Winner of the 2022 Charleston Conference Librarian Stipend has been Announced by IGI Global

As part of the application for the sponsorship, we asked librarians some questions. See Andrei Mihailovici's responses below:

Andrei Mihailovici: There are several significant ways that the COVID-19 Pandemic changed content acquisitions and implementation in academic libraries. Most significantly, it accelerated the shift to e-preferred collecting- which was already underway in academia, but at a much more gradual pace. The acceleration was spurred by academic libraries' rapid pivot to e-resources, due to building closures and physical collection restrictions during the early stages of quarantine and lockdown. Acquisitions staff had to increase access levels to online course texts or acquire electronic versions of materials not already held to accommodate the vast swaths of students and professors that were remote learning and educating for the first time. With this shift, an increase in patron comfort with electronic resources developed, and most academic libraries have maintained an e-preferred collection profile- whether through approval plans or firm orders- even after re-opening their doors. Another pandemic-based change in academic library acquisitions is the growing awareness of e-book licenses and platforms that has resulted from communication with faculty and staff around electronic access to course materials. Professors are now used to making sure an e-book is available to an unlimited number of users, so that their students can access course content simultaneously without impediment. Once merely a radical contingent of librarianship, the growing conversation around predatory publishing and textbook access has led to more knowledge and action among all major campus constituents- students, faculty and staff- around open access, affordable learning and open educational resources (OER). Vendor relations have changed in academic library acquisitions as well.

Andrei Mihailovicih: There are trends among publishers and aggregators to accommodate the growing awareness of issues in electronic resource access; for example, patron-driven collecting is more ubiquitous than ever, and initiatives around electronic course reserve bundles have emerged as well. A new pandemic-based comfort with remote meetings has meant an increase in video conferences. While once seen as standard practice, being present in a room together has added weight for vendors and librarians, and signals a significance, pressure or urgency to a resource pitch- like a new ILS (integrated library system) or discovery layer- that was not there before. Finally, collections budgets have suffered in the wake of the pandemic. Many university libraries shut down their approval plans for practical reasons during lockdown- there was simply no one in the building to receive physical shipments of books. But financial crises have hit many institutions of higher learning during this unprecedented state of uncertainty and instability, and collections budgets have been hit the hardest at academic libraries, with staffing not far behind. This means that many approval plans stayed shut off, even after campuses resumed in-person classes and librarians returned to their offices. In the monograph world, it is not uncommon to simply have a DDA (demand driven acquisitions) plan in place, supplemented by online material requests from campus stakeholders like faculty and students, with nothing else.

Andrei Mihailovici: Library liaisons are purchasing less and less, and liaison programs are disappearing in general, while automatic physical shipments are a luxury for the well-funded. In more than one instance, I have heard technical services librarians at other university libraries refer to their approval plan as “dead.” Some of these changes seem grim, but there is no need to impose a value judgment too hastily, especially when the stakes are not fatal, as they were- and for many continue to be- during the pandemic. Times of transition have always felt like a death knell to traditionalists and an exciting opportunity for innovators. I personally embrace the latter ethos; it is not often that one gets to feel creative as an acquisitions librarian, and our current era has made that a necessity.

Andrei Mihailovici: I am a new Acquisitions Librarian here at Marquette University, but I am from Charleston, and used to attend the conference every year for free (Katina Strauch was my boss in Technical Services- I was the Acquisitions Manager for the College of Charleston Library from 2016-2021). So it is strange to return with a need for funding assistance, which is why I am so grateful for this opportunity. Being new, I only have one real accomplishment since beginning, which is a paper that is currently in press (and very relevant to this prompt): The State of the Approval Plan in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic (ID: 2125678 DOI:10.1080/07317131.2022.2125678) Journal: Technical Services Quarterly, Volume: 39, Issue: 04, pages 412 - 427. Authors: Andrei Mihailovi