Against the Grain v32 #3 June 2020 by against-the-grain

c/o Katina Strauch Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482

ALA Annual issue

volume 32, number 3

ISSN: 1043-2094

June 2020

“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”

Brave New World — Access and Authority in 2020 by Lettie Y. Conrad (Publishing & Product Consultant, Information Science PhD Candidate, Queensland University of Technology) <lettieconrad@gmail.com>

ow more than ever, the scholarly communications industry is struggling to ensure scholars and learners have state-of-the-art digital access to the world’s research and instructional resources off campus. Just as the library community was taking steps toward modernizing access controls, with initiatives like SeamlessAccess 1 and GetFTR, 2 social distancing interventions during the coronavirus pandemic put a spotlight on the limitations of IP-based authentication, virtual private networks, and other legacy systems. Before COVID-19 was a household name, our traditional modes of institutional controls on access to scholarly resources were undeniably disrupted — by funding agen-

cies and other open-access advocates, various points of “content leakage,”3 not to mention illegal efforts on the part of wily activists who want to liberate information from social constructions, such as copyright law. This issue is dedicated to establishing a collaborative understanding of where we go from here, in the brave new world of access and authority in 2020. Marshall Breeding offers his expert perspective on today’s challenges with digital authority controls, including shifting to distributed workfrom-home library operations all while scaling networks for high-volume remote access. Members of the Scholarly Networks Security Initiative discuss cyber challenges and methods for subverting efforts such as Sci-Hub — just

If Rumors Were Horses

his month, Charleston County Public Library (CCPL) is honoring the lives of those lost at the Mother Emanuel AME Church five years ago by promoting acts of kindness around the county and releasing a special tribute documentary about Cynthia. The Library is asking the public to perform acts of kindness and post a photo or video of the act to social media using #ThisIsForCynthia. Cynthia Graham Hurd was one of the nine people killed in the shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church and she was a beloved long-time librarian with CCPL. The Cynthia Graham Hurd/St. Andrews Library is named after her. “We do not want anyone to forget what happened to Cynthia or the eight others killed in the church five years ago,” said CCPL Executive Director Angela Craig. “Every year since the tragedy, we have Pictured are two of Katina’s grand- worked to honor her legacy through book drives children, George (lt) and Porter (rt) for her family’s foundation, special programs, Jacks — young and already reading! continued on page 6

one of the various pathways and pitfalls discussed by Scott Ahlberg of Reprints Desk, who explains how flexibility in serving diverse user needs is the key to success. Building on this theme, the folks at Third Iron outline ten principles that ensure simple, user-friendly library access, where Kendall Bartsch and John Sequin have seen first-hand how content delivered to meet user expectations “will be happily used.” Abigail Wickes echoes this sentiment by explaining that library “access is people,” which was her motto when Duke University librarians were scrambling to support students, faculty, continued on page 8

What To Look For In This Issue: Problems with Searching Amazon....36 Eight Lessons Learned From Eight Years of Open Access...................... 61 Librarians as Interdisciplinary Digital Research Project Partners................ 65 Academic Library Response to COVID-19....................................... 67 Interviews

Barbara Casalini............................ 40 John T. Nardini, PhD..................... 42 Steven J. Bell – Part 2.................... 45 Alex Lazinica.................................. 72 Profiles Encouraged

People, Library and Company Profiles............................................ 81 Plus more............................See inside

1043-2094(202006)32:3;1-0

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Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094) (USPS: 012-618), Copyright 2020 by the name Against the Grain, LLC is published six times a year in February, April, June, September, November, and December/January by Against the Grain, LLC. Business and Editorial Offices: PO Box 799, 1712 Thompson Ave., Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. Accounting and Circulation Offices: same. Call (843-509-2848) to subscribe. Periodicals postage is paid at Charleston, SC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Against the Grain, LLC, PO Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482.

TABLE OF CONTENTS v.32 #3 June 2020 © Katina Strauch

ISSUES, NEWS, & GOINGS ON Rumors.................................................. 1 From Your Editor................................. 6

Letters to the Editor............................. 6 Deadlines............................................... 6

Editor:

FEATURES

Associate Editors:

Brave New World — Access and Authority in 2020 Guest Editor: Lettie Y. Conrad

Katina Strauch (Retired, College of Charleston) Cris Ferguson (Murray State) Tom Gilson (Retired, College of Charleston) Matthew Ismail (Central Michigan University)

Research Editors:

Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)

Assistants to the Editor:

Ileana Strauch Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)

International Editor:

Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino)

Contributing Editors:

Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University) Rick Anderson (University of Utah) Sever Bordeianu (U. of New Mexico) Todd Carpenter (NISO) Eleanor Cook (East Carolina University) Will Cross (NC State University) Anne Doherty (Choice) Michelle Flinchbaugh (U. of MD Baltimore County) Joyce Dixon-Fyle (DePauw University) Michael Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC) Chuck Hamaker (Retired, UNC, Charlotte) William M. Hannay (Schiff, Hardin & Waite) Bob Holley (Retired, Wayne State University) Donna Jacobs (MUSC) Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University) Myer Kutz (Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.) Tom Leonhardt (Retired) Stacey Marien (American University) Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University) Alayne Mundt (American University) Bob Nardini (ProQuest) Jim O’Donnell (Arizona State University) Ann Okerson (Center for Research Libraries) Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University) Rita Ricketts (Blackwell’s) Jared Seay (College of Charleston) Corey Seeman (University of Michigan) Lindsay Wertman (IGI Global)

ATG Proofreader:

Rebecca Saunders (Franklin Pierce University)

Graphics:

Bowles & Carver, Old English Cuts & Illustrations. Grafton, More Silhouettes. Ehmcke, Graphic Trade Symbols By German Designers. Grafton, Ready-to-Use Old-Fashioned Illustrations. The Chap Book Style.

Production & Ad Sales:

Toni Nix, Just Right Group, LLC., P.O. Box 412, Cottageville, SC 29435, phone: 843-835-8604 fax: 843-835-5892 <justwrite@lowcountry.com>

Advertising information:

Toni Nix, phone: 843-835-8604, fax: 843-835-5892 <justwrite@lowcountry.com>

Publisher:

Brave New World — Access and Authority in 2020................................................1

by Lettie Y. Conrad — This issue is dedicated to establishing a collaborative understanding of where we go from here, in the brave new world of access and authority in 2020.

Library Response to Pandemic Closings: Implications for Network Access, Privacy, and Security................................................................................................12

by Marshall Breeding — The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has led to massive changes in libraries. These new patterns require substantial efforts in the deployment of supporting technologies, especially those related to network access and authentication.

Beyond Sci-Hub: Cyber Challenges for the Scholarly Communications Industry.... 17

by Rick Anderson, Robert Boissy, and Sharon Mattern Büttiker — Ultimately, how can we all work together better to address challenges of balancing security and simple authentication methods from multiple locations and devices.

Acquiring Scholarly Content: Is It Possible to Set Users on the Right Path, Even If They Start Off on the Wrong Foot?...........................................................20

by Scott Ahlberg — The path to acquiring scholarly content is not concrete. That is, there is no single, established route researchers take to find and obtain the articles they need for their studies.

10 Principles of Simplifying Access to Keep Libraries at the Center of the Research Process.......................................................................................................22

by Kendall Bartsch and John Seguin — Researchers are increasingly leaving behind traditional routes to content. In response, publishers, libraries and technology companies are developing new initiatives to simplify and expedite access to authoritative content.

Access is People: Navigating the E-resource Access Landscape During a Pandemic....................................................................................................................24 by Abigail Wickes — The pitfalls of the content pipeline and the importance of building relationships with the people facilitating access at each point becomes even more important when options change so drastically.

When Thinking “Access,” Think Like a User........................................................26

by Christopher Lee and Robert Lisiecki — Users are shifting to online learning and library support of faculty and students is provided completely virtually. In this piece we shapeshift to think about access from a user’s perspective instead of from our own.

Op Ed — Random Ramblings.................................................................................36

Problems with Searching Amazon: You Can’t Always Find What You Want by Bob Holley — Confused by not finding items through a well-formulated search but then serendipitously discovering them in some unexpected way prompted Bob to investigate this issue.

Back Talk — Carpe Diem – Seizing Pandemic Opportunities?............................86 by Ann Okerson — So what do we make of this chaotic and erratic information environment? We can draw a few lessons.

A. Bruce Strauch

ATG INTERVIEWS & PROFILES

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

Barbara Casalini – Casalini Libri...........................................................................40 John T. Nardini, PhD – SAMSI & N.C. State University......................................42 Steven J. Bell – Temple University Charles Library – Part 2...............................45 Profiles Encouraged..................................................................................................81

Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to:

Against the Grain is indexed in Library Literature, LISA, Ingenta, and The Informed Librarian. Authors’ opinions are to be regarded as their own. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This issue was produced on an iMac using Microsoft Word, and Adobe CS6 Premium software under Mac OS X Mountain Lion. Against the Grain is copyright ©2020 by Katina Strauch

Against The Grain

Against the Grain / June 2020

ATG SPECIAL REPORT Does the Repository Reflect the Institution?..........................................................54

by Gail McMillan — This study looked at VTechWorks, the IR at Virginia Tech, as a whole and through three lenses.

<http://www.against-the-grain.com>

ALA ANNUAL Issue REVIEWS

Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews......................28 by Corey Seeman — Two types of reviews in one column. What we are doing continues to morph and grow as the very nature of reference works and some monographs change.

“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”

Booklover — Travel During An Apocalypse...........................................................32

by Donna Jacobs — Peter Handke’s novel Short Letter, Long Farewell was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Collecting to the Core — Decolonizing Francophone Literature.........................33 by Kathleen A. Langan — This essay explores philosophical approaches to classification and knowledge organization and reflects on how we assign value and meaning.

Uncommon ...

Legally Speaking — “McEngage” Disengages.......................................................50

Against the Grain is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. ATG is a unique collection of reports on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books, journals, and electronic information.

Cases of Note — Copyright – Ripping off Lady Liberty.......................................51

Unconventional ...

by Bill Hannay — McGraw-Hill and Cengage were prepared to divest (or spin off) a few titles or subject areas where there was substantial overlap, but the DOJ and the CMA were looking to have the companies shed significantly more overlap products. by Bruce Strauch — Robert Davidson v. The United States.

Questions and Answers — Copyright Column......................................................52

by Will Cross — As always, many relevant questions and answers. Who owns course materials? And what’s the importance of precedent to the Supreme Court judges?

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

by Bruce Strauch — What do Oscar Wilde and Carrie Fisher have in common? Read it here!

And They Were There — Reports of Meetings......................................................57 by Ramune K. Kubilius — The third installment of 2019 Charleston Conference reports.

Don’s Conference Notes............................................................................................77 by Donald T. Hawkins — A brief summary of the NISOPlus2020 Conference.

BOOKSELLING AND VENDING Stop, Look, Listen — Eight Lessons Learned From Eight Years of Open Access.... 61

by Dr. Sven Fund — This article considers some key takeaways from an insider perspective, which should be of interest to publishers, libraries and research funding agencies.

Oregon Trails — RIP – He Liked To Read.............................................................63 by Thomas W. Leonhardt — Tom likes to read!

Biz of Digital — Case Study: Librarians as Interdisciplinary Digital Research Project Partners........................................................................................................65 An Overview of Recently Established and Emerging Digital Research Projects and Support Services Led and Implemented by the Rowan University Libraries by Benjamin Saracco and Shilpa Rele

Optimizing Library Services — Academic Library Response to COVID-19.....67

by Prof. Jennifer Joe — We should be planning for two different futures: one where we are able to return to our buildings, and one where we are not.

Squirreling Away: Managing Information Resources & Libraries — Our Grand Intermission: Libraries & Change Management..............................75

by Corey Seeman — It is definitely the time to think long and hard about what we are doing and what will be needed of us after we get to return to normal – or what we think will be normal.

TECHNOLOGY AND STANDARDS Considering Games in Libraries and Such — Zoom-A-Zooma Head Shots: In Virtual and In The Real.......................................................................................69

by Jared Alexander Seay — During this time of pandemic exile, we have reached the point now where we too need to start distinguishing between working in virtual and working in the real.

Library Analytics: Shaping the Future — Inspec: Precision Analytics for Research Excellence..................................................................................................70 Upcycling, Innovation, Relevance and Renewal: How Analytics Transformed our Business by Vincent Cassidy

The Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Alex Lazinica...................................72 by Darrell W. Gunter — We are excited to welcome Darrell to Against the Grain!

Against the Grain / June 2020

ATG is published six times a year, in February, April, June, September, November, and December/January. A six-issue subscription is available for only $55 U.S. ($65 Canada, $95 foreign, payable in U.S. dollars), making it an uncommonly good buy for all that it covers. Make checks payable to Against the Grain, LLC and mail to: Against the Grain c/o Katina Strauch Post Office Box 799 Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482 *Wire transfers are available, email <kstrauch@comcast.net> for details, however, credit cards are the preferred alternative to checks ($25 fee applies).

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LEGAL ISSUES

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From Your (feeling my way) Editor:

here are no new words to describe how times are changing for all of us. Each day brings new challenges. Will we have a conference — virtual or in person? Will we have more attendees if we go totally virtual or should we keep our in person conference assuming we can afford it and enough people come? Where is our crystal ball? Last night we had a meeting of many of the Charleston Conference directors who could attend. We have decided to take the Conference virtual assuming we can get dispensation from our hotel colleagues.

Amidst all this uncertainty, we have a great issue guest edited by the wonderfully persevering Lettie Conrad. The theme is Access and Authority in 2020 and is dedicated to understanding where we go from here in the brave new world of access and authority. There are articles by Marshall Breeding (massive changes in libraries), Rick Anderson, Robert Boissy, and Sharon Mattern Büttiker (working together for security and authentication), Scott Ahlberg (the path to acquire scholarly content), Kendall Bartsch and John Seguin (leaving behind traditional

Letters to the Editor Send letters to <kstrauch@comcast.net>, phone 843-509-2848, or snail mail: Against the Grain, Post Office Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. You can also send a letter to the editor from the ATG Homepage at http://www.against-the-grain.com. Dear Editors, I am writing in regard to the post “Little Red Herrings — The Wuhan Wilding” by Mark Y. Herring. This post’s use of the virus’ name referring to the city and jokingly referring to it with Asian imagery are concerning to me, especially in a publication and profession working with information. In addition, the post continued with Chinese/ Asian stereotypes of food. These words and these stereotypes are associating “blame” to Asians and Asian American communities, some of which are members of the library and information profession. In the last few months, Asians and Asian Americans are experiencing a rise in racism and xenophobia due to COVID-19 and posts like this are adding to that experience. As an attendee and presenter at The Charleston Conference, I have had opportunities to present on issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in libraries. This post is not representative of my experiences at Charleston. I respectfully ask this post to be either taken down or heavily revised. I also encourage ATG and The Charleston Conference to help combat racism and xenophobia against Asians and Asian Americans. Thank you! Paolo P. Gujilde (Assistant Head of Acquisitions, University Libraries, Northwestern University) continued on page 8

AGAINST THE GRAIN DEADLINES VOLUME 32 — 2020-2021 2020 Events Issue

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06/11/20

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Dec. 2020-Jan. 2021

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ALA Midwinter

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Against the Grain / June 2020

routes), Abigail Wickes (pitfalls of the content pipeline), and Christopher Lee and Robert Lisiecki (online learning virtually). Our Op Ed is about problems with searching (Bob Holley). Our Back Talk (Ann Okerson) asks what lessons we can take out of our current environment. We have great interviews with Barbara Casalini, John T. Nardini, and Steven J. Bell. This issue’s Special Report (Gail McMillan) looks at how the repository can reflect the institution. Our review section includes Corey Seeman’s excellent reviewers (Reader’s Roundup), Donna Jacob’s Booklover (Peter Handke), and Kathleen A. Logan’s Collecting to the Core (Francophone literature). The Legal section has an article by Bill Hannay on the disengagement of the McGraw-Hill and Cengage agreement, a Cases of Note, and enlightening questions and answers from Will Cross. Sven Fund tells us about the eight lessons from Open Access’ eight year history, Biz of Digital includes a case study on librarians and interdisciplinary research (Benjamin Saracco and Shilpa Rele), Optimizing Library Services (Jennifer Joe) is about planning for two futures, returning to our buildings or not. Squirrelling Away (Corey Seeman) tackles change management in the new normal. Jared Seay (Considering Games) talks about working in the virtual versus working in the real. Vincent Cassidy (Library Analytics) discusses how analytics can transform business. We saved the best for last! An entirely new column, The Innovator’s Saga, by Darrell Gunter. This one’s an interview with Alex Lazinica, the man who has established IntechOpen. Love, Yr. Ed.

Rumors from page 1 exhibits and events. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are unable to host these tributes this year and that pains us. We hope the community will take this opportunity to share a little love, even from afar.” All in-person public programs and events were suspended at all CCPL libraries due to the COVID-19 pandemic. CCPL published a continued on page 16

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Letters to the Editor from page 6 Hi Katina, Leah, and Tom, I hope this email finds you well. It’s been a long time, and I sincerely hope you are all healthy and coping with the challenges brought about by this pandemic. I’m writing because of the column written by Mark Herring entitled “The Wuhan Wilding.” A friend called my attention to that post late last night, and when I read it, I was greatly disturbed, disappointed, and angry. It was insensitive, cruel, and just flat out racist. It doesn’t take a person from another ethnicity to see that it was problematic and inhumane. It perpetuated the false narrative that this government is espousing about the origins of this virus. His attempt to be humorous at the expense of a group of people demonstrates privilege and utter lack of empathy. What bothered me the most was that ATG published it. As you know, I have a connection to this publication as a member of the editorial board, and I deeply respect all of you. However, I wonder why no one saw how this narrative might affect those of us from the minoritized segment of our profession. My friend Tweeted about it, and I replied, expressing my disappointment, and as a result, that article was retracted this morning. While I appreciate the retraction, I think ATG did not address this head-on. I hope you issue a written statement about why you decided to retract and your commitment as a publication to do better. Not everyone will get it right, and sometimes even with the best of our intentions, we make mistakes. I just hope this becomes a learning opportunity to uphold your values and commitment as publishers. 8

Against the Grain / June 2020

Endnotes 1. https://seamlessaccess.org/ 2. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet. org/2020/04/21/guest-post-seamless-remote-access-during-a-global-pandemic-an-indispensable-necessity/ 3. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet. org/2019/02/27/will-publishers-have-platforms/

Thanks so much for hearing me out. I look forward to visiting Charleston when it is safe for all of us to do so. In the meantime, take care, and I wish you all the best. Regina Gong (Open Educational Resources, and Student Success Librarian, Michigan State University Libraries)

Dear ATG Editors, On Monday, May 11, 2020 at 11:23 PM, I fired off an email to draw your attention to an opinion piece on ATG that was shared with me by a colleague: https://against-the-grain.com/2020/05/ v322-little-red-herrings-the-wuhan-wilding/ The basic gist of my email included bullet points on the insensitivity of the column, that while not every single one of Herring’s points are offensive, the examples below clearly are: • Referring to China as the “Third World” • “That is yet another sad chapter about a country in which its inhabitants, at least some of them, could not find enough to eat and so ate animals that the rest of the civilized world exterminated” in reference to China • “Wuhan virus (Kung Flu as a friend of mine dubbed it)” in reference to COVID-19 ATG promptly responded by first retracting the editorial on Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at 9:50am, forwarded the reactions from individual letters (like mine) along with comments posted on the website to the author, and took further action by removing Mark Herring from the list of contributing editors. continued on page 10

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Bet You Missed It Press Clippings — In the News — Carefully Selected by Your Crack Staff of News Sleuths Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel) Editor’s Note: Hey, are y’all reading this? If you know of an article that should be called to Against the Grain’s attention ... send an email to <kstrauch@comcast.net>. We’re listening! — KS

Let’s Read Life Onstage

Jean Stein, West of Eden (2016) (daughter of the founder of MCA writes about growing up among actors, agents, shrinks, and gardeners); (2) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) (Dorian wasn’t an actor, yet his whole life was a performance); (3) Anthony Sher, Year of the King (1985) (Sher was famous for playing Richard III; huge insights into actor’s mind); (4) Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking (2008) (daughter of Debbie Reynolds was an addict and bipolar); (5) Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984) (novel about an Edwardian trapeze artist). See — Anne Enright, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, March 21-22, 2020, p.C12. (Anne is the author of the novel Actress.)

Letters to the Editor from page 8 But in a profession that values facts, records, and social justice, the externality was that ATG demonstrated it has not upheld these values. Herring’s remarks were belittling, divisive, and ill-informed. It was disheartening to see Herring’s opinions, further fueling harmful misconceptions, published in a library publication/website at a time when there is especially high anti-Asian racism and xenophobia as a result of COVID-19. I have seen Herring’s tweets and do not expect an apology from the author, but I do believe ATG should be accountable to its audience — accountable for allowing its platform to be used in perpetuating racism. Although Herring’s opinions were deleted online, as we all eventually transition back to in-person/face-to-face work spaces and open up our mail backlogs, the print copies sent to libraries and individuals cannot be retracted. Merely erasing Herring’s presence on your site does not absolve ATG from permitting content rooted in hatred and/or ignorance to get published in the first place. What will ATG do to actively combat racism in your content in the future? I am wondering why Herring’s submission did not get flagged prior to publication? Is it because there was no editorial review for Herring’s column? Or worse, the reviewer(s) did not see a problem?? I think the ATG editors should be transparent about

10 Against the Grain / June 2020

Royal Maps Online

George III is mostly remembered by American history as being mad. But he ruled from 1760 to 1820. That includes the last of the Seven Years War, American Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. And he was big on maps. He founded the Ordnance Survey, thoroughly mapping Britain. Also founded the Royal Military College at High Wycombe where officers were taught topography, surveying and mapping. Now his entire collection of 3,000 military maps, prints and sketches are available digitally, graciously provided by the Royal Collection Trust. www.military-history.org/news. See — “George III’s Military Map Collection Released Online,” Military History, April/May, 2020, p.6.

the editorial process and say what steps they will take to prevent editorials like Herring’s from surfacing on ATG again. If you are willing to take a recommendation, I would suggest adding an EDI-torial review process. Thanks, Moon Moon Kim (Acquisitions Librarian | Assistant Professor Ohio State University Libraries Acquisitions and Discovery)

Statement from the Publisher of Against the Grain The article titled “Little Red Herrings — The Wuhan Wilding” from v.32#2, our April 2020 issue, has been retracted. We sincerely apologize for publishing the article. Mr. Herring was a long-time contributing editor for the journal, and we made the mistake of not monitoring the content more closely. We are taking steps to modify our editorial process to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. We stand with the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) in condemning the rise of inappropriate behaviors due to the novel coronavirus outbreak (http://www.apalaweb.org/coronavirus-response/). Thank you to all our readers who wrote emails or commented online about this issue. We appreciate your feedback and will use it to continue to improve. Thank you. A. Bruce Strauch, Publisher

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Library Response to Pandemic Closings: Implications for Network Access, Privacy, and Security by Marshall Breeding (Independent Consultant, Library Technology Guides) <marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org>

he ongoing coronavirus pandemic has led to massive changes in libraries. Almost all have closed their physical facilities to the public, abruptly changing the way that libraries provide access to their content, resources and other services and in the ways that library personnel accomplish their work. These new patterns require substantial efforts in the deployment of supporting technologies, especially those related to network access and authentication. Two different sets of challenges arise, one in supporting library workers shifting to working from home, and the other in optimizing support for patron use of electronic resources to enable high volumes of off-campus access and to compensate for loss of access to physical materials. This essay explores some of the issues and concerns related to technology, privacy, and security as libraries strive to respond to the ongoing crisis.

Library Workers Shift to Work From Home The shelter-in-place and social distance mandates mean that libraries, generally oriented to performing their duties onsite, have rapidly made accommodations for working remotely from their homes. In support of this change, libraries have implemented expedited responses to provide administrative and technology support. Policies regarding telework have been adjusted. Organizations that may have previously limited telework have altered or suspended these policies. We can anticipate that once the crisis abates, institutions that have previously limited remote work arrangements will review policies both to be more prepared for any future emergency situations and to benefit the organization and its employees based on experiences gained during the COVID-19 pandemic. Special consideration applies to library workers that work primarily with physical materials or whose primary responsibilities are closely tied to the physical facilities. Many libraries have been able to identify data cleanup or other projects that can be accomplished remotely by staff members whose usual work responsibilities cannot be performed at home. Libraries have also needed to address computer equipment issues to support staff members working from home. While librarians and those in other professional or administrative positions may already have personal or institutionally supplied laptops, many libraries have been able to allocate computers to staff members lacking suitable equipment. Some library workers may not have adequate home Internet connectivity. Institutions may be able to provide Wi-Fi hotspots with cellular data subscriptions to staff members working from home. Many public libraries lend these devices to patrons as part of their efforts to promote digital literacy and to address disparities in access to digital information in their communities. As libraries make accommodations for their personnel to work remotely, it is important to take into consideration the differences and disparities in the levels of technology that may be present in their homes as well as the many scenarios that may impact each individual’s ability to work productively that do not involve technology — 12 Against the Grain / June 2020

such as maintaining work / life balance, ergonomic health, and much more. Policy and equipment issues aside, some of the most trying technical challenges relate to access, security, and authentication issues. Library workers rely on a wide variety of systems, services, and resources to accomplish their daily activities, often residing on a complex array of infrastructure components. In some cases, these components rely on legacy technologies, not necessarily designed for remote access. Libraries that have moved to cloud-based services for their core systems are better positioned for shifting to remote work than those with legacy systems requiring proprietary client software. VPN (virtual private network) services are well established as the standard tool to provide access to internal network resources for offsite workers. This category of network product establishes a secure, encrypted communications path between a remote worker’s computer and the institutional network. Once attached via the VPN, the external computer is recognized as participating in the internal network, enabling access to institutional resources restricted by IP address or network directory services such as Microsoft’s Active Directory. VPN technology is generally regarded as a secure and reliable method for remote access to network resources. It is common to implement VPNs with advanced security features such as two-factor authentication or biometrics. VPN clients, however, are notoriously complex to install and configure. They are especially well suited for institutionally owned and managed laptops. This approach may be less ideal for personally owned devices where the user would be responsible for their installation and configuration. Once connected via a VPN, remote computers essentially reside within the institutional network. From a security perspective, VPNs used with personal devices can be problematic since any preexisting malware or other vulnerabilities could pose a threat to the institutional network.1 Since VPNs establish an encrypted tunnel between the user’s computer and the institutional network, they provide a high level of security and ensure privacy from network eavesdropping, even when the home Wi-Fi network may have security vulnerabilities. For reasonable security and privacy on a home network, it is essential to configure home routers to use encryption, which is the default setting for almost all service providers. It is also important to change the router’s administrative access to a strong password other than that provided in the default settings. Surveillance cameras, smart thermostats, and other IoT (Internet of things) devices may come with weak security and may leak personal information. Although it is always beneficial to configure home networks to use the best security options available, the stakes are even higher when accessing institutional resources. The use of a VPN alters some of the basic flow of network communications. When accessing resources outside the institutional network, traffic goes from the user’s computer at home continued on page 14

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Library Response to Pandemic Closings ... from page 12 to the VPN server on the institutional network, and then to the external service. The overhead involved in this additional hop would usually be insignificant, but when these shifts happen abruptly and at large scale, they can press the capacity of the network involved. Networks scaled or optimized for the use levels of the pre-crisis period may need to be rebalanced for the new patterns where significant portions of activity have moved outside of institutional networks. This rebalancing applies not only to specific components, such as VPN services, but to the broader domain of institutional and residential Internet services. Library personnel working from home only needing access to web-based services would not necessarily need to use a VPN. If the library uses a fully web-based resource management systems, productivity suites such as Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) or Google G Suite and associated storage services, remote workers may be able to carry out their work with only their institutional login without the need to reconfigure their personal computers with a VPN. The shift to working from home has brought increased use of collaborative communications tools to library workers. Video conferencing services such as Zoom, WebEx, or BlueJeans have replaced face-to-face meetings and collaborative communications tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack supplement email for the daily communication library workers need to carry out their work. These types of tools had already seen adoption in many libraries, though the shift to work from home has accelerated their use. The rapid uptick in the use of online communications tools has exposed privacy and security concerns. Unsecured meetings using Zoom, for example, have been subject to intrusion by uninvited and unwanted participants, a phenomenon now known as “zoombombing.” These incidents have led to some strengthening in the security of the service but, more importantly, are important reminders to use available mechanisms to control meeting access with passwords and not to publicly share the access credentials. Those working from home should also be vigilant in separating personal from work communications. Personal communications, even among work colleagues, should not be carried out over the same channels as those used for formal or informal work dialogue. Although rarely exercised, institutionally supplied communications tools may be subject to administrative and technical monitoring. Consumer services may be more private relative to one’s employer but may be subject to scanning for identification of advertising interests. The necessity of continued employment in the context of library closures has meant a quick shift to working from home and adoption of readily available supporting technologies. Privacy and security concerns will continue to be addressed and will improve throughout the duration of this crisis and will also result in libraries being better prepared for any future events.

Patron Access to Library Resources The pandemic crisis and the closure of library facilities also has broad implications for the methods that libraries use to provide access to their resources and services. Without access to physical materials, libraries have taken any available measures to provide increased access to digital content. This crisis has highlighted the reality that much material remains available only in print despite large-scale efforts over recent decades, and 14 Against the Grain / June 2020

that the current scholarly publishing models continue to hamper access to digital content. Many publishers and providers of scholarly content have opened access restrictions to resources related to coronavirus research. The need to eliminate barriers during the pandemic to medical practitioners and researchers during the crisis also serves to highlight that these same restrictions represent barriers to other important areas of research during more normal times. Although major initiatives are underway which promise growth in open access publishing going forward, the possibility of universal open access to all scientific research seems unlikely. The mechanisms for access to scholarly resources present another layer of constraint in the ecosystem of scholarly content. This ecosystem is optimized for the scenario where researchers are associated with institutions that have licensed access to collections of materials that otherwise are not available. Systematic research requires comprehensive discovery tools able to address both restricted resources and the growing body of open access content. Access to proprietary content requires reliable authentication and linking technologies. Libraries acquire licenses to relevant resources of highest interest to the researchers and students of their institution and provide tools for discovery and access. Apart from the ideal world where all scholarly content is available through open access, or where libraries have unlimited resources to purchase licenses to every possible electronic collection, a number of challenges remain in optimizing access to content within the current restrictive environment. One component of the ecosystem deals with determining that a researcher has permission to access a given piece of content. Since the earliest days of electronic journals, mechanisms have been based on the network address of the computer used to access the resource. When a library subscribes to a resource, it provides the list of IP addresses associated with the institution. Once activated, users on the network are recognized as valid users. Proxy services have been almost universally implemented that enable individuals working outside their institutional network to login to the library website or discovery tool so that their session becomes associated with an authorized IP address. The model of IP authentication and the related proxy services are generally regarded as convenient and ideal for protecting the privacy of the researcher. When using IP authentication, the only data point inherently known by the content provider is the associated institution. Providers may also encourage users to create voluntary accounts on their systems which may collect additional information and offer personalized features. IP authentication likewise has many shortfalls. From the publisher perspective, IP addresses are easy to forge, risking leakage of content to non-subscribers. Proxy servers can be defeated through the capture of login credentials, enabling bulk downloads of resources from content providers. IP authentication mechanisms can also be inconvenient for students and researchers in many scenarios. Especially when working off campus, they may be denied access or be presented with a paywall for resources to which their institution subscribes when trying to access materials via popular mainstream search tools, such as Google Scholar. The proxy servers associated with IP authentication mechanisms can also represent a bottleneck or single point of failure in network access patterns. For off-campus users, proxy services mean that rather than the simple path between a user’s web continued on page 16

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Library Response to Pandemic Closings ... from page 14 browser and the content server, requests travel through a more complex path, either via the campus network or through a third party that hosts its proxy server. OCLC’s EZproxy (https://www. oclc.org/en/ezproxy/) service has become the most implemented IP-based service and is increasingly offered as a hosted service rather than installed on the campus network. Federated authentication provides a more modern and scalable alternative to IP authentication and proxy services. This model enables a single sign-on to provide access to authorized resources within the institutional network and with trusted external providers. Rather than simply rely on the presence of a computer on an authorized IP address, federated authentications rely on standard protocols, such as SAML, which transfer limited elements of trust from a signed-in user on one network to another. A researcher, for example, would sign into the university network to gain access to email, library services, the learning management system, and other relevant services. These credentials can also be used to gain access to other external resources that participate in a shared authentication framework. The RA21 initiative (Resource Access for the 21st Century ra21.org), a partnership between publishers and NISO with participation from the library community, was established to explore alternatives based on SAML authentication frameworks to the prevailing IP authentication model. This initiative has been adopted by NISO as a recommended practice (https:// www.niso.org/standards-committees/ra21) and is the basis for the SeamlessAccess service (seamlessacces.org), now in early implementation. The service operates under the governance of NISO, Internet2, ORCHID, STM, and GÉANT. The first use of this new federated model is the cross-publisher initiative GetFTR (https://www.getfulltextresearch.com/). Librarians have raised concerns about how RA21 and SeamlessAccess impact patron privacy.2 As noted above, in the IP authentication ecosystem, information providers are only aware of the institution associated with any given patron. With the federated authentication transaction exemplified by RA21, a

Rumors from page 6 video showing some of its staff members performing a few acts of kindness in hopes to encourage the public to keep it going the rest of June. Those who participate should upload photos or videos of their acts of kindness and tag them with #ThisIsForCynthia. “We hope this sparks a string of positive interactions,” said Craig. “More than ever, we should all work to make kind connections within our community.” CCPL will also release a video tribute of Cynthia Graham Hurd on June 17. “Cynthia Graham Hurd, A Legacy Everlasting,” was produced by CCPL Digital Studio Manager and local documentarian Julian Gooding. The video will be posted on the Library’s YouTube channel and Facebook page.

16 Against the Grain / June 2020

broader set of characteristics can be passed between the institutional environment and service providers. For most educational institutions, the authentication service would be managed by the campus IT department, rather than by the library, and would be designed to interoperate with a broader set of service providers other than those related to library content. SAML-based transactions allow for a broad range of data points to be passed to service providers, such as email addresses, usernames, or departments. Expectations for privacy may differ between those that manage institutional services and the library. While RA21 has been designed to accommodate privacy protection, it depends on institutions to agree on a minimal set of data elements passed among authentication authorities and service providers. In a scholarly publishing ecosystem increasingly hungry for analytics and personalization, it will be critical to ensure privacy controls in federated access models are consistent with library values and policies. The COVID-19 crisis may or may not have a direct impact on the wide-scale transition from IP authentication to federated services such as SeamlessAccess. The urgency to accelerate research in related fields will more likely accelerate the movement toward open access publishing models and other open science initiatives. For materials that continue to be restricted within subscription models, researchers need convenient, scalable, and reliable access and authentication mechanisms — which libraries will continue to service, either on or off campus.

Endnotes 1. Haber, Morey. “The Dangers of Using A VPN On Home Computers For Work And What To Do Instead.” Forbes. January 17, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/01/17/ the-dangers-of-using-vpn-on-home-computers-for-work-and-whatto-do-instead/ 2. See for example: Hinchliffe, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, “What will you do when they come for your proxy server.” The Scholarly Kitchen. January 15, 2018. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet. org/2018/01/16/what-will-you-do-when-they-come-for-your-proxyserver-ra21/. Accessed April 29, 2020.

https://www.ccpl.org/news/ccpl-launches-thisisforcynthia-campaign-honor-former-librarian-cynthia-graham-hurd?fbclid=IwAR3i1AAu6PUpzOUpftMnSYNlHk1uHYfDw1uu3KTezr3crXFbfQItW9MK4vY And please don’t forget that each year, Springer Nature honors the legacy of Cynthia Graham Hurd by awarding a $1,500 travel grant to a library employee that has not had an opportunity to attend the Charleston Library Conference. https://against-the-grain.com/2020/06/ atg-news-announcements-6-19-20/ I am heartened by the fact that books (print and online) have surfaced greatly and survived through the pandemic and become even more popular than ever before! Hooray! To help us know more about books out there, Corey Seeman’s Readers’ Roundup in this issue (p.28) includes three first time

reviewers! Introducing Jessica Brangiel, Electronic Resources Management Librarian at Swarthmore College, Heather Cyre, Head of Public Services, University of Washington Bothell & Cascadia College Campus Library, and Christopher Edwards, Assistant Head of Information Literacy, University of Texas at Dallas. These first timers join longtime reviewer Jennifer Matthews, Collection Strategy Librarian, Rowan University. Thanks to the innovative Corey who sends word that if you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain or if you are a publisher with a book you would like to have reviewed, please write him at <cseeman@umich.edu>. And thanks to all of our authors and reviewers. So much has changed in downtown Charleston. I supposed that we all have noticed! Just learned that after 24 years Jestine’s Kitchen on King Street which was continued on page 19

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Beyond Sci-Hub: Cyber Challenges for the Scholarly Communications Industry Co-authored by the following members of the Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI) University Relations Group: by Rick Anderson (Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication Marriott Library, University of Utah) <rick.anderson@utah.edu> and Robert Boissy (Director of Account Development Institutional Sales and Marketing, Springer Nature) <Robert.Boissy@springernature.com> and Sharon Mattern Büttiker (Director of Content Management, Research Solutions)

iven recent reporting in the press,1 it seems that the legitimacy and credibility of Sci-Hub is no longer a matter for debate. However, the challenge of how to address the continuing threat Sci-Hub poses to authors, societies, university presses, and other publishers reliant on the royalties derived from book sales and subscription income remains — and is connected to the much wider challenge of cybercrime. And unfortunately cybercrime is something to which the higher education sector is particularly vulnerable. In fact, not only is the sector vulnerable but the education sector is the third largest target for attacks,2 ahead of retail, due to the fact that most universities, including library systems, routinely store a tremendous amount of personal data. Rutgers University has reportedly had to spend $3 million on cybersecurity. In the UK last year, the National Cyber Security Centre published its first

Against the Grain / June 2020

report on the cyber threat to UK universities, noting that some of the effects of state-sponsored espionage included damage to the value of research, notably in STEM subjects, a fall in investment by public or private sector in affected universities, and damage to the UK’s knowledge advantage. Sci-Hub is just one example. When it exploded into the academic research space in 2011, it brought to the fore one of the huge challenges not only to our roles as publishers, librarians and institutions but also to the wider integrity of the sector within which we work — namely how do we all balance the need for access while also protecting ourselves, our assets, those for whom we are responsible, and the quality of the academic record from criminals? It has no incentive to ensure the accuracy of the research articles on its site, no incentive to ensure research meets continued on page 18

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Beyond Sci-Hub: Cyber Challenges ... from page 17 ethical standards, and no incentive to retract or correct if issues arise — all of which make its actions particularly egregious. But its activities are not the only threat to the scholarly communications ecosystem and the integrity of the academic record, and this issue goes beyond that of the illegal accessing of academic research. It is clear that in order to address this sustainably and effectively, publishers need to work with librarians, university network security officers and others responsible for cybersecurity in academic institutions. As the saying goes — we are all in this together. Collectively, we have a responsibility to safeguard and manage a successful online researcher experience by ensuring institutional and individual access is enabled to high quality, licensed, peer reviewed publications; that data is protected; and entitlements from licensed institutions are safeguarded. For example, publishers and librarians worked together as part of the RA21 initiative, now called seamlessaccess.org, to make access to articles easier for researchers using their institutional logins when they are not on campus. As this becomes implemented across platforms and publishers, it will also negate the need for researchers to log in each time they move between publishers’ websites. This is an excellent demonstration of how publishers and librarians have come together to solve real pain points as outlined by researchers. Publishers also worked together to create Crossref so that research outputs could be easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. Most recently, GetFTR (Get Full Text Research),3 a new, free-to-use solution has been sent out into the market for consultation that will enable faster access for researchers to the published journal articles they need from a wide variety of discovery tools that they are already using. While this was initially developed in the publishing community, its advisory boards include a number of librarians to ensure the views of this important stakeholder group are properly represented and reflected in the development of GetFTR. While sites such as Sci-Hub are harmful to the research community, we understand why people use them but are pleased to note that they are becoming continuingly less attractive as alternative, legitimate, means of accessing content are developed and rolled out. However, more awareness around the harm caused by such sites — to all in the research community, researchers, institutions, providers — needs to happen. Particularly, we think that the members of the research community need to work together to improve and better spread awareness of the benefits of the legitimate services on offer, to reduce researchers going to illegal sites, and to ensure we have a scholarly communication cycle that collectively addresses and protects the needs of all those involved. One way that our community is looking to address and tackle these issues is through the Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI). This was initially an informal group of interested publishers (large and small, societies and university presses) and others involved in scholarly communications. We are now keen to take this partnership a step further and are seeking to engage more proactively with higher education institutions to solve the cyber challenges they are facing, whether they be the accuracy of the scientific record, the integrity of scholarly systems or the 18 Against the Grain / June 2020

safety of personal data. For example, by exploring whether the dangers related to Sci-Hub connect to other cybercrime issues, it may mean that it is useful to include solutions that help protect universities from Sci-Hub’s network intrusions in broader information literacy and other library outreach programs. Some of this outreach is already underway such as the security summit co-hosted by Springer Nature, part of SNSI, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Libraries and the Boston Library Consortium. This brought together a diverse group of librarians, corporate information professionals, and academics with an interest in cybersecurity to discuss cybersecurity issues, determine the scope of threats to higher education and the scholarly communications network and begin a dialogue regarding practical steps to make campus records and resources more secure. The great thing about this event was that it saw tangible outputs, one being an Information Security Checklist for Academic Libraries. This was created using the comments that came throughout the day from the very engaged participants and contains information on self-education, support, partnering, and spreading the word about cybersecurity threats in higher education. It gives concrete guidance on becoming involved with organizations like EDUCAUSE and REN-ISAC, as well as use of encryption and the need to reach out to their own network security staff with concerns relating to protection of library resources, clearly setting out for librarians the steps they can take to secure their networks. The success of this summit means that a second is being planned later this year as are a series of webinars with key stakeholders — more information on both of these will be available shortly. This is all in addition to members of the group attending conferences and speaking at seminars (coronavirus permitting) to provide information and support to potential partners and stakeholders. Whilst the initiatives mentioned above have not been without their challenges, the point stands that they are examples of the need for a collective approach to cybersecurity and demonstrate the impact such a collaborative approach can deliver. Ultimately, a combination of forces is needed to protect institutions from cyber-attacks, to ensure data is protected on both sides, and to ensure that researchers are presented with the best possible user experience, safe in the knowledge that the work they are accessing is correct, up to date and properly connected to the scientific record. Academic research was digitised and made available across a range of platforms faster than any music or film content. Open access articles are immediately accessible and sharable by anyone who wishes to read them. Most publishers have policies in place which enable authors to publish their articles to publicly accessible platforms, and most fully support pre-print servers. The industry encourages openness and accessibility as a path to our shared goal of a more interconnected research world. Collectively, what we are seeing so far from the work that we have been doing within SNSI is that, moving forward, we need to expand the scope of our activities to address the following questions: • What support do librarians need from publishers and technology providers to effectively balance the need for access and the need for security and data protection? continued on page 19

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Beyond Sci-Hub: Cyber Challenges ... from page 18 • How can we help IT security within institutions in designing systems that meet both researcher and organisational goals so that people don’t choose risky convenience over legitimate options? • What support do institutions need to implement and uphold a secure network system that safeguards users and ensures streamlined simple access? • How can publishers continue to make platforms more interactive and interconnected so that communities can access the research published how, where and when they want to? Ultimately, how can we all work together better to address challenges of balancing security and simple authentication methods from multiple locations and devices? Cybersecurity isn’t just an issue for publishers. It isn’t just a challenge for librarians. It is not just an obstacle for institutions or a nuisance for researchers. This is an issue for all of us, and a problem that we firmly believe can be best addressed sustainably and effectively together. We hope that you will join us in the collective outreach.

Against the Grain / June 2020

Endnotes 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-department-investigates-sci-hub-founder-on-suspicion-of-working-for-russian-intelligence/2019/12/19/9dbcb6e6-2277-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html 2. https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/report/the-cyber-threat-to-universities 3. https://www.getfulltextresearch.com/

Rumors from page 16 known for its fried chicken, gumbo, pecan pie and other Southern classics has closed! The Old Towne Greek Restaurant on King Street has closed as well. I remember earlier when the Conference was smaller that we used to have meetings at the Old Towne. Also closed is Mellow Mushroom and Kickin’ Chicken on King Street. So sad to see these cherished eating memories going away but I don’t think that we will starve! Just finished a webinar from the Financial Times Digital Dialogues: Business Books in Times of Uncertainty. This provocative webinar discussed key issues facing all the business book sector’s stakeholders during this time. The webinar featured Andrew Hill, FT’s management editor, moderating a virtual panel discussion continued on page 25

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Acquiring Scholarly Content: Is It Possible to Set Users on the Right Path, Even If They Start Off on the Wrong Foot? by Scott Ahlberg (Chief Operations Officer, Reprints Desk) <sahlberg@reprintsdesk.com>

s anyone in our industry knows, the path to acquiring scholarly content is not concrete. That is, there is no single, established route researchers take to find and obtain the articles they need for their studies. And that creates challenges for librarians. Librarians work hard to help their users obtain content in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. But steering researchers in the right direction isn’t always easy. As users move through their widely varied literature acquisition workflows, how can librarians ensure each user finds what they need, quickly and easily, while avoiding wrong turns and frustrating dead-ends? At Research Solutions/Reprints Desk, we’ve heard countless stories from librarians about the obstacles they face. Here are some of the top challenges we hear about — both actual and perceived: • Academic users don’t want to pay for content, yet they don’t seem to be thorough about searching for free content. Some Open Access resources seem to be surprisingly hidden from the view of many researchers. • Users find library authentication and navigation cumbersome. • Users sometimes seem to treat interlibrary loan (ILL) as a crutch, like an assistant who will do the work for them. • Users are accessing content on sites that librarians, publishers, and vendors don’t want them to use — including pirate sites, which may be easier to use than legitimate sources, but can come with significant security risks. Additionally, librarians say they want users to take advantage of the helpful resources the library has paid for — like content features and other added value on subscription sites, controlled vocabularies, and semantic searching. One of the concerns we hear is the risks involved in accessing free content. These range from faculty using articles which might not be the version of record, to the possibility that pirate sites may compromise the credentials of researchers. And there is also the situation of a user encountering a paywall for content which their institution’s library has already paid for, simply because the user struggled to navigate through search results and authentication challenges to the library’s entitlements. We know that there are mixed feelings amongst librarians about users accessing content independently of the library. But wherever one stands on that question, it is certainly the case that this activity strips the library of valuable user data, which is critical to collection development and improving services. This also undermines the efforts of publishers to produce high quality content in a commercially viable way.

An Anecdotal Look at Acquisition Workflows To gain some insight into how users find and access content, we conducted an informal, small-sample study. Fourteen post-graduate researchers at universities in the UK, U.S., Canada, 20 Against the Grain / June 2020

and Australia participated via usertesting.com (an online platform for collecting real-time user feedback). We presented participants with a “known-item search” scenario — and mocked-up results to look like Google search results, including relevant live pages from: • PubMed • Journal website (where the DOI resolves) • ResearchGate • An experimental Article Page with links to 3rd party OA versions, rental and purchase options, and a pathway to navigate their institution’s authentication to access subscribed content We then observed participants’ individual search workflows and concluded by asking the following questions: 1. When you’re searching for articles online, what website or service do you start with? 2. Were you familiar with the resources presented in these search result images? 3. What methods do you use to access the full-text articles you want to read? 4. If you can’t get to an article without paying, what do you usually do? Some users were thorough and tried almost everything. Other users either found what they wanted straight away or gave up quickly. Because of this variability and the small sample size, we felt that compiling statistics from the results wasn’t the right thing to do. Instead, we studied the audio and video from the user testing and pored over the written responses to compile our results. As such, the results should be considered anecdotal — providing helpful insights rather than hard numbers.

Key Takeaways Overall, we found that users often cherry-pick search results and go first to sources they trust or prefer (e.g., PubMed and ResearchGate). They will often ignore unfamiliar sites, even though they might offer a pathway to a free version of the article. Somewhat surprisingly, no users mentioned pirate sites (we didn’t suggest these options, but because the questions we asked were open-ended, we expected some users might mention them). As librarians look for ways to improve their literature management systems and set users on the right path, here are four things to keep in mind: 1. Familiarity is important. Users confer “trust” on sites that have worked well for them in the past. Specifically, they prefer to search Google, ResearchGate, and their library (in that order). Similarly, ResearchGate and PubMed are preferred by many because the navigation is consistent and familiar. This survey finding reveals an advantage for aggregators — and a challenge for publishers and libraries. The hard truth is that many continued on page 21

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Acquiring Scholarly Content: Is it possible ... from page 20 users try their library for full-text access only if other options don’t work first. 2. Researchers can be impatient. Even though they don’t want to pay for content, most respondents indicated they won’t do an in-depth search for a free version. Users will often opt for alternate articles rather than pay for their first choice. Some users lamented that there is no single source for all their content needs. 3. Logins are unpopular: To avoid complexity and extra steps, users will often use Google or ask a colleague for a paper before authenticating. 4. Format matters: Users prefer PDFs for familiarity, consistency, and ease-of-use.

Flexibility is the Key to Success While there is no one-size-fits-all discovery-to-acquisition workflow that will work for everyone, understanding the varieties of typical user behaviors — and the reasons behind them — is an essential first step for improving service. For example, if users are starting their research somewhere other than the library’s discovery environment, is there a way to bring them back to the library to access the content? Are Open Access resources hidden because they’re not well integrated into what your library offers? Are pathways leading to broken link resolvers and other Against the Grain / June 2020

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dead ends? Are they being forced to re-key citations on ILL request forms? Do they find that it takes more time to authenticate than it does to ask a colleague for a PDF? In other words, when users hit a fork in the road, what factors drive their next steps? And what can librarians do to make the institution’s preferred path more efficient and enticing? Armed with this critical information, librarians can identify areas for improvement — and then make informed decisions about how to address them. The key is to create a system that has the flexibility to accommodate a broad set of users — in whatever means their search originates, no matter how many possible outcomes there may be. The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of the graduate student participants in the study discussed in this article. The underlying research question in this project was inspired by conversations with Kieran Prince of OpenAthens and Michiel van der Heyden of Springer Nature. Writing and editing was made possible by Karen Hittelman.

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10 Principles of Simplifying Access to Keep Libraries at the Center of the Research Process by Kendall Bartsch (CEO, Third Iron) <kendall@thirdiron.com> and John Seguin (Third Iron) <john@thirdiron.com>

n an era where the amount of scholarly information has never been higher, researchers are increasingly expressing a preference for alternative markets such as ResearchGate and Sci-Hub as sources of scholarly content. This is not, however, because these alternative sources necessarily offer more or higher quality content, but because they offer easier access. As a result, researchers are increasingly leaving behind traditional routes to content such as publisher sites and library resources. In response, publishers, libraries and technology companies are developing new initiatives to simplify and expedite access to authoritative content. With these new services, libraries and publishers look to simplify and speed delivery to their wealth of content. Third Iron is part of this new access technology wave, having developed our LibKey technology in 2017, reconciling what users experience when linking to scholarly content with what they expect the experience should be. In this essay, we outline what we see as the necessary components needed to make new technologies successful. The digitization of content, and the technology infrastructure to support information seeking and retrieval, opened up an unparalleled opportunity for research. However, getting from the point of information discovery to the digital full text has never been straightforward. When researchers start their journey with library databases and discovery services, getting to content typically requires using a link resolver. Studies1 spanning over the past decade, however, have consistently found link resolvers to be a stumbling block in researcher workflow, long complained about as being confusing, requiring too many steps and time consuming to use. As an example, in recent a study of graduate students’ research behavior, a doctoral student declared, “library access was too difficult and took too many steps.”2 Starting research on the open web, at indexes like Google Scholar, often ends with similar frustration. Users following links from popular indexes often end up at pages where content is locked behind paywalls with no obvious way to access them, even if the library has full-text access available either from the publisher or an aggregated source. The response to this seemingly byzantine process needed to reach scholarly content within and outside of the library has been the fast rise of alternative information marketplaces. Peerto-peer sharing, content exchange on social media, academic social network sites such as ResearchGate, and pirate sites like Sci-Hub, all share the common trait of providing easy, often one-click access to content. Need an article? Post a DOI on r/ scholar and others will send the article; post the DOI on Twitter using the hashtag #icanhazpdf and others will direct message to a Dropbox site with the article; search ResearchGate and you’ll likely find the author has posted a manuscript copy or sometimes the article of record; or go to Sci-Hub, paste a DOI, 22 Against the Grain / June 2020

click search and the article is revealed. These services thrive not because they contain more or better content than a library but because access to it is so frictionless. The lessons we take today from these alternative content sites are similar to those taught to the music industry by Napster in 2000. First, if industry technology delivers content in a way that meets user expectations, it will happily be used; and second, using authorized access channels will benefit all stakeholders. We see ten elements as essential in developing a successful technology that will meet user expectations while benefiting researchers, publishers and libraries. These principles inform our LibKey product development. First, minimize clicks. If a PDF or HTML version of the article is available, the link found at the point of discovery should go directly to that full text. Second, indicate at the point of discovery when content is available. Links to content from library and open web sources are usually suggestive, indicating that content is likely available, but the user never quite knows what to expect until after they start following the link. When information is discovered on a webpage, the researcher should not have to guess if access is available or in what format it will be. Inconsistency leads to distrust in a service, driving users away from the library and towards services that provide a consistent experience. Third, be content inclusive. At most libraries, aggregated sources comprise a substantial percentage of full text available to researchers, and open access content sources are growing. Linking technology should seamlessly incorporate this content, along with what may be available from the publisher directly. Fourth, be authentication agnostic. Different libraries use different methods of authentication for varying reasons, such as IP-based methods including proxy servers and VPN systems, as well as federated technologies like SAML. While some see universal SAML adoption as the future of authentication, given the costs to publishers and libraries to adopt it, the road to universal SAML adoption, if achieved at all, will be a long one. In the meantime, linking technology should route through whatever authentication system a library is using or even a combination of SAML and IP technologies as is appropriate. Fifth, keep libraries at the center of the process. At all times and in multiple ways, library branding should be incorporated into linking technology to visually remind researchers that the library is the source of the content. Sixth, integrate document fulfillment systems. When content is discovered that is not available from one’s library, the link should fall back to library services like interlibrary loan and document delivery. The link to these services should deliver the article metadata in order to make fulfillment requests as close to one-click access as possible. continued on page 23

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10 Principles of Simplifying Access ... from page 22 Eighth, be fast. Most users expect content to load in less than two seconds. Delivering this requires technology be built on performant, reliable hardware and software, technologies that can be scaled easily with demand. Ninth, make the technology ubiquitous. Better access to information is in everyone’s interest so the technology that promotes it should be available to be integrated by any company who is interested. Finally, respect user privacy. Things such as a user account, caching of user credentials or reading of all web traffic for marketing purposes is not required to link users to content. Linking technology should only gather what personal information is needed for usage reporting and what is gathered should be clearly disclosed. For these reasons, nearly a thousand libraries are using our LibKey technology in various ways to simplify access to content and the results are impressive. Information we are gathering from our own internal data review, user studies from a number of libraries, and anecdotal feedback demonstrate four things. First, with our LibKey Discovery service, a direct article link is displayed in a library’s discovery service in addition to the link resolver link. When given this option, users strongly prefer oneclick access to content over the traditional link resolver route. Against the Grain / June 2020

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Second, removing steps in the access process saves a considerable amount of users’ time. Having to select content platforms, waiting for different pages to load and hunting around for PDF buttons can take up to a minute or more, compared to just a few seconds with direct access. Across hundreds of thousands of full text downloads at any given institution, the research process time savings is substantial. Third, reducing complexity in the access process leads to fewer library help desk and interlibrary loan requests. Simplifying access minimizes the amount of time library staff spend assisting users lost in the access process or fulfilling requests for documents that are already part of the library collection. Fourth, it is better to meet the researcher where she is than it is to try to change research habits. Adding direct links to content at points of discovery outside the library keeps the researcher engaged with library services, even when the researcher is not “in” the library. Our experience is also demonstrating that simplifying access will require some change in stakeholder thinking. For example, publishers must accept that the great majority of researchers want to go directly to content and bypass the platform; libraries must recognize that access is correlated to usage, which means easier access will likely lead to more full-text downloads. Whatever the challenges, the benefits of new access technologies are increasingly clear: for researchers, it increases efficiency; for libraries, organically incentivizing researchers to stay within the library ecosystem; and for publishers, diminishing the incentive for researchers to use alternative content markets. endnotes on page 25

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Access is People: Navigating the E-resource Access Landscape During a Pandemic by Abigail Wickes (Electronic Resources Management Librarian, Duke University) <abigail.wickes@duke.edu>

hen I first began brainstorming this article in early March 2020, the refrain that kept coming to mind was a riff on a blog post by Whitney Hess1 — Access is People. Just as Hess points out that a human being is behind every email, a human being is also behind every twist and turn in the content pipeline2 that can go awry. (For clarification, when I use the term access, I’m talking about the process of a library user identifying then getting to content in the desired format.) I knew this from my experience working in content discovery management at Oxford University Press, where I learned the importance of building relationships and facilitating communication across the library, publisher, and discovery vendor trifecta. This was further validated in my current role as an ERM Librarian at Duke University, where I still work to open doors of conversation between content providers and discovery vendors when access issues arise in our collection, while also working with colleagues to manually provide e-resource access, and helping patrons and colleagues who are experiencing any number of enigmatic access issues. Then, the rest of March 2020 began to unfold. On the last night of the ER&L 2020 Conference, I learned that my campus was extending spring break then abruptly switching to entirely remote classes and work. One month later, writing up this article in mid-April, the whiplash I’m experiencing from these rapid and all-encompassing changes is unprecedented (though the lack of ergonomic office furniture in my home workspace may be contributing.) The pitfalls of the content pipeline and the importance of building relationships with the people facilitating access at each point became even more important when options changed so drastically.

E-Resource Access “Before” In the world leading up to roughly March 1-9, 2020, a typical library user with good intentions would try to access scholarly e-resource content via their library website. They then may have encountered any number of errors, stemming from unregistered DOIs, openURL failure due to outdated citations, unannounced URL changes that break proxies, or intentional road bumps, such as restrictive DRM. While we hope our users report these frustrating situations so they can be remedied, it’s also likely that these intentional or unintentional hurdles drive some users to access the content using more circuitous methods, some unsanctioned. These hurdles to legitimate access are a lot like the piracy warning you have to sit through when you watch a DVD. (I realize this comparison is also a great example of a way to indicate my age without using any dates.) Like the library user with good intentions trying to get to content via legal methods, I’m the user with good intentions who bought this Shrek 2 DVD from Media Play; why do I have to plod through these piracy warnings before reaching the content for which I should have legitimate access? In an ideal world, discovery should be delivery.3 Standards for discovery and access protocols, such as recommendations from Project Transfer, KBART and KBART automation, the Open Dis 24 Against the Grain / June 2020

covery Initiative, and the Content Platform Migration working group, have emerged in an effort to minimize these problems and facilitate timely and accurate information transfer among content providers, discovery vendors, and libraries. However, problems persist when these standards are not adopted at a wide scale. Industry shifts, such as the emergence of digital-first publishing, waves of content platform migrations, and major changes of scale in library software, also contribute to delays and bottlenecks in the content pipeline. Metadata distribution lagging behind publication will be inevitable until content provider discovery and access resources are scaled to meet the growing quantity of digital-first content. In discussions with content discovery management colleagues from a variety of publishers, focused discovery work such as creating and distributing KBART files (often manually) and troubleshooting e-resource access issues is commonly relegated to one person or a small team, who can only do so much. The sheer volume of e-resource content librarians must contend with has been one of the most striking parts of my experience transitioning to e-resource management work in libraries after working in a similar capacity for a publisher. In contrast to the low number of discovery and access resources employed by many large publishers, academic research libraries employ teams of people to constantly work on solving these problems. When standards are not ubiquitous, facilitating e-resource access becomes grindingly manual, demanding local work that is very difficult to keep current.

E-Resource Access During a Global Pandemic When remote e-resource access becomes one of the only ways for users to interact with library resources, existing authentication issues and confusion compound, spiked with newfound anxiety and urgency. Here, too, it has been helpful to remember that behind each frantic request for help is a person trying to cope in a stressful situation. Students trying to complete an assignment from home may not understand that navigating to a resource directly from a content provider’s website may result in an erroneous paywall due to lack of a proxy prefix in the URL. Faculty trying to continue with research may not know that the university VPN is necessary for IP authentication. This creates a cocktail of potential issues, which could be attributed to existing but unearthed problems, new obstacles stemming from remote access limitations, or some ambiguous combination. The gravity of the abrupt and ubiquitous transition to remote access has largely been acknowledged with gestures of goodwill from content providers; communication styles have shifted, and more formal tones are overwhelmingly replaced with well wishes and updates about how each person and their community are faring as the days of social distancing add up. It’s a reminder that although these are business relationships, there are people behind each point of correspondence who ideally have a similar end goal — getting content to users who need it. This has been especially important for research directly related to stemming the pandemic; when some of our colleagues in Engineering urgently continued on page 25

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Access is People: Navigating the E-resource Access ... from page 24 needed new subscriptions to several standards for efforts to create PPE using 3D printers, the provider granted access immediately. Content providers have also opened an abundance of free content provided during the pandemic. This seems to largely be a gesture of goodwill, where most providers are looking to contribute what they can to a dire situation. There have also been some bad actors who are using this as an opportunity to snare institutions into contracts if they don’t actively opt out before the end of the complimentary period. Along with cultivating a healthy wariness about whether anything is truly free, expectations for access options for temporarily free resources have also made evident some existing confusion about access models. Although these temporarily free resources may fill short-term resource gaps created by the transition to relying solely on decentralized e-resources, it may not make sense or even be possible to quickly add this fleeting abundance of temporary holdings to the knowledgebase, temporary MARC records to the catalog, or temporary stanzas to the proxy server, and then remove them all before the complimentary period is over. Without these access frameworks in place, getting users to these provisionally free resources becomes a convoluted process.

all working, researching, and studying remotely, e-resources are the content. Drawing on my own experience working in publishing, the importance of optimizing e-resource content for library access points is not always widely understood or prioritized by publisher stakeholders, who are more likely focused on augmenting their own platforms and investing in digital content innovations. While these individual platform enhancements are important, especially when meeting ADA requirements, if users are unable to get to newly enhanced content because of link resolver failures or discrepancies in KBART files, who is benefiting from these developments? This is where librarians can lean on what are hopefully strengthened relationships, and take the opportunity to offer explanations to the people we talk to when reporting problems. At the risk of sounding like one of the many advertisements [insert brand/chain/car dealer/etc.] emphasizing their focus on people “during these troubling times,” it can help to remember there are people behind every bend in the content pipeline from provider to vendor to library to patron. In troubling times, we can build these relationships through shared experience. Just don’t be afraid to leverage that bolstered relationship to advocate for more resources invested in ensuring smooth library access and adoption of industry standards!

E-Resource Access to Come As social distancing continues, there are some examples we can draw on for building more robust e-resource access in the days to come. Specifically, by advocating for widespread adoption of information standards and data cleanup practices, and building on strengthened relationships to create teachable moments. So many access issues stem from lack of standardization and bad data that blocks linking. While we are

10 Principles of Simplifying ... from page 23 Endnotes 1. See for example: Chisare, C. et al. (2017) “Selecting link resolver and knowledge base software: Implications of interoperatbility,” Journal of Electronic Librarianship, 29(2), pp. 93–106. doi: 10.1080/1941126X.2017.1304765 and Imler, B. and Eichelberger, M. (2011) “Do They ‘Get It’? Student Usage of SFX Citation Linking Software,” College & Research Libraries, 72(5), pp. 454–463. doi: 10.5860/ crl-141. 2. Moore, M. and Singley, E. (2019) “Understanding the Information Behaviors of Doctoral Students: An Exploratory Study,” portal: Libraries and the Academy, 19(2), pp. 279–293. doi: 10.1353/pla.2019.0016.

Against the Grain / June 2020

Endnotes 1. https://whitneyhess.com/blog/2013/06/03/email-is-people/ 2. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/07/11/building-pipesand-fixing-leaks-in-scholarly-content-discovery-and-access/ 3. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/01/08/discovery-delivery-user-centric-principles-discovery-service/

Rumors from page 19 composed of Christy Fletcher, Hollis Heimbouch, Mohamed El-Erian and Rik Kirkland. The good news is that most attendees were cautiously optimistic about the future of books and publishing. The webcast will be archived shortly. Talk about change! In this recent article, Christopher Cox (Dean of Libraries at Clemson University) predicts the significant ways academic libraries will shift in terms of collections, services, spaces and operations as a result of the pandemic. https://www.insidehighered. com/users/christopher-cox More – The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) presented two awards during its virtual 2020 Annual Meeting, recognizing two individuals for outstanding service to the university press community. Ned Stuckey-French received the Inaugural Stand UP Award Posthumously. The Stand UP Award was established by the AUPresses Board of Directors to honor people who through their words and actions have done

extraordinary work to support, defend, and celebrate the university press community. Next — Larin McLaughlin, editor-in-chief of the University of Washington Press, was named the 2020 AUPresses Constituency Award honoree. The award was presented by Niccole Coggins, editorial, design, and production coordinator and assistant project editor at the University of Virginia Press, and a former Diversity Fellow. McLaughlin was honored for her contributions to advancing the goals of diversity and inclusion in the university press community; in particular, her nominators commended her leadership as author and principal investigator of the Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowship Program. Talk about innovative. De Gruyter has published 13 Perspectives on the pandemic: Thinking in a state of exception, a digital collection of thirteen think pieces on Covid-19 written by humanities scholars. The publication is freely available online and will be accompanied by the weekly digital debate series CoronaTalks, which will be streamed live on De Gruyter’s YouTube channel. www.degruyter.com continued on page 44

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When Thinking “Access,” Think Like a User by Christopher Lee (Electronic Resources Librarian, Utah State University) <Christopher.lee@usu.edu> and Robert Lisiecki (Marketing Manager, Lean Library, a SAGE Publishing company) <Robert.Lisiecki@sagepub.com>

s librarians and vendors, we often fall into the trap of assuming information is accessible or easy to find because we are so close to our platforms and resources. Instead, we should consider the user’s journey, particularly at a time where users are shifting to online learning and library support of faculty and students is provided completely virtually. In this piece, we shapeshift to think about access from a user’s perspective instead of from our own.

Christopher Lee, Electronic Resources Librarian at Utah State University Librarians should be proud of the many services we provide for users to find information, technology, or community resources. The end results of these services are wonderful, but sometimes getting through the interface is a challenge. It doesn’t matter how good the information available inside a database is if the patron cannot access it. While studying for an MLIS at San Jose State University, I read something from the textbook Designing Interfaces that stuck with me: “you are not the user” (Brewer, Tidwell, and Valencia). While an obvious statement, it helped put into words a frustration I had when I was a student: many library websites and databases seemed to be designed with librarians and vendors in mind instead of undergraduate students. And the problem seems to have only increased since then. There are two overall issues I have seen with library and database websites. The first major issue is the accessibility of the content for persons with disabilities. Last year the court decision in Payan v. Los Angeles Community College District brought attention to the lack of accessibility. Most databases and library websites do not adhere to the most recent Web Accessibility Content Guidelines and as such do not work well with devices such as screen readers. This is an area we can all improve on. Librarians need to ensure our websites are accessible and communicate the importance of accessibility to vendors when we renew or purchase content. Vendors need to strive to make all their content accessible, which is admittedly a daunting task that will take time. The second issue is broader but equally frustrating. Many users don’t use the library website or vendor databases as their main research tool. It may be because our interfaces are clunky and complicated, or it may be that they are conditioned to seek all their answers through Google (there is a reason the Google name has moved from a noun to a verb!). Libraries and vendors cannot hope to ever have the resources Google has to create intuitive and powerful search tools that understand human ways of asking questions, but we can learn to work with Google instead of trying to compete with it. Google also has major drawbacks when used as a research tool. It doesn’t know what patrons are associated with a university and therefore won’t get them past paywalls to content the library subscribes to. And it can bring patrons to legally questionable file sharing sites where content may not be credible. 26 Against the Grain / June 2020

To improve access to library resources at Utah State University, we recently purchased a subscription to Lean Library. This web browser extension will alert library patrons when they find content online that the library has access to. For example, a patron can Google “article on Civil Engineering,” find a publisher page, and Lean Library will pop up saying the library has access to this content if you sign in through a provided link. The idea is that if students won’t go to the library, we will bring the library to them. They can now access library content by using whatever search techniques they are most comfortable with. We also have the option of posting alerts on well-known illegal sites to steer patrons to legal alternatives. We have not taken that route at Utah State University, but it is a possible option through the Lean Library extension. There is a drawback to Lean Library. We need to convince students to download it for it to be useful. Before the global pandemic, our plan was to hand out flyers at tables in the library and student center, but plans have changed for now. We have shifted to reaching out to faculty to promote the resource in their classes, posted links on our website, and advertised the service through social media. Our hope is that faculty will share it with incoming freshmen in the fall semester when their research habits are more fluid.

Robert Lisiecki, Marketing Manager at Lean Library, a SAGE Publishing company Johan Tilstra, founder of Lean Library, noticed the same issue related to research access at his own library, Utrecht University, where he was a Program Manager. Realizing that a large majority of patrons were not starting their discovery at the library or library’s website, Utrecht started its “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Library without a Catalogue” initiative. The basic premise was to shift their focus from discovery to delivery — to bring the library to its patrons. This initiative led Johan to buying a lot of coffee — mostly as a means to talk to patrons about their frustrations with their research. A key theme among the countless patrons was they struggled with figuring out what they had access to and how they could access it. Google helped them find resources for their research, but it did not help them access it. That is when he decided to develop the prototype for what is now Lean Library. The patrons ended up loving the prototype, even in its early, clunky stages, because it brought the library to them as they researched rather than forcing them to start at the library. With the extension, patrons can reap the benefits of the library’s services and messaging without understanding how the library works, what avenues are needed to authorize, or where to look. But their access issues do not stop there, and it has been important to constantly gather feedback and think like a user to ensure the extension is truly useful for patrons. For instance, a major hurdle for patrons is encountering barriers to accessing articles or eBooks. To help, we added functionality to automatically continued on page 28

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When Thinking “Access,” Think Like a User from page 26 look for alternative options within the library or available open access. It is important to ensure they can research as they will and still feel the library’s support, wherever they are. Doing so alleviates access issues while increasing library visibility when patrons are researching off campus. For Johan and Lean Library, thinking like a user led to finding solutions to access issues. Here are some tips from our experience on how to think like a user: 1. Listen to the data: Each year, several new studies and surveys are published (e.g., Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, National Survey of Student Engagement, ITHAKA, etc.) Many universities conduct their own surveys or analyze their own data (e.g., usage, access denial, discovery methods, etc.). Considering what the data means from a user’s perspective can lead to thinking about solutions that work for them. 2. Acknowledge and avoid assumptions: As the product experts, it is easy to think we have all the answers. Sometimes that thought process can lead to missing the solution that makes most sense for users.

3. Ask and listen: Sometimes the best solutions come from the people experiencing the problem daily. A casual conversation over a cup of coffee can be really insightful. 4. Try it out: Forget your expertise for a moment and try finding access the way your patrons would. Consider the steps they would take when off campus and try to experience their frustrations. As Chris mentioned, the Lean Library extension still requires some action from patrons. They need to download it and sign in through the library. That being said, we have consistently seen positive growth, month over month because, put simply, it works: closely listening to patrons’ frustrations while thinking about how the library can help ease those frustrations resulted in a tool that works for the patrons. And last year, we saved researchers an estimated 90,000 hours through streamlined access. Sometimes making a difference and merging library and patron needs should start with a listening ear. We are excited to continue finding ways to reconnect patrons and libraries, while helping patrons traverse the everchanging landscape of research one cup of coffee at a time.

References Brewer, C., Tidwell, J., Valencia-Brooks, A. (2019). Designing Interfaces. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; Phone: 734-764-9969) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman Column Editor’s Note: The 1993 Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day is one of the truly great comedic movies of the last 40 years. Featuring a fantastic script that Ramis co-wrote with Danny Rubin (who also supplied the story), we follow weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) repeatedly live through the same day over and over again as he tries to woo his on site producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell). To be a librarian in 2020 has a fair amount of “Groundhog Day” in it. At one point in the movie, Phil even muses “Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.” Everyday seems to take on a strange dynamic of both something completely different and something fundamentally the same. But one element in our world that does change continually are the resources that we have at our fingertips and on our shelves (remember those?). While some things seem not to change at all, the flow of new books and new works into the library community continues. All the while, our budgets and our abilities to manage resources might be more constrained in the upcoming year, so having a good sense of what we should add to our holdings is just the thing we hope to provide to our readers. We want people to make the right choices for their library. While Dr. S. R. Ranganathan pointed out in his Third Law of Library Science, “every book its reader,” we know there is value in all the works that are published. However, the value might not be for our particular community. So hopefully this will help you navigate 28 Against the Grain / June 2020

how to spend your collection budget that might not have been as robust as we thought earlier this year. Thanks to my great reviewers for getting items for this column. I have three first time reviewers for this column: Jessica Brangiel, Heather Cyre, and Christopher Edwards joining longtime reviewer Jennifer Matthews. If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain (and I can ever get back into my office), 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. Be safe, be well, take care of others, be a helper ... and happy reading and be nutty! — CS

Hussey, Lisa K., and Diane L. Velasquez. Library Management 101: A Practical Guide. 2nd Edition. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2019. 9780838917152, 312 pages. $76.99 Reviewed by Jennifer Matthews (Collection Strategy Librarian, Rowan University) <matthewsj@rowan.edu> Library management is an area where some librarians have interest from the beginning, while others either grow their careers into a management position or have management thrust upon continued on page 29

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Reader’s Roundup from page 28 them. No matter where in one’s career library management may come, it is helpful to have a variety of tools available to assist an individual in that role. Library Management 101: A Practical Guide is one such tool. While written as a textbook for the library school classroom, it also serves individuals well into their careers who are first entering management or those who may be returning to management after a hiatus. Edited by Lisa K. Hussey and Diane L. Velasquez, this text covers the gamut of management topics such as business theory, human resource management, strategic planning, unions, organizational culture, ethics, and grants among other things bound to keep the new manager up at night. Discussions include practical applications at both public and academic organizations with sample examples of items such as budget worksheets along with the inclusion of case studies, exercises, references and further reading for most chapters. A particularly timely inclusion is Lisa K. Hussey’s chapter on diversity. The chapter includes not only a definition of diversity but discussion about microaggressions, White privilege, visual diversity, language diversity, as well as conversations about diversity initiatives. Most importantly, Hussey emphasizes the need for commitment to this issue from both the organization and the community. This issue is too important to overlook or neglect and every leader should be cognizant of not only their diversity awareness but also the resources available to them and their staff. I also recommend the joint chapter on leadership by Mary Wilkins-Jordan and Lisa K. Hussey, particularly for those who have had leadership thrust upon them. Wilkins-Jordan and Hussey cover several leadership theories and competencies in this chapter and any leader should have at least a basic understanding of both so that they can be a better leader. The section on followers is slim but the reader can supplement this section by obtaining materials from the references and further readings. There is a great deal of literature in this area for one to absorb so this cursory view provides an excellent starting point for the novice leader. This text provides timely information on management and leadership theory that would be of benefit to anyone that is new to a leadership role or learning about leadership in library school. It is also good for those managers and leaders who have been in their roles for some time to read as a refresher. 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.)

Jaeger, Paul T. and Greene Taylor, Natalie. Foundations of Information Policy. Chicago: ALA Neal Schuman Publishing, 2019. 9780838918029, 212 pages. $64.99 Reviewed by Jessica Brangiel (Electronic Resources Management Librarian, Swarthmore College) <jbrangi1@swarthmore.edu> Information is everywhere and the landscape around information policy is vast. Paul Jaeger and Natalie Greene Taylor have set out to write a book to fill the gap between information policy and informational professionals. Their goal as stated in the Against the Grain / June 2020

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.)

acknowledgements was to write a book introducing library and information science students and new professionals to the field of information policy. This book meets and exceeds that goal. As a librarian working in a four-year baccalaureate granting institution, I think this book would also prove useful to undergraduate students in several fields including history, law and computer/ information science. Each chapter ends with “Questions to Consider” to further the exploration and interrogation of this subject. Though this book could easily be used as an introductory textbook, the authors have managed to intersperse humor and a lighthearted tone, making for a quick and enjoyable read. The authors go far beyond the title of this book and provide a well researched background on how information policy has developed over time since the United States was founded. The interesting perspective of how our founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the United States Constitution — intersect with areas of information policy such as intellectual freedom, access to information, protection of intellectual property, privacy and information security are woven throughout the book. Students and professionals new to the field of information policy will appreciate the broad coverage of the topic that the authors provide. In Chapter Three, for example, there is a very thorough and well cited discussion of the origin of the right to privacy. The authors connect the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Bill of Rights to Judge Thomas Cooley’s 1880 book Laws of Torts to 1960s case law including the influential case of Griswold v. Connecticut to the creation of the Privacy Act of 1974, to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 and finally to the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. Jaeger and Greene Taylor adeptly juxtapose these historical laws and acts with modern day privacy issues resulting from the explosion of information online. In Chapter Four, “Why Study Information Policy,” the authors make a particularly effective argument for the importance of this topic by relaying no less than eight examples of informacontinued on page 30

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tion policy related stories from just one day in the year 2018. Just a few of the noted stories include the government of South Korea seeking to increase its policy of hidden spy cameras to be utilized in public and private spaces; to the lawyer for the president of the United States claiming that a tweet cannot be considered obstruction of justice; to genetic testing companies increasing new privacy guidelines that would limit the sharing of genetic information with researchers, law enforcement or other companies without prior consent. We are living in interesting times where issues of privacy, security, sharing and selling of information are constant and touch nearly every area of our lives. The final chapters of Foundations of Information Policy nod toward advocacy and activism for librarians and information professionals. The book takes a noticeably different tone touching on the current political administration and climate. However, this does not detract from the overall importance of this book. Paul T. Jaeger, Ph.D., J.D., is Professor and Director of the Master of Library Science (MLS) program of the College of Information Studies. With over 180 published articles and book chapters, Jager has demonstrated his expertise in the fields of Information Policy, Disability and Accessibility, E-Government, Information & Human Rights and Information Studies. Dr. Jaeger is Editor of Library Quarterly, Co-Editor of Advances in Librarianship, and Co-Editor of International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion. In 2014, he received the Library Journal/ALISE Excellence in Education Award. Natalie Greene Taylor is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Florida’s School of Information and the Program Coordinator for the Masters of Library and Information Science program. Dr. Greene Taylor’s research focuses on young people’s access to information exploring youth information behavior, information intermediaries, and information policy as it affects youth information access. She is an editor of Library Quarterly and the co-author of two additional books including Digital Literacy and Digital Inclusion: Information Policy and the Public Library and Libraries, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Enabling Access and Promoting Inclusion. 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.)

devising a linear approach to the material. Where do you begin when the frames are deliberately overlapping and adaptable? This is where librarians find ourselves as we are being asked more often to develop specific curriculum to foster information literacy within the context of a field. I myself have recently had the task of revising an information resources class for healthcare majors with this very goal. The authors have great experience in the field of medical librarianship. Lauren M. Young, MLIS, MA, AHIP, is an associate librarian and instruction coordinator in the Reference and Research Services Department at Samford University’s Davis Library. Elizabeth G. Hinton, MSIS, AHIP is an instruction and research librarian and assistant professor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Rowland Medical Library and a liaison to the School of Nursing. Young and Hinton manage the seemingly nebulous task of matching up each frame to relevant lessons within the material using real life examples that could realistically serve as a stepby-step guide to developing a health information literacy course. To illustrate this point: Chapter One, “Bibliographic Instruction and Accreditation in the Health Sciences,” breaks out standards from various degree programs and accrediting bodies that directly reference or relate to information literacy skills and the specific frames that apply. This chapter would be all a person ought to need to “sell” administration on a documented need for instruction programs. Not only are information and research skills necessary for success in these degrees, they are demanded! Each successive chapter addresses one of the frames with concrete examples of application and learning objectives. What does constructed authority really mean for medical professionals? How does the creation of information as a process manifest for health studies researchers? These questions are sketched out in terms that would be easy to translate into a practice. Indeed, the contextual explanation of the frame is followed with actual lesson plans and assignments as examples pulled from contributing librarians who have already navigated these waters. While I would not advocate wholesale adoption of another instructor’s lesson, there are elements of inspirations that would certainly help less experienced instruction developers to move from theory to meaningful learning activities. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.)

Young, Lauren M. and Elizabeth G. Hinton (Editors). Framing Health Care Instruction: An Information Literacy Handbook for the Health Sciences. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 9781538118931, 208 pages. $54.99 (ALA Members: $49.49)

O’Dea, Suzanne. From Suffrage to the Senate: America’s Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes, and Issues. 4th Edition. New York: Grey House Publishing, 2019. 978-1-64265-097-6. 800 pages. $255.00.

Reviewed by Christopher Edwards (Assistant Head of Information Literacy, Eugene McDermott Library, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson) <chris.edwards@utdallas.edu>

Reviewed by Heather Cyre (Head of Public Services, University of Washington Bothell & Cascadia College Campus Library, University of Washington Bothell, Bothell) <hcyre@uw.edu>

This is a book that I wish had come across my desk a year ago. Any instruction librarian should be familiar with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, which is a flexible and conceptual approach to necessary information skills. One challenge for course formatted instruction in the framework is

The 2018 midterm elections not only saw the largest surge of female candidates and women elected to political office since 1992 but shattered a historic number of firsts in United States History. New Mexico, Maine, and South Dakota elected their

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Reader’s Roundup from page 30 first female governors. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee became the first female senators to represent their states. The 116th Congress elected that year included the first Muslim Americans (Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib), the first Native American women (Debra Haaland and Sharice Davids), and the first Latina members of congress (Veronica Escobar and Sylvia Garcia).1 Though women are still far from equal representation in Congress, author Suzanne O’Dea has revised From Suffrage to the Senate: America’s Political Women to underscore the significant advancement of women and politics in the United States. Originally published in 2000, this fourth edition includes new and expanded biographical entries of the “the people, laws, court cases, and organizations that establish or alter women’s relationships to their families, their communities, and their government.”2 Maintaining the selection criteria of previous editions, O’Dea includes 100 new entries covering topics such as the #MeToo, #YouKnowMe, and #BlackLivesMatter movements, biographies of all of the 40 freshmen women of the 116th Congress, and a summary of the 2017 Women’s March. O’Dea also updated and expanded previously-published entries, specifically broadening profiles on female judges in the federal court of appeals, women in the military, and presidential appointees. The advantage of From Suffrage to the Senate is that entries are well-organized and provide a brief overview of the political history and landscape of women and politics. The fourth edition not only introduces readers to lesser-known state and local officials, historical leaders, and essential legislation but highlights rising newcomers and political activism. The 1,028 entries are organized alphabetically over two volumes and additional facts, statistics, and primary source documents are included in two appendices to provide supplemental context. Individual profiles are concise, highlighting the impact and significance of their work or relevancy in chronological order. Depending on

length of public service or accomplishments, entry lengths vary. Legislative and topical entries follow a similar organizational structure but provide more breadth of information. It should be noted that this text is best paired with other similar reference works, such as Women in the American Political System: An Encyclopedia of Women as Voters, Candidates, and Office Holders, in order to form a complete account of the issues and individuals impacting women and politics in the United States. For example, the Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. decision in 2014 allowed closely held for-profit corporations to exclude certain forms of health care products and services, namely contraceptive methods, from their employee health insurance plans by claiming religious objection. This Supreme Court case is not included in whole or as footnotes or cross-references of relevant entries such as Sylvia Burwell, former Secretary of Health and Human Services, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the dissenting opinion. Overall, the fourth edition of From Suffrage to Senate provides a good starting point for researching the political women, legislation, court cases, social issues, and organizations that shape the lives of women in the United States and that have altered the course of American politics. Academic libraries supporting lower-level undergraduate research and high school libraries would find this a useful and accessible addition to their reference collections. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Endnotes 1. Eli Watkins, “Midterm Elections: Women and LGBT Candidates Make History in 2018 Midterms,” CNN online, last modified November 7, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/07/politics/ historic-firsts-midterms/index.html. 2. Suzanne O’Dea, From Suffrage to the Senate: America’s Political Women: an Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes, and Issues, New York: Grey House Publishing, 2019), xxi.

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

t is a strange time. In a world where a popular subject for many movies (and books) is apocalyptic and/or post apocalyptic scenarios, how does one settle into an innovative story about escape and travel? Before I answer that question I felt compelled to google “novels about apocalypse.” One site listed the ten best post-apocalyptic books to read before the world ends. I have read three of them: Earth Abides, 1949, On the Beach, 1957 and The Stand, 1978. I have a few to go and will not be seeking any of them out soon as truth is playing out better than fiction at this point. Sidebar: The 2018 award was announced in 2019 due to the scandal that exposed serious flaws in the appointed-for-life 32 Against the Grain / June 2020

committee. After a year of regrouping, new members, new rules and a new hope for transparency, the committee announced both the 2018 and the 2019 Nobel Literature Laureates. The Washington Post wrote a perspective on this that is worth the read: “The Swedish Academy took a year off to fix the Nobel Prize in literature. It’s still broken.” In case you missed it, the previous Booklover explored a work of fiction entitled Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 prizewinner. Peter Handke was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has continued on page 34

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Collecting to the Core — Decolonizing Francophone Literature by Kathleen A. Langan (Assoc. Professor, Waldo Library, Western Michigan University; French and Italian Languages and Literatures Subject Editor, Resources for College Libraries) <kathleen.langan@wmich.edu> Column Editor: Anne Doherty (Resources for College Libraries Project Editor, CHOICE/ACRL) <adoherty@ala-choice.org> Column Editor’s Note: The “Collecting to the Core” column highlights monographic works that are essential to the academic library within a particular discipline, inspired by the Resources for College Libraries bibliography (online at http://www.rclweb.net). In each essay, subject specialists introduce and explain the classic titles and topics that continue to remain relevant to the undergraduate curriculum and library collection. Disciplinary trends may shift, but some classics never go out of style. — AD “La colonisation fait partie de l’histoire française. C’est un crime, c’est un crime contre l’humanité, c’est une vraie barbarie.” — Emmanuel Macron1 In 2017 the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, declared France’s role in colonialism a crime against humanity and a barbaric act.2 More recently, while on a state visit to the Ivory Coast in 2019, Macron again denounced colonialism as a “grave mistake” and emphasized the “hegemonic views and the trappings of colonialism.”3 Macron’s public acknowledgment of the political trappings also speaks to the social and cultural trappings of colonialism, as cultural and social identity continue to suffer from a pervasive colonial mindset. Macron’s declaration is relevant to the discipline of library and information science because it serves as a reminder that there is an ongoing need to address those cataloging and classification practices which have lingering remnants of a colonial framework. Some of the most prominent research in this area focuses on the inclusion and/or erasure of collective or individual identity directly due to colonialism and how bias, power, and privilege surface in cataloging and classification practices. Those identities include racial, social, political, cultural, and gendered constructs.4-9 Of particular interest to my work are colonial constructs related to Francophone literature (historically considered literature in French from countries outside France, but often used for any literature written in the French language) and its organization and Against the Grain / June 2020

classification. This essay explores philosophical approaches to classification and knowledge organization, reflects on how we assign value and meaning through categories, and presents an applied attempt to decolonize the cultural output of historically colonized regions. As the subject editor for RCL’s core list of titles in French language and literature, I annually review new titles for inclusion as well as review older works for continued relevancy. Another key element to this project is to maintain and develop a unique taxonomy to organize the content in a meaningful and relevant way for users. The RCL subject taxonomy is a knowledge system that has been established for the sole purpose of this project; a subject taxonomy may draw from the Library of Congress Classification Outline (LCCO) or another disciplinary classification system, but can retain greater flexibility to mirror the undergraduate curriculum and evolve as scholarly practices, and in this case, cultural and social norms shift. In the fall of 2017, I was simultaneously selecting new works to add and reviewing the subject taxonomy for French language and literature. Originally developed by the founding subject editor for French, Jeffry Larson, and informed by LCCO, the taxonomic hierarchy has remained fairly simple, organizing literature into primary and secondary works and also by genre, period, and author. A catch-all heading, “French Literature, outside France” served to organize all literary production written in the French language by authors outside of France, regardless of the political, historical, geographic, or cultural attachment. Reviewing the works, I encountered several literary theory texts that gave me pause, perhaps in part due to Macron’s acknowledgment of colonialism’s “trappings,” but also because of the scholarly work in library science around bias and knowledge systems, which argues that a Eurocentric hierarchy effectively marginalizes and devalues content while perpetuating the colonial mindset. The depth and breadth of these literary analyses question the concept of autonomy and ownership of cultural production. Two particular titles stood out: Bonnie Thomas’s

Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past and Allison Connolly’s Spaces of Creation: Transculturality and Feminine Expression in Francophone Literature.10-11 These two texts of literary criticism did not neatly fit into the existing taxonomy. They treat transnational, multi-faceted identities in literary works that span cultural and geopolitical borders. They also call to question how naming and labeling perpetuate colonial mindsets and create problematic classifications, like the catchall “Literature outside France” heading. While the original taxonomy was not inherently wrong or bad, ongoing review and revision allows for the flexibility to adapt to the current scholarly practices of the discipline. Any attempt to restructure or recalibrate the taxonomy (not to mention the canon) to account for the political displacement that shaped Francophone literature’s diversity, however, is a challenging endeavor with its own obstacles. The challenge, then, is to revise the taxonomy to accommodate for an evolving concept of Francophone. The scholarly literature on classification systems and cultural identity informs this effort. Discussing knowledge organization, Hannah Turner notes: …approaching knowledge organization in a culturally relevant way can help…build bridges between different knowledge communities and increase mutual understanding. A first step to achieve more culturally appropriate knowledge organization systems is to document the history of and to highlight the changes through time that occur in classification schemes.12 My first step in developing a more mindful taxonomy for literature written in French is to acknowledge the complex relationship between France proper — also called “the hexagon” which refers to France’s six borders and defines the colonial center — and the colonies, also referred to as les dom-toms (departments outre-mers and territoires outre-mers, translated as overseas states and territories). The continued on page 34

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Collecting to the Core from page 33 heading “Literature, outside France” reflects this colonial approach and treats those literary works as cultural domtoms, denying cultural autonomy and reinforcing a long-standing subjectivity of otherness: “Marginalization of a topic is the process of placing it outside of the cultural mainstream — making it ‘other.’ One way of marginalizing a topic is to focus on the qualities that make it other and fail to recognize the qualities that are similar to the mainstream.”13 The relationship is complicated. Citizens of les doms are French citizens, but citizens of les toms are not. Yet, literary cultural output continues to be created in French, which maintains its linguistic dominance. To categorize these works as French because of the language or refer to them as a relational product of France is flawed. Language is the only shared marker of commonality. Philip Pacey asserts, “The classification of literature by language, while apparently eminently sensible, can fragment national literatures and create groupings in which parts of the literatures of other nations are subordinated to that of the country of the ‘mother tongue.’ Classifying literature in this way reflects, and implicitly endorses, literary colonialism.”14 A few alternate terms have emerged: commonwealth literature which, “superficially… appeared to efface the ethnic and political divisions associated with colonialism”; Françafrique, a term used to indicate France’s “sphere of influence”; and Francophone.15-16 All are problematic in that they continue to perpetuate and privilege the colonial relationship. Reorganizing the taxonomy is to reconcile not only how we define “French Literature” and “French Literature, outside France” but also how we interact with

it, how we teach it, and how students find it. Knowledge organizations might be able to resolve this, which would mean reconciling with the labeling and naming of literary categories. The power to name affords authority to the taxonomy, which requires a methodical and meaningful approach to priority, structure, and the value conferred to content through labeling. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein proposes that “words name things” and that language is the vehicle by which one knows something. However, the meaning of labels is relational to and dependent on contexts. Without context, the label loses meaning. Assigning labels is ultimately an act of assigning meaning and essence.17 Literary warrant was a historical cataloging practice that limited labeling to extant works — “actual published literature rather than abstract philosophical ideas or concepts in the universe of knowledge.”18 Unfortunately, this practice can perpetuate the mainstream status quo and ignore the growth in complexity of relationships over time.19 As cultural theorist Homi Bhabha argues, “The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.”20 In reviewing how the taxonomy accommodated contemporary titles, I also examined how some of the classic Francophone literary works had been classified, including the poetry collection Nocturnes by Sengalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor (originally published in 1961), the novels Moi, Tituba sorcière by French Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé (1986) and Kamouraska by French Canadian author Anne Hebert (1970), as well as the more recent graphic novel Persepolis by Iranian-born French illustrator and author Marjane Satrapi

Booklover from page 32 explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” This choice by the Nobel Committee did not go with out protest and controversy as outlined in the above-mentioned Washington Post article. I will leave that part of this Austrian author’s bio for you to explore. Handke’s novel Short Letter, Long Farewell is an interesting postscript to my previous read, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. Both works of fiction deal with travel, an interesting subject matter 34 Against the Grain / June 2020

(2000).21-24 Each of these titles represents a part of the Francophone canon. They are connected by language but represent various genres and geographic regions that span the globe. The concepts of identity and otherness are treated in each of these works, yet from such distinctive perspectives that it is otherwise hard to reconcile that they are to be grouped together under one label. Additionally, approaches to literary criticism are increasingly interdisciplinary, transnational, and culturally-hybrid. Restructuring the RCL subject taxonomy to better accommodate the breadth and depth of Francophone literature was a way to recalibrate the connection between the curriculum and the collection. More specifically, it now has room to grow and better aligns with current pedagogical practices and how users interact with print and electronic collections. How the RCL subject taxonomies — and other knowledge organizations — will categorize cultural hybrids and historically marginalized content, ideas, and authors is a matter of ongoing consideration. For now, the taxonomy will continue to adapt in how it reflects the title selections, defines classification rules, and structures relationships. Cataloging and classification hierarchies can translate into teachable information organizations that reflect content in a meaningful, logical, and accessible way for users. Knowledge systems actively shape our perceptions of the world around us and can also help to disentangle the political and cultural “trappings” of colonialism. Francophone literature is more than a mere cultural response to the colonial power. This essay is a reminder that there is constant need to review and adapt knowledge organizations for the purpose of access, interaction, instruction, and research. endnotes on page 35

in light of the current pandemic that brings new social norms of social distancing, sheltering in place and a run on toilet paper. And just as this situation has produced wildly different points of view about how to handle all of this, these two authors also demonstrate wildly different points of view on travel given to the reader in two unique styles of writing. Handke’s German traveler arrives in Boston. Upon checking into the Wayland Manor Hotel he is handed a note by the desk clerk: “The letter was short: ‘I am in New York. Please don’t look for me. It would not be nice for you to find me.’” Thus begins his journey (or escape) across America. The travelogue/ continued on page 35

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Collecting to the Core from page 34 Endnotes 1. Roger, Patrick. “Colonisation: les propos inédits de Macron font polémique.” Le Monde, Feb. 16, 2017. https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2017/ article/2017/02/16/pour-macron-la-colonisation-fut-un-crime-contre-l-humanite_5080621_4854003.html. Accessed January 4, 2019. 2. Ibid. 3. Salaudeen, Aisha. “Marketplace Africa. France is set to end the use of the 75-year-old controversial CFA franc in West Africa.” CNN, December 23, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/23/africa/france-stops-use-of-cfa/index.html. Accessed January 4, 2019. 4. Billey, Amber and Emily Drabinski. “Questioning Authority: Changing Library Cataloging Standards to Be More Inclusive to a Gender Identity Spectrum.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 1 (2019): 117-123. DOI:10.1215/23289252-7253538 5. Biswas, Paromita. “Rooted in the Past: Use of ‘East Indians’ in Library of Congress Subject Headings.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2018): 1-18. DO I:10.1080/01639374.2017.1386253. 6. Mai, Jens-Erik. “Marginalization and Exclusion: Unraveling Systemic Bias in Classification.” Knowledge Organization 43, no. 5 (2016): 324-330. DOI:10.5771/0943-7444-2016-5-324 7. Noble, Safiyah Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 8. Watson, Brian M. “Review of Ethical Questions in Name Authority Control.” Edited by Jane Sandberg. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 57, no. 7-8 (2019): 547-49. DOI:10.1080/01639374.2019.1673524. 9. Algier, Aimee. “The Dynamic Caribbean: A Challenge for the Library of Congress.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2001): 29-38. DOI: 10.1300/J104v32n01_03 10. Thomas, Bonnie. Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017.* 11. Connolly, Allison. Spaces of Creation: Transculturality and Feminine Expression in Francophone Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.* 12. Turner, Hannah. “Decolonizing Ethnographic Documentation: A Critical History of the Early Museum Catalogs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5-6 (2015): 658-676. DOI: 10.1080/01639374.2015.1010112 13. Olson, Hope A. “Difference, Culture and Change: The Untapped Potential of LCSH.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 29, no.1-2 (2000): 53-71. DOI: 10.1300/J104v29n01_04 14. Pacey, Philip. “The Classification of Literature in the Dewey Decimal Classification.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1989): 101-107. DOI: 10.1300/J104v09n04_08 15. Hargreaves, Alec G. “Ethnic Categorizations in Literature.” Revue Européenne Des Migrations Internationales 21, no. 2 (2005): 19-33. DOI: 10.4000/remi.2485 16. “Françafrique.” In The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Diplomacy. Edited by Geoff Berridge and Lorna Lloyd. 3rd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 17. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by Peter Hacker. 4th ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2010.* 18. Chan, Lois Mai, Phyllis A. Richmond, and Elaine Svenonius. Preface to Theory of Subject Analysis: a Sourcebook. (Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1985), quoted in Mario Barité, “Literary Warrant.” Knowledge Organization 45, no. 6 (2018): 517536. DOI:10.5771/0943-7444-2018-6-517. 19. Olson, “Difference, Culture, and Change,” 63. 20. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.* 21. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Œuvre Poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990.* 22. Condé, Maryse. Moi, Tituba sorcière... noire de Salem. Paris: Editions du Mercure de France, 1986.* 23. Hébert, Anne. Kamouraska. Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1970.* 24. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York: Pantheon, 2003.* *Editor’s note: An asterisk (*) denotes a title selected for Resources for College Libraries.

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Booklover from page 34 journal style holds intimate descriptions, awareness, and details of our beautiful country as seen through the eyes of someone, albeit foreign, who cherishes it and seems to know it. Truth be told, the traveler is escaping a marriage — the “me” in the note is his wife. This fact plays into the adventure. In addition, he seeks out a previous companion, Claire, and piggy backs on her and her daughter’s travels. One stop along the way has them spending time with some artists where this observation is made: “When the child saw a representation of nature, one of the painter’s pictures, for example, she never thought of asking whether there really was such a scene, and if so where, because the copy had replaced the original forever. I remembered that, unlike her, I myself as a child had always wanted to know where the object represented actually was. In our house, for instance, there was an oil painting of a glacier landscape with a mountain hut at the lower edge. I had always been convinced that this landscape and this hut existed in nature; I even thought I knew where the painter must have stood, and when someone told me the picture was pure imagination I couldn’t believe it. For a long time I could hardly breathe when it came to me that the picture was alone and that I could find nothing to go with it. It was very much the same when I learned to read: I couldn’t see how it was possible to describe something that didn’t exist. The village described in my primer was a real village, not my own of course, but another not far away. I even knew which village. And because the first books I read on my own were told in the first person, I was horrified when for the first time I opened a book in which there was no “I” narrator. These forms of perception had so powerful an influence on my other experience that now in retrospect it seemed to me that the shock of discovering they were not valid had been a turning point of my life. I felt almost jealous of this child, who from the first looked on symbols and representations as having an existence of their own.” These observations, insights, and musings punctuate the travelogue. I leave you with my favorite phrase: “All at once I understood how illusions and mistaken identities give rise to metaphors.”

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Op Ed — Opinions and Editorials

Random Ramblings — Problems with Searching Amazon: You Can’t Always Find What You Want Column Editor: Bob Holley (Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University, 13303 Borgman Avenue, Huntington Woods, MI 48070-1005; Phone: 248-547-0306) <aa3805@wayne.edu>

’ve been selling books on Amazon for eleven years and was sometimes confused by not finding items through a well formulated search but then serendipitously discovering them in some unexpected way. Only in February 2020 did I decide to investigate this issue more systematically. From a posting to an Amazon Forum, I learned that I wasn’t the only one who has encountered this problem. Earlier, at the 2020 ALA Midwinter, I talked to one acquisitions librarian who told me that this issue was common knowledge. I was unable, however, to find any confirmation in Library & Information Source or through Google searching though the lack of results may have been my failure to identify the correct search terms. Not finding items that exist in the Amazon database due to searching “glitches” affects both librarians and booksellers everywhere. As buyers, librarians are looking to purchase needed items. As sellers, both librarians and booksellers wish to find Amazon records to list their items. Creating a new record is much more difficult than appending the seller’s copy to an existing record and further diminishes the usefulness of the database by adding a duplicate record.

Defining the Problem

The problem is not the result of a searching mistake. The searching sequence was as follows: 1. I searched for the item using multiple search terms. 2. I didn’t find the item and put it aside. 3. I found the item later by trying another search strategy or through serendipity. 4. The record that I found included search terms that I used in step 1 so that I should have discovered it then. 5. Retrying the searching strategy in step 1 sometimes still does not retrieve the item so that changes in the database do not completely explain my success in step 3. In other words, the problem is not a searching mistake on my part or problems with the record from misspelling or other errors in the database. To reiterate, I used terms in step 1 that should have worked because they matched data in the record that I ultimately found.

Different Ways to Search in Amazon.com and Searching Conventions

The most accessible way to search for an item is the search area in the Amazon retail screen. It is possible to search in “All Departments” or in specific areas such as “Books,” “CD & Vinyl,” “Movies and TV,” and many

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other options. Amazon presents results first in the indicated department followed by matches in other departments and then by various combinations of the words used in multi-word searches. An “Advanced Search” tool is available for books that is similar to those in many library databases. This option offers eleven searchable fields of which the most important are Keywords, Author, Title, ISBN, Publisher, and Publication Date. A third search is available only to sellers. In “Amazon Central Seller,” the “Catalog” and “Inventory” options lead to a drop-down menu that includes the choice to search for existing records to which the sellers can add their copies. If the seller doesn’t find a match, another link leads to the form to “Create a new listing.” Amazon provides the following document on “Using search terms effectively” at https://sellercentral. amazon.com/gp/help/help.html?itemID=G23501&language=en_US. Most of the rules would be familiar to librarians. One disconcerting rule, however, is You don’t need punctuation, such as: “;”, “:”, “-”.”. even though using quotations marks is the normal convention to search for exact multiword expressions. In practice, Amazon does apply this convention to searches. I routinely use quotation marks for precise searching. For example, “music for children folk songs” retrieves six items while music for children folk songs returns “over 1,000 results.” In a similar fashion, applying the rule “Use singular or plural, no need for both” is a bad idea since following this rule returns different and less accurate results. I fault Amazon for providing this incorrect information. Finally, Amazon provides a list of “Related articles” on the left of the search helps page, but they have little relevance for this column.

Using Creative Search Strategies I have discovered two other creative strategies for finding items where the multiple search strategies in the section above retrieved no records. The first is using AddAll — Used and Out of Print Search at http://used. addall.com/. As of February 8, 2020, this meta-search engine queries twenty-two used book sites for matches, including Amazon.com and its foreign affiliates. At one point, the site claimed access to 40 million records, but this figure no longer appears on the main searching page. I use this site frequently to determine my next steps when I don’t find an Amazon.com record. I have been surprised at times to find a listing for a book on Amazon.com that my prior searching didn’t find. I would then click through to this record to add my listing to the Amazon database. For the searcher not interested in comparative prices, AddAll can be set to continued on page 38

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Op Ed — Random Ramblings from page 36 search only Amazon for greater efficiency. One disadvantage is that AddAll won’t provide any results if an item in the Amazon database is unavailable for sale. The second strategy is to search Google with the terms “Amazon” and my chosen search terms for the item. This is my least favored preference because evaluating the results takes more time since Google also provides close matches and results from the affiliated foreign Amazon sites and non-Amazon.com sources. On the other hand, I used this strategy successfully just today to find an item that the Amazon search strategies didn’t retrieve. Since Google’s specialization is searching, the company may take more care to provide accurate results than Amazon itself. My query on the Amazon forums, to be discussed in more detail below, about issues with searching identified a third strategy that proved less successful. One seller suggested looking for American sellers on Amazon’s international sites and then using their entries to see if the item is available in the main American site. To implement this strategy, AddAll can be set only to search any or all the Amazon offerings in their Canadian, French, German, or the UK subsidiaries. Amazon also has sites in China and Japan for those interested in buying or selling such materials.

My Experiments I immediately tried out the new searching options on a stack of books where my simple searching from the Amazon retail screen didn’t retrieve any records in the Amazon database. Since I did this before considering writing this column, I didn’t keep formal statistics, but I estimate that I found useable Amazon entries for over half of them. I later did the same with a second group of books and kept statistics that I’ll provide below. To give some context, I sell books on Amazon as a hobby and get most of them cheaply as remainders from rummage and church sales. At these prices, I scoop everything up and come home with some strange items including older materials, gray literature, foreign language books, pamphlets, and publicity/propaganda items from various organizations. Sometimes these strange items are somewhat valuable and can be listed for $50 or more. Some even sell at these prices. For the second test, I had a sample size of 23 books, certainly more indicative than statistically valid. After having failed to find a record from using multiple strategies in the Amazon options, I searched first in AddAll set to search only Amazon.com and then Google with “Amazon” and search terms from the book. For both searches, I tried multiple search strategies before giving up. If I found the item on AddAll, I didn’t repeat with Google so that Google might have had a higher count if I had done both searches. Overall, I was able to find a useable Amazon record for seven items (30.4%) on AddAll and six (26%) on Google for a combined success rate of thirteen (56.5%). The failure rate was 43.5%. I was thus able to add a significant number of books to my inventory that I would otherwise have put aside for original input. Remember too that buyers, including libraries, would not have found these items with an Amazon retail or advanced book search. I learned a few other things. If the book had a distinctive cover, a Google image search was an effective way of visually finding items or double-checking negative results. I found sev 38 Against the Grain / June 2020

eral books on non-US Amazon sites, but they were not available on the US version. I couldn’t find a decent record for the book that was available as a bilingual edition when my copy was an English translation and for those cases where the ISBN led to the hard cover version when I wished to sell the paperback with the same ISBN.

Speculation on the Reasons for Amazon Search Failures From having read hundreds if not thousands of answers to questions on the Amazon forums, I didn’t expect Amazon to give any explanation for these search glitches. Amazon is amazingly close lipped about how its system works or, more importantly, doesn’t work. Since Amazon monitors these forums, I assume that an Amazon employee read my question, plus I specifically asked for a staff member to provide an explanation. No one did. What follows is my analysis of the various reasons proposed by responses on the Amazon forum. I then give my personal favored explanation. (My question and the answers can be found here: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/can-anyone-explain-searching-on-amazon-to-me/563168.) I have two initial comments. First, I would expect that Amazon wants to make it easy for buyers to find items available for purchase and for third party vendors to list them for sale. Some of the answers below, however, contradict this assumption. Second, the search problems could be temporary glitches from a momentary hardware or software failure; but I have some scant evidence that this isn’t the case. After finding items through non-traditional searches, I put some aside to scan the book covers to add to my individual listing. When completing this task a few weeks later, I had the same difficulties in finding these items to list them for sale. My sample, however, was quite small. 1. Amazon doesn’t include items when they are “currently unavailable” for sale. This reason makes partial sense because related search results provided by Amazon normally include similar buying options. The buyers could, however, put unavailable items on their wish lists. On the other hand, Amazon should want sellers to find “currently unavailable” items if they will then make the item available. A related question, too complex to describe here, is the case where sellers cannot find items that they themselves have listed because they show up as “currently unavailable.” One comment indicates that Amazon knows about this problem and is trying to correct it. 2. The record is suppressed due to problems with the data. While the search term is found in the record, other problems with the record lead to its being suppressed. This reason also makes partial sense if the problem affects only some search strategies but not others including those from outside sources like Google search and AddAll. This reason doesn’t appear valid if the record is good enough to support a buyer purchase. For potential sellers, Amazon might want to avoid dealing with additional copies listed for sale that could complicate data correction. 3. Search results are modified according to the searchers’ prior searching. Amazon tracks browsing history as can be seen by the section “Inspired by your browsing history” for users that have logged into their Amazon accounts. Amazon may also track searches of those not logged in by using cookies. I don’t, however, see any reason why Amazon wouldn’t want anyone not to find items that they wish to purchase. The same comment suggests that Amazon may use a seller’s searching history to punish sellers that it has caught violating its rules. continued on page 39

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to ship to the customer. While, in my experience, Amazon focuses on customer satisfaction and often treats its third-party sellers poorly, I’m loathe to suggest maliciousness on its part.

Op Ed — Random Ramblings from page 38 4. Amazon wants to lengthen the search process so that buyers will be tempted to purchase additional items. To quote one response, “distraction means bigger shopping carts and a larger volume of sales.” I would, however, question a strategy that diverts buyers from an item that interests them in the hopes that they will buy something else. One experiment for another day might be to test search results from the retail selling searching options with those designed for sellers because Amazon has no reason to discourage sellers from listing additional items for sale. 5. Amazon doesn’t care about the accuracy of its searches but only cares about increasing sales. Another comment states that “what Amazon calls a search function is not a search function under any generally recognized use of the term. It is almost entire(ly) a sale engine designed to direct you to whatever they want to sell you with at least as high, or higher, profit margin for Amazon.” While Amazon has shown itself to be ruthlessly focused on increasing sales, I have trouble totally agreeing with this statement. Creating distrust of its searching function will have a negative effect upon both buyers and sellers and perhaps push them to look elsewhere where the search function provides greater accuracy. But I could be wrong since Amazon has a treasure trove of data to examine and can take advantage of the best artificial intelligence available to maximize sales and proft.

My Hypothesis to Explain Amazon Search Failures

Conclusion: What Does This All Mean? For most buyers and sellers, these search problems will not be very important. Current popular books of all types will be easy to find, and Amazon will fix problems quickly where significant revenue is at stake. It does matter for third party sellers like me and for libraries that are looking to sell their materials on Amazon. Our goal is to list as many items as possible by using existing records since record creation takes significantly more time. The multi-step search process described earlier in this column may help both groups find “hidden” records as it did for me with my limited sample. Sometimes these items may be listed at a good price because of their scarcity, but their odds of selling are also not high. As for the effect upon buyers, libraries may wish to purchase specialized items, especially those not available through interlibrary loan. In this case, I would recommend, however, using AddAll since the library is not limited to purchasing such items on Amazon. The philosophical lesson for me was learning not to trust large databases. I spent ten years believing that simple Amazon searches were accurate when they weren’t. We should all be aware of and humbled by the potential failures of our access tools and employ multiple search strategies rather than giving up too quickly.

My hypothesis is that the Amazon database is so large that mistakes are inevitable, that Amazon focuses on fixing problems affecting the largest number of products first, and that some of the reasons for searching glitches given above would not be worth Amazon’s time to correct. According to Scrapehero, “Amazon.com has a total of 119,928,851 products as of Dear Ms. April Hathcock, April 2019” and “the largest category in I am deeply sorry and regret not citing your quote (April M. Hathcock, Amazon is Books (44.2M)” (https://www. “Learning Agency, Not Analytics,” At the Intersection, Jan. 24, 2018), in scrapehero.com/number-of-products-onthe Against the Grain (ATG) article I wrote for the April 1, 2020 issue. It amazon-april-2019/). Given that the number was wrong and an insensitive mistake not to include your citation. I am of individual items for sale for each entry asking the editors of ATG to include the following corrections to the article: can range from zero into the hundreds, the Amazon database is huge and must deal with ATG editors, please include (Hathcock, 2018) as an in-text citation to an enormous number of simultaneous transparagraph 13: actions in real time. Errors and temporary Inflammatory rhetoric ends Kyle Jones’ (2019) piece, Just Because outages are unavoidable. You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should: Practitioner Perceptions of Learning Two pieces of evidence lend support for Analytics Ethics where he quotes Hathcock (2018, para.4): my hypothesis. First, Amazon itself often In stark terms, April Hathcock argues that learning analytics ‘is a colotells its users that it is experiencing technical nialist, slave-owning, corporatizing, capitalist practice that enacts violence, difficulties and suggests trying again later. If yes violence, against the sanctity of a learner’s privacy, body and mind.’ (18) such stoppages occur while third party sellers Please add this reference to the article: are entering book records, errors in the record Hathcock, A. (2018, January 24). Learning agency, not analytics. At may hinder later retrieval. Similar glitches The Intersection. https://aprilhathcock.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/learnin processing search queries can negatively ing-agency-not-analytics/ affect retrieval. Second, the Amazon forums, which I read each day, include examples Sincerely, Kirsten Kinsley from sellers of multiple things that have gone wrong. I have encountered such problems, Please Note: The article has been corrected at: https://against-thesome of which have been difficult to detect grain.com/2020/04/v321-one-academic-librarys-approach-to-the-learnbut with serious consequences for my busiing-analytics-backlash/. — Yr. Ed. ness, such as not being able to find the book

Correction Notice / Letter

Against the Grain / June 2020

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ATG Interviews Barbara Casalini President, Casalini Libri by Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> ATG: Barbara, some of our readers may not be familiar with Casalini Libri. Can you tell us a little bit about the company? What are the main services Casalini Libri provides to libraries and publishers? What do you see as the company key mission? BC: The company was an idea of my father’s. While visiting the U.S. on business in the late 1950s, he became conscious that there was little (and unreliable or untimely) information available on Italian publications, and no real supply structure for the diffusion of Italian titles abroad. He established Casalini Libri as an information and supply service for titles that were not easily found, initially working with the Library of Congress and progressively with more and more libraries and institutions. We have always tried to respond to the needs of our customers and now offer many services aimed at assisting libraries and publishers, from approval selections to subscription management and the Torrossa digital library. Although our customer base and services have widened considerably over the past 60 years, I would say that the importance of providing prompt and high quality bibliographic information to libraries and of supporting the diffusion of Italian culture and learning worldwide have remained at the core of all of our activities. Of course, it is not just Italian culture that we wish to promote, but original language research from across Europe. This is reflected first in our investment in creating the same infrastructure for the provision of Spanish, Portuguese and French titles over the last fifteen years and — just last month — in our participation in the acquisition of the two Dutch companies, Erasmus and Houtschild. In creating synergy with these companies with whom we share a single vision, we aim to offer the very best services to the Library world, not simply by strengthening our coverage and providing a more efficient use of technological resources, but by striving to maintain the excellent customer service for which we are known. ATG: The world of libraries and scholarly publishing has changed dra 40 Against the Grain / June 2020

matically since your father founded Casalini Libri in 1958. How has the company kept pace with the rapidly changing market? What would you say are the key factors that have enabled Casalini Libri to thrive? BC: I would say that the key has been our constant collaboration with both publishers and libraries and the confidence we have received from both sectors, not only in the trust libraries have placed in us to source and select quality material for them, but also publishers in our ability to provide a technological support and widen the reach of their publications. As I said, it has always been very important for us to listen to the emerging needs of our customers and respond with services that offer solutions to those needs. ATG: One of the cornerstones of your services to libraries and publishers appears to be the ilibri Casalini Bibliographical Database. Can you tell us about that? What is so unique about the database? BC: We are indeed very proud of the ilibri database as it is the main showcase for our dedication to providing quality bibliographic information. We carefully select the new publications that fit the interests and quality required by academic and research libraries in order to create detailed bibliographic descriptions for our customers. All of the bibliographic data that we produce is included in our online

database, making it a very specialised resource for librarians. It’s also worth mentioning that in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, it is still very often not easy to acquire information about publications or rely completely on national bibliographies. The ilibri database works to fill those gaps in information. What’s more, the database is integrated with our other systems, meaning that librarians can follow a single, linear and straightforward workflow, from viewing our new title suggestions to creating and editing their selections, sending orders and checking on their status, to finding a complete archive of all of the invoices connected with their orders. ATG: Another key component of your offerings is the Torrossa digital library. Can you describe what it provides libraries? Does it work with the ilibri® Casalini Bibliographical Database to offer integrated services? BC: Torrossa was born in its first incarnation in 2000 as a project to explore the potential of digital publishing. As the initial digital library of Italian scholarly titles grew steadily and was joined by a second digital collection of academic titles from Spain, we decided to unite the two resources in a single website, which takes its name from our historic headquarters in Fiesole. Twenty years on and we’re preparing to publish an enhanced version of the site, which by now includes digital content from over 280 highly respected HSS publishers from Italy, Spain and a variety of other countries. The main benefits of Torrossa for libraries include the possibility to reach such a wide offering of digital publications from a single access point and manage all the content under a single licence. As with print, we try to give libraries the freedom and tools to decide how to put their collections together. So in addition to the recommended collections of titles selected by our bibliographers, we also offer the possibility to pick and choose collections or single titles, provide tools and services such as PDA and Approval selections, and have integrated all of our continued on page 41

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Interview — Barbara Casalini from page 40 digital content with the ilibri database in order to ensure that print and digital go hand in hand. ATG: According to your website, Casalini Libri is particularly interested in linked data and the possibilities it holds for the field of librarianship. Can you tell us about that? What benefits does linked data offer libraries? BC: Linked data helps discovery. Much of the vast quantity of data and resources contained and described in library catalogues has previously often remained hidden. Linked data now gives us the opportunity to create links among collections and provide library patrons with the key to unlock and navigate a wealth of data that otherwise would have remained unknown and undiscovered. By applying the linked data paradigm, libraries, archives, museums and information professionals have a more comprehensive suite of tools at their disposal, based on structured data and fully compliant with the semantic web. Keeping pace with web technologies in this way means that searching and navigating data becomes much more dynamic and similar to the functioning of the web than to a traditional library catalogue. Our work on the linked data approach — with the Share Virtual Discovery Environment — is another example of the emphasis we put on the central role of libraries in shaping our activities. Share-VDE is a library-driven initiative which brings together the bibliographic catalogues and authority files of a community of libraries in a shared discovery environment based on linked data. ATG: As part of this interest in linked data, you have been actively involved in the library community’s discussions on BIBFRAME (Bibliographic Framework Initiative). Can you give us an update on BIBFRAME’s progress? BC: BIBFRAME is an evolving model of entities and it is important for us to contribute to its development given the experience that we are developing in the field through our collaboration with the community of libraries participating in Share-VDE, and also in anticipation of a future in which bibliographic resources may be catalogued directly in linked data. For example, while the Share-VDE entity model is based on the three original BIBFRAME Work-Instance-Item levels, in order to maintain and optimise Against the Grain / June 2020

interoperability with the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM), we have introduced a fourth level of abstraction — higher than the BIBFRAME Work — which later proved to be in line with the latest developments from the Library of Congress, who have recently released the BIBFRAME Hub, a more abstract level entity than the BIBFRAME Work. All this tells us yet again how productive discussion and exchange of experiences are within the community, and how it is impossible to separate them from experimentation and the practical application of theoretical models. ATG: Casalini Libri is known for its interest in research and development. In fact, we notice there is a section on your website called the Casalini Lab. Can you tell about the latest projects Casalini Lab is focusing on in addition to BIBFRAME? BC: Casalini Lab covers a wide array of projects, from our collaboration in projects such as BIBFRAME and ShareVDE, which take librarianship and bibliographical data into a new, exciting future, to discussions on other aspects close to our hearts. This May, we planned to host in Fiesole the CRL working forum “New Shape of Sharing: Networks, Expertise, Information,” dedicated to the theme of supporting research in the humanities and maintaining non-English collections. Although it has been necessary to postpone the meeting, we are confident that it will take place once conditions allow. Our dedication to the sector and to its continuing ability to thrive also shows through in both our support for the Master’s course in BookTelling run by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, which allows us to contribute to the training of future publishing professionals, and in our long-running collaboration in the Fiesole Collection Development Retreat Series. Emerging from our interest in the ever increasing potential of digital resources is the Torrossa Open initiative, a platform designed specifically to contribute to the dissemination of research content from Southern Europe in Open Access, while since last year we have been investing heavily in enhancing and updating all of our websites, from the Torrossa digital library and bookstores, to our dedicated content management site for publishers contributing to these resources. We have also updated our main company website and are now working on an improved search and ordering interface for our ilibri database and order management functions.

Returning to our role as a bibliographic agency, we continue to strive for excellence. Not only have we become an ISNI registration agency, we are also embarking on a special project and new services that take into account the importance of the attribution of URI and accurate authority records. ATG: In 1999, Casalini Libri, along with the Charleston Company and Against the Grain, was one of the founding sponsors of the Fiesole Retreat Series. Can you tell us a little bit about the Fiesole Retreat? Where did the idea for Fiesole come from? As you look back over the years why do you think Fiesole has been important to discussions about the future of libraries, publishing, and collections? BC: The idea for the Retreat was initially conceived by Katina Strauch and Mario, as a way of bringing the Charleston Conference model of an informal gathering and its culture of exchange of views and discussion among industry leaders to Europe. The world at the time was much less connected than it is today over great distances and the Fiesole Retreat created a bridge between the North American and European communities of librarians, publishers, vendors and experts. Now, after more than 20 years and thanks to the tireless work of Becky Lenzini and Katina, the Fiesole Retreat is running stronger than ever, testifying the foresight of both Katina and Mario. Each year’s programme is a collaborative effort to create and balance a discussion that represents the views of all sectors of the industry on the most pressing questions and challenges of the moment. Understandably, a huge focus has always been given to digital content and with the COVID crisis we are seeing many publishers reviewing their approach to this whole area. The proceedings for all meetings are available on the Fiesole Retreat website (http:// www.casalini.it/retreat/) and they make fascinating reading as they address issues that continue to be relevant in our fast evolving world. Although the current situation has made it necessary for us to postpone this year’s meeting in Greece, we are very grateful to our hosts, the National Library of Greece, who has agreed to welcome us to its beautiful new facility inside the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens next April. continued on page 44

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ATG Interviews John T. Nardini, PhD Postdoctoral Scholar, SAMSI & N.C. State University https://johnnardini.wordpress.ncsu.edu/ • <jtnardin@ncsu.edu>

by Bob Nardini (Vice President, Library Services, ProQuest Books) <bob.nardini@proquest.com> Author’s Note: John Nardini was one of the many thousands of university professors across the world forced by COVID-19 to move their teaching so quickly from an actual classroom to an online classroom. John and I talked recently about what this experience was like for him and for his students. — BN

Teaching Math: From Homework to Home Work ATG: John, please tell our readers a little about yourself. JN: Hello! I am currently a postdoctoral scholar in Biomathematics at North Carolina State (NC State) University in Raleigh, NC. I also have a joint appointment in precision medicine at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute in Durham, NC. ATG: Tell us about the course you’re teaching and about your students. JN: I am currently teaching MA 225: Foundations of Advanced Mathematics. My students are transitioning from very computation-heavy calculus courses into the more analytical aspects of advanced mathematics. The focus of the course is to introduce students to methods commonly used to prove mathematical claims, proper presentation of these proofs, and the logical structure underlying these different proof methods. My current class is pretty small. I have 18 students, most of whom are either first or second-year students. Most are mathematics majors, although some are also double majoring in an engineering discipline or majoring in statistics with a minor in mathematics. ATG: How far into the course was the class before it went online? How much notice did you have to prepare for online teaching, and how did you prepare? JN: The semester is 15 weeks long, and we found out that we’d be transitioning to an online format 9 weeks in. We were told about this transition during our spring break, and NC State cancelled classes the following week to give faculty time to prepare. That week was very help 42 Against the Grain / June 2020

ful for me, as I was able to read articles on useful technology for online classrooms, practice using this new technology, and determine how to best structure my future lectures, homework, and exams. The most valuable resource for me during this preparatory week was Twitter. I follow all sorts of academics on my Twitter page, and my feed was full of suggestions for how to be accommodating of students’ needs during this trying time. For example, many professors were advocating to just give all students A’s at the end of semester because of the extreme difficulties some may be facing. While I didn’t adopt this strategy, I was sure to be clear with my students that all course assignments were now secondary to their health, happiness, and well-being. I am continuously telling students now that they can consider all assignments due on the last day of finals. ATG: What platform or software are you using for the class? JN: We are currently using the Zoom software to meet for synchronous lectures and office hours. Because my students are now scattered throughout the country and may have difficulty maintaining their previous schedules, I record each lecture (a built-in Zoom function). I also use the Moodle platform for online course management. On my class’s Moodle page, I now post all previous assignments with solutions, in-class assignments, class re-

cordings, lecture notes, and the textbook pdf. With so many possible challenges for all of my students during this transition, my goal is just to make class material as accessible for students as possible. ATG: You mentioned a textbook. Can you tell us about the textbook you use? JN: Professor Jo-Ann Cohen from NC State has written her own lecture notes for this class and made them openly available to students and faculty teaching this course. I am happy to use this resource because my students are not required to spend any money on a course textbook. I’ve enjoyed these course notes because they encourage students to think critically about course definitions and their implications. For example, we begin with proofs on even and odd numbers early on in the course. Instead of simply stating that “a whole number cannot be both even and odd,” Dr. Cohen’s book asks students to explore what might happen if a whole number were both odd and even (answer: this number would end up contradicting the definition of being either odd or even!). ATG: How common is it for your colleagues to assign textbooks not produced by a traditional publisher? JN: It isn’t common. Dr. Cohen’s book is one of the first of its kind that I knew about. The majority of math classes are taught from textbooks published commercially. But I am very encouraged by Dr. Cohen’s book and hope to see more open access books like this one offered for students. ATG: Do you assign any library resources in the class? JN: I have not. But students often ask me how they can get extra practice on problems before exams or how to access more material explaining class topics differently. In these cases, I always direct students to other textbooks available for checkout at the university library (during the switch to online courses, I now direct students to websites, eBooks, or YouTube videos). ATG: In teaching math, is that a typical approach to library resources? continued on page 44

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Interview — John T. Nardini from page 42 JN: It’s typical for most math classes. We tend to keep things simple and often stick to only the course textbook and/or lecture notes. But I would like to add a bit about how important the library can be in serving students and faculty for online teaching. NC State benefits tremendously from a great library system that offers workshops for professional development and technology lending for all faculty and students. Technology lending includes laptops, tablets, and headphones, all of which can typically be checked out for several hours or a week. For the pandemic, however, the library system has been checking out this technology indefinitely, which was crucial in allowing many students to access their courses. I even checked out a pair of headphones that I use for classes and meetings because the headphone’s microphone is better than my laptop’s. I also have not had access to physical textbooks at the library during the pandemic, but eBooks have made it possible for me to read some textbooks during this time. ATG: What has your overall experience been, then, in teaching this course online, versus teaching in person, regarding preparation, actual class time, office hours, exams, anything else you’d care to mention? JN: Preparation has been very different for me after this switch to online courses. When teaching in person, I am often engaging with students by answering questions, soliciting feedback, or interpreting their body language. This helps me to identify challenging areas for

Interview — Barbara Casalini from page 41 ATG: Barbara, when you are not directing such an active and innovative company, how do you like to spend your down time? Are there particular leisure activities that help you refresh and get ready to take on the next challenge? BC: I do invest a lot of time and energy in my local community in Fiesole and make the most of the wonderful cultural events that are organised both in Fiesole and in Florence with my husband, a pro 44 Against the Grain / June 2020

students so that I know which topics I can gloss over and which topics need more indepth explanation. This is all much more difficult online! Reading the room has been near impossible for me online. Furthermore, recording my lectures so that students can go back and re-watch them afterwards means that a lecture must be self-contained, present all necessary material, and be easily digestible. When preparing for online lessons, I now begin by identifying the key topics and then try to break it down into brief and easy to understand blocks. I ended up splitting most online 50-minute lectures into four 10-minute intervals. During each interval, I would introduce a topic, explain its basic principles, provide an example, and then review the highlights and solicit questions. It was far less fluent and engaging than in-person lectures, but my students seemed to appreciate being able to go back and re-watch lectures. I switched all of my exams to be takehome and gave students all day to complete them. I told students they were open course notes (textbook, lectures, etc.), but told them they were on the honor code to not look up the solutions online. It’s not a perfect strategy, but I’m not sure if there’s a better option. ATG: How about your students, what can you tell us about their experience with this online class? And your colleagues, do you have anything to share about their experience? JN: It’s been very difficult for my students. Everyone has experienced unique challenges, including limited internet access, having to coordinate studying and childcare, or trouble adjusting to a new learning format. I understand that

fessional musician. In these last few weeks when we have been unable to attend theatre and concerts, I have been relaxing with a good book and music at home. I am also lucky enough to have my family and three lively and adorable grandchildren nearby, and I thoroughly enjoy cooking and baking for them in the family home. ATG: Thank you so much for taking time to talk to us. We’ve learned a lot!

academics may not take priority for my students during this pandemic, so I am sure to let students know that all deadlines and policies are flexible. I have many more requests for assignment extensions than ever, and they are all granted without question. I am also a bit more lenient than usual when grading because it didn’t feel fair to hold every student to our normal high standards during this time. In talking with my colleagues, I’ve learned that everyone has their own unique approach to online lecturing. I’ve detailed how I structured my courses already, but everyone has been doing theirs differently. I have colleagues who are having students watch pre-made lectures and then holding weekly Q&A sessions, others have students watch videos before lecture and then assign problems in class (this allows for more 1-1 feedback that you typically get in person). I am interested to see if such a variety of methods within the department will persist for the next few semesters or if departments will eventually converge to standard methods for online instruction. ATG: In the future, what do you think the role of online teaching will be, for you, for your department, and for North Carolina State? JN: I have no idea what the future holds! But I would guess that virtual learning may quickly become central to the day-to-day workings of a university. Until a vaccine is developed, there is a good chance we’ll be alternating between in-person and online lectures. And some people may begin to favor the online format over in-person meetings. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years.

Rumors from page 25 BTW have y’all noticed the Rumors Blog? Caroline Goldsmith, Leah Hinds’ sister, posts the content for that and other ATG articles. Rossana Morriello has kept us apprised with what is happening in Italy and I noticed that Rossana participated in a recent IET/Inspec webinar on COVID-19 and the future of the academic library. https://www.researchinformation. info/news/webcast-covid-19-and-future-academic-library continued on page 49

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ATG Interviews Steven J. Bell — Part 2 Associate University Librarian for Research and Instruction Services, Temple University Charles Library by Donald T. Hawkins (Freelance Conference Blogger and Editor) <dthawkins@verizon.net>

hen you open up the morning paper and the lead story on the front page is about the opening of a new university library,1 you know something big is happening. By coincidence, that very same day, I went to Temple University, home of the new Charles Library, to interview Steven Bell. In this issue you will find part two of my interview with Steven. Part one can be found in ATG v.32#2 April 2020. The full interview is also available online at https:// against-the-grain.com/2020/04/v32-2atg-interviews-steven-j-bell/. — DTH DTH: Many public libraries are reinventing themselves and becoming community centers. They have makerspaces, outreach programs, meeting rooms, etc. for the community. Is the same thing happening in the academic world? SJB: I believe so. I think that many academic libraries see that they have a community mission as well. We are not putting up walls and gates to keep the community out. Rather, we are doing those kinds of things for the people who are affiliated with our university. You must keep in mind that although the College of Engineering might have a makerspace and the College of Communications might have a great video production studio, you cannot use those unless you are a student in those schools. So it is up to the library to be the place on campus that provides those kinds of facilities for the entire community much like a public library might provide those kinds of space for everyone in the community. Not everyone has access to a private makerspace, so we see that as being very important to our mission,

Against the Grain / June 2020

and we have all of those things. We have extensive community programming, such as lecture series or musical series that are open to everybody that wants to come. We also have our Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio, a digital scholarship center for faculty and students from across the university who want to learn how to use digital scholarship techniques, and we have expertise in how to do that. We have a virtual reality and visualization studio in the library for any student who wants to learn how to use those technologies and tools. So if you are a student in the Tyler School of Art that wants to learn how to use virtual reality for your art, you can do that at the TU library. Plus, we have a makerspace that has 20 3D printers in it. We already have humanities faculty coming in and showing their students how to use makerspace technology to create 3D replicas of ancient artifacts. DTH: Some of the public libraries are getting into areas that an academic library would not. I am thinking of the Fayetteville, NY Public Library that has sewing or woodworking classes as well as 3D printers (which are the most popular).2 I don’t see that coming into academic libraries. SJB: Probably not. The reason we would not do that is because we probably have that expertise in other areas. So our Tyler School of Art,

for example, has extensive resources for people who want to learn how to do woodworking, sewing, fashion design and those sorts of things. It would not surprise me if at some point our Scholar’s Studio might bring in something like that. It is really up to what people want; if students said, “We want to start a sewing club and need a place to put our sewing machines,” we would provide that. A couple of years ago, students came to us from our Gaming Club and said, “We need a place on campus where we can have our monthly meeting and gaming tournaments, and we created a “Gaming Den” in the library; our Scholar’s Studio will be where all the gaming takes place. I should mention that TU Library, being in a highly densely populated urban area, does collaborate with the Free Library of Philadelphia (FLP) which has five branches in North Philadelphia that are somewhat near to our campus (the closest one is a mile away). For example, we held a “sign up for a library card” event here so our students and faculty could get an FLP library card. That is very valuable for our students and faculty because, for example, we do not collect any audio books. We therefore encourage our students and faculty to get a FLP card because they have extensive audio book collections. We asked our FLP colleagues if they would mind if we directed our students and faculty to sign up for an FLP card, and they said, “Tell as many people as you can!” DTH: Do they have to be Philadelphia residents? SJB: The state is moving toward a “state library card” to reduce barriers between counties. Even though I am a Montgomery County resident, there are some things I can get from FLP when I show my local library card because they have cooperative agreements between the counties. But the main thing is that any student affiliated with TU can get an FLP card. We collaborate with the FLP branches in our area and talk together about what kinds of offerings to have. In this region of the city, the libraries do not have makerspaces and sewing clubs like continued on page 46

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Interview â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Steven J. Bell from page 45 they have in Fayetteville because they are much more stretched for resources. So if there are ways in which we can help out, we are glad to do it. DTH: Do you want to say anything about the TU Press? It is now physically located in the library. SJB: Our relationship with the TU Press3 was established about seven years ago when the University Provost restructured it so that it reported to the Dean of the library. Our Dean has been working to create a much more collaborative relationship and make the Press an integral part of the library. So when we were designing the library one of the things we wanted to do was to bring the Press into it. DTH: Is there friction between the Press and the library? SJB: No. We maintain a productive collaborative relationship. DTH: They have different missions. The Press must sell books and produce income, and the library is giving out information, not selling it. SJB: Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true. The library does use some of its budget to support the TU Press because, like the vast majority of university presses, the TU Press does not sell enough books to cover all of its expenses. It is very important that universities, when they are able to do so, continue to support the press so that we can have a press which produces scholarly monographs that no commercial publisher would ever publish. The other thing that is great about the Press is that we collaborate quite a bit on programming. We have authors that feature the content of their books and they bring in interesting speakers.

One of the things that presses are doing to become more self-supporting is to produce more popular types of books; two of our most popular books are the encyclopedias of the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers. Those 46 Against the Grain / June 2020

types of works help support the scholarly monographs. We have also created a new imprint called North Broad Press that is designed to publish only open access books, and we already have eight books in the pipeline. All books published by North Broad Press will be available as open textbooks. We will use the expertise of the Press to get the books through the publishing process, getting rights to materials, editing, and reviewing. The expertise of the Press makes these types of projects possible.

We are also not the only library that has an ASRS, but one of the things that is very different about our implementation of it is that we are not using it as just a storage facility. Some libraries do that, but they do not have 40,000 students and 3,000 faculty on campus almost every day. We believe that we are the first university that is experiencing regular daily heavy use of our ASRS to retrieve materials from a very active circulating collection. Unlike some libraries, our circulation has not plummeted but is rather healthy. Right now, we are retrieving books from the ASRS at the rate of one every four minutes. Other libraries might retrieve 50 or 60 books a day, so

we are really putting our ASRS to the test as an everyday collection that people use heavily, and you can see that our hold shelf is packed with requested books. DTH: You told me that you can order something and by the time you walk down 3 floors from your office, it is available on the shelf. SJB: Yes. We tell people that retrieval can be between 20 minutes and 1 hour, but we know that we are doing it much quicker than that; we just did not want to raise expectations when we first opened. Retrieval times depend on the time of day when a book is ordered; in the mornings books can come very quickly. One of the tradeoffs that people will always tell you about these kinds of systems is that you lose the serendipitous discovery of materials, and we totally understand that. But another thing that is very valuable to people is their time, especially to students and faculty. TU is a school of people from middle-class families. Many of our students have jobs or families to take care of, and we want to maximize their time for that; for example, if you are a student at home, you could order the books you want, then come to campus and as you are walking to class, you stop at the library, pick up your books, check them out at a self-check machine, and be on your way. How much time would it have taken that student to search, write down all the call numbers, go to the stacks, search for every book, and perhaps find that one is missing? That is a lot of time we are saving people with a system like this. DTH: If people really want to wander the stacks and have serendipitous discovery, you have a whole 4th floor for them. SJB: We do, and those are our latest five years of books, and we weight that collection towards more visual materials. For the future we and other libraries are working to have an online virtual browse technology, so you can imagine being on your computer, looking up a book, then swipe to the left or right and see what continued on page 47

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Interview — Steven J. Bell from page 46 books are on either side of that book. We are totally comfortable with people requesting 20 books and when they look at them, only taking the five that they need. You could still retrieve books and browse them in our hold area. DTH: Another thing that I think is innovative is a single “one stop shopping” help desk for anything.

SJB: We previously had three different service desks: a reference desk, a circulation desk, and a media services desk. That created a lot of confusion because people did not know what desk to go to, or they would go to one desk and be told that they needed to go to another one, so we centralized all of the services at a single desk. No matter what your task is on any day, you can go to that one desk and the staff there can resolve your need. Most people need help with finding a book, paying a fine, or reserving a room. These are repetitive questions that are easily handled by our one-stop desk staff. DTH: So you do have fines? SJB: Yes, although students pay no fines until they reach $35. They can keep borrowing books and accrue fines up to $34.99. Few students ever reach $35 in fines. Students must pay replacement fees for lost or damaged material, but we understand that students are struggling and always work with them to develop reasonable options because not everybody can afford these costs. DTH: We have mentioned open access already, but is there anything more you would like to say about its role at TU? SJB: We are strongly committed to open access and have a staff member who works with the scholarly communication group in the library and also with the Press, so that is a unique position. Few libraries have a staff member working for both the library and the Press who bridges the two. Against the Grain / June 2020

We are one of the libraries that ended our Big Deal with Elsevier in 2019. We felt that we could no longer pay the exorbitant amount of money that they were requesting to keep our existing Big Deal in place, so we decided to subscribe to their publications individually, and it seems to be working out very well. It has saved us a large amount of money, and the items that we are subscribing to are our most heavily used items. We receive few complaints from anybody about cancelled publications. We are also using the Copyright Clearing House’s “Get It” service. When people want an article from a journal that we do not have, they can use this service to get it within 24 hours. We also obviously make heavy use of interlibrary loan. To my knowledge, since we ended our Big Deal with Elsevier, we have been able to fully meet the needs of our community for scholarly information. We also encourage our faculty to publish in open access journals, celebrate Open Access Week, Open Education Week, and Fair Use Week, acknowledge faculty who publish in open journals, offer an Author Publication Charges fund, and promote all these to our faculty and graduate students. TU was one of the first universities to start a textbook affordability project in the library, and we consider it an important part of our work. We started this project in 2010, and since then we have had nine cohorts consisting of ten faculty projects. We provide them with a stipend to literally stop using commercial textbooks, as well as expertise to help them identify alternative materials which could be open educational resources, articles in eBook chapters from the library, or any number of no-cost options. We have had faculty use primary research materials in place of textbooks. It does require the faculty to do a bit of work and change the nature of their course, and we believe they should be compensated for the time they put into that, which is why we provide stipends. Conservatively, we have saved our students approximately $1 million. We have heard frequently from students that they don’t buy a textbook if it is too expensive or that they drop the course. The bottom line is that affordable learning content contributes to student retention and success, and we want to support that. DTH: Do you have an institutional repository? SJB: We have definitely been behind the curve on that and are actually rolling out TUScholarShare now. It is in beta right now and should be fully implemented for the Spring 2020 semester.

We created and filled a position that is heavily involved in the maintenance of an institutional repository. I used it the other day (I am on the beta team), and it is super simple for people to add materials to the repository. DTH: Is that publicly available? SJB: It will be. You could use it to find our content. We are one of the libraries that use the Blacklight discovery system,4 which uses open access software and is used at several libraries. We customized it to meet the needs of our researchers. If you look at our web page and click on “library search,” you are using the Blacklight system. It searches everything we have, so when you get your results, you see the books, articles, videos, special collections, our web site, our librarians with subject expertise, and materials from the TUScholarShare. So you will not have to do a separate search on ScholarShare, but you can just use the library search to bring back results from it. DTH: Let’s broaden our outlook to the information industry in general. What do you see as the major trends for now and the future and are any of them unique to a large academic institution like TU? SJB: As a major research library, we still continue to make heavy use of all types of information resources, in the traditional databases as well as the more contemporary ones. Part of the challenge is that there seems to be no decline in the number of databases that third parties are developing and offering to libraries. We are constantly doing trials of new types of databases and services. I cannot foresee any time in the near future when we would not be providing access to the traditional databases like EBSCO, ProQuest, Web of Science, etc. DTH: Do you use a traditional commercial discovery system? SJB: Our library search using the Blacklight system searches many of the databases. I think the trends continue to point to an increase in streaming video and audio (Films on Demand and Kanopy are very popular with educators). I anticipate that we will see more of these kinds of databases, but they are expensive, and we have limited resources, so we will need to make some very tough decisions. Another major trend is the information industry showing greater awareness of accessibility, privacy, and security issues. We are only at the cusp of this; at our university, we cannot even buy one continued on page 48

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Interview — Steven J. Bell from page 47 of these products until it goes through an accessibility review. Either it must be fully accessible or the vendor must have a demonstrated roadmap or pathway to becoming accessible. If we want to buy something that is not accessible, we must demonstrate that it is the only product in that category that is available for purchase, or we can get an exclusion for a two year period. The same thing now applies to security. If we want to acquire certain information systems, they must go through a security audit. DTH: Does that also include privacy? SJB: Yes. Part of our security audit requires that the vendors have liability insurance covering a security breach of their system, and if they are collecting data about our students, they must divulge this information. Our IT has very high security concerns, the foremost of which is cybersecurity. We must make absolutely sure that the products in the information industry will not open us up to cybersecurity liability, which will become a greater concern across all the libraries and vendors that we deal with. We are looking forward to other new kinds of exciting products, and I hope the information industry will continue to develop things in the artificial intelligence area, such as voicebots and chatbots. We obviously have concerns about privacy and security, but on the other hand, how can we make a better library experience for all the people that use our technologies? The people now coming to our university exist in a largely digital world. Our students in the Class of 2023 were born in 2001, so they literally have lived all of their lives in front of screens. For better or worse, that’s the information landscape in which we exist and for which we must adapt. DTH: That raises staffing issues. With all these new innovations and services, what additional skills and training do you expect from your professional library staff? Is the MLS still good enough for a professional position? What other backgrounds and degrees do you see as being desirable for TU as it staffs its new library? SJB: That could be a conversation all to itself! You are absolutely correct that to have a successful 21st century library at a research university, you need a fairly diverse staff in terms of the skill 48 Against the Grain / June 2020

sets that they bring to it. For example, just to run Blacklight, you need a team of programmers and developers to manage those kinds of systems. In a building like this, every study room is on an automatic scheduling system so that rooms can be reserved online. We therefore need to have people that can make those systems work. Our Access Services and Special Collections staff had to undergo extensive training to learn the ASRS system. Staff are continuously learning new skills to make sure our library customers have the best possible experience. DTH: Do you have an in-house IT staff? SJB: We do, and we collaborate with the campus Information Technology Services as well, so if you look at research data management services, data curation, or data preservation, a contemporary research library needs to know how to provide those kinds of services such as advising a faculty member how to curate a large set of data. You can learn about that in a library science program, but you may need to collaborate with somebody in IT who knows how supercomputers work or how to set up storage systems for vast amounts of data. DTH: Or how to do natural language processing or automated indexing. SJB: I think library science programs are changing to realize that you just cannot teach people all the technology skills they need to have in a year or two. They will be learned on the job. We need to prepare students to have the soft skills and the critical thinking and learning skills so that they know that they are a work in progress and still have a huge amount to learn to be an effective librarian, technologist, or educator. That is where continuing education will be critically important in the future for people coming out of library schools. I am currently an instructor for San Jose State University teaching design thinking, which is something they were not teaching in library schools even a few years ago. Increasingly, librarians are presented with very challenging problems that don’t have obvious answers, and you can use a technique like design thinking to create a design challenge with your colleagues, so that you have a more sophisticated way of arriving at a good thoughtful solution to a problem. Very few library schools teach design thinking. It is an example of those kinds of soft skills, leadership, and knowing how to work in more diverse environments

that you will need in a library science environment, as well as organization of information and how certain technologies work. Library science must change, and there must be a clear path to continuing education for future skill development. It is not like 20 or 30 years ago when you could graduate like I did, and your skills were fine for 5 or 10 years because nothing changed that much. DTH: If there are other things you would like to discuss, please mention them now. SJB: I would always advise librarians that if they have questions about the design and nature of this library to come and visit and experience it for themselves. I think it is interesting that many of the students and new librarians that I encounter want to know how to learn about the nature of this profession and industry, and I tell them that you learn what is happening by going out and visiting libraries and librarians. If they come here and experience it for themselves, they will see where innovation is happening. This library is not designed just for today’s students, but to be in a position to serve people who will be here two or three generations from now. We can hardly imagine what skills library workers will need in that future, but I suspect that design practice and design thinking will always contribute to our professional success. DTH: Speaking for myself as one who has been in this industry for many years, it certainly has been a fascinating experience to come here, tour this library, see the technology, and have this conversation. We often close these interviews on a personal note. What do you do for downtime, relaxation, and spare time (if there is any!)? SJB: I try to get to the gym several times a week and stay physically fit. I think that is really critical, especially when we have a lot of stress in our life. Staying fit and eating healthy is very important to me. When I am teaching like I do now, I do not have much spare time. People who know me know that I do a lot of writing—two columns a month for Library Journal which I have been doing for 10 years now. Writing gets you to think about things carefully, and it forces me to stay current with what is happening in librarianship, higher education, and technology. I also like taking walks, going camping, hiking, gardening continued on page 49

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Interview — Steven J. Bell from page 48 and taking care of plants, and spending time with my family as much as I can. I probably do not pay as much attention to the work-life balance as the people coming into the profession now do; I came in at a different time and am part of a different era and a different culture. I seek to understand the new colleagues coming in to the profession; they have different ideas, different interests, and different lifestyles. At TU, we offer flexible work arrangements to allow staff a better way to manage their lives, which can be complicated now. Donald T. Hawkins is an information industry freelance writer based in Pennsylvania. In addition to blogging and writing about conferences for Against the Grain, he blogs the Computers in Libraries and Internet Librarian conferences for Information Today, Inc. (ITI) and maintains Against the Grain / June 2020

the Conference Calendar on the ITI Website (http://www.infotoday.com/ calendar.asp). He is the Editor of Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage, (Information Today, 2013) and Co-Editor of Public Knowledge: Access and Benefits (Information Today, 2016). He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley and has worked in the online information industry for over 45 years. Endnotes 1. “New library is Temple’s most compelling work of architecture in decades,” Inga Saffron, Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 2019, Page 1 (also available at https://www.inquirer. com/columnists/temple-university-library-inga-saffron-architecture-review-snohetta-20190919.html). 2. “Making and Community Engagement in the Library,” Donald T. Hawkins, Information Today, Vol. 32, Issue 8, Page 1. 3. http://tupress.temple.edu/ 4. https://projectblacklight.org

Rumors from page 44 This is from Publishers Weekly: The investment firm KKR has completed its purchase of OverDrive. On Christmas Eve, KKR announced it had reached an agreement to acquire the digital reading platform from the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten. The deal was expected to be closed in the first quarter of 2020; it is not known whether the pandemic caused a problem in completing the agreement. “With the sale completed, we are excited to begin working on the opportunities to grow our digital content platform with KKR’s support,” said Steve Potash, OverDrive founder and CEO, in a statement. In addition to OverDrive, KKR owns RBmedia, one of the largest independent publishers and distributors of audiobooks. The OverDrive acquisition, like that of RB, was overseen by Richard Sarnoff, one-time executive at Random House who also was president of Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments until leaving for KKR in 2011. Thanks to PW for during the COVID-19 crisis, Publishers Weekly is providing free digital access to the magazine, archive, and website. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/industry-deals/article/83551-kkr-completes-overdrive-purchase.html continued on page 85

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LEGAL ISSUES Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel) <strauchb@citadel.edu> Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University) <jack.montgomery@wku.edu>

Legally Speaking — “McEngage” Disengages by Bill Hannay (Partner, Schiff Hardin LLP, Chicago, IL) <whannay@schiffhardin.com>

n May 1, 2019, textbook publishers McGraw-Hill and Cengage announced that they had signed a merger agreement that would produce “a broad range of best-in-class content — delivered through digital platforms at an affordable price,” worth $5 Billion. Almost exactly a year later, on May 4, 2020, the parties announced that they had mutually agreed to terminate their proposed “merger of equals.” They ascribed the breakup to opposition from antitrust regulators in the U.S. and U.K. who demanded substantial divestitures of course offerings to avoid competition concerns. In a press release about the termination of the merger agreement, the head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Asst. Atty. Gen. Makan Delrahim, stated: The decision to abandon this merger preserves competition in the market for textbook publishing, an important industry in the education sector. Cengage and McGraw-Hill’s decision to abandon this merger also preserves innovation, as the two firms compete aggressively in the development of courseware technology. At the time the merger was devised, it would have combined the second and third largest publishers of textbooks in the United States in a market long dominated by only three major textbook publishers. The leading education company is Pearson plc which owns educational media brands including Addison-Wesley, Peachpit, Prentice Hall, eCollege, Longman, Scott Foresman, and others. McGraw-Hill and Cengage were the second and third largest textbook publishers in the U.S., respectively. McGraw-Hill, headquartered in New York City, is the second-largest publisher of course materials in higher-education, which include physical textbooks, eBooks, and digital courseware. McGraw-Hill is 50 Against the Grain / June 2020

a private company, owned by a private equity fund operated by Apollo Global Management LLC. Cengage had emerged from bankruptcy in the Spring of 2014, after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2013. The company had struggled with the major trend affecting textbook publishing, i.e., the move from paper to digital versions of learning tools. The industry has also suffered from the vicious cycle of increased book pricing, prompting students to save money by borrowing, renting, or buying used texts. At the time, Cengage vowed to focus on electronic versions of its textbooks and developing digital study guides and other educational supplements. Following May 2019, the proposed merger — which quickly was dubbed “McEngage” — prompted opposition from student groups and open market advocates, such as SPARC, which in turn prompted concerns among Democratic Congressmen and led to investigations into the potential effects of the merger by the DOJ Antitrust Division and Great Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Critics of the merger asserted that the combined firm would control between 40% and 50% of the college textbook market in an era when major textbook publishers had dramatically raised prices in recent years. Between 2006 and 2016, the price of textbooks had risen at four times the rate of inflation. During the winter of 2019-20, the parties to the merger disclosed that the transaction had been and remained under review by the U.S. Department of Justice as well as antitrust authorities in Australia, New Zealand and Mexico and in certain U.S. states. Early in March 2020, two

members of the U.S. House Antitrust Subcommittee, Chairman David Cicilline of Rhode Island and Commerce Chair Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, wrote a letter to the DOJ asking for increased scrutiny of the deal. In addition to raising competitive concerns about market concentration, the Congressmen expressed concern that the merger would put more student data into the hands of one company. This could increase the risk of cybercrime but also potentially give the combined entity “an insurmountable lead in the development of machine learning tools for higher education.” On March 24, 2020, the U.K.’s CMA announced that it had decided to conduct an in-depth review of the transaction, referred to as a “Phase 2 investigation.” The Phase 2 process provides for a 24week review, which is subject to further extension by the CMA. It became clear by the Spring of 2020 that McGraw-Hill and Cengage were prepared to divest (or spin off) a few titles or subject areas where there was substantial overlap, i.e., direct competition between the parties, but it was equally clear that the DOJ and the CMA were looking to have the companies shed significantly more overlap products. No lists were made public, but press reports suggested that the Justice Department had demanded “significant divestitures of several dozen courses” to address antitrust concerns. And the CMA said that the companies had offered divestitures that were “unlikely to be sufficient in addressing its competition concerns.” In the end, no settlement could be reached with the government agencies, and the publishers decided to walk away from the deal rather than go to court over the dispute. continued on page 51

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Legally Speaking from page 50 Cengage issued a press release on May 4th, stating that the deal was scrapped “by mutual agreement due to a prolonged regulatory review process and the inability to agree to a divestitures package with the U.S. Department of Justice.” The company vowed to act, on a standalone basis, “to continue to support the transition to digital and help students save significant money.” Looking ahead, as faculty and administrators move their classes online,

Cengage is “now singularly focused on ensuring the Cengage Unlimited subscription and our leading digital courseware platforms continue to deliver value for students and faculty.”

codes to ‘inclusive access’ automatic textbook billing — still make it difficult for students to get good grades, pay the bills, and graduate on time.”

The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) which was one of the NGOs opposing the transaction raised doubts about the future benefits of the textbook publishers’ individual efforts: “While Cengage and McGraw-Hill won’t have quite as much power to jack up prices on course materials, the new wave of digital textbook products out there — from access

William M. Hannay is a partner in the Chicago-based law firm, Schiff Hardin LLP, and is a frequent contributor to Against the Grain and a regular speaker at the Charleston Conference. He can be reached at <whannay@schiffhardin. com>.

Cases of Note — Copyright Ripping off Lady Liberty Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Robert Davidson v. The United States. United States Court of Federal Claims. No. 13-942C, June, 2018. Among the ceaseless waste of federal dollars, this is something of a standout. On the corner of Las Vegas and Tropicana Boulevards in Las Vegas, NV sits the New York-New York Hotel & Casino. And what is more New York than the Statue of Liberty? The casino moguls had to have one. In the early 1970s, Davidson started in the plaster business as a water boy hosing down stucco plastered the day before. Through luck and pluck, he advanced through the ranks to executive VP, then left to form Plaster Tech. A lion head design in a mega-mansion got him into sculptor and designer work. He would start with foam for the initial shape, hand-rasping it, then slaver on plaster for the final layer. And it was Vegas. He soon was into the Egyptian theme of the Luxor Hotel, shaping walls like pyramid blocks and building a 110-foot-tall replica of the Sphinx. He built the Joan of Arc at the Paris Hotel in Vegas and a Mount Rushmore of Dudley Do-Right characters at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. These successes led to the Lady Liberty job, a model two-thirds the size of the Statue in New York harbor. Against the Grain / June 2020

The end result was terrific but not an exact replica. He wanted it more modern, more feminine. A picture of his motherin-law was a big influence, and a plaque in her memory was placed at the crown. Not since Whistler’s Mother has … The cost for materials and labor ran $152,000 with a profit of $233,000. Which is not relevant to our case, but you might want to change professions. The US Postal Service introduced the Forever Stamp in 2007. The first one was an image of the Liberty Bell. Wanting another patriotic image, they considered flags, but those had been over-done. Likewise, the USPS had used the Statue of Liberty in 20 different images. Nonetheless, culling through Getty Images, they came across a photo of the Statue of Liberty they liked and paid $1,500 for a three-year non-exclusive license to print a blizzard of stamps. They were unaware the photo was of the Vegas statue. In their defense, if you Google it, the difference does not jump out at you. Upon study, the Vegas statue has a less severe face. But that does become important. And in CYA communiqués, the USPS later insisted that even had they known, they would have used it anyway as they loved it so much.(!) And in a footnote, it is stated that the USPS has run

a loss every year since 2006 on annual revenues of $60 billion. By the time the error was discovered, a billion stamps had been printed. The USPS scrambled to determine ownership of the image while continuing to ship and sell images. Meanwhile, Davidson’s excited wife returned from the post office presumably having recognized her mother on the stamp. Davidson filed suit.

So, Let’s Look at the Law.

The USPS asserted the statue was a replica and had no original work. The standard, however, is only a minimal degree of creativity. See Feist Publ’ns. Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340, 345 (1991). Further, it does not need to be wholly original. You can work off a prior creation in a new and original way. Id. Davidson testified he was hired to invoke the image, and he did it by making her softer and more feminine. The fact finder need only decide that the differences are non-trivial. Which the court found. The jaw is less massive and the face more rounded. Indeed, these features were appealing enough to cause the USPS to select Davidson’s version.

But is it Fair Use?

The Fair Use defense is laid out in 17 U.S.C. § 107 (2012). A. Purpose and character of the use. Other than chopping and continued on page 52

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Cases of Note from page 51 sizing it for the stamp, the USPS did nothing to transform the image which would put it under Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994). But in fact, the USPS never really argued that, asserting instead that the bulk of the money received was the necessary payment for sending mail. They had, however, sold $4 billion of stamps for $140 million profit, making this a purely commercial use — not educational or charitable — and not subject to fair use defense. Davidson takes that one. B. Nature of the Copyrighted Work. The USPS argued Davidson’s work was so derivative as to receive only a thin copyright. Davidson said the USPS wanted the image for a reason, otherwise they would just print blank stamps. And the statue had been up since 1996.

Result: factor favors neither party. C. The Portion Used. This favors Davidson, as the face was the part the USPS wanted and they used it all. D. Effect of the Use. This favors the USPS as Davidson had not attempted to exploit his creation so they didn’t disrupt a market of his sales. E. The Use Was Not Fair. Davidson wins this one. The USPS used it to earn revenue and collected a whole bunch. USPS’s only defense is they didn’t hurt Davidson very much.

So What Are the Damages? USPS argued they never paid more than $5,000 for art, and the artist ought to consider it an honor to be used and revel in all the publicity. Which is to say if they had known Davidson wanted to sell, they wouldn’t have given him squat. On the other hand, if you wanted to license their image for your product, well, that’s different. Want to put the image of a stamp on a million T-shirts, the USPS

would seek a running royalty at around 8% of total gross sales. And there was a whole bunch of expert testimony from both sides on how to value the thing. The court made an odd observation that since the USPS lost money — its costs exceeding its revenue — each stamp was a small money-losing contract. However, there are stamps on which the USPS has pure profit — those kept by collectors. And that was easy to measure, because they weren’t used to move mail. So they applied a 5% running royalty on stamps never used. Which rather seems like something they did because the USPS had a clear record of the number of unused stamps. Which rendered Davidson damages of $3,554,946.95. Which is certainly precision.

Questions & Answers — Copyright Column Column Editor: Will Cross (Director, Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center, NC State University Libraries) <wmcross@ncsu.edu> ORCID: 0000-0003-1287-1156 QUESTION: A faculty instructor asks, “Does using a platform like Zoom impact ownership of my course materials?” ANSWER: This is a question I have heard a lot recently, and it gets at two underlying issues that many faculty instructors are currently grappling with. The first is whether changes in the way instruction is done will impact their rights under university policy. The second is whether a service like Zoom makes any claim on their work. The first question is relatively straightforward, but the answer depends on local policy rather than black letter copyright law. Most (but not all) institutional copyright policies vest ownership of instructional materials with faculty instructors based on principles of academic 52 Against the Grain / June 2020

freedom rather than claiming that they are works made for hire. In those cases, however, many institutions also claim greater interest or outright ownership in materials created with “unusual” or “exceptional” use of institutional resources. As the terms suggest, this claim is not usually asserted based on normal use of resources such as an office computer, access to the library, or similar. Instead, universities often claim ownership in instructional materials where a special grant is provided or another special benefit like course release is offered. These policies were often invoked or even revised during the great MOOC boom in the early 2010s when universities provided substantial labor and expertise, as well as funding, to create online courses that were university-branded and

often launched with the hope they would become dependable revenue streams. As noted above, these claims based on unusual or exceptional use of resources do not typically apply when an instructor simply uses a standard resource available to anyone on campus. So, instructors relying on an institutionally licensed version of Zoom may not need to worry about university ownership any more than they do when they rely on an institutional license for Microsoft Office or a course management system like Moodle or Canvas. Because every institutional policy is different, however, an instructor would be advised to check out their local policy and ask for clarification where needed. The second part of this question may be more complicated. Zoom, like most online tools and services, comes wrapped in a set of terms of use that can create an additional layer of legal complexity. As of this writing, Zoom’s terms of service do continued on page 53

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Questions & Answers from page 52 not assert ownership as a condition of use — indeed they explicitly state that users retain copyright — just a nonexclusive license needed to transmit users’ work to their audience. Because those terms can change, however, it is always advisable to review these agreements or at least refer to a resource such as Terms of Service; Did Not Read (https://tosdr.org/) that reviews and summarizes them. This is, of course, general good practice as we all explore new tools and services whether they support streaming, plagiarism detection, or student learning. The recent report from the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) on automatic textbook billing programs (https://uspirg.org/ feature/usp/automatic-textbook-billing) offers a useful case study on the language that is often built into these services and the changes that can be negotiated by a thoughtful administration. QUESTION: A librarian asks, “What did the Supreme Court decide in the recent Blackbeard case?” ANSWER: In March, the Supreme Court decided a case that should have major implications for copyright holders and users even though it was focused on a narrow question about federalism. The facts before the Court were irresistibly romantic (for both headline writers and the Justices as they drafted their opinions), concerning The Queen Anne’s Revenge, a long-lost pirate ship used by Blackbeard as his flagship in the early 1700s. The ship was lost at sea in 1718 and remained lost for more than two hundred years until it was discovered off the coast of Beaufort, North Carolina in 1996. As the owner of the wreckage, the state of North Carolina hired a salvage company to recover the remains of the ship. That salvage company in turn hired Frederick Allen, a local videographer, to document the operation. Allen registered copyright for the photographs and videos he took of the salvage and offered a license, but North Carolina declined the license, posting several of the videos online and included some of his photographs in a newsletter without his permission. As a copyright matter, the case was relatively straightforward. Instead, the arguments turned on North Carolina’s claim to sovereign immunity, the general rule that federal courts cannot hear suits brought by individuals against nonconsenting states. North Carolina claimed Against the Grain / June 2020

immunity from Allen’s suit and Allen countered that sovereign immunity did not apply to copyright infringement cases based on a statute called the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 (CRCA), which provides that a state “shall not be immune, under the Eleventh Amendment [or] any other doctrine of sovereign immunity, from suit in Federal court” for copyright infringement. In March, a unanimous Supreme Court decided Allen v. Cooper, Governor of North Carolina, holding that Congress lacked authority to abrogate the states’ immunity from copyright infringement suits in the CRCA. Writing for the Court, Justice Kagan noted that the Eleventh Amendment has generally been understood to bar federal courts from hearing a suit brought by any person against a nonconsenting state but that suit may be brought when two factors have been met. First, Congress must have enacted “unequivocal statutory language” abrogating the States’ immunity from the suit. In addition, “some constitutional provision must allow Congress to have thus encroached on the States’ sovereignty.” The CRCA clearly included unequivocal statutory language abrogating state immunity, so the core question was whether Congress had the constitutional authority to do so, either under Article I or the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court rejected both, in large part based on its 1999 decision in Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Ed. Expense Bd. v. College Savings Bank, an analogous case considering state sovereign immunity for patent infringement claims. Concluding that Florida Prepaid “all but prewrote” the Court’s decision, Justice Kagan held that Congress did not have the authority to limit sovereign immunity in cases of copyright infringement. North Carolina may rely on sovereign immunity and thus it remains a bar to Allen’s suit. While Justice Kagan wrote for a unanimous court, two justices did write concurrences. Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Ginsburg, noted that he disagreed with the decisions in both Florida Prepaid and in this case but, “recognizing that [his]longstanding view has not carried the day,” he joined the opinion. Justice Thomas also wrote a concurrence noting that, while he agreed with the decision itself, he did not feel bound by the precedent of Florida Prepaid in the way that the majority or Justice Breyer did. These concurrences offered two distinct approaches to the importance of reliance on precedent and may signal a deeper

disagreement on the Court, as we shall see in the other major copyright decision this term, discussed below. For librarians, scholars, and publishers, this case is important primarily as a reaffirmation of sovereign immunity. If you follow copyright in higher education, you may remember that sovereign immunity plays a critical role in the (still ongoing, twelve years later) Cambridge University Press v. Patton case regarding fair use of electronic course reserves at Georgia State University. Because Georgia State was able to rely on sovereign immunity the plaintiff publishers were not able to sue for damages, only injunctive relief. This meant that the court did not adjudicate the original copyright policy, which the court held to be moot. Instead, the case has been contested primarily based on a revised and more pragmatic policy. So, while Allen v. Cooper was decided on federalism grounds, it casts a long shadow over copyright policy and practice for all state institutions, particularly in the way they understand and calculate risk when relying on fair use. QUESTION: A legal publisher asks, “What does the recent Supreme Court decision about who owns copyright in Georgia’s law mean for us?” ANSWER: In another technical but highly important case this spring, the Supreme Court considered whether annotations to Georgia’s statutes could be protected by copyright in light of the “government edicts doctrine.” Grounded in the bedrock principle that citizens must have free access to the law if they are presumed to know it, the government edicts doctrine holds that government officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot generally be the copyright holder of works they create in the course of their official duties. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, the Supreme Court considered the copyright status of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA). Assembled by a Georgia state entity called the Code Revision Commission, the Code includes a set of annotations developed by Matthew Bender & Co., Inc., a division of the LexisNexis Group, pursuant to a workfor-hire agreement with the Commission. The annotations include resources such as summaries of judicial decisions, opinions of the state attorney general and relevant scholarly and reference materials. Under this agreement, Lexis enjoyed the exclusive right to publish, distribute, and sell the OCGA. continued on page 54

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Questions & Answers from page 53 Relying on the government edicts doctrine, the nonprofit Public.Resource. Org (PRO) argued that the OCGA was not protected by copyright and posted a digital version on various websites where it could be downloaded by the public without charge. In response, the Commission sued PRO on behalf of the Georgia Legislature and the State of Georgia for copyright infringement. While PRO argued that the OCGA was not eligible for copyright under the government edicts doctrine, Georgia argued that the annotations should not be covered by the doctrine and were eligible for protection because they did not have the force of law and were drafted by a private party.

Writing for the Court, Justice Roberts concluded that, “in light of the Commission’s role as an adjunct to the legislature and the fact that the Commission authors the annotations in the course of its legislative responsibilities, the annotations in Georgia’s Official Code fall within the government edicts doctrine and are not copyrightable.” Where the Blackbeard case was written by a unanimous Court, this case was decided by a narrow 5-4 majority. Justice Thomas, joined by two others, returned to the theme he sounded in Cooper, lamenting that “an unwillingness to examine the root of a precedent has led to the sprouting of many noxious weeds that distort the meaning of the Constitution and statutes alike.” Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justice Breyer, affirmed the

importance of precedent but dissented on other grounds. This case is great news for libraries, publishers, and everyone who values access to the law. Taking a step back, however, both this and the Blackbeard case suggest that a significant schism is growing on the Court related to how much deference should be given to precedent — previous decisions made by the Court on relevant issues. As these battle lines are drawn in copyright cases, it will be worth watching to see how a crop of newer Justices defers — or does not defer — to precedent in high-profile cases revisiting issues that had been considered settled for many years.

ATG Special Report — Does the Repository Reflect the Institution? by Gail McMillan (Professor, University Libraries, Virginia Tech) <gailmac@vt.edu> Author’s Note: Gail McMillan is a professor on the faculty of Virginia Tech Libraries and Director of Scholarly Communication. Correspondence concerning this article should be emailed to <gailmac@vt.edu>. — GM

Abstract The IR gives the university both a digital library and a showcase so the IR should accurately reflect its home institution. Assessing IRs from the perspective of its resources, however, is an as yet unused frame of reference. The goal of this initial study was to investigate whether the IR represents the scholarship and activities of its home institution by comparing a microcosm of the IR to the same microcosm at the institution. The IR can be correlated with the university by using a controlled vocabulary to search each source and comparing the percentage of hits. This study looked at VTechWorks, the IR at Virginia Tech, as a whole and through three lenses, that of graduate students’ ETDs, the faculty’s scholarly publications, and the academic units’ web-accessible publications. Using the LGBTQ microcosm, the percentage of hits for a controlled vocabulary showed a good correlation, demonstrating that the IR is representative of the university for this microcosm. Can we extrapolate and say this IR accurately represents its university?

Does the Repository Reflect the Institution? Since institutional repositories (IRs)1 have been in use for about 20 years, it’s time to address how well they reflect their home institutions. Within the wealth of articles about IRs, there is little attempt to assess the relationship of IR content to the scholarship and activities of its institution as an indicator of the value of the IR. We do not know if IRs have attained Clifford Lynch’s vision of hosting “the intellectual works of faculty and 54 Against the Grain / June 2020

students — both research and teaching materials and also documentation of the activities of the institution itself in the form of records of events and performance and of the ongoing intellectual life of the institution.” (2003, p.2) Assessing IR content now is also appropriate in light of the COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories, 2017, p.4) recommendation that “The next generation repository... is resource-centric, making resources the focus of its services and infrastructure.” Among my responsibilities at Virginia Tech Libraries, I oversee the IR, VTechWorks, established in 2012. VTechWorks had about 70,000 items at the time of this study (April/May 2019). About 96% of those items were publicly available and about 85% were textual. Members of the university community largely created these works, but about 10% were created by others about Virginia Tech (e.g., Condolence Archives) or related to university interests (e.g., New River Symposium). VTechWorks is highly focused on research and scholarship, but also hosts academic unit publications, governance and historical documents, etc. Most items were born digital, but many items have been scanned and OCR’d. IRs have not been developed like library collections by subject experts. IRs are not dependent on money to purchase items, but on people’s time to locate, deposit, and describe items. VTechWorks has been populated in a variety of ways. For example, some faculty voluntarily deposit directly or through integrated systems (e.g., Elements). Mandatory ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) deposits come through the online graduate school system, and some courses require students to deposit final projects. VTechWorks staff deposit through casual (e.g., reading VT news) and organized systems (e.g., OA Subvention Fund and SWORD protocol-captured articles). continued on page 55

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Does the Repository Reflect the Institution? from page 54 To determine whether VTechWorks is representative of Virginia Tech, I chose to study a microcosm2 of VTechWorks, anticipating that it might encapsulate the characteristics of the repository as a whole. The microcosm I chose to study was influenced in part by articles and presentations I read and heard that addressed questions about diversity within the academy. At the 2017 CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) fall membership meeting, Amanda Rust from Northeastern University Library, presented “Design for Diversity,” a grant funded project that focused on ways in which information systems embody and reinforce cultural norms (e.g., data models that enforce strict gender binaries) and addressed designing systems that account for diverse cultural materials. In “The Hubris of Neutrality in Archives,” Sam Winn (2017, p.2), at Virginia Tech Libraries, made several salient points, including “Archivists contribute to the omission or erasure of historically marginalized groups in the archives.” And, a “radically inclusive historical record” will not happen by accident. Rebekah Scoggins (2018), a librarian at Leander University, authored “Broadening Your Library’s Collection: Implementing a LGBTQIA Collection Development Project.” She determined that her library was not meeting the needs of its users because the LGBTQIA collection was out-of-date and incomplete. It struck me as a well-aimed study but one that was limited because it only considered the traditional library collection, that is purchased books, serials, multimedia, etc., but did not consider the content of the IR.3 Because of these works and the dearth of articles about IR content assessment, I chose to conduct a study that might also help me learn whether VTechWorks was contributing to the omission of works of marginalized people or providing an inclusive record. I analyzed the microcosm of LGBTQ works and compared the IR findings to the output of the university as indicated by its website. I created a list of search terms by compiling terms and phrases from academic and community resources. [Appendix A — see http://hdl.handle.net/10919/97085] I eliminated some terms that historically had different meanings (e.g., gay and queer) or that were too broad (e.g., discrimination). However, I did not discard biological terms because, though they sometimes refer to plants or animals, they appeared in each studied collection. The resulting list had 155 terms.4 [Appendix B — see http://hdl.handle.net/10919/97085] To refine my investigation, to help understand who was doing the scholarship and research in the LGBTQ microcosm, and to help put the data in context, I searched the terms across the university, the IR and within three of the IR’s actual and virtual collections: graduate students’ ETDs, peer-reviewed faculty publications,5 and academic units’ (called “colleges” at VT) web publications. These collections targeted the scholarship of graduate students and faculty as well as information often aimed at the general public or alumni from the colleges and the university. 129 of the 155 terms searched got 21,455 hits in the 71,734 items in VTechWorks (VTW). To search the university website, I entered the terms directly in Google (i.e., www.google.com) by using this search strategy: [term] site:vt.edu -site:vtechworks.lib -site:theses.lib.vt.edu. In what I’m calling the “VT collection” (VTC), 109 of the 155 terms got 84,793 hits. Against the Grain / June 2020

I did not compare the number of hits per se because of the radically different sizes and ages of the collections. For example, the ETD collection had 32,557 works with LGBTQ terms dating from 1910. In the virtual faculty research collection (FRC) of 3,870 items, these terms dated from 1989, and in the virtual college collection (CC) of 14,590 items, these terms dated from 1972. Because of these discrepancies and for comparison purposes, I calculated the percentage of hits for each term within each collection. An example of the beginning of the alphabet displaying the percentage of hits in VTC and in the three targeted collections in VTW when the term was found is available at http://hdl.handle.net/10919/97085 (Table 1). In FRC, 40 of the 155 terms got hits, with the top 10 terms getting 86% of the hits. There were two outliers in FRC. “Gender bias” was used much more (9.3%) by faculty than any other collection (.6% and 1.9%). FRC used “sexual orientation” twice as many times as ETDs (5.9% v 2.9%). However, CC and VTC, the most public-focused collections, used it much more (13.8% each). In CC, 89 of the terms got hits, with the top 10 terms getting 81% of the hits. “Sexual orientation” got more than twice the hits as FRC and more than four times the hits as ETDs. VTC, however, used “gender identity” and “gender expression” about twice as often as it was used in CC, FRC, and ETDs. The term “gender” got nearly 50% of the hits in ETDs, leaving the remaining 114 terms with between 3.5% and 0.01% of the hits. “Gender” also got about 50% of the hits in FRC and CC, though only 39% in VTC and VTW overall. The same five terms got the most hits in VTW and VTC. Only eight terms got more than 2% of the hits in VTC. Gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression — the top four terms, were the only terms in VTW that got more than 2% of the hits. The top 20 hits in VTC varied by <2% with VTW, except for “sexual orientation” which got 4.7% more hits in VTW. See http://hdl.handle.net/10919/97085 for Table 2 comparing the 20 most used terms in VTW and VTC. VTC had three terms that did not appear in VTW: gender expansive, homonormative, and gender creative. At http://hdl.handle.net/10919/97085 see List of the 23 terms used in VTW but not in VTC. Ten of these terms only appear in ETDs. Two terms, cisnormative and diverse sexualities and genders, appeared only in CC. Analyzing the terms that did not appear in a collection was not necessarily meaningful due to the very low number of hits (1-2). Using VTC as the measure of scholarship and activities at the university, and comparing the percentage of hits in VTW with the percentage of hits in VTC, the data provides some evidence that there is a positive correlation between the IR and the university, at least, when studying the LGBTQ microcosm. To speculate how well VTechWorks represents the scholarship and activities of Virginia Tech, I considered, first, a difference in frequency of <1% to indicate that the works in the IR’s LGBTQ microcosm appropriately represent the university for this microcosm. VTechWorks and VTC had 109 terms in common. Only four terms appeared slightly more frequently in VTC: lesbian (+1.2%), “gender identity” (+1.3%), gender expression (+1.5%), and LGBTQ (+1.6). 95% of the terms appeared in both collections with about the same frequency (i.e., <1% difference in hits), which may indicate that the IR’s LGBTQ microcosm adequately represents the university’s scholarship and activities in this microcosm during this study. continued on page 56

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Does the Repository Reflect the Institution? from page 55 • ETDs and VTC had 99 terms in common. 89% of the terms appeared with about equal frequency. • FRC and VTC had only 40 terms in common, with 73% of the terms appearing with about equal frequency. • CC and VTC, the two most public-oriented collections, had 85 terms in common. 87% of the terms appeared with about equal frequency. If instead of a <1% difference, we consider <2% difference to be about the same frequency of appearance, no terms appeared more frequently in VTC than VTW. One term appeared more frequently in VTW. Therefore, 99% of the terms appeared with about the same frequency so the IR’s LGBTQ microcosm is representative of the university’s scholarship and activities in this microcosm during this study. • ETDs and VTC: 97% of the terms appeared with about the same frequency. • FRC and VTC: 90% of the terms appeared with about the same frequency. • CC and VTC: 95% of the terms appeared with about the same frequency. As a digital library and a showcase for the university, the IR should accurately reflect the scholarship and activities of its home institution. This study was a preliminary investigation into whether the resources available from VTechWorks are aligned with scholarship and activities at Virginia Tech. Not finding any guidance in the literature for assessing the contents of institutional repositories, I chose to investigate whether comparing the percentage of hits on a common list of terms used by authors at the university website and the IR would indicate a correlation and, therefore, a true reflection of the institution by its IR. Looking into the LGBTQ microcosm also gave me a chance to see whether an unconscious bias had crept in. With a 95% - 99% correlation, I feel confident saying that in the LGBTQ microcosm, VTechWorks accurately reflects Virginia Tech. This preliminary investigation should be followed by studies of other microcosms in other IRs and universities as well as VTechWorks, before speculating that the IR truly reflects the university. The information community will need to agree on what percentage of similarity indicates a high enough correlation to consider the IR representative of its university. Readers feedback on the research methods as well as potential collaborators who would consider conducting similar studies at their institutions and comparing results among institutions, would be very welcome.

References Confederation of Open Access Repositories. (2017). Next Generation Repositories. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https:// www.coar-repositories.org/activities/advocacy-leadership/working-group-next-generation-repositories/. Crow, Raym. (2002). “The case for institutional repositories: A SPARC position paper,” SPARC. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/papers-guides/ the-case-for-institutional-repositories (brief) http://sparc.arl. org/sites/default/files/ir_final_release_102.pdf (full version). Lynch, Clifford. (2003). “Institutional repositories: Essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age,” ARL 56 Against the Grain / June 2020

Bimonthly Report 226. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https:// www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2003/02/arl-br-226-LynchIRs-2003.pdf. Plutchak, T. Scott and Moore, Kate B. (2017). “Dialectic: The aims of institutional repositories.” Serials Librarian 72. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0361 526X.2017.1320868. Rust, A. (2017). Design for diversity: Towards inclusive information systems for cultural heritage. Coalition for Networked Information [presentation] Dec. 9, 2017. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https://www.cni.org/topics/assessment/design-for-diversity-towards-inclusive-information-systems-for-cultural-heritage. Scoggins, R. (2018). Broadening your library’s collection: Implementing a LGBTQIA collection development project. C&RL News, 79(3), 114-116, 126. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.79.3.114. Winn, S. (2017). The hubris of neutrality in archives. On Archivy. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https://medium.com/ on-archivy/the-hubris-of-neutrality-in-archives-8df6b523fe9f.

Appendix A — Sources of LGBTQ Vocabulary County of San Mateo [California], LGBTQ Commission. LGBTQ Glossary. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https://lgbtq. smcgov.org/lgbtq-glossary. Scoggins, R. (2018). Broadening your library’s collection: Implementing a LGBTQIA collection development project. C&RL News, 79(3), 114-116, 126. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.79.3.114. SumOfUs. Progressive’s Style Guide. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https://www.alumni.vt.edu/.../Diversity%20Language%20Style%20Guide.pdf. Virginia Tech. Safe Zone [Training 101]. Core Vocabulary. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https://ccc.vt.edu/resources/ safe_zone.html. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Stonewall Center. LGBTQIA+ Terminology. Retrieved June 28, 2017, from https://www.umass.edu/stonewall/sites/default/files/documents/ allyship_term_handout.pdf. Please Note: This article was originally intended to be part of Against the Grain’s IR themed issue “IRs R Cool Again,” ATG v.31#5, November 2019. Endnotes 1. I prefer Clifford Lynch’s broad definition: “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.” (p2) to Raym Crow’s: “digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a … university community.” (brief, p1) 2. “a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger” from Dictionary, an Apple Inc. application for macOS. 3. I later learned that Leander University does not have an IR. 4. In an attempt to reduce wordiness in this article, when I use “terms,” I mean both terms and phrases. 5. Articles are from Elements, SWORD and those supported by our Open Access Subvention Fund.

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And They Were There Reports of Meetings — 39th Annual Charleston Conference Column Editors: Ramune K. Kubilius (Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> and Sever Bordeianu (Head, Print Resources Section, University Libraries, MSC05 3020, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001; Phone: 505-277-2645; Fax: 505-277-9813) <sbordeia@unm.edu>

Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition, “The Time has Come ... to Talk of Many Things!” Charleston Gaillard Center, Francis Marion Hotel, Embassy Suites Historic Downtown, and Courtyard Marriott Historic District — Charleston, SC, November 4-8, 2019 Charleston Conference Reports compiled by: Ramune K. Kubilius (Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> Column Editor’s Note: Thanks to all of the Charleston Conference attendees who agreed to write short reports highlighting sessions they attended at the 2019 Charleston Conference. Attempts were made to provide a broad coverage of sessions, but there are always more sessions than there are reporters. Some presenters posted their slides and handouts in the online conference schedule. Please visit the conference site, http://www. charlestonlibraryconference.com/, and link to selected videos, interviews, as well as to blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins. The 2019 Charleston Conference Proceedings will be published in 2020, in partnership with Purdue University Press: http://www.thepress.purdue. edu/series/charleston. Even if not noted with the reports, Videos of most sessions as well as other video offerings like the “Views from the Penthouse Suite” interviews are being posted to the Charleston Conference YouTube Channel as they are completed, and are sorted into playlists by date for ease of navigation. In this issue of ATG you will find the third installment of 2019 conference reports. The first two installments can be found in ATG v.32#1, February 2020, and v.32#2, April 2020. We will continue to publish all of the reports received in upcoming print issues throughout the year. — RKK

LIVELY DISCUSSIONS WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2019 I Don’t Want to Go Among Mad People: Adventures in Establishing Good Communication Between Subject Librarians and Technical Service Departments in a Large Academic Library — Presented by Jennifer Mezick (University of Tennessee), Elyssa Gould (University of Tennessee) — https://sched.co/UZRN Reported by Chris Vidas (Clemson University) <cvidas@clemson.edu> The fun and provocative session title suggested that an engaging and informative session would follow, and the presenters did not disappoint. Gould and Mezick tackled several serious issues surrounding communication between library departments, but they incorporated a refreshing amount of humor into the discussion. They used polling software to collect and display Against the Grain / June 2020

responses from the audience members in real-time. It was reassuring to learn that many libraries are encountering similar problems, and it was beneficial to hear the perspectives of the presenters as well as those in attendance. This approach made it clear that librarians within distinct units often make assumptions or have false impressions about the work and the roles of colleagues within other units. The discussions that occurred during the question and answer portion provided some valuable insight, but throughout their presentation, Gould and Mezick highlighted a few key concepts to help overcome feelings of separation between siloed departments. Training goes a long way toward learning more about the work that colleagues perform to help eradicate negative or flawed attitudes. Any opportunity to meet with colleagues will further strengthen relationships between units and enhance collaborative endeavors. Lastly, it is important to recognize that most library units are equally busy, and delays in workflows can often be traced to issues occurring outside the library. Communication issues are not limited to large academic libraries, so the guidance offered by the presenters should prove to be beneficial for any libraries that are attempting to address these difficulties. (The session’s slides and a handout can be found in Sched.)

Library Collections: Creatively Adjusting Budgets to Invest in Open Content and Research Infrastructure — Presented by Julia Gelfand (University of California, Irvine), Roger C. Schonfeld (Ithaka S+R), Tom Hickerson (University of Calgary), Barbara Dewey (Penn State University) — https://sched.co/UXst Reported by Susannah Benedetti (University of North Carolina Wilmington) <benedettis@uncw.edu> Academic researchers’ needs are changing rapidly, moving beyond library collections and services to expertise with new tools to mine, access, and create new forms of data through curation, analytics and visualization, digitization, metadata, rights management and dissemination, and collaborative spaces. How can libraries meet these needs? Collection budgets are being tapped as the definition of “a library resources” evolves, but funds are also needed for skills training, positions, equipment, and spaces. Sources include personnel budgets, campus budgets, grants, continued on page 58

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And They Were There from page 57 development funds, and advancement campaigns. However, if libraries remain in big deals and pay the same publishers through different channels, are they exacting real change towards opening up research content? Is a more intentional strategy to leave the big deals and redeploy funds straight to new tools and support for university presses and campus publishers to provide OER and OA services? Libraries also face reorganization to shift value from access to knowledge creation. Librarians have concerns, not able to see their professional role “on the other side.” New roles will not replace traditional tenets, but they will grow and afford libraries the opportunity to support unmet faculty research needs and expand libraries’ value in an age of increasingly open content and infrastructures.

Print Collections as Battleground? Replacing Conflict with Conversations in the Use of Library Spaces — Presented by Sarah Tudesco (Yale University Library), Brad Warren (University of Cincinnati), Boaz NadavManes (Lehigh University), Michael Meth (Florida State University) — https://sched.co/UZR8 Note in Sched: Georgie Donovan, Associate Dean, Collections and Content Services, William and Mary, also contributed to this session but was unable to attend and present in person. Reported by Jeanne Cross (University of North Carolina Wilmington) <crossj@uncw.edu> Each of the presenters described projects involving weeding or moving print collections as a result of proven space needs in their libraries. The session focused on pushback and communication problems encountered during the projects and steps that were taken to resolve conflict. Fifteen minutes were saved at the end of the presentations for a lively question and answer section. Themes of feeling under attack were discussed. Despite due diligence, some imagine disasters occurring, taking projects that were not supposed to be a big deal into unexpected areas. A seemingly small project can morph in the minds of others into a symbol reflecting larger campus problems. Misunderstandings and the spread of misinformation can be frustrating, but time, patience, and dialog are keys to smoothing the way for successful change. Specific recommendations came out of these experiences. Engage your communities as early as possible. Keep messaging simple. Consider external politics as well as internal politics. Finally, find allies and create many opportunities for conversation and communication. Questions after the presentation included discussion of communication and events around library collections and questions about long-term strategies for print collections. The Future of Print project at Arizona State University https://lib.asu.edu/futureprint was referenced.

The Scholarly Kitchen Live-Chat With the Chefs — Presented by Lynnee Argabright (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Todd Carpenter (National Information Standards Organization (NISO)), Melanie Dolechek (moderator, Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP)), Joe Esposito (Clarke & Esposito), Gwen Evans (OhioLINK), Jasmin Lange (Brill), Judy Luther (Informed Strategies LLC) — https://sched.co/UZRc Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> The session, moderated by Dolechak, featured a scripted questions and interactive discussion with a number of the “Chefs” who write regularly for The Scholarly Kitchen blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). In one round, Carpenter talked about the interactive digital ecosystem, transformed by the research data landscape. Increasing numbers of repositories (research data sets, etc.). Publishers don’t serve their community if they limit to journal articles. Per Lange, disciplinary distances sometimes mean that bells and whistles desired in one discipline are not needed in another (for example, humanities projects may not fit into a box or platform). New research questions generate new tools: fund and invest in collaboration and open science. Argabright, a library school student and guest blogger, already attended the SSP conference as a guest and was now in Charleston. She shared that library schools emphasize system analysis and user experience. Products should be useful and productive to stakeholders; vendors should collaborate, not overlap. Per Esposito, tools that tie into content are mostly commercial, though some independent consortia develop some. Per Evans, format, not discipline is the driver. In her consortium (OhioLink), supercomputers are in play and they require security experts. Luther talked about next content forms, and later-about scenarios seen in Retraction Watch, e.g., a society that took three years to retract a publication. Discussion time was lively: about scholarly communication (with no global systems) and scholarly communities (with loosely connected networks). Comments with future debate potential: Skepticism about new roles for librarians (Evans comment); Open Access: Is it the “Jonestown” of libraries? (Esposito comment); does OA go against library self-interest? Never dull, the session with the chefs is a welcome (now annual?) addition to the Charleston Conference menu.

A Springboard to OER Success: How One State’s Higher Education Agencies and Academic Libraries are Working in Tandem to Create Greater Awareness of the Value of OER — Presented by Jennifer L. Pate (University of North Alabama), Ron Leonard (Alabama Commission on Higher Education), Katherine Quinnell (Athens State University) — https://sched.co/UZQz Reported by John Banionis (Villanova University) <john.banionis@villanova.edu> In this interactive session, Pate and Quinnell explained how they worked with Leonard to secure grant funding supporting OER initiatives at their respective campuses during continued on page 59

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And They Were There from page 58 the 2018-2019 academic year. At University of North Alabama, the grant funding was used to encourage faculty to adopt or create OERs for their Spring courses, and student satisfaction measurably increased with the OER used in the Spring compared to the traditional textbook used in the previous Fall. Additionally, funding was used to sponsor OER presentations and workshops for faculty, including an ACRL Roadshow presentation from Will Cross of North Carolina State University (NCSU). At Athens State University, the grant funding was spent on staff time supporting the creation of OERs based on freely available online medieval manuscripts as source material. At both institutions, survey statistics, data on OER efforts, and projected student savings were used to justify additional funding requests from internal and external sources. Attendees offered a lively exchange of questions and their own OER successes, including partnering with university presses, creating OER repositories, and using OER for tenure and promotion considerations.

The Time Has Come for eBooks, or Has It? — Presented by Gabrielle Wiersma (University of Colorado Boulder), Leigh Beauchamp (ProQuest) — https://sched.co/UZQt Note: Two student eBook users joined the panelists Sai Gunturu, an undergraduate at the University of Michigan Flint, and Emmie Mai, a graduate student at The Citadel. Reported by Jennifer Fairall (Siena College, Standish Library) <jfairall@siena.edu> The panelists discussed the past, present, and future of eBooks. Although eBooks try to replicate their print equivalents, eBooks can vary quite a bit from the print version in pagination, fonts, conversion of footnotes to endnotes, platform, availability, licensing, compatibility, DRM, and other nuances that affect the content. The student panelists shared perspectives on their own eBook versus print usage. Generally, students prefer print for textbooks and leisure reading because they tend to focus and concentrate better. They will use eBooks on their laptops or library desktop computers for research papers but tend not to download eBooks on mobile devices. Students prefer not to sign up for individual platform accounts to take notes or use other eBook features like highlighting, not because of privacy concerns but because they are not sure how to get back to those notes, do not want another password to remember, and do not want more emails. ProQuest collaborates with libraries and end-users to add or remove features to improve the platform. Has the time come for eBooks? It depends on what the book is being used for. Print books and eBooks go hand in hand.

The Value of Video: Accessibility, Streaming, and the 21st Century Library — Presented by Kerri Goergen-Doll (Oregon State University), Chris Dappen (Kanopy), Ryan Wilkins (Kanopy) — https://sched.co/Uy8C Note: Shannon Spurlock, (Sales Director, Kanopy) spoke in place of Chris Dappen (Director of Customer Success, Kanopy). Reported by Kelly Singh (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University) <robinsk2@erau.edu> Goergen-Doll, Spurlock, and Wilkins presented on the benefits and challenges of providing streaming video through the library. While streaming video was merely a blip on the radar of libraries ten years ago, today many librarians find that demand of streaming content outpaces budgets. Spurlock outlined research on streaming video, noting a 256% increase in demand for Kanopy content from 2016 to 2019. Research additionally shows that video supports learning outcomes and learning memory. Goergen-Doll reported that the successful streaming video collection at Oregon State University (OSU) mirrors these findings. OSU relies on streaming video to support users on their large e-campus and finds that streaming video provides needed accessibility options and supports multiple learning modalities for all students. Wilkins next shared an analysis of how users at OSU interact with streaming offerings, with statistics showing that users are watching videos that correspond to curricular offerings at OSU and enhance their educational canon. Panelists concluded by discussing budgeting for streaming video. Spurlock suggested partnering with others on campus, such as disability services, individual colleges, or faculty to provide streaming content. Kanopy reported that they are exploring a price-capped program to keep streaming costs for libraries stable.

CONCURRENTS WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2019 Begin at the Beginning: Revamping Collection Development Workflow — Presented by Jennifer Mezick (University of Tennessee), Elyssa Gould (University of Tennessee) — https://sched.co/UZSF Reported by Alexis Linoski (Georgia Institute of Technology) <alexis.linoski@library.gatech.edu> This session presented how the University of Tennessee restructured their collection development workflows to better meet the needs of the library. Based on feedback from within the library and observed needs, a Collections Committee was established with the charge of reviewing new resources, large one-time or recurring resources and questionable resources. The Committee has two co-chairs and representatives from the various subject areas. Resources over $3,000 are reviewed by the committee, which also maintains a list of priorities, but available funds can affect what gets purchased, sometimes overriding the priority. A standard process was established for requesting new resources (managed via a form), regular communications to the continued on page 60

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And They Were There from page 59 library were established (with a standard format) and a vendor information form was developed to be sent to vendors to request all needed information for trials and purchases. These forms and the communication template were uploaded to Sched and are well worth a look.

“The Evolution of Ebook Collections: Learning Something New Every Day” – Presented by Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University Libraries), Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University) — https://sched.co/UZRu Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University, Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> Veteran librarians Alvin and Montgomery highlighted eBook collection building and management strategies during university landscape changes (i.e., drops in budget, staffing, and/or enrollment), emphasizing the need to adapt, change, and evolve. Alvin shared scenarios of “errands in the wilderness” and “down the river and through the valley,” as it became necessary to finesse internal business practice fund assignments for eBook expenditures, in order to satisfy single title purchase needs for curricular programs. One lesson learned? Optimally, have eBook licenses in place with vendors and platforms, even before it might become necessary to use them. Montgomery began his presentation about the realities of operating in a tight fiscal environment with a corporate sector quote: “Companies that change may survive, but companies that transform thrive.” eBook adoption, begun in 2002, was spurred as a way of finding better book expenditure value, and ventures evolved across platforms, collections, and DDA. Not all library team members embraced the transition to eBooks, nor did some younger generation library users who still prefer print. eBook collection building now is done using a team approach, with a default of “eBook preferred,” with plans for more expansion into DDA, as well as weeding of older eBook editions. Other “search for tomorrow” plans: seek new models for usage analysis, and overall, continue to work towards a more responsive, fluid organization structure that is adaptable to future institutional changes.

Piloting the Surge: Streaming Video and Academic Libraries — Presented by Anita Foster (The Ohio State University), Azungwe Kwembe (Chicago State University), Joanna Kolendo (Chicago State University), Charlene Snelling (Chicago State University) — https://sched.co/UZSd Reported by Jeanne Cross (University of North Carolina Wilmington) <crossj@uncw.edu> This session was broken into two parts. The librarians from Chicago State University presented first, followed by the librarian from The Ohio State University Libraries. Kwembe, Kolendo, and Snelling described Kanopy’s DDA model, the process of acquisitioning a resource for the library 60 Against the Grain / June 2020

at Chicago State University, and the promotion and marketing that was done for Kanopy by the library. The library had a small fund for their initial trial of this resource, but they were pleased overall with the results. Foster’s presentation, additionally titled From Trickle to Torrent, detailed three, 3-year pilots of streaming video packages. Docuseek2, Kanopy DDA, and Swank were chosen for review. Use of all packages started out slow the first year, increased in the second, and had taken off by the third year. The task force evaluated the resources based on use, subject coverage, and satisfactory user experience. In the end, they decided to continue to provide access to packages from all three vendors. Discussion after the presentations focused on unsustainable costs of streaming videos and how to place limits and/or gain some control over budgets for what is clearly a high demand area.

State of the Academic Library: Results from the 2019 Academic Libraries Survey — Presented by Oren BeitArie (ExLibris), Dr. Dennis M. Swanson (University of North Carolina at Pembroke) — https://sched.co/UZSj Notes: Shlomi Kringel (Corporate VP of Learning and Research Solutions, ExLibris) joined the panel as a speaker and Bob Banerjee (Director of Marketing, Ex Libris) served as moderator. Oren Beit-Arie (Chief Strategy Officer with ProQuest) was originally scheduled but did not present in this session. Reported by Roger Cross (University of North Carolina at Pembroke) <Roger.Cross@uncp.edu> Banerjee introduced this session which reviewed the “Ex Libris Library Journal report,” a survey of 244 Academic Libraries, on the impact of academic libraries in educational institutions. If based on annual budgets and campus awareness of the library’s role, the overview is negative because budgets have continued to decline, and the library’s role on campus and for research seems to have declined with it. Swanson believes this trend will worsen as declining demographics will mean continued declining library budgets. Enrollment will fall for the next few years and universities funded by tuition should prepare for worsening conditions. In addition, Swanson noted, there has been a national trend in which administration and non-academic costs in Higher Education has increased while library funds have decreased. Kringel pointed out that when our users, faculty and students alike, do not understand where the resources they use originate, then they tend to devalue the library. Thus, libraries need to publicize the value of the scholarly tools the library provides. The library has faded from view in the plethora of online resources. The report also that shows most librarians believe they can “justify budget increases by demonstrating increased value,” and much of the remaining part of the session was devoted to discussions of how to demonstrate value to universities; this including course packs, affordable learning initiatives, Open Access, and even mission statements. The survey results themselves are available for viewing at the following url: https://page.exlibrisgroup.com/library-journal-report-download. continued on page 64

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Stop, Look, Listen — Eight Lessons Learned From Eight Years of Open Access Column Editor: Dr. Sven Fund (Managing Director, fullstopp GmbH, Society for Digitality, Wartburgstraße 25A, 10825 Berlin; Phone: +49 (0) 172 511 4899) <sven.fund@fullstopp.com> www.fullstopp.com Abstract: Knowledge Unlatched (KU) was the first initiative to make monographs available Open Access in the Humanities and Social Sciences and has been offering annual pledging rounds since the pilot in 2013. The KU model has grown considerably in the meantime and has expanded to include journals and other categories. This article considers some key takeaways from the last eight years from an insider perspective, which should be of interest to publishers, libraries and research funding agencies, but also to comparable initiatives aiming to further develop their own approaches. Keywords: Open Access; monographs; Knowledge Unlatched; scientific publishing; scholarly publishing; Humanities and Social Sciences.

Background Free access to scientific information in the form of Open Access (OA) has been developing rapidly since the beginning of the 2000s. Especially in the early years, the natural sciences received the most attention, while other academic disciplines played a negligible role in the rapid development of OA. Frances Pinter, then a publisher and later Managing Director of Manchester University Press, felt that the lack of Open Access publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) was a central weakness of the model and one which needed to be addressed. As a result, she devised an approach in 2012 to make HSS content available Open Access, and that was unique at that time. In contrast to the APC model dominating scientific journals, in which individual articles are “bought free” by the authors or their research funding agencies/institutions, Pinter introduced a model based around institutional funding. At the core of what she later called Knowledge Unlatched (KU) was a collaboration by libraries all over the world who work together to finance making academic books freely available to all users, regardless of their location. A pilot was launched in 2013 as a “proof of concept” exercise to gauge the willingness of libraries and publishers to support such a collective approach. Several well-established HSS publishers participated, and thanks to the collaboration of libraries worldwide, 28 new HSS books were made available OA at that time. Since then, a total of six pledging rounds have been realised and alongside the purely quantitative expansion, the model has also undergone considerable qualitative development.

Objective In order to achieve KU’s entrepreneurial goal of making as much HSS content as possible available OA, various growth options were evaluated from 2015 onwards — once the model had been established. A central question was the (justified) concern that new models in the library market would be rapidly adopted by a small group of enthusiasts but that the broader acceptance Against the Grain / June 2020

necessary for the successful establishment of such a model might not be present among all stakeholders, particularly in the early phase of KU, when funding within libraries was often taken from special or leftover budgets. In cooperation with libraries and publishers, two approaches have been tested: alongside quantitative growth (i.e., more titles in the respective pledging rounds), KU created a virtual marketplace in order to offer more variety in collections and models. The rationale for this was based on the observation that a strong increase in the number of titles in the core model “KU Select” would almost inevitably lead to a greater segregation among participating libraries. It was clear that the funds made available for OA monographs would not be enough to even begin to finance the range of titles that publishers could offer. At the same time, it was assumed that the larger academic institutions would probably be those most willing and economically able to support several simultaneous offers. It also became apparent early on that packages with little differentiation (i.e., numerous publishers contributing titles from a wide range of disciplines to an overall package) would be of limited relevance. This followed the insight that libraries would not completely change their decision-making and acquisition behavior in a short time, even if this were now to take the form of a funding commitment for OA content. Parallel discussions with publishers revealed that they often had an interest in “opening” certain disciplines more than others. This was primarily due to publishing strategies and pressure from editorial boards and authors. Thanks to the cooperation with Language Science Press (LSP) in 2017, KU was able to test, at an early stage, an entire publishing program that could be offered OA. This case study with LSP, KU’s first publishing partner, proved to be a pioneer that would lead to various other models. As of 2019, 15 different partner models have been introduced by KU and libraries worldwide, based on a variety of approaches.

Marketplace as a Core Strategy The concept of a marketplace for OA models also includes other components, however. There was an early strategic goal to be able to finance HSS journals via KU similar to the way in which the Open Library of Humanities works. It was clear, though, that such a model would require a significant departure from the APC model prevalent in the STEM field, which had developed under very different funding conditions. In addition, early discussions with providers of OA infrastructures showed that these also had funding requirements which could additionally be built into the marketplace idea where appropriate. continued on page 62

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Stop, Look, Listen from page 61 In the further development of KU into an OA marketplace, it was paramount that the core mission of KU, namely the collaboration of institutions worldwide, should not change. On the contrary, this key element of the model, namely the role of librarians in the selection of content, should be further strengthened.

Eight Lessons from Eight Years The intensive work with OA and the systematic development of test cases has helped KU to draw some key lessons for its endeavours in a rapidly developing and changing environment of scholarly publishing: 1. Community Action Works — According to the classic schools of business administration, it is by no means a given that collective action by stakeholders around the world can function in a coordinated manner. Obviously, there are several coordination issues, but KU has proven that over 600 libraries and more than 100 publishers worldwide can create a stable ecosystem that has enabled the financing of around 2,000 OA books and 46 journals to date. The collective funding over the last eight years amounts to approximately ten million euros. On both the supply and the demand side, there has been a high proportion of participants in several pledging rounds. The participation of libraries today is just as much driven by the individual profile of the institution as is the case with the traditional acquisition of paid content — a clear difference from the early days when institutions were often driven more by idealistic reasons to participate rather than investing in content relevant for their researchers. 2. Open Access is Multilingual — The model started as an initiative for purely English-language monographs, but it has since grown to include German and French language content, which libraries have been able to fund via KU. There were initial concerns that the far smaller number of libraries interested in non-English content would not be enough to raise the level of funding necessary for books in other languages, but it has been proven that such a goal can also be achievable. With packages such as the political science program of the German publisher transcript, or with the OpenEdition initiative in France, successful non-English-language models have launched. In the case of transcript, it has even been possible to renew the model in the following years and thus to establish a longer-term sustainable publishing model. 3. Ongoing Specialization — At the same time, the example of the original KU model (which today goes by the name “KU Select”) shows that models with broader thematic content are also undergoing changes and becoming more specialized. Last year, for example, the collection was already streamlined to primarily include titles from those disciplines with a high degree of usage — a decision unanimously welcomed by librarians. Increased specialization should also help institutions to more easily flip their current holdings and to reduce complexity in the face of greater demand. 4. Growing Importance of Proof of Success — Faced with a growing range of OA initiatives and products, it can be observed that libraries are significantly more interested 62 Against the Grain / June 2020

in seeing measurable effects than in the early days. While support for some initiatives was first motivated by a high degree of idealism and political goodwill, institutionally funded OA is increasingly developing into a form of acquisition that must be able to compete with other models. This poses certain challenges for OA providers, especially with an access model where decentralized storage and use of content is an integral part of the approach. Obviously, users of such OA models do not have to use an institutional (and thus easily measurable) access route to the content, meaning that proof of use within the IP range of an institution alone is of limited value. It can be observed that libraries — as well as publishers — often make their decisions regarding the support of OA collections or the publication of content based on usage and citation statistics. With the portal KU Open Analytics, there is now a solution that consolidates the usage from almost two dozen platforms and can provide valuable insight into the use of open content. The data can also include location-based usage from outside of the institutional IP range. 5. Hosting Gains in Importance — The decentralized structures inherent in OA are increasingly reaching their limits, as the example of usage reporting above shows. In view of the growing amount of openly available content and the need for a minimum level of efficiency and thus organization, this decentralization is coming under increasing pressure. KU’s surveys of libraries suggested at the start of 2019 that a common hosting platform for OA content (at least for books) would be desirable. The Open Research Library (www.openreserachlibrary.org), which has been online since the middle of last year, is KU’s reaction to this wish. 6. Timing is Central — KU has made several attempts over the past few years to identify the optimal time for the launch of its offers — and to accomplish this in a global context in which budget years and practices vary significantly. Not surprisingly, the optimal timeframe fits into the traditional ordering behavior of libraries worldwide. Attempts by publishers to offer products to the market at a later or earlier date have so far seen limited success. It therefore seems advisable to launch new products in the second quarter of the calendar year in order to secure financing in the following two quarters. 7. Collaboration with Trade Partners Yields Mixed Results — KU has been working with resellers since 2016, and the number of trade partners is now into double figures and growing. While it could be assumed that such partners would generally be very important intermediaries in institutional OA, experience so far has been mixed. Some resellers, especially in the German-speaking countries, have proven to be highly useful partners due to their customer knowledge and sales expertise, while others have proven to be more of a distraction from efficient processes. The dependence on individual resellers by libraries is often high, but the institutional knowledge of the book trade about OA is usually limited. 8. Different Access Models for STEM Books — In KU’s experience, OA books from the STEM disciplines seem to fall more in line with the practices of the APC-based journal business. Decision-making processes within institutions continued on page 64

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Oregon Trails — RIP – He Liked To Read Column Editor: Thomas W. Leonhardt (Retired, Eugene, OR 97404) <oskibear70@gmail.com>

eing of a certain age, I’ve taken to reading the local obituaries. I find myself interested less in what people did for a living than what they did for fun and relaxation, especially in retirement. The typical, often-occurring activities include, attending athletic events, golfing, traveling, camping, gardening, baking, and bowling. I’ll see almost everything imaginable but rarely do I see any reference to reading and none at all to books. And then that rare occurrence, interspersed among other activities — “She liked to read.” What better endorsement for a life well led! But is it? Reading seems a simple skill learned so early in life that it may be taken for granted and not even thought of as a skill. But reading is more than a skill; it is a knowledge-foundation on which we build other skills. Language is the real foundation but books and journals — the written and printed word — is the permanent record of humankind’s accomplishments and wonderments. Fiction, too, plays an important a role in our well-being as a species. And reading is much more than this because it is such a personal pursuit that it can be a spiritual, mystical, transformative experience. She liked to read? What does that mean? Read what? Reading matter comes in a myriad of forms — newspapers, magazines, political flyers, advertisements imposed on any and every available surface, cereal boxes, and even digitally produced words that appear on my computer screen. And books. When I think of reading, I think of books, so when I see, that is, read, that some recently deceased person liked to read, I become curious about what she liked to read. It doesn’t matter, some would say, and at one level (reading is better than vegetating before a flickering screen), it doesn’t, but I want to know more about the person’s intellectual interests that spurred the interest in reading. If the obituary author is not a reader, then someone who reads only the daily newspaper would be a reader by comparison. My father, in that sense, was a reader back when morning and afternoon papers were delivered to our house (he subscribed to both). He did have a small collection of books that followed him wherever the Army sent him — Lee’s Lieutenants, The Foxes of Harrow, Kitty Foyle, Apartment in Athens, and some whose titles I’ve forgotten — and yet I never saw him reading a book. I would not call my dad a reader. I don’t know what he thought about my reading habit of seventy plus years, a habit I have never tried to break, but I can hear my mother even now complaining that I always had my nose in a book. Not true, but I did read a lot and thus stood out in my family. In my defense, I was always among the first to turn out for a pickup baseball game. And I didn’t forgo a dance at the teen club to finish the Studs Lonigan trilogy. You don’t have to be a hermit to like reading. An obituary that merely mentions reading is not enough. In fact, the more I think about it, the less I want my relationship with reading and books reduced to “He liked to read.” As Nero Wolfe would say, “Pfui!!” There’s more to it than that. My obituary would need to be at least the length of a chapbook to express my long-term relationship to the printed word,

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especially on the pages of books going back to the time my parents invested in a set of books, sixteen slim volumes still in my possession, that began with nursery rhymes and folk tales and that ended with excerpts from established children’s books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My father was overseas or in distant Army bases during the first seven years of my life but I have a faint image of him reading about Goldilocks, the Three Billy Goats Gruff, and the Tale of Peter Rabbit. By the time kindergarten came, I was feeling an urge to read the stories myself. Because the illustrations accompanying all of the stories were so inviting, I was especially eager to read the stories that my father had not read to me. My chapbook reading biography includes my gratitude for the Dick and Jane readers for giving me the confidence to advance to comic books that when read aloud, impressed relatives at family reunions. My chapbook would have to include my affinity for and use of Army Post Libraries and school libraries from California and Alaska to Germany, both as a dependent and as a soldier. I knew that people bought books because my grandmother would send me Whitman reprints of Tom Sawyer and others, straight out of a dime store, but it never occurred to me to buy a book, even one costing only a quarter because a quarter would buy a comic book, two candy bars, and a Coke. Besides, the libraries that I had access to had more books than the dime store. Of the hundreds of books I have read, I can see patterns that reflect a phase of my life. Interests come and go and they came and went. I am no longer interested in reading disorders, not enough to read about them, or about psycholinguistics and deep structure, although there was a time I thought it was the most fascinating subject I’d ever come across. There would have to be a section about German literature in the original and how certain books had me thinking in German by the time I’d finished them: Buddenbrooks; Die Zauberberg; Die Blechtrommel; Die Blendung; and Berlin: Alexanderplatz. These are lengthy novels that transported me far beyond the realm of liking to read. Reading begets re-reading begets multiple editions of books: The Grapes of Wrath (6 ); Two Years Before the Mast (9 ); Casuals of the Sea (10 ); and Parnassus on Wheels (7). There are several other books and authors that I keep on my shelves to re-read as the mood strikes me, authors who have become old friends: W.W. Jacobs, John Steinbeck, William McFee, Frank Waters, Christopher Morley, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Wright Morris, the only one of my favorites I was privileged to meet and have supper with. I did have lunch with Lawrence Ferlinhetti and I do like A Coney Island of the Mind, but I don’t rank him with the others. I do, however, own a copy of The Portable Beat Reader that contains 19 pages dedicated to the still-living owner of City Lights Bookstore. continued on page 64

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And They Were There from page 60

Stop, Look, Listen from page 62 and the willingness of publishers to make significant titles from their programs available via cooperative models seem less suitable for institutional funding models. Although KU has been able to report some positive cases, the cost-benefit ratio in general does not seem to be reasonable.

Outlook Open Access models for monographs have developed dynamically and, in terms of results, very positively since KU’s foundation. Numerous stakeholders and research funding agencies continue to look for ways to further develop institutionally funded OA. The basis for this positive development has been the willingness and ability of all participants to continually make necessary adjustments to its implementation. Institutional OA is thus developing very successfully, but it requires a much higher degree of adaptability compared with other business and access models within scientific publishing. It is to be expected that OA offers such as those from KU will continue to develop in popularity, both from the demand and the supply side. Many publishers are actively interested in expanding the number of titles openly available to users everywhere and have largely overcome their initial concerns. In order to increase the share of OA books in the output of publishers in a timely and reliable manner, the sustainability of reliable financing is crucial. Publishers must ensure that they consider — and fulfil — the growing service requirements of libraries, who now see OA content as a normal part of their service, and thus as an integral part of their acquisition and financing structure.

References Fund, Sven; Mosterd, Max; Godek, Piotr (2019): Open Access Monographs in the UK: A data analysis, Berlin, retrieved 2020-03-22, https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2019/Fullstopp-Final-October-2019.pdf. Montgomery, Lucy (2014): Knowledge Unlatched: A Global Library Consortium for Funding Open Access Scholarly Books, in: Journal of Cultural Science, Vol. 7, No, 2, pp. 1-28.

Oregon Trails from page 63 In Black Boy by Richard Wright, there’s a telling exchange: “Boy, are you reading for the law? My aunt would demand. “No.” “Then why are you reading all the time?” “I like to.” If you read the entire Black Boy, you will discover that Wright’s “I like to read” is more than that. Reading allows Wright to begin a new life, a life of the mind, a writer’s life. Contrast Wright, with an unnamed associate of A. Edward Newton as described in The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections: 64 Against the Grain / June 2020

The Sun Shining in the Middle of the Night: How Moving Beyond IP Authentication Does Not Spoil the Fun, Ease, or Privacy of Accessing Library Resources — Presented by Andrew Nagy (EBSCO), Michelle Colquitt (Gwinnett Technical College Library) — https://sched.co/UZSC Reported by John Banionis (Villanova University) <john.banionis@villanova.edu> This session opened with Nagy providing an overview of OpenAthens, which instead of anonymous IP-based authentication leverages an identity-based SAML solution, allowing for usage data collection categorized by defined user groups. Single Sign-On (SSO) adoption was the primary goal of the NISO working group RA21, now followed by the successor NISO working group called Seamless Access. Colquitt discussed her experience in leading the transition to OpenAthens at Gwinnett Technical College as an initiative of the GALILEO consortium. Preparations ran from August to December 2018, including a GALILEO Local Resources Integration, Alma integrations, and continuous communications to the user community, ultimately resulting in a smooth transition at the end of December. OpenAthens has provided additional reporting functionality, though per GALILEO standards, only minimal user attributes were shared with vendors by default unless the additional data was to be used for local reporting customizations. Colquitt’s successful experience with launching OpenAthens at Gwinnett Technical College also led her to a new position as Resource Management Librarian at Georgia Gwinnett College. (The session’s slides can be found in Sched.) That’s all the reports we have room for in this issue. Watch for more reports from the 2019 Charleston Conference in upcoming issues of Against the Grain. Presentation material (PowerPoint slides, handouts) and taped session links from many of the 2019 sessions are available online. Visit the Conference Website at www.charlestonlibraryconference.com. — KS

“I asked a man what he did with his leisure, and his reply was, ‘I play cards. I used to read a good deal but I wanted something to occupy my mind, so I took to cards.’ It was a disconcerting answer.” Yes, a disconcerting answer but one that suggests that playing cards in the society of others is superior to sitting home alone in your favorite chair, a soft lamp illuminating the pages of your book and you far away in some world of another person’s making. I suggest, and I know without doubt, that I am not alone, that there is room in our lives to participate in society and enjoy it without surrendering a private, rich, inner life of reading. So if the author of your obituary doesn’t know and really couldn’t know what moves you to read and what reading moves you and stimulates you and provides you solace when nothing else does, it seems okay to state: “He liked to read.” <http://www.against-the-grain.com>

Biz of Digital — Case Study: Librarians as Interdisciplinary Digital Research Project Partners An Overview of Recently Established and Emerging Digital Research Projects and Support Services Led and Implemented by the Rowan University Libraries by Benjamin Saracco (Research and Digital Services Librarian and Managing Editor: Cooper Rowan Medical Journal, Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, One Cooper Plaza, Camden, NJ 08103; Phone: 856-342-2522; Fax: 856-342-9588) <saracco-benjamin@cooperhealth.edu> <saracco@rowan.edu> and Shilpa Rele (Scholarly Communication & Data Curation Librarian, Rowan University, Keith & Shirley Campbell Library, 201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, NJ 08028; Phone: 856-256-4970) <rele@rowan.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>

owan University has seen rapid expansion over the last decade and has grown from a state teachers college to a Carnegie-classified national doctoral research institution. Rowan University started the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University (CMSRU) in 2012 and merged the Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine (SOM) in 2013 and is one of only three institutions in the nation that grant both M.D. and D.O. medical degrees. Due to this merger and growth in the University’s research portfolio, Rowan University earned R3 research status in 2017. One year later, the University was designated as an R2 institution. At the same time, the University has seen tremendous growth in student enrollment, which reached more than 19,618 in Fall 2019, new faculty hires (176 within the last five years) and expansion of graduate programs. Sponsored research funding grew significantly as well during this time to $5.6 million in 2010 to $39.5 million in 2018. With this tremendous increase in enrollment, research, faculty, and additional campuses, the Rowan University Libraries (RUL) has faced a proportional increase in demand for digital research project collaborations and new research support services from the university community. In 2015, RUL wisely established an institutional repository (IR), called “Rowan Digital Works,” by subscribing to the Bepress Digital Commons platform to provide open access to the increased research, scholarly, and creative outputs at the University. This repository includes peer-reviewed scholarship, open educational resources, faculty post-prints, graduate student publications, electronic theses and dissertations, conferences, events, and symposia proceedings. A committee that includes representatives from all three libraries, as well as a representative from the Division of University Research (DUR), guides the activities related to the IR. This committee has created a place for librarians of different professional backgrounds at the University to stay informed on new scholarly communications-related services available to the faculty and students with whom they interact. A key goal for the University libraries is for all its librarians, no matter their subject specialty or assigned campus, to have a core competency in the area of providing basic scholarly communications support to their patrons. This is a trend that has been reported and written about at other academic libraries as well.1

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The collaboration with the DUR on the IR committee has been particularly significant as it has informed our decision to make the creation of researcher profiles a requirement for all internal grant funding application opportunities. Not only has this led to increased faculty engagement with the IR and highlighted scholarly activity on campus, the researcher profiles have proven useful for faculty and the DUR to discover collaborations across departments and disciplines. An additional example of the value of these researcher profiles is the ability of the medical students at CMSRU to utilize them to identify faculty research mentors for their required capstone projects. Another fruitful collaboration with the DUR has been the use of the IR’s journal hosting features, such as managing the backend submission workflows to running internal seed funding programs for faculty on both the Glassboro and Camden campuses. This collaboration has helped the DUR centralize the seed funding application workflows and track applicants and submissions over time in one system. The varied use cases of this University resource have grown substantially due to the fact that the University Libraries have actively marketed it to new faculty at events like New Faculty Orientation and University research-related events. The IR was also highlighted as an important resource in the Middle States Accreditation Report for the campus community. The addition of new materials and services over the past few years resulted in one million downloads last fall, an achievement that RUL celebrated with the campus community. RUL also established a Digital Initiatives Working Group with the goal of making strategic decisions to enable the implementation of digital projects in a more systematic and efficient manner and to allow for flexible and collaborative work across departments within the libraries. One project established by the Digital Initiative Working Group is a strategic digital collections development decision to segregate purely scholarly materials, such as journal articles, datasets, and symposia held in the IR, from digital assets used by digital social science, humanities, and natural science faculty and historians. The working group identified and implemented a new Islandora-powered digital asset management system to manage and provide open access to digitized content, starting with materials from both our Unicontinued on page 66

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Biz of Digital from page 65 versity Archives and Special Collections and faculty projects/ collections. The rationale behind this decision was made for two reasons: 1) We wanted these materials in a system that would be easily connected to the potential New Jersey/Delaware DPLA Hub being established, and we are ensuring that our work is being informed by DPLA metadata standards to make the metadata shareability and discovery processes easier in the long run. 2) We found that Islandora has additional capabilities and features that allow for a better user experience and more efficient abilities to organize and manage digital assets on the backend. With the increased focus on research, the University Libraries also conducted two surveys to identify research data management and digital scholarship needs at the institution. We have made significant progress with the evidence of need collected from both surveys and are currently in the process of implementing services, policies, and infrastructure needed to support those needs. We formed the Research Data Management Working Group, which is comprised of members from the DUR and the Division of Information Resources & Technology (IRT). We secured approval for implementing ORCID and DMPTool, which we plan to roll out to faculty later this Fall, and we are currently advocating for the Open Science Framework to be implemented as well. [ORCID provides unique identifiers for researchers and the DMPTool is used to write data management plans for inclusion in grant applications: orcid.org and dmptool.org.] We are also in the process of beginning discussions with faculty about open scholarship as it pertains to new metrics for evaluating open research, journal selection, data and tools, and the education and training needed to support and raise awareness of the quality and the value of open scholarship. These discussions are being conducted in collaboration with the DUR as open scholarship training and discussions are part of DUR’s new strategic plan. Librarians at Rowan are on the tenure-track, and conducting and collaborating on research and scholarship endeavors is considered a core job responsibility. With the new research infrastructure and groups mentioned above in place and possibly as a result of outreach that has been conducted across the University about these new services, librarians now have the opportunity to play more significant roles as research-collaborators and add value by contributing their expertise and specialized skill sets to the research lifecycle processes. Some examples of this increased involvement include: • Librarians partnering in grant applications that utilize library research infrastructure: Librarians are partnering with faculty from the School of Earth and Environment’s Geology department to build a digital collection of fossils discovered at the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park of Rowan University. This

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digital collection will ensure broader open access to digital images from this collection, which could also be used in K-12 educational efforts and potential collaboration with other fossil archives on grant-funded digital scholarship projects. • Librarians serving on collaborative research teams for projects that involve digital humanities: Another digital project involves librarians being included as collaborators on a Rowan faculty member’s grant-funded oral history project that captures water histories in New Jersey. This project will use Islandora to provide access. • Librarians serving as scholarly publishing partners for University journals: The library’s IR added a new journal publishing platform in order to host and publish University-run peer-reviewed journals. The first example is a faculty and student-run medical journal called The Cooper Rowan Medical Journal (https:// rdw.rowan.edu/crjcsm/). This peer-reviewed publishing project is being used as a possible model for other future IR-hosted journals, some of which are currently being developed at the University. • Librarians assisting research teams with the development of research protocols and systematic review projects: Librarians at CMSRU have created a pilot service where they partner on research teams containing students, faculty, and medical residents for systematic literature review projects. Librarians assist with the creation and registration of research protocols and recommend using the IR for research data management and archiving of resulting publications, if appropriate. In order to further strengthen and expand our digital project and research support services, the RUL plan to raise awareness across campuses via informational sessions and an expanded web presence highlighting our work. We envision cross-training librarian colleagues on providing these services and advocating for future strategic hires to further engage and support in these endeavors. Additionally, librarians have conducted advocacy work in the University to bring attention to the importance and value of these projects and how they can support the University’s overall strategic research mission and goals. In this advocacy work, librarians have communicated with the University’s leadership to highlight how these efforts align with the University’s overall strategic research mission. We believe these partnerships have demonstrated the library’s essential role in furthering the University research enterprise.

Endnotes 1. “Leading Change in the System of Scholarly Communication: A ....” https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16059/17505. Accessed 28 Feb. 2020.

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Optimizing Library Services — Academic Library Response to COVID-19 by Prof. Jennifer Joe (Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Engagement Librarian, University of Toledo, USA) <Jennifer.Joe@UToledo.Edu> Column Editors: Ms. Brittany Haynes (Editorial Assistant, IGI Global) <bhaynes@igi-global.com> and Ms. Lindsay Wertman (Managing Director, IGI Global) <lwertman@igi-global.com> www.igi-global.com Column Editors’ Note: This column features IGI Global contributor Prof. Jennifer Joe, Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Engagement Librarian at the University of Toledo, USA, co-editor of the publication Social Media for Communication and Instruction in Academic Libraries along with Prof. Elisabeth Knight, from Western Kentucky University, USA. — BH & LW

Introduction Serving patrons from a distance is nothing new. There is a large body of literature available showcasing the ways that colleges and universities have adjusted their approach to library services for the good of students who are off campus. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) released the most recent Guidelines for Distance Learning Library Services (which began as the 1990 ACRL Guidelines for Extended Campus Library Services) in 2016, and it states, “The originating institution is responsible for ensuring that the distance learning community has access to library materials equivalent to those provided in on-campus settings” (American Library Association, 2016, n.p.). While attempting to adhere to this guideline, modifications have mostly been small and appropriate in scope for the number of patrons they serve, which depends on the institution. Overall, however, a 2015 survey found that just 54.05% of institutions offer “special classes or training program[s] for distance learning students,” which means many face-to-face programs and methods have not been adapted for the online learner (Primary Research Group, 2015, p. 38). At the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio, USA, where I am the undergraduate engagement librarian, the institution went to a work-from-home plan beginning the week after our Spring Break (March 9-13, 2020). By the end of the week (March 20, 2020), library employees were all working remotely, and our building was closed. We only had a few basic services designed for distance students — electronic resources, LibGuides, reference chat, and email consultations. This abrupt departure from normal clearly required some changes in our approach toward our patrons.

We Are All Online Learning Librarians Even before the decision to shutter the library and the rest of the campus, the administration had decided to shift classes to the online environment. The initial decision was that this would happen on a temporary basis and then it would be reevaluated, but subsequent talks in the administration have resulted in classes being held online through the summer (Whiteside, 2020). Therefore, even before we were working from home, faculty and staff at the university had prepared to meet our students in the online environment. We had reviewed important LibGuide materials; made sure that students were aware that they could reach us via email, chat reference, and social media; and set up Against the Grain / June 2020

our office computers with web conferencing software so that we could conduct synchronous consultations to meet the needs of our patrons. Once we learned that the situation would be more permanent and that we would also be working from home, our preparations shifted slightly. First, we had to test that we had access to everything we would need from home. This gave us unique insight into the challenges that our students faced as they returned to their homes. Connection issues, redundant sign-in requests, and unintuitive paths to accessing materials were suddenly our problems, too. This confirmed what had already been reported in the general literature. For example, a study conducted by Mueller et al. found that of nine eBook platforms studied, no platform achieved a 100% success rate in more than two of the research tasks attempted, and some eBook platforms failed to achieve 100% in any task (2019). Our electronic resources librarian is working diligently to help us with these issues as we find them in our own resources, but some of them are systematic and are out of her control. Finally, some of us also made attempts to teach information literacy in the online environment. In addition to the three librarians who are also instructors at our university and were teaching credit-bearing courses online, I was able to teach a one-shot library session virtually through our learning management system. The class was a Pro Seminar in Anthropology and Sociology. Thanks to a good working relationship with the instructors of record, they felt comfortable allowing me to teach the class online synchronously on the same date that I would have been teaching it in person, March 30th, less than two weeks after the university had shifted to online work. It was optional for the students, but we had a good turnout, leading me to believe that it is something students would benefit from in the future. We also recorded the session for students who were unable to attend. This returns us to the report by Primary Research Group conducted in 2015; we have the technology and capabilities for more comprehensive distance learning efforts. Now that we have heightened demand, it would behoove us to conduct them.

We Are All Scholarly Communication Librarians At the University of Toledo, we have a scholarly communications librarian. Her job includes handling everything related to public access, data sharing, copyright, and the support of new scholarship. In normal times, her job gets many requests, but when one is trying to pivot to online in the middle of the semester, in the middle of an international emergency, these requests were not always going directly to her. Furthermore, if they had gone directly to her, she would have easily become overwhelmed. Therefore, many of us took it upon ourselves to help answer scholarly communications issues in our respective subject areas. I took a question from one of my liaison departments about continued on page 68

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Optimizing Library Services from page 67 format access that turned into coordinating a response from our reserves specialist that would not violate copyright but that would also provide the students with materials that they needed. The response also eventually came to involve our cataloging staff, as they worked through the possibility of individually purchasing eBooks from publishers directly, which is something that had not been done by the university in the past. Other patrons needed access to electronic materials, too, not just faculty. I have navigated many research questions where the best materials for research are locked up in our building right now, helping students find electronic resources that will answer their questions and help them proceed with their work. As I have dealt with these questions, I have also begun managing a list of materials that have become open access in response to the crisis. I am not the only librarian keeping these lists; many librarians outside my institution have been freely sharing lists that they have made themselves, to the point that my list is more like a list of lists. I have also been developing the best ways to express to students how to find these materials; because they are temporarily open access, they typically would not show up in our discovery tool. WorldCat has become a dear friend to me because it can show me if something has an electronic format available. Unfortunately, at least one study has suggested that students are less capable of navigating WorldCat, with Gewritz, Novak, and Parsons finding, “[m]any students appeared to have difficulties interpreting records in [WorldCat Local],” and, as a result, these students were unable to find materials that they could have accessed (2014, p. 119).

We Are All Solo Librarians My colleagues are still available to support me when I have tough questions, but gone are the days when I could just stop by their office. This has led me to work harder, and hopefully smarter, at answering the questions posed by patrons and my liaison units. However, it is reminding me more and more of my previous library position, where I was a solo campus librarian at a regional university campus, 70 miles away from my colleagues working for the same system. It has opened me up to new possibilities, too. Because I am using e-mail and video chat to contact my university colleagues, I am just as likely to ask the same question in a webinar or a listserv; these two methods of information gathering require the same amount of effort, but I also get the added benefit of hearing more diverse opinions, leading to more innovation in my job.

Conclusions The pandemic has made clear position definitions blurry, but it is also identifying the strengths within us all. While we should not be afraid to step outside of our assigned roles when it is necessary for the good of our patrons, we must also recognize when someone else on our team would be better suited for the task and allow them to do the work themselves. During a disaster, self-motivation and cooperation with a team must work together to meet the challenges the library faces. This is, of course, only the response from one academic library. We should and are working together to share best practices. There are already several surveys circulating, asking individuals to share their responses to the crisis. Hopefully, those results will be made available as soon as possible because it will help us plan. 68 Against the Grain / June 2020

As we navigate this new but hopefully temporary normal, we should be planning for two different futures: one where we are able to return to our buildings, and one where we are not. The former will happen eventually, as our students miss our collaborative spaces, our computer access, and yes, even our physical materials, but the latter may last longer than we would like, or it may become necessary again at some future date. We should try to learn from the best practices we are developing today, so that we can use those practices again in the future.

Works Cited American Library Association. (2016). Standards for Distance Learning Library Services. Retrieved from: http://www. ala.org/acrl/standards/guidelinesdistancelearning (Accessed April 14, 2020). Document ID: afcce136-a64c-6094-6de07ad1550814c4 Gewirtz, S. R., Novak, M., and Parsons, J. (2014). Evaluating the Intersection Between WorldCat Local and Student Research. Journal of Web Librarianship, 8(2), 113–124. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/19322909.2014.877312 Mueller, K. L., Valdes, Z., Owens, E., and Williamson, C. (2019). Where’s the EASY Button? Uncovering E-Book Usability. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 59(1), p. 44-65, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/rusq.59.1.7224 Primary Research Group. (2015). The Survey of Library Services for MOOCS, Blended and Distance Learning Programs. Primary Research Group, Inc. Whiteside, B. (2020, April 6). UT, BGSU move all summer classes online. The Blade. Retrieved from https://www. toledoblade.com/local/education/2020/04/06/ut-and-bgsu-moveall-summer-classes-online/stories/20200406076

Recommended Readings Clough, H., and Foley, K. (2019). “Is There Anybody There?”: Engaging With Open University Distance Learners. In J. Joe, and E. Knight (Eds.), Social Media for Communication and Instruction in Academic Libraries (pp. 151-172). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-8097-3.ch010 Cowick, C., and Cowick, J. (2019). Planning for a Disaster: Effective Emergency Management in the 21st Century. In I. Management Association (Ed.), Emergency and Disaster Management: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (pp. 142-163). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-15225-6195-8.ch008 Dixon, J., and Abashian, N. (2018). Beyond the Collection: Emergency Planning for Public and Staff Safety. In I. Management Association (Ed.), Library Science and Administration: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (pp. 14941514). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-52253914-8.ch070 Mabe, M., and Ashley, E. A. (2017). Emergency Preparation for the Library and Librarian. In The Developing Role of Public Libraries in Emergency Management: Emerging Research and Opportunities (pp. 61-78). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-2196-9.ch005 Tolman, S., Dunbar, M., Slone, K. B., Grimes, A., and Trautman, C. A. (2020). The Transition From Teaching F2F to Online. In L. Kyei-Blankson, E. Ntuli, and J. Blankson (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Creating Meaningful Experiences in Online Courses (pp. 67-84). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-0115-3.ch006 continued on page 76

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Considering Games in Libraries and Such — Zoom-AZooma Head Shots: In Virtual and In The Real Column Editor: Jared Alexander Seay (Media & Services Coordinator, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424; Phone: 843-953-1428) <seayj@cofc.edu> blogs.cofc.edu/seayj Column Editor’s Note: In the distant future (just before we succumb to our robot overlords) the irony of starting out a column talking about a Netflix series during a time of severe “shelter in place” will be lost on readers. So, while this irony is currently fresh and relevant in your minds, I am going to roll with it. — JAS

n the future science fiction world of the Netflix series Altered Carbon, in which the virtual world is every bit as realistic as the real one, the characters distinguish between the two by referring to the real world as being in the real. During this time of pandemic exile, we have reached the point now where we too need to start distinguishing between working in virtual and working in the real. Before this pandemic forced me to do so, I had very little idea of the whole video conferencing thing. I had been in Skype interviews and meetings before, but it was still in my peripheral vision as something the “with it folk” were into. But it did not figure prominently in my world. Golly, what a difference a pandemic makes. Now everyone is a Zoom veteran. Indeed, I think that the iconic symbol of this pandemic, at least for the work-fromhome crowd, will be Zoom. My dreams are even populated with images of people talking to me from multiple little boxes, Brady Bunch style, splayed across my dream vision screen. As far as a way of having meetings, I actually kind of like it. In fact, in keeping (at least microscopically) with the theme of this column, I have created a kind of game for myself while in these virtual meetings in which I try to gauge the mood and motivations of the meeting participants while closely observing their expressions, dress and backgrounds. Zoom meetings seem especially conducive to this. For one thing it seems I can more easily gauge the mood of each person in the meeting by actually staring into each person’s face for extended periods of time, without them knowing it. Now, once you get beyond the creepy sound of that last sentence, there is a certain value in this. Work with me for a minute. Against the Grain / June 2020

In a normal face-meeting one’s vision is of course focused on the speaker. Indeed, in these table meetings in the real, other than the purpose of giving another meeting member a knowing nod, it is socially forbidden to stare into the eyes of any other person for very long. It’s just weird, and besides, except for your colleagues sitting directly across the table from you, the only view you get of most people is some angle on the side of their head. Well, not anymore. Now that we have the Brady Bunch style meetings, with everyone’s thumbnail video image stacked up and spread out across the screen, one can see each one of their colleagues face-on. Everyone is literally staring into each other’s eyes. Of course, this staring is not in the real, so though everyone sees each other, no one can see who is looking at who. This allows the interesting pastime of carefully studying each person in the meeting in detail, including their facial cues and fashion choices. In fact, one can often get insight as to whether the person in their little thumbnail video has really thought about how they are being perceived. Some people have their face right up into the camera, giving an almost fisheye look to their image. Such people are either keen to have their presence right in there, or they have trouble gauging camera distance. Then there are those who apparently do not particularly care if they are fully in the field of view. The most common symptom being the “eyes above the horizon” look, with the head stuck to the bottom of the frame and only visible from the chin or nose up. In a meeting in which you can see yourself for the whole meeting (literally like looking into a mirror) I do not understand why one would want to appear with only part of their head visible, like the top of a carrot sticking out of the ground. But perhaps they cannot be bothered by such vain considerations, no more than they think twice about their background. Ah, the background. This is perhaps the most interesting component of these “virtual” meetings in that it affords the novelty of seeing all of your colleagues in

their home world — usually their kitchen, living room and even bedroom. It is intriguing to get a glimpse of the home environment of people you have worked with for years and have never seen outside of the office. I spend entire meetings meticulously taking in the backgrounds of doors, windows, nik naks, paintings, photos, furniture and even children milling about. Of course, some folks short circuit my intense observations by placing themselves against a blank wall, giving them a neutral, sterile look that gives the appearance of broadcasting from a prison cell. Some just throw up a headshot picture and be done with it. Then there are those of a sweeping fantasy mind that do the green screen thing of giving themselves an exotic digital background of outer space or a tropical island. I am always looking for the imaginative person who gives themselves the digital background of a broom closet. How exotic would that be? Though no one combination of camera placement and background is superior, I like to think that each one says something about the personality of each person or at least how they are feeling. As for me, I am never satisfied about how I look on camera. Like most people, I do not like the way I look on camera anyway, so I try to compensate by being particularly careful of my environment. Coming from a background in theater and video and possessing loads of self-conscious vanity (and with my mind always on posterity), I am deliberately cognizant of how I appear on camera. Though I cannot really do much about my appearance (my genetics, alas, are mostly unalterable, despite my best efforts), I can change my background with ease. I have thus carefully constructed a “set” with lights and a black hanging curtain backdrop that gives little or no indication of the actual interior of my house. I try to give myself that headshot, interview look with a professional background. This makes it appear that I might have something witty or important to say, even if my actual statements during a meeting belie that impression. continued on page 85

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Library Analytics: Shaping the Future — Inspec: Precision Analytics for Research Excellence Upcycling, Innovation, Relevance and Renewal: How Analytics Transformed our Business by Vincent Cassidy (Head of Academic Markets, the Institution of Engineering and Technology) <VCassidy@theiet.org> Column Editors: John McDonald (EBSCO Information Services) <johnmcdonald@ebsco.com> and Stephanie S. Buck (EBSCO Information Services) <ssbuck@ebsco.com>

s the process of scholarly communications continues 3,500 classification codes in a 5-tier structure, allows the highly to reshape itself with pace, it can often seem that those structured Inspec records to be discovered precisely and accubest placed to respond to the new opportunities require rately. Inspec is available across a range of platforms including a rare mix of size, agility, technology and, often, a singular EBSCOhost, Elsevier’s Engineering Village, Clarivate’s Web purpose. We can see this borne out, both in the strategic plays of Science, ProQuest’s Dialog and Wolters Kluwer’s OVID, of big corporations and their leverage of scale and technology as well as the IET’s own Inspec Direct. to innovate new solutions and services, as much as we can see it in the proliferation of start-ups and micro-businesses, often springing from the research communities themselves. But what of learned societies? How are learned societies faring? Do they have the scale, the agility or the strategic intent? Learned societies can often appear to be slow to respond, with complex governance and multiple stakeholder interests. For a learned society, the pace and rate of change and the singularity needed to respond to it can be daunting, and can challenge the identity and the mission of the organisations themselves. The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has geared up to respond to changes in research literature discovery behaviours. It has reinvigorated its Inspec A&I service with Inspec Analytics, an insight and analytics soluInspec’s Precision Discovery Connecting Two Records Across 50 years tion, and it has effectively reinvented itself as a 150-year-old start-up. This has been done by focussing on users Over the last ten years, however, changes in user behaviour, and workflows, re-engineering key processes and embedding largely driven by the emergence of “good-enough” free-to-air an agile project methodology. Most importantly, and critically, scholarly search alternatives, and an increased preference for we have invested considerable time and effort in revisiting our full-text library discovery services have led to declining usage partnerships with librarians and platform hosts, and engaging of A&I resources in our core research market. In turn, some of them in our change process. What follows is a brief account our library partners, increasingly requiring return on investment of how the IET has embraced the challenges in the changing evidence to justify subscription commitments, reluctantly canprocess of scholarly discourse and how this is changing the way celled long-held institutional access to Inspec. From 2014 this our organisation approaches new projects. had become a noticeable and worrying trend for Inspec, and Before reviewing the project, first a little context. The IET, unique searches declined by around 30% between 2010 and 2017. celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2021, is the world’s leading The IET has long had strong partnerships with libraries and inter- and multi-disciplinary engineering institution with over universities, and over the last three years we have been working 168k members around the world in 150 countries. We aim to with a group of librarians around the world to understand the deliver on our mission to ‘engineer a better world’ by supporting dynamic of declining usage, seeking a better appreciation of the engineers and researchers in their education, training, certifica- relative value of the “good-enough” alternatives, and looking to tion and professional development, including the publication identify new uses for our high quality structured data. Partnering of research journals, books, proceedings and Inspec. In terms with libraries to explore “upcycling” opportunities in the expandof scholarly publishing output we are a mid-size learned and ing workspace around scholarly communication reminded us of professional society, with the accent on professional. the shared goals and shared DNA we have. Research libraries Inspec is a jewel in the IET’s crown, covering a broad water- and societies are mission driven and independent, connecting front of research output across the physical sciences, engineering people and communities and we have been refreshed to see this and computing comprising over 19m records from journals, shared purpose reflected in our Inspec Analytics project. We proceedings, books and pre-print services. Our domain experts are appreciative that our colleagues from the library community curate around 900k new items a year sourced from over 200 pub- were willing to back up their clear understanding of the value of lishers, and our application of 10,000 controlled terms and over continued on page 71 70 Against the Grain / June 2020

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Library Analytics: Shaping the Future from page 70 curated and structured data by supporting its development into insight and impact tools. Our library advocates provided invaluable insights into the segmentation of user types within the university or corporation that they support, helping to set up interviews and work-shadow sessions, engagement in the development of proofs of concepts and prototypes and, critically, facilitating trials and demonstrations. Partnering with librarians helped the introduction of open, agile project working and has transformed our organisation. It has helped to bring users and their workflow into sharp focus, reminding us that our first objective is to understand our users in the context of their work and, to paraphrase our mission statement, to engineer better research outcomes. Identifying real-world problems, use cases and personas has helped us to identify new value propositions and re-engineer our production process. The agile process worked particularly well for the development of Inspec Analytics as it is a visual analytics application that uses a large amount of high-quality legacy data. We were able to interview users to understand their pain points and key business needs, demonstrate the development progress, and they could specify which additional data points would be most valuable to them. For example, when we demonstrated a feature showing how many articles an organisation had authored on a particular subject, customers specified it would be very useful to see lists of authors who had published those articles. As we already had the data, we were able to modify our roadmap based on customer feedback to add this feature and implement it within a few sprints â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and customers were very pleased with the response. Our partners have also brought important insights into the project. Elsevierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Engineering Village team has helped to identify key user journeys, allowing the visualisation of data on Inspec Analytics to trigger searches back into the Engineering Village platform. Inspec users can now move between Inspec and Inspec Anaytics within the Engineering Village platform. Our EBSCO colleagues have opened doors into the library community and collaborated with us on researcher communications and usage campaigns and EBSCOhost provides a gateway to Inspec Analytics encouraging customer access.

Launched in Spring 2019, Inspec Analytics is available to all Inspec subscribers, adding precision insights and impact analysis to the traditional A&I proposition. The semantic enrichment of the Inspec article records (bibliometrics, affiliations, authors, journals, concepts and keywords) has created a knowledge base of billions of data points that can now be related in response to specific user needs, deriving new value and up-cycling 50 years of curated data. Now, researchers can monitor global trends in their field, compare emerging topics and find the most relevant journals to consider publishing in. Libraries can monitor the research output of their institution and evaluate resources in line with growing and declining areas. Inspec Analytics provides insights to allows senior teams to compare their institution with collaborators and competitors to set valuable benchmarks, monitor research output to evaluate strategies and find collaboration opportunities to support research impact.

We continue to receive positive support from our library contacts who appreciate the opportunity to provide impact assessment tools across the organisation and particularly into the hands of those making strategic budget decisions, all within their current Inspec subscription. Furthermore, we are delighted to have been awarded the Best New Product or Service award from The Charleston Advisor in October 2019. More importantly, as well as transforming the use of Inspecâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s data, the introduction of Inspec Analytics is also increasing the use of the Inspec database. From September of 2019, usage of both Inspec and Inspec Analytics has improved month to month, with usage of Inspec up by 300% on prior year. Usage of Inspec is now back at peak levels, in some instances, showing that there is a full and rich life for A&I datasets beyond pure discovery. The investment in quality and in the specialist curation of Inspec data over 50 years is now reaping dividends in a research environment seeking reliable, authoritative and verifiable sources that can be trusted. We are now planning the next phase of our developments for Inspec, including adding additional datasets to complement the Inspec data, and we look forward to working with our users, customers, information professionals and platform partners alike to help transform the landscape of research communications and engineer better research outcomes. EBSCOhost Provides a Gateway to Inspec Analytics Encouraging Customer Access

Against the Grain / June 2020

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The Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Alex Lazinica, CEO, Underline Science, Inc. Column Editor: Darrell W. Gunter (President & CEO, Gunter Media Group) <d.gunter@guntermediagroup.com> Column Editor’s Note: I am very pleased to be part of the ATG family with the introduction of my column titled, “The Innovator’s Saga.” I chose this title as the innovator’s work is never complete; it is truly a work in progress. — DG

s technology evolves, the innovator must balance many choices to ensure that his/her business remains an ongoing concern. Our mission is to highlight those individuals and companies that “put it on the line” every day to improve the critical path of scholarly research. Our stories will include both the success stories and the “lessons learned” stories. I look forward to your feedback and comments, both good and constructive, as our goal is to provide you, our reader, with the best and latest information on the innovators. Our inaugural column focuses on a gentleman who has established the world’s largest open access book publishing house, IntechOpen (https://www.intechopen.com/). Now he has launched the world’s first streaming of livestream and virtual content repository for scientific conferences, Underline Science, Inc. (https://www.underline.io/). DG: Alex, can you share with our audience a little bit about your experience, knowledge, background and education, which is quite fascinating? AL: I graduated from an engineering school in Croatia. I’m of Croatian origin. After graduation, I went to do the Ph.D. studies at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, and I worked there as a robotic and artificial intelligence researcher for six years or something. I spent some time at the EPFL, Lausanne. It’s a quite famous university. I was doing my specialization in multi-robot simulation software. The research I was doing was in the area of multi-robot systems for the manufacturing industry. But, as I was always kind of curious in biology as well, I was researching the behaviors of a flock of birds and a swarm of ants and how to replicate those behaviors in multi-robot systems. Robots were simple as a unit, but as a group they should perform intelligent behaviour. DG: Very Fascinating! AL: Yes, so I was kind of intrigued with engineering and biology as well. It was quite interesting. DG: After that, you decided to launch a company called IntechOpen, but it actually started because you wanted to find a way to communicate and collaborate with other researchers and scholars. Is that correct? AL: Yes. So, you need to understand, it was a quite different time back then. It was really hard for us, you know, to find the high-quality literature which we needed for our studies, for our research. Even though Vienna University of Technology is in Europe, their library has quite a big budget for subscriptions; but, they were struggling as well. And I remember, one time I wanted to get one book from one famous professor from Japan, and then I called my colleague in Tokyo, and then he was photocopying the book and sending it to me via post, you know. Those were the days. 72 Against the Grain / June 2020

So, that was one reason why we started to publish open access. We didn’t even know that it was called “Open Access” or that there was a movement. We just wanted to share our journals and books free of charge with the robotics community. The whole idea started as a hobby project. We were just Ph.D. students, so quite young, and we wanted to connect with our peers. You know? It was quite exciting to communicate with famous professors from MIT, Stanford, et cetera. That was the reason. And then the whole robotics community and artificial intelligence accepted our open access idea; so, I decided to leave academia and then to try, you know, entrepreneurial life. DG: Right, and that launched IntechOpen which is now the world’s largest open access book publisher. AL: Well, we didn’t start from a garage, but, yes, from a small office at the Robotics Institute at the university. Yes, it was 15 years ago. I was the book editor of our first book, and most of the chapters were written by my colleagues and my friends. At this moment IntechOpen has published almost 5,000 original book titles in all areas of science, technology, and medicine. Yes, it’s quite a successful story, I would say. DG: You have some Nobel Prize winners as authors and editors, correct? AL: Yes, actually, we have three Nobel Prize winners as our authors. Yes, quite exciting, other famous people as well from all over the world. We are strongest in technology, since that was our core discipline. Yes. But, medicine is quite a big field as well. Intech is in Europe, in Croatia, in the UK, in London, in China and has a presence in India and the U.S. It’s a global business and a global company. Most of our authors are from the U.S. and Asia, and that’s quite obvious since most of the research is done in those two parts of the world. DG: And as an entrepreneur, one of the key things that I’ve witnessed over the years, because I’ve gotten to know you since 2016, is that you’re able to hire really talented people to run your operation. What are the criteria that you use to select the people who do such a good job for you? AL: I mean, you need to make a lot of mistakes during this journey, you know. The saying is, as you grow, the more I practice, the luckier I get. So, I think that you need to be, I mean, at least that’s for myself, you need to be honest with your people, with your team. You need to inspire them. People need to see that you have honest goals and your vision, and they need to identify with that. It’s a daily job. The job I would say, it’s not easy; but, yes. DG: And at some point, you were publishing both books and journals; but, I think it was in 2017-18, or whatever, you decided to just focus on the book program. AL: I think it was in 2015. DG: Thank you for correcting it.

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The Innovator’s Saga from page 72 AL: Yes. So, our first open access book came from a robotic open access journal. We decided to collect the ten most read journal articles and gave those authors the opportunity to write more on the same topic and create an open access book. And I would like to say that it’s the world’s first scientific open access book; I cannot claim that, but I have a good feeling. DG: I think you’re right! AL: Yes, it came from a need, or coincidence, I can say. During those few years, we figured out that we have a unique value proposal in open access books, and expertise, knowledge and technology. At that time, it was not possible to buy the software for the publishing process to produce books, open access books, so we were kind of forced to make our own system. And now that was all unique, and then we decided strategically to focus on the books and we are the best in the world, yes, so far. DG: That’s great. AL: And SAGE approached us and they acquired our project. DG: And you found a great home for your journals because SAGE is a very reputable publisher. And so you have IntechOpen, a successful business, and then I read an article about your Yellow Submarine gourmet hamburger chain in Europe, which is voted one of the top 50 gourmet hamburgers in Europe. How did you decide on a hamburger franchise for your second business? AL: It started as a hobby project, again. I like to cook a lot, and we used to live for a while in New York, and then I got hooked on one famous organic burger chain. I noticed that in Europe the market is not so crowded with those concepts. And, together with my friend, we started one outlet. I mean, we didn’t know what to expect. But, five years later, we have 150 employees. Yes, it’s a growing chain. DG: And I must say, when I was in Croatia a year ago, I had the opportunity of enjoying a Yellow Submarine gourmet hamburger, and it was delicious, and the service was excellent, and the environment was very funky, in a good way. AL: Yes, yes. I mean, that “Yellow Submarine.” (laughter) DG: Yes, that’s right. The IntechOpen business has opened an office in London, and you have established a very successful gourmet hamburger business. So, what prompted you to take the next step to launch your third business, Underline Science? AL: As you and all of us do, we attend a lot of conferences during our career or life. And I noticed a great lack in this ecosystem, you know, in a way, frustration as well. When you get to the conference, first, you need to get to the conference. You need to have time and money or energy to fight with jet lag, and all of the processes. When you get there, there are always multiple sessions. You need to make a choice about which room to enter and which lecture to attend. When you come back home, there is no platform where you can re-experience the whole event. And that’s kind of frustrating, you know. There is no repository platform where you can just log in and watch the lecture of your favorite colleague, mentor and/or leader from the last conference he or she attended. That’s something we need to change. With today’s technology, this should be easy, doable, and quite manageable. Against the Grain / June 2020

DG: And so Underline Science is a virtual streaming video conference platform that works both in a live environment and a virtual environment. Wow! That is dynamic. So, what you’re saying is that if there’s a concurrent session going on, you’ll be able to attend the live event if you want to, and then catch the other ones pretty much “on demand,” as it streams. AL: Yes, yes. It’s the world’s first live streaming and repository platform custom-made for scientific or academic conferences. We have basically two value proposals, one for the conference organizers and one for scientific societies. We are giving them the possibility, technology, and support to organize online events, which is quite important today, especially in this COVID-19 environment. In the past we have lacked one for end-users — a repository of the most important scientific conferences in their field. Users can watch the lectures from wherever, whenever. Due to the COVID-19 situation, everything is under lockdown. And we have great technology and great features. We are building new features every week. And since we are, in a way, not from that industry, we are thinking out of the box. On the Underline site, when the whole event ends, it all becomes part of the Underline Science repository platform. So, we are hosting and broadcasting the lectures. We are enriching the lectures with the transcriptions, translations, DOI numbers, which we can talk about a bit later on, slides and PowerPoint presentations. You can cite the lecture. You can share it. You can search. You can connect with the speaker, since we know that the community is one important aspect of the conferences in general. We are building the community features on the platform. So, you can read the short biography of the speakers. You can start a collaboration. Yes, it’s quite exciting. We are developing something that’s not seen in this industry, especially, so far. I’m quite excited about that and thankful for my team. DG: Very exciting. And if I understand correctly, you’re transcribing the lectures, which means that they’re searchable. AL: Yes, yes. DG: The demonstration that I saw earlier, you were able to change the language from English to Mandarin, to Spanish, at a click of a button. Tell us about this particular transcription service that you’re using that really translates it at a very high level. AL: Well, we are using machine learning coupled with linguistic experts to build our transcription and translation feature. Yes, it’s quite fascinating to see how you can change the language “on the fly,” and, I mean, with this, I want to say to the world that the language should not be a barrier to science. Science is a global discipline, and we all need to be unified, and our next phase is to work with the conferences which are being presented in the non-English languages, to translate those to English as well. Yes. DG: You’re one of the few publishers that I’ve ever heard to voice that, that you feel that science should not have language as a barrier versus saying that science should be in English, that science should have no barriers. That is awesome, Alex. AL: I mean, that’s a huge problem in today’s world, and I had that problem as well, and you can see it. We need to be more inclusive to all researchers. There are a lot of countries doing great science, but they’re not English-focused. So, you’re... DG: So, Underline Science is capturing conference content which is groundbreaking, simply because before you’d attend a conference and that information was forever lost, or it was just in the minds of the people who attended the conference, but continued on page 74

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The Innovator’s Saga from page 73 that record, that scholarly record, wasn’t shared with anyone. I guess you were shocked that no one was providing this level of service, especially when you think about the larger publishers who have the financial wherewithal to build such things. AL: I mean, the importance of conference lectures is, without any question, very important. It’s not unavoidable, but it’s one of the most important parts of the scholarly communication process in general. And, you know, all the ideas people present and invest a lot of their time and energy to prepare for the lectures, to do the proper presentation, all of that just vanishes after the last day of the conference. You know, there is no platform where you can re-experience that. DG: And what about the poster sessions? AL: That’s something, you know, which needs to be changed. I like to say that the lecture is just another type of information exchange. Like journals, like books, like conference paper proceedings. And with today’s technology, you know, it’s the right time to build the repository which preserves that information for many years to come. With regard to the poster sessions, we are doing that, especially during our online events, you know, it’s an important aspect of the conference for the conference organizers and societies. So, we’re building poster session rooms, virtual ones, yes, but our focus is video lectures. DG: So, your first Livestreaming event for the AAMAS Conference is coming up. AL: Yes, AAMAS is one of the leading AI conferences in the world, and we are quite flattered, again, that they have chosen Underline Science as their partner to do the online event. It means a lot to us, for me especially. I’m a former AI scientist; yes, and to have such a famous and important event as one of our first customers, it shows us that we have a promising future. DG: That’s right. I know you’re excited about Underline Science, but what do you think is the most exciting feature of the platform when you’re talking to a prospective conference or publisher? AL: Yes, I would say, the most exciting features are the ones that are being built. So, let’s keep it, in a way, a tiny secret. DG: Okay. AL: We just started, so what you see now on the platform is our starting position, yes. DG: And when you go to the site, you can see current conferences that have been recorded and see the lectures. AL: Yes, good point, Darrell. So, we are offering to conference organizers the service of filming the lectures at the venues as well. We have our internal team and a network of freelancers all over the world. We can film the conference wherever it is happening, and we did that for a dozen conferences before this crisis. DG: Which is nice. And the profiles of the presenters, it’s very professionally done. So, it looks far better than what we see on other social media platforms or academic platforms. So, congratulations on that. AL: Thank you. We are just now building the new features, as I told you before, so the speakers will have their dedicated pages where they can log in and see the really detailed analytics of their lectures. They can see who is watching their lecture from each country, for how long, how many minutes and they can connect with those as well. And I would like to mention, as 74 Against the Grain / June 2020

well, that we have a Q and A feature so that you, as a viewer, can pose a question to the lecturer, and then the lecturer gets informed through our system, and then they answer your question. That’s really important; then it’s the start of some collaboration as well. DG: Yes, I’m happy you brought that up because you have a team behind the scenes that are actually producing the events. So, the organization putting on the event, they don’t have to worry about introducing people, or moving things around to introduce people, share screens, and all of that. Tell us a little bit more about the Underline Science philosophy and about how to run an effective conference, whether it’s live or if it’s a hybrid. AL: Yes, so we are here to help societies, publishers, or individual conference organizers. So, we are not just giving them the technology. We are giving them the support and knowledge to organize the online event. Through our team, or through technology, or through our marketing services, you know, in the end, it’s the same. We are here to support them. So, together with them, we are building the scripts, really detailed scripts for each day of the live event. We have a professional studio, director, and a professional moderator who is moderating the event. We are focused on the visual identity, the branding of the whole event because it’s important in the end as to how you present your conference. The content is important, but the visual identity is important as well. Our team is coming from the gaming industry, and the professional TV industry, with big show experience. So, they have a lot of knowledge and expertise in doing the live-streaming. DG: Let’s talk about the Coffee Break rooms for people to interact at the virtual conference. AL: Yes, that’s something we are building right now since, as I said, we know that the community is one important aspect of the conference event as well. So, we are now building the feature where people can attend one virtual room and speak informally through video chats. We call it the Coffee Break Room Sessions. DG: Yes, it’s going to be cool. And then to build on that, to help to fund the conference, you are able to build exhibit halls for sponsors where sponsors can demonstrate their services. AL: Yes, we are kind of mimicking the behavior at the conference, the activities which are happening at the conference booths or stands. So, sponsors or exhibitors can have their leaflets, you know. They will have video chats so that they can communicate with the attendees. They can present their products or services through video, through different digital types of communication. So, in a way, the digital world is quite diverse, I would say. You just need to be creative and, yes, you will have amazing products. DG: So, Underline is bringing forth this great platform, and the research community is going to have this new tool, right? This new area of information that they’ve never had before. So, when you mesh the two together, hopefully, it’s going to move scholarly research forward in a more productive way. AL: Well, I hope as well that the future for Underline Science is, I can see it now that it’s promising, it’s exciting for the research community as well. I mean, it’s the new tool, a new platform for scientists, it’s like a new pool of knowledge or information, which did not exist. So, imagine in a few years when we get to more content as well, you know. We are building great stuff, and people are already noticing that, and I’m quite excited. Regards to the... I thought you were asking about the research community in general, yes. continued on page 76

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Squirreling Away: Managing Information Resources & Libraries — Our Grand Intermission: Libraries & Change Management Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan; Phone: 734-764-9969) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman

f you wondered what I was listening to these days, you will the case over the last few years, we have been asked to address likely hear classical music from my two favorite stations.1 If the “Top 3 Things Affecting Your Library.” What I shared might I am not listening to that, it is likely I am listening to Broad- make sense for a broader audience. way on XM or the brilliant cast recording of Hadestown, Anaïs Building a Library for the World We Live in Now Mitchell’s brilliant show that captured the 2019 Tony Award for In thinking about this question, I broke it down into three best musical on its way to a total of eight wins along with 14 nominations. This brilliant re-telling of the tale of Orpheus and terms: Resources, Relevancy and Resiliency. I also want to Eurydice set in a time period that conjures up the image New address one more term, the need to be grounded in Reality. Orleans during the Great Depression. Resources can make or break a library. Resources, very At one point, Orpheus is asked to share a toast to Persephone loosely identified, give the library the fuel they need to run. to welcome her back and celebrate the arrival of Spring (in the These resources include financial resources (needed to grow song titled Livin’ It Up On Top). and acquire collections), personnel resources (needed to provide services and assistance for the community), and space (needed to And if no one takes too much, there will always be enough operate and provide places for students and community members She will always fill our cups to work). If a library is deficient in any of these resources, then And we will always raise them up providing services and information tools to the community is impaired. Larger libraries and smaller libraries have one thing To the world we dream about, in common, neither have enough resources to fully satisfy their And the one we live in now! campus communities. In the world of COVID-19, there are not When I first heard that beautiful turn of phrase, it might as many libraries that will have the people and budget they need to well have been 1,000 years ago. Right now, we definitely find fully support their communities. For librarians who support their ourselves wondering about the world we dream and about the community through print resources, our world has been flipped one we live in now. upside down with the shuttered buildings and the need to close And as our libraries, theaters, stadiums and convention centers face-to-face services. Working through this new world order will remain quiet, we are left to wonder and ponder what the future require libraries and librarians to be creative and collaborative will bring. It is as if we are in a here to bridge the gap. If internationgigantic intermission and we are all al students are not coming to North left wondering when the house lights American universities (especially the will flash to let us know when we can business schools) or students decide return to our seats. It has been weeks to defer a year or two — this could and weeks — we are still wondering. get much, much worse. If there was ever a time to ponder Relevancy stems from the simple change management, maybe it is this question are we providing the retime. Strike that — it is definitely sources and services that our campus the time to think long and hard about community needs. I was thinking what we are doing and what will be about the billions of dollars of print needed of us after get to return to books that are sitting on the shelves normal — or what we think will be of our locked libraries these last 2-3 normal. months. While we will get back into the buildings someday — was If you read my earlier columns, I that the best way to help our camhave broken down change managepus? I also saw a message from a ment into six key terms: inevitabilHatchlings on campus. Not practicing social vendor encouraging the adoption of ity, rapidity, flexibility, hospitality, distancing at Hatcher Library, University of OER textbooks (this is good) with accountability, and empathy. These Michigan (Ann Arbor), April 15, 2020. a purchase of a printed set of the terms are particularly important to use in the context of your institutional culture and identity. freely available 32 volumes for your reserve collection (this is Through these six terms, I was exploring how to best manage bad — especially now). I know why you would want to have a your operation in less than optimal conditions (and let’s face it, print option available — but is this the best use of money for a most libraries are operating in exactly that “place”). I need to library? The desire for us to be the library of old will make us work on hospitality, but given the state of the travel and food less relevant for what our community needs. When all our free service industries, maybe a pause might be in order. Instead, I access to resources dries up this summer — will we be able to want to share some thoughts that I pulled together for my annual help the campus as effectively as they need? report to the Academic Business Library Directors.2 As has been continued on page 76 Against the Grain / June 2020

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Squirreling Away from page 75 Resiliency might actually be the most important here. How do libraries bounce back after this longest term ever in Winter 2020? How do we grow and change to reflect our current world? There are many librarians who see our current situation as something that will be over in due time. But in many ways, this will last longer for institutions in the higher education space. A colleague at the University of Michigan Library astutely pointed out that our austerity will far outlast the public health crisis. This is a complete change in the way that we operate and what we can do. From this event, there will be schools that consolidate, merge, and collapse. From this event, there will be publishers that will do the same. The most important task we have as librarians is to see this not as an event or an episode, but an opportunity to change how we operate and how we interact with our campus and our users. It might not be 100 years until the next pandemic… Reality did not make the initial trio of elements — but it might be the trickiest. Maybe it is my role embedded in the Ross School of Business, but our reality heading into the Fall Term is one that cannot truly be figured out just yet. I was listening to an interview with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who talked about his state’s response to COVID-19 as stone to stone. As you cross the morass, you plant your foot on a stone and wait for it to steady before moving the other leg. Our new reality is one that will forever change our environment and should forever change the way that we think about services for our communities. When we first moved Kresge Library Services to a library without print holdings in 2014, I thought we were 20-30 years ahead of the curve. Now, I think we are less than 5 years. Just as COVID-19 accelerated the demise of many retail and travel entities, I think this will accelerate problems across our environment. The things that we could count on in libraries may not be there for us in the year coming up. So in many ways, we need to raise a toast, “to the world we dream about, and the one we live in now!” We need to see this as two distinct places and act accordingly. While it is great to dream about the 2020 that we all planned to have, in the end, it will not help. We have a new reality and our job is to look forward. Don’t look back, whatever you do. It will not end well for us, as it did not end well for Eurydice. Corey Seeman is the Director, Kresge Library Services at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also the new editor for this column that intends to provide an eclectic exploration of business and management topics relative to the intersection of publishing, librarianship and the information industry. No business degree required! He may be reached at <cseeman@umich.edu> or via twitter at @cseeman.

Endnotes 1. WRCJ-FM (90.9 from Detroit, Michigan) — Classical Days and Jazzy Nights — https://www.wrcjfm.org/ or KBAQ-FM (89.5 from Phoenix, Arizona) — great classical music all day long under the name KBACH — https://kbaq.org/. 2. See ABLD at http://www.abld.org/.

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The Innovator’s Saga from page 74 DG: Yes, I was looking at how this is really going to help the research community to be more effective, to be able to capture more information. As we know, researchers build on each other’s ideas. And having access to this conference information, even poster sessions where it can spur someone’s ideas or enhance someone’s idea, I think it’s going to be extremely valuable. AL: Yes, yes. DG: What closing thoughts would you like to leave with our audience about Underline Science? AL: We all need to work together now towards an open society, connected world, the world in which we are, in a way, leveling the playing field. I always like to emphasize that we, as humankind, we need to build the bridges, not the barriers. And that’s the way to go forward. And that’s easy to say but it’s, yes, it’s not so easy to do, but we at IntechOpen and Underline Science, I’d say it, we are one tiny brick in that bridge. Yes, I would like to conclude with that. DG: That was well said. Build bridges and not barriers. Very profound. Alex, thank you for being our first guest for “The Innovator’s Saga.” AL: Thanks for inviting me.

Optimizing Library Services from page 68 Van Krieken, T., and Pathirage, C. (2019). Factors Affecting Community Empowerment During Disaster Recovery. International Journal of Disaster Response and Emergency Management (IJDREM), 2(1), 15-32. doi:10.4018/IJDREM.2019010102 Column Editors’ End Note: As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to severely impact institutions and libraries as they transition to an online-only environment and serve as emergency response hubs for COVID-19 updates and educational resources, IGI Global continues to actively publish the latest information in library and information science, online education and resources, and more, to better serve institutions, librarians, and their patrons. Well in advance of the increased demand for electronic resources, IGI Global offers all of its research content in electronic format, including e-books and e-journals, all of which are available in IGI Global’s InfoSci-Databases (www.igi-global. com/e-resources/). To learn more about the InfoSci-Databases, or to request a free trial, email IGI Global’s Database Team at <eresources@igi-global.com>. Additionally, learn more about the research surrounding the topics in this article by checking out IGI Global’s Research Trend article “What Is the Role of Libraries During the COVID-19 Pandemic?” at https://bit. ly/3ckQCRd.

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Don’s Conference Notes by Donald T. Hawkins (Freelance Editor and Conference Blogger) <dthawkins@verizon.net>

NISOPlus2020: A New Event on the Information Conference Calendar Column Editor’s Note: Because of space limitations, this is an abridged version of my report on this conference. You can read the full article which includes descriptions of additional sessions at https://against-the-grain.com/2020/06/v32-3-dons-conference-notes/. — DTH

he NISOPlus2020 meeting convened in Baltimore on February 23-25, 2020. Organized by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), it brought together information creators who work with publishers and others who supply content and add value to the user community. A highlight of NISOPlus was the prestigious Miles Conrad Lecture. The meeting was limited to 240 attendees, and it was sold out.

Knowledge is the greatest legacy of human achievement. Brand closed her address by recommending reading The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses (known as the “master builder” of New York City).

Big Data Mark Hahnel, CEO of Figshare,1 said that everything is getting more computational, so we must deal with many file formats. The goals of big data are to find different ways to group it together and mark it up. NIH has mandated open access to research data which will have a major impact because it is the biggest grant funder in the world. Data should be FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. We need to motivate researchers to send their data to publishers so it can be checked and validated. According to Karin Wulf, Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture,2 “big data” in the humanities can actually be fairly small. The humanities differ from scientific disciplines because humanities research is not project-driven, and the data is frequently textual.

Seamless Access Seamless access to information provides a single sign-on infrastructure through one’s home institution, while maintaining an environment that protects personal data and privacy. A final recommended NISO Recommended Practice published in June 20193 concluded that there were no significant security risks for users.

The CRediT Initiative

Lord Baltimore Hotel, NISOPlus2020 Venue

Opening Keynote The opening keynote address by Amy Brand, Director of the MIT Press, was entitled “The Other i-Word: Infrastructure and the Future of Knowledge.” She noted that we are all pioneers working on the leading edge of information, and our world is becoming more open. We must think about possible unintended consequences of openness. Information is the life blood of a community, and the struggle for control is prominent everywhere. Technology is driving the Amy Brand transformation of knowledge (Brand called it “Techknowledgy”). The future relies on distributed networks, librarians, startups, and vendors, but entrenched models remain a hindering force. Is peer review an adequate quality control measure of knowledge? Methods for peer review transparency need to be developed, and researchers need help in tagging to identify their contributions to collaborative projects. Against the Grain / June 2020

The CRediT (Contributor Roles Technology) Initiative will help researchers get the credit they deserve for all their contributions. It assigns up to 14 roles to different project members, which can then be used to generate metadata for research reports such as articles, books, etc. NISO members have just voted to develop a standard for CRediT.4

Lightning Talks This was a session of 10 5-minute presentations on new or updated services, tools, or events in the industry. • Charles O’Connor, Aries Systems: Liquid XML. Corrections can be made by authors and editors in XML. • Anne Stone, TBI Communications is organizing the 4th Transforming Research Conference, which will be held on October 12-13 at Emory University in Atlanta.5 • Vandana Sharma, InfoBeans Inc. Are we still investing the same amount of time in research as when we only had physical files? InfoBeans helps users make the right decisions so their work can be done in a more sustainable manner. It uses an automatic bot to issue information to all attendees at a meeting. • John Dove, Paloma & Associates. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an infrastructure player like many organizations and has designated four new “ambassadors” to advocate for it with publishers and researchers. continued on page 78

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Don’s Conference Notes from page 77 • Violaine Iglesias, Cadmore Media is Chair of a NISO group on audio/visual (A/V) standards to treat A/V with the same care as journals and articles. • Linda Thomas, APTARA: A new platform, SCIPRIS, delivers smart content, providing web-based payment of Author Publication Charges (APCs). • John Seguin, Third Iron: Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) fall short for users because they refer to a publisher’s website and so must be hosted at an IP-based institution. Third Iron’s new platform, LibKey.io/DOI, provides authentication for about 10,000 institutions globally. • Tim Lloyd, LibLynx: Combining an on-demand real-time analytic solution using an online tracking system allows building real-time reporting dashboards to tell which organizations are reading the content. • Sami Benchekroun, Morressier: Many researchers’ publications are from conference posters and presentations where they cannot be easily accessed. Morressier is helping organizers digitize early research content, assign DOIs, and bring it to a platform where it can be accessed. • Brian Trombley, Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL): DCL helps companies format their metadata for discovery by creating a master record and associating it with content. The DCL Discovery Bridge creates feeds for each discovery vendor so content gets up quickly.

The Future of Search and Discovery Christine Stohn, Director, Product Management, ExLibris, noted that we currently have many new types of resources and more data sources. Users are now heavily influenced by social media and in an academic environment they are expected to use more diverse materials, for example: • Many users are focused on articles and books. • Many parameters determine scholarly value, but we do not have them for many resource types. • Are there metrics beyond peer review that can be used to evaluate research? • How do we index masses of data? • How do users search for and find material beyond articles and books? How should they? How do we flag content appropriately? Sometimes “search” does not mean traditional searching. In the ocean of material, search alone is not enough anymore; serendipity is as important as knowing what you are looking for. Methods for creating new discovery paths include following the citation trail, letting others inspire you, and browsing virtually to discover “visual” treasures in a collection. Alex Humphreys, Director, JSTOR Labs, described how JSTOR used different types of resources to build an archive of interviews. The system shows topics of the interview that can be clicked on by using linked open data to connect the materials. Topicgraph6 can explore a scholarly book and use natural language processing to determine its subject, then display a graph of occurrences of the selected term and related terms. 78 Against the Grain / June 2020

Research is multi-valued and diverse, and a major tool of research is searching, so students are often trained to search for PDFs. JSTOR’s Text Analyzer7 lets users search their own documents for mentions of articles and books. New researchers in a field do not know its major keywords, so the Analyzer eliminates a lot of “keyword thrashing.” The JSTOR Understanding Series searches primary text for concepts, finds relevant articles about them, and flags those that are more important.

Information Privacy According to Quiana Johnson, Collection and Organizational Data Analysis Librarian at Northwestern University, privacy means consuming information with little outside observation. She noted that there are 48 laws protecting the confidentiality of printed library records, and it will not be long before they also apply to electronic records. Users often choose to forego viewing information because someone might be observing them. There is a fine line between data-driven decisions and protecting privacy. Do users know that data is attached to their name and another person might view it? Laura Paglione, consultant and advisor at the Spherical Cow Group,8 and formerly Technical Director at ORCID, asked how we engineer a system with privacy at its core. Users expect privacy, so tools should be engineered to be privacy-preserving. Major questions: Who is at risk as we move forward in collecting data to provide enhanced services? Are we forcing people to disclose information to access something that their organization has paid for? We are in an evolving world of less and less privacy and are all at risk when privacy is not prominent. Librarians are at risk when collecting user data. Many data leaks make libraries look bad, even when the vendors have not protected the data, but users get angry at the library. How can we build in privacy by design? A widespread tendency is to collect data in case we might need it in the future, but a better approach is to identify the smallest amount of data needed to answer a question. How long must raw data be kept? How are we articulating to users what is being collected? Asking users to evaluate vendors’ privacy controls is burdensome. We should disclose the business reasons for collecting information. The issue is often not about what information we collect, but rather how we care for it and preserve it. How can we engineer comfort levels or determine degrees of transparency and control to foster trust in information resources or environments? How many privacy agreements has a library agreed to on behalf of its users? What data is being gathered and with whom is it being shared? Users view their relationship as with the library, not with a third party organization. If data is breached, trust is broken. How hard is it to build trust into the licenses that we sign? We are complaining about privacy policies of vendors, but how many libraries have a privacy policy on their websites? Not many! We need guidelines about how to conduct an audit.9

Economics of Information: Funding, Sustainability, and Stakeholders Keith Webster, Dean of Libraries, Carnegie Mellon University, said that serious information tipping points are emerging as librarians push back against Big Deals, pricing, and subscriptions, while shifting towards OA. continued on page 79

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Don’s Conference Notes from page 78 Big deals are affecting all players in the information community: libraries, readers, publishers, and societies. Webster presented this quotation by Jan Velterop, former publisher at BioMed Central, “Only librarians, on the whole, complain about the Big Deal, since their researchers are mostly not aware of costs and cost increases. And librarians have limited power. They also have no strong track record when it comes to negotiating, only in rare cases employing professional negotiators, it seems. That is their weakness, and the publishers’ strength.” Many libraries have annual budget increases of only 1%, but journal prices have increased 6% annually, so many researchers are using ResearchGate and Sci-Hub. Librarians complain about pricing and Big Deals that limit their ability to cancel titles. They question why they should pay high prices since their faculty did the research, which is leading to support for OA. In response, publishers point to exploding volumes of content, increases in costs per download, Big Deal discounts, and the good things they do. They want to work directly with faculty members and be regarded as partners in the research process.10 Some publishers say that they will support OA if they can meet their costs, which has raised a debate on what APC charges should be.

The Miles Conrad Award Ceremony Deanna Marcum, former Managing Director and now senior advisor at Ithaka S+R11 introduced the Miles Conrad Award Lecture with a brief biographical sketch of G. Miles Conrad and a history of the Award, a highlight of NFAIS meetings since it began in 1994. (Marcum was the final president of NFAIS before its merger with NISO in 2019.) Deanna Marcum G. Miles Conrad was a Director and Trustee of Biological Abstracts;12 before that he was a Documentation Specialist at the Library of Congress. Based on his work in the early days of electronic information, he saw the potential of computer technology applications in the creation, organization and dissemination of research information, and he spearheaded meetings of professionals from organizations in G. Miles Conrad the industry, leading to the creation of (1911-1964) NFAIS, with Conrad as its first president. After Conrad’s death, 13 the NFAIS Board of Directors created a lecture in his memory that became a highlight of the NFAIS annual meetings. Since then, a wide range of industry leaders has been honored as Miles Conrad Lecturers.14

Closing Keynote In her closing keynote address, danah boyd, Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, and founder and president of Data & Society,15 questioned the legitimacy of data and asked why AI is being discussed so much. She quoted Geoffrey Bowker, Professor Against the Grain / June 2020

of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who said, “Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; on the contrary, data should be cooked with care.” As soon as data got significant power, people started to tamper with it, and then it becomes vulnerable to being used for business or political interests, as Jeff Hamdanah boyd merbacher, Founder of Cloudera16 and former leader of the data team at Facebook, said:

Legitimacy comes when we can believe that data are sound and useful. The problem is often not what is included in the data set but what is missing. Here are 4 areas to consider: 1. Data have power. 2. Vulnerable data infrastructure. 3. Agnotology (the study of the production of ignorance) and manipulation. 4. Towards a more secure future. NISOPlus2021 will be on February 21-23 in Baltimore. Endnotes

1. https://figshare.com/ 2. https://oieahc.wm.edu/ 3. “Recommended Practices for Improved Access to Institutionally-Provided Information Resources: Results from the Research Access in the 21st Century (RA21) Project,” Final report available at ra21.org. 4. https://librarytechnology.org/pr/25092 5. http://www.transformingresearch.org/ 6. http://labs.jstor.org/topicgraph 7. http://www.jstor.org/analyze 8. https://sphericalcowgroup.com/ 9. Lists of references can be found at https://libraryfreedom.org/. 10. See the report published by the STM Association, “An Overview of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishing and the Value it Adds to Research Outputs,” April 2008. (Available at https://www.stm-assoc. org/2008_04_01_Overview_of_STM_Publishing_Value_to_Research.pdf.) 11. https://sr.ithaka.org/people/deanna-marcum/ 12. Now part of the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Group https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/solutions/webofscience-biological-abstracts/. 13. A full obituary of Miles Conrad is at https://www.nytimes. com/1964/09/11/archives/g-miles-conrad-publishing-aide-biological-abstracts-officer.html. 14. A list with links to each lecture is on the NFAIS website at https:// www.nfais.org/miles-conrad-lectures. 15. https://datasociety.net/people/boyd-danah/ 16. A software platform for data engineering, data warehousing, machine learning, and analytics (https://www.cloudera.com/).

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The 2020 Miles Conrad Memorial Lecture Column Editor’s Note: Because of space limitations, this is an abridged summary of this lecture. You can read the full report at https://against-the-grain.com/2020/06/v32-3-2020-milesconrad-memorial-lecture/. — DTH This year’s Miles Conrad Lecture was presented by James G. Neal, University Librarian Emeritus at Columbia University. Neal has had a distinguished career in the library world, and has held offices in many other professional organizations.1 Neal began his lecture by answering three questions that had been given Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive to him: Director (L) and James G. Neal When you started in library leadership, what were the pressing issues the information community faced and how have they changed over your career? 46 years ago, they were: not enough funding, imminent technology, new collaborative strategies, and social unrest. What has been the most disruptive change in information dissemination during your career, and how well or poorly have we as a community reacted to that change? We have not reacted well to global scholarly communication, online learning, user-managed applications, big data, streaming access, and smart access and systems. What do you see as the biggest challenges faced by libraries, publishers, and information intermediaries over the next five to ten years? • Democratization of creativity, • Born digital explosion, • Policy chaos, • Diversity, equity, and inclusion, • Human-machine symbiosis, and • Blended reality. Future trends of our industry are particularly challenging to define because the community of interest is narrow. We have entered a period of constant change, productive and powerful chaos, radical shifts in our traditional staffing, and massive leadership turnover. The library has always been a significant player in the learning and research process, but changes in our environments are challenging this relationship and raising questions about its value in the community. The emphasis for libraries in the next decade will be not on what we have but what we can do with the content. Open resources and tools to support innovation, collaboration, and productivity will be more prevalent; self-publishing and niche technology will dominate. Measured transformation will be the key: what we are, what we do, and how we are viewed and understood. Here are five commandments for the future: 1. Thou shalt preserve the cultural and scientific record. We have done a modest job at preserving analog records, but have lacked with digital records, which are being produced in 80 Against the Grain / June 2020

large amounts. We must hold, secure, and care for the content while enabling access to it. 2. Thou shall fight the information policy wars. We must represent and advance the public interest and the needs of users and readers. Network neutrality, open access to research, copyright, and intellectual property are areas of concern. Publications and databases provided by libraries are increasingly covered by contract law, not copyright. Technological controls and digital rights management systems are reducing libraries’ ability to apply fair use to their operations. 3. Thou shalt be supportive of the needs of your users and readers. Users are far more diverse than we realize. They want more and better content, access, and convenience, as well as technology and content ubiquity, places for experimentation (particularly in their communities), support services, and privacy spaces. 4. Thou shalt cooperate in new and more vigorous ways. Although cooperation is in our lifeblood, we need more radical strategies, deeper integration of operations, and a commitment to shared knowledge repositories. We are now in a polygamous period of widespread partnering, but are we ready to form more selective and deep collaborations? We must move beyond conflict in the relationships among libraries, publishers, and information intermediaries. 5. Thou shall work together to improve knowledge creation, evaluation, distribution, use, and preservation. Researchers want to share their results and communicate with their peers globally through publication. They need support and help in navigating, analyzing, and synthesizing the literature, and guidance for an open environment. The new model is one of informationists and partners, where researchers get help with disparate sources of information and grey literature. Our challenge now is how to support these shifting research conditions. Following Neal’s lecture, he and Deanna Marcum discussed these issues:2 • How do organizations like NFAIS and NISO have a role? • How can we be more effective in leading the community? • How can we capture and preserve the digital record? • How do we deal with the expanded scope of our institutions? Donald T. Hawkins is an information industry freelance writer based in Pennsylvania. In addition to blogging and writing about conferences for Against the Grain, he blogs the Computers in Libraries and Internet Librarian conferences for Information Today, Inc. (ITI) and maintains the Conference Calendar on the ITI Website (http://www.infotoday.com/calendar.asp). He is the Editor of Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage, (Information Today, 2013) and Co-Editor of Public Knowledge: Access and Benefits (Information Today, 2016). He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley and has worked in the online information industry for over 45 years. Endnotes 1. Details of Neal’s professional career are at https://library.columbia.edu/james-neal.html. 2. See the full report (URL above).

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ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Scott Ahlberg COO Research Solutions / Reprints Desk 16350 Ventura Blvd., Suite D #811, Los Angeles, CA 91436 Phone: (310) 477-0354 <sahlberg@reprintsdesk.com>

How/where do I see the industry in five years: I expect to see more consolidation in scholarly publishing, but more decentralization in getting content to end users.

Deni Auclair President/CEO Media Growth Strategies LLC 42 Walpole Street Dover, MA 02030 Phone: (508) 785-8384 <dauclair56@gmail.com> www.mediagrowthstrategies.com

Born and lived: Born in Mt. Kisco, NY and, up to and including while in high school, lived in Brewster, NY; Arlington, VA; Cincinnati, OH; Woods Hole, MA; Naples, Italy; Troy, NY; Pittstown, NY; Cambridge, England. Early life: My father was a graduate biochemistry professor at University of Cincinnati and RPI, so we moved around as he changed jobs and went on sabbaticals. He also did genetics research (cloning) at the Rockefeller Institute in NYC and genetics-related marine biology at the Massachusetts Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole. We finally settled in Pittstown, NY when my family bought a 650-acre Century farm (meaning it had been in the same family for over 100 years). We started as a beef farm, raising Charolais and Herefords as well as horses, chickens, and geese. After our farm manager joined us, we went to dairy and had a herd of Holsteins until it was sold when my parents retired. I spent seven summers working on the hay wagons – long days of throwing hundreds of bales of hay. I learned a lot about hard work, discipline – and being stronger than the boys on the school bus! – during those years. I went to Albany Academy for Girls, the sister school to Albany Academy which had several notable attendees, but the most meaningful to me was Herman Melville. I did my thesis on him my senior year at Bates College, which I attended for three years, spending my junior year at University of Stirling in Scotland. Professional career and activities: I started my career working in Portland, ME for a team of industrial psychologists. I wanted to get into publishing, however, so after a summer taking the Stanford Publishing program, I moved to NYC and started as a Reader for the children’s book division at (what was then) Harper & Row, moving into the adult division after a year. After six months working as an editorial assistant, I was hired as assistant to Phyllis Grann, publisher at G. P. Putnam’s Sons. I was promoted to Senior Editor after two years – acquiring bestselling And So It Goes by Linda Ellerbee and working with notable authors like comedian George Burns, actress Elizabeth Taylor (her assistant, to be honest), Robin Cook, Dick Francis, Joe McGinnis, and many more. I decided, since I had played sports through high school and participated as much as I could in college (there were very few women’s teams at that time), that I wanted to be in the business of baseball so I interviewed with a bunch of baseball teams – and ended up as a Reporter (i.e., fact

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checker and sometimes supporting the Writers on stories) for Sports Illustrated. Not really what I wanted to do, but it was a fun experience for a little over a year. I returned to Putnam for a couple of years, worked for a sports media coach for a year, then got my MBA at NYU’s Stern School of Business while working again at Sports Illustrated, before joining what is known as a “vulture fund” as a buy-side analyst. (Vulture funds invest in distressed debt.) After six years, I got a job at Wiley doing M&A and that started my career in scholarly publishing. I worked at Wiley for 12 years, then joined JBJS as CFO. I then started my consultancy, Media Growth Strategies LLC (MGS) before joining Outsell. I was VP and Senior Analyst there for two and a half years, joined Delta Think as CFO and analyst for a year and a half, then restarted MGS. I am now very happily consulting and working with the wonderful people in scholarly communications on as many projects as possible! Family: I live with my eight cats and two dogs, am a widow of 15 years, and have a brilliant 43-year old stepson who is an attorney in NYC. In my spare time: I am treasurer for USA Boxing, Metro (USA Boxing is the national governing body for amateur boxing, under the aegis of the USOPC, and Metro is the NYC chapter) and the National Golden Gloves of America. I am also Vice President of the USA Boxing Foundation. I have been involved in amateur boxing as an official and administrator (all volunteer) for 36 years – they are like family to me. I am also treasurer of The Cat Connection, based in Waltham, MA. Basically, being involved with boxing and cats, I’m a member of the two craziest groups of people you can find. Favorite books: Too many to list… I listen to audiobooks constantly, and am currently reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. Pet peeves: Drivers who don’t signal when they turn, malapropisms, sloppy writing in a professional setting. Also, people who create drama when it just isn’t necessary. Philosophy: Be happy. Most memorable career achievement: Working on the Blackwell acquisition while at Wiley. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Being ready to semi-retire. How/where do I see the industry in five years: Pretty much where it is today, while recovering from this coronavirus pandemic. With COVID-19, it seems as if life has been put on hold. Combine that with an industry that moves relatively slowly, and five years is a drop in the bucket when it comes to time.

Marshall Breeding Independent Consultant Library Technology Guides 2512 Essex Place Nashville, TN 37212 Phone: (615) 479-0392 <marshall.breeding@librarytechnology.org> https://librarytechnology.org

Short professional bio: https://librarytechnology.org/marshallbreeding/ Full c.v.: https://librarytechnology.org/marshallbreeding/cv/ continued on page 82

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ATG Profiles Encouraged from page 81

Barbara Casalini President Casalini Libri Via Benedetto da Maiano 3 50014 Fiesole Italy Phone: +39 055 50181 Fax: +39 055 5018 469 <barbara@casalini.it> www.casalini.it

Born and lived: In Fiesole all my life.

Early life: Only happy memories except for some Sunday morning German and French dictation exercises my father painstakingly bestowed on me. Professional career and activities: Casalini Libri, for as long as I can remember. Family: One husband, two daughters, three grandchildren. In all, we are also family to three rowdy dogs and two hefty cats that wander freely around the Torrossa grounds. In my spare time: I like to cook and bake for friends and family, watch old movies, read good novels and mysteries, avoid physical exercise if at all possible. Favorite books: Asterix (in French) to cheer me up.

Pet peeves: People who complain when they have every reason not to, people who don’t show respect for others or for the environment. Philosophy: Look on the bright side.

Most memorable career achievement: Loving my job every day. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: To take a back seat (but of course being a back seat driver!) while the new generation goes full steam ahead. How/where do I see the industry in five years: Definitely more digital and more accessible, owing not only to recent events and the needs that have come to light, but also on the emerging work and developments in linked data and the conversion of library data to interconnect with and harness the potential of the structure of the semantic web. I like to think that there will be ever more communication and collaboration among all sectors of the community.

Lettie Y. Conrad Publishing & Product Consultant LYC Consulting Ventura County, California <lettieconrad@gmail.com> https://www.linkedin.com/in/lettieyconrad/

Professional career and activities: Lettie brings nearly 20 years’ experience in scholarly publishing to her diverse portfolio of product research and development talents and passions. She is dedicated to helping information organizations cultivate a user-centered, standards-compliant approach to digital publishing and academic programs. Her work history demonstrates a commitment to the dissemination of high-quality scholarly and professional publications that advance science and knowledge for the greater good, and transform the researcher experience. Lettie excels in driving optimum content discovery and access of academic content platforms, leveraging her R&D experience in web analytics, user experience, information architecture, SEO, institutional discovery, metadata standards, and semantics. In her 10 years with SAGE Publishing, Lettie played a key role in establishing product management expertise and

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user-centered product lifecycles and market research routines. She was instrumental in launching user-centered web and mobile products, driving research and analysis that enabled evidence-based product management to maintain outstanding quality of SAGE platforms. In my spare time: Currently, Lettie is a North American Editor for Learned Publishing and is a “chef” with the SSP’s Scholarly Kitchen blog. Lettie has a master’s degree in Mass Communication from California State University, Northridge, and is currently an Information Science PhD candidate at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Lettie enjoys organic gardening and drinking wine with her her husband in their Southern California home, ruled by Frida & Bonita, their two calico-tabby cats. Philosophy: We’re in this together!

Darrell W. Gunter President and CEO Gunter Media Group, Inc. 298 Mathers Road, Ambler, PA 19002 Phone: (973) 454-3475 <d.gunter@guntermediagroup.com> www.guntermediagroup.com

Born and lived: Born Atlantic City, NJ. Lived in Los Angeles, CA, Chicago, Il and South Orange, NJ. Early life: Growing up in Atlantic City, NJ with access to the boardwalk and beach was awesome. I worked in my family’s grocery store and had a paper route for the Philadelphia Bulletin. I played youth football with the Atlantic City Dolphins which led me to become a lifelong Miami Dolphin fan! In highschool I lettered in football and track and broke the school’s high jump record with a leap of 6’6”! Attending Seton Hall University was a phenomenal experience and I served many organizational posts. I also ran and won campus elections and won election to serve on the national board of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. Oh, yes, I was the captain of the SHU Fencing team. Professional career and activities: During my high school years in addtion to the family grocery store, I worked for McDonalds and Mr. Best Car Wash. During my college years I worked at Jules Men’s shop which set the stage for a career in sales. Post college, I started my professional career at Xerox which led me to Dow Jones Financial Services and Elsevier. My entrepreneurial leanings opened me up to Collexis a semantic technology company. After Collexis was acquired by Elsevier, I joined AIP and sometime later formed Gunter Media Group, Inc., a management consulting firm. The grocery store experience certainly set the foundation for me to want to be in sales and a desire to help people. Family: Wife Deb, daughter Bailee.

In my spare time: I love spending my time with my family and our 6 pets (3 dogs and 3 cats), light exercising, reading and watching thought provoking films. Favorite books: The Bible, Art of War, any novel by Tom Clancey.

Pet peeves: Dishonest people.

Philosophy: A man’s word is his bond.

Most memorable career achievement: Having my mom see me receive the Seton Hall University Many Are One Libraries Alumni Service Award at their annual gala in 2008. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: To be part of a new development that will improve scholarly research. How/where do I see the industry in five years: The scholarly publishing industry, in my humble opinion, will have a complete new business model that will move subscriptions to open access and be supported by advertising and data analytics. Data Analytics is the new oil! This predicted shift would truly open scholarly research to the global research community. Considering faster computiing power and Internet speed, we can expect to see the research community achieve new developments in record time. continued on page 83

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ATG Profiles Encouraged from page 82

Christopher Lee Electronic Resources Librarian Utah State University USU Merrill-Cazier Library 3000 Old Main Hill Logan, UT 84322-3000 <Christopher.lee@usu.edu>

Born and lived: I was born in UT and lived there most of my life except for 6 years in California. Professional career and activities: I started working in libraries as a student worker for Interlibrary Loan at Utah State University. I went on to be an Interlibrary Loan staff member at California Polytechnic State University for 6 years. I am now back at Utah State University as the Electronic Resources Librarian. Family: Spouse and 2 wonderful daughters.

In my spare time: I read, watch Netflix, and play video games.

Favorite books: Harry Potter series for fiction and Educated for nonfiction. Most memorable career achievement: Winning a work Halloween costume contest as Conan the Librarian. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Tenure.

How/where do I see the industry in five years: The coronavirus has stressed the importance of electronic resources and the need to move more and more online. While I think library buildings and print materials are here to stay, I do see more and more services going entirely online to make space for studying or community events.

Abigail Wickes Electronic Resource Management Librarian Duke University Duke University Libraries Durham, NC 27708-0187 Phone: (919) 660-6939 <abigail.wickes@duke.edu>

Professional career and activities: I studied English and Film Theory at the University of Rochester before getting my MLS from UNC-Chapel Hill. I started my early career in scholarly publishing, doing marketing analysis and content discovery management at Oxford University Press, then transitioned back to the library side of things as the ERM Librarian at Duke. Family: I have an awesome husband, a fabulous preschool-aged daughter, and a scrappy elderly mini-dacshund. Favorite books: Lately anything by Connie Willis, Grady Hendrix, Rainbow Rowell. Pet peeves: Pedantry.

How/where do I see the industry in five years: This is the hardest question on the profile template, and also difficult to answer mid-pandemic (filling this out in April 2020.) I think there may be an industry shift towards full text syndication or aggregation by subject, like JSTOR, PubMed, or LexisNexis/WestLaw, in a wider range of subject areas. These will be similar to A&I services in that they will be discipline specific, but they’ll have full text rather than just citations and abstracts so discovery can also be delivery. We know from reports from Renew Publishing that researchers already find A&I services extremely valuable. If these were larger scale, researchers would still benefit from that richer, discipline specific metadata subject experts can layer on, but with access and delivery incorporated (somehow!) as well.

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Casalini Libri Corporate Headquarters: Via Benedetto da Maiano 3 Operational Offices & Logistics: Via Faentina 169/15 50014 Fiesole (Florence), Italy Phone: 055 50181 • Fax: 055 5018201 • www.casalini.it Officers: CEO Michele Casalini, President Barbara Casalini.

Key products and services: Sourcing, cataloguing and supplying print and electronic publications in all formats and subject areas. We specialise in titles from Italy, Spain, the Vatican City, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Greece and Portugal, with a particular focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences. Core markets/clientele: Libraries.

Number of employees: 96

History and brief description of your company/publishing program: Established by Mario Casalini in 1958, Casalini Libri is recognised as one of the leading suppliers of publications and bibliographic data from across Southern Europe to libraries and institutions worldwide. We provide an efficient and personalised service for libraries, combining the supply of information and publications with a range of solutions that facilitate selection, acquisition and processing workflows. The Torrossa digi-

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tal library aims to offer institutions a resource that gives access to scholarly eBooks and ejournals. Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers? As a major bibliographic agency for data regarding European publications, we are driven by the determination to anticipate the changing needs of the market and are currently working on the development of solutions for the effective use of Linked Data and BIBFRAME within libraries. We are a partner in the Share-VDE collaborative initiative. Following the renewal of the Torrossa digital bookstore in 2019, our investments in technological innovation continue with, most recently, a new look company website and enhanced management interface for publishers. The project is ongoing and further, exciting developments will be announced later in the year. Lean Library Hofplein 20 3032 AC Rotterdam <info@leanlibrary.com> leanlibrary.com Key products and services: Library Access, Library Assist, Library Alternatives. continued on page 84

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ATG Profiles Encouraged from page 83 Core markets/clientele: Academic, Non-Academic, Corporate, Public Libraries. Number of employees: 10

History and brief description of your company/publishing program: Johan Tilstra is a former Program Manager at Utrecht University whose passion lies within the library world and the need for libraries to remain current, useful and dependable. As Lean Library’s Founder and CEO, Johan Tilstra, came up with the idea for a browser extension when Utrecht University had the “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Library without a Catalogue” initiative. The groundwork for the idea of not offering a catalogue was the conviction that libraries should shift their focus from discovery to delivery. This conviction is based on an evident change in users’ behavior with regards to where and how they are starting their research, as pinpointed in many talks, articles and blog posts. Therefore, it’s vital for libraries to revolutionize the library environment to adjust and capitalize on this behavioral shift of their users. Working closely with students and researchers, Johan recognized this shift and worked tirelessly, creating a prototype and developing it into a fullfledged extension that puts libraries directly in their end users’ preferred workflow.

like myself as a boss! I have been happily running MGS for three years and while being a consultant can be challenging at times – looking for projects and not knowing what’s coming next – I absolutely love it. The diversity of clients and projects, talking to the really smart people in our industry, and learning every day – that’s what makes the challenge of bringing in new projects worthwhile. Market research/business intelligence and financial analysis are my favorite things to do, but I have enjoyed every project I’ve worked on, with no exceptions. As long as I’m learning, I’m happy. Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI) Contact: Susie Winter <Susie.winter@springernature.com> More information and full list of members can be found on our website, coming soon at www.Snsi.info. History and brief description of your company/publishing program: SNSI is an initiative bringing together publishers and institutions to solve cyber challenges threatening the integrity of the scientific record, scholarly systems and the safety of personal data. Its members include large and small publishers, learned societies and university presses and others involved in scholarly communications. Third Iron, LLC PO Box 270400 St Paul, MN 55127 Phone: (855) 649-7607 https://thirdiron.com

Armed with his vision, he set out to start Lean Library, which once dependent on early adopters, is now a powerful force of change in the library landscape. Lean Library, via browser extension, simplifies access to library services while increasing library visibility with branding and custom messaging. Media Growth Strategies LLC 42 Walpole Street Dover, MA 02030 Phone: (508) 785-8384 www.mediagrowthstrategies.com Officers: Deni Auclair, CEO/President Association memberships, etc.: SSP

Key products and services: Consulting services to the scholarly information industry. Core markets/clientele: Scholarly publishers. Number of employees: 1

History and brief description of your company/publishing program: I decided I wanted to try working for myself – and I really

Officers: Kendall Bartsch, John Seguin, Karl Becker

Key products and services: LibKey Discovery, LibKey Link, LibKey Nomad, libkey.io, BrowZine. Core markets/clientele: Academic, hospital, corporate and government libraries. Number of employees: 25

History and brief description of your company/publishing program: Third Iron technologies keep the library at the center of the research process, whether the point of discovery is library services or on the open web. Our services simplify and expedite getting to full text, freeing up countless hours of researcher time, reducing help desk and ILL burden, and meeting the expectations of students, faculty and researchers. Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers? Third Iron is private, self-funded company whose products are designed to meet the needs of libraries and the users who rely on them.

LIBRARY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Duke University Libraries 411 Chapel Drive Durham, NC 27708 Phone: (919) 660-5870 https://library.duke.edu/

Does your library have an ILS or are you part of a collaborative ILS? Aleph. Do you have a discovery system? Summon.

Background/history: https://library.duke.edu/about

Number of staff and responsibilities: https://library.duke. edu/about/directory/browse/all

84 Against the Grain / June 2020

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Back Talk from page 86 by providers who mean well, while also needing to consider their own convenience and advantage And the gifts are ephemeral — promised to expire on June 30 or some other early date, promised, that is, to go away and leave us. As I’ve been working on this column (since April 15th) and living through lockdown, that June 30 deadline approaches. What should we expect next? [And as I write this, a few publishers have just extended their free offerings to August.] Will there be bold announcements of the “it’s safe to go back in the water so we’re pulling the plug” variety? Will librarians and others push back and insist on longer-term concessions? Most people agree that the virus conditions and fallouts won’t go away for a long time. Do we go back and undo the work we’ve done to make these temporary resources useful? Web pages would be deleted, LibGuides cut back, etc. User expectations — or at least hopes — will have to be dashed just when we’re all discovering that the budgetary world of 2020-2021 isn’t going to be even as happy a place as, in its limited way, it has been in 2018 and 2019. In short, we’re all learning that nothing about the pandemic and nothing about responding to the pandemic is just going to magically go away. The new temporary generosity and venturesomeness we’ve experienced reveal the flaws in a system of information provision that isn’t as universal, transparent, and accessible as we need it to be. Who’s going to step up to the challenge and find ways for us to come out of these times better off than our readers and we were before? Wrapping up this piece on Memorial Day weekend 2020, I have to say that the answers elude me. Against the Grain / June 2020

Considering Games ... from page 69 So, if this pandemic has taught me anything, beyond the joys of going to work in my underwear, it is a new appreciation of face meetings in the real. Sure, you don’t get all the personality telling Zoom features. But you do get… Wait a second. I just remembered that chat feature which allows you to pass detailed notes — undetected — during a meeting. Never mind. I think I do like Zoom meetings after all. Isn’t this 21st century just the greatest? Rumors from page 49 To finish up, I have to confess that I have suddenly become obsessed with rare book collecting. This is strange since I have never owned a rare book or been a special collections librarian. I will admit, though, that the very first Charleston Conference in 1980 began as a rare books conference with the likes of Jake Chernovsky of A.B. Bookman’s Weekly (long defunct because of the internet), Paul Koda Rare books librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill back then and several others. Anyway, I got into this all again when I read a review of a book called Bluffing Texas Style (U of Oklahoma Press, 2020) by Michael Vinson, a rare book dealer. I bought it immediately. Next I got into The Lost Gutenberg by Margaret Leslie Davis (Tarcher/Perigee, 2019). I highly recommend both books! I have even devoted a special bookshelf to my growing collection of rare book collecting. Please send suggestions. Yr. Ed.

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Back Talk — Carpe Diem – Seizing Pandemic Opportunities? Column Editor: Ann Okerson (Advisor on Electronic Resources Strategy, Center for Research Libraries) <aokerson@gmail.com>

hese are head-spinning days. On the one hand, it’s as if someone pushed the pause button on the world and everything has gone into suspended animation. On the other hand, an invisible enemy is loose among us, powerful and untraceable. Are these the best of times or the worst of times? Where will we be in six months? And of course the network world doesn’t just terrify and inform us, but it also distracts us. Netflix and other providers have had to scale back the speed at which they feed our binge-watching habits because there are so many of us at home, in suspended animation, browsing for distraction and amusement. Will we stay the course watching Schitt’s Creek and its reverse Beverly Hillbillies in their tiny town in Canada? Stay tuned! For those who work in the world of library collections, it’s just as head spinning. Suddenly, whether on request from librarians or goodwill from information providers, we have jumped into an age of even more plenty — of information. The global drama is being played out in every form of media ever invented, and we can spend whole days sorting, scanning, and sifting through the welter of information about the COVID-19 crisis — and of course, much more besides. Never have so many had access to so much information about something so small and so dangerous. Our readers turn back to their computers and find that their research li-

brary is offering a COVID-19 resource page — only to discover that there’s some COVID-19-specific information, but there’s a lot more. It’s a welter of variously themed information resources, some they’ve heard of, some not, all concentrated in a menu listing or two and turned in their direction like a great info-firehose. Publishers have leapt to show social concern (and marketing savvy) by opening up assorted resources that are often available only via expensive licenses and making them available for the duration of the emergency. For example, in the commercial sector, publishers such as De Gruyter offer a huge aggregation of near current and backlist university press books — can Princeton Press really be offering 6,000 titles for free? Various information providers are offering periodical indexes, research databases, full text journals, and more — some are freely open to all, some to subscribers, others only to members of specific libraries or consortia. On the non-profit side, for example, The Internet Archive has a National Emergency Library for the world, while HathiTrust offers Emergency Temporary Access Services for its members. And all these riches are offered with shortterm expiration dates estimating when the emergency will lift. So what do we make of this chaotic and erratic information environment? We can draw a few lessons:

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It’s mainly up to the librarians to figure out how to translate this transitory Wild West availability successfully, so that information reaches those end-users who will benefit from it. Every publisher wants to show how generous they are, but readers care less about specific publishers or their generosity: they will use what they need and they will look first of all for content relevant to their teaching, learning, or research. There’s the non-trival question of how much work librarians can imagine doing to make accessible all this “free” information. They (we) do some of the usual work: create websites, LibGuides, instructional sessions (on Zoom, of course), and liaison outreach to faculty. We re-learn the lesson that many organizations have already discovered over time — information being made available for free is only the first part of the picture. For example, almost 20 years ago when Research4Life (https://www.research4life. org/) began offering to emerging nations access to hundreds and thousands of free or very inexpensive high quality journals, the founders quickly learned that turning on and pointing the fire hose was only the beginning — and that it was necessary to spend a fair amount of time with the users, conducting training and workshops and managing the sudden “free” riches. Training in use of e-resources continues unabated to this day not only in R4L, but also in libraries worldwide. [By the way, there’s one thing that will not work optimally in accessing these “free” resources, and that is reliance on a search engine. For specific searches, tools like Google and Google Scholar can be very powerful, but the user doesn’t learn about the underlying structure of information resources nor how to understand the riches and possibilities of a given site, when all she sees are some hits from that site mixed in with many others on a relevance-keyed search.] And then there’s what may be the most important lesson of all in this time of resource deluge: ephemerality is a critical weakness. The offerings readers are now being given are haphazard and as full of holes as Swiss cheese, not chosen by any rational selection process, but instead offered continued on page 85

86 Against the Grain / June 2020

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