The WRLC Board of Directors engaged Koya Partners to find the next leader for the WRLC. The Search Committee appointed by the Board of Directors (which included representatives from the Board, the Library Directors Council and the WRLC staff) reviewed applications received from Koya and conducted the first round of interviews in late July. The Search Committee provided their recommendations to the Board’s Executive Committee, which then interviewed candidates in mid-August and selected finalists for an in-person visit and interview with the Board of Directors in late September. 



Mark Jacobs has agreed to continue to serve as Executive Director until Friday, November 4. 



- Mark Jacobs

Executive Director, WRLC

One of our strategic initiatives for this year is to "Assess our implementation of Alma/Primo to identify successes and continuing challenges and develop future priorities." The WRLC Steering Committee has asked the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) to coordinate this assessment with other WRLC committees that work with Alma and Primo. APAC started its work by creating an assessment tool, testing it on ourselves, and then creating a facilitation guide for other committees. The exercise will begin via email and be completed as part of each relevant committees normal meeting schedule. APAC found that using Jamboard helped to stimulate and track discussion. Each of APAC's liaisons to the other committees (CCC, RSAC, etc.) will reach out to those groups to explain the exercise and offer to lead the discussion this fall.



The exercise consists of answering three questions:

• What has worked well about the WRLC's implementation of Alma/Primo?
• What could have gone better?
• What can we do differently going forward?

When this work is complete, results will be sent back to APAC. Further synthesis of the results will be an iterative process between APAC and the other committees. A report on the results will be shared with the Steering Committee - which will make any further decisions on future action.



- Aaron Kreback (WRLC) and Don Gourley (WRLC)

On behalf of the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

Ex Libris hosts the Idea Exchange to enable customers to influence the development of new features and solutions. Anyone with an Idea Exchange login can use their 25 votes to support their favorite ideas. Each month, the WRLC Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) highlights an idea and encourages you to vote for it to raise its visibility.



APAC’s October Idea of the Month recommendation seeks to improve the user experience of the 'Search in full text' toggle in Primo and make its behavior consistent with the other search options.



Since the May 2022 Release institutions can choose to display a 'Search in full text' toggle option so users have more control over how their search is conducted. There is a significant catch, though: when a user changes this setting while reviewing their search results, their selection is NOT reflected in the URL and can even be undone by refreshing the page.



So imagine: You're helping a student find resources on a particular topic, and the student emails the link to themselves for later, only to find that the results produced by that link are different from what they saw before and they don't understand why.



Or a professor saves a search to their account and opts to get weekly email alerts for new results. Those weekly emails will not reflect the professor's choice to include results from the 'full text'.

 

Other facet and search selections made in Primo are 'kept' for future use by modifications to the results URL so that saving a URL or setting up email alerts provides consistent results. The 'Search in full text' option needs to function this way, too.



APAC welcomes nominations for future Ideas of the Month. Anyone Library staff can highlight an idea on the WRLC Idea Exchange Basecamp or you can submit ideas to your APAC representative. And remember, anyone with an email can get an Idea Exchange account, just find the "New here? Create an account" link on the idea page. Then enter your email address to start the account creation process.



- Cindy Bowen (GT)

On behalf of the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

The security of the WRLC’s information technology infrastructure and the data stored there is of critical importance. The WRLC signed up for vulnerability and web application scanning by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as part of its effort to enhance our cybersecurity. Our most recent security vulnerability engagement with CISA has been a Remote Penetration Test (RPT) Assessment. 



The Remote Penetration Test included:

• Network Penetration Test assessed open ports, protocols, and services to verify whether the WRLC network is accessible from the public domain by an unauthorized user. 
• External Web Application Test evaluated web applications for potential exploitable vulnerabilities and included a combination of automated scanning and manual testing. We provided the CISA team with a list of 20 web applications, including some hosted for AU, CUA, GWU and MU, as well as sample Islandora, Omeka, Drupal, Wordpress and Coral websites.
• Phishing Assessment tested the WRLC’s email and endpoint protection infrastructure through carefully crafted phishing emails— containing a variety of malicious payloads—sent to a test user who acted as a victim of a phishing attack. 
• Open-Source Information Gathering identified publicly available information about the WRLC environment that may be useful to a malicious cyber actor in preparing for an attack. 

The RPT findings indicated that our cybersecurity controls are good -- no "critical" vulnerabilities were found -- but there are areas where we can improve, such as putting additional access controls on services that don't need to be public and tightening up the configuration of our endpoint protection software.

- Don Gourley

Director of Information Technology, WRLC

Registration is now open for the DC Regional User Group (DCRUG) Annual Meeting, to be held virtually on Friday, October 7th, 2021, 9:30am - 12:15pm EST.



The schedule includes updates from the ELUNA Steering Committee and Ex Libris, followed by two Alma-focused presentations. The first, presented by WRLC's Aaron Krebeck, reviews the use of an Alma Institution Zone for off-site inventory control; the second, presented by the Acquisitions team at the University of California Santa Barbara, showcases their use of Alma Analytics to support standing order management. A comprehensive schedule with presentation summaries can be viewed here.



Please submit your registration by Wednesday, October 5th; there is no registration fee.



We look forward to seeing you there!



- Jackie Saavedra (saavedra@wrlc.org, Washington Research Library Consortium), DCRUG Co-chair

- Laura Morales (lcmorales@wm.edu, College of William & Mary), DCRUG Co-chair

The WRLC Textbook Affordability Working Group (TAWG) will once more begin hosting the faculty workshop series, Faculty Perspectives: Open Textbooks in the Classroom, to increase faculty awareness of high-quality open textbooks. These workshops will feature a panel discussion of faculty members from across the consortium who are already using an open textbook for their course materials. The workshops are scheduled for:  

• October 13th, 2022 11:00 AM Faculty Perspectives: You've Already Done This!: Creating and Publishing OER Courseware
• November 2nd, 2022 12:00 PM Faculty Perspectives: Use Only What you Want: Adapting and Remixing OER
• November 16th, 2022 12:00 PM Faculty Perspectives: Choosing a Creative Commons License for your OER: Where to Begin?
• December 6th, 2022 12:00 PM Save the Date!

Check out our events page for more details about how to register for these events.

The WRLC is sponsoring a “faculty stipend program” in which workshop attendees can earn $200 for writing a review of a textbook in the Open Textbook Library. 



Contact us at open@wrlc.org if you have any questions.

- Angelique Carson (WRLC)

On behalf of the Textbook Affordability Working Group

Are you new to the WRLC and our Alma Network Zone? Did you recently start cataloging? Or, would you benefit from a refresher on WRLC NZ policies? 



Register for the upcoming Metadata in the WRLC Alma Network Zone training sessions conducted by members of the WRLC Metadata Committee.



Session 1: What you absolutely need to know

• Presented by Jackie Saavedra
• Tuesday, October 18, 2022 2pm-3pm
• Strongly recommended for everyone cataloging in the Network Zone. This session will cover WRLC NZ guidelines, use of the Metadata Basecamp, and the WRLC Service Desk.

Session 2: Alma Basics

• Presented by Jen Froetschel
• Tuesday, October 25, 2022 2pm-3pm
• This session will cover searching in Alma, including physical title, holdings, and items; differences between the IZ, NZ, and CZ; and customizing the Alma toolbar.

Session 3: Using the Metadata Editor

• Presented by Robert Bratton
• Tuesday, November 1, 2022 2pm-3pm
• This session will cover the Search External Resources process, sharing a record with the network, merging records, local fields, and normalization rules.

Session 4: Advanced Alma topics

• Presented by Matthew Bright with Jackie Saavedra
• Tuesday, November 8, 2022 2pm-3pm
• This session will introduce sets, jobs, indication rules, import profiles, Alma sandboxes, and WRLC colleagues to contact for support with Alma.

Please register in advance for any or all sessions using the registration form at https://forms.gle/gEaNH4i95ZFRN2g16 and indicate whether you would like interpreter services.



All sessions will use the same Zoom link: https://wrlc-org.zoom.us/j/86127507643

All sessions will be recorded and made available.

The Partnership for Shared Book Collections is excited to announce our new Best Practices Assessment Tools. The Best Practices Assessment Tools provide shared print programs an opportunity to review and reflect on their program's policies and procedures. The criteria used in these assessment tools are based on The Partnership for Shared Book Collections’ Best Practices. To-date, shared print programs are able to assess their program's policies and procedures in the following areas:

• Exiting a program
• Facsimiles
• Policy Development and Program Management
• Program Assessment
• Resource Sharing and Access
• Scarce Copies
• Shared Print Education and Awareness 

You can find the new assessment tools on the Shared Print Toolkit website at https://toolkit.sharedprint.org/best-practices/best-practices-assessment-tool. Additional topics will be added as they become available.



Registration information is provided below. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. The webinar will be recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording. 

Sponsored by the Catholic University Libraries and the Department of Library and Information Science. 

See registration information below.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab (1): Building a Dataset - Friday, October 21, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Come and explore our latest acquisition devoted to text analysis, data mining, and data visualization through a series of three workshops. Using Gale’s Primary Sources archive (or combining with your own text data), we will: (1) build a corpus, (2) clean the data, and (3) perform analyses. The first workshop will be building a corpus from the documents made available through our library subscription. We will learn how to search for documents, add them to a content set, upload our own .txt files, and combine them with the Gale content. No previous experience necessary.

Authors’ Rights & the Publishing Industry - Monday, October 24, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

As a graduate student or a faculty member seeking an academic position, tenure, or promotion, you will need to establish a scholarly presence and build your curriculum vitae. A building block in this process is publishing in quality academic journals (subscription-based or open access). This workshop will assist you in selecting the right journal, ascertaining your rights as an author, and explore the problem of predatory publishing practices and how to avoid becoming a victim. Part of Open Access Week (October 24th-30th).

Gale Digital Scholar Lab (2): Cleaning a Dataset - Friday, November 4, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

The second workshop on using the Gale Digital Scholar Lab will focus on cleaning our data. The integral ‘Clean’ tool works with unstructured text data that is generated by the OCR process and shown in Lab. We will walk through the stages of the cleaning process by tackling such problems as removing ASCII characters and document sections, normalizing whitespace, and performing text corrections and modifications as necessary. How you clean your data will impact the tools used for analysis.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab (3): Analyzing a Dataset - Friday, Nov. 11, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

The final workshop in our Gale Digital Scholar Lab series will focus on the tools for analyzing a dataset. Document clustering, Named Entity Recognition, Ngrams, parts of speech, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling, will be covered.

Registration

Register through the Events page at libraries.catholic.edu (CUA members only) or by contacting Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu). Unless otherwise indicated, the instructor for each session will be Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship. All workshops will take place on Zoom, recorded, and made available on the Catholic University Libraries' YouTube Channel.

One of our initiatives over past year has been to “analyze the monographic collections of the WRLC libraries using Gold Rush®, assign retention commitments for monographs published from 2005 to present and consider options for reducing current retention commitments for monographs published before 2005, being mindful of DEI and whose voices are retained.” We are now in the final stages of this project. 



We exported 2.7 million unique titles for monographs in the collections of eight of the WRLC universities into the Gold Rush® Library Content Comparison System in December 2021. (George Mason was unable to participate due legal requirements of the Commonwealth of Virginia.) The analysis of the WRLC monographic collections found approximately 570,000 unique print monographic titles added to the collection since 2005. Of these, 360,000 were held by a single institution. These items were marked as retained in Alma in the early summer. The final step is to address the approximately 210,000 remaining titles held by multiple institutions and to equitably distribute retention commitments. This was completed in mid-August by Aaron Krebeck (WRLC) with assistance from Gwendolyn Reece (AU) and Josh McDonald (GW). There are a few missing barcodes and small numbers (<500) of mismatched titles that need to be investigated. Only about 1/8th of the marked retention copies are already located in the SCF. 

- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

Ex Libris hosts the Idea Exchange to enable customers to influence the development of new features and solutions. Anyone with an Idea Exchange login can use their 25 votes to support their favorite ideas. Each month, the WRLC Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) will highlight an idea and encourages you to vote for it to raise its visibility.



The Alma/Primo Advisory Committee’s (APAC) September Idea of the Month recommendation is about providing better tools to deal with compromised Alma user accounts.



Let's say a library staff member falls victim to a phishing attempt and their campus credentials are compromised. If the staff member is signed in to Alma at the time, there is currently no way to disconnect them, which potentially puts library processes and patron information at risk. Alma administrators can disable the staff member's roles one-by-one and take other passive steps, but cannot actively kick a user out of Alma if they're signed in.



This Idea proposes adding the ability for someone with the General System Administrator role to disconnect a specific user from Alma, more easily disable that user's roles, and receive an email notification if the user attempts to log in again after being disconnected. Merely having the ability to disconnect someone would be a significant security improvement. This is the sort of feature you hope you never need, but if you do, having the functionality available would be a great help.



Remember, anyone with an email can get an Idea Exchange account, just find the "New here? Create an account" link on the idea page. Then enter your email address to start the account creation process.



APAC welcomes nominations for future Ideas of the Month. Anyone can highlight an idea on the WRLC Idea Exchange Basecamp or you can submit ideas to your APAC representative.



- Cindy Bowen (GT)

On behalf of the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

Nearly all collections in the Merrill Learning Center at Gallaudet University have been relocated in preparation for the replacement of the library. Most books, journals, archives and other library materials are now shelved in the WRLC’s Shared Collections Facility. Other materials (e.g., furniture, large sports trophies) have found another temporary home. The transfer of this material began in February 2022 and was completed in July 2022. Many thanks to the Gallaudet and the WRLC SCF staff for managing and processing these items. These transfers rocketed Gallaudet from using just a few shelves in the SCF to being the fourth largest user of the SCF space. As of August 2022, 72% of the space in the SCF is now filled and 28% remains available.

- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

The WRLC Assessment Interest Group (AIG) will be re-convening in the new academic year for discussion groups, skillshares, project sharing, and other low-lift activities, as well as potential professional development opportunities. If you work in assessment or are interested in growing your knowledge of assessment, please join us! For more information, contact AIG chair Cathy Meals at catherine.meals@udc.edu.   



- Cathy Meals (DC) 

On behalf of the Assessment Interest Group

The work of the Partnership for Shared Book Collections (of which the WRLC is a member) is carried out by four Working Groups, and is looking for volunteers with an interest or expertise in the following areas to join existing working groups and/or task forces. 

• Communications and Advocacy for shared print programs (Communications and Advocacy Working Group)
• Identifying gaps in the collective collection, including both print and digital (Infrastructure WG)
• Collections and cataloging expertise(Infrastructure WG, Research and Network Level WG, Best Practices WG)
• Resource Sharing, including metrics and methods (Infrastructure WG, Research and Network Level WG)
• Defining workflows and best practices (Best Practices WG)

The four Working Groups are:

• Best Practices Working Group: Draft and promulgate a set of guidelines for various shared print activities. Current activities include drafting best practices for data reporting, weeding and succession planning.  
• Communications and Advocacy Working Group: Joint working group with the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance in support of communicating the value, needs, and impact of shared print at scale. 
• Research and Network Level Working Group: Investigates at scale activities including research, funding, and expanding shared print. Includes task forces on Risk, ROI in shared print, developing a Shared Print Toolkit, and the Impact of Shared Print on Resource Sharing.
• Infrastructure Working Group: The Infrastructure Working Group of the Partnership was established to develop an understanding of Shared Print program data needs, to explore the existing infrastructure capabilities, and to define recommendations and advocate for improvements. Includes task forces on Resource Sharing, Matching Algorithms and Discovery & Metadata

There are no fixed term commitments for the working groups. There is an annual review of membership yearly in July.



Interest in serving can be expressed using the form link below. Since these working groups and task forces are, for the most part, ongoing, there is no specific deadline for joining.

 

The WRLC Textbook Affordability Working Group (TAWG) will once more begin hosting the faculty workshop series, Faculty Perspectives: Open Textbooks in the Classroom, to increase faculty awareness of high-quality open textbooks. These workshops will feature a panel discussion of faculty members from across the consortium who are already using an open textbook for their course materials. The workshops are scheduled for:  

• September 28th, 2022 12:00 PM Faculty Perspectives: Adopting OER into your Courseware Material: How to Begin?
• October 13th, 2022 11:00 AM Faculty Perspectives: You've Already Done This!: Creating and Publishing OER Courseware
• November 2nd, 2022 12:00 PM Faculty Perspectives: Use Only What you Want: Adapting and Remixing OER
• November 16th, 2022 12:00 PM Faculty Perspectives: Choosing a Creative Commons License for your OER: Where to Begin?
• December 6th, 2022 12:00 PM Save the Date!

Check out our events page for more details about how to register for these events.

The WRLC is sponsoring a “faculty stipend program” in which workshop attendees can earn $200 for writing a review of a textbook in the Open Textbook Library. 



Contact us at open@wrlc.org if you have any questions.

- Angelique Carson (WRLC)

On behalf of the Textbook Affordability Working Group

Scholars Trust is a shared print partnership for journals among ASERL, FLARE and the WRLC. Scholars Trust Town Hall e-meetings provide a forum to share progress on current initiatives and elicit further feedback from participating libraries.



Please register here.  After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.  The meeting will be recorded for later playback.

Sponsored by the Catholic University Libraries and the Department of Library and Information Science. 

See registration information below.

Starting a Text Mining Project - Friday, September 30, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm 

Planning your project is a critical skill in contemporary research. Many students and faculty embark on a project without understanding fully the resources needed and the time commitment involved. This workshop will walk you through the process of a text mining project by asking the right questions: what is my research question, how can I locate and acquire the texts, what tools are relevant for cleaning and analyzing the texts, and what legal issues may limit my access and use of the texts? 

Gale Digital Scholar Lab (1): Building a Dataset - Friday, October 21, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Come and explore our latest acquisition devoted to text analysis, data mining, and data visualization through a series of three workshops. Using Gale’s Primary Sources archive (or combining with your own text data), we will: (1) build a corpus, (2) clean the data, and (3) perform analyses. The first workshop will be building a corpus from the documents made available through our library subscription. We will learn how to search for documents, add them to a content set, upload our own .txt files, and combine them with the Gale content. No previous experience necessary.

Authors’ Rights & the Publishing Industry - Monday, October 24, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

As a graduate student or a faculty member seeking an academic position, tenure, or promotion, you will need to establish a scholarly presence and build your curriculum vitae. A building block in this process is publishing in quality academic journals (subscription-based or open access). This workshop will assist you in selecting the right journal, ascertaining your rights as an author, and explore the problem of predatory publishing practices and how to avoid becoming a victim. Part of Open Access Week (October 24th-30th).

Gale Digital Scholar Lab (2): Cleaning a Dataset - Friday, November 4, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

The second workshop on using the Gale Digital Scholar Lab will focus on cleaning our data. The integral ‘Clean’ tool works with unstructured text data that is generated by the OCR process and shown in Lab. We will walk through the stages of the cleaning process by tackling such problems as removing ASCII characters and document sections, normalizing whitespace, and performing text corrections and modifications as necessary. How you clean your data will impact the tools used for analysis.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab (3): Analyzing a Dataset - Friday, Nov. 11, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

The final workshop in our Gale Digital Scholar Lab series will focus on the tools for analyzing a dataset. Document clustering, Named Entity Recognition, Ngrams, parts of speech, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling, will be covered.

Registration

Register through the Events page at libraries.catholic.edu (CUA members only) or by contacting Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu). Unless otherwise indicated, the instructor for each session will be Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship. All workshops will take place on Zoom, recorded, and made available on the Catholic University Libraries' YouTube Channel.

The Partnership for Shared Book Collections is excited to announce our new Best Practices Assessment Tools. The Best Practices Assessment Tools provide shared print programs an opportunity to review and reflect on their program's policies and procedures. The criteria used in these assessment tools are based on The Partnership for Shared Book Collections’ Best Practices. To-date, shared print programs are able to assess their program's policies and procedures in the following areas:

• Exiting a program
• Facsimiles
• Policy Development and Program Management
• Program Assessment
• Resource Sharing and Access
• Scarce Copies
• Shared Print Education and Awareness 

You can find the new assessment tools on the Shared Print Toolkit website at https://toolkit.sharedprint.org/best-practices/best-practices-assessment-tool. Additional topics will be added as they become available.



Registration information is provided below. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. The webinar will be recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording. 

Creating Coordinated Collections

• Assign monograph retention commitments for materials published from 2005 to 2021 consistent with our MOU on Shared Collection Print Retention. 

• Create a new process for Alma for reassignment of retention commitments for lost and damaged materials.

• Assess our collections against our DEI mission and make recommendations for implementing these values in our collective collection development. 

Creating a Robust Infrastructure for Discovery and Access

• Conduct the pilot of peer-to-peer lending with SUNY.

• Resolve Alma Fulfillment Network issues identified by RSAC. 

• Standardize serial holdings records to improve access and to support collective print preservation efforts.      

Preserving Physical and Digital Resources

• [See the retention initiatives under Creating Coordinated Collections.]

Sharing Expertise

• Finish the toolkit for OER advocates.

• Begin implementation of the Open@WRLC program.

• Improve documentation and discoverability for WRLC projects and committee work that has been done in previous years

• Assess our implementation of Alma/Primo to identify successes and continuing challenges and develop future priorities.

• Assess the end-user experience of Primo/Alma to identify weaknesses and develop recommendations to improve the user experience.       

The WRLC Board of Directors has engaged Koya Partners, “the nation’s premier search firm dedicated to mission-driven organizations,” to find the right leader to ensure the continued impact of the WRLC with its university partners and on learning and scholarship in the consortium. Since its founding in 2004, Koya has conducted nearly 3,000 executive searches in the U.S. and around the world. To view the full job description, visit this link: https://koyapartners.com/search/wrlc-executive-director/.



The Search Committee appointed by the Board of Directors has reviewed applications received from Koya and conducted the first round of interviews during the week of July 25 with those candidates who best address the expectations for the position.



Finalists will be selected by the Search Committee and will be interviewed by the Executive Committee of the WRLC Board in the middle of August. The Executive Committee will then make its recommendation on a final candidate to the full WRLC Board of Directors.



- David P. Long

Chair of the WRLC Executive Director Search Committee and Assistant Provost, Catholic University of America

The 2022 WRLC Annual Meeting was held virtually, kicking off on Wednesday, May 18th with a virtual lunch followed by a 90 minute “Renewal Colloquium" led by Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, 2019 ACRL Academic/Research Librarian of the Year and Dean of the Library, Archives & Special Collections at Winthrop University. Kendrick explored morale and ambiguity in libraries during COVID-19. She reviewed selected data from her library morale studies, including the impacts of COVID-19, expanded impacts on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and implications for formal leaders. Attendees were able to enhance engagement in the event by completing reflective pre-assessment activities – including question submissions. The colloquium was not recorded to allow for the free discussion of ideas.



Breakout sessions highlighting presentations by your colleagues from throughout the Consortium took place Tuesday – Thursday, May 24-26th, 2022. Over the course of the three days, a dozen presentations offered by your WRLC colleagues on a wide range of topics were presented and recorded. All sessions are now available on the Library Staff Intranet.

The WRLC Coordinated Collections Committee proposed an addendum to augment our current Shared Collection Vision for the Washington Research Libraries Consortium to incorporate the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Cultural Competency Standards. The Steering Committee recommended the proposed addendum to the Library Directors Council. The LDC unanimously approved adding the EDI statement to our current Shared Collection Vision for the Washington Research Libraries Consortium as an addendum at its May 6, 2022 meeting. 



Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Addendum



The WRLC supports ACRL’s Cultural Competency Standards and strives to incorporate them into the framework of the consortium’s mission, vision, and goals. Standard 4: Development of collections, programs, and services states that “Librarians and library staff shall develop collections and provide programs and services that are inclusive of the needs of all persons in the community the library serves.”



The WRLC recognizes that our commitment to diversity, equity, and accessibility requires immediate, intentional, and resolute action to address any historic and ongoing exclusions.



Therefore, the WRLC will work to:

• Collaboratively acquire works for the consortium created by people and communities of diverse experiences and identities.
• Update selection workflows to include materials from independent, small, and local publishers to include voices from marginalized groups that are under-represented in mainstream publishing.
• Provide resources in formats that meet the needs of users with differing abilities;
• Identify and challenge exclusionary practices in academic publishing and collection development.
• Critically examine access restrictions, description, and location of materials in the collections to avoid de facto exclusion of historically overlooked materials and authors. 
• Conduct ongoing assessment of our cooperative collections work in light of inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility.
• Support strategies designed to address issues of inequitable participation and distribution of knowledge such as Open Access materials. Promote equitable access to content and advocate with vendors to ensure their products meet appropriate standards.

----

The ACRL Definition of Cultural Competence is a congruent set of behaviors, attitudes, and policies that enable a person or group to work effectively in cross-cultural situations; the process by which individuals and systems respond respectfully and effectively to people of all cultures, languages, classes, races, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and other diversity factors in a manner that recognizes, affirms, and values the worth of individuals, families, and communities and protects and preserves the dignity of each.

- Mark Jacobs

Executive Director, WRLC

APAC's August choice for Idea of the Month focuses on the Primo Library Card page.



The request is simple: Patron accounts in Primo need to have a patron's requests and/or loans collected together in unified lists on the My Library Account page. If you've ever tried to renew your loans via Primo, you've seen how annoying it is to have to figure out which institution provided the item you're trying to renew. Simplifying this would be a HUGE improvement for usability. Ex Libris has said they're reviewing the idea but adding your votes will help demonstrate how much we want this issue to be addressed.



Remember, anyone with an email can get an Idea Exchange account, just find the "New here? Create an account" link on the idea page. Then enter your email address to start the account creation process.



APAC welcomes nominations for future Ideas of the Month. Anyone can highlight an idea on the WRLC Idea Exchange Basecamp or you can submit ideas to your APAC representative.



-Cindy Bowen (GT), for the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

Twice per year, Ex Libris refreshes all Alma Sandbox environments. A refresh means that all data and configurations are copied from the corresponding production environment; these replace any data and configurations already existing in the sandbox. 



Our second refresh of the year is scheduled for Sunday, August 14, 2022.



WRLC will do its best to recreate all consortial user accounts created in the past six months (login information will be emailed to all applicable users), but if you find that you do not have access to the sandbox after Tuesday, August 16th, you can fill out the WRLC Sandbox Access Request Form to request a new sandbox user account.



- Jackie Saavedra

Consortial Network Zone Manager, WRLC

July 26 was the fourth anniversary for going live with Alma and Primo in the WRLC. It's amazing how that time has flown by. We've now been using Alma for about 20% of the length of time that our consortium used our previous system, Voyager. Thank you to everyone who has made these last years as successful as possible and to everyone who continues to work to improve library management and discovery through your work on committees, advocacy and other ways.  



Our initial contract with Ex Libris for Alma and Primo had a three year term which now renews each fiscal year (July 1 – June 30). As we enter year five, one of our FY23 initiatives is to "Assess our implementation of Alma/Primo to identify successes and continuing challenges and develop future priorities." While this work will be coordinated by the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee, the APAC will be seeking input from users throughout the consortium. We encourage you to begin reflecting on your experiences and share feedback as we move into the new fiscal year.  



- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

The Washington Research Library Consortium seeks a dynamic, creative Executive Director to provide innovative and thoughtful leadership and to advance the mission of this member-driven not-for-profit organization composed of nine libraries in the greater Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The WRLC supports and enhances the library and information technology services of its member universities, enabling the success of learning and scholarship by: creating coordinated collections, creating a robust infrastructure for ease of discovery and access, ensuring the long-term preservation of physical and digital information resources, supporting emerging information technologies and information management, and sharing expertise across the consortium and beyond.



The search is being managed by Koya Partners. To view the full job description and learn how to apply, visit this link: https://koyapartners.com/search/wrlc-executive-director/.

Several years ago, Ex Libris introduced the Idea Exchange as an online community to enable customers to shape the products and solutions they invest in and use every day. Within the WRLC, however, we have struggled to gain much support for ideas that would really help in our specific network environment. To try to address that – and to increase knowledge and usage of the Idea Exchange in the WRLC generally – the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) is introducing the Idea of the Month: a featured idea on the Exchange that would positively impact the WRLC.



Every person with an Idea Exchange login has 25 votes to either create or support existing ideas and can place up to three votes on any one idea. Those votes are one metric driving the Ex libris development team's review and consideration of an idea. If half of the staff across WRLC libraries gave an idea 3 votes, that idea would have over 1,000 votes – a very persuasive point total almost immediately! In addition, ideas that get the most votes in a week are featured on the “Hot Ideas” list on a product’s Idea Exchange page, gaining even more visibility.



Anyone with an email can get an Idea Exchange account. Simply select a product (e.g. Alma, Primo) from the Idea Exchange home page and click the sign in link on the top right. There you can enter an email address and password, or just select an existing Google, Facebook or Ex Libris login.



Here is APAC’s choice for our inaugural Idea of the Month: Include available NZ e-inventory within IZ Alma/Primo VE browse indexes



This Idea was submitted by our very own Cindy Bowen, Georgetown’s APAC representative, and would help your patrons and staff discover shared e-resources in our network zone, such as JSTOR and OUP collections.



APAC welcomes nominations for future Ideas of the Month. Anyone can highlight an idea on our Idea Exchange Basecamp (which is where June’s Idea of the Month came from). Contact your APAC representative if you need an invite to join that basecamp project. Committees are encouraged to submit Idea of the Month nominations to their APAC liaison



-The Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

The WRLC Service Desk has long maintained an email list to notify our community of any issues or events that may impact the library and IT services we provide. This worked well for communicating about planned maintenance and for issues impacting our locally hosted ILS (i.e. Voyager). But now the most serious issues and service disruptions we experience are related to our network and virtual server infrastructure – which can also affect our locally hosted alert list.



To ensure we can communicate with stakeholders even when our private cloud is unavailable, we have moved the WRLC alert list to a Google Group that is hosted in the public cloud. All members of the old list have been added to the Google Group, so no action is required on your part to continue receiving alerts. The email address has changed so you may need to add wrlc-alert@wrlc.org to your address book if the alerts are ending up in your spam folder.



We have also added a convenient subscribe/unsubscribe button to the Library Staff Intranet to help you manage your subscription. Simply Log In to the Intranet and your profile page will indicate whether you are subscribed or not and provide a button to change your status. If your subscribed email address is a Gmail account you can also go to the Google Group page to manage your subscription. You can send us an email at servicedesk@wrlc.org if you need any help subscribing or unsubscribing.



-Don Gourley

Director of Information Technology, WRLC

It has been a busy year for Open Educational Resources (OER) at the WRLC!



Textbook costs have increased by over 1,000% since 1977 and students are a captive market. This environment becomes increasingly concerning as the number of publishers decreases- threatening the diversity of material that is available. It is the goal of the Textbook Affordability Working Group (TAWG) to coordinate efforts to support the adoption of OER and to further WRLC’s initiatives for affordable education and student success across our institutions.



Workshops



In the Fall/Winter of 2021, TAWG coordinated 4 training workshops that provided a brief introduction to open textbooks and panel discussions featuring faculty members who teach with them. All teaching instructors that attended were given the opportunity to earn a $200 stipend by posting a review of an open textbook on the Open Textbook Library website. [provide link to OTL] You can learn more about these sessions and watch recordings of them at https://open.wrlc.org/events



Impact

To date, 236 faculty have participated in this program and written 140 textbook reviews. More often than not, this introduction to OER has led to the adoption of open textbooks by participants in the workshops, which generated an estimated potential savings of over $67,000 for students.  



OER Toolkit

In the Spring semester 2022, TAWG published a Student OER Advocacy Toolkit on the recently updated Open@WRLC website and hosted a presentation dedicated to instructing students on how to begin advocacy efforts on their own campus. Additionally, we offered programming that included topics specific to higher level graduate courses, STEM resources, and using discovery tools to effectively search for OER material. 



Being a Catalyst for WRLC



The WRLC Board of Directors recently approved funding for a new grant program designed to encourage faculty in the WRLC community to replace commercial textbooks through the adoption, adaptation, and creation of Open Educational Resources. The grants are projected to replace commercial textbooks used by over 12,000 students with OER textbooks, saving $1.8 million over five years. In addition, a recommendation for continued funding for the Open@WRLC Catalyst Program was also approved.



 The OER Catalyst Program will address the following goals. 

• Advance educational equity at WRLC institutions via providing centralized financial support for the adoption and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER)

• Build a sustainable infrastructure to support the Open@WRLC grant program, products, resources and training.

• Support the integration and creation of OER material to reduce the direct costs to students and contribute to their retention, progression and graduation.

• Establish a sustainable OER community of WRLC partners that promotes sharing of OER expertise, Open Pedagogy and highlights the opportunities of OER to address diversity and inclusion in courseware material.

Conclusion

2022 has been an exciting academic year for OER at WRLC.  We look forward to next year’s work and growing our initiatives even more to provide affordable education and student success across our institutions.



If you are interested in participating or want to learn more about our work, please contact us at open@wrlc.org and visit our website at https://open.wrlc.org



-Textbook Affordability Working Group

We reported in the May WRLC Newsletter about our project to identify the journal titles held in the WRLC Shared Collections Facility that were not yet included among those journals with retention commitments. The Coordinated Collections Committee (CCC) decided that those journal titles owned by the WRLC partners with fewer than three retention commitments by other shared print programs should be retained and added to our shared print commitments. This decision adds 4,500 journal titles with retention commitments made by the WRLC libraries, for a total of over 19,000 retained shared print journal titles. The WRLC retention commitments are now recorded in Alma, national shared print databases (JRNL, PAPR) and are now marked in OCLC’s WorldCat as being committed for retention as part of the WRLC Shared Print program. 



- Jackie Saavedra

Consortial Network Zone Manager, WRLC

Through the efforts of several WRLC committees (Coordinated Collections, E-Resource, and Alma/Primo Advisory), over thirty free or open access collections of electronic resources have been identified and activated in the Alma Network Zone. These represent collections that had already been activated individually in four or more Alma Institution Zones. Converting these collections to Network Zone resources is a more efficient and cost-effective use of Alma bibliographic records. The complete list of current shared resources may be found on the WRLC Intranet.



Additional shared open access collections may be added after further review. Any recommendations for changes to institutional participation for these resources should be directed to your institution’s representative on the E-Resource Committee. Please contact WRLC Network Zone Manager Jacqueline Saavedra (saavedra@wrlc.org) with any other questions about the Shared E-Resource Collections spreadsheet.

Gloria Sena and Aaron Krebeck have developed a new workflow that improves the ability to track intra-consortial lending using Alma. As many Alma institutions using the Alma Fulfillment Network (AFN) have found, anonymization jobs remove all identifying features that would tell the home institution of linked users. On two separate occasions, Ex Libris has made adjustments to data analytics that were supposed to improve this situation. The fixes have made minor improvements, but far too many cross-library transactions are still being anonymized to provide accurate statistics. 



WRLC has developed a new strategy using statistical categories to embed the linked user's home institution in a non-anonymized field. This technique will ensure that patron transactions will have an identifiable home institution, which will allow us to accurately track borrowing and requesting between the WRLC libraries. Intra-consortial lending reports will be found in the WRLC Library Staff Intranet here: https://www.libraries.wrlc.org/alma-documents-resource-sharing-statistics-and-reports/consortium-lending-reports.

- Aaron Krebeck

Director of Library and User Services, WRLC

The WRLC welcomed two new additions to its team of Shared Collections Specialists. This position is responsible for the operations of the WRLC Shared Collections Facility, including accessioning, shelving, retrieving and fulfilling requests for materials in the SCF. 

• Sarah Concepcion has a Bachelor’s degree and Master’s in History from George Mason University and two years’ experience working as a student assistant at George Mason’s Mason Square Library (formerly Arlington Campus Library).

• Suzanne Holcombe has a BA in Art History from Aberystwyth University and a Master’s in History of Art from the University of York with experience in various arts, library and other cultural heritage organizations.

- Mark Jacobs

Executive Director, WRLC