LJAN Resources

Welcome to LJAN Resources, our monthly academic content roundup. We’ll be curating standout InfoDocket posts and nonfiction LJ book reviews on the last Thursday of every month for quick access to news and reviews you can use.

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From InfoDocket:

Robert Miller, CEO of LYRASIS, Will Be Leaving Organization at the End of June 2022

From a LYRASIS Announcement: Following seven years of service, Robert Miller, the Chief Executive Officer of LYRASIS, a leading nonprofit member organization serving and supporting libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage organizations globally, will be leaving the organization as of June 30, 2022.

Since becoming CEO in 2015, Robert and his team have led LYRASIS through a series of positive transformations, including merging with DuraSpace and acquiring BiblioLabs. This has resulted in growth of existing programs and establishing LYRASIS as a top provider of open source technologies and electronic content to the sector.

Black Press Archives at Howard University Gets Preserved, Digitized Thanks to $2 Million Grant

From Howard University: The Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) received a $2 million grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation to support the preservation and digitization of the Black Press Archives, a newspaper collection of titles by Black journalists, editors, and publishers. MSRC worked in partnership with the Center for Journalism and Democracy to secure this critical gift, and the center will be committing additional funds to the project to ensure a significant number of publications in the Black Press Archives are available in an online repository for worldwide research.

New Publication: MPS in Publishing Program at George Washington University Announces Inaugural Issue of GW Journal of Ethics in Publishing

From GWU: The Master of Professional Studies (MPS) in Publishing program, George Washington University, is pleased to announce the inaugural issue of the GW Journal of Ethics in Publishing. This new online journal is managed by students in the MPS in Publishing program, and led by Editor-in-Chief Randy Townsend, Director of Publishing Operations, PLOS, and an editorial board of publishing leaders

New Experimental Service From arXiv: Articles as Responsive Web Pages

From an arXiv Blog Post: arXiv readers can now benefit from new, experimental access to our article collection converted to responsive HTML5. For a quick preview, replace the “X” of arXiv in any article link to the “5” of ar5iv and be redirected to a corresponding arXivLabs page.

This service was developed by the KWARC research group at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, Germany, with the close support of the LaTeXML project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA.

Annenberg/Penn: “Bridging Wikipedia’s Gender Gap, One Article at a Time”

From the Annenberg School of Communications, Univ. of Pennsylvania: As the world’s largest and most-used information resource, Wikipedia is home to 6.4 million articles and counting. But despite how comprehensive it seems, 90% of the site’s editors are men, and women are vastly underrepresented as subjects in the encyclopedia. The problem is particularly glaring when it comes to biographical information. Of the 1.5 million biographical articles on the site, less than 20% are about women.

A new study co-authored by Isabelle Langrock, a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Annenberg Associate Professor Sandra González-Bailón, evaluates the work of two prominent feminist movements, finding that while these movements have been effective in adding a large volume of biographical content about women to Wikipedia, such content remains more difficult to find due to structural biases.

The Rosenbach Podcast: “A Mother’s Grief, a University’s Library: How Eleanor Elkins Widener’s Loss on the Titanic Changed the Rare Book World. A Conversation with Leslie A. Morris, Susan D. Block, and Sue E. Morris of Harvard University”

From the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia: The loss of Harry Elkins Widener onboard the R.M.S. Titanic inspired his mother, Eleanor Elkins Widener, who survived the maritime disaster, to build a great library at Harvard University in her son’s honor. She collaborated closely on the project with Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach—an endeavor that helped launch Dr. Rosenbach’s career. In this episode of the Rosenbach Podcast, we will journey to Harvard University to learn more about the Widener Memorial Library, its collections, and the process by which it came to exist by speaking to a Harvard curator who works closely with books Harry Elkins Widener once owned. We will also speak with Harvard University experts in grief to gain insights about what inspired Eleanor Elkins Widener to create a library in her son’s memory—and what her journey from anguish to triumph can teach us about healing from grief in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.

From LJ Reviews:

HISTORY
Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe
By Keith O’Brien
This Love Canal story exposes the nation’s utter unpreparedness to respond to that public health crisis and is very timely during the COVID pandemic. This authoritative book deserves a wide audience and should provoke reflection on just how much we have progressed in the 45 years since the Love Canal disaster.

PREMIUM
Persians: The Age of the Great Kings
By Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Recommended for readers with an interest in ancient Persian history and culture, Greek philosophy, and contemporary Iran.

PREMIUM
Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth
By Clyde W. Ford
Ford’s forceful arguments and writing will compel readers to face the facts of the long history of exploitation and appropriation that have defined so much of America’s struggle with itself to give substance and meaning to its promise of “freedom” for all.

SOCIAL SCIENCES
Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present
By Eugene Linden
Of the many books written on climate change and how humanity has gotten to where it is and where it needs to go, this is one of the most essential.

PREMIUM
Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others
By Stephen M. R. Covey
A timely look at management styles during the COVID pandemic, and a thought-provoking look at leadership. Recommended especially for practitioners and for students and faculty of business schools.

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong
By Louisa Lim

A fascinating work that is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Hong Kong. Those looking for something focused more exclusively on the 2019 protests should consider Antony Dapiran’s City on Fire.

POLITICAL SCIENCE
PREMIUM

Growing Up Biden
By Valerie Biden Owens

Owens’s narrative is informative and engaging and is a perceptive firsthand account of President Biden’s background. Readers who are interested in political campaign operations and strategy or want to know more about the Bidens will enjoy this book.

The Forever Prisoner: The Full and Searing Account of the CIA’s Most Controversial Covert Program
By Cathy Scott-Clark & Adrian Levy
A tour de force of investigative journalism.

What It Took To Win: A History of the Democratic Party
By Michael Kazin
This book will please Kazin’s enthusiasts and win favor among new readers previously bereft of his reality-grounded ruminations.