May 08, 2023

Tuesday, May 23rd - 24th, 2023

The Annual Meeting will kick off 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 will be followed by a virtual lunch from 12:00 Noon to 12:45 PM that will feature a “Meet the New Director” session where you will have a chance to say hello and hear from WRLC’s new Executive Director, Kim Armstrong.

Join us for the 90 minute keynote beginning at 1:00 PM. “The Colors of Disinformation: Information Disorder and the Literacy Landscape” presented by Dr. Nichole A. Cooke from the University of South Carolina.

Concurrent sessions, highlighting presentations by your colleagues from throughout the Consortium, will take place Wednesday, May 24.

Check out the full agenda, learn about the Keynote presentation, and pick your preferred Concurrent Sessions.

This MayDay, the Society of American Archivists and the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation are urging cultural heritage institutions to do one thing for emergency preparedness. WRLC’s Preservation Advisory Committee (PAC) is pleased to announce that the disaster plan (dPlan) for the Shared Collections Facility (SCF) is currently being updated after a few years hiatus and welcoming new committee members.

PAC has long worked with WRLC to maintain a disaster preparedness plan for the SCF. In 2022 the dPlan platform underwent a major upgrade and combined the old product with another online preparedness tool. This spring, PAC began updating the plan in the new platform. Sections include things like risk assessments, collection summaries, contact lists, vendors and suppliers, instructions for types of disasters, and building information. We will share it with everyone once it is completed!

Rebecca Kennedy of Curae Collections Care will lead an in person disaster preparedness and emergency response training to PAC members and invited colleagues this July at George Washington University.

The trainings will include content rich lectures and scenario-based learning exercises (both

tabletop and hands-on). The training will be customized based on the Consortium’s areas of

interest and relevant collection types.

The topics covered during the training should enhance the participants skills for assessing,

preparing, and responding during complex emergencies relevant to all Consortium members’ collections and risk. Participants should feel fully involved in the preparedness and response of their own collections.

April 30-May 6th is Preservation Week! This year’s theme is building resilient communities. Preservation Week is an annual event meant to inspire action to preserve your collections. Focusing on preservation for a designated week every year raises awareness of the role libraries and other cultural institutions play in preservation, by sharing information to help make informed decisions that help your collections last for the future. There are tons of free trainings, webinars, and leaflets available to learn more!

• https://preservationweek.org/free-webinars/

• https://www.loc.gov/preservation/outreach/presweek/index_presweek.html

• https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/overview

Did you know that WRLC has a committee dedicated to preservation?

WRLC’s Preservation Advisory Committee is a longstanding group of library professionals whose work touches on preservation and conservation, most of us work in preservation units or archives and special collections. Our purpose is to propose policies and develop procedures to ensure the preservation and conservation of materials in all formats, including but not limited to printed text, audio-visual recordings, and digital files held within the WRLC central facility as well as in the individual member libraries that comprise the WRLC.

This year we have continued our environmental monitoring of the SCF, are planning a disaster preparedness training for select individuals, participated in Preservation Week, and have updated the disaster preparedness plan for the SCF. 

PAC has welcomed many new members this year. Feel free to reach out to your PAC representative or the PAC committee if you have preservation concerns!

• Leslie Nellis, Head Archivist for Special Collections and Digital Initiatives, AU - chair

• Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship, CU

• Chris Anglim, Archivist, DC

• James McCarthy, Director, Gallaudet University Archives, GA

• Amy Sullivan, Preservation Librarian, GM

• Vani Murthy, Department Head, Technical Services, GT

• Jay Sylvestre, Rare Books Curator, GT

• Brigette Kamsler, University Archivist, GW

• Christina Vortia, Rare Books Librarian, HU

• Mason Yang, Electronic Services Librarian, MU

• Aaron Krebeck, Interim Executive Director and Director of Library & User Services, WRLC

PAC was charged with gathering a year’s worth of environmental data (temperature, relative humidity, and seasonal changes) in the WRLC SCF as a pilot project. PAC members deployed four PEM2 monitors; one monitor in shelf locations within each of the three collections modules and one monitor within the collections ingest area. This analysis was expected to help eliminate assumptions about collections environments in the SCF and assist WRLC central and consortium leadership with making data-driven decisions about the current usage of and planning for future needs re: HVAC; especially as more consortium libraries rely on the SCF to maintain rare, archival, medium rare, and other cultural heritage collections. Over the past year, WRLC has implemented the conserv system. PAC members received training from a conserv staff person last year.

Pilot findings: Module 1 has a lower TWPI, due to its higher and less stable overall relative humidity. The overall time-weighted preservation index (TWPI) drops noticeably in Module 3 due to fluctuations in RH over the summer months.

Further reading about environmental monitoring:

• Fundamentals of Preservation Metrics 

• The Evolution of New Standards—Defining an Optimal & Sustainable Preservation Environment in the 21st Century

• Understand the Risks & Benefits of Your Storage Environment

• Best Practices for Collecting and Analyzing Environmental Data

Reparative Cataloging Updates

Reparative Work Around the Profession: The Prejudicial Materials Working Group of Rare Books and Manuscripts Section’s Controlled Vocabularies Editorial Group wants feedback on approximately 50 proposed new and revised terms for the RBMS Controlled Vocabulary for Rare Materials Cataloging. Suggestions/feedback can be submitted via this form, 4/17-5/26/2023. They will be hosting a 90 min public forum on the history of the project and an overview of the proposed terms on 5/10/23 at 3 pm EST via Zoom. More info and link to be sent out later.

ASERL Sponsored Professional Development Activities

ASERL offers a wide variety of webinars at no cost for members and other interested professionals. Follow the linked program title for full details and to register for an event.  

NOTE:  ASERL’s Code of Conduct is in effect for all webinar participants. See http://www.aserl.org/aserl_code_of_conduct/.  ASERL webinars are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

• 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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April 24, 2023

One Last Chance to Submit your Concurrent Sessions Proposal!

You have more last week to share your ideas and your expertise with your colleagues in the WRLC community! The Annual Meeting concurrent sessions are designed to provide you or a group of your Consortium colleagues an opportunity to share what you know with others in the Consortium. Each concurrent session lasts 45 minutes. Proposals that incorporate interaction, discussion, and creativity are encouraged.

Submit your Annual Meeting concurrent session proposal by Friday, Apr 28, 2023

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April 18, 2023

Tuesday, May 23rd - 24th, 2023

Share your ideas and your expertise with your colleagues in the WRLC community! The Annual Meeting concurrent sessions are designed to provide you or a group of your Consortium colleagues an opportunity to share what you know with others in the Consortium. Each concurrent session lasts 45 minutes. Proposals that incorporate interaction, discussion, and creativity are encouraged.

Submit your Annual Meeting concurrent session proposal by Friday, Apr 21, 2023

Improving Physical Item Editor management

The Alma/Primo Advisory Committee's (APAC) April Idea of the Month is a BOGO! It features two ideas which can improve working with the physical item editor. Those two items are below:

1. Enable all tabs and fields to be editable without clicking on 'save and edit' button – Currently after you click on 'Add item' and being navigated to the 'Physical Item Editor' form, not all the fields and tabs (General, ENUM/CHRON, Notes, and History) are enabled for editing, the barcode no. is not populated automatically, and the dropdown list of process type is disabled as well. Only after clicking on 'save and edit' button, the complete form, including the tabs are enabled for editing. Therefore, each time you need to add an item, you have to go through 2 phases: 1) fill a limited number of fields and click on 'save and edit' 2) edit more fields, choose process type, and add public/internal notes (if needed) and click on 'save'. This workflow is extremely long and if all tabs and fields were enabled for editing in one flow, it would make the whole process faster, easier and prevent users from making mistakes, in cases where they forgot to fill some fields.

   
   

2. Add 'Save as Default' button – Cataloguers who most of the time handle the same material type or fill/choose the same content for several fields (including process type) and, etc. would be glad if there was an option to save the content of number of fields as a default, so they don't have to fill them for each item. I'm aware there's already an idea to add templates to handle this, but I believe this will extend the workflow, because when the cataloguer wants to add an item, first he'll be directed to a screen where he has to choose to load from a template (same as it works with POL's templates) and only then he can fill out any missing data in the form, such as receiving date, enumerations, description, and etc. Hence, the 'Save as Default' button will solve this long workflow and save precious time, so if the user would like to save fields with content and update them from time to time (similar to how it worked in Aleph), he can do it easily and quickly.

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.

- Aaron Krebeck (WRLC)

On behalf of the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

In years past, WRLC had registered our consortia’s shared print retention commitments in OCLC for items marked as Permanent, as well as for our shared print periodicals. This retention statement is visible in OCLC’s FirstSearch and Worldshare Record Manager; the statements allow WRLC to advertise our obligation to retain a particular title.

Now in addition to our periodicals and Permanent items, we have registered all WRLC items marked as Retention for our participating institutions (American University, Catholic University of America, Gallaudet University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Howard University, Marymount University, and the University of the District of Columbia). A little less than 3 million WRLC shared print commitments are now visible in various OCLC platforms.

-Jackie Saavedra (WRLC)

Reparative Cataloging Updates

This past month the preferred term correction job in Alma made three changes:

• Headings with “Slaves” has now changed to “Enslaved persons”; examples “Slaves’ writings” is now “Enslaved persons’ writings” and “Women slaves” is now “Enslaved women”.

• “Albinos” and “Albinism” has been updated to either “People with albinism” or “Albinism”

• “Giants” changed to either “Giants (Folklore)” or “Tall people”

You may continue to see non-preferred headings as the preferred term correction may not have corrected every instance. If you see other headings you feel should be updated, changed, or that the WRLC catalog is lacking, please submit the heading via the Reparative description heading reporting form.

Highlights of reparative work around the profession of possible:

• CORE IG week was held the week of March 6, 2023. All recordings are available to all on-demand. Interest groups that had sessions of possible interest:

• Cataloging & Classification research (slides | recording)

• Metadata (slides | recording)

• Role of the professional librarian in tech services (recording)

• Instructional technologies (slides | recording)

• Cataloging norms (slides | recording)

• ITAL (Information Technology and Libraries) v. 42, no. 1 (2023)

• Avgousti, A., & Papaioannou, G. (2023). The Current State and Challenges in Democratizing Small Museums’ Collections Online. Information Technology and Libraries, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v42i1.14099

• Park, H., & Kim, H. (2023). Japanese Military “Comfort Women” Knowledge Graph. Information Technology and Libraries, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v42i1.15799

• Critcatenate does a monthly round up of blog posts, articles, and webinars.

• OCLC’s blog “Hanging Together” has a monthly segment, Advancing IDEAs, which covers topics and links out to additional resources.

The Reparative Cataloging Subgroup holds open meetings the last Wednesday of every month. Meeting announcements are made on the Metadata Committee Basecamp, but all are welcome to attend. For more information, contact chair Jen Froetschel at jfroetschel@gwu.edu.

ASERL Sponsored Professional Development Activities

ASERL offers a wide variety of webinars at no cost for members and other interested professionals. Follow the linked program title for full details and to register for an event.  

NOTE:  ASERL’s Code of Conduct is in effect for all webinar participants. See http://www.aserl.org/aserl_code_of_conduct/.  ASERL webinars are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

• Equipment Coordinator and Access Services Specialist - Georgetown University

• Associate University Librarian for Learning, Research, & Engagement - George Mason University

• 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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April 11, 2023

Concurrent Sessions Call for Proposals

Share your ideas and your expertise with your colleagues in the WRLC community! The Annual Meeting concurrent sessions are designed to provide you or a group of your Consortium colleagues an opportunity to share what you know with others in the Consortium. Each concurrent session lasts 45 minutes. Proposals that incorporate interaction, discussion, and creativity are encouraged.

Submit your Annual Meeting concurrent session proposal by Friday, Apr 21, 2023

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The Open@WRLC $2,000 Faculty Grant Transformation due date has been extended to Thursday, April 6th. The grant is available to all faculty affiliated with WRLC's partnering institutions.

Mandatory attendance, to a live informational webinar, is no longer required to participate in either the $2,000 Faculty OER Course Transformation Grant or the $200 Open Textbook Library Review Stipend. Interested applicants are welcome to review a past recording and contact their university's Textbook Affordability Working Group (TAWG) representative if they have any questions:

Open@WRLC Workshop Recording: $2,000 Faculty Course Transformation Grant + $200 Open Textbook Library Review Stipend

More information can be found here: $2,000 Faculty Course Transformation Grant. Please share widely with your department and any fellow colleagues you think may be interested.