space was precious. I had just taken beginning ancient Greek that year and spent my serious reading time that summer reviewing grammar and vocabulary.

One success that year was Frank Herbert’s Dune, then only a few years old. The sweeping epic on the imaginatively realized world captivated me, so, when I finished, I immediately proceeded to the sequel, Dune Messiah, a much slimmer volume then quite new. I hated it. It seemed to me to betray the original, to be just a quickie knockoff with none of the rich imagination or thoughtful plotting. When I finished it one evening, I jumped up, walked thirty feet down the corridor of the apartment building to the trash room, and pitched the book down the chute. And plotzed.

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OMG, what have I done? I’ve just thrown a book away. How could I? The impact of the moment is best measured by the ease with which I recall it now many years later. I had never done such a thing before and it felt very wrong.

OK, I was overreacting. The rules by which we decide what printed matter can be trashed and what can’t be are subtle, undoubtedly vary from person to person, and make no intrinsic sense. Newspapers and “magazines” can go, certainly. Hardcover books, no, with exceptions. In between, much trickier. Is National Geographic a magazine for these purposes or something with a longer life? Judging by the piles and piles of them we used to see in secondhand bookshops, a lot of people thought there was something (the binding?) that kept them from the heave-ho.

(I assume that owners of secondhand bookshops, on the other hand, learned soon enough how to do the needful.)

What was going on there and what can it tell us about books — and libraries? The “book” is now very old in human terms — call it 2,500+ years for words on durable material in quantity and presentation raised above the everyday; call it almost 2,000 years for the codex book with its turning pages. For a very large part of that time, books were scarce and expensive and the differentiation of titles meant that a given work, once it had been produced and sold off, could be hard to find. So on principle, we collectively hoarded them, nurtured them, cared about our secondhand shops, and occasionally crowed about surprisingly valuable finds we might make in them. A tiny paperback edition of C.L.R. James’s Melville book, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, washed up on the 25¢ table at a shop in Paoli, PA one day in front of me, and I snatched it up in astonishment, recognizing it, as the shopowner hadn’t, as an extremely rare first edition, privately printed, of the first book by the Jamaican activist and historian. Ten or fifteen years later, the secondhand book world had moved to the Internet and I saw that my 25¢ purchase would then sell for at least $500, now only about $200 on Abebooks. (I donated it to the Georgetown University Library.)

So it made sense to be careful. Hoarding made a material contribution to what we now call preservation and discovery.

Today? Not so much. Yes, yes, rarities retain value, but James’s books, several long out of print, are now available in standard editions, and Dune Messiah is doing nicely, thanks ($8.99 paperback, $9.99 Kindle). The tasks of preservation and discovery now depend as well on two advances: the combination of cheap reproduction with a nearly frictionless transparent global market in books (and yes, Amazon is problematic, but, for the moment, at least its contribution there is significant) and the possibility of digitization by libraries. I was already overreacting to my youthful fit of pique back then, and today it would just be silly — I doubt any 20-year-old is having a similar experience.

But we’re not where we need to be yet. Our friend Brewster Kahle is faring badly just now with the good ship Controlled continued on page 61

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LIBRARIES SUPPORTING HUMANITIES EBOOKS AND OPEN ACCESS FUND TO MISSION Open Access Ebooks from University of Michigan Press In 2021, the University of Michigan Press began to transition its ebook collection into an open access monograph model called Fund to Mission.

Under this model, the Press converted 75% of its frontlist monographs to open access in 2023. By purchasing one of the collection packages, libraries join the University of Michigan and individual funders in supporting an open access program where no author ever has to pay. Libraries that purchase the collection receive perpetual access to approximately 80 frontlist titles as well as term access to a growing backlist of over 2,200 titles.

Learn more at ebc.press.umich.edu.

ACLS HUMANITIES EBOOK COLLECTION The American Council of Learned Societies Humanities Ebook Collection (ACLS HEB) is a subscription-based collection of over 5,700 scholarly books from over 125 publishers. More than just a group of books, ACLS HEB is a set of titles curated for scholars by scholars with members of ACLS learned societies nominating books to be added to the collection.

Learn more at humanitiesebook.org.

LEVER PRESS Emerging initially from a collaboration between liberal arts college libraries, Lever Press offers a collective solution to open access book publishing. With the participation of more than 50 academic institutions and publishing support from Michigan Publishing, Lever Press produces peer-reviewed, open-access monographs at no cost to authors or their academic institutions.

This collaborative structure allows institutions to have a voice in the future of scholarly communications and academic publishing regardless of their size or amount of resources.

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