For Immediate Release
Photographs Available

Contact:
Didi Yunginger
610-559-9550 x239
Didiy@wolper.com

Librarians Attend Free Workshop on Fundraising in an Era of Cuts

Easton, PA – June 22, 2011 – Public and school librarians from Northeast Pennsylvania attended a free workshop that was sponsored by Wolper Subscription Services, Inc. to create an environment for local librarians to obtain resources necessary to seek funding through grants to supplement their continuously diminishing budgets. Lisa Curran, Executive Director of The Century Foundation, and Janet Roth, Executive Director of The Harry C. Trexler Trust, provided guidance on what funders look for in grant proposals. Valerie Ryder, Director of Information Strategy at Wolper Subscription Services, highlighted the changing needs of libraries from her perspective as a seasoned librarian to initiate ideas for grant-funded projects to provide new and expanded services and technologies that address emerging needs of the libraries’ communities.

The workshop was held at the United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley on June 22nd, 2011 and was attended by a diverse group of school and public librarians from the region.

Susan Wolper, President and CEO of Wolper Subscription Services, was reading the news regarding the Easton Public Library and pending budget cuts from the local school district, which were threatening to close the library doors. “I started brainstorming ways to use my business to increase support for public libraries in my community,” Wolper said, “and the ‘teach a person to fish’ parable was the first thing that came to mind. I wanted to find a way to teach librarians how they can seek outside funding.” Wolper Subscription Services, which provides subscription management services to corporate, medical, public and academic libraries nationwide, reached out to local funders and to the United Way to arrange the workshop.

The workshop was much appreciated by attendees. “Thankfully my budgets have not been cut yet but I would like to increase my resources now and I would like to be ready if or when my budget does take a hit,” said a school librarian from the Lehigh Valley. Recent cuts in state and school district budgets have adversely affected programs, and closed doors at satellite branch locations, causing librarians to search for external funding to maintain and increase their programmatic offerings

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Wolper Subscription Services is a one-stop information management resource and the only 100% woman-owned business in the field. For 35 years, the company has been providing service and savings to corporate, academic, medical, government, public and consortia customers. Wolper’s High Tech, High Touch® approach delivers the perfect combination of next-generation technology and time-proven, personalized service. Learn more at www.wolper.com.

Dallas, TX — Robert Watkins, Chief Operations Officer for Amigos Library Services, is retiring from Amigos effective June 30, 2011. Watkins informed Amigos of his decision earlier this year, ending a 24-year career that saw him rise steadily through the ranks of the organization and hold numerous positions of increasing responsibility.

Watkins cited family considerations among the factors prompting his decision. “I’m originally from Austin (TX) and my family lives there,” Watkins noted. “My mom is not in the best of health, and I’ve had to make several trips there in recent months to help care for her. My goal has long been to get back to Austin someday, and this just seemed like the right time.”

Watkins joined Amigos in 1987, starting and managing the onetime Bibliographic Resource Center, where he oversaw contract retrospective conversion, cataloging, and union listing. He also managed the Amigos Computer Services Department, which conducted database prep services for libraries. These services ended as Amigos Members began to automate their libraries and no longer needed this type of assistance. Amigos was one of the first organizations in the country to conduct database prep services for libraries installing online catalogs.

He later moved into managing other service units for Amigos, including BioOne, Member Discount Services, and marketing and sales for the OCLC/Amigos Collection Analysis Systems. For the last several years, he has served as the Associate Executive Director of Amigos (recently changed to Chief Operations Officer). In this role he administered all Amigos member service programs.

As to his future plans, Watkins said he is unsure. “I don’t know yet what I’ll do. Once I get to Austin and get settled I’ll give it some thought. In the meantime, I’ll just be an Austin hippie.”

About Amigos Library Services
For more than 35 years, Amigos Library Services has helped its members obtain affordable services and share library resources and knowledge. With over 600 members, Amigos is one of the largest consortia of libraries and cultural heritage institutions in the United States. Through membership in Amigos, libraries collectively gain access to the latest innovations and services in the library community; pursue opportunities for continuing professional education; leverage their buying power; and preserve the rich cultural heritage of their communities. This collaboration strengthens each member’s ability to serve and lead its community in the creative and effective use of information resources. ###

Media Contact:
Terri Maguire Mertz
Amigos Library Services
972-340-2855
mertz@amigos.org
www.amigos.org

June 22, 2011

Introducing PressForward
http://pressforward.org/

For some time here at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media we have been thinking about the state of scholarly publishing, and its increasing disconnect with how we have come to communicate online. Among our concerns:

• A variety of scholarly work is flourishing online, ranging from long-form writing on blogs, to “gray literature” such as conference papers, to well-curated corpora or data sets, to entirely novel formats enabled by the web

• This scholarship is decentralized, thriving on personal and institutional sites, as well as the open web, but could use some way to receive attention from scholarly communities so works can receive credit and influence others

• The existing scholarly publishing infrastructure has been slow-moving in accounting for this growing and multifaceted realm of online scholarship

• Too much academic publishing remains inert—publication-as-broadcast rather than taking advantage of the web’s peer-to-peer interactivity

• Too much scholarship remains gated when it could be open

Legacy formats like the journal of course have considerable merit, and they are rightly valued: they act as critical, if sometimes imperfect, arbiters of the good and important. At the same time, the web has found ways to filter the abundance of online work, ranging from the tech world (Techmeme) to long-form posts (The Browser), which act as screening agents for those interested in an area of thought or practice.

What if we could combine the best of the scholarly review process with the best of open-web filters? What if we had a scholarly communication system that was digital first?

Today we’re announcing a new initiative to do just that: PressForward, generously supported by a $862,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation‘s Digital Information Technology program.

PressForward will bring together the best scholarship from across the web, producing vital, open publications scholarly communities can gather around. PressForward will:

Develop effective methods for collecting, screening, and drawing attention to the best online scholarship, including scholarly blogs, digital projects, and other web genres that don’t fit into traditional articles or books, as well as conference papers, white papers, and reports

Encourage the proliferation of open access scholarship through active new forms of publication, concentrating the attention of scholarly communities around high-quality, digital-first scholarship

Create a new platform that will make it simple for any organization or community of scholars to launch similar publications and give guidance to institutions, scholarly societies, and academic publishers who wish to supplement their current journals with online outlets

We hope you’ll join us making this new form of scholarly communication a reality. You may be a researcher in a field that is underserved by traditional outlets, because it is new, interdisciplinary, or involves non-textual media. Perhaps you have a digital project that can only be “published” if you describe it in an article. You may be an editor of a journal who would like to supplement standard articles with digital content from across the web, or a scholarly society that wants to find and feature online work. As PressForward evolves, we hope to serve all of these constituencies, as well as a broad audience currently locked out of gated scholarship.

Learn more about PressForward on our new site, or by sending us an email. You can also follow us on Twitter or via RSS.

New Series Added to Slavery and Anti-Slavery, The Making of the Modern World and The Making of Modern Law

Farmington Hills, Mich., June 22, 2011 — Gale, part of Cengage Learning and a leading publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools and businesses, today announced new series for three Gale Digital Collections – Slavery and Anti-Slavery, The Making of the Modern World and The Making of Modern Law.

“We are excited to publish additional installments of these important collections,” said Jim Draper, vice president and publisher, Gale. “With these new releases, Gale continues to fulfill its mission to create essential resources for scholars and students in fields of high interest.”

Draper added: “Most of the materials in these new installments have never been digitized before or even published in microfilm, making them fresh destinations for performing in-depth research in a variety of disciplines. Now, with substantial new content being added to the collections, students and researchers have the opportunity to create important new scholarship in many areas of study.”

The new series, targeted to academic, special and public libraries, are currently available for purchase and trial and include:

• Slavery and Anti-Slavery, Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World – Complementing Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition, which explored the varying debates that surrounded the practice, experience and abolition of slavery in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Part II focuses on the Atlantic Slave Trade and its aftermath through a corpus of historical printed documents and manuscript collections. It documents the slave trade as a key global phenomenon with ramifications for the study of commerce, philosophical and moral issues, literature, empire, law, government and international relations. Sourced from prestigious institutions worldwide, Slavery and Anti-Slavery is considered to be the most important undertaking related to the study of slavery, as nothing comparable currently exists. Future series include Part III: Institution of Slavery and Part IV: Age of Emancipation.
• The Making of the Modern World, Part II: 1851-1914 – Following on the release of Part I: The Goldsmiths’-Kress Collection, 1450-1850, which focused on the expansion of world trade, the Industrial Revolution and the development of modern capitalism, Part II takes the series into the early 20th century. Comprised mainly of monographs, reports, correspondence, speeches, and surveys, this collection includes international coverage of social, economic, and business history, as well as political science, technology, industrialization and the birth of the modern corporation. Cross-searchable with Part I of the series, these collections combined provide access to 450 years of world history.
• The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources II, 1763-1970 – Adding over 1.6 million pages of content sourced from the Harvard Law School Library, Yale Law Library and the Law Library of Congress, this archive supports far-reaching research in legal and social history. Scholars interested in tracing major legal topics across states and territories will find it valuable. It is comprised of United States codes, constitutional conventions and compilations, and municipal codes, and is cross-searchable with Primary Sources, Part I. Volumes in this collection are, for the most part, not digitally available elsewhere, making the collection particularly unique. The four previous components in the series include: Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926; Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978; Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926; and Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 1620-1926.

For more information on any of these Gale Digital Collections, please visit http://gdc.gale.com. For questions or to request a free trial, please contact Kristina Massari at kristina.massari@cengage.com.

About Cengage Learning and Gale
Cengage Learning is a leading provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions for the academic, professional and library markets worldwide. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, serves the world's information and education needs through its vast and dynamic content pools, which are used by students and consumers in their libraries, schools and on the Internet. It is best known for the accuracy, breadth and convenience of its data, addressing all types of information needs – from homework help to health questions to business profiles – in a variety of formats. For more information, visit www.cengage.com or www.gale.cengage.com.

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Press Release: Lyrasis [June 22, 2011]
LYRASIS Technology Services announces Discovery and Delivery Software expansionCopyright (c) 2011 Lyrasis

Summary LYRASIS Technology Services added the LYRASIS Discovery Layer Service to its array of services. The DLS, a hosted solution, provides libraries with a single search box for patrons to access a wide range of print and electronic information resources. Leveraging the latest advances in discovery technology from Index Data, the LYRASIS DLS will retrieve, de-dupe and rank results from a variety of resources, offering member libraries one-stop access to online content from journals and database providers in a responsive and facet-enabled interface. To further enhance the Discovery Layer Service, LYRASIS is working with Relais International, who provides sophisticated systems and software to automate and streamline operations in ILL and Document Delivery services.

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Atlanta, GA, — June 22, 2011 — LYRASIS Technology Services (LTS) is proud to add the LYRASIS Discovery Layer Service (DLS) to its array of services. The DLS, a hosted solution, provides libraries with a single search box for patrons to access a wide range of print and electronic information resources.

Leveraging the latest advances in discovery technology from Index Data, the LYRASIS DLS will retrieve, de-dupe and rank results from a variety of resources, offering member libraries one-stop access to online content from journals and database providers in a responsive and facet-enabled interface. With the option of seamless integration with the Relais International delivery and material-handling back-end, this product is a single point of access to all of the library's information offerings, priced to allow budget-constrained libraries to take better advantage of their existing resources and subscriptions.

LYRASIS has selected Index Data as the technology provider for the DLS because the company is known for building powerful technologies in support of information retrieval, used behind the scenes by some of the most important organizations in the industry. Index Data's continuing objective to provide easy access to information, no matter where or how it is made available, aligns well with the LYRASIS mission of collaboration, creative solutions and leadership for libraries.

To further enhance the Discovery Layer Service, LYRASIS is working with Relais International, who provides sophisticated systems and software to automate and streamline operations in ILL and Document Delivery services. LYRASIS is offering these related services in the continued effort to provide member libraries with options that help them expand information access for their constituencies while controlling costs in the face of economic and operational challenges.

The LYRASIS Discovery Layer Service, offered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription, can be configured for consortia and single-site libraries. With a "tiered configuration" multiple libraries or library branches can set up search targets for subscriptions held in common, while allowing each library or branch to add and customize search targets to meet the needs of their patrons. Consortia can also take advantage of the automated request-handling system from Relais International that allows patrons to view real-time status displays of copies in consortia members' catalogs and make requests for those items.

The LYRASIS family of SaaS discovery and delivery services, all designed with the ease of installation and operation in mind, meet a variety of library needs:

LYRASIS Discover Layer Service:

•The LYRASIS Discovery Layer for Single-Site Libraries provides a single discovery interface to optimize the user's ability to discover material in the library's catalog and selected electronic resources, both subscription and freely available.
•The LYRASIS Discovery Layer for Multiple-Site Libraries is for groups of libraries or library consortia where there are multiple catalogs and/or layers of subscription and free databases to be managed amongst a group for optimization of discovery. Library groups can choose to add the real-time item status display and patron-initiated requesting feature from Relais International.
Relais International DLS-Related Services:

•RELAIS ILL converts libraries' ILL operations into a more streamlined, efficient service by automating the routine tasks, supporting unmediated services and fully integrating ILL with delivery of documents to the requester.
•Relais Express converts paper documents to electronic format, or uses existing electronic documents, and delivers them to users or to other libraries.
•The Relais Scanning Workstation is a completely integrated and ergonomically efficient work environment for scanning superior quality documents with Relais ILL and Relais Express.
•Relais D2D seamlessly integrates the discovery experience with request management, circulation interoperability and delivery, irrespective of the multiple ILS used by the participating libraries within the consortium. D2D optimizes the user's ability to discover items of interest in library catalogs and get immediate access to, or request delivery of, the material with minimal or no intervention by staff.
"Single search box discovery tools have become important ways for patrons to find licensed and open access content curated by libraries. LYRASIS is excited to offer these options that will expand the ability of a greater number of library members to provide the benefits of these technologies to their users," stated Peter Murray, Assistant Director of Technology Services Development, LYRASIS Technology Services.

About LYRASIS
Created in April 2009 by the merger of PALINET and SOLINET and joined shortly thereafter by NELINET, LYRASIS is the nation's largest regional membership organization serving libraries and information professionals — providing opportunities for networking and collaboration, offering innovative solutions and delivering significant cost savings through group purchasing for products and services. For more information, please visit www.lyrasis.org.

About Index Data
Index Data is a software development and consulting enterprise headquartered in Copenhagen and the United States, with offices in several countries. They are experts in networked information retrieval and management based on open standards, and have a seventeen-year history of releasing advanced software components as open source. Their mission is to use their skills and creativity to build bridges between people, technologies and organizations, and to empower information providers to deliver better, more integrated services. For more information, please visit www.indexdata.com.

About Relais International
Relais International Inc is based in Ottawa, Canada and has been selling systems to support interlibrary loan and document delivery services since 1996. Relais International (www.relais-intl.com) assists libraries in implementing intelligent and automated methods to support the delivery of documents. Relais products range from scanning stations through to fully integrated request management, scanning and delivery software suitable for a single library through to a consortium.

Publication Year: 2011
Type of Material: Press Release
Issue: June 22, 2011
Publisher: Lyrasis
Company: Lyrasis

Permalink: http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displaytext.pl?RC=15831
Record Number: 15831
Last Update: 2011-06-22 13:15:23
Date Created: 2011-06-22 13:13:34