News from the Field

David Free

GPO Joins Digital Preservation Coalition

The US Government Publishing Office (GPO) has joined the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), an international charitable foundation that supports digital preservation. GPO is joining a growing DPC community with 170 members in 24 countries worldwide. The DPC helps its members deliver resilient long-term access to digital content, such as that on GPO’s GovInfo, the one-stop site for authentic, published information for all three branches of the federal government.

“GPO remains committed to standards-based approaches to digital preservation, and joining the DPC is another way GPO delivers on its vision of an America Informed,” said GPO Director Hugh Nathanial Halpern. “Joining this community means GPO will learn from other leading organizations and contribute our expertise to the community. Ultimately, efforts like this help us serve the American public.”

GPO’s GovInfo is one of two organizations in the world to be designated as an ISO 16363 Trustworthy Digital Repository. GPO achieved the certification by meeting rigorous criteria for trustworthy digital repositories as defined by experts in the field. GovInfo also earned a CoreTrustSeal certification for the first time in 2024.

Carolina Consortium, Elsevier Announce Read and Publish Agreement

Elsevier and The Carolina Consortium recently announced a new Read and Publish agreement for 2025. The three-year agreement underscores the consortium’s commitment to empowering its member institutions with seamless access to scholarly content and sustainable publishing options. The proposed agreement will enable 17 participating institutions to access the latest high-quality scientific content while supporting authors in publishing their work open access, fostering greater visibility and impact of their research.

“We are excited to have the Carolina Consortium and Elsevier come together on an agreement that meets the collective needs of our diverse member libraries while expanding options for our researchers to make their work openly available,” said North Carolina State University Senior Vice Provost and Director of Libraries Greg Raschke. “This agreement represents some of the major benefits achieved by the Carolina Consortium by collaborating at a broad scale.”

This hybrid model aligns with the global transition toward open access, promoting equitable knowledge dissemination and innovation.

New from ACRL—Instructional Design for Teaching Information Literacy Online: A Student-Centered Approach

ACRL announces the publication of Instructional Design for Teaching Information Literacy Online: A Student-Centered Approach, by Janna Mattson, David X. Lemmons, Valerie Linsinbigler, and Christopher Lowder, offering learning activities, lesson plans, worksheets, and more to help you rapidly design effective online instruction.

Demand for online classes in higher education is growing. And whether you’re a seasoned library instructor adapting to more online instruction or a new librarian learning about instruction for the first time, you’re probably expected to be equally skilled in both face-to-face and online classrooms.

Instructional Design for Teaching Information Literacy Online introduces light-hearted tips and advice with author-curated playlists and practical tips on rapidly designing online instruction. It offers scenarios, learning activities, lesson plan examples, rubrics, worksheets, and more, using the classic instructional design model ADDIE to frame the process and the universal design for learning framework, the community of inquiry model, and asset-based pedagogy to address the social and emotional needs of diverse online learners. Six parts offer a theoretical grounding, practical resources, and the enhanced confidence and skills needed to create successful learning experiences:

• Foundational Knowledge
• Analysis
• Design
• Development
• Implementation
• Evaluation

Online learning can be an opportunity to extend our reach and connection to our students and help them learn what they need to succeed. Instructional Design for Teaching Information Literacy Online provides a learner-centered approach to online instruction for both students and teachers.

Instructional Design for Teaching Information Literacy Online: A Student-Centered Approach 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 US or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.

Paradigm, Penn Press Announce Digitization Partnership

Paradigm Publishing Services, a division of De Gruyter Brill, a family-owned publisher headquartered in Berlin since 1749, is partnering with the University of Pennsylvania Press to digitize the backlist of their distribution client, The American Philosophical Society Press (APS Press), the oldest continuously operating scholarly press in North America (since 1743). Some of the APS Press’s oldest published titles, including the first 27 volumes of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, will be digitized in Paradigm’s Boston office, as will writings from Benjamin Franklin, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and anthropologist Margaret Mead, among others. De Gruyter Brill will hold library distribution rights to the content for three years.

The APS recently joined forces with Penn Press to distribute and market the books and journals published by the APS Press. Both the APS and Penn Press are products of Benjamin Franklin’s fertile imagination, and this new partnership brings together the distinctive strengths of two pillars of Philadelphia’s intellectual landscape.

UPLOpen Adds 10,000th Open Access Monograph

The De Gruyter eBound Foundation also recently announced a major milestone for University Press Library Open (UPLOpen), its comprehensive open access initiative and ebook platform. Launched in April 2024 with a goal of drawing attention to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), UPLOpen now hosts 10,000 open access titles from more than 50 prestigious academic publishers.

The diverse collection of titles on UPLOpen cover a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. A large number of these are new or recently published titles, and more than 1,800 have a copyright date of 2023 or later. Among the publishers represented in UPLOpen are Chicago, Cornell, Duke, NYU, Penn, Stanford, Toronto, De Gruyter, Edinburgh, Manchester, London School of Economics (LSE), Helsinki, and Stockholm. UPLOpen is also home to two unique and complete series collections: Luminos, from the University of California Press, and Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME), a five-year pilot project of the Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, and Association of University Presses. Learn more at https://uplopen.com/.

New from ACRL—From Interrogation to Integration: Centering Social Justice in Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation

ACRL announces the publication of From Interrogation to Integration: Centering Social Justice in Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation, edited by Kim Hoffman and Rachel Makarowski, offering accessible, low-cost solutions from authors who have grappled directly with the legacy of harm present in their own institutions.

From their inception, special collections and archives have memorialized the lives of people in power, serving as a tool to preserve the status quo and perpetuate systemic oppression. In five prescriptive sections, From Interrogation to Integration: Centering Social Justice in Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation collects case studies, research projects, lesson plans, stories, practical strategies, and color illustrations:

• Research
• Description
• Preservation and Access
• Outreach
• Instruction

Centering social justice in our daily practice and tasks is a form of resistance against external pressures. From Interrogation to Integration contributes to ongoing efforts to create a more inclusive, diverse, just, and equitable profession while acknowledging both the scale and complexity of that work.

From Interrogation to Integration: Centering Social Justice in Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation 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 US or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.

Springshare Acquires CareerShift

Springshare recently announced the acquisition of CareerShift, a software platform that helps students with job search, career, and company research. Springshare acquired CareerShift from Student Playbook LLC who, after this divestiture, will focus on serving the alumni associations market. CareerShift will operate as an independent brand under Springshare’s corporate umbrella. Springshare will provide investment, resources, and assistance to grow the CareerShift software platform to realize its full potential as a must-have job and career seeking resource for students and library patrons. More details about this acquisition and any potential impact on customers of both CareerShift and Springshare are available as FAQs on the Springshare website at https://springshare.com/careershift-faq.html.

ARL Publishes Annual Impact Report 2024

2024 was an eventful year for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and its membership of research libraries and archives in major public and private universities, federal government agencies, and large public institutions in Canada and the United States. ARL’s 2024 impact report enumerates the vibrant engagement of ARL’s membership that empowers and advocates for research libraries and archives to shape, influence, and implement institutional, national, and international policy and develop the next generation of leaders. The report also demonstrates the value created by and for membership in an association that works collaboratively with many other organizations to advance equitable access to knowledge. The report is available on the ARL website at https://www.arl.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ARL-Annual-Impact-Report-2024.pdf.