ARL Libraries – DigitalKoans

Reparative Description and Metadata Remediation Planning at the University of Michigan Deep Blue Institutional Repositories

This report shares ongoing metadata remediation work on The University of Michigan Library’s Deep Blue Repositories, or the “Deep Blues,” primarily focused on Deep Blue Documents. Deep Blue Documents is a repository that has been accepting research outputs since 2006. Currently, it contains about 160,000 deposits of items from 1863 to the present, with hundreds of thousands of downloads per month. Deep Blue Data launched in 2016, and as of Fall 2025 has approximately 2,000 deposits.

https://tinyurl.com/mtkh3f7m

How Library Consortia Are Building Resilient Open Infrastructure in Times of Crisis

US-based library consortia provide an essential collaborative framework that enables academic institutions to achieve preservation, access, innovation, and educational goals that would be impossible individually. The report reveals that library consortia are stepping up as critical bulwarks against resource scarcity and service disruption among their members. Interviews with consortial leaders highlight both the urgent challenges they face—vendor consolidation, shrinking institutional capacity, and political and financial pressures—and the opportunities they see for bold collective action.

https://tinyurl.com/yzdu7rtu

Paywall: “ARL Statistics 2024 Publications Describe Resources, Services of Member Libraries”

These three publications present information describing the collections, expenditures, staffing, and service activities of 123 of the Association’s 125 member libraries in 2024. The survey illustrates the alignment between library expenditures and resources they support. Of these 123 members, 118 are university libraries (16 in Canada and 102 in the US); the remaining 5 are governmental and nonprofit libraries in the US. The law and health sciences publications focus on the 71 law libraries and 60 medical libraries among the Association’s membership that completed the law and health sciences surveys. . . .

The total expenditures (in US dollars) of all 123 reporting libraries in 2024 was $4.4 billion. In the same year, 31,425 full-time equivalent staff in ARL libraries made approximately 5.5 million contacts with their user communities through group presentations and reference transactions.

https://tinyurl.com/45jyp48r

“ARL/CNI Futurescape Libraries AI Toolkit Can Help You Thrive in the AI Landscape”

The Futurescape Libraries AI Toolkit integrates the ARL/CNI AI Scenarios along with priorities trialed and refined by strategic thinkers working in the research library field during a Strategic Implications forum in December 2024. . . .

Organized into flexible modules, the toolkit offers structured activities to help library leadership teams, staff, and external stakeholders:

Explore future possibilities

Test current strategies

Identify opportunities and vulnerabilities

Build readiness for long-term change

https://tinyurl.com/bdss8hac

“ARL Annual Salary Survey 2024 Reports Data on Professional Positions in Member Libraries”

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Annual Salary Survey 2024, which analyzes salary data for professional staff working in 123 of the 125 ARL member libraries during 2024. Data are reported for 11,256 professional staff from 118 university ARL libraries in Canada and the United States and for 2,040 professional staff of the 5 US federal, nonprofit, and public ARL libraries. . . .

Among US public universities, 76% reported offering faculty appointments and 41% reported bargaining unit eligibility. In comparison, US private universities reported 29% and 16%, while Canadian universities—all public—reported 69% and 81%, reflecting varied approaches to both faculty status and collective bargaining across different types of institutions. . . .

Across all ARL university member institutions, executive leadership roles reported an average of 22 years of professional experience with salaries averaging $177,800, while senior managers averaged 18 years and $112,600. Managers followed with 15 years and $91,400, and other professionals recorded averages of 13 years and $82,300.

https://tinyurl.com/yd5bvy2e

“ARL Comments on NIH ‘Maximizing Research Funds by Limiting Allowable Publishing Costs’”

A growing number of funders, publishers, and libraries have concluded that the article processing charge (APC) is a suboptimal business model for scientific publishing, because it creates barriers to participation, incentivizes unsustainable growth in publication volume, and entrenches the journal article as the sole research output of value. Yet our concern is that imposing caps on APCs will simply shift high costs elsewhere rather than addressing their root causes. Institutions can expect renewed pressure to sign open-access publishing agreements so that their researchers can still publish in prestige journals with APCs that exceed the cap, straining library budgets at a moment when federal investments in institutional research support are being pared back. Efforts to move research assessment away from an emphasis on journal brand are underway, and we recommend that NIH support these efforts by ensuring consideration of the value of nonarticle outputs in the review of funding proposals. We also encourage NIH to expand its definition of allowable publication costs to include preprint review services that offer rigorous expert assessments of research results but may not issue binary accept/reject decisions. In our view, actions like these are more likely to align with existing reform efforts and to avoid damaging second-order effects than imposing isolated caps on publication costs.

https://tinyurl.com/t3y3k7hw

Sr. Director/Director, Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries at CARLI

Provides leadership and direction for the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois, CARLI, an academic and research library consortium that provides essential infrastructure and services to 125 member institutions located throughout the state of Illinois. The Senior Director provides dynamic, experienced executive leadership for academic/research libraries, builds on the deep history and tradition of library cooperation in Illinois, extends the rich information resources, and enhances the skill and dedication of information professionals across the state. The Senior Director is responsible for sustaining CARLI as a vital consortium that is a national leader in library resource sharing and the application and development of information services.

https://tinyurl.com/yynm7f7c

“Guest Post — From Overhead to Essential: The FAIR Model Recognizes Research Information Services as Essential to the Research Enterprise”

The current moment presents three distinct approaches to federal research funding reform for consideration by Congress. . . .

A Straight 15% Cap: The most draconian option under consideration would simply impose a uniform 15% indirect cost rate cap across all federal agencies and institution. . . .

Simplified Negotiated Rates: A second option proposes streamlined negotiated rates. . . . However, early indications suggest these simplified negotiations might eliminate recognition of research information services, folding library costs back into general administrative categories. . . .

JAG’s FAIR Model: The third option, JAG’s refined Financial Accountability in Research (FAIR) Model. . . . Rather than treating research support as undifferentiated overhead, FAIR explicitly recognizes Research Information Services (“project-specific costs related to journal subscriptions, database access, institutional repositories, and related resources”) as Essential Research Performance Support. . . .

https://tinyurl.com/yeyvas69

“Mihoko Hosoi Named University Librarian at UC Riverside Effective Late October 2025”

Mihoko will join UC Riverside from The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), where she is the chief officer for Collections, Research, and Scholarly Communications and is tenured at the rank of full librarian. She previously served as the associate dean for Collections, Research, and Scholarly Communications at Penn State.

She has over 20 years of experience developing and managing academic libraries, at the California Digital Library (CDL), Stanford University, Cornell University, UC Santa Barbara, and Duke University. Prior to her library career, she worked in the airline and hotel industries in Japan.

https://tinyurl.com/fx7j8jxp

“CNI as an Idea Factory:An Appreciation of Clifford Lynch”

Innumerable times over this 30-year period, I have witnessed Clifford’s superpowers: his capacious intellect; his extraordinary ability to identify and clearly communicate issues of strategic importance; and his unfailing generosity of spirit in working with others to generate ideas and stimulate efforts to address these issues. In this essay, I highlight some of the key issues on which I think CNI has been especially influential under Clifford’s leadership. Context and history help explain this influence, and I begin this expression of my deep appreciation of Clifford as a friend and colleague by referring to this origin story, which he himself recounted in a rare moment of personal disclosure.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pla.2025.a964196

“From Building a First-Generation Digital Library Infrastructure to Reimagining Discovery”

Twenty-five years ago, Harvard University was in the early stages of a project to build a first-generation digital library infrastructure. The project was carefully named the Library Digital Initiative (LDI), signifying that ‘digital’ would be an integral and integrated aspect of ‘library’ and not a separate entity. The initiative aimed to develop knowledge and expertise relating to digital objects, as well as technical infrastructure to create, curate, access and preserve them, and to integrate the new digital collections with Harvard’s extensive tangible collections.

Today, we still benefit from the foresight of this first-generation development and the subsequent ones it spawned, but we are also at a pivotal point of reflecting on lessons learned and opportunities to be seized as we rebuild and reimagine our digital infrastructure and services in a vastly expanded data ecosystem. Predicting what libraries will look like two decades ahead is always conjecture. What we do know, however, is that while the themes and challenges from the past two decades endure, the way we are tackling them is different. This paper examines what has changed since early library digital initiatives, and the imperatives we see for the future.

https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v19i1.1068

“Georgetown Hires New University Librarian and Dean of the Library”

Hudson-Ward is the associate director of research, learning and strategic partnerships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries. . . .

As dean, she will serve as the chief administrative officer for the Georgetown University Library, which holds 3.5 million volumes and extensive collections and offers research and information services for students and faculty. . . .

Hudson-Ward earned her master of library and information science from the University of Pittsburgh, where she pursued both academic and corporate librarianship tracks, and her doctorate in library and information science from Simmons University.

In the years since, she served as a tenured associate librarian at Pennsylvania State University and the director of libraries for Oberlin College. . . .

She joined MIT in 2020, where she leads research and learning services for MIT’s library; partnerships with more than 40 MIT departments, labs, centers and institutes; and the library’s AI strategy — work she’s eager to continue at Georgetown. Her latest book project, Social Intelligence in the Age of AI, will be published by ALA Editions later this year.

https://tinyurl.com/ywsyadyn

“Accomplished Library Leader, AI Scholar, Named UVA Librarian and Dean of Libraries”

Leo S. Lo, who currently serves as dean of the College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences at the University of New Mexico, has been appointed the University of Virginia’s next University librarian and dean of libraries, effective Sept. 15. . . .

Before arriving at UNM, Lo was associate dean at Pennsylvania State University Libraries, where he oversaw more than 350 faculty and staff across 20 campuses and helped establish the Center for Black Digital Research. Earlier in his career, he served as associate university librarian at Old Dominion University, department head at the University of Alabama and faculty librarian at Kansas State University.

https://tinyurl.com/23ue985m

“AI Chatbots Need More Books to Learn From. These Libraries Are Opening Their Stacks”

Harvard’s newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter’s handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians.

https://tinyurl.com/bdzxx8r7

“Robert H. McDonald Appointed Senior Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries”

The University of Texas at Austin announces the appointment of Robert H. McDonald as Senior Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries, effective August 16, 2025. McDonald currently serves as Dean of University Libraries and Senior Vice Provost of Online and Extended Education at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he has led transformative initiatives in digital scholarship, online learning and library services. . . .

At CU Boulder, McDonald has overseen strategic initiatives in digital library services and online program development, including the expansion of alternative credentialing programs and learning technologies that support researchers and students across disciplines. He guided adoption of an open-source, community-based Library Services Platform to secure sustainable and affordable software for CU Boulder’s Libraries. . . .

Prior to his time at CU Boulder, McDonald served in leadership roles at Indiana University Bloomington, where he helped build national infrastructure for digital preservation and cyberinfrastructure initiatives, including work with the HathiTrust Research Center and the IU Data to Insight Center, and has held positions at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, Florida State University and Auburn University. He holds a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of South Carolina and a Master of Music from the University of Georgia.

https://tinyurl.com/5aj3p9p6

University Librarian and Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of the Libraries at University of Rochester

The University Librarian has oversight of the policies and enterprise systems for the UR Libraries, including the Miner Medical Libraries (UR Medical Center), the River Campus Libraries (RCL), the Sibley Music Library (Eastman School of Music), and the Charlotte Whitney Allen Library at the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG). The University Librarian also represents the UR Libraries in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), where the UR Libraries play an active role.

For the Academic Center, the University Librarian has administrative responsibility for all library divisions, including oversight of an approximately $24 million consolidated operations budget (collections, endowment return) with a total of 115 FTEs. The University Librarian will be a principal fundraiser for the Libraries as the University launches its next comprehensive capital campaign. . . .

The University of Rochester’s library system stands at a critical juncture, balancing exceptional staff dedication and beautiful physical spaces against operational challenges in the current political and fiscal environments. The next University Librarian has significant opportunities to build a transformational vision, leverage existing strengths and continue to address new and ongoing needs in creative research-forward ways.

https://tinyurl.com/3bde3vmk

“Big Ten Academic Alliance and Springer Nature Announce First-Ever Unlimited Open Access Publishing Agreement in the Americas”

The Big Ten Academic Alliance has signed a two-year Open Publishing Agreement with Springer Nature, making it the publisher’s first truly unlimited and uncapped open access agreement in the Americas. This is the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s fifth Open Publishing Agreement or OPA, and its most expansive to date. This groundbreaking deal offers all authors across participating institutions unlimited open access publishing in Springer’s hybrid journals portfolio—with no fees, no caps, no limits, and no hassle—while at the same time uniformly expanding access to those titles regardless of past local subscriptions. . . . .

Beyond publishing, this agreement also grants full read access to the entire Springer Hybrid portfolio across all participating campuses, which includes over 2,200 titles across the Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, and Adis imprints, as well as Academic Journals on nature.com.

https://tinyurl.com/4wvmrda8

Associate Chief Librarians [3] at Western University

Within these three positions, we are looking to recruit leaders who can support teaching and learning; research infrastructure and scholarly communication; user services and user experience; information technology; and collections, including collection development and stewardship, and archives and special collections. One ACL will be assigned responsibility for Western Libraries’ $15.5 million acquisitions budget.

https://tinyurl.com/bdxxeum2

Dean of Libraries at Florida State University

Reporting to the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, the Dean is the senior academic and administrative officer of the University Libraries, home to 138 full time employees supported by a total annual operating budget of more than $18 million. As a member of FSU’s senior academic team, the Dean of University Libraries is an active participant in the education, research, and community engagement mission of the University.

https://tinyurl.com/5n8rcva6

“Copyright Claims Board is “Ineffective and Costly,” Watchdog Groups Say”

Responding to an inquiry from the U.S. Copyright Office, a coalition of watchdog groups [including ALA, and ARL] has flagged various problems with the Copyright Claims Board. . . .

According to the groups’ analysis, the CCB has spent approximately $5.4 million in its first years of operation, while only about $75,000 has been awarded to claiming copyright holders through its decisions.

With well over 1,200 complaints. . . most of these end up being dismissed and thus far the board has only reached final determinations in 35 cases, awarding little over $2,000 in damages on average.

https://tinyurl.com/5bsa8p92

“ARL Supports Senator Wyden’s Call for FTC Action on Digital Ownership Rights”

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) joined a letter by Public Knowledge supporting US Senator Ron Wyden’s February 25, 2025, request for Federal Trade Commission (FTC) intervention to protect consumer rights in digital marketplaces. . . .

Senator Wyden highlighted a critical issue: consumers who “purchase” digital materials like ebooks are actually only acquiring temporary access licenses, often with significant usage restrictions. Libraries must accept these restrictions when licensing essential databases and digital resources for education and scholarship. For instance, in some cases publishers have retroactively banned AI research applications through impromptu contract addendums—even after the library and publisher signed license agreements.

ARL joins the American Library Association (ALA), Software Preservation Network (SPN), University Information Policy Offers (UIPO), Public Knowledge (PK), and other library and civil society groups in signing the letter supporting Senator Wyden’s request.

https://tinyurl.com/ywbambsx

“NYU Names Kristina Rose Dean of NYU Libraries”

Rose has been serving as NYU’s interim dean of libraries since January. She was appointed associate dean for collections and content strategy in 2019. She was made interim head of Access, Delivery, and Resource Sharing Services in 2011, and named permanent head in 2013. She first joined the NYU libraries in 2004 as an access services librarian. Prior to coming to NYU, she was the supervisor of the Butler Reserves and Milstein College Library at Columbia University.

https://tinyurl.com/yc5c2nmc

“Remembering Bill Mischo”

The University Library [of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign] honors the memory of William H. Mischo [https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4234-9836], who passed away on April 20, 2025. Bill was a legendary figure among his colleagues—an innovator, mentor, and leader whose influence shaped not only the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, but also the very systems through which countless users have discovered knowledge. His decades of service leave a lasting impact on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and throughout the wider world of library and information science. An excerpt from his obituary follows.

William H. Mischo began as Head of the Engineering Library in Engineering Hall in 1982 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He developed science and technology library collections, worked with faculty to understand their research, and was a role model for other librarians on campus.

Bill was perhaps best known for the planning and construction of the world-class Grainger Engineering Library Information Center (GELIC), which opened on March 14, 1994, and is the northernmost landmark on the Bardeen Quad. Bill trained hundreds of new STEM librarians and information professionals who work around the world.

Soon after Grainger opened, Bill was a Principal Investigator on the Digital Library Initiative I (DLI-I), a National Science Foundation-funded grant in which research was developed to create digital journals and was a major change for information delivery. In 1999, some of the very first Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), which are used to create unique identifiers for articles, books, chapters, and conferences, and are used to discover and connect information on the Web, were first created in GELIC.

https://tinyurl.com/2mmysndk

“Charting Open Science Landscapes: A Systematized Review of Us Academic Libraries’ Engagement in Open Research Practices”

Open Science aims to make research publicly accessible, transparent, and reusable, promoting collaboration across disciplines and fostering relationships among government, academia, industry, and society. International and regional reviews have explored the roles of academic libraries in promoting open science on both global and local scales. However, practices within U.S. academic libraries have not been examined comprehensively. This study addresses this gap. We employ a systematized literature review methodology to map U.S. academic library engagement in key areas of open science (e.g., open access, open data, open educational resources) and overlap analysis is used to assess shifts from discrete initiatives (e.g., open access, research data management) to holistic, integrated services that span the research lifecycle. Using a comprehensive search strategy, we identified 3752 publications for inclusion in the study. We find that U.S. academic libraries are actively engaged in open science practices, with the most extensive involvement in open access and the provision of infrastructure to support open science. However, engagement in activities related to citizen science remains limited. Through thematic overlap analysis, we find that ~50 % of publications report activities across two or more themes of open science, suggesting a possible shift toward more comprehensive practices. A key challenge reported by libraries is the need for continuous professional development to address technical skills gaps. As research needs and corresponding librarian responsibilities continue to evolve, maintaining librarian professional development opportunities will remain crucial for equipping librarians with the skills necessary to continue supporting and advancing open science initiatives.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103054

Vice-Provost (Libraries) and University Librarian at University of Manitoba

The University of Manitoba is the province’s only medical doctoral institution and is a member of Canada’s U15 group of research-intensive universities. The University offers a robust and diverse suite of over 100 graduate programs taught by award-winning professors and in partnerships with over 40 research centres and institutes. The University generates more than $1.7 billion in annual economic activity and attracts 200 million dollars annually in sponsored research income. The University’s culturally diverse community is home to over 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students, of which 21.3% are international students representing over 122 countries. . . .

In this role, the Vice-Provost (Libraries) serves as the principal expert on libraries, archives, and digital technologies, ensuring UML remains a dynamic hub of knowledge, discovery, and academic support.

https://tinyurl.com/4yt8bt27