Against the Grain Vol. 33 #5 November 2021 by against-the-grain

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

VOLUME 33, NUMBER 5

NOVEMBER 2021 TM

“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”

ISSN: 1043-2094

The Value and Use of Creative Commons Licensing By Nancy Sims (Copyright Program Librarian, University of Minnesota Libraries) <nasims@umn.edu>

he November 2021 issue of Against the Grain highlights the varying perspectives of numerous stakeholders on the value and use of Creative Commons licensing.

Our guest editor, Nancy Sims, Copyright Program Librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries, has compiled three articles focusing on unique stakeholders. They range from graduate student authors to librarians and publishing advisors to the editors of the open access journal AGITATE! Their observations and opinions are both informative and thought provoking and based on direct experience in working with Creative Commons licensing.

The full titles and running order are as follows: Graduate Student Authors’ Experiences with Creative Commons Licenses; Perspectives from Another Angle: Publishing Advisors; and AGITATE! As Creative Commons: AGITATE! Editorial Collective Speaks to Nancy Sims. Naturally, we think that this issue of ATG offers valuable insights into an important topic that is of concern to all of our readers. But more than that, it recounts varying experiences with Creative Commons licensing drawn from real life practitioners. After reading these three articles, you will have gained a richer understanding of the uses and im-

If Rumors Were Horses

IG NEWS! Against the Grain will be moving to an all-digital publication beginning with the February 2022 issue, Volume 34 #1. We’re excited about the new features and functionalities this will bring to improve the publication and bring us fully into the digital era. In addition to making it easier to find and read content online, we have added IP-based access for institutional subscriptions, and we’re working on bringing improved advertising and sponsored content options for our friends in the publishing and information industries to meaningfully connect with our librarian audience. Look for more news to come with a full press release soon!

Social Media Do you follow the Charleston Hub on our various social media accounts? Christy Anderson, our Director of Marketing and Communications, who is also the Marketing/Administrative Assistant, Kimbel Library at Coastal Carolina University, is doing an amazing job of growing our involvement and engagement. Stay up to date with the latest announcements and news on your favorite platform of choice: • Facebook: @CharlestonHub • Twitter: @chsconf • LinkedIn: Charleston-hub • Instagram: @charlestonhub • Tag Us! #chsconf2021 continued on page 6

pacts of Creative Commons licensing as expressed by multiple voices, all of whom are directly involved. Enjoy!

From the Creative Commons website: “Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?” Six types of licenses and the public domain dedication tool give creators a range of options.” See https://creativecommons.org/about/ cclicenses/ for a full list and descriptions of the various types of licenses available.

What To Look For In This Issue: Reader’s Roundup..................... 24 Don’s Conference Notes............. 42 Building a Prototype Environment for LibGuides CMS..................... 44

Interviews Jake Zarnegar............................ 56 Dustin Holland.......................... 58 Glenda Alvin.............................. 61 Greg Eow................................... 64

Profiles Encouraged People, Library and Company Profiles...................................... 67 Plus more...................... See inside

1043-2094(202111)33:5;1-8

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Against The Grain – ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS 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.

v.33 #5 November 2021 © Katina Strauch

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

Editor:

Advertising Deadlines....................................................................................... 6

Katina Strauch (Retired, College of Charleston)

Associate Editors:

Cris Ferguson (Murray State) Tom Gilson (Retired, College of Charleston) Matthew Ismail (Charleston Hub)

FEATURES The Value and Use of Creative Commons Licensing......................................... 1

Research Editors:

Graduate Student Authors’ Experiences with Creative Commons Licenses.....10

Assistants to the Editor:

Perspectives from Another Angle: Publishing Advisors..................................14

International Editor:

AGITATE! As Creative Commons: AGITATE! Editorial Collective Speaks to Nancy Sims......................................................................................................18

Judy Luther (Informed Strategies) Ileana Jacks Toni Nix (Just Right Group, LLC)

Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino)

Contributing Editors:

Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University) Deni Auclair (De Gruyter) Rick Anderson (Brigham Young University) 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) 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 (Georgia Southern University Libraries) 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)

Back Talk — My Glorious Library Career: Part I..............................................70

REVIEWS Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews....................24 Booklover — Poetic Travel................................................................................28

LEGAL ISSUES Legally Speaking — Reasons for Copyright Infringement................................30 Questions and Answers — Copyright Column..................................................34

PUBLISHING Bet You Missed It.............................................................................................. 8 And They Were There — Reports of Meetings..................................................40 Don’s Conference Notes...................................................................................42

TECHNOLOGY & STANDARDS AND TEACHING & LEARNING Let’s Get Technical — Building a Prototype Environment for LibGuides CMS.................................................................................................44 Learning Belongs in the Library — Digital Textbook Acquisition and Library Workflow: Three Regions and Three Very Different Scenarios: North America, United Kingdom/Ireland and Australia/New Zealand.............46

ATG Proofreader:

Caroline Goldsmith (Charleston Hub)

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>

Emerging Tech: To Be or Not to Be? — Should University Presses Partner with Commercial Publishers? De Gruyter has the Answer!.............................48

BOOKSELLING AND VENDING The Digital Toolbox — OverDrive eBooks for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Justice Collections........................................................................50

Advertising information:

Optimizing Library Services — How Open Access and OA Agreements Can Support Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion?...........................................................52

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

Publisher:

A. Bruce Strauch

Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to:

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>

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 ©2021 by Katina Strauch

Against the Grain / November 2021

The Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Jake Zarnegar...............................56 Dustin Holland – President & CEO, Better World Books..................................58 Glenda Alvin – Interim Executive Director of Libraries and Media Centers, and Associate Professor, Brown-Daniel Library, Tennessee State University.....61 Greg Eow – President, Center for Research Libraries, Global Resources Network...........................................................................................................64 Profiles Encouraged.........................................................................................67

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From Your (optimistic) Editor:

reetings! Welcome to the November 2021 Against the Grain! After this issue and the Dec21-Jan22 issue, ATG will be digital and no longer printed. I know this is a shock for many of us (especially your editor). The postage and mailing costs were going higher and higher and support in the form of ads and sponsorships were getting harder and harder to obtain. So we bit the proverbial digital bullet! Now you will be able to log in with either your username and password or your institutional IP address and page through our ISSUU app and see ATG digitally as it was in print! It is good! This issue is guest edited by the incredibly flexible Nancy Sims and focuses on the value and use of Creative Commons licensing. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to sharing. Nancy shares articles including experiences from graduate student authors, publishing advisors and AGITATE! a new editorial collective.

(legally speaking: reasons for copyright infringement); Will Cross (questions and answers – copyright: what’s happening with eBook pricing?); Donna Jacobs (booklover – Derek Walcott’s Omeros); David Parker (learning belongs in the library); Steve Rosato (digital toolbox – OverDrive eBooks for diversity, equity, inclusion & justice collections); Deni Auclair and John Corkery (emerging technology – should university presses partner with commercial publishers); Kyle Banerjee and Susan Martin (let’s get technical – building prototype environments); Ramune K. Kubilius (and they were there – reports of meetings); and others.

ATG will continue with our columnists like always! This issue includes Jim O’Donnell (did you know he was from El Paso); Darrell Gunter, (the innovator, interviews Jake Zarnegar of Hum); Corey Seeman (reviews of books on library marketing basics, graphic novel and many more; Anthony Paganelli

I hate to say goodbye now because there’s lots more! See you all in Charleston virtually or in person! And let’s be optimistic!! Love, Yr. Ed.

Our wonderful interviews are with Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University), Dustin Holland (Better World Books), and Greg Eow (Center for Research Libraries).

Rumors continued from page 1

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 Charleston Hub at http://www.charleston-hub.com/contact-us/. Dear All, I wanted to let you know that as of September 30, 2021, I will be retiring from my position as Territory Manager at Rittenhouse. I am excited about planning some travel around the country and reconnecting with friends. I have enjoyed working with you all throughout my years at Rittenhouse. I can’t express enough how much I have appreciated your loyalty and support. And Katina, I will miss going to the Charleston meeting; this is always the highlight of the conference schedule. In the interim period, before someone is hired to fill my role, you may direct all questions to Nicole Gallo at <nicole.gallo@ rittenhouse.com>. I wish you all the best. If you would like to get in touch with me between now and September, 30th, please call or email me. Thank you, Wendy Bahnsen <wendy.bahnsen@rittenhouse.com> Thank you for your support and friendship, Wendy! Please keep us up to date on your retirement progress! Our very best! Katina Strauch and the Charleston Hub team www.charleston-hub.com

Against the Grain / November 2021

Celebrating Anniversaries, Awards, and New Jobs/Roles: Congratulations to Marjorie Hlava for 43 years at Access Innovations! She has served as President and Chairman since 1978. An expert in taxonomies, metadata, and data science, Margie is a pioneer in databases and search. Margie’s work has been acknowledged through numerous awards, including ASIS&T’s Watson Davis award, the SLA John Cotton Dana and SLA President’s Award, recognition as an SLA Fellow, and as an Albuquerque Business First Woman of Influence for Technology. Danielle Cooper has been named Associate Director, Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums, at ITHAKA S+R. Danielle oversees a team exploring how information practices are evolving in higher education and cultural organizations. Her team specializes in creating large-scale cohort-based projects and working with underrepresented and under-resourced academic communities, including Indigenous Studies scholars, community colleges, and currently incarcerated learners. continued on page 12

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Bringing Forth the Jackal

Let’s Read WASP Aristocracy

In late 1969, Frederick Forsyth (there’s no ‘e’ on it) was fired from the BBC, broke and sleeping on a friend’s couch when he hit on the “as daft as it gets” solution of writing a novel. He sat down to a battered typewriter from his war correspondent days and 35 days later had The Day of the Jackal. Three rejections later, it was snapped up by Hutchinson & Co and sold 2.5 million copies in five years. Not a line, word or phrase in it was ever changed.

(1) Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin (1964) ( the northern boarding schools that became feeders to Wall Street and the board room); (2) John Marquand, The Late George Apley (1937) (New England Brahmanism gone to seed); (3) Henry James, The Bostonians (1886) (reformist zeal in a daughter of old Boston); (4) Joseph Alsop with Adam Platt, I’ve Seen the Best of It (1992) (famous columnist laments his class is on the way out); (5) Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) (testament to the civic humanism of the WASP).

It was a favorite among terrorists, and the Venezuela assassin Carlos came to be called “The Jackal” because the book was found in his possession. Vladimir Arutyunian, who tried to kill George W. Bush, had a heavily annotated copy as a “how-to” guide. Forsyth is 82 now, but the book draws new legions of fans. One actually said to him, “How on earth did you make up a character like Charles de Gaulle?” See: Jane Fryer, “Here’s what you didn’t know about The Day of Jackal, 50 years after it was written,” The DailyMail.com, Published 19:41, EDT, 22 July, 2021.

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Against the Grain / November 2021

See: Michael Knox Beran, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, July 10-11, 2021, p.C8. Beran is the author of “WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.”

Queen of the Third Sex Chawa Zloczower was a Polish Jew born in 1891. At the age of 20, she emigrated to New York all on her own. Her first name is translated “Eve” and she added “Adams.” She ran Eve’s Hangout, a lesbian friendly tearoom, where she hosted poetry readings. She self-published Lesbian Love, a short-story collection, under the name Evelyn Addams. 150 copies were printed and handed out to friends. They disappeared and were forgotten but for one green, cloth-bound copy found by a college student in 1999. Eve liked to hang out with anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and the author Henry Miller. The book got her 18 months in prison and deportation to Poland. She moved to Paris where she wrote unsuccessfully and hawked Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. She was interned during WW II and died at Auschwitz. A street in Paris is named for her. See: Emily Palmer, “Overlooked No More: Eve Adams, Writer Who Gave Lesbians a Voice,” The New York Times, July 2, 2021.

Obit of Note Jean Paul Belmondo (1933-2021) was Mister New Wave Cinema with hits like Breathless and A Man and a Woman. A poor student at elite schools, he tried his hand at professional boxing and received his trademark broken nose. Then he was discovered by Jean Luc Goddard. Tiring of art films, he shifted to popular adventures and spy thrillers. This of course exasperated the intellectuals who called him a sell-out. He in turn dismissed them as hating success. “If I’m nude in a film, that’s fine for the intellectuals. But if I jump from a helicopter, they think it’s terrible.” See: “The New Wave star who personified Gallic cool,” The Week, Sept. 24, 2021, p.39.

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Graduate Student Authors’ Experiences with Creative Commons Licenses By Nancy Sims (Copyright Program Librarian, University of Minnesota Libraries) <nasims@umn.edu>

n the following piece, several authors offer their perspectives (lightly edited from interview prompts) on using Creative Commons licenses with their terminal graduate research papers. Graduate authors are featured because their works of authorship tend to be developed in various directions subsequent to publication, their decisions tend to reflect their own goals and plans and also the perspectives of more senior scholars, and most importantly, they are in places to lead future directions in academic publishing.

Anonymous May 2020, an R1 University in the northeast U.S. My school encouraged releasing your thesis with a CC license, which I was fine with in principle. However, I’m in computer science and my thesis came with an accompanying artefact containing a whole bunch of code. This was all itself freely licensed, but not with CC licenses (which in general aren’t for code)... and it occurred to me that incautious license text in the thesis itself could conflict with those licenses. This is something that I could deal with — everyone working in software pretty much has to be an armchair IP lawyer — but not when the realization comes at ~11am on the day of the thesis filing deadline and you’ve already been up all night. So I punted. I can always distribute my thesis from my webpage, it’s in the university open access archive, and realistically at most a handful of people will ever look at it anyway.

Morgan Lemmer-Webber Spring 2021, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Art History Currently co-founder and director of FOSS and Crafts Studios LLC, and on the academic job market for the upcoming application cycle My introduction to Creative Commons licenses, free and open source software, and free culture likely took a different path than many scholars. My wife had been a long time advocate for user freedom and the advancement of the software and cultural commons by the time we met. At the time I started my master’s program, she was a member of the tech team at Creative Commons. Therefore I had a fairly sound understanding of the basics of free culture licenses independent of my academic career. Even with this background knowledge, I still published my master’s thesis with the “all rights reserved” copyright option available through UMI.1 […] I was […] given the impression by multiple senior scholars that publishing original research under a Creative Commons license would limit the ability to publish it down the line in an academic journal or as a monograph through an academic press. As I progressed on to my PhD program, I became involved in multiple public and digital humanities projects. These projects gave me a more tangible application for Creative Commons licenses in my own work. Through this work, I became increasingly involved in advocacy for the use of free software and free

10 Against the Grain / November 2021

culture in academia culminating in co-hosting FOSS & Crafts, an interdisciplinary podcast about free software, free culture, and making things together. While I had been on this journey of user freedom in parallel to writing my dissertation, I had not seriously considered what license I would release my dissertation under until I was in the final year of writing. I was conducting an interview with Vicky Rampin (née Steeves) about reproducibility and open research in library sciences for the podcast when my dissertation topic came up. She suggested that I should slap a Creative Commons license on it and put it up on the Internet when I finished.2 Despite having given it little prior thought, it immediately seemed like the most natural way to proceed given my other advocacy and public scholarship goals. After this decision was made, I began thinking about expanding the potential for engagement with my research utilizing the freedom that a Creative Commons license allowed. I had already had several members of the general public express an interest in my dissertation topic. Since I already have a platform for public scholarship, I decided to release the official defense copy of my dissertation online3 concurrently to publishing two podcast episodes presenting my research in a manner that is more easily digestible to a public audience.4 My involvement in the free and open source software and free culture movements has, until recently, run parallel to my academic career with only minimal overlap. However, the common thread that runs through all of my interests has been that of freedom, access, and agency. My choice to release my dissertation under a Creative Commons license may not currently align with the standard track of academic publishing; however, I am positive that I have had more public engagement with my scholarship through this route than I would have within the first few months post-graduation had I merely published through ProQuest/UMI. While the results of further efforts to publish this work remain unseen, I look forward to a future where this route of open access publication for original scholarship is more broadly applied.

Ross Mounce 2013, University of Bath Currently Director of Open Access Programmes, Arcadia Fund I didn’t really know about Creative Commons licenses before I started my research but through being invited to give a talk at the 2011 Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin run by the Open Knowledge Foundation, I became sensitised to issues around the lack of open licensing of research outputs. I soon became an open data activist and then also an open access activist. I wanted to licence my thesis under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY), but the upload portal and signature/declaration form did not have any kind of Creative Commons licensing available as an option. I am truly indebted to my librarians, including Kara Jones and Katie Evans who

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realised my desire to make my thesis openly licensed and who helped me achieve that, despite it not being formally available as an option to simply select. […] Having vocally advocated for increased use of Creative Commons licensing to the palaeontology community during my PhD research, it was fitting that I lived by my own words and made my thesis available under a Creative Commons license. My thesis has been cited at least four times as of 2021 (one of those is a self-citation), so I know that people are getting good use out of it. […] I have no worries about sharing my research under the CC BY license. If someone wants to sell a print copy of my thesis on Amazon — go for it! If someone wants to print a bit of my thesis on a mug or a t-shirt, or include it in a rap song — go for it — I would be highly entertained! I stand to lose nothing from someone else re-using my work, provided that the CC BY licence is fully respected. I would not want someone to pass-off my work as theirs — e.g., plagiarism. But I know that the CC BY licence provides recourse against plagiarism if it does occur — proper and sufficient attribution has to be given, and a re-user has to indicate if they make any changes. […] I am yet to see an instance of people re-using my research in a way I do not like. On the contrary, I have seen many instances where people have re-used my research outputs, particularly my data files, that I do “like” as they have further advanced our collective knowledge. Re-use of research outputs is generally a good thing in my opinion, provided ethics are abided by such as CARE principles.

Bruno Ruviaro 2010, Stanford University Currently Associate Professor of Music, Santa Clara University I knew about Creative Commons licenses before I started working on my Doctoral Dissertation. My Doctor of Musical Arts dissertation consisted of a portfolio of musical compositions presented in concert along with written documentation of the process. A great deal of the creative scholarship there involved what we call Musical Borrowing, broadly defined as the act of borrowing from other musical compositions in order to produce new pieces of music. Because of this, my dissertation5 had to tackle questions of copyright from a creative perspective in a quite direct way. […]

The dissertation itself, composed primarily of the musical scores and associated documentation, was released using a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC) license. I did not have any concerns about sharing the work under this license, nor did any of my advisors or mentors. Also, the university made it relatively easy to select a Creative Commons license at the time I uploaded the work. I have routinely released all my works using Creative Commons licenses, and I never had any trouble with it. The heavy usage of borrowed samples in my creative work is not anything new, as there have been many musicians past and present whose creative output is greatly indebted to Musical Borrowing in various forms. Musical ideas flow and evolve a billion times from one musician to another; at the grassroots level that’s what makes music breathe. Originality and authorship cannot (should not) be understood in isolation from this larger river of musical memories and exchanges from which we all drink. Particularly in Electronic Music, the practice of sampling is second nature to many. I am convinced the law needs to evolve to recognize the multitude of ways in which borrowing happens in music. At the bottom of this is the very question of what it means to “own” music? To “own” a sound, a melody, or any other aspect of music? The increasing encroachment of intellectual property law into multiple domains of music is troubling to me. It amounts to a privatization of musical expression, akin to a music-specific “primitive accumulation” process where the very building blocks of music are treated as public land to be enclosed, demarcated by barbed wire, its residents expelled, and its usage monopolized and put under strict control.

Endnotes 1. Lemmer-Webber, “The Body as Ornament,” 2012. 2. FOSS & Crafts, “Vicky Steeves,” 2021. 3. Lemmer-Webber, Morgan. Women and Wool Working in the Roman Empire. 2021. University of Wisconsin Madison, PhD Dissertation. https://mlemmer.org/dissertation/ 4. FOSS & Crafts, “Women and Wool Working” Parts 1 and 2, 2021. 5. Ruviaro, Bruno. Intellectual Improperty. 2010. Stanford U, PhD Dissertation. https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:xp202nz7820/2010-05-28_Ruviaro_Dissertation-augmented. pdf

Rumors continued from page 6 Members of the Special Libraries Association have elected Seema Rampersad, a senior business researcher and service manager at the British Library, to serve as president of SLA in 2023. https://www.sla.org/about-sla/media-room/press-releases/ sla-members-elect-u-k-librarian-as-2023-president/ Arianna Pearsall, formerly Sales Director and our primary contact for several years at the Francis Marion Hotel, has moved to a new position as Program Operations Manager at Destination South Meetings + Events. We’ll miss working with Arianna as we plan for the next Charleston Conference, but we wish her the best of luck with her new endeavors and hope to cross paths again! Congratulations to Lauren Kane on being announced as the next President/CEO of BioOne, beginning January 1, 2022. She succeeds Susan Skomal, who has announced her retirement

12 Against the Grain / November 2021

after 16 years at BioOne’s helm. http://www.bioonepublishing. org/news/kane-president/ The incredible Ann Okerson received a well-deserved award from IFLA! Here’s a quote and a photo from Ann: “Incredibly honored to receive the IFLA – International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Scroll of Appreciation for Distinguished Contributions to IFLA’s Governing Board and committees & also commitment to increasing understanding of the global context in areas continued on page 16

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A New Type of Transformative Agreement for Research Publishing in Biology “A sustainable path to open publication of biomedical research is a long-sought objective among the many science communication initiatives at Cold Spring Harbor. Our transformational offerings provide a model for any research-intensive institution whose scientists wish to make their articles openly available in these long-established, prestigious, not-for-profit journals.” — Dr. John Inglis, Publisher of CSHL Press, co-founder of bioR χiv and medR χiv

Turn your subscription license into an OA publishing license — Immediate benefits for your authors and no extra cost for most institutions Subscribers to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (CSHLP) journals who renew for 2022 now have the option to adopt a Transformative License Agreement. This allows corresponding authors from your institution to publish unlimited OA articles (once accepted for publication), while giving your users access to the complete collection of CSHLP journals. Transformative license agreements offer a fully OA publishing option for your researchers whose papers are accepted at Genes & Development, Genome Research, Learning & Memory, RNA, Molecular Case Studies, and Life Science Alliance Benefits include: • Unlimited open access publication in CSHLP research journals • Access to the complete collection of CSHLP journals • No additional cost for most current subscribers (some minimums apply) • Life Science Alliance: manuscript transfer option for authors submitting to CSHLP research journals ( JCR Impact Factor = 4.592) • bioRχiv at your institution: ° receive a branded channel on bioRχiv for preprints posted by authors at your institution (includes medRχiv postings) authors can save time when posting to bioRχiv by also transmitting a paper to any of more ° than 180 journals from 50+ publishers Present your institution as an “end to end” open access advocate for the biological sciences.

For complete details, including specifics for your institution, visit https://bit.ly/cshlpressopen SEE US AT THE CHARLESTON LIBRARY CONFERENCE— November 2nd, 10am – 6pm at stand #89 in the Gaillard Center

Perspectives from Another Angle: Publishing Advisors By Nancy Sims (Copyright Program Librarian, University of Minnesota Libraries) <nasims@umn.edu> Contributors: Jennifer Chan (Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of California – Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA) and Emily Finch (Scholarly Communication and Copyright Librarian, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS) and Dr. Danny Kingsley (Associate Librarian, Content & Digital Library Strategy, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia) and Melanie Kowalski (Copyright & Scholarly Communications Librarian, Emory University, Atlanta, GA) and Jody Bailey (Head of Scholarly Communications Office, Emory University, Atlanta, GA) and Charles Oppenheim (Visiting Professor, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland)

ach of these contributors has significant experience advising scholars about publishing options in multiple disciplines and at various stages in their careers. Although these advisory roles are often tangential to standard processes of scholarship and publishing, individuals working in these roles often encounter similar issues repeatedly from slightly different angles, which develops insights that complement and expand on those of people in more traditional publishing roles. Each contributor replied to a set of written questions/ prompts. These have been compiled and edited below, with specific quotes pulled to highlight interesting observations, areas of agreement, or points of departure. All of the respondents agreed that Creative Commons licenses are generally a good choice for academic authors — especially those interested in enabling sharing and reuse of their work. Kingsley: […] in the authors’ perspective, the commodity [in the publishing “market”] is not financial, it is reputational. Authors want their work to be read and reused in the form of citations which collectively contribute to various measures in academia. All of the respondents also agreed that Creative Commons licenses are not universally applicable. Chan pointed out that some authors are only interested in sharing their work with limited audiences, and Kowalski & Bailey highlighted that some academic authors do want to monetize their work. Respondents reflected on general advantages that CC licenses offer for authors. Kingsley highlighted the ease of reuse for authors that goes along with retaining copyright ownership, such as when reusing images or graphs in later publications, or for sharing with colleagues. Chan emphasized the “net effect of streamlining permissions and encouraging remix/reuse culture.” Kowalski & Bailey discussed the citation advantage for open access work,1 and Finch explained that the predictability of CC licenses ease burdens on researchers by creating certainty around reuse. But they also offered some thoughts about ways CC licenses disadvantage authors. Chan pointed out that CC licenses can “hide” some reuses from authors, by removing the need for permissions correspondence. Kingsley discussed the potential for reputational harm to authors whose works are reused in poor adaptations or translations. Kowalski & Bailey commented on the potential reputational harm of the “misperception that CC-licensed works lack quality and rigor, even though there are thousands of high-quality, peer-reviewed, CC licensed, open access journals and other publications.”

14 Against the Grain / November 2021

I asked whether there is one (or more) specific Creative Commons license that is particularly good for academic work, or any that are particularly bad. Here, responses ranged widely. Finch and Oppenheim preferred CC Attribution-Noncommercial (which requires attribution and limits reuse to noncommercial users), explaining that, “I recognise of course there are costs associated with some forms of redissemination but favour an open science approach rather than a profit making motivation.” (Oppenheim) and “the NC adds something significant in a realm where labor can be and is exploited.” (Finch) By contrast, Chan did not recommend NC licenses due to the limits they place on reuse (noting they prevent use in Wikipedia). These divergent perspectives on NC clauses among respondents reflect a point of principled divergence in the Creative Commons community in general on limiting commercial reuse versus enabling all reuse. This point of principled divergence also exists to some extent in the broader universe of open licensing beyond Creative Commons. Chan instead emphasized ShareAlike (SA) licenses, “since we wish to encourage further sharing of content.” But in yet another contrast, Kowalski & Bailey said they generally do not recommend SA licenses because “they force downstream users to apply a license that may be impractical or completely unworkable for their use case, and they also make remixing more complicated.” They instead preferred the simple Attribution-only (BY) license — and noted “Any CC license is better than traditional all-rightsreserved copyright that the creator transfers to a publisher. We cannot think of an instance where the creator losing control of their own intellectual property is better than CC licensing it.” I asked respondents if they think most authors are aware of the various benefits and drawbacks of different CC licenses. While Finch offered that “very few authors are completely unfamiliar with them,” others had less sanguine takes. Chan pointed out that even for authors who know about CC licenses, “further explanation is often still necessary.” Kowalski & Bailey noted that in their first encounters with CC licenses, authors tend to choose more restrictive licenses, imagining worst-case scenarios; they address this through discussion to “help them understand that highly restrictive CC licenses will hobble users and prevent their work from gaining a wide audience. It’s also helpful to remind them that even if they don’t openly license their work, bad actors still might copy their work without attributing them and sell it on the Internet.” Kingsley pointed out that even “[u]nderstanding of copyright in general is patchy, with many authors still not realising that their work is no longer theirs on

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signing a copyright transfer agreement”, and hence some authors may not fully understand the ramifications even after they have selected a CC license. Respondents raised many considerations that vary among academic disciplines, especially for early-career scholars. One common set of complications arise when a thesis or dissertation is composed of pre-existing works (common in some disciplines.) Kowalski & Bailey stated that they “have seen students limited in their ability to attach a CC license to their dissertation or thesis as a result of complex authorship [… or] because portions were previously published and copyright in them has transferred to the publisher already.” Kingsley observed that “[t]his is where management of the thesis process needs to begin early,” so that the writing process takes into account existing rights elsewhere, as well as the student-author’s goals for sharing the dissertation. Several respondents discussed concerns that arise in disciplines where theses and dissertations are usually turned into academic monographs. Kowalski & Bailey said they “have found in the humanities that graduate students’ faculty advisors and committee members often discourage open licensing or even open sharing,” but all respondents agreed that most or at least many presses are not discouraged by open dissertations — as Kingsley observed, “after all, a thesis is not a book and they should be different documents.” Chan observed that “seeking clarification with the series editor at the prospective Press can help clarify the publisher’s position on this issue,” and several respondents suggested that embargoes are good tools for authors concerned about monograph acquisition. Kowalski & Bailey also pointed out that “none have raised concerns with the availability of the dissertation in ProQuest’s subscription-based Dissertations and Theses database” as a barrier to monograph acquisitions. Kingsley also used the monograph discussion to highlight a tension inherent in academic reward structures: “Unfortunately, monographs are considered successful if 200 copies are sold. Openly accessible theses, on the other hand, are very highly used. So the author has to effectively make a choice between securing an academic position or having their work actually read.” Embargoes were also offered as tools to address potentially patentable material that may appear in some theses & disserta-

tions, and in the fairly rare “circumstances where a student has done such a good piece of work that it could be commercially exploited, with income to the student as well as to a publisher.” (Oppenheim). Chan commented on debates about appropriate lengths of embargoes, observing that two year embargoes suffice to address patent concerns, and that although some disciplines advocate for longer embargoes — up to indefinite lengths — “such embargoes […] fail to fulfil the original purpose of a thesis or dissertation, which is to serve as an open academic record of the candidate and the program itself.” Few respondents had many observations that reached beyond author experiences. Oppenheim suggested CC BY licenses for journal referee reports, as a solution for reports being too strictly confidential. Kingsley wondered “how much discussion of this type of issue actually occurs in [journal] editorial teams,” since among many editors Kingsley has spoken with, “their training as an editor usually extended to how the submission system worked rather than in depth discussion about licensing, copyright and open access issues.” Despite journal editorial teams’ perhaps limited background on the issues, Finch observed that “journal editorial teams have more agency and power to help support a larger and more robust OA ecosystem [than individual authors], and there is and should be greater pressure on them because of this.” Across all responses to these questions, publishing advisors had some strong areas of overlapping perspectives: all agreed Creative Commons licenses are good options for academic publishing, but that there can be some drawbacks as well. Perspectives varied widely on the specific drawbacks perceived, and on how well authors at various stages of their careers and in various disciplines may understand the decision-making landscape. Despite these specific points of divergence, Creative Commons licenses clearly have a large and increasing role to play in academic publishing.

Endnotes 1. Piwowar, H., et al. (2018). The state of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of open access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375

Rumors continued from page 12 of library collections. (Here’s a photo from the Moscow August 1991 IFLA World Library Congress, which was cancelled on the day it began, because of the historic coup d’état attempt that changed history. IFLA was there! With former colleague Barbara Von Wahlde, then Director of the SUNY-Buffalo Library.)”

Charleston Conference News and Related Events Camille Gamboa, Corporate Communications and Public Affairs Director at SAGE Publishing, writes to tell us that she’ll be attending the Charleston Conference virtually this year. “With my virtual registration, I’m really getting three for the price of one as these two little ones will be enjoying from time-to-time as virtual attendees as well!!” Thanks for sending the picture of your adorable young conference attendees, Camille!

16 Against the Grain / November 2021

Darrell Gunter, President and CEO of Gunter Media Group, will be moderating and hosting both the Innovation Sessions and the Charleston Premiers this year! We’re excited to have this professional and knowledgeable host on board for these two important events — these are two key events designed for conference attendees to find out about the newest, most innovative project and products in the industry. Check out the conference agenda for more details! https://2021charlestonconference.pathable.co/ The Fiesole Retreat hosted a reunion and Zoom catch up on October 7, including a virtual toast from the beautiful home of the Casalini family in Florence. The 2022 Retreat is scheduled for April 5-7 to be hosted by the National Library of Greece in the Stavros continued on page 22

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AGITATE! As Creative Commons: AGITATE! Editorial Collective Speaks to Nancy Sims Editorial Collective Contributors include: Emina Bužinkić, Keavy McFadden, Nithya Rajan, Richa Nagar, Samira Musleh, Sara Musaifer, and Sima Shakhsari Compiled By Nancy Sims (Copyright Program Librarian, University of Minnesota Libraries) <nasims@umn.edu>

Introducing AGITATE! An online, open access journal, AGITATE! is a platform for knowledges that seek to unsettle the dominant politics and practices of experts. AGITATE! explores the possibilities and challenges of interweaving scholarship, creative writing, art, journalism, and activism. We invite contributors from diverse locations to engage the anti-disciplinary space of AGITATE! to catalyze new conversations, visions, and narrative practices in multiple genres and languages, in order to advance struggles for sociopolitical and epistemic justice. We encourage work that is cognizant of and intentional about the simultaneous ethics, aesthetics, poetics, and politics of transformative knowledge-making and pedagogies. We welcome the submission of essays, creative non/fiction, artwork, poetry, translations, musings, and meditations on political struggles in named and unnamed forms. By evolving an open process of co-creation, AGITATE! challenges the traditional divides between process and product, and between author, artist, reviewer, and editor. As an anti-hierarchical collective, AGITATE! strives for equity, transparency, and plurality in our creative, editorial, and publishing processes. Launched in 2019, we have now published three volumes, one annually since our founding. In addition to our volumes, we also host a more dynamic space called AGITATE Now! which compliments and extends AGITATE!’s annual volumes by offering a home for ongoing conversations, emerging meditations, and creative agitations. Because volumes are imagined around particular themes and are published annually or biennially, AGITATE Now! provides a space for fostering ongoing discussions that fall outside of volume themes but reflect our political commitments and communities. The editorial collective, the collective of seven that is co-writing this interview, is the group most directly involved in the recruitment, review, and development of the publications; in the daily life of the platform; and with the unfolding relationships with our contributors and editorial board members. The work of publishing includes: conceptualizing the thematic focus of each volume, recruitment of contributions, reviews in multiple languages and genres, determining the layout, undertaking all the work of formatting and revising, and translating the labor into forms that both reflect and share with our audiences what the work of unsettling dominant knowledges looks like for us, and what are the lessons learned in the process. Our editorial collective evolves with each volume. Nancy: Why did your collective choose to use a Creative Commons license for AGITATE!, broadly speaking? How did your collective make that choice? When we embarked on the process of dreaming up and later founding AGITATE!, our emphasis was on building a platform that would work against the dominant norms of publishing and knowledge production, especially as conceptualized within universities. While there are many dominant norms that one

18 Against the Grain / November 2021

can name here, there are at least two that we were concerned with from the get go: First, how to encourage, nourish, and recognize knowledges that are necessarily created through collective praxes, including creative partnerships between authors and artists, on the one hand, and editors and reviewers, on the other. Second, how could we better represent knowledges that are partial, tentative, everflowing, and ever-evolving and that refuse clean genres, frameworks, and languages. The work of creating a space that agitates against these norms has been an ongoing, labor-intensive, and highly rewarding process of co-evolving a vision, of naming AGITATE! intentionally, and of developing a language about who we are and what our own evolving priorities and ways of co-traveling have been. For us, this has always been done collectively and the editorial collective is central to advancing the visions of AGITATE!. The early conversations about AGITATE! started in the context of our individual and collective involvement in other collectives and long-term collaborative relationships. Our vision for the journal, in part, came out of a dissatisfaction with (a) how graduate students in the collective (Keavy McFadden, Sara Musaifer, Beaudelaine Pierre, Julie Santella in the initial group) were being pushed to produce work in certain kinds of formats by other publishing venues and (b) the types of feedback we received when we tried to publish our work, particularly politically-engaged, collectively-created work that blurred and challenged the imposed compartmentalization of academia, activism, and the arts. We felt that some of the tensions we were trying to hold — particularly around the genres and forms in which our intellectual and political engagements were taking place — were not empowered or were purposefully erased and hidden by reviewers. When we thought about where we could turn to with our emerging pieces and commitments, we realized we did not know of a home for our writing that would honor the particular ways in which we were engaging with storytelling, scholarship, and politics in our work. Incidentally, one member of our collective, a faculty member (Richa Nagar) who had been working closely with us, had already been in a long-standing conversation with the University of Minnesota Libraries about the necessity for creating a publication that agitated against these dominant norms, values, and practices and she had heard great enthusiasm from the publishing team at the UMN Libraries to help advance such work. So the group that would later become the founding editorial collective began to ask: what would it mean for us to work with the UMN Libraries to start a platform that intentionally pushed back against some of the limitations that intellectuals from marginalized locations repeatedly face? What would it mean to share and articulate knowledge(s) in ways that are foreclosed in the dominant disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and anti-disciplinary academic spaces available to us? The emphasis from the beginning was on how to push back against traditions of exclusion — how to create a platform for knowledges that are suppressed both within and outside the academy, and how to struggle for and center just and ethical

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processes of knowledge production in our platform rather than representing mere products? It was by dwelling in these questions as a collective that we began to develop a vision for AGITATE! and of naming AGITATE!’s evolving priorities and language. Through the platform of AGITATE! we, alongside our collaborators and co-agitators, are interested in exploring the possibilities and challenges of interweaving scholarship with storytelling and all forms of creative expression (whether classified as “art” or “activism” or “analysis”), and many of our engagements dive into the simultaneous ethics, aesthetics, poetics, and politics of such knowledge making. AGITATE! explores how stories told from multiple genres, languages, and perspectives can be read as theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical tools in order to rethink intellectual labor and socially transformative engagements. It searches for what it means to undiscipline ourselves in search of sociopolitical, epistemic, and poetic justice, while also embracing the responsibility to translate ourselves to and between the communities and issues we agitate with, in, and for. This has involved challenging and interrogating the conventional separations that are held/policed between process and product, between genres, and between author, artist, reviewer, and editor. The process of review is a central place where our commitments and priorities come through. So we have consistently devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to imagining how our collective review process can emphasize relationship building and nourishing collaborations with those who are creating and thinking in ways that unsettle prevailing norms. From this agitational mode, licensing and copyright were not at the forefront of our minds. But, in conversation with you and other folks at University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing, we realized that a Creative Commons licence might help support our commitments to open access, freely accessible content and to granting explicit control and copyrights to contributors. We were particularly inspired by your insights around copyrights and how they can be shared with journals and publishers without the contributor being stripped of the copyrights to their own work. Collectively, we agreed that engaging with CC could help us articulate visions for and practices of intellectual, artistic, and academic freedom, even though we didn’t have much of a background or stake in the legal context. Nancy: Why did you choose the specific license you did (CC BY-NC-ND)? (Were there any you considered and chose not to use? If so, why?) Initially, we did go with the ND, largely because we did not have a full understanding of the ecosystem of Creative Commons and what the different clauses mean. However, we recently decided to change our licensing and distribute our work with a CC BY-NC 4.0 rather than the CC BY-NC-ND. When we were in the very early stages of dreaming up and building AGITATE!, we were not fully aware of the differences between the different Creative Commons licenses and did not know that we had opted for a relatively more restrictive license. For example, we did not understand that the more clauses you add to a CC license, the fewer ways that readers can re-use the content without the author’s permission. But, especially as we have grown and deepened our work, we realized that we needed our licensing to reflect our commitments around sharing, adapting, translating, and otherwise agitating existing knowledges, and the ND was too restrictive to support those goals. This shift and our return to questions around CC licensing and copyright speaks to a longstanding tension that is at the heart of our work, especially as we continue to grow. As an an-

20 Against the Grain / November 2021

ti-hierarchical collective, we are acutely aware of the violence of dominant academic systems. Setting out to challenge and push up against the dominant norms of publishing, there can be a tendency, or maybe a temptation, to think that agitating conventional models means just throwing out and doing away with everything that is a vestige of the traditional system — whether it be peer review, author or submission agreements, editorials, etc. But what we have found, and what we continually return to as our collective process evolves, is that some of these practices and mechanisms, such as licensing, can be reappropriated and used in powerful ways to actually support agitational modes of knowledge production. At present, we see CC as supporting our broader commitments. Is Creative Commons alone going to undo entrenched ways of thinking about knowledge and publishing in the academy and beyond? No. But it can be an important component or supportive piece of that effort. Our evolving engagements with copyrights and licensing represent our simultaneous complicity in the violences of dominant academic systems but also our commitments to creatively working through them, resisting them, and fostering collectivity by pushing back against them. Nancy: Did you consider using more mixed approaches (i.e., allowing contributors to select between more than one CC license, or using both Creative Commons licenses and more traditional approaches to copyright)? If so, why did you move away from that? We haven’t ever considered that. From our launch, we were committed to CC over more traditional approaches. From our perspective, our commitment to open access and collective processes means that we need something like the CC framework and that more conventional or limited approaches are not capable of supporting our vision. One of our core principles is a commitment to including marginalized or less heard voices that are not professionally trained in academia, arts, or activism, but whose commitments align with and advance the vision of AGITATE!. Especially in this context, it is important for contributors to retain control and autonomy over their own work. So the traditional approach will likely never be something that we are interested in, unless a contributor could make a compelling case for why they needed something published under a different license. We do occasionally make changes to our review and publishing processes on a case-by-case basis, based on the needs and dreams of our contributors, but rarely are folks asking for more traditional models. Instead, our collaborative relationships with contributors often lead us to keep learning to undo and reimagine conventional approaches. Nancy: Do you think using a Creative Commons license for all contributions has affected contributors/contributions? We haven’t had a contributor approach us about it either way. There haven’t been any instances of someone choosing not to contribute or choosing to contribute because of our licensing, at least not any that have been communicated to the editorial collective. We have had to explain our licensing approach to potential contributors who have asked about permissions or republishing, but one of the best parts of operating with a CC license is that it takes away most thorny legal and permissions-based issues: the answer is always “yes,” because a contributor retains the rights to their own creative, intellectual, and political work. And, for us, this comes from a deep acknowledgement of the ways in which knowledges and any “outputs” are always the result of collective processes of knowledge production, even if a particular article or artist expression or translation is thought of as a result from a “single author.”

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We are just now starting to have more explicit conversations about our policies and licensing with contributors, so perhaps we will have more collective discussions about CC as our upcoming volumes take shape. Nancy: Are there ways in which Creative Commons licenses are frustrating or disappointing for you as editors/facilitators? (e.g., do they limit things you’d want to enable; are they tied to legal constructs you’d like to get rid of/bypass) When we began this work together to build the space of AGITATE!, we added the tagline “unsettling knowledges” to our journal. We felt this tagline helped capture our intention to build a space that fundamentally questions some assumptions about what knowledge looks like, which are frequently taken for granted in academic spaces. This knowledge pretends to be complete, authoritative, owned by individuals, and authored either by experts or at least with the stamp of approval from experts. We sought to destabilize much of this by creating a community wherein partial, shared, collective, and non-“expert” knowledges would properly be held up as intellectually and politically rigorous knowledge. Since then, we have often discussed our use of the term “unsettle.” Particularly given our affiliation with and sponsorship by UMN, an R-1 land grant university responsible for ongoing stealing and ongoing occupying of Dakota homelands, as well as profiting from the theft and occupation of other Indigenous lands, what sorts of claims to “unsettling” can we actually make? What does it mean to seriously grapple with the complex histories and present realities of the land on which UMN presently sits? Recognizing that this ‘we’ is a fraught term, what obligations and responsibilities do we carry as a result of where we are located — both as a collective and individually, situated as we differently are? What might it mean for us to ground AGITATE!’s commitment to “unsettle knowledges” here, in relation to this land, while also attending to the many lands and struggles that we associate with? Coming at these questions with accountability displays some of the limitations of CC. Western copyright law is deeply embedded within rights discourse and histories of colonialism and imperialism, and that includes contemporary articulations of CC even as it works to address some of that history. CC still intervenes at the level of authorship, ownership, and property, even if the intent is to redistribute and share that authorship and ownership. But CC’s entrenchment within legal constructs of property and colonial assumptions about ownership is certainly a limitation and frustration. Nancy: Are there ways in which Creative Commons licenses have been freeing for you, or have allowed you to make positive changes?

Another core principle of ours is a commitment to publishing work and fostering collaborations across multiple sites, genres, and languages, that are often rendered unequal by prevailing structures. CC helps mitigate some of the extractive models of publishing by making sure that, to the extent possible through licensing, the power and autonomy is in the hands of the contributor. In this sense, CC is a supportive infrastructure that frees us to dream and agitate in other spheres without getting bogged down by legal obstacles and decisions. Nancy: If you could begin AGITATE! again with — absolutely any — approach to copyright/ownership/authorship/credit, what might that look like? Within current constraints, we would likely still reach for the Creative Commons model, especially given the mentioned importance of working against extractive models and expanding the terrain of collectivity in publishing. However, if we can imagine a different world, we would take a different approach to embodying an anti-copyright and anti-intellectual property position, in order to work towards copyright abolition. We would do away with any notions of individual “ownership” of intellectual “property.” We would also do away with copyright’s emphasis on neatly categorized products, rather than elevating the messy and creative processes of knowledge production. Consequently, any conversation about reimagining authorship means a re-imagination of the purpose of AGITATE! and a re-dreaming of what forms AGITATE! might take. If we could rebirth AGITATE!, we would likely question the journal format altogether. As we’ve grown over the past few years, we’ve expanded our engagements beyond our annual journal publication. Our dreams have found inspiration in the relationships we fostered and the communities we built across our platform, which includes the journal volumes, but also our AGITATE Now! space, workshops, webinars, and organized conversations. What we realized in the years since our inception is that much like copyright frameworks, the inherited structures of journals emphasize final products, a narrow understanding of authorship, and a glorification of the written word. All of this happens at the expense of the relational, the collective, the messy, and the creative in knowledge production. Were we to dream AGITATE! over again, we would emphasize ourselves as a platform, a community, a different type of periodical, or something else entirely, rather than a journal. As we grow, we continue to think about how we can expand into a platform that supports named and unnamed radical work that agitates beyond the outputs we have so far been focused on — beyond the written word, beyond final “products,” and beyond publications.

Rumors continued from page 16 Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center of Athens. More details at https://www.casalini.it/retreat/. We’re looking forward to the return of our in-person exhibits at the 2021 Charleston Vendor Showcase! We currently have 100 booths ready to visit with conference attendees either virtually or in-person. To see some of the plans from participating exhibitors, check out our Charleston Conference Vendor Showcase Round Up https://www. charleston-hub.com/2021/09/2021-charleston-vendorshowcase-round-up/! Sharna Williams and Shirley Davidson are hard at work, doing conference preparations behind the scenes!

22 Against the Grain / November 2021

Last, but not least, if you’re a first-time vistor to the Charleston area who plans to attend the conference this year, we have a series of four guest posts on fun, touristy things to see and do in Charleston written by Traci Magnus, realtor for Dunes Properties, Charleston, SC. Check out her ideas on downtown day tripping, rainy day activities in Charleston, southern food you need to try, and visiting historic Fort Sumter. https://bit.ly/ CHS-Guest-Posts That’s it for this go-round. Do you have any Rumors you’d like to share? If so, send them to us at <editors@against-the-grain.com>!

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Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman Column Editor’s Note: So … its Fall out there (no I will not say that…). We know that because the leaves are starting to turn, the students are back on campus and everything is back to normal. Well, they are kinda back to normal — or trending in that direction. I hope that everyone is successful this Fall in providing services to your students, faculty, staff, community and other users, be they in person, remote or hybrid (where just about everything is). So my contribution to “normal” will be in sharing these three excellent reviews of three excellent works. Reviewers in this issue are: Christopher Edwards (University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson), Steven W. Sowards (Michigan State University), and Katherine Swart (Calvin University). I will have a larger column in our December 2021/January 2022 issue. If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain, please write me at <cseeman@umich.edu>. If you are a publisher and have a book you would like to see reviewed in a future column, please also write me directly. You can also find out more about the Reader’s Roundup here — https://sites.google.com/view/ squirrelman/atg-readers-roundup. Happy reading and be nutty! — CS

Jewell, Alyssa. Move, Play, Learn: Interactive Storytimes with Music, Movement, and More. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2020. 9780838919125, 144 pages. $47.99 (ALA Members: $43.19) Reviewed by Katherine Swart (Collection Development Librarian, Hekman Library, Calvin University) <kswart20@calvin.edu> Children’s storytimes can be magical experiences ... as long as you can hold everyone’s attention. But with young children, staying still and listening can be challenging. Moving, playing, and interacting with others is what busy toddlers do best. Why not incorporate that behavior into storytime? That’s what Alyssa Jewell learned as a children’s librarian in Birmingham, Alabama. With a background in theater education and experience as a musician, Jewell incorporated music and movement into her storytimes and had great success. Alyssa Jewell is well positioned to write on this topic. While getting her MLIS degree from the University of Alabama School of Library and Information Studies, Jewell did an intensive study of movement and music storytimes. She studied early childhood development and literacy, interviewed librarians with successful storytime experiences, and perfected her own storytime methods. The project became so extensive that her professor encouraged her to make it into a book. Move, Play, Learn: Interactive Storytimes with Music, Movement, and More teaches readers how to create their own storytimes and gives several examples for varying age groups. While Jewell approaches storytime as a librarian, the book is also useful for elementary school teachers, early literacy

24 Against the Grain / November 2021

specialists, and students studying education or library science. The book is readable and practical, easily engaging novices and experienced storytellers alike. Interspersed in the chapters are interviews with experienced storytellers who use music and movement in their work. Jewell begins by giving an overview of music and movement storytime and its importance within public library programming. Throughout the book, she cites ways that her model of storytime meets the Association for Library Service to Children’s (ALSC) Competencies for Librarians Serving Children in Public Libraries. Chapter 2 describes the importance of play in early child learning. Jewell calls music and movement the “dynamic duo” for the way they stimulate the senses and promote healthy brain development. She has brief notes on Piaget and Vygotsky, but delves deeper into Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences and the different types of learning styles. Combining music and movement with early literacy also leads to improved learning. The Public Library Association (PLA) and ALSC created a research initiative called Every Child Ready to Read (ECRR1 and later ECRR2) to define the goals of early literacy programs. Jewell takes her storytime model and maps it against the ECRR1 and ECRR2 goals, along with five domains of school readiness. She shows how everything fits into place in order to make music and movement storytimes ideal early literacy activities. The next three chapters take readers through the steps of designing, planning, and leading music and movement storytimes. Jewell is quick to assure librarians that they don’t need to be able to sing and dance in order to lead a storytime. She recommends interactive read-aloud stories and books for story dramas. Then, she shares her favorite storytime musicians and bands, as well as specific songs and albums. While some of the songs are still on CDs, many are on YouTube. She also suggests thematic movements and cooldown activities. Jewell ends the section with sage advice about leading storytimes, from setting the right expectations to empowering parents and caregivers. The second part of the book includes 20 music and movement storytime programs for infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and all ages. Jewell’s expertise really shines here as she outlines each program, interjects advice, suggests supplies, and even includes the lyrics to the songs. The book ends with a complete bibliography of recommended books and music, as well as professional books and articles about early literacy and child development. Comparable with classics like Mother Goose on the Loose, this book is the complete package with background information and ready-made programs, sure to please children’s librarians and the children they serve. ATG Reviewer Rating: If I were a children’s librarian, I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.)

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Polger, Mark Aaron. Library Marketing Basics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 9781538118931, 208 pages. $54.99 (ALA Members: $49.49) Reviewed by Christopher Edwards (Assistant Head of Information Literacy, Eugene McDermott Library, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson) <chris.edwards@utdallas.edu> This particular book was an easy choice to review because it addresses a big challenge for libraries of all kinds. In addition to maintaining collections, providing on the spot reference assistance, and engaging in user education, librarians also have to be aware of how our patrons find us. The information landscape is more cluttered that ever before, so our users must select the library as an option from a wider field. We can’t wait for them to come in and discover us or (as was the case these last 18 months) find us over the Web. The best thing about this book is how well thought-out it is. The chapters begin with defining marketing and selecting targeted audiences and progress through step-by-step basics of marketing tools from signs to social media presences. In the forward to the book, Kathy Dempsey, founding chair of Library Marketing Conference and author of The Accidental Library Marketer, notes that this book is unique among library marketing books in the attention that is given to process and why things can work rather than relying on anecdotal examples alone. Author Mark Aaron Polger, MLIS, is the first year outreach librarian at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY), and an information literacy instructor at ASA College. He has written and presented internationally on topics such as library marketing strategies, faculty outreach, information literacy campaigns and library signage. (From back cover) Mark Polger begins by defining the need for marketing and key marketing terms and moves through several exercises to assess audience and opportunities for greater engagement through marketing activities. The book progresses through planning a

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.)

26 Against the Grain / November 2021

campaign and making use of physical and online spaces to spread library information. The writing is straightforward and easy to digest. Each chapter is accompanied by copious bibliographic references. All told, this is a very good introduction to a multifaceted and complex beast that many librarians find themselves tackling in addition to their titular duties. 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.)

Spires, Kendal (ed.). Graphic Novels Core Collection. Third edition. Amenia, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2020. 978-1-64265-647-3, xii + 774 pages. $295.00. Reviewed by Steven W. Sowards (Associate Dean for Collections, Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing, Michigan) <sowards@msu.edu> This multipurpose tool supports both collection development and advice to the reading public. From summary entries for more than 2,000 graphic novels, librarians can tackle “purchasing, … verification of information, … curriculum or programming support, … collection maintenance, … professional development or instruction, [and] … readers’ advisory” (p. ix). This “curated list of fiction and nonfiction comics and graphic novels for all ages” emphasizes English-language works for the American market and American libraries, including a few bilingual titles and some works translated into English from Japanese, Korean and French. More than 500 two-column pages of title-by-title entries are followed by almost 300 pages of indexes by author, title and subject. One entry is devoted to each publication. For multi-volume series, each volume has its own entry. Each listing states the title of the work, the names of authors and illustrators, the publisher and year of publication, the length in pages, and a series notation if relevant. Age-appropriate audiences are noted as “Adult” or by grade level (K to 12). A Dewey classification is followed by suggested subject headings (these reflect the indexes at the back), and the ISBN. Brief notes describe the content or theme, sometimes quote reviews in sources such as Booklist and Library Journal, date the first published appearance of the content, and list any awards earned such as ALA YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens. “Essential” titles are marked with a star. Grade level appears in each entry, and listings are grouped into four sections: there are 65 pages of works for “Children: Pre K-5”; a hundred pages with titles assigned to “Middle School: 6-8”; 170 pages devoted to “High School: 9-12” entries: and 180 pages for “Adult” materials. Publications may appear in more than one section. Three indexes follow the listings. A spare list of authors does not include illustrators. The title index includes separate listings for each volume in a series, and signals publications that appear in multiple age-range sections (because the same title can point to more than one listing page). The subject index is by far the longest, well over 200 pages. The subject entries point up the extent to which graphic novels speak to the imagination, interests and worries of children, teens and young adults. Graphic novels do not shy away from uncomfortable and controversial topics, so one sees here the Holocaust, Slavery, Assassination, Alcoholics, and AIDS Activists. A stated goal is to “emphasize equity, diversity, and continued on page 38

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

ho can resist the sirens of an exotic tale, the blue green of the Caribbean Sea, the gentle ocean breeze swaying a palm tree, or the romance of island fishermen? Now deliver that in poetic verse with a twist of history and a look at social injustice. It makes for interesting, magical reading. “O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros, as you did in my boyhood, when I was a noun gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise.” “Omeros,” an epic poem of seven books and 64 chapters, is considered Derek Walcott’s masterpiece. In “Omeros,” the reader easily feels the laissez faire of the islands, the gentle breezes and yet is quickly entranced with the complexity of the historical and geographic accents. Published in 1990 to great praise and critical review, the work was recognized as the literary achievement that garnered the attention of the Swedish Academy. Thus, Derek Walcott was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.” “Now he heard the griot muttering his prophetic song of sorrow that would be the past. It was a note, long-drawn and endless in its winding like the brown river’s tongue: ‘We were the colour of shadows when we came down with tinkling leg-irons to join the chains of the sea, for the silver coins multiplying on the sold horizon, and these shadows are reprinted now on the white sand of antipodal coasts, your ashen ancestors from the Bight of Benin, from the margin of Guinea.” Born on the island of St. Lucia, Walcott incorporated his Caribbean heritage into his works. When he passed away in 2017, I cut the article out of the newspaper. It has lived folded with the list of Nobel laureates. Reading the article again created awareness. There was juxtaposition with the easy breezy of the islands and Walcott’s struggle with race. Four illustrative items from the article: 1) Joseph Brodsky, a poet of Nobel renown, expressed criticism for the critics that regionally pigeonholed Walcott due to “an unwillingness…to admit that the great poet of the English language is a black man.”; 2) Walcott’s statement that: “The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the English poets.”; 3) He struggled early on with what he described as a “wrestling contradiction of being white in mind and black in body, as if the flesh were coal from which the spirit like tormented smoke writhed to escape.”; 4) He ultimately conquered the racial nature of this struggle stating — “Once we have lost our wish to be white, we develop a longing to become black.” All are very provocative perspectives in our current environment.

language around the rocks in its clear-running lines and its small shelving falls with their eddies, ‘Choctaws,’ ‘Creeks,’ ‘Choctaws’, and I thought of the Greek revival carried past the names of towns with columned porches, and how Greek it was, the necessary evil of slavery, in the catalogue of Georgia’s marble past, the Jeffersonian ideal in plantations with its Hectors and Achilleses, its foam in the dogwood’s spray, past towns named Helen, Athens, Sparta, Troy. The slave shacks, the rolling peace Of the wave-rolling meadows, oak, pine, and pecan, and a creek like this one. From the window I saw the bundles of women moving in ragged bands like those on the wharf, headed for Oklahoma; then I saw Seven Seas, a rattle in his hands.” {Sidebar: Achille is the protagonist in this story. Hector is his adversary. Seven Seas symbolically represents Homer. Besides the obvious ties to Homer — Helen is a city in Georgia and St Lucia is also referred to as Helen.} Walcott was not only a poet defining and refining the language, he penned 40 plays, taught at Boston University, was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, and worked as well with a paint brush as a pen. The cover “If we wonder of “Omeros” is one of Walcott’s waoften, the gift tercolors — fishermen in a small craft of knowledge navigating a green choppy sea with an island in the background. will come.” — In the isolation created by the panArapaho demic one can immerse in “Omeros.” However, now that we are peeking out from a COVID closet and learning to navigate again, maybe Walcott’s poem entitled “Map of the New World” can give direction: I Archipelagoes At the end of this sentence, rain will begin. At the rain’s edge, a sail. Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands; into a mist will go the belief in harbours of an entire race. The ten-years war is finished. Helen’s hair, a grey cloud. Troy, a white ashpit by the drizzling sea. The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp. A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain and plucks the first line of the Odyssey.

“‘Somewhere over there,’ said my guide, ‘the Trail of Tears started.’ I leant towards the crystalline creek. Pines shaded it. Then I made myself hear the water’s

28 Against the Grain / November 2021

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LEGAL ISSUES Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Jack Montgomery (Western Kentucky University) <jack.montgomery@wku.edu>

Legally Speaking — Reasons for Copyright Infringement Column Editor: Anthony Paganelli (Western Kentucky University) <Anthony.Paganelli@wku.edu>

s many in the United States took time to remember the events of September 11, 2001, an interesting clickbait headline stated the most infringed photograph was the iconic 9/11 photo of the three firemen raising the American Flag near the debris of the Twin Towers. I do not typically go for these type of clickbait headlines, but it made me wonder how and why copyrighted works are frequently infringed. According to the U.S. Copyright Office, “copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.” This appears simple enough that if you want to use a copyrighted work you need to get the permission of the copyright owner. Yet, this simple definition has caused numerous lawsuits and involved millions of dollars, because copyrighted works continue to be infringed, especially with easily accessible content available online. Copyright infringement is a major concern for artists, authors, and publishers, which requires numerous and expensive resources to prevent and seek remedies for infringed works. While the United Kingdom’s Intellectual Property Office (2021) noted a slight decline of online infringement incidents from their recent quantitative and qualitative study from the previous four years at 23%. There is still cause for concern based on the knowledge of why people violate copyright laws, which the Intellectual Property Office began to study online infringement in 2012. The Online Copyright Infringement Tracker study by the Intellectual Property Office (2021) examined online copyright infringement issues in music, film, television, live sports, video games, software, eBooks, digital magazines, audiobooks, and digital visual images. The summary of the study noted, “The main drivers for online consumption were cost, the choice available and the convenience of being able to consume content whenever they want” (IPO, 2021, p. 1), which gives a beginning look as to why people infringe on copyrighted works. In other words, the availability of online copyrighted works can cost less and are easily accessible. Due to Covid-19, the study did account for some reasons the percentage had declined in some categories, such as live sports streaming. Since numerous sporting events cancelled during the Covid-19 shutdowns, there was a lack of available online content. In addition, Covid-19 was addressed as a part of the research in the qualitative portion; participants mentioned that forms of online entertainment content were important to their mental health during the periods of shutdowns.

30 Against the Grain / November 2021

Of the categories examined, music was a major category for copyright infringement, which participants had utilized various online platforms to access streaming music. The categorized platforms on which the participants accessed music were classified as either legal, illegal, or other. The main forms of illegal downloads included, “Downloading from sites such as YouTube using an online converter or software, app or browser extension; receiving a link to download music made available by someone else; receiving the file(s) directly from someone else; a file sharing or peer to peer service where links to download files are typically made available; and a file hosting website or cyberblocker.” Only a small percentage accessed streaming services illegally through the use of “a file hosting website or cyberblocker (MediaFire, Reaidgator, etc).” (IPO, 2021, p. 59). The music category also mentioned an ‘unknown’ option, which was created “to serve as a catch-all for those who were unsure of the exact source” (IPO, 2021, p. 59). This indicated that there were 12% of the participants that download music without understanding that they may or may not be infringing on copyrighted works. For instance, one respondent stated, “I’m not sure about their legality anymore and I am wary of doing something online that I should not do. I seldom see any clear guidance as to whether or not it is acceptable to use such sites so I prefer to err on the side of caution” (IPO, 2021, p. 74). Despite a majority of participants (59%) that utilized a subscription service or paid for online music, there were a small percentage of participants that illegally downloaded music intentionally. While music is one category, the other categories that were examined indicated several participants that either were not aware they infringed or they intentionally infringed. The study indicated the driving factors of infringement were costs, “the availability and broad range of content accessible via illegal sources which often offer people more options than legal methods, and the ease of access of illegal methods meaning that there are relatively few barriers to use” (IPO, 2021, p. 235). The study considered two types of consumers that infringed on copyrighted works via online. The types were Cautious Infringers and Savvy Infringers. The Cautions Infringers are “those who worry about infringing the law and the risks of illegal activity.” The Savvy Infringers are “those who are more tech savvy and knowingly access content illegally without much concern over the related dangers or consequences” (IPO, 2021, p. 237). Because most copyrighted works provide messages warning the consumer about the impact of infringement, a communications testing was also conducted during the study that noted the

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behavior of participants that viewed the warning messages. The Cautious Infringers were most likely to change their behavior reading copyright messages, whereas the Savvy Infringers were not likely to change. In fact, the study revealed that the Savvy Infringers were “Sceptical about the true impact of illegal access on industries or of the opinion that industries must change, not consumers.” The Intellectual Property Office also offered considerations when preventing infringement by a Savvy Infringer that a message should note the impact of infringement to an individual, rather than the industry, which would be more effective, as well as the risk to the consumer through computer viruses. The study also stated that messages with “greater legal action and consequences for those who infringe — this is not currently seen as a viable threat but was mentioned by a few as a potential deterrent if enforced more widely” (IPO, 2021, p. 237). Overall, the study provided insight on the reasons people infringe and the types of online content that is downloaded illegally. In addition, demographics were also included in the study. For instance, social status was a category for those that downloaded online content illegally. The data indicated that upper, middle, and lower class consumers infringed more software, eBooks, and audio books than the working skilled class, working class, and the non-working class. In fact, the working skilled, working, and non-working class illegally downloaded more music, film, sporting events, video games, and digital magazines than the other social classes. While the study is creating a better understanding of the behavior of consumers infringing on copyrighted works and providing best practices, this does not factor in other authors or creators that infringe on other works. It would be ideal to have similar data that would give us insight on their behaviors and motivations. The numerous copyright lawsuits only describe the plaintiffs and defendants arguments, along with the judges’ remarks without motivations or behavior reasons for infringement. A couple of recent music copyright issues arose that interestingly suggests that other artists unknowingly infringe on other copyrighted works. For instance, Nick Thorburn from the band Islands released the album Islomania and the song “Carpenter” was actually a cover of a 2014 song by Julie Byrne called “Prism Song.” Thorburn stated that he forgot he had heard the song before, which he listened to through a streaming playlist. After he heard the song on the playlist, he recorded a demo using his phone. Later he listened to his version and then made a studio recording. Once he realized the issue, he attributed the infringement issue as a mistake. According to Rogers (2021), “He took full responsibility, apologized to Byrne, and noted that she would be receiving 100 percent of the publishing rights for the song.” This is not the only instance of mistaken use of infringement, but it does appear to be a growing trend following the landmark case involving Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up,” which Thicke and Pharrell Williams paid $5 million for their infringement case. Since the Thicke ruling, artists are being more aware of the consequences of infringing, and they are addressing these issues once they are raised. For example, Lorde’s song “Solar Power” was similar to the Primal Scream song “Loaded,” which was brought to the attention of Lorde before “Solar Power” was released. She immediately contacted the leader of Primal Scream, Bobby Gillespie and informed him of the similarities.

32 Against the Grain / November 2021

Fortunately, Lorde received their blessings to move forward. Interestingly, this did not end with Primal Scream. In fact, there is a similarity with the George Michael song “Freedom,” which the George Michael’s estate also gave their blessings. The idea of seeking out permission after the fact is becoming a common trend in the music industry. Taylor Swift contacted the band Right Said Fred in 2017 before she released the song “Look What You Made Me Do,” because there was similarities to the Right Said Fred song “I’m Too Sexy.” A more recent account is Olivia Rodrigo’s song “Good 4 U” and Paramore’s “Misery Business,” which she gave writing credits to the band. The technique of giving writers credit on a song is also a growing trend to avoid any legal remedies. For instance, Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” includes song credit to 11 people associated with Gap Band. Furthermore, Animal Collective also received writing credit on Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” These are just a few examples of musical artists either unknowingly infringing or being proactive to avoid any copyright infringement lawsuit. Fortunately, the artists mentioned in Rogers’ article avoided lawsuits and financial repercussions, which is attributed to prior agreements between the artists. Such as Rogrigo’s song that George Michael’s estate stated, “George would have been flattered to hear, so on behalf of one great artist to a fellow artist, we wish her every success with the single” (Rogers, 2021). Also Lorde’s case that according to Lorde, Gillespie replied, “You know, these things happen. You caught a vibe that we caught years ago.” After Elvis Costello was made aware of a Rodrigo song similar to his “Pump It Up,” he stated, “It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That’s what I did.” (Rogers, 2021). This article examined two types of online infringers, which are those that are Cautions and those that are Savvy, along with those artists that unknowingly and knowingly infringe, but immediately seek resolution before the issue reaches the legal system. However, there are those that are innocent infringers. According to Reese (2007), “Innocent or unknowing copyright infringement occurs when someone engages in infringing activity not knowing that her conduct constitutes infringement” (p. 133). Innocent infringers may have violated copyright laws due to their lack of knowledge regarding copyrighted works. A common issue for an innocent infringer is that they may not understand the legitimate way to copy works, which there are proper ways to use copyrighted works. About innocent infringers, Reese noted, “Perhaps most commonly when she knowingly copies from another’s work but reasonably believes that her copying is not infringing” (p. 133). Similar to the knowing infringers, unknowingly or innocent infringers are likely to have an idea that violating copyright laws can have consequences, but their understanding of the complicated copyright laws are limited or non-existence; therefore they will infringe without fully understanding the act. While we are getting a better understanding of the types of works that are frequently infringed and the type of infringer, the ability to deter these acts will continue to be a challenge despite the strengthening of laws and technology to combat infringement.

References Intellectual Property Office. (March 2021). Online Copyright Infringement Tracker: Latest Wave Overview and Key Findings. Retrieved from https://assets.publishing.service.

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gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/1000795/OCI-report-2020.pdf.

com/music/2021/9/9/22663301/music-plagiarism-copyrightinfringement-lorde-olivia-rodrigo-blurred-lines.

Reese, R. A. (2007). Innocent infringement in U.S. Copyright Law: A history. Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, 30(2).

U.S. Copyright (2021). Definitions. Retrieved from https:// www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definitions.html#:~:text=As%20 a%20general%20matter%2C%20copyright,permission%20of%20 the%20copyright%20owner.

Rogers, N. (Sept. 2021). Music copyright in the age of forgetting. The Ringer. Retrieved from https://www.theringer.

Questions & Answers — Copyright Column Column Editor: Will Cross (Director of the Open Knowledge Center and Head of Information Policy, NC State University Libraries) <wmcross@ncsu.edu> ORCID: 0000-0003-1287-1156 QUESTION: An academic publisher asks, “What is going on with the recent lawsuit over textbook materials?” ANSWER: Some of the most valuable aspects of academic textbooks are the ancillary materials such as questions at the end of a chapter, homework problems, and so forth. Indeed, the lack of ancillary materials has been identified as a significant obstacle for uptake of some open educational resources (OER) and their inclusion has been a key selling point for OER developers such as OpenStax. Given their value and the fact that these questions are often used to assess and grade student performance, it should come as no surprise that many online sites have sprung up offering unauthorized access to these questions and providing answers. One of the best-known companies in this business is Chegg, which hires an army of independent contractors to prepare answers to those questions and then makes those answers available to students online. Services like Chegg have been criticized by faculty instructors for facilitating student cheating, but a recent lawsuit by textbook publisher Pearson raises a distinct set of claims under copyright law. In a lawsuit filed in September (Pearson Education, Inc. v. Chegg, Inc. (2:21-cv-16866)), Pearson claims that Chegg’s “Chegg Study” service — which sells access to ancillary materials aligned to textbooks including Pearson’s for $14.99 a month — violates Pearson’s copyright in their textbooks and ancillary materials. At first blush, a claim that Chegg’s answers violate Pearson’s copyright in the corresponding questions may seem strange. After all, the answer to a question is likely to include a fair amount of factual information and to primarily reflect ideas rather than the specific expression of those ideas, all things that are not protected under U.S. copyright law. Pearson, however, offers two arguments that Chegg is infringing. First, Pearson argues that many of the answers quote or closely paraphrase the answers provided in the Pearson textbooks. They also argue that the answers are “based upon, and necessarily derive from” Pearson’s questions. As such, Pearson argues that the answers are “a byproduct of the questions, and a result of the creativity set forth in the questions” and thus derivative works. While Pearson offers several examples of Chegg answers that may meet the legal requirement that they be “substantially similar” to Pearson’s, it is difficult to tell at this stage whether

34 Against the Grain / November 2021

the copying is pervasive enough to overcome a fair use defense. In a blog post discussing the case, legal expert Jonathan Band suggests that the three examples provided in the initial complaint by themselves “almost certainly would not be sufficient” to prove infringement. Pearson’s second claim that Chegg’s answers are infringing because they derive from Pearson’s question is broader but may not be much stronger. Pearson argues that the selection and arrangement of questions is creative and that the answers are derivative works. Chegg, however, is likely to argue that questions are generally selected functionally to present the materials covered in the textbooks, perhaps analogously, to the Bikram Yoga sequence that the Ninth Circuit found to be unprotectable in a 2015 case. (https:// caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1714982. html) Chegg is also likely to raise a fair use defense based on an argument that Chegg’s use is transformative and any copyright protection is thin and only applies to the selection and arrangement of the questions and answers. For libraries, faculty, and academic publishers, this case raises interesting questions about how much services like Chegg help or hinder student learning. Are services like Chegg an asset, improving the quality and usefulness of textbooks and offering alternatives that create market competition? Are they simply a tool for academic dishonesty that allows students to cut and paste answers without engaging with the materials? Questions like these may be on the mind of the judges as they consider the case. Assuming this case goes to trial, the answers we receive may have a significant impact on for-profit businesses like Chegg but also on a variety of open study aids and guides, especially where they are keyed to well-known textbooks. QUESTION: A library collection manager asks, “What is happening with eBook pricing for libraries?” ANSWER: Libraries’ struggles with eBooks have been well documented in this column and elsewhere. So far, the inability to rely on any sort of digital first sale has left libraries at the mercy of publisher contracts, which have led to astronomical pricing and a parade of horror stories about eBooks disappearing without notice or even being changed in ways both ridiculous and dangerous. In the past year, however, legislators at the state and federal level have begun to respond. The September issue of this column

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With an ISSN National Centre, take your local publishers global Being a part of a global network has its benefits. Over 90 ISSN National Centres receive support from the ISSN International Centre to put into practice the ISO 3297 standard. The ISSN Network coordinates the collection of bibliographic data for serials and continuing resources which is in turn published in a centralized registry. Member countries have recognized the value of hosting their own ISSN National Centre at a research centre, national library, book chamber or publisher association. Benefits: Offering publishers a recognized global label (ISO 3297) and service in their native language Support for establishing data workflows and a network of experts to consult A way to promote your country’s cultural and academic publications on a global platform In 2021, Austria, Ukraine and Peru joined the ISSN Network to assign ISSNs to local publishers, maintain local ISSN databases, and promote the overall system. Isabel HUBER, Head of the Austrian ISSN Centre, says “Since 1st of April 2021, we, the Austrian Publishers and Booksellers Association, have been operating as the National ISSN Centre of Austria. It’s only been five months, but we can already tell how advantageous a National ISSN Centre is for the publication landscape of Austria. On multiple occasions we have already had feedback from Austrian publishers how much easier and more convenient it is to have a direct contact person in one’s country of residence. As we have already been the National ISBN Agency of Austria for years, we were able to profit from our experience with international identification numbers and are now together with the help of the ISSN International Centre in Paris supporting the Austrian publishers directly where we can.” Iryna POGORELOVSKA, Head of the ISBN/ISSN Ukrainian Centre, adds "In 2021, Ukraine became the 92th member of the ISSN Network. Our State Scientific Institution, the Ivan Fedorov Book Chamber of Ukraine, is responsible for implementing the ISSN. Opening this registration agency is an important step for maintaining a positive image of Ukraine on the international stage and for advancing European cooperation. It is also a great opportunity for all the print and electronic media, science community, publishers, libraries, and archives of Ukraine to integrate the global information network and have effective communication worldwide. On August 24, 2021, Ukraine celebrated the 30th anniversary of its independence, and we are happy to celebrate it as a part of the ISSN family!" Catalina ZAVALA BARRIOS, Director of Collections Management, National Library of Peru says “The ISSN National Centre of Peru will facilitate the assignment of ISSNs to serials and continuing resources published in the country, thus enabling their unique and unequivocal identification worldwide. In addition, the ISSN will sup to national publishers so that their publications have an internationally standardized identification; ISSNs are used by libraries for the acquisition of serials and their registration in catalogues, effectively allowing the search, identification and retrieval of these publications, as well as the correct bibliographic citation by researchers. The ISSN as an ISO standard is a secure international standard that offers various benefits and its interaction with other identifiers, e.g. ISNI, DOI, ISBN, ensures the interoperability of information and enriches records across catalogues or databases." For any question concerning the accession procedure and how to create an operational ISSN National Centre, visit our website: https://www.issn.org/

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discussed a recent bill (SB432) passed in Maryland that requires any publisher offering to license “an electronic literary product” to consumers in the state to also offer to license the content to public libraries “on reasonable terms” that would enable library users to have access. In late September, the U.S. Senate also raised questions about eBook pricing and access. In a letter from Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden and U.S. Representative Anna G. Eshoo, the Committee asked a set of questions to the big five eBook publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan). The questions request information related to pricing and access restrictions, as well as legal actions taken in response to library activities including interlibrary loan, electronic reserves, and controlled digital lending. Answers to these questions have been requested by October 7. It should be worth watching to see how these publishers respond and what actions the Senate takes in response. You can read the complete overview from the Senate Finance Committee as well as the letters themselves here: https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wydeneshoo-press-big-five-publishers-on-costly-overly-restrictive-ebook-contracts-with-libraries. QUESTION: An access services librarian asks, “Are librarians liable for copyright violations related to work done on the job?” ANSWER: Traditionally, library employees acting within the scope of their duties have been able to rely on significant protections from liability when they are doing the work they have been assigned in line with institutional policies. After all, libraries have always been recognized as fulfilling a special role under copyright and libraries as institutions can only meet their mission through the actions of their employees. As such, many of copyright’s protections against liability were expressly written to protect library employees in cases where their resources were misused (17 U.S.C. 108) or where they have a good faith belief that their use is fair (17 U.S.C. 504(c)2). Some recent developments, however, have muddied these waters in potentially troubling ways. Several previous columns have discussed recent challenges to the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which librarians at public institutions have historically relied on to limit liability in copyright cases. Along with

these challenges, librarians may find themselves vulnerable under the recently-passed Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement Act of 2019, often called the CASE Act. The CASE Act is designed to reduce the cost and administrative hurdles of filing a copyright lawsuit, based on the belief that many creators with limited resources are unable to adequately address infringement under the current rules. CASE specifically supports the creation of a small claims court called the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) to hear “small dollar” infringement claims in the Copyright Office, with maximum damages of up to $30,000. Since CASE was passed last year, the Copyright Office has been establishing rules and structures with a stated intention of beginning operation in 2022. As part of this process, the Copyright Office released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in September asking for comments on, among other things, a rule that permits libraries and archives to preemptively opt out of proceeding under the CCB. Significantly, however, the proposed opt out expressly does not apply to individual employees working in a library or archive. In response, individual librarians and many library organizations have submitted comments noting that allowing suits under CASE against individual librarians such as a library director or the library technician that scans materials as directed by their supervisor would be perverse. As comments submitted by the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) note, since libraries can only act to meet their mission through the activities of individual employees, “requiring this array of library employees to opt-out of individual CCB claims brought against them would defeat the purpose of the preemptive opt-out.” You can read the full set of comments from the LCA here: https:// www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ CASE_NOI.pdf. Comments were due to the Copyright Office on October 4th and the Office will review comments and continue to develop the specific rules over the coming months. Hopefully the Office will hear and understand the clear concerns voiced by librarians about the dangers posed by holding them individually liable for doing assigned work as described under library policies. Stay tuned for a full discussion about the specifics of CASE and the CCB once it is finalized next year.

Reader’s Roundup continued from page 26 inclusion” (p. vii), with diversity-related headings such as Arab Americans, People with Disabilities, African Americans, Transgenderism, Women Cartoonists, and Lesbians. “Growing Up” is a heading, along with topics such as High School Hockey Players, Bullying and Bullies, Homeless Teenagers, Safe Sex, and Student Elections. Of course, other headings cover fun and adventure — Imaginary Kingdoms, Jedi Knights, Kittens, Sea Monsters, Steampunk, and Role Playing Games – or conventional topics — such as Insects, the South Pole, Farms, Thanksgiving Day, and Architects. The editor, Kendal Spires, often works on volumes in this Core Collection Series (formerly Standard Catalog Series). For

38 Against the Grain / November 2021

this volume, he is assisted by a teen services librarian in a public library who produces a graphic-novel web site (Robin Brenner); a public library director with interests in graphic novels (Marcela Peres); an academic librarian with expertise in teen/YA services and comics/graphic novels (Gail de Vos); and a consultant and former public library collections manager (Francisca Goldsmith). This print volume is an abridged snapshot from an EBSCO database. The 1st print edition appeared in 2016, the 2nd in 2018, and this 3rd edition in 2020. ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

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And They Were There — Reports of Meetings 2020 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> Column Editor’s Note: Thanks to the Charleston Conference attendees who agreed to write brief reports that highlight and spotlight their 2020 Charleston Conference experience. Out of necessity, the conference moved from on-site to virtual, and all registrants were given the opportunity to view recordings, to re-visit sessions they saw “live,” or to visit sessions they missed. Without a doubt, with 173 total choices, there were more Charleston Conference sessions than there were volunteer reporters for Against the Grain, so the coverage is just a snapshot. For the 2020 conference, reporters were invited to share what drew them to various themes and sessions, or what they learned, rather than report on individual sessions as they’ve done for “And They Were There” reports in past years when conferences were on-site. There are many ways to learn more about the 2020 conference. Some presenters posted their slides and handouts in the online conference schedule. Please visit the conference site, https://www.charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/, and link to selected videos, interviews, as well as to blog reports written by Charleston Conference blogger, Donald Hawkins, https://www.charleston-hub.com/category/blogs/chsconfnotes/. The 2020 Charleston Conference Proceedings will be published in 2021, in a new partnership with University of Michigan Press: https://www.press.umich.edu/. — RKK

My Five favorite concurrent sessions from the 2020 virtual Charleston Conference (and why) Reported by Ramune K. Kubilius (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Galter Health Sciences Library) <r-kubilius@northwestern.edu> The Charleston Conference provided academic special librarians opportunities to view not only “big picture” sessions, but also sessions with special subject impact (health sciences for this reporter). Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going? (the 20th Health Sciences Lively Lunchtime Discussion) This was a “go to” destination, not only because of a self-assigned role as annual “Developments” trends handout compiler. The panel, moderated by Lorbeer, addressed timely topics. Per Noe, health libraries are trusted, and often — users’ primary libraries. Medical content impacts health, but roadblocks to addressing calls for balance and neutrality may include internal politics, title availability. Though his June “Black Lives Matter: Antiracism and Health Suggested Resources” compilation was the library website’s most visited page, lists are a minimal (first) step. Lubker spotlighted COVID-19 era challenges in the global landscape that included: budget, technology, but also new services, collaborations, and surveys, including post-pandemic planning. Conference founder Strauch reminisced about early

40 Against the Grain / November 2021

career days with medical library public and technical services role silos (reporter déjà vu: specialized roles exist now, too). Her rallying encouragement to ensure survival of medical libraries: collaborate, and think big. Gallo shared recommendations for libraries and vendors: partner, start conversations. In seeking equity, strive for integration, not separate “collections.” https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/ CKBaRxwbbewrFxnZd Preprints: “Beastly Breakfast” Roundtable Discussion The National Library of Medicine preprint pilot (announced in 2019 by NLM director Dr. Patricia Brennan, launched in June 2020) aligned with the topic of this session, moderated by Ishmael. Unscripted thoughts and opinions were shared. Preprints may be recruitment tools, the first to get a “scoop,” de facto or openly “peer review” (about 70% are eventually published). Libraries venturing into the information validation world are creating new positions, e.g., “reproducibility librarian.” https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/ CxcMEzevduHsbNAgq Breakfast/Sunrise Session: A Year of Preserving Library Legacies Together At the 2019 Charleston Conference, the Internet Archives and Better World Books partnership was announced. This interesting one-year update covered ownership transitions, pandemic era “Covid stashes,” and initiatives fitting the mission of preserving libraries together. Donation recipients included: schools, senior centers, also a Books for Africa milestone — the 40th millionth book in 30 years. Spotlights included investments: discoverability and access options, and digitization-preservation projects: of a unique historical Frederick Douglass oration, and the closed Marygrove College’s library. https://2020charlestonconference. pathable.co/meetings/virtual/JM6ius35L34mrWd5g Research Librarians and Society Publishers Working Together to Advance OA and Research A reminder that missions come first came from smaller society publishers (IWA Publishing and Microbiology Society) and research librarian Russell. They opined on steps, actual and visionary, towards advancing OA, and responded to chat questions. Make things “administratively light.” Group together as libraries, work with publishers, don’t disenfranchise authors. What authors and funders want is not a simple equation. https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/ p77cQsYRYibevmb4x Innovation Session 2 Three interesting health and basic science initiatives were included in Innovation 2. Lindsay reported on marketing research technique of constructing a customer value hierarchy continued on page 47

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Don’s Conference Notes Column Editor: Donald T. Hawkins (Freelance Editor and Conference Blogger) <dthawkins@verizon.net> Column Editor’s Note: Because of space limitations, the full text of my conference notes will now be available online in the issues of Against the Grain on Charleston Hub at https://www. charleston-hub.com, and only brief summaries, with links to the full reports, will appear in Against the Grain print issues. — DTH

The ExLibris part of ProQuest has had a significant market impact, provides a substantial increase in scale for Clarivate, and gives them new markets to enter. Will the combined company be able to bypass the library and sell directly to the institution?

Library and Education Marketplace Issues

Charleston InBetween: A New Symposium Charleston InBetween was a new symposium hosted by the Charleston Hub (see https://www.charleston-hub.com/) to provide an in-depth examination of subjects not practical at the Charleston Library Conference (see https://www.charlestonhub.com/the-charleston-conference/) because of lack of time, or because the subjects were too important to leave until the annual conference occurred. The inaugural InBetween symposium took place virtually on July 28, 2021 and attracted 211 registrations (over 600 including members of attendee groups). The symposium featured two panels: • Panel 1: Clarivate Acquires ProQuest, moderated by Roger Schonfeld, Director, Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums Program, Ithaka S+R. • Panel 2: Exiting the Tunnel: Reflections from Savvy Executives Upon What the Bright Light of PostCOVID Offers to Them, moderated by Ann Okerson, Senior Advisor, Center for Research Libraries (CRL).

Panel 1 The acquisition of ProQuest by Clarivate for $5.3 billion was announced on May 17, 2021. Key questions include: • Is the transaction principally financial or strategic? • Is the product opportunity principally about discovery, enterprise library systems, the academic research experience, or something else? • Will the acquisition limit or increase competition?

Claudio Aspesi, Consultant, SPARC, said that ProQuest has tended to focus on its intellectual property business rather than science, which led to the possibility that the core of the future company will emphasize the corporate market rather than the academic. Kaitlin Thaney, Executive Director, Invest In Open Infrastructure (a consulting firm) said that the merger raises large technical issues.

Publisher Viewpoints Gwen Evans, Vice President, Global Library Relations, Elsevier, noted that the question today is not what libraries hold but who they serve. We are in the higher education business, not the library business, and publishers must recognize that. The direct relationship of publishers with faculty, authors, peer reviewers, and researchers is important — what is useful to them as users of content? Global experience matters and end users prefer bundles as long as their lives are made easier. Todd Toler, Vice President, Product Strategy and Partnerships, John Wiley & Sons, said that merging Clarivate and ProQuest is a huge transaction and will form the biggest entity in journal publishing. The merger deal seems to place a confidence in library-based discovery.

Panel 2 According to an article in The Economist (see https://www. economist.com/leaders/2021/07/03/the-long-goodbye-to-covid-19) the last phase of the pandemic will be drawn out and painful. Questions for consideration as we exit from the “Tunnel” of COVID include:

Michael Clarke, Managing Partner, Clarke & Esposito (a management consulting firm) thinks that the acquisition is both strategic and financial. Current economic conditions for it are good; low interest rates make it a good time to buy; and there are likely to be some cost savings from combining operations.

• Are there opportunities to effect change? Will we use them or go back to the “way we were?”

Dracine Hodges, Associate University Librarian, Duke University, noted that there is much diversity in libraries, and one size does not fit all. Libraries are publishers, partners, and customers of information providers; how will the merged company serve them?

Kevin Guthrie, President, Ithaka, noted that when the Ithaka offices were closed in March, 2020, everything changed instantly to a new world where nothing is normal. Staff safety became paramount. Weekly staff meetings using Zoom increased transparency; because people working from home have flexibility in managing their time. Leaders take a greater part in their lives and became more empathetic with their challenges. We are not going back to where we were; many staff members want to work at home permanently.

James Phimister, Managing Director, Education and Applied Knowledge, NEJM Group said that before the acquisition, Clarivate was a $1.8 billion business that primarily focused on a science and intellectual property portfolio, and ProQuest was an $800 million business with significant historic content and a focus on library solutions. Will the combination transform the academic library market? The merger has strong financial support, is a good non-speculative use of cash, and has a good potential to enhance user workflows.

42 Against the Grain / November 2021

• What if this isn’t the end of the pandemic? • What are we most worried or excited about? • How virtual will we become?

Ithaka worked with publishers to offer free access to books and journals. We will be held to a higher standard going forward, and it will not be possible to go back to how the world was before COVID. Why are people coming in to the office? Which part of the work requires them to be there?

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Amy Brand, Director and Publisher, MIT Press, said that the pandemic has shown us that crises bring people together with new ways to connect and care for one another. How we get our content where it needs to go and how we view our publishers and leaders have been greatly transformed. People are feeling raw and are still learning how to work remotely. OA, preprints, and new rapidly published journals are making peer review more efficient and reliable. Demand for trustworthy content is increasing. Book sales took a major hit early in the pandemic, but sales of books for entertainment and general readers have rebounded, which led to MIT Press’s Direct to Open program (see https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/mit-press-launchesdirect-open). Metrics to judge researchers’ reputations must be redesigned. Publishers must help authors achieve the reputation they deserve. Peter Brantley, Director, Online Strategy, University of California Davis (UCD) Library, noted that because of the need to move to a virtual environment, the UC libraries learned to collaborate. The staff became more confident in moving together as an institution. A collaborative focus on digital learning led to Equitable Access (see https://ucdavisstores.com/ EquitableAccess), an innovative UCD bookstore program that has saved students hundreds of thousands of dollars every quarter. Without controlled digital lending (CDL), many printed books would be unavailable. Rob Manuel, President, Indianapolis University (IU), said that IU has moved from being an educational institution to a caregiving one. The storm is continuing, but the effects are different, and the light at the end of the tunnel keeps moving. Most students and their parents are working in industries that will take a long time to recover from the pandemic, and many academic institutions have been forced to withdraw funds from their endowments. Mimi Calter, Deputy University Librarian, Stanford University, discussed issues for libraries on the other side of the tunnel: • How will we reopen our buildings? Who must be on campus and keep the doors open? What should the hours be? • Paging services made print more accessible when buildings were closed. Do we continue them, rescind them, or manage them? • How do we implement CDL and provide access to course reserves and digital access to collections? • How have we have turned to virtual services and what does that mean for our reference and research support service model going forward? We must consider how we provide materials without requiring users to come into the library. What can we realistically undertake as we deal with budget cuts? We have not yet found a new normal in many places, but we need to be ready and willing to find things we will stop doing. Nancy Kirkpatrick, CEO, OhioNet, challenged the audience to recognize that the pandemic has shone a light on the inequities not only in our society but also in our profession. It is exciting

Against the Grain / November 2021

that we are not going back to how things used to be; people are recognizing that normalcy was not good or appropriate for everyone. How might the library support engagement in new and different ways? How has the curriculum changed with the move to online courses? What is an ideal teaching environment and what role does the library play? If you did not come out of the last 18 months as a changed organization, why not? Jim O’Donnell, University Librarian, Arizona State University, said that we are living in a time of transformation. • The age of digital transformation is done. Digital has won and is here to stay. Print is for special and unique collections. We must make everything our users want digital. If it is not online, it is not literature! • The age of collecting is over. Our users do not care about who has what; they just want access, and we must challenge content providers to enable it. • The age of fumbling to remember your password must end very soon. • We must not face another 40 years of the death of digitization. Librarians’ roles in leading us out of it are essential. Ann Okerson summarized lessons learned in Panel 2: • We are intensifying and trying to do better in what we have been doing all along. • Virtually vs. physicality — which is better when? • Are we really encouraging diversity in the new normal? • Nobody imagines that technology is a solution to all of our problems, but it has a strong role to play. • We do not know what the new normal will be, but a high degree of optimism exists. Read the full report at https://www.charleston-hub. com/2021/08/dons-conference-notes-charleston-inbetween-anew-symposium/. Because of the success of this InBetween conference, they will continue. The next one is tentatively scheduled for the last week of April, 2022. 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 50 years.

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Let’s Get Technical — Building a Prototype Environment for LibGuides CMS By Denise FitzGerald Quintel (Discovery Services Librarian, Middle Tennessee State University) <Denise.Quintel@mtsu.edu> OCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0730-6665 and Isaac Ingram (Web Developer, Middle Tennessee State University) <Raymond.Ingram@mtsu.edu> OCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1494-1779 Column Editors: Kyle Banerjee (Sr. Implementation Consultant, FOLIO Services) <kbanerjee@ebsco.com> www.ebsco.com www.folio.org and Susan J. Martin (Chair, Collection Development and Management, Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University) <Susan.Martin@mtsu.edu>

Abstract Library employees have long relied on Springshare’s LibGuides to connect with users, share information, and easily create web content, whether experienced designers or new librarians. LibGuides CMS is a flexible out-of-the-box solution for many libraries. As the library staff responsible for our main website content, we reached a point where we wanted to push the design and function of our LibGuides CMS content. Pushing the boundaries of LibGuides CMS proved challenging, as the system does not provide a level of version control we are accustomed to in commonly used CMSes. After locking ourselves out of the CMS editor with custom code, we recognized the potential risks, and wanted to see if there was a way to test features and functionality, without ever disrupting our live website.

Introduction Content Management Systems (CMS) are great options for users to manage online content without needing advanced coding knowledge. You can build a CMS site quickly, with the content structure automatically in place, or at least relatively easy to place. The shift from static webpages to content management systems has been steadily growing, with several open-source and hosted options. In a 2013 survey, the most commonly used CMSes by academic libraries were the open-source choices of Drupal and WordPress and LibGuides CMS, hosted by Springshare.1 While open-source CMS options are free upfront, they require a significant investment of staff time and human resources to implement and maintain. Upgrading to LibGuides CMS is an added cost to a library’s Springshare subscription but provides ways for libraries to integrate with other apps and websites, such as Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) for integrating with Learning Management Systems, internal groups that allow for staff intranets, and APIs that work with discovery layers or other search portals.

edits, often referred to as version or source control.2 LibGuides CMS, albeit not expected to have a complicated development environment, does not provide a way to easily roll back to a previously saved version.

The Usual Process Normally, when we want to test any new functionality in LibGuides, we create a brand-new private guide and then add content to the guide using the Rich Text/HTML option. Guide-specific styling (CSS) and JavaScript (JS) interactive features are then added using the Guide Custom JS/CSS option. If we reach the 2000-character limit, we will then create a CSS and/or JS file, and upload those at the system level, under Look and Feel. Springshare will then generate a link tag, which can then drop into our test guide’s Guide Custom JS/CSS option. As cumbersome as the workflow is, it is usually successful. In those times where it is not as successful, the consequences can be unfortunate. Springshare automatically runs jQuery for their guides and if you happen to forget this, and you accidentally add incompatible JS code, then the entire guide will break. The only way to get the guide back online is by contacting Springshare who has the super administrator ability to remove your unwelcome code and get your guide back online. You then continue with writing new code, peppered with fresh anxiety and embarrassment, and hope you don’t mess up again. The process to test new functionality in LibGuides CMS is somewhat clumsy and has the potential to take a site offline. As a unit, we had learned from those pitfalls. We still wanted to push the design and function of our site, which is when we began working on a way to introduce a level of version control for LibGuides CMS, where we could clone our site content, and prototype without the risk of disrupting our live instance.

Building a New Process

CMSes, which make for easy content creation, also allow for granular level permissions. Going beyond a single administrator, CMSes make room for editors, writers, and developers. Also known as a distributed content model, this allows for multiple content creators within a single system. With this model, organizations can disseminate content quickly, shared governance provides feelings of ownership to the creators, and can foster inclusiveness in any organization.

To establish a development environment for reliable prototyping, we needed a web environment that matched LibGuides’ native appearance and behavior. This meant building an environment that could replicate both Springshare’s administrative backend behavior and its front-end user interfaces.

With their distributed content models, CMSes have built-in solutions for potentially problematic situations. Whether that is an editor gone rogue or JS code that accidentally breaks a site, CMSes like Drupal and WordPress have a way of rolling back

Using browser-based web development tools, we first identified the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JS necessary to match that appearance and behavior, respectively. We copied these required sources to a development system where they will be

44 Against the Grain / November 2021

Walker Library’s web developer, Isaac Ingram, successfully created a development environment for our LibGuides CMS using the following methods:

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accessed through a web server. For this system, we chose to use Vagrant to run a virtual machine with Debian GNU/Linux and the Apache HTTP Server installed. Though the required sources do not change frequently, the possibility exists, and they should be updated in that event to ensure the development environment matches production. Rather than manually copy the latest copies of the sources, we opted to automate the process by installing PHP on the development system and writing a script to compare and download the sources from LibGuides should they change. Furthermore, in addition to CSS, much of LibGuides’ appearance is controlled through HTML, and we use PHP’s interoperability with Apache to create dynamic pages matching that portion. With the means to match LibGuides’ appearance and behavior outside the online service, we can prototype advanced HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a space that protects us from inadvertently disabling the LibGuides CMS editor and live content due to coding mistakes. Software to manage content and custom code will vary among organizations, and we have chosen the Apache NetBeans integrated development environment. With NetBeans, we gain source code editing tools, repository management with version control, Vagrant administration, and a convenient means to rapidly preview our work in several web browsers. • Vagrant, a software tool to customize, share, download, and run virtual machines locally to ensure testing occurs with the target environment and supporting software versions (https://www.vagrantup.com/) • Apache NetBeans, a development environment that supports several languages (Java, JavaScript, PHP,

Against the Grain / November 2021

HTML5, CSS) and provides tools to facilitate coding and common tasks (http://netbeans.apache.org/) • Custom PHP to synchronize online web assets with a local repository, mimic a basic LibGuides environment, and provide web UI tools to manage guide metadata in the local repository. It is important to note that the environment we created, although ideal for prototyping, cannot push edits to a live site, like most version control systems. Our internal process is to add content to the development environment, test, retest, and then copy and paste our compatible code into the live LibGuides environment. Even without the ability to deploy to our website, prototyping our designs and features is incredibly beneficial to our library’s web presence. We can easily try out the web suggestions that we receive, quickly test for accessibility, and streamline our workflows, all without the risk of accidentally taking our site offline.

Endnotes 1. Connell, Ruth Sara. 2013. “Content Management Systems: Trends in Academic Libraries.” Information Technology and Libraries 32 (2), 42-55. https://doi.org/10.6017/ ital.v32i2.4632. 2. “What is Version Control?” accessed March 4, 2021, https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/what-is-versioncontrol.

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Learning Belongs in the Library — Digital Textbook Acquisition and Library Workflow Three Regions and Three Very Different Scenarios: North America, United Kingdom/Ireland and Australia/New Zealand Column Editor: David Parker (Publisher and Consultant; Phone: 201-673-8784) <david@parkerthepublisher.com>

etween the summer of 2020 and the summer of 2021, I conducted more than 50 interviews with librarians responsible for acquiring textbooks (print and digital). I conducted many of these interviews as a member of the ProQuest Ebook Central team, and also as an independent consultant and writer after leaving ProQuest in January, 2021. The interview participants were equally spread across North America, the UK and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand. The goal of my research was to understand the workflow challenges the librarians faced in each of these regions and the role of the library within the larger university strategy of textbook fulfillment. While affordability and open access were critical topics in the interviews, I will leave these topics aside for a follow-up article. The pandemic engendered a near-total, instantaneous shift to digital learning and that became the catalyst for the deep reflection amongst the librarians I interviewed. And while so much changed so rapidly, it occurred within fairly rigidly defined regional and institutional practices concerning the role and place of the library in textbook provisioning. In other words, the status quo of “who pays” and how acquisition is conducted shifted rather little in response to the pandemic. I came to understand that any profound shift must commence from either senior administration policy change, or an exogenous economic or regulatory shock. Students, faculty, instructional designers, and librarians all have a voice, but it is the senior university leadership and the regional policy and regulatory framework that drives the publishers’ business models for access and pricing. Librarians have well-worn workflow solutions and practices in place for acquiring books (print and digital). When textbook (print and digital) acquisition is mission critical, those well-worn workflow solutions break down to a great degree, but not entirely, and the pandemic fueled significant growth in the availability of digital textbooks in extant workflow solutions with “library friendly” purchase models. The connection between reading list software and acquisition workflow solutions eases the process in certain regions and less so in others. The degree to which workflow and reading list solutions are a significant source of aid or concern in each of the three regions is driven by historic practices. Again, the sudden shift to nearly complete digital only curriculum, created headwinds and opportunities, but it did not fundamentally change longstanding practices.

Australia and New Zealand I begin with Australia and New Zealand because, in my view, it is in between the practices of North America where the campus bookstore is central to textbook delivery and the university library focuses on reserve copies only and the United Kingdom and Ireland where the bookstore does not exist in a meaningful way and the campus library is viewed as the critical center of textbook delivery for students. Among the librarians I interviewed in Australia and New Zealand, there was a nod to the bookstore as a resource for print textbooks, but when

46 Against the Grain / November 2021

asked where the university administration was focused it was the library. But this observation was juxtaposed against a clear view that the university expected each student to acquire their textbooks directly; in other words, there was seemingly little administrative strategic coherence as to the “center” of textbook deliv“The goal of my ery on campus.

research was Unlike North America and the United Kingdom and Ireland, most to understand of the major textbook publishers the workflow deliver their textbook catalogs in challenges the library workflow solutions, most notably through ProQuest (though librarians faced this is in flux and very recently pubin each of these lishers are pulling back on front list regions and availability in library workflow). The publishers understood these digital the role of the textbook sales to be in support of library within the course reserves. As the pandemic larger university took hold, and all courses moved strategy of online, digital textbook access through the libraries increased textbook in equal measure to students not fulfillment.” purchasing print textbooks. This fueled publisher business model changes, including digital list price, changes to number-of-user models (typical is 1 user, 3 user or unlimited user), digital rights management changes in the direction of more restriction and, in some cases, new title release embargoes. I characterize the current library textbook market in Australia and New Zealand as chaotic. The librarians I spoke with see their role as very much about providing broader access to textbooks, whereas the administration of the universities is focused on student responsibility for purchase and access. The publishers have historically provided broad library 1 user and 3 user access and allowed for “stacked purchases” of 3 user purchases, which implies usage beyond course reserve and knowing publisher acceptance thereof. Reading list tools (Talis, E-Reserve Plus, and Leganto) are in use, but adoption by faculty is fragmented. The workflow solutions (Gobi, Ebook Central, Rialto) are broadly used to acquire textbooks because textbooks are broadly available. The primary challenges facing the librarians are publisher pricing, DRM and access changes and thus uncertainty about what will be available. This is compounded by uncertainty from university administration about the central versus supporting role of the library in providing wide access to digital textbooks.

North America In North America the campus bookstore in the unequivocal center on campus for both print and digital textbook delivery. Institutional access, in the context of the bookstore, is delivered through inclusive access (IA). IA is a program whereby the stu-

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dent fee for the textbook is included in the tuition and student fees and the textbook is delivered on day one of class through the learning management system or direct e-textbook access. Each IA adoption requires price setting (based on enrollment) and entails communication, back and forth, between the publisher and/ or the aggregation platform (Vital Source for example) and the bookstore. The university library is not typically involved in textbook delivery and traditionally only provided access to print reserve copies (often sample textbooks acquired by faculty and donated to the library). The pandemic led to an immediate need for digital textbook reserve copies in the library (1 user or 3 user) and this transition from print reserve to digital reserve is unlikely to reverse. I expect increasing coordination between the college bookstore and the library on the university-wide textbook adoption information so that the library can more easily identify the titles to acquire for course reserve. There is little evidence that the North American university administration will move the responsibility for textbook acquisition from the student to the institution and, thus, potentially to the library. The primary questions for the future will be in regard to publisher decisions about the extent of access to reserve textbooks via library workflow and then how students react to this digital access. It is conceivable that the publisher’s experience in the Australia and New Zealand market will influence how they react to requests for broadening title access via the library. Reading list tools are not broadly adopted in the North American market and where they are the use case is not in regard to textbooks from the largest publishers. Reading list tools are leveraged primarily by librarians, in support of faculty, who are relying on library-licensed content (articles, cases, monographs, etc.) for syllabus creation. Workflow solutions are not a hindrance to the work of the library in acquiring textbooks because this is clearly not the role of the library; however, should digital textbook reserve holdings grow, if accompanied by publisher business model volatility, workflow challenges will surface.

is strategic coherence from the top of the university that drives textbook purchasing through the library, informed by faculty using reading list tools. As in the North American region, there is clarity about the role of the library. And as in Australia and New Zealand there is an understanding by the textbook publishers about the role of the library in fulfilling required and recommended textbooks for the curriculum. But unlike the North American and Australian/New Zealand market, there is a tremendous workflow bottleneck because the textbook aggregation platforms that are critical to accessing required/core content do not perform in an unmediated workflow solution like conventional scholarly monographs.

Summary The transition from print to digital has been irreversibly accelerated by the pandemic. And the growth of online and hybrid courses will also accelerate irreversibly. The degree to which this is experienced as a bottleneck by the university and by the library will be a function of how each major region discussed here views the place of the library in textbook fulfillment for course required versus course reserve and also for textbooks as recommended only. For North America the major open question will be to what extent and how rapidly libraries move to provide digital reserve copies. For Australia and New Zealand, the primary issue to monitor will be how the publishers and libraries define what is a reserve policy versus broader access beyond simple reserve content. And for the United Kingdom and Ireland, the critical pain point to watch is the degree to which the major textbook providers can provision purchasing through unmediated library workflow tools. As noted in the beginning of this article, affordability and open access, such as open educational resources (OER), is a chief concern among libraries. This is a topic infused with regional nuance, but the regional variation will still be subject to strategic direction delivered by senior university leadership. More on this topic in a future column.

United Kingdom and Ireland I finish with UKI because this is the region where the library is the central campus location for textbook delivery to students because there is no meaningful campus bookstore presence and because the university administration is focused on the library as the solution for student textbook access. Before the pandemic shut down in person classes, eBook aggregation platforms focused on textbooks, such as Kortext and BibliU were important partners to the library and the leading textbook publishers looked to these companies to supply UKI libraries. The increase in demand for digital caused by the pandemic drove large increases in purchases from these aggregation platforms and occasioned the introduction of new business models that resonated with UKI librarians. Adaptations of evidence-based access and demand-driven access, for example, gained traction, but were not developed nor delivered to perform in known library workflow solutions like Oasis, Gobi and Rialto. Faculty in the United Kingdom and Ireland are encouraged to use reading list tools to establish the required (core) and recommended textbooks for each course. This information provides the larger data set, if you will, for library acquisition and sets in motion purchasing via workflow those titles available within workflow and purchasing via other solutions for textbooks not available in the library workflow solution of choice. There

Against the Grain / November 2021

And They Were There continued from page 40 to understand health sciences user needs. Mortimer and Cannon-Rech helped chemistry faculty to create, adapt, and host an OER textbook, in the LibGuide platform. Pringle, Ponichtera, Sloane, and Ince shared how the DigitalCommons (BePress) institutional repository platform supported their institutions during the pandemic: a) COVID-19 briefings (University of New Mexico); b) oral histories collected by students (Seton Hall). https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/meetings/virtual/ Fp5hEYHwXCy69Zzr9. Well this completes the reports we received from the 2020 Charleston Conference. Again we’d like to send a big thank you to all of the attendees who agreed to write short reports that highlight sessions they attended. Presentation materials (PowerPoint slides, handouts, etc.) and recordings of most sessions are available to Conference Attendees on the Charleston Conference event site at https://2020charlestonconference. pathable.co/. Or visit the Charleston Hub at https://www. charleston-hub.com/the-charleston-conference/. — KS

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Emerging Tech: To Be or Not to Be? — Should University Presses Partner with Commercial Publishers? De Gruyter has the Answer! Column Editors: Deni Auclair (Editorial Director, Humanities and Social Sciences Journals and U.S. Partnerships, De Gruyter) <Deni.Auclair@degruyter.com> and John Corkery (Client Engagement Director, LibLynx) <john@liblynx.com> www.liblynx.com German publisher De Gruyter has made a splash in the U.S. with its University Press Library (UPL) program, supported by a brand-new platform built by 67 Bricks and launched in February of 2021. Although I recently joined De Gruyter in the journals division, I didn’t know a lot about the UPL program and wanted to learn more, including how the data-focused platform will increase its value exponentially. To that end, I spoke with Steve Fallon, Vice President, Americas and Strategic Partnerships. Deni Auclair: First, tell me a bit about De Gruyter. I know it’s one of the oldest publishers, best known for its Humanities and Social Sciences content. Is there anything else we should know about it? Steve Fallon: We have a unique origin that started with the publishing of our first book in 1749 when our small bookstore in Berlin was granted the royal privilege to print books by King Frederick II of Prussia. It wasn’t until 1919 that we became Walter De Gruyter Verlag when three renowned publishing houses merged to become one company. We’ve made significant contributions to the German literary canon over the past 270 years with works by the Brothers Grimm, Schiller, Schlegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Kant. In the late 2000s, the company made the strategic decision to become more international through organic publishing, partnerships and acquisitions. Today, we publish 105 OA journals, 353 subscription journals and over 1,500 books per year, predominantly in English language. Through our partnership program with university presses and small international publishers, we distribute an additional 2,500+ new titles per year. It has been quite an evolution from our roots publishing only in German. Last year, because of COVID, we did a free access campaign with over 1,800 libraries globally — the overwhelming response to that campaign was users were surprised regarding the amount of content we published and distributed. If you include the archive for De Gruyter and our partners, we will have over 100,000 titles on degruyter.com by the end of 2022. DA: This column is meant to be about technology, but I’m curious, can you tell me more about the partnership program? How was it started? How does it work? That is, what is the business model and who do you partner with? SF: In 2010 our presence in the Americas was described to me as “sleepy and dusty.” I think that assessment was apt. Recently, our vendors have been surprised to find out that we are celebrating our 50th year in the U.S. in December! It wasn’t until 2011, when we moved the U.S. office from New York to Boston, that we made a strategic decision to become more international. As partnership is in our DNA, we were looking for a new book distributor and asked Triliteral, a vendor owned by three presses, Harvard, MIT, and Yale, to do our warehousing, distribution, and

48 Against the Grain / November 2021

fulfillment. At that point, we saw an opportunity to provide digital distribution as a service to university presses like Triliteral provided print distribution for De Gruyter. Harvard University Press expressed interest, with the goal of expanding their digital presence outside the U.S. In 2012 we signed them as our first university press publishing partner. It wasn’t long before we saw larger distribution opportunities for HUP domestically through their gaps in the academic library acquisition landscape. We strategized “By 2019 we had that if HUP supported our business enough data that model, we could generate new and showed there sustainable revenue streams for the press. is very little In 2012, presses were wary of difference in print cannibalization from eBooks usage between and libraries faced challenges due to press-assigned Digital Rights Management restrictions. Harvard was less restrictive restricted-use in 2012 and by the end of 2013 we and nonhad 81 unique libraries buying their restricted-use front list content with our new offer. However, like most other university titles.” presses in 2014, HUP started restricting the use of their front list content and by the end of the year the collection became too restrictive to sell as a front list collection and we went from 81 to 0 libraries. That situation came to a head at Charleston in 2014 and became the clarion call for all stakeholders.

I have to say, Harvard University Press answered the call and Susan Donnelly, then the Sales and Marketing Director, deserves a ton of credit for what happened next. Together, with two new presses that joined our program (Columbia and Princeton), librarians from ten academic libraries and LYRASIS, we created a pilot project to address the serious challenges when it comes to university press front list eBook acquisition for presses and libraries. Five years later, the pilot grew to include five more presses (8) and ten more libraries (20). By 2019 we had enough data that showed there is very little difference in usage between press-assigned restricted-use and non-restricted-use titles. Therefore, the data showed that the three presses in our pilot were suppressing additional digital revenue streams. The pilot project became The University Press Library (UPL) and we launched it where it all began at Charleston in 2019. University presses without their own platform rely on third parties for hosting, distribution, and fulfilment of eBooks. Many aggregators provide similar business models representing their content through single title sales, aggregated collections, and demand-driven models. While the models and global reach

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from aggregators is critical to the global acquisition ecosystem for all libraries and presses, our partners were missing out on an opportunity to be individually represented to academic libraries that wanted to own the complete digital collection. This is the gap that UPL can fill. We don’t consider ourselves an aggregator because we are primarily a scholarly publisher. And as a publisher we partner with other publishers to provide individual global representation on our research platform. Our business models are based on the content from each brand, not the collection of brands. DA: Can you tell us a little more about your partners? SF: Our pilot project made it clear that a collaborative approach through partnerships with presses, libraries and consortia may take a little longer to accomplish your goals, yet it is critical to make an impact and inflict change. We have consortia and libraries that have invested many years in our UPL program. They understand the challenges and have demonstrated a commitment to making this work. Remember, we are a publishing house, not an aggregator. As such, our systems are set up to publish books and journals, not distribute third-party content. Our library and consortia partners have been patient and supportive with us through our digital transformation. Our UPL partners include (in order of signing): Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, Toronto , Cornell, Yale. We also have Rutgers, Chicago, Stanford, California, NYU, Fordham, and Duke. Last year we signed Texas and Penn State, and this year we will add Edinburgh, Central European and Lynne Reinner Publishing by the time this interview is published.

Against the Grain / November 2021

M O N E T A R Y

F U N D

DA: Now to the tech part: Tell me how does the new platform help enable the services you provide these presses? SF: Transparency, transparency and then more transparency. First, we did not own the technology or the data on our old platform. Now that has changed with our new platform built by De Gruyter’s new and innovative Platform and Technology team based in Berlin in collaboration with the award-winning software company, 67 Bricks based in Oxford. We launched the platform in February 2021 and since then the results have been fantastic: our number of users are up 10% consistently due to our SEO efforts, our page views are up 16%, and most importantly, the platform is 500% faster than before. These are impressive numbers considering that we launched a “minimum viable product” and thereby, are taking a gradual approach to our platform development. Second, remember, our partners do not own their own platform, therefore having direct access to the user data on third-party platforms is limited. I was struck when I learned from the pilot that many libraries knew more about the performance of press content online than the presses themselves. As a service provider we can do better, and our new platform can provide our press partners with direct and unrestricted access to this information. Full disclosure: this development hasn’t happened yet, but it will happen and be done collaboratively with our publisher partners. Another thing that struck me is how limited our partners are to assessing their own content on a research platform. What site can our university press partners use where they can view,

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search and investigate their complete digital output (DG exclusively digitized out of print content for eleven UP partners) at the chapter level in a bespoke environment of just their eBooks? This summer we launched microsites on degruyter.com where our UPL partners now have access to their own homepage that contains their own content. DA: When it comes to your platform digital transformation, what is the benchmark that you are holding yourself up to? SF: Data transparency: we are updating our distribution agreements to include the rights for our partners to have access and ownership of the data from our platform in real-time through dashboards, so now, when 1,800 libraries are accessing an individual press’s content, they will know what eBooks researchers are downloading at what institutions. Taking into account the metadata behind each eBook, presses will also have data on book series, book types, subject areas and more. That could be transformative for our presses because historically they make decisions about digital rights management at the title level, determining if a title should be a single- or multi- or unlimited-user model, based on print data. Now, they can make informed decisions based on data from a digital environment. DA: You mentioned that you are not set up like an aggregator, what do you not have? What are your challenges? SF: Historically, our systems have been set up to publish books and journals, not to distribute content. We have to do a lot of manual adjustments to support digital distribution. Digital transformation allows us to align the publishing side of our business with the distribution/service side in an effort to build operational efficiencies in both publishing and distribution.

DA: MIT Press and CEUP have come up with business models that address the issues of low-use scholarly monographs via open access. Do you think that is the future? SF: From my vantage point, sustainability for the “low use scholarly-monograph” is mission critical for all stakeholders. I have great appreciation for the attention these scholarly presses are bringing to the issue and admire both of them and Michigan for their transparency, collaboration with stakeholders and innovative approach. Taking a closer look and in my opinion, the common denominator between these models is they require a number of libraries to make an ongoing investment through collection acquisition to become sustainable. I don’t know if it is the future, but it appears to me libraries around the globe will tell us either way. In the meantime, I’ll be watching and rooting for them! I must say I would be remiss if I did not address the similarities between these OA models and our UPL. As of this interview, the UPL does not have an open access component, yet the business models are very similar since they involve libraries acquiring ongoing collections. These commitments are critical for press predictability and sustainability. How the UPL model differs is important. As I stated earlier, the UPL is about the complete digital record that includes all titles: monographs, trade, reference works, textbooks etc. and not just the low-use scholarly monographs DA: Thanks, Steve. It sounds like the UPL, as well as the new platform, will continue to be exciting as De Gruyter continues to add partners. I’m sure everyone will look forward to hearing more about both!

The Digital Toolbox — OverDrive eBooks for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Justice Collections By Phillip Hewitt (Senior Engineering and Electronic Collections Librarian, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015) <pjh315@lehigh.edu> and Carrie Baldwin-SoRelle (Social Sciences & Scholarly Communications Librarian, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015) <chb316@lehigh.edu> Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director and Business Development Executive, OverDrive Professional, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>

uring the COVID-19 pandemic, academic libraries faced the challenge of supporting remote extracurricular learning around Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ) at a time of increased public conversations about racism and white supremacy in the United States. One way that the Lehigh University Libraries addressed this challenge was implementing the OverDrive platform with eBooks and audiobooks with a targeted DEIJ collection focus.

The Lehigh University Libraries are part of a merged library and technology organization within a mid-sized, doctoral, high-research, private university. After some funds were made available following journal negotiations, librarians began investigating OverDrive as a resource to support extracurricular reading and learning. At the end of a six-month long investigation and implemen-

50 Against the Grain / November 2021

tation, librarians at Lehigh University chose to invest significant collections funds in the OverDrive platform to support reading and learning about DEIJ topics.

“The project has been an important vehicle for collectionsbased, DEIJ outreach and serves as a small but public signal of the libraries’ commitment to antiracism.”

An initial marketing push over summer 2020 focused on two collections: a Black Lives Matter Reading List and Stories of Black Excellence. Both collections were heavily used initially and see steady continued use. Additional reading lists added over the past year include collections for Native American Heritage Month, a National Poetry Month list featuring poets of color, and LGBTQ+ Pride Month. In building the lists, we considered: popular titles nationally that

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were likely to have long waiting lists at local libraries; items not available in our existing eBook collections; and books by Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) authors with a breadth of intersectional identities. We referenced lists like the NAACP Book Awards, Stonewall and other ALA book awards, and antiracist reading lists developed by NYPL’s Schomburg Center (see https://www.nypl.org/locations/schomburg) and other libraries and media, attempting to include a range of voices and identities. Though we hoped and expected that the white students, faculty, and staff in our community would use the titles, we strived to select content by and for the breadth of our community, and not build a collection just for a white audience.

reads that allow for simultaneous access, but the options are limited and often cost-prohibitive. Because of these limitations, we built the collection assuming individual and extra-curricular use and further focused the collection on audiobooks and titles that are often unavailable on academic eBook platforms.

Our initial publicity and marketing advertised both the new platform and the featured booklists. In collaboration with our Communications Strategist, we announced OverDrive and the Black Lives Matter reading list (see https://ltsnews.lehigh.edu/ black-lives-matter-overdrive-collection-lehigh-libraries) in early June 2020 through a campus-wide email, a blurb in a daily events list distributed across the university, and library social media. Later lists were also featured in newsletters from the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Instruction & Outreach librarian blog, the library website and digital signage, and social media.

Reception of the collection was very positive. Books included in either of the featured collections comprise 52 percent of our top checkouts, and 39 of our top 50 most popular titles. Audiobook usage has been particularly strong. However, overall usage has been mixed. Of all the titles purchased, 40 percent have not yet circulated. Because the collection is very new, we anticipate that these unused titles will be used as the platform becomes more familiar and better publicized. The oldest items in the collection — purchased in April 2020 — average more than six checkouts per title. Titles purchased within the last six months (as of August 2021) were checked out an average of less than once. In our first year, we have seen a total of 335 unique users. This represents less than 5 percent of our total FTE including staff, but is on par with usage of the New York Times, one of our most popular account-based general resources. Because of the patron privacy settings we have chosen for our OverDrive accounts, we cannot determine identities or affiliations of our users.

When purchasing eBooks for our general collection, we have a strong preference for unlimited, DRM-free licenses so that any eBook can be used in a classroom. The lending models available on the platform contradict this practice in several ways: most licenses limit titles to one patron at a time; loans last an adjustable three weeks; files are DRM-controlled and can’t be downloaded as shareable PDFs. Some titles are available for book club-type

While OverDrive is neither a perfect nor singular platform for providing these materials and performing this type of outreach, it provides an effective tool to enable hundreds of faculty, staff and student users to access DEIJ-related titles. The project has been an important vehicle for collections-based, DEIJ outreach and serves as a small but public signal of the libraries’ commitment to antiracism.

Against the Grain / November 2021

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Optimizing Library Services — How Open Access and OA Agreements Can Support Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion? By Bridgette Whitt, MSLS, MA (Acquisitions Librarian and Assistant Professor of Library Science at the University of Tennessee at Martin) <bwhitt1@utm.edu> and Caroline Campbell (Assistant Director of Marketing and Sales, IGI Global) <ccampbell@igi-global.com> Column Editor: Mr. Nick Newcomer (Senior Director of Marketing and Sales, IGI Global) <nnewcomer@igi-global.com>

iversity and inclusion continue at the forefront of the academic publishing world, but how are publishers and libraries working together to ensure diversity and inclusion are supported and actively promoted in academic research? You may have read the editorial piece from IGI Global, “A Critical Analysis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Publishing Industry,” where topics such as how the historical concept of diversity in academia leads to malicious mislabeling, how the peer review process can be the key to breaking down prejudices, how citation impact can hinder diversity and inclusivity, and how libraries, researchers, and publishers can support DEI. In that article, one of the key areas that can also support DEI is open access (OA). Although OA has been a key discussion in the overall industry, institutions, researchers, and others are, at times, hesitant to embrace OA due to the overall concerns about the quality, integrating OA resources into libraries, as well as managing OA funding. In this piece, we will cover more specifically the challenges of creating an OA movement that embraces DEI and how truly transformative OA agreements support DEI in the academic publishing world.

How Inclusive Is OA? OA enables research to be published without the content being locked from behind the traditional paywall and inherently promotes equity and inclusion, as it enables anyone from around the world to freely access it and share it. This includes increasing the accessibility of this research to audiences that previously could not afford academic papers or may not receive as much research funding, including libraries in developing countries (with countries “OA can pave in Africa averaging around $10 the way to billion in available funding opporhelping increase tunities for researchers while countries like the U.S. over $35 billion in the standing available funding (Exlibris, 2021)). of underIt can also enable a wider audience represented of researchers to build upon the reresearchers, DEI search internationally and provide key insights and breakthroughs in research, as well the field of research.

as providing equitable access to the latest research findings...”

A d d i t i o n a l l y, OA c a n n ot only benefit the wider academic community but helps authors in receiving a higher citation rate with OA content receiving upwards of an 89% higher download rate. Therefore, authors who publish their research under OA receive wider recognition for their work, increased networking opportunities, faster dissemination of

52 Against the Grain / November 2021

their research (as it is published electronically immediately upon acceptance), opportunities for career advancement, and more. Through these benefits, OA can pave the way to helping increase the standing of underrepresented researchers, DEI research, as well as providing equitable access to the latest research findings regardless of socio-economic factors, gender, race, etc.

Cost Barriers for Underrepresented Researchers Although these benefits on the surface seem like plausible solutions to increase the accessibility of research and help increase DEI in academic publishing, a looming challenge for researchers is overcoming the costs associated with publishing under OA. In the traditional subscription-based model, the cost to the publisher to produce each article is covered by the revenue generated by journal subscriptions. Under OA, all the articles are published under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license; therefore, the authors or funding body will pay a one-time article processing charge (APC) to offset the costs of all the activities associated with the publication of the article manuscript. This can include costs associated with: • Digital tools used to support the manuscript management and review process • Typesetting, formatting, and layout of the research • Online hosting and maintenance • Submission of the journal’s content to numerous abstracts, directories, and indexes • Third-party software (e.g., plagiarism checks) • Editorial support includes manuscript tracking, communications, submission guideline checks, and communications with authors and reviewers • All promotional support and activities include metadata distribution, press releases, promotional communications, web content, ads, flyers, brochures, postcards, etc. for the journal and its published contents • The internal staff needed to ensure that these processes are completed correctly and to provide support to authors and editors However, with this APC model, some publishers have been profiteering from high-impact journals based on the sheer need for researchers to publish in these outlets. According to the article, “The Pricing of Open Access Journals: Diverse Niches and Sources of Value in Academic Publishing,” written by Profs. Kyle Siler, University of Sussex, UK, and Koen Frenken, Utrecht University, Netherlands, “At the high end of the market, publishing consultants have floated the notion of US$ 25,000 APCs for outlets such as Nature and Science, based on the premise that the willingness of authors to submit articles to prestigious

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journals is highly priced inelastic. A Springer Nature publishing executive once argued, ‘In the end, the price is set by what the market wants to pay for it.’” (Siler & Frenken, 2020) These costs alone make it increasingly difficult for academicians in developing countries to benefit from having their work published under OA. A Quartz Africa article breaks down this issue noting that the current OA model is hurting these academicians as: “The cost [of open access] is usually borne by individual researchers in many institutions. This is a huge burden particularly in developing countries with weaker currencies. Some universities can cover part or all of the cost of open access articles, but some make no provision. Universities in most economies, particularly in the developing world, are under huge financial pressure.” (Wingfield, 2019)

Funding Barriers for Non-Western Countries and Institutions Additionally, although, the current national funding agencies have been increasing resources and mandates on having all research be published under OA, these funding sources often can exclude independent researchers (as many funders require an affiliation with a research institution), as well as can cause barriers for early career researchers and those outside of the European and United States research community. According to Prof. Xavier Bosch, University of Barcelona’s Hospital Clínic in Barcelona, Spain, if the academic community continues to rely on the financial support of the few funding

Against the Grain / November 2021

8/23/2021 12:18:21 PM

agencies and organizations, it can “threaten editorial independence.” He states: “At first glance, the possibility of governments interfering with science, although important, does not seem relevant to the OA debate. However, theoretically, an OA publication that depends on government funding might encourage editors to commit self-censorship rather than jeopardizing their financial support, even if it were subtle and almost unconscious.” (Bosch, 2008)

How Can Open Access Read & Publish or Publish & Read Agreements Truly Support DEI? Due to these factors, the recent establishment of Read & Publish and Publish & Read models have come to the forefront and establish an opportunity for publishers and libraries to become champions of the OA movement. With major publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, IGI Global, Wiley, Springer, Sage, and more launching these models, libraries and publishers can work together to increase OA research and its availability to underfunded institutions. Although there has been a lot of discussion in the industry on the benefits of these models, it can still be a challenge for libraries to integrate them into their institutions and budgets. As many know and understand, smaller institutional libraries, like the University of Tennessee-Martin, must provide access within the constraints of tight budgets and increased content costs, and many of the larger publishers of scholarly materials do not offer

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the Read & Publish and Publish & Read models. They instead offer minimal discounts towards OA APC fees to researchers at subscribing institutions. Additionally, smaller institutions are limited to placing priority on acquiring high-usage items, materials needed for departmental accreditations, and faculty publication. Another major difficulty is having faculty be able to meet their scholarship expectations by publishing in OA publications that are offered in one of these models. To assist in combatting these challenges, University of Tennessee Martin took part in IGI Global’s OA Fee Waiver (Read and Publish) Initiative. When their library invests in IGI Global’s e-Collections, the publisher matched their investment with a fund of 100% OA APC waivers. Under this initiative, the institution was able to affordably acquire research content within the confines of its budget and receive sustainable OA funding. “IGI Global’s OA Fee Waiver (Read and Publish) agreements ensures institutions can acquire access to needed research, mitigates “double-dipping,” and provides a sustainable source of OA funding,” explains Mr. Nick Newcomer, Senior Director of Marketing and Sales. “Additionally, through our Publish & Read models, it can truly provide support for DEI through platinum funding of entire publications that have a host of international contributors associated with the project.” Not only can institutions receive this sustainable funding through a Read & Publish model, but they can benefit from Publish & Read models, where they can support individual reference books and scholarly journal funding in being published under diamond/platinum OA. Through these models, they can: • Provide platinum/diamond OA funding to a faculty-led scholarly journal: This not only increases the prestige of the journal and the faculty, but as each of our journals contain thousands of contributors from around the globe, it helps increase the visibility of these researchers’ articles. Additionally, it increases the overall standing of the journal in indices, including Web of Science and Scopus, which can assist early career researchers, researchers from developing countries, and underrepresented scholars in receiving credit and recognition for their work. • Provide OA funding for an OA reference book: Similar to journals, each edited book contains research from international contributors, and it can increase the discoverability of the title and the recognition of underrepresented researchers. It can also be utilized to help fund a publication in DEI that would not have been funded. • Provide 100% OA article processing charge and/ or book processing charge waivers: This enables faculty, students, and staff at institutions to freely publish an OA article and chapter (after the peer review and acceptance). Additionally, based on the agreement this option can be combined with the options above or be offered unlimitedly. These models not only provide a valuable opportunity for increasing OA funding and wider accessibility of resources but can provide a wider opportunity to support DEI. Historically, under traditional Read & Publish and Publish & Read models

54 Against the Grain / November 2021

(i.e., Elsevier’s offering with the University of California, Wiley’s agreement with JiSC, etc.), the availability of open access funding and access to the publisher’s research has been limited to the individual institution(s), which only enables faculty, staff, and students at the institution to take advantage of OA funding. However, similar transformative models like this can provide broader accessibility of resources and provide OA funding to researchers from various institutions and countries through the funding of full OA publications. For example, IGI Global’s publications contain articles and chapters from international researchers, and through a library supporting the OA funding of an OA reference book or platinum scholarly journal, it can increase the prestige of the editor from their institution while providing the opportunity for other international researchers to benefit from this funding and access to this research. This model has inspired many current transformative OA models, including the University of Cambridge’s popular Read & Publish model and other smaller presses. Institutions taking part in these models not only can provide sustainable OA funding for their researchers but can become the champions of the OA and DEI movements. It provides the control of OA funding to the individual institution and enables librarians to collaborate directly with the publisher and their patrons to become the facilitator of this model and funds. Additionally, through these truly transformative agreements, it can: • Maximize Library Investment in Content: Through e-Collections, libraries can receive better cost savings for individual titles. • Pave the Way for Industry-Disrupting Agreements: Through libraries collaborating with independent publishers, who can be more flexible, it encourages larger publishers to take part in truly transformative agreements. • Increase Funding to Underrepresented Researchers: It can increase the chances of researchers and institutions to obtain funding from different funding bodies based on their support of OA. This can assist with funds/grants for underrepresented or underfunded areas of research. When institutions participate in the OA movement, they are showcased as leaders which increases their prestige. • Encourage International Collaboration: Not only are OA models paving the way for more accessibility for diverse research, but they can indirectly increase funding for international collaborations between institutions. Full OA funding for projects or papers with authors from various institutions across the world through Read and Publish/Publish and Read agreements can help promote DEI by fully covering APCs or OA fees for any participating researcher. For example, with IGI Global’s OA Fee Waiver Initiative, papers are 100% covered under an OA APC waiver per the corresponding author, meaning the full paper is opened regardless of the number of authors and their affiliations as long as the corresponding author of the paper (or in some cases project) has access to the OA funds necessary.

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Conclusion

References

These are just a few examples of the complexities of transformative OA agreements and how they support the OA and DEI movement. Only by coming together to have a conversation about how publishers can collaborate with libraries on customized solutions will we be able to disrupt the current industry norms and move forward with truly transformative OA agreement options.

Bosch, X. (2008, May). An open challenge. open access and the challenges for scientific publishing. EMBO reports. https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2373378/

Librarians and publishers need to come together to discuss how to promote the Read & Publish and Publish & Read models to institutional researchers so that all parties can benefit. Additionally, there needs to be a discussion amongst all groups regarding changing the outdated expectations of what specific scholarly publications (which tend to be expensive and less inclusive) are acceptable for publishing in certain disciplines to more of a globally accessible model where the OA publications are considered just as prestigious. The academic community will see change when all parties come together, and truly transformative OA models are embraced.

Research funding insights - global funding trends: Ex libris. Exlibris. (2021, June 21). https://funding-insights.exlibrisgroup. com/#anchor_country Siler, K., & Frenken, K. (2020, February 1). The pricing of open access journals: Diverse niches and sources of value in academic publishing. Quantitative Science Studies. https://direct.mit.edu/ qss/article/1/1/28/15570/The-pricing-of-open-access-journalsDiverse-niches Wingfield, B. (2019, April 12). The Open Access Research model is hurting academics in poorer countries. Quartz. Retrieved August 5, 2021, from https://qz.com/africa/1593271/open-access-research-publishing-hurts-academics-in-poor-countries/.

If you are interested in supporting IGI Global in ensuring that the global community has access to needed resources or would like more information on IGI Global’s OA Fee Waiver (Read & Publish) Initiative, please contact IGI Global’s e-Collections Team at <eresources@igi-global.com>.

Against the Grain / November 2021

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The Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Jake Zarnegar Column Editor: Darrell W. Gunter (President & CEO, Gunter Media Group) <d.gunter@guntermediagroup.com> Column Editor’s Note: In this issue of Against the Grain you’ll find part one of my interview with Jake. Part two will appear in an upcoming issue of ATG. In the meantime, the full text of my interview is available online on the Charleston Hub at https://www.charleston-hub.com/2021/09/the-innovators-sagaan-interview-with-jake-zarnegar/. — DWG

ell, I’ll tell you — it’s always fun to have good friend and industry colleague on the show, and I’m so pleased to have Mr. Jake Zarnegar, the Chief Growth Officer of Hum, as our in-studio guest. DARRELL: Jake, welcome to the program. And thank you for making time for us to talk about what’s going on with Hum and also your views on leadership. Before we jump in to Hum, if you could share with our audience a little bit about your background and experience. JAKE ZARNEGAR: Sure. Well, Darrell, we’ve known each other for quite a while. But this might be the first time that I’ve heard your radio voice, and I’m loving it. So let me just get that out of the way, first. I’ve been in the kind of scholarly publishing technology business for quite a while, right after I came out of college. Actually, when I went to college, I thought I was going to be in journalism. I was a journalism major in school, and I came out and just kind of fell into this industry, which I hear a lot of people do. And it was right at the beginning of really the Internet, and most of the scholarly and research content moving online, and not a lot of folks knew how to do it. So I was in just a great position. I learned — I taught myself the early web programming, which wasn’t too hard because it was way easier back then, and was able to really kind of be hands-on engineer, creating content and research sites. But from there, I really kind of quickly — and this was at Silverchair, which was one of my current companies, which is a kind of research platform, and we were just getting started there, which was neat. And I got to grow with the company. And I’ve been with them now for 20-ish years, and was able to grow with them from being Employee #4 into — we’d launched another business out of Silverchair, that was in a long-term care education. We grew Silverchair — the platform went way beyond my abilities. So we hired lots of much more professional engineers to come in and work on that. And I got to do everything in Silverchair, from being at one point the Chief Technology Officer to working with the product, to working then with the marketing and sales teams. I was even the President for a little while. We have a joke at Silverchair that I’ve been in every role from intern to President, luckily in that order, although I may make my way back to intern by the end. So just about a year ago we decided to launch a new company, and that’s Hum. And now, I’ve been working with them as well for about the last year or so. I don’t know if there’s more you wanted to hear about me but that’s my kind of — it’s really — it’s a one company story, but I’ve had so many different experiences that I feel like I’ve worked at five or six different places. DG: Well, I tell you, I got to know Silverchair probably in the 2008-2009, when I first met Thane. I had him on one of my

56 Against the Grain / November 2021

Semantic Technology panels at the Charleston Conference. And I had the opportunity of really getting to know Silverchair, and I tell you, you guys know how to put on a user group meeting like no one else can. I mean very informative, good food, great wine! Well, tell us about Hum. You know, you’ve just answered one of my questions in regard to Silverchair and Hum. So Hum is part of Silverchair or is this a separate, wholly-owned subsidiary? JZ: It is a separate company. We like to say that Hum is a sister company of Silverchair. In Silverchair, because we’ve launched companies out of Silverchair in the past, we actually have a corporate structure which includes a kind of parent holding company, which is basically empty. And then we can launch companies underneath it, that sits side by side. And so Hum is our new company that’s now kind of sitting side by side with Silverchair. It is completely new. It’s a completely different team with probably me being the exception of standing between both. It’s a new team. It’s a new technology stack, so it’s completely separate technology approach and a technology team. It’s a fully virtual team because it was launched during the pandemic. So we have folks working in the Ukraine, and in Wisconsin, in New York City, in Washington DC, and here in Charlottesville — and with a small team, that’s a lot of locations. Oh yeah, Wisconsin, I’ve got at Wisconsin. I mean, I can tell you a little bit about why we launched Hum, which might be interesting for you to hear. Silverchair is a great business. It’s a kind of mature software platform, with a real strong value proposition in somewhat of a mature industry. I mean, everyone who’s publishing research needs a platform to get that research out. These are specialized platforms. It’s really kind of a high specialization software. It was very painstaking and expensive to build out all of the features we needed, but that creates barriers to entry. So it’s a great business to be in. But it’s also a little hamstrung in growth. You know, it’s in an industry that doesn’t grow very fast. There’s not a lot of greenfield. Basically, everyone has a platform at this point, whether it’s a competitor of ours, whether it’s us or whether it’s homegrown. And really the way to win business at Silverchair is to take it from someone else, which creates kind of some dampers on speed to grow. So even though it’s a great business — and we’re very happy about the position we’re in that business — it wasn’t providing us what we thought was enough growth for a business of an enterprise of our size. And so we, about two years ago, brought in a new employee who had been working in consulting for large, kind of, Fortune 500 companies. And his specialty is developing new lines of business in large companies. And this is Dustin Smith, who’s now the President of Hum. And we gave him a charter. We gave him a budget, which is important, and we gave him a charter and said, “Here’s what we do at Silverchair. Here’s the skills we have. Here’s the technology we have, the people we

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have. Find us a completely separate business in a separate marketplace.” Somewhat separate, maybe adjacent. It’s not something that we have no idea — we didn’t want to, you know, build a self-driving car. I mean, it’d at least be something we have some ability to access. And he walked us through a process that, in hindsight, was a great process. While we were doing it, it seemed arduous and long, and why aren’t we just skipping to the end. He took us through multiple stages where we looked at a succession of different opportunities — starting out with nearly 100 that he just quickly did research and cherry picked and grabbed things together. And he would spend less than an hour on them — that was his goal — and then we would go and review them, and we’d find maybe 30 of them. We’d throw out 70 of them and say, “That’s crazy. That’s never gonna work.” And then he would spend more time on the 30. And he started bringing in help as well. He brought in, Liz Heinberg, who’s now the co-founder of Hum. And they worked their way through a process, that took about a year and a half, of steadily doing more and more research on a smaller number of opportunities. But what it was — and then keeping us along the path with them.

we’d get an idea, and we’d say, “Ooh, we should do that.” And we’d spend three months, you know, intensively looking at something, and then, it would kind of fall apart at the end. It just wouldn’t work. He, kind of, helped us avoid that kind of ad hoc grasping at straws, and walked us through more of a funneled approach here. So we got down to just a few business, and he went deep into those. So we did much more market research. We brought in experts in each of those spaces. We paid money to bring experts in to advise us, to do external research for us. And we found an opportunity at the end of that, and this was the kind of very early stage of Hum. And that opportunity was that professional association. So we’re — I’ve been working in kind of one small corner of associations, which are kind of scientific and scholarly publishers. There are way more professional associations than there are scholarly publishers. So there’s professional associations for nearly every profession and industry imaginable. So, you know, everyone from the golf course superintendents to the Arabian horse breeders to the cleaning industry, who’s in a boom right now because of COVID.

And what was really great was — and I had never seen this kind of structured — I mean, it was almost like structured innovation, which sounds like a contradiction in terms. But he had a process that led us to kind of systematically examine a lot of different opportunities at the right level. Before that we have been very ad hoc. We’d hear something, and then

Against the Grain / November 2021

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ATG Interviews Dustin Holland President & CEO, Better World Books By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> ATG: Dustin we suspect that a number of our readers may not know much about Better World Books. Can you tell us a little bit about how the company got its start? Who were the key players in the beginning? DH: Certainly! First, thank you for spending time to shine the Against the Grain spotlight on Better World Books, the best place on the internet to buy books, while supporting libraries and communities across the globe. Our Company was originally named Campus Community Outreach at the time of its founding in 2002 by the Company’s three co-founders, Christopher Fuchs, Xavier Helgesen and Jeff Kurtzman, all graduates of the University of Notre Dame. The Company’s sole objective at the time was to collect, resell and donate “no value” college textbooks by hosting book drives on college campuses, which first started on the campus at Notre Dame and soon expanded across the Midwest and eventually the entire United States. The concept was simple — collect “old” textbooks no longer in use on a particular college campus by engaging and incentivizing student-led book drives, then resell those books on marketplaces such as half.com (which eBay shuttered in August 2017) using homegrown marketplace management software. As books were resold out of the basement of an off-campus office complex, a substantial portion of the sales price — up to 50% of each book sold — was donated to a local non-profit organization and the remaining textbooks were donated to Books for Africa, the largest shipper of books to the continent of Africa. In the worst case, if a book could not be reused, the Company paid a recycler to recycle any book that did not have resale or donation value. As the model took shape and the company grew, thanks largely in part to the development of the marketplace management, order fulfillment, pricing and customer service software platform, the Company’s Founders quickly realized they had a scalable business that required the experience of a seasoned CEO, a new trade name, and a new channel for acquiring books! In 2004, this led to the hiring of our first CEO, David Murphy, the renaming and branding of the Company from Campus Community Outreach to Better World Books, and the creation of the Library Discards & Donations Program. ATG: Your model is relatively unique. Can you describe your core business? DH: Multiple facets of our business are truly unique! Our core business is to maximize the value of each and every book entrusted to us by our library clients and book suppliers. Our primary goal is to keep books in the reading cycle either though resale online or via our donation program and ultimately get books to where they are needed most whether that be in a village in Kenya, a bookshelf in London, a rural library in Guatemala, or a community learning center in South Bend, Indiana. In a typical year, we process over 20 million unique products (sku’s) from

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clients and book suppliers in five countries, ship books to customers in over 200 countries, and donate books to organizations located across six continents. At the heart of the company, we are a mission-driven, socially responsible e-commerce and analytics business that puts people first and is focused on delivering the right book at the right price, while delighting customers located around the world. ATG: You’ve been with Better World Books since the beginning. How did the company’s unique purpose and mission evolve? Where did that sense of social responsibility come from? How did you make a successful business from “saving books from landfills and then selling, recycling, or giving them away?” DH: True — I joined Better World Books in 2004 as a newly minted M.B.A. to launch the Company’s Library Division. Seventeen years later, the Company’s purpose and mission of giving back remain largely the same, but our scale, impact and reach continue to grow and reach new milestones having sold over 100 million books and prevented over 400 million books from becoming landfill. As pioneers in our industry and as a leading social enterprise, one of our values is “to do the right thing,” and we evaluate our decision-making through that lens, against our core values, and how the impact of those decisions may or may not have on our annual sustainability and literacy objectives. Simply put — social responsibility drives the company forward, makes good business sense, and differentiates us from the competition. We see no other way to operate, our clients and customers expect it, and our mission of giving back makes us “Better World Books” — you could say it’s part of our DNA and our reason for existence, and I am proud to say that it’s been that way since day one. Why operate a company without a higher purpose? ATG: At the Charleston Conference in 2019 you joined Brewster Kahle on stage to announce a groundbreaking partnership with the Internet Archive. For those readers who are not familiar with the arrangement, can you tell us more about it? What is the specific nature of the relationship between the two companies? How has it impacted your role and responsibilities? DH: What a glorious day! As announced at the Charleston Conference in November of 2019, Better World Books is now 100% owned by Better World Libraries, a mission-aligned, notfor-profit organization that is affiliated with longtime partner, the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is one of the world’s largest public digital libraries, with an extensive collection of human culture, and Better World Books is seeking to supplement Internet Archive’s vast collection through our extensive and data-driven book donation program. While Better World Books remains an independent, for-profit social enterprise, the new ownership structure and partnership with the Internet Archive allows us to focus more time and resources on our mission, our

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brand and website, our clients, our customers and our employees and less time determining how to sell more books on unforgiving and thankless third-party platforms to appease institutional investors and private equity funds. ATG: The original press release about the arrangement claimed that “the partnership will allow both organizations to pursue their respective mission with additional resources, newfound synergies, and fervor in working toward a common goal.” Has that proven to be the case? Can you give us some examples? DH: Without a doubt, our new ownership structure has enabled Better World Books to flourish. Since the November 2019 announcement at the Charleston Conference, Better World Books has scaled our book donation program to support and selffund a steady stream of more than three million books donated to the Internet Archive for digitization and preservation in pursuit of their mission of making knowledge universally accessible. In addition, we have made major investments in growing www. betterworldbooks.com and expanding our own customer base thanks in part to referral traffic from archive.org. These efforts are paying off dramatically and www.betterworldbooks.com is quickly becoming our top sales channel, which in turn provides new opportunities to reinvest in our teams, facilities, technology platforms and supply chain. ATG: It sounds like a very successful partnership thus far. How do you see the relationship with the Internet Archive evolving? Are there any new initiatives being planned? Overall, where do you see Better World Books in two or three years? DH: Indeed! We continue to be impressed by the efforts of the Internet Archive team, and throughout the course of the pandemic, they continue on their noble quest to make knowl-

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edge universally accessible, and their impact is quite evident. According to Alexa Internet in April 2021, archive.org ranked as the #159th most popular website in the world. As the partnership between the two organizations evolves, we’ll continue to get better at identifying books that should be considered for donation to Internet Archive, and we’ll work to give readers newfound ways to buy a book that is discovered on archive.org. Overall, over the next two or three years, I see Better World Books continuing to expand and refine our mission, while keeping a watchful eye on marketplace developments and working to serve more customers that check out on www.betterworldbooks.com. Customers are undoubtedly looking for e-commerce alternatives, and we are hard at work looking to upgrade our ability to exceed our customer’s expectations on every order. I am excited for what’s ahead! ATG: This past April, Better World Books reached an amazing milestone when the company sold its one hundred millionth book. What did that mean for you personally? What about for the company? Have you all done anything special to celebrate this landmark accomplishment? DH: Wow — I am quite proud of our company for reaching this historic milestone. In April 2021, we sold A Day at the Airport by Richard Scarry to an unknowing www.betterworldbooks.com customer in Brooklyn, NY. This particular book originated from the South Brunswick Branch Library and their Friends of the Library Group, a partner of Better World Books since 2009. Naturally, we celebrated by doing what we do best — by giving back! In honor of this achievement, we made a $10,000 grant to the Robinson Community Learning Center, our first literacy partner (and first “warehouse” location in South Bend, Indiana). In addition, we awarded the supplying library a $2,500 grant, and also recognized our lucky customer with a generous gift

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certificate for use on www.betterworldbooks.com. To celebrate internally, every staff member in the US and UK received a commemorative t-shirt and a voucher for a pizza to share with friends and family. Personally, I am thankful for the collective efforts of so many dedicated and talented individuals that made this milestone possible — we certainly look forward to the day we serve our 100 millionth customer on www.betterworldbooks.com. ATG: Dustin, we also wonder who is your main clientele? Who is buying all of these books? We know that you sell internationally. Where are your key markets? How do sales break down between print and digital books? DH: Great questions! We sell books to customers across multiple channels, but our preference is for customers to buy directly from our own website. Most book buyers are unaware, but when you buy from a third-party site, that third-party site keeps upwards of 40% of the sales price in fees and marketplace commissions. Think of that — only sixty cents on the dollar goes back to the actual bookseller! This is not a sustainable practice for us. On www.betterworldbooks.com, our clientele come to us from all over the world seeking to do more with their purchases. We list over 10 million used books and over 16 million new books for sale, and our customers are mission-minded, avid readers, generally looking to purchase 2-3 books per transaction thanks to our great selection, consistent service and fair prices. Our customers represent a broad and diverse demographic base, and our top five shipping destinations include the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and India. At present, we do not sell digital books, so 100% of our sales are physical books, and our new book sales continue to climb month over month. ATG: Does Better World Books have plans to sell eBooks? We wonder how eBooks sales would fit into your model? DH: Interestingly enough, Better World Books was an early entrant in to the digital book selling market, but at the time almost 15 years ago, our customers were not ready to embrace eBooks outside of the eBook ecosystem primarily developed by Amazon and Apple. Fast forward to today, and we are certainly exploring innovative new ways to deliver customer-friendly content of all types to our customers; however, most of the larger content and eBook delivery platform providers no longer offer “turnkey” solutions to independent e-commerce sites, which is quite disappointing. At the end of the day, our customers drive our development cycle, and they will ultimately help us decide where we go next with eBooks. For now, our customers are telling us to get really good at selling new and pre-loved physical books, but we’re always listening! ATG: Better World Books has a multifaceted relationship with libraries. Can you describe it from your vantage point? In particular, we are wondering how academic libraries fit into the overall equation? DH: At Better World Books, we love all libraries, and we are thankful for the role we play in supporting libraries in both the physical and digital space! In my 17 years of working to support the needs of thousands of academic libraries of all sizes, I have learned that each and every library we support has unique challenges that require custom and collaborative solutions. We value these opportunities to listen to our library clients, understand their specific needs, and deliver custom surplus book management solutions that often result in long-term partnerships, many of which date back to the early years of the company. As a result of our partnership with the Internet Archive, we have increased the scope of our book donations program and

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are now doing what our competition is not doing for academic libraries — truly maximizing the potential and lifetime value of every single book that passes through one of our processing and distribution centers. ATG: How did the pandemic impact Better World Books, its business and its customers? With the pandemic seeming to subside, what are you predicting for Better World Books and its future? Where do you see opportunities? Are there any potential pitfalls that have you concerned? DH: Better World Books was quick to react to the uncertainty of the pandemic, and our leadership team and covid response team did a tremendous job implementing thorough health, safety and employee wellness measures in order to keep our associates and our customers safe. We operate four facilities in two countries spanning almost 750,000 square feet of distribution center space, and we constantly made adjustments to our supply chain network to keep books moving to their final destination. Although our inbound shipments from libraries and college campuses slowed for a short period of time, our queue of material to be processed is healthy and our incoming supply of books continues to grow. Thanks to our team’s rapid and exhaustive efforts and dedication to safely serving our customers, we were able to keep our associates fully employed, while meeting the rise in demand for reading materials, as millions of readers around the world are discovering www.betterworldbooks.com for the first time. We continue to monitor and respond to the evolving nature of the pandemic, and our covid preparedness efforts have recently shifted towards incentivizing our team members to get vaccinated. Reinvesting in www.betterworldbooks.com and cultivating relationships with our own customers remain our top opportunity. Although we are doing well, our top challenge across the board is the ultra-competitive labor market and the corresponding shortage of prospective employees. On top of the labor shortage, we are seeing large spikes in prices from our key suppliers and our transportation and freight industry partners continue to pass down higher than normal price increases and various surcharges for their services. Our shipping network continues to be heavily impacted by covid in various regions throughout the world. We’re making our best effort (and then some!) to stay ahead of all the challenges we’ve encountered since March 2020, and I am grateful to all of our team members for stepping up to meet these newfound challenges and opportunities. ATG: The last year or so has been particularly stressful. Do you have any hobbies or fun activities that help you re-energize so you can take on the challenges of running a company like Better World Books? DH: Better World Books is a stronger company today than prior to the start of the pandemic, but it’s certainly been stressful for our team members and their families. We encourage a healthy work life balance, and we recently expanded our PTO policy to benefit and reward all hourly and salaried associates so that they may spend more quality time with their family and friends or do whatever suits them best. Due to the option for limited air travel since the start of the pandemic, my wife, two children and family dog spend time at a family rental property in the mountains of Western North Carolina just outside of Asheville. I find that I do my best strategic thinking in the solitude of the mountains, while working in the wilderness developing and maintaining our mountain trails. Working outside keeps me energized!

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ATG Interviews Glenda Alvin Interim Executive Director of Libraries and Media Centers, and Associate Professor, Brown-Daniel Library, Tennessee State University By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> ATG: Glenda you have had a long and accomplished career as an academic librarian. But we have to ask, what first attracted you to the profession? Why librarianship and not another field? GA: My love of reading started me on my path to being a librarian. I started first grade in a segregated school in Mississippi and when my family was stationed in D.C., my grades were low because I had poor reading and comprehension skills. I almost flunked third grade, but fortunately I had an African American teacher who worked with me and my parents, so I made it to the fourth. My mother loved to read and she encouraged me to read as a way to improve my grades. When I was in the fifth grade, we were stationed on Okinawa and Kadena Elementary had a library. I started reading constantly and went through over twenty Nancy Drew books and some of the Cherry Ames series and by the sixth grade, I was going to the base’s library to read Agatha Christie. I was a student assistant in my school libraries in East St. Louis from the 9th-12th grade and worked under Ethel Olendorf and Dr. Sheryl Clayton. I left there with the intention of becoming a librarian. I got the equivalent of a minor in library science at Kent State University. One instructor told us that we should become librarians because we want to help people, not because we loved books. I went to Atlanta University, a historically black university, for my master in library service and that has been a motivating factor in my forty years a professional librarian. ATG: We also noticed that you have a second Masters in US History Prior to 1865. Was having this additional credential helpful in your career as an academic librarian? Would you recommend pursuing an additional credential like this to other academic librarians? GA: The second graduate degree in U.S. History provided me with an opportunity to focus my research on African American history, especially food studies. It has been helpful to me as a liaison for African American Studies departments at different universities. It was a credential that helped me as ACRL Liaison to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the past Convener for the ACRL/African American Studies Librarian Interest Group (AASLIG). The history master was also a plus when I made the transition from college to university librarianship. At Tennessee State, a Carnegie designated “high research” university, librarians have full faculty status. Although the library degree is terminal, we encourage the librarians to take advantage of the tuition waivers and full tuition reimbursement programs offered by TSU to acquire second masters or doctorates to enrich their ability to support doctoral programs,

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and to provide other fields for publishing articles and giving presentations, thereby strengthening their tenure and promotion portfolios. The university provides a cash tuition incentive award that pays at least $2000 for additional graduate degrees, so that helps motivate. ATG: Library collection development and acquisitions has evolved a great deal since you first started your career at St. Petersburg Junior College. From your perspective, what have been the most impactful changes in the field — both from a technological and non-technological standpoint? GA: Of course, when I was at SPJC, we were using the card catalogs — I spent hours “dropping” cards. The most impactful changes are the online catalog, the development of databases and the migration from print to electronic books and journals. The physical space of the library has been transformed to accommodate electronic access, with computer workstations, learning commons and makerspaces taking up space where book ranges use to reside. In addition, the academic libraries have added electronic devices to the inventory of what they loan. Non-technological changes include the amount of floor space that is now used for areas for students to collaborate and study. Supporting electronic resources demands the majority of funding. The reduction in the budget for print materials has been critically important. It impacts staffing that was once based on the processing of that format. After a resignation and retirement, I combined the Accounting Clerk and the Senior Library Assistant positions into one because both were created for processing print, but neither position had enough to do for a full job. The Cataloging Dept had gone from five to two and the catalogers teach freshman library literacy and are embedded in classes. ATG: Putting on your hat as the Interim Executive Director of Libraries and Media Centers at Tennessee State University, what do you see as the key challenges for libraries if they expect to remain vital parts of their campus communities? GA: The key challenge is to be regarded as an essential player in the teaching/learning process and not an auxiliary or supplemental unit. We have had power outages and still had students come to the library and sit near a window to read or work on a laptop. During the worst of the pandemic, we remained open by appointment and the students who were on campus used the study rooms constantly. This told me that the library has a purpose other than what we provide electronically — which can be accessed remotely.

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It is important to be involved in the life of the university and have a presence on campus in the hearts and minds of the faculty, staff and students, always from a point of being of service. One of our previous Deans use to try to get involved in as many campus committees as possible to give the library representation on campus. I think it’s important to have influence on campus, but it should be a team effort. I implemented our first Scholarly Communications position and we have met with the College Deans and their leadership teams to promote the institutional repository, Digital Scholarship@TSU. We have a robust embedded program, but I recently transitioned the Embedded Librarian, a TSU graduate, to a position as Student Success and Outreach Librarian with a specific assignment to network with the International Students Program, the Office of Disability, the Academic Success Center and the Honors College. She is designated to teach the UNIV 1000 course each semester, which is coordinated by the Service Learning Department. We also have three other librarians who are UNIV 1000 instructors this semester. This provides the librarians with interaction with freshman beyond the English 1010 and 1020 courses. I have re-structured the library staff and at the annual retreat, I informed them that we were going to focus on introducing new services that support students. ATG: We understand that Tennessee State is a leader among Historically Black Colleges and Universities in training other HBCUs to use OER. Can you tell us about that? Does the library participate? If so, how? GA: TSU had a grant to train other historically black colleges and universities how to implement OER. It is led by the Dr. Robbie Melton, who also the Dean of the Graduate School. http://www.hbcuals.org/index.html We collaborate with and support the HBCU Affordable Learning program, by providing an OER research guide that links to it and participating in workshops. We share ideas on how to get the faculty to use MERLOT and the library’s subscription to Faculty Select to get more OER textbooks into the classrooms. We have met with the HBCU OER faculty and encouraged them to publish their research in our institutional repository. The Head of Cataloging, Julie Huskey, co-wrote a successful grant to introduce OER texts to history classes. I suggested that Dr. Melton be on the program at the most recent HBCU Libraries Annual Meeting to discuss OER. She has invited me to be on the HBCU OER Advisory Committee, so we are collaborating on ways to expand OER use among HBCUs. ATG: As an African American librarian what specific obstacles did you have to overcome to make your mark in the profession? If one of your students at Tennessee State approached you about a potential career in librarianship, what would you tell them? GA: I listen to mid-career African American Librarians who are at PWIs (predominantly white institutions) and feel limited in upward mobility and increased salary opportunities, in spite the institutions’ avowed commitment to “diversity.” They become disenchanted with the profession and sometimes lose the momentum to switch gears and move forward in a different direction. Racism and prejudice can be obstacles when supervisors do not “see” your potential, but so can jealousy and insecurity. I have been there and usually I advised preparation and knowing what path you want to chart your career, then go where there is growth. There can be work satisfaction at a PWI or a HBCU,

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if you feel that you are making a difference and meeting your personal goals for success. I have learned that it is not the size of the institution or its prestige, but whether I personally feel invested in the work and can see progress. Obstacles can become assets, because the skills you acquire dealing with what appear to be setbacks can be used as steppingstones to a better career path. Atlanta University did not have computers in 1976 and we lacked some of the opportunities/ resources provided by other accredited library schools. When I got my first job as a Youth Specialist at an urban branch library, I did just as well as or better than my peers who were new library school grads. The Human Resources Director told me that they hired AU grads because we knew how to adjust and excel in our environment. After I left the public library and went to the community college, I took library graduate courses at the University of South Florida to broaden my education and prepare to move to a university. I was fortunate to have mentors in my career who have helped nurture my ambitions to make a difference and that has been an enormous help in overcoming obstacles. My junior high school librarian, the late Dr. Sheryl Clayton, got her doctorate and became the city librarian. She provided me with summer jobs while I was in undergraduate school. Sonja Garcia, retired University of South Florida librarian, played a pivotal role in helping me transition from public library to community college librarian, where I was guided by the late Florence Jones and the late Dr. Theresa Goss (her most memorable advice to me: “Ms. Alvin, learn to wear your problems like loose clothes. Shake them off!”). Dr. Jesse Carney Smith, recently retired author and University Librarian at Fisk provided several invitations for publishing encyclopedia articles, an opportunity she extended to librarians on tenure track. All of these African American women are members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc, which I joined in 1989 and am now a life member. My university career has been helped by Katina Strauch, who provided opportunities for programming and publishing. My former Dean, Dr. Yildiz Binkley allowed me to stretch my talents to improve the collection and services provided by the TSU Libraries. I try to mentor other librarians when I get the opportunity. I would suggest finding a mentor to new librarians and being receptive to learned wisdom. I also would share a piece of advice that was given to me by an African American Assistant Dean at SPJC who kept getting passed over for promotion because she had not finished her doctorate: It is better to have the degree and be prepared when opportunity knocks, then to not have that preparation when the opportunity comes your way. Many years ago, one of my non-librarian mentors, Sister Angeline Lowery, preached a Women’s Day sermon from the Book of Ruth. Citing Boaz’s instructions to his workers to leave grains in the field for Ruth to pick up so that she and Naomi would have some to feed themselves, she told us that we should not strive to achieve just for ourselves, but that we should “leave something in the field” to help others achieve. I have tried to apply that lesson to my career. ATG: Glenda, you are currently one of the Directors of the Charleston Library Conference. How did you first learn of the conference? What prompted you to get involved in a leadership role? Can you talk about a few of your personal highlights from past conferences?

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GA: I attended my first Charleston Conference in 1992 when I was an acquisitions librarian at the University of Central Arkansas. I was having a rocky time when the Charleston Library Conference brochure landed on my desk. I saw it as opportunity to network and get advice. I never had any formal training in acquisitions and collection development and thought the conference could help. I paid most of my expenses to attend. I did find help from Tony Ferguson who was then a librarian at Columbia University and he gave some important career advice. In those days, there were around 400 people in attendance, and we all squeezed into a standing room only conference room in the Lightsey Center. There were 5-8 African American Librarians who use to attend the conference and four or five us would get together for meals. We started talking about the lack of Black representation in the programming and speakers. I think I eventually mentioned it on one of the surveys. I proposed programs and submitted articles to Against the Grain, which probably brought me to Katina’s attention. I don’t remember how long I have been a Director, but I’m pretty sure it’s over fifteen years. Memorable highlights include working the Gold Room in the Francis Marion Hotel with Jack Montgomery for several years. We did the moderating for the overflow crowd, in the room above the main conference room (Carolina), where we could be heard but not seen. Jack has a deeply resonant voice and Anthony referred to it as the “Voice of God,” because it always came from above. A second highlight was receiving the Vicky Speck Award for Leadership in 2011, which was a great honor. The third was creating the keynote program with Loretta Parham, CEO of the Robert Woodruff Library at the Atlanta University Center, my

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HBCU alma mater. She appeared as a speaker when she was ACRL Research Librarian of the Year. My most recent achievement was creating a Neapolitan for Trevor Dawes, Vice Provost for Libraries, Museums and May Morris University Librarian at the University of Delaware and Aaisha Haykal, Manager of Archives at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture to speak about the collaborative opportunities for libraries, galleries and museums. ATG: Aside from being incredibly busy with all of your professional commitments, we know that you are really into quilting as a way to recharge your batteries. How did you get interested in making quilts? Are there other fun activities that you like to pursue? GA: I have always been craft person and had worked with macrame, jewelry making, kimekomei (Japanese doll making) and calligraphy. My grandmother was a quilter and I always wanted to try it, but did not get started until I was working at the College of New Jersey. I had time on my hands and took a quilt class in the Mercer County Adult Evening Education program. After that, quilting became my passion along with reading and collecting African American cookbooks. I cannot afford any other hobbies, because I am a fabric-oholic — someone who collects fabrics, but does know what she is going to do with them until an idea strikes. I like to make pictorial quilts which can be wall hangings or bed covers. I donate them to charitable causes like my sorority’s Educational Advancement Fund (EAF) or to disaster victims. I also belong to a prayer quilt group, Covered With Prayer, at my church. We donate quilts tied with knots representing prayers said on behalf of those going through illness, injury or serious trauma.

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ATG Interviews Greg Eow, Part 2 President, Center for Research Libraries, Global Resources Network By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Library Conference) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com> The following is the second part of a lightly edited transcript of an episode of “ATG: The Podcast” that aired on June 1, 2021: https://www.charleston-hub.com/podcast/ atgthepodcast-114-interview-with-greg-eowpresident-of-crl/.

LH: Well, this is a nice lead in. You already mentioned the MIT Direct to Open model, and in a recent interview talking about that model you suggested that the model allows us to change the conversation between libraries and academic presses. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? How do you envision the conversation being changed between libraries and academic presses? GE: One of the opportunities that we have in this moment is to really think intentionally about who we are and what comprises the community that we are working in. I think that one community that we are working in is the community of research librarians and particularly collection development and acquisition librarians. When I think about the mission of research librarians, it is to collect, preserve and disseminate research-based content. That’s also part of the mission of academic publishing and university presses. University presses work with authors and scholars to produce and disseminate research based content. I see more opportunities for research librarians and university presses, given mission overlap, to work together. For instance, we can be collaborating at the level of workflows and staffing. Take the work of acquisition editors at University Presses. The skills, relationships, and work are similar to the roles of liaison librarians. And so we could be sharing staff and working together in new ways. So what does the Direct to Open model do, why is that so helpful? It changes the conversations we generally have between research librarians and University presses. If I look at my work only in the context of the library, I may look at my role as procurement. I procure content on behalf of library users. I’m looking at licenses, I’m looking at price. I’m looking at workflow. Does this product work with our ILS and with our ILS functions? So, I’m viewing the library as a purchasing agent, and viewing collection development in terms of procurement. But when we’re looking at Open Access models, such as MIT Direct to Open, I think the opportunity is to look up from the operational day-to-day and ask “Alright, who are my partners here?” If I am negotiating with a commercial publisher and buying big deal content, then a procurement mindset might be appropriate. But if I am working with a University Press on an OA model, the conversation is quite different, since I am not procuring content from a vendor as much as I am partnering with a colleague in the nonprofit academic enterprise to ensure the production and accessibility of high quality research. If I’m a research librarian, and I am interacting with colleagues from university presses, I

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am going to recognize that I am working with a fellow colleague in the academic research enterprise, not interacting with a commercial vendor. It’s a different conversation altogether, and the MIT Direct to Open model helps librarians and University Presses have new kinds of conversations and relationships. TG: I think it gives you more of a view of being partners in the same or in a similar project in terms of getting information out there to people. It’s more than just libraries collecting. It’s working with the presses to determine maybe what content ought to be or should be and how it would make the most sense to your users. GE: Thinking about collections, you can think about collections as procurement and purchasing; but you can also flip that and think about collections as library publishing and this gets libraries in the content production space. You put it really well. Thank you! LH: Well, speaking of collections, we know that you have an extensive and growing digital collections program. Can you tell us a little bit more about it? GE: Sure. The Center for Research Libraries, was originally built as a physical collection. Today, CRL comprises a large analog collection of five million items, including print books, journals, large microform sets. Although analog collections remain important at CRL, for decades now we have been pivoting into a digital ecosystem, through mass digitization projects and building out our digital collections platform, DDS. Today, when I think about the CRL collections, we have about five million analog items but we have about 60 million pages of digital content that grows by about five million pages every year. So, if researchers at CRL member libraries request a large collection of microfilm, if we can digitize it and deliver that digitally we do so and then we keep those digital files and we make them available if we can, given copyright restrictions. CRL is actually a really substantial, collectively stewarded digital collection created by and for the research library community. CRL has some work to do in terms of our marketing plan, since I think the CRL brand remains in part “warehouse of microfilm.” We have a ways to go to make our digital collections and digital collections and content work more visible. I have only been president at CRL for a year and a half, so, I have to sing the praises of Bernie Reilly and the staff that came before me in making bold moves into a digital library environment. The digital platform and the “scan on demand” workflows that they created has been pure gold in this Covid environment and our “scan on demand” statistics have just gone up astronomically, as you would expect during Covid. That was really good work by folks that came before me. TG: Let’s move the conversation in a slightly different direction. Let’s talk a little bit about print. Do you think print

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and analog collections still have a viable role in the research and teaching enterprise which is increasingly dominated by the digital? And how are you thinking about print collections in terms of CRL’s strategic directions? GE: That’s a really fantastic question. I keep thinking about print, conceptualizing print, what it is and what its affordances are. It is a rich area of exploration. So here is the problem space as I see it. We live and work and do research and publishing in an emphatically digital environment. Emphatically digital. Like this conversation we’re having now over Zoom. We are deep into a digital age and that’s fantastic. We all know that print and analog collections in a relative sense are dramatically less important than they were 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. We know that. But this is where things get really interesting or dicey or problematic or fun. The fact that print is dramatically less important than it once was doesn’t mean that print is no longer important. Print remains essential. So given that print is dramatically less important than it once was, yet remains essential: what does that look like in terms of resource allocations in research libraries? What does it mean in terms of workflows? So, when I think about print, I think the problem space is that print is much less important in a relative sense than it was in the recent past, yet print books remain an essential technology for communication. Additionally, print books have half a millennium of brand equity build up and lots of momentum in our professional mental maps and work practices. When you ask folks about libraries, they still think of books. Right? We have to right size how much we think about and invest in analog formats and, frankly, shrink some of that down. But our investments in print must continue to be some meaningful level above zero. So the problem space is finding that

Against the Grain / November 2021

responsible balance. I think a way to navigate the problem space is to see print as just nothing more but also nothing less than as a technology. There were technologies for communication before the printed codex and there will be technologies after it. When you appreciate that print is just a technology among others, I think that helps get away from the romance or the nostalgia for print. In some ways print remains an unsurpassed technology. Also, if you look at the world before print, it helps one to appreciate the opportunities of the current moment as we navigate a post print context. Print culture and related scholarly conventions have been central to Western models of scholarship and knowledge for 500 years. There have been and continue to be diverse sources for knowledge creation outside of print and print culture — think of oral traditions and the literally thousands of languages that have never been represented in print. So I think we need to remember that print remains a technology and a really essential and important one. But we should right size our investments in print, and not let nostalgia or a sense of loss prevent us from recognizing the limits of print that have been with the medium since the beginning. TG: I agree. I think print is another technology to distribute information in another format and just as oral storytelling or digital, it’s just a way that we try to communicate information to one another. I couldn’t agree more. LH: So, Greg, what do you see as the key opportunities and challenges in building collections at the network or consortia level and how is CRL taking advantage of those opportunities in meeting those challenges? GE: Well, I think building, stewarding and disseminating collections at the network level is a massive opportunity. We know

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what we want to accomplish — Lorcan Dempsey has articulated it beautifully as the facilitated collection. Research libraries want to provide researchers access to the collections and content they need, and libraries will do this by strategically investing in collections and content at the local and the network level in complementary ways. Research libraries need to determine what local collections they need to invest in and what collections can they build at the network level. Ultimately, it’s about using the local and network contexts strategically and in relationship with each other in order to build rich and diverse collections in ways that minimize waste, unintentional duplication, and stretches the impact of library budgets and resources. So, you don’t have to duplicate network level collections at the local level. You can save significant costs in terms of purchase and long-term stewardship by relying on the network. Research libraries have multiple collective action models that have demonstrated success, such as HathiTrust and CRL to name two, and I think going forward we can invest in and rely on these network level models to address local challenges and constraints. There are multiple challenges in the way. Building trust within networks is a perpetual challenge. Additionally, the research library environment is filled with multiple groups, programs and initiatives. There are so many different organizations out there, just getting a map or an understanding of it is a challenge. A third challenge is operational — establishing workflows across networks. Of course libraries excel at such things, take ILL for instance, but these things do not exist without operational expertise. So those are three levels of challenges but I think the opportunity to do more together at the network level, it’s something that research libraries have done really well for years and it’s something that we will continue to do. TG: Greg, you’ve already alluded to this and that’s the academic community’s concern about diversity, inclusion and equity in research and scholarship and we’re wondering how has that impacted CRL and your decisions? GE: Centering diversity, inclusivity, equity and respect in my professional work gives me great joy. I think that’s part and parcel of being a research librarian. Research libraries are about building and stewarding collections and content that reflect multiple experiences, tell many, multiple stories, and empower researchers to ask and explore many kinds of questions. Inclusivity, diversity, and equity are just part and parcel of what we do. I do not know how we would be successful in advancing our missions as research libraries without foregrounding DEI values. In the last year there have been some incredibly painful and disturbing moments reminding us of the legacies of racial violence, injustice and systemic oppression that we have inherited, live in, and navigate daily. The heightened attention and collective awareness to these issues in the last year has been necessary and helpful. This is a real opportunity for research libraries to center their values, their work and their sustained thinking on these issues in new and powerful ways. To be honest, although we can and should do more, I am heartened by how often research libraries have adopted a leadership posture on DEI issues on college and university campuses. I’m hearing time and again that the research library is playing a leadership role on campus on those conversations because research libraries have been doing a lot of work and explorations in this space. Another important consideration for us is to reflect on what ways does maintaining print collections help, or hinder, ensuring that distinctive and diverse and marginalized voices are reflected

66 Against the Grain / November 2021

in our collections. At CRL we have about 240 languages reflected in our print collections; but the number of languages that exist in the world measure in the thousands, the vast majority of which are not reflected in the print record. So, focusing on print will in some ways reinforce DEI, but in other ways it is radically not inclusive. Thinking through these tensions, paradoxes and challenges with the DEI lens is really, really important for all we do. LH: Thank you for a wonderful conversation. It’s been wide ranging. We’ve covered a lot of topics, but are there any other questions or topics that we haven’t asked you about that you would like to cover? Is there anything we missed? GE: I think we’ve covered a lot of ground and I’ve really enjoyed the conversation, but I’ll leave with maybe one tantalizing observation to gesture towards the future and it builds on that last topic we were talking about which was diversity, equity and inclusivity. When I think about collections and research libraries and partnerships going forward, I think a framework that is very helpful in terms of thinking about research collections is a postcolonial framework and I think that folks have probably been hearing more about postcolonial frameworks or decolonizing collections. This kind of theoretical approach to collections can be generative and powerful for research collections, and I just want to make a note of that as something that we could talk about in the future, but I won’t leave it at that. I’ll just say that when it comes to postcoloniality and when it comes to navigating legacies of colonialism, it is more than a theoretical construct. Colonialism and postcoloniality are temporal and geographic realities. For instance, my own father, to use one story to bring it down to a micro level, my father is Chinese and born in Malaysia. Over the course of his life he has been the subject of more than one imperial project — born a subject of the British Monarchy, then for a time a subject of Imperial Japan, later a citizen of a newly independent Malaysia and now a citizen of the United States. Colonial legacies and postcoloniality are part of our temporal, geographic, legal, economic, and epistemic reality. Thinking about what this means in terms of international collaborations, research collections, research and publishing is both a necessary corrective as well as generative. Foregrounding a decolonization mindset forces one to think about what voices are being included in publishing. What voices are excluded? To what extent are colleagues and partners in the Global South included, and on what terms? A decolonization framework is useful both practically as well as theoretically in guiding how we’re thinking about collections, collection building, partnerships and conferences. LH: That’s great. Thank you so much. That is a great look into the future of where our discussions can go. So, thank you, again for being here. Thank you for taking time out of what I know is a busy schedule to speak with us. I learned a lot. It was a fascinating conversation, so thank you. GE: Thank you for having me. It’s been a delight. TG: Thanks, Greg. This concludes our two part interview with Greg Eow, President at Center for Research Libraries, Global Resources Network. Part 1 of this insightful and fascinating interview can be found in the September 2021 issue of Against the Grain.

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ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Glenda Alvin Interim Executive Director of Libraries and Media Centers Tennessee State University 3500 John A. Merritt Blvd Nashville, TN 37209 Phone: (615) 963-5230 Fax: (615) 963-5224 <galvin@tnstate.edu> www.tnstate.edu\library

Born and lived: Landstuhl, Germany; Air Force family; Both mother and father served. Early life: Attended schools in CA, MS, D.C., Okinawa, OH and IL. Professional career and activities: Tampa-Hillsborough Public Library System, St. Petersburg Jr. College, U. of Central Arkansas, The College of New Jersey and Tennessee State University; Past Activities: Member of CHOICE Editorial Board, ACRL, Convener, African American Studies Librarians Interest Group, Member, African American Funnel Group, ALA Biblioquilters, American Quilters Society and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Family: One sister, Bettie Alvin, Clinical Services Coordinator for DCFS(IL); One brother, John Alvin, IT Specialist, and two nephews, John Alvin III and Andrew Alvin. In my spare time: I create quilts for myself, my family, friends, and charity — I do not sell. I manage my church’s bookstore ministry and coordinate it’s book club. I am member of the Ushers/ Greeters ministry and Covered With Prayer, a prayer quilt ministry. I am involved in my graduate chapter sorority activities and I like to travel. Favorite books: Jubilee by Margaret Walker; Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine by Norma Jean and Carol Darden; Facts & Fabrications: Unraveling the History of Quilts and Slavery by Barbara Brackman; Down Bohicket Road by Mary Whyte; Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats by Michael Cunningham & Craig Marbury; Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate; The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar; The Woman’s Study Bible. Pet peeves: Selfishness. Philosophy: Lead by example and try to treat others as I would like to be treated. Most memorable career achievement: At this point, re-organizing the TSU Libraries and Media Centers, updating job descriptions and implementing new positions. We now have a Scholarly Communications Librarian, a Coordinator of Research and Instructional Services, an Access Services Librarian and were recently approved to add an Assistant Director of Operations and Planning. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now (or less): A happy retirement! I would also like to leave the libraries with a staffing structure and services that meet current and emerging trends. How/where do I see the industry in five years: Although I am Interim, I still retain my permanent position as Assistant Director for Collection Management and supervise the purchase of databases, books and journals. I see the industry continuing to migrate from paper to electronic format. Open access will continue to grow and be an integral part of library services. I also think that the smaller independent library vendors will continue to be absorbed by the larger providers like EBSCO, ProQuest, and Elsevier.

Against the Grain / November 2021

Greg Eow President Center for Research Libraries (CRL) 6050 S. Kenwood Avenue Chicago, IL 60637 Phone: (773) 955-4545 <geow@crl.edu> www.crl.edu

Born and lived: Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada; Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA. Early life: Split between the Boston area and visiting my father’s family in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Family: Spouse (Katherine); Cat (Moshi). In my spare time: Learning French. Favorite books: Neither Settler Nor Native (Mamdani); Paper Cadavers (Weld); Silencing the Past (Trouillot); The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Eisenstein); Teaching to Transgress (Hooks); Weapons of the Weak (Scott); Reasons and Persons (Parfit). Pet peeves: Cynicism, apathy, negativity. Philosophy: Friendly skepticism. Most memorable career achievement: Getting into (and completing!) a history PhD program after years of wondering if I could acutally do it. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) in 2024 with a year of compelling programming that brings the community together in productive ways. How/where do I see the industry in five years: The nonprofit sectors of the academic publishing systems (university presses, research libraries, scholarly societies) will continue to find ways to work ever closer together to create sustainable business models for the creation and distrubtion of research based scholarship. .At least, that is my hope!

Dustin J. Holland President and CEO Better World Books 55740 Currant Road Mishawaka, IN 46545 USA Phone: (574) 855-5205 <dholland@betterworldbooks.com> https://www.betterworldbooks.com

Born and lived: Born in State College, PA. Lived in Boston, MA, Hannibal, NY, Weatherford, TX, Decatur, AL, Alpharetta, GA, Athens, GA, Cuenca, Ecuador, Atlanta, GA and Granger, Indiana. Early life: Spent my lunch hour in the library during high school in Georgia. Professional career and activities: 17 years at Better World Books; serves on the board of Books for Africa. Family: Married with two children (10 year-old daughter and 8 year-old son) and Booker, the Irish Golden Doodle! In my spare time: I avoid screen time and spend quality time with my family working outdoors.

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Favorite books: All topics related to business, e-commerce, leadership, international relations, and mission! Pet peeves: Having to ask twice!

Philosophy: Do your best work the first time around!

Most memorable career achievement: (1) Taking the reigns as President and CEO after spending 15 years with the same company; (2) Annoucing our new ownership structure live on stage at the Charleston Conference with Brewster Kahle; (3) Selling 100M units of anything!; (4) The global impact of our company’s mission. Goal I hope to achieve five years from now: Selling exclusively on www.betterworldbooks.com! How/where do I see the industry in five years: Libraries serve a critical role in society and access to books is needed now more than ever. I see a need for more collaboration across the industry that serves libraries and library patrons, and a need for more innovation in resource sharing. We need our business leaders, community leaders, academic community, and politicians to step up and support and embrace libraries of all types, and encourage our nation’s youth to do the same.

Nancy Sims

Director of Copyright & Scholarly Communications University of Minnesota Libraries 309 19th Avenue S #0438 Minneapolis, MN 55455 <nasims@umn.edu> • lib.umn.edu Born and lived: Mostly Minneapolis, MN (with significant sojourns in the northeast U.S., and Michigan). In my spare time: Political organizing, biking, minor carpentry, textile mending. Most memorable career achievement: Not sure much tops the first time I did an online presentation with embedded audio, video, and interactive polling, and it all worked. How/where do I see the industry in five years: I think the social and political instability we’re facing now are likely to continue growing in the next several years, especially as we continue to fail to address climate change. That’s going to have a lot of repercussions for Libraries — if we can really make some significant departures from processes and practices that keep us comfortable, we could even actually contribute to some improvements. (Nancy’s Photo courtesy of Merrie Rendahl.)

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED Qumpus, Inc., d/b/a Better World Books Main address: 55740 Currant Road, Mishawaka, IN 46545 Warehouse locations in Indiana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and the UK. Phone: (800) 894-0242 • Fax: (574) 252-5826 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/ Officers: Dustin Holland, President & CEO. Ginger K. Patton-Schmitt, EVP, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary. Jeff Baer, VP, Finance. Association memberships, etc.: Book Industry Study Group, American Library Association, American Booksellers Association. Key products and services: Library Discards & Donations program.

68 Against the Grain / November 2021

Core markets/clientele: Libraries, bookstores, and academic institutions. Number of employees: +/- 350 History and brief description of your company/publishing program: Founded in 2003, Better World Books is a for-profit, socially conscious business and global online bookseller that collects and sells new and used books online, matching each purchase with a book donation. Each sale generates funds for literacy and education initiatives in the U.S., the UK, and around the world. Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers? Since its inception in 2003, Better World Books, the world’s leading socially conscious online bookseller, has sold over 100 million books, raised over $32 million for libraries and literacy, donated over 30 million books, and reused or recycled almost 400 million books.

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LIBRARY PROFILES ENCOURAGED TSU Libraries and Media Centers Brown-Daniel Library (Main Campus); Avon Williams Library (downtown campus). 3500 John A. Merritt Blvd, Nashville, TN 37209 • Phone: (615) 963-5064 Fax: (615) 963-5224 • www.tnstate.edu\library Background/history: TSU was founded as a land grant college and was formerly Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial University. It is an historically black university that with two campuses in Nashville. The main campus is home to the College of Agriculture, the College of Education, the College of Engineering, the College of Health Sciences, the College of Liberal Arts, and the College of Life Sciences. The downtown campus is home to the College of Business, the College of Public Service, College of Graduate and Professional Studies and the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology. Our most famous alumni are Oprah Winfrey, Olympic Gold Medalist Wilma Rudolph, football great Richard Dent, actor Moses Gunn and children’s author Patricia McKissick. The Martha Brown-Lois H. Daniel Library is named after the first two library directors, who tbuilt the collection. Ms. Brown became the librarian in 1924 and persuaded the administration to set aside funds to build the library. In 1945 she was followed by Lois H. Daniel who worked at the library for 31 years. The library houses the collections related to the university history and its alumni. The Special Collections Department is frequently contacted for information about TSU Olympic medalists and Tennessee’s desegregation and civil rights history. For the history of the Brown Daniel Library, please see: https://www.tnstate.edu/library/history_of_brown_daniel_library.aspx and tnstate.edu). Number of staff and responsibilities: There are thirty-six faculty and staff positions, which include Public Sevices (Reference, Special Collections and Access Services), Collection Management (Acquisitions/ Serials, Cataloging and Electronic Resources). There are Media Centers on the Main Campus and the downtown Avon Williams site. Overall library budget: $1.3 million for databases, eBooks, and serials. An additional $700,000 is provided from three grants from Title III, a federal program for strengthening academic programs. Types of materials you buy: eBooks, textbooks, video streaming services, databases, ejournals, media and print books/serials. What technologies does your library use to serve mobile users? We use Airpac for mobile users. Remote access is provided by OpenAthens. The Ask-A-Librarian service provides access via text and email. Does your library have an ILS or are you part of a collaborative ILS? Since 2005, we have been with Innovative Interfaces, Inc/ProQuest and currently use Sierra. Do you have a discovery system? EBSCO EDS. Does your library have a collection development or similar department? Yes. We have a Collection Management De-

Against the Grain / November 2021

partment that consists of Serials, Acquisitions, and Cataloging. Electronic Resources Management and material repairs are handled in the department. My permanent position is Assistant Director for Collection Management. If so, what is your budget and what types of materials are you purchasing? Print or electronic or both? My budget is $1.3 million databases, eBooks, and serials. We are allocated $700,000 from Title III grants. Book budget is $255,990. We buy print and electronic. What proportion of your materials are leased and not owned? An estimate is at least 85%. What do you think your library will be like in five years? We just heard that we may get a top to bottom renovation, so the physical spaces that we have will be transformed to provide better services to students, staff and faculty. As we weed the collection, we are providing more spaces for students to study and collaborate. I think our staff will be smaller because that is a trend. There will certainly be less print books, microform and bound journals. What excites or frightens you about the next five years? The lack of funding to support the increase cost of resources frightens me. Last year we had a 50% cut that was a real wake up call. I spend more time trying to figure out to make ends meet for the library’s budget than I do my own personal finances. Considering that I am looking at retiring in a couple of years, that may not be a good thing! It excites me that that there are new and emerging fields of library services. We are re-launching our institutional repository initiative with the hiring of our first Scholarly Communications Librarian and this year we have implemented our first Student Success and Outreach Librarian. We have four librarians teaching UNIV 100 classes which is also a first and this integrate us more into the university life. Is there anything else you think our readers should know? Tennessee State University has a partnership with Apple, Inc and we are the HBCU Hub for its coding and creativity program (Apple broadens Racial Equity and Justice Initiative with $30 million in new commitments – Apple (see https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/ apple-broadens-racial-equity-and-justice-initiative-with-30-million-in-newcommitments/). It is called HBCU C2 and staff who sign up for the Apple Teacher program receive an IPad. Last Spring nine of us signed up for the program and we achieved more Apple Teacher badges than any other department! The Graduate Dean, Dr. Robbie Melton, administers the program and she was so impressed by our performance that she allowed the Libraries and Media Centers team to add another five librarians, a library assistant and a media assistant to the HBCU C2 program. They also did well and now we have permission to train a third group. (https:// www.tnstate.edu/hbcuc2/centers.html) We have iMacs in the Multimedia Learning Commons and are expecting to get a cart of IPads to support student learning. This has challenged us to be “Apple ready.” Our Computer Specialist is looking at more training to support Apple using students, staff, and faculty.

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Back Talk — My Glorious Library Career: Part I Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

t might seem I came a little late to the library profession, joining ASU as director in 2015 after a career as academic and administrator, but appearances can be deceiving. My first library job came a lot longer ago than that. Now, it may seem hard to believe that I was once kind of a nerdy kid, the sort who chose his college based on which one had the most minimal physical ed requirement — and then spent my freshman year gaming the system to evade as much of it as I could. (I still haven’t passed the swimming test.) But for a kid growing up in El Paso, I was lucky in my school, because a team of American Jesuit priests had come to our town a few years earlier and taken over the building that had been headquarters of the Mexican Jesuits when they were hiding out from anticlerical political parties in the 1920s and 1930s. We had a handsome brick building on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande about two miles away There were some extraordinary teachers, incredibly smart and committed and charismatic and in every way just the right sort of mentors for a bunch of boys on the border — about a third for them from across the border, because their parents could afford the modest tuition and figured that getting a high school degree from American Jesuits was a very good thing. They were pretty right about that, even though we kids were never smart enough to take real advantage that we could have of the bicultural possibilities. Even though the school had only been open for about six years when I got there, it had a library of maybe 5,000 books, presided over by the incredibly serious and quiet Brother Murphy. School libraries had some magic in them for everybody in those days, when other libraries and bookstores (especially in El Paso) were

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limited in their powers of attraction. There were real books in that library. A little heavy on adventure yarns (Rafael Sabatini and Kenneth Roberts) and Doubleday Image paperbacks — their separate publishing line for specifically Catholic books. To be sure there were other books around as well, and Catcher in the Rye was passed hand-to-hand under the table. Larry had a copy and was excited to report to us that the cussing started right on the first page. So the first library job of mine: my only marketable skill, from that day to this, is my typing. When I was 14, my parents had bought me a Smith-Corona portable for $90, and I spent five cents at the annual Jewish women’s book sale in the El Paso Coliseum (where they had the rodeos) on a very old booklet that showed where to put your fingers on which keys — and I was off to the races. I still type over 100 words a minute these days, but that’s partly the much better keyboards we have nowadays. I still get stiff necks from the summer I spent writing my doctoral dissertation on one of those machines and remember one day I typed so much that I had shooting pains in my forearms for twenty-four hours after. But I could type, and Brother Murphy found out, so that meant I had a job. Study hall? Recess? I can’t remember, but the job was typing catalog cards for new books that came in. And Brother Murphy was serious. He (im)patiently and firmly taught me the correct format and the exact placement of every detail of author, title, and subject cards. This was not copy cataloging. I was taking the data (ok, we didn’t say “data” then) straight from the books themselves and laying out the cards just so. (And I learned alphabetizing rules as well!) There was no margin of error because, of course, it made perfect sense that the cards had to be perfect. The typewriter, I’m pretty sure, was manual, but the eraser was electric. It was about the size of a baseball, it plugged into the wall, and it had a spinning arm with a fierce eraser. (Was the head replaceable? I can’t remember.) Brother Murphy emphasized clean, precise, minimalist erasing — and as little of it as possible, thank you very much. The whole world of librarianship in a nutshell was there for us in that couple of thousand square feet. I got good at it and can truly say that everything else I’ve ever done for money came from that experience. I guess it was what we’d now call an unpaid internship, but it still paid off. Of course, this is all poignant to think about nowadays for a lot of reasons. The school opened about six years before I started and closed four years after I graduated — no market for private schools, even good ones with low tuition, in the El Paso of those days. I was lucky to find the place when I did. The building was soon sold off to the local school district and then a very few years later burned to the ground. I wonder what happened to those books — whether they’d been redistributed somehow to local Catholic schools or whether they just went up in smoke. Deaccession, smoke, and budget cuts have taken out a lot of libraries over time. A lot has changed about libraries and school libraries since those days, a lot of it for the good. But that quiet, safe, orderly place, where Brother Murphy and the others demonstrated by example that books were valuable, were things to cherish, and could make a difference — that was quite a place.

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Against the Grain Vol. 33 #5 November 2021

Articles inside

If Rumors Were Horses

The Value of Use of Creative Commons Licensing

Back Talk — My Glorious Library Career: Part I

Optimizing Library Services

The Digital Toolbox

Emerging Tech: To Be or not to Be?

Learning Belongs in the Library - Digital Texbook Acquisition and Library Workflow

AGITATE! As Creative Commons: AGITATE! Editorial Collective Speaks to Nancy Sims

Booklover — Poetic Travel

Questions and Answers — Copyright Column

And They Were There — Reports of Meetings

Legally Speaking — Reasons for Copyright Infringement

Graduate Student Authors’ Experiences with Creative Commons Licenses

Perspectives from Another Angle: Publishing Advisors