jan08a.indd


 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Free N e w s  f r o m  t h e  F i e l d  

ACRL Insider launches 
ACRL is pleased to announce the debut of a 
staff-produced Weblog, ACRL Insider. 

The mission of the new ACRL Insider blog 
is to keep ACRL members, and the world at 
large, current and informed on the activities, 
services, and programs of the association. 
ACRL Insider features information on publi­
cations, events, conferences, and eLearning 
opportunities, along with podcasts and other 
media. 

With the launch of this new communica­
tion tool, ACRL hopes to foster openness and 
transparency by providing an open, online 
connection between members and staff. In 
order to create a collaborative environment, 
all ACRL Insider posts allow for reader com­
ments and suggestions. 

ACRL Insider focuses on communicating 
information about the association to members 
and the wider academic library community, 
while the existing ACRLog weblog (www. 
acrlblog.org/) continues to address the is­
sues of the day in the field of academic and 
research librarianship. The blogs work in 
tandem to provide a big picture view of the 
association and academic librarianship. 

Visit ACRL Insider online at www.acrl.ala. 
org/acrlinsider and keep up to date on your 
association. 

Electronic ILL delivery in Ontario 
Laurentian University’s J. N. Desmarais Li­
brary has become the first library in Ontario 
to offer patrons an electronic interlibrary 
loan delivery service for single copies of 
articles and book chapters. The service is 
being offered at no charge to authorized us­
ers. 

Ashley Thomson, coordinator of the ILL 
service, said that the library introduced the 
program to expedite document delivery. 
“Laurentian has a big distance education pro­
gram,” he noted. “This initiative will be par­
ticularly appreciated by Laurentian students 
who do not have access to the library.” 

Thomson added that the program will 
reduce the impact on the environment as­
sociated with printing thousands of pages of 
ILL materials per month. 

ARL reports examine university 
publishing and e-journals 
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) 
recently released two reports related to pub­
lishing. A special double issue of the ARL Bi­
monthly Report, no. 252/253, focuses on the 
state of university publishing and the evolv­
ing role for research libraries in the delivery 
of publishing services. 

The Ithaka report “University Publishing in 
a Digital Age,” is the focus of three articles: a 
summary of the Ithaka report by its original 
authors, an assessment by NASULGC’s David 
Shulenburger of the report’s recommenda­
tion that research institutions should have 
“publishing strategies,” and a description of 
the University of Michigan Library’s hosting 
of social commentary on the Ithaka report 
using CommentPress. 

Three additional articles look at new pub­
lishing initiatives involving libraries: the joint 
project of the California Digital Library and 
the University of California Press, the pub­
lishing services developed at the University 
of Illinois-Chicago, and the Canadian collab­
orative project, Synergies—a national multi-
institutional project to create a publishing 
infrastructure to support society publishing 
in the humanities and social sciences, as well 
as other scholarly publishing. An overview of 
the changing environment of university pub­
lishing is provided by ARL’s Karla Hahn. 

“The E-only Tipping Point for Journals: 
What’s Ahead in the Print-to-Electronic 
Transition Zone,” by Richard K. Johnson and 
Judy Luther, examines the issues associated 
with the migration from dual-format pub­
lishing toward electronic-only publication 
of journals. 

The report provides a synthetic analysis of 
librarian and publisher perspectives on the 
current state of format migration, considering 
the drivers toward electronic-only publish­
ing and barriers that are slowing change. 
The authors provide an assessment of likely 
change in the near term and recommend 
strategic areas of focus for further work to 
enable change. 

The work is based in large part on inter­
views conducted between June and August 

C&RL News January 2008 6 

www.acrl.ala
http:acrlblog.org


 
 

  
 
 

 
 
 

 

  

 
 

 
 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACRL Arts Section ArtsGuide to Philadelphia 
The ACRL Arts Section has released its 
“ArtsGuide to Philadelphia,” just in time for 
the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting.ArtsGuides 
are developed by the Arts Section to help 
ALA conference attendees fi nd arts-related 
venues/events in and around host cities. 

The guides point out the more unique, 
off-the-beaten path arts experiences that 
you might not discover from other types of 
tourist guides. Since the ArtsGuides are pre­
pared by local arts librarians, they provide 
added value by listing travel considerations 
to a venue, costs and discount possibilities, 
and cover a wide diversity of galleries/per­
formances/events to help you truly absorb 
the arts of the city. The guide is a great 

2007 with two dozen academic librarians and 
journal publishers. Publishers and librarians 
were consulted equally in recognition that 
these changes pose significant issues of co­
ordination. Interviews were conducted with 
collection officers and others at ARL member 
libraries and publishing staff of societies and 
university presses, publishing platform hosts, 
and publishing production consultants. 

Both reports are available as free down­
loads from the ARL Web site. The ARL Bi­
monthly Report is located at www.arl.org 
/resources/pubs/br/br252-253.shtml, and 
“The E-only Tipping Point for Journals” at www. 
arl.org/bm~doc/Electronic_Transition.pdf. 

Oregon State University opens Our 
Little Village 
In order to help Oregon State University 
(OSU) student parents in need of childcare 
for their children, the Associated Students of 
OSU and the Valley Library have teamed up 
to create Our Little Village, a drop off day-
care in the middle of the library. 

Our Little Village is a short-term childcare 
center for student parents. Any currently en­
rolled student can drop off their children ages 
six months to 10 years old on a fi rst-come, 
first-served basis for a maximum of two to 
three hours. Student parents must stay in the 
library while their child is being cared for at 
the facility and are given a pager to alert them 
of problems or if their time has expired. The 
space is divided up by age, with appropriate 

resource for making your Midwinter trip 
enjoyable and enlightening. 

Mary Edsall Choquette coordinated and 
edited the Philadelphia ArtsGuide. Cheryl 
Lajos, Sara MacDonald, Erin McKinney, and 
Alessia Zanin-Yost served as contributing 
editors.Tom Caswell, the Arts Section’s in­
trepid Webmaster made sure the PDF guide 
is readily available, and Beth Kerr, chair of 
the section’s Publication and Research 
Committee, oversaw the process. 

Be sure to check out the “ACRL Arts 
Section’s ArtsGuide for Philadelphia” 
online at www.ala.org/ala/acrl/aboutacrl 
/acrlsections/arts/artsguide/artsguide. 
cfm. 

toys and programs for each age group. The 
program is paid for by student fees, so there is 
no extra cost to use the center. Hours for the 
center are focused on afternoons, evenings, 
and weekends. 

“It is exciting to be the first university li­
brary in the country—as far as we know —to 
be able to offer this innovative resource to 
our students,” said Karyle Butcher, university 
librarian. “The university’s focus on student 
engagement calls for all of us to look at new 
and different ways of providing services to 
our students so that they feel that they are a 
part of the university community. Our Little 
Village is one way that the library can do 
this.” 

Library building project 2.0 
The University of Tennessee-Chattanooga 
(UTC) Lupton Library is taking advantage 
of Web 2.0 tools to increase the transpar­
ency of their new building project. Gover­
nor Phil Bredesen and the Tennessee Leg­
islature have provided one-time funds in 
the amount of $48 million to plan and build 
a new library for the university. The new 
library is anticipated to be approximately 
180,000 gross square feet, which equates to 
gain of just over 60,000 square feet from the 
existing library building. 

The library, as the academic and intel­
lectual heart of the campus, is the core phi­
losophy driving the design process at UTC. 
In an effort to create an open, collaborative, 

January 2008 7 C&RL News 

www.ala.org/ala/acrl/aboutacrl
http:www.arl.org


 

 

 

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 

 

 

and transparent process, all information 
about the project, including meeting minutes, 
photographs, and videos are available on 
the library wiki located at www.library.utc. 
edu/building. 

“Using 2.0 tools to put this project in mo­
tion has saved us enormous amounts of time, 
and just allowed us to do things that couldn’t 
have been done before,” stated UTC Lupton 
Library head of library information technol­
ogy Jason Griffey. 

The new library will be the focal point for 
collaborative research and teaching in the 21st 
century on the UTC campus. In building a 
new space, the UTC library seeks to blend old 
traditions with new developments in library 
usage—carrels providing quiet study among 
book stacks on one floor, complemented by 
comfortable chairs, wireless laptops, and an 
area designated as information commons to 
enhance group study and the navigation of 
library databases and other electronic tools 
on another. The new library will offer an 
academic and social gathering place for stu­
dents, faculty, and members of the academic 
community through classrooms, labs, meeting 
and event spaces, and technology-equipped 
study areas and rooms. The library’s goal is to 

I can’t live without . . . 
Although this site is not directly related to 

academic librarianship, the information it contains 
is valuable to all librarians. This site predicts and 
warns of severe weather in the United States. 
Librarians may find it useful for planning outdoor 
activities and for checking weather conditions 
before traveling to conferences. Weather watches 
and warnings are mapped out on the site, and 
these advisories include both severe summer and 
winter weather. As the number of severe weather 
events that affect libraries increases, this site will 
prove valuable in helping librarians maintain 
awareness of potential severe weather. The site 
includes a form for linking to local weather fore­
casts, and it even provides predictions for “fi re 
weather,” that is, areas with a high fi re hazard. 

—Jeffrey Beall, Auraria Library, University of 
Colorado-Denver and Health Sciences Center 

. . . Storm Prediction Center 
www.spc.noaa.gov 

create a warm, welcoming environment that 
brings UTC community members together to 
study, work, and relax. 

Open access collaboration at the 
University of Pittsburg 
The University of Pittsburgh’s University 
Library System (ULS) and University Press 
have formed a partnership to provide digital 
editions of press titles as part of the library 
system’s D-Scribe Digital Publishing Pro­
gram. Thirty-nine books from the Pitt Latin 
American Series, published by the Univer­
sity of Pittsburgh Press, are now available 
online, freely accessible to scholars and stu­
dents worldwide. Ultimately, a majority of 
the Press’ titles older than two years old will 
be provided through this open access plat­
form. 

For the past decade, the ULS has been 
building digital collections on the Web un­
der its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, 
making available a wide array of historical 
documents, images and texts, which can be 
browsed by collection and are fully search­
able. The addition of the University of Pitts­
burgh Press Digital Editions collection marks 
the newest in an expanding number of digital 

collaborations between the ULS and 
the University Press. 

The D-Scribe Digital Publishing 
Program includes digitized materials 
drawn from Pitt collections along with 
those of other libraries and cultural 
institutions in the region, preprint re­
positories in several disciplines, the 
University’s mandatory electronic 
theses and dissertations program, and 
electronic journals. During the past 
eight years, 60 separate collections 
have been digitized and made freely 
accessible via the Web. The D-Scribe 
collections are freely accessible free­
of-charge on the Web at www.library. 
pitt.edu/dscribe/. 

The Pitt Latin American Series be­
gan in 1968 and has grown to include 
a wide array of distinguished books 
on Latin American history, politics, 
society, economics, and culture. The 
inclusion of the series in D-Scribe com­
plements the Library’s Eduardo Lozano 
Latin American Collection, one of the 
largest collections of Latin American 

C&RL News January 2008 8 

www.library
http:www.spc.noaa.gov
www.library.utc


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

material in the world, established in 1967 in 
cooperation with Pitt’s Center for Latin Ameri­
can Studies and the Latin American studies 
program. The University of Pittsburgh is one 
of the country’s major centers for teaching 
and research on Latin America. 

More titles will be added to the Univer­
sity of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions each 
month until most of the current scholarly 
books published by the Press are available 
both in print and as digital editions. The 
collection will eventually include titles from 
the Pitt Series in Russian and East European 
Studies; the Pitt-Konstanz Series in the Phi­
losophy and History of Science; the Pittsburgh 
Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture; 
the Security Continuum: Global Politics in 
the Modern Age; the History of the Urban 
Environment; back issues of Cuban Stud­
ies; and numerous other scholarly titles in 
history, political science, philosophy, and 
cultural studies. 

Creative Commons genomes 
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is intro­
ducing a Creative Commons license for 
original research articles in nature jour­
nals that publish the primary sequence of 
an organism’s genome for the fi rst time. 
The Creative Commons Attribution-Non-
CommercialShare Alike 3.0 Unported license 
will enable researchers to freely share and 
adapt the work, provided the original is at­
tributed and not used for commercial pur­
poses, and that any resulting work is distrib­
uted under a similar license. No publication 
fees will be applicable, and the articles will 
be available free of charge. 

“Nature journals have regularly published 
articles reporting novel primary genome-
wide sequences without access control. NPG 
supports genomics community agreements 
that genome sequences should be placed 
in the public domain to maximize benefi ts 
to society. We now have the opportunity to 
formalize our position with the introduction 
of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non­
Commercial-Share Alike license for primary 
genome sequence articles published in Na­
ture journals,” said David Hoole, head of 
content licensing at NPG. 

Wherever possible, NPG will apply the 
Creative Commons license retrospectively 
to original research articles reporting novel 

primary genome-wide sequences published 
in NPG journals. Only original research 
articles publishing the primary sequence of 
an organism’s genome for the first time will 
be offered to users under the Creative Com­
mons license. All other articles published by 
the NPG journals will remain under NPG’s 
existing licensing and copyright agreements. 
Under these agreements authors of original 
research articles retain their copyright, giv­
ing NPG an exclusive license-to-publish. 
This license encourages self archiving of the 
accepted version of the authors manuscript, 
and is compatible with all major funders ac­
cess policies, including NIH, Wellcome Trust, 
MRC, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 
CRUK, and DFG. 

Details of the new policy are avail­
able online at www.nature.com/authors 
/editorial_policies/license.html. Visit the Cre­
ative Commons Web site at creativecommons. 
org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ for additional 
information on the Attribution-Non-Com­
mercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. 

Columbia University Libraries join 
Google Book Search Library Project 
Columbia University Libraries and Google 
have signed an agreement to digitize a large 
number of the libraries’ books in the public 
domain and make them available online. 

By partnering with Google, the librar­
ies will support the research and teaching 
mission of the university by archiving and 
making accessible scholarly resources that 
the libraries have been collecting since the 
early 19th century. 

“Our participation in the Google Book 
Search Library Project will add signifi cantly 
to the extensive digital resources the Libraries 
already deliver,” said James Neal, Columbia’s 
vice president for information services and 
university librarian. 

C&RL News RSS 
Cover art, article links, and other valuable 
information from C&RL News is now avail­
able by subscribing to our new RSS feed. 

Point your Web browser to feeds.feed­
burner.com/candrlnews, and add our feed 
to your favorite reader, such as Bloglines 
or Google Reader. 

January 2008 9 C&RL News 

www.nature.com/authors