News from the Field

David Free

PIL Launches Research Scholars Program

Want to hone your information literacy research skills? Project Information Literacy (PIL) is offering a new “PIL Mid-Career Research Scholars Program: The Climate Change Study” three-month virtual course from January through March 2025. The course is a professional education program for mid-career professionals and faculty in librarianship, user experience, new media, data science, communication, and inter-related fields, who have published research articles and have some experience and training with research methods. The small seminar-style course will be taught by longtime senior PIL researchers Alison Head, Steven Geofrey, and Kirsten Hostetler. The approach will be hands-on and the Report and Data Dashboard from PIL’s latest climate study will be the textbook. The course will be limited to enrollment of five-to-six PIL Fellows who will explore and work on research projects of their own. A Certificate of Completion will be given to all who complete the course. Visit the program page at https://bit.ly/3MnFFlV for complete details, includes an application form. Applications are due at 5 pm Eastern on November 8, 2024. Applicants will be notified of a decision by November 25, 2024.

Big Ten Academic Alliance, Next Generation Library Publishing Launch Pilot Project

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) recently announced a partnership with the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project to test and expand state-of-the-art infrastructure solutions for our academy-owned scholarly publishing programs that are open source, community-led, and grounded in academic values. To enable greater discovery, dissemination, and preservation of BTAA-published content, the pilot project will create a single aggregate discovery layer for the many disparate publishing platforms of the participating libraries, enabling an experience of them as a single, shared collection of published open access materials.

Through this BTAA-funded pilot project, Penn State University Libraries and Indiana University Libraries will work with the NGLP team to advance their infrastructure and service models by implementing a scoped instance of its modular, open-source display layer, Meru, specifically for the BTAA. The pilot project will involve migrating select, diverse content types from the publishing partners’ catalogs into the NGLP ecosystem, implementing interface design improvements, and expanding the types of content that can be displayed. The BTAA-NGLP project envisions at-scale solutions that support and strengthen academy-owned scholarly publishers. This work is also a part of a broader effort, undertaken by BTAA, the California Digital Library, and Lyrasis to advance Diamond Open Access publishing in the US.

Penn State Debuts New Open Access Journal

Penn State University Libraries Open Publishing has launched Geomorphica, a Diamond Open Access journal that promotes discourse and disseminates research in geomorphology, the study of landforms. Geomorphica is the only journal in its field that is free to access, read, and publish, as the Diamond Open Access model removes all author and reader fees that come with traditional academic journals. Geomorphica aims to publish content in the field of geomorphology, including but not limited to landscapes and landforms, earth and other planetary surface and near-surface processes, and the mechanisms, dynamics, and timescales pertaining to those processes. The first issue launched in May 2024. Beginning next year, the journal will move to publishing biannual issues. Editors are currently recruiting for submissions on a rolling basis. Learn more at https://journals.psu.edu/geomorphica/.

New from ACRL—Assessment and Advocacy: Using Project Outcome for Academic Libraries

ACRL announces the publication of Assessment and Advocacy: Using Project Outcome for Academic Libraries, edited by Gena Parsons-Diamond, demonstrating how a variety of libraries have used Project Outcome to make improvements in their practice and highlighting the value the toolkit has brought to institutions and the academic library profession.

Project Outcome for Academic Libraries (https://acrl.projectoutcome.org) is a free toolkit from ACRL designed to help academic libraries understand and share the impact of essential library programs and services. The toolkit provides simple surveys and an easy-to-use process for measuring and analyzing outcomes. The standardized surveys allow libraries to aggregate their outcome data, compare against similar institutions, and analyze trends over time by service topic and program type.

In celebration of Project Outcome’s fifth anniversary, Assessment and Advocacy: Using Project Outcome for Academic Libraries collects case studies that capture ways to use Project Outcome to make small changes, like the optimal arrangement of a library’s study room furniture, to using Project Outcome data in conversation with datasets from other sources to provide greater insights into the contributions of academic libraries to student learning and success. It also explores using Project Outcome to gather evidence that can be used in advocating for institutional, state, and federal funding.

Academic librarians know that their work makes a difference. You set students on the road to success and researchers on the road to results, providing valuable skills and access to knowledge that help our colleges and universities thrive. The challenge for libraries can be capturing meaningful data to support that story. Since 2019, the Project Outcome for Academic Libraries toolkit has helped library workers measure learning outcomes to drive change, make data-informed decisions, and demonstrate the impact and value of academic libraries. Learn how to use this data in your library, institution, and the profession with Assessment and Advocacy, all proceeds of which go to keeping Project Outcome free.

Assessment and Advocacy: Using Project Outcome for Academic 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.

ARL, CNI Release Deluxe Edition of AI Scenarios

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) have released the deluxe edition of the “ARL/CNI AI Scenarios: AI-Influenced Futures,” designed to empower stakeholders across the research enterprise by providing them with the tools and knowledge necessary to anticipate and shape the future direction of the research environment in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The deluxe edition includes a final scenario set that explores potential futures where AI plays a pivotal role, providing critical insights into the evolving challenges and opportunities for the research environment; summarizes community feedback gathered through focus groups and interviews about an AI-influenced future for the research environment that were held in winter 2023–24 and spring 2024; and features interviews with industry leaders that challenge conventional wisdom and stimulate stretch thinking with regards to an AI-influenced future. The publication is available at https://www.arl.org/resources/the-arl-cni-2035-scenarios-ai-influenced-futures-in-the-research-environment/.

EBSCO Launches Dyna AI for DynaMedex and Dynamic Health

EBSCO Information Services’ (EBSCO) Clinical Decisions has introduced the launch of Dyna AI, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) capability that surfaces the information clinicians need at the point of care faster than ever. Dyna AI will be available for Dynamic Health and DynaMedex, retrieving industry-leading, trusted evidence-based, expert-curated responses for clinicians, redefining clinical decision support. Today’s clinicians need quick access to high quality information to make the best decisions at the point of care. Using the highly curated, trusted resources of DynaMedex and Dynamic Health, Dyna AI uses a retrieval augmented generation framework to bring concise, actionable, reliable answers to clinical questions. Information presented by Dyna AI adheres to the Clinical Decisions’ Principles for the Responsible Use of AI: Quality, Security and Patient Privacy, Transparency, Governance and Equity. Learn more at https://more.ebsco.com/Dyna-AI.html.

New from ACRL—Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices

ACRL announces the publication of Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices, edited by Kathryn Houk, Jordan Nielsen, and Jenny Wong-Welch. This collection can help you center equity in your hiring, attract job seekers, and support both candidates and search committees through these time-intensive, laborious, and crucial processes.

Rather than focusing just on how to diversify applicant pools, Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices breaks down the many considerations involved in hiring and the intentional, thoughtful preparation and self-examination that leads to successful recruitment and retention in three parts:

1. Training for Search Committees and Stakeholders
2. Removing Barriers for Candidates
3. Transforming the Process for All

Throughout are practical solutions for emphasizing inclusivity and accessibility through the hiring process, including instructions and examples for developing the position description and job postings, tips for creating diversity statements, interview instructions and preparation lists, interview itineraries, sample candidate emails and feedback forms, evaluation rubrics, ideas for onboarding and mentorship, and more.

Academic library hiring can be a bureaucratic and exclusionary process. Inclusive hiring practices can help libraries recenter the people in the process and incorporate transparency, empathy, and accessibility.

Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices 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.

JSTOR Announces Artstor on JSTOR

The JSTOR platform is now the official home for the complete Artstor Digital Library, a collection of rights-cleared images and media for use in teaching and research. Comprising more than 2 million images, videos, panoramas, and audio files contributed by museums, galleries, and other cultural organizations around the world, the collection is now known as Artstor on JSTOR, signaling the collection’s deep integration with the more than 2,800 journals, 100,000 books, 50,000 research reports, and robust primary source collections accessible on JSTOR. JSTOR has also been optimized for working with images, offering features such as image-only and cross-content searching, options for comparing and presenting images, and more. Learn more about Artstor on JSTOR at https://about.jstor.org/librarians/artstor/.

GPO Adds Partner Libraries

The libraries at Colgate University and the University of Idaho have signed Memorandums of Agreement with the US Government Publishing Office (GPO) to become Preservation Stewards, and libraries at the Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge and Colorado School of Mines have expanded their partnerships with GPO. To help libraries meet the needs of efficient government document stewardship in the digital era, GPO has established Preservation Stewards to support continued public access to US government documents in print format. These libraries join the 50 Preservation Steward partners that contribute significantly to the effort to preserve printed documents. Through the agreement, many libraries also serve as digital access partners providing digital access to government information.