Program

The term ‘research library,’ coined to describe a very particular form of work environment for researchers in the humanities, needs to be reexamined in the context of today's interconnected digital world. This talk argues that the research library represents a set of services that carry with it a long-term and resource-intensive commitment, not a one-size-fits-all marketing concept to endorse the ongoing “relevance” of libraries. However, for some libraries it actually may be the best way to ensure a future “so bright, we gotta wear shades."

The presentations in this session explore the ways in which new technologies, practices, and approaches can reshape and revitalize national and historical collections. In the first paper, the respective curators of Italian and French collections at the British Library give an overview of collection-building in an environment of shared expertise and resources. The presentation discusses new digitization and research projects aimed at integrating digital scholarship into work with students and researchers. They present an innovative project of creating an umbrella group to enhance and facilitate discussion and collaboration between European languages librarians, academics, GLAMS institutions ("galleries, libraries, archives, and museums,") and interested readers, students, and researchers. The second presentation discusses the “Digital Cicognara Library,” an international collaborative project initiated to recreate the renowned private book collection of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834), an influential Venetian art historian and bibliophile. The partnership’s effort realizes Cicognara’s Enlightenment-era ideals by making digital copies of his library available online, where they will be fully searchable from a centralized database as well as via relevant subject research portals. Together, the aggregated images and text offer a potentially transformative opportunity for the discipline of art history.

Three experts in the publishing sector from France, Italy, and Spain present on the current state of independent and small press publishing in each of the countries or linguistic regions they inhabit. They shed light on the vital role of bibliodiversity in an information ecosphere increasingly threatened by overproduction and dominated by publishing conglomerates. Specifically, they will address how publishers, bookdealers, vendors, and librarians continue to collaborate in promoting the values of diversity, innovation, and social justice despite adversities such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

This session will focus on adapting research to digital resources and recent trends on digitization and tools for libraries, archives, and researchers. It will provide an inside look into the Medici Interactive Archive and the Italian archives. The focus will be on collaboration, dynamism, and interactivity.

The first presentation will provide an up-to-date overview of The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium’s (ReCAP) project to transform the partnership from joint operation of a shared facility to cooperative stewardship of one of the largest managed shared collections in the United States. The Discovery to Delivery Project, with critical and longstanding support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has enabled the partners to both plan and implement a shared print collection, including the design and development of a cloud-based middleware solution, which allows patrons from the New York Public Library, Columbia University, and Princeton University to seamlessly discover, request and borrow shared material regardless of the owning institution. The integration of Harvard University, which joined the consortium in January 2019, is currently underway and will further transform the partnership, expanding the shared collection and advancing strategies for collaboration in building and preserving physical collections. With this new service model as its foundation, the second presentation will review the partners’ deep engagement in developing new models of collaborative collection development for European and other world language materials.

This panel discussion will discuss issues of cooperative collection development from both the vendor perspective and from that of librarians.

Barbara Alvarez and Patricia O'Loughlin will discuss issues librarians and vendors face as they work together to support collaborative collection development, as libraries work to decrease duplication within their “collective collection” and seek to increase the breadth of the collective holdings, both print and electronic. In this prospective environment, vendors of library materials that provide selection services via approval plans will be in a unique position to help achieve collective library goals. Library partners and vendors will need to implement strategies that assure a sustainable business model for all involved. Currently, a few pilot projects are underway to test the feasibility of vendor-supported cooperative collection development for specific geographic areas. Initial results of those pilots will be shared with participants.

Manuel Ostos and Lisa Gardinier will discuss their model for collaborative collecting print resources to support research and teaching across the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) institutions, while ethically supporting the fragile distribution networks that supply international materials to academic libraries. Drawing from a pilot project for Latin America implemented among several BTAA institutions, the authors will discuss the results of this model and how European studies would benefit from a shared collection.

This panel discussion on collection development and assessment will focus on the academic landscape in terms of open access (OA) publishing models and research evaluation activities.

Rossana Morriello will describe how the use of bibliometrics for research evaluation is causing many consequences on the behavior of researchers. The massive use of bibliometrics is changing the publishing scenario and increasing trends to concentration of scientific publications in the journals of a few big publishing companies, some of which are the producers of the citation databases used for the evaluation, too. This presentation will analyze data collected from a survey of Italian academic libraries about the use of bibliometric tools for collection development, and investigate whether libraries are contributing to these trends

John Lenahan will review the development of sustainable OA models and how understanding the usage data of this content can help libraries and publishers understand research trends to support future publishing opportunities and to provide data to support libraries in the acquisitions of licensed content. With new models developing regarding OA publishing of currently licensed content or publishing content to begin as open, it is important to understand the curatorial process that goes into making these resources available to scholars and to understand how they are using the content. JSTOR is working with the library and publisher communities to develop long term sustainable OA publishing models while at the same time supporting a platform and service to provide licensed content from publishers that is paid for through the library.

Timothy Shipe will explore how a number of academic libraries are helping to further the cause of OA publishing through subvention of authors’ fees or through in-house infrastructure and technical support for locally mounted journals. His talk will examine how one university library is supporting OA by providing not only technical and infrastructure support, but also editorial support in the form of professional and student staff time in order to publish a free, peer-reviewed academic journal. This discussion focuses on how support for this journal fits in with the library’s overall strategies for encouraging alternative models for publishing models, and on the arguments used to convince the library, the former editor, and the scholarly society to pursue this unusual approach.