Librarianship, as a profession, has historically stood on the front line of issues challenging freedom of speech. This holds true today with many stories detailing book challenges and attempts to ban titles across the nation. Libraries and librarians are, once again, fully immersed in the culture conflict that is evolving in our country. Admittedly, I am grateful to be an academic librarian where this issue is less pronounced. Still, we are not immune, and our professional obligation requires us to seek answers that preserve freedom while valuing the opinions of others in the most civil manner possible.
On September 22nd from 11am to 2pm, the Watson Library, in partnership with the Wilmington Public Library, will be hosting two discussion sessions on book banning and appropriate responses when titles are challenged at your local library. The goal of these two sessions will be to provide our attendees with ideas about how they can be involved in the process of protecting intellectual freedom by understanding how libraries are administered and the foundational tenets of librarianship in general. This event is open to the public, and we highly encourage Wilmington College Students and Faculty to attend, light refreshments will be provided.
In case you have not heard, in late August, the Biden Administration announced some very substantial changes to public access publishing of government funded research. Though it is still very unclear how these changes will be implemented, it is certain to change many aspects of research and scholarship, and not just for libraries.
The recently released White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research”, outlines updated guidance requiring all federally funded research be made freely available upon its publication, to be implemented no later than the start of 2026. However, there are many questions that have not yet been addressed.
OhioLINK has invited Michael Clarke, Managing Partner at Clarke & Esposito, to brief OhioLINK library staff, researchers, faculty, and administrators on the OSTP memo. He will discuss what it means for publishers and researchers, and how it may affect academic library content procurement. If you would like to learn more, please plan to attend this webinar on Thursday, September 29, 2022 at 2PM (registration link below).
The Watson Library is happy to announce two new features on our new website. Each of these pages are very early in development, but they will hopefully become more and more useful to our community over time. The first is our new Video Tutorial Library page. This page currently hosts just one instructional video, but over the coming months it will become a full repository of video content that will cover how to use many of the tools and databases found on our website. Eventually, we hope to be able to make videos on demand for departments, showing how to use discipline specific resources as well.
The second feature release this month is our new Graduate Student Resources page. This page focuses on both the prospective graduate student who is planning to continue their education and, also, the current Wilmington College graduate student. Each of these new webpages will see more and more content added over the coming weeks, so please check them often.
The start of each school year can be a very confusing and overwhelming time. We see it here in the library, as students come to us looking for textbooks to get a jump on their studies. However, our library does not offer any sort of “textbook loaning” program, and other OhioLink libraries who do circulate textbooks, treat those books as any other item that gets loaned out. Therefore, if the book is not returned by its due date, fines and fees will be applied.
However, if a faculty member wishes to place a textbook on reserve here in the library, we can definitely do that, and we even have a page on our website with information on how we can help. We will be developing a web form and a streamlined process later this year to get faculty reserves in the library quicker, and we will also be available to host eReserves in the future as well. Aside from textbooks, if a faculty member is interested in pursuing Open Educational Resources (OER) to help curb textbook costs, we are here for you on that too, just ask.
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