The Authority File

Item holds can function as both the bane of patrons, and valuable insight for librarians. The more holds on an item, the more popular it may be, helping inform future purchasing choices.

Jill Grunenwald, Communications Specialist at OverDrive, discusses OverDrive’s approach to the admin side of its Libby app. While some librarians choose to manually look at the holds list and how many people are waiting on an item, they also have a more hands-off option, “that will automatically manage the holds and put a cart together based on a high hold ratio if needed, and they can buy it from there.”

In this final episode, Grunenwald drills down into the types of lending models libraries can choose from—metered access; one copy, one user; simultaneous-use—and which are most practical for an institution’s needs. She also discusses OverDrive’s growing catalog of university press titles, course texts, and foreign ebook and audiobook options.

Community work doesn’t have clear-cut, one-size-fits-all solutions. Each community in need requires a unique approach, meaning successful community development requires action rooted in malleability, empathy, and most importantly, communication.

Sarah Todd of Carleton University wanted the chapters in her edited volume, Canadian Perspectives on Community Development, to be in conversation with each other. Many work to challenge existing theory, bumping shoulders to reveal disparity and innovative problem-solving. “There are other people working toward social justice who have a very different vision of what that social justice is … and that’s not a problem unless we stop having conversations with each other and asking new questions.”

In this final episode, Todd discusses how even though the end result of the text is stunningly cohesive, connection between theories more than anything else was what she and co-editor Sébastien Savard were aiming for when assembling the work. She looks ahead, explaining how the volume gives her hope for the future of community work in Canada. “I think the beauty about the theories in these collections is they don’t give the answers and solutions. What they do is they open up possibility, and I think, that’s where freedom lies, right? Freedom isn’t in the solutions and answers. It’s often in what we can imagine beyond those solutions and answers.”

As the publishing industry embraced digital reading options, audiobook and ebook reading app choices exploded to accommodate the modern, mobile patron. But how do you make an app that appeals to both public and academic library end-users? Accessibility is a safe place to start.

OverDrive has marketed its Libby app as a “one-tap reading app” that’s streamlined, user-friendly, and most importantly, accessible. Jill Grunenwald, Communications Specialist at OverDrive, explains why the app’s customizable features—font size, lightness, and typeface, e.g. OpenDyslexic—make it ideal for students. “It’s easy for people to log in and then once they’re in, they can make whatever changes they need to to be able to maximize the app for their own personal needs.”

In this third episode, Grunenwald dives into how libraries have marketed Libby to students, and the usage data and metrics the app provides to the admin. She also acknowledges a top concern from librarians: “Having worked with public libraries for so long we are well aware that there are concerns about privacy. We are very sensitive to that, and the system is built to maintain that.”

One assumption about community work is that state actors function as the rigid, weighty authority compared to local powers’ more flexible, adaptable direction. However, like most things in life, the dynamic is much more nuanced than that.

Sarah Todd of Carleton University explains how local level authorities can be just as rigid as those on the state level. Some local communities have even called upon the state to enact changes that smaller jurisdictions couldn’t provide. “It’s a bit like dance … the state is the one that sets the music and is the lead and the community is trying to adapt and play around that, but sometimes the community also needs a bit of support and guidance. That push-pull has really different impacts depending on the context.”

In this third episode, Todd discusses the process of compiling, curating, and reviewing her exhaustive collection, Canadian Perspectives on Community Development. By pulling together studies from all over Canada, she and her co-editor Sébastien Savard were determined to present perspectives that both supported and opposed one another. “We were trying to take a real intersectional approach, to both geography, language, and identity, and to create as much theoretical diversity and as much interdisciplinary conversation as we could. Then the challenge was, we had all this, how to line it up against and put pieces in conversation with each other.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every trade—publishing and librarianship included. But what has it revealed about these markets? How can stakeholders best prepare for the fast-approaching fall semester? What of these temporary changes will stick once we regain “normalcy”?

Jill Grunenwald, Communications Specialist at OverDrive, explains how OverDrive has adjusted to meet student and faculty needs during the pandemic. “We’ve actually started working closely with our publishing partners to try and provide more access to content. A lot of publishers have stepped up and reduced pricing or have changed their lending models to open up access, which is greatly appreciated.”

In this second episode of the four-part series, Grunenwald discusses how OverDrive has made headway into the academic library market. Both appealing to academic libraries and adjusting to challenges of the pandemic have revealed similar needs: “Readers are relying on ebooks and audiobooks more than ever, so if nothing else I think it sends the message that it’s important that libraries of all kinds invest in this type of content, and also that publishers embrace the format as well.”

Theory is not a hard-and-fast rule. It’s a fluid practice, something that warps and bends due to new information, context, and the situation it’s being applied to.

Sarah Todd, of Carleton University, believes that one of the dangers of applying theory to community work is clinging so tightly to a belief that it drowns out that community’s needs. When privileged, university-educated outsiders enter highly marginalized communities, they must recognize that “one always has to be open to the possibility that your theory may be wrong and it may not work, and that you have to create the openness and the humility for the community to tell you that and for you to hear that and pivot and change in your practice.”

In this second episode, Todd explains how her book, Canadian Perspectives on Community Development, seeks to explore the many types of community development theory, the flexibility of each, and how theory can connect a practitioner to the larger goal of community work. “Is what you’re doing actually creating more equality, or is it just making people settle down and live with the conditions of inequality that they’re becoming accustomed to? It lets us ask those critical questions of the work that we’re doing.”

Librarianship can lead one to many places. Jill Grunenwald, Communications Specialist at OverDrive, has worked in collection development, at a career college, and as sole librarian at a prison in Cleveland, which inspired her memoir Reading Behind Bars.

“It was actually really challenging in a lot of good ways,” Grunenwald explains. “I was the only librarian, so I did all of the work. It was a good and very quick introduction into being a librarian after grad school.” After several library jobs, Grunenwald now works in marketing, managing OverDrive’s blog and co-hosting the podcast Professional Book Nerds.

In this first episode, Grunenwald discusses her duties at OverDrive, the ins and outs of being a podcast host, and some of her favorite comfort reads during the pandemic—historical fiction, anyone? Join the conversation to hear Grunenwald chat about her background and passion for books: “My poor TBR just keeps getting longer and longer!”

Collaboration is a key component of academia. While it’s easy to romanticize the lone scholar typing away in an ivory tower, academics working together birth some of the best and most exciting ideas—especially when each holds a different background or perspective.

Sarah Todd, an English-speaking professor at Carleton University, discovered this for herself in meeting Sébastien Savard, a Francophone professor at the University of Ottawa. Coediting journals at the Canadian Association of Social Work Education, Todd and Savard found commonalities and differences in their approaches to teaching social work, resulting in their own coedited volume, Canadian Perspectives on Community Development. “What we wanted was the learning that was happening in our friendship across linguistic communities to be sketched out into a textbook, so the students in our classrooms and the scholars we work with would also have the opportunity for that kind of excitement and learning and curiosity.”

In the first episode of this four-part series, Todd talks the book’s fruition and gives some history to community development in Canada. A complicated and diverse effort, Canadian community development varies deeply based on a region’s history and culture. By working with Savard, Todd explains that she deepened her understanding of differing communities’ approaches to social work—especially between Francophone and Anglophone ones—and emphasized how “each tradition has both its strengths and its limits that we can learn from.”

Karina Vernon, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, knew that when collecting material for her book, The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, she couldn’t include everything: “The fantasy of the total archive—it’s an impossibility.” She enacted several editorial guidelines to achieve her goal of presenting diverse Black stories that expanded the dominant narrative of the prairies.

She sought out unique pieces—spoken word, letters, oral histories, and rap. She hunted for contributions from women writers, queer voices, and an even count from all provinces of the prairies, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Most importantly, “I also wanted to choose material that was self-conscious in some way about race that would reveal something about Black life on the prairies.”

In the final episode of this four-part series, Dr. Vernon discusses her inclusive process of collecting entries for the archive, and highlights some of her favorite pieces. When audiences pick up the volume, she hopes that they’ll widen their own perspectives as well: “I ask readers when they encounter something that challenges them, that they might not identify with, to make space for listening, to perhaps approach the material differently with open ears, with the willingness to sit with something that might be different or uncomfortable because it will allow us to hear a story that has not yet been told.”

Though this may sound crass, a topic like a global pandemic—something that naturally attracts gossip, mania, and misinformation—is a gold mine for information literacy instructors. Is that pre-print reliable? Is that headline’s only purpose to strike an emotional chord? Who should you listen to, the politician or the scientist?

But even as the need for information literacy programs grows, proving its value can be difficult at the institutional level. Roz Tedford at Wake Forest University, Dan Chibnall at Drake University, and Sarah Morris at Emory University Libraries, explain that the key is to show “librarians as being these multidisciplinary people that have these critical thinking skills to showcase.”

In the last episode of this four-part series, the guests discuss the scale of info lit in an ideal world, how to measure the success of their instruction, and how they’ve incorporated the pandemic into their class discussions. Mila Steele, Senior Publisher of Social Sciences at SAGE Publishing, reveals how SAGE has provided materials to students, faculty, and librarians during this crisis: “As an industry, publishing isn’t known for being a swift current, so it was quite a revolutionary feeling for us to feel like, just drop everything. What’s our supply chain? How can we help? How can we support in terms of getting stuff out there?”