"The current system of scholarly publishing has become too costly for the academic community to sustain."

The above statement is not an alarmist reaction from overwhelmed and underfunded librarians. It is the final judgment of a concerned group of university provosts, presidents, library directors, and representatives from national science associations, who met last spring under the auspices of the Association of American Universities (of which Brandeis is a member) and the Association of Research Libraries.

The group’s report, "Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing" (http://www.arl.org/scomm/tempe.html), is a call-to-arms aimed at scholars, who must be involved in implementing the changes necessary to sustain the future of scholarly publishing. Science journal prices have seen an annual rise of about 10-12%. With such increases in subscription prices - along with additional demands for online access to journals, which costs yet more money - the budget squeeze is on at university libraries around the country. Brandeis is not immune.

Over the last 15 years, ARL libraries have increased the amount spent on serials by an incredible 170%. Yet these same libraries purchased 6% fewer titles. The true impact of this trend is even greater, because the number of journals continues to increase, so that the proportion of published research purchased by libraries has declined by more than that 6%. In addition, monograph purchases have decreased 26%, partly in order to free up funds for the increasingly expensive journals.

If journal prices continue to rise at a rate of 9% (which has been the minimum rise in the sciences for years) and library budgets increase by 7.9% (a high figure for most colleges and universities, if not for ours), journal collections will decline by 24% by the year 2012 (Scholars Under Siege: http://www.createchange.org/librarians/issues/silent.html#WhereGoing).

More and more scientists, members of editorial boards, and other interested individuals are committing themselves to transforming scholarly publishing. The last three years have witnessed successful cooperative efforts among authors, professional society publishers, and libraries, engaged in publishing high-quality, low-cost scientific journals. Many of these journals are available via the Brandeis University Libraries' homepage, like the journals supported by SPARC (Evolutionary Ecology Research, Organic Letters, PhysChemComm, Geometry and Topology, to name a few.) and the numerous life and social sciences journals from HighWire Press.

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is a direct challenge to the for-profit publishers of Science, Technology, and Medical journals, who have gained more and more market share over the last 50 years (and particularly over the last 20). It is a worldwide alliance of around 180 research institutions and libraries. With the combined purchasing power of the alliance’s members and its support of new electronic journals created specifically to compete with high-priced titles, SPARC is providing a much needed alternative to big business as usual (more information at http://www.arl.org/sparc/home/).

HighWire Press uses a similar strategy of pooling the resources of universities and libraries, but it works with existing journals from small societies and publishers, who would otherwise be unable to provide the technology, skills, and finances necessary for electronic publishing on their own. HighWire, an imprint of the Stanford University Libraries, has for some time been the second largest electronic repository of full-text articles in the world (see http://www.highwire.org/).

While there can be no question that these organizations have contributed significantly to the dissemination of research, the impact on commercial journal prices remains to be seen. There is some hopeful, documented evidence that such efforts have forced the hand of commercial publishers to respond to a more competitive market (see SPARC's Create Change web site: http://www.createchange.org/resources/stories.html). Nevertheless, the big boys are hardly sweating, as Elsevier's recent $4.1 billion acquisition of Harcourt/Academic attests.

We need to support efforts such as SPARC and HighWire if we are to maintain collections adequate to the needs of faculty and students. Faculty need to realize that editing and/or publishing in journals from the worst offenders of journal price gouging is damaging to their own libraries and institutions. Libraries need to carefully consider the implications of purchasing journal packages from publishers 1) whose prices are high and have demonstrated an historical trend of increasing beyond the ability of the library to pay; 2) who eliminate librarians' (and their constituents') power of discretion by offering all-or-nothing deals; and 3) who effectively forbid cancellations.

With cooperation from all parties involved, we can make a difference. Libraries are providing the infrastructure for alternative methods of publishing. Scientists and scholars can choose where to publish their research with an eye towards the fiscal reality of their libraries and get involved in new avenues of scholarly communication such as those described above (see the SPARC web page at http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI/ for how to get involved). Without the combined efforts of faculty and librarians, we are left with a publishing system that is "too costly for the academic community to sustain."  

A great old resource, one the Brandeis University Libraries has had for forty years, is looking and acting a little differently today.

The resource is Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The Brandeis University Libraries owns one of the approximately 230 known copies of the Folio, which was donated to Brandeis in 1961 by Allan Bluestein. Now this resource is available on the web, fully digitized.

The Brandeis University Libraries have collaborated with the Perseus Digital Library to offer the first free, publicly accessible copy of the First Folio. The Folio can be viewed and studied as never before. From the exceptionally clear images of the Folio’s pages, scholars can not only read the text, they can zoom in and examine in detail a specific line or word on the page.

In digitizing the Folio, professors of literature, history, or book history can now regularly use it in their classes. Brandeis students can finally use the First Folio for their studies, an opportunity we have never before been able to offer, due to the physical fragility of the book and its paper. Furthermore, Shakespeare scholars worldwide can study the Brandeis First Folio without leaving their office, at their own time and schedule.

The First Folio consists of 454 leaves (908 pages). Each page was scanned at a very high resolution with no digital manipulation in order to preserve the experience of seeing the real page, including the text bleeding through from the other side. The images are offered at three different resolutions to give scholars the ability to view the page image that best suits their needs, including a microscopic examination of the typeface. There is a table of contents, so that the user can go directly to a particular play. Thumbnails of the pages are also available for browsing.

Look for the First Folio at the Perseus Digital Library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu) under the "English Renaissance" section.  

The Brandeis University Libraries has recently added three new reference librarians to its staff.

Before coming to Brandeis, Joanne Adamowicz, the new Reference Librarian at the Science Library, was a Business Information Librarian at Baker Library, Harvard Business School. Prior to working at Harvard, she was employed for nearly 14 years as an Information Specialist at Arthur D. Little, Inc., supporting the research needs of the Telecommunications, Information Systems, and Management Consulting practices.

Jason Bernard is the new Reference Librarian/ Technology Coordinator for the Goldfarb Reference Department. Jason, a recent graduate of Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, has research experience in academic libraries (Babson College), in business libraries (including Duracell, Inc), and experience in Web content development (CEOexpress).

Leslie Homzie is now Reference Librarian/Coordinator of Outreach Instruction and Services. Most recently, she was a Senior Assistant Librarian in the Reference Department at the University of Delaware in Newark.  

A Major Southern History Collection

The Brandeis University Libraries has just completed its acquisition of the entire collection of the Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations From the Revolution Through the Civil War, a huge microform set consisting of over 1,500 roles of microfilm.

The collection offers researchers at Brandeis a comprehensive look at the workings of plantations and at southern life in general. Since record keeping was essential to the commercial operation of plantations, many planters kept detailed journals, crop books, overseers’ journals, and account books. Family members often kept personal diaries and corresponded extensively with friends and relatives. Jacqueline Jones, Professor of History, says that the records in the collection "are incredibly detailed, and deal with a wide variety of issues, including slave life and labor, white masters and mistresses, cultivation techniques, and plantation households in general."

The contents of the collection have been drawn from major repositories throughout the South, including the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library, and the Library of Congress.

The Brandeis University Libraries had been collecting various parts of the microfilm collection over many years. With the help of the Brandeis University National Women’s Committee’s Benefactor Fund for Choice Acquisitions, the library was able to purchase the remaining parts of the collection. Completing this collection is a major accomplishment for our library, especially for our size. The only other school in the New England area that owns this collection is Harvard.

--Anthony Vaver

Yes, the Library Has DVDs!

The Library is now actively acquiring DVDs (digital video discs) for the collection. All DVDs (no matter what the subject) are available at the Listening Desk in the Creative Arts Section on level 3 of Farber, where two playback stations are also located. So far, the Library has a small collection of operas and films on DVD, but we expect this collection to expand exponentially during the coming years as the medium gradually replaces video cassettes.

Faculty and students will soon discover the teaching and learning advantages of videorecordings on DVD (no rewind, tracking, etc., not to mention the useful supplemental material often included on the disc). DVD players are now available in several classrooms on campus, and Media Services can set up playback equipment in most classrooms not yet equipped—contact Matt Kaplan (64632) for further information.

To find our DVD holdings in LOUIS, enter DVD in the keyword box of the Advanced Search screen.

--Darwin Scott 

Left to right: Malcolm Cowley, Gay Wilson Allen, Milton Hindus, and Kenneth Burke, March 29, 1955

This photo was taken by Ralph Norman, Brandeis University Photographer, during a symposium held in Ford Hall in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Milton Hindus, professor of English at Brandeis University from 1948 to 1998, was the moderator of the symposium and had recently published Leaves of Grass: One Hundred Years After.

The Milton Hindus Papers are now available for research. His collection includes correspondence with Cowley, Burke, and Allen as well as many other literary figures of the second half of the 20th Century. It also contains research materials, teaching material, and drafts of his publications. You may access the finding aid online at: http://www.library.brandeis.edu/specialcollections/findingguides/archives/faculty/hindus.html.  

• Rich Remsberg. Riders for God. University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Riders for God takes us into a world generally inaccessible to outsiders, one situated at the crossroads of two seemingly incongruous realms: motorcycle gangs and Spirit-filled Christianity. Remsberg founded The Unchained Gang, an outreach ministry that goes into prisons and jails, biker rallies, and other places where people on the fringe are often ignored by other churches and the rest of society. Remsberg combines powerful photographic images with gang members’ first-person testimonies.

• Georgina Howell. Vogue Women. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000.

A glorious anthology of women’s portraits from Vogue, ranging from Twiggy to Mother Theresa, Greta Garbo to Bianca Jagger, divided into ten chapters ("Society Girls," "Muses," "Waifs," "Icons," etc.). "Distinguished or notorious, pretty or striking, and sometimes all four, the women selected by Vogue over almost a century have a double significance. Photographed by the greatest photographers as the essence of each decade, the ongoing gallery of their spectacular images reveals to us our own aspirations and the changing place of women."

• Eric H. Monkkonen. Murder in New York City. University of California Press, 2001.

The book dramatically expands what we know about urban homicide, and challenges some of the things we think we know. Monkhonen’s investigation covers two centuries of murder in one of America’s largest cities and combines newly assembled statistical evidence with many other documentary sources. With many vivid case studies for illustration, the author examines the crucial factors in killing through the years.

• Benjamin Miller. Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York, the Last Two Hundred Years. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000.

Miller uses the history of garbage in New York to look at how politicians, businessmen, health officials, and environmentalists have shaped public policy over the last two hundred years. The book begins with an account of the notorious barge filled with New York garbage that was turned away from a port in North Carolina in 1987 to languish out in the Atlantic for months while it sought a home.

• Eric Schlosser. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.

Over the last three decades, fast food has infiltrated every nook and cranny of American Society. Fast food has proven to be a revolutionary force in American life. This is a book about fast food, the values it embodies, and the world it has made. Schlosser states that fast food is one of America’s most prominent cultural exports and gives much insight into the nature of mass consumption.

• Mimi Sheraton. The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World. Broadway Books, 2000.

A passion for bialys, the crusty rolls with the toasted onion center, drew Sheraton to the Polish town of Bialystok to explore the history of this Jewish staple. Once there, she found a place of utter desolation, where turn-of-the-century massacres, followed by the Holocaust, had dramatically reduced the number of Jewish residents. She traveled to many lands to rescue the stories of the scattered Bialystokers. She tells of their once-vibrant culture, reviving the exiled memories of those who escaped to the corners of the earth with their recollections and their recipe.

• Randy D. McBee. Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and Leisure Among Working-Class Immigrants in the United States. New York University Press, 2000.

As older generations of immigrants to America’s cities attempted to preserve their traditions, values, and ethnic identities, the young sought out the cheap amusements and sexual freedom offered by the urban landscape. Free from their parents and their strict rules governing sexual conduct, working women took advantage of their time in dance halls to challenge conventional gender norms by passing over certain men for dances, refusing escorts home, and asserting their superior abilities on the dance floor. Working men, on the other hand, tried to transform the dance hall into places that resembled their accustomed hangouts, like poolrooms and saloons.

• Sheila Whiteley. Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity. Routledge, 2000.

A collection of essays primarily focused on performers considered to be catalysts within their respective genres—Janis Joplin Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Madonna, k.d. lang, Tracy Chapman, Tori Amos—and how their contribution to popular music is equaled only by their personal struggle against the inherently sexist attitudes that underpin the "material world" of the music industry.

• Albert Glinsky. Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage. U of Illinois Press, 2000.

Glinsky tells the story of Leon Theremin, the Russian-born inventor of the space-control electronic musical instrument during the late 1920s and early 1930s that bears his name—and launched the field of electronic music technology. Wonderful chapter titles: "Soviet Power Plus Electrification," "A Theremin in Every Home," "The Ether Wave Salon," etc.  

Lillian L. Rolde Memorial Lecture

"Treasures in Your Attic: Old and Rare Books" presented by Ken Gloss, owner of the Brattle Book Shop

Wednesday, March 21, 200l
3:OO PM
Rapaporte Treasure Hall - Brandeis University Libraries

Bring a treasured book with you. Mr. Gloss has agreed to appraise some books brought by the audience.