Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a comprehensive overview of various services, programs, and collaborations to help libraries serve high-needs patrons as well as strategies for supporting staff working with these individuals. While public libraries are struggling to address growing numbers of high-needs patrons experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, mental health problems, substance abuse, and poverty-related needs, this book will help librarians build or contribute to library services that will best address patrons' psychosocial needs. Beth Wahler and Sarah C. Johnson, experienced in both library and social work, begin by providing an overview of patrons' psychosocial needs, structural and societal reasons for the shift in these needs, and how these changes impact libraries and library staff. Chapters focus on best practices for libraries providing person-centered services and share lessons learned, including information about special considerations for certain patron populations that might be served by individual libraries. The book concludes with information about how library organizations can support public library staff. Librarians and library students who are concerned about both patrons and library staff will find the practical advice in this book invaluable.NBN can get 20% off Creating a Person-Centered Library by using the discount code NBN20 on the Blooomsbury.com US website.Beth Wahler, PhD, MSW is founder and principal consultant at Beth Wahler Consulting, LLC and affiliated research faculty and previous director of the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina- Charlotte. Dr. Wahler is a social work consultant, researcher, and experienced administrator whose primary focus is trauma-informed librarianship, library strategies for addressing patrons’ or community psychosocial needs, supporting library staff with serving high-needs patrons and reducing work-related stress/trauma, and various kinds of collaborations, services, and programs to meet patron, staff, or community needs. She has also published and presented internationally on library patron and staff needs, trauma-informed librarianship, and library/social work collaborations. Sarah C. Johnson, MLIS, LMSW, is an Adjunct Lecturer at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she teaches a graduate course on Library Social Work. As a researcher and educator, Sarah is the creator and host of the Library Social Work podcast which aims to inform the public about interdisciplinary collaborations between social service providers and public libraries.Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Bram Adams, Professor at the School of Computing, Queen's University, Canada. We talk about current developments in peer review, as it is practised in software engineering research.Bram Adams : "As an editor, one thing you want to see in a review is a summary that clearly says, 'Okay, my overall scoring is this, and my reasons for that are (a) these few negative points but also (b) these few positive points.' But that, in my experience, is missing from reviews much more often than before. Now it is common for editors to get very long and detailed reviews — very well done, in fact — but the major turning-point-reasons for the reviewer’s final recommendation are really spread all throughout the review. And the problem here is that the editor is now put in the difficult position of having to sift through and to locate and in the end really interpret so that those reasons can be made clear to the authors but also to the presiding editor too.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you been told your draft isn’t ready yet, because you still need to find your argument? We have all gotten that feedback at some point. But what we haven’t been told is how to find our argument. Today we return to The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript (U Chicago Press, 2023), with Dr. Katelyn E. Knox and Dr. Allison Van Deventer, to learn how to find and assemble an argument. Whether you are writing an article, dissertation or a book, this episode is the skills workshop you need!Our guest is: Dr. Allison Van Deventer, who is a freelance developmental editor for academic authors in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. She is the co-author of The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript.Our co-guest is: Dr. Katelyn Knox, who is an associate professor of French at the University of Central Arkansas. She is the author of Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France. She is the co-author of The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.Listeners may also enjoy: The Dissertation to Book Workbook The Grant Writing Guide Where Research Begins Book Proposals Learning from Rejection and Failure Contracts, Agents and Editors: Demystifying the Path to Publication Dissertations Wanted : A Conversation with the Editor of the University of Wyoming Press University Press Submissions and the Peer Review Process Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us here again to learn from even more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Often assumed to be a self-evident good, Open Access has been subject to growing criticism for perpetuating global inequities and epistemic injustices. it has been seen as imposing exploitative business and publishing models and as exacerbating exclusionary research evaluation culture and practices.Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic, and Participatory Openness (Taylor & Francis, 2024) engages with these issues, recognizing that the global Open Access debate is now not just about publishing and business models or academic reward structures, but also about what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge, how we know and who gets to say. the book argues that, for Open Access to deliver its potential, it first needs to be associated with "epistemic openness", a wider and more inclusive understanding of what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge. it also needs to be accompanied by "participatory openness", enabling contributions to knowledge from more diverse communities. interacting with relevant theory and current practices, the book discusses the challenges in implementing these different forms of openness, the relationship between them and their limits.Stephen Pinfield is Professor of Information Services Management at the University of Sheffield, UK, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Research on Research Institute (RoRI).Xiaoli Chen is project lead at DataCite, a non-profit organization that provides open scholarly infrastructure and supports the global research community to ensure the open availability and connectedness of research outputs. She has a background in Library and Information Science and worked with different disciplinary communities to create and integrate services and workflows for open and FAIR scholarship. She can be reached at xiaoli.chen@datacite.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Anthony Anjorin, a lead software architect at Zühlke Engineering, Germany; and also, Hsiang-Shang Ko, assistant research fellow, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. We talk about their paper Benchmarking bidirectional transformations: Theory, implementation, application, and assessment (Software and Systems Modeling).Anthony Anjorin : "I really believe in the method called peer instruction in teaching. The basic idea is that experts, who deal with focused topics over long periods, are not necessarily best suited to explaining a thing simply and in just a few sentences. So, in this paper, we took this method into the drafting process. The first three coauthors did nearly all of the writing, while the other six coauthors provided their solutions — which, of course, was crucial, so that we could claim that each solution was provided by an expert person in that area. But nonetheless, it remained for the first three coauthors to do the writing, and that meant, they interviewed the experts and discussed with them so as to become able to write about those solutions themselves — even though they are non-experts. Then, in final round of revision, the solution experts reviewed the texts, providing the writers with the feedback, the comments, and the recommendations they needed to revise the text and make it final." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With My Gothic Dissertation, University of Iowa PhD Anna M. Williams has transformed the dreary diss into a This American Life-style podcast. Williams’ witty writing and compelling audio production allow her the double move of making a critical intervention into the study of the gothic novel, while also making an entertaining and thought-provoking series for non-experts. Williams uses famed novels by authors such as Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelly as an entry point for a critique of graduate school itself—a Medieval institution of shadowy corners, arcane rituals, and a feudal power structure. The result is a first-of-its-kind work that serves as a model for doing literary scholarship in sound. This episode of Phantom Power offers you an exclusive preview of My Gothic Dissertation. First, Mack Hagood interviews Williams about creating the project, then we listen to a full chapter—a unique reading of Frankenstein that explores how the university tradition can restrict access to knowledge even as it tries to produce knowledge. You can learn more about Anna M. Williams and her work at her website. This episode features music from Neil Parsons’ 8-Bit Bach Reloaded.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Predatory publishing is a complex problem that harms a broad array of stakeholders and concerns across the scholarly communications system. It shines a light on the inadequacies of scholarly assessment and related rewards systems, contributes to the marginalization of scholarship from less developed countries, and negatively impacts the acceptance of open access. To fix what is broken in scholarly communications, academic librarians must act as both teachers and advocates and partner with other stakeholders who have the agency to change how scholarship is produced, assessed, and rewarded. Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications (ACRL, 2024) by Monica Berger is a unique and comprehensive exploration of predatory publishing in four parts: Background; Characteristics and Research; The Geopolitics of Scholarly Publishing; and Responses and Solutions. It examines the history of predatory publishing and basics of scholarly assessment; identifies types of research misconduct and unethical scholarly behaviors; provides critical context to predatory publishing and scholarly communications beyond the Global North; and offers structural and pedagogical solutions and teaching materials for librarians to use in their work with authors, students, faculty, and other stakeholders. Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications gives powerful insight into predatory publishing across the world, inside and outside of the library community, and provides tools for understanding and teaching its impact and contributing to its improvement.Monica Berger is the Instruction and Scholarly Communications Librarian and Professor at the New York City College of Technology, City University of New York.Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Istvan David, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computing and Software, Faculty of Engineering, McMaster University, Canada. We talk about his coauthored paper "Collaborative Model-Driven Software Engineering – A Systematic Survey of Practices and Needs in Industry" (JSS 2023).Istvan David : "When I read a paper, I like to have a visual excerpt of it — somewhere I can go to find the key messages. This is immediately what I look for, because we all use adaptive reading depth, right — that is, at first, we skim to look for the key visual elements, to find and use those informative conclusion boxes — because on our initial-starting reading level, we are most helped by these features of the paper to really grasp the large meaning of the research reported there." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do you turn a dissertation into a book?Today’s book is: The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript (U Chicago Press, 2023), by Dr. Katelyn E. Knox and Dr. Allison Van Deventer, which offers a series of manageable, concrete steps and exercises to help you revise your academic manuscript into a book. The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook offers clear examples, as well as targeted exercises, checklists and prompts to take all the guesswork out of writing a book. You will learn how to clarify your book’s core priorities, pinpoint your organizing principle, polish your narrative arc, evaluate your evidence, and much more. Using what this workbook calls “book questions and chapter answers,” you will learn how to thread your book’s main ideas through its chapters, assemble an argument, and revise the manuscript. By the time you complete the workbook, you will have confidence that your book is a cohesive, focused manuscript that tells the story you want to tell.Our guest is: Dr. Katelyn Knox, who is an associate professor of French at the University of Central Arkansas. She is the author of Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France.Our co-guest is: Dr. Allison Van Deventer, who is a freelance developmental editor for academic authors in the humanities and qualitative social sciences.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.Listeners may also enjoy: Stylish Academic Writing The Emotional Arc of Turning A Dissertation Into A Book The Artist's Joy: A Guide to Getting Unstuck and Embracing Imperfection Becoming the Writer You Already Are Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us here again to learn from even more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would it be like if scholars presented their research in sound rather than in print? Better yet, what if we could hear them in the act of their research and analysis, pulling different historical sounds from the archives and rubbing them against one another in an audio editor?In today’s episode, we get to find out what such an innovative scholarly audiobook would sound like–because our guest has created the first one! Jacob Smith‘s ESC (University of Michigan Press) is a fascinating sonic exploration of postwar radio drama and contemporary sound art, as well as a meditation on how humans have reshaped the ecological fate of the planet. Before we listen to an excerpt of ESC, Mack interviews Jake about how his skills as a former musician came in handy for his work as an audio academic.You can listen to ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene in its entirety for free courtesy of the University of Michigan Press.You can also watch Jake’s 90s band The Mysteries of Life perform in the “bad music video” Jake mentions or on Conan O’Brien.Jacob Smith is founder and director of the Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries, and professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He is the author of three print-based books on sound: Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (University of California Press 2008); Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures(University of California Press 2011); and Eco-Sonic Media (University of California Press, 2015). He writes and teaches about the cultural history of media, with a focus on sound and performance.Today’s show was edited by Craig Eley and featured music by Blue Dot Sessions. Our intern is Gina Moravec. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices