Category: Research Libraries

"More than a House of Cards: Developing a Firm Foundation for Streaming Media and Consumer-Licensed Content in the Library"

William Cross has published "More than a House of Cards: Developing a Firm Foundation for Streaming Media and Consumer-Licensed Content in the Library" in the Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship..

Here's an excerpt:

This article will introduce traditional library practice for licensing multimedia content and discuss the way that consumer-licensing and streaming services disrupt that practice. Sections II and III describe the statutory copyright regime designed by Congress to facilitate the socially-valuable work done by libraries and the impact of the move from ownership to licensed content. Collecting multimedia materials has always presented special legal challenges for libraries, particularly as licensed content has replaced the traditional practice of purchasing and circulation based on the first sale doctrine. These issues have grown even more complex as streaming services like Netflix and Amazon and video game downloads through services like Steam have come to dominate the landscape. Section IV will describe the way that consumer-licensed materials, which not only remove the ownership that undergirds library practice, but also the ability to negotiate for library use, imperil the congressionally-designed balance. Section V will present a path forward for libraries to develop robust, cutting-edge collections that reflect a sophisticated understanding of the contractual and copyright issues at play.

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"Publishers Appeal GSU Copyright Case"

Andrew Albanese has published "Publishers Appeal GSU Copyright Case" in Publishers Weekly.

Here's an excerpt:

Following their second district court loss in eight years of litigation, the publisher plaintiffs in Cambridge University Press vs. Patton (known commonly as the GSU e-reserves case) have again appealed the case.

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"Write up! A Study of Copyright Information on Library-Published Journals"

Melanie Schlosser has published "Write up! A Study of Copyright Information on Library-Published Journals" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION Libraries have a mission to educate users about copyright, and library publishing staff are often involved in that work. This article investigates a concrete point of intersection between the two areas—copyright statements on library-published journals. METHODS Journals published by members of the Library Publishing Coalition were examined for open access status, type and placement of copyright information, copyright ownership, and open licensing. RESULTS Journals in the sample were overwhelmingly (93%) open access. 80% presented copyright information of some kind, but only 30% of those included it at both the journal and the article level. Open licensing was present in 38% of the journals, and the most common ownership scenario was the author retaining copyright while granting a nonexclusive license to the journal or publisher. 9% of the sample journals included two or more conflicting rights statements. DISCUSSION 76% of the journals did not consistently provide accurate, easily-accessible rights information, and numerous problems were found with the use of open licensing, including conflicting licenses, incomplete licenses, and licenses not appearing at the article level. CONCLUSION Recommendations include presenting full copyright and licensing information at both the journal and the article level, careful use of open licenses, and publicly-available author agreements. External Data or Supplements:

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"Dr. Carla Hayden to Serve as the Next Librarian of Congress"

ALA has released "Dr. Carla Hayden to Serve as the Next Librarian of Congress."

Here's an excerpt:

Today the Senate approved the nomination of Dr. Carla Hayden to serve as the nation's 14th Librarian of Congress. Dr. Hayden, American Library Association (ALA) past president and director of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, is the first female and the first African American to lead the Library of Congress. She also is the first professional librarian to be confirmed in more than 60 years.

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"ACRL Issues Policy Statement on Open Access to Scholarship by Academic Librarians"

Kara Malenfant has published "ACRL Issues Policy Statement on Open Access to Scholarship by Academic Librarians" in ACRL Insider.

Here's an excerpt:

In support of broad and timely dissemination of library and information science scholarship, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) encourages academic librarians to publish in open access journals. When academic librarians choose to publish in subscription-based journals, ACRL recommends a standard practice of depositing the final accepted manuscript in a repository to make that version openly accessible.

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"Deploying Islandora as a Digital Repository Platform: a Multifaceted Experience at the University of Denver Libraries"

Shea-Tinn Yeh et al. have published "Deploying Islandora as a Digital Repository Platform: a Multifaceted Experience at the University of Denver Libraries" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

The Library Technology Department at the University of Denver was tasked with implementing an Islandora open-source framework for its Special Collections Department because the current host was being retired. Although Islandora's front-end is tailored for librarians, its back-end is complex, and built upon many subsystems. A failure in any of the subsystems guarantees a domino effect and a chain reaction which can obfuscate the root cause of the issue. Though product documentation and support communication channels exist, many of the problems we faced were unique to our specific hardware and software configuration. The development team had to learn fast, and be innovative, agile, and systematic in order to work with such a complicated system. This article describes the tactics used in this repository development effort, as well as the library's stakeholder relationship management.

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"Assessing the User Experience of E-Books in Academic Libraries"

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "Assessing the User Experience of E-Books in Academic Libraries" by Tao Zhang, Xi Niu and Marlen Proman.

Here's an excerpt:

We report findings from an assessment of e-book user experience (search and information seeking) from usage data and user tests. The usage data showed that most reading sessions were brief and focused on certain pages, suggesting that users mainly use e-books to find specific information. The user tests found that participants tended to use default keyword search and browse the search results. Experience levels with e-books and features of e-book platforms influenced users' information seeking in e-books. The assessment results have significant implications for designing e-book features to support users' reading strategies and help libraries create a consistent user experience.

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Emory University Receives Grant for Digital Publishing Services for Humanities Faculty

Emory University has been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its Digital Publishing Services for Humanities Faculty project.

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"Rewarding Open Access Scholarship in Promotion And Tenure: Driving Institutional Change"

Jere Odell, Heather Coates, and Kristi Palmer have published "Rewarding Open Access Scholarship in Promotion And Tenure: Driving Institutional Change" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

Here we describe the efforts of one institution, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), to reward OA scholarship in the P&T process. With librarians as advocates, participants, and change agents, IUPUI has become one of the first to include OA as a value in its P&T guidelines.

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"Measuring the Impact of Digitized Theses: A Case Study from the London School of Economics"

Linda Bennett and Dimity Flanagan have published "Measuring the Impact of Digitized Theses: A Case Study from the London School of Economics" in Insights: the UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This study tests the assertion that the online dissemination of theses has a positive impact on the research profile of the institution and sets out to gain a greater understanding of how digital theses fit into the scholarly resources landscape. The year-long study combined primary and secondary research and was undertaken with the London School of Economics, based on its programme of theses digitization. The paper outlines the types of metrics an institution may use to measure the impact of its corpus of digitized dissertations and examines how these metrics may be generated. Findings included: a higher volume of theses attracts more traffic; Google's strong indexing capabilities make it the most frequently used tool for discovery of digital theses; primary conclusions are that there is little correlation between downloads and citations of digitized theses; having a digital thesis collection enhances the reputation of the institution; although they recognize that digital theses are a valuable research tool, postgraduates and academics widely believe that making them available affects future publication opportunities; building and maintaining a digital thesis collection makes considerable 'hidden' work for librarians in terms of training about copyright and permissions. Some conclusions: better statistics are needed, especially of citations; institutions need to promote digital thesis collections better; more work needs to be done on whether digitizing theses impairs authors' chances of traditional publication and on how digital theses affect and are affected by the open access movement.

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"Gathering the Needles: Evaluating the Impact of Gold Open Access Content with Traditional Subscription Journals"

Alison Bobal and Jill Emery have published "Gathering the Needles: Evaluating the Impact of Gold Open Access Content with Traditional Subscription Journals" in Insights: the UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Utilizing the Project COUNTER Release 4 JR1-GOA report, two librarians explore these data in comparison to journal package subscriptions represented via the JR1 reports. This paper outlines the methodology and study undertaken at the Portland State University Library and the University of Nebraska Medical Center Library using these reports for the first time. The initial outcomes of the study are provided in various Tables for 2014 and 2015. The intent of the study was to provide both institutions with a baseline from which to do further study. In addition, some ideas are given for how these reports can be used in vendor negotiations going forward.

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"Rethinking Authentication, Revamping the Business"

Roger C. Schonfeld has published "Rethinking Authentication, Revamping the Business" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

While I have heard these arguments on and off this year, the meeting hosted by CCC [Copyright Clearance Center] made abundantly clear that there is great dissatisfaction with IP-based authentication across the community. Publishers want to move away from it due to their piracy concerns, their desire to improve seamlessness for researchers, and their expectations about the value they can offer through greater personalization. . . . And at least some academic librarians want to move away from it because of the poor user experience, especially with off-site access. Taking aim at IP authentication and proxy servers has become all the rage. But what might supplant them?

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"The Academic Data Librarian Profession in Canada: History and Future Directions"

S. Vincent Gray and Elizabeth Hill have self-archived "The Academic Data Librarian Profession in Canada: History and Future Directions."

Here's an excerpt:

From the 1970s onward, Canadians have been active in developing services and establishing structures to support the dissemination of data. In recent years the academic data profession in Canada has largely developed around access to data from the national statistics agency, Statistics Canada, and around the services which have been developed to permit access to these data. This chapter will provide a historical background for these activities and explain how current and emerging trends continue to affect the profession.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 6. Over 560 works. Over 200 works added. Live links. Selected abstracts. OA. CC-BY License. Covers topics such as research data creation, acquisition, metadata, repositories, provenance, management, policies, support services, funding agency requirements, peer review, publication, citation, sharing, reuse, and preservation.

Libraries as Publishers in the Early 1990s

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in interest in academic and other types libraries acting as publishers and considerable discussion about how this will transform them.

What is sometimes lost in the excitement over the library publishing movement is historical context: this trend started over a quarter century ago at the dawn of the Internet age. While most e-journals published in the early 1990s were produced by scholars acting as digital publishers, at least two academic libraries established formal digital publishing programs in this period: the University of Houston Libraries and the Virginia Tech Libraries.

In August 1989, the Director of the University of Houston Libraries, Robin N. Downes, authorized the establishment and announcement of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review), the first open access journal in the field of library and information science. The journal began publication in January 1990, became refereed in November 1991, and ceased publication in August 2000. Authors retained the copyright to PACS Review articles. Unrestricted copying of PACS Review articles was permitted for educational, noncommercial use by academic computer centers, individual scholars, and libraries.

Only partial use statistics are available for the journal. It was initially distributed using the LISTSERV software, and LISTSERV use statistics were not tallied. From 1994 through 1996, the journal received over 81,000 Gopher requests. From March 1995 through 2005, the journal received over 3.5 file requests via the Web.

In October 1996, Robin N. Downes authorized the establishment of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, an open access, updated electronic book that provided references to new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Between October 1996 and October 2006, 64 versions of the e-book were published by the University of Houston Libraries. There were over six million file requests for it during this period.

In the fall of 1989, Virginia Tech's Vice President for Information Systems, Dr. Robert Heterick, established the Scholarly Communications Project. The project was subsequently moved to the University Libraries, and it was directed by Lon Savage until December 1993, when Gail McMillan took over.

Since 1990, the Virginia Tech Libraries have published a number of e-journals, some of which were previously published by other entities prior to being migrated to the Libraries. Notably, the Scholarly Communications Project published the first issue of The Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research in November 1990. The journal was published in cooperation with Virginia Tech's Department of Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management. It ceased publication in 1998. It is described in "The Journal of the International Academy of Hospitality Research."

The Virginia Tech Libraries' Scholarly Communication department currently publishes e-journals, conference proceedings, and open educational resources.

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"Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure"

Benedikt Fecher and Gert G. Wagner have published "Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

In this article we argue that the current endeavors to achieve open access in scientific literature require a discussion about innovation in scholarly publishing and research infrastructure. Drawing on path dependence theory and addressing different open access (OA) models and recent political endeavors, we argue that academia is once again running the risk of outsourcing the organization of its content.

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"Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much"

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much" by John Wenzler.

Here's an excerpt:

Why has the rise of the Internet—which drastically reduces the cost of distributing information—coincided with drastic increases in the prices that academic libraries pay for access to scholarly journals?This study argues that libraries are trapped in a collective action dilemma as defined by economist Mancur Olson in The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. To truly reduce their costs, librarians would have to build a shared online collection of scholarly resources jointly managed by the academic community as a whole, but individual academic institutions lack the private incentives necessary to invest in a shared collection. Thus, the management of online scholarly journals has been largely outsourced to publishers who have developed monopoly powers that allow them to increase subscription prices faster than the rate of inflation. Many librarians consider the Open Access Movement the best response to increased subscription costs, but the current strategies employed to achieve Open Access also are undermined by collective action dilemmas. In conclusion, some alternative strategies are proposed.

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Hillman University Librarian and Director, University Library System at University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh is recruiting a Hillman University Librarian and Director, University Library System.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

A member of the Association of American Universities, current enrollment in Pitt's 16 undergraduate and graduate schools and 4 regional campuses is 34,934 (25,074 undergraduate and 9,860 graduate students).

In 2015, the University's federally funded research summed to almost $600 million. . . .

The ULS is comprised of 11 libraries and holdings of nearly 7.2 million volumes and employs a total FTE count of 180. The director oversees the ULS budget, which in 2015 was approximately $32 million.

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"After Copyright Win, GSU Seeks $3.3 Million from Publishers "

Andrew Albanese has published "After Copyright Win, GSU Seeks $3.3 Million from Publishers" in Publishers Weekly.

Here's an excerpt:

After winning a key copyright decision, attorneys for Georgia State University want the publishers who brought the suit to pay more than $3.3 million dollars in fees and costs.

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"Research Library Associations Endorse Open Data Accord"

ARL has released "Research Library Associations Endorse Open Data Accord."

Here's an excerpt:

IARLA [International Alliance of Research Library Associations] views the Science International accord on "Open Data in a Big Data World" as an important step towards creating and enabling this common vision of the importance of open data. In setting out principles for open data that are derived from emerging practices within the scientific community, the accord lends the voice of a key stakeholder to the case for open data and provides a practical road map for the implementation of open data at the global level.

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Simon Neame Named Dean of Libraries at University of Massachusetts Amherst

Simon Neame has been named the Dean of Libraries at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

At UBC, Neame oversees 33 professional librarians and 114 support staff as associate university librarian, learning and engagement. His budget responsibilities include the Barber Centre, the Walter C. Koerner Library for humanities and social sciences, the Woodard Library for health sciences, science and applied science, the Music, Art and Architecture Library, access services and the library's teaching, learning and community engagement programs. . . .

He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Victoria and a master's of library and information studies from UBC.

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Valerie Hotchkiss Named as University Librarian at Vanderbilt University

Valerie Hotchkiss, Andrew S.G. Turyn Endowed Professor and Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been named as the University Librarian at Vanderbilt University.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hotchkiss built visibility for the collections and promoted the study of primary resources as an integral part of the school's curriculum. . . . In addition, she served as editor-in-chief of Women in Print, a digital humanities publishing project of the University of Illinois Press. . . .

From 1993 to 2005, Hotchkiss was the J.S. Bridwell Foundation Endowed Librarian and professor of medieval studies at Southern Methodist University, where she raised more than $16 million for the library's endowment and introduced many new community initiatives. . . .

She also served as library director for Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and was employed by Yale University's Divinity School Library. She earned three degrees—master of arts, master of philosophy, and doctorate in medieval studies—all from Yale. In addition, she earned a master of library science from Southern Connecticut State University.

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John M. Unsworth Named as University of Virginia University Librarian and Dean of Libraries

John M. Unsworth, Vice Provost, University Librarian, Chief Information Officer, and Professor of English at Brandeis University, has been named as the new University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Virginia .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

He received his Ph.D. in English from UVA in 1988, and later in his career became a tenured associate professor of English at the University, as well the first director of UVA's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. Recognized as a pioneer in the field of digital humanities, he is the co-founder of the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture.

Before going to Brandeis, Unsworth was dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also held faculty appointments in library and information science, English, and library administration. His first faculty appointment was as an assistant professor in English at North Carolina State University.

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Anne Jarvis Named as University Librarian at Princeton University

Anne Jarvis, University Librarian at the University of Cambridge, has been named as University Librarian at Princeton University.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Jarvis has a bachelor's degree from Trinity College Dublin, a diploma in library and information studies from University College Dublin, a master's degree in communication and cultural studies from Dublin City University and a master of arts from Cambridge.

Her library career began in special libraries and included posts in Ireland and the United Kingdom. She began working in academic libraries in 1992 and spent some years at Dublin City University and Trinity College Dublin. In 2000 she was appointed deputy librarian at Cambridge.

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"Science and Technology Librarians: User Engagement and Outreach Activities in the Area of Scholarly Communication"

Lutishoor Salisbury and Julie Speer have published "Science and Technology Librarians: User Engagement and Outreach Activities in the Area of Scholarly Communication" in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper highlights the findings of a survey completed by ACRL/STS members on scholarly communication issues. In particular it identifies the percentage of their daily activities that are spent in support of scholarly communication activities; extent of change of job responsibilities in the last five years; roles engaged in relating to scholarly communication including those that are formal responsibilities, those they are informally engaged in, or those with which they have no engagement. It highlights areas in the area of scholarly communication that STS members need to know more about or want to know more about. It presents the status of open access policies at members' institutions and the needs expressed by members about activities that STS or ACRL could undertake to help advance their work in the areas of scholarly communication.

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Cambridge Press v. Georgia State University: "Here We Go Again: Latest GSU Ruling an Odd Victory for Libraries"

Kevin Smith has published "Here We Go Again: Latest GSU Ruling an Odd Victory for Libraries" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

Here's an excerpt:

So this ruling, like each ruling in the case, is clearly a disaster for the plaintiff publishers. Once again it establishes that there is significant space for fair use in higher education, even when that use is not transformative. Nevertheless, it is a difficult victory for libraries, in the sense that the analysis it uses is not one we can replicate; we simply do not have access to the extensive data about revenue, of which Judge Evans makes such complex use.

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