Noriko Asato has joined the LIS program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Information and Computer Sciences. She will teach research methods, coordinate the internship program, and develop specialized courses dealing with Asian librarianship. Asato most recently was associate professor and Japanese-language program coordinator at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Peter Brantley has been appointed executive director of the Digital Library Federation, Washington, DC, a partnership of 39 academic libraries and related organizations, effective February 5. Brantley currently is director of strategic technology for academic information systems at the University of California's (UC) Office of the President. He also served as director of technology for the California Digital Library and has a total 20 years' systems development and management experience at the Berkeley and San Francisco campuses of UC and at New York University.
Rebecca Graham will become associate librarian for administrative services at Harvard College, Cambridge, MA, effective July 1. Until July, Graham will be associate designate, a first for Harvard. Graham has been special assistant for strategic initiatives since April 2006; she joined Harvard in 2003 as director of library operations at the Countway Library of Medicine.
U. of Michigan Press, Library, Scholarly Publishing Office Launch Digital Studies Imprint, Web Site
With its latest venture, the University of Michigan Press is exploring the cutting edge, both in terms of the content it publishes and how it publishes. Under a new collaborative program between the press, the library, and the Scholarly Publishing Office, the UM Press's new Digital Culture imprint will both sell books and offer the full-text of those books freely on its Digital Culture Books website. The imprint debuted with the fall 2006 publication of The Best of Technology Writing 2006, edited by journalist and Sunday New York Times business columnist Brendan Koerner, who with UM press editor Alison MacKeen selected 24 pieces from several hundred submissions. "We wanted a versatile mixture of the light-hearted and serious, profiles, features, and 'big think' pieces," MacKeen said of the first volume. "We also wanted to embed some articles in there that would help to make people aware of undercovered issues such as digital copyright, municipal wireless, and so on," A 2007 volume, to be edited by Newsweek's Steven Levy, is currently accepting nominations.
As groundbreaking as some of the ideas, however, is the Press's decision to practice what many of its authors now preach, using the Digital Culture imprint to develop an "open and participatory publishing model" that seeks to "build a community" around its content. "Our goal is to give each project a robust online and print presence and to use the effort not only to introduce scholars to a range of publishing choices but also to collect data about how consumption habits vary on the basis of genre, age, discipline," MacKeen explained. "The data will help us to understand more about the economics of digital publishing, and will also, we think, offset any potential economic risks by developing the venture as a research opportunity."
While press officials use the term "open access," the venture is actually more "free access" than open at this stage. Open access typically does not require permission for reuse, only a proper attribution. UM director Phil Pochoda told the LJ Academic Newswire that, while no final decision has been made, the press's "inclination is to ask authors to request the most restrictive Creative Commons license" for their projects. That license, he noted, requires attribution and would not permit commercial use, such as using it in a subsequent for-sale product, without permission. The Digital Culture Books web site currently reads that "permission must be received for any subsequent distribution."
The initiative is an innovative publishing strategy for university presses, who have the increasingly complex mission of serving scholarly communication needs while staying financially viable. "It will be interesting to see how it will go in terms of book sales," MacKeen concedes. "I can imagine either an increase or a decrease." Pochoda stressed that there is "more than a business model at stake," however, noting that the collaborative nature of the Digital Culture imprint represents the press' chance "to support open access in principle and practice while still acknowledging the obligation to survive as a business operation." Nevertheless, he has reason to believe the press will sell some books. The National Academy Press, for example, offers its book content online, Pochoda notes, and its data suggests a corresponding jump in sales.
Readers Prefer Princeton's Bullshit to Knopf's Truth
After hitting the New York Times bestseller list in 2005 with his 80-page treatise on prevarication, On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt did what many authors understandably do. He stepped up to a bigger publisher for his next book, from the smaller Princeton University Press to Random House's prestigious Knopf imprint. But according to Nielsen BookScan sales reports, Frankfurt's commercial follow-up, On Truth, published last fall, hasn't measured up to its university press predecessor. The retail sell-through for On Bullshit was 21,500 copies for November and December of 2006, while On Truth showed retail sales of 15,400 for the same period.
Jessica Pellien, assistant publicity manager at PUP, admitted press officials have watched the numbers with interest. "It's fascinating to contemplate the publishing aspect of a university press trumping a trade house," Pellien told the LJ Academic Newswire. Of course, the true winner here is Frankfurt, the Princeton philosophy professor who is selling a lot of books between both houses, and just this week made his second appearance on the popular Daily Show with Jon Stewart, sure to spur sales even further. Given the most recent sales figures, however, Pellien is happy for now to embrace the idea that bigger isn't always better, or, as she playfully suggests, perhaps "the public simply prefers Bullshit to Truth."
ALA Committee on Accreditation Seeks Comments on Changes
The Committee on Accreditation (COA) of the American Library Association (ALA) is seeking comments on proposed changes to the Standards for Accreditation of Master's Programs in Library and Information Studies 1992. The draft is available on the ALA web site; librarians can send comments to accred@ala.org before March 15, 2007.
The Standards Review Subcommittee has identified five areas that need updated language: 1) Schools haven't adequately adopted the concept of systemic planning in the accreditation process. Results of COA evaluations should be used for continuous program planning, assessment, development, and improvement. Programs have failed to integrate this concept into presentations and documentation of program activities. 2) The phrase "student learning outcomes" should replace the terminology "educational results to be achieved," as it has emerged since 1992 as the standard. 3) Language expressing diversity should be updated to include the terms ability, age, culture, ethnicity, experience, language, and lifestyle. They complement the existing multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual. 4) The term "evaluation" should be replaced by "assessment" in describing quality assurance in learning environments. 5) The Standards should have explicitly numbered paragraphs, as it has in the online version.
The COA is mandated to review the standards at five-year intervals. Meanwhile, meetings to discuss the proposed changes are scheduled during the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle on Sunday, January 21, from 4–5 p.m. at the Red Lion Hotel, Emerald Board Room I, and at a Town Hall Meeting during the ALA annual conference in Washington, DC, June 25, from 1–3 p.m. at the convention center (room to be determined).
Faculty Want Answers as Bush Library Appears Headed to SMU
Roughly 150 Southern Methodist University (SMU) faculty members met this week to discuss their concerns with the school's pursuit of the George W. Bush presidential library. With SMU now apparently the lone contender, faculty members demanded urgent answers to lingering questions. In late December, Donald Evans, chair of the president's library selection committee, told reporters that SMU's competition, Baylor University in Waco and the University of Dallas in Irving, were being set aside to focus on negotiations with SMU.
With the official announcement now just weeks away, roughly one-quarter of the total SMU faculty members gathered to voice concerns, targeting prominently Bush's plan to convene a "think tank" at the library and the university's role in administering the library and its documents. The meeting came after some faculty objected to the university's pursuit of the Bush library in the first place. SMU officials, however, told the New York Times that opposition among faculty members was not widespread. Rhonda Blair, president of the faculty senate, meanwhile, said faculty questions would be relayed immediately to SMU president Gerald Turner for his response.
U. of Minnesota Libraries to Collaborate on "Practical Ethics" Program
To clone, or not to clone? That is sure to be one of the many questions researchers can now examine under a new University of Minnesota (UM) program called EthicShare. The program, a collaboration between the UM Libraries and the UM Center for Bioethics, was created through a grant of $144,250 from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), which itself was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The vision for EthicShare, officials noted, "is to create a sustainable online environment for the field of practical ethics that will create new resources, fuel research and scholarship, build a community of scholars, and stimulate engagement."
Bioethics, a hot topic in the U.S. because of issues like stem cell research, will be the first content area examined in the program. Officials hope it will yield a model approach for the EthicShare community site, which will be then expanded to additional areas of practical ethics. During the six-month grant period, faculty and staff will "coordinate efforts to identify and create target topic and content areas for bioethics; identify and create the technology platform to support the EthicShare model of scholarly communication; and work with stakeholders in the practical ethics community to specify structure, organization and governance of this new resource."
Best Sellers in Language and Literature, May 2006–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
Nation & Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day
Parrinder, Patrick
Oxford University Press
2006. ISBN 0199264848. $45.00
Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth- Century English Fiction
Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer
Yale University Press
2006. ISBN 0300110316. $30.00
Terrorist: A Novel
Updike, John
Alfred A. Knopf
2006. ISBN 0307264653. $24.95
In Search Of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line
Hutchinson, George
Belknap/Harvard
2006. ISBN 0674021800. $39.95
Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War, and American Literature, 1852-1867
Nabers, Deak
Johns Hopkins University Press
2006. ISBN 0801883504. $49.95
Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee
Shields, Charles J.
Henry Holt
2006. ISBN 080507919X. $25.00
Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters
Crane, Hart; ed. by Langdon Hammer
Library of America
2006. ISBN 1931082995. $40.00
Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity
Blake, David Haven
Yale University Press
2006. ISBN 0300110170. $35.00
Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict
Lewis, Paul
University of Chicago Press
2006. ISBN 0226476995. $25.00
Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups
Rosenbaum, Ron
Random House
2006. ISBN 0375503390. $35.00
Everyman
Roth, Philip
Houghton Mifflin
2006. ISBN 061873516X. $24.00
Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media
Henderson, Diana E.
Cornell University Press
2006. ISBN 0801444195. $39.95
Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary
Gilliver, Peter
Oxford University Press
2006. ISBN 0198610696. $25.00
William Faulkner: Novels, 1926-1929
Faulkner, William; ed. by Joseph Blotner
Library of America
2006. ISBN 1931082898. $40.00
Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America
Kercher, Stephen E.
University of Chicago Press
2006. ISBN 0226431649. $35.00
Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture
Gitelman, Lisa
MIT Press
2006. ISBN 0262072718. $36.00
Philip Roth: Novels, 1973-1977: The Great American Novel/My Life as a Man/the Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip; ed. by Ross Miller
Library of America
2006. ISBN 1931082960. $35.00
Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote
Duran, Manuel
Yale University Press
2006. ISBN 0300110227. $30.00
Looking Into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850- 1920
Bohan, Ruth L.
Penn State University Press
2006. ISBN 0271027029. $50.00
You Must Set Forth At Dawn: A Memoir
Soyinka, Wole
Random House
2006. ISBN 037550365x. $26.95
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