Here's an excerpt from the press release:

On November 18, 2011, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and LYRASIS signed an agreement designating LYRASIS as an agent to negotiate licenses for online content on behalf of interested ARL member libraries. This is the culmination of an effort that began in 2010 to identify a strategy for ARL to influence the marketplace regarding licensing rights, technical specifications, and business terms to meet the needs of research libraries.

This activity has involved task forces, the Reshaping Scholarly Communication Steering Committee, and the ARL Board. The initial task force drafted a white paper outlining the potential areas of action that ARL could take and content that could be considered, and a second task force developed an RFP that went to prospective agents. The Board approved the recommendations, RFP, and agent decision. The license offerings identified for this initiative will not be exclusive to ARL members, but may include libraries with which they have established licensing relationships.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

On November 1, 2011, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) joined over 300 organizations and institutions to endorse the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

In a letter to Dr. Peter Gruss, President of the Max Planck Society, Winston Tabb, ARL President and Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums at the Johns Hopkins University, wrote, "The Association of Research Libraries has been a longtime and consistent supporter of Open Access and has worked hard to advance its principles internationally. During the October 2011 meeting of the Board of Directors a decision was taken to become a signatory to the Berlin Declaration. I am pleased to extend our endorsement of the Declaration and join the growing number of signatories from North America."

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The survey asked ARL libraries about their digital content, their strategies for preserving that content, and the staff, time, and funding they currently devote to digital preservation. It also asked each responding library to compare its digital preservation activities of three years ago to current activities and project three years into the future. In addition, to better understand the roles of research libraries in the emergent field of digital curation, the survey sought to identify issues that are and are not being addressed through current practices and policies.

This survey revealed, as the digital preservation field is maturing, that most ARL libraries are rising to the challenge of establishing policies, workflows, and infrastructures to systematically preserve their rapidly expanding bodies of digital content. The survey also revealed that most ARL libraries are actively engaging in in-house digital preservation rather than outsourcing it to external parties, thus maintaining their control and ownership over the digital content that they curate.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

ARL makes publicly available the ARL Library Investment Index (previously named the ARL Expenditures-Focused Index). Beginning with data for 2005-06, this Index replaces the public availability of the ARL Membership Criteria Index. This new Index is highly correlated with the ARL Membership Criteria Index and less affected by changes in the collections variables. The ARL Library Investment Index calculates principal component scores and the analysis is based on all university member libraries' data (as compared with the ARL Membership Criteria Index, which is based on the 34 founding members of the Association). It is a summary measure of relative size among the university members of the association and has also been calculated retrospectively beginning with data from 2002-03. The Index scores are rounded to two decimal places, which may give the appearance of identical scores (and thus ranks) for some institutions; in fact, when the complete principal component score is calculated, it is extended to higher precision decimal places. Each institution has a unique result and place in the rank order.

| New: Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Charles B. Lowry has announced that he will retire from his position as Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) at the end of December 2012. By announcing his retirement plans now, Lowry provides the ARL Board of Directors with time for a search and a seamless transition of leadership.

Lowry was appointed Executive Director in 2008 for a three-year term, which was extended for an additional two years at the request of the ARL Board. He has led ARL through significant expansion in membership and renewal of its strategic plan. During his tenure, ARL's capacities and offerings have been strengthened and expanded. Guided by Lowry's leadership, the Association:

• gained three new members—University of Calgary, University of Ottawa, and the US National Archives and Records Administration;
• renewed its strategic plan twice;
• led the reshaping of the Library Copyright Alliance;
• navigated the difficult economic downturn that began in 2008;
• expanded ARL's Public Policies capacity, a vital strategic direction; and
• conducted successful searches to replace three highly accomplished senior staff essential to the Association's mission.

| New: Google Books Bibliography, Version 7 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

H. Austin Booth has been named vice provost for university libraries at the University at Buffalo, Harvey G. Stenger, UB interim provost, announced today. Her appointment is effective immediately.

Booth has served as interim associate vice president for university libraries since June 1, 2010. . . .

As vice provost for university libraries, Booth is responsible for nine libraries that serve UB's 12 schools and colleges, manages an annual budget of $20 million and oversees a staff of 150.

UB's library system is the largest and most comprehensive in the State University of New York and includes more than 4 million print volumes, access to more than 50,000 electronic journals and the largest collection of James Joyce manuscripts, notebooks and letters in the world. . . .

Prior to her appointment as interim associate vice president, Booth served as director of collections and co-director of the Arts and Sciences Libraries.

Booth, who holds the rank of full librarian, joined UB in 1997 and received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Librarianship in 2005.

Her research focuses on digital culture, and on higher education and information technology. She earned a master's degree in library and information science from the University of California-Berkeley and holds a master's degree in English language and literature and a graduate certificate in women's studies from the University of Michigan, where she was named University Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor and held a Mellon Fellowship. She received bachelor's degrees in English and economics from Cornell University.

| New: Google Books Bibliography, Version 7 | Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Columbia University Libraries is joining a growing movement among universities and research institutions to make scholarly research free and available to the public online. The Libraries is among the first departments at the university to adopt an open access resolution, which calls for faculty and other researchers to post their journal articles in online repositories such as Columbia's Academic Commons. In January, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory became the first program at Columbia to adopt an open access resolution.

The resolution for the Libraries, which goes into effect on June 1, 2011, will require librarians and other professional staff members to deposit their published scholarly works into Academic Commons or another repository that makes the work publicly available. By posting articles in an open-access repository, authors are able to make their works freely accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection and discoverable via Google Scholar and other search tools, thus promoting a wider dissemination of research and information.

"The Libraries at Columbia have championed open access to research,” James G. Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian, said. "It is appropriate that its professional staff should model this policy and place their works in repositories for wide access and use."

The resolution covers only scholarly journal articles and is not retroactive. There is an opt-out feature built into the resolution, with respect to publishing an article in a journal that insists on exclusivity.  The resolution will also cover Health Sciences Library professional staff.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Academic Health Sciences Library Statistics 2008–2009, which presents data that describe collections, expenditures, personnel, and services in 62 medical libraries at ARL member institutions in the US and Canada.

In 2008–2009, the reporting health sciences libraries held a median of 230,011 volumes, spent a total of $235,821,026, and employed 2,131 FTE staff. Expenditures for materials and staff accounted for the bulk of total expenditures, at approximately 50% and 41% respectively. Respondents reported spending a total of $83,986,222 for electronic materials, or an average of approximately 76% of their total materials budgets; this includes a total of $78,539,253 for electronic serials.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Academic Law Library Statistics 2008–2009, which presents data that describe collections, expenditures, personnel, and services in 72 law libraries at ARL member institutions in the US and Canada.

In 2008–2009, the reporting law libraries held a median of 355,922 volumes, spent a total of $213,618,759, and employed 2,057 FTE staff. Expenditures for materials and staff accounted for the bulk of total expenditures, at approximately 47% and 46% respectively. Respondents reported spending a total of $21,860,327 for electronic materials, or an average of approximately 27% of their total materials budgets; this includes a total of $18,940,834 for electronic serials.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Statistics 2008–2009, the latest in a series of annual publications that describe the collections, staffing, expenditures, and service activities of ARL's member libraries. Of the 124 members in 2008–2009, 114 were university libraries (17 in Canada and 107 in the US); the remaining 10 were public, governmental, and nonprofit research libraries (two in Canada, eight in the US).

ARL libraries are a relatively small subset of libraries in North America, but they account for a large portion of academic library resources in terms of assets, budgets, and the number of users they serve. The total library expenditures of all 124 member libraries in 2008–2009 was slightly more than $4 billion; of that total, roughly $3.1 billion was spent by the 114 university libraries and slightly more than $940 million the 10 nonuniversity libraries.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt:

This consent order presents a unique opportunity to shape best practices in reader privacy for a major online service provider. The marketplaces for e-books and for book search are both in formative stages, and the standards adopted by Google can be highly influential for other market participants. We urge the Commission to confirm that reader privacy deserves the same respect in the online world that it has long demanded in the physical world by insisting on strong protections for reader privacy in the comprehensive privacy program.

Read more about it at "In Comments to FTC, ARL Suggests Privacy Oversight for Google Books."

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Google Books Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Save your work in perpetuity with a new tool called Libra. A joint project between ITC and the University Library System, and requested by the Faculty Senate, Libra allows any employee of the University who produces scholarly works to store their papers, and in the near future, theses and datasets, in a secure location. Libra was developed specifically as a repository for peer-reviewed, scholarly articles, although other works such as books may also be deposited, as long as sufficient rights have been retained by the authors.

Read more about it at "LIBRA: University of Virginia's Hydra-based Fedora Repository for Open Access Materials."

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Denise is currently the Strategic and Organizational Research Librarian at the University of Kansas, where she previously had oversight of library and information technology activities as Vice Provost for Information Services and Chief Information Officer from 2005 to 2010. Her experience includes lead roles in library research, library administration and planning, information management and policy, and program assessment at the University of Virginia, the University of Kansas, and Syracuse University. She was the acting University Librarian at Syracuse before returning to the University of Kansas to assume the Vice Provost role. She holds a master's degree in library science from the University of Oklahoma and is an alumna of the Association of Research Libraries Leadership and Career Development Program. Her research interests include organizational and change leadership, an area in which she has produced several publications and presentations. Denise has served on numerous library and information technology advisory committees and boards, including the Depository Library Council of the U.S. Public Printer, BioOne, the Simmons College Ph.D. program in Managerial Leadership, the Great Plains Network, Educause, and the Kansas Research and Education Network. Her background makes her extremely well suited to lead our libraries into the future.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Here's an excerpt from the policy:

To promote openness and fairness among libraries licensing scholarly resources, Cornell University Library will not enter into vendor contracts that require nondisclosure of pricing information or other information that does not constitute a trade secret. All new and renewed licenses submitted with nondisclosure clauses will not be signed but henceforth will be referred to the Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources and Special Collections for further negotiation. . . .

It has become apparent to the library community that the anticompetitive conduct engaged in by some publishing firms is in part a result of the inclusion of nondisclosure agreements in contracts.¹ As Robert Darnton recently noted, by "keeping the terms secret, … one library cannot negotiate for cheaper rates by citing an advantage obtained by another library."² For this reason, the International Coalition of Library Consortia's "Statement of Current Perspective and Preferred Practices for the Selection and Purchase of Electronic Information" states that "Non-disclosure language should not be required for any licensing agreement, particularly language that would preclude library consortia from sharing pricing and other significant terms and conditions with other consortia."³ The more that libraries are able to communicate with one another about vendor offers, the better they are able to weigh the costs and benefits of any individual offer. An open market will result in better licensing terms.

Read more about it at "Cornell U. Library Takes a Stand with Journal Vendors: Prices Will Be Made Public."

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Gibbons joined the University of Rochester in 2000 as the digital initiatives librarian of the River Campus Libraries, and over the years assumed greater and more diversified responsibilities at the University. She was appointed to her present position in 2008.

She is well known in the library world, most significantly for the library user studies at Rochester she has undertaken since 2004. In collaboration with an anthropologist, Gibbons determined how faculty and students do their academic work, find information, and make use of the physical and technological resources offered by the libraries. The results have led to service, collections and physical space changes in the River Campus Libraries designed to better meet user needs. . . .

Gibbons received a B.A. in history from the University of Delaware in 1992, and in 1995, and master's degrees in both history and library science from Indiana University-Bloomington. More recently, she returned to school while working full-time to earn both a M.B.A. in 2002 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an Ed.D. in higher education administration from the University of Rochester in 2009.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |