Flipping the Model: A Values-Based Consortial Approach to Journal Negotiations

When negotiating journal pricing, the disadvantages libraries face are well documented. In addition to financially incompatible acquisition models that are out of sync with both library budgets and any predicted growth, libraries are also presented with rising inflationary costs, content added to an already overloaded system, and vendor consolidation. Pricing issues are further exacerbated by traditional negotiations, where libraries begin negotiations based on the offers made by publishers and vendors. These offers too often are predicated on historical spend and coupled with list prices that come with few explanations for their sums. Big package deals, that arguably expand access to resources and may lower costs on an article basis, have also increased overall costs and pushed out diverse resources. In attempting to move away from such deals institutions are faced with similar pricing for dramatically reduced access. The difficulties in navigating our way to a sustainable model become clear when the loss of researcher access is coupled with the increased staffing needed to manage individual subscriptions. New, and potentially viable pathways are beginning to emerge, including open access initiatives and the application of new models, such as read/publish. Although these pathways are not yet fully formed, they are promising developments that attempt to more holistically account for the contributions of the academy, the public good, and the costs of publishing. This presentation detailed the efforts of a task force within VIVA (Virginia’s academic library consortium) to create a bridge-solution between the current acquisition model and the future vision of its members. It creates a space to rethink what these deals could be and relies on consortial criteria to determine the value of content. The approach remains conscious of the real long-term institutional trust and communication risks to such endeavors, and is built on concerted, collective action

Speed Weed: How We Weeded More Than 70,000 Items in Three Months

Texas A&M University‐Commerce was founded in 1889 as East Texas Normal College, and since that time has gone through five name changes. Each name change brought about a change in focus for the university. Since the university’s founding, an intensive weeding of the James G. Gee Library print monographs collection has never been undertaken. A January 2011 age of collection report from the ILS showed that the greatest growth in the collection took place in the years between 1970 and 1990. Many of the monographs contained obsolete information and/or supported programs and courses that are no longer offered by the university. While librarians were in the midst of completing a literature review of best practices for weeding and constructing weeding policies and procedures, a major event changed the entire direction of the library’s weeding goals. The Director of Libraries received word that a United States senator was considering donating his congressional papers to the library, and an entire floor of the library must be cleared to receive the documents. This paper outlines how the library weeded more than 70,000 items between June 1, 2011 and August 31, 2011

Confinement Effects for Lithium Borohydride : Comparing Silica and Carbon Scaffolds

LiBH4 is a promising material for hydrogen storage and as a solid-state electrolyte for Li ion batteries. Confining LiBH4 in porous scaffolds improves its hydrogen desorption kinetics, reversibility, and Li+ conductivity, but little is known about the influence of the chemical nature of the scaffold. Here, quasielastic neutron scattering and calorimetric measurements were used to study support effects for LiBH4 confined in nanoporous silica and carbon scaffolds. Pore radii were varied from 8 Å to 20 nm, with increasing confinement effects observed with decreasing pore size. For similar pore sizes, the confinement effects were more pronounced for silica than for carbon scaffolds. The shift in the solid–solid phase transition temperature is much larger in silica than in carbon scaffolds with similar pore sizes. A LiBH4 layer near the pore walls shows profoundly different phase behavior than crystalline LiBH4. This layer thickness was 1.94 ± 0.13 nm for the silica and 1.41 ± 0.16 nm for the carbon scaffolds...