June 05, 2023

The Annual Meeting took place on Tuesday, May 23rd at 10:00 AM with two featured presentations: “Publishing and Creating OER Courseware” and “Access Solutions and Primo VE Features Lightning Round.”

This was followed by a virtual lunch from 12:00 Noon to 12:45 PM that featured a “Meet the New Director” session with WRLC’s new Executive Director, Kim Armstrong.

The day Concluded with the keynote presentation “The Colors of Disinformation: Information Disorder and the Literacy Landscape” by Dr. Nichole A. Cooke from the University of South Carolina.

Day 2 consisted of a multitude of concurrent sessions highlighting presentations by your colleagues from throughout the Consortium.

Recordings of all events are available here: https://libraries.wrlc.org/2023-wrlc-annual-meeting/agenda and on YouTube.

The Textbook Affordability Workgroup (TAWG) would like to formally announce the inaugural Open@WRLC Faculty Course Transformation Grant awardees! 

The $2,000 Faculty Course Transformation Grant pilot program, launched January 31, 2023, is a 2-year pilot program developed by the WRLC Textbook Affordability Working Group to fulfill the WRLC’s Sharing Expertise Initiative to “Identify and/or create faculty grant opportunities to support adoption of no-cost or low-cost materials for courses offered by the WRLC partners.”

Using no-cost or low-cost materials advances educational equity and directly impacts student retention and academic success. The grant program is designed to promote a community of Open Educational Resource (OER) advocates among partnering institutions, create incentive to add to the availability of open course materials, and provide monetary support to acknowledge the time and effort required for curriculum redesign when adopting OER. 

Selected faculty members and courses represent a wide variety of disciplines, and open education resources, from across the partnering WRLC institutions. The first cycle of the pilot program estimates $124,018.00 in student textbook savings for the 2023- 24 academic year.  

Please join us in congratulating the newly awarded OER faculty advocates at your institution!

Click here to view the list of recipients.

The Alma/Primo Advisory Committee's (APAC) May Idea of the Month recommendation seeks to improve the handling of user record purge dates.

Currently, when user information is manually entered or updated in Alma, the purge date for the record is handled independently from the expiration date. This makes it possible for an account to have a purge date that is earlier than the expiration date, which makes no logical sense and can cause problems when trying to run patron purges.

This Idea Exchange post asks for the ability to have purge dates automatically update based on the expiration date when a record is saved. This would remove the potential for staff error when modifying accounts and make it easier for institutions to run patron purge processes.

Ex Libris hosts the Idea Exchange to enable customers to influence the development of new features and solutions. Anyone with an Idea Exchange login can use their 25 votes to support their favorite ideas. Each month, the WRLC Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) will highlight an idea and encourages you to vote for it to raise its visibility.

If you don't have an Idea Exchange account, just find the "New here? Create an account" link on the idea page. Then enter your email address to start the account creation process.

APAC welcomes nominations for future Ideas of the Month. Anyone can highlight an idea on the WRLC Idea Exchange Basecamp or you can submit ideas to your APAC representative.

- Cindy Bowen (GT)

On behalf of the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

Each month, members of the Reparative Cataloging Subgroup take turns sharing news related to reparative cataloging and recent updates to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSHs).

Guide for creating subject headings for Indigenous peoples and topics became available 

Submitting subject headings proposals to the Library of Congress can be time-consuming and complicated. A manual titled, Creating subject headings for Indigenous topics : a culturally respectful guide was developed by a group of librarians to assist the creation of successful subject headings proposals for Indigenous peoples and topics.

New problematic headings were established 

From the Library of Congress Subject Heading Approved Monthly Lists, the following “problematic” headings were established or revised in May 2023:

• Sexual minorities in comics

• Sexual minorities in literature 

• Sexual minorities in the theater

• Sexual minority activists

The authorized heading, “Sexual minorities” is one of the many problematic headings listed on Cataloging Lab’s Problem LCSH list. It “does not reflect predominant usage of how LGBTQ people are referred to" or how they would refer to themselves. However, as seen on the recent approved list, the Library of Congress continues to assign variant headings, “Sexual minorities” and “Sexual minority” to describe LGBTQ+ people.

What's also troubling is that all reference sources that are supposed to justify the heading, “Sexual minority activists’ are using terms, "LGBTQ+ activists", "LGBTQ rights activist", "LGBT rights activists", and not even one source uses the term, "sexual minorities". Furthermore, one of the sources even includes the recent Google Search results, which prove "sexual minority activists" is not a term commonly used. And yet, the Library of Congress decided to establish a new LCSH, “Sexual minority activists”.

We have a long way to go. 

WRLC Reparative Cataloging Subgroup is committed to repairing these problematic headings in our shared catalog by evaluating and suggesting replacement or alternative headings. If you see headings or descriptions that you feel should be updated or changed, please submit the Reparative description heading reporting form created by the subgroup or join us at our next meeting in June!

Yoko Ferguson

Cataloging and Metadata Librarian, UDC
On behalf of the Reparative Cataloging Subgroup

The Innovative Library Classroom

6/2/2023, 9:00 AM

William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA

Meghan Kowalski and Catherine Meals (UDC) will be presenting a session that will share initial findings and implications for practice for instruction librarians from our qualitative study on writing composition faculty members’ approaches to designing research assignments for and experiences teaching research to their students. It will discuss faculty members’ understanding of the meaning and goals of student research, the knowledge they most prioritize for students, their pedagogical approaches to teaching research, and the structural challenges that affect their teaching.

Note: This event took place prior to the release of the June Newsletter, but we want to be sure to recognize the work of WRLC Library staff like Meghan and Cathy for their contributions to the library community and profession.

Conference on Academic Library Management (CALM)

6/6/2023, 12:00 PM

“Amplifying Others: How to Promote the People on Your Team”

Presented by Meghan Kowalski, UDC

Libraries do amazing things and the people in an organization are what make that happen. Library professionals often talk about their organizations but rarely promote themselves. This not only hurts individual growth, it stagnates an organization by siloing skill sets. In this session, Kowalski will discuss how to amplify the people on your team. She will help attendees discover the strengths of those they work with, share ways to promote their team’s work, and discuss ways to help staff overcome common hurdles like self-doubt and imposter syndrome. She will also highlight why promoting others is beneficial to an organization and an individual. Attendees will take away actionable steps to help them promote their staff member’s skills and projects inside and outside of libraries. (THIS SESSION WILL BE RECORDED AND SHARED ON YOUTUBE.)

https://www.conferenceonacademiclibrarymanagement.com/

• Resource Sharing Supervisor - Georgetown University

• Reference and Instruction Librarian - Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library

• Serials Librarian - Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library

• Course Reserves Coordinator - American University

• Instruction & Online Learning Librarian (Instruction Team Coordinator) - Marymount University

• Media Services Coordinator - American University

• Access and Education Librarian, Department Head - Marymount University

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