January 13, 2025

In This Issue:

• Retirement Announcement
• Shared Print Partnership: Announcing Vision, Mission, and Strategic Directions
• Happy Public Domain Day 2025!
• ELUNA learns 2024 - Resource Management Presentations
• WRLC Job Listings

After two successful runs as our Director of Information Technology, Don Gourley has announced his plans to retire from WRLC at the end of February 2025.

Don's arrival at WRLC in 1998 was well-timed as it coincided with the consortial Voyager implementation. Don brought expertise that was critical in solving significant systems and network problems, while working strategically with WRLC staff, library staff and Endeavor staff to launch the system successfully. Don departed WRLC in 2008, but returned in 2015, again in time to provide leadership for the transition to Ex Libris and implementation of Alma and Primo.

Over the years, Don has amassed an impressive record for leading technological innovation at WRLC to benefit libraries and their users.  Most recently, Don led the migration of the WRLC data center operations to the cloud. Don's colleagues say that they have valued, " his understanding of the full range of IT operations", "his openness to creative solutions", and "his ability to teach and discuss IT issues with non-technical staff".  Thank you and all the best Don!

The Shared Print Partnership Bridge-Year Executive Committee (BYEC) is delighted to announce the successful completion of the organization’s Vision, Mission, and Values. This marks a milestone in advancing the organization’s foundational principles and strategic goals.

Advancing the Merger Plan

Charged with implementing the Merger Plan, the BYEC has been working to establish strategic priorities for the Shared Print Partnership (SPP). The development of the Vision, Mission, and Values was informed by key contributions, including the outputs of the Merger Summit hosted by CRL in Summer 2023 and insights from the Merger Implementation Task Force.

Strategic Directions to Guide the Future

Building on the SPP Vision, Mission, and Values, the BYEC is pleased to unveil the Strategic Directions for the organization. These directions reflect the core priorities of SPP and will serve as a framework for resource allocation and mission fulfillment. As external factors and internal capabilities evolve, so too will these strategic directions, ensuring they remain relevant and impactful.

We Value Your Feedback

Your input is vital to shaping the future of the Shared Print Partnership. We invite all stakeholders to review and comment on the Strategic Directions via our Google form. The form will remain open through Friday, February 7.

Stay Connected

For updates on the SPP BYEC’s work, including access to public meeting notes, visit our Committee page. Additionally, if you have questions or need further information, please reach out via the Contact Us form on our website.

Sincerely,

The Shared Print Partnership Bridge-year Executive Committee

• Joseph Hafner (co-chair), Dean of Libraries at York University

• Scott Warren (co-chair), Senior Associate Dean for Research Excellence at Syracuse University Libraries

• Amy Wood, Director of Discovery & Technology at Center for Research Libraries

• Cathy Austin, Interim Director for Collection Management & Strategy at Mississippi State University Libraries

• Heather Weltin, Content & Data Management Lead and Shared Print Program Officer at HathiTrust

• Alison Wohlers, Assistant Director for Shared Print at California Digital Library

After Mickey Mouse’s long-awaited appearance in 2024, Public Domain Day has become an important event on the library calendar. This year is no exception. In addition to more films featuring Mickey and his friends, many new properties are now copyright free. Works from 1929 including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Sound and the Fury, and A Room of One’s Own are now open to all in the United States. Also sound recordings from 1924 (recordings being subject to a slightly different law/timeline) like Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and early songs from Marian Anderson can be freely shared and re-used without permission. These works now provide what Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain describes as a “wellspring for creativity.” Copyright law protects the rights of the original authors, but allowing copyright to expire ensures that “future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies.”

Last year, Aaron Krebeck of WRLC created a short film to celebrate the end of the silent film era and to reimagine the artistic work of Agatha Christie and WC Handy. For 2025, Aaron has combined two of his favorite works from this year’s public domain offerings. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon popularized the hardboiled detective genre. Since its original 1929 publication in Black Mask magazine, the story has been adapted dozens of times for film, radio, and other formats. This year, in place of Sam Spade, you’ll find the private-eye role played by E.C. Segar’s Popeye. The spinach-chomping sailor originally began as a sidekick in Segar’s Thimble Theatre comic strip, but eventually became popular enough for his own comic, cartoons, and other media. Enjoy!

It is important to note that the work of Hammett and Segar are readily available for re-use because they have been widely preserved as part of our shared cultural heritage. Countless other less-famous works from 1929 and earlier only exist for that same purpose because of the hard work of librarians like all of you and shared print organizations like WRLC, the Shared Print Partnership, HathiTrust, and others.

Reparative Cataloging in the Washington Research Library Consortium.

Presented by Jen Froetschel, Metadata Services Librarian, George Washington University; Jacqueline Saavedra, Consortial Network Zone Manager, Washington Research Library Consortium

Librarians across the profession are actively practicing and implementing reparative description in order to mitigate the biases found within our metadata and help highlight work going on around the profession. This session describes the specific reparative cataloging efforts within the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC), and how these initiatives translate to various Alma workflows (authority definitions, normalization rules, local metadata extensions, and local display fields in Primo), as well as initiatives outside of Alma and Primo to communicate ongoing reparative cataloging work across the profession.

Enhancing Your Spreadsheet Reports With "Excel Alma Lookup"

Thomas Ventimiglia, Computing Support Analyst, Princeton University East Asian Library

The "Excel Alma Lookup" tool (https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/appcenter/excel-alma-lookup/) is a free Excel plugin developed by Princeton University Library. It allows users to take a list of identifiers from a spreadsheet (such as MMS IDs, ISBNs, OCLC Numbers, etc.), search for them in the catalog, and output the results in the same spreadsheet. It can be used to extract any bibliographic field from the retrieved records, including those not available by default in Analytics or other reporting methods. This presentation will explain how to set up and use the tool, some common use cases, and new features in development for future versions.

Creating DEIA Activities in Alma for the Cataloging Team at University of Tennessee Libraries

Anchalee Panigabutra-Roberts, Associate Professor and Head of Cataloging, University of Tennessee Libraries; David Scott, Cataloger, University of Tennessee Libraries

At the University of Tennessee Libraries, we created DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) projects for our catalogers based on their individual interests and expertise. This presentation will highlight individual catalogers’ DEIA projects to enhance access in our local Alma and WorldCat catalogs. Their projects range from enhancing catalog records for a local collection for Black and Latinx music composers, ensuring access to books receiving literary awards from National Associations of Librarians of Color (NALCo), adding DEI-related subject and genre terms from the Library of Congress vocabularies and other vocabularies, such as Homosaurus, to general books', comic books' and streaming videos’ catalog records; to adding and assessing accessibility metadata in videos' catalog records. We will conclude the presentation by linking our projects with the national and international DEIA-related efforts.

Location, Location, Location: Revamping the Request for New Location Process

Margaret Alexander, Core Systems Librarian, University of Oregon

Updated presentation from ELUNA 2024: Are you tired of the same old, boring policy reviews? Do you struggle to find the time to update your processes and procedures? This session will give you an overview of our work to revise and update our "Request for New Location" processes and procedures. We realized our old written process had not been thoroughly revamped since before we moved to Alma and Primo, and our software and policy ecosystem has unsurprisingly expanded and changed since then. Attendees will not only potentially laugh and cry at our trials and tribulations, but may leave with a plethora of ideas that can be applied to your own institutional processes.

• Library Associate I: Evening Circulation & Stacks Maintenance - Marymount University

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