Are you looking for a new career opportunity within the WRLC partnership? Is your library recruiting new employees? The WRLC has created a list of library positions available among the WRLC partners in one central location. 



A dedicated webpage for job listings is available on the WRLC’s public website at https://wrlc.org/jobs (and on the Library Staff Intranet at https://libraries.wrlc.org/jobs). The listings provide a summary description, application information, and links to the full listing at each university. An RSS/XML feed is publicly available on the public website for other institutions to aggregate the data.

Adding a job listing is easy.  Visit https://www.libraries.wrlc.org/jobs/job-listings-instructions for instructions on how to get started sharing your library’s job opportunities today.  We recommend speaking to your university’s Steering Committee member to see if your library already has a dedicated staff member for posting jobs on the website.



- Joel Shields

Digital Services and Systems Librarian, WRLC

To address ongoing concerns about bias and disparaging language built into our descriptive vocabularies, the Reparative Cataloging Subgroup, in partnership with the Metadata Committee, has created a procedure for WRLC partner members to report subject headings that should be replaced, updated, or enhanced. That way, our cooperative cataloging and consortia records benefit from our work. Please use this form to report headings that you'd like to see replaced, updated, or enhanced. Share with your library colleagues!

 

Recuttering in the LCSH: The Library of Congress has recently updated a group of call numbers that were based on the subject terms “negros in…” to better reflect the accepted term “blacks in…”. Some partner libraries have begun the work of updating call numbers in the catalog records, as well as updating the call numbers on items onsite. However, institutions recently brought up concerns about how to handle shared materials at the SCF. Do we recall the hundreds of items? Is it worth updating the call numbers on the items? Do we update the physical pieces only when they’re recalled? If you’ve participated in this project, or are about to embark on it, please come to the next Reparative Description Subgroup meeting to discuss more on November 30, at 10am via WebEx (meeting link is available here or on the Metadata and E-Resources basecamps as well as on Slack wrlc-work.slack.com).

 

If you have another project you'd like assistance with or would like to talk about, please join us on Slack or at our regular meetings. 



- Jen Froetschel (GW), 

On behalf of the Reparative Cataloging Subgroup

Ex Libris hosts the Idea Exchange to enable customers to influence the development of new features and solutions in Ex Libris products. Anyone with an Idea Exchange account is allocated 25 votes to support their favorite ideas. Each month, the WRLC Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) selects an idea to highlight in the WRLC Newsletter. We encourage everyone to vote for APAC’s Idea of the Month in order to raise its visibility in the Idea Exchange.



APAC’s November Idea of the Month recommendation seeks to filter electronic resources results by library in Primo.  Currently, Primo’s library facet only limits physical resources, not electronic resources.

APAC welcomes nominations for future Ideas of the Month. Anyone can highlight an idea on the WRLC Idea Exchange Basecamp or submit ideas to an APAC representative. And remember, anyone can get an Idea Exchange account. On any Idea Exchange forum (Alma, Primo, etc.) or article, click on "New and returning users may sign in” and then on the “New here? Create an account" link. Enter your email address to start the account creation process.



- Jen Fritz (GWL)

On behalf of the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

The WRLC is a founding member of the Partnership for Shared Book Collections, a federation of monograph shared print programs in North America. The Partnership provides quarterly reports to inform its partners about their progress and activities to ensure the long-term preservation of, access to, and integrity of monographic print resources.



In the last three months the Partnership has:

• Reported out the results of the Partnership's 2022 assessment.
• Began launching Best Practices Assessment Tools. A webinar on October 18th will introduce these tools.
• Created web pages for the Value of Shared Print Working Group which include their first calculators to determine the impact of shared print in offsite storage and costs of adding new members. Feedback is encouraged. 
• Had the Risk group’s paper titled “A Model to Determine Optimal Numbers of Monograph Copies for Preservation in Shared Print Collections” accepted for publication by College & Research Libraries, with a scheduled publication date of September 2023.
• Continued talks with Rosemont on closer alignment of the two organizations.

The quarterly report also includes updates from the Partnership’s working groups, including Best Practices; Communications and Advocacy (Joint Working Group with the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance); Infrastructure; and Research and Network Level.

You can still attend Session 4 (Zoom link below) of our Metadata in the WRLC/Alma webinar series, as well as view recordings and presentation slides of the first three sessions on the WRLC Intranet. 



Session 1: What you absolutely need to know

• Presented by Jackie Saavedra
• Strongly recommended for everyone cataloging in the Network Zone. This session covered WRLC NZ guidelines, use of the Metadata Basecamp, and the WRLC Service Desk.

Session 2: Alma Basics

• Presented by Jen Froetschel
• This session covered searching in Alma, including physical title, holdings, and items; differences between the IZ, NZ, and CZ; and customizing the Alma toolbar.

Session 3: Using the Metadata Editor

• Presented by Robert Bratton
• This session will cover the Search External Resources process, sharing a record with the network, merging records, local fields, and normalization rules.

Session 4: Advanced Alma topics

• Presented by Matthew Bright with Jackie Saavedra
• Tuesday, November 8, 2022 2pm-3pm
• This session will introduce sets, jobs, indication rules, import profiles, Alma sandboxes, and WRLC colleagues to contact for support with Alma.

All sessions will use the same Zoom link: https://wrlc-org.zoom.us/j/86127507643



All session recordings and presentation slides can be found on the WRLC Intranet at this link: https://www.libraries.wrlc.org/content/metadata-wrlc-alma 

 

- Jacqueline (Jackie) Saavedra

Consortial Network Zone Manager, WRLC

The WRLC Textbook Affordability Working Group (TAWG) will once more begin hosting the faculty workshop series, Faculty Perspectives: Open Textbooks in the Classroom, to increase faculty awareness of high-quality open textbooks. These workshops will feature a panel discussion of faculty members from across the consortium who are already using an open textbook for their course materials. The workshops are scheduled for:  

• November 16th, 2022 12:00 PM - Faculty Perspectives: Choosing a Creative Commons License for your OER: Where to Begin?
• December 6th, 2022 12:00 PM - Save the Date!

Check out our events page for more details about how to register for these events.

The WRLC is sponsoring a “faculty stipend program” in which workshop attendees can earn $200 for writing a review of a textbook in the Open Textbook Library. 



Contact us at open@wrlc.org if you have any questions.

- Angelique Carson (WRLC)

On behalf of the Textbook Affordability Working Group

Sponsored by the Catholic University Libraries and the Department of Library and Information Science. 





Gale Digital Scholar Lab (3): Analyzing a Dataset Friday, Nov. 11, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

The final workshop in our Gale Digital Scholar Lab series will focus on the tools for analyzing a dataset. Document clustering, Named Entity Recognition, Ngrams, parts of speech, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling, will be covered.

Registration

Register through the Events page at libraries.catholic.edu (CUA members only) or by contacting Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu). Unless otherwise indicated, the instructor for each session will be Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship. All workshops will take place on Zoom, recorded, and made available on the Catholic University Libraries' YouTube Channel.