C&RL News November 2011 562

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

New commons for New Brunkswick 
The University of New Brunswick (UNB) 
in Saint John is now home to one of the 
most advanced and environmentally friend-
ly buildings in Atlantic Canada. Officially 
opened on September 7, the Hans W. Klohn 
Commons is a silver-rated Leadership in 
Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) 
building. The design of the building allows 
a great deal of natural light inside during the 
day and features LED lighting. An electric el-

evator system produces power back into the 
building. The elevator only requires power 
to get to the top of the building; when com-
ing down, the elevator becomes a power 
generator for the commons.

“We are very thrilled to finish the construc-
tion of the Hans W. Klohn Commons at UNB 
Saint John,” said UNB vice-president Robert 
MacKinnon. “I am looking forward to having 
students use this advanced learning facility 
for their studies.”

The university’s library system has moved 
into the commons, along with the Student 
Technology Centre, the Writing Centre, the 
Math and Science Help Centre, and the Com-
mons Café. Three hundred trees have been 
ordered by UNB Saint John to encourage 
natural habitat back into the project.  

More information, including two videos 
on the development and features of the com-
mons, is available at www.unb.ca/excellence 
/commons.html.

arXiv celebrates 20th anniversary
Twenty years ago, physicist Paul Ginsparg 
began a project on his desktop: an elec-
tronic database to let fellow physicists share 
unpublished academic manuscripts without 
photocopying and paper mail. Over the past 
two decades, that project has revolution-
ized the way scientists share information. 
Today, arXiv—a free scientific repository of 
research in physics, mathematics, statistics, 
computer science, and related disciplines— 

boasts 700,000 “preprint” ar-
ticles, a million downloads a 
week, and hundreds of thou-
sands of contributors. 

Since Ginsparg moved 
arXiv to Cornell University in 
2001, he collaborated with the 
university library in overseeing 
and developing the service. In 
September, he turned arXiv 
fully over to the library, al-
though he will continue to 
serve on the scientific advisory 
board which provides arXiv 
with intellectual oversight 
and shapes the policies and 
procedures that define arXiv’s 

moderation processes.
“arXiv has played a leading role in the 

migration of scholarly communication to the 
online world over the past two decades, and 
remains an essential resource,” Ginsparg said. 
“It is an exciting challenge to architect its 
role over the next two decades, anticipating 
the needs of new generations of born-digital 
users.”

In January 2010, arXiv launched a sustain-
ability initiative that has created a voluntary, 
collaborative business model to engage insti-
tutions that benefit most from its services. So 
far this year, 114 institutions in 12 countries 
have pledged their support, and more are 
expected to join. More information is avail-
able at www.arXiv.org.

Gale Launches Librareo online 
community
Gale, along with Library Journal and School 
Library Journal magazines recently an-

The Hans W. Klohn Commons at the University of New Brunswick- 
Saint John.



November 2011 563 C&RL News

ACRL signs Berlin Declaration on Open Access

ACRL recently joined the growing ranks of 
signatories to the Berlin Declaration on Open 
Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the 
Humanities. ACRL encourages college and 
research libraries, as well as other campus 
groups, to follow suit. The declaration builds 
on the significant progress of the Budapest 
Open Access Initiative, calling for open access 
to knowledge in the humanities as well as in 
the sciences. 

It also moves beyond the scope of primary 
literature, indicating, “Open access contribu-
tions include original scientific research results, 
raw data and metadata, source materials, digital 
representations of pictorial and graphical 
materials and scholarly multimedia material.” 
Signatories commit to the principle of open 
access as well as to pursuing solutions that ad-
vance the Internet “as an emerging functional 
medium for distributing knowledge.”

While the Berlin Declaration has garnered 
signatures from research institutions, librar-
ies, archives, museums, funding agencies, and 
governments worldwide, the organizers are 
seeking more signatures prior to the November 
9, 2011, Berlin 9 Meeting. This will be the first 
Berlin Conference held in North America, and 
the organizers hope to clearly demonstrate 
strong support for the declaration in conjunc-
tion with the conference, which research 

funders, policymakers, and other influential 
communities are expected to attend in force. 

“On the momentous occasion of Berlin 
9 being held in the U.S., it is important to 
join our European colleagues in their ef-
forts to advance open access initiatives,” 
said ACRL President Joyce L. Ogburn, 
dean of the University of Utah J. Willard 
Marriott Library. 

ACRL has long supported open access to 
scholarship as a central principle for reform 
in the system of scholarly communication.  
In the association’s new strategic Plan for 
Excellence, the goal in the area of research 
and scholarly environment calls for librar-
ians to accelerate the transition to a more 
open system of scholarship. Signing the 
Berlin Declaration is one way college and 
university libraries can demonstrate their 
intention to influence scholarly publishing 
policies and practices toward a more open 
system. Earlier this year, ACRL demonstrated 
its own commitment to open access by re-
moving price barriers to online version of 
the scholarly research journal College and 
Research Libraries, which is now available 
at from 1997 to the present at no charge.

More information on the Berlin Declara-
tion is available at http://oa.mpg.de/lang 
/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/. 

nounced Librareo, a free Web-based com-
munity that supports the future of librar-
ies and librarianship by providing students 
enrolled in Library and Information Studies 
(LIS) programs with free access to profes-
sional resources. LIS students in the United 
States and Canada who sign up for Librareo 
will get free, unlimited access to online Gale 
resources throughout their library school ca-
reer, such as Academic OneFile, Gale Virtual 
Reference Library—including access to 115 
e-books. Before starting their library careers, 
students will be able to explore and master 
in-demand resources currently being used 
in libraries around the world. 

LIS students will also have access to the 
Librareo message board and forum, operated 
by library thought-leaders and LIS faculty, 
giving them the opportunity to make contacts 

and solicit timely advice and best practices 
from experts. Students can gain access to all 
of the great resources housed on Librareo 
without any fees or commitments.  For more 
information on Librareo, visit www.librareo.
com. 

National Poetry Series to publish book 
by KU librarian
Julianne Buchsbaum, a humanities librarian 
at the University of Kansas (KU), has been 
selected as one of five winners in the Na-
tional Poetry Series 2011 Open Competition.  
Buchsbaum’s third book of poetry, With 
Venom and Wonder, was selected by poet 
Lucie Brock-Broido and will be published 
by Penguin Books in the summer of 2012. 

“We are extremely excited and proud to 
have one of our library faculty members hon-



C&RL News November 2011 564

Hot on the Web
The following are the top five most read articles on 
C&RL News online from January to August 2011.

1. “2010 top ten trends in academic libraries: A 
review of the current literature” by ACRL Research 
Planning and Review Committee (June 2010) 

2. “Mobile technologies for libraries” by Lori Barile 
(April 2011)

3. “Setting up a library iPad program: Guidelines for 
success” by Sara Q. Thompson (April 2011)

4. “QR codes and academic libraries” by Robin Ash-
ford (November 2010)

5. “Ten simple steps to create and manage your 
professional online identity” by Susanne Markgren 
(January 2011)

Visit C&RL News online at crln.acrl.org to find 
your favorite current and past articles.  And discover 
something new.

ored for this prestigious award,” said Deborah 
Ludwig, assistant dean of collections and 
scholar services at KU Libraries. “Julianne’s 
accomplishments as a poet and writer are 
notable and complement to her work in KU 
Libraries as a humanities librarian.” 

Buchsbaum has worked at KU Libraries 
since August 2008. Her prior books are Slow-
ly, Slowly, Horses (Ausable Press, 2001) and A 
Little Night Comes (Web del Sol, 2005). Poems 
from her new collection have appeared in 
The Iowa Review and New Orleans Review. 

The National Poetry Series is a literary 
awards program that sponsors the publication 
of five books of poetry each year. The manu-
scripts, solicited through the annual Open 
Competition, are selected by poets of national 
stature and published by a distinguished 
group of trade, university, and small presses.

Purdue develops Databib
Purdue University Libraries is leading the 
development of Databib, a new resource 
that will help people locate research data on 
the Internet. Databib will engage a commu-
nity of librarians from around the world to 
collaborate in creating an online bibliogra-
phy of data repositories that can be used by 
researchers, students, funding agencies, and 
other librarians to find appropriate places to 
access and share research data. 

The project also will serve as a testbed for 
presenting, linking, and integrating informa-
tion about data repositories in new ways. 
Records from Databib will be integrated into 
social bookmarking services and made avail-
able for libraries to import into their catalogs. 
They will also be exposed as Linked Data, 
which is an implementation of the Semantic 
Web that seeks to create a “Web of data.” 
Supported by an Institute of Museum and 
Library Services grant, Purdue is collaborating 
with Penn State University on the nine-month 
project, which is scheduled to be completed 
in May 2012. More information can be found 
on the project’s Web site, http://databib.lib.
purdue.edu.

CUPA-HR issue diversity position 
statement
For the past year and a half, College and Uni-
versity Professional Association for Human 
Resources (CUPA-HR) leadership, working 
with diversity consultant Alma Clayton-Ped-
ersen, has been focused on finding ways to 
promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in 
the higher education workplace. After many 
months of dialogue, information gathering, 
writing and rewriting, the association has 
unveiled its Inclusion Cultivates Excellence 
position statement and action plan (www.
cupahr.org/diversity/Inclusion_Cultivates 

_Excellence.pdf). 
The position statement articulates 

the association’s long-held belief 
that inclusive workplace practices 
are critical to achieving excellence 
in higher education institutions, 
and the action plan lays out clear, 
concise goals to help CUPA-HR (and 
HR professionals working in higher 
education) lead workforce diversity 
and inclusion efforts on campus. 

LifeTime Library launches for 
UNC LIS students
Students in the School of Informa-
tion and Library Science at the Uni-
versity of North Carolina-Chapel 
Hill (UNC) are the first at the uni-
versity to use a new, Web-based 
LifeTime Library, the brainchild of 
Gary Marchionini, dean and Cary 
C. Boshamer Distinguished Pro-
fessor at the school. Since arriving 



November 2011 565 C&RL News

at UNC in 1998, Marchionini has pondered 
ways to allow students to keep their digital 
files where they can access them whenever 
they need them for as long as they need 
them, before and after graduation.

“The vision is for students to be provided 
with storage facilities that would persist after 
they graduate,” Marchionini said. “This would 
include public space as well as private space 
to keep files, photographs, health records, 
and legal downloads of music—all in one 
place.”

Anything the library user wanted to make 
private would be password-protected, as 
long as it falls within the university’s terms-
of-service agreement for use of computing 
resources. Even so, users can search the 
Internet for medical information filtered by 
their private health information. Graduates 
could access their projects and class work 
for job interviews and career projects. Two 
years in the making, the LifeTime Library was 
developed with funded by the National Sci-
ence Foundation and other sources. 

“Railroads and the Transformation of 
Capitalism” exhibit
“Railroads and the Transformation of Capi-
talism,” an exhibition organized by Baker Li-
brary Historical Collections, recently opened 
at the Harvard University Business School 
Baker Library/Bloomberg Center. In the 
mid-to-late 19th century United States, more 
than 240,000 miles of railroad track was 
laid, connecting vast regions of the country, 
transporting raw materials, goods, and peo-
ple, and making possible an unparalleled 
level of commerce. The railroad system, un-
precedented in its size and complexity, be-
came the model on which modern business 
would be based. 

“Railroads and the Transformation of 
Capitalism” draws from Baker Library 
Historical Collections materials to explore 
the continuing research in the history and 
role of railroads in creating not only the 
foundations of modern business, but also a 
system of modern capitalism that survives 
to this day. 

Visit www.library.hbs.edu/hc/railroads/ to 
learn more about the railroads and capitalism, 
to find materials that could support further 
research, and to view some of the items fea-
tured in this exhibition. 

OCLC Research and OhioLINK release 
book usage patterns report 
OhioLINK and OCLC Research have released 
a report of, and the data set used in, a joint 
study of OhioLINK circulation, to better un-
derstand the usage patterns of books in aca-
demic libraries and support further research 
in this area. The study, which incorporated 
usage data from 2007 to 2008, was limited to 
books and manuscripts because these mate-
rials typically circulate, and circulation is a 
significant element in evaluating collections. 

The report, OhioLINK—OCLC Collection 
and Circulation Analysis Project 2011, pro-
vides an overview of the study, a description 
of how the data was analyzed and made avail-
able, and suggested uses for the data. The 
report is accompanied online by an extensive 
set of Excel spreadsheets that analyze the us-
age patterns observed in the study.

The data used in the report was from a 
collaborative OCLC-OhioLINK Collection 
and Circulation Analysis project that joined 
OhioLINK circulation data with WorldCat 
bibliographic records to produce a base file 
of circulation records for nearly 30 million 
different books. Ninety institutions partici-
pated in the study, including 16 universities, 
23 community/technical colleges, 50 private 
colleges, and the State Library of Ohio. 

The dataset generated by the project has 
also been made publicly available under the 
Open Data Commons Attribution license (an 
open license) to download for study and 
research. The report and dataset are avail-
able at www.oclc.org/research/publications 
/library/2011/2011-06r.htm.

ProQuest expands Historical 
Newspaper collection 
ProQuest has added digitized collections of 
historic American Jewish and regional news-
papers to its Historical Newspaper collection.
Available now are The Jewish Advocate and 
The American Hebrew/Jewish Messenger. Re-
gional coverage in Historical Newspapers will 
expand with Newsday (1940 through 1984), 
best known for its local coverage of New 
York’s Long Island area post World War II, and 
the Cincinnati Enquirer (1841 through 1922), 
a key newspaper covering the high growth pe-
riod of the Ohio River Valley region.

More information is available at www.
proquest.com.