Posts by Melanie Schlosser

Water with the word reflections in all caps with a horizontal line above and below
November 1, 2022

What LPC accomplished under our first strategic plan

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LPC’s current 5-year strategic plan (PDF) is winding down. Published in summer 2018, it was our young community’s first concrete statement of our strategic goals. From LPC’s seed-funded project period (2013-14) through our first two years as a full-fledged membership association (2015-2017), we relied for guidance on our original scoping materials and focused much of our energy on getting the community’s infrastructure and ongoing programs on solid footing. By 2017, it had become apparent that we were ready to think more strategically about the future and put in the work to make sure we were pulling in the same directions across the community. The strategic planning process we undertook was a traditional one, involving a SWOT Analysis, an environmental scan, and community consultation. The outcome was a traditional 5-year strategic plan consisting of three goals, with nested objectives and action items. 

As we head into a new planning process, I wanted to reflect on what we accomplished under our current plan from my perspective as the LPC Community Facilitator. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive listing of accomplishments. Instead, this post will share a high-level view from the staff perspective of how LPC has evolved in each of our strategic areas, where we’ve made significant progress, and where I see untapped potential.

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January 27, 2022

The state of the field: An excerpt from the 2022 Library Publishing Directory

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As much as we love the searchable online interface for the Library Publishing Directory, it doesn’t include the introduction found in the print, PDF, and EPUB versions. Each year, the Directory‘s introduction includes a ‘state of the field’ based on that year’s data that highlights trends and new developments in library publishing as reported by the programs that contribute their information. To make it easier to find, we are republishing that portion of the introduction here. This year’s introduction was written by Perry Collins, Ian Harmon, Karen Stoll Farrell, and Nicholas Wojcik with an assist from me. Enjoy!

THE 2022 LIBRARY PUBLISHING LANDSCAPE

The yearly Library Publishing Directory provides insights into library publishing activities, allowing us to consider how the field has evolved, prevalent current practice, and possible future directions. While we discuss trends below – often in comparison to prior years – please note that the number and composition of the data set of Directory listings changes yearly, thus a strict comparison year to year is not possible. Further complicating any analysis of the data are changes to the survey itself. We do try to update the survey as changes in technology and publishing platforms emerge. The Directory Committee routinely evaluates the data model to ensure that it best reflects the library publishing field. Many of the survey questions remain the same year to year and new questions are periodically added.

GENERAL DEMOGRAPHICS

Over 60% (87) of library publishers are organized as a centralized library publishing unit or department, while approximately 22% are organized across multiple units or departments within the library.

Library publishers continue to report programs that have made substantial progress moving beyond initial efforts. Only two survey respondents considered their publishing programs to be in the “pilot” phase of development, while over 68% of the library publishers in the 2022 Directory consider their publishing efforts to be “established.” Of the 138 respondents that stated when their publishing operations were established, half were operational prior to 2010, and a strong majority (68%) have been operational for at least a decade. In 2021, 28 library publishers reported that they worked with an established editorial board or advisory group for their work; in 2022, this number climbed to 34 publishers.

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June 16, 2021

Transitions: standing on the shoulders of librarians

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Transitions is an occasional series where community members reflect on the things they have learned while moving from one institution to another or one role to another. 

By Monica Westin, Google Scholar partnerships lead / technical program manager

In the spring of 2014, I left a PhD program in classical rhetoric to try out a career in scholarly communication. I was immediately hooked by what I saw as unsolved problems in the ecosystem and the potential impact of making academic research easier to access. Except for a brief stint at HighWire Press, I spent the following four years in the institutional repository and library publishing space, first at bepress and then at CDL’s eScholarship, the University of California’s system-wide repository and publishing platform. 

One Monday in November 2018, three days after leaving my job as publications manager for the library publishing program at the CDL, I started a new role as the program manager for partnerships at Google Scholar. The past two and a half years have been eye-opening.

I have three strong memories from my first week. The first is knowing I had made the right decision to take the job when my new boss, Google Scholar co-founder and director Anurag Acharya, described the mission of Scholar to me in our first meeting: that “no matter the accident of your birth,” he told me, you should be able to know about all the papers written in any research field you might want to enter. What you did with that knowledge was up to you. 

My second memory is the expression on Anurag’s face when I admitted I didn’t really understand what robots.txt instructions did. “Goal: be more technical!” I wrote in my notebook that afternoon after spending hours looking up basic web indexing protocol information on Wikipedia. I don’t think he looked quite as disappointed as I remember, but I knew that I could no longer get away with not knowing how things worked. 

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June 8, 2021

Intersections: Connecting and Collaborating – Reflections of a Consortial Library Publisher

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Intersections is an occasional series where community members reflect on what they are seeing in other parts of their professional world and what library publishers can learn from it. 

By Amanda Hurford, Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI)

A conference icebreaker recently posed the question: How do you describe your job to someone who has no idea what it is that you do? For me, this can be a difficult question to answer since working for a library consortium falls outside the boundaries of traditional librarianship.  So, when I describe what I do to someone who knows nothing of the world of library consortia, I typically say something like: “I work for a non-profit organization that connects people and works together to develop services at private college libraries across Indiana.” 

My actual job title is Scholarly Communications Director for the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI). For the last four years, I’ve been working to develop a scholarly communications community of practice by connecting with a group of engaged librarians across the 24 PALNI-supported institutions.  We created a Schol Comm advisory group, led by a steering committee, and driven with the efforts of several work-focused teams administering programs for the consortium.  Some specific projects have been developing an open source consortial institutional repository (Hyku for Consortia), establishing our group affordable learning program (PALSave), statewide digitization of scarcely held resources (PALNI Last Copies), and finally, operationalizing publishing services for the PALNI Press.

When I started this position, I was excited for a change of pace and to work at a statewide scale.  As a former metadata and digital collections librarian, the concepts of consortia and scholarly communication were generally familiar to me.  But it’s been a whirlwind of learning about the growing consortial involvement in that space, and a significant shift, for me, working so collaboratively in every phase of a project.

For library publishers, here are some important things to know about consortia:

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June 2, 2021

Intersections: Library Publishing and Scholarly Societies

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Intersections is an occasional series where community members reflect on what they are seeing in other parts of their professional world and what library publishers can learn from it. 

By Lauren B. Collister, Director, Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing, University of Pittsburgh Library System, lbcollister@pitt.edu, @parnopaeus

Many people who come to librarianship have a background in a particular discipline of scholarship. In my case, this disciplinary experience is not just in the past, but rather an ongoing engagement with a scholarly discipline through work for a scholarly society. This work not only gives me insight into the lived experiences of scholars in my discipline who are attempting to carry out the open scholarship and publishing practices that we in the Library Publishing community often advocate for, but also presents opportunities for me to share resources and knowledge that can help the society and its members with their work. I hope that by sharing my experience with one scholarly society, I can inspire other people in our field to consider engaging with a disciplinary scholarly society as a way to not only develop and hone your own skills, but also to bring the practices and values of the library publishing community to the disciplines.

In my case, my scholarly background is in linguistics, and the scholarly society for linguists in the United States is the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). I was a student member during my PhD days; not only was I involved as a local host for the conference when it was in Pittsburgh, but I also took advantage of several of the training workshops as well as the job listings. When I transitioned to library work in 2013 with a new position in the library publishing program at the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, my membership in the society lapsed for a few years because I was very busy learning about my new job. However, when I heard that the LSA was planning its 2016 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., and that part of the conference would include an Advocacy Day at the Capitol and meetings with Senators and Representatives, I was excited to sign up again to go back to the LSA conference.

The opportunity to advocate for linguistics, the discipline where I first felt like a scholar, was what drew me back to the Society, and while at the Annual Meeting I discovered another opportunity: the newly-formed Committee on Scholarly Communication in Linguistics. I attended the first meeting and immediately signed up. As a Scholarly Communications Librarian with a PhD in Linguistics, what more perfect service opportunity could there be?

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March 10, 2021

Transitions: Transitioning from a small, liberal arts university to a large, research university

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Transitions is an occasional series where community members reflect on the things they have learned while moving from one institution to another or one role to another. 

By Johanna Meetz, The Ohio State University

I worked as the Scholarly Communication and Publishing Services Librarian as well as the Associate Director of Pacific University Press at Pacific University, a small, liberal arts institution near Portland, OR, from 2016-2020. My job was split between institutional repository administration, which I had previous experience with, and the tasks associated with publishing, which were unfamiliar to me when I started. Pacific offers a more full-service set of publishing services than many publishing programs, including copyediting and typesetting, which added to the complexity of the job. In addition, the year before I started in the position, Pacific Libraries had recently founded Pacific University Press, a hybrid open access publisher that offers OA digital editions as well as print copies of books for purchase. As a result, while there I published both books and journals. I learned by doing, and it was an adventure to solve stylistic and technical problems as well as to become familiar with typical publishing standards and practices. Since I was the only faculty or staff member in my area, I grew comfortable relying largely on myself, as well as with reaching out to the LPC community when I needed assistance.

I started my new position as the Publishing and Repository Services Librarian at Ohio State University in 2020. I currently administer Ohio State’s institutional repository and oversee the publishing program. Though the high-level responsibilities are the same, the biggest difference in the two positions is that I now work with others; I supervise three full-time staff members who also work on the IR and with our publications. As a result, I am now a little more removed from the day-to-day tasks associated with production work in general, which enables me to spend more time and energy concentrating on the bigger picture: improving workflows and considering sustainability and scalability, particularly for our publishing program as it grows.

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March 1, 2021

Kudos to the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force!

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The Kudos program recognizes impactful work done by community members on behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition community.

Group photo of the task force

This Kudos recognizes Cheryl Ball (Wayne State University), Kevin Hawkins (University of North Texas), Harrison Inefuku (Iowa State University), Joshua Neds-Fox (Wayne State University), Angel Peterson (Penn State University), and Willa Tavernier (Indiana University) for their excellent work on the new LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice:

The Diversity and Inclusion Task Force has done a huge amount of excellent work since it convened in July of 2019, but its recently published LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice is likely to have the largest and most lasting impact on the organization. The task force held a community call on anti-racism in September of 2020, and spent the next four months reviewing, organizing, and fleshing out the ideas that arose into a long-term plan for LPC to engage in anti-racist practice. They held extra meetings to accomplish this work alongside their regular activities (such as meeting with representatives from other LPC groups), and put in a substantial amount of time on it outside of meetings, as well. The result is a foundational document for the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee that will launch in July of this year, and one that will make it possible for that group to hit the ground running with community-driven anti-racist leadership for the whole organization. The task force deserves the recognition and thanks of the entire community. Kudos!

Statements from the task force:

Joint statement: “Working on the DEI Task Force is a way for us to demonstrate our commitment to anti-racist work in scholarly publishing. The anti-racist roadmap shows how the LPC stands behind these mandates on diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Cheryl: “Already I have cited the roadmap to senior library leaders and have begun implementing its suggestions in other areas of my publishing work.”

Angel: “I joined the Library Publishing Coalition in 2020 and working on the anti-racist roadmap was my first official duty within the coalition. It is really inspiring to see our commitment to being a diverse and inclusive community. I fully plan on using these principals in my day-to-day work!”

Willa: “LPC has an amazing sense of community and the support for the work of the DEI Task Force that has come from the community is tremendously inspiring!”

This Kudos was submitted by Melanie Schlosser

March 1, 2021

Kudos to the Documentation Month planning group!

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The Kudos program recognizes impactful work done by community members on behalf of the Library Publishing Coalition community.

Zoom photo of the planning groupThis Kudos recognizes Allison Brown (SUNY Geneseo), Erin Jerome (University of Massachusetts), and Emily Stenberg (Washington University St. Louis) for their stellar work on Documentation Month:

The idea for a documentation event came up during a community call on creative staffing solutions, and it was picked up by the Professional Development Committee for implementation. It was Erin, Allison, and Emily, however, who brought it to life. They defined the purpose and structure of Documentation Month, created the Documentation Toolkit, planned and hosted community calls, and drafted communications. For five months, they met regularly to plan and did substantial work outside of meetings, coordinating with the Professional Development Committee and Educopia staff to ensure a successful event. Their Documentation Month is likely to serve as a model for future events, within LPC and in the wider community. Kudos!

 

A statement from Allison, Erin, and Emily:

“When we first began meeting as a group to work on mapping out what our Documentation Month would look like, the project felt incredibly ambitious and just a bit overwhelming. It’s been really amazing to see all the pieces fall into place and to know that the LPC community is just as excited as we are about this endeavor.”

 

This Kudos was submitted by Melanie Schlosser

February 4, 2021

Sunsetting LPC’s Service Providers List

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For the last few years LPC has maintained a list of service providers on our website. Although it was very lightly curated and intended to serve as a starting point for research, we felt it was worth maintaining because of the lack of any similar resources. 

We have been excited to see the growing interest in researching, tracking, cataloging, and assessing scholarly communications infrastructure. Now that several of these efforts have come to fruition, we feel it’s time to retire our basic list and direct our efforts towards supporting these more comprehensive resources. Because January is when we normally update the list, this is a good moment to sunset the service providers list and direct library publishers to these other resources. 

In particular, we would like to recommend the recently-announced Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCat), developed by the Coalition of Open Access Repositories (COAR) as part of the Educopia-hosted Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project. NGLP is also doing transformative work on aligning scholcomm infrastructure with academic and values that will add much to this conversation over the next couple of years. Further, we encourage library publishers to follow the Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) initiative, which is the new organizational home of the Census of Scholarly Communication Infrastructure. These efforts have already begun to produce sophisticated tools to support the needs of libraries and other mission-driven publishers, with more in the works. 

To avoid broken links, we are retaining the page that the Service Providers List lived on, but replacing the content with a link to this post. We have an archived version of the list for reference, so please feel free to reach out to us at contact@librarypublishing.org if you need it for any reason. We will continue to have a sponsorship program for the Library Publishing Forum that will allow library publishers to connect with service providers.