News from the Field

David Free

Revised Standards for Libraries in Higher Education

The ACRL Board of Directors has approved a revision of the association’s Standards for Libraries in Higher Education (SLHE). SLHE, adopted in 2004 and previously revised in 2011, is designed to guide academic libraries in advancing and sustaining their role as partners in educating students, achieving their institutions’ missions, and positioning libraries as leaders in assessment and continuous improvement on their campuses. The standards are a framework for library planning and assessment, particularly in regard to providing guiding principles, performance indicators, outcomes, and metrics for libraries to use in a variety of circumstances as they work with faculty and students in a higher education setting, achieving and measuring institutional learning outcomes.

The revised version of SLHE will become part of ACRL’s Planning, Assessing, and Communicating Library Impact: Putting the Standards for Libraries in Higher Education into Action RoadShow workshop beginning in May 2018. Additional opportunities to learn more about the revised SLHE are forthcoming. The revised standards are freely available on the ACRL website at www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries.

William and Mary Libraries, Williamsburg Regional Library expand access

In celebration of National Library Week 2018, the College of William & Mary (WM) Libraries and the Williamsburg Regional Library (WRL) announced a partnership that will significantly benefit local residents and the WM community by expanding access to library resources. A key element of the partnership is its reciprocal borrowing privileges agreement, which provides unprecedented access to the collections at both library systems. Individuals can now receive borrowing privileges at WM Libraries at no cost, and, likewise, WM students, faculty, and staff can receive library privileges at WRL with their WM identification, including those who do not live in Williamsburg, James City County, or York County. WM Libraries and WRL will also be working together on a variety of projects to include community programming and ILL service expansion. For more information, visit WM Libraries at https://libraries.wm.edu/ or WRL at www.wrl.org/.

OhioLINK partners for textbook savings

Ohio’s efforts to make higher education more affordable for all students include strategies to reduce the cost of textbooks, and a new price agreement with four major textbook publishers has the potential to save students $39.7 million each year. The agreement was announced by OhioLINK, a consortium of 120 academic libraries distributed among 91 Ohio colleges and universities, and part of the Ohio Department of Higher Education’s OH-TECH consortium.

OhioLINK concentrated on publishers with demonstrated cost savings across its 91 higher education institutions, with priority given to high enrollment in lower division courses and a title catalog widely assigned in Ohio.

This first round of wholesale price agreements includes four of the “big five” global academic publishers: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson, and Macmillan Learning. These agreements will reduce the wholesale price of e-textbooks to participating colleges and retailers by up to 80 percent and courseware by up to 55 percent, with the potential for nearly $40 million in direct annual savings to Ohio’s college students.

ACRL selects consultants for research environment and scholarly communication system project

ACRL has selected the team of Rebecca R. Kennison (principal, K|N Consultants Ltd.) and Nancy L. Maron (founder, BlueSky to BluePrint, LLC) to design, develop, and deliver a new report on effective and promising practices within the research environment and scholarly communication system and identify areas where further research is needed. The researchers will be particularly looking to include the perspectives of historically underrepresented communities to expand the profession’s understanding of these environments and systems.

The team was selected after an open and competitive request for proposals to investigate and write an action-oriented report that provides an update on progress since the publication of ACRL’s 2007 white paper “Establishing a Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication: A Call for Community Engagement.”

This new report will provide an overview of trends, identify effective and promising practices, and delineate important questions where deeper inquiry is needed to accelerate the transition to more open, inclusive, and equitable systems of scholarship. The project will be informed by interviews, a review of the scholarly literature, advances in practice, and focus groups with diverse voices across the profession. The team will work closely with ACRL’s Research and Scholarly Environment Committee, as well as targeted participants in the interviews and focus groups and the broader community via open public forums to share progress and solicit feedback.

Open Dissertations Project launches

Open Dissertations, a project from EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) and BiblioLabs, has gone live. More than 800,000 electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) are now available for public search and discovery, with more than 1 million expected by June 2018. EBSCO Open Dissertations is committed to providing open and free access to ETD metadata and content. In addition to the fully open website, EBSCO will include ETD metadata in EBSCO Discovery Service to facilitate access and improve content discovery for researchers. With more and more universities now hosting and distributing their own ETDs on the open web, EBSCO and BiblioLabs have created a service that freely aggregates and exposes this content. To learn more about the Open Dissertations project, visit www.opendissertations.org.

CLIR names 2018 Mellon dissertation fellows

Fifteen graduate students have been selected to receive awards this year under the Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research in Original Sources program, administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The fellowships are intended to help graduate students in the humanities and related social science fields pursue research wherever relevant sources are available; gain skill and creativity in using primary source materials in libraries, archives, museums, and related repositories; and provide suggestions to CLIR about how such source materials can be made more accessible and useful. Complete details, including a list of recipients, is available on the CLIR website at www.clir.org/fellowships/mellon/.