News

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 © 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 © 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.

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.