One Book, One Middletown is a community literacy project sponsored by the City of Middletown, the Middletown Rotary, and Russell Library.  The goal is to encourage reading in the community by sharing the experience of reading a single book, and then bring people together to talk about it.

The book for 2012 is Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand.   It is the true story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner and Army Air Force bombardier, who survived a plane crash into the Pacific, followed by long weeks on a raft at sea and finally capture by the Japanese as a prisoner of war.  Zamperini’s grit and determination—first to survive, and then to come to terms with his survival after the war—makes for an intense and compelling story.

There will be a series of events in and around Middletown in the next several months to bring people together to discuss the book and the issues raised there.  At Wesleyan, Professor of History and Chair of Asian Languages and Literatures Bill Johnston will give a talk on the book at Olin Library on Wednesday, February 15 at 7pm.  The talk is free and open to the public.

One Book, One Middletown is a wonderful opportunity to promote literacy and to strengthen the University’s ties to the rest of the Middletown community.  A complete list of One Book events will be available shortly.  You don’t have to read the book to participate in the events—but I guarantee that if you start reading it you’ll find it hard to put down!

Where can you get the book?  Wesleyan University Library has a copy (call number: Olin D805 .J3 Z364 2010).  If it is checked out, there are copies in Olin’s lobby that you can take; we only ask that you return it when you’re finished so others can read it.  There are also several copies available for checkout at Russell Library, Middletown’s public library, at 123 Broad Street.   And of course, you can purchase a copy in any number of places, including a downloadable version for your Kindle.

Tags: one book one Middletown

In President Roth’s recent blog post on re-accreditation, he summarized the following challenge for the library and other information resources:

“How do we maintain vibrant up-to-date access to the best information across a wide variety of fields?

The Wesleyan Library is one of the jewels of the campus, and it remains a great study space and intellectual resource. It is also part of a network of resources that connect student and faculty to the materials they need for study. Increasingly, this means access to information rather than ownership of materials.”

President Roth’s challenge is one that the library has taken to heart, and is working to meet in an ever-changing, dynamic information environment.  The Wesleyan University Library is one of Wesleyan’s great assets, and this continues to be true as the library expands its resources and services beyond the local and tangible to the virtual and electronic.

For many people, the word ‘library’ evokes a strong, specific image—a ‘cathedral of books,’ a building where print materials are stored, preserved and celebrated, a treasure-trove of scholarly and creative volumes to be explored and re-discovered.  This is a wonderful image, imbued with the awe and emotion that scholars sometimes eschew in other aspects of their work. At Wesleyan, Olin Library in particular evokes this image, with its stately lobby and the soaring spaces of the Campbell Reference Center.  This symbolic function—the library as an outward sign of an inward institutional commitment to teaching, scholarship and research—is not unimportant.  It draws both students and faculty to Wesleyan, and helps to inspire those who are here.

Tangible resources—print books, journals, CDs, DVDs and other physical collections—continue to be important to Wesleyan students and faculty both for their content and their value as artifacts.  Content qua content is increasingly being made available in electronic form, but for many types of material there are technical and legal obstacles to making them as accessible, preservable and usable as print.  Until these obstacles are overcome, the library will continue to acquire print and other physical materials when appropriate.  The study of books and other physical resources as artifacts, and as content in its original form, will always be an important aspect of scholarly work.  Special Collections & Archives and the World Music Archives will continue to collect and preserve rare and unique print and other artifacts for study by students and scholars within and outside Wesleyan.

So how is the library extending beyond its physical boundaries?

As electronic resources and services have proliferated in the past few decades, the library’s scope has expanded.  Librarians and library staff provide access to an increasing variety of material in electronic form, most of which is accessible to Wesleyan students, faculty and staff wherever they are, whenever they need it.  In some disciplines, students and faculty rarely if ever have to go to a library building anymore.  They use the library virtually, sometimes without being aware that the resources they are using are evaluated, paid for, and managed by the library.

Library services such as interlibrary loan and reserves are also increasingly available online. The highly specialized systems and applications used within the library allow us to perform more efficiently the essential library functions of evaluating, selecting and assessing resources, as well guiding our users to the resources that best meet their needs.

Libraries have always placed a high value on collaboration.  We are using technology to develop new and more effective information networks for creating and sharing resources.  At Wesleyan, we share responsibility with ITS and interested faculty for WesScholar, the University’s online archive of faculty and student work.  We also work with ITS and faculty on projects that involve both technology and content, such as the iPad in the classroom pilot last year.  For the past 20 years we have shared our online catalog and print collections with Connecticut College and Trinity College, our CTW consortium partners, and for the past few years we have started to share the costs of access to electronic books.  We share a storage facility for print volumes of selected journals with the Five College Consortium in western Massachusetts.  And of course we have long shared materials with other libraries through interlibrary loan.

Academic libraries are often called the ‘center of campus,’ symbolically and sometimes physically.  With the development of online resources and services this is true in a virtual sense as well.  The Wesleyan University Library is the campus nexus of an ever-expanding information network both within and outside the University.  The purpose of this network is to provide Wesleyan students and faculty with the material they need for their teaching, assignments and research.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …

A bill recently introduced in the House of Representatives, H.R. 3699 – the Research Works Act, would prevent federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health from requiring that articles resulting from the research they fund be made publicly available.  The bill reads, in part:

“No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that–

(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or

(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.”

Here’s why I think that the Research Works Act is a bad idea and, if passed, would have a chilling effect on scholarly and corporate research in the U.S.

It all goes back to scholarly journal prices and how they’ve increased over the past several decades. As an academic librarian, I am discouragingly familiar with the pricing practices of scholarly publishers.  A publisher of a prestigious journal has, in effect, a monopoly on the articles published in that journal, and those articles are not interchangeable with others in the same field published in other journals.   (Interlibrary loan of articles is, of course, a long-standing library practice; but the time it takes to deliver these articles is inconvenient for many researchers and students.)  Because they are the only source of the specific articles that researchers require, scholarly publishers have been able to increase their subscription prices by as much as 10% annually, with the knowledge that most research universities cannot cancel their subscriptions without adversely affecting the work of their students and faculty.

The open access movement in scholarly publishing has developed over the past 20 years to oppose these practices, and to take advantage of emerging technologies by developing an alternative, affordable model of sharing scholarly work among students and researchers. Providing open access to the results of publicly-funded research is an important part of this effort.

The NIH mandate to provide open access to publicly-funded medical research does give scholarly publishers the opportunity to publish these results first, which is a considerable advantage in time-sensitive areas of research. This advantage, along with the importance to researchers of publishing their findings in journals prestigious in their field, means that for-profit scholarly publishers are not being forced out of business by the mandate.  But they will be less able to act–and price–as monopolies, as the sole, permanent sources of critical research findings needed by researchers in higher education, medicine, and industry.

By making research results accessible to everyone without regard for their ability to pay, the open access movement increases the influence and impact of that research on future scientific and scholarly work.  It is a spur to the innovation and creativity needed to maintain the United States’ leadership role in science and technology, and to work towards the resolution of the many challenges facing this country and the world.

What can you do?  Contact your federal officials and ask them to help defeat the Research Works Act.  For Middletown, these officials are: President Barack Obama; Senator Joseph Lieberman, Senator Richard Blumenthal, and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro.  The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has a site that allows you to easily contact all of them: http://www.congressweb.com/cweb2/index.cfm/siteid/SPARC/action/TakeAction.Main

Update, January 18:  See the Chronicle article on some university presses’ opposition to RWA: http://chronicle.com/article/University-Presses-Disagree/130366/

Tags: open access movement

In case you were wondering what happens on campus over the holiday break (from the Wesleyan Argus, January 11, 1884, page 93):

“The monotony of the Christmas vacation here at college was varied one morning by an impromptu snowball skirmish between some of the faculty. The Prof. of Chemistry [Wilbur Olin Atwater] opened the ball with a nine-pounder point blank at the Prof. of Literature [Caleb T. Winchester]. The latter let fly from his left a chunk of ice with his famous underhand curve, to avoid which his antagonist with great agility turned himself edgeways and split the missile in twain. Modern Languages [Rev. George Prentice] now came on the scene, and by his gallant attempt to reinforce Chemistry so drew out the reserve energies of Literature that both light weights were forced to take refuge behind a sapling. Ancient Greece [James Cooke Van Benschoten] was then noticed to be hastening toward the scene of carnage, and at this apparation the marauders dispersed.”

Andy Curran recently sent to the faculty forum list a link to an article in Inside Higher Ed: Academic Libraries in Flux, by Steve Kolowich.  Wesleyan University Library participates in the NCES survey described in the article.  Here’s how our numbers compare to the trends Kolowich describes:

1. Library expenditures.  This includes all library expenditures, including staff salaries and benefits, systems, students, and resources.  The 2008 economic downturn and subsequent cuts in library budgets and staffing account for the decrease in expenditures for Wesleyan Library:

2. Expenditures per student.  The article compares figures for 2008 and 2010.

As you can see, compared to the 3,700 academic libraries participating in the NCES survey Wesleyan is doing quite well in this category.  In the Oberlin Group of 17, a group of 17 libraries at liberal arts institutions in the Northeast, Wesleyan ranks 12^th highest in expenditures per student, just behind Middlebury and Williams.

3. Electronic journal expenditures.  The changes in Wesleyan’s spending for electronic journals from 2004 to 2010 is similar to the NCES average:

The 2010 figure for Wesleyan includes some subscriptions–for data sets, reference works and indexes–that are not journals, as well as annual access fees some electronic monograph sets that we ‘own.’  (See Electronic book expenditures, below).  But for the most part this figure is for electronic journals.

4. Print journal expenditures.  As most academic libraries have over the past several years, Wesleyan has reduced the number of its print journal subscriptions as online versions have become available and more convenient than their print counterparts.

5. Electronic books.  In 2004 Wesleyan did not report on its electronic book holdings, although we had a few sets of older electronic books and some online reference works.  The electronic books we reported in 2010 included some sets of new books, but many more sets of older, rare books such as Eighteenth Century Books Online and Early English Books Online.

6. Electronic book expenditures.  This number for Wesleyan is deceptive:

So we’re spending less now on electronic books than we were in 2004? No, we are not, but how we pay for them is changing.  Print books are almost always ‘one-time’ purchases—the library pays for them one time and then owns them.  Many (but not all) electronic books are in sets or packages for which the library pays an annual subscription.  Wesleyan’s e-book expenditure number is therefore lower than it would be if we tracked expenditures by format instead of price model.

7. Print book expenditures.

This change in Wesleyan’s print book spending is to a small degree due to the shift to electronic books, but to a much larger degree to the reduction in the acquisitions budget in 2009-10.  A few years before, the library had conducted a comprehensive journal review and cancellation project, and it was thought too soon to undertake another review.  So the monographic acquisitions budget was reduced instead.  At the time, the library was working with our CTW partners on a very successful Mellon-funded project to more efficiently share our print (and electronic) book collections.  Because Connecticut College and Trinity College were also facing acquisitions cuts, we refocused the project to minimize duplication in purchasing specialized, expensive books.

8. Staffing.  Wesleyan Library also underwent a signficant staff reduction in 2009 and 2010 as a result of the Voluntary Separation Programs offered to librarians and library staff.  The full extent of the reduction was only realized in 2011 (‘FTE’ is ‘full-time equivalent’, to include part-time as well as full-time librarians and staff):

It is a tribute to the flexibility, expertise and dedication of Wesleyan’s library staff and librarians that we were able to adjust to these reductions and still provide a high level of access and services to students, faculty and the rest of the Wesleyan community.

9. Information (research) literacy.   Wesleyan Library has continued its commitment to working with students, faculty and visiting researchers in navigating the increasingly large and complex universe of scholarly content.  For several years now we have had chat reference service (try it by clicking the Live Reference link on the library’s home page), as well as more traditional email, phone, and in-person reference services. 

Personal Research Sessions (PRSs), in which a student makes an appointment with a librarian for an in-depth discussion of their research or assignment, are increasingly popular.  In 2005-06, the first year for which we have figures, librarians conducted 385 PRSs; in 2010-11, the figure jumped to 625.  If this fall is any indication, we will break this record in 2011-12.  These individualized, focused research interviews have (anecdotally at least) an enormous impact on students’ use of library and other scholarly resources.

Tags: Library changes, Statistics

Wordle is a fun tool for creating word art from texts.  Just as in tag clouds, the more often a word appears in a text the larger it is in the Wordle cloud.  Here’s the cloud for the library’s mission statement:

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

In the past several days there have been a lot of messages about the library weeding project both on the faculty forum listserv and sent directly to me.  I’ve responded to people individually, but since these concerns are no doubt shared by many others I decided to address them in the WesWeeding blog as well.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the discussion so far!   Please continue to send along your comments, concerns and suggestions.  Weeding is a difficult, controversial, and complex process.  The more open discussion we have about it, the better the result will be in the long run.

In my last post, we left the scholarly enterprise in dire straits.  How has the open access movement developed to respond to the crisis?

The Internet, and with it the conversion of scholarly content to electronic form, helped bring the scholarly publishing crisis to a head by increasing the demand for obscure journals and by the sheer number of available electronic resources.  But the Internet has also made possible the development of alternatives to for-profit scholarly publishing.

The open access movement began about twenty years ago, and since then several alternative scholarly publishing models have been explored.   Some organizations established open access journals, including Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central.  These recoup their publication costs by charging the authors or research sponsors for the articles they publish.  In some fields open-access repositories of scholarly work have been established, beginning in 1991 with arXiv in physics.  Many colleges and universities have established institutional repositories to showcase the scholarly work of their students and faculty—including here at Wesleyan, where WesScholar premiered in 2008.

These are all interesting experiments, but many of the most prestigious academic journals are still available only by subscription, and their cost continues to increase at an unsustainable rate.  How can faculty and others in higher education promote greater access to the scholarly work they produce?  Michael Roth’s signing of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, is a wonderful first step for Wesleyan in acknowledging the problem and supporting an open access solution.  As Michael wrote in his latest blog post, the faculties of several leading colleges and universities have passed formal resolutions to make their work accessible through open access journals or online archives such as WesScholar.

To what does a faculty commit itself in such a resolution?  More about this in my next post …

Tags: open access movement

This week is Open Access Week.  It is not a topic to make anyone’s heart beat faster, but it is an important movement to make scholarly and creative work more accessible to students and researchers, regardless of their (or their institution’s) ability to pay.  What is it, exactly, and why should Wesleyan pay any attention?  In the next several days I’ll be exploring various aspects of the open access movement in detail, starting with the factors that contributed to its emergence in the early 1990s.

Scholarly publishing through the ages …

Since the seventeenth century, scholars have shared their work through books and articles published by a variety of scholarly societies and other organizations.  Commercial, for-profit publishers were not a major force in scholarly publishing until after World War II, but over the next twenty years they came to dominate the market.  With the shift to for-profit scholarly publishing, the cost of subscriptions rose at an accelerating rate, reaching an average annual increase per journal of 8% in the 1970s, and sustaining that increase for the next 30 years.

In the 1990s, publishers began producing electronic journals, and later bundled them into subscription packages for libraries, called ‘big deal’ subscriptions.  As a result, libraries were able to provide access to many more journals than before, at a lower cost per journal than in the days of print.  But because of many of the journals treated subjects that did not match faculty or student research interests, many of the journals were rarely or never used.  ‘Big deal’ packages limited libraries’ ability to save money by cancelling rarely-used journals, but they were usually more cost effective than subscribing to the most-used journals individually.  As a result, more and more of the library’s acquisitions budget has been tied up in the big deals.

# of Wesleyan journal subscriptions, 1999-2010

In the meantime, the number of electronic resources—and the demand for them—has increased exponentially.  With the advent of electronic indexes in the 1980s, articles in formerly obscure journals became easier to find and demand for them increased.  Statistical data, which was of limited use in print books, has become extremely accessible and manipulable in electronic form, as well as increasingly expensive.  Large audio, video, and image databases are now available in subscription form, providing access to large collections of media files that are needed both in assignments and in scholarship.

So now there are more resources in demand than ever before, and the price for them increases every year.

What’s a library to do?

Academic libraries, whose budgets have not increased at the same rate as subscription costs, have tried a variety of strategies.  They lobbied their institutions for additional increases to their materials budgets to maintain full access to the journals their patrons needed.  But although this was sometimes successful for a few years, most institutions just were not able to provide this level of support indefinitely.

Percent change in Wesleyan Library acquisitions budget, 1999-2011

Libraries worked with their faculty to cancel journals that did not get much use, and cut book budgets to cover journal subscription increases.  The problem with reducing the number of journals and books immediately available from the library, particularly before the improvements in interlibrary loan, was that students and faculty following a research trail could be stalled for a week or more while waiting for an item to arrive from another library.

The bottom line is that all academic libraries provide direct access (through purchase or subscription) to more scholarly and creative content in an absolute sense than a generation ago, but a smaller percentage of the total universe of scholarly content.  Interlibrary loan services have greatly improved as processes have been automated, but some electronic resources such as data sets are not loanable, and there are limitations on loaning most electronic books.

The accessibility gap

At Wesleyan and other private, liberal arts institutions, this accessibility gap is of concern because of the extensive research done by students and faculty and the library’s commitment to supporting this research, wherever it leads.  At less-wealthy schools in the United States and elsewhere, the situation is far more dire.  Some academic libraries have had to drastically cut their book budgets to cover increased subscription costs, or cut journal subscriptions while limiting interlibrary loan requests to stay within their operational budget.  Often publishers require that libraries restrict the use of their electronic resources to current students, faculty and staff, so independent scholars are prevented from accessing them.  Scholarly and creative work is becoming less and less accessible to students and researchers.  And that puts at risk the whole scholarly enterprise.

In my next post I’ll talk about the rise of the open access movement in response to this crisis.

Tags: open access movement

In 2010-11 the library faced many challenges and embraced many opportunities–in short, it was a typical year!  Here are some of the highlights:

People

In February 2011 Lori Stethers joined the library as Systems/Emerging Technologies Librarian.  Lori is an expert on library applications and how they might be securely linked to campus systems to make them efficient and productive.  Lori’s work with librarians, library staff, ITS and system vendors has already borne fruit with improved electronic reserves and the successful launch of the library’s redesigned web site.

Collections

This past year electronic books have been the focus of a lot of attention both within and outside libraries.  In the fall of 2010, Wesleyan’s Information Technology Services (ITS) and the library teamed up to explore how first year students would use iPads to access readings and other classroom materials.  Although the post-semester survey of participating students uncovered technical limitations with the device and the content, these will no doubt be overcome in the next few years.

The CTW Consortium (consisting of Connecticut College, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University) has just completed a three-year project funded by the Mellon Foundation.  As part of the project, CTW negotiated a contract with Coutts Information Systems for electronic books to be purchased on demand.  Purchase on demand works like this:  Coutts provides records for electronic books that meet our criteria, and we download them into our online catalogs.  CTW only pays for a book, however, after it has been used twice on a CTW campus.  Given the program’s success CTW will likely continue it for at least another year.  As of May 2011, here are the most-used Coutts electronic books:

Olin Reference completed a multi-year weeding project that reduced the size of Olin’s reference collection by 40%.  Many reference works are now online, and are much more useful in this format than in print.

Wesleyan’s many publicly-available web pages are now being systematically archived using Archive-It, an online service that saves and makes accessible instances of an institution’s web presence.   This and WesScholar, the University’s online repository of scholarly work, are making possible the digital preservation of Wesleyan’s institutional and scholarly history.

The Friends of the Wesleyan Library premiered the Adopt-a-Book program in the winter of 2011.  Anyone—whether associated with Wesleyan or not—may donate money toward the conservation of selected books in Wesleyan’s collections that are particularly valued for their use in teaching and research, or their relationship to Wesleyan’s history.

Working well with others

The library has undertaken many collaborative ventures over the past year, in addition to those mentioned above.  Alec McLane, Music Librarian, and Scores & Recordings staff worked with Professor Mark Slobin to digitize recordings as supplements to his book, Music at Wesleyan, and make them available through WesScholar.

Helen Aiello, Acquisitions & Electronic Resources Librarian, and Diane Klare, Head of Reference, acted as mentors to Andrea Berger, a library science student at Southern Connecticut State University.  Andrea worked on a variety of projects during her fall 2010 internship.

Suzy Taraba, University Archivist and Head of Special Collections, worked with History Professor Magda Teter and Congregation Adath Israel to facilitate a long-term loan of 30 items from the synagogue’s impressive collection.  Special Collections & Archives will catalog and stabilize these materials and make them accessible to researchers.

Getting the word out

The MyWesLibrarian program premiered in September 2010, to provide personalized library service to incoming first-year and transfer students.  Each student was assigned a librarian through a link in their electronic portfolio, and were encouraged to contact their librarian with questions about library resources and services.  We are continuing the program this year.

In the spring of 2011, the library started a Twitter feed, WesLibNews, to provide followers with up-to-the-minute information about library services, resources, systems and events.  The library also has a Facebook page, ‘Wesleyan University Library’, to post pictures and other information.

In the summer of 2011 the library’s web site was redesigned to have the same look and feel as other Wesleyan web sites, and for greater ease in finding resources and library services.  The CTW Consortium’s combined catalog also has a new search interface with new ways to narrow search results by language, author, format and other criteria.

Events

The Friends of the Wesleyan Library, led by Professor Emeritus Karl Scheibe and coordinated by Jennifer Hadley, sponsored a number of successful events this past year, including a screening of Paths of Glory with the Center for Film Studies, a Constitution Day talk by the Hon. Mark Kravitz ’72, the fall book sale and the spring membership meeting with speaker Matt Warshauer, Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University and author of a recent book on Connecticut and the Civil War.

Michaelle Biddle conserved a rare nineteenth-century album of Chinese paintings, several examples of which were displayed by the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies in their Visions of Cathay exhibit in the winter of 2011.

Special Collections & Archives mounted two major exhibitions: Food for Thought (Suzy Taraba and Val Gillispie, Fall 2010) and Building Wesleyan’s Poetry Collections: Frank Kirkwood Hallock (1882) and Caroline Clark Barney (1895) (Suzy Taraba, Spring 2011).  They also hosted well-attended open houses during Homecoming/ Family Weekend and Reunion/Commencement, as well as special open houses for April Fools’ Day and in conjunction with the Friends program on the Civil War.

Erhard Konerding, Government Documents Librarian, was a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, which aired in May 2011.

In the coming year …

The major initiative in the library next year will be a two-year, 60,000-volume weeding of the collections, to create space in the libraries for new material and innovative study spaces.

In addition to this massive project, Systems will explore ways to improve access to library resources through mobile devices, Special Collections & Archives will begin digitizing 19^th century issues of the Argus, Scores & Recordings will evaluate the preservation and security of digitized versions of World Music Archives field recordings, and Reference will add a text reference service to its methods of reaching out to students.

The CTW Consortium will be evaluating a new interface for our catalogs and exploring discovery tools to make it easier to search online collections quickly and efficiently.

It is going to be another interesting year!

The complete report is available as well: http://www.wesleyan.edu/library/about/annualrpt2011rev.pdf