November 2019

TLDR:

• On Thursday, January 30 from 2:00-4:00pm, TRLN will host a screening and panel discussion of Change the Subject at Carolina Theatre. Register your interest in attending via this form. We hope to see you there!
• TRLN Employee Orientation will be held Thursday, January 16 from 9:00-11:00am at the NC Biotechnology Center. All new staff are encouraged to attend as well as any staff who would like to learn more about current and upcoming activities for TRLN. It's a great time to get involved! More information about the orientation and registration coming in mid-December.
• From November 4 to November 6, Lisa Croucher, TRLN Executive Director, participated in various meetings related to the Charleston Conference. Read Lisa's updates here.
• Since the release of TRLN Discovery, we’ve been hard at work planning for how to maintain and build upon our work in a sustainable way. Recent updates made to TRLN Discovery include configuration changes to the shared Solr index to improve stability and performance and implementation of alarms and recovery methods to better monitor Solr.
• TRLN has been busy exploring diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities we could do as a consortium. To track ideas, plans, and resources we receive, we’ve created a Trello board that anyone can access. We will update this board as new ideas are shared and planned for the coming years.
• A Steering Committee is being charged to develop a vision statement and begin planning the provosts' scholarly communication forum proposed in the Sustainable Scholarship report. The Steering Committee will have its first meeting December 16 at the Frontier.
• DEI FYI: The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) shared their first-ever collaborative online exhibit, “Enslaved People in the Southeast.” The complete press announcement is available at www.aserl.org/news.  The direct link to the online exhibit is https://bit.ly/2JETOLF.

Change the Subject Screening & Panel Discussion

Charleston Conference Recap

Lisa Croucher, TRLN Executive Director, traveled to Charleston, SC, November 4 to November 6, to participate in various meetings associated with the Charleston Conference. The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) meeting included a presentation by James Wiser, Library Consortium Director, Community College League of California, on the accessibility lawsuit ongoing in the Los Angeles Community College System. A federal court recently ruled in favor of the National Federation of the Blind due in part to accessibility issues with the library. Mention of the case and ruling were repeated in a few subsequent meetings and conversations serving as a wake-up call about the importance of ensuring accessibility of library resources. There was general belief that this was the first of many such suits coming down the pike and that all of our institutions should be vigilant and prepared.

GOBI hosted its annual gathering of libraries, consortia, and publishers to focus on the future of print books in academic libraries. The session on Textbook Affordability, Open Access, and the Institutional Mission included a presentation by Dean Smith, director of Duke University Press. DeGruyter hosted a meeting led by Michael Zeoli, formerly of EBSCO and now with DeGruyter, that focused on similar topics, using two publications as fodder for conversation: Cost of Publishing Monographs (2016: https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/the-costs-of-publishing-monographs/) and Library Acquisition Patterns (2019: https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/2019-report-library-acquisition-patterns/). The meeting included an exercise to help participants view the publishing ecosystem from each other’s perspective.

TRLN Discovery Working Group Updates

Since the release of TRLN Discovery, we’ve been hard at work planning for how to maintain and build upon our work in a sustainable way. Currently, TRLN Discovery team members meet monthly to discuss issues in the backlog - prioritizing, refining, and moving them into sprints. In addition to remote monthly product owners and developer meetings, we hold an in-person quarterly meeting with all team members to discuss longer term priorities, big ideas, and process changes.

We’ve also recently formed a TRLN Discovery Metadata Team to inform development related to metadata. This team will be co-led by Jacob Shelby, Interim Lead Librarian for Metadata Technologies and Kelly Farrell, TRLN’s Program Officer. This team will have an initial kickoff meeting on December 13th.

Recent updates made to TRLN Discovery:

• Configuration changes to the shared Solr index to improve stability and performance

• Implementation of alarms and recovery methods to better monitor Solr

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Trello Board 

TRLN has been busy exploring diversity, equity, and inclusion events, programs, resources, training, and more activities we could do as a consortium. One example of upcoming programming is the screening and panel for Change the Subject – registration open now!

To track all the ideas, plans, and resources we receive, we’ve created a Trello board that anyone can access. On this board you will find a card for each idea and by selecting a card, you can get more information. Many ideas have been shifted into quarters throughout 2020 and we will keep updating this board as new ideas are shared and planned for the coming years.

TRLN staff are reaching out to all TRLN groups over this quarter and next to garner more ideas and feedback for DEI work we can undertake together. The Change the Subject screening is one result of this outreach.

We want to structurally build DEI into all the work TRLN does. This will take time and lots of work, but we think documenting our current and future activities is a step in making positive change. If you have any ideas or feedback to share about what TRLN can do to weave DEI throughout our work, please don’t hesitate to reach out to info@trln.org!

Provosts' Forum Planning Update 

A Steering Committee is being charged to develop a vision statement and begin planning a provosts' scholarly communication forum. This provosts' forum is proposed in the Sustainable Scholarship report, which asserts: "We believe that the economics of publishing, libraries, the research lifecycle, and the promotion and tenure process are inextricably linked and that a broad conversation is crucial for any significant change. TRLN can support efforts to further this conversation by providing infrastructure for events, conferences, or discussion that bring together provosts, faculty, and representatives from learned societies, publishers, and funding agencies. Specifically, we propose inviting the National Academies to participate in a provosts’ forum on scholarly communication. Events and work of this nature are becoming more prevalent and TRLN hosting would not only present the opportunity to stimulate scholarly synergy across institutions, but would also help to establish the Triangle as a nucleus of thought and action in effecting change in this area." 

An initial group of scholarly communication experts from our libraries is meeting December 16 at the Frontier. Soon after, 1-2 faculty members from each institution will be invited to join the steering committee. 

Upcoming Meetings & Events