News from the Field

David Free

Proposed ACRL Bylaws Revisions

The ACRL Board of Directors is pleased to notify membership that the ballot for the spring 2024 ALA/ACRL election will include a membership vote on proposed amendments to the ACRL Bylaws (https://www.ala.org/acrl/acrl-bylaws).

The proposed revisions (https://bit.ly/47KrPCx) seek to align the ACRL Bylaws with current ALA and ACRL policies along with defining action for special elections. After forming a Board Working Group in June 2023, the ACRL Board of Directors in December 2023 approved a recommendation for a membership vote on the following ACRL Bylaws amendments:

• Article VII Budget and Finance Committee Chair: Revised to reflect current Board-approved term length of up to ten consecutive appointed years on the Budget and Finance Committee and five consecutive years on the Board.
• Article IX Board of Directors, Section 5: Removed references to “Midwinter” and replaced language to reflect quarterly meetings. Revised language regarding “virtual meetings.”
• Article XI Nominations, Section 1: Added language to reflect Leadership Recruitment and Nomination Committee (LRNC) actions for special elections.
• Article XIII Elections, Section 2: Added language in a new sub-section regarding special election actions for Vice-President/President-Elect and Councilor positions.
• Article XVIII Mail and Electronic Votes, Sections 1, 2, and 3: Updated language to align with ALA’s policy/protocol regarding mail ballots for membership votes.

All ACRL members are encouraged to participate in the upcoming election, which will be held March 11 to April 2, 2024. To be eligible to vote, individuals must have been members in good standing of ALA and ACRL as of January 31, 2024. Voting instructions will be mailed to eligible members by March 12, 2024.

The Bylaws Working Group included Board Directors-at-Large Jessica Brangiel and Rebecca Miller Waltz, Past-President Erin L. Ellis, and ACRL Interim Executive Director Allison Payne. The Board is grateful for their contributions in preparing these revisions.

CUPA-HR Trends in Diversity and Pay Equity From 2002 to 2022 Report Releases

CUPA-HR recently published Higher Ed Administrators: Trends in Diversity and Pay Equity From 2002 to 2022, a new research report highlighting trends in representation and pay equity by gender among higher education administrators from 2002 to 2022, as well as trends in composition and pay equity by race/ethnicity and gender within the higher ed administrator workforce over the past 10 years.

Data show that while some progress has been made, gaps in pay and representation are still prevalent. For example, while the number of women serving in top leadership roles in the nation’s colleges and universities has steadily increased over the past two decades, they still are not paid equitably to men serving in the same roles. The study also found that between 2012 and 2022, the representation of people of color in higher-ed administration increased by 41 percent and the median pay ratio of all administrator positions was higher in 2022 than it was in 2012, though changes in pay equity were larger for some groups and far smaller for others. Read the full report and explore the interactive graphics at https://www.cupahr.org/surveys/research-briefs/higher-ed-administrators-trends-in-diversity-pay-equity-november-2023/.

2022 Digitizing Hidden Collections Symposium Proceedings Now Available from CLIR

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has released the proceedings from the 2022 Digitizing Hidden Collections Symposium. Titled Learning from and Making Use of Digitized Hidden Collections, this collection of papers celebrates the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives program, generously funded by the Mellon Foundation since its inception in 2015. With more than $28 million distributed to date, the program has played a pivotal role in digitally capturing and sharing rare and unique materials stewarded by cultural memory organizations.

Edited by Nancy Adams, the volume features a keynote address by Michelle Caswell titled “‘So that Future Organizers Won’t Have to Reinvent the Wheel’: Activating Digital Archives for Liberatory Uses,” along with selected papers and an afterword by CLIR Program Officer Sharon M. Burney. The topics covered in the papers range from privacy protection and workflow implementation to exhibit creation and translation. The collection, available in PDF, is complemented by additional content such as videos, slides, and transcripts and is available at https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/learning-from-and-making-use-of-digitized-hidden-collections/.

New from ACRL: Empathy by Design: Empathy-Driven Marketing for Libraries

ACRL announces the publication of Empathy by Design: Empathy-Driven Marketing for Libraries by Sabine Jean Dantus, offering step-by-step strategies for understanding why people visit the library and tailoring your marketing with personalization that resonates with users on a deeper level.

The library is a universal resource where knowledge and information meet. To advertise this resource and advance equal access in positive ways, libraries must develop strategies, campaigns, and messages that show they care about the lives of their diverse communities.

Empathy by Design: Empathy-Driven Marketing for Libraries provides real-world solutions for understanding your target audience through empathy and demonstrates how to gather and use data to develop messages and programming that fosters meaningful connections and engagement. You’ll find ideas for understanding the customer journey, creating an empathic library brand, and creating empathy-driven marketing strategies, campaigns, content, and tactics.

Today’s library marketers should both understand the effectiveness of using empathy in marketing and use it as a radical tool for advancing our profession’s values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. The strategies outlined in Empathy by Design can give you the tools you need to make your marketing—and your library—more targeted and empathic.

Empathy by Design: Empathy-Driven Marketing for Libraries is available for purchase in print and as an ebook through the ALA Online Store; in print through Amazon.com; and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the United States or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.

Project MUSE Accelerates Move to Open with S2O

With more than 50 journals from more than 20 publishers already committed to participate, Project MUSE is poised to offer the largest Subscribe to Open (S2O) program to date, bringing open access to vital scholarship through an equitable and sustainable model that requires no author-side payments. MUSE’s S2O program is built around our familiar and trusted Journal Collections, making the transition from conventional subscriptions to support for open access seamless for libraries while providing revenue stability for nonprofit publishers. The program will launch with the calendar year 2025 subscription term, and more participating journals will be announced soon. Learn more at https://about.muse.jhu.edu/muse/s2o/.

ACRL Releases Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces

ACRL announces the publication of Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces, edited by Maggie Murphy, Stephanie Beene, Katie Greer, Sara Schumacher, and Dana Statton Thompson. This collection provides new ideas and inspiration for how to unframe, adapt, and apply visual literacy pedagogy and praxis in your work.

Visual literacy is an interconnected set of practices, habits, and values for participating in visual culture that can be developed through critical, ethical, reflective, and creative engagement with visual media. Approaches to teaching visual literacy in higher education must include a focus on context and not just content, process and not just product, impact and not just intent. Unframing is an approach to visual literacy pedagogy that acknowledges that visuals are a pervasive part of everyday life, as well as embedded into every scholarly discipline.

In four parts, Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces explores:

• Participating in a Changing Visual Information Landscape
• Perceiving Visuals as Communicating Information
• Practicing Visual Discernment and Criticality
• Pursuing Social Justice through Visual Practice

Twenty-four full-color chapters present a range of theoretical and practical approaches to visual literacy pedagogy that illustrate, connect with, extend, and criticize concepts from the Framework for Visual Literacy in Higher Education: Companion Document to the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Topics include using TikTok to begin a conversation on academic honesty and marginalization, supporting disciplines to move to multimodal public communication assignments, critical data visualization, and exclusionary practices in visual media.

Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces is available for purchase in print and as an ebook through the ALA Online Store; in print through Amazon.com; and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the United States or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.

Paradigm Launches University Press Library Open

Paradigm Publishing Services, the newly founded publishing services division of academic publisher De Gruyter, is taking a significant stride forward in shaping a financially sustainable business model for open access book publishing for its partner presses. In response to the call from the scholarly community, Paradigm Publishing Services, comprising the University Press Library Group and Ubiquity, in collaboration with their publishing partners and libraries, has announced the launch of the University Press Library Open (UPLO), a comprehensive open access initiative and ebook platform hosted by Ubiquity with a central focus on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

UPLO leverages insights gained from previous open access eBook initiatives such as TOME, Luminos, and Opening the Future while uniting the collective influence and prestige of more than 50 university press partners and more than 115 participating libraries, in addition to other vital stakeholders, including consortia, aggregators, vendors, and authors. This community-driven approach enables Paradigm Publishing Services to distribute the financial responsibilities more equitably across the scholarly publishing ecosystem, ensuring the long-term sustainability of open access book publishing. Learn more at https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/uplopen.