Citizen Kane poster

Be sure to check out movie titles available for classroom use from Swank. The Library licensed Swank content because we often have requests for feature films or TV shows not covered in our other resources Kanopy and Films on Demand. This week Swank is highlighting material from HBO like

• The Weight of the Nation
• Abortion: Stories Women Tell
• Meet the Donors: Does Money Talk

We only pay for Swank movies that we request and turn on in their interface. If you see a title in Swank that you want to use for a course just send email to Kim Rinaldo at kimberly.rinaldo@trincoll.edu know and we’ll have Swank turn that on for Trinity access.

Beprexit

The Trinity Digital Repository is an open access resource for papers written by Trinity faculty and students, materials from the Trinity libraries, and Trinity publications. It is open to anyone, anywhere in the world. Making material freely available fits perfectly with the mission of the library, and supporting it has been important to staff. Open access material also helps raise the visibility of Trinity publications, as you can see in the list of popular downloads. We have always hosted the repository with a company called Bepress, which was a small independent start up when Trinity started working with them. This year Bepress was purchased by the publishing giant Elsevier, causing great angst among the library community active in institutional repositories and open access initiatives. This was recently expressed by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, who announced their Beprexit project to find an alternative to Bepress. Like University of Pennsylvania and many other institutions, Trinity is looking at alternatives to Bepress now that it is owned by Elsevier.

I’m not completely an Elsevier critic. They provide high-quality access to a large body of scholarly work, and we license a lot of highly-used digital content from them. Elsevier is also very expensive, and they have a deserved reputation for purchasing many smaller publishers and affiliated service companies, giving rise to concerns about a monopoly, or something close to a monopoly. There are a few other big publishers, such as Kluwer, but there are far less publishers than when I started in the library profession.

To be fair to Elsevier they also have a history of supporting some open access initiatives, for example, the Hinari project. Through Hinari,  a program run by the WHO, Elsevier makes medical journals available to low and middle-income countries. They also have made no move they libraries have seen to shut down or put new conditions on Bepress repositories. Still, the move by Elsevier to take over Bepress is unsettling to say the least.  It isn’t entire clear why Elsevier purchased Bepress, but they have been very active in purchasing other platforms and citation tools like Mendeley aimed at the academic community. There is some thought that Elsevier is seeking to link open access preprints to the publication process. We in the library believe that we need to carefully examine options other than Bepress to host our repository.

The environment for repositories has changed pretty dramatically since we started with Bepress. There are more options available to us, many of which have been developed within the open access/open source community. Over the next few months the library will talk with companies that support DSpace, Islandora,  and Preservica. We’ll also talk with Bepress, since we are not necessarily ready to abandon a platform that has worked well for us. We do need to be concerned with both access and long-term management of our materials. We need a solution that will minimize our costs, and assure us that we can continue to provide access to Trinity materials in a reliable, open, and anonymous way (without intrusive data mining from any external company).

We invite any students or faculty to contact us with comments or concerns as we explore repository options.

Connecticut State Library in Hartford

Libraries across Connecticut, including the Trinity Library, benefit from programs run by the Connecticut State Library. Several of our most popular databases, including PsycInfo, ABI Inform, and Proquest Historical Newspapers are funded through the State Library’s ResearchIt CT service.  Historical Newspapers is used widely and offers content back to the 1980’s and sometimes earlier, for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and thousands of other newspapers. Access to these and other digital resources are provides to all Connecticut libraries–college, university, K-12 and public libraries.

State legislators and the governor have not been able to agree on a fy18 budget, and  since July 1 Connecticut has functioned under Governor Malloy’s Executive Order Resource Allocation Plan, which cuts funding for the State Library 18%. Funds specifically for ResearchIT are cut 50%.

Here are the specifics on the State Library budget under the executive order (ResearchIt funds are State-Wide Digital Library): overall funding is reduced from $9,396,000 by $1,728,000 to $7,668,000 in fy18 and for State-Wide Digital Library funds from $1,768,000 by almost $900,000 to $880,000.

This was nothing new for libraries–every year for the last few years, as part of budget negotiations the spending for the library and its services has been threatened with fairly drastic cuts, but funding has usually been restored at the eleventh hour. Because everyone is used to this there wasn’t too much concern. However, the budget stalemate has gone on for months, and the governor recently vetoed a budget passed by the legislature, which has now brought us to a more difficult situation.

The State Library has let us know that the subscriptions for Proquest Historical Newspapers and ABI Inform expired September 30. Proquest will not turn off access while we await a pricing proposal from them for all Connecticut libraries to keep access to these resources, but they won’t continue that access past December. The State Library and Proquest have said that the total bill will be the basic renewal price Proquest would have charged the State Library, but it is not at all clear how they intend to apportion the bill across all Connecticut libraries, or how all the libraries will manage that access and negotiations going forward.

Trinity College library knows that these resources are important to the community and we intend to fund them. Most libraries in the state will want to continue access as well, but the price may put these resources out of reach for some. Additionally, most libraries have tight budgets, and may not be able to suddenly pick up a large subscription they did not expect (major digital resources can run into the thousands or even tens of thousands.) The situation does underscore that the state budget problems can affect us all in unexpected and unwelcome ways.

More Info

• ResearchIT Resources and Services
• Connecticut Library Association