"Collection development at an academic research library has a dual mission. We must support our community’s research interests and fields of study as we also build collections with enduring value, beyond the here and now."—Elsa Álvaro, Associate University librarian for collections and access
The international scholarly movement for open access scholarship addresses the complicated economics of academic journal publishing. Library-led open scholarship initiatives are building a cost-effective, adaptable future for academic publishing.
The origin story of Northwestern University's new archivist: Matthew Richardson ’06, MS ’12 grew up hanging out and working in his family’s comics store, a cozy community space where his love of history and culture, including the preservation of it, took hold.
For the professors who deposit their papers in University Archives, educating never stops. Lectures, research notes, book manuscripts, and even exam answer keys— the evidence of entire careers resides in the Archives.
If democracy relies on an informed public, democracy relies on Northwestern Libraries.
The US Congress of 1813 sensed the importance of keeping citizens apprised of their government’s doings and passed an act requiring important documents to be deposited in a nationwide network of libraries. Northwestern joined those ranks in 1876. Nearly 20 years later, Congress formalized the process, under the auspices of the Federal Depository Library Program, to document the work of elected leaders.
“We’re obligated to help people access this information, because in a democratic society, the voting public needs to understand what their government is doing,” said Anne Zald, government documents librarian. “Citizens must be able to have a say, to be able write to their representatives, to vote them into or out of office, using the knowledge we preserve here.”
Today Northwestern is one of nearly 1,150 federal depository libraries, each of which self-selects categories of government material to preserve, depending on its own collection strategies; taken together, these institutions house the whole of government action that has ever been committed to print (or produced on CDs or microfiche). Northwestern’s Government & Geographic Information Collection can be found in room B190 of University Library, amid towering compact shelving and multitudes of map drawers.
“If you just walk the stacks, you’ll see it all from A to Z,” Zald said. “Agriculture, the EPA, the departments of defense, state, transportation, commerce, the Smithsonian Institution, The National Endowment for the Humanities, Congress—just think of a federal agency, you’ll find it here.”
The kinds of information to be found in the collection run the gamut: research reports, annual reports, public health studies, studies of national historic sites, demographic, economic and trade statistics, foreign policy, regional weather data, space exploration, information about aid and loans citizens can apply for, and, of course, the World War 2 Poster Collection, which is one of the most viewed digital collections on the Libraries website.
Now that most government publications are created digitally, the federal repository govinfo.gov is home to most of this material, Zald said. But not all. Certain important documents—such as the US Code—must still be deposited in print and available in a geographic dispersion. “We play our part in this network so citizens can be informed,” Zald said. “We are here for the public to dive deeper into any issue reported on, voted on, or discussed at the federal level.”
What’s not to love about a hoard of 20th-century census data? A new acquisition of census archives provides a wealth of historical data.
“Watching him engage with patrons and colleagues, I learned and mimicked a good deal of his personality when I succeeded him as University archivist in 2009. I hope, somewhere along the way, I have greeted you with a smile, a kind word, or a joke. If I have, consider that a gift from Patrick.” —Kevin Leonard ’77, ’82 MS, University historian