“Fundamentals”: Primary Source Collections, Content, and Data for Research

This year, CRL’s annual council meeting will be a two-day, in-person event, held in Chicago during the third week in April. CRL welcomes library directors, associate university librarians, and collection development officers to attend its main annual governance event.

Meeting locations are Loyola University’s Lake Shore campus (day 1) and the historic Newberry Library in the city’s Gold Coast (day 2). Transportation will be provided between the hotel and the event space.

Thursday’s business meeting will be webcast to directors of CRL libraries. Some of the collections forum events will be recorded and available after the conference. (All times indicated are Central Time.)

Thursday, April 19

The day’s events will take place at the new Information Commons on Loyola University Chicago’s Lake Shore Campus. (Tours of the Information Commons by Loyola staff will be available throughout the day.)

Welcome: Robert Seal, Dean of University Libraries, Loyola University Chicago

Business Meeting    View All Presentations
10:00 a.m.–12:00 noon
Continental breakfast at 9:30 a.m.

During the CRL Business Meeting, the main annual CRL governance event, designated representatives of CRL libraries will discuss new and ongoing CRL initiatives, elect new Board members, and vote on the annual budget for the coming fiscal year:

• Chair’s Report: Sarah Michalak, Associate Provost for Libraries and University Librarian, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill View Recording
• Secretary’s Report: Leslie Weir, University Librarian, University of Ottawa
• President’s Report: Bernard Reilly, President, Center for Research Libraries View Recording
• Treasurer’s Report and Proposed Budget for FY2013: Deborah Carver, Dean of Libraries, University of Oregon
• Nomination and Election of Board of Directors: Sarah Michalak, Associate Provost for Libraries and University Librarian, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• CRL Primary Source Awards: Richard Fyffe, Rosenthal Librarian of the College, Grinnell College

Business meeting documents:

• FY 2011 Annual Report
• Nominating Committee Report
• FY 2013 Budget Proposal Narrative
• Council Minutes 2011

Box Lunch for Business Meeting Attendees
12:00 noon–1:30 p.m.

Global Resources Collections Forum, Part I
New Horizons in Primary Source Research
2:00–5:00 p.m.

Welcome: Bernard Reilly, President, CRL

Moderator: Charles Henry, President, Council on Library and Information Resources, and member, CRL Board of Directors.

Libraries have long supported original research in the humanities and social sciences by making physical collections and databases available to scholars. Today, research practices are changing radically. With more news, archives, government information, and other primary materials available in digital form, computer-assisted mining and analysis of large bodies of text and immense corpora of historical data are becoming commonplace. These changes will have an impact on the types of collections libraries build and the types of services and databases they provide for researchers.

This session will showcase new and innovative uses of primary evidence, and will explore the implications of these new practices for research libraries. Featured uses will include text-mining in newspaper back files; the Brazilian government’s digitization of court transcripts to expose the history of military abuses and torture in the 1960s and 70s; and analysis of the Google Books corpus. Presentations will include:

• Analysis and Visualization Using Large Bodies of Electronic Text: What Chicago Humanities Faculty Are Up To View Recording
  Peter Leonard, Associate Director for Research Computing, Division of the Humanities, and Elisabeth Long, Associate University Librarian for Digital Services, University of Chicago

• Overview of New Work with Documentary Sources by History, Media, and Public Affairs Scholars at George Mason University
  John G. Zenelis, University Librarian and Associate Vice President for Information Technology

• The Short History and Long Future of Human Rights Documentation: A Tale of Three Archives View Recording
  Pamela Graham, Director, Area Studies and Director, Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research, Columbia University Libraries

• Old News, New Research: Observations from the Field View Recording
  Debora Cheney, Larry and Ellen Foster Communications Librarian and Head, News and Microforms, Penn State University Library

 

Commentators will include:

• Charles Henry, President, Council on Library and Information Resources
• David Magier, Associate University Librarian for Collection Development, Princeton University Library
• Beverly Lynch, Professor of Information Studies, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

Members’ Reception
Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington Street
Millennium Park Room, 5th Floor
5:30–8:00 p.m.

Friday, April 20

The day’s events will take place at the historic Newberry Library in Chicago's Gold Coast (except for the tour of CRL).

Global Resources Collections Forum, Part II
Shaping CRL’s Strategic Agenda: Primary Sources and Research Collections
9:00 a.m.–12:00 noon
Continental breakfast at 8:30 a.m.
Welcome: David Spadafora, President, Newberry Library

Against the backdrop of new trends in primary source research, CRL is focusing its resources on three major fields of knowledge, wherein we believe we can together bring about positive change: news; legal and government information; and the history and economics of agriculture. Attendees at this session will examine and weigh in on new CRL collection development initiatives and archiving strategiesincluding:

• News View Presentation
  The traditional ways libraries have collected and preserved news no longer work in a world of digital distribution (see CRL’s report). CRL has put in place elements of a new collaborative framework for news digitization, licensing, and print management. CRL now negotiates terms for member acquisition of historical news databases like ProQuest’s The Times of India and is digitizing other historical foreign newspapers in partnership with Readex.
  
  Ensuring long-term access to current news for researchers, however, is more problematic. In this session CRL will propose a new North American strategy that involves working with key aggregators and publishers to provide robust access to news for academic and independent researchers.
   
• Law and Government Information View Presentation
  CRL’s partnership with the Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC) is now in its second year. This session will appraise the benefits of this partnership, including the value of access to the LLMC-Digital database. A comparative analysis of LLMC-Digital against comparable online legal collections will be available shortly.
  
  CRL will outline proposed next steps in this partnership. Discussion will cover models for equitable cost sharing for the LLMC collaboration beginning in FY 2013, and priorities for digitization and licensing of electronic resources in the field.
   
• Agriculture View Presentation
  Some of the most voluminous legacy collections in research libraries are agricultural serials, including historical journals and government publications. Because of their bulk and (often) fragility, these collections are expensive to maintain. At the same time, in an era of growing concern about water and food supply, the data contained in these materials has increased in value. As our 2010 CRL-GWLA Global Resources Forum on Water showed, a new growth in demand for water-related information is coinciding with the growing inaccessibility of publications on water and agriculture.
  
  With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services CRL is establishing a Global Resources program in Agriculture. CRL has begun to work with the Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) and the U.S. Agricultural Information Network (USAIN) to plan for the long-term archiving of agricultural serials, centering upon works identified by participants in these two efforts as the critical literature of the history and economics of agriculture. Discussions are afoot to plan and scope the systematic archiving of print materials in tandem with microfilming and digitization activities. CRL will outline its proposed strategy for action in this realm and the costs and resources involved.

These discussions will help shape CRL's agenda for the next two years and beyond.

Global Resources Collections Forum, Part III
Strategic Archiving and Management of Print and Digital Collections in North America: Where Are We? View Recording
1:30–3:00 p.m.

The ongoing transition from print-based to digital collections has generated innovative new cooperative print archiving programs like WEST and ASERL’s Cooperative Journal Retention Program. It has also spawned a number of services to preserve digital content, like Portico, CLOCKSS, and HathiTrust. The session will provide a holistic look at these programs together, and invite attendees’ ideas on possible new synergies.Session presenters include:

• Lizanne Payne, Consultant to CRL on Print Archiving. An update and discussion on the major U.S. and Canadian print archiving initiatives. Status report on the PAPR database and other CRL data and analysis support for archive decisions and planning.
• Bernie Reilly, President, CRL. New developments at Portico, CLOCKSS, HathiTrust, Scholars Portal, and other digital repositories and services.

Tour of the Center for Research Libraries
4:00–5:00 p.m.

 

ACCOMMODATIONS

The CRL shuttle bus will provide transportation to and from the DoubleTree Chicago Magnificent Mile Hotel (www.doubletreemagmile.com; 312-787-6100) and Loyola (on Thursday) and the Newberry (on Friday).