Collections and Content Strategy

Open Access publishing

In 2021, the Libraries Open Scholarship Committee issued the “Towards Open Access at the University of Minnesota” statement that outlines the principles and actions we stand by in our commitment to building a more open and equitable publishing system. The statement was endorsed by the U of M Senate Library Committee. Open access publishing provides equitable access to research — anyone, any-where, can access and use research — enabling new ideas to be spread more rapidly and widely, accelerating further research.

In FY21, the Libraries also advanced Open Access through these collection development efforts and educational opportunities:

• Signed an open access publishing agreement with Cambridge University Press and joined PLOS’s Community Action Publishing program
• Began supporting “Demography” and IWA Publishing as they moved to innovative, new publishing models

• Invested in the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Directory of Open Access Books, OAPEN, C4DISC (the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications).
• Hosted open access workshops for graduate students, staff, and faculty authors

Accomplishments in 2021 include signing the Wiley extension to facilitate open access content from BTAA authors and kickstarting several pilot projects, including the re-visioning of the UBorrow service and creation of an e-book collection that advances DEI.

Follow the #OpenAccessUMN blog at z.umn.edu/OAUMN

Interlibrary Loan and Digital Delivery

The Libraries filled 92% of the 44,367 Interlibrary Loan/Digital Delivery requests in FY21. Of those:

• 798 e-books were purchased for the collection to fill user needs and
• 3,816 were completed by scanning existing print and microform collections.
• Nearly 1/3 of the requests were delivered to the homes of U of M faculty, students, and staff

Praise for Interlibrary Loan

“Dear Terrific Loan Librarians,
Wow, just five minutes ago I requested: Title: “The Difference is Great Teachers”,
Author: Eric Hanushek, Book Title: “Waiting for ‘Superman’: how we can save
America’s failing public schools” and poof! I got it! In less than five minutes! Thank
you so much for a speedy delivery and everything you do to support my education.”

The BIG Collection

We continued our collaborative work with the BIG Collection initiative, which aims to leverage collective resources across the Big Ten Academic Alliance libraries to manage their separate collections as a single collection. In 2021, the BIG Collection Steering Committee was formed and charged with a number of responsibilities, including:

• Stewarding the strategic roadmap
• Endorsing budgets and resources
• Ensuring alignment across the initiative, and
• Ensuring that the BIG Collection advances Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) values of the respective institutions.