C&RL News May 2021 206 N e w s f r o m t h e F i e l dDavid Free MSU Library awards faculty OER grants The Michigan State University (MSU) Li- braries Open Educational Resources (OER) Advisory Committee has awarded a sec- ond round of grants totaling $28,500 to ten MSU faculty. The announcement was made by Dean of Libraries Joseph A. Salem Jr., who noted that the awards are designed to support the goals of the OER program, which aims to help instructors reduce costs for students, improve access to required texts, and increase student success. The faculty members (and faculty mem- ber teams) will each receive $4,000 to create and develop new OER for primary course material. More information, including a list of recipients, is available at https://blogs. lib.msu.edu/news-msu-libraries/2021/mar /msu-libraries-award-28500-msu-faculty -help-instructors-reduce-costs. LYRASIS, Columbia University Libraries announce e-books partnership LYRASIS and the Columbia University Li- braries recently announce a new partnership to bring SimplyE, an open source e-book management platform, to Columbia Uni- versity Library users. This partnership will increase access to materials available from the Columbia University Libraries with an improved and more consistent reading ex- perience and will foster discoverability and use of ebooks for all students and faculty at Columbia and beyond. The first phase of the partnership includes approximately 20,000 ebooks prepared for discovery through CLIO (Columbia’s lo- cal Blacklight-based catalog) and delivered through the SimplyE mobile app, hosted by LYRASIS. The ebooks are now available to mobile devices used by faculty, students, and staff for full-book download. The goals of the project are to deliver an improved and consis- tent experience for reading ebooks. Springer Nature, UC-Berkeley Library sign new open access book partnership Springer Nature has signed its first ever in- stitutional open access book agreement with the University of California (UC)-Berkeley Library. The agreement will cover a broad range of book titles across all disciplines from humanities and social sciences to sciences, technology, and mathematics. Starting in 2021 and running for at least three years, the partnership will provide open access funding to UC-Berkeley affiliated authors. The open access book titles will publish under the Springer, Palgrave, and Apress imprints, with initial titles set to publish later this year. The books will be published under a CC BY li- cense and readers around the world will have free access to the books via Springer Nature’s content platform SpringerLink. This agreement with UC-Berkeley Library follows the UC systemwide landmark trans- formative agreement with Springer Nature announced last year to enable UC authors to publish research articles open access in more than 2,700 Springer Nature journals. ASERL, DOAJ forge new partnership The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has announced a new partnership with the Association of Southeastern Re- search Libraries (ASERL). The arrangement shines a spotlight on the importance of open access at a time when both libraries and the organizations on which they depend, such as DOAJ, are facing unprecedented financial risks. As a free and independent database, DOAJ indexes more than 15,000 peer-re- viewed open access journals from around the world. ASERL is one of the largest regional research consortia in the United States. Its members are world-renowned libraries at research-intensive universities, with a vested interest in open access and open science. The COVID-19 pandemic and the increased demand for vetted, high-quality https://blogs.lib.msu.edu/news-msu-libraries/2021/mar/msu-libraries-award-28500-msu-faculty-help-instructors-reduce-costs https://blogs.lib.msu.edu/news-msu-libraries/2021/mar/msu-libraries-award-28500-msu-faculty-help-instructors-reduce-costs https://blogs.lib.msu.edu/news-msu-libraries/2021/mar/msu-libraries-award-28500-msu-faculty-help-instructors-reduce-costs https://blogs.lib.msu.edu/news-msu-libraries/2021/mar/msu-libraries-award-28500-msu-faculty-help-instructors-reduce-costs May 2021 C&RL News207 Creativity: A Toolkit for Academic Libraries ACRL announces the publication of Creativ- ity: A Toolkit for Academic Libraries by Nan- cy Falciani-White, a guide to understanding and developing creativity in yourself, your library, and your institution. Creativity is the ability to produce a prod- uct or idea that is both new and appropriate in a given context, and is essential for innovation, change, and employee satisfaction. Cre- ativity is inherently human, a transferable skill that can be developed and that can improve an individual’s personal and professional life, regardless of their level of artistic ability, education, or experience. Academic libraries are often the first to face budget reductions, hiring freezes, and staff reductions when higher education encoun- ters financial stress, and creativity can seem like either a luxury or an attempt to spur libraries to support the needs of their insti- tution without adequate staff and funding. However, creativity is vital at all levels of the academic library if that library expects to adapt to the current challenges facing higher education. Change is necessary for adapta- tion, and creativity is essential for change. Creativity: A Toolkit for Academic Li- braries can help you create, encourage, and participate in an environment that is con- ducive to creativity, helping make change a more natural and organic part of the library’s culture. The first part, “Understanding Cre- ativity,” looks at the psychology of creativity and its use in design thinking, innovation, research, and physical and social environments. The second, “Creativity in Context,” examines perspectives of library staff and creativity in academic library litera- ture, and how to enhance personal creativity and foster it in your library. Greater creativity in librarianship—and creat- ing a culture that values trial and error along with successes—needs to be encouraged by those in library leadership, in the library profession more broadly, and in institutions of higher edu- cation. Creativity: A Toolkit for Academic Libraries can be the first step in developing your own creativity and advocating for it across your institution. Creativity: A Toolkit for Academic Librar- ies is available for purchase in print and as an ebook through the ALA Online Store, in print through Amazon.com, and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the United States or (770) 442-8633 for international customers. online academic research has highlighted the critical importance of support for essential library infrastructure services such as DOAJ. This agreement will be vital in creating a smooth path for such support to flow directly from ASERL members to DOAJ. Under the new partnership, ASERL will be able to offer support for DOAJ to consortia members at a substantial discount. LexisNexis introduces Nexis Data Lab LexisNexis has launched the Nexis Data Lab to address the challenges universities face with big data mining and analysis. With more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data gen- erated each day, big data mining and analysis has become big business. But it also comes with big challenges for academic research, including reliable search and capture, secure C&RL News May 2021 208 Choice launches Toward Inclusive Excellence initiative Choice is pleased to announce the launch of a new content vertical, Toward Inclusive Excellence, focusing on racial justice, and the appointment of Alexia Hudson-Ward, associate director of research and learning at MIT Libraries, as its editor-in-chief. Toward Inclusive Excellence will explore issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, particularly as they affect the library community. The vertical is anchored by a weekly updated blog and will incorporate podcasts, webinars, and research reports. C o n t r i b u t o r s and participants will include ad- ministrators at every level, fac- ulty, and other members of the library commu- nity. The purpose of this initiative is simple, but powerful: to provide solutions, opinion, and constructive discourse grounded in current research on diver- sity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, belonging, and social justice (DEIA) within the academy and to highlight programmatic initiatives al- ready underway that deserve more coverage. Choice considers racial justice a cornerstone of its mandate to support academic study and, more broadly, the ends of social justice. Accord- ingly, this project will develop a pool of knowl- edge and actionable resources for information professionals, administrators, undergraduates, and faculty seeking to understand racism from new perspectives and promote diversity on their campuses. Commenting on this new initiative, Hudson- Ward said, “It is such a great time in history to launch Toward Inclusive Excellence, as there is a convergence of intentional and strategic dialogues, research, teaching, learning, and ini- tiatives happening within the DEIA space in the academy now. Entirely by ‘happenstance,’ the blog’s title transforms into a powerful acronym (TIE). TIE is the essence of how we think about the unifying and foundational na- ture of DEIA in the academy. I look forward to partnering with colleagues rep- resenting every functional area within academia to provide rich, thought- provoking, and solutions-centered content that will advance the DEIA discourse in a high- impact fashion.” The launch follows a number of other initia- tives at Choice focused on DEIA, including the addition of a new feature on ChoiceReviews.org that allows subscribers to filter searches with a racial justice facet and an upcoming series of feature-length reviews of important scholarly titles on racial and social justice. L e a r n m o r e a t w w w. c h o i c e 3 6 0 . o rg /toward-inclusive-excellence. sharing, authoritative sourcing, and data vi- sualization. Nexis Data Lab is a next-generation data mining and analysis tool that allows students and academic researchers to search across the world-leading Nexis news archive. It streamlines the analytical experience and reduces the time and complexity of curating a data set—getting the data into an analytical environment faster. Users can search, refine, analyze, and visualize thousands of documents in mere minutes, all within a secure, end-to- end, cloud-based Jupyter notebook. For more information on Nexis Data Lab, its features, and a glimpse into its new data mining prod- uct, visit http://lexisnexis.com/datalab. http://www.choice360.org/toward-inclusive-excellence http://www.choice360.org/toward-inclusive-excellence http://lexisnexis.com/datalab May 2021 C&RL News209 Tech Bits . . . Brought to you by the ACRL ULS Technology in University Libraries Committee FireShot is a tool at my fingertips that takes screenshots of webpages and is free to get from the Chrome Web Store. With the aid of FireShot, I captured an entire webpage that exceeded the length of my browser’s window and embedded the image in one of my professional posters. The convenience of the single click saved me from the hassle of using the native tool on my PC workstation and having to continually scroll and capture the visible part within the screen area. I also find FireShot handy for attaching snippets of documentations for tickets with service providers, for saving con- firmation messages as receipts, and for preserving information on websites I may want to later retrieve. —Minhao Jiang Wayne State University . . . FireShot https://getfireshot.com/ Springshare announces new LibCal mapping features Springshare has announced the LibCal map- ping module, a new tool that visually engages and informs library patrons as they navigate the reservation process. Launched in April 2021, these new features include interactive maps for booking in-person activities and directional maps for event and appointment locations. Key highlights from LibCal’s new, optional mapping features include interactive maps with clickable spaces, seats, and event and appointment locations; color options for map areas based on a user’s date and time selection; information bubbles that display each book- able area’s capacity, power, and accessibility options on hover; along with nested map capability so users can click from building floor map to a layout map with bookable study rooms or an individual room’s map with bookable desks. For more information about LibCal’s new mapping module, including a video demon- strating an interactive map’s functionality, visit https://blog.springshare.com/2021/03/16 /coming-soon-libcal-interactive-mapping/. Ex Libris, DataCite launch new integration features Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, has part- nered with DataCite, a leading global orga- nization that provides persistent identifiers for research outputs and data. The integra- tion between the Ex Libris Esploro research information management solution and the DataCite service enables researchers and li- brarians to seamlessly publish institutional research work and facilitates the discovery, citation, and tracking of the publications and underlying datasets via unique identi- fiers. Esploro enhances the discoverability of research outputs and data by including the complete set of metadata for each research asset, along with its identifier. When any change is made to research outputs in the Esploro system, the metadata in the DataCite platform is automatically updated. Correction The title of the Scholarly Communication article by Willa Tavernier in the April 2021 issue of C&RL News was presented incor- rectly. The correct article title is “Develop- ing scholarly communication competen- cies: How a post-master’s degree residency program can provide career preparation.” The title has been corrected in the online version of the article and the editors regret, and apologize for, the error. Learn more at https://exlibrisgroup.com /press-release/esploro-integrates-with-datacite -service/. https://getfireshot.com/ https://blog.springshare.com/2021/03/16/coming-soon-libcal-interactive-mapping/ https://blog.springshare.com/2021/03/16/coming-soon-libcal-interactive-mapping/ https://exlibrisgroup.com/press-release/esploro-integrates-with-datacite-service/ https://exlibrisgroup.com/press-release/esploro-integrates-with-datacite-service/ https://exlibrisgroup.com/press-release/esploro-integrates-with-datacite-service/