To: ARL Directors
From: Duane Webster
Re: October–November 2006 E-News for ARL Directors
Note: We are experimenting with a new format for E-News: the e-mail now contains a summary version of the full E-News, which is available in its entirety on the ARL Web site in HTML and PDF form. Your feedback on this format will be appreciated.
These news notes are organized by the strategic directions identified in the ARL Strategic Plan: Scholarly Communication; Public Policies Affecting Research Libraries; and the Library Role in Research, Teaching, and Learning. In addition, there is an initial section for Governance and Membership Activities and complementary sections on Diversity, Professional Workforce, and Leadership Development; Library Statistics and Assessment; and Other Items of Interest to ARL Directors. E-News for ARL Directors: Part One is a collaboration of ARL program staff, compiled and edited by Duane Webster (duane@arl.org) and Kaylyn Hipps (kaylyn@arl.org).
You are encouraged to route the E-News to your staff and others in your institution.
1. ARL Membership Convenes in Washington, DC, October 18–19
2. Highlights of the ARL Business Meeting, October 19
3. HIghlights of the ARL Board of Directors Meetings, October 17 and 19
4. Higher Education and Library Communities Examine Access to Publicly Funded Research
5. Information Access Alliance Takes Action on Proposed Wiley Acquisition of Blackwell
6. NISO Working Group Develops New Alternative for E-Resource Licenses
7. ACLS Releases Cyberinfrastructure Report
8. MLA Task Force on Tenure and Promotion Releases Report
9. Author Rights Webcast Offered by ARL Institute on Scholarly Communication, SPARC & ACRL
10. Faculty Interviews Added to Create Change Web Site
11. Karla Hahn Discusses New Tools for New Times
12. SPARC–ACRL Forum at ALA Midwinter to Explore Public Access
13. SPARC Supports Open Repositories Conference
14. SPARC, CARL and ARL Respond to CIHR Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs
15. SPARC’s Peter Suber Wins Award
16. LC to Conduct Hearings on Audio Preservation
17. LC Forms Working Group on Future of Bibliographic Control
18. Librarian and Seven Other Scholars Confirmed to NEH Council
19. US Copyright Office Approves New DMCA Exemptions
20. ARL and ALA Release Additional Comments on Section 108
21. Higher Education and Libraries Signal Opposition to Broadcast Flag Legislation
22. ARL Commissions Paper on Web Archiving
23. NSF Workshop Report on Data Stewardship Available
24. Research, Teaching, and Learning Steering Committee Update
25. University of Massachusetts Amherst Director of Libraries Interviewed on NPR
26. CNI Update
27. ARL Leadership and Career Development Program Selects 2007–08 Fellows
28. ARL to Host Third Annual Leadership Institute at ALA Midwinter
29. Research Library Leadership Fellows Program Extends Deadline to January 8, 2007
30. UCLA Senior Fellows Program Invites Applications
31. ARL Statistics and Measurements Program Update
32. LibQUAL+® Update
33. ARL Publications
34. ARL Transitions
35. Other Transitions
36. Memorials
Speakers at the 149th ARL Membership Meeting, held October 18–19 in Washington, DC, addressed “Profiling Research Libraries,” “NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure Initiatives with Researched Libraries,” and “Faculty Assessment of New Publishing Models.” Speakers’ slides are on the ARL Web site http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/149/.
ARL President Brian E. C. Schottlaender (California, San Diego) convened the ARL Business Meeting on October 19 and reported on Board actions and discussions (see also item #3 below).
Barbara I. Dewey (Tennessee), Carol A. Mandel (New York University), and Dana C. Rooks (Houston) were elected to the ARL Board of Directors by the membership.
Betsy Wilson (Washington), Winston Tabb (Hopkins), and Carol Mandel (NYU), as chairs of the strategic direction steering committees on Research, Teaching, and Learning, Public Policies, and Scholarly Communication, highlighted the work-in-progress in each arena. Written reports are available from the members-only section of the ARL Web Site (listed under committee reports).
Marianne Gaunt (Rutgers) provided an update on the work of the Fair Use Working Group.
Jennifer Younger (Notre Dame) summarized the results of the member survey conducted by the Leadership Development Task Force and confirmed that a report would be submitted to the ARL Board prior to its meeting next February.
Brinley Franklin (Connecticut) reported for the Task Force on New Ways of Measuring Collections. He urged members to read and send feedback on the consultant reports that had been distributed the previous day, adding that the Task Force would be submitting its final report to the Board prior to its meeting next February. Mr. Franklin also e-mailed a written report to member representatives on November 17.
Karin Trainer (Princeton) reported on the selection of participants in the 2007–08 Leadership and Career Development Program and described two ways that member libraries could contribute to this program for midcareer librarians: by making voluntary financial contributions to support the programming, and by volunteering themselves or a member of their senior staff to serve as a career coach for the participants. A written report was e-mailed to all ARL directors from Jerome Offord on August 28 followed by an update on November 17.
Susan Brynteson (Delaware) announced that ARL’s 75th anniversary will be celebrated at the ARL Membership Meeting on October 10, 2007 in Washington, DC. All former ARL member representatives will be invited to the meeting. Current member representatives are asked to help compile current mailing addresses for the invitations. A program celebrating research libraries is planned for the opening session of the Membership Meeting, and will be followed by an evening event to be held, thanks to Deanna Marcum, in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress.
Duane Webster reported that the association is in good financial condition while pursuing an active agenda within the new framework of the strategic plan, and updated members on staffing changes. He also announced that six ARL libraries will be sponsoring the second offering of the Research Library Leadership Fellows (RLLF) Program in 2007 (see item 29, below).
At the conclusion of the Business Meeting, Brian Schottlaender presented the gavel to Sherrie Schmidt (Arizona State) who began her term as ARL President. Ms. Schmidt congratulated Mr. Schottlaender for his leadership during the past year and acknowledged the contributions of the Board members whose terms ended with this meeting: Ann Wolpert (MIT) and Betsy Wilson (Washington).
Sherrie Schmidt announced that the next Membership Meeting will be held May 22–25, 2007, in St. Louis, hosted by the libraries of Washington University, St Louis, Southern Illinois University, and the University of Missouri. The program theme for the meeting is “The Library Impact on Research.”
The ARL Board met on October 17 and 19. Actions taken include:
At an October 20 forum on “Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research” held in Washington, DC, representatives of higher education, library, and scholarly and scientific communities convened to examine recent measures to expand public access to research funded by the US government. The forum was cosponsored by ARL, the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). Excellent papers and speaker slides from the forum are available at http://www.arl.org/forum06/.
John Wiley and Sons recently announced its plans to acquire Blackwell Publishing, a publisher of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals, for a price of $1.08 billion. This increase in concentration in an already concentrated market is cause for substantial concern on the part of the library community. The combined company will control more than 1,200 titles, many of them scholarly society journals.
The Information Access Alliance (IAA), representing the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the American Library Association, the Association for College and Research Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association, SPARC, and the Special Library Association, wrote to the US Department of Justice on November 29 asking that they act to issue a second request for information from the two companies and review the market and the merger. The IAA letter to the Department of Justice is available on the Web http://informationaccess.org/wiley.blackwell.pdf.
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has formed a working group to develop a best practice statement for use in e-resource licensing. The statement is intended to provide publishers (and libraries) with a new option for selling access to their e-resource products. Publishers could rely on existing law and the expectations expressed in the best practice document. In addition to helping publishers, particularly smaller publishers, libraries could see substantial reductions in their handling costs for e-resource purchases. The working group members reflect several communities of stakeholders including publishers, librarians, and serials vendors. See “Do I Have to Negotiate a License for Every E-Resource I Buy? Developing a Best Practice Option,” by Karla Hahn, in ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 248 (October 2006): 11, http://www.arl.org/newsltr/248/licenseopt.html.
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has released its report, Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences. In explaining the need for action the authors note, “In the last decade, users of the Web have gained unprecedented access to pre–twentieth–century cultural materials, but the real promise of our digital collections has yet to be realized…Users of these massive aggregations of text, image, video, sounds, and metadata will want tools that support and enable discovery, visualization, and analysis of patterns; tools that facilitate collaboration; an infrastructure for authorship that supports remixing, recontextualization, and commentary—in sum, tools that turn access into insight and interpretation.”
The report addresses a broad audience that includes funding bodies, scholarly societies, university leaders, and senior scholars and makes eight recommendations. These include cyberinfrastructure investment, policy development, public/private sector cooperation, the cultivation of leadership and digital scholarship, the development of national centers and open standards, and the production of broad collections, often through digitization. The report frames the grand challenge cyberinfrastructure development presents to the humanities and social sciences. It looks honestly at the constraints faced while articulating a framework for action. The published report is being mailed to each ARL member representative by the ACLS. The report is also available as a PDF at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/acls.ci.report.pdf.
The Modern Language Association (MLA) Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion has released its final report, which addresses issues such as the scholarly monograph crisis and treatment of publications in digital formats in evaluations for tenure and promotion.
Written by a seven–member task force that was led by Domna C. Stanton, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the MLA’s 2005 president, the report offers a thorough historical analysis of “the shifting nature of academic work over the past decades.” It lays out the well–known financial pressures on university presses and the ever–increasing demands for teaching and publication faced by junior faculty members as they navigate “changes in the resources for disseminating scholarship,” including digital media.
The report also declares that while the aforementioned factors, along with changes in educational policies, have brought the profession to “a threshold moment,” the situation has not yet reached a crisis.
“We can state that faculty members hired to tenure–track appointments over the last 10 years have been tenured in ways—and at rates—similar to their predecessors,” the report states. “There has, to date, been no ‘lost generation of scholars’ from the tenure track.”
The report offers 20 broad recommendations on how to deal with the problems that it did identify in the hiring and tenuring process. It calls on the field to be wary of “the tyranny of the monograph” and “to recognize…that valuable and important scholarship can take multiple forms.” It states that the profession and academe as a whole “need to rethink not only the conception of the dissertation as a larval monograph but also, and more broadly, the entire graduate curriculum.” The task force also calls for the practice and promotion of “transparency throughout the tenuring process.”
But the report mostly leaves the challenge of making specific reforms up to individual departments and institutions. As the report puts it, “requirements for tenure and promotion should be tailored to the mission of the institution.” And it recommends further study of several issues, including faculty salaries, unions, tenure appeals, and how minority faculty members fare in hiring and promoting decisions.
The report is available on the MLA Web site http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion/.
The Institute on Scholarly Communication is cosponsoring with SPARC and the Association of College & Research Libraries a webcast to prepare librarians to work with disciplinary faculty and researchers on the topic of author rights. The webcast was offered in November to participants in the July and December Institute on Scholarly Communication. The webcast will be repeated December 14 with registration open to the library community at large; the December webcast registration filled very quickly and registration is closed. However, the institute will continue to develop resources to support library outreach on this and other scholarly communication issues. For more information about the webcast, see http://www.arl.org/osc/institutes/isc/webcast.html.
The “Cases in Point” section of the Create Change Web site continues to grow: four faculty interviews discussing new models of scholarly communication are now available and another new interview will be posted soon. Currently available faculty interviews include a chemist, a historian, a computer scientist, and a molecular geneticist. A new interview with a former president of the Modern Language Association will be released shortly. All of the faculty interviews are available at http://www.createchange.org/cases/.
The November issue of C&RL News includes an article by Karla Hahn, Director of ARL’s Office on Scholarly Communication, “Scholarly Communication, New Tools for New Times.” The article is freely available at http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2006/november06/newtools.htm.
The upcoming SPARC-ACRL Forum at the ALA Midwinter Meeting will focus on the timely topic “Public Access: Federal Research Access Policies and How They’ll Change Your Library.” The forum will be held on Saturday, January 20, 2007, 4:00–6:00p.m. in the Sheraton Seattle (Metropolitan B).
Speakers include Carl T. Bergstrom, Associate Professor of Biology, University of Washington; Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and David Pershing, Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs, University of Utah. Each will examine current and emerging public access policies and explore key opportunities and challenges facing libraries—including what can be done to prepare for the transformation ahead. The forum is followed by the ACRL Scholarly Communication Discussion Group on Sunday, 4:00–6:00 p.m., where there will be an open discussion of key issues that surface at the forum.
SPARC has signed on as a Major Supporter of the upcoming conference, Open Repositories 2007: Achieving Interoperability in an Open World (OR07), which will take place January 23–26, 2007, in San Antonio, Texas.
As with the meetings and workshops on repositories that SPARC has held over the past four years, OR07 is designed to help ensure that members of the community are positioned to make further strides in creating, maintaining, and expanding their repositories. The program for OR07 aims to equip attendees with practical problem-solving tools and ideas, and to explore both theoretical and strategic topics. Areas covered will include service design, recruiting content, and understanding users and uses. In addition, SPARC Director Heather Joseph will present an update on legislative advances related to open access and repositories in US and worldwide.
The Web site at http://www.openrepositories.org/ offers further information on the program and registration.
SPARC, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), and ARL have announced their support for the strength and timeliness of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The draft policy will govern peer-reviewed journal publications, research materials, and final research data stemming from CIHR funding. The policy marks a significant step forward for Canadian science and puts Canada in the forefront of the global open access movement. CIHR is the major federal agency responsible for funding health research in Canada.
The CIHR Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs is online at http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/32395.html.
The SPARC letter to CIHR is online at http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/canada/cihrdraftpolicy_response.pdf.
The CARL letter, also supported by ARL, is online at http://www.carl-abrc.ca/projects/openaccess/pdf/cihrdraftpolicyresponse.pdf.
The first of the Charleston Advisor’s recently announced Six Annual Readers Choice Awards was a special award for a “Non-Librarian Working for Our Cause,” which went to SPARC’s Peter Suber. He was commended for his “excellent work in managing the influential SPARC Open Access Forum and the Open Access Newsletter.” For more information, see http://www.charlestonco.com/features.cfm?id=209&type=me.
The Library of Congress recently announced that it is conducting hearings on Preserving America’s Recorded Sound Heritage. The hearings will garner information for a study concerning the current state of recorded sound preservation and restoration with the goal of drafting a comprehensive plan for a national audio preservation program. Congress called for such a plan in the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000. The library also hopes to raise public and private recognition of the importance of recorded sound preservation. In addition, the program will allow the library, in consultation with the National Recording Preservation Board, to identify initiatives to help solve the challenges faced by various stakeholders.
The next hearing open to the public will be held on December 19 in New York City. Additional information on hearing locations and times is posted at http://www.loc.gov/rr/record/nrpb/.
ARL will be filing a statement for the upcoming New York City hearing. If there is information that you would like ARL to include in its testimony, please contact Prue Adler, prue@arl.org or Karla Hahn, karla@arl.org.
The Library of Congress (LC) has convened a Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control “to examine the future of bibliographic description in the 21st century.” The working group aims to advise LC on its role in steering the library community to analyze “how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices” can help librarians manage, and users access, library materials.
The working group is chaired by José-Marie Griffiths of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The convener is Deanna Marcum, LC’s Associate Librarian for Library Services, who hosted the first meeting in early November. The group will hold three regional meetings during 2007, and each will focus on one of three broad categories: Uses & Users, Structures & Standards, and Economics & Organization. The meetings will be preceded by distribution of a background paper. Further details will be available at the project Web site http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/. A report will be drafted by September 1, 2007; public comments will be taken into account in the final report, which will be issued by November 1, 2007.
ARL is represented on the LC Working Group by Brian E. C. Schottlaender (California, San Diego), Olivia M. A. Madison (Iowa State), and Judith Nadler (Chicago). Other members include Richard Amelung for the American Association of Law Libraries; Diane Dates Casey, Janet Swan Hill, and Sally G. Smith for the American Library Association; Gary Price for the Special Libraries Association; Robert Wolven for the Program for Cooperative Cataloging; Daniel Clancy for the Google Company; Jay Girotto for the Microsoft Corporation; Clifford A. Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information; and Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC.
The US Senate recently confirmed eight new members of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) National Council. Importantly for the research library community, one of the new appointees is Robert Martin, former head of the IMLS and currently professor and Lillian Bradshaw Endowed Chair in the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman’s University. The seven other new members are Josiah Bunting III, Jane Marie (Jamie) Doggett, Mary Habeck, Wilfred M. McClay, Manfredi Piccolomini, Kenneth Weinstein, and Jay Winik. Two other council members began their service at the council’s July meeting: Jean Bethke Elshtain and Allen C. Guelzo.
The National Council on the Humanities meets four times a year and reviews applications submitted for grant awards from NEH. Members of the council serve staggered six–year terms. Additional information about the council is available at http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/council.html.
On November 27, the Copyright Office announced six Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) exemptions. The DMCA requires that the Librarian of Congress consider exemptions on a periodic basis whether access to particular classes of works protected by anti-circumvention technology should be allowed to facilitate fair use and other copyright law limitations. Of particular interest is the new exemption that permits the use of “audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.” Another one of the new exemptions is already subject to a legal challenge. Wireless vendor TracFone has filed suit against the Library of Congress to block the new DMCA exemption that permits a cell phone to legally connect to a wireless telephone communications network. The new DMCA ruling can be found at http://www.copyright.gov/1201/.
ARL and the American Library Association (ALA) convened a workshop June 1–2, 2006, to consider and receive additional input from members of the library and archival communities regarding the deliberations of the Section 108 Study Group. In the February 15, 2006, Federal Register, the study group requested feedback on their initial areas of study: access to digital copies and two new exceptions—preservation–only copies and Web site preservation. Sherrie Schmidt (Arizona State) and Ken Frazier (Wisconsin–Madison) represented ARL and ALA at a March roundtable sponsored by the study group. Based on the additional input from the library community, ARL and ALA released two papers in November to provide more in-depth responses to the Section 108 Study Group.
In these new comments, ARL and ALA note that, “we appreciate the extensive effort that the Section 108 Study Group has undertaken in reviewing the provisions in Section 108. We note however that any proposed changes to Section 108 should not be predicated on the use of restrictive conditions or technologies such as those included in the TEACH Act as these would severely interfere with the ability of libraries to achieve their missions. Such proposals would undermine the objective of the Section 108 Study Group which is to suggest revisions to Section 108 to better meet the needs of libraries and archives in the digital environment.” See “The ALA and ARL Position on Access and Digital Preservation” and “Part II: Detailed Responses to Section 108 Working Group Questions,” both available as PDFs from http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/sec108.html.
ARL and ALA will host a second meeting to consider additional changes to Section 108 to be discussed at the study group’s January 31 Roundtable. The study group has a Web site at http://www.loc.gov/section108/.
The Library Copyright Alliance joined ACE, AAU, NASULGC and EDUCAUSE in a letter to the Senate opposing consideration of broadcast flag legislation during the closing days of the congressional session. In 2005, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) overstepped its authority when it issued a regulation that would have required consumer electronic devices, such as televisions, to include a “broadcast flag”—a device that would prevent digital TV shows from being copied and then shared. As a consequence, proponents of the broadcast flag have sought congressional approval of the flag. At issue is how institutions may use media in support of distant education activities and how the government should not be able to mandate the use of certain technologies. As noted in the letter, “by prohibiting the redistribution of any portion of digital broadcast television programming, the broadcast flag will deny educators this critical and legal teaching tool.” The letter is online at http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=GovernmentRelationsandPublicPolicy.
At the request of the Public Policies Steering Committee, Jonathan Band, counsel to the Library Copyright Alliance, recently published an analysis of recent court cases concerning archiving of Web sites. The analysis, “A New Day for Website Archiving: Field v. Google and Parker v. Google,” notes that “two recent district court decisions, Field v. Google and Parker v. Google, provide several viable legal theories for library preservation.” In addition, Band concludes, “moreover, library archiving of websites will take place in an environment where all the leading search engines, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, and ASK, routinely cache millions of websites.” The paper is online at http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/resources.html.
In late September, ARL and the National Science Foundation (NSF) hosted a workshop funded by NSF to explore new approaches—including the roles of research libraries in partnership with other organizations and entities—to the stewardship of scientific and engineering digital data. The final report of the workshop, To Stand the Test of Time: Long–Term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering (Washington, DC: ARL, 2006), is now available on the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/digdatarpt.pdf. For more information about the workshop report, please contact Prue Adler, prue@arl.org.
The Research, Teaching, and Learning (RTL) Steering Committee met twice in October and considered reports on teaching and learning, e-science, special collections, diversity, and preservation.
The ARL Task Force on Library Roles in Enhanced Environments for Teaching and Learning had drafted a near final report and Bill Walker (Miami), chair of the Task force, presented the report’s recommendations to the Steering committee. The Task force recommended priorities regarding marketing, developing member library skills, library facilities, partnerships, and identifying measures of success. The draft was favorably received by the Steering committee and action recommendations from the committee are forthcoming. Walker also led a topical briefing at the ARL Membership Meeting on teaching and learning programs in research libraries, highlighting results from the Task force environmental scan of emerging practices.
Members of the Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science met in a half-day session just prior to the October ARL Membership Meeting. Their discussion included an update on the National Science Foundation/ARL workshop on “New Collaborative Relationships: Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe.” That workshop focused on the role of research libraries in support of data curation for large digital data collections. Several members of the Task force were in attendance. Also at the meeting, Task force members reviewed documents related to the life cycle of data and considered activities that would provide educational benefit to the ARL membership. Wendy Lougee (Minnesota), co-chair, presented a summary of the Task force activities at the ARL Membership Meeting, http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/149/presentations/lougee.htm.
The RTL Steering Committee reviewed the final report of the Special Collections Task Force and identified priority elements for ARL’s future agenda on special collections as: (1) encouraging concerted action and coordinated planning for collecting and exposing 19th- and 20th-century materials in all formats (rare books, archives and manuscripts, audio, and video) and (2) identifying criteria and strategies for collecting digital and other new media material that currently lack a recognized and responsible structure for stewardship. The Steering committee recommended the establishment of a Special Collections Working Group to pursue this new agenda.
The Steering committee also heard a report on the September invitational preservation workshop and applauded the direction and achievements of the Working Group on Diversity Initiatives, chaired by Karin Trainer (Princeton). See items 27 and 28, below.
For more information on RTL activities contact Julia Blixrud, ARL Assistant Executive Director, External Relations, jblix@arl.org.
On December 2, Jay Schafer, University of Massachusetts Amherst Director of Libraries, was interviewed on the National Public Radio program Weekend Edition that explored how library facilities are being redesigned to attract students and facilitate new roles for libraries in supporting research, teaching, and learning. The interview is available on the NPR Web site http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6569891.
On December 4, at the Fall CNI Task Force Meeting, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $650,000 in prizes to 10 not-for-profit institutions in the first annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). The Mellon Awards honor not-for-profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with particular application to higher education and not-for-profit activities. More information on the awards, including the full text of the press release detailing award winners and their projects, is available at http://rit.mellon.org/awards/. Podcast interviews with some of the recipients were conducted at the meeting and will be available in December from http://www.cni.org/.
In addition to the Mellon awards announcement, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch reported on developments over the past year, and presented the 2006–2007 CNI Program Plan (online at http://www.cni.org/program/) during the opening plenary session of the Task Force Meeting. The closing plenary address, “The National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Movement and the CNI Community,” was delivered by Daniel E. Atkins, Director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure. The meeting also featured some 38 project briefings covering a wide range of current topics, including sessions exploring the delivery of library and information technology services vis–á–vis the question of how faculty conduct and report on their research, institutional repositories and the management of locally produced scholarship, and the showcasing of new digital information management systems, such as Zotero, a scholarly research tool developed by the George Mason Center for History and New Media. More information about the meeting and featured project briefings is available at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006b.fall.
ARL and the Medical Library Association (MLA) are pleased to announce the 2007–08 fellows in the Leadership and Career Development Program (LCDP). The LCDP is an 18-month program that prepares midcareer librarians from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to take on increasingly demanding leadership roles in ARL member libraries. ARL sponsors the LCDP to address the needs of research libraries for a more diverse professional workforce that can contribute to library success in serving increasingly diverse scholarly and learning communities. The Medical Library Association, with funding from the National Library of Medicine, is provided funding for a scholarship to support a medical librarian in the 2007–08 LCDP class.
The LCDP design includes three in-person meetings: the ARL Annual Leadership Institute, held in conjunction with the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, WA (January 2007); two strategic institutes hosted by ARL member institutions; and a closing event held in conjunction with ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA (June 2008). Each fellow will have a one-on-one career-coaching relationship with an ARL library director or senior staff member who meets the professional, career, and/or research interest of the fellow and a personalized visit to their career coach’s library. The program will be held from January 2007 through June 2008.
For information about the 2007–08 fellows and the LCDP, see http://www.arl.org/diversity/lcdp/ or contact Jerome Offord Jr., Director of ARL Diversity Initiatives, jerome@arl.org.
ARL is hosting its third annual Leadership Institute in conjunction with the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, January 19–21, 2007. The Leadership Institute is a component of ARL’s Diversity Initiatives, which aim to support member library recruitment efforts by promoting careers in research librarianship among underrepresented groups in the US and Canada. The Institute of Museum and Library Services and ARL member institutions provided funding for this event.
The Leadership Institute will have three distinct programmatic tracks, focusing on (1) MLS graduate students, (2) subject specialists who are currently enrolled in MLS programs, and (3) midcareer librarians. The institute will provide an opportunity for participants to gain exposure to current issues and trends in research libraries. The program will focus on transitioning into and building career networks in research libraries and will include presentations from library directors and other leaders in the field. Three events are held during the institute when directors of ARL libraries as well as human resources and other senior library staff may meet and interact with all the participants.
For more information, see http://www.arl.org/diversity/symposium.html, or contact Jerome Offord Jr., Director, ARL Diversity Initiatives, jerome@arl.org.
The deadline for applications to 2007–2008 ARL Research Library Leadership Fellows (RLLF) Program was extended to January 8, 2007, to ensure that all interested parties have ample opportunity to participate in the second iteration of this program. Notification of selection will be made by January 25, 2007.
The RLLF is an executive leadership program jointly designed and sponsored by ARL member libraries. This program, piloted in 2005–06, is designed to prepare future senior-level talent for leadership in an ARL library. After reviewing the success of the pilot experience and incorporating enhancements based on feedback, six libraries have agreed to sponsor a second RLLF. The new RLLF sponsors are: California, Berkeley; Harvard; Minnesota; North Carolina State; Pennsylvania State; and Toronto. The program will start in the first quarter of 2007 and will extend until the October 2008 ARL Membership Meeting.
The RLLF approach to leadership development complements and builds on available programs such as the UCLA Senior Fellows Program (see item #30), the EDUCAUSE/CLIR Frye Institute, and the ACRL Harvard Program by focusing on the six sponsoring research libraries as distinct entities with unique cultures and challenges.
Complete RLLF Program information and application materials are available at: http://www.arl.org/leadership/rllf/. For more information about the program visit the Web site or contact Julia Blixrud, ARL Assistant Executive Director, External Relations, jblix@arl.org.
The 2007 Senior Fellows program will be held at UCLA August 6–24, 2007. This is one of the most important professional development programs for senior level research librarians currently available to the ARL community and complements other developmental programs such as ARL’s RLLF (see item #29). The Senior Fellows program offers a unique combination of management perspectives, strategic thinking, and practical and theoretical approaches to the issues confronting academic institutions and their libraries. The program is an intensive three-week residential program structured around a variety of learning experiences and set on the UCLA campus. More information and application forms are on the Web http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/seniorfellows/.
Nominations and requests for more information can be sent to the director, Dr. Beverly P. Lynch, Professor and Director, Senor Fellows Program, UCLA, 211 GSEIS Building, Mailbox 951520, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520, e-mail bplynch@ucla.edu.
The online interactive edition of the ARL Statistics has been updated to include 2004–05 data. See http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/arl/.
The status of the annual surveys is as follows:
The “2006 ARL Statistics Data Collection” webcast offered to ARL Survey Coordinators on December 5 was archived and is available on demand until midnight on January 31, 2007 at http://desktop.ilearning.com/launcher/ft/ft.asp?1&ARL&27C8915D6C59DDE4.
All survey coordinators, directors of ARL libraries, and other staff involved in the ARL Statistics data gathering are invited to attend the ARL Survey Coordinators and SPEC Liaisons Meeting at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle:
ARL Survey Coordinators and SPEC Liaisons Meeting Friday, January 19, 2007 3:30–5:00 p.m. Hotel Andra, Ballroom 2000 Fourth Avenue Seattle, Washington
For information regarding the annual data-collection activities, contact Martha Kyrillidou, Director, ARL Statistics and Service Quality Programs, martha@arl.org.
LibQUAL+® has reached a milestone: since the inception of the program in 2000 with 12 pioneering ARL libraries, more than 1,000 libraries have participated in LibQUAL+®.
More than 300 libraries completed the 2006 survey cycle, collecting data from over 175,000 users. Registration for 2007 includes consortia from Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, the UK, and Hong Kong. A partnership with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries led by Sam Kalb (Queens’s University) is attracting the largest number of Canadian libraries ever to participate in a single year.
All past and future participants are invited to attend our LibQUAL+® meetings scheduled to take place in conjunction with the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting. Preliminary agendas are available at http://www.libqual.org/. There is no fee but we request that you register in advance:
LibQUAL+® 2007: An Introduction 9:00 a.m.–Noon Register at http://db.arl.org/lqintro/
Your LibQUAL+® Community: A Results Meeting 1:00–4:00 p.m. Register at http://db.arl.org/lqresults/
Monday, January 22, 2007 Renaissance Seattle Hotel, East Room 515 Madison Street Seattle, Washington
A powerful issue featuring remarks by NASULGC’s David Shulenburger and CNI’s Clifford Lynch on improving access to publicly funded research, Emory’s Frances Maloy on the ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication, and ARL’s Karla Hahn on a no-license alternative for some e-resources. Available online at http://www.arl.org/newsltr/248/.
The final report of the ARL & NSF workshop, To Stand the Test of Time: Long-Term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering (Washington, DC: ARL, 2006), is available on the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/info/events/digdatarpt.pdf. See also item #23 above.
Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI): Bernard Dumouchel is retiring from his position as Director General of CISTI, effective January 31, 2007.
Cornell: Sarah Thomas announced her resignation as University Librarian. She has been appointed Bodley’s Librarian and Director of the Oxford University Library Services at the University of Oxford in the UK, effective February 2007.
Hawai’i at Manoa: Paula T. Mochida, Interim Associate University Librarian for Administration and Public Services, is serving as Acting University Librarian, following Diane Perushek’s resignation in September 2006.
CAVAL: Steve O’Connor resigned his position as Chief Executive Officer of CAVAL Collaborative Solutions, a consortium of Australian University libraries. He has been named University Librarian at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University effective in early 2007.
Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR): Charles J. Henry, Vice Provost and University Librarian at Rice University and Publisher of Rice University Press, was appointed CLIR President, effective early 2007. He will succeed Susan Perry, who has served as Interim President since Nancy Davenport stepped down June 30.
CLIR Board of Directors: The CLIR Board elected Paula Kaufman Chair and Wendy Lougee Vice Chair at its meeting on November 3, 2006. Kaufman, Interim Chief Information Officer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, succeeds Charles Phelps, who retired from the board after serving his term limit of nine years. Wendy Lougee, University Librarian at the University of Minnesota, succeeds Kaufman as Vice Chair.
Robert C. Miller, 70, Director Emeritus of University Libraries at Notre Dame, died on October 8, 2006, at his home on Green Lake in Chisago City, Minnesota. Director of University Libraries at Notre Dame from 1978 to 1997, Miller previously served as director of libraries at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. His career also included a year at the Library of Congress; administrative service at the University of Chicago Library; and librarian positions with Marquette University and the former Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa, where he developed, designed, and implemented automated library systems. Miller held numerous positions with national, state, and regional library societies, including service as chair of the ARL Committee on Collection Development from 1984 to 1986.
Margaret A. Otto, 69, the 16th Librarian of Dartmouth College, died on December 10, 2006, in Hanover, New Hampshire, following a battle with cancer. Otto became the first woman to lead the Dartmouth College Library in 1979. Under her directorship, which spanned 21 years, she established a strong service ethic across the libraries and a dedication to customer service among her staff. She is also remembered for the growth of collections and the development of access tools she oversaw while at Dartmouth. Prior to her tenure at Dartmouth, Otto was employed from 1964–1979 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, where she rose to become Associate Director. She was an active participant on many committees and professional organizations from the local to the national level. Her broad interests and dedication to the field of librarianship are reflected in her extensive involvement in a wide variety of ARL committees, task forces, and working groups, including nominations, statistics, scholarly communication, and serving as chair of the membership committee. In 1985, she was elected to, and served a three-year term on, the ARL Board of Directors.
DEW 12/14/06
Duane Webster
Executive Director
Association of Research Libraries
21 Dupont Circle
Washington, DC 20036
voice: (202) 296-2296
fax: (202) 872-0884
cell: (202) 251-4431
e-mail: duane@arl.org