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Against the Grain is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. Our goal is to link publishers, vendors, and librarians by reporting on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books and journals.

Against The Grain Journal

Charleston Library Conference 

Jul 31, 2017

Welcome to episode 32 of ATG: The Podcast. Against the Grain is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. Our goal is to link publishers, vendors, and librarians by reporting on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books and journals.

This week, Leah Hinds hosts another installment in our series of Charleston Conference preconference previews! You can find registration for these sessions on the main conference registration page, and session details are available on the conference website.

Charleston Library Conference Website

First, we’re happy to welcome Lettie Conrad and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. They’re presenting a preconference titled “Prospecting User Perspectives and Practices for Past Trends and Future Predictions.” It will be held on Tuesday, November 7, from 1:00 – 4:00 pm. Starts at the 13 minute, 20 second mark in the recording.

Lettie Conrad brings 15+ years publishing experience to her work with a variety of global information organizations and partners, dedicated to advancing knowledge and driving product innovations that ensure positive and effective researcher experiences. She offers rigorous R&D skill and experience designing digital products to address academic user information practices. Lettie’s services span from strategic planning to delivery, with a proven record of success with evidence-based product management, user-focused product development, and specialized expertise with metadata standards and architecture, SEO and discoverability, performance analysis, UX and journey mapping, and more!

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Professor/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as an affiliate faculty member in the university’s School of Information Sciences. Lisa is a past-president of the Association of College and Research Libraries, which launched the Value of Academic Libraries Initiative during her presidency. Lisa has presented and published widely on information literacy, teaching and learning, the value of academic libraries and library assessment, evaluation, and innovation. Lisa earned her Master of Education in educational psychology/instructional design and Master of Library and Information Science degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently a PhD student in Global Studies in Education in the Department of Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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“Fund your Dream: Business Strategy to Support your Innovative Initiative” is a preconference that is scheduled for Tuesday, November 7, from 1:00 – 4:00 pm. We’re happy to welcome the presenters and organizers Nancy Maron, Kimberly Schmelzinger, and Brian Keith to talk with us about the background and details about the session. Starts at the 20 minute 14 second mark in the recording.

Nancy Maron is President of BlueSky to BluePrint. Nancy works with publishers, librarians and other innovative project leaders to define, test and refine assumptions about new and existing products and services. She honed her skills in over 20 years of experience working at the nexus of publishing, higher education and technology, most recently with the not-for-profit organization Ithaka S+R, where she led the team focused on Sustainability and Scholarly Communications.

Kimberly Schmelzinger is the founder of MeanLine Publisher Services. She is a consultant providing customized research solutions to scholarly publishers. Among other projects, she conducts research for the AAUP (for whom she prepares the AAUP Annual Statistics), and has recently completed two projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, both related to estimating the cost of publishing a humanities monograph.

Brian Keith is the Associate Dean for Administrative Services & Faculty Affairs at George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. Brian is the senior administrator for the areas of Human Resources, Staff Development, Grants Management, Facilities and Security, and Finance and Accounting for the Smathers Libraries. This system includes 405 employees and annual funding in excess of 34 million dollars. Brian has a distinguished record of service to the profession and has noteworthy accomplishments in research and scholarship.

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In this week's "If Rumors Were Horses" segment by Katina Strauch:

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE are pleased to announce that Herbert Van de Sompel, research scientist at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been named the 2017 recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award. Named for CNI’s founding director, the award will be presented during the CNI membership meeting in Washington, DC, to be held December 11–12, 2017, where Van de Sompel will deliver the Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture. The talk will be recorded and made available on CNI’s youTube and Vimeo channels after the meeting concludes. The award recognizes notable, lasting achievements in the creation and innovative use of network-based information resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Nominated by over a dozen highly respected members of the information science community, Van de Sompel is widely recognized as having created robust, scalable infrastructures that have had a profound and lasting impact on scholarly communication. Adept at applying theory to practice, nominating colleagues noted that the application of some of his groundbreaking work has become an integral part of the core technology infrastructure for thousands of libraries worldwide, helping to connect information across the Internet, and constantly working to further his dream of “a scholarly communication system that fully embraces the Web.”

An accomplished researcher and information scientist, Van de Sompel is perhaps best known for his role in the development of protocols designed to expose data and make them accessible to other systems, forging links that connect related information, thereby enhancing, facilitating, and deepening the research process. These initiatives include the OpenURL framework (stemming from his earlier work on the SFX link resolver), as well as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which included the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and the Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) scheme. Van de Sompel was hired by his alma mater, Ghent University (Belgium), in 1981 to begin library automation. Over time, the focus shifted to providing access to a wide variety of scholarly information sources leveraging the technologies of the day to reach the largest possible end-user base, and by the late 1990s, the work of his team was considered among the best in Europe. In 2000 he received a PhD from Ghent University, working on context-sensitive linking, which led to the OpenURL standard and library linking servers. Following stints at Cornell University and at the British Library, in 2002 he joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory as an information scientist, where he now leads the Prototyping Team at the Research Library.

Widely sought after for advisory boards and panels, Van de Sompel served as a member of the European Union High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data, as well as the Core Experts Group for the Europeana Thematic Network, charged with building a digital repository of European cultural assets.

www.cni.org/go/pep-award/

I was sad to learn from Buzzy Basch and Mark Kendall  that John R. Secor, formerly of Saugus, MA, Contoocook, NH and Westford, MA, passed away in Exeter, NH on July 24th after a long and brave battle with Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease. John was born in Everett, MA on April 22, 1939 and graduated from Saugus High School in 1957. He was predeceased by his loving wife, Sally. He is survived by children Glen and Rosheen Secor of Westford, MA, Heidi Coen of Concord, NH, and Traci and Martin Britten of South China, ME, as well as nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He also leaves his sister Cathy Neri and her husband Phil of Dover, NH, and his brother Richard Secor and his wife Melissa of Punta Gorda, FL.  From Mark:  John was a dynamic personality and a successful entrepreneur. In 1971, he acted upon his great love of books and libraries, forming Yankee Book Peddler, Inc., in Contoocook, NH. From its beginnings in the basement of his home, he grew YBP into a leading national and international bookselling company. Those of us who had the privilege to know and work with John and witness his unwavering commitment, dating back to 1971, to building a world class organization for its employees, our community and customers (who he often simply referred to as “partners”) know well that his legacy continues  to live on in our business.  John’s willingness and desire to serve as a mentor and friend as well as building a lasting and meaningful organization that supports learning and education is one that I, and so many of us, will be forever grateful for. Let’s join together in honoring John and his memory by continuing the special work that he so successfully began nearly 50 years ago.  He will be missed by the library and publishing communities and by his friends and colleagues at YBP. He will also be missed by the wonderful staff of Riverwoods in Exeter. John was exceptionally loving and generous to his children and grandchildren, who will forever cherish him as their Binty. He was also a dog and cat lover and was rarely without his canine and feline companions. Katina remembers meeting John at the very first ALA that I attended in New York City in June 1980. I had just started my job as an acquisitions librarian at the College of Charleston Library. John was a dynamic and passionate visionary speaker and he keynoted many early Charleston Conferences. Wonderful memories and YBP (GOBI) lives on!

 

Have you heard of William (Bill) Ferris? I opened my copy of the Carolina Alumni Review, (July/August 2017) and was riveted by a fascinating article by Barry Yeoman, “Timelessness on His Hands.” It’s about how Bill Ferris, methodically built a priceless archive of Southern folklore. It began in 1968 when Ferris, a long-haired 26-year-old Mississippian who was working on a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, drove his white Chevy Nova up to a sharecropper’s shack to hear and record James “Black Boy” Hughes play blues guitar. That could have been all, but Ferris and Hughes became friends and Ferris made pictures and reel-to-reel tapes of Southern Black artists and communities. Half a century later, the tapes and pictures would become a 173,000-item archive with Bill Ferris’name in the UNC Southern Folklife Collection. Ferris was always fascinated with “vernacular culture” and he began to take pictures when he was given a ground-breaking for the time Kodak Brownie camera on his twelfth birthday. It was the 1960s and Ferris was a civil rights activist. When he was an undergraduate at Davidson, he helped organize protest marches. Various friends and academic advisors encouraged Ferris to pursue folklore and over the years he talked with Southern writers like Eudora Welty and Alice Walker. Ferris invited B.B. King to play for his Yale class. In 1996 an aide to President Bill Clinton called Ferris to see if he was interested in chairing the National Endowment for the Humanities. Federal arts and humanities funding were under siege in the 90s but Ferris’ expansive view of culture served him well for the 4 years he was in Washington. To quote Ferris: “Our politics, a century from now, will be forgotten. But the great contributions of our artists and writers and filmmakers as the beacons of who we are and who we were.”  Ferris is now at UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South(CSAS) and is focusing on new teaching technologies, working to produce online courses on Southern stories, art, and music. Ferris has worked with the Morehead Planetarium on a production of the American South with Morgan Freeman. He has also  written three books published by the University of North Carolina Press. This is quite an article and I have barely skimmed the surface. Read it! I promise you will enjoy it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_the_Study_of_the_American_South#History

http://barryyeoman.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/billferris.pdf