Elizabeth Vihnanek has been hired as head of reference and research services at Old Dominion University Libraries, Norfolk, VA. She comes from Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, where she has been director of curriculum materials/maps center.
Elizabeth Mengel has been appointed head of collection management at the Johns Hopkins University's Sheridan Libraries. She will develop programs to evaluate collections, user needs, academic priorities and fiscal resources, and recommend and implement strategic priorities for the collections.
Sue Peacock has been named reference/instruction librarian and coordinator of electronic resources at Columbia College, Chicago. Peacock comes to Columbia from DePaul University, where she most recently was Library Web Services assistant coordinator. In this last position, she developed and maintained Web-based services for the library and provided reference services. She received her MLIS and Master of Arts in History from the University of Wisconsin.
For ACLS E-Book Project, Success Is a Moving Target By all accounts, things have gone very well for the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) History E-book Project. Now in its seventh year, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, the project has over 1230 titles, all selected by top historians, well over the 500-title goal the project started with, and with 300 titles available in Print-on-Demand (PoD) editions. All titles are fully searchable and many titles link out to online reviews in JSTOR. The price is certainly right—ranging from $350 to $2000 annually, depending on an institution's size. That has translated into well over 400 institutional subscriptions, more than double the 200 subscriptions the project needed to keep going. Add to that another 600 individual subscriptions, and it's hard to not to come to the conclusion that the project has been a booming success. "The project has been self-sustaining since April of 2005," ACLS' Eileen Gardiner told the LJ Academic Newswire. "We have a lot of small schools subscribing, too," she added, calling that an unexpected and especially gratifying occurrence. Even so, for Gardiner and her ACLS colleague Ron Musto, success remains a moving target. While still adding more backlist titles, about 250 annually, the effort to pioneer and expand front-list and "born digital" editions, a key goal of the project, is going a bit more slowly than expected.
Musto says that, while people have warmed to the backlist editions of e-books, outpacing early usage predictions, progress in the other part of the project, tapping the full potential of what the e-book can be for scholars—a format that utilizes multimedia to its fullest—has been slower. "The surprise is that when we talk to librarians, they ask things like how many books in the collection, what's the search engine like, how many fields do you cover?," Musto said. "Librarians are more excited about PoD than digital innovation," Gardiner added. So what's been holding back the e-book's potential? The current publishing environment, mostly, Musto concedes. ACLS has necessarily partnered with university presses for their content, but many of those presses face financial and institutional pressures and are simply unable or unwilling to risk their bottom lines on innovative, untested new products. Slowly, however, that's beginning to change. Electronic course reserves and courseware are beginning to help open people's eyes to the possibilities of electronic text. "Persistent endurance," Musto said, is the key. "Everything will catch up." He characterizes the ACLS project as two projects, "frontlist and backlist," each with different sets of issues, problems, and approaches. Both Musto and Gardiner are clearly upbeat about their prospects. "There was an almost apocalyptic expectation that the shift to the e-book was going to happen in three years," Musto noted. "It's year seven and it's still years away, but it's coming and when it comes it will be tremendous."
UNC Library, School of Information and Library Science Join the Open Content Alliance The University Library and the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have joined the Open Content Alliance (OCA), becoming the first school within a university to join the alliance. UNC's SILS will offer its expertise on range of topics, including its open source and open digital content projects. UNC SILS officials said it was a win-win. "This joint initiative will allow us to expand the capability and influence of our research while engaging our students in a 'living lab,' enhancing their educational experience," said Dr. José-Marie Griffiths, dean and professor of SILS. Meanwhile, SILS faculty and students can offer expertise in the areas of digitization of not only books, but also video and multimedia, metadata design and development, and digital preservation."
The UNC library is also contributing another first—the first library to offer manuscript materials to the OCA. The library will initially focus on a potential project to digitize manuscripts from its Southern Historical Collection. "These are unique items such as letters, notes, diaries, handwritten records, even photos," said Sarah C. Michalak, university librarian and associate provost for University Libraries. "They are fragile, sometimes they're hard to read, and they can be very difficult to convert to digital form. Making them available through the Open Content Alliance for the world to use is an exciting opportunity." The library will also contribute expertise it gained in the "Documenting the American South" digital library effort and in other projects. The Open Content Alliance, launched last spring, seeks to build a permanent archive of digitized text and multimedia materials freely available to users.
Oberlin's Ray English Wins ACRL Award Ray English, Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries at Oberlin College (OH), has been named the 2006 Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) Academic/Research Librarian of the Year. The award, sponsored by YBP Library Services, recognizes an outstanding member of the library profession who has made a significant national or international contribution to academic/research librarianship and library development. In announcing the award, ACRL officials cited English's extensive work on scholarly communication issues and open access and his work on more than 15 ALA and ACRL committees since 1988. He is also a founding member and chair of the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee and recently was elected chair of the steering committee of SPARC, of which Oberlin is a founding member. Previous award winners include Ravindra Nath Sharma (2005); Tom Kirk (2004); Ross Atkinson (2003); Shelley Phipps (2002); Larry Hardesty (2001); and Sharon Hogan (2000). Winning the award marks a kind of sweep for Oberlin—in 2002 Oberlin received the ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries Award in the college category. English will receive a $3,000 award on Monday, June 26, 2006, at a 4:30 p.m. ceremony and reception during the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans.
Codrescu to Visit U. of Illinois to Open the Andrei Codrescu Collection Will the Cuba issue rise again? Fresh off plunging ALA into controversy over the rights of so-called Cuban librarians, Romanian-American man of letters Andrei Codrescu will address librarians again this week, this time at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to which Codrescu has given a collection of hundreds of Romanian books, periodicals and other materials, many of them rare. It will be his first visit to the collection since he made the donation last year. Codrescu will participate on a number of campus activities, including a symposium on contemporary Romanian history and a reception, book signing, and exhibit of the Codrescu Collection, both today. UI library officials said Codrescu continues to add to the collection since his original gift. Although most of the 660 items Codrescu originally donated are in Romanian, his native language, the collection also includes books in English and other languages, including some of the author's own writings. With 755,000 volumes and more than 3,500 serial publications, the Slavic and East European Library is the third largest Slavic and East European collection in the United States.
ALA Accreditation Committee Announces Latest Actions The Committee on Accreditation (COA) of the American Library Association (ALA) has announced accreditation actions taken at the 2006 ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Antonio. COA has continued the accreditation of the following graduate programs for the full seven years, scheduling the next program review for fall 2012: Master of Arts offered by the School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona, Tucson; Master of Library and Information Studies offered by the School of Information Management in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS; Master of Science and Master of Arts offered by the School of Information Studies at Florida State University, Tallahassee; Master of Science in Library and Information Science program provided by the Palmer School Library and Information Science at Long Island University, Brookville, NY, and New York City. COA has granted conditional accreditation to the Master of Library Science offered by the School of Library and Information Science at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. The next program review will take place in spring 2009.
Best Sellers in European history, 2005-present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia
De Madariaga, Isabel
Yale University Press
2005. 0300097573. $35.00
Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
Ward-Perkins, Bryan
Oxford University Press
2005. ISBN 0192805649. $28.00
Day in a Medieval City
Frugoni, Chiara
Translated by William McCuaig
University of Chicago Press
2005. ISBN 0226266346. $37.50
History of Russia
Bartlett, Roger P.
Palgrave Macmillan
2005. ISBN 033363263x. $26.95
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Judt, Tony
Penguin Books
2005. ISBN 1594200653. $39.95
King's Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church
Bernard, G.W.
Yale University Press
2005. ISBN 0300109083. $40.00
Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader
Zagorin, Perez
Princeton University Press
2005. ISBN 0691123519. $24.95
Churchill and America
Gilbert, Martin
Free Press
2005. ISBN 0743259920. $30.00
Hitler's Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation
Redles, David
New York University Press
2005. ISBN 0814775241. $45.00
War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
Hanson, Victor Davis
Random House
2005. ISBN 1400060958. $29.95
In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat
Olick, Jeffrey K.
University of Chicago Press
2005. ISBN 0226626385. $29.00
Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History, 500-1000
Smith, Julia M.H.
Oxford University Press
2005. ISBN 0199244278. $35.00
Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour
Dejean, Joan E.
Free Press
2005. ISBN 0743264134. $25.00
War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans
Barnouw, Dagmar
Indiana University Press
2005. ISBN 0253346517. $29.95
Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830
Heuer, Jennifer
Cornell University Press
2005. ISBN 0801442869. $34.95
Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day
Sharpe, James
Harvard University Press
2005. ISBN 0674019350. $19.95
Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
Westad, Odd Arne
Cambridge University Press
2005. ISBN 0521853648. $35.00
Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend
Lupack, Alan
Oxford University Press
2005. ISBN 0192802879. $90.00
Interpreter
Kaplan, Alice Yeager
Free Press
2005. ISBN 0743254244. $25.00
History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History
Cohen, Sande
Johns Hopkins University Press
2006. ISBN 0801882141. $55.00
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