One of our initiatives over past year has been to “analyze the monographic collections of the WRLC libraries using Gold Rush®, assign retention commitments for monographs published from 2005 to present and consider options for reducing current retention commitments for monographs published before 2005, being mindful of DEI and whose voices are retained.” We are now in the final stages of this project. 



We exported 2.7 million unique titles for monographs in the collections of eight of the WRLC universities into the Gold Rush® Library Content Comparison System in December 2021. (George Mason was unable to participate due legal requirements of the Commonwealth of Virginia.) The analysis of the WRLC monographic collections found approximately 570,000 unique print monographic titles added to the collection since 2005. Of these, 360,000 were held by a single institution. These items were marked as retained in Alma in the early summer. The final step is to address the approximately 210,000 remaining titles held by multiple institutions and to equitably distribute retention commitments. This was completed in mid-August by Aaron Krebeck (WRLC) with assistance from Gwendolyn Reece (AU) and Josh McDonald (GW). There are a few missing barcodes and small numbers (<500) of mismatched titles that need to be investigated. Only about 1/8th of the marked retention copies are already located in the SCF. 

- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

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.



The Alma/Primo Advisory Committee’s (APAC) September Idea of the Month recommendation is about providing better tools to deal with compromised Alma user accounts.



Let's say a library staff member falls victim to a phishing attempt and their campus credentials are compromised. If the staff member is signed in to Alma at the time, there is currently no way to disconnect them, which potentially puts library processes and patron information at risk. Alma administrators can disable the staff member's roles one-by-one and take other passive steps, but cannot actively kick a user out of Alma if they're signed in.



This Idea proposes adding the ability for someone with the General System Administrator role to disconnect a specific user from Alma, more easily disable that user's roles, and receive an email notification if the user attempts to log in again after being disconnected. Merely having the ability to disconnect someone would be a significant security improvement. This is the sort of feature you hope you never need, but if you do, having the functionality available would be a great help.



Remember, anyone with an email can get 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

Nearly all collections in the Merrill Learning Center at Gallaudet University have been relocated in preparation for the replacement of the library. Most books, journals, archives and other library materials are now shelved in the WRLC’s Shared Collections Facility. Other materials (e.g., furniture, large sports trophies) have found another temporary home. The transfer of this material began in February 2022 and was completed in July 2022. Many thanks to the Gallaudet and the WRLC SCF staff for managing and processing these items. These transfers rocketed Gallaudet from using just a few shelves in the SCF to being the fourth largest user of the SCF space. As of August 2022, 72% of the space in the SCF is now filled and 28% remains available.

- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

The WRLC Assessment Interest Group (AIG) will be re-convening in the new academic year for discussion groups, skillshares, project sharing, and other low-lift activities, as well as potential professional development opportunities. If you work in assessment or are interested in growing your knowledge of assessment, please join us! For more information, contact AIG chair Cathy Meals at catherine.meals@udc.edu.   



- Cathy Meals (DC) 

On behalf of the Assessment Interest Group

The work of the Partnership for Shared Book Collections (of which the WRLC is a member) is carried out by four Working Groups, and is looking for volunteers with an interest or expertise in the following areas to join existing working groups and/or task forces. 

• Communications and Advocacy for shared print programs (Communications and Advocacy Working Group)
• Identifying gaps in the collective collection, including both print and digital (Infrastructure WG)
• Collections and cataloging expertise(Infrastructure WG, Research and Network Level WG, Best Practices WG)
• Resource Sharing, including metrics and methods (Infrastructure WG, Research and Network Level WG)
• Defining workflows and best practices (Best Practices WG)

The four Working Groups are:

• Best Practices Working Group: Draft and promulgate a set of guidelines for various shared print activities. Current activities include drafting best practices for data reporting, weeding and succession planning.  
• Communications and Advocacy Working Group: Joint working group with the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance in support of communicating the value, needs, and impact of shared print at scale. 
• Research and Network Level Working Group: Investigates at scale activities including research, funding, and expanding shared print. Includes task forces on Risk, ROI in shared print, developing a Shared Print Toolkit, and the Impact of Shared Print on Resource Sharing.
• Infrastructure Working Group: The Infrastructure Working Group of the Partnership was established to develop an understanding of Shared Print program data needs, to explore the existing infrastructure capabilities, and to define recommendations and advocate for improvements. Includes task forces on Resource Sharing, Matching Algorithms and Discovery & Metadata

There are no fixed term commitments for the working groups. There is an annual review of membership yearly in July.



Interest in serving can be expressed using the form link below. Since these working groups and task forces are, for the most part, ongoing, there is no specific deadline for joining.

 

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:  

• September 28th, 2022 12:00 PM Faculty Perspectives: Adopting OER into your Courseware Material: How to Begin?
• October 13th, 2022 11:00 AM Faculty Perspectives: You've Already Done This!: Creating and Publishing OER Courseware
• November 2nd, 2022 12:00 PM Faculty Perspectives: Use Only What you Want: Adapting and Remixing OER
• 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

Scholars Trust is a shared print partnership for journals among ASERL, FLARE and the WRLC. Scholars Trust Town Hall e-meetings provide a forum to share progress on current initiatives and elicit further feedback from participating libraries.



Please register here.  After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.  The meeting will be recorded for later playback.

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

See registration information below.

Starting a Text Mining Project - Friday, September 30, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm 

Planning your project is a critical skill in contemporary research. Many students and faculty embark on a project without understanding fully the resources needed and the time commitment involved. This workshop will walk you through the process of a text mining project by asking the right questions: what is my research question, how can I locate and acquire the texts, what tools are relevant for cleaning and analyzing the texts, and what legal issues may limit my access and use of the texts? 

Gale Digital Scholar Lab (1): Building a Dataset - Friday, October 21, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Come and explore our latest acquisition devoted to text analysis, data mining, and data visualization through a series of three workshops. Using Gale’s Primary Sources archive (or combining with your own text data), we will: (1) build a corpus, (2) clean the data, and (3) perform analyses. The first workshop will be building a corpus from the documents made available through our library subscription. We will learn how to search for documents, add them to a content set, upload our own .txt files, and combine them with the Gale content. No previous experience necessary.

Authors’ Rights & the Publishing Industry - Monday, October 24, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

As a graduate student or a faculty member seeking an academic position, tenure, or promotion, you will need to establish a scholarly presence and build your curriculum vitae. A building block in this process is publishing in quality academic journals (subscription-based or open access). This workshop will assist you in selecting the right journal, ascertaining your rights as an author, and explore the problem of predatory publishing practices and how to avoid becoming a victim. Part of Open Access Week (October 24th-30th).

Gale Digital Scholar Lab (2): Cleaning a Dataset - Friday, November 4, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

The second workshop on using the Gale Digital Scholar Lab will focus on cleaning our data. The integral ‘Clean’ tool works with unstructured text data that is generated by the OCR process and shown in Lab. We will walk through the stages of the cleaning process by tackling such problems as removing ASCII characters and document sections, normalizing whitespace, and performing text corrections and modifications as necessary. How you clean your data will impact the tools used for analysis.

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.

The Partnership for Shared Book Collections is excited to announce our new Best Practices Assessment Tools. The Best Practices Assessment Tools provide shared print programs an opportunity to review and reflect on their program's policies and procedures. The criteria used in these assessment tools are based on The Partnership for Shared Book Collections’ Best Practices. To-date, shared print programs are able to assess their program's policies and procedures in the following areas:

• Exiting a program
• Facsimiles
• Policy Development and Program Management
• Program Assessment
• Resource Sharing and Access
• Scarce Copies
• Shared Print Education and Awareness 

You can find the new assessment tools on the Shared Print Toolkit website at https://toolkit.sharedprint.org/best-practices/best-practices-assessment-tool. Additional topics will be added as they become available.



Registration information is provided below. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. The webinar will be recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording.