The WRLC has made significant progress in our ongoing initiative to strengthen our security posture to protect WRLC services and business operations. In the last 12 months we have implemented the following key cybersecurity measures.

• We have completed implementation of multi-factor authentication (MFA), requiring two or more means of identification and access control for all remote network access, internal and remote administrative access to network devices, directory services and servers/endpoints, and all access to our cloud based email service.
• We have signed up for vulnerability and web application scanning by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). We receive weekly reports from CISA and have remediated all Critical and High vulnerabilities. We continue to work through the Medium vulnerabilities and monitor the effectiveness of our mitigations.
• We are now copying server backups for all production services to cloud storage, implementing the 3-2-1 backup rule (three copies, two different media types, at least one off-site). We are now in the process of migrating the cloud backup repositories to "immutable" buckets, making it impossible for those copies to be remotely hacked or corrupted.

- Don Gourley

Director of Information Technology, WRLC

Journals transferred to the WRLC Shared Collections Facility are subject to the shared copy policy adopted by the WRLC Library Directors Council in 2008 to limit duplication of bound journal volumes housed in the SCF. The WRLC Shared Copy Policy triggers a retention commitment when a duplicate copy of a journal volume is sent to the SCF. This policy has resulted in a collection of nearly 10,000 journal titles that are retained on behalf of the WRLC libraries and for our shared print partners in Scholars Trust and the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance. 



In addition to the 10,000 titles we have retained to date, there is a similar number of journal titles for which we have never received a second copy at the SCF. Using a shared print overlap tool recently developed by the California Digital Library, Center for Research Libraries, and HathiTrust (CCH), we are now able to tell which of these journal titles have retention commitments by shared print programs in the United States and Canada. The results show that nearly 4,500 journal titles with 60,000 volumes shelved in the SCF are retained by three or fewer shared print programs. 



The WRLC Coordinated Collections Committee (CCC) decided that those journal titles owned by the WRLC partners with fewer than three retention commitments in the CCH tool will be retained and added to our shared print commitments. This adds 700 new titles that are not currently retained by any other library in the Rosemont Alliance and 4,500 additional titles over all. The WRLC has now marked those items in Alma.



- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

The WRLC task force conducting an analysis of our combined collections has identified 570,000 monographic titles published after 2004. Of these titles, nearly 360,000 are owned by only a single WRLC library. Lists of these 360,000 monographs have been shared with the owning library to allow them to identify any books that they do not believe have long-term research value (e.g., computer instruction manuals, travel books). The WRLC is currently adding retention commitments in the bibliographic records for these titles. The next step will be to assign retention commitments equitably for the 210,000 remaining titles held by multiple institutions. This project will ensure that the WRLC libraries have access to these materials over the long term while eliminating unnecessary duplication and reducing the need for shelf space. 



- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

Systematic deaccessioning of materials from a Harvard model high-density facility like the WRLC Shared Collections Facility is an often-discussed, but rarely attempted process. The commonly held assumption has long been that removing material and then filling the created gaps would be too labor intensive to be of cost-effective. Aaron Krebeck began a discussion with the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) two years ago to brainstorm some potential workflows. Aaron, Tammy Hennig, and Joel Shields then applied some of these ideas to the WRLC’s SCF and were able to implement them for a project with George Mason University. As of today, 5,403 items have been deaccessioned and will be sent back to Mason’s Arlington Campus Library in May. This project demonstrated that we are able to cost-effectively remove materials from the SCF and refill the empty space with new items. This exciting project with a potentially transformative outcome will be presented at the WRLC Annual Meeting.



- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

On April 4, 2022, the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) sponsored “Toward a More Perfect Union”, a conversation with:

• Dr. Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress
• David Ferriero, Archivist Of The United States, National Archives and Records Administration 
• Tom Medema, Associate Director for Interpretation, Education, & Volunteers, National Park Service

These leaders from three of our nation’s cultural heritage organizations discuss activities their organizations are undertaking and planning that reflect a more inclusive view of our nation's heritage. This is an exceptional opportunity to hear about great work being done by these agencies.

• The Annual Meeting will kick off on Wednesday, May 18th with a virtual lunch from 12:00 Noon to 12:45 PM.
• Join us for a 90 minute “Renewal Colloquium" that will explore morale and ambiguity in libraries during COVID-19, led by Kaetrena Davis Kendrick beginning at 1:00 PM on Wednesday, May 18th.
• Breakout sessions, highlighting over a dozen presentations by your colleagues from throughout the Consortium, will take place Tuesday – Thursday, May 24-26th, 2022

Check out the full agenda, learn about the Renewal Colloquium that will be presented by Kaetrena Davis Kendrick and pick your preferred Breakout/Concurrent Sessions. 

Notice: The newsletter sent earlier this morning had the date of March 18th listed for the keynote when it should be May 18th.  The article has been updated to reflect the correction.

This year’s WRLC Annual Meeting features a breakout session where presenters will share technology tools they are leveraging in innovative ways to support their work and enhance resources and services.



Have you found an app that increases your productivity? Are you creating more impactful images and visualizations than before? Did you discover some new tool that helps engage students in the classroom or optimize your code? The WRLC Technology Showcase wants to hear about it!



We are looking for 5-6 people to give a short, five-minute lightning talk to demo the tool, share how it is been used to make an improvement, and answer questions from attendees. If you are interested, please fill out this short form by Friday, April 15th.



- Morgan Stoddard (GW) and Tom Boone (WRLC)

WRLC Technology Showcase organizers

Are you interested in issues related to outreach and marketing? If so, please consider joining the WRLC Outreach Interest Group (OIG). 



The mission of the WRLC OIG is to provide a community for interested members of the WRLC to advance outreach and marketing initiatives and best practices on our individual campuses and within the WRLC Consortium. OIG will provide a forum for members to learn from each other, share their expertise and best practices, and collaborate on outreach initiatives including but not limited to consortial level initiatives along with shared and individual programming, communications, and projects.



The interest group will have a listserv that members can use to share announcements, ask questions, or seek partners for collaboration. The interest group will also develop a local repository of Creative Commons licensed marketing material for use among the WRLC libraries.  



This is a new interest group, and we are seeking interested members from all WRLC partner libraries. If you are interested in joining, please fill out this very brief survey or contact Meghan Kowalski, Outreach and Reference Librarian, University of the District of Columbia, at meghan.kowalski@udc.edu.

- Meghan Kowalski (UDC)

The WRLC is pleased to announce a new digital preservation service to provide dedicated digital object storage, designated and managed specifically for digital preservation. The Preservation Archive for WRLC (PAW) is built on the OAIS standard Archivematica platform and supports the storage of multiple copies of digital resources in separate geographic locations with different disaster threats.

Digital resources in Archivematica are stored in a container called an archival information package (AIP). In PAW the AIPs can be stored at WRLC and in cloud storage, thus providing geographic distribution with different disaster threats and storage media types. WRLC has created an automated pipeline using the Archivematica APIs to export content from Islandora and ingest it into PAW, storing the resulting AIPs in the cloud provider’s US West region. Starting this month we will begin running the pipeline on the most valuable collections as identified by the libraries using the Islandora repository.



For the Islandora pipeline, Archivematica is used to create and store AIPs, with processing steps limited to file fixity verification and virus scanning. However, Archivematica can do much more to support digital preservation activities, such as identifying and normalizing file formats, checking policy conformance, adding metadata, and performing OCR. If any partners are interested in using PAW for other content, we can provision an Archivematica dashboard to run custom pipelines and work with you to integrate PAW in your digital preservation workflows.



- Don Gourley (WRLC)

Director of Information Technology

Journals transferred to the WRLC Shared Collections Facility are subject to the shared copy policy adopted by the WRLC Library Directors Council in 2008 to limit duplication of bound journal volumes housed in the SCF. The WRLC Shared Copy Policy triggers a retention commitment when a duplicate copy of a journal volume is sent to the SCF. This policy has resulted in a collection of nearly 10,000 journal titles that are retained on behalf of the WRLC libraries and for our shared print partners in Scholars Trust and the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance. 



In addition to the 10,000 titles we have retained to date, there is a similar number of journal titles for which we have never received a second copy at the SCF. Using a shared print overlap tool recently developed by the California Digital Library, Center for Research Libraries, and HathiTrust, we are now able to tell which of these journal titles have retention commitments by shared print programs in the United States and Canada. The results show that nearly 4,000 journal titles shelved in the SCF are held by three or fewer shared print programs in the US and Canada. 



The WRLC Coordinated Collections Committee (CCC) made the decision that those journal titles with fewer than three retention commitments should also be retained and added to our shared print commitments. We have now marked those items in the SCF Institution Zone (IZ) and they will be retained according to the shared copy policy. The final step in this process will be to circulate the lists of journal titles to each shared periodical collection partner to mark the retention commitment in the owning library’s IZ and to create summary holdings statements so our retention commitment can be shared with our international shared print community. Thank you to the CCC for your hard work on this complex project.



- Aaron Krebeck (WRLC)

Director of Library and User Services

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. 



The primary focus for OER material may be textbooks, but OER ancillary materials and multimedia resources are also available to augment the courseware. When considering OER, don’t limit the search to just the textbook. Quizzes, slide decks, discussion questions, videos, lectures, and images are also available for courseware material. And, as always, instructors are free to use as little or as much as they prefer. This is an ideal opportunity to add desirable material to a syllabus without adding to the burden of textbook costs. 



This list of OER Multimedia Resources, curated by Meghan Kowalski, UDC’s Outreach and OER Librarian, is a great place to start for multimedia courseware needs: 



In the original document, the three headings below were in three side-by-side columns. I don’t know whether that is possible in MailChimp, but it made for a very efficient display.



Video

• Digital Public Library of America
• FedFlix
• Internet Archive - Feature Films
• Internet Archive - Moving Image Archive
• Khan Academy
• OER Commons
• The Open Video Project
• TeacherTube
• TED Talks
• YouTube

Images

• Creative Commons Search
• Digital Public Library of America
• Flickr
• Library of Congress - Digital Collections
• Nappy.co
• The Noun Project
• Open Photo
• Pexels
• Pixabay
• Unsplash
• Wikimedia Commons

Audio

• Digital Public Library of America
• Free Music Archive
• Internet Archive - Audio Archive
• Jamendo
• Library of Congress - Audio Recordings
• Public Domain Information Project
• Sound Bible
• Wikimedia Commons - Sound

The following handout and slide presentation are also great opportunities to learn more about discovering OER ancillary material. Both resources accompany the webinar on OER Ancillary Materials, as part of the Maryland OER Webinar Series. They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which allows reuse, revision, and redistribution so long as the original creator (Rebus Community) is attributed. 

• M.O.S.T. Webinar on OER Ancillary Materials Slide Presentation
• M.O.S.T. Webinar on OER Ancillary Materials Handout

As always, if you are interested in learning more about Open Education Resources at WRLC, please contact us at open@wrlc.org. Please be sure to include your name, institution, job title, and any additional comments. We look forward to hearing from you!



- Textbook Affordability Working Group (TAWG)

The Partnership for Shared Book Collections is soliciting representation from the membership to fill a Member-at-Large vacancy on the Operations Committee (OC). This is a 3 year term from July 2022 - June 2025. This request is being sent to all programs not currently represented on the OC.

The Operations Committee (OC)

• The purpose of the OC is to work with the Program Coordinator to monitor and oversee the work of the working groups. The OC works closely with the Program Coordinator on guiding the strategic direction of the Partnership, advises the Executive Committee on that direction, prepares grant proposals, timelines and business model plans, and may recommend to the Executive Committee the appointment of other working groups or task forces.
• The OC consists of individuals with operational shared print roles (e.g. program managers) and those with leadership roles (e.g. program/consortial directors) at Partnership Member Programs and their participating libraries
• The OC includes the conveners of the four Partnership Working Groups – Best Practices, Communications and Advocacy, Infrastructure, and Research and Network Level, as well as up to 4 Members-at-Large. The Operations Committee meets virtually for one hour on a monthly basis, and quarterly with the Executive Committee for 90 minute meetings, and collaborates via email as necessary.
•  See the Partnership Governance document for more information on the OC and how it fits into the overall governance of the Partnership.

Are you interested in serving as a Member-at-Large on the Partnership Operations Committee? Or, would you like to nominate a colleague to serve? Contact Mark Jacobs at jacobs@wrlc.org no later than Tuesday, April 26.

- Mark Jacobs (WRLC)

Executive Director

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



PIDs and the Research Lifecycle Mon., April 11, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm



PIDs (Persistent Identifiers) are long-lasting references to digital resources that play a significant role in the research lifecycle. Learn the fundamentals of PIDs, the types of PIDs, how PIDs work, and the impact of PIDs on your research. Examples include researcher IDs (e.g., ORCID), work IDs (e.g., DOIs), and organization / publisher IDs (e.g., Ringgold). The session will end with a quick demo on how to set up your ORCID account in their new user interface.



Register



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.

This year’s WRLC Annual Meeting features a breakout session where presenters will share technology tools they are leveraging in innovative ways to support their work and enhance resources and services.



Have you found an app that increases your productivity? Are you creating more impactful images and visualizations than before? Did you discover some new tool that helps engage students in the classroom or optimize your code? The WRLC Technology Showcase wants to hear about it!



We are looking for 5-6 people to give a short, five-minute lightning talk to demo the tool, share how it is been used to make an improvement, and answer questions from attendees. If you are interested, please fill out this short form by Friday, April 15th.



- Morgan Stoddard (GW) and Tom Boone (WRLC)

WRLC Technology Showcase organizers

Are you interested in issues related to outreach and marketing? If so, please consider joining the WRLC Outreach Interest Group (OIG). 



The mission of the WRLC OIG is to provide a community for interested members of the WRLC to advance outreach and marketing initiatives and best practices on our individual campuses and within the WRLC Consortium. OIG will provide a forum for members to learn from each other, share their expertise and best practices, and collaborate on outreach initiatives including but not limited to consortial level initiatives along with shared and individual programming, communications, and projects.



The interest group will have a listserv that members can use to share announcements, ask questions, or seek partners for collaboration. The interest group will also develop a local repository of Creative Commons licensed marketing material for use among the WRLC libraries.  



This is a new interest group, and we are seeking interested members from all WRLC partner libraries. If you are interested in joining, please fill out this very brief survey or contact Meghan Kowalski, Outreach and Reference Librarian, University of the District of Columbia, at meghan.kowalski@udc.edu.

- Meghan Kowalski (UDC)

The WRLC is pleased to announce a new digital preservation service to provide dedicated digital object storage, designated and managed specifically for digital preservation. The Preservation Archive for WRLC (PAW) is built on the OAIS standard Archivematica platform and supports the storage of multiple copies of digital resources in separate geographic locations with different disaster threats.

Digital resources in Archivematica are stored in a container called an archival information package (AIP). In PAW the AIPs can be stored at WRLC and in cloud storage, thus providing geographic distribution with different disaster threats and storage media types. WRLC has created an automated pipeline using the Archivematica APIs to export content from Islandora and ingest it into PAW, storing the resulting AIPs in the cloud provider’s US West region. Starting this month we will begin running the pipeline on the most valuable collections as identified by the libraries using the Islandora repository.



For the Islandora pipeline, Archivematica is used to create and store AIPs, with processing steps limited to file fixity verification and virus scanning. However, Archivematica can do much more to support digital preservation activities, such as identifying and normalizing file formats, checking policy conformance, adding metadata, and performing OCR. If any partners are interested in using PAW for other content, we can provision an Archivematica dashboard to run custom pipelines and work with you to integrate PAW in your digital preservation workflows.



- Don Gourley (WRLC)

Director of Information Technology

Journals transferred to the WRLC Shared Collections Facility are subject to the shared copy policy adopted by the WRLC Library Directors Council in 2008 to limit duplication of bound journal volumes housed in the SCF. The WRLC Shared Copy Policy triggers a retention commitment when a duplicate copy of a journal volume is sent to the SCF. This policy has resulted in a collection of nearly 10,000 journal titles that are retained on behalf of the WRLC libraries and for our shared print partners in Scholars Trust and the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance. 



In addition to the 10,000 titles we have retained to date, there is a similar number of journal titles for which we have never received a second copy at the SCF. Using a shared print overlap tool recently developed by the California Digital Library, Center for Research Libraries, and HathiTrust, we are now able to tell which of these journal titles have retention commitments by shared print programs in the United States and Canada. The results show that nearly 4,000 journal titles shelved in the SCF are held by three or fewer shared print programs in the US and Canada. 



The WRLC Coordinated Collections Committee (CCC) made the decision that those journal titles with fewer than three retention commitments should also be retained and added to our shared print commitments. We have now marked those items in the SCF Institution Zone (IZ) and they will be retained according to the shared copy policy. The final step in this process will be to circulate the lists of journal titles to each shared periodical collection partner to mark the retention commitment in the owning library’s IZ and to create summary holdings statements so our retention commitment can be shared with our international shared print community. Thank you to the CCC for your hard work on this complex project.



- Aaron Krebeck (WRLC)

Director of Library and User Services

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. 



The primary focus for OER material may be textbooks, but OER ancillary materials and multimedia resources are also available to augment the courseware. When considering OER, don’t limit the search to just the textbook. Quizzes, slide decks, discussion questions, videos, lectures, and images are also available for courseware material. And, as always, instructors are free to use as little or as much as they prefer. This is an ideal opportunity to add desirable material to a syllabus without adding to the burden of textbook costs. 



This list of OER Multimedia Resources, curated by Meghan Kowalski, UDC’s Outreach and OER Librarian, is a great place to start for multimedia courseware needs: 



In the original document, the three headings below were in three side-by-side columns. I don’t know whether that is possible in MailChimp, but it made for a very efficient display.



Video

• Digital Public Library of America
• FedFlix
• Internet Archive - Feature Films
• Internet Archive - Moving Image Archive
• Khan Academy
• OER Commons
• The Open Video Project
• TeacherTube
• TED Talks
• YouTube

Images

• Creative Commons Search
• Digital Public Library of America
• Flickr
• Library of Congress - Digital Collections
• Nappy.co
• The Noun Project
• Open Photo
• Pexels
• Pixabay
• Unsplash
• Wikimedia Commons

Audio

• Digital Public Library of America
• Free Music Archive
• Internet Archive - Audio Archive
• Jamendo
• Library of Congress - Audio Recordings
• Public Domain Information Project
• Sound Bible
• Wikimedia Commons - Sound

The following handout and slide presentation are also great opportunities to learn more about discovering OER ancillary material. Both resources accompany the webinar on OER Ancillary Materials, as part of the Maryland OER Webinar Series. They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which allows reuse, revision, and redistribution so long as the original creator (Rebus Community) is attributed. 

• M.O.S.T. Webinar on OER Ancillary Materials Slide Presentation
• M.O.S.T. Webinar on OER Ancillary Materials Handout

As always, if you are interested in learning more about Open Education Resources at WRLC, please contact us at open@wrlc.org. Please be sure to include your name, institution, job title, and any additional comments. We look forward to hearing from you!



- Textbook Affordability Working Group (TAWG)

The Partnership for Shared Book Collections is soliciting representation from the membership to fill a Member-at-Large vacancy on the Operations Committee (OC). This is a 3 year term from July 2022 - June 2025. This request is being sent to all programs not currently represented on the OC.

The Operations Committee (OC)

• The purpose of the OC is to work with the Program Coordinator to monitor and oversee the work of the working groups. The OC works closely with the Program Coordinator on guiding the strategic direction of the Partnership, advises the Executive Committee on that direction, prepares grant proposals, timelines and business model plans, and may recommend to the Executive Committee the appointment of other working groups or task forces.
• The OC consists of individuals with operational shared print roles (e.g. program managers) and those with leadership roles (e.g. program/consortial directors) at Partnership Member Programs and their participating libraries
• The OC includes the conveners of the four Partnership Working Groups – Best Practices, Communications and Advocacy, Infrastructure, and Research and Network Level, as well as up to 4 Members-at-Large. The Operations Committee meets virtually for one hour on a monthly basis, and quarterly with the Executive Committee for 90 minute meetings, and collaborates via email as necessary.
•  See the Partnership Governance document for more information on the OC and how it fits into the overall governance of the Partnership.

Are you interested in serving as a Member-at-Large on the Partnership Operations Committee? Or, would you like to nominate a colleague to serve? Contact Mark Jacobs at jacobs@wrlc.org no later than Tuesday, April 26.

- Mark Jacobs (WRLC)

Executive Director

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



PIDs and the Research Lifecycle Mon., April 11, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm



PIDs (Persistent Identifiers) are long-lasting references to digital resources that play a significant role in the research lifecycle. Learn the fundamentals of PIDs, the types of PIDs, how PIDs work, and the impact of PIDs on your research. Examples include researcher IDs (e.g., ORCID), work IDs (e.g., DOIs), and organization / publisher IDs (e.g., Ringgold). The session will end with a quick demo on how to set up your ORCID account in their new user interface.



Register



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.