ARL News

image © François ProulxToday, dozens of civil liberties organizations and Internet companies—including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ThoughtWorks, and Americans for Limited Government—have joined the coalition demanding that Congress initiate a full-scale investigation into the National Security Agency (NSA)’s surveillance programs. The coalition includes ARL, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many other organizations and companies concerned with privacy and civil liberties. 

image © MacroMiracleARL invites participation in the MINES for Libraries survey in 2013–2014. Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services (MINES for Libraries, or MINES) is an online, transaction-based survey that collects data on user demographics and the purpose of use of e-resources. The MINES project utilizes a point-of-use survey technique and integrates usage data about such electronic resources as digital collections, open access journals, pre-print and post-print servers, and institutional repositories to provide an inclusive picture of the library’s supported networked e-resources. MINES has been administered at more than 50 North American libraries since 2003, surveying more than 100,000 networked services users.

Davita Vance-Cooks, photo courtesy GPOOn June 11, ARL joined the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Library Association (ALA), Medical Library Association (MLA), and Special Libraries Association (SLA) in a letter (PDF) to the US Senate Committee on Rules & Administration supporting President Obama's nomination of Acting Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks for Public Printer of the United States. The Public Printer oversees the US Government Printing Office (GPO). If confirmed, Vance-Cooks would be the first woman and first African American to head the GPO.

image © Jordon CooperARL and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) will sponsor a workshop on using evidence for assessment and evaluation as part of the Seventh International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference (EBLIP 7) in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. This preconference session will be held on Monday, July 15, 2013, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

image © François ProulxYesterday, ARL joined with a broad, bipartisan coalition of 86 organizations and Internet companies—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reddit, Mozilla, and the American Civil Liberties Union—to send a letter to Congress demanding swift investigation and reform in light of the recent revelations about unchecked global surveillance.

McMaster U Library staff with Elliott Shore, photo by John FinkARL executive director Elliott Shore has embarked on a "listening tour" of ARL member libraries. This is the sixth in a series of informal reports from his visits.

Last month my listening tour of ARL libraries took me to University of Toronto, York University, and McMaster University, where I met with Larry Alford, Cynthia Archer, and Vivian Lewis (a former ARL RLLF fellow) and their respective staffs.

ARL will offer a workshop about acting on LibQUAL+ survey results, led by Martha Kyrillidou, ARL director of statistics and service quality programs; Lisa Hinchliffe, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Raynna Bowlby, ARL consultant. “Using LibQUAL+® Effectively and Strategically” will be held over two half days, October 22–23, 2013, in conjunction with the Southeastern Library Assessment Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

image © Niklas WikströmARL, the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) have drafted a proposal, “SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE)” (PDF), in response to the recent White House directive on public access to federally funded research and data.

On May 30, ARL joined the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Library Association (ALA), Medical Library Association (MLA), and Special Libraries Association (SLA) in a letter (PDF) to the Committee on House Administration, thanking the committee for rejecting the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) recommendation that the US Government Printing Office (GPO) consider charging public user fees for access to government documents via the Federal Digital System (FDsys).

ARL has published Research Library Issues (RLI) no. 282, which features articles on ARL library budgets over the past two years, subscriptions to journal collections from large publishers, and the impact of the changing roles of librarians on reference staffing. A pre-publication version of the article about journal bundles was released earlier this year.

The complete table of contents with links to the articles follows: