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>

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

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 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.

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.

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 ensure that these books would arrive as distinct from other books ordered by the libraries (“VIVA” on the invoice and on the mailing label). endnotes on page 26

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.

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.