Guest Edited by Erich van Rijn (Director, University of California Press)
Begins on Page 13
If Rumors Were Horses
Hey y’all! Is it spring yet? This winter weather needs to GO! Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow though, so we must struggle through a few more weeks. So, let’s get to it!
ChatGPT Intro
I asked ChatGPT to write the introductory paragraph, and this was the outcome:
Prompt: Write an opening paragraph for Katina Strauch’s “If Rumors Were Horses” column in Against the Grain for February 2025.
Reply: Certainly! Here’s a possible opening paragraph for Katina Strauch’s If Rumors Were Horses column in Against the Grain, February 2025:
“Well, folks, here we are — February already! Time sure does gallop along, and the world of libraries, publishing, and scholarly communication isn’t slowing down either. There’s plenty of chatter about AI’s growing influence in research workflows, the latest publisher mergers shaking up the market, and of course, the ever-evolving landscape of open access. Meanwhile, conference season is sneaking up on us again, and you can bet there are some
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Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094), Copyright 2025 by the name Against the Grain is published five times a year in February, April, June, September, and November by Annual Reviews. 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:
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Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to: Leah Hinds, Editor, Against the Grain <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com>
Help Support Katina through Sponsorships and Advertising
At the 2024 Charleston Conference, the Charleston Hub unveiled Katina, a new digital publication that addresses the value of librarians to society and elevates their role as trusted stewards of knowledge.
Named after Katina Strauch, the visionary founder of the Charleston Conference, it is written by and for the international community of librarians, and will also be of special interest to publishers and vendors.
Your support during the inaugural year (2025) will help bring this engaging content to all, openly available without restriction
From Your (looking forward to Doing the Charleston) Editor Emerita:
The long-awaited day is almost here! Doing the Charleston: My Personal History of Scholarly Communication will be launched at the ACRL 2025 conference in April. It will be published open access online, and is also available to preorder as a paperback ATG readers can use code “charleston30” for a 30% discount on the pre-order direct from Michigan Publishing. There will be book launch events at ACRL at the Michigan Publishing booth so keep an eye out! My eternal gratitude to Charles Watkinson for his help in bringing this book to life. Charles recently posted this selfie with a print proof of the book. #getcaughtreading
This issue, guest edited by Erich van Rijn, Director of the University of California Press, brings us insight and updates on the cost of OA on print book revenue. It follows up on
Letters to the Editor
a 2023 Charleston Conference presentation on the same topic. It features the librarians perspective from Miranda Bennett (California Digital Library), key findings from Laura Brown (Ithaka S+R), and quantitative data from John Sherer (University of North Carolina Press).
We also have an excellent bunch of reviews in Corey Seeman’s Readers Roundup column, along with a funny photo and story about his cat Ginger. Corey is a fantastic photographer — his specialty is squirrels, as you probably know if you know him at all. You can find out how to become a reviewer for Readers Roundup (and find squirrel photos!) at https://www.squirreldude.com/atg-readers-roundup. Our first installation of reports from the 2024 Charleston Conference is included in the “And They Were There” column, edited by the wonderful Caroline Goldsmith, as well. Thanks to all of our reporters, and to Ramune Kubilius for her help in keeping this tradition going.
Enjoy reading, and we’ll see you back here in April!
Love, Yr.Ed.
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 Katina and Leah:
Thanks for the mention in this week’s Tea Time. It’s a level of professional achievement I didn’t specifically aspire to, but it feels significant enough that I told my parents.
Marci Cohen (Head of Music Library, Boston University, Retired) <rockhackcohen@yahoo.com>
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Grain / February 2025
Dear Marci, You’re welcome! I love to hear this. Hope your parents were appropriately proud!
Thanks for all of your contributions to the ATG Blog.
See Marci’s shout out in a recent installment of Tea Time with Katina and Leah! https://www.charleston-hub.com/2025/02/teatime-with-katina-and-leah-76/
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Rumors continued from page 1
interesting sessions brewing. So, saddle up as we take a ride through the latest rumors, news, and musings from across our ever-changing field!”
Would you like any tweaks or a different tone?
Prompt: Re-write this to be more in Katina’s voice
Reply: Sure! Here’s a revision in Katina Strauch’s signature conversational and lively style:
“Well, y’all, here we are — February already! Can you believe it? The new year is off to a roaring start, and the rumor mill is churning faster than ever. There’s plenty of buzz about AI creeping (or stampeding?) into research workflows, another round of publisher mergers making waves, and of course, the never-ending saga of open access. And let’s not forget — conference season is just around the corner! I hear there are some intriguing sessions in the works, so stay tuned. But first, let’s dig into what’s been swirling around in the world of libraries, publishing, and beyond!”
Haha, they added “y’all” for me!!! Do you think it sounds like me?
A Fond Farewell
I can’t believe it. Don Hawkins, our intrepid Charleston Conference Blogger and author of the Conference Notes column, is retiring! We have a tribute column and a Personal Profile for him in this issue where you can read more. Did you know that he worked for Bell Laboratories as an Information Scientist? Amazing! Don and his wife Pat have been a fixture at the Charleston Conference and other events for many years, and we will miss them dearly.
Podcasts, Interviews, and More
Michael Upshall has been conducting some excellent interviews recently for ATG the Podcast! Recent guests include Alex Carroll, Associate Director, Science and Engineering Library, Vanderbilt University, and Josh Borycz, Librarian for STEM Research, Vanderbilt University; Michael Levine-Clark, Dean of the University of Denver Library; and Alicia Wise, Executive Director, CLOCKSS, and Lorraine Estelle, Director, COUNTER. The podcast has also featured audio from the Charleston Hub Leadership Interview series, with more interviews yet to come. You can see all of the Leadership Interviews on the Charleston Hub YouTube channel.
Did you know that Darrell Gunter, who contributed a chapter to my memoir, hosts a podcast about leadership? Leadership with Darrell W. Gunter is a program designed to inform the audience of the best practices in Leadership and to share the practical steps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your business, sales team, departments, etc. In his most recent episode, Darrell chats with Lord Tim Clement-Jones, a leading voice in AI governance and policy and author of Living with the Algorithm:
Servant or Master?
AI Governance and Policy for the Future
As former Chair of the House of Lords Select Committee on AI and Co-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI, Lord ClementJones has been at the forefront of shaping global AI regulations.
Acquisitions and New Strategies
Like ChatGPT said, there’s been some big news in the acquisitions department lately! Sage announced in December that it had acquired Mary Ann Liebert, Inc, “a renowned global media company publishing more than 100 peer-reviewed journals in biotechnology and the life sciences, specialized clinical medicine, public health and policy, and technology and engineering, as well as the leading B2B media brands Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN) and Inside Precision Medicine.” I’ve known Mary Ann for years and was happy to hear her good news! Just a few days later, they also announced that they were also expanding their business portfolio by acquiring titles in accounting, finance, business, and marketing from Textbook Media Press, a publisher of digital and print higher education textbooks.
In other acquisitions news, Molecular Connections purchased Morressier and Editorial Office in back-to-back announcements within the past month. Roger Schonfeld wrote an excellent analysis of the Morressier acquisition.
Clarviate recently announced a change to their pricing strategy that includes moving ProQuest Ebooks to a subscription service and phasing out one-time purchases and perpetual access. Response across the industry has been intense, and the ripple effect and ramifications will be interesting! We’ll keep an eye out for further news.
Celebrating the 25th Anniversary
The Fiesole Retreat will hold it’s 25th gathering at home in Fiesole from April 7-9 under the theme “Learning from the Past, Informing the Future.” Wow! Hard to believe that it’s been 25 years!!! I reminisced about Mario Casalini and the creation of the retreat series in an excerpt of Doing the Charleston : “In 1999, Mario Casalini flew Bruce and me to Fiesole, Italy to consider starting a conference in Europe. He had attended many Charleston Conferences. He was the most urbane, elegant, cultured, courteous
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Cambridge Open Access
Our open access ebooks programme Flip it Open is expanding by 100 backlist titles. Learn more about how the Cambridge EBA is enabling this change.
cambridge.org/FiO
gentleman I have ever known. He always brought me roses. He had a daughter, Barbara, and a son, Michele. He was known all over the world and even in the United States. As the Charleston Conference became more of a must-attend conference, he started coming regularly…. Sadly, Mario died before the first Retreat, but we planted an olive tree on the Casalini property, which lives on. My husband Bruce also painted a fabulous portrait of Mario which we gave to his wife. We have a copy hanging in our Sullivan’s Island home.”
This year’s retreat is being hosted by the EUI (European University Institute) and in collaboration with CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources). The rich, diverse program includes a preconference on AI and Libraries, and two and half days of presentations and panels on topics such as biodiversity in scholarly communication, through the lens of the humanities, the broad topic of metrics, and equitable partnerships for an equitable world of knowledge. Also including a keynote from Richard Gallagher, President and Editor in Chief of Annual Reviews and closing remarks from the amazing David Worlock, Chief Research Fellow at Outsell. You should be there! See the full program and register at https://www.fiesoleretreat.org/ fiesole_2025
SEWE
Each year, Charleston celebrates the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition (SEWE) in grand style. SEWE is a non-profit event dedicated to conservation, wildlife art, and education. Hordes
of people descend on the city wearing their best outdoorsy attire (there are jokes about the prolific number of Barbour jackets roaming downtown). I wrote in Tea Time recently about how “…majestic birds of prey take center stage in the downtown Charleston skyline…” for one of my favorite traditions.
Charleston Conference News
Again, as ChatGPT said, conference season is sneaking up on us! Planning is already well underway with our fabulous group of Conference Directors for another bam-zowie conference this year. The call for papers will open in April, and registration will open in June as usual. More info to come soon! In the meantime, the 2024 recorded sessions are now available on our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@CharlestonConference/ playlists
If you attended the 2024 conference, what did you think of our new attendee tote bags? We went with a different style this year that featured photography from a local artist. Check out all of her beautiful work at https:// lesliehallphotography.com/.
As always, thanks for reading, and please be sure to send us your “rumors” at editors@against-the-grain.com. We’d love to hear from you!
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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>
Wazzok, Ya Plonker?
Tik-tok is killing British slang. “Karen” and “basic” is bandied about while “the dog’s bollocks” is no more. Gen-Z knows not “lummox” or “ninny,” “prat” or “tosspot.”
The Brits used to have more of a shared culture built around TV comedies like “Only Fools and Horses,” about a family of likeable con men. “Blighter,” “toe-rag,” “lovely jubbly,” and “smell my cheese” were common parlance. Alas, “numpty,” “pillock,” and “wanker” are vanishing.
See: James Hookway , “British Slang Might Not Be The Dog’s Bollocks Much Longer,” The Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2024, p.A1.
Obits of Note
Lewis Lapham (1936-2024) was born a true patrician with a shipping magnate dad, a founder of Texaco in the family line as well as Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of war. After Yale, he tried graduate work at Cambridge, but gave up footnotes for journalism. He worked at the New York Herald Tribune, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post.
He saved Harper’s from extinction by finding a benefactor in the MacArthur Foundation and helmed that august journal from 1971 to 2006.
Although his Harper’s column skewered the world of the rich, he wore tailored suits, was a fixture at A-list galas and restaurants.
Late in life, he launched Lapham’s Quarterly , each issue covering a single theme that “examined modern problems through prisms of history.”
See: “The editor who skewered America’s status quo,” The Week, Aug. 16, 2024, p.35.
Francine Pascal (1932-2024) was raised in Queens, NY, hated high school, and always had a longing for a mythical HS experience of beach parties and boyfriends. She did freelance writing for True Confessions and Cosmopolitan, wrote scripts for the soap opera The Young Marrieds. Hearing a book editor complain there was no teen version of Dallas, she set to work. She had never been to Southern California, did not have an identical twin, and did not have a “perfect size-6 figure.” But imagination triumphed, and at age 50, she published 1983’s Double Love. The Sweet Valley High books were launched and ran to 181 total and sold 200 million copies. There were spin-off books series, a 1994-97 TV show, board games, and a line of dolls. Alcohol and drugs were only present to show a character’s downfall, and sex ended at second base. Critics called them formulaic, but they weren’t her audience. She reached a “whole population of young girls who were never reading.”
See: “The YA author who created Sweet Valley High,” The Week, Aug. 16, 2024, p.35.
American Library in Paris
In 1917, the U.S. entered WWI. Our libraries organized the Library War Service to send books to the doughboys. More than a million books were sent. Post-war, these became the core collection of the the American Library, organized by expatriats. It sits near the Eiffel Tower in the 7th arrondisement.
Along with the books, it hosts multiple literary events for all ages. You can buy a one-day membership if you’re in town.
See: Jerry Marterer, “Americans in Paris,” The Charleston Mercury , Jan. 2025, p.11. Jerry is the author of Paris 201: Uncommon Places in the City of Light. He may be reached at <jmarterer@bellsouth.net>.
So That’s What It’s Called
The Morris Column is a dark green 13-foot tall metal cylinder with an onion dome (although it’s called neo-Renaissance) roof. In 1868, at that glorious time of open air pissoirs, advertising in Paris was posters slapped on buildings. Gabriel Morris won a competition for an advertising concession, and his columns became a fixture of Paris. Two hundred of them still exist, plus they appear in many classic paintings of Paris.
See: Jerry Marterer, “The Morris Columns of Paris,” The Charleston Mercury, June, 2024, p.11. Jerry is the author of Paris 201 — Uncommon Places in the City of Light <jmarterer@ bellsouth.net>.
Craze for Med Books
Investment bankers, but mainly MDs and med administrators — all folks with the big bucks — are driving a trend in collecting medical books. Probably $26 million worth of volumes will change hands this year.
The afficionados are drawn by the thrill of the hunt plus the wonderful feel of old volumes with anatomy illustrations that are works of art. And they’re actually interested in the text between the covers.
The new breed of collectors network by email and hunt and bid in packs. Gene Flamm, 88, emeritus prof of neurosurgery, is considered to be the dean of the group.
Flamm began his quest as a med student, selling his used Porsche for $2,500 to buy a 1515 copy of De Humani Corporus Fabrica Libri Septem by the Flemish physician Andreas Visalius. It’s the first text to show the human body based on dissections and is now the ultimate trophy for collectors.
A retired cardiologist is putting together a collection of all the editions of William Harvey’s De Mortu Cordis. It is the first text to show blood pumped by the heart circulating through the body. He longs in vain for the first edition.
See: Jared S. Hopkins, “A Boom for Books on Bloodletting And Delivering Babies in 1669,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4-5, 2025, p.A1.
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Universal Word
Across all languages, there is one common word that everyone understands. No, it’s not some variation of “coitus.”
The word “huh.”
Word sounds are seldom connected to the meaning meant to be conveyed. Dog is “Hund” for the Germans, “chien” for the French, and “inu” for the Japanese.
But “huh?” is a “repair initiator when you aren’t clear on what you just heard” — a monosyllable with a “glottal onset consonant, unrounded low front central vowel, and questioning information.”
And we now know this because a linguistic team from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics have found it true across 31 languages. And won an Ig Nobel Prize for their study published in PLOS ONE in 2013.
“Pretty weird, huh?”
See: James Felton, “The Most Universally Understood Word in the World Appears In So Many Languages,” IFL Science, Nov. 20, 2024.
Finally It Ends
“Sleep No More” is an immersive drama with fanatic fans. (Full disclosure: I never heard of it before this article.) Some have seen it 400 times, others have commemorative tattoos, one couple just getting married has chosen the name of the hotel in the play as their new last name. And they spend thousands of dollars on tickets, airfare and hotels. They can get in five viewings in a weekend.
The set is a multi-floor replica of a 1930s hotel. The complex production has dozens of cast members move constantly trailed by streams of audience members in masks.
This fanatic fan following probably began with the rock musical “Rent” and has new contenders with “Back to the Future: The Musical” and “Six” about the wives of Henry VIII. Which is good, because “Sleep No More” is finally scheduled to close after 5,000-plus performances.
See: Charles Passy, “The Theatrical Show That People Can’t Quit Calls It Quits,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9, 2024, p.A1.
Brontë Country
One imagines the Brontë sisters “marooned in a moorland sanctuary,” but in fact they lived in what were then significant towns. They were born in Bradford which grew from rural wool town to a big trading center during their days.
Haworth has the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Daughters of a parson, they were comfortable but hardly wealthy. They were on course to be govenesses.
From Rising Star to Maxwell Flunky
Peter Jay (1937-2024) was born into Labour politics, educated at Winchester and Oxford where he got a First and was president of the union. He made a dynastic marriage to the daughter of Jim Callaghan who became Prime Minister. Daddy-in-law made him ambassador to the U.S. at the tender age of 40 with zero diplomatic experience.
The Brits had called him “the cleverest young man in England.” Americans thought him a supercilious twit. The Washington Post pronounced him “insufferable.”
And his wife promptly began an affair with Carl Bernstein then riding high on Watergate fame. Bernstein’s wounded wife Nora Ephron wrote about this in Heartburn. And the book became a Meryl Streep/Jack Nicholson movie. Jay forged on by knocking up the nanny who was 14 years younger than him and then denying paternity.
Margaret Thatcher yanked Jay home where he was reduced to factotum for Robert Maxwell, publishing baron and fraudster. Jay claimed to be Chief of Staff; unkind tongues chortled he was “head of paperclips and car parking.”
Maxwell, famous for his humiliation rituals of employees, would phone Jay, waking him in the wee hours to ask what time it was.
See: Tom Leonard , “Peter Jay dies aged 87: How ‘the cleverest man in England’ had the whole world at his feet … but blew it all over an affair with his children’s nanny,” The Daily Mail , Sept. 25, 2024 ( www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-13891863).
Let’s Read Publishing
(1) Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke (1962) (fictionalized version of Thomas Wolfe finding success and getting tangled with women and hubris); (2) Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year (2014) (overeducated and underpaid drudge in publishing meets J.D. Salinger); (3) Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything (1958) (a time when young women got married and moved to the suburbs or became hard, miserable career women) (I believe this is one of the first “three women” sagas; there are two others with tear-jerker story-lines and a movie of same); (4) Andrew Lipstein, Last Resort (2022) (novelist writes about friend’s real misadventures; MS is discovered by friend; they agree author will take money and friend the authorship); (5) John Boyne, A Ladder to the Sky (2018) (not plagiarism but theft of a story; protag founds lit magazine to better steal stories).
Their books, however, were so lucrative they were elevated above that. Charlotte made £500 from Jane Eyre, 25 times the salary of a governess. Anne invested their joint income in the new steam train industry with great success.
See: Jean Hanff Korelitz , “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 5-6, 2024, p.C9. Korelitz’ most recent novel is ‘The Sequel.
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Monographs, Open Access, and the Persistence of Print
By Erich van Rijn (Director, University of California Press, Oakland, CA 94607) <evanrijn@ucpress.edu> https://www.ucpress.edu ORCID
ID: 0000-0003-1197-2887
This special feature of Against the Grain focuses on a Charleston Conference session that explored some of the ramifications of a study conducted by the Association of University Presses in partnership with ITHAKA Strategy and Research. The study was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it explored the impact on sales of print editions of open access monographs. Print sales of monographs — to both individual consumers and to libraries — have been central to university press publishing for well over a century. During that time, the sales model has come to underpin most university presses’ sustainability strategies. With few exceptions, nearly all university presses today are operated to a greater or lesser extent on a cost recovery basis within their host institutions. In other words, their activities are expected to generate revenue that helps underwrite their costs of operation. Sales of monographs have been and continue to be central to most presses’ revenue generating efforts. Yet, even in the digital age, those sales have continued to be fueled by an ongoing reader predilection for print, which makes up the vast majority of university press sales revenue.1 This fact has meant that, unlike our cousins in the journals business, the university press book publishing business continues to have a strong tie to print products.
“If an electronic version of a book is freely available, will print continue to sell? This is a question that we sought to answer through our study.”
Emerging open access (OA) publishing models that include the distribution of an electronic version of a book that is free to download and read is forcing university presses to question whether print sales can continue to meaningfully contribute in the way that they have historically to the sustainability proposition for monograph publishing. If an electronic version of a book is freely available, will print continue to sell? This is a question that we sought to answer through our study. My colleague, John Sherer, Director of the University of North Carolina Press, and I led this study in partnership with Brenna McLaughlin, Research and Communications Director of the Association of University Presses. We collaborated with Laura Brown, Senior Advisor, and Roger Schonfeld, Vice President, Organizational Strategy and Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums, both at ITHAKA S+R, who analyzed the data collected in our study and synthesized it into a report including recommendations. Laura Brown, John Sherer, and I presented our findings at the 2023 Charleston Conference, and we invited Miranda Bennett, the Director of Shared Collections at the California Digital Library, to present the library perspective on our findings.
The hallmark of a good piece of research is that it leads to further questions, and this research project is no exception. A year has passed since the publication of our study, and my co-presenters and I still have unanswered questions that are
worthy of further research. In the first piece, in this special collection, Bennett tackles the question of why, if a freely downloadable eBook version is available, would a library wish to purchase print at all? Our study focused largely on aggregate ongoing sales of print, but we thought less about the various channels through which those print books are sold. While many of us know why consumers might favor print, Bennett addresses why a library would continue to favor purchasing print in at least some cases. Her conclusions are valuable, and also address some larger issues that inform libraries’ collection and preservation strategies. While we do live in an increasingly digital age, the technological and licensing complexities involved in collecting and lending eBooks forces libraries to continue to consider purchasing print when they wish to see a book be part of their ongoing collections.
If libraries and individuals have reasons for continuing to purchase print, then publishers need to think through their strategies for continuing to publish print even when an OA eBook is available. In our study, Laura Brown presented fairly concrete recommendations for how publishers should continue to approach managing print editions and maximizing the revenue they derive from them. But in her contribution to this special feature, Brown also reflects on her co-authored study with Kevin Guthrie and others, “University Publishing in a Digital Age,”2 and thinks through some of the unanswered questions in our study. Importantly, print sales are but one element of a university press’s title-level cost recovery strategies. What are the other components, and how do they contribute to a more comprehensive picture of what financial contributions are really necessary to sustainably publish open access monographs? What other models exist that can help enhance a press’s global impact through open access publishing? These are important questions to answer.
But, do we know that removing barriers to access enhances a press’s, and indeed a university’s, global impact? Yes, argues John Sherer, and he shares data that supports this claim. However, unlike the studies of global impact of OA book publication, previous conversations about the sustainability of OA monograph publishing have tended to rely too much on anecdotal evidence rather than hard data. Thus, when Sherer first conceived of the idea for this study, it was to bring a more data-driven approach to presses’ collective decision-making about open access publishing. Sherer emphasizes that the data show us that open access titles are exposing scholarship to historically marginalized communities in ways that our traditional monographs were not. How can we use the data that we now have in hand about how print sales contribute to the sustainability of the open access monograph publishing proposition, and what questions do we still need to answer in order to create a more data-driven approach to transforming our distribution models?
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For me, the appeal of this study is that it was among the first to ask questions about the revenue side of the publishing equation. There have been numerous studies on the costs of publishing a monograph, but if presses are being run as cost recovery operations, then we have to address the revenue side of the equation. Is there an opportunity cost to publishing a monograph in an open access model that increases equitable access and impact, but that could have been published in a paid access model that generates more revenue to support our operations? Can we quantify what the delta is between revenue generated by a monograph published in a paid access model and one published in an open access model? It has been well documented that most presses are not profitable, so forgoing any amount of revenue at all will be harmful to presses’ bottom lines. Most presses achieve sustainability not just through earned revenue, but also through university subsidy, philanthropy, fundraising, profitable side businesses, or some combination of all of these. In order to migrate increasing numbers of titles into open access models and thereby enhance the impact of the scholarship we publish, we will need more data on what revenues a typical non-open access monograph actually generates because this will be the starting point for many university presses to think about transformation. This study has now demonstrated that the sales model can make a contribution to reaching that number. What the remainder is and how to get there is what we are still exploring and collectively trying to figure out as we navigate a path to greater amounts of open scholarship.
Endnotes
1. ______. 2024b. “AAP StatShot Annual Report: Publishing Revenues Totaled $29.9 Billion for 2023 - AAP.” AAP – the Voice of American Publishing. August 22, 2024. https://publishers.org/news/aap-statshot-annual-reportpublishing-revenues-totaled-29-9-billion-for-2023
2. Griffiths, Rebecca J., Matthew Rascoff, Laura Brown, and Kevin M. Guthrie. “University Publishing In A Digital Age.” Ithaka S+R. Last Modified 26 July 2007. https:// doi.org/10.18665/sr.22345.
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Why Purchase Print if the eBook is OA?: A Librarian’s Perspective
By Miranda Bennett (Director of Shared Collections, California Digital Library) <miranda.bennett@ucop.edu> ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6225-1046
From the perspective of an academic librarian working in collection development and management, the question of how open access eBooks relate to print books is an interesting one. Several issues are important to take into account, including potential markets for a print version of an OA eBook, interests and priorities of readers, and the investment of libraries, both individually and collectively, in long-term sustainability of key elements of the scholarly communication infrastructure.
Perhaps the first question that arises with regard to libraries and print versions of OA books is why a library would spend money on content that is freely available online. For most if not all libraries, competition for every collections dollar is serious, and librarians with collection development responsibilities must always consider trade-offs. There are, however, several potential reasons a library might deem acquisition of a print version of an OA book a good use of its resources.
First, having a print copy of a book that is also openly available in an electronic format offers an additional level of assurance that the content will be preserved over the long term. While paper is, of course, fragile and susceptible to a variety of threats, including fire and flood, its vulnerabilities are different from those of eBooks, which must be adapted to constantly changing digital technologies in order to remain accessible. A library with a commitment to preservation could justify purchasing print copies of OA eBooks as a way to build redundancy and resilience into a program of long-term preservation.
“Equipped with familiar skills from established collection development practices and understanding of the needs and interests of their readers and researchers, librarians can make informed, strategic choices about the acquisition of print versions of OA books and contribute to the sustainability of new business models from scholarly publishers.”
The preservation market for print versions of OA eBooks could be a meaningful source of publisher revenue, especially if libraries are able to act collectively to pursue the systematic acquisition of print. Established shared print programs may be excellent candidates for publishers seeking collaborative partners in this area.
Second, academic libraries may see acquisition of print versions of OA books as an investment in the stability of the scholarly record. Content captured in print is fixed in a way that electronic versions cannot offer. In some ways, this disadvantages print, since it is harder to, for instance, update information or correct errors, but a version that is difficult to change without obvious signs of alteration
is vital to the ability of future scholars to interpret the past. The difficulty inherent in modifying print content also protects it against potentially nefarious modifications, and the existence of a stable version of record could be particularly important for OA books licensed with generous reuse rights.
Third, academic libraries might identify interests and priorities among their patrons that are better served by print than eBooks, even if those eBooks are openly available. For some readers, print remains a more ergonomically comfortable format for long-form reading, and the potential for distractionfree engagement with a print text, as compared to an eBook that lives so close to other digital temptations, may be appealing as well. Additionally, students and scholars in some disciplines may prefer to view non-text content — illustrations, diagrams, graphs — in print, which may offer more faithful reproductions than screens. Even if they appreciate the affordances provided by an open access eBook, readers can gain different benefits from a print version, making acquisition by libraries a potentially worthwhile investment.
In addition to these generic reasons an academic library might purchase print versions of OA books, traditional collection development priorities could motivate a specific library to acquire print versions that meet defined selection criteria. For example, many libraries are eager to acquire books authored by faculty affiliated with their institution and would likely purchase print versions of open access books in this category. The print version would fulfill some of the needs described above, such as a complementary content preservation method and use cases an eBook cannot provide — including a proud author showing off a book on the shelf of their university library.
Academic libraries could also base the acquisition of print versions of OA eBooks on subject-based collecting priorities. If a library supports high-level research agendas in particular disciplines, for example, adding print versions of OA books in those areas might be justifiable, especially if researchers have demonstrated an interest in having access to print copies. A library’s commitment to preservation of content may also have a subject component, and it might seek to acquire print versions of OA books with a specific intention to retain them in conditions suitable for long-term preservation and access.
As vital parts of the scholarly communication ecosystem, both libraries and publishers rely on its overall health and seek to act in ways that support its thriving. The opening of scholarly monographs is a complex challenge that presents an opportunity for librarians and publishers to reflect on the enduring value of print books — a technology that has served our respective communities well for centuries — even when they offer the same content that is freely available online. Equipped with familiar skills from established collection development
continued on page 18
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Print Revenue for Open Access Monographs: Key Findings and More Questions
By Laura Brown (Senior Advisor, Ithaka S+R, ITHAKA, New York, NY 10006) <laura.brown@ithaka.org> ithaka.org
It has been a little more than a year since we completed our study of the ways print revenue contributes to the overall sustainability of university press open access monograph publishing. John Scherer, Director of University of North Carolina Press, first proposed the project together with Erich Van Rijn, Director of University of California Press, and Brenna McLaughlin, Research and Communications Director at AUPresses. They enlisted Ithaka S+R as an independent, non-profit partner with a deep history of studying scholarly communication to help design a survey of university presses and then analyze the survey results. We were excited to undertake this project not only to better understand the landscape of open access business practices but also to generate actionable recommendations that could help to foster sustainable open access publishing models for scholarly monographs. On a practical level, the study produced several recommendations based on our analysis of the rich dataset we compiled from the survey of university presses. That dataset, which included information on 976 titles published between 2005-2022, is openly available here. In terms of findings, first and foremost, we discovered that print editions can contribute meaningful and, in some cases (30% of titles), substantial revenue to the publishing of open access monographs. We recommended that, if economically feasible, presses should consider publishing accompanying hardcover and paperback print editions as a way to generate additional income. And we pointed out that offering a priced digital edition through retail eBook platforms could give readers useful platform enhancements while generating welcome supplementary income that contributes to the overall sustainability of open access monograph publishing.
“What is the magic subsidy number for OA? What mix of subsidy, print sales and library contributions should we be aiming for?”
A year later, we’re curious: did the study make any difference in how presses think about their monographic publishing programs? Have any presses that have been reluctant to publish open monographs decided to at least modestly experiment with the format? Have any presses that already publish open monographs tried to benchmark their lists against the findings in the study? Have they experimented with their open access model, adding a print edition to one or more of their offerings, or including a priced digital version? Have they adjusted their revenue expectations in any way? We’d love to hear the results. This was the first such dataset analyzing the impact of print on OA monographs, but there is much we can do to build on it, especially as the landscape continues to change.
This project also was just a first step in gathering the kind of empirical evidence that will help to shape new approaches to open access. As such, it raised far more questions that it could begin to answer. We suggested some of these new
areas for investigation at the conclusion of our report, and heard additional questions from publishers, aggregators, and librarians during the presentations of our findings. Ultimately, we hope this initial research serves as a catalyst to undertake further inquiry into some of the areas we identified.
For instance, while we were able to build a sizable dataset on print (and surprisingly, digital) sales of OA monographs, we were not able to measure how these per title revenues compare with those of traditional monographs. We asked for this information from participating presses, but they had trouble providing hard data. Much of their feedback was impressionistic and anecdotal at best. Without comparable evidence of average revenues from traditional monographs, it is difficult to assess the level of financial risk OA poses to at least a portion of a university press’s monograph list. It also makes it difficult to determine what subsidies are needed to make up the delta. It would be great to see a study that results in a comparable dataset of the sales of traditional monographs in the last 7-10 years.
Comparable print sales are just part of the needed evidence. Costs are another side of the equation. We touched on this question in our report, recognizing that publishers’ willingness to embrace open access models for their monographs is founded, in good part, on the need for cost recovery. It has been some time since a survey has been done on the cost of publishing a monograph and that evidence would be a welcome addition. We also need to collect evidence on how subsidies contribute to cost recovery scenarios for open access monographs. Again, we saw anecdotal evidence that the financial model for OA is usually a blend of direct institutional subventions, library revenues from subscribe to open models (whether for initially open or conditional models), foundation funding for pilot programs, and, as we learned in our study, revenues from the sales of print and digital editions. We need to understand this complicated mix better if we are to design sustainable models that will work for various types of university presses and the institutions, libraries, authors, and readers they serve. One participant in our presentations summed it up this way: “What is the magic subsidy number for OA? What mix of subsidy, print sales and library contributions should we be aiming for?”
We also need to track some of the more robust models that have emerged and assess their progress. Publishers such as MITP have navigated the OA transition thanks to generous funding from the Arcadia Foundation which has enabled them to develop their own distribution platform and build momentum for a sustainable subscribe to open model. They are now considering the idea of opening their platform to other presses. Some aggregators are experimenting with open access monograph offerings such as our colleagues who have developed JSTOR’s “Path to Open,” which is showing signs that it could be a viable model. There are other success stories from aggregators such as
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DeGruyter, Knowledge Unlatched, and Project Muse, and other success stories from individual presses.
As publishers and libraries determine whether, or how extensively, to participate in these open access offerings, comparative data will be essential. Ithaka S+R has already begun some of this research. We have a project underway, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to analyze the market fit of various models within the academic eBook sector to understand how these models are functioning for their consumers. The study will particularly examine the needs of academic libraries, which not only represent a primary market for publishers at universities but also serve as critical links between authors and researchers.
Beyond these financial models, we heard calls during our presentations for more channel analysis of OA print and digital sales, case studies to help us understand user interactions with OA monographs (such as this from University of Michigan Press), more robust metadata creation and distribution strategies, and ways to increase the visibility of, and access to, all available versions of a title through simple, clickable links between editions.
Perhaps most of all, we heard about the need for more comparative usage. There are projects underway to study this, such as the OA Book Usage Data Trust. Once system-wide usage evidence is made available for analysis, and as we deepen our understanding of cost and revenue models for open access monographs, we can begin to chart new pathways that realize the benefits of open scholarship while delivering sustainable publishing models. This is the question that surfaced in the presentation of our findings: “How can we build an up-to-date dashboard that pools data for university press sales and usage from distributors?”
Almost twenty years ago, Ithaka S+R published a report titled “University Publishing in a Digital Age” which took a system-wide look at how universities think about their publishing mission. We said in the introduction to that report: “As information transforms the landscape of scholarly publishing, it is critical
Why Purchase Print if the eBook is OA? continued from page 16
practices and understanding of the needs and interests of their readers and researchers, librarians can make informed, strategic choices about the acquisition of print versions of OA books and contribute to the sustainability of new business models from scholarly publishers.
A word about print versions of OA books and individual consumers: In addition to potential library markets for print versions of open access books, individual consumers or end-readers may also have an interest in purchasing print. The findings of the 2023 “Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs” study that was the basis of our 2023 Charleston Conference panel presentation included evidence that “almost all of the OA monographs we reviewed generated at least some revenue from print + eBook sales, and a healthy percentage — close to 30 percent — enjoyed sales of $10,000 or greater.” It
that universities deploy the full range of their resources — faculty research and teaching activity, library collections, information technology capacity, and publishing expertise — in ways that best serve both local interests and the broader public interest. We will argue that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their specific institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship and which scholars deserve recognition and, in some cases, reduce costs. There seems to us to be a pressing and urgent need to revitalize the university’s publishing role and capabilities in this digital age.”
At that time, open access policies were just beginning to shape the scholarly communications landscape. That was the case, chiefly, for journals. Monographs were hardly mentioned in the report because presses had not even begun to think about ways to openly publish their monographs. Now, after more than a decade, scholarly books have joined the open access conversation. The forces that shape their publication models, however, are very different from those of serials. That landscape is dominated by commercial firms; their market share and profitability expectations set the pace for journal publishing strategies, including OA. Monographs, on the other hand, are a market dominated by the academy. Their authors are primarily university faculty. Their publishers are primarily university presses. Their buyers are primarily university libraries (although as this study demonstrates, there is certainly a market beyond the academy for some monographs). And in some cases, their subsidies come from university grants. With such a dominant position, universities have the ability to shape the goals and market for scholarly book publishing, leveraging their influence to help deliver the kind of scholarly ecosystem they wish to foster. As we consider the future of university press open access monographs, we need to understand the perspective and values of their parent institutions too.
is unlikely that all of this revenue derives from library sales, so individual readers may represent a meaningful market for print versions of OA books.
As noted above, some readers prefer the experience offered by a print book to reading on a screen, and in the case of a book in their personal library, they might particularly appreciate the ability to take notes in the margins or otherwise annotate their print copy (in a way they would never, of course, do in a library’s print book). Also, like a library that acquires print versions of OA books by affiliated authors, friends and family of an author might purchase print as a sign of appreciation and support. Wellinformed readers with a principled commitment to open access might even purchase (appropriately priced) print versions of OA books as a means to help underwrite the resources necessary to make the eBook version available to everyone.
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Threat or Advantage?: Quantifying the Impact of OA on Print Revenues
By John Sherer (Spangler Family Director, The University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill, NC 27514) <john.sherer@uncpress.org> www.uncpress.org ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-2471-2446
The collective work of university presses to publish and distribute monographs is one of the cornerstones of the creation and advancement of scholarship in the humanities. With the development of digital distribution tools and Open Access (OA)1 models, there is the potential for exponentially increasing the accessibility, use, and impact of these monographs. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many university presses allowed platforms like Books at JSTOR and Project MUSE to temporarily make their digital monographs OA. These platforms experienced almost unimaginably high usage increases of over three thousand percent during this time.2 While the COVID era was deadly, traumatizing, and generally tragic, it also undermined the declension narrative about humanities monographs. It wasn’t the monograph that was in decline. It was the distribution model that was failing. There is also growing evidence that OA monographs are used in historically marginalized geographies, creating an equity and inclusion argument in favor of these models.3
“What if the discoverability afforded by OA leads to an increase in print revenues?”
All of this has led to a growing desire among university presses to do more OA publishing. But presses cite long-term, sustainable funding models as the top problem in implementing OA. In an already challenging fiscal environment, the prevalent and intuitive assumption that open digital editions will cannibalize revenues is stopping OA from growing. But is this an evidence-based assumption? We commissioned our study because we realized there was almost no data on this subject. We knew that while it might seem obvious that free editions would harm sales, there’s also ample evidence that humanists prefer print editions.4 But if the hypothesis was not correct — if OA had only a marginal impact on print revenues — then there could be a substantial opportunity to expand OA publishing. Could there even be a more surprising result? What if the discoverability afforded by OA leads to an increase in print revenues?
My own read of the study’s results was that the print performance of OA titles looked a lot like our general publishing programs. Which is to say, some books sold really well, and most sold modestly. The data definitely shattered the myth that print books won’t sell when digital is free.
But there were limits to what we could learn. While we looked at the sales performance of nearly one-thousand titles, we still craved more information. We wanted to compare print sales to OA downloads and usage. Were pricing or format a driver of sales? Did different disciplines show different sales patterns? Perhaps most importantly, we wanted to see the results over a longer period of time. Could the “long tail” of print sales be enhanced when digital discoverability is maximized?
There’s one more significant outcome I wish we could have studied. We had hoped that participating presses might have been able to identify “control titles” they had published in traditional paywalled editions. By doing a side-by-side comparison of OA against the legacy model, we could begin to see that even if OA erodes print revenues, we could understand just how much print revenue was reduced. Quantifying that delta would be a key guidepost in modeling a sustainable OA subsidy.
Endnotes
1. In its simplest form, OA is defined as literature that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. https://mitpress. mit.edu/9780262517638/open-access/ Most OA book publications do not meet this definition, but instead could be called free to read, download, and share.
2. https://issuu.com/against-the-grain/docs/feb_2022_ v34-1_hr/s/15073548 and https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AGROsXct6-c
3. DOI: 10.1629/uksg.558
4. See Naomi Baron’s Words on Screen, (Baron 2015) (page 86) as well as the 2021 Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey which suggests scholars discover monographs in digital formats, but strongly prefer print editions for reading and engagement. See figure 14 at https://sr.ithaka.org/ publications/ithaka-sr-us-faculty-survey-2021/
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: Late last year, I very much enjoyed being at the Charleston Conference and talking about books, journals, databases, patron needs, patron wants, and the building blocks that we assemble for our communities. It was my first in-person Charleston since 2019 — and only my third since taking over this column. Being in this role is a bit surreal at times. I need to remove my business librarian hat and put on one that is larger and seeks out to cover more topics and needs. And when you factor in how to spread money around to get a strong collection, you realize how difficult our work is year in and year out. So one of the things that we rely on is the advice of colleagues who can really provide a deep dive into a book or a database or a whatever. Bringing this to the library community is really a privilege and a joy for me (and I hope) our reviewers.
Ever since I returned to Michigan, I have been thinking a great deal about our professional gatherings. Well, to be fair, the rest of what is going on in the world leaves me little to be happy about. Almost nothing good happened over the last few months … well, except Michigan beat Ohio State 13-10 IN COLUMBUS. I do not know if you saw that game or not — but it was literally the only good thing that I can recall happening recently … maybe something else will come to me.
SO ANYWAY … our annual gatherings at Charleston or at ACRL, ALA, etc. allows us to learn about what is new in the world and what might look great on our physical or ethereal bookcases. I guess the fun part about this gig as column editor is that I get to enjoy the wonder that is walking around the vendor exhibits for practically the entire year. Though to be fair, the giveaways are not as sweet when I am at home on my laptop.
One of the real challenges of people charged with assembling collections is that you want items to be used and useful. That is why we are doing this work. We might rely on services to help select books and resources — but fundamentally, we need to understand the value that each of these items has and how it fits into the whole. We want to buy stuff that is useful. But will everything fit that bill? This is where you cannot just toss your decision to an AI bot — but explore what your library needs.
is a wonderful light scarf that is perfect for trips, but almost never gets used the rest of the year. So as we are getting ready for a trip ourselves, it was placed in the suitcase. But it appears to be our cat’s favorite article of her clothing. Three times this week, we found it pulled out of the suitcase and on the floor. It was not until we caught Ginger in the act (actually biting the scarf) that we realized it was her. And she was the one that we called the good one.
But this is relevant because my wife does not use it most of the year — probably 49 or 50 weeks. But still, it is something that both my wife and my cat Ginger need from time to time. So there might be items in your collection that are only used once or twice in a while — but when they are used, they are critically important … or delicious … hard to know which sometimes.
We have four books reviewed here — two monographs on the profession and two reference works. The two monographs are from Rowman & Littlefield, and I am trying to branch out and get more publishers for our column. The books are focused on library accessibility, a very important topic for librarians and academics, and the future of libraries — assuming we make it to 2035. Hard to tell right now. The reference works address Women’s History and Treason. Ugh … now I am thinking about the election again….
on Jan. 7, 2025.
Special thanks to our reviewers who take the time to explore these works to see if they are appropriate for libraries. Special thanks to my reviewers for this issue: Heather Cyre (University of Washington Bothell), Mary Jo Orzech (SUNY Brockport), Julie Huskey (Tennessee State University), and Jennifer Matthews (Rowan University).
As always, I want to thank them for bringing this column together.
If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain, please write me at <cseeman@umich.edu>. If you are a publisher and have a book you would like to see reviewed in a future column, please also write me directly. You can also find out more about the Reader’s Roundup here — https://www.squirreldude.com/ atg-readers-roundup
As we think about the items we select, we often get excited about the usage statistics or circulation stats for popular items. But not everything is going to fit that bill. Afterall, our libraries are filled to the brim with resources that we use sparingly, but are still important. Maybe it is the topic that is not as commonly studied by your community. Maybe the work goes into greater detail than members of your community might need. That does not make these resources any less valuable to our identity and our collection, but it does make you wonder if you chose wisely.
So lets get to the picture of my Ginger — seemingly enjoying a bit of a cashmere scarf that my wife uses when we travel. This
Happy reading and be nutty! — Corey
Defining Documents in World History: Treason. Edited by Steven L. Danver. Ipswich, Mass: Grey House 2024. 9781637007600 (set), 2 volumes. $295.00
Reviewed by Julie Huskey (Head of Cataloging and Coordinator of Government Documents, Tennessee State University, BrownDaniel Library, Nashville) <jhuskey@tnstate.edu>
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Ginger is honestly a sweet cat — so we think. Taken in Ypsilanti, Michigan
“Treasonous acts serve as critical junctures in history, often catalyzing significant changes in legal and societal structures” (xi) says editor Steven L. Danver (Ph.D. in American history from the University of Utah and a prolific author and editor in history and social sciences). Laws are passed, symbols are created, and new societal and political movements are started by evident betrayals.
The majority of entries are authored by Danver, but twentyfour others, approximately half of whom have a Ph.D. or J.D., also contribute articles.
The entries cover a broad range of situations: they concern accusations of treason, legislation about treason, or events that were suspected of being treasonous (the last category, for instance, includes the 1939 German-American Bund “Free America” rally in Madison Square Garden, which, while not technically treasonous, represented an extremely unpopular view). The selections are indicative of a breach of perceived trust by the rulers, or of disobedience by the ruled. The articles in the set range chronologically from the English Treason Act of 1351 to the Resolution Establishing the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. The bulk of the documents are from the United States, but a few other nations are represented: in addition to the English Treason Act, the Freedom Charter of South Africa, a leaflet from the White Rose movement of Nazi Germany, and the Manifesto of the Paris Commune are reprinted. Earlier entries are more likely, the editors say, to involve religion.
The format is similar to that of other works in the series. Each of five sections — “Treason and the Law,” “Treason in Wartime,” “Treason and Espionage,” “Treason and Ideology,” and “Treason and Insurrection” — has an approximately onepage introduction; the discussion of the documents themselves, which are not in chronological order, follow. Each document is summarized and set in historical context, along with a short paragraph about its author. The document (or a long excerpt) then appears, with a few glossary terms, and a one- to three-page
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.)
analysis. Public-domain illustrations, primarily from Wikimedia Commons, are intelligently chosen, and they also keep the layout from becoming too dry.
The authors also point out the difficulties of defining treason in a globalized, technology-heavy world; when some people have dual citizenship, and communication technologies have offices in multiple countries, jurisdiction is more complicated. Danver also points out modern democracies’ challenge of preserving civil liberties while maintaining national security.
Although coverage of most of the events is available elsewhere, the commentary is generally solid. There are a few minor mistakes; for instance, the entry for Gillars v. United States (271- 279) says “Mildred Gillars, [was] known as ‘Axis Sally’” (271), not indicating that the nickname was given to a number of women radio personalities. Sometimes the glossary terms — such as “revolution,” “KGB,” and “civil liberties” — are so basic as to suggest a younger audience, but the definitions are carefully placed within the context of the work.
Despite these caveats, the set is a thought-provoking supplement to research, particularly for high school or lowerdivision undergraduate students.
ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)
Great Events from History: Women’s History. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2022. 9781637000991. $225.00
Reviewed by Jennifer Matthews (Head, Collection Services, Rowan University) <matthewsj@rowan.edu>
History is an area where many aspects can be gathered and traced, leading someone down the proverbial rabbit hole on any topic. Finding reputable resources for students to consult as a starting point for research on topics is becoming more challenging each year in this age of internet prowess. Series and volumes such as those contained within the Great Events catalog at least ensure that the researcher knows the information is from reputable sources, with lists of further reading and additional essays to consult on topics.
The current volume, Great Events from History: Women’s History , is a brand-new addition to the Great Events series, which includes around 300 essays on a wide range of topics in this area. The timeframe for inclusion in this two-volume set spans over four thousand years — ranging from 2300 BCE to 2021. Entries have been sorted into categories based on the nature of the event, including a description, summary, and significance of the event, keywords, and byline of the contributor. Events have been separated into fourteen distinct topic areas spread across the set, which ranges from activism or education to the workplace or the monarchy.
The articles are easily approachable, beginning with the event’s summary, date, and locale, followed by the significance. Most articles are around a single page in length. Events from the current era (e.g., Obergefell v. Hodges: The United States Supreme Court Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage) will occasionally be articles of multiple pages and contain insets with information about the legal case, as in this instance.
One limitation of a reference work such as this is that the publication has a cut-off before a significant recent
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event. In this case, the volumes do not mention the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 or Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 candidacy for the presidency. While all publications must choose a date to end their data collection, knowing where these significant events end will help those who refer students to this work, and will help when receiving questions from those using the item. Since the set is available electronically, perhaps the editor and publisher will update it soon to account for these two events and others that have happened since the work was published.
ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)
Hirsh, Sandra (Ed.). Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024. 9781538180396, 223 pages. $85 hardback, $35 paperback, $33 eBook.
Reviewed by Mary Jo Orzech (Scholarly Communications Librarian, Drake Memorial Library, SUNY Brockport) <morzech@brockport.edu>
Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries builds on a rich history of writing about the future of libraries, and challenges its readers to peer into a future that is only a brief decade away. The book adeptly captures this topic through twenty-five short chapters organized into six themes of Landscape, Community, Equity and Inclusion, Organizations, Workers, and Vision that resonate especially well in today’s world. Editor Sandra Hirsh has an extensive, well-regarded background as a library and information science educator, researcher and professional that make her well-suited for this work. Hirsh provides an intentional nod to the past while inviting some of the best thinking of twenty-nine current library leaders to provide their predictions about libraries of the nottoo distant future.
The opening Landscape chapters by library notables, including Joseph Janes, Jason Griffey, Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, Erin Berman, and Chris Brown, provide background and context for the chapters that follow. They are even-handed in outlining both perceptions and the reality that libraries are facing in increasingly complex environments. Berman’s speculative scenario related to libraries teetering on the edge of the trust cliff presents a particularly thought-provoking allegory.
The theme of Community is well-developed and skillfully woven throughout the book. It is specifically highlighted in chapters by David Lankes, Anthony Chow, Patty Wong, and Lynn Silipigni Connaway. The Equity and Inclusion chapters provide a critical lens for today as well as the future, and are represented by authors Nicole Cooke, Veronda Pitchford and Annie Norman. Alexia Hudson-Ward addresses the topic as it relates to academic libraries while Joyce Valenza and Debra Kachel focus on school libraries.
The Organizations theme addresses demographic growth and change (Kelvin Watson), while Raymond Pun and Tarida Anantachai zoom in on research and academic libraries, Peter Hepburn focuses on community college libraries, and Ewa Zwiedzic-Elliott describes school libraries in New Jersey.
The Library Workers chapters emphasize the care needed in supporting and promoting library work that can sometimes
be unseen or undervalued by the public. More specifically, K. Matthew Dames and Tony Zanders shine a light on the Library CEO, Loida Garcia-Febo discusses worker wellness and Stacey Aldrich and Jarrid Keller provide a glimpse into future library job descriptions. The final Vision theme challenges us to think ahead to the future that we want to see for libraries and the world. It includes compelling chapters by Joel A. Nichols, Miguel Figueroa and Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada, Susan W. Alman, and editor Sandra Hirsch.
The multiple perspectives and voices of the strong list of library authors involved bring a fresh sense of contemporary urgency to keep the reader engaged, and at times, amused, worried and concerned. While not the only hot button issue included, artificial intelligence is mentioned by several authors, and at least one imaginative chapter freely admits to the use of engineered prompts and the author’s reaction to responses generated by ChatGPT (Chow).
Calls to action echo loudly in several chapters concerning libraries’ roles in diversity and inclusion, sustainability, literacy, as well as the larger umbrella related to the promotion of civic ideals. The chapters exhort readers to underscore today’s library decision-making with a clear-eyed understanding of how choices made in 2025 will set the tone and tenor for the future of library place-making, staffing, community building, collections, programs and more.
The inclusion of a Library 2035 Webcast hosted by Sandra Hirsh, editor, is a thoughtful and welcome addition that enriches the book’s written words (please visit: https://sites.google.com/ sjsu.edu/library2035/home). Featuring interviews with many of the contributing authors, the webcast complements the book and provides additional insight into the authors’ thoughts about libraries in 2035.
ATG Reviewer Rating: 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.)
Vincent, Jane. Making the Library Accessible for All: a Practical Guide for Librarians. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024. 978-1-5381-7681-8, 179 pages. $65.00.
Reviewed by Heather Cyre (Director of Public Services, University of Washington Bothell & Cascadia College Campus Library, University of Washington Bothell, Bothell) <hcyre@uw.edu>
Libraries of every variety have an obligation, both legally and professionally, to provide an accessible environment for all individuals. However, it can be challenging for library staff or administrators to know where to begin evaluating, remediating, and creating accessible spaces, services, and web presences. Making the Library Accessible for All is a concise yet thorough guide to approaching and improving library accessibility and universal access for librarians new to the profession or those seeking to refresh their knowledge and familiarity.
Updated from the 2014 publication, this book is divided into eight easily digestible chapters, each exploring a specific area of accessibility: communications, collections, physical environments, events and exhibits, technology, and websites. The concluding chapter provides an overview for navigating conversations with library administration about implementing accessibility needs and making accessibility a part of the library’s ongoing infrastructure and budgeting processes. Each
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chapter includes background information on the specific topic, applicable regulations or guidelines, and suggested starting points for implementing change. The author concludes each chapter with interviews with various librarians and other experts in the field that offer innovative approaches, personal experiences, and effective and innovative accessibility strategies. Additionally, the Key Points section provides a brief review of the information presented and main takeaways while the Resources section supplies ready starting points for further topic exploration.
Jane Vincent is the assistive technology manager for ITS (Information & Technology Services) at the University of Michigan. Vincent has presented on the topics of accessibility, assistive technology, and universal access at several professional conferences, and has also authored the related titles Implementing Cost-Effective Assistive Computer Technology: A How-to-do-it Manual for Librarians (2012) and A Guide for Digital Assistive Technology Provision to Postsecondary Students (2021).
Of particular note are the chapters on technology accessibility and web accessibility. In chapter six, Vincent provides guidance on identifying potential barriers to current library technology and understanding the legality of providing assistive technology and accommodations. Moreover, the author offers an introduction to the variety of approaches that incorporate assistive technology to support those with visual, audio, dexterity, or neurodivergent disabilities.
Chapter seven addresses web accessibility. Notably the longest chapter in the book should be of significant consideration following the Department of Justice’s final rule in updating its regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This rule sets specific requirements for web and mobile app accessibility for state and local government entities. Vincent summarizes the principles and standards of website accessibility outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as well as recent updates to the required criteria for Level A, AA, and AAA compliance. Vincent also reviews other federal guidelines and standards applicable to web accessibility, including the Americans with Disabilities Act. Although the Department of Justice’s final rule regarding Title II of the ADA was published in April 2024, presumably after the publication of this book, Vincent offers detailed strategies for evaluating web accessibility and establishing an achievable website design or redesign process that aims to comply with WCAG’s Level A and Level AA, the de facto standard for providing an accessible website.
From cover to cover, this book provides valuable starting points to examine, address, and promote accessibility throughout library services, resources, community engagement, and physical and digital spaces.
ATG Reviewer Rating: 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.)
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Booklover — White-out
Column Editor:
Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425)
<donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>
“Now and then, the passage of time seems acutely apparent.”
This quote from Han Kang’s The White Book brings into laser focus how the grief from the loss of a loved one can come in white-out, shadowy, unforeseen waves. Ten words that hit sharp and “acutely.” Kang used her words to navigate not only the color white but also to gain an understanding of the loss of her older sister, who lived only a few hours after birth. The wordsmith in The White Book vacillates between prose, poetry, prayer and word artistry on the canvas of a white paper page. What a gem.
Han Kang is the 2024 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” The White Book poignant illustration of this accolade. Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea in 1970. Later the family moved to Seoul in order for her father to concentrate on a career in writing. The influence of the literary profession is strong in this family — the father, older and younger brother all orbit in this sphere. The family influence is now elevated not only by her entrance into the halls of the Nobel Laureates but also by the fact that she is both the first Korean writer and first Korean female to be honored with this award.
Kang begins The White Book with a list. Fifteen items that represent white to her. “Swaddling bands” is the first item. A nod to beginnings, birth and the white swaddling clothes cocooning a newborn after entering the world. The last item is “Shroud.” A nod to the end and death as white is a color of mourning in many cultures. A search for synonyms for white, when used as an adjective, produces: pale, colorless, fair, ashen, bloodless, hueless, snowy, innocent, or pure. These are just a few examples of the many choices. Such a curious list as some of these synonyms are reflected in Kang’s writing like the natural shine of polished alabaster.
So how does the color white, a list of items that are white, and a journey of grief come together to create a piece of work that Kang defined as a novel when the definition of this work of artistry was hard to categorize?
Read on. Embrace the book’s opening and be drawn into a magical white-out experience.
“In the spring, when I decided to write about white things, the first thing I did was make a list.
Swaddling
bands
Newborn gown Salt Snow Ice Moon Rice Waves Yulan White Bird
Laughing whitely Blank Paper White Dog White Hair Shroud
With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt that yes, I needed to write this book and that the process of writing it would be transformative, would itself transform into something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound. Something I needed.
But then, a few days later, running my eyes over that list again, I wondered what meaning might lie in this task, in peering into the heart of these words.
If I sift those words through myself, sentences will shiver out, like the strange, sad shriek the bow draws from a metal string. Could I let myself hide between these sentences, veiled with white gauze?”
Lastly, kudos to the translator, Deborah Smith — the person who brought this pure white yet colorful work to all who read in English.
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The White Book
LEGAL ISSUES
Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Jack Montgomery (Georgia Southern University) <jmontgomery@georgiasouthern.edu>
Questions & Answers — Copyright Column
Column Editor: Kyle K. Courtney (Director of Copyright & Information Policy, Harvard Library) <kyle_courtney@harvard.edu>
QUESTION FROM A LIBRARIAN: As a librarian following the Internet Archive’s Open Library program and the lawsuit (the “CDL case”), what is the latest update, and how does the 2nd Circuit Court’s recent decision shape the balance between equitable access to knowledge and the library mission?
ANSWER: The legal dispute between the Internet Archive (IA) and major book publishers over their digital lending program has reached a conclusion.
Background
During the height of the pandemic closures in 2020, four major publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House — filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive (IA), alleging copyright infringement involving 127 books that were already available in an established eBook market. The publishers argued that IA’s program, “Open Library,” distributed their works without permission or compensation and violated their exclusive rights as copyright holders. IA, in turn, defended its actions under Section 107 of the Copyright Act and the principles controlled digital lending (CDL) program.
District Court Opinion
On March 24, 2023, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of the publishers. Judge John G. Koeltl determined that the Internet Archive’s actions constituted copyright infringement, stating that the CDL program did not qualify as fair use under copyright law. The district court granted the publishers summary judgment motion and rejected IA’s fair use defense. According to the court, IA’s use of the works was not “transformative,” as the digital copies served the same purpose as the original physical books — merely replacing one format with another. Moreover, the court determined that IA’s lending model directly competed with the publishers’ licensed eBooks, negatively impacting the market for these works.
One of the more contentious aspects of the district ruling involved the first fair use factor, which considers the purpose and character of the use. The court deemed IA’s actions “commercial,” citing the presence of a “Donate Now” button on its website and a link to Better World Books, an online secondhand bookstore. This interpretation surprised many observers, as IA operates as a nonprofit organization.
Following this decision, the parties reached a negotiated judgment on August 11, 2023. The agreement included a permanent injunction preventing the Internet Archive from lending digital copies of the plaintiffs’ books that are commercially available as eBooks. Additionally, IA agreed to an undisclosed financial settlement. Despite this, the IA retained the right to appeal the decision.
On appeal, a key issue was whether IA’s Open Library program using digitized copies of legally acquired books — without explicit permission — constituted fair use. At the heart of the matter was the legal foundation of the CDL model and IA’s calculated risk in pursuing this approach as a means to expand access to information while navigating the complexities of copyright law.
The Appeal and Decision
The Internet Archive proceeded with an appeal; however, on September 4, 2024, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s ruling, affirming that the IA’s Open Library program infringed on the publishers’ copyrights. The court emphasized the balance between providing access to creative works and ensuring that authors are compensated for their creations.
The Second Circuit, however, dismissed the district court’s controversial claim that the Internet Archive’s (IA) use was “commercial” simply because its website included a “donate” button and received limited funds from a for-profit bookseller. This ruling was a relief for nonprofits nationwide, as accepting the publishers’ argument would have dangerously blurred the line between nonprofit activities and commercial use. This, at least, was a win for libraries and the broader nonprofit community.
Additionally, the court’s decision focused on a specific set of circumstances: IA lending digitized books that were already available in a licensed eBook market. This narrower interpretation leaves the door open for future fair use debates about digitizing and lending books without a commercial eBook option — a key point often overlooked in press coverage.
This perspective ties back to the foundational principles of CDL. CDL was about balancing copyright respect with expanded
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access. Libraries invest billions in their collections, including many out-of-print or unavailable works, which hold immense social and scholarly value. The pandemic underscored the critical need for digital library access.
Market Harm?
Another significant issue in the case was whether the Internet Archive’s (IA) digital lending harmed the market for original works. The 2nd Circuit’s decision placed the burden of proof on IA to demonstrate a lack of market harm, relying more on assumptions about potential market damage than on concrete evidence. This approach raised concerns about the fairness of the economic analysis applied.
The 2nd Circuit highlighted its reasoning on the fourth factor of fair use: the effect of the use on the market for the original works. In its decision, the court acknowledged that the publishers did not provide empirical data to support their claims of market harm but nonetheless accepted their assertion that IA’s practices could harm eBook licensing revenue and potentially damage the market if such practices became widespread. The court sided with the publishers, despite IA’s argument that the publishers needed more than a “common-sense inference” to prove harm.
This approach led to a challenging situation for IA, which presented expert studies indicating that the publishers had not experienced financial harm. However, the court dismissed these findings as insufficient, emphasizing its belief that the widespread adoption of IA’s practices would “self-evidently” harm the publishers’ markets. The court ultimately concluded that such market harm was inevitable, despite the lack of direct evidence.
Critics have noted that the publishers, as the parties with access to financial data, were better positioned to provide evidence of market harm but chose not to do so. Instead, the court’s reasoning placed a burden on IA to disprove market harm without access to proprietary data. This situation underscores a broader concern about fairness in copyright disputes, particularly when one party controls critical evidence. While the publishers’ claims of market harm persisted, the time in question coincided with record-breaking profits for these companies, bolstered by costly eBook licensing schemes. As some commentators have observed, the court’s decision appears to rely on assumptions and inferences rather than a
robust analysis of the fourth fair use factor, raising questions about how future cases might interpret market harm in a digital lending context.
While the publishers’ claims of market harm persisted, the time in question coincided with record-breaking profits for these companies, bolstered by restrictive and costly eBook licensing schemes. As some commentators have observed, the court’s decision appears to rely on assumptions and inferences rather than a robust analysis of the fourth fair use factor, raising questions about how future cases might interpret market harm in a digital lending context.
Conclusion of the Case
In December 2024, the Internet Archive announced it would not pursue further legal action, effectively bringing the case to a close. As a result, the IA is now barred from lending digital copies of the plaintiffs’ books that are available for eBook purchase. This outcome has led to the removal of over 500,000 books from IA’s digital lending library, significantly reducing the availability of certain digital books through the platform.
The resolution of this case may have profound implications for libraries and digital lending practices. The court’s decision underscores the limitations of the fair use doctrine concerning the digitization and lending of copyrighted works. Libraries employing or considering digital lending must now navigate these legal precedents within the guidelines outlined by the 2nd Circuit. By focusing on books with viable licensed eBook markets, the court’s decision could be interpreted to be relatively narrow, leaving room to further explore digital lending in a rapidly evolving landscape. For example, rare, unique, local, and materials for which there is no electronic licensed market may be a low-risk area for which to provide access. Yet, libraries, as always, should carefully investigate their collections to avoid potential copyright infringement. This may involve reassessing digital lending programs where the books have an eBook market and seeking alternative methods to provide digital access within the bounds of current copyright laws.
In conclusion, the culmination of the Hachette v. Internet Archive case marks a pivotal moment in the realm of digital lending, reinforcing the necessity for libraries and digital archives to align their practices with established copyright frameworks to ensure the continued dissemination of knowledge.
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And They Were There — Reports of Meetings 2024 Charleston Conference
Column Editor: Caroline Goldsmith (Associate Director, The Charleston Hub) <caroline@charlestonlibraryconference.com>
Column Editor’s Note: Thanks to the Charleston Conference attendees, both those who attended in person and those who attended virtually, who agreed to write brief reports highlighting their 2024 Charleston Conference experience. Our in-person event was held November 11-15, 2024 in historic downtown Charleston, with the virtual event following on December 9-13, 2024. The virtual event included recorded presentations from the in-person event followed by live Q&A sessions with speakers as well as exclusive “virtual only” content. There were more Charleston Conference sessions than there were volunteer reporters for Against the Grain, so the coverage is just a snapshot.
There are many ways to learn more about the 2024 conference. Please visit the Charleston Conference YouTube site, https://www. youtube.com/user/CharlestonConference/videos?app=desktop, for selected interviews and videos, and the conference site, https://www.charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/ for links to conference information and blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins, https://www. charleston-hub.com/category/blogs/chsconfnotes/. The 2024 Charleston Conference Proceedings will be published in 2025, in partnership with University of Michigan Press.
In this issue, we have the first installment of Conference reports, including some key takeaways from the 2024 Charleston Conference, some lessons learned at the vendor showcase, and some summaries of the 20 minute vendor information sessions (also held on vendor day). Thank you again to all of our volunteer reporters! — CG
Top Three Things I Learned at the 2024 Charleston Conference
Reported by Alice Nguyen, EM-MSIPP (Library Graduate Fellow, Savannah River National Laboratory) <alice.n.69521@gmail.com>
As a first-year attendee and an early career librarian, I felt like there was almost too much to learn in just a few days. However, there were some points that stood out and still make me think months after the conference.
1) There were multiple sessions on retractions with intriguing discussions about how to treat retracted articles, publisher perspectives and processes on retractions, and the future handling of retractions by libraries and librarians. This conference’s unique offering of both librarian and publisher perspectives allowed for nuanced discussion on a topic that I had questions that sometimes librarianship did not have the answer for. The different kinds of librarians represented at the conference also gave me a chance to see how a Business Librarian versus a University Librarian might approach the same issue based on the priorities of their job and users.
2) Other topics also included the inclusion of AI in the current research and publishing landscape and how librarians and publishers can constructively include AI technology into existing practices. AI is already upon us, and it was fascinating to see how librarians have warily embraced the technology.
3) I was particularly drawn to the presentation and discussion on standards that affect librarian work and scholarly publishing. Especially presentations about establishing and updating existing standards to make retractions an easier process for authors, researchers, librarians, and publishers. I always considered standards as things that were like dry manuals that dictated how things should be done. However, seeing that librarians like myself were able to have a hand in shaping and changing these standards empowered me to reevaluate what standards could be, and positive change can be enacted.
Top Three Things I Learned at the 2024 Charleston Conference
Reported by Jordan Claire (Assistant Acquisitions Librarian, Arizona State University) <jordan.claire@asu.edu>
Attending the virtual 2024 Charleston Conference was easily one of the professional highlights of my year as a new acquisitions librarian. I am so glad that this was my first conference I attended as a librarian because I learned so much! Previous to the conference, I had decided to become a conference volunteer. From this, I learned that volunteering at the Charleston Conference ensured that I gained new knowledge about a broad range of topics. I will likely volunteer again in the future because it was a great learning opportunity. Another noteworthy memory from the Charleston Conference for me was attending the Acquisitions Bootcamp. In attending this interactive session, I was able to hear from others who are currently involved in acquisitions processes in the field. In this session, I heard about the similarities and differences between my workflow as an acquisitions librarian and the workflows of others. Further, I came to an understanding of how interactive conference sessions can become networking opportunities within the field of information science and librarianship. Being able to interact with others in a session like the Acquisitions Bootcamp, along with seeing other conference presentations, was a valuable experience. The presentations that I attended contributed to the growth of my knowledge and my understanding of what peers in the field are discussing and writing in the literature. Being able to see these presentations allows me to understand where my own future contributions to the field as an acquisitions librarian will fit into discussions.
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Top Three Lessons Learned from the Vendor Showcase
Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu>
Spending time in the vendor showcase prior to the start of the Charleston Conference is always a high energy undertaking, necessitating stopping for refreshments during breaks (thanks to sponsors!). In 2024, some vendors’ tables were located in “established” spots, others moved to new locations and, in at least one case, a company had two nearby tables (because of a recent merger / acquisition). A suggestion to showcase organizers would be to bring back the tradition of somehow visually / physically marking (with ribbons or other) the “first timer” showcase participants so that their representatives could be welcomed and “chatted up” by attendees. Unlike last year, it was not as “easy” to guess which vendors and products might receive audience votes later in the conference’s “Charleston Premiers” session, as most innovative, etc. (It should be noted that Charleston Premiers is a curated and selected group of presenters…)
Conference director, Beth Bernhardt, was seen touring the vendor showcase, filming a tour (with some good vendor “elevator pitches”) for virtual conference attendees. Conference founder, Katina Strauch, stopped at the Annual Reviews booth to pick up a t-shirt designed to celebrate the launch during conference week of the new publication, Katina, named in her honor.
Lessons learned are mostly reinforcements:
1) It can be worthwhile to chat to the vendors. Reps can often tell you if another unit at your institution already may be a customer, or someone at your institution has enquired about or is involved in some capacity with one of their products. You can learn something even if initially it may not appear to be a good fit for your institution or library.
2) In this global era, it may turn out that a product or site or group of journals from an internationallybased vendor may actually have potential relevance to a North American audience (e.g., with substantive English language or otherwise relevant content). The publisher or vendor may be seeking new audiences.
3) Sometimes a rep will provide a teaser (without details or specifics) of new features coming to one of their/ your products soon... This experience has challenging aspects.
You can view the Charleston Conference blog photo montage of the vendor showcase by Don Hawkins at https://www. charleston-hub.com/2024/11/the-vendor-showcase-7/.
20 MINUTE VENDOR INFORMATION SESSIONS (TUESDAY, VENDOR DAY)
Scopus AI – Leading the next 20 years of Innovation Elsevier Vendor Information Session
Reported by Alice Nguyen, EM-MSIPP (Library Graduate Fellow, Savannah River National Laboratory) <alice.n.69521@gmail.com>
This session was focused on the debut of Scopus AI and its application to research for students, early career researchers, and multidisciplinary scholars. Key takeaways about the product are that it is trained on only Scopus’ data, it has a feature to help identify new and emerging topics in research, it is transparent and describes the process it uses to find information, and it is capable of finding “underserved” themes from the last 24 months of published research. All these features are meant to help start the research process and save researchers up to 50% of research time. However, the target audience of this tool seems to be researchers without a clear research idea or theme, or those looking to collaborate with others outside of their specific field of research. This tool may or may not be as useful or timesaving to experienced researchers with expertise in their fields already.
How Much of Your Paid Content Is Open Access?
Hint: It’s a Lot More than You Think SirsiDynix-CloudSource Vendor Information Session
Reported by Jeffery Wagner (Collection Development Librarian, Harrell Health Sciences Library, Penn State University - College of Medicine) <jwagner21@pennstatehealth.psu.edu>
This session focused on CloudSource OA by SirsiDynix, a discovery platform that connects customers and their users to over 60 million open access scholarly resources. The presenters provided a concise overview of CloudSource OA, highlighting significant statistics, including the fact that since 2017, 61% of all scholarly articles published have been open access. Additionally, over 65% of scholarly articles published in 2023 were licensed under open access. Following this session, I felt motivated, as effective utilization of this product could lead to more strategic spending of collection funds, assuring that users have access to freely available, peer-reviewed, scholarly works. Furthermore, librarians can take advantage of SirsiDynix’s offer of a complimentary Collection Analysis, which delivers detailed insights into the proportion of open access content within a library’s collection, aiding in decisions regarding resource subscriptions.
This concludes the first installment of reports from the 2024 Charleston Conference. Make sure to check out the next batch of reports in the April, 2025 issue! You can view recordings of conference sessions, podcast interviews and our new Charleston Conference leadership interview series on our YouTube channel. Thank you again to our volunteer reporters!
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Don’s Conference Notes — A Review and Farewell
Column Editor: Donald T. Hawkins (Freelance Editor and Conference Blogger) <dthawkins@verizon.net>
Istarted writing about conferences for Against The Grain about 10 years ago. I think it was Katina Strauch who got me started covering conferences. The title “Don’s Conference Notes” only appeared in URL’s until the last few years when I started putting it in the article titles as well. From 2015 until now (late 2024), 73 articles have been published; a few of them were written by someone besides me; for those I functioned as the column editor. I have found these experiences most enjoyable because of the personal interactions involved and also because of the exposure to many varying aspects of the scholarly publishing industry.
The conferences in the Conference Notes are mostly those of well-known scholarly publishers including Society for Scholarly Publishers (SSP), National Information Standards Organization (NISO), Information Today, Inc. (ITI), Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L), and of course, the Charleston Information Group. Until the COVID pandemic, I attended the conferences in person and took notes and photos which I used in writing an article. Since then, virtual conferences have become popular, and I have mostly attended virtually. Virtual conferences allow one to attend a wider variety of different ones and
do not incur costs for travel, lodging, etc.; however, attendees (myself included) miss many of the beneficial personal interactions with others. For all conferences that I attended, I requested and received a free press pass; in fact, I did not write an article about a conference if I did not get a pass. Without exception, no sponsoring organization refused to give me a pass, which is understandable because the Conference Notes are a source of publicity for them.
The previous paragraphs present some background to Don’s Conference Notes, but this article is the last one. Having reached the age of 82, I have decided to retire and pass the coverage of conferences in Against The Grain to someone else. I therefore bid you all a fond farewell and look forward to my successor’s coverage. If you are interested in taking over the Conference Notes, please contact Leah Hinds, Executive Director of the Charleston Hub.
A Farewell to Don from Our Staff
Don Hawkins, author of “Don’s Conference Notes” and the Charleston Conference Blog, among many other publications, has recently announced his retirement. This article will be his last for Against the Grain. Our staff would like to say thank you and congratulations:
From Katina Strauch, Conference Founder and Executive Advisor:
Dear Don, I remember so well when you proposed becoming the Charleston Conference blogger many decades ago! I didn’t know what to expect! Thank you! You are the prototype conference blogger! We will NEVER find a replacement! Thank you for showing us what is needed! I will miss our annual meetings to discuss what ancillary meetings to blog and yours and Pat’s active participation in it all! My comments are inadequate and bring tearful memories to my eyes! Thank you is a pitiful word. Love to you and Pat as you embark on your next adventures! All my love always, Katina
From Caroline Goldsmith, Associate Director, Charleston Hub:
Don, for years we’ve seen you sitting in the front row of Conference sessions and have been reading your reports in past issues of Against the Grain and those featured on our weekly blog. Your conference summaries and reports have always offered a clear, concise account of who was there and what the hot topics
were for all of the major scholarly communication industry events, and we’ve been happy to feature those for many years. So, to our longtime Conference blogger, we’re bidding you a very fond farewell. I’ve loved working with you and your lovely wife, Pat, at the information desk for many years, and I’ll be sad to see both of you retire in 2025. We wish all the best for both of you and hope you enjoy a very happy retirement.
From Leah Hinds, Executive Director, Charleston Hub:
Don, as you step into this exciting new chapter of life, we want to take a moment to express our deep appreciation for all you’ve contributed to the Charleston Conference and Against the Grain over the years. Your insightful conference reports, thoughtful reflections, and dedication to sharing the latest developments in the library world have enriched our community in countless ways.
Your travels took you across the globe, capturing the essence of so many important conversations and ensuring that those who couldn’t attend felt as if they were right there. Your presence will be deeply missed by many in our professional circles. While we’ll miss your dispatches from conferences near and far, we are thrilled for you as you embark on this well-earned retirement. Wishing you happiness, good health, and plenty of time to explore the world on your own terms!
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Seeing the Whole Board — If the Academy is in Play, Be a Gamer
At the 2024 Charleston Conference, I was privileged to live out the goals of this column to leverage advocacy to influence policy and impact the societal trends affecting the future of academic libraries. By highlighting the challenges facing libraries and academia, bringing professionals together to help others “see the whole board,” and learning from one another, we can start to stress test solutions and incorporate what works into our own portfolio.
At Charleston, Florida International University Dean of University Libraries, Nancy Kirkpatrick; University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science, Director and Professor, Lucilia Green; and University of Iowa, College of Law, Law Library Director and Professor of Instruction, Carissa Vogel, discussed strategies library professionals can use to turn the library’s implicit value into explicit results. The Neapolitan Session: “The Legislative Landscape — The Library’s Hand in the Higher Ed Game” was conceived as a primer for library professionals concerned about the impact of policies in their state or on their campus and as a playbook for those who find themselves needing to advocate for themselves and their library.
It is always a privilege to attend the Charleston Conference, and presenting is an opportunity to share thoughts and ideas beyond the coffees, lunches and dinners that have become the conference’s calling card. By rewatching the session, I was able to see the whole board, or presentation, and track how the conversation came together along with the end result. In our initial meetings, we spoke about the importance of focusing on broader goals and being pragmatic rather than getting mired in the angst. As we brainstormed, a few core ideas came into view about the library’s place on campus, the value in building allies, strategies to test when seeking budget increases, opportunities for new funding, and separating passion from practicality. When working with all parties, the library staff should serve as a voice of reason.
“Alignment and understanding are not just nice to have, they are essential and can have wide-ranging benefits for librarians as they seek increased budgets and a share in the stakes.”
When leveraging resources, seeking out new solutions, defying expectations, and providing cogent analysis, library staff expose unintended consequences of proposed actions through a collaborative lense. By “depoliticizing” issues, library professionals provide an alternative to “the loudest voices” and reactionary policies by demonstrating where costs can be saved; where they are incurred, highlighting where services would be duplicated by pointing out what is already available in libraries — whether resources or staff expertise. If this could be accomplished while establishing the library and library services as resources and ways to connect people to good information, a positive view
of libraries would be achieved.
The brainstorming and thought exercises were a nice way to expand our thinking, flesh out ideas, and prepare for the presentation. But, when the microphones and cameras were turned on, we had to translate those thoughts into concepts and examples that would allay fears and provide a roadmap for those entering the fray.
Define the Library
Each of my fellow presenters worked for a large state institution and their goals were influenced by those roles. For Lucilia Green (Lucy) efforts began with making libraries, library staff, and library services real. She described her approach as translating “what I do into things people crave.” As the director of a school of library and information science, that included asking: How does the school meet the needs of people in the state, which often required her to translate the vernacular of libraries (Librarian-ese) into words that explain “how we meet the needs and desires they have but in words that they are comfortable with.” In her experience, “the work we do is one we are probably always going to have to justify.” Success comes from making what librarians do attractive and accessible and making sure it meets people’s needs.
For Carissa Vogel, a law library director and professor of instruction, defining the library requires supporting different communities. Her thought process includes answering the question: How do we support and tell good stories about how we can help the people of Iowa? To do that, she needed to define not only the library but its stakeholders. In Iowa, the university’s law library isn’t just for the College of Law, it is a legal resource for the public. Since public libraries are the first contact for those looking for legal advice, reaching out to public libraries is part of Carissa’s overall mission. To meet the needs of the public, the Peoples’ Law Library of Iowa was created as an easy-to-understand website for the state library that could also serve as a resource for public library staff. Helping people access information the way librarians do was a core part of defining the law library. Throughout her first full year as Dean of University Libraries, Nancy Kirkpatrick said she took every opportunity available to showcase the library internally. “The library is one of the most valuable resources on the university campus and one of the most undervalued resources on campus.” Her advice was to “say ‘yes’ to every invitation and speak to the value of the library.”
Consider the ways you are communicating about the library right now and what your students will take from that once they graduate. They could be a future faculty member doing valuable research or a future college administrator. They could become a donor or board member. They could run for office or work on a legislator’s staff. What are the foundations you are putting down now to build library supporters of the future? Define the library and build your community.
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Seek Alignment and Support
Once the library can be defined, that narrative can be leveraged to seek alignment and support. For Nancy, it is all about intent. “I assume intent. I can’t assume positive intent. I assume intent and try to be intentional in my response.” She asks, “Who is intentional about supporting the library and what can we do to inform them and increase support?”
Lucy said, “when you speak to people, know what your purpose is in each conversation. Enlightenment or ‘winning’ is not the purpose. It is to get a seat at the table. Use the interaction to get a seat at the table. Learn about the stakeholder and how they best receive information and use that to present it to them.” As Carissa said, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be funded?” At a previous institution, she used the idea of spiders building webs as a reminder for staff that they were “building connections throughout the institution.” This served to “inform departments about the work the library does, so they would understand the value to them and would advocate for the library if it was facing cuts.”
Alignment and understanding are not just nice to have, they are essential and can have wide-ranging benefits for librarians as they seek increased budgets and a share in the stakes.
Budgeting
When discussing budgets, Lucy advocated for a deep dive into stakeholder needs by figuring out their language priorities, foundational values, which anecdotes work best, and how they like information presented. She suggested that library professionals could use that information through data visualization, per student statistics, and the amount of money other schools at the university with similar enrollment are investing in each student to make comparisons across the university. A similar approach could provide comparisons across institutions in the state and among the institutions that universities benchmark themselves against. By understanding how a particular stakeholder preferred to receive information, presenting the data along with the numbers to back it up, and explaining how she arrived at the data, Lucy was able to help that stakeholder compare Lucy’s budget to the stakeholder’s own missions and goals. In Lucy’s case, the approach helped her increase her school’s budget 1.5 times in her first year.
Nancy made the case that stakeholders need to understand how library budgets compare to other departments to build alliances. She said librarians are accustomed to providing services but “when something goes wrong, we don’t tell them;” an opportunity to create a library ally is lost. Sharing may lead to a conversation about ways to support the library and ensure they can leverage the services they need. If “faculty only know about the library budget when they [can’t] order books,” then it’s time to reassess how to define the library and reach across the campus.
Researching a Solution
Once you have defined the library and have shown its value, creating allies on campus and among stakeholders who may influence or control your budget, it might be time to consider whether these relationships can lead to alternative funding opportunities. Research dollars that come into a college or university may make headlines, but the role libraries and library staff play in the grant researching and writing process is often unspoken. All three presenters had experience with, or plans for, leveraging the work libraries do in the grant process
to bring money back to the library. As Nancy reaches out to constituencies across campus, she hopes she can make a case to the Office of Research and Economic Development that using library resources to write grants and bring in research dollars should translate into a percentage of those funds coming back to the library. As she said, given the amount of research money coming into research institutions, a small percentage being designated for the library would not impact the research, but “it would be a gamechanger for the library.”
Lucy said there needs to be language in grant proposals about money coming back to the library. It is another way to “make implicit support explicit.” This is already in practice at the College of Law. Carissa said library staffers are listed in grants and the library has a stake in the game. Even better, “professors are coming to them” and “the library adds receiving funding in its annual report.” She said, “that is the language that the provost’s office and the president understand, use those pathways and relationships to advocate, insert, and benefit the library.” Like Nancy, Carissa says yes to all meetings, especially those about research. “Find out about research. People love talking about their research, so do lots of listening. Know which professors are doing grant-funded research” and do your own research and “know which questions to ask.”
Lucy takes a practical approach to explain the work she and her team can provide and to help researchers benchmark themselves telling researchers, “this is where we are and what we are able to provide with the funding,” or, “here are the institutions you are interested in matching, and this is how they are funded, and this is what we need to match that.”
Be Practical
In a time and place where emotions can run high, there is real strength in reinforcing that voice of reason mentality. Lucy said there is no value in winning an argument. “It does not help me to come into a room with a side taken.” Being practical and providing scenarios can add to the conversation. By asking questions, a library professional can position the library to be the solution. She told the Charleston Conference audience, “people will equate not knowing what something is with thinking it doesn’t exist.” The library often already has resources or tools to address the needs and solve the concerns of stakeholders who may be pushing for a solution to a problem the library has already solved. Here are some examples of the language Lucy finds effective when bringing her research and practicality into a conversation:
• I see that you are considering X.
• I see that you are thinking about doing Y.
• It looks like it is funded at $$ and is doing Z.
• If you improve funding by $$, you’ll get ZZ out of it.
• It sounds like you want to start over, here is what you’ll need to do and what is currently being done.
• It looks like this is what other institutions are doing, (e.g., cost per student).
By asking questions, highlighting scenarios, and doing the research, library professionals can tangibly demonstrate that the library is the best and least expensive option. This doesn’t mean taking on more and more work, it goes back to showing what is being done now at a given rate and demonstrating what could be accomplished by increasing budgets or staffing. For Lucy, it is a shift from what is implicit to what is explicit, from a perception of what the library is to examples of what
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the library does and can do. She told the audience to, “be the person who is explicit, who clarifies things.” Defining the ways in which the library can help and explaining which resources are available reinforces the value of the library and makes it more evident.
By removing the emotion in decisions or policies, monetizing the plans you want to move forward, offering existing or new services as a solution, and expanding the notion of outreach, library professionals can expand their portfolio, their budgets, and their reach. Seeking alignment can not only benefit the library but also the larger institution. If the academy is in play, be the one who has thought through the game, identified the problems, and negated the impact of inflamed discourse and emotions.
By shifting your focus, you shift your future. Understanding the monetary pressures on institutions and the goals of stakeholders, understanding who your natural allies are and building new allies wherever possible, you will get ahead of issues, find solutions, and provide yourself with more options.
Kathleen McEvoy is a long-time communications executive with direct experience in crisis communications, media and public relations, and public affairs. She has lobbied and created strategies to address legislation in multiple U.S. states and has met directly with state executives and legislators to call out the unintended consequences of legislation that impacts digital privacy and data stewardship, as well as data security risks and personally identifiable information (PII). Kathleen has presented on crisis communications, social media, communications, and media training. She has written about emerging technology, the current political landscape, and the legislative and policy issues impacting academia, research, and intellectual freedoms.
Kathleen is a board member of EveryLibrary, the national political action committee for libraries, and is a senior policy fellow at the EveryLibrary Institute. Kathleen has also co-chaired a task force on intellectual freedoms as part of the American Library Association’s United for Libraries division, where she is an executive board member and serves on the Intellectual Freedom, Public Policy, and Advocacy Committee.
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Libraries, Leadership, and Synergies — Constant Disruption in Electronic Resource Management
By C. Sean Burns (Associate Professor, University of Kentucky, School of Information Science) <sean.burns@uky.edu> orcid.org/0000-0001-8695-3643
Column Editor: Antje Mays (Collection Analysis Librarian, University of Kentucky Libraries) <antjemays@uky.edu>
Column Editor’s Note: Libraries have prevailed with remarkable resiliency as wide-ranging disruptions have affected all library services and operations over sustained periods of time. The author examines how technological disruptions are reshaping electronic resource librarianship and offers insights for operational workflows, key competencies, library services, shifting data control and management, and ethical considerations around user privacy in the age of massive datagathering and analytical capabilities. — AM
Introduction
Electronic resource management (ERM) is dependent on current technologies. This means it is subject to rapid technological changes, evolving industry standards, and shifting user expectations. Whether we regard all these as innovative, they are a source of constant disruption. These disruptions result in continual shifts in the tools and therefore workflows used to manage and provide access to library resources. As a consequence, the traditional roles of librarianship and the use of the library are constantly disrupted but open to re-framing. This essay explores these themes by considering the roles of ERM librarians, the technologies they utilize, the challenges they face, and the implications for the future of library services.
The Role of the Electronic Resource Librarian
Electronic resource librarians occupy a space that overlaps technical services and collection development.1 ERM librarians must understand a range of technologies, be able to negotiate licenses, handle subscription renewals, and work with other library staff to integrate digital content into the library’s collections. The work demands a holistic understanding of library services and processes from metadata to acquisitions to technological troubleshooting.
ERM librarians also function as “bridges” or “translators” between different parts of a library organization. 2 This bridging role means they must constantly adapt to new technologies and translate the changes to library staff and patrons in understandable ways. The ability to act as a technical communicator, someone who facilitates conversations between vendors, technical staff, and library users, highlights the position’s complexity. It is a balancing act that exemplifies the constant disruption in ERM work: as technology evolves, so must the ERM librarian’s skills, responsibilities, and facility to communicate clearly.
Technological Disruptions
The way we use computers today is different than the way we have used them each decade since the web and internet started to become available to the public in the 1980s and 1990s. That constant disruption for the public at large is more intense and disruptive for electronic resource librarians. The migration from the card catalog to the Integrated Library System (ILS), the evolution of the ILS and the adoption of Electronic Resource Management Systems (ERMS) and finally the development of Library Service Platforms (LSP) have all occurred in living memory. The ILS originated as an extension of the card catalog system but was too limited to handle the complexity of growing, disperse electronic resources. We added the ERMS to supply that missing functionality, but this functioned as a placeholder until the LSP arrived. The LSP, cloud-based, offers more capabilities to handle the whole ILS/ERM workflow, but it represents a shift from local control on the premises to the cloud. All of this itself is emblematic of the broader transformation affecting libraries.3 As artificial intelligence takes off and is added to our LSPs and discovery systems, we should expect more change and disruption.
The modular structure of the ILS and the LSP provide an example of the ongoing technological upheavals in ERM workflows. These systems have included modules for acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, and serials, and they play vital roles in managing a library’s print and electronic collections. However, the increasing prominence of digital resources necessitate additional modules to handle electronic management, access, discovery, and analytics. Even if the incorporation of these modules expanded the functionality of these systems, they also redefine the skill sets needed by ERM librarians.
Linking technologies play a central role in understanding the constant disruption in ERM. Technologies like OpenURL and federated search allow users to move, we hope, seamlessly across various search systems and to access content housed among different platforms. However, linking technologies require constant updating and maintenance and accurate metadata. These technologies are invisible to most end users but not to the librarians. Their complexity and their demand for constant fine-tuning require a disruptive vigilance.
Licensing, Access, and Control
Licensing, access, and control are a source of significant disruption. Unlike physical materials that are governed by straightforward ownership rights, electronic resources
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are typically licensed and not owned. This distinction has consequences for how libraries manage their collections and provide access. Zhu 4 highlights the unique challenges for ERM librarians that illustrate the complexity in meeting both budgetary constraints and user needs.
The First Sale Doctrine underpins the rights of libraries to lend physical materials, but it does not apply to licensed electronic resources. The latter are licensed under restrictive terms set by publishers, and this holds even under models that mimic physical lending, as the Internet Archive’s recent court loss over its controlled digital lending program illustrates.5 As a result, ERM librarians must navigate complicated contractual language and negotiate for terms that allow for broader usage rights, such as interlibrary loan or access for remote users. This situation necessitates a high level of legal and contractual knowledge.
The shift towards cloud-based services means that the management of these licenses involves multiple agents that include vendors, library consortia, and institutional IT services. This represents an expansion of the organizations involved in licensing, and they include relationships that need to be carefully managed to ensure reliable access to electronic resources. The increased reliance on third-party vendors adds a layer of complexity. Issues like service outages, authentication errors, or changes in platform terms directly impact a library’s ability to provide consistent access to its users. This includes not only the content to which the library provides access but also the cloud-based platforms and technologies that provide that access, such as cloud-based LSPs.
Disintermediation and the Shifting Role of Libraries
Many users now rely on non-library-provided resources, like Google Scholar, to locate scholarly materials.6 The reliance on non-library services and sources is likely to grow with the advent of artificial intelligence chat services, especially those that are integrated with scholarly databases or that are able to search the web. This question arises: if users bypass library systems to search for and acquire content, what becomes of the electronic resource librarian’s role? The answer lies in the ERM librarian’s ability to add value by curating, licensing, and ensuring seamless access to high-quality content that may not be accessible through open platforms. In this sense, the ERM librarian’s role, and other librarians as well, become less about collecting and more about overseeing digital libraries.7 Re-framing librarianship to include increased curation responsibilities can inspire discussions about the training in and practice of electronic resource management.
The Importance of Workflows and Migration Projects
All these conditions mean that workflow management is constantly disrupted. Managing electronic resources requires a highly organized workflow that incorporates acquisitions, metadata management, licensing, and usage analysis. The disruption comes not only from the need to update workflows that respond to new technologies and manage them but also
from the occasional need to migrate from one system to another. Migrations, such as those from an on-site ILS to a cloud-based LSP, are major undertakings that require careful planning, cross-departmental coordination, a thorough understanding of both the legacy and new systems and a library’s collections. They are costly, time-consuming, and fraught with challenges. They become necessary because the technologies that support ERM evolve so rapidly that older systems, and older workflows, become obsolete. Migrations might be driven by a desire to improve user experience, enhance interoperability, or integrate new functionalities that are not supported by legacy systems.8 However, they mean that ERM librarians must be adept at their day-to-day responsibilities and also prepared to lead or assist in major projects that can disrupt regular operations for weeks or months at a time.
Privacy, Analytics, and Ethical Challenges
Ethical considerations surrounding the use of electronic resources provide another source of constant disruption. With the advent of digital resources comes the ability to collect detailed usage statistics unlike what was possible in the print era. Usage statistics can be used to make decisions about collection development, budget allocations, and user needs. However, the collection of usage data raises concerns about privacy, particularly when these data are managed by third-party vendors. Libraries must balance the need for detailed analytics with the obligation to protect user privacy. This balance becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as vendors expand their data collection capabilities.
Conclusion: A Future of Perpetual Change
Electronic resource management librarianship can be viewed by its constant evolution and the disruptions that come with that. ERM librarians are tasked with navigating a complex and shifting landscape that demands both broad conceptual knowledge and specific technical skills. They need to adapt to new technologies created by markets outside the control of librarians. These markets lead to shifts in user expectations, which librarians must respond to as users apply these expectations to the use of library resources. The change in technology and the shift in user expectations can require migrations to different technologies. Licensing, already complex due to the nature of copyright and contract law and related court cases, must be negotiated repeatedly. Privacy concerns that did not exist in the print era and that are inherent in the usage of digital resources requires constant attention.
Looking ahead, ERM will continue to evolve as new technologies, like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and whatever else might be lurking over the horizon begin to play a more prominent role in information retrieval and resource management. Despite this constant disruption, the challenge for ERM librarians will remain the same: to adapt to these changes while maintaining the core values of librarianship of ensuring access, preserving privacy, and serving the needs of the community.
endnotes on page 35
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Endnotes
1. George Stachokas, “The Electronic Resources Librarian: From Public Service Generalist to Technical Services Specialist,” Technical Services Quarterly 35, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/07317131.2017.1385286
2. Anna Hulseberg, “Technical Communicator: A New Model for the Electronic Resources Librarian?,” Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship 28, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 84–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/1941126X.2016.1164555.
3. Marshall Breeding, “Smart Libraries Q&A: Differences between ILS and LSP,” Smart Libraries Newsletter 40, no. 10 (October 1, 2020): 3–4, https://librarytechnology.org/document/25609.
4. “Driven Adaptation: A Grounded Theory Study of Licensing Electronic Resources,” Library & Information Science Research 38, no. 1 (January 1, 2016): 69–80, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2016.02.002
5. Thomas Claburn, “Appeals Court Affirms Internet Archive Violated Copyrights,” The Register, September 5, 2024, sec. Personal Tech, https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/05/appeals_court_internet_archive_copyright/
6. C. Sean Burns, “Google Scholar and Free or Open Access Scholarly Content: Impact on Academic Libraries,” January 2013, https:// mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/16178; Hulseberg, “Technical Communicator.”
7. C. Sean Burns, “The Issues with Journal Issues: Let Journals Be Digital Libraries,” Publications 11, no. 1 (March 2023): 7, https:// doi.org/10.3390/publications11010007
8. Marshall Breeding, “Smart Libraries Q&A : Differences between ILS and LSP.” Smart Libraries Newsletter (October 2020), https:// librarytechnology.org/document/25609
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Wandering the Web — Tired of Retirement? Resources on Post-retirement Employment
By Jack Montgomery, MLS (Librarian/Professor Emeritus, Western Kentucky University Libraries)
Column Editor: Lesley Rice Montgomery, MLIS (Catalog Librarian II, Tulane University Libraries’ Technical Services Department)
Introduction
I remember when I decided to take the “golden parachute” offered by my institution and finally retired from academic librarianship after thirty-five years. I must admit that before this time, I really did not consider retirement seriously as my family tended to work well past the average retirement age. My mother retired at age seventy-eight and my father worked until a year before his death at age seventy-four. I also was working part-time on weekends doing reference at the local public library when I began to have patrons approaching me with retirement questions which alerted me to the fact that I had better investigate my own situation. I soon realized I had a lot of catching up to do regarding my knowledge of this major step in my life. This article is designed to help the individual planning to retire or who has retired but wishes to return to work for a variety of reasons. I will explore the basic issues of retiring and/or considering returning to work and hopefully will provide some vetted resources to help everyone make the best decisions possible for their situation. As the Canadian television actor Mike Smith aka “Red Green” used to say at the end of his comedy sketches, “I’m pullin’ for ya, we’re all in this together.”
Many retirees have discovered that, due to economic necessity or the desire to work to feel more connected to the rest of society, they are contemplating returning to some sort of employment. In an article in RetireGuide https://www. retireguide.com/ the author states that “Retirement was once a destination — a goal post to mark the end of a long, productive career. But research indicates that retirement is becoming much more fluid in America. A 2017 survey from RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research firm, found that almost 40% of workers over age 65 had previously retired — only to rejoin the workforce. And for those still in retirement, roughly half said they would return to paid work if the right opportunity presented itself.” Other well-written articles to pursue when researching the idea of retiring and then returning to the workforce is an online article entitled “The Retiree’s Guide to Going Back to Work: Inflation and a bear market have prompted some retirees to change course” at https://www.kiplinger. com/retirement/604989/the-retirees-guide-to-going-backto-work and “Thinking About Semi-Retirement? What You Need to Know” at https://www.kiplinger.com/retirement/semiretirement-what-you-need-to-know, both published in the Kiplinger Personal Finance online magazine. Let us begin with some excellent informational retirement resources. (Please see the References at the end of this column for the full citations of online articles.)
RetireGuide — https://www.retireguide.com/ — If you are looking for a non-threatening place to begin your retirement search, RetireGuide is an excellent place to begin. RetireGuide is a
company headquartered in Orlando, Florida and it claims to be a website designed to help seniors find and develop a sound financial basis for retirement. They claim to “provide this through a stringent editorial process that involves fact-checking, attribution to reputable sources, insight from financial experts, and original reporting from a team of experienced journalists.” (Review is taken from Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot. com/review/retireguide.com.) The website is structured around basic issues like Medicare, annuities, life insurance, and basic retirement planning. Each category opens with definitions about an issue or plan/product and the differences between, for example, annuities and life insurance are discussed with links to further information and products. The descriptive content is easy to read and understand. It appears unbiased, and does not seem to be leading the reader towards a specific product line, but leads you to lists of financial advisors and agents. If one needs basic information on how these products operate, then RetireGuide is a recommended site. Clearly there is a hope that you will allow yourself to be directed toward one of their supporters, but there is no pressure. You can learn what you need to know and certainly go somewhere else better informed. If you have little background in financial planning, RetireGuide is a good place to become better informed.
AARP – American Association of Retired Persons — https://www.aarp.org/ — According to Wikipedia, “AARP is a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) nonprofit that advocates for older Americans on a number of federal health and fiscal issues such as Medicare and Social Security, and at the state and local level for better community healthcare services and lower utility rates. It fights age discrimination in the workforce, lobbies for lower prescription drug prices, and educates seniors about consumer fraud through the AARP Fraud Watch Network.” https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARP
With its headquarters in Washington, D.C., AARP was founded in 1958 and commands a large presence in the life of the retired persons community. It is “one of the largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations in the world.” https://www. aarp.org/about-aarp/history/jo-ann-jenkins-ethel-andrus/ With over thirty-eight million paying members, it wields considerable political and social influence and is instrumental in advocating for the rights and welfare of those Americans over age fifty. The website is very extensive in scope with many articles of general interest. Its substantive information is organized from a drop-down menu leading to linked informational articles and sites. As an example, the “Work and Jobs” menu provides access to articles relating to working and even a job listing service where you can look for employment opportunities. In terms of reliable, current information about diverse topics of interest to older Americans, it is hard to find a more thorough, well-built website.
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Governmental Information Sources
The U.S. Government Publishing Office and other agencies provide a wealth of information to help retirees. Here is a sampling of several of these websites in no particular order: USAJOBS — https://www.usajobs.gov/ Medicare.gov — https://www.medicare.gov/
Internal Revenue Service — https://www.irs.gov/ Tax issues — https://www.irs.gov/individuals/seniorsretirees
SSA.gov Social Security Administration — https://faq. ssa.gov/en-us/Topic/article/KA-01921#!
Benefits while continuing to work — https://www.ssa. gov/benefits/retirement/planner/whileworking.html
Now, let us move to retiree employment resources. Retirementjobs.com — https://www.retirementjobs.com/ — Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Retirementjobs. com is owned by Age Friendly Ventures, Inc. which is “a Public Benefit Corporation — operates and supports three affiliated, mission-driven brands whose common purpose is making aging easier.” https://www.agefriendlyventures.com/ Retirementjobs.com is one of the brands along with “Mature Caregivers” and “Age-Friendly Institute.” Retirementjobs. com is a job listing service that provides access to jobs with “Certified age-friendly employers” who have stated they would like to hire older people. The website is structured in such a way as to provide job listings by state and city. The job listings are further identified by using a keyword search like “Sales,” “Caregiver” or “Security.” The job listings include an online application form that you can submit directly to the employer. You provide your email address and potential employment opportunities appear in your mailbox. The site also provides reviews of the companies from employees who found the position through Retirementjobs.com. In addition, webinars on job skills and employment advice will be provided through the drop-down menu.
RetiredBrains.com — https://www.retiredbrains.com/aboutus.html — A comprehensive, multifaceted website that began in 2003 focuses on appealing to the Baby Boomer generation. The site begins with a drop-down menu that separates the various elements of retired life including health, money, travel, and even has a Blog where various topics can be discussed.
The “Work and Jobs” section begins with a concise article on how to begin to work at home, avoiding online work frauds, with a breakdown of the main types of employment pursued by retirees: Working in public in regular types of jobs, working from home, part-time employment and creating your own business. Within each section, there is a further breakdown of the topic. As an example, under the working from home section, the short descriptions direct the reader to links such as becoming a consultant, telemarketing, being an online customer service representative, becoming a caregiver and tutoring, to name a few sections. Within each of those links, the searcher will find further delineation of various resources. In “Virtual Customer Service Jobs,” you will find links to online employment including using online chatting to promote various products. This practice is nicknamed “needling” and, for those who spend a lot of time in chatrooms, it could be a very lucrative pursuit.
Under the tutoring section, following the description, an extensive list of businesses who employ tutors is given with links for those seeking employment. Due to its comprehensive and
well-organized, updated content, RetiredBrains.com is highly recommended.
A basic listing of jobs available by geographic location is Seniors for Hire.com at https://www.seniors4hire.org/
Managing Your Finances in Retirement
Anytime you make a major life change such as retirement you need to have a clear picture of how to manage your finances before, during and after the transition. One excellent and comprehensive source for authoritative information and advice is Balancepro.org.
Balancepro.org/resources — https://www.balancepro.org/ resources/ — This website is designed as a one-stop shopping source approved by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the FCAA Financial Counseling Association of America. The structure of the information starts with drop-down menus at the top to larger subject categories for counselling services, webinars, and online tools. There is even a series of “Getting Started” categories for all stages of life and financial awareness.
Going Back to School
The great educator and philosopher John Dewey once remarked, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” Sometimes reentering the job market will entail updating your existing skills and/or learning new ones. In short, the adage of life-long learning really becomes reenergized and redefined in today’s wide-open market. Often, there are scholarships and free tuition programs available for seniors. It pays to do your homework.
One place to begin would be an article by Dawn Wotapka, a contributing writer for Kiplinger Personal Finance magazine entitled “Why Retirees Are Going Back to College” where she writes, “You are retired with time to do what you love. For many, this means it’s the perfect opportunity to learn.” https://www. kiplinger.com/retirement/happy-retirement/why-retirees-aregoing-back-to-college Another good article, “Free (or Cheap) College for Seniors and Retirees in All 50 States” asserts, “Whether it’s to complete a degree, gain new knowledge or just for fun, seniors and retirees can go or get back to school in a most inexpensive way.” https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/ retirement/t065-s001-free-or-cheap-college-for-retirees-inall-50-state/index.html#:~:text=The%20University%20of%20 Louisiana%20at,for%20you%20and%20your%20budget.
Aging Greatly — https://aginggreatly.com/best-onlinecourses-for-seniors/ — This website is an unusual one in that it was created by a mother and daughter and reflects the 53-yearold mother’s job burnout and eventual retirement from her job. Having never gotten her college degree, the website is a result of her desire to get the education she always wanted and to return to the workplace to fulfill her dreams. Her daughter’s role was one of support and assistance with her mother’s transformation into a new, more fulfilling life. Most of the content in Aging Greatly is concerned with well-known aspects of retirement such as living abroad and health-related issues. As a segment of their site, they provide links for various colleges recommended for adults returning to school, as well as online educational opportunities including Academic Earth.
Academic Earth — https://academicearth.org/ — The introduction states that this website “was launched on the premise that everyone deserves access to a world-class education. In 2009, we built the first collection of free online
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college courses from the world’s top universities.” A list of recommended sites is provided, along with a search box for pursuing a certain subject of interest. You enter your degree aspiration, your general field, and your specialization. An example would be a doctorate in Education and Teaching with a specialization in Higher Education. The results appear and reflect the universities that offer an online degree matching those search terms. At that point, you select and explore the program that best serves your needs, time commitment and budget.
Academic Earth also provides links to the various online course offerings at a wide range of non-profit and for-profit colleges and universities nationwide. The structure of the websites varies from institution to institution, but the information is presented in a logical and sequential manner.
Other recommended sites for online college degrees include:
Class Central — https://www.classcentral.com/ — Here you can find your best college courses, browse by subject or university, and this site includes information from 250,000 courses!
Education Connection — https://www.educationconnection. com/ — Education Connection matches you to colleges for free, offering information on “hundreds of schools, thousands of programs, and millions of matches.”
Federal Student Aid — https://studentaid.gov/ — You may also be qualified for Federal loan assistance as you pursue your degree program. The best place to look for your options is Federal Student Aid, which is an office in the U.S. Department of Education.
Legal Advice Issues
Finally, when planning to retire or to return to work, one must be aware of any tax or legal issues involved. If you already have an attorney or financial advisor, you are one step ahead of the game. It would be an exercise in wise planning and certainly worth the expenditure to find out all you can about the impact of your plans. If, however, you like to explore these topics on your own, I recommend FindLaw.
FindLaw — https://www.findlaw.com/ — FindLaw bills itself as the “#1 most visited legal information website.” Search boxes are easy to navigate and will help you to explore hiring an attorney or assist you to find a firm that specializes in your area of legal need. There are articles by lawyers on a wide variety of subjects from estate planning to family law to personal injury. This site is managed by a team of legal professionals and is maintained for content currency. You can also explore the federal codes and regulations as well as state laws.
Postscript: Whatever you decide to do once you retire, I hope the resources I have recommended are helpful and I wish you the best in this new phase of your life.
References
AARP. (2024, December 17). In Wikipedia . https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARP Gerstner, L. (2022, July 28). The retiree’s guide to going back to work. Kiplinger Personal Finance https://www.kiplinger.com/ retirement/604989/the-retirees-guide-to-going-back-to-work Jenkins, J. A. (2024). How Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus and AARP changed America. AARP https://www.aarp.org/about-aarp/ history/jo-ann-jenkins-ethel-andrus/
Niedt, B. (2024, December 4). Free (or cheap) college for seniors and retirees in all 50 states. Kiplinger Personal Finance https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/retirement/ t065-s001-free-or-cheap-college-for-retirees-in-all-50-state/ index.html#:~:text=The%20University%20of%20Louisiana%20 at,for%20you%20and%20your%20budget
RetireGuide, LLC. (2025). Your guide to a better retirement. RetireGuide https://www.retireguide.com/
Vanzler, J. (2023, March 6). Thinking about semi-retirement? What you need to know. Kiplinger Personal Finance https:// www.kiplinger.com/retirement/semi-retirement-what-youneed-to-know
Wotapka, D. (2023, July 22). Why retirees are going back to college. Kiplinger Personal Finance. https://www.kiplinger.com/ retirement/happy-retirement/why-retirees-are-going-back-tocollege
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Biz of Digital — Data as Collections at UC Berkeley: Acquisition Workflows and An Open Source Infrastructure Solution
By Anna Sackmann (Data Services Librarian, University of California, Berkeley, 289 Doe Annex, Berkeley, CA 94720) <asackmann@berkeley.edu>
and Lynne E. Grigsby (Head, Library IT, University of California, Berkeley, 289 Doe Annex, Berkeley, CA 94720) <lynne.grigsby@berkeley.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
Acquiring and licensing data for the purposes of research, teaching, and learning, or “data as collections,” in academic libraries is a relatively new area of collection development. Like other digital resources, datasets acquired by academic libraries face a breadth of curatorial challenges to maximize investment in the resources through proper management, storage, documentation, and discoverability. 1 The most prevalent example of data as collections is geographic information system (GIS) data, which GIS librarians have been collecting and curating since the late 1990s when GIS services through computing, storage, and personnel were beginning to be addressed by universities. 2 Aside from GIS data collection policies, much of the focus on data services in libraries in the last fifteen years was on the curation and stewardship of research data. Computing power and availability of digital storage through cloud solutions and campus operated servers accompanied funder-mandated data management plans that require researchers to account for, and plan, how data will be managed and shared during the duration and completion of a research project.3 As a result, academic libraries developed a suite of research data services in order to increase “...data awareness amongst researchers; provid[ing] archiving and preservation services within the institution and through institutional repositories; and develop[ing] a new professional strand of practice in the form of data librarianship.”4
Data Acquisition at the University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) addressed their own growing need for research data management services through the development of the Research Data Management Program (RDM Program) in 2015. This program is a partnership between the Library and Research IT, which provides research computing technologies and consultation services to campus. The partnership leverages the technical and computing expertise of Research IT with the digital preservation and research lifecycle expertise of the Library.5 While the program focused on supporting researchers in managing their own data, the Library simultaneously faced a different challenge: acquiring external datasets developed by non-profits, government agencies, and for-profit entities, which often required licensing agreements and financial investment.
During the same year, the Associate University Librarian convened a working group of subject librarians and library staff to develop a data acquisition program. The group was tasked
with developing eligibility criteria for dataset purchases, an acquisition workflow, and a timeline. Their report proposed a licensing process tailored to datasets, a structured acquisition workflow and timeline, and recommendations for data storage and ongoing support. These recommendations addressed the complexities of data acquisition and established a foundation for an effective workflow within the Library. As a result, the Library launched the Data Acquisition and Access Program (DAAP), creating a streamlined pipeline for acquiring datasets. However, changes in staffing, including a new Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology, organizational structure, funding, and other factors — such as data discoverability and long-term stewardship — eventually led to the program being paused.
Resuming Data Acquisition: Changes in Organizational Structure and New Recommendations
Following the pandemic, the Data Services Librarian position was moved from the Library’s social sciences division to operate centrally across all library units. With this reorganization, a new working group was formed to revisit the data acquisitions process. They also identified challenges to dataset acquisition and use:
• Datasets are often expensive and exceed what selectors can cover through collection development budgets
• Unclear process for requesting a data purchase
• No documented process or timeline for requesting, acquiring, or cataloging the dataset
• Due to limited space for file metadata, selecting, downloading, and using dataset files was difficult for the end user
It was evident that clearer communication over the course of the data acquisition process was required to make forward progress and identify and address issues that may arise along the way.
Reviewing Infrastructure Needs
In addition to the above challenges, the group recommended that all acquired data should follow the FAIR principles: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.6 This meant addressing how users find the Library’s datasets in the catalog, UC Library Search, which were cataloged similarly to other digital assets. While the catalog is well-suited for finding and accessing books, journal articles, media, and other library holdings, it falls short
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when it comes to datasets. Cataloging datasets presents unique challenges because datasets may not come with the level of metadata or documentation needed for catalogers to adequately describe and catalog the dataset. Additionally, retrieving files from vendors and storing them locally requires understanding how the data will be used, as well as details like file formats and software requirements, which demand ongoing stewardship.
Acquiring datasets is expensive, and since they are licensed for use in research, teaching, and learning by all authorized UC Berkeley users, maximizing their discoverability and usability is essential. Before evaluating repository and data infrastructure solutions, the Data Services Librarian collaborated with the Head of Library IT, the Head of DevOps, and the Head of Applications to identify key attributes for a future solution. The Library IT unit develops and maintains the technological infrastructure that functions as the backbone for all UC Berkeley Library systems. The group identified the following attributes needed to address both the Library’s internal workflows and the needs of its users, including:
• Business processes: direct and indirect costs, metadata handling, and analytics
• Management of large datasets: Efficient handling of data volume and complexity
• Cataloging and discovery: Improved methods for dataset indexing and access to aid discovery of datasets
• Authorization and licensing: Addressing unique dataset licenses and clearly providing clear terms of use for UC Berkeley users
• Management & administration: Configurable workflows and simplified processes.
• Flexibility to create metadata records for subscription and vendor-managed datasets that do not have files stored locally
• Technology: Security, accessibility, ongoing costs, and compatibility with the Library’s existing Linux VM infrastructure that enables users to more easily download and work with files
Given the Library’s limited budget and reliance on staff expertise, the solution needed to be both cost-effective and manageable by Library IT without requiring a hosted service. The team sought an open-source option with robust community support and development to minimize the need for extensive local customization, ensuring future maintenance remained straightforward.
Datasets also posed specific challenges. Each dataset typically comes with a unique license outlining terms of use that must be clearly communicated to users. Managing datasets had long been a challenge for Library IT, as the process of uploading files to library servers was often complicated by limited communication with selectors and insufficient details about the file formats and configuration, usage requirements and license terms.
The Library’s ultimate goal was to streamline dataset delivery, offering users a more efficient and user-friendly way to access and download files. Following an extensive review, the team selected Dataverse, an open-source repository developed and supported by Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). Dataverse provides a robust community of developers, thorough documentation, and features designed to “share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data.”7
Given that UC Berkeley’s Research Data Management Program is well-established but lacks storage capacity and data curators, the Dataverse implementation is focused exclusively on Library-acquired and licensed datasets — not researcherdeveloped data.
Developing Dataverse
The implementation of Dataverse proceeded smoothly, thanks in part to the cohesive team tasked with developing the repository for the Library and the robust documentation and community support behind Dataverse. However, challenges arose from the lack of established policies and documented processes for both internal library staff and external library users.
LibraryIT and the Data Services Librarian worked to address several key challenges:
• Establishing two single sign-on (SSO): Ensuring compatibility for both UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
• Determining storage options and space requirements.
• Gathering datasets: Identifying and consolidating datasets from various sources and locations.
• Organizing and Loading datasets:
— Some datasets contain thousands of files.
— Some datasets include very large files, reaching hundreds of gigabytes.
• Developing a dataset loading tool: Creating DeoVolente to allow for the Data Services Librarian to add large datasets.
Implementing single sign-on through Shibboleth required collaboration with campus IT, LBNL and Library IT to allow access. Library IT documented the process and continues to monitor campus updates to ensure Dataverse remains secure and aligned with current protocols.
Historically, locally managed dataset files were stored on a secure local library server in the campus data center. Dataverse was deployed in the same VM cluster; however, the question was about performance for the end user if the datasets were kept in their current configuration or if they should be uploaded to Dataverse configured storage. After evaluating storage options and considering user experience, the team decided to migrate the datasets to Dataverse. This prompted an extensive review to locate and inventory all datasets. Because the Library had been collecting datasets for years without a formal system, creating a complete inventory proved labor-intensive. For example, the Library manages datasets like the EEX Market Transparency Data, which includes over 800,000 files, and the Thomson Reuters Tick History dataset, exceeding 7 terabytes. Previously, these datasets were stored on a library server protected by CalNet (UC Berkeley’s SSO) but were presented as directory listings, requiring users to right-click each file to download.
Transferring data between locations is time-consuming and requires careful curation to ensure accuracy and uninterrupted transfer. Additionally, the post-transfer organization of files significantly affects user experience. Some datasets are relatively small in total size but consist of thousands of files, necessitating a clear directory structure to simplify downloading and analysis. Unfortunately, using the Dataverse web interface for uploads can disrupt directory structures, and large datasets (over 10 gigabytes) often time out during upload.
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To address these issues while maintaining the internal security requirements of Library IT systems, the Application Development Services Unit developed DeoVolente (Latin for “God willing” or “if nothing prevents it”). This tool enables the Data Services Librarian and other staff to efficiently upload datasets into Dataverse while preserving directory structures and ensuring repository security. DeoVolente significantly enhances upload speed and usability without compromising the integrity of the Library’s IT-managed applications.
With UC Berkeley Library’s Dataverse now launched, the Library’s next step is conducting a more comprehensive accessibility review. Although the preliminary review was successful, evolving standards and the 2022 Department of Justice consent decree — requiring UC Berkeley to make all future and most existing online content accessible to people with disabilities8 — means accessibility will remain a top priority for Library IT. Ensuring that Dataverse and other applications are updated with the latest accessibility features will be an ongoing focus.
Dataset Inventory
Many electronic resources include a data or statistics component, making it necessary to define what would — and would not — be stored in Dataverse. After reviewing the inventory, the Data Services Librarian collaborated with the Data Collaboration Team — a group of librarians and staff experienced with data resources who assist in setting direction and providing insights on user behavior — to establish clear parameters for including data resources in Dataverse:
in Dataverse, divided into four categories:
• Datasets with files managed locally from miscellaneous vendors
• Datasets managed locally from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). UC Berkeley Library is a member and receives several datasets with unique terms of use from the LDC each year.
• Data subscriptions managed by the vendor. These metadata only records link out to the resource.
• Data subscriptions managed by Wharton Research Data Services that link out to the vendor but frequently have unique terms of use.
All data in the UC Berkeley Library Dataverse has been acquired and licensed by the Library for use by UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab students, faculty, and staff.
All acquired data that has a license signed by UC Berkeley Library AND:
• Is available to all users without restriction to specific user groups
Note: there are some exceptions of data provided by the Business Library
• Is stored locally OR
• Is a subscription (must be data only content e.g., Sage Data, ICPSR, Nielsen marketing data, Wharton Research Data Services datasets)
• Can be manipulated either in the platform or after download
Not included in UC Berkeley Library Dataverse:
• GIS data and data resources. Please visit UC Berkeley Library’s GeoData Portal
• Databases that have data and additional content in the form of reports, articles, etc.
Data records and terms are viewable by any user, regardless of affiliation.9
While not all library licensed data has been added to Dataverse, the below pie chart represents the data that will be
Communicating Terms of Use
With the Dataverse repository infrastructure in place, the Data Services Librarian collaborated with additional stakeholders to document a data acquisition workflow that incorporated Dataverse. These stakeholders included the Collection Services Division and the Licensing Librarian from the Office of Scholarly Communication and Information Policy, who leads the Library’s licensing team. The workflow developed for data acquisition at the UC Berkeley Library functions, in part, because of a widely adopted ticketing system, Jira, and communication with the Data Services Librarian during each step of the process.
One primary goal of building Dataverse for licensed collections was to notify users of dataset terms of use — something difficult to achieve through the Library catalog. In collaboration with the Office of Scholarly Communication and Information Policy, the Library developed General Mandatory Data Use Terms which outline the minimum terms of use for datasets in the repository. This approach mirrors the Library’s Conditions of use and licensing restrictions for electronic resources, which apply to all of our electronic resources. The UC Berkeley Library Dataverse General Mandatory Data Use Terms are presented to the user when they first login. The terms also live statically on the repository’s landing page. For datasets with additional terms of use, they are presented to the user through Dataverse’s guestbook feature. This functions as a click-through agreement that must be completed prior to downloading the dataset’s files.
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Current Acquisition Workflow
Subject librarians play a key role in determining the need to add datasets to the Library’s collections, leveraging their in-depth knowledge of their academic departments and collaborating with faculty and researchers to identify needs. Most librarians may consult with the Data Services Librarian when requesting a new dataset or renewing a subscription dataset. The acquisition process begins with librarians completing a submission form that requires detailed information about the dataset, including storage requirements, file formats, software compatibility, and licensing terms. This ensures that librarians are thoroughly familiar with the dataset they are requesting.
Data acquisition process:
1. The selector submits an electronic order form for an existing resource (renewal or data file add-on) or for a new resource. The selector is responsible for negotiating the price with the vendor and determining funding for the resource. The selector consults with the Data Services Librarian if needed.
2. Once the selector submits the electronic order form, a Jira ticket is automatically created and directed to acquisitions.
3. The Library’s acquisitions unit will create a purchase order and encumber the funds. The Data Services Librarian is then added to all data acquisition tickets whether hosted locally or by the vendor. At this point, the Data Services Librarian creates an initial metadata record in Dataverse.
4. The Library’s licensing team reviews and negotiates (if needed) the contract. The Licensing Librarian flags terms of use that extend beyond UC Berkeley Library Dataverse terms of use for Data Services Librarian to create Dataverse Guestbook.
5. The acquisitions unit places the order, contacts the vendor for the invoice, and completes payment. For data hosted locally, the acquisitions unit requests FTP information from the vendor. For data hosted by the vendor, the electronic resources unit activates the resource and confirms access.
6. The Data Services Librarian loads the data files or adds access information to the Dataverse record.
7. The Dataverse record is then reviewed with the selector for completion and accuracy. The guestbook is reviewed with the Licensing Librarian (when applicable).
8. The Dataverse record is published.
9. OAI metadata harvesting will be added in the future to be performed in regular intervals for the Library catalog, UC Library Search.
On-going Challenges
A recurring challenge, consistently identified by working groups and frequently experienced by librarian selectors, is the exorbitant cost of purchasing data. In their paper published 20 years ago, Tucker, Bullian, and Torrence highlighted “new technology, decreasing budgets, an increase in resource options, and rising prices of resources” as critical issues.10 These budget constraints have only intensified over time and are felt more acutely each year at the UC Berkeley Library. The financial burden of funding data acquisitions prevents librarians from proactively building comprehensive data collections, forcing them to reactively purchase data based on requests when budgets permit. As long as academic libraries remain underfunded, the high cost of acquiring data will remain a significant barrier.
Improving the Library’s data acquisition process — aside from the cost of staff time — required a focus on centralized communication and collaboration among all stakeholders, as well as a commitment to supporting an open-source repository. This centralized approach to stewarding the Library’s substantial investment in data collections has already led to enhanced access for researchers and empowered selectors to develop unique, supportive collections. Furthermore, Library IT’s partnership with the Data Services Librarian ensures that the local instance of Dataverse remains highly functional, accessible, and up-to-date. This collaboration is instrumental in making the Library’s acquired data collections more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, aligning with modern principles of effective data stewardship.
Endnotes
1. Daniel Greenstein, “Managing Digital Collections: Towards a Strategic Framework for the Development of Appropriate and Effective Organisational Data Policies. Part I1,” New Review of Information Networking 3, no. 1 (January 1997): 23–42, https://doi. org/10.1080/13614579709516893.
2. Patrick Florance, “GIS Collection Development within an Academic Library,” Library Trends 55, no. 2 (September 2006): 222–34, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2006.0057
3. Andrew M. Cox and Stephen Pinfield, “Research Data Management and Libraries: Current Activities and Future Priorities,” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 46, no. 4 (December 2014): 299–316, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000613492542.
4. Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown, “The Skills, Role and Career Structure of Data Scientists and Curators: An Assessment of Current Practice and Future Needs,” 2008, https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/266675/1/Data_skills_report_final_draft.doc
5. Jamie Wittenberg and Mary Elings, “Building a Research Data Management Service at the University of California, Berkeley: A Tale of Collaboration,” IFLA Journal 43, no. 1 (March 2017): 89–97, https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035216686982.
6. “FAIR Principles,” GO FAIR, 2016, https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/.
8. Office of Public Affairs, “Justice Department Secures Agreement with University of California, Berkeley to Make Online Content Accessible to People with Disabilities,” November 21, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-securesagreement-university-california-berkeley-make-online-content.
10. James Cory Tucker, Jeremy Bullian, and Matthew C. Torrence, “Collaborate or Die! Collection Development in Today’s Academic Library,” The Reference Librarian 40, no. 83–84 (March 24, 2004): 219–36, https://doi.org/10.1300/J120v40n83_18.
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The Digital Toolbox — Going Beyond the Course Work: How Libraries Are Focusing on Supporting Overall Student Success and Well-being
Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director of Digital Book Services for Academic Libraries, OverDrive, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNCChapel Hill) has been a leading institution of higher education for the past 231 years. In their “2025 Best Colleges” standings, U.S. News & World Report ranked UNCChapel Hill fifth among public schools. UNC-Chapel Hill is committed to “preparing talented students from different perspectives and life experiences to become creators, explorers, entrepreneurs, and leaders.”
UNC-Chapel Hill’s University Libraries plays an essential role in this vital mission. Beyond its traditional role in supporting the academic and research needs of students and faculty, this forward-thinking library is working to empower and engage students.
To that end, the libraries have focused on recreational reading’s role in fostering a sense of belonging on campus and encouraging healthy school-life balance.
Gaining a Better Understanding of What Students Need to Thrive
“Several years ago, we assessed students to understand better what non-academic priorities they had,” explained Suchi Mohanty, Head, R. B. House Undergraduate Library and Interim Director of Access Services, UNCChapel Hill University Libraries. “Amongst these priorities were an interest in financial literacy, wellbeing, and civic engagement. That feedback was at the core of our initial collecting philosophy.”
“Several years ago, we assessed students to better understand what non-academic priorities they had. Amongst these priorities were an interest in financial literacy, well-being, and civic engagement. That feedback was at the core of our initial collecting philosophy.”
The University Libraries has been steadily expanding its digital collections to meet the growing demand for eBooks and audiobooks. The pandemic accelerated these efforts as the Libraries responded to readers cut off from the campus’s physical collections. “Students expressed a desire for greater access to recreational materials as a healthier alternative to doomscrolling on their digital devices,” stated Mohanty.
“During COVID, audiobooks saw a rise in popularity. Today, the use of eBooks and audiobooks is more balanced. We also have a steady interest in our popular print collections for those who wish to read in traditional formats.”
Digital Collections Increasingly Focus on Nourishing Student Minds
UNC-Chapel Hill utilizes the Libby app from OverDrive, a digital distributor of eBooks, audiobooks, online magazines, and streaming video titles. The Libby app allows students, faculty, and staff to borrow from an extensive collection of digital content curated by the subscribing library.
Mohanty explained that offering students a digital library as a resource has led to higher visibility of popular reading collections, which has been a productive way to build connections with students. This has helped them better understand one of the ways the University Libraries supports their academic and personal interests. Students help spread the word and are asked to share their favorite authors, titles, and genres at library-sponsored events.
These library collections are curated by a team of librarians and library staff, including representatives from access services, communications, and research and instructional services, as well as student employees with diverse reading interests and backgrounds. Meeting in person quarterly and frequently engaging in online collaboration, the team brainstorms ideas for curated lists, prioritizes celebration initiatives, and suggests individual titles and methods of connecting with students.
Input is also gathered from campus partners, such as the Carolina Latinx Center and UNC Student Organization for Undergraduate Literature (UNC S.O.U.L.), along with other student groups who offer suggestions and collaborate on curating reading lists. “We gather direct title recommendations from students at orientations, events, and through social media,” stated Mohanty. “Managing such an endeavor is a significant effort, but building a truly dynamic collection is worth it.”
A 2023 user survey revealed that a majority of readers (51%) found out about the eBook collections via the Libraries’ website, followed by the library catalog (20%) and friends (16%).
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Reaction to the efforts of the Libraries has been overwhelmingly positive. In this user survey, one undergrad responded with appreciation for “access to diverse books, especially indie published books and books by authors of various marginalized identity backgrounds often not available or have more limited availability through my county libraries. Also, I LOVE browsing the recommended lists curated by library staff.”
Meeting the Digital Preferences of Undergraduate and Graduate Students
UNC-Chapel Hill’s University Libraries has made it a goal to support student accessibility and inclusivity, which is why digital collections have become a priority. Taking advantage of Overdrive and other popular reading collections, the Libraries has been able to provide invaluable access to a wide array of recreational titles that meet students’ needs.
“Readers have shared that they appreciate having multiple formats from which to choose, depending on their needs and circumstances at any given time,” added Mohanty. “Making popular reading available allows us to meet a wide variety of needs and interests.”
The reader survey revealed that undergraduate students prefer eBooks, while graduate students prefer audiobooks. However, format preference tends to be evenly split among all respondents. One student indicated, “I love audiobooks! I’m neurodivergent, and I find it’s a lot easier for me to listen to a book.”
Library’s Important Contribution to Student Success and Sense of Belonging
By offering expanded digital reading collections for students, the University Libraries focused on aiding in student success. The goal is to enable recreational reading, which can positively support a stronger sense of belonging and self. As a result, students can achieve a healthier school-life balance. The hope is that with greater personal well-being comes improved academic success.
Beyond the digital reading collections, the Libraries also offers a collection of popular films that students can view to support curricular and personal interests. These resources help students connect with each other and the world outside the campus.
“Academic libraries are constantly evolving,” concluded Mohanty. “At UNC, we found it invaluable to have our readers and campus partners help shape our collections. As library staff, we are experts in collection development and management, but the collections are here for the readers.”
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Optimizing Library Services — Do Collection Audits Help Achieve Bibliodiversity?
By Julia Gelfand (Applied Sciences & Engineering Librarian, University of California, Irvine) <jgelfand@uci.edu>
Column Editor: Mr. Will Hartley (Director of Business Solutions, IGI Global Scientific Publishing) <wharltey@igi-global.com>
Column Editors’ Note: Understanding the value and benefits that diverse research brings to the students and faculty of academic institutions, IGI Global Scientific Publishing places a strong emphasis on maintaining a diverse researcher base to ensure that experts from all walks of life globally have a platform to share their research and contribute to the dissemination of knowledge. By effectively spotlighting these diverse scholars, campuses around the world can gain insight into concepts and theories sourced from authors beyond Western civilization — authors often overlooked by many top publishers. In an age where information is just a click away, it is critical that research reflects this diverse mindset to accurately represent the academic and social realities taking place in our world.
To best support the collection management needs of our librarian partners, IGI Global Scientific Publishing offers a range of collection options within the subject areas of Business & Management, Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM), and Education & Social Sciences to align with their academic and budgetary goals. By providing customizable collections of varying sizes and contents, librarians are able to acquire valuable content that fills key gaps within their holdings while remaining within their financial constraints. In addition to these options, libraries have access to various acquisition models to support both their short-term and long-term needs, including perpetual, evidence-based acquisitions (EBA), and subscription options. To learn more about IGI Global Scientific Publishing’s collection offerings, visit https://www.igi-global.com/e-resources/ecollections/e-book-collection. — WH
Introduction
Inspired by many recent conferences and publications, this short piece begs an important question that this title asks. Many libraries conduct diversity audits to measure how representative their collections are in different subject areas. Initially, this was done to determine gaps in the collection and to achieve better representation of authors, cultural contexts, subject matter, languages and linguistics, and such elements. With the emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in most library practices — from hiring to services and programming — a new focus on the range of the collection evolved. The criteria may vary, but the data analysis that is performed reflects the notion of expansion, where the goal is to understand what is in your collection and how to make improvements to it. How well the audit’s criteria align with the strategic goals and mission of the library at any given time sets the tone and determines how corrections in collection development can be administered.
Diversity Audits
Such audits are important as they should offer transparency and accountability. Libraries tend to compose collection
policies to summarize goals they have for collection strengths, identifying the degree to which they will collect certain content matter. An audit documents how well diversity is measured and serves its community of users. Additional formats may be acquired, such as audiobooks, eBooks, large-print books, and juvenile literature, to ensure that readers with special needs have access. Doing business with a wider distribution chain of publishers and information providers who may specialize in certain topics or getting content from certain regions, in specific languages, and formats may lend to the objectives of an institution and break down social and geographic barriers, fostering greater understanding in brokering miscommunication or quick judgments.
Collection Management
Uncovering gaps and disparities may include whether authors from all regions in the world are included. This underrepresentation, often described as marginalization, causes a reality of neglect in reflecting opinions worldwide. Translations and specific language coverage are one of the easier efforts to correct. Harder to achieve is determining where biases in collection viewpoints are evident. When library budgets are not flush, making critical choices becomes crucial, as prioritizing initiatives and goals may be more challenging. Valuing diverse perspectives and global origins leads to a more inclusive library work environment and provides readers with a wider net for information seeking. For libraries, whether they are school, academic, or public, the greater positive social impact the library collection has created from its holdings, the greater the benefit to the user is as it lends to sharing and promoting a more equitable, open-minded, and inclusive future.
Bibliodiversity
With the roots of bibliodiversity in biodiversity, and the last couple of decades’ concerted efforts in scholarly communications to launch different methods of open access, especially in STEM fields, the demand for more inclusive non-English collections still appears not to be realized. With STEM publishing primarily in English, and overall scholarly publishing pointing that way, non-English authors have the greatest obstacles. The imbalance of English speakers around the globe in relation to the perception that English is the major language of scholarly publishing affirms that tipping point.
The geography of the global South has been central to arguments of how those authors are neglected in library collections outside that region. Libraries are partnering with independent bookstores around the world and often specifically in their communities to gain access to local authors, small presses, and cultural events to achieve this collaboration and a higher degree of bibliodiversity. But often, these books do not conform to a library’s preferred collection. As libraries thin the print holdings by sending them off to low-use storage
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facilities, withdrawing or passing when that is the only format, it remains challenging to see fast or any progress in shifting audit outcomes.
Potential Solutions
While some publishers may not compete with the “Big 5” for submissions, many have a robust network of authors throughout the globe in many STEM and policy fields that allow libraries to showcase achievements and understandings from different cultural, religious, linguistic, governmental, and educational traditions available in English. Libraries in North America may be more prone to collect from the “established” commercial and society publishers that dominate book sales to libraries unless they make a serious effort to make improvements in their collection audits and expand their acquisitions practices. Foreign language content is losing favor as it tends to be used less, and the competition for collection budget support is keen.
Considering newer practices like evidence-based acquisitions (EBA) or demand-driven acquisitions (DDA), where libraries, for a set fee, can add a larger set of titles for discovery and use and then pay and retain those that reach a certain threshold of use, working with publishers that can offer this seems to accelerate options but does not come easily or without financial investments. With greater outreach methods to promote these authors and content, utilizing less risk of only wishful expectation that the books will be used, bibliodiversity can be tested before larger financial commitments are made. The threshold for when triggers are set and when decisions about purchase and retention can often be negotiated with the provider.
Conclusion
Libraries have many tools at their disposal, are launching various AI practices, and can achieve some of the criteria in their diversity audit if they are serious and creative about achieving greater bibliodiversity. Capacity for online translation is improving. Exposing readers to wider and deeper horizons with scholarship from more corners of the world is not a misplaced goal but should be seriously implemented. Collecting library data from collection audits defines a baseline for future goals and can provide options for improvement in collection development.
References
Beger, M. (March, 2021). Bibliodiversity at the Centre: Decolonizing Open Access. Development and Change 52,(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12634
Condlin, J. (August 28, 2024). Conducting a Diversity Audit in an Academic Library on the Psychology, Non-Fiction Collection in The Library with The Lead Pipe. https://www. inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2024/conducting-a-diversityaudit/
Huskisson, M. (Jan 21, 2025). Guest Post: Reflections from the Munin Conference Part One: Bibliodiversity. Scholarly Kitchen, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/01/21/guestpost-reflections-from-the-munin-conference-part-one-bi bliodiversity/?informz=1&nbd=af981659-fc33-49d8-808375fc09ef0630&nbd_source=informz
Okrent, N. (July 19, 2023). Diversity in the Stacks: Supporting Bibliodiversity in Philadelphia. Penn Libraries News. https:// www.library.upenn.edu/news/bibliodiversity
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ATG Interviews Alicia Wise & Lorraine Estelle
Directors, Information Power
Interview conducted by
Transcript edited by
Michael Upshall (ConsultMU) <michael@consultmu.co.uk>
The following is a lightly edited transcript from an excerpt of an episode of ATG the Podcast. The video of the full episode can be found at https://youtu.be/km-FgkB9nfc?feature=shared
Lorraine Estelle and Alicia Wise are two well-known figures in the scholarly landscape, having been involved with the industry for over 25 years. They both worked with Jisc, as well as heading not-for-profit initiatives: Alicia with CLOCKSS, and Lorraine with COUNTER, as well as the consultancy Information Power. On January 1, 2025, Lorraine retired as Director of Information Power after an illustrious career in the information service landscape. Alicia will step up as Managing Director.
In this engaging conversation, Michael Upshall interviews Alicia and Lorraine about their influential careers in scholarly publishing. They reflect on their journeys, the evolution of digital access, the importance of negotiation skills, and the transformative projects they have been involved in, such as Jisc Collections and historic book digitization. They discuss the challenges and progress of open access, their engagement in accessibility and climate change initiatives, and the ongoing issues surrounding peer review in academic publishing. The conversation highlights their commitment to collaboration and innovation in the scholarly community.
Michael Upshall: Welcome to ATG the Podcast. I’m delighted to be talking to two very well-known figures in the scholarly landscape, both of whom have had an enormous influence on scholarly publishing, not least for their dynamism and the energy that they’ve brought to all their activities. The immediate impulse for this interview came from Lorraine announcing her retirement a few weeks ago. We thought this was a good moment to look back on two fascinating careers. Let’s start with a question for both of you. I believe you met when you were both at Jisc, perhaps?
Lorraine Estelle: Yes, we did. We both worked for Jisc. It seems a very long time ago, very different days, but that’s where we started.
MU: What were you doing? What was your role?
Alicia Wise: Well, we handed over roles between us. I started out leading consortium negotiations for the Jisc on behalf of all the UK universities. And Lorraine took over that role when I moved to
leading research and development initiatives on how to use computing in creative ways to advance teaching and research. And Lorraine did a terrific job.
MU: And how long were you both at Jisc?
AW: I was there from 1996 to 2003 and, Lorraine, you joined slightly later didn’t you?
LE: Yes, slightly later than you. I was there about 16 years altogether and I left in 2015.
MU: Gosh, fascinating. So how did you, Alicia, get into Jisc in the first place? How did you get into scholarly publishing, in fact?
AW: It was kind of a weird stroke of luck, which felt like notluck at the time. I’d done a PhD in archaeology. I was looking for my first teaching job in an archaeology department. And I had landed my first real proper job doing digital preservation for archaeology data sets in a service that was funded by the Jisc: the Archaeology Data Service. I was recruited by Jisc and given the opportunity to learn to do consortial licensing — not that I had any experience of working with libraries or consortia or publishers for that matter. But at that time, they just wanted an academic who was passionate about electronic access to information to be trained by librarians to negotiate with publishers. They wanted somebody who had a first-hand appreciation and enthusiasm for digital content. And I was just lucky. I was hit with a lucky stick. I left archaeology. I had great misgivings about this and found the decision rather traumatic. A wonderful librarian named Mary Auckland gave me six weeks to make up my mind to take the job. I was in such angst about it. So glad that she was patient and that I had the sense to say yes. At the Jisc I discovered this whole world of information science that I didn’t even know existed. It’s been amazing. Just such a privilege to learn about so many different subject areas.
MU: Fascinating! And Lorraine, how did you get into scholarly publishing?
LE: Well, I worked in publishing for quite a long time, and in my last publishing job, I worked for a children’s publisher that was doing really innovative things. Really fantastic things. It wasn’t online then, but it was electronic publishing. For example, we had this most amazing newsletter that went out to hundreds of people on a floppy disk, would you believe? It was just doing really crazy, amazing things at that time using computers that had less power than my phone does. I don’t know how we even managed it, to be frank.
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I was feeling disillusioned with publishing, and I was looking for a change of direction. I’d been looking at various jobs, and it was just more and more of the same. Then one day, I saw this advertisement for the job that was to take over from Alicia. And I wasn’t 100% sure even quite what it was, but I thought this sounds really interesting. This idea about empowering people through online access sounded so exciting. And anyway, I went along for the interview and I must say there are many acronyms in the Jisc and I realized after my interview I got some of them rather muddled. But nonetheless, amazingly, they gave me that job, and it was the most wonderful opportunity and I’m very grateful that they did, too.
AW: It was brilliant bringing Lorraine into Jisc with this real-world publishing experience. Michael, this is a theme I’m sure we’ll come back to again and again in the conversation. We both moved between libraries and publishing and enjoy bridging between the communities. It’s a fascinating space to work in, and it’s really important to have real practical experience of all stakeholder perspectives in this space.
MU: One thing that’s fascinating is that neither of you has mentioned anything about negotiations and, as far as I understand, you were both very much involved in negotiating. So where did that skill come from? Lorraine?
LE: Well, I think in my previous roles in publishing, I had been involved in negotiating with publishers. I’d also negotiated with authors and various other contractors. I had quite a lot of practical experience. But also doing my degree in psychology enabled me to bring an evidence-based approach to negotiating. And I can remember, you know, very often people would think that negotiating with the publishers was all about thumping your fist on the table and so on. That doesn’t really help very much, despite it being a popular idea that this is what a negotiator does. I’ve always tried to bring a very evidence-based approach to negotiation. I think, as well, what Alicia said is so right, and I think something that we bring to our work is this understanding of libraries and the publishers. When you’re negotiating as a consortium leader with publishers, you have to understand the publisher, you have to understand their objectives, you have to understand their fears and what they see as the risks and then build up your evidence-based for the negotiation. They’re my top tips for negotiating, really.
MU: I can see the relevance of psychology for negotiation. It’s not quite so easy, Alicia, to see the link with archaeology. Do you think it stood you in good stead for your work at Jisc?
AW: It did absolutely in two ways. My PhD research was on the Roman invasion of Scotland and the resistance put up by the local population to this incursion. Sometimes the dynamic between librarians and publishers can feel a little similar to that. So that’s kind of the lighthearted way to think about it. But more accurately, in the United States where I was trained, archaeology is a sub-discipline of anthropology and anthropologists learn about people from different cultures by embedding themselves within those cultures. It’s that skill set that has been really very helpful, and where the negotiation ability was nurtured. I’m fascinated with people, with their differences and similarities, listening to them, and really understanding them from their own perspective.
MU: Fascinating. I quite understand the sort of cutting across disciplines, being aware of the different roles of publisher and information scientist, librarian, and so on. I can see that. Alicia, after your role of negotiating, you say you went on to a different role at Jisc. What were you doing there?
AW: I was leading the innovation program. We had a budget of about 150 million pounds a year to invest in research and development projects that were then conducted in all of the universities across the UK. We would advertise the availability of funding around different topic areas, and my team at Jisc would manage the selection and the review processes for the bids that would come in and then did the program management. There were projects on stimulating digital library development, and also innovative teaching and learning initiatives. The first MOOCs and online learning resources came out of some of those funding initiatives, and also some terribly complicated projects aimed at improving information management systems available to university leaders and administrators. There were projects on indexing the web back in the days when people thought that this would be organized within the academic sector rather than by organizations like Google and so forth. And I just learned so much. It was great. We did projects on digital preservation, which is a continuing theme of interest, and really projects on just everything: middleware, authentication and authorization, network security. All of these topics are still relevant and, in many cases, still quite problematic 25 years later.
MU: Sounds like a very wide-ranging role, covering lots and lots of different areas. And also, very high profile. I think you had to be quite robust, because in a situation like that, you attract a lot of attention, and you’re very much in the public gaze. I think the same was true for you, Lorraine, because you took on Jisc collections. That was another high-profile role.
LE: It was. It was indeed, yes.
MU: Do I understand that you actually created that role?
AW: Lorraine came to it with experience and poise and psychology. I came to it as a very young person with too much confidence and proceeded as if I knew what I was doing and learned the hard way sometimes. I apologize to any early colleagues that I might have brushed up the wrong way, inadvertently, while learning.
LE: Yes, but, Alicia, we talked about this earlier today in a different context. When you have lots of confidence, you might not have a lot of experience or skill, but that confidence is what we need to drive things forward. People who have more confidence and ability will tackle things and make changes that perhaps older and more wiser or more poised people might be too scared to tackle. So, it’s a good thing.
MU: That may be true. Do you think it was also something to do with that particular period at the beginning of the 21st century when a lot of computing and the internet was still in its infancy, a lot of things were very open, there was an opportunity to sort of do things without lots of experience because there wasn’t any experience around?
AW: Absolutely right. There was such an innovative kind of atmosphere, and the UK was particularly well placed because of the E-lib initiative. Leaders like Lynne Brindley and Mary Auckland and Derek Law had convinced the government to invest money in figuring out what an electronic library needed to be in the future. There was a lot of funding around. They consciously wanted to let a thousand flowers bloom. They wanted to try all sorts of initiatives. And it was a time when you could be really creative and experimental. You could fail and learn from that and move on. And we were all figuring it out together. It was a real privilege to be working in this space at that time.
LE: It absolutely was. It was so exciting. You know, I think the things I’m proudest of in my career, we did at that time.
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And there wasn’t really a playbook. I remember what one of the people in my team, he’s quite senior now, said to me: “you seem to be making this up as you go along.” And I said, yeah, well, I am really. But you know, it was all new and we really were able to be creative, as Alicia said, and try new things and do new things.
MU: Amazing. Do I understand, Lorraine, that you created the role at Jisc collections, that you’re the first to have that role?
LE: Well, it developed and morphed over time. As Alicia said, she was in that role before me, and then I took over from her, and Jisc Collections was spun out separately, and I became CEO of that organization. It changed its structure, and then it went back into the Jisc eventually. So the role and organization changed over time. So yes, I was the first leader of Jisc Collections in that form. It was a very exciting time.
MU: So there you were as a manager with all the problems that that brings. Did you enjoy it?
LE: Yes, I so did enjoy it. And I think we just achieved so much with a really small team. Alicia had started work when she was there on the Jisc model license. Now this may seem quite a boring thing. And I took the model license forward with the team that we were then. And that has been such a game changer, not just for libraries in the UK, but across the world. The work that we did in developing the model license to really provide libraries with rights and protections, actually helped publishers, too. And that standardization! The Jisc Model License has been adapted and adopted by consortia worldwide, and by publishers worldwide. And that’s just one example. I mean, I know it doesn’t sound that exciting — licensing — but really you’ve got to have those tools in place and you’ve got to have that standardization. And that was sort of amazing work we did.
AW: There was a collaborative project at the roots of what became the Jisc model license. The seeds were planted in a regular meeting that I had while at the Jisc with Sally Morris from ALPSP and Graham Taylor from the Publishers Association. We were actively looking for projects that would benefit both the library and the publishing community, and could be informed by both of them and that would help everyone to advance. At that time, publishers were struggling with different contracts coming from customers. Customers didn’t know what contracts that they wanted or needed. So, working together to come up with a model that could be shared, that was informed from the perspective of both communities, was really helpful. And Lorraine’s just explained that beautifully already.
LE: I think another thing that we did slightly differently was around democratizing access and really making things available to academics and to students in every university in the UK. This was never possible before. For example, Alicia negotiated an agreement for access to digitized versions of early English books for all UK academic libraries and then I negotiated an agreement for the 18th century collection. Suddenly every library in the UK could make so many English-language books accessible to their users in these digital versions. These were very, very old books, and many of those books in their physical form you could only get to if you were a really senior academic at a research intensive university wearing your white gloves and so on. Suddenly, for the first time, students could interact with this primary source material. This just another example of some of the really exciting things that became possible.
MU: I remember when I first found out about what later became the Jisc Historic Books, the sheer enormity of that project. I mean, to capture everything published before 1700,
quite an astonishing achievement. What made you think it was even possible, Alicia, when you started?
AW: There was a chap named Mark Sandler at the University of Michigan who animated the library consortium there and was very entrepreneurial. He did a lot of collaborative work with the Chadwick Healey publishing team and with ProQuest. He went around the world drumming into us that it was possible if we all pooled our resources and if consortia would commit to supporting it financially, then the publishers could afford to digitize and bring this collection to life. And it was this international collaboration that was crossing organizational and community boundaries that made it possible. I don’t think anybody really thought it was going to work to start with, but we kept doggedly going for it. And it did in the end work, thank goodness.
LE: I always remember we did a conference which the British Library actually hosted for us around those collections, Michael, called “Waking Up in the British Library”. We had various speakers who would use those collections. There was one academic and he — I can’t quite remember the focus of his thesis — spent years and years in the British Library and he’d found four instances in these ancient books to support his thesis and that was that. And then when these collections of early English books became available online, he said “in a few minutes I found another seven which actually sort of disproved my thesis”. But it shows you how powerful online access is.
MU: Absolutely. Remarkable collection. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the story of Google attempting to capture the world’s libraries and how that project failed. Don’t you agree that that project and its very checkered history reveals how successful you’ve been in negotiating a very challenging environment to try and pull lots and lots of resources together?
AW: But, you know, even though that Google Books scanning project has perhaps not fulfilled all of its original objectives, it has been transformational. The HathiTrust would not exist had that project never happened. And so a lot of these really ambitious digitization and digital access initiatives have to kind of adapt and change as they hit copyright complications or differences in stakeholder needs and interests that must be navigated. But still they can have profound effects, even if they’re not exactly as they were originally envisaged. Having room to be flexible and to let a project land in a slightly different place than you originally anticipated is really important if you want to keep progressing and moving forward.
MU: I think you’re absolutely right and this brings me to your next role, Alicia, when you worked for Elsevier where negotiation and a public face was very much part of that role. Tell us about your role at Elsevier.
AW: Michael, can I tell you about a role before Elsevier? Because I think it’ll make more sense that way round. So, between Jisc and Elsevier, I worked at the Publishers Licensing Society, or it’s called the Publishers Licensing Service now. And it’s a copyright collecting society. I was lucky to be offered the role of Chief Executive, and the reason I accepted is that at the Jisc, I kept hitting up against copyright as a barrier for libraries and as an absolutely fundamental enabler for publishers. And I didn’t understand copyright, yet it was clearly fundamental to expanding access to information. Moving to the PLS gave me the chance to learn about copyright organically and how it can be used to enable authors, visual creators, publishers, universities, and other rights holders as well. I did a nice stint there for six years and then moved to Elsevier. And that was lovely, actually.
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It was a newly created role to lead on open access. It was a return to academia for me from out of the copyright world and armed with an absolutely fundamental commitment to the fact that any challenge or problem can be solved if you could get stakeholders, authors, libraries, researchers, publishers, and funders together to think through issues and concerns and to identify practical challenges. Working for the world’s largest academic publisher in the early days of open access was such a privilege. Again, it was like doing anthropology every single day.
MU: Sounds fascinating. I think there is a common theme through all this that achieving consensus is what you’ve both been involved with. Jisc Collections is all about getting agreements and, as you say, so was your role at Elsevier. So let’s talk a little bit about open access. When you started at Elsevier, It was very much the big topic and it’s still a topic today. But I think open access has changed somewhat. Do you think open access has achieved its goals yet?
AW: There are so many goals behind open access, and this is one of the things that makes it a little bit challenging to realize. In fact, I was pretty convinced that OA would be completely settled and a done deal by 2015 and I was proven wrong about that! It’s more complicated and it’s taking more time. And so part of the reason for this is that there are different drivers. It’s to democratize access to knowledge. It’s to ensure that everyone, anywhere in the world, can access what they need and want to explore. It’s about democratizing writing and authorship and scholarship as well; to make sure everybody is enabled to communicate in an open way. It’s about advancing and accelerating the dissemination of knowledge. It’s about interoperability so that there’s frictionless flow of, and access to, information as it makes its way around the web through different products and services and workflows and tools. And all of those use cases need to be addressed, need to be funded, need to be sustainable for the stakeholders who rely on them. There are business and governance and legal issues as well as the complicated details about the technology and interoperability
and standards. And it’s just a really difficult mix of different challenges. Progress is slowed up too often by mistrust or misunderstanding between the parties who need to be involved to make it happen in reality at scale.
MU: I think you’re right, there’s many different aspects of open access. Open access for discovery, I think, is on the way to being achieved, but there are other aspects of open access, and I’m not sure if we’ve reached a sustainable model yet for open access. What’s your view Lorraine?
LE: Well, very much as Alicia said, and I remember actually when I was at Jisc, and some board member of Jisc said to me: “are you a bit worried about your job as you won’t be needed soon because we’ll have open access?” So anyway, my job was quite safe. But so much has been achieved. We want everybody to be able to read the science wherever they are in the world. Just like those books I was talking about, there shouldn’t be barriers based on where you are, what type of institution you are in, or even if you’re in an institution. Research should be available to everybody who can build on it. We also have the problem that the ability to publish has to be equal across the world. And that’s one of the real challenges I think that we really are now facing: the whole issue of equity and how some of the models that we have operating for open access, you know, exclude people in the world who cannot pay APCs, for example. So, there is still a lot of work to be done. But again, I really agree, we have to be having those discussions. No problem cannot be overcome, but we need to be collaborative and we need to really talk to all the stakeholders in all the places in the world to try and achieve that.
Please visit https://youtu.be/km-FgkB9nfc?feature=shared or https://www.charleston-hub.com/podcast/atgthepodcast-258-aconversation-with-alicia-wise-executive-director-clockss-andlorraine-estelle-director-counter/ to hear the rest of this fascinating discussion!
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ATG Interviews Dr. Mark Hahnel
VP, Open Research, Digital Science, and Founder of Figshare
Interview conducted by Caroline Goldsmith (Associate Director, Charleston Hub) <caroline@charlestonlibraryconference.com>
The following is a lightly edited transcript of an episode of ATG the Podcast. The video for this episode can be found at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=SgYoEQ-Lq8A
In this conversation, Caroline Goldsmith interviews Dr. Mark Hahnel about the recent global survey conducted by Digital Science, focusing on the transformation of research in a postCOVID world. They discuss the impact of open research, AI, and collaboration on the academic landscape, as well as the implications for the library community.
Mark shares key findings from the survey, emphasizing the importance of adapting to new metrics and security concerns in research. The conversation also touches on upcoming conferences and the need for global engagement in understanding research trends.
Caroline Goldsmith: Hello and welcome to ATG the Podcast. I’m Caroline Goldsmith, Associate Director for the Charleston Hub. And today we’re talking with Dr. Mark Hahnel. Mark, you earned your PhD in Stem Cell Biology while simultaneously founding Figshare. You’ve worked with Data Cite, DOAJ, NIH. You’ve done some master classes with Springer Nature. And just this past year, you became VP of Open Research with Digital Science, which with you being a researcher, that’s a great fit. So, welcome Mark.
Mark Hahnel: Thank you for having me.
CG: Just this past July, Digital Science undertook a global survey and we featured it on Against the Grain. We put it in our daily newsletter email and you guys were seeking answers to some pressing issues in the research world and for open science, such as how roles are impacted, what’s influencing the change, how the research world is changing due to AI. You did some very insightful interviews with Delta Think, and these results have now been compiled into a report. What inspired Digital Science to undertake this report and to do the survey?
MH: I’m very happy that you mentioned the interviews in there as well because we were very fortunate to get some good people to join us on the journey of understanding what’s going on. But I think the speed of transformation in research is something that is shocking us at the moment in terms of, you know, I think those of us who’ve worked in the academic sector and particularly some of your audience who may work at academic institutions will say there’s always change. They’ve got used to the evolution of the research setup, whether it’s in the library, and there’s no longer the books and they’re more kind of like we-work setups. But I think there’s a few things that have really triggered an acceleration in transformation. I think when we reference COVID, it’s not the COVID itself that changed
things, it’s the way that we work now in a post-COVID world. You know, I always think like the fact that my dad knows how to use QR codes in restaurants just shows how far we’ve come. And so I think the digital transformation within research and more people working in different ways has had an impact. And I think the other big cliche zeitgeisty thing is AI. And particularly in the open research world where I’m based, think there’s a lot of excitement around the potential for AI. And we’re not sure how it affects every — I’m sure it’ll touch every part of everything that we do in our careers. But some areas it’s more obvious and some areas it’s not so obvious. And I think we’re still trying to understand that. I really think it’s a step change in the way that research is happening. And then the folks who are in the research world, not necessarily the researchers, but those supporting the researchers, those working in publishing. I think there really is a step change coming in the way that we do a lot of the things. And so we wanted to know what was happening and try and get our head around it and try and understand, try and elucidate which bits are important, which bits are not as important for folks and their evolving academic lives.
CG: At Digital Science, you guys made a really neat video compilation giving the five key takeaways and we’re going to link to that in the session description. But can you summarize those and tell us some of key findings?
MH: Sure, the big three topics for me were open research, research metrics and AI. Not surprisingly AI. But I was happy to hear that open research was a big thing going forward. I think it was 82% of respondents said that open research advancements would have the most impact on research in general going forward. I see that as a good thing that open research is part of the conversation, but also everybody who was commenting on this was not always commenting to say it’s a great thing. I think the end result is a great thing, but just talk about open access alone and the 18,000 different models of open access that you’ve got to get your head around. And if that’s your job, the job’s getting a lot more complicated, right? So I think the interesting thing, and again, the encouraging thing about research impact is we’re — I think everyone agrees on this — we’re moving towards a more holistic view of what research impact means and what metrics we use to measure and to tell the story. It’s not a binary thing, right? It’s not, this university has the most citations, they’re number one. It’s a much more holistic viewpoint, and I think funders are getting behind that. We’ve obviously seen different declarations. So, it’s not necessarily a surprise that metrics are an important thing going forward, but it’s the view of the way in which we contextualize and tell the story which seems to be the big thing going forward.
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CG: Right, the bigger picture. Were there any findings that you were surprised about or that just really shocked you?
MH: As I mentioned, you know, AI is not necessarily shocking. Research metrics, I think was surprising in the way that it was the storytelling. Open research, not necessarily a surprise, but I was excited about. I think the real surprise for me was the findings around how collaboration is booming. We know that for every author from a different country that’s added to a paper is correlated with more citation. So we know that collaboration is something that researchers and their institutions are looking for. But I think there’s concerns about the security aspect there, and security and risk management in general needing a strategic and cultural overhaul was something that I wasn’t expecting. It seems to have happened very quickly, that security and risk management in research and in academic institutions, I don’t remember us talking about it four or five years ago. And so that’s a shock to see. It’s not a shock in the sense that I think it’s really important thing, especially given the macroeconomic climate, but it was surprising that it is at the forefront of a lot of people’s minds. 58% of respondents said they expect to spend more time on research security going forward.
CG: Yeah, I saw that in there and I was wondering if that’s going to be a topic at the conference this year coming up. So that’s going to be interesting. What part of the report were you very happy to see?
MH: I was happy to see the open research stuff. I mean, the combination of open research and AI together, I think, is where we’re headed. And I think it’s always been a question. It’s always been, is open access going to be a thing? Open data, the world I’m from, is that going to be a thing? And we’ve seen funder mandates, funder policies, moving the conversation along at a fast rate and so the fact that that’s really hit home, again, as I say, not necessarily positive all around, but it’s more a case of the rubber is hitting the road and we’re going to have to deal with this. Everybody seems positive about it because everybody likes the idea that they’re working in a space where the sustainable development goals are the urgent needs that need to be solved. I’m a big believer in technology, and I think a lot of the people we spoke to are aware of the problems or the bureaucracy or the knowledge gaps in this new open research world, but ultimately they’re happy to be working in an industry that they get to directly affect change and move the needle on some of these issues.
CG: What are the actions or the key takeaways that you think the library community should do based on this report and the findings?
MH: I think read the report. You know, it’s for this community, and it’s written about you, the listener. I think you might be interested to see if it aligns with what you’re thinking about. The interesting part for me is understanding where the skills gaps might be coming and how is that going to affect my career in this industry? And am I clued up enough? Do I agree? You know, I think AI’s transformation potential is huge, but bureaucracy and skill gaps threaten progress. That’s the line we use, you know. If I was in the space, I’d be thinking about, what are those skill gaps and is there any way I can plug them going forward or lean on my colleagues to help move the space at my own institution?
CG: And will you guys be presenting on this at the Charleston Conference this year? Are you guys doing some sessions? I know you’re a big supporter of the conference, and you guys are sponsors again this year. I was just curious if you’re going to present anything about this.
MH: We’ll be there. The Digital Science CEO, Daniel Hook, will be talking this year as well. He’s always got some very
considered thoughts around the space. I think he’s aware of the transformation, and he gets very excited about the transformation that’s happening. We’re all, as I say, we work for a technology company. We’re technologists at heart. And I think Charleston’s always been a fantastic conference for these conversations, you know, I think people are aware of the trends and this report is looking at the trends and Charleston’s always looking at trends too.
CG: Yeah, like trendspotting initiatives and what’s coming down the pipeline, what’s the future of the library landscape. We like predicting all those things to try to prepare for them and have sessions on that. We were talking about where our listeners can access this full report. We’re going to link to that video in the session description, but where can they actually go to read the full report?
MH: Yeah, we’ll be of course @DigitalScience on Twitter, we’ll be tweeting out, or X as it’s called now, and LinkedIn and all of the usual social media places, but it’s got its own URL at https://www.digital-science.com/academic-researchtransformation/ and that’ll have all of the associated materials. Of course, we make the data openly available. We eat our own dog food as somebody who’s pushed open data. So if you wanted to go and dig into the data and find out some more, you know, reanalyze it in different ways, it’s there for you to do so as well. So we’ll be making all of that available under that URL.
CG: Awesome, and so you’re heading off to Australia tomorrow, is what I’ve been told, doing some traveling.
MH: Yeah, we’ve got a lot of conversations to have and so we’ve got a bit of travel to be done and you know, we always find it’s good to get the global footprint. Again, why we did the report is to understand what’s globally because different countries have different rules. I always think about it as, you know, their own terms and conditions and while there’s global trends, it’s always, you know... Again, going to Charleston and getting your feet on the ground with North American colleagues is where we find a lot of the real nuance in what they need and what’s shaping the space. What’s coming down the road, like you say?
CG: Yeah. And did you see any areas predominantly showing up in your survey? The results were from, or was it pretty, I know it was global in nature, but did you see any areas popping up more than others from respondents?
MH: Yeah, well, what’s nice is that you do see differences when you filter on the regional differences, but also the types of interviewees and the different jobs that they have. So that’s why I was saying before, with the listeners who might be interested, you can see what the folks with a similar job to you are saying around the world. And there are some differences, but there’s a lot of similarities. Also what the job you might want to move into, what they’re thinking about. And so you can prep yourself and think, well, maybe if I want to advance my career that way, I need to be more concerned about metrics because that part of the world or that part of the career ladder seems to be focused on metrics in the next five years. We’ve got this kind of five years ago and five years forward. What do you think will be, what’s changed and what do you think will change? And I think that’s useful.
CG: Well, thank you for talking with us about the research transformation report, Mark. We really appreciate you taking your time today. I know you’re busy and we just wish you safe travels and thank you for joining us. We’ll see you in Charleston. Thank you, Mark.
MH: Thanks so much for having me, I appreciate it.
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ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED
Miranda Bennett
Director of Shared Collections
California Digital Library 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA 94607
<miranda.bennett@ucop.edu> https://cdlib.org/
PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: Since October 2022, I have served as Director of Shared Collections at California Digital Library, part of the University of California System. My portfolio includes systemwide licensing, transformative open access agreements, and shared print, and I work with other members of the CDL leadership team in areas such as scholarly communications outreach, research data support infrastructure, and the UC Libraries integrated library system. Before joining CDL, I was Associate Dean for Collections at the University of South Carolina and Head of Liaison Services for Collections and Research Support at the University of Houston, where I began my career as an instruction librarian in 2005. I am currently active in Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures (a division of ALA), ICOLC, and HathiTrust, and I serve on advisory boards for MIT Press and the Library Partnership Rating.
FAMILY: Husband and three sons, ages 11, 14, and 16.
IN MY SPARE TIME: I’m an avid knitter/crocheter and love to learn new crafting skills.
PET PEEVES: Vague email subject lines, really loud restaurants, miscommunication about time zones.
PHILOSOPHY: Everyone has something to teach, everyone has something to learn.
MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Being selected for the ARL Leadership Fellows Program (2022).
HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: I am hopeful that large-scale, cross-library collaborative projects, such as HathiTrust and the Shared Print Partnership, will be thriving, and library consortia will continue to provide meaningful value to their members and to the broader library and scholarly community. I am also cautiously optimistic that we in libraries will have figured out ways to use new artificial intelligence technologies to advance our goals and values, and I see metadata creation, maintenance, and remediation as a promising arena where this could happen.
Laura Brown
Senior Advisor, Ithaka S+R ITHAKA
One Liberty Plaza, 165 Broadway, 5th floor, New York, NY 10006
Phone: (917) 254-0626
<laura.brown@ithaka.org> • ithaka.org
BORN AND LIVED: Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Woodstock.
PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: I spent half of my career at Oxford University Press, most recently as president of OUP, USA, and half my career at ITHAKA, helping to get ITHAKA S+R off the ground, then moving to JSTOR where I was the managing director for many years.
IN MY SPARE TIME: Teaching in the Bard Lifelong Learning program (small seminars on poetry and short fiction; large lecture courses on social justice issues).
FAVORITE BOOKS: To the Lighthouse, Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Fire Next Time, Orwell’s essays, Homeland Elegies, Barsetshire Chronicles
HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: (Hopefully) learning how to evolve using AI for good.
C. Sean Burns
Associate Professor University of Kentucky, School of Information Science 326 Lucille Little Library Lexington, KY 40506 Phone: (859) 257-8370 <sean.burns@uky.edu> https://cseanburns.net/
BORN AND LIVED: I grew up in San Antonio, TX.
IN MY SPARE TIME: Spend time with family doing outdoors things.
Favorite books: All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers / Larry McMurtry; Les Misérables / Victor Hugo.
GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: I’d like to go on a very long walk.
HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: I’m not a fan of predictions, but broadly, I would say that there will be more disruptions. I would guess that disruptive forces will dominate for many years or decades to come.
Donald T Hawkins
Freelance Editor and Conference Blogger 418 Wyndon Road Ambler, PA 19002
Phone: (215) 654-9126
Fax: (215) 654-9126 <dthawkins@verizon.net>
BORN AND LIVED: Born in Oakland, CA, lived in Berkeley, CA; Summit, NJ; Stirling, NJ; Ambler, PA.
EARLY LIFE: Attended school in Berkeley until my father was transferred to New York, then attended Summit (NJ) Junior High and High Schools. Returned with my parents to Berkeley when my grandfather’s health began to fail and graduated from Oakland High School. Received Honors at Entrance from University of California (UC), Berkeley.
PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: Attended UC and got B.S., M.S. and PhD degrees, then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1971 as an Information Scientist. Attended conferences in the U.S. and various parts of the world (Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand), and keynoted some of them. Worked closely with the founders of the Online Conference and National Online Meeting. Collaborated with the developers of the Lockheed Dialog system as online searching became widely used in
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technical libraries. Retired from AT&T in 1995 and formed InfoResources Corporation. Joined Information Today as Editor-in-Chief of Information Science Abstracts until it was sold to EBSCO Information Services, then joined Charleston Information Group. Blogged conferences and wrote “Don’s Conference Notes” until retiring in 2025.
FAMILY: Wife Patricia, Son Michael, 4 grandchildren.
IN MY SPARE TIME: Read books, work in my wood shop, go to our house on Long Beach Island, NJ in the summer.
FAVORITE BOOKS: The Bible.
PET PEEVES: Waiting in lines.
MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Making Information Science Abstracts profitable.
HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: AI will continue to have a significant influence in improving the publishing process.
John Sherer
Spangler Family Director
The University of North Carolina Press 116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514
Phone: (919) 962-3748
<john.sherer@uncpress.org> www.uncpress.org
BORN AND LIVED: Navy brat. Everywhere there was an ocean.
PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: Lifelong bookseller and publisher.
IN MY SPARE TIME: Keeping my badly behaved corgi in line.
FAVORITE BOOKS: Faulkner, Woolf, Sebald, Orwell.
HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: Harder than ever. More important than ever.
Erich van Rijn Director
University of California Press 1111 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA 94607
Phone: (510) 883-8264
<evanrijn@ucpress.edu> https://www.ucpress.edu
BORN AND LIVED: Mostly the San Francisco Bay Area with a brief but very enjoyable stint in New York City.
IN MY SPARE TIME: Running — lots of it.
FAVORITE BOOKS: Current favorites are Marjan Kamali’s The Lion Women of Tehran and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Stolen Pride
MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Celebrating 27 years with the same employer!
HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: I see a strong, vibrant, diverse university press ecosystem that continues to provide the highest quality publishing option for scholars worldwide and that evolves and grows with the changing needs of its readers.
UNIVERSITY PROFILES ENCOURAGED
University of Kentucky
School of Information Science, College of Communication and Information 320 Lucille Little Library, University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506-0224
Phone: (859) 218-0290
Websites:
University homepage — https://www.uky.edu/
Brief History of the University of Kentucky — https://www.uky.edu/ prmarketing/about-university
Background and Overview — https://visit.uky.edu/
College of Communication & Information Studies — https://ci.uky.edu
College Background & History — https://ci.uky.edu/sis/about/our-school
BRIEF OVERVIEW / HISTORY OF THE PARENT UNIVERSITY / COLLEGE: Founded in 1865 as a land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky is the flagship university in Kentucky and one of eight universities in the United States with colleges spanning arts & sciences, liberal arts, design, engineering, professional fields, agriculture, and medical sciences on one contiguous campus.
BACKGROUND/HISTORY OF THE ACADEMIC PROGRAM UNIT: The University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science teaches a wide range of classes including library and information sciences, information communication technology, and core courses in communication.
Since 1911, the University of Kentucky has been offering classes in library science. 1932 saw the formation of the Department of Library Science, followed by its 1968 growth into the Graduate School of Library Science. In 1970, the program became the first College of Library Science in the United States and soon established distance learning programs in 1973. In 1982, the unit became the College of Library and Information Science. The 1993 merger with the College of Communications formed the College of Communications and Information Studies; the School of Library and Information Science became a unit within the College. The program’s 2015 renaming to the School of Information Science reflects the evolving and diversifying courses offered by the School.
Building on its long-standing distance learning expertise since 1973, the School launched a fully online Master’s in Library Science degree in 2009, followed by the 2013 launch of its undergraduate minor in Information Studies.
NUMBER OF FACULTY AND SPECIALIZATIONS WITHIN THIS ACADEMIC PROGRAM: 44 total faculty in the School of Information with 13 specifically in library science. Faculty in our other programs often contribute to the library science program, with respect to both teaching and research.
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PROGRAM SPECIALIZATIONS:
Information Studies Minor (undergraduate),
Graduate Certificate in Instructional Communication (Primarily taught by SIS faculty but technically housed in the College)
Information Community Technology
Master’s in Library Science — tracks: Academic Libraries, Health Information, Information Technology and Systems, Instruction Communication, Public Libraries, Special Libraries, Youth Services and Literature School Librarian Program, Library Science, Concurrent degrees and certificates in a vast range of disciplines, customizable with approval from both graduate programs of the students’ choosing.
NUMBER OF STUDENTS IN THIS ACADEMIC PROGRAM: The School has over 550 students across our graduate and undergraduate programs.
WHAT LEVELS ARE THE PROGRAMS? (UNDERGRADUATE, MASTER’S, DOCTORAL?):
Undergraduate:
Information Studies Minor Information Communication Technology (Major)
Graduate certificate:
Instructional Communication
Master’s programs: Library Science (LIS)
Information Communication Technology (ICT)
WHAT ARE THE PROGRAM’S MODALITIES? (IN-PERSON, HYBRID, FULLY ONLINE?) ARE THERE STILL IN-PERSON COURSES, OR ARE ALL THE PROGRAMS & COURSES FULLY ONLINE NOW? Our Master’s programs in LIS and ICT are exclusively online. Our undergraduate programs include face-to-face and online options.
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR ACADEMIC PROGRAM WILL BE LIKE IN FIVE YEARS? Our school has been responsive to emerging trends and social issues through research and curriculum development. To adapt to these changes, faculty members have offered numerous special topics courses and are developing new specializations that keep the curriculum dynamic and relevant. We expect our curriculum to expand to address social issues and technology applications in fields such as systems librarianship, cultural heritage information management, and social service librarianship. Much of our responsiveness is driven by faculty hires, feedback from alumni, our advisory board, and conversations with current students.
WHAT EXCITES OR FRIGHTENS YOU ABOUT THE NEXT FIVE YEARS? Our faculty members are showcasing their specialized expertise through impactful research that benefits the community and professional fields. Since last year, our school has recruited new faculty with expertise in misinformation, robotics, and technology applications in communication. This development excites us, as it presents the potential to offer unique courses that attract students, increase enrollment, and make our school more appealing to a broader audience.
Numerous studies have highlighted the negative impact of COVID-19 on student academic performance. As faculty, we have directly observed a decrease in student engagement and performance in the classroom. This trend has led to faculty burnout and stress, which could adversely affect learning outcomes and the overall quality of higher education. This issue is considered one of many threats we face. However, we aim to adapt to these kinds of developments. Adaptation and change can be new and exhilarating, but we recognize that it can also wear on employees and morale.
IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU THINK OUR READERS SHOULD KNOW? Our faculty and staff are very caring and build a strong rapport with students. We feel like we foster and have an inclusive and collegial learning environment.
Back Talk continued from page 56
This trip down ten years of memory lane crossed with a conversation I had last week with my longest-time friend in the library world. Gail and I met when we worked together in our first professional jobs in the Serials Department of Simon Fraser University Library when it was still rapidly growing. She now works part-time at the Tempe Public Library, and we are still close friends and see one another frequently. Our recent conversation about bibliographic searching in extensive sets of national bibliographies, kardexes, and card catalogs brought even more memories of how the library world has changed in so many ways. I suppose bibliographic searching was already doomed from the days of the OCLC and RLG online databases and met its demise well before the turn of the century, killed off by WorldCat and Google and other great tools. But back then, searchers were the detectives that transformed floods of often
inaccurately created faculty book requests into real titles that could be submitted to real booksellers worldwide, during the heady days of significant collections budgets and emphasis on foreign languages and area studies.
Whoops — I’ve really digressed now. Nonetheless, this trip down memory lane captures something essential about libraries: the endless quest for the information our users need, the hard work that the quest entails — no matter in what decade and with what technologies — and the satisfaction for us, as well as for the users, when we’re successful. This mix of old and new memories has left me appreciating that spirit all the more.
What’s next? Read some more “Back Talk” columns to keep up! Meanwhile, I’ll talk to my Martian friend some more, to learn what’s happening in her corner of the universe.
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Back Talk — When the Visiting Librarian is from Mars
Column Editor: Ann Okerson (Director, Offline Internet Consortium) <aokerson@gmail.com>
It’s been ten years — whew! — since we started writing this column, tag-teaming with Jim O’Donnell. That’s 60 columns and a good excuse for taking a deep breath and a look back. We could just count up topics, update a few points, and promise to work harder, but we thought it would be more fun to imagine that a librarian from Mars might get hold of the Against the Grain archives and try to figure out what our library world is like when her fellow Martians are busy trying to figure out what to make of the first half century of occasional earthling spacecraft crashing into their planet.
We went back and looked at all those columns and, you know, I think she’d get a reasonable picture of what we’ve been living through and thinking about. Some of those concerns are obvious in retrospect, in the columns that were devoted to pandemic issues. Did we take as much advantage out of that disruptive and strategic opportunity to rethink our ways of working as we might have? Or did we stay focused on the operational issues of caring for our colleagues and patrons? Are we now too much returning to the old ways? Maybe our Martian guest will have some opinions about all that.
Likely, the main thing our visitor would take away is a picture of change occurring on several axes.
• For example, because we’re librarians, we now talk more about the cultural artifacts we collect and make available to library users. Herein, we’ve described the increasing emphasis not only on collecting and preserving but also on libraries’ intentional focusing on making those special items central to our mission, opening them up to a wider public, and joining in the emphasis on public humanities.
• The dominance of digital information in the library landscape and the issues raised naturally took a large part of our attention. Our ATG decade (2014/15) was ushered in on some positive notes, as the Georgia State decision cleared that University of most charges of infringement and the Hathi Trust (vs. Authors Guild)
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decision found search and accessibility uses of digitized books to be fair use. However, we’ve ended with a ruling against Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending program, which raises many questions for our service to the public and to the future.
• The emergence of a larger society obsession with artificial intelligence has more recently begun to show its head, emphasizing just how much of our attention to the emerging digital world is devoted to the ways and means through which we encounter digital information and the ways that digitization is changing how we think and work. Generative AI went mainstream in November 2022, and looks to become a disruptor that affects every part of library life. AI is now everyone’s preoccupation.
• Upon reflection, we’ve spent a great deal of time here talking about the future of print in libraries: format + use. If libraries don’t invest in preservation and propagation of print, not many other forces in our society or educational systems are going to do it; thus, many hours are being devoted to analyzing just what difference the transformation or transition of media from fixed to fluid is making in how readers learn, know, think, and act — and how libraries can best facilitate their work.
• The “Back Talk” columns have also been a little obsessive about library building, systems, and functions. There’s no question that the physical shapes of library spaces — and the place those spaces play in the lives of patrons and staff — are evolving rapidly and at the same time conservatively. Are we paying too much attention to means and not ends, to outward form and not substance? Or not enough? At this point, I’m wishing that our Martian librarian were real enough to sit down for a serious conversation.
• We’ve spent a lot of pleasurable time here, reporting and reflecting on gatherings of library colleagues at some familiar and important venues: the Charleston Conference every November, the Fiesole Collections Retreat every spring, and the IFLA World Library and Information Congress and its spinoffs (library publishing meetings in Oslo and Dublin, an IFLA satellite meeting last summer in Cape Town on the impact of open publishing in the global south, an open access symposium in Istanbul). There have been so many places in the last decade where the excitement and energy of an increasingly inclusive and ambitious library community has shone through. Colleagues and speakers meet from all around the world in common cause, from Algeria to Croatia to Kuala Lumpur, Namibia and so many more. We are increasingly a global community.
continued on page 55
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Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. Our goal is to link publishers, vendors, and librarians by reporting on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books and journals. ATG’s eJournal, with an open rate of over 51%, is published five times a year (February, April, June, September, and November) and distributed to ATG subscribers, Charleston Library Conference attendees, and registered members on the Charleston Hub.
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