Recognizing University faculty book authors
The University Libraries are working to identify and collect books authored by University faculty in a catalog
As the University marks its 150th anniversary this year, the are recognizing the significant achievements of our Faculty at the 推荐杏吧原创 publish scholarly and creative books each year, on an impressive range of topics. These works often present years-long scholarly undertakings and may reflect career-spanning research projects.
The Collections & Discovery unit in the Libraries has been working since 2022 on identifying, acquiring and making available recent books authored, edited, and translated by University faculty. While we owned many of these books already, either in print or e-book format, we have been acquiring copies of works that are still available in print to make sure the library has a tangible copy that will be preserved for the future.
There have been a number of challenges in moving this project forward, largely due to the nature of book publishing and the lack of a way to know when a University faculty member has published a book.
For scholarly article publishing, established indexing typically includes the author’s institutional affiliation, along with scholarly identifiers such as ORCID IDs to bring together an author’s works. However, scholarly book publishing practices vary widely by both publisher and discipline, so there is no simple way to discover what books University authors are publishing. Additionally, faculty may be publishing in creative fields (such as composing musical pieces, translating fiction, or writing poetry) where it’s unlikely that their works will end up indexed in research databases (such as Web of Science) that track ORCID IDs and affiliation.
The availability of publication data in Interfolio (the University’s faculty information system) has helped make the current collection initiative possible, as it has given us a central reporting hub to learn what books have been published. It’s not a perfect system, and it only has recent works for current academic faculty, but it has proven be a good starting point.
The current initiative has focused on identifying and collecting recent (2017 or later) books authored by current University faculty. We selected this publishing window because it both lets us recognize the work of current faculty and because we have a relatively reliable source of data, with faculty-reported publication data in Interfolio. It becomes more difficult to identify faculty authors as one moves back in time, and the older a book is, the less likely it is to still be in print. While we have started with this window, we have added tracking in our catalog for all print books by a particular author once we have established their University affiliation. These books can be browsed in our catalog in the Libraries’ online collection and through a note in the catalog record for books we have identified.
We want to know about any books that we might have missed! If there are books by you that we do not own or if we have not identified them yet as University Faculty Author books, please let us know!
推荐杏吧原创 the author
As the Director of Collections and Discovery, Molly Beisler provides leadership for the technical services departments: Budget, E-Resources, & Discovery Services (BERDS) and Metadata, Cataloging, and One-Time Acquisitions (MCOTA). Beisler oversees the Libraries’ materials budget and serves on the teams that maintain and set policy for the Alma Library Services Platform and Primo VE discovery service.
