ARL News

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:

HathiTrustOn June 3, the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) filed an amicus brief (PDF) in support of HathiTrust and its partners as they defend their district court victory on appeal in the Second Circuit. LCA consists of three major library associations—the American Library Association, ARL, and the Association of College and Research Libraries—that collectively represent over 300,000 information professionals and thousands of libraries of all kinds throughout the US and Canada.

Tricia DonovanTricia Donovan has resigned as communications and project coordinator at ARL, effective June 28, 2013. She is taking the position of coordinator of professional education and project support at the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies.

NDD United: Stop the Cuts videoNDD United—a campaign representing 3,200 organizations, including ARL, working to stop budget cuts to core US government functions—has released a 3-minute video that explains the impact of disproportionate cuts in non-defense discretionary (NDD) programs, including education, employment and training, research, public health, public safety, housing, social services, infrastructure, and environmental protection.

image © Julian BurgessARL invites participation in the ClimateQUAL survey in 2013. The online survey collects information about: (a) library staff perceptions of the organization’s commitment to the principles of diversity, (b) staff perceptions of organizational policies and procedures, and (c) staff attitudes. The survey addresses such issues as diversity, teamwork, learning, fairness, current managerial practices, and staff attitudes and beliefs.