Against the Grain V37#4, September, 2025 Full Issue

Opening the Digital Stacks: Accessibility and Discoverability Across Disciplines

This issue is Sponsored by AM

Edited by Holly Francis

(Associate Head of Marketing, AM)

Begins on Page 14

If Rumors Were Horses

Well, here we are sliding into September already — can you believe it? The summer has been full of changes and chatter in our little corner of libraries and publishing. As always, I’ve gathered a few tidbits, rumors, and bits of news to share with you all. There’s a lot going on so let’s dive right in!

Hurricane Anniversary Commemorations

We recently passed the 20-year anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina (frequently mistaken for my name). The city of New Orleans has created a remembrance called “KATRINA K20: Still Standing, Still New Orleans” with community events taking place across the city. https://katrina20. nola.gov/home/ There was also a documentary on Netflix called “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water” featuring interviews with survivors who reflect on the disastrous storm that forever changed their lives and the systemic inequities it exposed. One of our former conference directors, Jack Montgomery, and his wife Lesley, column editor for Wandering the Web, live in New Orleans but moved there after the storm.

We’re also coming up on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, whose flood waters devastated western NC following landfall in the Florida big bend region. The East

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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/

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Katina Strauch (College of Charleston, Retired)

Editor: Leah Hinds (Charleston Hub)

Manager:

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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)

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AGAINST THE GRAIN – ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS

BOOKSELLING AND VENDING

From Your (Moving!) Editor Emerita:

Bruce and I are moving to Winston-Salem to be with our kids, grandkids, and family! It’s a big change, but one filled with love and excitement for this next chapter, especially for seeing the grandkids more often. They’ll be close enough to ride their bikes over! I hope you will all keep in touch. I would love to visit in person or connect on Zoom or FaceTime whenever you can. Really and truly! This means I won’t be able to attend the conference this year sadly… Will try to attend virtually though! I won’t miss hurricane season but I will miss seeing all of you in person for sure.

Moving along! We’re grateful to AM for sponsoring this issue on accessibility and discoverability across disciplines, and to Holly Francis for being a wonderful guest editor. We have a conversation between Laura Blomvall, Engagement Manager at AM, and Professor Claire Battershill, University of Toronto, discussing ways to promote the use of special collections and archives to different

Letters

to the Editor

student groups. Bee Cassim’s article highlights how AM’s Quartex platform integrates accessibility standards and advanced tools to make digital primary sources more inclusive and innovative for research across disciplines. Jennifer Wedge’s piece explains how high-quality, standards-based metadata underpins discoverability in libraries, enabling researchers to connect and analyze primary sources across subject boundaries. Clare Kellar’s article shows how U.S. Geological Survey scientist Brian Atwater uses colonial archives to study ancient tsunamis, demonstrating the modern scientific value of historical records for risk assessment. And finally, Martha Fogg’s essay argues that working with primary sources fosters curiosity, critical thinking, and adaptability — skills essential for preparing students to thrive in today’s evolving job market.

We also have three top-notch interviews! One with yours truly from the inimitable Darrell Gunter on “Doing the Charleston!” my memoir about the Charleston Conference. Darrell also interviewed Lord Tim Clement-Jones about AI Governance, Ethics, and the Future of Innovation. And we have a fantastic interview with Martha Fogg, Managing Director of AM.

Happy reading! 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 Editors:

Thank you so much for the opportunity to publish in Against the Grain. It’s great to contribute to the journal, which helped me a lot during my master’s and doctoral degrees.

All the best, Liliana

Liliana Giusti Serra (Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) <lgiustiserra@gmail.com>

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Dear Liliana,

Thanks so much for your note! It’s always great to hear how Against the Grain has supported readers throughout their professional and academic journeys. We’re thrilled to have you as part of the ATG community now as a contributor, and we really appreciate the thought and perspective you bring.

Looking forward to seeing more from you in the future!

Best, Leah

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

See Liliana’s Special Report titled “eBooks, Types of Licensing Models, and Access Attributes for Libraries” in this issue on page 28 . AGAINST THE GRAIN

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the Grain / September 2025

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Rumors continued from page 1

Asheville Library is hosting a daylong series of events and activities centered around remembering the events of the past and building resilience and community for the future on Saturday, September 27. And UNC Asheville is holding a Post-Helene Symposium. To mark the one-year anniversary of the storm, they’re gathering stories of courage, kindness, or community that community members experienced since the storm. The stories will be included in the Come Hell or High Water project, part of Buncombe County Public Libraries collection dedicated to stories of those impacted by Helene. Submissions can also be seen and shared during a free public event on September 24. Conference director Beth Bernhardt lives in Asheville and had lots of damage to her home and neighborhood in the path of the storm! Very scary! I will not miss the anxiety of hurricane season on the coast!

Personal Stories and Updates

academic libraries. Congratulations and way to go, Christy!!! We will miss you!

Announcements and Updates

Alas, bittersweet news for Charleston Conference regulars. Anthony Watkinson, one of our longtime conference directors and the emcee of the conference for many, many years, has stepped down from his role with the committee. Anthony will be attending the conference this year and will even be leading a session titled “Doing the Charleston: Evaluating the Conference’s Enduring Legacy” alongside Corrie Marsh and George Machovec. Anthony has been instrumental in curating interviews and auxiliary materials for my memoir and history of the Charleston Conference. I can’t imagine the conference directors committee without him! Please join me in expressing my deep gratitude for his many years of service, guidance, and friendship to this directors group and to the Charleston Conference as a whole. His contributions have helped shape the success of the conference, and his presence will be greatly missed.

On a brighter note, Leah Hinds’ son Jacob is engaged! He proposed right here on Sullivan’s Island on the beach under the full moon. How romantic! Jacob grew up coming to the conference alongside his mom and has even helped Sharna work to put together attendee materials for the registration desk during high school. Congratulations and much love!

And back to bittersweet (do you have whiplash yet???) — Christy Anderson, the social media specialist for the Charleston Hub, has stepped down from her role recently. Christy was the voice behind all of our live-tweeting/liveposting for events and all of our social media accounts for the past four years. She’s accepted a new role as the Executive Director of the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Region 2 in Charleston! AND she recently completed the Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This is a prestigious program designed to strengthen strategic leadership, innovation, and organizational impact within

ACLS has received a $500,000 gift from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to support its mission to advance the creation and circulation of knowledge about humanity and human endeavor, past and present. The ACLS mission has emerged as especially urgent at a time when the value of the humanities and social sciences, efforts to elevate diverse histories and scholarly perspectives, and securities afforded by long-held principles of academic freedom have all come under attack. Read the full press release for a quote from ACLS President Joy Connolly about the award: https:// www.acls.org/news/acls-receives-500000-from-john-d-andcatherine-t-macarthur-foundation/

Applications are once again open for the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s (SSP) ongoing Mentorship Program! Whether you’re new to scholarly publishing or a seasoned pro, mentorship adds value to your career. SSP’s popular program gives mentors and mentees a dedicated space to develop an industry friendship uncomplicated by workplace politics, letting mentors share hard-earned wisdom and giving mentees the opportunity to gain valuable insights while developing communication and leadership skills. The Mentorship Program provides opportunities for mentors and mentees to develop new relationships, share experiences, and learn from others outside their organizations. https://www. sspnet.org/community/news/call-for-mentorship-programapplications-open-f25/

Skilltype is excited to welcome Victoria University Library, the first full CAVAL member to go live, and Monash University Library, a member of Australia’s prestigious Group of Eight, to the Skilltype platform. Through their partnership with CAVAL, both libraries now have access to Skilltype’s skills management workflows and dedicated support. https://www.linkedin. com/pulse/skilltype-welcomes-monash-victoria-universityskilltype-kagtc/

continued on page 10

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Remembering Ward Shaw

By Katina Strauch (Editor Emerita, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net>

Iwas shocked to learn that Ward Shaw died in Santa Fe on July 2, 2025. He died at such a young age, only 79! Ward Shaw was a real innovator. He saw the possibility of creating searching mechanisms for library collections when we were debating about print or digital! As Executive Director of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, which was founded in 1974, Ward created the CARL System, which included one of the original keyword Google-style search engines and assured that all academic libraries could share their catalogs and resources via shared computer networks! To allow the system to be sold outside of Colorado, he formed CARL Systems Inc. and served as its Chairman of the Board. That for-profit group in turn created the Uncover article level database and document delivery service which appeared in 1988 — among the first to offer article level indexes against a single database of 18,000 journal titles — a WOW moment that allowed access on an article-by-article basis to the scholarly community. Ward himself wrote the code and directed the technical and support staff making all this possible! Ward was 43 when he received an honorary doctorate and citation from the University of Northern Colorado in recognition for improving the lives of students, faculty, and citizens of Colorado.

lunch in South Africa, following the Cape Town Fiesole Retreat in May 2024.

My husband Bruce Strauch and I were fortunate enough to know Ward during this period. Together, we shared presentations and papers during ALA, the Charleston Conference, the Fiesole Retreats, etc. We also explored many venues like Fiesole, Oxford, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Lund, Hong Kong, Glasgow, St. Petersburg, Cambridge, Singapore, Berlin, Barcelona, Lille, Basel, Athens,Cape Town, and this coming year Tubingen. The Retreats were established to foster shared ideas and to stimulate collaboration and dialog within the scholarly communication sector. In 2025, when anyone finds a library book or journal article on their smartphone, they are fulfilling Ward’s pioneering vision.

Rumors continued from page 8

Ex Ordo recently announced a major platform upgrade! “This wasn’t just about adding new features,” said Paul Killoran, Founder & CEO of Ex Ordo. “This was about strengthening the foundation of Ex Ordo for the next 10 years. We’ve modernised our infrastructure, consolidated our systems, and enhanced our security — all so we can deliver faster innovation and an even better experience for our customers.” Read all about it here: https://www.exordo.com/blog/major-platform-upgrade

Knowable Magazine has recently featured a free course called “Teen Brain Bootcamp,” A free email course on the science of adolescent brain development. According to Emily Underwood, “We’ve had more than 2,500 people enroll in our course on adolescent brain development since it launched last month. Some sample feedback: ‘I realized how strongly relationships and social contexts shape function in teens. It shifted my perspective from seeing challenges as individual weaknesses to understanding them as connected to support systems, environment, and trust.’ Another told us that the brain research presented ‘gave me real information rather than just what people repeat from reading social media (mis)information.’” Read more about it and sign up here: https://knowablemagazine.org/teenbrain-bootcamp

Interviews and Conversations

I just read the Library Journal interview with my friend Roger Schonfeld, and it’s wonderful. He talks about JSTOR’s new Digital Stewardship Services and how they’re using AI, like their Seeklight tool, to help libraries and archives tackle backlogs

while still keeping human expertise at the center. It’s classic Roger: thoughtful, forward-looking, and always grounded in what libraries really need. https://www.libraryjournal.com/ story/roger-schonfeld-qa

Just saw that the Bodleian Libraries will be featuring a special event with award-winning author Ian McEwan where he will discuss his new novel, What We Can Know, with Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian. According to Richard, “The book is a powerful reflection on truth, evidence, archives and the future of the humanities and humanity. It is sent in a future where the The Bodleian Libraries has relocated to Snowdonia due to rising sea levels — and it is a MUST read of all librarians and archivists.” I hope there will be a recording of this event! https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/sep25/ian-mcewan I heard a rumor that Richard Ovenden might be attending the next Fiesole Retreat, so keep your eyes and ears open for more updates on that event!

Conferences and Events

Speaking of Fiesole, the retreat arrives in Tubingen, Germany, 13-15 April 2026. Save the date! https://www.fiesoleretreat.org/ tuebingen_2026 The event will be held in memory of our dearly departed friend Ward Shaw. See above for my remembrances. May he rest in peace!

The Collection Development in Africa (CDiA) 2025 series will be held later this month in Cape Town, South Africa.

continued on page 12

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Photo taken by Steve O’Connor over

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>

Book Stores Galore

Southern Living does a multi-page spread on notable bookstores in fun towns you want to visit.

Mahogany Books, Oxon Hill, MD (family enterprise to promote books on African diaspora); Book People, Austin, TX (largest indept in state; in-house café til 9pm); Parnassus Books, Nashville, TN (author Ann Patchett’s creation); Carmichael’s Bookstore, Louisville, KY (two locations plus Carmichael’s Kids); The Bookshelf, Thomasville, GA (destination for all south GA); Faulkner House Books, New Orleans, LA (in Fr Qtr where WF once lived); Commonplace Books, Oklahoma City, OK (offers literary clubs); Sundog Books, Seaside, FL (known for tall, dense shelving, which makes searching a worthwhile challenge); Righton Books, St. Simon’s Island, GA (big cookbook section plus on-site coffee and pastries); Marfa Book Co., Marfa, TX (along with books, performance venue for musicians); Little Professor, Birmingham, AL (two locations plus mahjong nights); Malaprop’s Bookstore Café, Asheville, NC (pairs shoppers with unknown titles based on key words; top-notch café right there); Taylor Books, Charleston, WV (espresso bar, bakery, café and art gallery).

See: Caroline Rogers, “Read All About It,” Southern Living, May, 2025, p.CA2.

TikTok Literary Craze

TikTok can make anything “from beauty products to cucumbers fly off the shelves.” So it’s no surprise that it can turn a book into a craze.

In 2024, Dostoevsky’s White Nights was the fourth most sold work of lit in translation in the UK. BookTok and it’s Instagram parallel Bookstagram are filled with references to the 90 page novella from reviews to quotes to moody photos of the book next to a coffee cup.

Typically, TikTok makes famous a YA or fantasy novel. So why this 1848 Dostoevsky of a lonely man meeting a mystery woman on the street and suffering unrequited love?

Some say the short length provides an easy notch for a reading goal as well as an introduction to the daunting door-stops of Russian literature. Others argue it appeals to the romantic souls of heavy readers who live largely in their own heads.

Naomi Philbert who posts on Instagram as @bookish.naomi says she picked it up thinking it was a romance but found it was about loneliness. Young people fatigued with app-based dating might find that the narrator and his love object meeting in person “is romantic in itself.”

See: “Fyodor fever: how Dostoevsky became a social media sensation,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/ books/2024/dec/17/white-nights-fyodor-dostoevskysocial-media-instagram-booktok-tiktok

Obits of Note

Sam Keen (1931-2025) was born in Scranton, PA to a teacher mother and choir-director father. He earned a PhD from Princeton and a Doctor of Divinity from Harvard. The lure of the hippy movement drew him to California where he lectured with mythology scholar Joseph Campbell and did workshops at New Age institutes on “creating a personal mythology.” And he wrote.

Faces of the Enemy (1986) was about dehumanizing war propaganda. Fire in the Belly (1991) became his break-out success, preaching the need for men to lose the warrior metaphor and develop a new emotional identity. While he sparked the men’s movement with its drum circles and primal screams, Keen was not anti-feminist and was acknowledged as an expert on gender dynamics. He gave a seminar on sexual harassment to U.S. senators after the Clarence Thomas contretemps.

See: “The New Age thinker who inspired men,” The Week, April 18, 2025, p.35.

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025), born in Peru, got off to a great start to be a famous writer. Father ditched the family but then returned, didn’t like his son and shipped him to military school at 10. After a wretched time, at age 18 Llosa published The Time of the Hero (1963) exposing venality and corruption at his school. This, of course, infuriated the army, making his book a big success. He had his credentials as a young rebel genius.

Next, he eloped at 19 with his uncle’s 29-year-old sisterin-law and published Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. With his sexual rebel cred established, he moved to Europe where they know how to lionize an author. As fortune would have it, he was perfectly situated to catch the 1960s wave of the Latin American Literary craze with authors like Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Julio Cortázar.

But Llosa believed in free markets, and that’s always a problem for the egghead class. He ran for President of Peru in 1990 advocating privatizing state industries and firing a lot of bureaucrats. He got soundly thumped.

Taking the rejection badly, he moved to Spain. Despite winning the Nobel Prize for lit in 2010, he was never forgiven by the Peruvian Left, so he stayed abroad.

See: “The novelist who lectured Latin America,” The Week , April 25, 2025, p.35.

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Let’s Read Scientific Women

(1) Bruce Goldfarb, 18 Tiny Deaths (2020) (Frances Lee pioneers forensic science with tiny crime scenes in boxes); (2) Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe (2016) (Women hired by Harvard to catalog star images and do a half million plates that are still in use.); (3) Lori Alvord and Elizabeth van Pelt, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear (1999) (First Navajo woman to become an MD combines modern and traditional medicine.); (4) Judith Zinsser, La Dame d’Esprit (2006) (Bio of Émilie de Chåtelet, poet, translator of Newton, collaborator and lover of Voltaire.); (5) Shelley Emling, The Fossil Hunter (2009) (Mary Anning found dinosaur skeletons and laid groundwork for Darwin’s theory of evolution.)

See: Olivia Campbell, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 8-9, 2025, p.C8.

Book Store Plug

The high desert town of Marfa, TX began turning hip circa 1977. Now it’s a destination road-trip jaunt to a town with the population of a suburban high school but a rich array of galleries, shops and restaurants.

Marfa Book Company has books by local authors and regional studies about the Chihuahuan Desert, West Texas, and Northern Mexico. And also art exhibitions, a reading series, and the week-long Agave Festival celebrating the plant’s “influence on culture through food, film, music, science, and spirits.”

See: Rachel Monroe, “A Rootin’ Tootin’ Boot Scootin’ Ride Through Marfa,” Bon Appétit, May, 2025, p.78.

Let’s Read About Fame

(1) David Kinney, The Dylanologists (2014) (author is a Bob Dylan obsessive who mocks those with his obsession); (2) Donald Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa (2001) (rise of Mona “from a cheerful housewife to a mysterious, iconic woman”); (3) John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech (2001) (“satirical vignettes on the absurd distractions offered by literary fame”); (4) Alethea Hayter, A Sultry Month (1965) (“collage of London cultural life in summer of 1846”); (5) Pat Hackett, The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989) (more than 1,000 diary entries of Warhol’s encounters with the famous).

See: Craig Brown, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal , April 5-6, 2025, p.R8. Brown is author of “Q: A Voyage Around the Queen.”

Rumors continued from page 10

Following a successful event of the Fiesole Retreat held there in 2024, this event will center African libraries and librarians in the conversation about collection development practices and more. See the excellent program at https://librariescd.itoca. org/proceedings.html

The annual STM dinner and conference in Frankfurt prior to the book fair is coming up October 13-14. Leah Hinds will be attending and looks forward to connecting with friends and making new connections there! The theme is The Invisible Bridge: The role of publishers in science diplomacy. https://stmassoc.org/events/stm-dinner-conference-2025-frankfurt/ And more news from Frankfurt, the Charleston Conference will once

again be hosting a mini conference event on Friday, October 17, on the stage in Hall 4.0 beginning at 9 am. Be sure to stop by! https://www.charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/ welcome/the-charleston-conference-at-the-frankfurt-bookfair/

And of course, the main event, the Charleston Conference preliminary program is now available to browse! Early bird registration discounts are available through September 27, so don’t delay!

That’s it for now. Thanks, as always, for reading and I hope you enjoy this issue!

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ACLS Humanities Ebook Collection

The original DRM-free, unlimited multi-user subscription collectionand still the best.

Collection Details

ACLS HEB is a partnership between ACLS and Michigan Publishing. This collection is curated by scholars, and includes more than 6,300 scholarly books from over 125 publishers. It includes foundational backlist titles in the humanities and social sciences, with 150-200 new titles added annually.

Accessibility

ACLS HEB’s accessibility roadmap is now available on Fulcrum, a leading, open-source platform for digital scholarship. For more information on Fulcrum’s accessibility efforts, including platform and collection-level VPATs, visit: fulcrum.org/accessibility

How to Support

Michigan Publishing has partnered with libraries to ensure transparent and affordable pricing. The cost of the collection increases by 3% each year to match the 3% increase in content. If you are a library interested in subscribing to ACLS HEB or would like a quote, please contact Lyrasis at aclsheb@lyrasis.org.

“Books have enduring, undeniable value. Humanistic knowledge is as urgent and necessary as scientific knowledge. We need knowledge of humans all over the world — our languages, cultures, ways of reasoning, values, ideas, hopes, and fears if we are to move into the future together in peace." - Joy Connolly, President, ACLS

Opening the Digital Stacks: Accessibility and Discoverability Across Disciplines

By Holly Francis (Associate Head of Marketing, AM) <Hollyf@amdigital.co.uk>

Primary Sources for the Humanities and Beyond

Whether it’s a business major examining historical trade records, a public health researcher analysing archival epidemiology data, or an engineering student studying the social context of infrastructure projects, primary sources have expansive scope beyond traditional use in humanities research.

Academic libraries are uniquely positioned to leverage digital primary source collections that encourage interdisciplinary research, support innovative scholarship, and cultivate critical thinkers across all fields of study.

How Do Digital Primary Sources Support Interdisciplinary Research?

When students work with original, unfiltered records, they learn to interrogate data, recognise bias, and construct evidencebased arguments. These are skills not bound to any single discipline; rather, they form a foundation for many successful career paths. Even including those yet to be imagined.

Enriched metadata, contextual guides, and AI-driven tools such as Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) are all used to enhance discoverability across subject areas. These make it easier for researchers in STEM, social sciences, and the arts, perhaps unfamiliar with primary source content, to uncover relevant materials that spark new lines of inquiry.

Interdisciplinary Value in Practice

In recent years, libraries have demonstrated the power of primary sources to bridge disciplinary boundaries. Environmental science students have conducted datamining projects using historical climate data from ship logs; political science researchers have compared policy shifts using archival newspapers; and computer science students have trained machine learning models on digitised manuscripts. Each case underscores how primary sources can enrich research far beyond a traditional humanities context.

In this issue we’ve explored the value of digital primary sources within libraries like yours. From the technologies that support users with a broad range of needs, to the interdisciplinary nature of the material itself, and the enduring value of a humanities education to creating career-ready graduates.

In “How to Position Archives to Different Student Groups,” Laura Blomvall speaks with Professor Claire Battershill of the University of Toronto about tailoring archival engagement to

the needs of different disciplines. From English Literature students conducting close readings of poetry to Information Studies students critically evaluating digitisation practices, Battershill demonstrates how archives, both physical and digital, can be framed to meet learners where they are while fostering archival literacy and creative inspiration.

In “From the Archive to the Screen: Unlocking Knowledge and Expanding Research Through Accessible Digital Primary Sources,” Bee Cassim offers a behind-the-scenes look at AM’s commitment to accessibility as an evolving standard. She explores how the AM Quartex platform integrates WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, user feedback, and cutting-edge tools like HTR to break down barriers for researchers. The article shows how accessibility features designed for inclusivity also power innovation across disciplines, from STEM data analysis to environmental and public health research.

In “What Powers Discoverability and Accessibility at the Heart of Your Library?” Jennifer Wedge reveals the critical, often invisible role metadata plays in making digital archives usable. She explains how detailed, standards-based metadata that is integrated into library systems ensures researchers across all fields can find, connect, and analyse primary sources. From MARC 21 cataloguing to controlled vocabularies, Wedge illustrates how good metadata bridges subject silos, enabling unexpected research connections.

In “Archives in Science: Using Colonial Records to Map Today’s Geological Risks,” Clare Kellar profiles the work of U.S. Geological Survey scientist Brian Atwater, who uses British Colonial Office records from AM’s Colonial Caribbean collection to study prehistoric tsunamis. His research demonstrates the tangible, contemporary value of historical archives in scientific fields and illuminates how past human records can inform modern risk assessment and public safety planning.

In “Curiosity and the Critical Role of Primary Sources in Building Career-Ready Graduates,” Martha Fogg argues that curiosity, nurtured through engagement with authentic, challenging primary sources, is among the most valuable skills in today’s job market. Drawing on her own career experience and employer data, she makes the case that primary source research develops analytical thinking, empathy, and adaptability, preparing students not just for their first job, but for leadership in an uncertain future.

By investing in digital primary sources, libraries can foster interdisciplinary collaboration across campus and support long-term student success goals. Read on to find out how.

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Discover archival collections, learn how to use them, or create your own

How to Position Archives to Different Student Groups

By Laura Blomvall (Engagement Manager, AM) <laurab@amdigital.co.uk>

In an interview with AM’s Engagement Team, Professor Claire Battershill (University of Toronto) spoke of teaching archives in the digital age, material history and modernist movements to students in English Literature and Information Studies.

It’s a rare course where Claire Battershill doesn’t take her students to special collections. “I use archives in my teaching a lot, I think! I try to whenever possible,” she says.

The student could be from the English Department or the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto — she has a foot in both worlds, and seems to seamlessly move between different disciplinary settings in her teaching and in her own creative and scholarly work. (In addition to her research, she also writes short stories.)

Battershill is, in fact, on the move the morning we speak. There are rows of empty shelves behind her; she has borrowed a colleague’s office, she explains, and snuck in temporarily. Her own office is on the other side of campus, and she’s about to run a research session for students.

“We have this undergraduate research opportunities programme called the Jackman Scholars in Residence programme. Students come in for the month, and they work with a faculty member on their research.” The students helping Battershill will be thinking about access to special collections and creativity in the library.

Battershill has written extensively on archives. Her most recent book publications include Women and Letterpress Printing 1920-2020: Gendered Impressions — a feminist historiography of printing, from the letterpress to the digital age — and a new, updated version, together with Shawna Ross, on digital humanities pedagogy. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students examines in-depth, among other topics, how to find, evaluate, and use digital resources with students. She uses a digital resource review task with her masters students in the information school; called “The Future of Things: Digitization and Remediation,” the course explores how and why material objects, cultural artifacts, and artistic works relate to and are transformed through technological mediation.

“Most of the students hope to be professionals in libraries, museums, galleries, archives (the GLAM sector),” Battershill explains. In many entry-level roles, they will have to field questions about digitisation early.

“A lot of what I try to emphasise here is just a certain literacy around the practice of digitisation across different kinds of organisations; what is possible, and what is ethical,” she says. “Because sometimes our graduates are called upon to make those decisions really early in their professional lives.”

Over a video call, Battershill discussed how she incorporates digital resources in student assignments and why archives are so important to her teaching practice in both her departmental homes.

In your information school course on digitisation and remediation, you ask your students to evaluate a digital resource. How do you set up this assignment?

I would show the students at the beginning of the course a digital archive of some description. Anything from the Smithsonian’s Digital Collections — something big like that run by a cultural institution — all the way to a small project started by an academic about something very specific. So when they come to the AM resources partway through the course, they have some kind of framework for assessing what they’re seeing.

Then, the students have an assignment to find an AM resource, specifically an AM resource that aligns with their research interests: to go into it and have a look around it and do an assessment of what’s available; what the materials are, how those are presented. So they’ll look at OCR, transcripts, what the metadata looks like.

The idea there was to allow them to choose content that related to their own interests, because there’s a wide range of AM resources that U of T is lucky to have access to.

Your information school students visit physical archives as well as examining a wide range of online collections. How do you talk about the difference between the material and the digital with them, the gains and losses?

It’s something we talk about together, and usually the students in discussion generate what they think those are. So it shifts a little bit depending on what the group’s interests are. But, generally, they tend to identify searching as an advantage of the digital. That really makes a difference to their research process. Also, the contextual metadata and any kind of apparatus around the documents — historical introductions, essays, materials that allow them to understand what they are seeing. Of course, the convenience of being able to access the digital, wherever they are, and not having to go to a special collections reading room, put away their coat, take their pencil … [Laughs].

And I think the loss is partly that aura, the feeling of seeing an original document. I also think that for those interested in materiality, or the nature of the paper, sometimes feeling a document between your fingers shows you a material knowledge that is hard to translate on a flat screen.

And some of them point out smell. [Laughs.] They always say something about smell.

Are there any challenges your students face in working with primary sources?

Increasingly, reading basic cursive is a challenge for students in a way that I didn’t use to experience as much, even if it’s not a particularly ornate hand. Obviously, transcriptions help with that. So the digitised object is in some way more legible to them than the material object would be …

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Sometimes, when you come to correcting those transcripts, it can be an illuminating process in itself.

It really is. I did a digital editions project with my undergraduate modernism class a number of years ago and I had them clean OCR — it wasn’t a handwritten text, it was a printed text, so the transcript would start cleaner, but there was still cleaning to do, even on modernist little magazine-style typeface.

My contention at the time was that transcription encourages you to close read the poem, because if you’re cleaning the transcription, you’re spending some time thinking about the text at that literary, letter-by-letter, word-by-word level. And there’s a benefit to that deep attention, for reading poetry in particular.

So you use archival documents in your teaching in the English department, as well?

I do! We’re really lucky here at Toronto, we have really amazing library resources. I do tend to try and design my courses around what we have here, so that the students can have some primary document experience at the library. The Virginia Woolf collection at the E.J. Pratt Library is one of the best ones in the world, so I have an assignment for students to go for a field trip there and do some analysis of the primary materials within that collection.

I also teach an undergraduate chapbook class. At the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, we do a session looking at chapbooks from way back in history all the way to contemporary. They start to think of archives and special collections in a slightly different way in that context, as inspirations for their own creative practices and works.

What differences do you notice between students in Information Studies and in the English department, when they engage in primary source work from within those different fields?

In the Information Studies context, there’s a critical approach to digital resources as objects in themselves. And I try to really open it to a wider range of primary materials (so not just literature but any kind of cultural heritage artifact). Part of the reason I designed this assignment around AM’s resources was the range of available primary historical materials. This allowed the students could choose which one appealed to them.

With English students, they have research questions related to literary matters or contextual issues. If we’re doing a transcription exercise, it’s almost always with the goal of eventually producing a close reading of the poem. So they’re led a little bit more by the research question and the content, as opposed to the framing and the apparatus.

That’s more or less how I would think of them differently — although I try and make space for a little bit of both in both places, because I think there’s a lot the two disciplines can learn from each other.

How do English students benefit from being introduced to archives early?

Most of what I work on and teach is early twentieth century. Modernism is an interdisciplinary artistic movement: it isn’t only a literary movement, it’s also a movement in the arts, and in living, in domestic decoration. Because it was this holistic thing at the time, it really makes a lot of sense to me to see the visual aesthetics of the object of the book as well as the text. They weren’t made separately; they were made together.

I have also always felt that especially with historical materials, it enriches your experience of the text, to think of its relationship to the book especially if it’s been thoughtfully made, or handmade. And this is again my research area: DIY publications and small presses. There was a consciousness and care with which those objects were produced that relates the text to the material object.

For a lot of the stuff that I look at and work on with students, it is a holistic process that connects the text with the book itself, or with the embodiment of the text. So for me they’re just always really connected.

This is a bit of a big question, but to end, I wanted to ask what you think the value of primary sources is?

It is a big question! [Laughs] I think a lot of work we’re doing when we’re trying to think about cultural heritage and materials from the past is trying to situate those materials and to understand what their original context was. It’s much easier to understand a lot of things at once from a primary document. Whether that’s visual aesthetics, whether that’s practices of handwriting, whether it’s everyday living — as in the Mass Observation Archive [digitised by AM in Mass Observation Online and Mass Observation Project; the original archive is held at The Keep in University of Sussex]

In order to understand historical materials, you have to understand both your own contemporary situation and also the situation of the past. There’s something direct about engaging with primary sources that allows you to say, “I can feel what it felt like to be a person in the past, who might have been writing this.” And that imaginative exercise is really facilitated by access to primary documents.

And then of course, sometimes in accessing the primary sources you might see a different story in them than the one that has already been told by other historians or literary critics. Both of those things are made possible through access to primary sources.

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From the Archive to the Screen: Unlocking Knowledge and Expanding Research Through Accessible Digital Primary Sources

By Bee Cassim (Senior Product Manager, AM) <beeoz@amdigital.co.uk>

The role of the research library is rapidly evolving, not only as a steward of scholarly resources but as a critical driver of inclusion, equity, and innovation in research. One of the most powerful ways libraries fulfil this mission is by championing accessibility in digital resources. Accessibility, when thoughtfully implemented, does far more than support compliance; it opens entirely new pathways for interdisciplinary research, deepens engagement with collections, and ensures that the next generation of scholars can pursue inquiry free from barriers.

As a digital publisher, we at AM have placed accessibility at the core of our platform strategy. Our goal is to make primary source content usable and discoverable for everyone, regardless of their physical, cognitive, or research needs.

Accessibility as a Dynamic Standard

Accessibility is not a one-time achievement. It is an ongoing commitment that evolves with new technologies and shifting user expectations. Our in-house publishing platform, AM Quartex, is designed with this in mind. We continuously test it against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA, the benchmark for legal compliance under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the European Accessibility Act.

This means integrating best practices like keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, image alt text, captioning, and audio description. But it also means going further by reassessing usability across devices, designing with empathy, and staying in constant dialogue with users and librarians to ensure the platform evolves in ways that meet real-world needs.

From Historical Archives to Cutting-Edge Access

The recent migration of our flagship East India Company resource, developed in partnership with the British Library, onto the AM Quartex platform exemplifies this evolution. Originally built on an earlier platform focused on serendipitous browsing, the updated resource now supports more intentional, topicdriven research thanks to enhanced metadata and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology.

HTR in particular marks a transformative leap in accessibility and discovery of primary source materials. By creating searchable AI-generated transcripts of handwritten documents, many of which are visually difficult to read or inaccessible via traditional means, we’re enabling users across disciplines to explore the material more deeply. These transcripts not only support screen readers but also make the archive far more navigable for researchers with visual impairments, learning needs, or unfamiliarity with historic script.

Primary Source Research Beyond Traditional Fields

While accessibility improvements directly support users with enhanced needs, their ripple effects are far broader. Researchers in STEM fields, for instance, are increasingly turning to digitised historical materials for longitudinal data, ethical case studies, and environmental tracking.

Data science and AI ethics developments are supported by accessible transcripts of archival materials providing rich, structured content for training AI models and examining the ethical evolution of technology.

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While Environmental studies researchers can access historic weather logs, agricultural reports, and disaster accounts from colonial records providing unique datasets and context for analysing climate change and the human response over time.

And Public health and policy can be explored through medical registries and government correspondence found in colonial archives which now feed into epidemiological studies and impact of policy analysis.

When discoverability and accessibility are treated as foundational, rather than supplementary features, primary sources become usable by a far wider audience. This invites collaboration across disciplines and encourages students and faculty to pursue novel research questions previously deemed too difficult or niche due to technical or cognitive barriers.

A Human-Centred Approach to Digital Design

AM’s commitment to accessibility also extends to our internal operations. We’ve invested in specialised training for staff, not only within our technology teams but across editorial and user experience roles. Our UX designers shape interface improvements that support equitable access and intuitive design.

And we’ve also undertaken independent third-party accessibility audits to identify and prioritise high-impact

improvements. These include updates required under the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) guidelines, which many universities and colleges rely on when procuring digital resources.

Libraries as Partners in Access and Innovation

At AM, we see libraries not only as users of our resources but as partners in shaping a more inclusive scholarly landscape. Your feedback helps us develop more responsive platforms and your priorities help guide our investment in training and infrastructure. And your commitment to accessibility ensures that students, scholars, and the public can engage fully with the historical record drawn from archives around the world.

In today’s information-rich but attention-scarce world, access and discoverability go hand in hand. By prioritising accessibility, research libraries can unlock new possibilities for engagement and empower not just for history and other humanities majors, but researchers in engineering, policy, data science, and beyond.

Accessible digital archives aren’t just tools for inclusion; they’re engines of interdisciplinary innovation.

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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

What Powers Discoverability and Accessibility at the Heart of Your Library?

By Jennifer Wedge (Metadata and Discovery Manager, AM) <jenniferw@amdigital.co.uk>

As a metadata specialist I know that each time a student in your library searches a database or library catalogue, or even their favourite streaming service on the weekend, it’s metadata working hard behind the scenes. Well-structured metadata is essential to helping your users discover relevant sources and materials needed for assignments regardless of the subject they’re studying.

As a former academic librarian, the metadata I’ve relied on throughout my career can be as simple as a file creation date. Or can take the shape of detailed and structured records governed by international standards. Either way, it is vital for discoverability and ensures that wherever your students start their search, they can either find exactly what they’re looking for. Or even serendipitously discover something relevant they perhaps didn’t even know existed.

As an example, one student studying the Dust Bowl might find weather data, while another discovers novels or letters from the same period. All through shared metadata like “1930s” and “Great Plains.”

Supporting Discovery in the Library Environment

Metadata is a big part of the publication process at AM and my role to make materials as discoverable as possible to all users. The metadata we work with is drawn from source archives and supplemented with additional data created by the AM Editorial team. This facilitates more effective browsing and searching across each collection.

Providing as much data as possible behind the scenes is an increasingly important part of the process. Digital resources are even more frequently being used in teaching and research beyond humanities in support of developing critical skills.

Making these digitised historical materials as discoverable as possible to all researchers, regardless of topic, means ensuring metadata integrates smoothly into existing library systems.

A large part of that is the provision of records that comply with MARC 21, the standard format for bibliographic data used in academic libraries. Monographs and serials digitised within AM’s collections are catalogued using familiar MARC practices, but our collections go far beyond books and journals. AM’s primary source collections can include anything from promptbooks to personal correspondence, artwork to alarm clocks.

Translating all of that into MARC requires a blend of automation and human cataloguer oversight, taking metadata created by our Editorial team and converting it into structured MARC records using a tailored process for each collection.

Key Challenges in Cataloguing Primary Sources

Creating MARC records for primary source collections is a fascinating endeavour, though it comes with a unique set of challenges. One of the foremost issues is scale. Some of AM’s largest collections include tens of thousands of digitised items, making a certain level of automation not just helpful but essential to ensure efficiency and consistency.

Another major consideration is the diversity of material types within our collections. For example, our publication 1980s Culture and Society includes more than a dozen different document formats, ranging from zines, posters, and physical objects to correspondence and films. While we strive to tailor MARC records to the specific characteristics of each material type, many of the items we publish defy neat categorisation within existing MARC formats, requiring creative and flexible metadata solutions.

Assigning accurate and consistent subject metadata across such varied historical materials is also a complex task. Our Editorial team develops bespoke controlled vocabularies for each publication, drawing on feedback from contributing archives, expert editorial boards, and the communities represented in the collections. While this allows for nuanced and contextually rich metadata, mapping these terms to standardised library thesauri — particularly the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) — can feel reductive. Nonetheless, LCSH remains the most frequently requested subject vocabulary among librarians, and considerable effort has been made to incorporate it into many of our newer collections. In instances where LCSH integration is too labour-intensive, we are exploring the use of FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology), which offers better alignment with our in-house editorial metadata structures. Sensitive content poses another layer of complexity. For instance, the Amnesty International Archives includes materials related to human rights violations in the latter half of the twentieth century. Representing this content appropriately within MARC records requires careful attention, including the use of accurate subject headings and the thoughtful inclusion of content warnings to inform users without sensationalising the material

Finally, we aim to create metadata that is flexible enough to meet a wide range of institutional needs. This often means adopting multiple approaches within the same collection. For example, when revisiting the MARC records for Mass Observation Online, we encountered differing preferences among users — some valued granular, item-level records for individual documents, while others preferred higher-level records that grouped related materials. To accommodate both perspectives and support broad discoverability, we now offer both item-level and collection-level MARC records for download.

Despite these challenges, each collection offers the cataloguer its own quirks and joys to work on. From transliterating Russian film titles for Socialism on Film , to navigating established meeting names in The Olympic Movement, every collection brings a different form of puzzlesolving to the intellectual work of cataloguing.

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Upcoming Charleston Hub Event:

Friday, October 17, 2025

The Charleston Conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair

Friday, October 17, 9:00 am - 11:00 am

Micro-conference on Hall 4.0 Academic Stage

Balancing Efficiency and Accuracy in MARC Creation

AM publishes interdisciplinary collections regularly and we strive to release accompanying MARC records alongside them so that researchers can start discovering content right away. With collections containing hundreds or even thousands of items, creating these accurate and vital records is no small task.

Attention to detail is crucial. The placement of specific punctuation in a title statement may seem minor, but for a metadata librarian, that misplaced colon can signal wider issues within a record. Hamilton fans will know the importance of punctuation placement. After all, you can change the meaning with a comma in the middle of a phrase.

Previously, records were generated through a rigid mapping process that kept all formatting as it appeared on the platform. But today, workflows are customised for each collection with improved formatting and added enhancements like authority-controlled names and subject headings to optimise discoverability.

In AM’s The Nineteenth Century Stage collection, for example, authority control is used to disambiguate theatres with similar names and link records related to specific locations, helping trace productions and organisations more effectively.

So How Does All This Metadata Work Help Your Users Across Disciplines?

Humanities resources in your library are not just used by humanities students. From business to politics and human rights to marketing, students and researchers are using historical materials in different ways. Having the correct data sitting behind the scenes supporting discovery is the key to making interdisciplinary research easier whatever the research topic.

Metadata makes primary sources searchable, relatable, and analysable across disciplines, allowing for richer, more integrated research. It acts as a bridge between fields that might otherwise operate in silos and presents new opportunities for fascinating research and discovery.

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Archives in Science: Using Colonial Records to Map Today’s Geological Risks

By Clare Kellar (Engagement Manager, AM) <clarek@amdigital.co.uk>

Primary sources aren’t just reserved for the classrooms of history majors. Increasingly these materials are being used in cross-disciplinary areas including contemporary research having a direct impact on today’s public policy.

One example of this is the research field of Brian Atwater, U.S. Geological Survey and Affiliate Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington. He describes this research as “ trying to clarify earthquake and tsunami potential in the north-east Caribbean.” Working alongside colleagues from Canada, France, Germany, Puerto Rico, Pakistan, and the United States, he has been assessing the possible tsunami threat to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands from the Puerto Rico Trench.

To do this, he has been looking to use the history of the region as a natural warning system for coastal hazards.

Historical Investigation Alongside Scientific Research

As part of this important research, Professor Atwater accessed historical sources through AM’s Colonial Caribbean digital collection, delving into historical records for mentions of geological events in the region. Specifically, his research has focused on the potential impact of a pre-Columbian tsunami on Anegada in the British Virgin Islands. Highlighting the value of the historic materials, Professor Atwater described his work as “sleuthing a pre-Columbian tsunami with clues from Colonial Caribbean.”

Professor Atwater’s current work follows previous research he has undertaken both in Japan and on Indian Ocean shores following the disaster of December 2004. His approach to his research embodies the idea “that Earth history can overlap with human history, and it gets all the more interesting when it does,” both disciplines being interested in “the same issues of evidence, and why was something recorded.”

Professor Atwater’s recent work in this area bears out this interest in pursuing historical investigation alongside his scientific research.

There is a fascinating relationship between his study of the historical record in British Colonial Office documents of the nineteenth century, digitised in Colonial Caribbean, and his field research in Anegada, one of the British Virgin Islands, which, he discovered, has spectacular evidence for a catastrophic flood from the sea during the last centuries before Columbus.

“Access to the Colonial Office documents has helped figure out which boulders were moved by a Caribbean tsunami during the last centuries before Columbus.” — Professor Brian Atwater, University of Washington

The Value of Historical Sources

The value of the Colonial Office papers lies in helping to illuminate “ what transpired on Anegada that could affect the geological record of a pre-Columbian tsunami.” Professor Atwater’s intriguing findings have come to centre on limestone boulders and coral heads on the island that he believes to have been transported by a giant pre-Columbian wave, and then in some instances these have been used by islanders to form up to around 200 km of limestone walls.

Key documents to which Professor Atwater has had access through Colonial Caribbean include the work of an individual named Dr. John Stobo, whose estimates of land use on the island of Anegada include detailed tallies of acreage and productivity in 1815 and 1823. These offer clues on land modification and wall-building and are, according to Professor Atwater, “ the earliest things that we have that tell us that some large fraction of that island, Anegada, was devoted to pasture. That was very helpful to see that confirmed.”

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Professor Atwater has looked further into the records relating to the colourful character of Stobo, investigating both his credibility and the accuracy and reliability of his statistics, while seeking additional information on when the walls were built and by whom.

In using historical sources to form a picture of limestone wall-building on the island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Professor Atwater is seeking to establish what this can reveal about the potential distribution of the boulders by a tsunami hundreds of years earlier; at the heart of his investigation is “ the problem that we had of distinguishing between boulders moved by water and boulders moved by people.”

The Past Isn’t Just History

Professor Atwater’s research into this region, combining scientific analysis with his study of human activity as revealed in the written historical record, continues. For the important story of tsunami activity of 600 years ago and what this might suggest for the future, the intricate record-keeping of the obscure figure of John Stobo has, perhaps surprisingly, come to play important part.

The work of Professor Atwater is just one illustration of the importance of the historical record alongside modern interpretation and investigation and the value of primary sources across disciplines continues to increase.

Copyright The National

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St Christophers, Nevis and the Virgin Islands, 1823, Despatches, Offices and Individuals.

Archives, UK. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

An Anegada wall, copyright Brian Atwater. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

Curiosity and the Critical Role of Primary Sources in Building Career-Ready Graduates

By Martha Fogg (Managing Director, AM) <info@amdigital.co.uk>

What if the Most Valuable Skill in Tomorrow’s Job Market Isn’t Coding — But Curiosity?

As Managing Director of AM, my role is to direct strategy, analyse results to improve performance, and communicate our vision. To do that effectively, I need to listen, to reflect critically, to debate, and to persuade.

I’m 25 years into my career, but I can say with absolute confidence that the foundation for these leadership skills was developed during my experience of studying history and literature as an undergraduate and postgraduate.

I’m not alone. According to CNBC, one in three Fortune 500 CEOs holds a degree in the liberal arts or humanities. Their career paths were shaped not by rigid technical training, but by the ability to interpret nuanced information, think contextually, and ask the challenging questions. These are precisely the skills nurtured through engagement with primary sources.

Why Primary Sources Matter in a Career-Focused Academic Environment

Unlike secondary texts, primary sources don’t give you the answers. They present perspectives, contradictions, and gaps. Students must interrogate them. Why was this written? Who was the audience? What was the intention? This process isn’t just intellectually rigorous. It’s career training in disguise regardless of the subject being studied.

In an age where AI, automation, and big data dominate the professional landscape, the most future-proof graduates are those who can think critically about the use of these technologies.

The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2030, core skills such as analytical thinking, curiosity, and lifelong learning will be among the most in-demand globally.

Meeting Employer Expectations Through the Humanities

Meanwhile, studies from Business Insider and the Harvard Business Review consistently report that top employers prioritise communication, creativity, and critical thinking over narrow technical specialisation.

More and more leaders within industries such as Wall Street or Silicon Valley are advocating for the benefits of a humanities education.

In a recent interview Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered, advised teenagers with aspirations for business success to follow in his footsteps studying international relations and history, noting that “I learned to think at university. I’m going to go back to curiosity and empathy. Really, really understand the audience that you’re dealing with and anticipate those needs beforehand.”

This rising awareness of how humanities education can benefit career success and our economy and society as a whole, intersects powerfully with the educational mission of research libraries and of AM. By expanding access to and engagement with primary source materials, libraries contribute directly to institutional goals around workforce preparedness, civic engagement, and inclusive education.

Libraries as Drivers of Career-Ready Outcomes

Research libraries are not simply custodians of knowledge but can be the engines of multi-disciplinary collaboration, innovation, and student development. Digital primary source collections, represent a strategic investment with long-term impact.

Working with primary sources such as oral histories, visual records, and personal narratives promotes intellectual independence and creativity as students learn to weigh evidence, think empathetically, and question their assumptions. All key skills central to leadership and driving innovation in the workplace.

The use of historical materials enriches teaching across any discipline from English to engineering. They encourage experiential learning by immersing students in multi-faceted perspectives on how global humanity has changed and evolved, helping them to navigate real-world complexity. In an era where the speed of technological innovation and AI development pose urgent questions as to what being human really means, the value of a humanities education shines through.

Working with Historical Materials Provides the Skills to Answer the Questions of Tomorrow

In my work at AM, I’ve been privileged to encounter some genuinely inspirational use cases of primary sources that show how, with curiosity and imagination, they can be deployed to grapple with some of the most profound challenges and opportunities facing society.

As frameworks for use of AI become a necessity across all areas of human life, from medical care to education and the workforce , historical case studies exploring the impact of revolutionary technologies, from early industrialisation to electricity, can be used to debate their profound impact and if and how that impact can be managed ethically.

Historical data on climate, gathered from often unexpected sources such as ship’s logs or disaster narratives, support longitudinal analysis of human-environment interactions over the past few centuries, assisting with climate modelling.

Digitised primary sources are a rich tool for digital humanities development, where the merging of computational tools with historical documents can foster multi-disciplinary collaboration and creatively engage students from both STEM and humanities majors, in readiness for hybrid careers.

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Curiosity Isn’t a Luxury

Curiosity doesn’t just lead to better research. It leads to better decisions, better collaboration, and better futures.

In a constantly changing world, curiosity is the skill that helps graduates adapt, question, and lead. And primary sources in all their challenging, confusing authenticity and diversity are among our most powerful tools for cultivating it.

In an era of constant change, curiosity isn’t a luxury — it’s a leadership imperative. And primary sources are one of the most powerful tools we have to cultivate it in every graduate.

Libraries that centre these materials are not just preserving the past. They’re preparing students to shape the future.

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ATG Special Report — eBooks, Types of Licensing Models, and Access Attributes for Libraries

By Liliana Giusti Serra (Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Phone: +55 11 98107-1503) <lgiustiserra@gmail.com> http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6788-2376

This paper discusses the types and access attributes of eBook licensing models offered to libraries. Eight licensing models were identified and separated into perpetual, transient, or patron-oriented types based on their characteristics and applications in academic libraries. Four access attributes of licensing models determine whether content can be used concurrently. These attributes are not business models but are characteristics of the business models that influence the value of licensing. This study is qualitative and descriptive research analyzing the characteristics of eBook licensing based on literature collected from books, journals, sites, interviews, and providers’ documentation from 2011 to 2023. Besides identifying the most used licensing models, it discusses the difference between licensing models and their access attributes.

Keywords: licensing models; access attributes; licensed eBooks; e-lending; academic libraries; digital collection.

Introduction

An eBook (also called an “electronic book” or “digital book”) is a resource with text, images, or multimedia, published in digital form and accessed on computers, mobile devices, or dedicated reading devices. We can identify three milestones in the evolution of the eBook. The first one was in 1945 when Vannevar Bush published As we may think (Bush, 1945), presenting the idea of the Memex, a machine where anyone could store data and access it anytime and anywhere (Walters, 2014). The second milestone is the Dynabook, the first reading device, developed by Alan Kay in 1968 (Walters, 2014). The third is the Gutenberg Project,1 initiated by Michael Hart in 1971, which provides digital content (Zhang, 2018). Bush, Kay, and Hart made the trilogy of eBooks: the concept, the hardware, and the content. We can’t analyze eBooks without these three aspects.

By the late 1980s, CD-ROMs functioned as storage for texts and images. The 1990s brought important aspects to the eBook expansion: the Internet, other reading devices, and the PDF format (Gardiner & Musto, 2010). The Internet facilitates eBook storage, retrieval, and delivery.

About the Author

Liliana Giusti Serra — Postdoctoral Associate Researcher at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Ph.D. in Information Science at the University of Sao Paulo State (UNESP, Brazil). Master’s in Information Science at the University of Sao Paulo (USP, Brazil). Research interest in eBooks in libraries, licensing models, cataloging, RDA, IFLA LRM, and linked data.

The COVID-19 pandemic promoted increased usage of eBooks since printed copies in libraries had restricted physical access. eBooks were fundamental to keeping academic activities proceeding during lockdowns, allowing remote study and research (Wells & Sallenbach, 2023).

Licensed eBooks entail big changes to libraries. One of them is the mandatory use of providers’ platforms to access the content itself, besides the presence of embargos, restrictions on new releases, and price schemes (Zhang, 2018). Some library activities face changes with eBooks, such as acquisition, cataloging, collection management, reference, rights, etc. (Zhang, 2018), besides the variety of licensing models and content access possibilities.

The management of printed books is different from that of eBooks. With printed books, librarians choose desirable titles, order them with providers, wait for delivery, catalog them, make them available on an OPAC, and put them on shelves. The relationship with the provider is finished when the printed books are delivered. With eBooks, libraries can offer titles for consultation even before licensing, without waiting for physical delivery and with no demand for shelf space. The library depends on the provider until the end of the license agreement. According to Zhang (2018), three main aspects distinguish eBooks from printed books: 1) the dependency on proprietary reading platforms, 2) the appliance of licensing models, and 3) the conditions of licensing terms (which are identified in this paper as access attributes).

Currently, content producers and aggregators offer various licensing models to libraries. Some licensing models have dynamic characteristics, with titles going in and out of packages without librarians’ awareness. Other models engage patrons, with their choices directly affecting collection management.

This paper discusses eBook licensing models used by academic libraries, proposing an organization of types of models based on their characteristics, access attributes, and use possibilities. It also analyzes the challenges and opportunities of different licensing models.

Methodology

This is qualitative, descriptive, and exploratory research based on a literature review of books, papers, proceedings, and interviews. Magazines, blogs, newspapers, and sites were consulted as new licensing models may frequently occur. The literature covers from 2011 to 2023. With the evolution in licensing models during these years, some models have multiple names, and others have engendered yet other models.

The research considered providers operating in the US, Europe, and Brazil. As a result, not all models and access content options are available in all these locations. Academic libraries were the focus of this research, although the models are applicable to any library, and they are more frequently present in academic libraries.

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The words used to identify the selected literature were the names of the licensing models, such as Perpetual Acquisition, Subscription, Metered Access, Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA), DDA Access to Own (DDA-ATO), Short Term Loan (STL), Evidence-based Based Acquisition (EBA), and Cost Per Circulation (CPC). Other names used to identify licensing models were also searched, such as Perpetual Ownership, Acquisition by license number, Patron Driven Acquisition, Patron Driven Selection, Patron Driven Initiative, Patron Driven Purchasing, Pay-Per-View (PPV), Pick & Choose (P&C), Evidence-Based Selection (EBS), Usage-Driven Acquisition (UDA), Harper26, and Dynamic Content. The attribute characteristics investigated in this paper were “online,” “offline,” “non-concurrent,” and “concurrent access.”

eBooks and Libraries

Libraries license eBooks from specific suppliers who offer different licensing models. Even though it is possible to license items from virtual bookstores, this is not recommended for libraries because it attaches an institutional or personal account to a reading device to which items are downloaded (Walters, 2014). Of course, a library can have some devices and lend them to patrons, but when a patron borrows one device, all the eBooks stored in that particular equipment will be unavailable for other patrons since the eBooks are stored in one particular physical device and not in the catalog or a cloud.

Independent of the bookstore where the eBook was bought, in this situation, the access is for a single non-concurrent user without simultaneous use.

The libraries’ suppliers are: publishers – (responsible for the content), aggregators – (who represent the publishers), and distributors – (who sell the content of publishers and/ or aggregators). Aggregators have a reading platform, while distributors deliver eBooks access from publishers’ or aggregators’ platforms (Roncevic, 2013). Publishers can sell their titles directly to libraries if they have a platform. Otherwise, they can be represented by aggregators who usually have robust platforms that are reliable for publishers. Even if a publisher has their own platform, they may license their catalog with aggregators, enhancing the chances of selling their titles and, consequently, getting better financial returns.

Usually, eBooks are licensed in packages (Walters, 2013; Grigson, 2011). Of course, there is an option to buy titles individually, but that is not so interesting for providers who prefer to offer bulk sets. One aspect that concerns librarians is that the titles in the licensing packages may frequently change (Georgas, 2015), even during a single licensing period. Changes occur due to the contracts between authors and publishers and between publishers and aggregators. If an author or publisher decides to cancel or not renew a contract, the supplier must remove the content from its platform because it no longer has the authorization to distribute the title.

As an example, during an interview, an acquisition librarian who works at a private academic library in Washington, DC, reported that an aggregator removed the titles Learning to Save the Future, 2 by Alexander J. Means, and Family Firms, 3 by Brännback and Carsrud from its platform. She also reported that one to two titles, on average, are removed monthly from suppliers’ platforms. In another report, deletions occurred from the collection at the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY) in the calendar year 2013, corresponding to 3% of the package licensed, or 3,462 titles from only one supplier. (Georgas, 2015). With titles coming in and going out

of the platforms, libraries can lose control of collections, without autonomy to define which titles will be part of a collection, and for how long they will be available for consultation.

Licensing Models for Libraries

Licensing models have been tested and improved, and providers frequently release new models with different nomenclatures. Usually, providers propose the models, bringing other ways to do the licensing with security and compatible remuneration. Even though librarians may complain about providers’ attitudes towards profits, it must be remembered that they are enterprises that must be paid for their services. Also, providers are an important part of the scholarly publishing ecosystem and facilitate authors in providing a platform for new knowledge production. However, if providers establish unreasonable prices or conditions, it will be challenging for libraries to license eBooks with them. Libraries and providers need each other, and they must work together to find a balance.

It is possible to contract an eBook for a certain number of accesses instead of long-term licensing or invest in titles with seasonal or low-frequency use (Seave, 2013). The academic community renews itself constantly, with students coming and going, while patrons, faculty, and university staff usually request new subjects. It is possible to get total or partial access to the eBook content for one or only a few accesses or even for a short period, reducing the costs for titles that may not see significant use.

eBooks have two distinct access situations: the platform and the content. Patron validation is necessary to access the platform. This can be done by IP ranges, VPN connection, discovery services tools, and integrations between the library system and providers’ platforms. After being validated in the platform, patrons can access the eBook content. Content access is an attribute of licensing models, not a licensing model itself. I did not find papers discussing the differences between platform and content access or content being an attribute in the texts analyzed. This is one contribution of this research.

The access attributes are:

1. Online: requires the Internet to read (Walters, 2014). Does not allow downloads;

2. Offline: reading does not depend on the Internet after the patron downloaded the eBook;

3. Non-concurrent: usage is not simultaneous. Similar to a print book, if the book is on loan, other patrons must wait for the return to get access (Walters, 2014). Also known as One Copy, One User; Pretend It’s Print (PIP); and Single User Purchase Option (SUPO) (Chen, Kim & Montgomery, 2016; Doucette & Lewontin, 2012);

4. Concurrent: there are three possibilities:

• Multiple users: instead of having multiple licenses of the same eBook for simultaneous usage, the library contracts a number of concurrent accesses to an eBook as if they were copies of printed books (Walters, 2014). Also known as Multiple User Purchase Option (MUPO) (Chen, Kim & Montgomery, 2016; Doucette & Lewontin, 2012). If all the licenses are in use, a reserve (hold) line starts. The provider may allow online access if there is no license available for download;

• Number of patrons: the library and vendor define the number of patrons who can use the eBooks simultaneously. If more patrons access

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the platform, the price will increase. There is no discount if the accesses are lower. This attribute was only identified from an interview with a provider in Brazil4;

• Unlimited access: patrons can access the eBooks without restrictions. Its application is costly and may be impracticable for many institutions, and not all titles in a package are needed for simultaneous use (Chen, Kim & Montgomery, 2016). Depending on the provider, the cost of unlimited access can be the same as for one or three users.

Table 1 shows the access attributes.

titles instead of a package. It is also known as Perpetual Ownership and One-time Purchase. The library pays the licensing fee once, and the title can be used unlimited times, one user at a time. Some providers require an annual payment for the use of the platform. There is no reading without the platform, so the library does not have options if providers demand payment (Grigson, 2011). This payment is not a new license but a maintenance fee to keep the platform online and updated.

Publishers usually offer this model. Only the publisher establishes whether or not a title can be licensed on Perpetual Acquisition. Aggregators and distributors must follow publishers’ definitions without autonomy.

The attributes are part of the licensing models and influence the final price. There are many license models for eBooks for libraries. The second contribution of this paper is to organize the models based on their main characteristics. The types of models can be perpetual, transient, or patron-oriented. The perpetual type has only one license model: Perpetual acquisition. The transient models are Subscription and Metered Access. The patron-oriented models are Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA), Access to Own (ATO), Short Term Loan (STL), Evidence Based Acquisition (EBA), and Cost Per Circulation (CPC).

Although it is not simple to precisely date them, Figure 1 establishes a timeline of the models’ releases. The perpetual model is represented in red, the transients in green, and the patron-oriented in blue. It is curious to observe that DDA is a model created originally for print books and has evolved to accommodate digital resources. That justifies the presence of this model in the early years of licensing models. The patron-oriented models are mainly derived from DDA. In the literature consulted, no date or period was found for the start of the application of licensing models in the perpetual and subscription modalities. As a result of this, the timeline was defined as these models starting in the 1990s, with the increase in the supply of digital resources in libraries.

Perpetual Model

The perpetual model provides a feeling of comfort in emulating printed book acquisitions. After licensing, the eBook is part of the collection, with no explicit expiration date. The only perpetual model is Perpetual Acquisition.

Perpetual Acquisition

The model is familiar to librarians, picking selected

Although this model provides a feeling of security in keeping the title on the catalog, Perpetual Acquisition does not, in fact, protect libraries against contractual disruptions. If the provider no longer has the right to represent the title, it must be removed from its platform. Otherwise, the provider risks lawsuits. The removal of two George Orwell titles in 2009 (Animal Farm and 1984) illustrates this situation (Walters, 2014). Although Amazon is not an ordinary supplier for academic libraries, the example illustrates the removal of titles from a platform, and librarians need to be aware of this possibility.

Perpetual Acquisition is a model with high licensing prices and reports of costs above those of printed books (Grigson, 2011). Titles with high demand and recurrent use are suitable for licensing by this model, amortizing the costs according to the number of accesses made (Doucette & Lewontin, 2012). The investment in areas with constant updates, such as law, health, and technology, should be analyzed as challenging, considering the quick content changes.

For both the Perpetual Acquisition and Subscription models, no library starting date was found in the sources consulted. However, as they are familiar models for libraries, it is estimated that they have been offered since the beginning of the 1990s, when the option of adding digital books in libraries began.

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Table 1. Licensing Models Attributes

Figure 1. eBook Licensing Models Timeline

The name of this model is doubly wrong: the licensing is not forever, and it is not an acquisition. Licensing eBooks does not mean that the titles belong to the library. Digital content is generally contracted as software and not as a product or object, as it occurs with printed books. The library has a usage license but does not own it. The eBook threatens the First Sale doctrine, establishing that a book belongs to the person or institution who bought it, allowing lending, keeping it in the collection, or weeding.

Transient Models

Transient models are those in which licensing must be renewed periodically. Usually, transient models do not allow the library to choose specific titles; the provider curates the package offered. To keep access to the eBooks, the library needs to renew the license, but this does not imply that the collection will increase in size with each renewal.

Contracting transient models, the academic library reinvests in the same titles annually. If license renewal does not occur, the titles become unavailable and must be removed from or hidden in the library catalog. Subscription and Metered Access (Seave, 2013) are transient models.

Subscription

This model is similar to serials licensing. Libraries subscribe to databases with titles organized by area. While the subscription is under a contract, the eBooks are available. If the library did not renew the licensing, all the content would go away. A licensed title can also be removed from the database, as occurs with the Perpetual model. With Subscriptions, either the inclusion or removal of titles can happen during the licensing period. This situation has two sides: on the one hand, it provides growth and fast updates of the collection; on the other, it does not guarantee that a work or previous edition will be in the collection for the entire period contracted or whether it will be available for renewal (Georgas, 2015).

Subscriptions offer a wide variety of titles in a certain area. This fact does not mean that the database titles are high quality because eBooks of unknown or non-representative authors or publishers may be in the set. “Unfortunately, nearly all eBook collections (…) require libraries to pay for titles they don’t want to get the ones they do want” (Walters, 2013, p. 197). During an interview in 2024, another librarian from an academic library in the state of Illinois got a different perspective on that matter: the library is paying for the eBooks that were demanded and getting several others for free. If the library licenses only the eBooks requested by patrons, the amount can be more expensive than contracting the whole package. The licensing of packages is advantageous compared to individual licensing (Georgas, 2015). Disruptions between authors, publishers, and providers can represent a threat of instability for the collection.

Aggregators are the providers that usually offer this model, which is used extensively in academic, K12, and enterprise libraries (Roncevic, 2013).

Metered Access

Some providers license eBooks with a number of accesses available over an established period. This model is also known as Harper26. In 2011, the publisher HarperCollins offered licensing titles for libraries with only twenty-six accesses a year. After reaching this number or finishing the period, the eBook expires, and a new license is required (Walters, 2014). The publisher MacMillan added to the initiative, allowing a license of fifty-two accesses over up to two years (Georgas, 2015), followed later by

Penguin Random House (Enis, 2018). Aggregators must follow the publishers’ determination to use this model if they want to offer the titles for libraries. The eBook access is non-concurrent for this model.

The adoption of these quantities of accesses, which can be understood as a number of loans, was determined by the publishers’ belief that the maximum number of loans a printed book could bear would be 26 or 52 times in 1 or 2 years. According to the publishers, the book would not be in suitable condition for continued circulation after all of these loans, so the library should buy another copy to substitute the damaged one. This argument did not convince librarians; after all, the number of loans is a criterion for describing a book’s longevity, but not the only one. eBooks do not suffer physically during circulations, nor do they have handling.

The goal of the publishers in offering this model was to ensure ongoing commercial transactions between providers and libraries. The number of licenses cannot be identified as a way of accessing the content (i.e., an attribute) but as a licensing model where once a certain number of views within a predetermined period is reached, the license expires, and the title must be licensed again, initiating a new cycle of usage. This model usually doesn’t accept concurrent accesses.

Patron-oriented Models

Patron-oriented models provide flexibility. Providers can make all titles available for consulting on their platforms, and the licensing occurs when the eBook is accessed. Usually, only aggregators offer these models, identified as Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA), Short Term Loan (STL), DDA-Access to Own (DDA-ATO), and Cost Per Circulation (CPC). Publishers and aggregators can also offer evidence-based acquisition (EBA).

These models provide a lot of licensing agility, giving patrons quick access to titles. They demand the ongoing monitoring of usage metrics, patrons’ interests, and costs. The library determines which titles will be offered on this model according to the institution’s budget to avoid cost overruns. The accesses made can contribute to including titles in the collection, and the library will pay a percentage for each eBook accessed. One advantage here is that it enhances the content offered to patrons without licensing all the available titles from the provider.

The variety of oriented models and the diversity of possibilities of use suggest that they can be adequate for contracting eBooks. If well used, they may promote autonomy for patrons and growth in the titles offered, allowing the library to invest only in titles that interest patrons. On the other hand, if the usage is not monitored, these models can result in high costs. This situation occurs when an eBook in high demand in the library is licensed by PDA or STL and not by subscription or perpetual acquisition.

Providers can allow libraries to moderate patrons’ requests, concluding the loan or not. It is also possible to stipulate an amount of time (usually a few minutes) of reading before considering that the title was effectively consulted, minimizing the risk of paying for mistaken access or accidental clicks. This feature allows patrons to read short excerpts, consult summaries, or navigate in the eBook, confirming their interest in the title and requesting a digital loan.

Demand Driven Acquisition – DDA

Demand Driven Acquisition was not born with eBooks but found an opportunity to spread in this scenario. DDA consists of allowing patrons to use titles and, from the accesses made,

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determining whether a title will become part of the collection. Titles are available on the OPAC and can be accessed by patrons.

DDA was the first patron-oriented model used in libraries and has also been called Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA), Patron Driven Selection, Patron Driven Initiative, and Patron Driven Purchasing.

The use of DDA started from experience with two providers: NetLibrary in the United States in 1999 and E-book Library (EBL) in Australia and Europe in 2004 (Paulson, 2011). The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries tested NetLibrary, deciding that only effectively used titles would be licensed (Polanka & Delquie, 2011) after patrons’ access, with no moderation, arrangements, or restrictions to read the content (Paulson, 2011).

The licensing is partially paid, as the eBooks are accessed. This can vary from 5 to 15% (Swords, 2011) or from 10 to 15% (Albitz & Brennan, 2012) of the value of the title. The library and provider decide how many accesses a title can have. The title is licensed using another business model when this number is reached. This model guarantees that only eBooks relevant for patrons, based on the number of accesses received, are licensed.

Short Term Loan – STL

Short-Term Loan, or STL, is a variation of DDA (Polanka & Delquie, 2011) and was already known as Pay-Per-View (PPV), Pick & Choose (P&C), Limited-time purchase (Chen, Kim & Montgomery, 2016), or rent. The difference between DDA and STL is that it is unnecessary to restrict the number of accesses (or rents) done. While in DDA, the licensing is performed by another model after reaching a pre-established quantity, in STL, no limits are imposed, with partial payments occurring when a title is consulted.

When accessing eBooks using STL, the library will pay a partial license costing a percentage of the value of the eBook. These partial licensing costs are more expensive in STL than in DDA. While in DDA, the percentage oscillates from 5 to 15%, in STL, they vary from 10 to 30% (Grigson, 2011) or 15 to 25% (Sewell & Link, 2016). As the costs are higher, it is not advantageous to a library that patrons do many STLs. Other models such as perpetual acquisition, subscription, metered access, DDA, ATO, or EBA, can preserve the institution’s budget for high-demand titles. However, STL can be a good model for titles with low demand or seasonal use, when paying for part of the book is enough to support patrons’ interests, discarding expensive investments.

Some authors have compared STL to an interlibrary loan (ILL) (Sewell & Link, 2016; Woods & Ireland, 2008). ILL is a helpful service to increase collection management, and sometimes librarians put the requested titles in an acquisition list, planning to include them in the collection. A comparison between STL and ILL makes no sense. Instead of borrowing a book from another library, a request can be addressed directly to a provider. ILLs of printed books demand costs such as postage and risk of loss or damages to books. In addition, the patron needs to wait for delivery to access the book. On the contrary, eBooks can eliminate ILL by doing a rent. There is no reason to restrict a library from lending an eBook to another, as the provider will be paid for the access.

DDA Access To Own – DDA-ATO

ProQuest developed this model and began applying it in 2016. As the name indicates, DDA Access To Own (DDA-ATO) is a variation of DDA, with the difference that, after reaching the determined quantity of accesses, the title becomes part of

the collection, with no need to do another payment as occurs with traditional DDA.

While DDA and STL can result in unexpected charges by changing a rent to a perpetual or transient licensing, ATO allows that for each access made, the number of authorized accesses amortizes the value of the work. After that, the title has already been paid and is added to the collection without generating new charges. It works as if the value of the title was divided into equal parts, with as many sets as the number of accesses that can be done. If the quantity of access is not reached, the cost is not high; after all, the title has not been fully licensed. If all the defined accesses were made, the title has already demonstrated that it is of recurrent use and justifies being incorporated into the collection on a perpetual model. DDA-ATO provides lower costs than STL, which are not attractive either for libraries or suppliers (Proquest, 2015).

Evidence Based Acquisition – EBA

Evidence Based Acquisition allows the licensing of titles consulted by patrons after a period. This model, also known as Evidence-Based Selection (EBS) and Usage-Driven Acquisition (UDA), is a variation of DDA with some particularities.

The provider offers its titles, and the library is charged. This charge can be based on an average of circulation or access done, an estimated amount of access, or other measurements aligned between the provider and the library. An estimated number of accesses that patrons can do in a period, usually a year. At the end of the contract, librarians analyze the access statistics. Usually, the most accessed titles are licensed, but there is a margin to negotiate the selection of eBooks, providing autonomy to librarians to do the curation. When contracted by EBA, the library knows exactly how much it will spend. If the quantity of access surpasses the estimated number, the provider does not make additional charges. If the accesses surpass the amount contracted, the price does not change for the library (LevineClark, 2015). The challenge is to balance how many titles will be licensed at the end of every period.

Cost Per Circulation – CPC

Cost Per Circulation (CPC) is a model released by the provider Hoopla Digital and adopted by HarperCollins in 2017. The first name for this model was Dynamic Content, but the aggregator OverDrive has called it CPC (Rosenblatt, 2017).

With CPC, titles can be accessed simultaneously. The library pays the provider for each access done. The provider defines which titles will adopt the CPC licensing. It is an interesting model for providers, and libraries face disadvantages with its use (Rosenblatt, 2017).

CPC was offered for public libraries where the demand for fiction releases and best sellers is higher than in academic libraries. Limiting the number of licenses made by CPC is possible, establishing a maximum amount to spend per day. Doing that, the budget does not suffer unexpected shocks, yet the library meets the patrons’ demands. When a library rents an eBook under this model, the publisher pays the copyright to authors as if a sale had occurred.

The initiative to create a service identified as Netflix for Books is similar to this model. The model is good for authors since they will receive full copyright even if patrons accessed only a few pages of their works. On the other hand, it seems uninteresting for the eBook market since the publishers pay comparatively more royalties, assuming much more financial risk than other licensing models (Rosenblatt, 2017).

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Discussion

All licensing models, even Perpetual Acquisition, can suffer title changes or removal, threatening library collection management. The ordinary models’ attribute is non-concurrent, and providers could define whether or not the access attribute will be concurrent. Transient models can use the attributes One Copy, One User, Multiple Users (Georgas, 2015), Number of Users, and Unlimited. Some providers allow libraries to use a Multiple-user attribute, providing concurrent usage as the number of contracted accesses.

Prepayment for some accesses, observed with Metered Access, may be interesting for public libraries, which acquire fiction titles that, when released, draw big demand from patrons, whose interest diminishes with new launches. For academic libraries, it may be interesting for titles whose use will be temporary. By using this form of licensing, the library ensures that the title will be part of the collection for a period, dispensing long-term investments.

Normally, patron-oriented models do not impose the attribute One-Copy, One User; after all, it is beneficial for providers that several accesses be done, including concurrent use, representing an increase in the commercial transaction quantity. The access attributes of these models usually are the Number of Users or Unlimited.

This paper analyzed eight licensing models; for each model, there can be more than one attribute (Table 2).

Conclusions

Despite patrons’ demands and libraries’ desires, the inclusion of licensed eBooks is not yet completely established but rather is filled with instabilities and insecurities. The possibilities of contract and access are still undergoing experimentation. The truth is that the market is not established yet, and legal and financial weaknesses cause concerns.

There are several licensing models, and their attributes vary. Librarians need to identify the appropriate model and the access attributes according to the titles, patrons’ requests and the possibilities providers offer. The option to navigate from one model to another

is also complex. It should be analyzed from an economic perspective, seeking to contract the largest number of titles in line with the expectations of patrons and without burning the budget. Based on the number of accesses made, some titles must be contracted by Perpetual Acquisition or according to patrons’ requests, while other titles may require the license for a time or amount of allowed accesses.

The patron-oriented models break with paradigms about the usage of eBooks in libraries and collection development, providing dynamism in the selection and possibilities of partial payment according to what patrons are accessing.

The library needs to evaluate the access attributes on a case-by-case basis; after all, not all titles need concurrent use. Because the default attribute is One copy, One user, it is preferable for the library to determine which titles actually need

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Table 2. Types, Names, and Attributes of Licensing Models

simultaneous use instead of contracting unlimited access to all the titles from a supplier. Usage monitoring can consider usage statistics. If the eBook is DRM-free, data from digital loans and holds can also be analyzed. In this way, the library optimizes its resources, investing more in titles of constant use but without ruling out the offer of titles of seasonal or sporadic demand.

Licensing models can adopt one or more access attributes. The distinction between the model and its access attributes must be clear for librarians to choose the right attribute for each title. The attributes are not always a librarian’s choice, which also can occur with licensing models, as in the case of CPC, where the provider determines which title will use this model.

Libraries can adopt all models simultaneously, designating an amount to invest in each one. The inclusions, removals, or changes during the licensing process require updates for bibliographic and licensing records, a constant factor related to eBooks, especially when using transient and patron-oriented models. Academic libraries can use all models offered by providers, even CPC, whose focus is on public libraries. The type of the model and its attributes should weigh in the providers’ choice and titles, according to the observed demand.

This paper aimed to map the main licensing models and their access attributes for academic libraries, defining types of license models and distinguishing access as attributes of models, and not a model itself. Although advances in contracting possibilities are evident, models are still being established between providers and libraries, with many variations observed.

Acknowledgments: Jodi Schneider, Amy Fry.

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Levine-Clark, M. 2015. Evidence-based selection at the University of Denver. Against the Grain 27(5): 18-20. http:// www.against-the-grain.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ fea_levine-clark_v27-5.pdf

Paulson, K. 2011. The story of patron driven acquisition. In D. A. Swords (ed.), Patron-drive acquisitions: history and best practices, 63-78. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Polanka, S., and Delquié, E. 2011. Patron-driven business models: history, today’s landscape, and opportunities. In Patron driven acquisitions: history and best practices, 119-135. Berlin: De Gruyter.

ProQuest. 2015. Introducing “Access to Own.” https://pqstatic-content.proquest.com/collateral/media2/documents/ access-to-own-brochure.pdf

Roncevic, M. April 2013. eBook platforms for libraries. Library Technology Reports 49(3): 5-42. https://journals.ala.org/ index.php/ltr/article/view/4306/4954

Rosenblatt, B. July 3, 2017. Libraries: be careful what you wish for. Copyright and Technology. https://copyrightandtechnology. com/2017/07/03/libraries-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/

Seave, A. November 19, 2013. You’ll need a PhD to make sense of the pricing schemes publishers impose on libraries, Forbes blog http://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2013/11/19/ youll-need-a-phd-to-make-sense-of-the-pricing-schemespublishers-impose-on-libraries/

Sewell, B. B., and Link, F. E. 2016. Developing workflows for short-term loans of eBooks as an adjunct to ILL: part one. Technical Services Quarterly 33(3): 240-250. DOI: 10.1080/07317131.2016.1169779.

Swords, D. A. (ed.). 2011. Patron-driven acquisitions: history and best practices. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Walters, W. H. 2013. eBooks in academic libraries: challenges for acquisition and collection management. Portal: Libraries and the Academy 13(2): 187-211. https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/504595/pdf

Walters, W. H. 2014. eBooks in academic libraries: challenges for sharing and use. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 46(2): 85-95. DOI: 10.1177/0961000612470279.

Wells, D. & Sallenbach, A. 2023. Print books and eBooks: the new equilibrium in an academic library. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 72(2): 166-177. https://doi. org/10.1080/24750158.2023.2183560

Woods, B., and Ireland, M. 2008. eBook loans: an e-twist on a classic interlending service. Interlending & Document Supply 36(2): 105-115. DOI: 10.1108/02641610810878585.

Zhang, T. 2018. eBooks for academic libraries in the USA. In: 2018 5th International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services (ETTLIS), Noida, India: IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/ETTLIS.2018.8485208.

Endnotes

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/

2. Means, Alexander J. (2018). Learning to save the future: rethinking education and work in an era of digital capitalism. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781315450193.

3. Carsrud, Alan L. & Brännback, Malin (2012). Family firms in transition: case studies on the management of growth, decline, and transition. New York: Springer. ISBN 9781461460466.

4. Minha Biblioteca (https://www.minhabiblioteca.com.br).

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ATG Special Report — Confessions of a Weeding Librarian

By Ian D. Gordon (Teaching & Learning Librarian, Brock University Library) <igordon@brocku.ca>

and Alicia Zorzetto (Head, Collections Services, Brock University Library) <azorzetto@brocku.ca>

Abstract

This article focuses on the shared lived experiences of librarians serving in a comprehensive academic library refining sustainable deselection practices of print monographs. In light of declining print book circulation statistics, increasing costs of maintaining underutilized collections, and students’ general preference for digital or online resources; this article sheds light on the importance of weeding as a sensitive, essential, and time-tested call to action.

Let’s Be Honest.

No one likes weeding library print collections. It’s dirty, involves too many people, takes forever, and there’s always something else better to do — always!

The weeding of redundant, irrelevant, outdated, and superseded print monographs too often falls to the bottom of most academic librarians to do list — year after year. According to Busch, Nance and Teague “Weeding can be contentious and easily put off for years (276).” Ackerman and Deluca further emphasize this predicament when commenting, “Although weeding is generally regarded as beneficial and necessary, it is also widely acknowledged that weeding is a difficult activity for many librarians. The discussion around weeding characterizes deselection as a difficult, unpleasant, and fraught task for librarians that many put off or avoid out of distaste, fear, or feeling overwhelmed ... Given the tension between incentives to weed and the disinclination of librarians to do it, there is no shortage of literature within library science on the topic of weeding (88-89).”

We confess that it takes expertise, dedicated time, space, the right people, and patience to rightsize collections when weeding becomes every library’s strategic priority.

Even though academic libraries have been weeding for hundreds of years their librarians continue to debate many outstanding functional, philosophical and ethical issues. One of the most important issues that continues to be debated is who does the weeding, how much, and when. Ackerman and Deluca comment, “It is unclear, however, whether general deselection guidelines are representative of the practices of many academic librarians and what subject-specific considerations might be relevant to weeding efforts ... [as] Little research has been done on how librarians approach weeding for a particular academic subject area and how they apply general weeding plans and criteria to a specific subject (88).”

This article’s call to action is intended to help you find the courage to weed like a professional in line with strategic priorities despite the drama and angst of stakeholders of all stripes while receiving the accolades of colleagues secretly cheering you on from the sidelines.

What Does Literature Say?

The literature has been commenting on weeding print materials as long as there have been libraries. Most of it is dated as user preferences, the advent of increased resource sharing resources, digitization, and now the influence of artificial intelligence increasingly contribute different nuances to this discussion.

A literature “must read” includes Ian Chant’s commentary titled The Art of Weeding, subtitled “Everyone Likes to Talk About Buying New Titles but Letting Go of Older Ones is Essential to the Collection Management Cycle” is timeless. Megan Lowe’s Against the Grain article titled “It’s My Deselection Project, I’ll Cry if I Want To” is a good summary of practical weeding talking points. Lowe openly ponders librarians’ collective angst for weeding by committee that too often evokes the irritation of everyone involved. Lowe purposely comments that, “At the end of the day, we as librarians have certain obligations which we must fulfill, regardless of how the members of the communities we serve understand those obligations, including deselection (20).”

Another Against the Grain must read article has authors Cristina Caminita and Andrea Hebert lament on the hassle of a typical academic weeding project, “Weeding is a skill that requires practice for maintenance. Without the practice of regularly scheduled weeding, many librarians and staff members experience anxiety about decisions to withdraw items, and in some cases, entire collections ... Weeding physical books is not just a library business practice but an emotional exercise for library employees and users alike (37).”

Tim Held’s article titled “Curating, Not Weeding” is an excellent read on seeing weeding as an important part of collection development too many of us don’t pay enough attention to. Tim asserts that weeding is a crucial piece of every library’s strategic mission, priorities, and values. Tim shares descriptions of different weeding personalities that include the professor who is characterized by a need to follow a weeding formula precisely. Alternate personalities include the snob who believes that the library knows best; the randomizer who weeds too casually, and the saver who can’t part with anything. Tim further comments that, “None [of these personalities] are completely wrong; the ideal collection manager shows a combination of these traits in moderation (143).” Which personality are you?

Kathleen Stacey in a conference presentation titled “Justifying and Advocating for Weeding Your Collection” examines ways to change hearts and minds about the value of weeding. Check out her conference presentation slides and resources as part of this real-world testimonial. Time well wasted!

Collective tomes on weeding are always helpful (to a point). Stanley Slot’s Weeding Library Collections: Library Weeding

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Methods, Francisca Goldsmith’s Crash Course in Weeding Library Collections, Rebecca Vnuk’s The Weeding Handbook: A Shelf-byShelf Guide, Mary Miller and Suzanne Ward’s Rightsizing the Academic Library Collection (read the first “Background” chapter only if needed), Holly Hibner and Mary Kelly’s Making a Collection Count: A Holistic Approach to Library Collection Management (read Chapter 6 on Weeding) are all good reads. Peggy Johnson’s recent edition of Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management (5th edition, 2025) has a good overview of collection development policies, references, suggested readings … with a section titled “Managing Collections” (Chapter 6) dedicated to collection maintenance and weeding.

Check out OCLC’s Weeding and Deselection Bibliography and ALA’s Collection Maintenance and Weeding resources as time permits, but we confess that it is essential that you do your own homework. Most importantly, find someone at another institution who weeds like a professional, can’t stop talking about it, and is willing to share their love of collections and how weeding really works — from the ground up!

The literature by omission cries out that each library weeds differently, has different weeding strategies and policies, while at the same time requires profound commitments. Successful libraries also have a Head of Collections that leads by example directing a full complement of staff that are skilled, task-driven, and committed.

Don’t Wait for a Crisis to Weed Book Materials.

Protect the collection. If you’re not weeding all the time, then you’re open to criticism that the collection doesn’t matter. Develop a working plan for your open stacks book collection that has staff and/or librarians shelf read and weed the entire print collection every [blank] years (you fill in the blank). Stick to this plan. Bowers, Allison and Faltinek comment, “As print usage continues to shrink while the demand for student space grows, many academic libraries have felt the pressure to weed more aggressively (120).” An effective weeding working plan helps to develop collections that are integrated and uses all-the-while prioritizes print, electronic, and digital resources.

For most academic libraries, the days of academic libraries retaining hundreds of thousands of low-use and older print volumes are over. Colleagues commented that weeding can be contentious and evokes strong emotions, but when done on a day-to-day basis by an obsessive team of staff and librarians with a religious zeal ensures that the overall collection continues to be relevant (Busch, Nance and Teague).

Weeding is a Team Sport

If you don’t have a well-oiled, seasoned team of library experts supporting, then weeding just doesn’t work. Weeding takes dedicated staff to create lists, shelf check, process records, fix problems and mop up after thousands of decisions have been made. Tragically, for far too many academic libraries the road to effective weeding is littered with ineffective hands-off collection policies, disinterested staff, librarians that don’t want to do this work, disengaged leaders, and general indifference. These libraries are unknowingly waiting for a crisis to weed.

Eleonora Dubicki comments on several reasons why librarians avoid weeding including a, “... lack of time, lack of experience, and of course, the belief that a book may be needed sometime in the future (132).” Sustainable weeding involves clear expectations, team meetings, setting goals, and a weeding champion to lead the charge. This person ideally should be zealous, obsessive

September 2025

compulsive, passionate, fanatical, fierce, gung-ho, unshakeable, fervent yet responsible, willing to get dirty, be consistent, have a user focus, and a conscience to doing the right thing. You may find this person stuck deep in stacks for months and effectively stickhandling around the many philosophical and existential questions that encompass weeding in academic libraries.

Weeding as a team brings staff together, finds gaps in collections, discovers missing books, makes libraries more accessible, develops user focused current collections, creates physical space, and builds towards positive outcomes. Dubicki further comments that, “Weeding should be viewed as a means of continuously improving the quality of the collection, reflecting changes in the university’s academic curriculum and meeting patrons’ research needs (135).”

Go team go!

Weeding Philosophies! Who Needs Them?

Weeding, like updating collection development policies, can get stuck in the weeds for far too many good reasons. Developing policy, operationalizing staff, communicating effectively, and building trust with stakeholders takes time and energy. Yet, we confess that if weeding is systematic, conducted year-round, and is considered just as important as building well-used collections, then most rightsizing your collection problems and issues should be small and solvable.

One day when asked by a colleague, “What is your weeding philosophy?” Ian looked at this person straight in the eye and replied, “Don’t share this with anyone else, but my philosophy is that I go the stacks and discard every second book on the shelf. This strategy is simple, provides a 50% weeding metric and in hindsight no one really knows the difference as less than 3.5 percent of our print book collection circulates at any given time.” This staff member looked at me as if I was an alien, but this strategy in 2025 begs to ask all of us how much pain, time, and energy goes into a successful and sustainable weeding program in your library?

Christine Ferguson in an article titled “In Favor of Weeding” comments that, “... it is a fallacy to say that libraries weed an item simply because it is available online. A number of factors are weighed in the decision to discard an item, including criteria such as age, use statistics, condition of the item, and how widely owned the title is. But ultimately, it should boil down to the space that the item takes up on the shelf. In making decisions about what to weed, what to keep, and what to store, libraries are evaluating whether or not the space an item occupies is best used for retaining that particular item or for another purpose, which could include making room for newer, more-pertinent materials (222).” Christine goes on to say that, “Accommodating the demand for more user-oriented spaces requires that we examine our physical collections and the space they occupy critically. Libraries simply can no longer afford, both literally and figuratively, to devote so much of their physical space to storing monographs, reference works, and bound journals when the demands on space and for other user-oriented services is so high. Through judicious reduction of collections through established best practices, we can provide both the information resources our users require as well as dynamic spaces that adapt to the needs of the community ... Establishing and adhering to institutional best practices for weeding may help to avert, or at least mitigate, objections to the weeding or storage of library collections. When embarking on any weeding or storage project, it is not only beneficial but critical to be open

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and transparent in communication with library constituencies about the deselection process. This includes sharing the reasons for the weeding, the desired outcomes and goals, and offering community members and library users the opportunity for feedback and input (222-223).”

Yes, weeding philosophies are important, but deselecting and shaping collections (whether they be print or electronic) is simply putting together a good team while getting busy making good decisions in a timely and sustainable manner.

Weeding is Ruthless — Not for the Faint at Heart

For the rare librarian, weeding is a passion, therapeutic, satisfying, challenging and yet a process that comes with shifting books amongst dead flies, dust bunnies, reaching, bending, pushing book trucks, and lots of homework at the end of every weeding session.

Ian recently weeded in an academic library the open stacks Library of Congress RA Health Sciences collection that included: shelf reading 2,991 print books, 232 discards (31 linear feet), identifying 41 missing books, sadly — 7 books that were misshelved, 5 books that were not in the catalog, 3 books that needed mending, 3 books that were lost and were replaced by more current eBooks, 2 books that had the wrong spine call number, and 2 books that were eventually reclassified to a more appropriate space/place in the library. Whew! You can’t do this work using a list and not connecting with your collections.

Rebecca Vnuk comments on rightsizing your library using holistic approaches to shaping collections in a classic article. Rebecca didn’t mix words, “Rightsizing is not the ruthless culling of a library collection, nor is it just the tentative and apologetic removal of ‘safe’ material like old editions of textbooks and superseded reference works. Rightsizing is a strategic, thoughtful, balanced, and planned process whereby librarians shape the collection by taking into account factors such as disciplinary differences; the impact of electronic resources on study, teaching, and research; the local institution’s program of strengths; previous use based on circulation statistics; and the availability of backup regional print copies for resource-sharing (8).” Ian Chant in an article titled “The Art of Weeding” comes alongside this weeding philosophy when commenting that, “Getting rid of books can feel uncomfortable and look bad to community members, but careful weeding is key to the health of a collection ... Pulling that chaff from the collection can be time-consuming for librarians with no dearth of other projects needing their attention. Also, weeding — removing items from the collection — can seem counterintuitive. It’s by and large a thankless task as well (34).”

A major or even systematic weeding project requires spending time in the stacks. Sorry, using weeding lists and/or weeding by numbers, and relying on spreadsheets of circulation statistics from the safety of your office is just plain wrong — and lazy. Get dirty — go to the stacks as a team and touch each book triaging with gusto. Be sure to celebrate when you’ve accomplished certain milestones!

Weeding is therapeutic, satisfying, and cleansing … for many. Weeding takes considerable time to evaluate individual books and in some subject areas, e.g., humanities and social sciences, requires patience moving through what it may seem like miles and miles of old, dirty, and stinky books ... thinking that this is a never-ending thankless job. Shaping collections takes a bit of time to consider who else has this book, determining relevance to current and future scholarly programs, and the gut reaction

as to whether this book will ever circulate or be of use in your lifetime. Weeding handbooks are great starting points, but too often they fail to help with the sticky parts. The ultimate decision to deselect or discard print books can be difficult to almost unsettling to many librarians.

Weeding is labor intensive and not easy when responding to last-minute requests. Librarians who weed systematically sleep soundly every night knowing that they’ve made important contributions whether they’ll get recognized, a shiny medal, or be promoted, or at least acknowledged for these contributions.

McHale and others comment that, “The practice of weeding in libraries is a historically contentious topic both within the professional community and among the public. For many, the idea of deaccessioning books seems like a bad omen (cue the Orwellian trope), which leaves the practice of weeding on the list of overlooked and even unpleasant professional duties. It is an onerous task that often requires coordination between multiple functional units of an institution ... Weeding an academic library is a complicated practice that tends to arouse debate. Despite these contentions, weeding is necessary to deal with the changing needs for space in many libraries ... It concludes that weeding requires a balance between objective rules and professional judgment (92).”

Diane Young with public library perspective congers up the angst of weeding for those willing to get dirty and make a difference. Diane’s eight-step weeding program involves three confessions to, “Admit that you are emotionally attached to your collection” followed by, “Recognize that space is finite and overabundance can be a detractor” and then by, “Seek the help of experts to overcome your reluctance to judge.”

We confess that this is sound advice when getting into a weeding rhythm. Weeding is not glamorous; it involves checking and double checking, touching thousands of records, adjusting metadata, and touching sticky and smelly books on their way to a better home.

Weeding, when done right, has profound implications for library staff, collections, space, and users.

Now, get out there and weed with enthusiasm!

Weeding in Academic Libraries Requires Disciplinary Expertise

Take a deep breath!

This rant confesses the point that that not everyone has the gift, expertise, or subject knowledge to weed.

Alex McAllister and Allan Scherlen as part of a well-written article titled “Weeding with Wisdom: Tuning Deselection of Print Monographs in Book-Reliant Disciplines” comment that, “Weeding is important to all libraries, but smaller academic libraries, those facing space crunches, midsized university libraries that have working or ‘to be used’ collections and are not repositories like the big university libraries are really important need to make new space for new library functions, need to be seen as relevant as libraries are digital and are a future increasingly devoid of print resources … Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all quantitative criteria to reduce a print book collection across disciplines” ... the “Days are long gone when books are deselected to find them for book sales, donation to developing countries or recycled. No one else wants them, then why do we keep them? (77-78).” Others continue to lament the value of general weeding guidelines when making subjectspecific considerations. You are not alone.

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To weed effectively, staff and more appropriately librarians require relevant and current disciplinary expertise. Imagine finding yourself weeding in the classics section without a humanities background; weeding in biosciences without a STEM background; weeding in geography without a working knowledge of the varied social sciences. I could go on!

Weeding is important to all libraries. Yet, there is a limit to the availability of disciplinary expertise. There are handbooks, systems and data-driven methods of weeding, but McAllister and Scherlen comment that, “… surprisingly little guidance is proved to academic libraries of any size for determining a set of deselection criteria that are fair to each discipline’s particular use of and need for print books…” Weeding with book in hand is to be commended, “… but careful steps should be taken to determine whether a book should be saved or discarded based on the individual book’s value to the current and potential research needs of the faculty and students in that discipline (80, 84).”

Times Have Changed; Students’ Attitudes Are Important

Sheila Intner in an article titled “The Benefits of Weeded Books” (2017) comments that “Libraries are institutions that command finite space (3).” The Times They Are A-Changin (Bob Dylan song) — Whether you are a Millennial or Gen Zer, the need to retain on-site hundreds of thousands of low-use older print volumes in most academic libraries has already drawn to a close. When teaching undergraduates in large lecture halls, Ian often surveys the audience asking, “Raise your hand if you continue to love print books.” Realizing that we’ll always have print books for many different reasons some students continue to love the feel of a print book in hand, take advantage of flipping pages back and forth, mark up the columns, put sticky book markers on certain pages, use the index, browse the table of contents, like the sense of picking up and putting down a text. Yet, this doesn’t make sense for Gen Z students, faculty, and staff that can’t get enough of their smart phones and mobile devices.

Ian was working with a graduate student finding key sources for a research project when he commented that, “… this book is available in print format located on a certain floor, in our library, with the following call number.” This student hesitated, then asked, “Are you asking me to come on campus, into the library, find this book, and then sign it out?” The student responded further with, “I don’t think so. I’ll look for alternate digital resources.” Building working collections is important, acknowledging that student attitudes are changing, print books, especially those that are dated, are not being used, and that eBooks are painfully — the way forward.

Another Against the Grain article titled “Future Tense — Weeding: The Time Is Now” published way back in 2008 eloquently forecasted that “The underlying problem remains. There are too many books. There are too many copies of the same books. And there are too many unused books to justify the space they now occupy, and the time spent caring for them (Lugg and Fischer, 88).”

Take this quote to your next library directors’ meeting and wait for a reply.

Weeding Print Books is a Library Prerogative.

Faculty to a large part don’t care about weeding. Increasingly, this includes most faculty in the humanities and social sciences. Most faculty don’t want to go to the stacks, don’t want to work through Excel spreadsheets of potential discards, and may only want the library to retain specific out-of-print texts that are

related to a course or their research. Should the library have a sustainable library weeding policy — yes! Should the library respond to faculty requests and their expertise — yes! Should the library proceed with weeding at full speed as it is their role — yes!

We do so at our own peril.

The Rule of Rocks (and the Audacity to Weed)

Weeding can take you on a spiritual journey — enlightenment in one moment. Academic librarians know the stakes: weeding done poorly can spark drama, tension, even outrage. But done well, it’s not flashy — it’s steady, thoughtful work that quietly reshapes a collection for the better.

Alicia shares about the value of weeding as being steady, and thoughtful work: there’s a small child in this story. One with an unshakable habit of collecting. On each walk, she’d return home with bulging pockets. Gravel. Granite. The occasional mystery lump that looked vaguely radioactive. To her, each of these rocks were priceless. She couldn’t bear to part with a single one. So, a rule was born: One rock in, one rock out.

At first, this one rock strategy was met with resistance, eyerolls, and dramatic sighs. But over time, she started to choose more carefully. To let go. To elevate the collection by selecting only what truly matters. No more tripping hazards in the hallway. Just a curated display of meaning. The story of weeding may be that simple. My kid is directed that if they want a new toy, an older or less used toy has to go. It could be a new law of weeding.

This same principle might apply to managing collections in academic libraries: One item in, one item out.

If we wait for the Big Moment — an urgent request to clear shelves for renovations, or a surprise mandate from admin that we’ve lost space — we end up scrambling. We then find ourselves weeding hastily and under pressure. It’s not strategic. It’s stressful.

Peggy Johnson and Mary Beth Weber offer advice from the trenches “Managing or maintaining [or weeding] collections is equally important as developing them (237).”

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But when we treat weeding as a sustainable practice — guided by policy, embedded in culture — something shifts. The work becomes thoughtful. Defensible. Even joyful. We shape collections that reflect the present while honoring the best of the past.

Yes, as previously noted, it still takes time. Expertise. Patience. The right people. But it earns us something lasting: a library space that truly benefits its users — from researchers who can actually find what they need, to administrators who see evidence of working collections shaped by long-term thinking, to the student who discovers there’s a view of the lake from the library. Students deserve better, not having to study in libraries with moldy and old books no one ever uses.

Concluding Thoughts:

Will anyone ever care whether the library has this print book? Why should we care?

It may come down to realizing the outlandish time, effort, and money we use to house thousands upon thousands of print books that are not used. You must ask yourself, “Do we have the budget to maintain print books going forward?” when developing working or sustainable collections for our users.

Ginny Collier in an opinion piece titled “The Reluctant Weeder” comments on how our users may recoil on discarding books (we’ve already paid for), “To them, throwing away a library book is like throwing away money ... There’s a reason we use the term “weeding” to describe the act of discarding books. Gardeners do it to get rid of the weeds that hamper the growth of the healthy plants. Weeds take up a lot of valuable nutrients that the other plants (or books, if you’re following the analogy) could use to thrive. Weeding is love! Take care of your collection. So, are you ready? Go forth and weed! (51).”

There are print resources that need to be kept, but times are changing. A note to ask your library collections person whether they spend as much time building collections as they weed collections. The answer may surprise you, but equal time should be given to both activities. If not, they ask “why not?”

We confess that weeding, was, and never is, easy.

Acknowledgements

This article is the sole opinion of the authors. We acknowledge no conflicts of interest; no financial assistance or AI-assisted software was used through the research process. We recognize Against the Grain, Charleston Hub editorial team members and collaborators for their contributions along the way. Additionally, we are extremely grateful and indebted to Brock Library colleagues that are the true heroes of collections management and weeding projects.

Works Cited

Ackerman, Erin, and Lisa DeLuca. “Weed ’Em and Reap? Deselection of Political Science Books.” Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 44, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 88-95. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.acalib.2017.10.003

Bowers, Michelle, et al. “Into the Weeds: High-Volume Weeding at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.” Technical Services Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2, Apr. 2020, pp. 120-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/07317131.2020.1730053

Busch, Heidi, et al. “Collaborative Weeding of an Engineering Collection: Two Perspectives.” Collection Management, vol. 43, no. 4, Oct. 2018, pp. 276-82. https://doi.org/10.1080/0146267 9.2018.1479324

Caminita, Cristina, and Andrea Hebert. “The Weeding Planner: How a Research Library Weeded Approximately 2.76 Miles of Print Materials from the Shelves to Repurpose Library Space OR Much Ado About the New Normal.” Against the Grain, vol. 28, no. 4, Sept. 2016, pp. 34-37. https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.7457

Chant, Ian. “The Art of Weeding.” Library Journal, vol. 140, no. 11, June 2015, pp. 34-37. https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/ the-art-of-weeding-collection-management

Collier, Ginny. “The Reluctant Weeder.” Children & Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children, vol. 8, no. 2, Summer/Fall 2010, pp. 51-53.

Dubicki, Eleonora. “Weeding: Facing the Fears.” Collection Building , vol. 27, no. 4, Oct. 2008, pp. 132-35. https://doi. org/10.1108/01604950810913689

Ferguson, Christine L. “In Favor of Weeding.” Serials Review, vol. 41, no. 4, Oct. 2015, pp. 221-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/009 87913.2015.1103573

Goldsmith, Francisca. Crash Course in Weeding Library Collections. Libraries Unlimited, 2016.

Held, Tim. “Curating, Not Weeding.” Technical Services Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 2, Apr. 2018, pp. 133-43. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/07317131.2018.1422882

Hibner, Holly, and Mary Kelly. Making a Collection Count: A Holistic Approach to Library Collection Management. 3rd edition, Elsevier, CP/Chandos Publishing, 2023.

Intner, Sheila S. “The Benefits of Weeded Books.” Technicalities, vol. 37, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 1-8.

Johnson, Peggy, and Mary Beth Weber. Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. 5th edition, ALA, 2025.

Lowe, Megan. “It’s My Deselection Project, I’ll Cry If I Want To.” Against the Grain, vol. 28, no. 4, Sept. 2016, pp. 12-20. https:// doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.7452

Lugg, Rick, and Ruth Fischer. “Future Tense — Weeding: The Time Is Now.” Against the Grain, vol. 20, no. 4, Sept. 2008, pp. 87-88. https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176x.5171

McAllister, Alex D., and Allan Scherlen. “Weeding with Wisdom: Tuning Deselection of Print Monographs in Book-Reliant Disciplines.” Collection Management, vol. 42, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 76-91. https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2017.1299657

McHale, Christopher, et al. “Weeding without Walking: A Mediated Approach to List-Based Deselection.” Collection Management, vol. 42, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 92-108. https://doi.or g/10.1080/01462679.2017.1318729

Miller, Mary E., and Suzanne M. Ward. Rightsizing the Academic Library Collection. 2nd edition, ALA, 2021.

Slote, Stanley James. Weeding Library Collections: Library Weeding Methods. 4th edition, Libraries Unlimited, 1997.

Stacey, Kathleen. Justifying and Advocating for Weeding Your Collection. 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10524/66767

Stacey, Kathleen. Weed Smart ppt slide presentation. https://www.ala.org/pla/education/onlinelearning/ webinars/archive/weedingsmart

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/weedsmart/53252712

Stacey, Kathleen. Justifying and Advocating for Weeding your Collection, Kathleen Stacey, ppt presentation. https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/ bitstreams/15cc42fb-dfc4-44a6-a287-21a21c881141/ content

Vnuk, Rebecca. The Weeding Handbook: A Shelf-by-Shelf Guide 2nd edition, ALA, 2022.

Young, Diane J. “Get to Effective Weeding.” Library Journal, vol. 134, no. 19, Nov. 2009, pp. 36.

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Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews

Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) <cseeman@umich.edu> Visit him at https://www.squirreldude.com/

Column Editor’s Note: There are many instances in my life when I think about driving somewhere — but the distance is simply too far. However, there is not a universal way that I apply value and ROI (Return on Investment) with anytime I get into the car. And when squirrels are involved, my willingness to drive further increases.

Such as my dilemma back in June when I sat in a hotel room in Louisville, Kentucky. I was there with Pam for the National Barbie Doll Collectors Convention in that very hot place on the Ohio River at the end of June. The thought racing around my head was if I should or should not drive the almost two hours to Bowling Green, Kentucky to try to find one of their famous white squirrels. Of course, that would be almost two hours each way … and there was no guarantee that I would see one. But I decided to give it a shot. Burn some gas and hopefully end up seeing one of these little ones.

The act of doing this — driving far to see squirrels — is something I have coined as “Squirrel Tourism.” Just this year (and featured in the last column), was one of the best trips for everything — my conference in Vienna (Wien). There, I was able to see fantastic Eurasian Red Squirrels in the Prater (the great public park in Vienna). I have also been successful in seeing albino squirrels in Olney, Illinois, and Delmarva Fox Squirrels at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland. However, I was not able to see Sherman’s Fox Squirrels in Florida — so that stays on my wish list.

To that end, sometimes you travel and see what you are looking for. Sometimes you don’t. Sorta the ways things work, especially if you are looking for wildlife or nature. These are not zoos after all.

So in this instance, my efforts were rewarded. That is not always the case. It is not true when you are trying to photograph birds or wildlife. And it is certainly not true when you are conducting research. With research, you start with a thought or an idea, and start building a body of knowledge to explore your question. Sometimes the material you pull together is easy to find. Others, less easy. And sometimes you end up finding nothing at all.

One of the weird dynamics of working today as a librarian is that people are always looking for the shortcut. Maybe that has always been the case, but with AI, the ability to find or create content is incredibly easy. Or so we would believe. Kinda a big leap from leucistic squirrels — but please hang on a few more paragraphs.

I am trying to read up on the history of postcards for a presentation I would like to give. I have been a collector of postcards for a while and it is fascinating to having lived through a real change in the use and the market for these souvenirs. As I am traveling, I wanted to have a book on my Kindle on the history of postcards. Having searched their catalog, I discovered a book that looked sorta good. But then something jumped out at me. The book was co-authored by two people. One I heard of and the other I had not. The name I had not heard of was Barrett Williams. The name I had heard of was ChatGPT. So apparently, they wrote a book together. I am sure that the work was divided evenly between the two. Well maybe not. But there is a school of thought that you only need a good prompt to get what you are hoping for.

On the morning on June 27th, 2025, I got up early and drove from darkness through sunrise as I arrived in Bowling Green. I found a place to park on campus and started walking about. And walking. And walking. In fact, I was there about an hour before I laid eyes on something rustling in a tree that was white as the driven snow. I followed that little one for nearly 30 minutes, trying to be calm and still so I could get closer. The white squirrels are kinda famous at Bowling Green and the campus of Western Kentucky University. These are not albino squirrels, but they are leucistic. A leucistic squirrel has a condition that leads to a partial loss of pigmentation. The distinction between leucistic squirrels and albino squirrels is typically in the eyes. If they have dark eyes and are white or mostly white or off-white, they have leucism.

In checking the Amazon catalog — there are nearly 7,000 books that list ChatGPT as a co-author. Barrett Williams is responsible for nearly half of them. Lord only knows how many books have a great deal of content from AI systems like ChatGPT without the honesty to list it as a co-author.

I did not buy the book. I’ll keep looking.

Was the difficulty in telling what has been careful prepared and what has been the result of someone typing a prompt into an AI bot? Having some reviews would hopefully be useful. Especially now, with library budgets heading south (especially in the United States), making good purchases is so important. And with that, I am happy to share a few reviews that have been carefully evaluated by librarians for librarians!

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Photo Caption: My summer of squirrel tourism takes me to Bowling Green, Kentucky where I saw this white squirrel on the campus of Western Kentucky University on June 27, 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: Kirsten Dees (University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville), Jennifer Matthews (Dartmouth College), Rose Melonis (Creighton University), and my colleague Mary Catherine Moeller (Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). 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.

Happy reading and be nutty! — Corey

Cortada, James. Today’s Facts: Understanding The Current Evolution Of Information. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2025. 9798881804732, 243 pages. $95.00

Reviewed by Mary Catherine Moeller (Associate Librarian, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) <mcmoelle@umich.edu>

As information professionals, we strive to help our patrons navigate the overwhelming sea of data available in today’s world. In this third and final volume in James Cortada’s series, Today’s Facts: Understanding the Current Evolution of Information aims to deepen readers’ understanding — not only of what information is or how it has evolved into the powerful force it is today, but also of the critical role it plays in shaping society.

James Cortada, a Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering and University Libraries, brings decades of experience to this work. Before entering academia, he spent

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.)

38 years at IBM in roles ranging from sales to management consulting. Because of his prior experience and scholarly work he is well positioned to discuss both the technological and theoretical aspects of this topic. He has authored numerous publications on information history, including two prior books in this series. In Today’s Facts, Cortada explores how information is created, distributed, manipulated, and consumed in modern society — and the increasingly complex challenge of determining what qualifies as a “fact.”

Throughout the book, Cortada draws on real-world examples to illustrate how information functions today. A particularly compelling case is the COVID-19 pandemic, which he describes as a true “information crisis.” As facts rapidly evolved, governments, health organizations, the media, and social media platforms struggled to keep pace, often presenting contradictory or outdated information. This example highlights the vulnerabilities in our information infrastructure and serves as a clear illustration of how misinformation can proliferate in the digital age. Rather than remaining purely theoretical, Cortada effectively grounds his analysis in lived experience.

The chapter on artificial intelligence (AI) is especially relevant, given how frequently AI comes up in our day-today reference work. Cortada examines how AI technologies are increasingly involved in the creation and distribution of information, with algorithms now acting — intentionally or not — as gatekeepers of what is presented as “fact.” He underscores a key point: AI systems are only as reliable as the data they are trained on. Cortada navigates this topic with balance, acknowledging both the potential and the pitfalls of AI without veering into alarmism.

Today’s Facts offers a thoughtful and timely exploration of modern information. It helps readers make sense of the complex ecosystem we now operate in and sheds light on the challenges of managing, interpreting, and validating information today. The book will be of interest to readers across many disciplines, particularly those working in information science, communication, media studies, and technology.

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

Rich, Mari (Editor). Social Media & Your Mental Health.

Amenia, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2024. 979-8-89179-0698, 536 pages. $165

Reviewed by Rose Melonis (Social Sciences Librarian, Creighton University) <rosemelonis@creighton.edu>

Social Media & Your Mental Health is a comprehensive reference material for up-to-date information on social media and its correlation with mental health. Edited by Mari Rich, contributors include independent scholars and academic affiliates. The book is organized into broad topic areas, and each subject is further broken down into narrower topics, with an introduction and short summary. References to dig deeper are included, which include a mix of books, magazine publications, and academic journal articles.

Subjects include basic terms and concepts relating to social media, the different social media platforms, physical and mental wellness, and addiction. A critical section on healthy and unhealthy relationships and its relation to social media is included. The text also includes information on safety and

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privacy, with “special interests” sections for seniors, parents and kids. Lastly, a few of the positive aspects of social media round out the entries provided.

This reference material is complete with a glossary, extensive bibliography, common abbreviations, slang terms, helpful websites, and an in-depth (and fascinating!) mediagraphy. I especially liked the latter, as I don’t see that inclusion often and I think many visual or oral learners could benefit from it. My only quibble regarding the collection of website links would be to include a brief description of what each site is, and/or why it would be helpful for the reader.

The information provided is useful for junior high, high school, and introductory-level college courses on social media, technology, and mental health. It can be helpful to have in the reference collection of a public library. It’s easy to read and each entry offers enough information to begin the research process. I can see many school assignments benefiting from the information presented. While this would not be the only text to have on this subject matter, it has enough to get started and familiarize a reader with the topics.

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

Simmons, John E. Things Great and Small: Collection Management Policies. 3rd Ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024. 9781538183786. $50.00

Reviewed by Jennifer Matthews (Head of Acquisitions and Collection Development, Dartmouth College) <jennifer.k.matthews@dartmouth.edu>

Collection management policies can be one of those things that curators, archivists and librarians take for granted. A well written one protects the library and informs the public about the purpose of the collection and the “why’s” for what the library contains. An ill-worded policy opens the door to all sorts of challenges, inquiry, and issues. In Things Great and Small: Collection Management Policies by John Simmons, the creation of collection management policies for museums is front and center. As Simmons states, “good collection management policies make the care and management of the collection easier and more efficient, not more complicated” (p. 20).

As this is the third edition of this work, there are several updates to the text. Simmons has expanded the areas discussing digital objects, intellectual property rights, deaccessioning, decolonization, standards and best practices, collection storage environment parameters, managing off-site storage facilities, health and safety laws and regulations, risk management, and sustainable collection management practices. Throughout the book, Simmons has provided extensive references and documentation behind how to create comprehensive collection management policies for museums.

To help those in the field, Simmons has created five fictional museums that are used throughout the book to demonstrate how a collection management policy can be applied in each environment. These museums include a local historical society, an independent non-profit, a university museum, a medium sized free-standing non-profit, and a government agency museum. The inclusion of these five museums allows for a multitude of readers to see their own environment in the application of policy.

Topics are handled by discussion with references and terms defined. Inserts are supplied with anecdotal information as additional information to help supply the reader with further background on how policy can help, or the lack of policy can hinder. Appendices have been supplied which cover the glossary, the American Alliance of Museums Code of Ethics & Professional Practices for Collection Management, and laws and legislation for collection management at the time of publication. Finally, there is an epilogue containing an example of a realworld problem Simmons provides to his students as a policy conundrum to consider.

Simmons has curated a useful text for those in the museum field, but the work is also useful for those who work with collections generally. While the examples and reasons are specific to museums, the practice of developing good collection policy is universal and others could learn and benefit from his methods and reasons. Certainly, anyone who is in the midst of a collection policy update should review this work for ideas and suggestions on how to approach their own documentation.

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.)

Spires, Kendal, ed. Young Adult Fiction Core Collection. Ipswich, MA: Grey House Publishing, 2023. 9781637005118, 986 pages. $255.00

Reviewed by Kirsten Dees (Acquisitions Receiving Specialist, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville)

<kd046@uark.edu>

Public and school librarians face the ongoing challenge of building comprehensive and engaging collections for young adult readers. With limited time, staffing shortages, and the constant pressure to stay current with popular trends, it can be difficult to keep up — let alone preview every title that enters the collection. For this reason, a resource like Young Adult Fiction Core Collection is invaluable. It provides an up-to-date, curated list of high-quality titles, allowing librarians to make confident, informed choices quickly.

This volume is designed to support libraries of all types in developing a core young adult fiction collection. It includes a thoughtfully curated mix of classic and contemporary works, with a strong emphasis on equity, diversity, and inclusion. With each new edition, outdated titles are removed, and newer, relevant ones are added. The 2023 edition features over 3,200 novels and short story collections, 770 of which are marked as “Essential” titles — key recommendations for any young adult collection.

The genres include science fiction, fantasy, realistic fiction, mystery, and mythology. One notable shortcoming is the exclusion of graphic novels, which are an important and growing part of YA literature. However, the guide does include select adult and short story titles that are appropriate for the young adult audience. Each entry includes critical bibliographic details such as awards, series information, publisher, ISBN, page count, and publication date. Essential titles are denoted with a star, making it easy to identify priority acquisitions, especially for libraries working with limited budgets or shelf space.

Beyond collection development, this resource serves several other purposes. It can be used to verify bibliographic continued on page 43

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Booklover — Fishing

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

Fish tales. Aficionados of this water sport have them aplenty. However, when recounting whether fish were caught or not during an outing, my husband always states that the name of the sport is “Fishing” not “Catching,” but the lesson delivered in Heinrich Böll’s The Fishing Lesson might be one that should catch on. This little gem, first published — Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral — in 1963, is not what one expects on any level. The version I checked out of the library is a 2018 adaption by Bernard Friot, creatively illustrated by Emile Bravo and published by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. The Young Readers should be the clue here — a hardbound comic book with a lesson, just like any comic book that teaches a young one a lesson.

Heinrich Böll was born in 1917 to a Catholic, pacifist family residing in Cologne, Germany. The Nazi takeover of Cologne, the resulting destruction from bombing raids, the dynamic of income differences of the citizens, and the abuse of power created the environment that heavily influenced his writing. “Trümmerliteratur” — the literature of rubble — was a descriptor often used in reference to his wordcraft even though his simplistic approach made him a popular author. So maybe it was a bit surprising when he was awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his writing which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal

of German literature.” The “sensitive skill in characterization” is captured by both Böll’s words and Bravo’s illustrations in The Fishing Lesson.

One biographical sketch recounts that Böll’s books found success in Eastern Europe for his portrayal of the dark side of capitalism. Interesting, as one might read the lesson of the dark side of capitalism into this illustrated tale. It begins: “In a small harbor on the coast, (insert colorfully illustrated comic cell) a man in shabby clothes dozes in his tiny fishing boat.” A tourist strolls by, snaps his pictures thus awakening the fisherman. A conversation ensues about how lovely the day is, so why isn’t the fisherman out catching fish — the tourist asks? The opinionated tourist designs a whole plan for catching more fish, making more money and thus having time to relax and enjoy life. Insert an illustrated comic cell pause then the fisherman’s reply to the plan: “But that’s exactly what I was doing just now. I was relaxing in my boat taking a nap until you woke me up with the annoying click click click of your camera!” Let your imagination see the wordless illustrated ending that concludes this lesson.

Reader’s Roundup continued from page 42

information, plan classroom programming, and facilitate book discussions. Subject classifications further aid in aligning titles with curriculum needs. The guide also includes advice on collection maintenance, helping librarians assess when to update, replace, or remove materials. Additionally, it can be a valuable teaching tool in college literature or library science classes, helping students learn how to build reading lists, create bibliographies, and evaluate collections. It also functions well as a readers’ advisory tool, offering genre- and subject-based recommendations made by librarians for librarians.

While there is no single author credited for this work, this is a compilation created by professionals in the field — that fact adds to its credibility. Rather than reflecting one person’s opinion, the recommendations come from a broad network of librarians, making the guide more representative of diverse professional perspectives.

One concern is how quickly this resource might become outdated, given the rapid pace of young adult publishing and the fast-moving trends driven by social media and popular culture. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Not to mention fast-moving trends in Washington, D. C. for librarians in the United States]. Today’s

teens often look for books they’ve just seen recommended online, and staying relevant is a continual challenge. Nevertheless, as a foundation for collection development, this guide remains highly useful.

This book would be particularly valuable for librarians creating a new YA collection, updating an existing one, or building thematic booklists. Personally, I wish we had this resource when I was purchasing books using grant funding — it would have made the process more efficient and informed.

In summary, Young Adult Fiction Core Collection is a highly recommended addition to any library’s professional collection. It is easy to navigate, comprehensive, and full of practical, ready-to-use information. Whether selecting titles, verifying awards, or creating advisory tools, this guide delivers exactly what librarians need at their fingertips. I hope to see this book on our reference shelf soon — and I’d love to be able to get up from my desk and pull it off the shelf whenever I need it.

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

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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, Esq. (Director of Copyright & Information Policy, Harvard Library) <kyle_courtney@harvard.edu>

QUESTIONS FROM A LIBRARIAN TRYING TO KEEP UP WITH AI DEVELOPMENTS: I keep hearing about “training” AI models on copyrighted books. What does that actually mean? How does this kind of training work, and why does it require so much data?

ANSWER : Great question, and an important one for understanding the court decisions that are interpreting these very questions. When we say an AI system is “trained” on books or other data, we’re using a metaphor from human learning, but the process is quite technical.

AI systems, especially those known as machine learning models, learn patterns by analyzing vast amounts of data. That data is called training data. For a language model like GPT-3 or Claude, the training data might include books, articles, websites, and other text-based sources. The AI doesn’t memorize these texts in a traditional sense, it statistically analyzes them to understand patterns in grammar, sentence structure, tone, vocabulary, and more.

Here’s a simple analogy: imagine you’re teaching a child what a cat is. You’d show them thousands of pictures of cats, and over time they’d start to notice patterns, fur, whiskers, ears, shape. They’d learn to distinguish a cat from a dog, or a raccoon, or a couch. That’s supervised learning in image recognition.

Now translate that idea to language. A large language model (LLM) doesn’t view images, it ingests text. To understand and generate coherent, human-like language, it needs to read millions (often billions) of words. It analyzes how words are used in context: how a question is usually followed by an answer, how characters in a novel speak differently than narrators, or how academic writing differs from casual conversation. It builds statistical associations, not meaning in the way humans do.

And as we have learned, the quality of the training data is crucial. Just like a person reading Shakespeare, science textbooks, and Wikipedia will speak and write differently than someone who only reads tweets, the AI’s abilities are shaped by the content for which it has been exposed. If the goal is to generate sophisticated responses or summarize complex arguments, the model needs exposure to rich, structured, and coherent text, like professionally written sources.

That’s why copyrighted books, in addition to all the material openly available on the web, are part of this AI training conversation. They represent high-quality language use. They learn from them to perform tasks like summarizing, answering questions, or even writing code.

The critical legal question is whether this kind of learning, internal, statistical, and non-expressive, constitutes infringement.

I also keep seeing news about lawsuits where authors are suing AI companies for using books to “train” their models. What’s really at stake in these cases? Are AI developers violating copyright?

ANSWER : That’s the essential question at the heart of two major recent cases: Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta Platforms. In both lawsuits, authors alleged that AI companies copied their books, entire texts, in order to train large language models (LLMs) like Claude and LLaMA. They argued that this unlicensed ingestion violated copyright law. But here’s where things get interesting: both federal judges agreed that there was no evidence the AI models produced anything that resembled the original books. And that absence shaped how they applied the law.

These cases don’t just raise questions about specific AI uses; they touch the very foundations of copyright and fair use. Do copyright holders have the power to charge a toll any time a work is used in a new, transformative way, even when it doesn’t replace or compete with the original? Or does fair use still serve its core function: as a legal shield that protects socially valuable uses like learning, research, and technological innovation?

The judges in these two cases came to different conclusions. One leaned toward a robust, doctrinally sound view of fair use that protects transformative, non-substitutive learning. The other warned against allowing fair use to swallow the rights of authors, but based that warning on speculative harm, rather than evidence of actual infringement. The tension between these two opinions is shaping the future of copyright, and it matters deeply for libraries.

Both Bartz and Kadrey deal with the fair use doctrine. How did the courts apply the four-factor test, and why did they come out differently?

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ANSWER: The fair use doctrine is codified in Section 107 of the Copyright Act and requires courts to weigh four factors: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect of the use on the potential market.

While both cases used the same four-part test, the judges differed in how they interpreted these factors, especially the fourth.

Let’s start with Bartz v. Anthropic, where Judge William Alsup found strongly in favor of fair use, at least on the pleadings. He emphasized that the AI model, Claude, didn’t replicate or generate infringing outputs. “Claude created no exact copy, nor any substantial knock-off,” he wrote. He analogized the model’s training process to how a person reads books to learn how to write, not to plagiarize. That’s a key point: fair use often protects “non-expressive” uses, like analysis, indexing, or learning, when they don’t result in competing outputs.

Judge Alsup leaned heavily on earlier fair use cases like Google Books, HathiTrust, and AV v. iParadigms. In all of those, courts upheld copying entire works for transformative purposes like search indexing, plagiarism detection, or accessibility. Alsup saw Claude’s training in that lineage: the use of full texts was necessary to achieve the model’s new, non-competing function.

In contrast, Kadrey v. Meta was decided by Judge Vince Chhabria, who took a more skeptical view. He agreed that there was no infringing output and accepted that training LLMs can be transformative. But he expressed concern that AI-generated content might in the future compete with human-authored works, even if it doesn’t copy them. This led him to question whether such uses might indirectly harm the market for authors’ books.

So, while both judges acknowledged the use was transformative, Chhabria gave more weight to potential future harm, a shift that risks turning fair use from a flexible balancing test into a permission regime based on hypothetical threats.

What does it mean that both courts said there were “no infringing outputs”? Doesn’t copying the books in full count as infringement?

ANSWER: That’s a subtle but crucial point. Under copyright law, infringement requires more than just internal copying. The courts distinguish between non-public uses (like internal analysis or indexing) and public distribution or derivative works. If the AI systems had generated outputs that closely mirrored or quoted the original books, that could have been clear infringement. But both judges emphasized that in the facts they examined, that didn’t happen.

In Bartz, Judge Alsup noted that Claude never reproduced the authors’ language, not even approximate summaries or paraphrases. He likened the model’s training to human learning: reading, absorbing, and synthesizing ideas to create something new. In legal terms, that’s a transformative use, one that alters the purpose and function of the original.

In Kadrey, even when plaintiffs used adversarial prompts designed to “jailbreak” the model, the most they got was 50 words of overlapping language, and even that wasn’t consistent. Judge Chhabria wrote that the plaintiffs “barely give this issue lip service,” and noted they failed to show any outputs that would harm the market for their books.

This absence of infringing outputs was decisive. Courts can’t rule against a defendant just because a plaintiff fears what might happen someday. As the Supreme Court made clear in Campbell

v. Acuff-Rose, speculative market harm doesn’t outweigh the benefits of new transformative uses.

Let’s dig into that fourth factor, the market effect. Why is that where the decisions split?

ANSWER : The fourth fair use factor, “the effect of the use upon the potential market,” is often treated as the “most important.” (But again, fair use is a balancing test!) The fourth factor asks whether the new use substitutes for the original or harms its market value. And it’s here that the two judges diverged.

Judge Alsup adopted a traditional and doctrinally sound approach. He wrote that there’s no market harm unless the new use competes directly with the original. Since Claude never reproduced the books, didn’t summarize them, and didn’t generate content that substituted for them, Alsup concluded there was no actionable harm. He cited Perfect 10 v. Amazon and Google Books, which upheld transformative uses that did not serve as market substitutes.

Judge Chhabria, on the other hand, imagined a more diffuse harm. He worried that AI could someday flood the market with similar books, reducing the incentive for human authors to write. But this is where his reasoning gets a little murky. Courts have repeatedly said that not all market loss is cognizable under copyright law. If a use causes harm because it offers a better or cheaper alternative, but doesn’t copy or substitute for the original, that’s not a copyright violation.

That’s what the Supreme Court warned about in Campbell: a “lethal parody” might destroy demand for the original song, but that’s not infringing, it’s lawful critique. Likewise, Judge Alsup recognized that learning from books to create new language is not a substitute, it’s a process that underlies all writing.

If courts start treating any unlicensed use as presumptively unfair, we risk flipping fair use on its head. That’s why Chhabria’s dicta (where a court waxes poetic about facts that were not in the record), though not binding, are worrying. They invite future plaintiffs to reframe fair use as a lost-licensing regime, where any transformative use could be viewed as “suspect” unless it’s paid for.

How do these rulings impact what libraries might be allowed to do? Can we train our own models using library books?

ANSWER: This is one of the most exciting, and promising, applications of the fair use doctrine. If AI developers like Anthropic and Meta can potentially invoke fair use for internal, non-expressive training, then the case for library-based AI may be even stronger.

Why? Because Section 107 explicitly lists uses “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research” as favored under fair use. Libraries serve those exact goals. And unlike commercial AI developers, libraries aren’t trying to monetize language, they’re trying to expand access, preserve knowledge, and support learning.

Think of a university or public library using its own legally acquired print collections to train a private LLM. The model would serve researchers, students, and educators. It wouldn’t be sold or exposed to the commercial market. It might power better search tools, reference assistance, or educational interfaces. That’s not just fair use; it’s model fair use.

The legal groundwork is already in place. In HathiTrust, the court ruled that full-text scanning of library books for indexing

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and accessibility was lawful, even when it involved entire works. In Google Books, the court upheld full-text digitization for search and snippet view. Both cases involved massive copying, but they didn’t displace the market for books. Instead, they enabled entirely new ways to interact with knowledge.

Judge Alsup embraced this analogy directly. He likened Claude’s training process to a student reading a book, learning from it, and writing something new. A library AI would do the same thing. It doesn’t compete, doesn’t publish, and doesn’t diminish the original’s value. Instead, it unlocks its potential.

So what’s the big takeaway here for librarians? Should we be cautious or bold in how we approach AI?

ANSWER: Be informed, but don’t be afraid. Fair use was designed to support exactly the kind of work that libraries do: enabling inquiry, education, and progress. We don’t want to

surrender the very values that copyright is meant to protect, which includes access and user right balanced with author’s rights.

These cases show us that the legal system is still grappling with how to balance innovation and rights. But it’s also clear that transformative, non-substitutive, public-interest uses, like what libraries do, are on more firm footing. The more we engage with these debates, the more we can help understand how they can enhance our access-based mission.

And remember, libraries have always been leaders in navigating new technologies. From microfilm to databases to digitization, we’ve adapted while keeping our mission front and center. AI is no different. With the right tools, partnerships, and understanding of the law, libraries can become not just ethical users of AI, but potentially ethical builders of it.

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And They Were There — Reports of Meetings

Column Editor: Caroline Goldsmith (Associate Director, The Charleston Hub) <caroline@charlestonlibraryconference.com>

SLA in 2025: One Member’s View

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

The state of Pennsylvania hosted three library association conferences in 2025: the Medical Library Association (April 29 – May 2), the SLA-Special Libraries Association (June 7-10) in Pittsburgh, and the American Library Association (June 26-30) in Philadelphia. Historically ALA is the oldest of the organizations (founded 1876), and over the years, the three organizations’ paths have intertwined. Most recently, MLA and SLA sponsored a joint conference in Detroit, MI (2023), and ALA’s past president, Emily Drabinski, was the keynote speaker at SLA’s 116th Annual Conference and Expo (2025).

The Annual SLA Conference

The 2025 SLA conference theme, “Creative Transformation: Shaping the Future of the Information Profession,” was also an opportunity to reflect on shaping the future of SLA as well (outlined further). This was the second year that SLA chose a college conference center venue- in 2024- University of Rhode Island, in 2025- the University of Pittsburgh campus. Just over 300 attendees represented the range of SLA’s membership: students, those working in corporate, government, non-profit, academic, and other specialized sectors. Attendees came primarily from the U.S., but also Canada, Europe, and Asia.

Keynoter Emily Drabinski spotlighted ALA presidential year moments, travels, celebrated library heroes, weaving in experiences from teaching future librarians, and meeting fellow SLA conference participants. During a presentation on librarian advocacy, Emily added to the discussion, inviting anyone interested to a pre-ALA 2025 conference workshop on workplace solidarity, incorporating censorship and book banning themes.

SLA 2025 featured panels, roundtables, solo presentations, posters, and vendors’ industry updates. Programming included the inevitable topic of AI, e.g., “Transforming Digital Collection Stewardship with AI-enabled Solutions” and “Configuring the 4Sets in the Era of GenAI.” Attendees were updated on standards, patents, “hot topics” in chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, law, and engineering (and more). Presenters shared expertise on “Budgeting 101,” the use of prompt engineering for physics research, issues in solo and other aspects of “special” librarianship. One session celebrated “Why It’s Great to Be a Special Librarian,” another explored “Expanding Horizons and Career Transformations.” Two nonprofit organizations’ librarians shared “Unlocking Institutional Knowledge: Leveraging Institutional Repositories to Bridge Past Knowledge to Present Application.” Current events were woven into sessions such as “Disappearing Guidance: Locating Previously Available Government Agency Information,” and “From Collection Development to Collective Action: Librarians Have the Right Skills to Make a Difference.” Although some sessions included video clips, unfortunately for those who could not attend in person, this was not a hybrid conference, and recordings were not made available.

Eighteen SLA conference travel scholarship awardees invigorated the conference with their presence and presentations. Some were pursuing master’s or doctoral degrees, attending various U.S. or U.K. university programs, while others were new to the field. SNIPS — (SLA’s Student and New Information Professionals Subcommittee) organized gatherings for them to network and have a “home base.”

SLA communities (formerly called divisions and chapters) organized excursions, dine-arounds, and social gatherings. The Engineering Community toured the Allegheny Observatory. The Biological and Life Sciences Community informally celebrated its 90th anniversary with sweets. Western States attendees gathered at one local eatery while the joint “East Coast Meets the Midwest” — at another. Specialty communities brought together “birds of a feather” — from military, taxonomy, corporate intelligence, and academic, to SLA fellows with 2025 SLA scholarship winners.

Invariably, discussions about the future came up. Looking back at the now concluded 2025 conference, it is unclear which SLA conference traditions will endure, and at which conferences vendors will see longtime customers. Initiatives supported by SLA members also are trying to “crystal ball” the future, one being the 20-year-old public charity, non-governmental organization, Lubuto Library Partners, www.lubuto.org, which has had longtime SLA member support for library and childrenfocused initiatives in Zambia.

Changes for SLA and Its Members

Prior to the conference, in March 2025, SLA made an announcement to its members and in public channels, that rippled far and wide: SLA’s board of directors voted for dissolution. The reasons outlined: dropping SLA membership figures (to about 1200 in 2025), and financial expenses that could not be covered by available funds, despite cost-cutting measures in recent years. Total dissolution (with a declaration of bankruptcy) was not the only option the SLA board explored. Alternatives included a volunteer-led model, and communications with other professional organizations about possible “alternative homes” for its members, that could involve organizational merger. (Members were not privy to the details).

On May 23rd, ASIS&T (The Association for Information Science and Technology, founded in 1937) and SLA (founded in 1909) publicly announced, as press releases indicated, “merger negotiations to explore a unified future for information professionals.” Some members recalled that several decades ago, leaders of SLA and ASIS&T (then ASIS) discussed possible merger opportunities, but those did not come to fruition. In 2025, both organizations’ boards decided to move forward. SLA members were alerted to review a framework document providing more information. SLA president, Hildy Dworkin,

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assembled working groups, e.g., a merger working group, and one to identify SLA’s legacy, including location of SLA association and community archives. SLA communities, both subject and geographic, began exploring where/how they would or could fit in as potential ASIS&T special interest groups. Each organization’s members were invited to pose questions and comments about the ramifications of the proposed merger, and responses were posted in each association’s site and otherwise communicated to members. Though each organization’s board entered into the discussions and negotiations, the ultimate decision will be by vote of the organizations’ members (some actually belonging to both organizations and can vote twice).

At SLA 2025, the hoped-for merger was in evidence as ASIS&T executive director, Lydia Middleton, was very much an active conference observer and participant. She attended conference sessions and social events, and sat at a table in the vendor showcase, ready with flyers and availability to talk with conference attendees and vendors. In 2025, ASIS&T continued with its strategic planning activities. Communications to SLA members about ASIS&T opportunities included an invitation to attend the next annual ASIS&T conference in the Washington, D.C. area (November 14-18, 2025).

Each professional organization has its own culture, organizational and management structure, and priorities. SLA has long touted its international membership, its support for information professionals in specialized environments, and its three-pronged approach — education, advocacy, and community building. In various venues, complementary missions of the organizations were spotlighted, as were some of the strengths that SLA could bring to a merged organization, including its “practitioner” approach, some of its unique specialty communities, its active local and regional communities, as well as its strong commitment to its student scholarship endowment. Through its channels, ASIS&T points out its strengths and priorities. At this writing, the 2025 SLA conference has concluded. Merger negotiations and scenario planning continue at board levels of both organizations, and the votes are forthcoming (in mid-August for SLA).

In the months since the March 2025 announcement, SLA communities continued planning activities, both virtual and in-person — meet-ups, educational events, book discussions, and presentations. For example, a small group (from IL, IN, IA, MN, MO) planned the 6th SLA Midwest Symposium, an annual event that in recent years has been virtual. It was decided to

make this year’s event on August 1st free (no registration fee) for all. The half-day symposium will feature keynotes by Hildy Dworkin, SLA president, and Brian Pichman, a well-received technology speaker at the 2024 SLA conference, and will include briefer presentations selected from submitted proposals. In Chicago, an in-person tradition was revived, when the CAA (Chicago Area Archivists) and members of the SLA-Illinois community, gathered in a local brewery on July 23rd for a joint happy hour (the last one scheduled in Jan. 2019 was cancelled “due to the weather”). One of the causes for celebration (perhaps bittersweet) — this year, SLA-IL commemorated its 100th anniversary.

Should members vote in the affirmative on the merger of ASIS&T and SLA, the next phase will be a transition and a new “married life” involving integration of two related but distinct organizations. As the SLA merger framework document phrased it (in a section on brand identity and mission alignment), “to reimagine the merged identity.” In today’s world, library and information professionals have many choices. As evidenced by the plethora of specialized and free-standing workshops, symposia, and conferences, professional endeavors do not necessarily require a “professional society home.” Still, as evidenced by the enthusiasm of new, up-and-coming professionals at the 2025 SLA conference, many may find value in having a professional society home — for networking, learning, and more. Whatever the outcome for SLA and ASIS&T, ultimately, each professional has choices to make and paths to take in their own professional journey.

Many of us will miss SLA as we knew it but remain optimistic for the future, whatever it holds.

It turns out that another SLA member also wrote up the conference: “SLA Faces Its Future” by Marydee Ojala, posted on July 29, 2025 https://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/ SLA-Faces-Its-Future-170689.asp.

Disclaimer: Ramune K. Kubilius, a longtime SLA member, is neither an SLA (or ASIS&T) officer, nor a board member. For official information and updates on the SLA / ASIS&T merger, please contact Lydia Middleton (ASIS&T executive director) or Hildy Dworkin (SLA president).

Just in – See Merger Update on page 54!

Fiesole Retreat 2025: Learning from the Past, Informing the Future April 7–9, 2025 | European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy

Reported

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

Editor’s Note: This report was previously published in B.i.t. Online, issue 4 / 2025, pgs. 389-391 https://www.b-i-t-online. de/heft/2025-04-reportage-hinds.pdf

The 25th Fiesole Collection Development Retreat , held April 7-9, 2025, at the European University Institute (EUI) in Fiesole, Italy, brought together an international group of librarians, publishers, technologists, and thought leaders to reflect on the evolving landscape of scholarly communication.

With just over 100 attendees, this milestone retreat was a rich blend of tradition and innovation, engaging participants through a curated program of keynotes, panels, discussions, and cultural experiences — including a stunning conference dinner overlooking Florence’s Duomo from the historic Hotel Baglioni. Setting the Stage: Pre-Conference on AI

and Libraries

The Retreat opened on Monday, April 7, with a compelling pre-conference session focused on the theme “AI and Libraries — Innovating for the Future.” Convened by Pep Torn, Library

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Director of the of EUI, the panel featured real-world case studies demonstrating how AI is reshaping library services. Laurie Bridges highlighted AI literacy efforts at Oregon State University, while Paris O’Donnell from I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies discussed generative AI’s role in collection management. Carme Fenoll’s imaginative take on “Rewriting Cervantes” illustrated the cultural potential of AI, and Piero Attanasio from the Italian Publishers Association underscored the opportunity for collaborative innovation between libraries and publishers. This session set a forwardthinking tone for the Retreat, emphasizing the balance between technology’s promise and libraries’ enduring values.

Opening Remarks and Intellectual Provocations

After a convivial lunch, the formal program began with a warm welcome from retreat organizers Michele Casalini and Becky Lenzini. The opening from the event hosts at the EUI was done by Pep Torn filling in for Patricia Nanz, the President of EUI, who was unable to attend due to a last-minute conflict. Michael Keller of Stanford University then offered a thought-provoking opening talk, “Re-Framing the Retreat,” inviting attendees to reconsider traditional approaches to collection development in light of global shifts. He looked back at developments that have happened in the last 25 years since the founding of the retreat and provided a comprehensive list of innovations that came about during that time period. He also paid tribute to Mario Casalini and his dedication to innovation in founding the retreat and acknowledged both Michele and Barbara Casalini for picking up the reins and carrying on the tradition.

Richard Gallagher, President and Editor-in-Chief of Annual Reviews, followed with a keynote that challenged the audience to think critically about knowledge production and dissemination in a complex, polarized world. His presentation titled, “Can we lower the knowledge barrier? Using academic publishing to empower society” spoke of “postnormal publishing,” a concept drawn from the problem-solving approach called “postnormal science.” He described Annual Reviews’ new strategy using a Brains Trust team to fund mission-aligned projects to move forward and invited participation or ideas from attendees.

Session 1: Biodiversity at the Margins: Spaces of Innovation in Scholarly Communication

The theme of “Biodiversity at the Margins” framed the first major session. The panel was originally to be convened by Charles Watkinson, Associate University Librarian at the University of Michigan and Director, University of Michigan Press, but he was unable to attend in person. Instead, he provided an engaging and cleverly created video introduction to set the stage.

Carol Mandel, Dean Emerita from New York University Libraries, convened the panel in his absence. Borrowing from ecological metaphors, the session explored the “ecotones” in scholarly communication — spaces where institutions, communities, content, and platforms collide. Presentations spanned topics from engaged scholarship to platform design and user experience, with speakers including Jenny Evans (University of Westminster), Sy Holsinger (Operas), and Georgios Papadopoulos (Founder of Atypon) sharing cross-sector perspectives.

Attendees enjoying an afternoon coffee break

The afternoon culminated in a lively panel discussion, moderated by Carol Mandel, where audience members engaged with panelists to unpack the tensions and opportunities in these interstitial spaces. The discussion reinforced the idea that innovation often emerges from the fringes — not the center — of established systems. It also included a sidebar conversation with a lively debate on the value of preprints.

The evening reception at the picturesque Villa la Torrossa, home of the Casalini family, provided an elegant close to the first day, fostering collegial connections and informal dialogue.

Session 2: Through the Lens of the Humanities

Tuesday’s program began with a deep dive into the role and reinvention of the humanities. Convened by Ann Okerson, Director of the Offline Internet Consortium, the session examined how humanities disciplines are adapting to institutional pressures, digital shifts, and broader cultural transformations. Ann opened by noting that one could argue that the humanities started in Florence, so this is a fitting location for the topic. Joy Connolly (ACLS) emphasized the importance of quiet revolutions over grand restructurings and started by grounding the conversation in the value of humanistic scholarship and the importance of plurality in scholarship. She also discussed the challenges of convincing this value to parents and potential employers, since less than 20% of STEM majors end up in a STEM career. Karla Pollmann (University of Tübingen) made the case for open access as essential to the humanities’ future, noting that the old structures from a 19th century imperialistic agenda aren’t fit any more, and the standards that were developed for those structures don’t fit either.

Kristine Rose-Beers (Cambridge University Library) offered a powerful argument for the preservation of physical books, reminding attendees that advocacy for heritage collections is as vital as ever. In the 20th century, conservationists were gatekeepers, limiting access to delicate and endangered historical artifacts. The new, evolving practice focuses on digitization for preservation and to allow wider access. This session resonated strongly, blending pragmatism with a

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Retreat venue at the EUI Badia Fiesolana

reaffirmation of the humanities’ intrinsic value in shaping ethical, inclusive scholarship.

Session 3: Metrics, Monitoring, and the Arithmetic of Prestige

The afternoon sessions addressed the central and increasingly contentious role of metrics in academia. Julien Roche, University Librarian and Director of the Libraries at the University of Lille and current LIBER president, convened the first part of the session, featuring Laetitia Bracco (University of Lorraine), Tasha Mellins-Cohen (COUNTER), and Christine Dunn (Clarivate). These speakers discussed the evolution of measurement in open science, usage tracking, and research integrity.

The second part, titled “The Perverse Arithmetic of Prestige,” interrogated the persistence of outdated benchmarks and misaligned incentives in scholarly publishing. Charles Henry (CLIR), Stephen Rhind-Tutt (Coherent Digital), Michael LevineClark (University of Denver), and Alison Mudditt (PLOS) provided historical context and future-forward proposals for reforming reputation systems. Themes of inclusivity, transparency, and mission-driven publishing emerged as guiding principles.

Conference Dinner: Celebrating Collaboration in a Historic Setting

Tuesday evening’s conference dinner, held at the elegant Hotel Baglioni and sponsored by EBSCO, was a standout moment of the Retreat. Guests dined on 5 courses of traditional Tuscan cuisine while enjoying panoramic views of the Florence skyline, including the iconic Duomo. The atmosphere was celebratory yet intimate, offering space for reflection on the past 25 years of the Retreat and the vibrant professional community it has fostered.

Session 4: Equitable Partnerships for an Equitable World of Knowledge

The final day took place at EUI’s Villa Salviati, offering a new vantage point for continued exploration. The morning keynote by Buhle Mbambo-Thata (University of Lesotho) addressed the strategic imperative of inclusivity in knowledge development. Her powerful call to action anchored the day’s theme of equitable partnerships.

Giannis Tsakonas, Director, Library & Information Centre, University of Patras, convened a panel titled “Equitable Partnerships for an Equitable World of Knowledge” with Sharon Memis (President, IFLA), Mpho Ngoepe (University of South Africa), and Heli Kautonen (University of Turku), examining the structures, values, and cultural dynamics that shape effective collaboration. Topics ranged from cross-continental partnerships to the role of library technology in enabling or inhibiting equity. This session emphasized that partnerships

must be critically examined, not just celebrated, to ensure they do not replicate old power imbalances. The panel urged institutions to adopt principles of transparency, mutual benefit, and shared decision-making in all collaborative endeavors.

Closing Reflections and Forward Momentum

The Retreat concluded with final remarks from David Worlock (Outsell) who offered a moment of quiet relaxation, giving a synthesis of the themes and challenges explored over the three days. Ever the storyteller, David began with a tale of John Milton on the road from Rome to Florence in 1648. This connected with the story of a letter-writing campaign from Samuel Hortleib, whose letters are in the collections of the University of Sheffield, which comprise a treasure trove of questions connecting scientific and academic luminaries of the day. He offered a “tasting plate” of quotes and ideas presented over the course of the retreat, and noted the generative tension between tradition and innovation, centralization and decentralization, and called on the community to embrace complexity rather than retreat from it.

A farewell lunch on the grounds of the Villa Salviati provided a fitting close, grounding participants once more in the collegiality and warmth that defines the Fiesole experience.

Takeaways

The Fiesole Retreat 2025 reinforced its position as an essential stage for meaningful, often provocative dialogue about the future of knowledge systems. Key takeaways included:

• AI is no longer speculative: It is already shaping workflows, ethics, and educational priorities in libraries and publishing.

• Diversity strengthens the ecosystem: Representation from global and underrepresented voices highlighted the necessity of inclusive approaches in building sustainable and equitable knowledge infrastructures.

• Metrics must be reimagined: Prestige, impact, and evaluation need to be redefined with a focus on equity, openness, and integrity.

• The humanities remain vital: Even as they evolve, they provide critical context and ethical grounding for the entire research ecosystem.

• True partnerships require work: Equity in collaboration must go beyond rhetoric and be embedded in structures and shared practices.

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Captivating view of Florence from the conference dinner.

EUI’s Villa Salviati

Seeing the Whole Board — A River Runs Through It

Column Editor: Kathleen McEvoy (Senior Policy Fellow, The EveryLibrary Institute) <kathleen.mcevoy@everylibrary.org>

Iwas privileged to speak at Charleston In Between which was held in Berlin, Germany in July. My panel was entitled Libraries Under Fire and my fellow panelists and I spoke about the threats to research integrity and funding, the history and language being suppressed and leveraged, and the impact on the research environment. I focused on the tactics being used, including us vs. them thinking; the firehose of headlines, posts, speeches, and executive orders; logical fallacies, and the strategic manipulation of language, but the entire panel, the entire two-day conference, had a river running through it.

From the start, storytelling and its role in science, research, and the current discourse along with perceptions and understanding of one another weaved their way throughout the conference. The opening keynote, a conversation between Meg White, a senior consultant at Delta Think, and Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief at Science, started off with a discussion of storytelling and anecdotes and their impact on public opinion. Thorp highlighted that the pandemic brought public health and scientific research into the public eye. The lesson for scholarly communications was that when the public reads scholarly papers, they aren’t approaching the research with an existing knowledge of the different kinds of articles and studies.

When politicians use stories and anecdotes to shape public opinion and when that is combined with social media, and its herd mentality, it makes it difficult for researchers to fight a story about one bad paper. Thorp went on to discuss corrections and retractions and the need to correct the scientific record. Since the discussion I had planned included a discussion of language and manipulation of language, the use of stories to shape opinion and the confuse the scientific record stood straight out.

As a former communications executive who often advises organizations on crisis communications, the need to educate the public about science and politics and to immediately correct the record resonated, and I started to see the themes of the conference aligning with the points I hoped to get across. When discussing public opinion, Thorp suggested that better explaining the different types of scientific papers and the importance of explaining the scientific process, rigor, and vetting, were core to countering the easy anecdotes and simplistic stories that can cloud public opinion. He said it would be better if people had a better understanding of the results of research.

Thorp also delved into the importance of correcting the scientific record, which, combined with education or clarification about the scientific process, would make it easier for science and researchers to manage public opinion. The current stigma about correcting the scientific record, doing “science by press release” as Meg White mentioned, does little to correct the public record. Both agreed that institutions need to lead with the correction, explain it is part of the process, and describe how the scientific process investigates research. By waiting to comment on a story that has already been shaped, an anecdote that has already entered the zeitgeist, science and research integrity are at a disadvantage in public opinion — especially when the data can be

ignored and the story being told dominates. Thorp suggested that if researchers and librarians don’t come out, that defensiveness makes “it easy for others to make their case.” By coming out, the scholarly communication community can “shape the scientific record and ensure research integrity.”

As someone who studies the language being used, it is clear that “retraction” is a term that is being introduced into the public record and is being misused, as other scientific terms are misused, to create a narrative. By allowing others to play on the public’s lack of awareness of the types of scientific papers and research studies, without getting in front of the criticism, engaging scholars and researchers around the world, and building systems that highlight the data and encourage reproducibility, we mute science for stories that do not tell the tale of research. The opposite of criticism is not confusion; it must be clarity. In a fraught environment, Thorp extolled the audience to maintain high standards and hold science accountable by helping people understand research standards and the process. Rather than reacting to each insult, those standards and processes can be leveraged to continually showcase science and research standards.

The first panel on day one was Libraries Under Fire: Defending Scholarship in a Time of Political Pressure. Suze Kundu, Science Communicator, Trustee of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and co-organizer of DefendResearch.org, spoke about the silencing of research and the real-world impacts this censorship will have. Kundu was the first but not the last speaker to discuss the “invisible infrastructure” of research which “helps us do science, conduct research and connect information and researchers.” She said this is “the work of metadata, indexing, discoverability” which “helps science make sense.” Banning terms in one country through policies, proposals, and submission guidelines has an impact globally. According to Kundu’s own research, these terms are not limited to the social sciences. In searching for the terms “cis” and “trans” in organic chemistry, she discovered 1.7 million journal articles and 50 million citations. These two terms are emblematic of the terminology tussle being played out in the court of public opinion, but the impact on science is profound. Kundu said, “if a term becomes unfundable in one place, it becomes unpublishable elsewhere.”

Katherine Klosek, Director of Information Policy and Federal Relations at Association of Research Libraries, also addressed the use of language when discussing legislation. By using vague language, those writing bills leave the meaning, and future enforcement, open for interpretation. The lack of precise language is a tactic which can encourage self-censorship and compliance beyond any law passed at the local, state, or national level. Klosek used the so-called Gold Standard Executive Order as an example of an action that is “cloaked in the language of research but puts power/censorship in the hands of loyalists.”

The May 2025 Executive Order accused previous administrations of “politicizing science” and used language such as “falsification

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of data,” and “high-profile retractions,” and “a loss of trust,” to usher in a new “gold standard” for science at government agencies.

Michael Seadle, Retired Executive Director, iSchool at Humboldt University, drew upon his German and American backgrounds to describe the ways dictatorial regimes treat scholarship. He said dictators “dislike facts.” He used both Hitler and Stalin as examples of dictators who “made up their own facts.” He said under both Hitler and Stalin, German professors were fired while even more left Germany. He said under the Nazi regime and then the Communists, “publications were closely controlled,” it became risky to share facts through speech, and books were banned while libraries were closed. Writers also fled the country.

Seadle said that in Germany people turned inward because once a dictatorial regime gains a foothold, it is difficult to stand against them publicly. He did add, however, that it is possible to resist such regimes. Preserving research is possible through current technology. There are ways to encourage informed voting and to spread reliable information. The research environment is also an opportunity to build strong international relationships.

That research community, the idea of strong ties, was echoed by both Kundu and Klosek, who spoke of the importance of community. Those communities can act when individual institutions cannot and when individual researchers are defunded or criticized. These ideas were a call back to the opening session and as Kundu noted, “a world where research is trusted, visible, and inclusive.” Just as Holden Thorp highlighted the importance of holding research to a high standard, Kundu recommended that the In Between audience “protect the evidence-based process.”

These three presentations and the opening session ran directly through my own presentation. I speak about language and tactics when I address library professions, publishers, content and technology providers, legislators, and library supporters. For information professionals, having to debate what is true is a frustrating conundrum. Just as Thorp spoke about anecdotes in the hands of professional politicians shaping public opinion, I recognize that the stories being told are themselves tactics. The notion of “us versus them” is a way to isolate people. The firehose of information, from headlines, statements and executive orders to social media posts, speeches, and threats are designed to be unsettling, to overwhelm.

Years ago, I heard the term “rage farming.” Someone said, “rage farmers needed to tend to their crops.” The goal is to keep people angry and afraid. The headlines and stories we share are test cases. Attacking marginalized groups (unpopular people), tests our support for the rules of our society, the rule of law. These are tactics, and they all have names. These Logical Fallacies, whether they take the form of Ad Hominem Attacks, False Equivalences, Ambiguity, Red Herrings, Oversimplifications, or Impossible Expectations, can be broken down, understood, AND countered.

Equivocation is one that resonated in my conversations and observations during In Between. This tactic uses words that have different meanings. As Kundu mentioned, “cis” and “trans” have scientific meanings. The words “theory” and “law” have different meanings beyond science, and those differences are exploited. Even “chaos theory” and “scientific uncertainty” read differently to a scientist or researcher than to the public at large. The word “transition” was eliminated from U.S. government

websites because of its political attachment to gender but “transitioning” from military to civilian life is an example of another use of the term. The wholesale elimination of a word because of a definition it has been assigned for propaganda purposes, is a concern.

Another tactic that many may recognize is called “Accusation in a mirror.” This is a rhetorical devise, wherein you blame the other for the harm you are doing. The goal is to tell your story first to make the people you are targeting the bad guy. A common tactic in the study of Dark Triad/Dark Tetrad personalities is DARVO. The strategy is one in which you Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Oppressor. These tactics, to get out in front of the story, are a perversion of the old school crisis communications tactic of Mess Up, Fess Up, and Dress Up which is replaced by Name, Blame, and Shame

Holden Thorp mentioned how storytelling shapes public opinion, but the way we receive information, and from whom, is vital as well. Misinformation scholar Renee DiResta said of the social media environment, “If you make it trend, you make it true.” This can be understood throughout history long before algorithms where part of the vernacular. A line from the 1962 movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance explained, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr once said, “History is written by the winners.” Long before that, an African Proverb declared, “Until the lion learns to write, the hunter will be the hero of every tale.”

Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once said, “The basic tool for the manipulation of society is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” In 1978, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, published a NY Times Op Ed called “Un-words and Policy” which provided context. The Op Ed was excerpted from a fall 1978 issue of Policy Review magazine. In it the Senator introduced the term semantic infiltration coined by his colleague Dr. Fred Charkes Ikle, former MIT professor and Director of the Arms Control & Disarmament Agency. In discussing Soviet Foreign Policy, Ikle cautioned that “We come to adopt the language of our adversaries in describing political reality ... We have been careless in adopting the language of our opponents...” It was not lost on me that I was talking about this in what had been East Berlin, a few hundred yards from the East Gallery which includes portions of the Berlin Wall in what had been East Germany, The German Democratic Republic. Just as Ikle and Moynihan before him, my presentation cautioned the audience not to use the words that have been leveraged to serve a particular purpose.

I have come to call my take on semantic infiltration and the manipulation of words “redefine, don’t cosign.” It is a take on rejecting the predicate. When asked a question based on an illegitimate premise, a lie, or a manipulation, you don’t answer until you set the record straight. This is not only true in conversation but when reviewing emails and other documents. Consider that the predicate is the framing being put forward. Don’t be afraid to redefine rather than cosign falsehoods.

Day two began with the panel , Bridging the Gap: Honest Conversations Between Libraries and Publishers. Even in the ongoing conversation about libraries and their vendors, the river ran through it. Panelists discussed the need for publishers to better explain what they are doing that supports the global research infrastructure, described in the first panel by Kundu as the “invisible infrastructure.” While panelists were discussing the alignment of values, they were talking about the stories being told. While talking about the importance of long-term

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relationships between librarians and vendors, the same message resonated — human connection is the key. The advice to “agree to disagree agreeably,” a quote from The Rest is Politics podcast, will work far beyond Berlin.

Charlotte Wein, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, said librarians and vendors didn’t understand one another and that “they don’t share the same knowledge or language or culture,” she wondered how “can they know what the other needs? How can they build trust?” These same sentiments could be said of the global issues research is facing.

Melanie Lehnert-Bechle, senior director of open research at Wiley, spoke of collaboration and though she was talking about publishers, researchers, and librarians, that same impulse, coming together around common ideals, fits the larger conversation. As she said, “the question isn’t whether we can afford to work together, it is whether we can afford not to.”

The next panel, AI Realities for Academic Libraries, featured library professionals, publishers, and AI experts. Once again, in discussing the need for transparency and AI literacy, the panelists shared common themes. These themes included the need to protect scholarship, consider the real-world impact, build in accountability, and address the trust issues inherent in the emerging technology.

In his closing remarks, Sven Fund, managing director of Reviewer Credits, pulled together many of the ideas discussed over the two days of Charleston In Between. He said Berlin had “experienced regimes that wanted research controls” where research professionals became either targets or tools of those Nazi and then Communist regimes. He outlined four next steps

— working as a global ecosystem for a structured response, highlighting that the work of scholarly publishers, researchers, and publishers as critical to science, creating visibility around science, and showing support for researchers and institutions so they know they are not alone.

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 has served as an executive board member and serves on the Intellectual Freedom, Public Policy, and Advocacy Committee.

And They Were There — Fiesole Retreat 2025: Learning from the Past, Informing the Future continued from page 50

As the Retreat enters its second quarter-century, the themes of innovation, margin, and transformation continue to resonate. Fiesole 2025 did more than celebrate its 25th anniversary — it offered a roadmap for navigating the next 25 years of change with courage, curiosity, and care.

The full program and presentations can be found at https://www.fiesoleretreat.org/fiesole_2025. Information on next year’s retreat will be available soon; as the Fiesole Retreat looks ahead to its 2026 gathering, the momentum from the rich conversations of the past will continue to inspire deeper collaboration, bold innovation, and a renewed commitment to equity and inclusivity across the global knowledge community.

MERGER UPDATE – SLA and ASIS&T

On August 21, a press release announced that the merger is moving forward: “The Special Libraries Association (SLA) and the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) today announced that their members have cleared the way for the organizations to merge. SLA members voted overwhelmingly to accept the dissolution plan proposed by their Board of Directors. Separately, ASIS&T members resoundingly approved their Board’s proposal to welcome SLA members into their organization along with the Association’s remaining assets. These decisions clear the way for the two organizations to formally unite and build on their shared commitment to advancing the work of information professionals worldwide…”

ASIS&T site: https://www.asist.org/2025/08/21/asist-and-sla-members-vote-in-favor-of-merger/ SLA president’s announcement: https://sla.org/page/httpsslaorgpageSLADissolutionInformation

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— Collections Analysis Skills, Part 3: Training Guidance and Resources for Analytical Software, Data Analysis and Visualization Tools, and Programming Languages

Column Editor: Antje Mays (Collection Analysis Librarian, University of Kentucky Libraries) <antjemays@uky.edu>

Column Editor’s Note: This article builds on two prior articles and completes this series on training and broader career planning for the growing realm of data and analysis in libraries: The November 2024 gleaned high-demand analytical skills and tools from recent library job ads and published analysis projects. The June 2025 article shared skill-development guidance in statistical analysis, analytical thinking, and software-aided analysis and visualization applied in library settings. This article shares detailed training guidance for analysis software packages and programming languages including specific coverage of SAS, SPSS, Python, R, Stata, relational databases and SQL, and visualization tools including specific coverage of Power BI, Tableau, and ArcGIS. — AM

Introduction

The continually rising complexity of digital content ecosystems and concurrent proliferation of analytical tools have spawned libraries’ increasing need for data-informed insights to guide collection strategies. However, the rapid expansion of these tools and rising demand for related expertise have outpaced the library profession’s move into systematic nurture of these high-demand analytical skills. As covered in the November 2024 article’s research of recent job postings and analysis projects in libraries,1 job trends convey rising expectations for both technical and cognitive skill families: Paired with growing need for cognitive skills such as creative problem-solving and design thinking, the increasingly cited key technical skills include programming languages and technological literacy, artificial intelligence and information processing, big data, data analysis and visualization, communication of data-informed findings to various stakeholders, and proficiency in analytical tools such as SAS, SPSS, Python, R, Stata, relational databases and SQL, and visualization tools including Power BI, Tableau, and ArcGIS. These skills are more common in data science than traditional librarianship. This divergence between library education and emerging skill needs poses the risk of skill gaps leading some institutions to seek candidates from beyond the library profession to acquire these technical competencies, sometimes omitting librarian credentials from required qualifications. Yet without librarianship’s epistemological foundations, the essential grasp of scholarly communication and information ecosystem, libraries’ analytical endeavors risk the mistake of neglecting important contexts. While the June 2025 article covered training resources for broad-based analytical skills and introduced data analysis for library projects,2 this article delves deeper with specific training guidance for the analytical and visualization tools and programming languages cited most prominently in job postings and published library-analysis projects.

Analytical Software and Programming Languages: Learning Resources

The powerful SAS software3 supports advanced analytics, data management, and artificial intelligence capabilities for use cases including fraud, risk, Internet of Things, and marketing. The software facilitates powerful customizable programming through its command-line interface and ease of use through its graphic user interface. Long-established in industries including medicine and related clinical sciences, business intelligence, economics, and finance, the analytical strengths of SAS are gaining recognition for compatibility with data-informed decision-making in library operations and outreach as evidenced by the above-referenced analysis job postings listing SAS among desired skills. The SAS Institute, the software’s developer, offers a wide range of training from beginning fundamentals through advanced skills and certifications. From the “Learn SAS” landing page,4 novices and experienced programmers alike can choose from a wide range of training,5 certification programs,6 academic learning resources for students and teachers,7 and books covering SAS skills and techniques for autodidacts.8 The “Learn SAS” site also offers a comprehensive catalog of learning resources, browsable by skill levels, types of SAS skills, subject, certification focus, and more.9 Other avenues for learning SAS include Coursera’s SAS programming certificate10 and LinkedIn Learning’s SAS online training courses.11

SPSS, also known as IBM SPSS Statistics, 12 is a statistical software package long prominent in social sciences research but also established in a wider range of disciplines. Similar to spreadsheet software in look and feel but with more powerful and customizable analytical functions and logical operations, SPSS supports statistical and predictive analytics, data analysis and visualization, advanced logical operations, and data management. Users can choose between its drag-anddrop and spreadsheet-similar interface and situation-specific custom coding with the syntax editor with the SPSS Syntax programming language. Open University’s online course covers SPSS fundamentals with interactive learning activities;13 LinkedIn Learning offers a variety of online training courses and tutorials under the software’s older name SPSS14 and its newer name, SPSS Statistics.15

Python is an open-source general-purpose programming language, suited for a wide range of tasks including software development, data analysis and machine learning, web development, and interface development.16 Libraries benefit from Python’s capacity for automating data-intensive tasks in a wide range of projects. Python’s Python for Beginners17 offers introductory training books, guides, tutorials, and code samples for learners ranging from completely new to programming

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to learners with prior programming experience. LinkedIn Learning offers online training courses in varying durations from fundamentals to more advanced applications.18

The open-source R software and programming language is prevalent in bioinformatics, statistics, and data science.19 R’s capabilities in statistical analysis and software development, data analysis and visualization, data mining, and machine learning are well-suited to many of the growing data-intensive analysis projects in libraries. Codeacademy20 and W3Schools21 offer self-paced online courses and tutorials covering basic introductions to R and its syntax, key skill families, applied use cases for R, major concepts, examples, and quizzes. LinkedIn Learning 22 offers various online training courses on R and learning paths from short introductory courses to extensive, in-depth learning material.

The statistical software package Stata supports statistical operations, data analysis, manipulation, and visualization, and reproducible reporting.23 Established among researchers in many disciplines across STEM, health, and social sciences, Stata translates well to libraries’ data-intensive analysis of operations, content, and services and visualization for communicating findings to stakeholders and wider audiences. For librarians interested in learning more about Stata, Alan Acock’s book, A gentle introduction to Stata, 24 accessibly introduces the Stata software, statistical methods, and provides work-along examples and exercises with context-sensitive explanations. StataCorp, the software company, provides extensive web-hosted training materials on its learning resources portal,25 its introductory page with detailed and structured coverage of Stata basics, 26 and its online video channel of Stata tutorials. 27

Relational databases and SQL: The power of relational databases rests with their structured organization: When multiple data tables containing records in distinct categories but share certain common data fields, these tables relate to each other through linkage by these common fields.28 Contextsensitive insights through granular and nuanced customizable data queries are key strengths for operational and decision insights. These qualities have earned relational databases wide adoption across many industries and research areas.

To illustrate how relational databases work, the following library scenario describes a use case of populating the database with data tables and then interlinking them through logical relationships as determined by the purpose of a given inquiry: An initial data table is sourced from an instructor’s spreadsheet listing a course-related reading list, with basic data including author, title, publisher, year, ISBN, and preferred format. A second data table is created through a library system search by the reading list’s ISBNs and subsequently downloaded in spreadsheet form with bibliographic record number as the title’s unique record identifier, OCLC number, ISBN, format(s), and a wide range of additional data. A third data table is created through library vendor searches by ISBN and downloaded in spreadsheet form with ISBN, OCLC number, and additional descriptive data unique to the vendor. The relational database is created by importing the spreadsheets which then become individual data tables. Relationships between the tables are created by linking them by a field shared by all tables. In this example, this shared field is the ISBN. Working with clean ISBN data, queries retrieve data fields from all three tables by selecting the desired fields and querying for matching conditions between all three tables’ ISBN fields. Matching by desired relation provides insights, for example: Which desired titles are already held by the library? If yes, are the titles held in the desired

format? Which desired titles are available from the vendor in the desired format? If the desired format is electronic, what are the access terms? Relational database queries are customizable to situation-specific needs, thereby enabling relational databases to provide context-pertinent support for workflows and datadriven inquiries. Additionally, relational databases’ customdesigned reports of outputs pulled from needs-tailored queries provide user-friendly insights for workflows and cross-team collaborative projects. Gavin Powell’s Database Modeling Step by Step29 guides learners through relational database structures and the mechanics of SQL query-writing. Microsoft’s online learning module with a built-in learning assessment, Explore fundamental relational data concepts, 30 provides a beginner’s introduction to the core structural characteristics of relational data and SQL. IBM Technology’s 7-minute video tutorial What is a relational database? 31 accessibly introduces the basics of relational database structures. LinkedIn Learning 32 offers various online training courses on relational databases and learning paths from short introductory courses to extensive, in-depth learning material. The relational database software Microsoft Access is ubiquitous because it is included with the widely used Microsoft 365 suite.33 For users for whom Access is not already installed, the Access software can be downloaded using the online Microsoft Office account. Microsoft’s Access training videos34 provide short tutorials from basic foundations to specific database functions. The training site also provides links to additional Access resources from LinkedIn Learning.

SQL (Structured Query Language) is the methodical mechanism by which data are selected from the user-targeted data tables within the relational database. Jeff Iannucci’s book, Learn SQL in a Month of Lunches , 35 presents a structured SQL learning plan from beginner-level to in-depth skills in manageably small training increments. Mike McGrath’s book, SQL in Easy Steps: Ideal for Those Who Want to Master SQL Essentials, 36 gently coaches learners from SQL novice to more complex queries. Codeacademy’s “Learn SQL” online course37 guides SQL learners through data manipulation, queries, aggregate functions, and multiple tables with a combination of lessons, quizzes, projects, and related readings. LinkedIn Learning 38 offers various SQL online training courses and learning paths from short introductory courses to extensive, in-depth learning material.

Visualization Tools: Learning Resources

Visualization Tools: Microsoft’s Power BI39 is business intelligence software for complex data analysis and visualizations, and creation of interactive reports and dashboards. Its business intelligence and analytical features readily translate to datainfused inquiries in libraries. Microsoft’s Power BI training site40 provides learning paths, tutorials from basics to advanced functions, instructor-led training, and certification. LinkedIn Learning41 offers various online Power BI training courses and learning paths from short introductory courses to extensive, in-depth learning material.

Tableau 42 is a powerful software suite for business intelligence, data analysis, customizable visualizations including heat maps, and creation of interactive dashboards. Tableau’s broad applicability and analytical flexibility has earned it adoption by many industries, research areas, and increasingly in libraries. Tableau’s learning portal43 offers self-paced video tutorials, instructor-led training, role-based curricula grouped as learning paths, and Tableau certification programs in focused expertise areas. LinkedIn Learning 44

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offers various online Tableau training courses and learning paths from short introductory courses to extensive, in-depth learning material.

ArcGIS, 45 a geographic information system (GIS) software suite, is designed for creating, analyzing, visualizing, and sharing two- and three-dimensional maps and data tied to specific locations, with interactive features for end users. Geographybased data are applicable to many uses including city and landuse planning, infrastructure and environmental stewardship, law enforcement, emergency response, logistics, and marketing. ArcGIS geospatial features also relate to location-based analysis projects for operational and service insights in libraries. ESRI’s ArcGIS Tutorial Gallery 46 offers a wide range of trainings by data tasks, skill level, and format including web courses, instructor-led courses, and documentation. The ArcGIS Tutorial Gallery and its broader-scale companion site, the ESRI Academy, 47 require personal or institutional account logins, but LinkedIn Learning48 offers numerous online ArcGIS training courses and learning paths from short introductory courses to extensive, in-depth learning material.

Implications and Next Steps

To help librarians who are interested in analytical directions, this article series offers a structured blueprint for self-directed training from analytical thinking to powerful data tools and programming languages. Although systematic analytical skill development is less prevalent in librarianship than data science professions, librarians can take heart from already possessing many competencies naturally compatible with analytical tools: Librarians bring subject-based content knowledge and intellectual prowess in building bridges between learners, researchers, and collections. These skills

cultivate a foundational, knowledge-informed grasp of which questions to ask — an essential starting point for formulating, designing, and carrying out context-sensitive analytical projects. Given librarians’ long record of accomplishments in bringing automation, technologies, and instruction into the profession, librarians already bring strong intellectual foundations for cultivating expertise across data analysis, visualization, and related software suites and programming languages.

On the practical side of easing into the nurture of analytical competencies, recommended next steps include looking to institutional licenses for these analytical software packages and visualization tools to access, learn, and deploy the tools. In absence of such institutionally licensed access, a fruitful first step is leveraging the ubiquitous Excel spreadsheet software’s statistical plug-ins and experimenting with smallscale analysis projects focused on an in-house need. Whether focused on services, operations, or resources, any combination of these library aspects will benefit from data-informed analysis managed with software such as Excel. Moreover, many institutions also offer in-house training avenues. While the extent of in-house learning resources varies, many institutions’ Information Technology departments offer their employees software workshops with hands-on practice built into the training sessions. Many universities and colleges also offer their employees tuition remission for degree and certificate programs. Concurrently, in-house library collections include learning resources on analytical principles — covering not only theoretical foundations but also applied analysis methods as inspiration for designing in-house analysis projects aimed at specific needs. Librarians may find a surprising wealth of inhouse training and development offerings — a gentle first step into the world of analytical expertise.

Endnotes

1. Antje Mays. “Libraries, Leadership, and Synergies — Collections Analysis Skills, Part 1: Introduction to Analytical Skills, Practical Projects, and Training Guidance.” Against the Grain 36 no.5 (November 2024), 42-44.

2. Antje Mays. “Libraries, Leadership, and Synergies — Collections Analysis Skills, Part 2: Training Guidance and Resources for Analytical Skills and their Application in Library Settings.” Against the Grain 37 no.3 (June 2025), 71-73.

3. The SAS Institute. SAS. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.sas.com

4, The SAS Institute. “Learn SAS.” SAS, 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.sas.com/en_us/learn.html

5. The SAS Institute. “SAS Training.” SAS, 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.sas.com/en_us/training/overview.html

6. The SAS Institute. “SAS Certification.” SAS, 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.sas.com/en_us/certification.html

7. The SAS Institute. “SAS Academic Programs.” SAS, 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.sas.com/en_us/learn/academicprograms.html

8. The SAS Institute. “SAS Books, written by SAS experts.” SAS, 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://support.sas.com/en/books. html

9. The SAS Institute. “Learn SAS — Browse Catalog: Follow guided learning paths at your own pace or sign up for expert-led classes.” SAS, 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://learn.sas.com/

10. Coursera. “SAS Programmer Professional Certificate,” Coursera. SAS. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.coursera.org/ professional-certificates/sas-programming

11. LinkedIn. “SAS Online Training Courses.” LinkedIn Learning. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ topics/sas

12. IBM. SPSS Statistics. IBM product and tutorials page. [n.d.], accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.ibm.com/products/spss-statistics

13. The Open University. “Getting Started with SPSS.” OpenLearn, August 7, 2019, accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.open.edu/ openlearn/society-politics-law/sociology/getting-started-spss/content-section-0

14. LinkedIn. “SPSS Online Training Courses.” LinkedIn Learning. 2025, accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ topics/spss

15. LinkedIn. “SPSS Statistics Online Training Courses.” LinkedIn Learning, 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/ learning/topics/spss-statistics-2

endnotes continued on page 58

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Endnotes — continued from page 57

16. Python Software Foundation. Python. 2025, accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.python.org/ 17. Python Software Foundation. “Python for Beginners.” Python. 2025, accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.python.org/about/ gettingstarted/

18. LinkedIn. “Python Online Training Courses.” LinkedIn Learning. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/ learning/topics/python

19. The R Foundation. The R Project for Statistical Computing. [n.d.], accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.r-project.org/ 20. Codeacademy. “Learn R.” Online course. Codeacademy. [n.d.], accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.codecademy.com/learn/ learn-r

21. W3Schools. “R Tutorial.” W3Schools. 2025, accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.w3schools.com/r/ 22. LinkedIn. “Results for ‘R’.” LinkedIn Learning. Search results retrieved May 30, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ search?keywords=R

23. StataCorp. Stata: Statistical Software for Data Science. 2025, accessed May 23, 2025. https://www.stata.com/

24. Alan C. Acock. A Gentle Introduction to Stata. Revised sixth edition. College Station, Texas: Stata Press, 2023.

25. StataCorp. “Resources for Learning Stata.” Stata: Statistical Software for Data Science. 2025, accessed May 23, 2025. https:// www.stata.com/links/resources-for-learning-stata/

26. StataCorp. “Introduction to Stata Basics.” Stata: Statistical Software for Data Science. 2025, accessed May 23, 2025. https://www. stata.com/links/stata-basics/

27. StataCorp. “Analyze with confidence.” StataCorp LLC’s video channel of software tutorials. YouTube. 2025, accessed May 23, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/user/StataCorp

28. Donald Chamberlin. “50 Years of Queries.” Communications of the ACM 67, no.8 (August 2024), 110–21. doi:10.1145/3649887.

29. Gavin Powell. Database Modeling Step by Step. Boca Raton: CRC Press/Auerbach, 2020.

30. Microsoft. “Explore fundamental relational data concepts.” Microsoft Training. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://learn. microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/explore-relational-data-offerings/

31. IBM Technology. What is a relational database? Online video tutorial. 2022, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OqjJjpjDRLc

32. LinkedIn. “Results for ‘relational database.’” LinkedIn Learning. Search results retrieved 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/ learning/search?keywords=%22relational+database%22

33. Microsoft. “Microsoft Access.” Microsoft 365. 2025. Accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/ access

34. Microsoft. “Access video training.” Microsoft Support. 2025. Accessed May 30, 2025. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ access-video-training-a5ffb1ef-4cc4-4d79-a862-e2dda6ef38e6

35. Jeff Iannucci. Learn SQL in a Month of Lunches. Shelter Island, NY: Manning Publications, 2025

36. Mike McGrath. SQL in Easy Steps: Ideal for Those Who Want to Master SQL Essentials. Fourth edition. London, England: In Easy Steps Limited, 2020.

37. Codeacademy. “Learn SQL.” Online course. Codeacademy. [n.d.], accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.codecademy.com/learn/ learn-sql

38. LinkedIn. “Results for ‘SQL’.” LinkedIn Learning. Search results retrieved May 30, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ search?keywords=”SQL”

39. Microsoft. “Power BI: Uncover powerful insights and turn them into impact.” Microsoft Power Platform. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-bi

40. Microsoft. “Microsoft Learn for Power BI.” Microsoft Training. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ training/powerplatform/power-bi

41. LinkedIn. “Results for ‘PowerBI.’” LinkedIn Learning. Search results retrieved May 30, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ search?keywords=”PowerBI”

42. Tableau. “Tableau.” Tableau Products. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.tableau.com/products/tableau

43. Tableau. “Train Up. Data Down. Welcome to Tableau Learning.” Tableau Learning. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www. tableau.com/learn

44. LinkedIn. “Tableau Online Training Courses.” LinkedIn Learning. 2025, accessed May 30, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/ learning/topics/tableau

45. ESRI. “ArcGIS.” ESRI Products. [n.d.], accessed May 23, 2025. https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/geospatial-platform/overview

46. ESRI. “ArcGIS Tutorial Gallery.” ESRI Documentation. [n.d.], accessed May 23, 2025. https://learn.arcgis.com/en/gallery/

47. ESRI. ESRI Academy. [n.d.], accessed May 23, 2025. https://www.esri.com/training/

48. LinkedIn. “Results for ‘ArcGIS.’” LinkedIn Learning. Search results retrieved May 30, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ search?keywords=”ArcGIS”

/ September 2025

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Wandering the Web — Online Fashion Resources, Part I: History of Fashion

Column Editor: Lesley Rice Montgomery, MLIS (Catalog Librarian II, Tulane University Libraries’ Technical Services Department)

with Guest Editor: Roxanne Myers Spencer (Retired, Associate Professor and Coordinator, Beulah Winchel Education Library, Western

Kentucky University)

Introduction

This month’s “Wandering the Web” is the first of a three-part series covering the topic of online fashion resources. Part I will briefly outline the interesting but complex history of fashion primarily in the western world, linking to websites such as museums, reenactor sites where people can buy authentically sewn clothing, and some beautiful blogs where folks share their historically accurate, customized costumes and bespoke clothing derived from different eras. Associate Professor Roxanne Spencer will be joining me this month, providing a few relevant and thoughtfully analyzed websites. In the following issue, Part II, I will review websites on the fashion industry itself, including educational sites for interested parties who want to enter the profession. The series will conclude with Part III, when Roxanne will write on the subject of blue jeans — the history and as a cultural meme.

History of Fashion

It is far beyond the scope of this column to fully cover the history of fashion, which is a fascinating story that reflects social, political, and technological changes over the centuries. It was not until the 1800s that the industrial revolution allowed clothing to be mass-produced. This change in how ready-to-wear clothing that was created, marketed, and sold to the general public came along at the same time as the growth of the haute couture era, when the concept of high fashion emerged, signaling two major simultaneous shifts in the fashion industry. The 20th century continued these significant transformations, with each decade — starting in 1900 — evolving both culturally and economically in significant ways that molded how modern consumers viewed their lives, which in turn greatly influenced each succeeding decade’s popular and distinctive fashion styles. For example, the end of World War II heralded a return to more feminine styles, as most citizens were frankly worn out from the recent wartime austerities. The 1950s brought new fabrics to customers who were leading increasingly busy lives and wanted their clothing to be easy to care for. Unfortunately, the savings in time and household chores such as laundry came with a severe cost, as many of these man-made materials were highly flammable, which didn’t go well with the increasing numbers of women who smoked, including around their young children. The 1960s and 1970s saw a return to “natural” fabrics and casual styles that often were decorated by hand, with a renewed interest in arts and crafts inspiring people to add embroidery to their flowing dresses, smock shirts, and blue jeans. Designers of the 1980s further developed beautiful lace fabrics, soft corduroys that draped more naturally than these cotton derivatives did in the past, as well as intense new color dyes such as periwinkle, mauve, taupe, and charcoal grays. Interestingly, we have come full circle in western societies in the 21st century, with a return

to sustainable fashion, reupcycling, ethical production, and consumers favoring international styles. These trends are quite similar to fashion attitudes of the 1960s through 1980s. Online researchers and others who love to investigate fashion movements can find out about many of these developments by virtually visiting fashion museums and browsing through individuals’ blogs. A rich wealth of information can be obtained by searching the Internet, so without further ado, here is a sampling of some particularly stunning sites…

Museums

According to the new site Fashion & Textile Museums which is still under construction at https://www. fashionandtextilemuseums.com/digital-collections/, there are many digital collections you can search online, but not all of these are necessarily connected to a museum. One premier collection is in fact affiliated with the famous Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The online collection at https://www. vam.ac.uk/collections is entered via the “Most searched for” drop-down menu in the middle of the page, under Fashion This leads you to a horizontal display you can scroll through with little directional arrows. Each fashion item is labeled with the designer’s name, year produced, geographical location of the designer, and where the piece is currently being stored (at the V&A East Storehouse, at the V&A South Kensington, and so on). Samples include a 1954 evening dress by Cristóbal Balenciaga and a wildly striped double-breasted suit by Mr. Fish, manufactured around 1968. The V&A’s home page has a standard keyword search box, with choices including Title/object type, Artist/maker, Materials/techniques, Place of origin and by dates. For example, searching for a “dress” by the Artist/maker for years 1968-1969 brings up a mini-dress that is archived in the V&A East Storehouse, packaging for Twiggy dresses, and a pair of 1967-1970 era white tights, which were very fashionable at the time.

The Museum at FIT in New York City at https:// fashionmuseum.fitnyc.edu/collections is more extensive, with over 100 exhibitions available if you use the menu bar link. This online museum display is more relevant for those researching the history of fashion, with easy-to-access internal links for the 1700s-1800s, 1900-1919, and then each successive decade through the 2020s. The FIT also displays Accessories, Curator’s Favorites (naming the designer for each item), Lingerie, Menswear and Shoes. There is even a link to Gifts of Lauren Bacall, the famous actress. I love the beautiful full-color photos that illustrate each of these internal links. A search of the Lingerie reveals 79 items, from corset stays c. 1750 through a revealing teddy by Jean Yu, produced in 2008. The Museum at FIT site is truly gorgeous and very user friendly.

Another fabulous fashion collection on the Fashion & Textile Museums site (https://www.fashionandtextilemuseums.

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com/digital-collections/ ) is the Kyoto Costume Institute Digital Collection at https://www.kci.or.jp/en/archives/digital_ archives/. This is a superb website. The Search by Date column on the left side of the KCI Digital Archives runs vertically from the -1700s through the 2010s. This researcher’s dream is so incredibly easy to access and provides beautiful images of each labeled item, including a dressed doll from early 18th century England, many items of clothing for both men and women from 1790 France, the era of the revolution, as well as swimsuits from the 1900s, mod and Op Art clothing from the 1960s, and overthe-top 1980s pantsuits with super wide shoulder pads.

Bloomsbury Fashion Central at https://www. bloomsburyfashioncentral.com/online-museum-collections lists a directory of eighteen distinct online museum collections. Each library or museum is clearly labeled in alphabetical order with the number of images available to view on each site, and the “Click here to explore the collection” lets you instantly enter the virtual museum. The only drawback to this site is you need a membership via your institution. However, you can arrange a free trial and the login site gives directions.

A final website that is more useful and easily accessible is the updated Austin Community College site, Fashion Design: Museums and Digital Collections at https://researchguides. austincc.edu/fashiondesign/onlinecollections, which is actually a Research Guide. This is an incredible LibGuide, providing dozens of free digital collections, fashion history sites, and eleven museums. You could browse for hours through this directory of online historical fashion sites, including The Fashion Museum, formerly known as The Museum of Costume, which is an amazing collection of historic and fashionable dress at https://www.fashionmuseum.co.uk/. The Fashion Museum Bath , for example, holds a leading international fashion collection that spans the centuries from 1600 to the present. This museum was founded in 1963 and currently has 100,000 items with a focus on European, particularly British, fashionable dress and accessories at https://www.fashionmuseum.co.uk/ collection . Many of the items are presented online, with photographs portraying each clothing article on manikins that are fitted out with appropriate hairstyles, shoes and other accessories that match the period. I would highly recommend this website for a clear and understandable visual review of fashion styles through different eras, and the Austin Community College directory is an exemplary portal that will help you to enhance your research activities.

Blogs, Vlogs and Substack Platforms

Fashion bloggers create and share content via social media, individual blogs, and other online platforms, curating their personal style or reviewing modern clothing trends. Some bloggers are affiliated with brand names or actively participate in fashion events. As with other bloggers, the fashion blogs are primarily used to connect with others who share similar interests. These blogs are numerous and include news blogging websites, such as Vogue at https://www.vogue.com/, Harper’s Bazaar at https://www.harpersbazaar.com/, Elle at https://www. elle.com/, and Fashion Times at https://www.fashiontimes. com/. Substack platforms are another way to access original newsletters, both free and with paid subscription options. These newsletters enable writers to share content, combining blogging with email marketing, with the substack effectively acting as a social network melded with a publishing venue. Popular fashion newsletters include Magasin by Laura Reilly at https:// www.magasin.ltd/, which is a store, a magazine, and a fashion

September 2025

shopping newsletter. Her writing is fresh, and the shopping newsletter offers timely advice. Other substack publications include 365 Days of Fashion at https://glamobserver.substack. com/s/365-days-of-fashion by Glam Observer that explores a variety of fashion eras like the 1920s; Mirror of Historical Fashions by Paula Bates at https://witchyvintage.substack. com/ that explores the history of fashion through vintage magazines, catalogs and books; and The Fashion Network Blog that covers fashion history at https://tfnuiuc.substack. com/. Yet another opportunity to investigate fashion history is via vlogs, which you can readily locate on YouTube . A sample is the 14:52-minute-long video by Pour la Victoire from December 19, 2020 entitled “Getting Dressed in the 18th Century and Snowy NYC Vlog” at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?app=desktop&v=WKwgWMvf-Oc . This New Yorker vlogger demonstrates details of how to wear handmade 18th century clothing, including a shift, stays, bum pad, petticoats, stomacher, jacket, fichu, cloak, cap, and mitts! Her outfit is an accurate representation of what middle-class women wore in New York between the 1750s and 1770s. It is simply amazing to watch how long it would have taken to dress in everyday 18th century clothing. — Lesley

Reenactor Sites, Videos and Online Stores

I highly recommend you check out Jon Townsends’ site on YouTube entitled Townsends Journal Townsends ’, an American educational YouTube channel, is “dedicated to exploring the 18th century lifestyle” at https://www. youtube.com/@townsends , to which you can subscribe for hundreds of videos on living history, including information about period clothing. The channel was originally intended to serve as an advertising venue for his family’s brick and mortar historical reenactment supply store. The family store sells authentically-made versions of tools, accessories, and clothing. Townsends also hosts a cookery show using authentic recipes, replicates ingredients, and utilizes period style implements. His journal is extremely popular with 23.7 thousand subscribers, and his company also has supplied the movie and television industries with appropriate clothing and uniforms for period filming. Samples include a 4:17-minutelong YouTube on “Dressing a Longhunter” at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=t9fNT33UPyk and a 9:06-minutelong historical conversation about “Sewing Histories’ Most Popular Garment,” the work shirt at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=_FbwRSfedoE . The latter video includes an excellent description of how long it took women in the past to sew this important garment and how crucial the piece was, saving the outer garments from additional wear and tear and allowing the wearers to keep relatively clean by washing only the shirt on a regular basis. Based out of Pierceton, Indiana, Townsends also covers 19th century reproduction and visits other living history places, including Virginia, Michigan, and Louisville, Missouri, in earlier episodes. Townsends Instagram with full-color photographs and descriptions of each image can be reached at https://www.instagram.com/ townsends_official/?hl=en, including #townsends, #livehistory, and #townsendswildernesshomestead.

LBCC Historical Apothecary at https://www.lbcchistorical. com/ and on Etsy at LitttleBits, https://www.etsy.com/shop/ LitttleBits.

Featuring recrafted hair pomades, rouges, lip color, scent, and other historical cosmetics, the beginnings of LBCC Historical

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Apothecary in 2010, which also sells under the LitttleBits Etsy store, was born of a fascination with history, plants, and “In a dream, my ancestors came to me and told me I was to build the first-ever historical apothecary, and they would help me.” These authentically recreated potions are perfect for historical reenactors, living history enthusiasts, Renn Fairs or even just a different makeup aesthetic.

Katelyn Kearns’ Prairie Flower Historical YouTube Channel, which covers fashion and clothing topics at https://www. youtube.com/@KatelynKearns and her Podcast at https://www. youtube.com/ watch?v=d2MnOuSxY6Y&list=PLZ1G1ThL3Fc D8zXEE5QDZlz3ngDFx2y9e&index=2

In an almost 50-minute-long backstory video for her viewers, “Women Only Had 2 Dresses and Other Victorian Clothing Myths — Random Research Rabbit Holes” at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxRUhKfirrs, Kearns debunks (with receipts!) common myths about clothing during the Victorian era. In addition to longer video histories of fashion during this long and influential period, Kearns includes fascinating

tidbits in YouTube Shorts, featuring such topics as dyeing cloth using an 1815 dye manual, and features pages from a fashion journal of the era, Godey’s Ladies Book. Kearns also ventures into clothing habits of the 18th and 20th centuries, as well. Ms. Kearns’ Podcasts provide beautifully filmed “adventures and research in living history.” The Podcast One Woman Is Twice Two Soldiers, Episode 27 discusses “Dressing the Late 18th Century Infant.” https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=d2MnOuSxY6Y Episode 24 takes a deep dive into “Dressing the 1830s Baby,” from diapers and shirts to belly bands which were all hand sewn, located at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3_t1BB5wOc . Episode 25, “Wedding Trousseaus of the Mid-19th Century,” https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=oHKnYFBScWY fully describes what new brides needed to do to prepare for their newly wedded lives. These and more video podcasts provide a wealth of information on historical lifestyles, including these fashionand clothing-oriented episodes. Both the YouTube videos and visual Podcasts are fun and useful resources for sewists and reenactors. — Roxanne

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Biz of Digital — Implementing Digital Systems for the Lewis University Archives and the Creation of an Institutional Repository

Reflections from a First-Year Librarian and Archivist

By Jason Smith

(Scholarly Communications Instruction

Librarian/University

Archivist, 1 Lewis University Library, University Parkway, Romeoville, IL 60446; Phone: 815-836-5397) <jsmith58@lewisu.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

Background

Lewis University is a mid-sized, private university nestled within the suburban community of Romeville, Illinois, located approximately 35 miles southwest from downtown Chicago. Founded in 1932, Lewis University began as a small aviation school for low-income boys and grew into what is now the seventh largest private university in the state. As of the time of writing, the University has over 530 faculty members, around 7,400 students, hundreds of other staff members, and over 40,000 alumni. While Lewis University focuses heavily on its mission as a primarily teaching-forward university, research still occupies a significant role within the community. For nearly a century, faculty, students, staff, and alumni have produced a myriad of materials. This ranges from documents produced within the day-to-day operations of the University and its offices as well as the scholarly and creative output from its community members. With the University having a positive outlook and currently experiencing consistent, solid growth, the quantity of these documents will only increase. To that end, the Lewis University Library has grappled with developing mechanisms to keep track of, collect, and make accessible all of these materials.

Developing Systems

A mechanism for collecting the day-to-day materials had already taken root in 1983. In that year, the University Administration created the University Archives, which was to be co-located within the library building and directed by Brother Ambrose Groble, FSC,1 a dedicated member of the De La Salle Brothers, the Catholic order that gained sponsorship of Lewis University in 1960 (then called Lewis College). The Archives operated under the Office of the President largely independent of the Library. Brother Ambrose and his successor, Brother Bernard Rapp, FSC, curated a large, meticulously arranged, described, and preserved collection. Although not archivists by training, they took the work seriously. They learned from organizations like the Society of American Archivists, the Midwest Archives Conference, and various archival publications. However, the Archives were internally focused; while community members could access materials by seeking permission from the current archivist, they were not meant to be a public-facing arm of the University.

As such, during his tenure as Archivist, Brother Bernard stuck with what worked and the technology that he had available to him. He utilized the DOS-based archival cataloging software ARCS up until he retired in January 2018. The system contained all of the digital finding aids and description information for the

archival collections. Looking to update the Archives to a more public-facing arm, his successor, Ariana Lim, began the process of studying different digital platforms to host finding aids, but she moved to a different institution in 2019 before the Library made any commitments to a platform.

In the meantime, in the months before Brother Bernard retired, the Library began studying the possibility of implementing an institutional repository. This work culminated in a white paper, prepared in January 2019 by the Library’s Head of Technical Services, Alice Creason, in which she proposed funding to secure an institutional repository platform; conversations evolved over the next few years. Finally, in Fall 2022, the Provost’s Office earmarked funding to secure a Digital Commons instance. While the current Library staff handled the initial work of building out the institutional repository, they deemed that the work would require a dedicated position and set out to create a new position within the Library. This same position would also handle the archives work since the Archives moved under the Library, and the work heavily overlapped with the work in the institutional repository.

Rebuilding

A New Start

The Library started accepting applications for the position in late 2023, and there were two main goals: the candidate was to serve as the head of the Archives and serve as the administrator for the institutional repository. I entered the Lewis University Library in June 2024. Having just graduated less than a month before, I entered the Library as a new librarian, eager to take on these two massive projects. Immediately, I was greeted with the full scope of the work ahead of me: a colossal backlog of archival materials dating back to 2019 to process and the fact that ARCS was no longer compatible with newer hardware — meaning that I did not have access to the old finding aid data. In addition, there was an institutional repository to launch. While I was used to large workloads as a graduate student, this felt real considering it was the start of my professional career. However, instead of being intimidated, I was excited to jump in; this was, after all, as close to a dream job that I could imagine.

(Re)Digitizing the Archival Finding Aids

The first order of business was getting the archives in order and building out its public presence. To do so, I needed to set up a digital platform for the archives, both to develop finding aids and to give the public a way to discover our holdings. We quickly settled on ArchivesSpace, which I was familiar with as a graduate

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student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While we secured the hosting contract, I did my best to learn as much as I could about the University, about the organization implemented by my predecessors in the Archives, and the materials that had yet to be processed. Over the next few months, I filed the backlog and began building out the ArchivesSpace instance.

But redigitizing finding aids of the entire archival holdings of an institution from scratch is hard. While I tried to temper my expectations — I have always heard of how difficult these massive projects are — I was still hopeful on completing the digital finding aids within the spring semester. However, nothing prepares you for the time commitment until you start. Creating accurate, even “golden minimum” compliant finding aids for an entire repository is a monumental task. Of course, most of the work is inputting metadata into ArchivesSpace, but you also have to verify that the current, physical arrangement is as upto-date as possible. Any changes to the arrangement add time.

For example, early in the 2020s, Lewis University restructured its constituent colleges, shifting departments around and creating new colleges that better reflect the diversity of degree programs offered. However, the current Archives structure did not reflect these changes in any way; this meant that, as part of the digital finding aid creation process, physical rearrangement and evaluation of the current structure were necessary steps. Arranging by organization has its own pitfalls because structures can continue to change, necessitating another adjustment of the physical arrangement. I briefly considered changing this type of arrangement, but the main priority was to build the Archives into a navigable, user-friendly arrangement. Completely redoing the structure would cost too much time upfront, so I would have to revisit the overall arrangement at a later date after the Archives were functional.

This emphasizes that, to have usable digital finding aids, you really have to start with physical arrangement. You cannot have your digital finding aids without first ensuring that your physical collection is as close to accurate as possible to the community you are serving and to the history that you are preserving. While this might appear obvious to more seasoned archivists, as a new archivist inheriting an established repository, I wanted to respect the structure established by my predecessors. It did not feel like it was my place to significantly alter the top-level organization that they implemented. However, I realized that these things are necessary when inheriting collections; as long as the original order of the series and files inside the record groups are maintained, I can make these changes. The digital finding aids, to ensure consistency, accuracy, and provenance, should note alterations. Ultimately, any physical arrangement of materials needs to respect the fonds2 of the records, but the overall structure should reflect the needs of the community. Digital finding aids can be utilized to preserve the original archival arrangement and show respect to those before me.

Preserving Scholarly Output

The other major project involved wider outreach to the University community. My role also made me the chair of the Institutional Repository Steering Committee, which is composed of representatives from every college on campus and some administrative units. This is an intimidating position for any new graduate; I was to lead a group of experienced scholars and long-time members of the community. But recent and current LIS graduate students are earning their credentials at a great time because the pandemic really revitalized and reinvigorated conversations on scholarly communications, open educational

resources, and open access to research. Even though I felt inexperienced, I was not. I had exposure to these conversations and experience working with institutional repositories.

I leveraged this experience to introduce the committee to current conversations on Creative Commons, industry standard guidelines, and open access as they relate to Digital Commons and institutional repositories. At the same time, institutional repositories are deeply tied to the goals and needs of each institution. In the case of Lewis University, because it is a Lasallian institution, it has a unique mission in accordance with its Lasallian heritage.3 To really address the needs of the community, any institutional repository should meld together industry accepted practices and the unique character of the institution. Having a newly graduated librarian lead a committee of faculty deeply familiar with the Lasallian mission meant that we were merging industry knowledge with expressions of our mission. In this regard, I was learning from the committee how to present our Lasallian mission, and the committee was learning from me how to turn that into an open access digital platform for Lewis University’s scholarly output. The more closely tailored to our mission, the more buy-in we could get from faculty. This should hold true for any institution: you need to provide the stakeholders a reason to believe in the platform.

Even then, faculty buy-in for such a platform requires immense work. To assist in getting the platform on the radars of our faculty members, the Library Director, Andrew Lenaghan, and I presented the early stages of the platform to each of the colleges during their college-wide meetings. These meetings magnified the same anxieties of presenting in front of the committee many times over! Regardless, presenting to your community is a vital, nonnegotiable step. The people who submit and host their material on the platform know best what they want from the platform. The committee is implementing the policies, guidelines, and making the final calls, but wider faculty feedback allowed us to consider materials that we would not have thought of and shaped how we designed the platform.

It also benefits in making the platform more inclusive in principle. By talking to the faculty about the platform, they are involved with its early construction. We are not springing it on them and expecting automatic buy-in of the platform. Instead, by giving them a voice and allowing them to influence the direction of the platform, it provides them a larger stake in the project. Of course, this does not guarantee that the stakeholders will fully commit to the platform. Part of the process is learning that everybody holds a different opinion. They may not view it as necessity. They may not see how it differs from platforms like ResearchGate. They may not be comfortable with the open access focus of the platform. This diversity of opinions is a benefit because it allows us to cater how we design the platform and how we promote it to the stakeholders.

Launch Event and Keeping the Momentum

When the platform launched at the end of April 2025, the Library held a formal launch event. As part of the event, we designed a display of physical scholarly works. The display included works dated from the 1960s that are stored in the Archives and current works that were to be stored in Digital Commons. The display was meant to showcase the evolution of storage and access: we have moved from physical, archival storage where access is more limited to a digital model wherein works are more readily accessible. It was also a celebration of the long history of work that Lewis University’s community has completed over many decades.

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The event took place during Common Hour. This is an hour-long block from 12PM to 1PM on Wednesdays in which no classes or meetings are held in order to give the community the opportunity to attend artistic, cultural, and professional growth events. Andrew Lenaghan spoke about the history and background of the Digital Commons initiative. Then, I introduced the platform, demonstrated the submission process, and spoke of our goals for the platform. In this way, we recapitulated some of the main points that we brought to the college-wide meetings while also highlighting what we changed based off community feedback. In addition, it served as a method to remind the community about the platform now that it was fully developed and ready to accept submissions. A significant portion of the work when implementing a new digital platform is just making sure that people know about it and making sure that they remember that they know about it. The more times you can promote it or hold events that emphasize its significance, the more people it will stick with. In this regard, we have also developed a plan to send reminder emails to the entire community every semester reminding authors to submit their work to the platform.4

Conclusion: Final Reflections from a First-Year Librarian/Archivist

Working on two massive, new digital initiatives is a massive amount of work for anyone. With my being in the first year of my professional career and having never been the lead on a single large-scale implementation project — and certainly not two — the work felt even more monumental. However, after nearly a year of work, both projects are things that the Library and the wider community can be proud of. Both projects continue to evolve (with the ArchivesSpace still not formally launched) and

provide Lewis University with a significant presence in the larger scholarly network, in open access initiatives, and in Midwestern archival holdings. The unique, fascinating nearly century-long history of Lewis University and its Lasallian mission is reaching people in newer, wider ways; the fascinating work that the community conducts is able to make a massive impact.

To close, I want to offer a few reflections and comments for how long-serving librarians can support new librarians or those taking on large-scale projects. These are all strategies that my director employed, whether intentional or not, and all made me feel more confident in my abilities.

• Trust them; you hired them for a reason.

• Check in with them and be willing to assist, whether through reviewing policy documents, developing outreach events, or even just talking through ideas.

• If you have been at your institution for a while and know a lot of people around campus or other stakeholders, facilitate the initial meetings between them and your new staff member.

• Identify webinars, professional development opportunities, or professional organizations that fit with their interests.

• Identify a variety of work that they can do; while the main projects should be the primary focus, working on other tasks is productive but allows a mental break from the projects.

• Provide honest, constructive feedback: let them know what they are doing well, work with them on setting goals, and assist in addressing any weaknesses.

Endnotes

1. Stands for Fratres Scholarum Christianarum and is a post-nominal abbreviation utilized to indicate one’s membership in the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools (commonly referred to as the “De La Salle Brothers” or the “Christian Brothers”).

2. A group of documents that share an origin and are collected, created, or accumulated during an organization’s functions or a person’s lifetime.

3. For more information on the mission, check the mission statement: https://www.lewisu.edu/welcome/mission. htm

4. For more information on the launch event, read the blog post posted to our website: https://lewisu.libguides. com/blog/Launching-Lewis-Universitys-InstitutionalRepository

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The Digital Toolbox — The Digital Divide Dilemma: Balancing Universal Access with Budget Realities

How Libraries Are Creatively Navigating Affordability While Expanding Equitable Digital Access

Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director of Digital Book Services for Academic Libraries, OverDrive, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>

In today’s higher education landscape, digital access is a baseline necessity. Students rely on easy access to streaming video, eBooks, and audiobooks to complete coursework, explore ideas, and conduct research. For too many libraries, providing equitable access runs up against the reality of tightening budgets and rising digital content costs.

The Core Challenge: Equity vs. Affordability

Librarians across institutions navigate a growing tension between providing universal digital access and managing finite resources. This dilemma is especially acute for schools with smaller FTEs or limited discretionary funding, where every dollar must stretch across multiple needs.

Access and affordability do not have to be competing priorities. Increasingly, institutions are embracing creative strategies to achieve both goals, strategies that reframe the conversation from “either/or” to “yes, and.”

Smart Solutions: Consortiums, Flex Models & KBASE Offerings

Libraries are turning to innovative cost-sharing models to mitigate the challenge without compromising service. Consortium purchasing allows institutions to pool resources and access broader collections. Shared digital libraries and cooperative licensing agreements are growing in popularity, especially for streaming media and academic video.

Kanopy’s flexible subscription models Kanopy BASE and KBASE Select, are designed with this exact challenge in mind. KBASE provides unlimited access to a large, curated collection for a flat price — ideal for campuses looking to stabilize budgets. KBASE Select goes a step further, letting libraries allocate funds toward specific subject collections aligned with their curriculum, putting control back in librarians’ hands while supporting areas of need or who may have funding for these resources.

View from a Student’s Perspective: Real-World Barriers

For students, digital barriers go beyond content availability. Many face inconsistent internet access, outdated or shared devices, and platforms that are not user-friendly. These obstacles disproportionately affect marginalized and nontraditional students — precisely those who most benefit from inclusive digital libraries.

When digital platforms are accessible and easy to use, they help level the playing field. That’s why it’s critical for providers to meet evolving accessibility standards without passing the burden to institutions.

Partner Success Spotlight: SUNY Morrisville

Several of Kanopy and Libby’s smaller full-time enrollment partners have demonstrated how thoughtful planning and the right platform partnerships deliver equity and cost-efficiency. They leverage flexible subscription models and align content decisions with course needs. These institutions have significantly expanded student access without overextending their budgets.

For SUNY Morrisville, a small rural college in upstate New York, ensuring equitable access to academic and cultural content has become a strategic imperative. In Fall 2024, the campus library began offering access to Libby through OverDrive — a move that Library Director Heidi Eakin describes as both practical and transformational.

“We started using Libby in Fall 2024, and the decision was rooted in three priorities: improving accessibility, making smarter budget choices, and better supporting our students,” said Eakin. “Students are engaging with fiction, career-readiness resources, and nonfiction they might not otherwise encounter,” Eakin noted. “It helps us support a more inclusive and wellrounded learning environment.”

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Libby’s intuitive interface and mobile-friendly experience have made it easy for students to access eBooks, audiobooks, and digital magazines — without adding financial strain to the institution or its users. And because the platform includes both academic and recreational titles, it supports student engagement in a more holistic way.

While SUNY Morrisville is primarily a residential undergraduate campus, Libby has become an essential tool for reaching students beyond the main library doors, including those completing internships, attending the Norwich campus, or enrolled in online courses. “Libby encourages casual, self-directed exploration,” said Eakin. “It supports cultural enrichment by providing access to diverse authors, perspectives, and genres — helping us foster an engaged and inclusive campus community.”

Accessibility has also been a driving factor behind increased use and adoption. Eakin and her team have taken deliberate steps to promote Libby’s built-in assistive features such as screen reader compatibility, voice control, and adjustable text sizes. With limited staffing, a tight budget, and a library preparing for renovation, the investment in Libby has proven to be a strategic solution to address long-term access challenges.

Partnership has also played a key role. SUNY Morrisville joined the Northern New York Library Network consortium, allowing the college to tap into a robust shared collection and stretch its resources through the OverDrive Advantage program.

“Join a consortium. That’s what made OverDrive work for us,” Eakin advised. “And look for campus funding tied to accessibility or student support — you can often apply those dollars to inclusive tools like Libby.”

Her biggest recommendation for peer institutions? Don’t wait.

“Don’t wait for a perfect launch plan, just make the resource available,” she said. “Equity starts with access, and usage will grow from there.”

Future-Proofing Your Digital Access Strategy

One often overlooked advantage of digital content subscriptions is the long-term sustainability they offer. Kanopy continuously updates their platform to meet current accessibility and compliance standards without requiring additional investments from libraries.

This means libraries can commit to digital access today with confidence that their choices will remain viable, inclusive, and relevant tomorrow.

Looking Ahead: Practical, Equitable, and Affordable

The digital divide is real, but it’s not immovable. With the right partners, tools, and strategies, libraries can offer students the rich digital resources they need without sacrificing fiscal responsibility.

By embracing flexible subscription models, collaborative licensing, and user-first technology, institutions future-proof their access strategies, making affordability and equity possible at the same time. And in doing so, they are able to serve the needs of students, faculty, and library teams alike.

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Librarian Luminaries — Sarah Tribelhorn

Sciences and Sustainability Librarian, San Diego State University

Column Editor: Caroline Goldsmith (Associate Director, The Charleston Hub) <caroline@charlestonlibraryconference.com>

Academic librarians and library staff are a bridge between the vast world of knowledge and the needs of students, faculty, and researchers. “Librarian Luminaries” is a new column which will feature a different librarian each month who has had a recent notable achievement, implemented a new idea or approach in their library, who is a trail blazer, or who is an overall exemplary model of service, scholarship and innovation.

We’re happy to share this interview with Sarah Tribelhorn, Sciences and Sustainability Librarian, San Diego State University, who was featured for our July 2025 Librarian Luminaries column!

ATG: Hi, Sarah! Can you share a little bit with us about your background and education?

ST: I come from a research background, with a Master of Science in Ichthyology and Fisheries Science. For the first 15 years of my career, I worked as an information specialist for National Inquiry Services Center (NISC SA) in South Africa (that was, at the time, headquartered in Fort Collins, CO). NISC specialized in publishing African journals, databases, and books. I worked specifically as an indexer, and created metadata for the database Fish, Fisheries, and Aquatic Biodiversity Worldwide (FFAB). I then transitioned to freelance scientific editing, specifically enhancing manuscripts of non-English speaking clients to help them publish their research in mainstream English-language journals.

ATG: What made you decide to go to library school or drew you towards librarianship?

ST: I was searching for something that I could do with the skills I have accumulated through my different experiences, and have always been passionate about information and science literacy, and so library school on an academic librarian track seemed a really good fit. It was also a full circle moment for me, as I worked in grad school in the South African Institute of Aquatic Sciences library, and worked closely with the librarian, who then transitioned into the Director for NISC SA, and offered me a job after graduation, effectively starting my career as an information professional!

ATG: Can you tell us more about your role as a sciences and sustainability librarian at San Diego State University and what your day to day work entails?

ST: As the Sciences and Sustainability Librarian, my daily activities are a dynamic mix of academic support, resource management, and environmental advocacy. A significant portion of my day involves instruction and research assistance for students and faculty in my liaison subjects: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, and Sustainability, ensuring they have the information literacy skills needed for success. I’m also responsible for the development and management of print and digital collections in these science fields, with a strong focus on open access resources. I often find myself leading the Library Green Team, strategizing with campus partners on new sustainability initiatives, and collaborating

within the library to implement sustainable practices within the library’s operations and programming. Beyond the campus, I’m engaged with community partners to deliver sustainability and climate information literacy, and participatory science programs.

ATG: Does your background in Ichthyology and Fisheries Science and your knowledge of delicate ecosystems help bring about or influence your work to drive towards greater sustainability in your library (reducing waste and energy conservation)?

ST: Absolutely! Sustainability goes deeper than the environmental aspects; and also includes social equity and economic feasibility as being fundamental to sustainability. On reflection, my research was focused on environmental justice (which I did not realize at the time). My research goal was to provide guidelines, based on extensive fisheries surveys of the river and floodplain lakes, to restore a natural flood regime to the Phongolo floodplain in South Africa. The floodplain was negatively impacted by the Pongolopoort Dam that was originally built in 1973 to support upstream agriculture. There was little consideration of the downstream impacts on the local underrepresented communities that relied on the river for not only water, but for their fish source needed for survival. Water was historically released from the dam during winter, when the normal flood regime would be summer. This had severely negative consequences for not only the natural environment but also for the communities relying on these resources. This had a profound impact on me, and ever since I have been searching for equitable and sustainable solutions as a common thread throughout my work, from making databases more accessible, to making research more accessible and inclusive, to advocating for more sustainable practices in libraries.

ATG: You organize a Sustainability Committee in your library. Can you tell us about this, who participates and what your goals are? What are some achievements so far?

ST: The Sustainability Committee (Green Team) was catalyzed through a project the library did on mapping the work in the library to the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which highlighted a gap and need in the library to formalize sustainability related work. The green team comprises members from administration, faculty, and staff and, in the fall, we are hoping to include student representatives. Our first big goal was to benchmark sustainability in the library, so we enrolled and have now completed the Sustainable Libraries Initiative Certification Program (SLCP). Projects on the horizon will be to work with our administration on developing a comprehensive Disaster Management Plan, as well as a Sustainability Hub in the library, modeled on that from Binghamton University. We publish monthly newsletters that are hosted in Sustainability in the SDSU Library, along with all things related to our committee, and try to host workshops

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quarterly that highlight some of the initiatives we have been involved in.

ATG: Can you tell us about the Citizen Science Projects that you’ve been doing and how involved the students have been? What have been some other recent successful services, initiatives or programs that you have offered to the community or university?

ST: Essentially we are facilitators of citizen or participatory science projects that are happening on campus. We do not host any of the projects ourselves, but highlight projects that are happening on our campus, or in our community, with input from our students, staff, and faculty. We have focused on Citizen Science month, with support from SciStarter, feeding into their #OneMillionActsofScience. This year, for the San Diego City Nature Challenge, we collaborated with students from the San Diego State University Biodiversity Museum for iNaturalist workshops as the students are involved in this initiative by volunteering as expert species identifiers. The aim of these citizen science initiatives is to make science open and inclusive to anyone wanting to participate.

Our workshops are aimed to provide some fun and education around the topic of sustainability and climate. Other successful workshops we have held include a “T-shirts-to-Totes” workshop for Earth Day, highlighting the importance of upcycling; Sustainable Gift Wrapping around the Holidays; and a Digital Declutter workshop emphasizing the environmental impact of our digital footprint, and providing solutions, including the mental health benefits of decluttering.

Some of our broader community collaborations include those with the San Diego Circuit, a consortium of academic and public libraries, focused on bringing social change to our communities through a series of author talks and programming related to combating health misinformation and climate equity.

ATG: We see that just last week, you were welcomed as an advisory board member to the Sustainable Libraries Initiative, which is for both public and academic libraries as well as individuals. What are some of your duties in this role? What do you hope to accomplish by being an advisor?

ST: I am honored to serve on the Sustainable Libraries Initiative (SLI) Advisory Board, where I will advocate for libraries that want to adopt environmentally sound, socially equitable, and economically feasible practices. My role involves raising awareness of SLI’s goals and achievements, mentoring libraries on best practices in sustainable librarianship, and helping to mobilize the SLI’s resources. Through my work for SLI and the American Library Association (ALA) Sustainability Roundtable ( SustainRT ) as their coordinator this year, I aim to be an ambassador for successful sustainability initiatives in academic libraries, empowering all libraries to tell their stories. Libraries are inherently engaged in sustainable work, and I’m eager to help them share their stories and knowledge with others to help build resilient communities.

ATG: There are still many states with no membership representation (Including the state where I live) in the SLI. What do you feel can be done to help gain support in libraries and individuals within these states and help get them on board with this initiative? What are some ways that libraries can “go greener” that are economically feasible?

ST: To foster broader adoption of the SLI in currently unrepresented states, strategic outreach is crucial, focusing on leveraging existing libraries and library networks that have success with SLI, showcasing the tangible benefits and success

stories of “green” initiatives, and providing accessible entry points like freely available webinars. SLI and ALA’s SustainRT have many free resources on their respective websites, with ideas of low entry, low cost programming and initiatives. Tailoring messages to local environmental concerns and diverse library types, alongside direct relationship-building with library leaders, is also key. Concurrently, libraries can embark on economically feasible “greener” practices such as optimizing energy use through LED lighting and HVAC adjustments, implementing comprehensive recycling and waste reduction programs, conserving water with low-flow fixtures, promoting digital collections, and engaging communities through sustainabilityfocused programming and “Library of Things” initiatives. Not all libraries have the options of these but, for example, if your library is going to be renovated, in the planning process, include some of these “greener” options to save money, as well as supporting the sustainability goals in the future.

ATG: Switching gears here a little- you recently wrote articles on Assessing AI and the resulting energy usage and also fair use in AI with assessing ethical and social equity concerns. What are your views on the use of AI in libraries and how we should educate incoming students on the use of AI in their work? Do you feel threatened by AI or see it as a good tool to have in the toolbox and the need for upskilling with faculty?

ST: I have many views on the use of AI in libraries — but not necessarily all negative! I feel strongly that we should be providing comprehensive AI literacy training to our students, so they can critically assess the tools they are using. I don’t feel threatened by AI as I consider it a tool, depending on its application. I do think there needs to be more education and literacy on how to critically assess specific tools, and we should not only focus on our students, but also our faculty and staff to ensure they are also critical of specific tools, as well as the implications of using AI regarding the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of these tools. We currently have a taskforce in our library to develop an internal AI policy that will help our employees to critically assess the tools they are planning on using, and I feel that all libraries should develop something like this, or follow the ACRL toolkit and guidelines.

ATG: What’s a major challenge you have faced in your role in librarianship and how did you overcome it?

ST: Challenges I have faced include doing work that is not necessarily considered typically “academic librarian” work, which includes the sustainability work I am pursuing, as well as the citizen science programming. These have mostly been carried out by public libraries, so my challenge has been getting the buy-in and support to show that this work is equally important for academic libraries, and can be done in conjunction with the typical work that someone in my role does, such as research support and information literacy instruction.

ATG: What does “Librarianship Elevated” Mean to you?

ST: I think of “Librarianship Elevated” as librarianship beyond traditional perceptions of what we think librarianship is, or perhaps what it traditionally was, to playing a more proactive, influential, and essential role to build resilient communities. So, a shift from being custodians of information to becoming dynamic leaders, educators, and community builders.

ATG: Is there anything that we didn’t ask you about that you’d like to talk about here?

ST: I do want to say that I am doing this work on the backs of many who have come before me: ALA’s SustainRT was founded continued on page 71

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ATG Interviews Martha Fogg Managing Director, AM

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

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

ATG: You’ve held leadership roles across various areas of Adam Matthew Digital, now AM, over the last 20 years. What led you to your current position, and what excites you most about the work you’re doing today?

MF: I’ve always been driven by a fascination with the intersection of history, technology, and storytelling. Over the years at AM, I’ve been fortunate to work across multiple strands of our business strategy, giving me a deep understanding of how all the moving parts fit together to deliver something of real value to our customers. Underpinning every role and team at AM, from technology to customer support, is a unified purpose and sense of the meaning behind what we do. My role as Managing Director allows me to evolve and shape that vision, and I’m always so excited and inspired to see how our incredible staff find creative ways to interpret our mission.

ATG: AM has built a strong reputation for curating and digitizing rich primary source collections. How do you see the company’s mission evolving in today’s research and teaching environments?

MF: In the past, the focus was on digitisation as access — getting a fragile manuscript online so it could be used without damage. Then came understanding how technologies such as HTR could transform the ability to interrogate that material. Now, it’s about enabling deeper engagement: supporting digital scholarship, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and experiential learning which encourages curiosity, creativity and empathy as well as data and analysis.

Particularly exciting to me recently has been a greater emphasis on how primary sources can be used in STEM. Or perhaps more accurately, as a tool to demonstrate how the traditional barriers between STEM and arts and humanities study can be broken down.

ATG: As Managing Director, what strategic priorities are you focused on to ensure AM remains a leader in digital scholarship and archival innovation?

MF: Three stand out. First, ensuring our products remain exceptional, whether through the provision of unique, wellcurated, and globally relevant content collections, or through our Quartex technology platform. Second, harnessing technology to its fullest, but with a great sense of the responsibility we have to use it ethically and sustainably. And third, listening to our library and archive partners, and working

with them to ensure that archival materials remain at the heart of brilliant research and teaching.

ATG: Critics sometimes argue that the commercialization of digitized archival content, particularly public domain or publicly funded collections, raises questions about equitable access. How does AM navigate the tension between offering valuable digital scholarship and ensuring broader public access to historical materials?

MF: It’s a fair and important question. We believe that investment in digitisation, curation, and technology adds real value in terms of discoverability, context, and preservation of these globally important materials. Often only achievable through commercial partnership with source archives. However we also recognise the importance of public access. We work closely with our content partners to balance these priorities. For example, many materials we digitise are made freely available in some form whether through open-access portals, community projects, or public exhibitions. And of course, our Quartex platform allows for libraries pursuing open-access goals to present their collections freely to users, whilst benefitting from our technology investment in our own platform.

ATG: What are some of the most exciting or unexpected ways you’ve seen AM’s collections used in classrooms or research projects?

MF: One of my favourites is seeing archival material inspire creative work. The poetry, art, exhibitions, and even community history projects that take the primary sources far beyond their original context. We’ve had some really interesting and inspiring research projects from different disciplines recently, such as analysis of Colonial Caribbean government papers to inform a project on historic climate modelling in the region. When you give students and researchers the freedom to explore, they’ll often find possibilities and stories that no one had considered before.

ATG: How do you select or prioritize new content areas or partnerships? Are there emerging fields or geographic regions that you’re especially excited about exploring?

MF: It’s a combination of listening and leading. We listen to our customers, academic advisors, and partners to understand where there are gaps or growing areas of interest. But we also try to lead by anticipating themes that will be important in the years ahead. Looking to the future I’m

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excited by the potential of building more collections that draw on global perspectives, twenty-first century histories, and science and technology. All spaces where the stories are both vital and timely.

ATG: In the push to digitize history, some argue that publishers often reinforce traditional narratives rather than challenge them. How does AM ensure its collections don’t just preserve elite or colonial voices, but also make space for marginalized perspectives?

MF: This is an area we’ve been very deliberate about. When we plan a collection, we actively seek out materials that expand the narrative. Whether that’s in the form of documents from grassroots movements, oral histories, or records from community archives. We also work with academic advisors who specialise in these perspectives, ensuring the editorial framework we build around a collection highlights multiple voices and contexts. We also try to be transparent and actively highlight where the historical record may be insufficient or biased, and suggest ways to read “against the grain.”

ATG: With AI advancing so rapidly, there’s growing concern that tech-driven solutions could devalue the curatorial expertise and human context that make archival collections meaningful. How do you see AM balancing innovation with thoughtful, human-led editorial work?

MF: For us, AI is a tool not a replacement. It offers transformative possibilities for interpreting and interrogating sources such as improving metadata, transcribing difficult scripts, and providing multilingual translation. But it can’t replicate the nuanced decision-making of a skilled curator or subject specialist. The challenge is to integrate AI where it adds value, while keeping intellectual framing and interpretation firmly human-led. We also have a responsibility to ensure AI doesn’t undermine the user’s ability to think critically and engage deeply. We mustn’t outsource critical understanding to AI, but we can use it to enhance the tools that support that engagement.

ATG: Finally, what keeps you personally inspired in this work?

MF: What inspires me is seeing the spark when someone discovers a story, a voice, or a piece of history they’ve never encountered before and knowing we’ve helped make that possible. That might be a student using a primary source for the first time, or a seasoned researcher who’s come across something genuinely new.

I’m also deeply proud of the role we play in preserving millions of digitised copies of unique and irreplaceable sources. We are living in a time of extraordinary change and uncertainty, and an understanding of history can help us navigate it more wisely. As Rachel Carson wrote, “To understand the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.”

more than 10 years ago, and the SLI has been doing the work since at least 2014. I have so many role models and mentors in the field that are too many to list. I feel a personal responsibility to be continuing the momentum of what many of these folks started. I think there is more urgency than ever to be doing climate-related work and telling the story, and that this work touches all of our jobs, no matter where we work in libraries.

ATG: Is there something that you enjoy doing in your “spare time” or a hobby that you enjoy that you want to share with us?

ST: I love spending time in my garden seeing it evolve, and am constantly in awe of nature — I find it grounding and therapeutic. I have also always loved running to clear my mind, and have recently embraced triathlons to test my endurance,

learning my biggest challenge isn’t my body, but my mind telling me to quit!

ATG: Thank you so much, Sarah, for taking the time to talk with us, and for sharing insight into your experiences at your library. We know you are very busy. We really appreciate it!

If you would like to nominate a librarian or library staff to be featured in this column, please reach out to us at info@charlestonhub.com.

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Librarian Luminaries — Sarah Tribelhorn continued from page 69

Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Katina Strauch

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

DARRELL GUNTER: Katina, let’s start at the beginning. The Charleston Conference didn’t exactly have the smoothest launch, did it?

KATINA STRAUCH: (laughs) No, it didn’t. First came the hurricane — and that certainly didn’t help. Hurricane Hugo hit us in 1989, and it was just awful. Charleston looked like a ghost town. At the time, we were living at the Citadel, and I remember the president inviting everyone to the mess hall because so many of us had nothing — no electricity, no phones, no way to communicate. It was eerie. It took two whole months before life began to feel normal again. That was a huge challenge.

Then came the antiquarian book fair — our first one. It was fascinating in its own way. We dove into rare books, learning their history and value, but it wasn’t quite what I envisioned. My real goal was to create something different — an event that brought publishers, vendors, and librarians together.

DG: Right, right — absolutely. The Charleston community and the College of Charleston weren’t just bystanders; they played a real supporting role. From your perspective, how did they step in?

KS: I started the conference through continuing education at the College. The dean at the time, Sue Summerrest — she’s still around — was incredibly supportive. I had to fill out all the paperwork and go through the process, but she made it easy. It was mutually beneficial — she wanted to grow her program, and I wanted to grow mine. We helped each other.

DG: And I imagine the city of Charleston noticed the economic boost — hotel bookings, restaurant traffic… Did they ever give you an official “thank you” for that?

KS: (smiles) No official accommodation. But that’s okay. The conference is popular enough now that it’s a benefit to everyone.

DG: When you think about all the conference has achieved, what are the three things you’re most proud of?

KS: First, that it’s continued this long. Second, that it’s brought together such a diverse group — publishers, vendors, and librarians — and stayed popular. And third, that after selling it to Annual Reviews, they’ve kept it going exactly the same. That means a lot to me.

DG: And they’re expanding into Asia, right? Bangkok?

KS: Yes, Bangkok. I wish I could go in person, but I’ll be there virtually.

DG: You’ve also had a strong right-hand in Leah Hinds.

KS: She’s fabulous. I hired her when she was in her twenties, and now she’s the executive director. She’s got the energy to keep going for a long time. She’s also started the Charleston Frankfurt Conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

DG: And of course, you’ve always had a knack for bringing people together for real dialogue. How did you manage to make that happen when other conferences couldn’t?

KS: I’ve never believed in compartmentalizing people. We’re all talking about the same things — just from different

perspectives. So why not talk together? I was young and maybe a little naive, but it worked.

DG: And that’s where the exhibit hall came in.

KS: Exactly. Some people didn’t like the idea of exhibits at first, but people wanted a place to keep the conversation going. It worked because it’s what they wanted.

DG: One thing that stands out is your “don’t say no” philosophy.

KS: That’s true. If someone had an idea, I’d try to make it work. Why not give it a chance?

DG: That openness has brought in things like the Innovator Sessions and the Charleston Premiers — ideas that came from outside but fit perfectly into the conference.

KS: Yes. I like to look at every point of view. If something works, it works — doesn’t matter where it started.

DG: The industry has changed so much since 1980 — open access, budget cuts. How has the conference responded?

KS: By being flexible. We have to change with the times and deal with challenges as a group.

DG: Looking back, what surprised you most while writing “Doing the Charleston”?

KS: That eBooks took off the way they did. I’ve always loved print books. And now there’s AI — ChatGPT. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

DG: When someone reads your book, what do you want them to take away?

KS: Don’t give up. If you have an idea, keep going — even if not everyone likes it.

DG: That’s great advice. Speaking of stories — tell me about your attempt to interview Robert Maxwell.

KS: (laughs) Oh, I went to England thinking I could just walk in and talk to him. I never met him, but I did meet some fascinating people — Brian Cox among them.

DG: You’ve known so many people over the years.

KS: Yes, and I’ve always believed everyone has something interesting about them if you take the time to find it.

DG: That’s the spirit of the Swamp Fox bar during the conference — where deals were made, jobs offered, and ideas exchanged.

KS: Exactly. And there’s no rulebook for this. You have to follow your gut, listen more than you talk, and be willing to try new things.

DG: If the Charleston Conference had a theme song, what would it be?

continued on page 75

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DOING THE CHARLESTON

My Personal History of Scholarly Communication

Katina Strauch with Darrell W. Gunter

In 1980, Katina Strauch started the Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition to bring together librarians, publishers, and vendors to discuss issues shared by the three groups The meeting has continued annually and boasts over 3,000 attendees in person and virtually This memoir is Katina’s diary and story of the Charleston Conference and its development concurrently with her career as a professional librarian. Over the last 45 years, there have been massive changes in scholarly communication, changes that Katina has been at the heart of Where and what will the library and publishing professions develop next? The sky’s the limit to reimagining! Let’s go

Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Lord Tim Clement-Jones

Topic: AI Governance, Ethics, and the Future of Innovation

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

“I’m on Team Human. That’s my team. That’s why I got involved in technology — because we have to work out where humans fit into all of this.” — Lord Tim Clement-Jones

Introduction

We’re honored to welcome Lord Timothy Clement-Jones, a leading voice in AI governance and policy. As the former chair of the House of Lords Select Committee on AI and co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI, Tim has played a critical role in shaping the conversation around artificial intelligence in the UK and beyond.

With a distinguished background in law and as a spokesperson for the creative industries, he brings a unique perspective on the intersection of technology, policy, and innovation. AI’s evolution offers remarkable opportunities alongside significant challenges, and today we’ll explore governance, ethics, and the future of industries worldwide.

Setting the Stage

DARRELL GUNTER: Tim, welcome to the “Innovator’s Saga.” Is there anything you’d like to add to your bio that I might have missed?

LORD TIM CLEMENT-JONES: Probably the only thing I’d add is — I’m on Team Human. That’s why I got involved in technology. We have to work out where humans fit into all of this.

International AI Governance

DG: Let’s start with the big picture. What kind of international governance is needed for AI?

TJ: The way we regulate is diverging. The EU has a lot of regulation, which many people aren’t happy about. The UK has taken a slightly different approach, but still plans to regulate the largest language models. The U.S.? We don’t quite know yet — Donald Trump tore up the executive order, so it may be some time before a new system emerges, if at all. I suspect most action will be at the state level.

For developers and adopters — especially multinational ones — that’s a problem. The answer is interoperability, through adopting international global standards. ISO, the OECD, and NIST in the U.S. are working on risk assessment frameworks, audit standards, testing, and continuous monitoring. These are developed by industry experts, not politicians, making them practical.

There’s a barrier for small and medium-sized companies — sometimes you must pay to use these standards. That needs fixing. But they are emerging quickly, and I hope we see developers follow these global standards rather than three separate regimes.

“Interoperability comes from adopting international global standards … If we can align on those, it won’t matter so much whether you’re following EU, UK, or U.S. law — your systems will meet a shared benchmark.”

DG: On a scale from one to five — five meaning strong international collaboration and one meaning it’s still in its infancy — where are we?

TJ: Four out of five. The OECD is a strong convening organization for the West. China prefers the UN, but all these major bodies are converging. Since the G20 principles in 2019, new standards have been designed to reflect those principles.

Finding and Following Standards

DG: For our readers, is there a website you’d recommend that lists these standards?

TJ: Not one single site. The NIST website is a good starting point, as is the OECD AI Policy Observatory. The UN website also has relevant material.

DG: And in terms of the UK, would you say we’re at a four or maybe a five in establishing standards?

TJ: We have an excellent standards-setting body — the British Standards Institution. They work closely with NIST and with the European standards body. But our government hasn’t pushed hard enough on regulation. I’d like to see certain standards made mandatory.

Open Source and Guardrails

TJ: I’m in favor of open source — it allows smaller developers to compete — but we need guardrails. Even if the large commercial developers are 100% ethical, open-source models can be misused. Standards should be mandatory for those models.

DG: DeepSeek has been making headlines in the U.S. Senators have raised concerns about its user policy and data usage.

TJ: DeepSeek should be adhering to a set of standards. They’ve innovated in interesting ways using fewer resources due to export bans on high-end chips, but standards still apply. The same goes for Meta’s open-source LLaMA model. Just because something is open source — or from China — doesn’t make it inherently bad. The key is whether it’s ethical and safe.

The Risk-Based Approach

DG: Could you define a risk-based approach and why it’s essential?

TJ: It’s about outcomes. You assess the possible harm — misinformation, deepfakes, pornography, reputational damage. In high-stakes contexts — social security, immigration — you’re

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impacting lives in profound ways. Those require stronger oversight.

The EU model is correct in identifying high-risk uses, though I find it overly complex. They’re also moving toward standards, so I believe there will be convergence.

“It’s about outcomes. You assess the possible harm … and in high-stakes contexts, those require stronger oversight.”

Ethics as the Foundation

DG: What ethical principles should guide AI?

TJ: The OECD principles from 2019, later adopted by Beijing, still hold:

• Transparency — People should know when AI affects them.

• Accountability — There must be a responsible party.

• Fairness — Systems should be tested to avoid bias.

• Explainability — Where possible, decisions should be explainable.

• Right to Redress — People must be able to challenge decisions.

These aren’t complicated, but they’re essential.

Copyright and Creators’ Rights

DG: What’s the current state of copyright law regarding AI training on copyrighted material?

TJ: In the U.S., “fair use” is under legal challenge. In the UK, the government is considering a text and data mining exception that favors big tech. Creators are pushing back.

Artists aren’t against AI — many use it creatively — but they want to be compensated if their work is used for training. It’s fine to copy Van Gogh, but not David Hockney — he’s alive, and his work is protected. Intellectual property exists to encourage creativity. Remove that incentive, and you risk stifling artistic work.

Tracking Use and Transparency

DG: Could blockchain be used to protect content?

TJ: Yes — for proving provenance. Watermarking, if indelible and linked to blockchain metadata, could also help. But above all, we need transparency: developers must disclose what data they’ve used for training.

The Next 6–18 Months

DG: What do you see in the immediate future for AI?

TJ: AI will become embedded in our daily lives — on phones, in the workplace, in tools we don’t label as “AI.” Agentic AI — systems that act proactively — will take on personal and administrative tasks.

Robotics integration will grow, especially in healthcare. We’ll also see more “walled garden” models — smaller systems with curated, high-quality data for reliable results.

DG: In scholarly publishing, I think AI could improve peer review and cut down on poor-quality research.

TJ: Absolutely. With curated data and robust auditing, AI can help ensure higher quality. But “garbage in, garbage out” still applies. Cleaning and controlling inputs will be essential.

Closing Thoughts

DG: Tim, thank you for sharing your insights.

TJ: Thank you, Darrell. It’s been a real pleasure.

DG: And that’s it for this edition of the “Innovator’s Saga.” Remember — leadership begins with you.

Note: You can watch the video of the interview on Darrell W. Gunter’s YouTube Channel, Leadership with Darrell W. Gunter. https://youtu.be/3qeTTjgn5R0?si=foJgqr-F4SiPidEH

KS: “Come Together” by the Beatles. Jack Montgomery even wrote a song for the conference once — I hope we can find that recording again.

DG: You’ve stepped back from day-to-day management, but you’re still involved.

KS: Leah doesn’t need me — she’s doing a fabulous job — but she still checks in now and then.

DG: You’re also launching Beña Publishing.

KS: Yes, a small southern publishing company. If people have book ideas, I’d love to hear them. We’ll consider anything interesting.

DG: As you look at AI, fads, and real change — what’s your advice to the next generation?

KS: Be open, but be discerning. Not everything new is worth chasing. And listen — to colleagues, to your community. Listening is more valuable than talking.

DG: Katina, thank you. Your story is an inspiration, and your work has brought our community together in ways that will last for decades.

KS: Thank you, Darrell. And thank you for everything you’ve done for the conference and for the book.

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Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Katina Strauch continued from page 72

ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Sneha Nair

Managing Editor

Enago Academy

<snehan@enago.com>

https://www.enago.com/academy/ | LinkedIn

BORN AND LIVED: Born and raised in India; currently based in Mumbai.

EARLY LIFE: Grew up with a keen interest in languages and communication, which shaped my passion for writing, editing, and bridging gaps in knowledge sharing.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: Currently Managing Editor at Enago Academy, where I focus on scholarly publishing, research integrity, and academic writing. I also contribute to global initiatives such as the Responsible Use of AI (RUAI) movement, and regularly write, edit, and curate thought leadership content for researchers, publishers, and institutions.

IN MY SPARE TIME: I enjoy painting, traveling, and exploring creative pursuits that allow me to look at the world from fresh perspectives.

FAVORITE BOOKS: Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom; the Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi.

PET PEEVES: Injustice and dishonesty in both professional and personal spaces.

PHILOSOPHY: I believe clarity, integrity, and accessibility are essential to advancing knowledge and building trust in scholarly communication.

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Leading editorial projects and contributing to thought leadership pieces that have helped conversations around AI use, peer review, and research integrity in global publishing.

GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: To play a larger role in shaping global policies and best practices for responsible and transparent scholarly publishing.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: The scholarly publishing industry will be shaped by responsible AI adoption, stronger integrity frameworks, and a balance between innovation and ethical responsibility.

Parvathy Venkateswaran

Associate Content Expert Crimson Interactive <parvathy.v@crimsoni.com> https://www.linkedin.com/in/parvathyvenkateswaran-16846a190/

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES:

As an Associate Content Expert at Enago Academy, Parvathy brings a unique blend of industry experience and fundamental research expertise to the field of science communication. Passionate about making science and academic publishing more accessible, she joined Enago Academy in 2024 to bridge the gap between researchers and the evolving scholarly landscape. With a strong background in academic writing and research, Parvathy is dedicated to empowering researchers through various innovative avenues in the publishing industry.

FAVORITE BOOKS: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

PHILOSOPHY: To be passionately curious and productively stupid!

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: I envision extensive collaboration among all stakeholders to fully embrace technological advancements while establishing robust guardrails that ensure the ethical deployment of AI and emerging technologies. This approach should strengthen and elevate our scholarly community. I believe, we must recognize, acknowledge, and celebrate the oftenoverlooked contributors who drive innovation behind the scenes.

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Trinka AI (Crimson AI Inc.)

1209 N Orange Street Corporation Trust Center Wilmington, DE 19801 U.S. Phone: +1 (213) 568-1220 www.trinka.ai

AFFILIATED COMPANIES: Crimson AI Pvt. Ltd.

OFFICERS: Parvathy Venkateswaran and Sneha Prakash Nair.

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: Trinka AI

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Global Market / Universities and Higher Education and Corporates.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 24

HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: Trinka, by Enago, is a privacy-first AI platform

providing anti-cheating academic integrity solutions and AI-powered writing and reading assistance to individuals, as well as top institutions, publishers, and enterprises across 150+ countries. It is recognized by Gartner® as an Emerging Visionary in the 2025 Innovation Guide for Generative AI Technologies. Its patented in-house AI technology helps authors to improve their writing and leverage AI reports to refine their papers, boosting their chances of successful publication.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT YOU THINK WOULD BE OF INTEREST TO OUR READERS? Trinka AI’s DocuMark is an anti-cheating academic integrity tool that records students’ writing processes, tracks AI use, gives “Effort Scores,” and shows version history — promoting honest work and reducing teacher workload so that they can refocus on learning instead of playing AI detective. Trinka’s advanced academic writing tools provide real-time grammar corrections, paraphrasing, style, and clarity improvements along with AI-powered reports for publication success.

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

Back Talk continued from page 78

So, to make the point and perhaps spread a few smiles, I’m devoting this Back Talk column to what one (on an optimistic day) might call photojournalism — a little essay comprising photos of The Guys with some friends from over the last twenty years or so. Since Against the Grain isn’t confined to print any longer, we can find room for some of them here, but if you want to see them in more of their glory, you can go to https:// photos.app.goo.gl/Ft2tDbm7YnQWX7Af7. When you’re doing this, you should know that there are literally hundreds more such photos from which these are curated. And as you look, The Guys will want you to smile. We Charleston-goers and Beanie friends owe our great friend Katina and her many co-conspirators a lot for what we enjoy there every November.

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

Jim O’Donnell

Kumsal Bayazit and Katina Strauch

Jim Neal and Anja Smit

Alicia Wise

Beth Bernhardt

Derek Law

Rebecca Seger

Gary Price

Sven Fund

Heather Staines

Lenny Allen Brewster Kahle

Kevin Guthrie and Michael Levine-Clark

Back Talk — The Other Side of the Charleston Conference

Column Editor: Ann Okerson (Director, Offline Internet Consortium) <aokerson@gmail.com>

Reading Katina’s splendid memoir, Doing the Charleston, has taken my mind back over many years of intellectually and culturally rich experiences at the Charleston Conference, where the most senior and most serious librarians, academic publishers, and vendors come together in discussions that regularly reach a high level of strategic seriousness. I was one of the folks who was interviewed by Anthony Watkinson to celebrate memories of the great achievements of the conference over the decades. Many Back Talk columns over the last decade have reflected the conference, its issues, its speakers, and its memorable moments.

But there’s another side to the story and it’s time to come clean about it. Many dear friends from the Charleston Conference and its world will know what I mean when I say that, in many important ways, the central feature of the conference for me is always … the Beanies. Surely everyone over the drinking age remembers the Beanie Baby™ craze of the ’90s, when everybody’s home was flooded with cheerful little critters with the TY logo on the ear tags. Well, the ’90s never ended in our house, a paradise for small stuffed animals. (And some who are not so small, but they mostly don’t get to Charleston.)

Friends, colleagues, and even strangers, have gotten used to seeing The Guys (as they insist on being called) rampaging around Charleston, pulling aside their distinguished friends for photo opportunities. The striking thing about this is that nobody — absolutely nobody — ever takes a bad photo when they have a Beanie in their hands. Something about The Guys brings out the best side of the human race and leaves behind photographic traces to cherish.

ADVERTISER’S INDEX

Toni Nix, Advertising Manger, Against the Grain, Charleston Hub <justwrite@lowcountry.com> • Phone: 843-835-8604

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

Becky Lenzini and Anthony Watkinson

Kyle Courtney and Michelle Wu

Katina Strauch

Michele Casalini

Leah Hinds

Stephen Rhind-Tutt

Ruth L. Okediji

Bill Hannay

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About Against the Grain

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.

Find ATG on the Charleston Hub at www.charleston-hub.com