What’s Past is Prologue: Charleston Conference Proceedings, 2017

By Lars Meyer

Over one hundred presentations from the 37th annual Charleston Library Conference (held November 6–10, 2017) are included in this annual proceedings volume. Major themes of the meeting included data visualization, analysis and assessment of collections and library users, demand-driven acquisition, the future of print collections, and open access publishing. While the Charleston meeting remains a core one for acquisitions librarians in dialog with publishers and vendors, the breadth of coverage of this volume reflects the fact that this conference continues to be one of the major venues for leaders in the publishing and library communities to shape strategy and prepare for the future. Almost 2,000 delegates attended the 2017 meeting, ranging from the staff of small public library systems to the CEOs of major corporations. This fully indexed, copyedited volume provides a rich source for the latest evidence-based research and lessons from practice in a range of information science fields. The contributors are leaders in the library, publishing, and vendor communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781941269350

Book preview

Preface and Acknowledgments

What’s Past Is Prologue was the theme of the 2017 Charleston Conference which took place in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday, November 6 through Friday, November 10, 2017, with over 1,800 participants. The far-ranging, diverse program, which focuses on the purchase and lease of information of all types and in all available formats, is curated by an able team of Charleston Conference directors headed by Beth Bernhardt, Lars Meyer, and Leah Hinds, who have worked long and hard to compile this volume. Thanks are due to Leah, Beth, and Lars, and to all the Charleston Conference directors who helped in assuring timely and professionally peer-reviewed submissions. Thanks are also due to the Purdue University Press team: Katherine Purple, Editorial, Design, and Production Strategic Manager; Bryan Shaffer, Sales and Marketing Strategic Manager; Nina Collins, Scholarly Publishing Specialist; Liza Hagerman, Assistant Production Editor; and many others behind the scenes. Last but not least, many thanks to all the authors and presenters of the amazing group of papers in this volume!

In 2017, the Charleston Conference included twelve preconferences covering strategic decision making, an acquisitions bootcamp, the future of the academic book, understanding the library market, legal issues in libraries, developing a collection development allocation formula, e-resource management, sharing and discovery, publisher and library cooperation, negotiating with vendors, user perspectives, and practices for past trends and future predictions. There was also a symposium focused on the Charlotte Initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Plenary and Neapolitan sessions; several hundred concurrent sessions; and lively lunch discussions, PechaKucha-like shotgun shorts, and poster sessions spiced up the offerings. The popular Neapolitan format continues into future conferences, allowing three plenary-level speakers to present in large rooms during the same time slot. Several important topics in 2017 included: publication ethics, evaluating user metrics, preprints, IRs and the version of record, public access compliance, open access monographs, and unlocking your classic books for new generations. The conference directors also continued Charleston Premiers, moving them to Thursday morning. Trey Shelton from the University of Florida ran the Premiers which were refereed and allowed companies to make 5-minute presentations about new and emerging products.

The Charleston Conference has a plethora of additional offerings, including Juried Product Development Forums for publishers or vendors who want to get feedback from librarians about new or emerging products, Dine Around dinners on Thursday night at some of Charleston’s well-known restaurants, a Gala Reception on Thursday evening at the Charleston Aquarium, the Vicky Speck ABC-CLIO Leadership Award, and the Cynthia Graham Hurd Memorial Scholarship Award.

Since the Gaillard Center opening in 2015, the Conference has been able to schedule the use of the performance hall, ballrooms, and salons. The Gaillard can accommodate larger groups than our other venues, and provided a more formal feel to the Conference than in the past. The Conference continues to schedule sessions in the Francis Marion Hotel and the Marriot Courtyard as well as the Embassy Suites.

The 2017 lead keynote presentation (21st Century Academic Library: The Promise, the Plan, a Response) was given by the vivacious Loretta Parham of the Atlanta University Center at the Robert W. Woodruff Library. For the next brief plenary, Jim O’Donnell of Arizona State University updated his proposal of The Future of Print in Open Stacks. We were then treated to technologist Georgios Papadopolous’s discussion of Technology and Platforms: What’s on the Horizon.

The second Thursday morning plenary introduced robots and artificial intelligence: All the Robots Are Coming! The Promise and the Peril of AI. The Charleston Conference Fast Pitch competition was the last plenary session on Thursday afternoon. Fast Pitch competitions, modeled on the TV show Shark Tank, allow librarians and publishers to pitch innovative ideas to the audience and judges.

The Friday keynote brought us the inspiring Brewster Kahle, who outlined the beginning of the Internet Archive and the Open Library Project. Kahle encouraged us all to donate our unwanted books to the Internet archive rather than discard them.

As noted, the main Conference dates have changed from Thursday and Friday to Wednesday and Thursday. Fully 80% of our attendees like this change!

The half-day Friday closing session held in the Francis Marion Hotel included Ann Okerson’s popular Long Arm of the Law session with Bill Hannay (Schiff Hardin LLP) and Ruth Okediji (Harvard Law School). Next we had another round of Neapolitan sessions, and heard about predatory publishing and the need for librarians and publishers to inform authors about it, streamline access to content, and reinvent knowledge discovery for user needs across the campus. This was followed by three concurrent Innovation sessions, which feature lightning round presentations on new and innovative projects and case studies.

The Concurrent sessions, Lively Lunches, Poster sessions, Shotgun sessions, and the like that were submitted and refereed by the editors are grouped into ten categories in this volume: Plenary Sessions, Budget/Fundraising/Allocation Formulas, Collection Development, Analytics, Up & Comers, Library Services, End Users/Use Statistics, Management/Leadership, Scholarly Communication, and Technology and Trends.

Many new ideas and innovations are implemented and shared at the Charleston Conferences!

Reports of many of the plenary sessions and concurrent sessions are included in this volume, many transcribed ably by Caroline Goldsmith. Archives of many of the papers are also loaded online at the Conference website: www.charlestonlibraryconference.com/

And, of course, the city of Charleston was as beautiful and vibrant as ever!

The next Charleston Conference will be held November 5–9, 2018, with the theme inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oh Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? There will be several new offerings, many preconferences, and Charleston seminars as librarians, publishers, vendors, aggregators, and consultants from all over the world explore important changes within the industry that impact the way in which information is leased, acquired, and made available. Charleston Conference information will be updated regularly. For archives and further information, see http://www.charlestonlibraryconference.com/

See you in Charleston in November!

Katina Strauch, Founder and Convener, Charleston Conference

Bruce Strauch, Owner, Charleston Conference

Introduction

The Charleston Conference continues to be a major event for information and idea exchange among librarians, vendors, and publishers. Now in its 37th year, the Conference continues to be one of the most popular library-related conferences in the United States and globally.

With record numbers for 2017, Conference attendees continue to remark on the informative and thought-provoking sessions. The Conference provides a casual, collegial atmosphere where librarians, publishers, and vendors talk freely and directly about issues facing their libraries and information providers. All of this interaction occurs in the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina. This is the 13th year that Beth R. Bernhardt has put together the proceedings from the Conference, the ninth year for Leah Hinds, and the first year that we are joined by Lars Meyer, Director, Access & Resource Services, Library & Information Technology Services at Emory University. We are pleased to share some of the learning experiences that we, and other attendees, had at the conference.

The theme of the 2017 Charleston Conference was What’s Past is Prologue. While not all presenters prepared written versions of their remarks, enough did so that we are able to include an overview of such subjects as collection development, management, end users, scholarly communication, and technology issues. The unique nature of the Charleston Conference gives librarians, publishers, and library vendors the opportunity to holistically examine these and other points of interest.

Katina Strauch, founder of the conference, continues to be an inspiration to us. Her enthusiasm for the conference and the proceedings is motivating. We hope you, the reader, find the papers as informative as we do and that they encourage the continuation of the ongoing dialogue among librarians, vendors, and publishers that can only enhance the learning and research experience for the ultimate user.

Signed,

Coeditors of the 37th Charleston Conference Proceedings

Beth R. Bernhardt, Assistant Dean for Collection Management and Scholarly Communications, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Main Conference Director

Leah Hinds, Executive Director, Charleston Conference

Lars Meyer, Director, Access & Resource Services, Library & Information Technology Services, Emory University

Plenary Sessions

21st Century Academic Library: The Promise, the Plan, a Response

Presented by Loretta Parham, The Atlanta Center Robert W. Woodruff Library

Moderated by Glenda Alvin, Tennessee State University

Copyright of this contribution remains in the name of the author(s)

https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316707

The following is a transcription of a live presentation at the 2017 Charleston Conference.

Glenda Alvin: Good morning. Loretta Parham is the 2017 Association for Colleges and Research Libraries Academic Research Librarian of the year. She began her career as a school media specialist and then progressed to leadership positions with Chicago Public Library and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Her academic library career began as director of the Harvey Library at Hampton University, and for the past 13 years she has been the chief executive officer and director of the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Atlanta University. As a model of a library that shows exemplary service in supporting the missions of its institutions, the Woodruff Library achieved the ACRL Excellence in Libraries Academic Award in 2016. Loretta is the co-founding director of the HBCU Library Alliance and is founding board chair. Through her transformative and visionary leadership, the historically black colleges and universities in this consortium have benefited from several Andrew Mellon grants, which have enhanced library services related to leadership, photographic preservation, digitization services, and faculty research support. I’m a graduate of the HBCU Libraries’ Leadership Institute and our library at Tennessee State has been enriched by its participation in the Digital Collections Program, which has made our founding documents globally accessible. Among her many contributions to our profession, Loretta has served on the ACRL Board of Directors, is a member of the OCLC Board of Trustees, and the ALA Committee on Accreditation. Her publications include coauthoring Achieving Diversity: A How to Do It Manual, and she has published an article on her work with digitizing the Martin Luther King Jr. papers in the RBM, a journal of rare books, manuscripts, and cultural heritage. Let’s give a warm Charleston welcome to Loretta Parham.

Loretta Parham: Well, good morning. Someone asked me earlier, they said, I think it was Glenda, had I attended the Charleston Conference before? And I must say unfortunately never, ever. I’ve had plenty of colleagues who have attended and perhaps several out there today, but I will be back. Also, when I come to this hall, my goodness! Don’t you just want to stand up and sing? It’s my moment. So I’m just going to talk. You know, I have this speech, but I don’t know if I’ll stick to it. I’ll tell you that ahead of time.

When I awoke a few Sunday mornings ago back on October 15, I first checked the time and then my e-mail. The work e-mail and the personal e-mail and then of course next I, old school, checked Facebook. Thanks to Jim Neal, our current president of ALA, who one might think really has too much time on his hands because he just really shares, tweets, and clicks a lot of information, but he seems to be able to do that, and he consistently shares with other people like you and I that are passionate about what we do. He forwarded a link to what is now, I think, the infamous USA Today careers article that cited the eight jobs that won’t exist in 2030. I’m sure several of you saw it and some of you probably also saw the reaction of our colleagues professionally to that article. But that article, it listed the following jobs: social media manager, word processor, travel agent, telemarketer, receptionist, cashier, paper boy and paper girl, and at the top of the list, number one position: librarian. The rationale for the listing of the librarian position seemed only to be based upon the surveyed public dislike for books and their preference for e-books, as if we couldn’t make that migration. The position of social media manager, which was number eight on the list, was justified with reasoning that said, the popularity of social media itself will force out the managers because the public is becoming expert in using media. I hope you all responded to the USA Today article.

When I joined this profession in the ’70s, the big conversation professionally was intellectual freedom. It was the value upon which we all hung our hat. It was a value that we were passionate about and that drove us to do our work in community, and I look forward and anticipate that this next generation/current generation of emerging leaders within our profession are also going to make their voices heard and known around issues which are important to this democratic country.

So, true enough, our environment is changing, has changed, and will continue to change. In John Palfrey’s book Born Digital, he says that librarians are focused on the pool of traditional knowledge: books, journals, case studies, and should focus more on helping others to manage the rivers of digital information that they encounter every day. This change in mindset means something has to change and much more quickly in our libraries and information centers than it currently is doing. Those rivers, that drowning in information that is characteristic of the digital age, demands a librarian, a professional that is current in the industry knowledge, fluent in communications, and knowledgeable in any of a number of specialty hard skills. It is less about the integration of technology and more about helping students and faculty of the academy to stay afloat and swim vigorously down those rivers of digital information.

ACRL, in their top trends, talked about the emerging staff positions. This was in their top trends of 2016, and they said that position postings for librarian and information science professionals looked for a familiarity with technology and technical support with focus on the user experience, support for virtual services, digital humanities, and knowledge management. The corporate sector is also increasingly interested in professionals with these skill sets; add to that collaboration, teamwork, and communications. Educause, which is the organization of IT individuals in higher education, and their top 10 trends for 2017 also cites sustainable staffing, and they say ensuring adequate staffing capacity and staff retention as budgets shrink or remain flat and as external competition grows is extremely important. They cite many risks but one such risk is trying to lead a 21st-century IT organization with support from a 20th-century HR organization. All parts of the institution need to adapt to new business practices and markets; ignoring workforce challenges risks lowering staff engagement and increasing burnout. I think this is strong messaging and one that we in our libraries must take seriously. We’re at quite a moment of change in many ways. I think that right now the most significant change is happening with staffing. Who is doing the work? Who is the right person at the right time and the right place? Who are we hiring and who are we retaining and what kind of leverage do we have to do those things?

But, as technology changes, so does the audience and our constituents as well. We know about the baby boomers, that’s me, and we know that we are all retiring, and we know about the millennials, that’s probably many of you, but who is this new generation of learners that’s coming to the door? Let’s call them Generation I or Generation Z depending on what literature you’re reading. A group that is approaching our steps and from all indications will certainly require a different agenda for the delivery of information services. But, before they arrive let’s consider this 21st-century library. David Lewis, who many of you may know from IUPUI, wrote a book, Reimagining the Academic Library, and David and I agree on many things. From his book he promotes the things that should be done now if the academic library is to remain essential. He talks about retiring our legacy print collections now. We should be able to continue our reliance on research libraries that continue to commit resources for storage and access to legacy print collections. That’s my belief. At the college library, at anything other than an ARL, we need to rely upon the research-level libraries to take care and provide access to those print collections and use our resources and our effort and our time and our space to really engage with and deliver to this generation in a way that they will expect. We need to develop a space plan as we repurpose space after we have freed space from the print materials. We need a materials budget strategy to manage the changing business model as it is related to publishing. We need to support local scholarly content, I’m probably preaching to the choir here, and we need to commit to special collections and make the investment in staff collections processes and systems. I believe in that strongly, particularly being in the environment in which I come from at the Atlanta University Center, and I should pause and tell you who we are. And I’ll do that in a second, okay? I’ll come back to this committing to special collections.

We should also infuse the curriculum with our knowledge and skills, and we should know our library demographics: who is working with us and what their skill sets are and what their qualifications are, and then we need to hire talent to fill in the gaps. We need to get the library’s culture right. The library organization should be prepared to change, take risks, innovate, and have in place proactive plans for our operations. And we need to support a network of library services out there and, finally, the academic library and its leadership, we need to sell the change, share the success with our stakeholders and we need to do it over and over and over and over again. That’s probably one of the more common speeches, or I shouldn’t say speeches, one of the more common remarks or comments that I make in my own environment. Staff will come up with some wonderful initiative, some wonderful program, and working with faculty, as precious as they are, they will share this information and send it on to faculty and then they wait. Well, we know what that means. I cannot say it enough, you cannot, and I am not in denial about the popularity necessarily of library with some individuals. I think that whatever it is we want to sell, we have to do it not once, not twice, not three times, not even four times. We need to sell, promote, and market repeatedly over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until our constituents say Aha. Because once they come, as we all know, once they discover us, we should have them for life.

So, who are we? I’ll say that for you before I go on. I am CEO and director of the Atlanta University Center. It is a consortium of four independent colleges. They are each—all of them—historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), which means that they were established for purposes of educating freed slaves and African Americans. Most of those institutions which constitute the HBCU were founded in the late 1800s. The institutions I serve were established in 1868, 1870s, 1890s. All four of the institutions I serve, Spelman, which is a women’s school, Morehouse is the men’s school, Clark Atlanta University, which is a research-level institution, and then the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC), which houses six seminaries. They are all independent of one another. Many years ago they came together and said, Let’s save ourselves some space and time and create a shared library. The brilliance is overwhelming to me. These presidents decided to do that and in 1981 they took all of their individual collections and all of the staff in those buildings and put them in one space. They built a new building, the building I’m in now, 220,000 square feet, and placed all the materials from each institution and staff in that facility for this shared library. And the library operated very well for several years, many years. And then it didn’t, because the library director was reporting to provosts. Now, I love those provosts. But, if you report to more than one that can be a problem. So, conditions became so bad that vendors would not even acknowledge a request for orders because they weren’t sure when they would get their check. The staff, the students, and the faculty did not look to the library for services. They looked far up the street. So they became vicious users of the collections of the public library, of Georgia State University, Emory University, Georgia Tech, and others around us. Finally, SACS, which is our accreditation body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, kind of dinged a couple of the institutions at the time of their reaffirmation. Well, that’s enough to get the attention of the president, and so then the presidents sat down together and they commissioned a group to do a study to make recommendations for informing and for improving the library. That particular study was called the Frye Report because it was chaired by Billy Frye, then provost of Emory University, and on its committee included Deanna Marcum and JoAnn Williams and Jim Williams, and they offered eight strategic recommendations to improve library services in the Atlanta University Center. Among those recommendations, the most important and the most transformative was the suggestion to incorporate the library as its own entity. The second was to improve the funding stream, and the third was to recruit for sustainable, stable leadership. Now there were five other very important ones but for the purposes of our communication today, these three stand on top.

Incorporating the library as its own nonprofit entity meant that the library director, and thus the title CEO and Library Director, really ran our own company. I like to say we buy our light bulbs, we hire the staff to put the light bulbs in, we decide when to change the light bulbs, what kind of light bulbs they are, and when to take them out. So, use that analogy across all aspects of operations. I report to a board of trustees, which includes the presidents of each of these institutions as well as a couple of faculty from various representations and then three at-large members from outside of the Atlanta University Center. In terms of the funding stream, we have this wonderful strategy. I just love this, you know when I get back to work we’re going to have our budget meeting. My budget for the next school year will be approved in this December and once it’s approved, when it’s time, the library will simply debit the accounts of the schools twice a year to retrieve the approved assessment for operations. So, I’m not waiting on them. And there is a wonderful rule at the AUC Consortium that says that among the members if you don’t pay your bill, if you don’t maintain accreditation, you cannot have library services. So simple. So precious.

The third recommendation I want to highlight was that of sustainable leadership. So, before I came to Woodruff, in a 10-year period there had been six different library directors. This was during the time of terror is what I’m going to call it. The reign of terror, yes. And no one who cared anything about their personal, professional development career would think about applying for that job, certainly not I. However, when the platform was changed, when the infrastructure was changed, and at that time the presidents brought in Elaine Sloan who had recently retired from Columbia University and brought her to the AUC Woodruff Library to help them place an infrastructure in place and to help them recruit, with that done, then when they knock on your door you say, Okay, I’ll take a look. So I started there in 2004 and have been there ever since, and we have been working successfully to transform our institution.

So our mission and our vision is there [Referring to slide]. In brief, our mission is to provide the highest level of information resources and services and preservation. And then, too, the vision to reflect the excellence of our member institutions and they are excellent. We take strategic planning very seriously at our institution. I do. One of my many jobs in the past was at Chicago Public Library back in the day when strategic planning had just kind of hit the management scene. This was in the ’80s, we worked with what was then Peat, Marwick, and Mitchell; they’ve changed their names a number of times since then, I think they are KPMG now. And they did a strategic plan for the Chicago Public Library and I had the responsibility and opportunity to serve as the liaison between the vendor and the library on our plan. That was a very aggressive plan, and as I’m recalling it now, someday I really must write about it. Talk about strategic planning, and environmental scans, we conducted 50 focus groups throughout the city to talk about how to influence and impact the library. Since then I’ve always appreciated and understood the value of planning. We talk about it often, many of us plan and we put that plan on the shelf and we keep doing what we’re doing; it doesn’t work like that. At Woodruff Library we are in our fourth iteration of planning and every year we make the effort to talk about and work on the plan. Every July we have what is called spirit week at the library and all staff meet, all staff, security, professional librarians, IT, all of us meet together to review the plan and to put in place annual work plans, and everything that is done at the library is based upon the priority and objectives of the plan, and I am confident that because of this strategy we have been able to make the changes necessary for transformation.

So, coming back to this 21st-century library mentioned earlier, I was recalling another article I read previously and it talked about the new vocabulary and the old vocabulary. I invite you, when you’re just sitting around doing nothing, perhaps flying back home, to create your own chart of old vocabulary and new vocabulary for our industry. It’s pretty interesting. The students, the learners, this new generation of learners that we will see, they really, at least the ones I’ve bumped into, they have little value, little consideration for many of the things that fit into our old vocabulary. [Referring to slide] So, what does it mean to them when we talk about newspapers and bibliography and library class and catalogs, etc.? These are the behind-the-scenes activities, the behind-the-scenes services and resources, which we understand are very important, but until the vocabulary changes and until we share that change in vocabulary with our constituents, it will make it difficult to respond and to continue to keep those advocates for libraries in our camps.

This generation Z, this is the group that I have said to librarians that I work with that we must be ready for, and if you have done any review of who this generation Z is you will know one thing, those that were born in 2012 will be knocking on the doors of academic college libraries shortly and this group is different. This group has lived with technology all of their lives. If you consider the fact that when they were born all these disruptive technologies occurred, so they are very accustomed to change. They’re very accustomed to the fact that things continue to evolve, and in fact they have an expectation that the particular service or resource that we share with them today, they really are expecting us to come out with something different next year, if not sooner. Perhaps on the other side of it we’re thinking, Okay, I’ve introduced this, now I can rest for five years or so. I don’t think so. They are characterized in some literature accordingly as being phigital, that is, they’ve always had tools in their hands to identify, enhance, and distribute to the world their own personal brand, so they are a physical and digital mix, phigital.

On the next slide we see hyper-custom, they expect the world to customize for them. They’ve always had retailers responding to their needs and their behaviors, so think of Instagram, Amazon, Google, etc. In college they will want to customize that experience, picking their own degree, determining how to complete an assignment. They stop and they learn only as needed, so it is not just in case. It is as needed and they hit pause and play based upon their rate of comprehension per task. They are realistic. Their experience has been lock-down drills and active shooter policies and terrorism at home and online. For baby boomers, our experience was tornado drills in the hallway of the school. This generation sees a result of not protecting things like climate warming, lead in water, chemicals in food, and they’ve never seen the government collaborate during their lifetime. Life is real to them and they don’t want to wander in this land of possibility. FOMO—they have a fear of missing out. Some of us have that disease too, so you know what that is. Always, always, always personally swiping all the time. Swiping of the phone screen to check for incoming information, friend chat, tweets, grades, teacher feedback, fashion, celebrity news, weather changes, always signed on, information always a click away, and unlike other generations, this generation is totally dependent on this form of socializing and communicating. They do not know nor want a world where anyone is not connected.

Now, my eldest granddaughter who is 12 years old and is at home. I took her phone away from her last week because she told me a lie and I told her she couldn’t have it back for a couple of weeks until November 30. She is distraught. Oh my gosh, as I was leaving to go to the airport yesterday morning, she woke up early, they had no school because of election day, she woke up early and she sat on the sofa at the door and looked at me with the most pitiful, puppy-like look as if, Grandma, surely you’re not going to leave town and not give me my phone? But to make sure she didn’t find iPhone, I took the phone with me and placed it in my car that I left parked at the airport.

This generation are economists. They are we economists. They believe in sharing of goods and service and think that that makes sense. It is better to share since we don’t all need to own the same thing, so again, Ecomoto, Airbnb, Uber, etc., do it yourself, they look at everything as a do-it-yourself. They don’t trust institutions to do things for them after watching so many of them fail. They believe that the smartest thing is to not rely upon someone else, vis-à-vis the rise of homeschooling, which really is shared by the millennial generation as well and they are driven. The participation award means nothing to Gen Z. That was for millennials who are more about effort and not about outcomes. Reality is a factor, Gen Z-ers understand winning and losing, but they want to know why they lose so that they can win the next time. They have not had to grow up to technology, they grew up with technology, they didn’t have to accept it; this generation expects it. I think to go on and to be able to satisfy this hunger and this expectation, we will need to change how we’re doing and what we’re doing in libraries.

We will certainly need to change, for example, the mix of library staffing. Perhaps we will need to have fewer support and student staff and more professional staff. We need a change in the mix of professional staff, more with special skills, technical, fewer generalists and more without the MLS. I know at my library to get some of the work done that I need to have done I am going to have to turn and bring in some individuals, professionals, without the MLS. I’ll also note, if you will pay attention to what’s happening in library and information schools, yes the library name is going away from many of them, Information Science is more prominent and also the introduction of the bachelor’s in Information Science is becoming popular and more attainable. The student who has that bachelor’s in Information Science has a place, certainly, in my library. And, of course, salary expectations, they are continuing to rise. This new group is demanding, they know they are in demand and they’re asking for more and more and more money. So, we have to reallocate and rethink how we are operating.

So, I’m going to skip over a few things because I was just signaled by Anthony that I have 10, probably 9 minutes, left now, so I’ll skip some material because I want to quickly show you this clip. [Referring to slide] This is the AUC Woodruff Library Archives Research Center. We have a particularly important responsibility and role as we look forward and think about the future of the library and indeed the future of our society. At the AUC Woodruff Library we take very seriously the opportunity to preserve the record history of those institutions we serve, and to preserve the work of the heroes and sheroes who have come through those corridors. Consequently, I made a pledge when I started my employment there, and I stick by it even today, being that no matter what, at no time will positions and activities go underfunded and unresourced in the library’s Archive Research Center. Through the utility of our institutional repository, we have been successful in getting some faculty to mount their open journals on the site. The digital collections that are attributable to these HBCUs enable us to raise up again the institutional records and history of our schools. I invite you to read the article in Rare Books and Manuscripts that I wrote about our experience as custodians of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection; and then, please, ask me to share at another time that experience and how the strategic plan in place made the AUC Woodruff Library the right fit at the right time. Let’s show the video created and produced by the staff of the AUC Woodruff Library. [Video playing]

[After the video] Thank you for this opportunity to speak with you about the academic library for the 21st century, the value of our promise, the importance of our plan, and the requirements for our response. Thank you.

The Future of Print in Open Stacks: A Proposal

Presented by Jim O’Donnell, Arizona State University Library

Copyright of this contribution remains in the name of the author(s)

https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316708

The following is a transcription of a live presentation at the 2017 Charleston Conference.

*Editor’s Note: This plenary session was followed by a Lively Lunch Discussion at the Charleston Conference with co-presenter Lorrie McAllister, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Strategy at Arizona State University, on Thursday, November 9 (http://sched.co/CHpt). The project will also be discussed in an article authored by Lorrie McAllister in an upcoming issue of Against the Grain (https://www.against-the-grain.com).

Jim O’Donnell: Anthony, thank you. Good morning, friends and colleagues. I shall be brief.

I want you to begin by examining that slide. I took that photograph myself about a year ago in one of America’s truly great libraries famous for its collections, collections that indeed, I would say are second to none. It’s a beautiful reading room. I envy this reading room. It has soaring high ceilings, skylights, natural light flooding down into the space, handsomely furnished with neoclassical details, built-in bookshelves, furniture, comfort, students hard at work, and yes, indeed, print books on the bookshelves.

But, look a little more closely at those print books. They all look alike. They have the same size and shape. They are rather tall and bulky and a dark or fatigue sort of green. Now, I have reason to suspect that there are individuals present here who are in fact professional librarians of a certain age. If there are, I suspect some of you should recognize those books. Do I hear any guesses?

NUC, that’s right. We present to the brightest students of this generation for their delectation the 750 volumes of the National Union Catalog pre-1956 imprints. We need still to remember to admire that extraordinary technology-assisted tool for improving bibliographical access. It was a miracle in the days of our youth. It is now somewhere in the vicinity of obsolete. Yes, I know there are wizards in the tribe who will tell you that there are days on which you still need to go back to NUC pre-56 to track down some particular volume, and they are right. But you will notice in this photograph an absence of undergraduates elbowing and jostling each other on the way to the shelves to grab their favorite volumes. Is this, I ask, the future of the print book in our libraries? Books as furniture, venerated but unread? At Arizona State University we think not. We think the print book has a glorious future in front of it if we just but take it, if we just strategize to make it happen.

We have a special opportunity at ASU because we are about to do a major renovation, gutting to the walls the 1966 Charles Hayden Memorial Library, our signature stack tower. We get to start over from scratch. For the moment, the books are leaving the building. Occasional panicked undergraduates come up to me with, You’re taking the books away? The books are actually looking forward to the trip. They’re moving to our high-density shelving facility. In Arizona 50°F and 35% humidity feels really good to a book. When I described the high-density facilities to our visionary president, Michael Crow, he said, Sounds to me like your fulfillment center. I said, Fulfillment center: that’s a good way to think about it. With new digital tools for access to what’s out there, with accelerated retrieval, we will be able to deliver from that high-density facility to all of our students wherever they happen to be, including the 25,000 online-only degree candidates who are scattered around the United States and around the world. We are inventing a new generation of service.

When we come back to the Hayden Tower we’ll bring in about 325,000 volumes. So, the challenge for us for now is to think about which 325,000 volumes we bring back and how we keep them from becoming wallpaper or furniture, how we keep them from becoming invisible and disappearing.

So, over the last month we have written a white paper: Which Books? Where? The Future of the Academic Library Print Collection: A Space for Engagement. I’m happy to acknowledge the support of a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that made this work possible. In this document, which was circulated to Charleston attendees before the conference, and my thanks to Leah Hinds for doing that, we lay out the first steps of a strategy and a planning process for taking what we’re thinking of as a zero-based budgeting approach to the books that go into the building. If you didn’t have any books, which 325,000 would you put there? Why? How would you display them? How would you make them objects of engagement for a new generation of students who enter this building in 2020 and after? We will, of course, draw upon the four and a half million volumes in our collection, but we will probably buy other volumes as well in order to stock that collection. I just had the pleasure of spending $1,000 on a new copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, partly because I was astonished you get one for a thousand dollars. Our old copies were falling apart, but we think it’s important to have those books on a shelf where students can see them, to brand the Oxford English Dictionary, to introduce to a 19-year-old what it means to use a real dictionary.

Let me tell you one other experiment we’ve undertaken. About six months ago we acquired a set of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions. You can read about them in a recent edition of the New Yorker, if you haven’t seen them otherwise; 502 volumes we acquired. If you buy the complete set, here’s a hint for you, you can probably negotiate with Oxford to get a free twirly rack thrown in to shelve them in your library. We put them in front of the circulation desk right where you come into the building, right next to the soft seating. They’ve been out there for six months. There are 502 volumes in that series and in that six months, 444 volumes have been checked out an average of two times each. We are moving that product, as the retailers would say; we’re making those books engaging to the students who are at Arizona State University today.

What else can we do in that direction? We have ideas about selection, about curation, about display; we’re going to bring in a retail consultant to talk to us about how we make our materials visible and usable. We’re designing our building to emphasize special and distinctive collections as you walk in the door. If you’re a student at ASU three years from now, you won’t be able to come in to do your calculus homework without passing exhibits, without passing books you can handle, that will suggest to you something of the riches and possibilities that only a great university provides, that only a great university library provides.

We’re excited. We are moving forward at warp speed on this project, but we also know that we cannot do it simply alone. So, my purpose in talking to you today is to encourage you to read the White Paper, to think about how this could have effect in your libraries, and in particular to think if you want to join with us in the conversation, the planning, and the conspiracy to invent new ways to make the print book in the modern research library exciting and visible and engaging for our students.

To that end, we are hosting tomorrow a Lively Lunch. I will be joined by my colleague Lorrie McAllister, who is our associate university librarian for Collections and Strategy. She has been the lead investigator on the work that we have done with the Mellon grant that we have so far. We’ll talk a little bit more about the project and what we’ve been doing and what we are doing, but we will really want to hear from the people who come to that meeting what you’re already doing in your libraries, what other ideas and suggestions you might have, and there will be a sign-up sheet for staying in touch, for becoming part of what I say we are describing as this conspiracy on behalf of the printed book.

To that end, here again is a reference to the white paper: https://lib.asu.edu/futureprint. But if you have any trouble accessing the white paper or if you’re not able to join us tomorrow but would like to stay in touch with this project, please contact me at [e-mail]. We will look to engage as many fellow institutions as possible. We have a program for doing a case study of where you are and can then work forward with you, looking for the kind of partners who want to make sure that the print book has a lively and energized future for our students for generations to come. I said I would be brief and I trust that I have been. Thank you for your time and attention, and thank you to Katina and Leah for giving us this moment in the spotlight. I hope to see as many of you as possible tomorrow. Thank you.

Technology and Platforms: What’s on the Horizon

Presented by Georgios Papadopolous, Atypon

Copyright of this contribution remains in the name of the author(s)

https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316709

The following is a transcription of a live presentation at the 2017 Charleston Conference.

Georgios Papadopolous: Thank you very much. Thank you everyone. Good morning. Thank you for the invitation. It’s a large crowd, so I’m the nerd in this, so of course I’m going to talk about technology. For 22 years, I have been running Atypon, and Atypon started as a dream for creating a better technology company for scholarly communications. What we perceived as not a very strong technology from the various players that existed at the time, we had a very strong focus on technology and enabling publishers to do more things with their websites. Atypon has grown tremendously in the years since it was founded. It’s hosting about 40% of all scholarly research content right now. So, you are interacting with some of our websites, and the reason for my presentation today is I’m going around trying to incite change on both the publisher side but also on the library side. We’re sitting in a place as a technology company, as a technology service company to the publishers, we’re sitting at a place where we develop a lot of technology but we cannot necessarily launch it until the publishers demand it. And in some cases, the publishers also want to hear from the librarians that the librarians are ready to embrace this change, so there is an ecosystem and there is a whole community that needs to embrace some of these changes that I want to talk about today.

I’ve been there since the beginning. I’ve been there since the first journal that launched and I was responsible for it, and the first two years were very exciting. We were doing a lot of different things, that was with Highwire at the time. If somebody, however, would go into a long sleep in ’97 and wake up November 8 of 2017, and if you would go and look at the websites, he would see pretty much the same things that he saw before he went to sleep. And what he would see is basically, for institutional access, you would have IP authentication pretty much, username and password for your individual accounts as a user, XML as the format that the content is coming in, a very dumb form of HTML and PDF, which are both pretty much dead if you look at them for a reading experience. The big search engines for if you have any questions that you want to ask across different publisher sites, and of course e-mail alerts that you have to register on every publisher site if you want to get any alerts about what is new, and frankly, even in ’97, there was some archiving going on and the same incomplete forms of archiving that existed then pretty much exist now. There is not too much change. What is interesting in technology for 20 years we’ve been doing pretty much the same thing over and over, and I can tell you Atypon is like 350 people, most of them engineers, and we’re doing pretty much the same thing and the same thing happens all around the industry.

Why do we need change? Maybe what we’re doing actually works. Who said that we should be doing any change? Well, I tried to list a number of reasons. I can list 100 more reasons, frankly. But some of the reasons, some of the topics that I’ve put here and some of the questions that I’ve put here and reasons that I put here touch on some of the topics that I want to talk about: institution authentication and PDF drive content piracy. SciHub, LibGen, and all of the other forms, and you might have your own views on piracy, I think that it actually has helped technology companies as well but at the end of the day it puts, it actually threatens the fundamentals of scholarly communications. Without rules, there is no game.

So, then of course we have user frustration with the various authentications that they have to do over various websites. Personalization is good. You know, everybody should have, every site should have personalization. The problem is that it becomes a nightmare for the users. And the, I call them archaic formats, HTML and PDF, basically is what we had 22 years ago, 20 years ago, basically they just mimic the print. That’s what we do. We don’t do anything much about it, although in the current world we see, we want more digital interaction. These formats don’t support digital interaction at all. Search engines, discovery done through search engines and search engines are good if you know what you’re looking for. They’re not good if you just want to manage the new information coming in. Getting 100 e-mails per week is no way, is not so manageable. And of course, as I say, archiving that is increasingly missing more and more content because more and more content in our websites, I can tell you, is not the content that it used to be 20 years ago; 20 years ago, we were just receiving the articles. Now you’re receiving all of this other content around the articles, editorial content, that is actually not archived anywhere. So, all of this is actually lost. At least it is kept by the website somehow, but a lot of it is actually going to be lost eventually. So we need to do something about it. Okay? Then there are other things like annotations that the users are putting in, and that is also going to be lost because that is also content in many cases, so we’re increasingly seeing user-generated content, editorial content, all kinds of content that is actually not archived anywhere.

Let me talk a little bit about the changes that are coming and how they are actually related to the libraries. There is a big initiative called RA21. It is a joint STM and NISO pitched initiative with publishers, technology companies, and libraries, as a matter of fact, that are trying to change the way the library patrons access content that they have access to. We’ve known the problems; we know that it is not convenient. We know that it is not—it actually enables content piracy and we can really have the Holy Grail here. We really can and we’ve proven it with some of the prototypes that are going on that you can have both seamless, very convenient access, preserve actually individual privacy, which is very important, and prevent content piracy. So, this is something that needs to be embraced by the libraries as well because there are some changes that need to happen. And we think that this is going to be rolling out in 2018 and 2019 so, you know, you get some information on this one. Now, it’s very interesting to me, the other one is very interesting, the individual user authentication. There’s so many social, academic social networks, any one of these could become essentially the SSO for users to access and have a password only in one place. None of them are vying for this position, interestingly enough. Nobody wants to do it. It’s a problem that needs to be solved; any of them can solve it. I would invite them to solve it. That’s something that maybe you should press on.

Content formats. I call them dinosaurs. Digital in name only. So, it’s a bunch of compromises the way they are today. You either have something that is portable, like the PDF, and immersive or you have something that is actually a little more dynamic and has a little more interaction, that is HTML. You either have something that is adapting to the device like the HTML or if it’s PDF it is very hard to read on the phone or you have the PDF basically. The data right now is all linearized into pictures, which is what we were doing for print, so you will not perhaps understand the difference unless you are shown the actual data, but when we’re printing articles the researchers had to take the results, create a chart, take an image of that chart, and send it with their submission. We do exactly the same thing now. Although clearly the researcher could just give the data. They could just say this is the way to create a chart out of the data and the chart can actually be created right there, and if I want to change the chart because I want to see a different kind of chart, I can as a user. That’s what I want to achieve. The data usually is stored somewhere else. It’s somebody else’s problem, these linkages, who knows whether they are going to be preserved or the data is going to be preserved? Most likely that is also going to be lost.

Just to give you, I stole this reference, actually, from the Scholarly HTML site, I think it’s attributed to Sebastian Ballesteros. Basically, New York Times had a report that did some change to their websites and they just added structured data. And by just adding structured data it increased our traffic to our recipes from search engines by 52%. So, as Ballesteros says, in other words cupcake recipes are reaping greater benefits from modern data practices than the whole scientific endeavor. And it’s true. It’s true. I mean it’s sad, but it is true. This is the state of the art in scholarly communications, which is insane because a lot of us are PhDs and we really care about the subject, we are really into it, not only as people who are trying to do things, but also as leaders, and for some reason this has become tough, difficult, so part of the difficulty is the freedom of what you do for the formats? Think about it, science has the richest content in terms of information. It has the richest information. We can really have a very rich information