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Main Building Still Closed, Salem State's Library Will Move to Interim Space
It looks like it could be a while before the Salem State College (SSC) Library, which closed due to structural concerns in October of 2007, reopens, if ever. In response, SSC officials last week said they have found a temporary home for the library on campus, while a thorough structural analysis now underway is completed on the closed library. "The engineering review is not completed and we expect the building will remain closed as a library for at least the remainder of the year," SSC president Patricia Meservey told students in a recent update.
Saying the library is "a key component in the delivery of our academic mission," Meservey said SSC would immediately begin work to transform 20,000 square feet of unfinished space in its main building on the central campus to serve as a library facility "for approximately three years," after which time the space, originally planned as a performing arts space, can be repurposed.
The interim space, known as the Interim Salem State College Library at Central Campus, will include:
- A full-service desk to accommodate interlibrary loan services, research assistance, and circulation and reserve requests.
- Access to a core collection of over 100,000 volumes, with another 150,000 volumes stored nearby.
- A fully-equipped high-tech classroom for librarians to provide orientation on library resources and services, training, and research instruction.
- Group study rooms to facilitate student collaboration on class projects and scholarly discussion.
- Upwards of 60 computer workstations.
Meservey ordered the library at Salem State University (SSU), Salem, MA, closed on October 15 after state officials said they could not guarantee the structural integrity of the building. SSC spokesperson Karen Cady told the LJ Academic Newswire that "there was no imminent catastrophic failure of the building," but said engineers had serious and unresolved questions about the building's load bearing capacity. The problems, she said stemmed from the library's initial construction, which began in the 1960s during an infamous period of corruption in Massachusetts that shortchanged a number of public works.
Administrators have since reassigned classes, relocated faculty offices, and juggled services for students, utilizing nearby public libraries and "sister institutions," such as Middlesex Community College, Northern Essex Community College, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
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With NIH Compliance Date Approaching, SPARC, ARL Issue White Paper
On April 7, 2008, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be required to deposit their articles in the PubMed Central online archive, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. To encourage and ensure compliance, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Science Commons have released Complying with the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy: Copyright Considerations and Options. The free paper is designed to help "provosts, research administrators, and campus counsel understand their institution's copyright-related obligations and options under the new Congressionally mandated policy."
The analysis was prepared by Michael Carroll, attorney, copyright expert, and faculty member at Villanova University law school. Carroll has long been involved with copyright issues as a member of the Creative Commons board and an advisor to Science Commons. In 2004 he worked with SPARC to develop the SPARC Author Addendum, designed to help authors properly reserve rights to deposit their works in open online archives. Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC, said the paper is a "great tool to help administrators jumpstart the local planning process."
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More "Pieces": Two More Memoirs Revealed as Fakes
Just a year removed from dumping a deal with James Frey following his fraudulent Doubleday memoir A Million Little Pieces, Riverhead is again at the center of a fake memoir storm. This week, Riverhead acknowledged that Margaret B. Jones, a half-white, half Native American foster child whose tell-all Love and Consequences divulged her gritty life selling drugs and gangbanging with the Bloods, is actually Margaret Seltzer, a Sherman Oaks valley girl who grew up with her family there. Seltzer's ruse was reportedly uncovered by her sister, who saw a newspaper article about the book accompanied by Seltzer's picture and informed Riverhead Books that the memoir—which received critics' raves, including a starred LJ review—was untrue.
Fortunately for Riverhead, Seltzer's book had not been an Oprah Winfrey favorite or deeply woven its way into reader's hearts like Frey's bestseller. WorldCat showed that only 81 U.S. libraries stock the title, which Riverhead has now cancelled. Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath told the New York Times, she never saw "any cracks" in Seltzer's story and that the situation was "a huge personal betrayal… as well as a professional one." Seltzer's whistleblowing sister, however, was perplexed that the publisher did not uncover the truth over the years-long publication process. "It could have and should have been stopped before now," she told the Times. "I don't know how they do business, but I would think that protocol would have them fact-checking."
Seltzer, meanwhile, wasn't the only fake memoirist uncovered in the past week. On February 28, the Boston Globe reported that Misha Defonseca, author of Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, which details a young Jewish girl's life traveling alone through war-torn Europe, admitted the story was fiction. In fact, Defonseca is not Jewish and lived in Brussels with her grandparents during the war. In a statement issued through her lawyer, Defonseca said she found it "difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality-it was my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness from all those who feel betrayed."
Though a European and Canadian best seller, the book did not do well in the United States. A WorldCat search showed only 162 U.S. libraries currently hold the book. Ironically, Defonseca and her co-author, Vera Lee, successfully sued publisher Mt. Ivy Press for failing to fully promote the book to U.S. buyers.
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Occidental College Library Flood Affects 20,000 Books
Occidental College (Los Angeles, CA) officials said an early Saturday morning flood on March 1 in the library was caused by broken coils in the air conditioning system. Laura Serafini, head of access services, told the LJ Academic Newswire that when Campus Safety did their walk through at 12:30 a.m. there was no problem. "When staff arrived at 7:30 a.m., we had a lake on our bottom floor," she noted. "The HVAC on the roof failed, and water traveled from the roof through five tiers to the first floor."
An estimated 20,000 volumes were affected, primarily portions of the college's psychology, philosophy, religion, sociology, women's studies, economics, law, politics, and education collections. Library staff, students, and volunteers quickly removed the books from shelves, scanned the barcodes, and packed them for transport to be freeze-dried to prevent further damage to stop mold from forming. Serafini said preliminary estimates for freeze drying are expected to top $100,000, although the library won't know the costs for replacement or rebinding until the process is complete and they can see what can be salvaged. The library is using Texas-based Steamatic, Inc.
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Library Journal Academic Newswire
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