C&RL News March 2015 114

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

ACRL 2015 awards record-breaking 
179 scholarships
ACRL has awarded a record-breaking 179 
scholarships for the ACRL 2015 confer-
ence. Scholarships were awarded in six 
categories, including early- and mid-ca-
reer librarians, support staff and Spectrum 
Scholar travel grants, amounting to a total 
of $112,995. Funding for 75 of these schol-
arships (more than $56,000 in value) was 
raised through the ACRL 75th Anniversary 
Kick Start the Future Scholarship Campaign.

“I am thrilled with number of the scholar-
ships given for the conference and for the 
breadth of recipients,” noted ACRL 2015 
Conference Chair Lori Goetsch of Kansas 
State University. “Scholarship numbers in the 
early-career group greatly exceeded previous 
conferences, and I am very pleased that we 
were able to add the mid-career category for 
Portland.  The ACRL 75th anniversary cam-
paign for scholarships played a significant 
role in increasing the number of scholarships 
given, so thanks to all who contributed to 
that effort.” 

The association expresses its sincere 
appreciation to the individuals and groups 
who participated in the 75th anniversary 
campaign. Their support enables ACRL to 
build the skills and capacities of the next 
generation to serve the academic and 
research library profession and create a 
sustainable community. A full list of schol-
arship recipients is available on the ACRL 
2015 website at http://conference.acrl.org/
scholarships-pages-162.php.

Digital Dante
Columbia University Libraries/Informa-
tion Services' (CUL/IS) Center for Digital 
Research and Scholarship (CDRS), in col-
laboration with the Department of Italian 
and CUL/IS’ Humanities and History Divi-
sion, recently launched a new version of 
the Digital Dante website. The site is a pub-

licly accessible digital research resource on 
Dante’s works with a special focus on the 
Divine Comedy and its translations. 

The relaunched and enhanced website 
seeks to provide a venue for collaboration 
with scholars at other institutions and for new 
research and perspectives from the next gen-
eration of Dante scholars. Along with a new 
design showcasing images from Columbia’s 
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the web-
site features a number of new digital projects 

The new Digital Dante retains and ex-
pands upon many of the essential features of 
the original site: translations of Dante’s works 
with easily navigable primary and compari-
son texts, lecture audio and annotations, and 
criticism and context. Digital Dante is avail-
able at http://digitaldante.columbia.edu.

Synthesis of Assessment in Action 
team projects
ACRL has released a new report “Academic 
Library Contributions to Student Success: 
Documented Practices from the Field,” which 
synthesizes results from more than 70 high-
er education institutions from across North 
America that recently completed team-based 
assessment projects. These projects, from the 
first year of Assessment in Action: Academic 
Libraries and Student Success (AiA), resulted 
in promising and effective approaches to 
demonstrating the library’s value to students’ 
academic success. By demonstrating the vari-
ety of ways that libraries contribute to student 
learning and success, academic librarians are 
establishing connections between such aca-
demic success outcomes as student retention, 
persistence, GPA, engagement, graduation, 
career preparedness, and different aspects of 
the library (e.g., instruction, reference, space 
and facilities, and collections). 

The full report, an executive summary, and 
a database of team project descriptions are 
available through the AiA website at www.
ala.org/acrl/AiA. 



March 2015 115 C&RL News

Springfi eld College’s creative staffi  ng keeps library open

Springfi eld College’s Babson Library resort-
ed to some creative staffi ng during recent 
Massachusetts blizzards and storms. Use of 
student staff on-site and professional assis-
tance from home kept staff safe when roads 
were treacher-
ous.

New meth-
ods also pro-
vided patrons 
with high-qual-
ity assistance. 
When staff real-
ized that winter 
weather was 
bearing down, 
they developed 
a new strategy 
f o r  o p e n i n g 
t h e  l i b r a r y 
w i t h  “ s n o w 
students,” highly regarded student workers 
who would monitor the building and com-
municate with the assistant director at home.  

Student workers who lived on campus 
were able to staff the building. Commuter 
students used WhenToWork software to 

request substitutes, and other student work-
ers assisted their peers by fi lling the desk 
holes quickly. At home, reference librarians 
monitored virtual reference (chat, text, and 
email reference) from home all day. Staff took 

turns so that no 
one was unduly 
burdened, and 
par ticipation 
was voluntary.  
Librarians will 
receive com-
pensatory time.  

Springfield 
C o l l e g e  h a s 
nine regional 
campuses out-
side of Massa-
chusetts. To stu-
dents in Tampa 
or Charleston, 

a Massachusetts storm does not have much 
effect.  This method of using technology 
to communicate and provide research as-
sistance, as well as making judicious use of 
residential students, was a success for Babson 
Library this winter.

Orbis Cascade Alliance, Ex Libris 
launch shared resource management 
and discovery system
The Orbis Cascade Alliance, a consortium 
of 37 North American academic institutions, 
and Ex Libris Group recently announced 
completion of a two-year effort to migrate 
alliance members to a shared, next-gener-
ation library management and discovery 
solution. Alliance member libraries have 
migrated from 37 locally hosted systems 
comprised of four discovery and three ILS 
platforms to shared use of the cloud-based 
Alma unifi ed resource management solution 
and Primo discovery solution. 

“This is truly a collaborative project that 
could not have happened without the support 
of everyone across the alliance. We now share 
a system and there are so many possibilities 
for service, training, workfl ow and product 
knowledge and development,” stated Jane 
Carlin, chair of the alliance and library direc-
tor at the University of Puget Sound. 

Working in partnership, the alliance and 
Ex Libris each played critical roles in manag-
ing the complex migration of four cohorts 
comprised of 6-11 libraries, each cohort 
migrating over a six-month period. Beyond 
migration, the alliance and Ex Libris worked 
in partnership to create a new resource 

The Babson Library during a recent snow storm.



C&RL News March 2015 116

New ACRL publication explores The Living Library

ACRL announces the publication of The 
Living Library: An Intellectual Ecosystem
by Patricia Steele, David Cronrath, Sandra 
Parsons Vicchio, and Nancy Fried Foster.

The Living Library describes the evolu-
tion of one possible future 
for academic libraries—as 
laboratories for cross-disci-
plinary investigation. At the 
University of Maryland, a 
collaborative effort among 
the Libraries, the School of 
Architecture and the De-
partment of Anthropology 
led to the participation of 
students, faculty, and staff in 
an initiative to design a full 
renovation of the main library 
building with the guidance of 
professionals in anthropology 
and architecture. 

As part of the process, Anthropology stu-
dents and library faculty and staff investigated 
how the broader university community un-
dertakes its work in the library. Architecture 
students in graduate design studio analyzed 

the fi ndings along with the building and 
then created a series of designs to support 
faculty, student, and staff work practices. All 
of the work was reviewed by a leadership 
committee from a variety of disciplines.

The authors—the library 
director, the dean of architec-
ture, a practicing architect, 
and an applied anthropolo-
gist—describe the project, 
explain the methods and 
review the outcomes, sharing 
their particular experiences 
of the living library. The Liv-
ing Library is essential read-
ing for academic librarians 
interested in innovative build-
ing redesign and space usage.

The Living Library is avail-
able for purchase in print, as 

an e-book, and as a print/ e-book bundle 
through the ALA Online Store; in print and 
for Kindle through Amazon.com; and by 
telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the 
United States or (770) 442-8633 for interna-
tional customers.

sharing solution and to develop consortial 
functionality that will allow alliance member 
libraries to build on their 20-year history of 
shared work. 

ProQuest, UM, Oxford team to 
provide 25,000 early books as open 
access text
The full text of more than 25,000 titles from 
the ProQuest resource Early English Books 
Online (EEBO) are now openly available 
on the websites of the University of Michi-
gan Library and the Bodleian Libraries at 
the University of Oxford. The new open 
access titles are the result of work of the 
Text Creation Partnership (TCP), a long-

standing effort to transcribe early modern 
print books, creating standardized, accu-
rate XML/SGML encoded electronic text 
editions. Through funding from ProQuest, 
Jisc, and a collective of libraries, these text 
fi les are jointly owned by more than 150 
libraries worldwide, creating a signifi cant 
database of foundational scholarship. 

From the fi rst book published in English 
in 1473 through the age of Spenser and 
Shakespeare and on through works pro-
duced in 1699, EEBO’s collection contains 
more than 130,000 books that have been 
digitized, with fully searchable images of 
each page. The images, along with enhanced 
meta data added, fulfi ll even the most ex-



March 2015 117 C&RL News

Tech Bits . . .
Brought to you by the ACRL ULS Technol-
ogy in University Libraries Committee  

Are sticky notes threatening to take over your 
desk? If so, you might consider Trello, an elec-
tronic alternative for organizing projects, ideas, 
and committee work. With a free account, you 
can create boards for each of your projects. 
Within the board, you can create and organize 
“cards” into columns, enabling them to be re-
arranged and tracked via email notifications. You 
can share your boards, attach photos and files, 
assign tasks, and give editing rights to anyone 
with a Trello account. Library instruction plans 
and courses, web development, and systems 
troubleshooting are just a few areas where 
Trello might be useful for both individual and 
collaborative projects. In addition to the web, 
you can download the Trello app for iOS and 
Android devices.

— Britt Fagerheim
Utah State University

. . . Trello 
trello.com

haustive research requirements of 
graduate scholars in subject areas as 
diverse as English literature, history, 
philosophy, linguistics, theology, 
music, fine arts, education, math-
ematics, and science.

OCLC Research, ALISE name 
recipients of 2015 Library and 
Information Science Research 
Grants
OCLC Research and the Association 
for Library and Information Science 
Education (ALISE) have awarded re-
search grants to Matthew Griffis of 
the University of Southern Missis-
sippi, Jin Ha Lee of the University 
of Washington, and Eric Meyers of 
the University of British Columbia. 
OCLC/ALISE Library and Informa-
tion Science Research Grants sup-
port research that advances librari-
anship and information science, 
promotes independent research to 
help librarians integrate new tech-
nologies into areas of traditional 
competence, and contributes to a 
better understanding of the library 
environment.

Full-time academic faculty (or the equiva-
lent) in schools of library and information 
science worldwide are eligible to apply for 
grants of up to $15,000. Proposals are evalu-
ated by a panel selected by OCLC and ALISE. 
Supported projects are expected to be con-
ducted within approximately one year from 
the date of the award and, as a condition 
of the grant, researchers must furnish a final 
project report at the end of the grant period. 
More information about the OCLC/ALISE 
Library and Information Science Research 
Grant Program can be found at www.oclc.
org/research/grants.html. A list of previous 
grant recipients is at www.oclc.org/research/
grants/awarded.html.

EasyBib integrates with EBSCO 
resources
EBSCO information Services and EasyBib 

have made it possible to directly export ci-
tations from EBSCO resources to EasyBib. 
The integration creates an effortless way 
for students and researchers to ethically 
use their resources. EasyBib is an informa-
tion literacy platform that provides citation, 
note taking, and research tools. EBSCO 
provides research content through hun-
dreds of databases and historical archives, 
as well as the ability to explore the library’s 
collection through a single search box via 
EBSCO Discovery Service. 

With the EBSCO integration with 
EasyBib, library users simply have to se-
lect the article they want to cite from one 
of the hundreds of EBSCO databases, his-
torical archives, or EBSCO Discovery Ser-
vice and click on the EasyBib option in 
the export process. The user’s EasyBib ac-
count will open and allow the citation to 
be imported.