Open Access Books

Rethinking Institutional Repositories

Rethinking Institutional Repositories: Innovations in Management, Collections, and Inclusion
edited by Josh C. Cromwell
This book aims to expand on existing scholarship around establishing a repository and increasing faculty submissions by highlighting a variety of approaches to administering IRs, increasing the variety of content, and broadening participation.

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge
edited by Maria Bonn, Josh Bolick, and Will Cross
This is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education.

Conducting a Map Collection Review

Conducting a Map Collection Review: A Workbook to Help You on the Journey
by Janet Reyes
This workbook covers the map collection review process from beginning to end, from getting started to potential partners through developing criteria, establishing processes, and how to make crucial dispersal and disposal decisions. It includes a thorough list of terms and easy-to-print worksheets.

Using OER to Promote Social Justice

Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice
edited by CJ Ivory and Angela Pashia
Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice offers something for everyone who advocates for open pedagogy and OER across campus, from librarians to teaching faculty to centers for teaching and learning.

Designing Libraries for the 21st Century

Designing Libraries for the 21st Century
edited by H. Thomas Hickerson, Joan K. Lippincott, and Leonora Crema
Designing Libraries for the 21st Century explores the latest trends and identifies promising strategies for new or renovated library space. It features an impressive array of authors drawn largely from the conference of the same name, providing guidance, principles, and a wealth of creative ideas for spaces, technology, programs, and partnerships.

Intersections of OER and Information Literacy

Intersections of Open Educational Resources and Information Literacy (Publications in Librarianship #79)
edited by Mary Ann Cullen and Elizabeth Dill
Intersections of Open Educational Resources and Information Literacy captures current open education and information literacy theory and practice and provides inspiration for the future. Chapters include practical applications, theoretical musings, literature reviews, and case studies and discuss social justice issues, collaboration, open pedagogy, training, and advocacy. 

3D Data Creation to Curation

3D Data Creation to Curation: Community Standards for 3D Data Preservation
edited by Jennifer Moore, Adam Rountrey, and Hannah Scates Kettler
3D Data Creation to Curation: Community Standards for 3D Data Preservation collects the efforts of the Community Standards for 3D Data Preservation (CS3DP) initiative—a large practicing community of librarians, researchers, engineers, and designers—to move toward establishment of shared guidelines, practices, and standards. Using a collaborative approach for standards development that promotes individual investment and broad adoption, this group has produced a work that captures the shared preservation needs of the whole community.


Copyright Conversations

Copyright Conversations: Rights Literacy in a Digital World
edited by Sara R. Benson
The expert copyright librarians collected in Copyright Conversations: Rights Literacy in a Digital World address complex legal issues at the intersection of copyright and information literacy. Four sections—Copyright Librarians’ Role and Advocacy, Education, Research and Policy, and International Issues—provide detailed explanations of the issues and considerations and offer prescriptive tips and advice for teaching and applying the information


Stories of Open

Stories of Open: Opening Peer Review through Narrative Inquiry (ACRL Publications in Librarianship No. 76)
edited Emily Ford
Stories of Open examines the methods and processes of peer review, as well as the stories of those who have been through it. Eleven chapters are divided into three parts: Part 1. Orientation, Part 2. The Stories (The Story Middle), and Part 3. Coda. Stories of Open offers questions for reflection at the end of many chapters in order to assist in the continued exploration of your own experiences with peer review, and encourages the use of these reflections in creating new and improved peer review methods.


CLIPP 45

Open Educational Resources: CLIPP #45
Compiled and written by Mary Francis
In six sections, Open Educational Resources provides context for OER initiatives in college libraries and provides insights and strategies for librarians who are new to the topic, part of an existing OER initiative, or looking to form a program at their institution. The survey, both analyzed and included in its entirety, gathers information on OER and other affordable course content initiatives that are occurring at college libraries, exploring questions such as funding, how libraries are supporting OER on their campuses, and what additional services might be possible in their libraries. Finally, there’s a collection of resources and sample documents related to OER initiatives, including faculty stipend programs, process documents, and sustainability and planning guides.


Copyright Conversations

Fostering Change: A Team-Based Guide
Brianna Marshall, Dani Brecher Cook, and Cinthya Ippoliti
Developed with leadership from ACRL’s New Roles and Changing Landscapes Committee, Fostering Change is intended to be a practical tool for teams immersed in the labor of leading change in the library and on campus. This guide takes you and your team step-by-step through understanding change, building engagement, and creating and instituting the change, allowing you to pick and choose different aspects of the process that resonate most. It’s intended to help place people at the center of every change process and give individuals across academic libraries the tools to spark, lead, and sustain change, no matter their organizational position. Fostering Change is packed with exercises, templates, and resources to use as you plan and execute change. 


Open and Equitable Schol Comm

Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications: Creating a More Inclusive Future
Developed over the course of a year with leadership from the Research and Scholarly Environment Committee (ReSEC) and with a high degree of community involvement, Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications: Creating a More Inclusive Future is a powerful new action-oriented research agenda that encourages the community to make the scholarly communications system more open, inclusive, and equitable by outlining trends, encouraging practical actions, and clearly identifying the most strategic research questions to pursue. This report is an important contribution to ACRL’s core commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion which includes valuing different ways of knowing and identifying and working to eliminate barriers to equitable services, spaces, resources, and scholarship. The full research agenda is also available for purchase in print in the ALA store.

Not Just Where to Click

Not Just Where to Click: Teaching Students How to Think about Information (PIL #68)
edited by Heather Jagman and Troy A. Swanson
Not Just Where to Click: Teaching Students How to Think about Information explores how librarians and faculty work together to teach students about the nature of expertise, authority, and credibility. It provides practical approaches for motivating students to explore their beliefs, biases, and ways of interpreting the world..

Applying Library Values to Emerging Technology: Decision-Making in the Age of Open Access, Maker Spaces, and the Ever-Changing Library (Publications in Librarianship #72)
Applying Library Values to Emerging Technology: Decision-Making in the Age of Open Access, Maker Spaces, and the Ever-Changing Library offers a wide range of perspectives on how to interpret and apply library values in the context of emerging technologies. Authors include academic librarians, public librarians, and professors, and contributors from the Library Freedom Project, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Free Ebook Foundation, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Tor Project, the Center for Information Policy Research, and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. Divided into two sections—Contemplating Library Values and Applying Library Values—and using the ALA’s Core Values of Librarianship as the primary reference point, chapters emphasize the underlying frameworks that guide librarian practice and capture practical, real-world applications that can ideally serve as a starting point for other librarians encountering similar issues, even if the specific technology or set of values may differ.

Undergraduate Research and the Academic Librarian: Case Studies and Best Practices
In 25 chapters featuring 60 expert contributors, Undergraduate Research and the Academic Librarian examines how the structures that undergird undergraduate research, such as the library, can become part of the core infrastructure of the undergraduate experience. It explores the strategic new services and cross-departmental collaborations academic libraries are creating to support research: publishing services, such as institutional repositories and undergraduate research journals; data services; copyright services; poster printing and design; specialized space; digital scholarship services; awards; and much more. These programs can be from any discipline, can be interdisciplinary, can be any high-impact format, and can reflect upon an institution’s own history, traditions, and tensions.

Collaborating for Impact: Special Collections and Liaison Librarian Partnerships
Collaborating for Impact opens with an exploration of current collaboration between liaison and special collections librarians, including a thorough literature review. A proposed framework for acquiring general and special collections that document the history of the academy and remain responsive to campus curricular needs, and a tutorial on object-based pedagogy that can underpin such arrangements, follow. And finally, there are thirteen case studies that provide concrete examples of how to move the needle towards sustainable efforts and away from one-off examples.

Bridging Worlds: Emerging Models and Practices of U.S. Academic Libraries Around the Globe
Academic libraries are playing a key role in many of these undertakings, acting as partners in the development of campus community, student life, and research. Bridging Worlds: Emerging Models and Practices of U.S. Academic Libraries Around the Globe presents examples of libraries working to play their part in campus development and international engagement. This book provides practical best practices, lessons learned, and perspectives gained, from collection building to finances to designing spaces, and touches on some of the cultural, political, and social factors at play as institutions work to support these complex organizations.

Academic Library Impact: Improving Practice and Essential Areas to Research
Developed for ACRL by OCLC Research, Academic Library Impact: Improving Practice and Essential Areas to Research investigates how libraries can increase student learning and success and effectively communicate their value to higher education stakeholders, and identifies the next generation of necessary research to continue to testify to library impact. This action-oriented research agenda includes a report on all project phases and findings; a detailed research agenda based on those findings; a visualization component that filters relevant literature and creates graphics that can communicate library value to stakeholders; a bibliography of the literature analyzed; and a full bibliography of the works cited and reviewed.

Curating Research Data, Volume One: Practical Strategies for Your Digital Repository (PDF, 5 MB)
edited by Lisa R. Johnston
Volume One of Curating Research Data explores the variety of reasons, motivations, and drivers for why data curation services are needed in the context of academic and disciplinary data repository efforts. Twelve chapters, divided into three parts, take an in-depth look at the complex practice of data curation as it emerges around us. Part I sets the stage for data curation by describing current policies, data sharing cultures, and collaborative efforts currently underway that impact potential services. Part II brings several key issues, such as cost recovery and marketing strategy, into focus for practitioners when considering how to put data curation services in action. Finally, Part III describes the full lifecycle of data by examining the ethical and practical reuse issues that data curation practitioners must consider as we strive to prepare data for the future.

Curating Research Data, Volume Two: A Handbook of Current Practice (PDF, 21.87 MB)
Lisa R. Johnston
Curating Research Data, Volume Two: A Handbook of Current Practice guides you across the data lifecycle through the practical strategies and techniques for curating research data in a digital repository setting. The data curation steps for receiving, appraising, selecting, ingesting, transforming, describing, contextualizing, disseminating, and preserving digital research data are each explored, and then supplemented with detailed case studies written by more than forty international practitioners from national, disciplinary, and institutional data repositories. The steps in this volume detail the sequential actions that you might take to curate a data set from receiving the data (Step 1) to eventual reuse (Step 8). Data curators, archivists, research data management specialists, subject librarians, institutional repository managers, and digital library staff will benefit from these current and practical approaches to data curation.

Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Manuscripts
Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Manuscripts, more efficiently known as AMREMM, was written by Gregory A. Pass and published by the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) in 2003. AMREMM is a supplement to AACR2, similar in scope to Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Books, allowing creation of item-level MARC catalog records for pre-modern manuscript materials in library online public access catalogs as well as in the national bibliographic utility OCLC. The rules that are described define the categories of information that an online manuscript description should contain and how these records should be implemented according to AACR2 and the MARC21 environment..

Meaningful Metrics: A 21st Century Librarian's Guide to Bibliometrics, Altmetrics, and Research Impact (PDF 10.1 MB)
Robin Chin Roemer and Rachel Borchardt
What does it mean to have meaningful metrics in today’s complex higher education landscape? With a foreword by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem, this highly engaging and activity-laden book serves to introduce readers to the fast-paced world of research metrics from the unique perspective of academic librarians and LIS practitioners. Starting with the essential histories of bibliometrics and altmetrics, and continuing with in-depth descriptions of the core tools and emerging issues at stake in the future of both fields, Meaningful Metrics is a convenient all-in-one resource that is designed to be used by a range of readers, from those with little to no background on the subject to those looking to become movers and shakers in the current scholarly metrics movement. Authors Borchardt and Roemer, offer tips, tricks, and real-world examples illustrate how librarians can support the successful adoption of research metrics, whether in their institutions or across academia as a whole.

Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists (PDF 12.36 MB)
Edited by Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Laura Braunstein, and Liorah Golomb
Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists is a collection of essays focusing on the role of the subject specialist in creating, supporting, and promoting digital humanities projects.  Chapter authors include experts from diverse areas, such as humanities subject specialists, digital humanities librarians, special collections librarians, and professors and graduate students from many disciplines. This book, published in collaboration with the ACRL Literatures in English Section and with a foreword by Joan K. Lippincott, provides valuable discussions around the role of subject specialists in digital humanities, gives practical advice regarding support of and collaboration with digital humanities projects, and describes real-world examples to inspire subject specialists to increase their own knowledge and expertise. Digital Humanities in the Library was edited by Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Laura Braunstein, and Liorah Golomb, and is appropriate for all types of academic libraries and collections devoted to Library and Information Science.

Getting the Word Out: Academic Libraries as Scholarly Publishers (PDF 3.35 MB)
by Maria Bonn and Mike Furlough
In the past decade there has been an intense growth in the number of library publishing services supporting faculty and students. Unified by a commitment to both access and service, library publishing programs have grown from an early focus on backlist digitization to encompass publication of student works, textbooks, research data, as well as books and journals. This growing engagement with publishing is a natural extension of the academic library’s commitment to support the creation of and access to scholarship. This volume includes chapters by some of the most talented thinkers in this area of librarianship, exploring topics such as the economics of publishing and the challenges of collaboration, and surveying the service landscape for publishing in support of a variety of formats and methods. Edited by library publishing experts Maria Bonn, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and Mike Furlough, HathiTrust Digital Library, Getting the Word Out deepens current discussions in the field, and provides both decision makers and current practitioners with an introduction to the current state of the field and an investigation of its future prospects. This book is appropriate for all types of academic libraries and for graduate programs in library and information studies.

Owning and Using Scholarship: An IP Handbook for Teachers and Researchers (PDF 2,297 KB)
Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
Copyright and other types of laws regulating intellectual property create an increasing concern for contemporary scholarship. The digital environment has created exciting new opportunities and possibilities for scholars to work and distribute their work. But these new opportunities also create issues that did not arise in the analog world. Owning and Using Scholarship: An IP Handbook for Teachers and Researchers attempts to demystify intellectual property, and especially copyright law, for academic authors and independent scholars who face these dilemmas. It also can serve as a comprehensive resource for librarians who are asked to assist with these new and challenging decisions. Throughout the book a clear explanation of the law is coupled with concrete examples drawn from actual issues encountered by scholars. This balance of theoretical background and practical application is designed to appeal to both those who want a quick discussion of potential approaches and those who prefer to know “why.” In addition to applying this approach to copyright issues that arise for research and teaching, the volume also discusses the options and obstacles that confront authors wishing to publish their work in new environment. Explanations and objective assessments of the different options available for disseminating scholarship are provided to assist authors and other creators in making their own decisions about the best choice for them.

Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication (PDF 2,541 KB)
Edited by Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Merinda Kaye Hensley Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication forges a new path that crosses boundaries between two vital areas of librarianship.  The book explores how librarians at a variety of institutions can engage students and faculty in discussing topics such as open access, copyright, fair use, publishing models, the social and economic aspects of scholarship and publishing through the lens of information literacy.  Readers will come away with new ideas for forging partnerships with others in their organizations in order to enrich both information literacy and scholarly communication programs, activities and services. The seventeen chapters in this volume represent the diversity and creativity in librarianship and aims to spark conversations about how to approach these topics using the case studies and interviews about programming, advocacy, outreach and instruction. In keeping with the scholarly communication principles discussed in this title, ACRL is also making available an Open Access (OA) Edition. This Edition is a variant edition in that it is lacking one of the chapters present in the original print and e-book full editions. 

The Kaleidoscopic Concern (PDF 2,023 KB)
This annotated bibliography on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship by Kaetrena D. Davis-Kendrick includes new areas of study such as gender issues and white privilege with regard to racial minority and ethnic librarians. It covers the concerns, goals and strategies surrounding the recruitment, retention, and advancement of librarians of color and contains over 80 years of the profession’s earliest training initiatives and current best practices. Also traced in this bibliography is the evolution of the specific idea of affirmative action to the more nebulous concept of diversity in libraries. Books and book chapters, dissertations and theses, articles, poster sessions, presentations, reports from professional library associations and consortia, and multimedia objects are annotated in here.