The Washington Research Library Consortium seeks a dynamic, creative Executive Director to provide innovative and thoughtful leadership and to advance the mission of this member-driven not-for-profit organization composed of nine libraries in the greater Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The WRLC supports and enhances the library and information technology services of its member universities, enabling the success of learning and scholarship by: creating coordinated collections, creating a robust infrastructure for ease of discovery and access, ensuring the long-term preservation of physical and digital information resources, supporting emerging information technologies and information management, and sharing expertise across the consortium and beyond.



The search is being managed by Koya Partners. To view the full job description and learn how to apply, visit this link: https://koyapartners.com/search/wrlc-executive-director/.

Several years ago, Ex Libris introduced the Idea Exchange as an online community to enable customers to shape the products and solutions they invest in and use every day. Within the WRLC, however, we have struggled to gain much support for ideas that would really help in our specific network environment. To try to address that – and to increase knowledge and usage of the Idea Exchange in the WRLC generally – the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) is introducing the Idea of the Month: a featured idea on the Exchange that would positively impact the WRLC.



Every person with an Idea Exchange login has 25 votes to either create or support existing ideas and can place up to three votes on any one idea. Those votes are one metric driving the Ex libris development team's review and consideration of an idea. If half of the staff across WRLC libraries gave an idea 3 votes, that idea would have over 1,000 votes – a very persuasive point total almost immediately! In addition, ideas that get the most votes in a week are featured on the “Hot Ideas” list on a product’s Idea Exchange page, gaining even more visibility.



Anyone with an email can get an Idea Exchange account. Simply select a product (e.g. Alma, Primo) from the Idea Exchange home page and click the sign in link on the top right. There you can enter an email address and password, or just select an existing Google, Facebook or Ex Libris login.



Here is APAC’s choice for our inaugural Idea of the Month: Include available NZ e-inventory within IZ Alma/Primo VE browse indexes



This Idea was submitted by our very own Cindy Bowen, Georgetown’s APAC representative, and would help your patrons and staff discover shared e-resources in our network zone, such as JSTOR and OUP collections.



APAC welcomes nominations for future Ideas of the Month. Anyone can highlight an idea on our Idea Exchange Basecamp (which is where June’s Idea of the Month came from). Contact your APAC representative if you need an invite to join that basecamp project. Committees are encouraged to submit Idea of the Month nominations to their APAC liaison



-The Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

The WRLC Service Desk has long maintained an email list to notify our community of any issues or events that may impact the library and IT services we provide. This worked well for communicating about planned maintenance and for issues impacting our locally hosted ILS (i.e. Voyager). But now the most serious issues and service disruptions we experience are related to our network and virtual server infrastructure – which can also affect our locally hosted alert list.



To ensure we can communicate with stakeholders even when our private cloud is unavailable, we have moved the WRLC alert list to a Google Group that is hosted in the public cloud. All members of the old list have been added to the Google Group, so no action is required on your part to continue receiving alerts. The email address has changed so you may need to add wrlc-alert@wrlc.org to your address book if the alerts are ending up in your spam folder.



We have also added a convenient subscribe/unsubscribe button to the Library Staff Intranet to help you manage your subscription. Simply Log In to the Intranet and your profile page will indicate whether you are subscribed or not and provide a button to change your status. If your subscribed email address is a Gmail account you can also go to the Google Group page to manage your subscription. You can send us an email at servicedesk@wrlc.org if you need any help subscribing or unsubscribing.



-Don Gourley

Director of Information Technology, WRLC

It has been a busy year for Open Educational Resources (OER) at the WRLC!



Textbook costs have increased by over 1,000% since 1977 and students are a captive market. This environment becomes increasingly concerning as the number of publishers decreases- threatening the diversity of material that is available. It is the goal of the Textbook Affordability Working Group (TAWG) to coordinate efforts to support the adoption of OER and to further WRLC’s initiatives for affordable education and student success across our institutions.



Workshops



In the Fall/Winter of 2021, TAWG coordinated 4 training workshops that provided a brief introduction to open textbooks and panel discussions featuring faculty members who teach with them. All teaching instructors that attended were given the opportunity to earn a $200 stipend by posting a review of an open textbook on the Open Textbook Library website. [provide link to OTL] You can learn more about these sessions and watch recordings of them at https://open.wrlc.org/events



Impact

To date, 236 faculty have participated in this program and written 140 textbook reviews. More often than not, this introduction to OER has led to the adoption of open textbooks by participants in the workshops, which generated an estimated potential savings of over $67,000 for students.  



OER Toolkit

In the Spring semester 2022, TAWG published a Student OER Advocacy Toolkit on the recently updated Open@WRLC website and hosted a presentation dedicated to instructing students on how to begin advocacy efforts on their own campus. Additionally, we offered programming that included topics specific to higher level graduate courses, STEM resources, and using discovery tools to effectively search for OER material. 



Being a Catalyst for WRLC



The WRLC Board of Directors recently approved funding for a new grant program designed to encourage faculty in the WRLC community to replace commercial textbooks through the adoption, adaptation, and creation of Open Educational Resources. The grants are projected to replace commercial textbooks used by over 12,000 students with OER textbooks, saving $1.8 million over five years. In addition, a recommendation for continued funding for the Open@WRLC Catalyst Program was also approved.



 The OER Catalyst Program will address the following goals. 

• Advance educational equity at WRLC institutions via providing centralized financial support for the adoption and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER)

• Build a sustainable infrastructure to support the Open@WRLC grant program, products, resources and training.

• Support the integration and creation of OER material to reduce the direct costs to students and contribute to their retention, progression and graduation.

• Establish a sustainable OER community of WRLC partners that promotes sharing of OER expertise, Open Pedagogy and highlights the opportunities of OER to address diversity and inclusion in courseware material.

Conclusion

2022 has been an exciting academic year for OER at WRLC.  We look forward to next year’s work and growing our initiatives even more to provide affordable education and student success across our institutions.



If you are interested in participating or want to learn more about our work, please contact us at open@wrlc.org and visit our website at https://open.wrlc.org



-Textbook Affordability Working Group

We reported in the May WRLC Newsletter about our project to identify the journal titles held in the WRLC Shared Collections Facility that were not yet included among those journals with retention commitments. The Coordinated Collections Committee (CCC) decided that those journal titles owned by the WRLC partners with fewer than three retention commitments by other shared print programs should be retained and added to our shared print commitments. This decision adds 4,500 journal titles with retention commitments made by the WRLC libraries, for a total of over 19,000 retained shared print journal titles. The WRLC retention commitments are now recorded in Alma, national shared print databases (JRNL, PAPR) and are now marked in OCLC’s WorldCat as being committed for retention as part of the WRLC Shared Print program. 



- Jackie Saavedra

Consortial Network Zone Manager, WRLC

Through the efforts of several WRLC committees (Coordinated Collections, E-Resource, and Alma/Primo Advisory), over thirty free or open access collections of electronic resources have been identified and activated in the Alma Network Zone. These represent collections that had already been activated individually in four or more Alma Institution Zones. Converting these collections to Network Zone resources is a more efficient and cost-effective use of Alma bibliographic records. The complete list of current shared resources may be found on the WRLC Intranet.



Additional shared open access collections may be added after further review. Any recommendations for changes to institutional participation for these resources should be directed to your institution’s representative on the E-Resource Committee. Please contact WRLC Network Zone Manager Jacqueline Saavedra (saavedra@wrlc.org) with any other questions about the Shared E-Resource Collections spreadsheet.

Gloria Sena and Aaron Krebeck have developed a new workflow that improves the ability to track intra-consortial lending using Alma. As many Alma institutions using the Alma Fulfillment Network (AFN) have found, anonymization jobs remove all identifying features that would tell the home institution of linked users. On two separate occasions, Ex Libris has made adjustments to data analytics that were supposed to improve this situation. The fixes have made minor improvements, but far too many cross-library transactions are still being anonymized to provide accurate statistics. 



WRLC has developed a new strategy using statistical categories to embed the linked user's home institution in a non-anonymized field. This technique will ensure that patron transactions will have an identifiable home institution, which will allow us to accurately track borrowing and requesting between the WRLC libraries. Intra-consortial lending reports will be found in the WRLC Library Staff Intranet here: https://www.libraries.wrlc.org/alma-documents-resource-sharing-statistics-and-reports/consortium-lending-reports.

- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

The WRLC welcomed two new additions to its team of Shared Collections Specialists. This position is responsible for the operations of the WRLC Shared Collections Facility, including accessioning, shelving, retrieving and fulfilling requests for materials in the SCF. 

• Sarah Concepcion has a Bachelor’s degree and Master’s in History from George Mason University and two years’ experience working as a student assistant at George Mason’s Mason Square Library (formerly Arlington Campus Library).

• Suzanne Holcombe has a BA in Art History from Aberystwyth University and a Master’s in History of Art from the University of York with experience in various arts, library and other cultural heritage organizations.

- Mark Jacobs

Executive Director, WRLC