LPC Blog

The Library Publishing Coalition Blog is used to share news and updates about the LPC and the Library Publishing Forum, to draw attention to items of interest to the community, and to publish informal commentaries by LPC members and friends.

March 3, 2021

New LPC Board members elected

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The nine-member Library Publishing Coalition Board oversees the governance, organizational structure, bylaws, and the review and direction of the membership of the Library Publishing Coalition. We have three newly elected Board members, with terms running from July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2024:

  • Justin Gonder, California Digital Library (2021-2024)
  • Willa Tavernier, Indiana University (2021-2024)
  • Sarah Wipperman, Villanova University (2021-2024)

They will join the returning Board members:

  • Karen Bjork, Portland State University (2019-2022)
  • Christine Fruin, Atla (2019-2022)
  • Jessica Kirschner, Virginia Commonwealth University (2020-2023)
  • Ally Laird, Penn State University (2020-2023)
  • Emma Molls, University of Minnesota (2020-2023)
  • Jody Bailey, Emory University, jody.bailey@emory.edu (ex officio Past President)
  • Melanie Schlosser, Educopia Institute, melanie@educopia.org (ex officio Community Facilitator)

Note: Sarah Hare is stepping down from the Board a year early. We will fill her spot as usual next year. 

Many thanks to outgoing Board members Vanessa Gabler, Scott Warren, and Sarah Hare for their service!

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 25, 2021

The LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice

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As part of our commitment to anti-racism, LPC’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force has prepared the LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. This document owes a great deal to the ideas and input of library publishing workers at last fall’s anti-racism community call, which was hosted by the task force and the Board. In that call, participants were asked to consider how LPC has perpetuated inequality and marginalization of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and to envision ways that we can adopt anti-racist practice throughout the organization. The task force took the resulting ideas, further developed them, and organized them into an action plan. 

The roadmap consists of a 6-month plan that the task force is currently enacting, and offers a menu of longer-term ideas that the organization and members can choose to implement. The items are organized in six categories: building an anti-racist organization, community building, demographics, education, resource creation, and supporting BIPOC library publishing workers. Several of the items suggested for LPC Committees are to support members in implementing anti-racism in their programs. We want to work together as a community to make library publishing an inclusive, equitable, flourishing endeavor.

As this roadmap is meant to guide the entire organization in anti-racist practice, you will see a number of different LPC groups referenced as being responsible for individual items. These should be considered suggestions from the task force at this point. Since the soon-to-be-established Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee will be working in a consultative capacity with its peer committees and task forces, there will be plenty of opportunities to review the items in the roadmap and decide together what to prioritize. 

This publication is a snapshot of an internal, working document that will be updated as work progresses. As future iterations of the DEI Committee and other LPC groups identify near-term action items, our expectation is that a new snapshot can be generated for the community. 

LPC Diversity and Inclusion Task Force: 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), Willa Tavernier (Indiana University)

Library Publishing Workflows. Educopia Institute. Library Publishing Coalition. Institute of Museum and Library Sciences.
February 24, 2021

Workflow Diagram Software Options

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In celebration of Documentation Month, I wanted to share a brief workflow diagram tool evaluation that I created early in the LPW project. There are an overwhelming number of tools and platforms for creating workflow diagrams, and I relied on a number of lists and reviews to find some candidates that could potentially work.

While there is a lot to like about the open source diagrams.net, we ultimately decided to use Lucidchart for our project for a few reasons. Lucidchart, along with many of the other freemium and premium tools, has slightly better aesthetics, more templates, and more built-in features to add non-diagram components. Educopia also had a subscription to Lucidchart and experience with the platform on OSSArcFlow, which made it compelling for us to use, while its freemium model also means that libraries can use our templates and shape libraries to create up to three of their own diagrams.

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February 10, 2021

2021 LPC Board election: Candidate bios and statements

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Elections for the Library Publishing Coalition Board open today and will continue through Friday, February 26. Instructions for voting will be sent to each member institution’s voting representative. The candidates are:

  • Willa Tavernier, Indiana University, Bloomington
  • Alissa Miller, Middle Tennessee State University
  • Amanda Hurford, Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI)
  • Mike Nason, University of New Brunswick
  • Kate Shuttleworth, Simon Fraser University
  • Justin Gonder, California Digital Library
  • Sarah Wipperman, Villanova University

Each candidate has provided a brief biography and an election statement; this year we have also asked candidates to provide a statement on anti-racism.

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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.

January 26, 2021

February is Documentation Month!

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Documentation: we all know it’s important. It helps to preserve institutional memory, allows future you to get up to speed, and can be a useful resource to share with colleagues. Yet this important activity is often neglected. Why? Well, one hurdle is simply not knowing where to begin. Another, because we are faced with perennial deadlines and constant day-to-day tasks, is that it too often falls to the bottom of our to-do lists. To encourage library publishers to undertake this important work, the Library Publishing Coalition has designated February as Documentation Month!

Documentation toolkit

To support the community in creating documentation, members of LPC’s Professional Development Committee have created a Library Publishing Documentation Toolkit. It consists of four sections: Getting started with documentation, Planning a documentation day, Suggested documentation projects to tackle, and Sharing documentation beyond your institution. The toolkit is available in PDF and as a Google Doc.   

Ways to participate in Documentation Month

For everyone: 

  • Create some documentation! The purpose of this event is to support library publishers in creating documentation about their publishing programs, so if it inspires you to create even one piece of documentation, you’re participating! 
  • Follow along on Twitter using the #LPCDocMonth hashtag. We will share a weekly discussion prompt to get you thinking about documentation.
  • Organize a local documentation day (see the toolkit for instructions). Share a photo or agenda from your event on Twitter with the #LPCDocMonth hashtag & receive a free registration for the virtual 2021 Library Publishing Forum (limit one per library).

For LPC members: 

  • Attend the weekly community calls! In addition to opening and closing calls, we will have an update on the Library Publishing Workflows project and a policy-writing community call. 
  • Participate in an accountability group. We can pair you up with a buddy or two to support each other throughout the month. 

More information on how to participate in the member-only events will be shared via the member listserv. 

Happy documenting! 

From the Documentation Month planning group (Allison Brown, Erin Jerome, Emily Stenberg, and Melanie Schlosser) on behalf of the LPC Professional Development Committee

Water with the word reflections in all caps with a horizontal line above and below
January 12, 2021

The state of the field: An excerpt from the 2021 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 Janet Swatscheno, Ellen Dubinsky, Perry Collins, Ian Harmon, and Laura Miller with an assist from me. Enjoy!

THE 2021 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 dataset 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. This year’s collaboration with LibPub SIG and the resultant focus on the international community of library publishers prompted the addition of a question about languages used in publications and added additional types of library publisher (public library and consortium).

We also point out that the survey was distributed in August 2020, over 6 months after the COVID-19 outbreak and the ensuing disruption of “business as usual.” We did not attempt to incorporate any questions related to the pandemic and how or if it has affected library publishing activities. This is an area that should be considered in future editions of the Directory. 

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January 12, 2021

The 2021 Library Publishing Directory is now available!

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The Library Publishing Coalition is pleased to announce the publication of the 2021 Library Publishing Directory! This year’s print,  PDF, and EPUB versions of the Library Publishing Directory highlight the publishing activities of 136 academic and research libraries. The openly available and searchable online directory includes 151 entries.

The Directory illustrates the many ways in which libraries are actively transforming and advancing scholarly communications in partnership with scholars, students, university presses, and others. Each year, the Directory’s introduction presents a ‘state of the field’ based on that year’s data, which we also publish in a related blog posting.

The 2021 Directory reflects a pilot partnership with the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Library Publishing Special Interest Group (LibPub SIG), and includes international entries, translated by IFLA LibPub SIG members. Libraries who chose to complete the full survey appear in the print, PDF, and EPUB versions of the Directory. All entries appear in the online version. IFLA’s LibPub SIG will also create a first-of-its-kind online database of global library publishing initiatives.

Publication of the 2021 Directory was overseen by the LPC’s Directory Committee:

The Library Publishing Coalition Directory Committee

Janet Swatscheno, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chair
Perry Collins, University of Florida
Ellen Dubinsky, University of Arizona
Ian Harmon, West Virginia University
Laura Miller, Florida State University

IFLA Special Interest Group on Library Publishing Subcommittee

Grace Liu (Canada)
Ann Okerson (USA)

SAVE THE DATE:
Join us for the virtual 2021 Library Publishing Forum, May 10-14!