News from the Field

David Free

Penn State presents information literacy awards

The Penn State University Libraries expanded its information literacy awards university-wide this year and honored 71 undergraduate students and three graduate students participating in their respective campus-wide research exhibition events. The university’s Undergraduate Exhibition, held at the University Park campus each spring, welcomes students from all campuses to participate. University Libraries faculty librarians created and presented the Information Literacy Award to recognize those student participants whose original scholarly work demonstrates careful background research using primary resources, or a bibliography or literature review of research, in a relevant field of study. In recent years, individual libraries among Penn State’s Commonwealth Campuses began expanding the award program beyond University Park. This year, the program was established at nearly all of Penn State’s undergraduate degree-granting campuses. A full list of award recipients is available at https://bit.ly/2l4f0Ok.

Newberry Library releases 200,000 digital images from Americana collections

For decades, the Newberry Library has been a physical destination for the study of early America and the westward expansion of the United States. And it’s increasingly becoming a digital destination, as well. Now anyone with an Internet connection can access more than 200,000 high-resolution images from a range of primary sources—maps, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, photographs, and artwork—documenting Europeans’ evolving conception of the Americas, early contact between colonial forces and Indigenous peoples, the expanding boundaries of the United States, and the imaginary construction of “the West.” These images come from the Edward E. Ayer Collection, one of the strongest collections of American Indian history and culture in the world; and the Everett D. Graff Collection, a substantial aggregation of Western Americana that ranks among the most extensive in the country.

Together, the two collections allow users to explore the complex history of America from a variety of perspectives: colonizers, missionaries, government officials, immigrant families living on the American frontier, Cheyenne warrior-artists resisting U.S. expansion, dime novelists weaving stories about Jesse James and Billy the Kid, and Indigenous leaders grappling with questions of identity, tradition, and political expediency.

The availability of the Ayer and Graff collections online coincides with a new open access policy recently implemented at the Newberry. Under the policy, users can share and re-use images derived from the library’s collection for any purpose without having to pay licensing or permissions fees to the Newberry. There are currently more than 1.7 million Newberry digital images freely accessible online. More information is available at www.newberry.org/digital-newberry.

Temple University joins Portico

Portico has announced that Temple University has joined its ejournal and ebook preservation services. Temple joins more than 1,000 libraries around the world that support digital preservation—including more than 80% of Association of Research Library members.

To date, 1,023 libraries from 21 countries participate in Portico. More than 500 publishers, representing more than 2,000 societies and associations, also participate. The Portico archive holds more than 1.4 billion files—with more than 900,000 ebooks and 26,000 ejournals. More information is available at www.portico.org.

FEDLINK announces annual awards for federal librarianship

The Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK) at the Library of Congress announced the winners of its national awards for federal librarianship at the FEDLINK Spring Exposition in Washington, D.C.

The awards recognize the many innovative ways that federal libraries, librarians, and library technicians fulfill the information demands of the government, business and scholarly communities, and the American public.

The 2017 FEDLINK award winners are recognized in the following categories:

• Federal Libraries/Information Centers of the Year—Large Library/Information Center: U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Library, Vicksburg, Mississippi.
• Federal Libraries/Information Centers of the Year—Small Library/Information Center: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Library, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
• Federal Librarian of the Year: Edward J. Poletti, chief of Learning Resources at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System, John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas.
• Federal Library Technician of the Year: Ozella Lee Gates, library technician at Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Command in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

For the latest information on the awards, please see the FEDLINK website at loc.gov/flicc/.

CLIR Recordings at Risk grants

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) recently announced that 16 institutions have been awarded Recordings at Risk grants in the program’s third grant cycle. Recordings at Risk is a national regranting program that supports the preservation of rare and unique audio and audiovisual content of high scholarly value. Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Recordings at Risk will award a total of $2.3 million between January 2017 and April 2019. More detail on this year’s funded projects can be found at www.clir.org/recordings-at-risk/funded-projects/.

Library Assessment Conference travel grants

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is accepting applications for ten $1,000 scholarships for attendance at the 2018 Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment in to be held December 5-7, 2018, in Houston, Texas. Each award will include conference registration plus $1,000 to cover travel costs and/or workshop registration fees. The Library Assessment Conference builds and furthers the library assessment community by bringing together interested practitioners and researchers who have responsibility or interest in the broad field of library assessment. Since 2014, scholarships have been awarded to individuals from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to attend the conference. Applications are due Friday, August 3, 2018. Complete details, including eligibility requirements, are available on the ARL website at https://bit.ly/2sUnH1Y.

EBSCO, Five Colleges Consortium announce EBSCO FOLIO beta partnership

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) and the Five Colleges Consortium have agreed to an EBSCO FOLIO Beta Partnership. The consortium includes Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. These institutions will leverage the FOLIO Library Services Platform in a variety of institutional scenarios. FOLIO, which stands for the Future of Libraries is Open, is a community coming together to develop a reimagined library services platform, one that supports traditional resource management requirements and functionality, yet is engineered for innovation and growth through industry collaboration. FOLIO allows for extensibility into new services for libraries and will dramatically change the technology ecosystem available to libraries, service providers, and technology developers. More information about FOLIO is available at www.folio.org/.