Community Updates

image © Thomas HawkToday the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced that the HathiTrust Digital Library will partner with DPLA to expand discovery and use of HathiTrust’s public domain and other openly available content. DPLA provides an online portal to freely available digital material held by libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. The HathiTrust Digital Library offers a collection of millions of titles digitized from academic and research institutions around the world. The new partnership doubles the size of the DPLA collection and provides a wider audience for the HathiTrust titles.

image © CRLLibrarians and library staff visiting Chicago for the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference later this month are invited to tour the Center for Research Libraires (CRL) collections and facility on Friday, June 28. This is an opportunity to see CRL's closed-stack library of rarely held material from around the world. CRL staff will be on hand to discuss new developments in their services, including digitization and offers for electronic resources, as well as expanded access to primary-source collections.

image © Matthew WhiteheadThe next SPARC Open Access Meeting, themed “Convergence,” will convene March 3–4, 2014, in Kansas City. The past year has seen growing momentum in the areas of open access, open data, and open educational resources. As the push for greater openness continues, these three fronts are converging in interesting and potentially transformative ways. Join us as leaders from the library community, academia, industry, student community, and other research avenues discuss how open access, open data, and open educational resources are intersecting, and the impact this convergence might have on research and discovery. The meeting is designed to emphasize collaborative actions that stakeholders can take to positively impact publishing, policy, digital repositories, author rights, and licensing.

Yesterday the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), through its National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), along with the University of Virginia Press launched a beta version of the Founders Online website. Founders Online provides free, searchable access to over 119,000 letters and other documents written and received by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. 

This spring the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) selected teams from 75 institutions, including 9 ARL member libraries, to participate in the first year of a new assessment program, Assessment in Action: Academic Libraries and Student Success (AiA). This is a three-year program funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and carried out by ACRL in partnership with the Association for Institutional Research and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

image © JanetandPhilCNI executive director Clifford Lynch discusses one possible future for American public libraries in a chapter of a new book edited by Joe Janes, Library in 2020: Today’s Leading Visionaries Describe Tomorrow’s Library. In his chapter, “The Public Library in 2020,” Lynch speculates about how public libraries will change over the next several years.

Also of interest is the recent interview of the book's editor, Joe Janes, by Andrew Richard Albanese for Publishers Weekly, “ALA 2013: The Library of 2020 Will Be…”

image © Right to Research CoalitionSPARC’s student initiative, the Right to Research Coalition, has released a video interview of Jack Andraka, a high school sophomore who won the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair with a breakthrough diagnostic for pancreatic cancer. Interviewed by Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Andraka discusses how open access articles and NIH’s PubMed Central played a key role in enabling his discovery.

John P. Wilkin
image © U MichiganJohn P. Wilkin, associate university librarian for publishing and technology at University of Michigan and executive director of HathiTrust, has been named university librarian and dean of libraries for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne (UIUC), effective August 16, 2013. His appointment is subject to approval by the university's board of trustees at its July 24 meeting. Wilkin will succeed Paula Kaufman, who has served as university librarian since 1999 and dean of libraries since 2007 and is stepping down on August 15. For more details, see the June 10 UIUC news article, “University of Michigan Associate Librarian to Lead U of I Libraries.”

image © CornellPrivacy and accessibility issues will be featured at this year's Cornell University Institute for Internet Culture, Policy, and Law (ICPL), to be held September 18–20, 2013, at Cornell. The oldest IT, law, and policy conference in the US, ICPL has broadened its reach to address rapidly evolving legal, policy, and social concerns related to Internet culture. The number of participants is limited to 50, allowing for in-depth exploration of topics. Faculty; higher ed administrators; academic librarians; and IT, legal, policy, and student life professionals debate, learn, and share ideas, experiences, and expertise at the three-day institute. 

This spring SPARC published a community resource, Article-Level Metrics: A SPARC Primer (PDF), by Greg Tananbaum. Article-level metrics (ALMs) are rapidly emerging as important tools to quantify how individual articles are being discussed, shared, and used. This SPARC primer provides an overview of what ALMs are, why they matter, how they complement established utilities and metrics, and how they might be considered for use in the tenure and promotion process.