Building Bibliodiversity in the Collective Collection through Consortial Acquisition of Small Publisher Content By Anne C. Osterman (Director, VIVA) <aelguind@gmu.edu> and Dr. Kevin Farley (Humanities Collections Librarian, Virginia Commonwealth University) <kdfarley@vcu.edu> and Peter Potter (previously Virginia Tech, now Vice President for Publishing Services, De Gruyter, Inc.) <peter.potter@degruyter.com>
R
ooted in the postwar boom of enrollment and the growth of new colleges and universities, the longstanding goal of providing comprehensive holdings within each local academic library collection now contends with the realities of budgetary fluctuations, changing user needs and expectations, and the shift from print to digital resources. For many libraries, the task of building extensive collections was always elusive. “There was a vision of a distributed national collection,” David E. Jones notes, “... of strategic value, although it was never realized.”1 Yet the constraints that often shape collections also suggest new ways of achieving comprehensiveness and inclusiveness. Recent national events have refocused our awareness on the need to find ways to ensure that collections include voices too often unheard, that digital and print holdings represent and foster inclusion, diversity, equity, and access. Such efforts involve retrospective analysis of holdings and gaps, as well as enhancing coverage of contemporary scholarship “Collections and creative works — again, a often reflect challenging goal. While larger publishers have increased their a publishing focus on diversity content, many triad — larger small presses were established university and specifically to address these issues. Collections often reflect a commercial publishing triad — larger university publishers and commercial publishers from from the US, the US, Canada, and the UK — Canada, and the but it is vital that voices from diverse communities themselves UK — but it is are heard within our collections. vital that voices Identifying and locating small from diverse press publications enhances and promotes bibliodiversity in our communities collections. themselves are
heard within our collections.”
Bibliodiversity has many definitions, befitting the complexities it describes. The concept of bibliodiversidad emerges at the end of the 20th Century, in a movement by independent publishers; by 2002, it is emphasized in the founding principles of the Alliance internationale des éditeurs indépendants (International Alliance of Independent Publishers, IAIP). In its definition, IAIP notes that “Bibliodiversity contributes to a thriving life of culture and a healthy eco-social system.” Independent publishers and their books are “essential to preserve and strengthen plurality and the diffusion of ideas.”2
22 Against the Grain / November 2023
Discussions of bibliodiversity often address the central role of intentionality — the dedicated effort to create a publishing and collections environment that supports and values diversity. “Intentional steps must be taken to employ equitable methods of publishing and dissemination, and to avoid perpetuating ... uneven power structures and hierarchies ....”3 For libraries, the inclusion in collections of independent small publishers focused on diverse viewpoints and experiences enlarges opportunities for teaching and research — as well as for self-discovery, as readers find voices that speak for who they are, as well as finding their own voice in the process. In this way, the interconnections between societal and personal issues that affect all of us may be explored and questioned. “We might enjoy reading and writing poetry for many reasons,” poet Stephanie Burt writes, “but we need it when we feel we need ... something unavailable in the literal world .... [I]t might be a new face, a new body; it might be a way to make the inward person audible (if not visible) to other people.”4 While ideal comprehensiveness eluded the postwar library, collective collections strategies make it possible now to achieve the kind of presence and representation for diverse voices that Burt describes. Providing a diverse and inclusive collection is important to VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium, which includes 71 public and private nonprofit members. In an effort to increase the bibliodiversity of VIVA’s shared collections and helping to ensure that small publishers have sustainable and long-term models for partnership with libraries, VIVA’s Steering and Collections Committees created a Support for Small Publishers Task Force, which started its work in Fall 2020. This Task Force was charged with having deep discussions with small publishers about their challenges in marketing, selling, and distributing their content at scale, as well as investigating ways to enable and streamline consortium-level acquisitions of content from these publishers. From the beginning, there was interest in giving special attention to publishers that have diverse voices represented in their content. As with all VIVA task forces, representation by institution type (public doctoral, public four year, public two year, and private non-profit) informed the formation of the group. The members at the beginning were Peter Potter (Chair, Virginia Tech), Dr. Kevin Farley (Virginia Commonwealth University), Missy Comer (Tidewater Community College), Greg Snyder (Virginia Wesleyan University), Malia Willey (James Madison University), Dr. Alicia Willson-Metzger (Christopher Newport University), Denise Woetzel (J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College), and Anne Osterman (VIVA). Miguel Valladares-Llata (University of Virginia) joined in Fall 2022 to contribute to the
<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>
