By Linda Hauck

By Centro de Estudios Públicos – https://www.cepchile.cl/CEP40Aniversario, CC BY 2.0 cl, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112613569

Falvey offers extensive access to commercial journals published by Elsevier, Sage, Wiley, Emerald, Taylor & Francis, Springer-Nature, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press, among others. Many factors are taken into consideration in negotiating access to these very costly resources, including alignment with curricula and research activity, journal impact or prestige, indexing, cost structure, actual usage, turn-a-ways, and stated demand.

A faculty member noted high quality, peer-reviewed journal articles relevant to a frequently offered graduate course were accessible using Business Source Premier and SCOPUS, two recommended database for business, and the Library Search Articles and More tool, but access to full text access was only available via interlibrary loan. The faculty member submitted a request for purchase.

As is often the case, the cost of subscribing to the single journal was quite high, but the journal was part of the Henry Stewart Business and Management Journal Collection, which maps to multiple disciplines taught at the Villanova School of Business, including digital marketing, real estate, data analytics, and supply chain management. Bundled with our HSTalks instructional video collection, the Library was able to negotiate for the Henry Stewart Business and Management Journals Collection.

Students and faculty now have immediate access to current issues and backfiles of these journals that publish papers written by applied scholars and seasoned practitioners.

Link to the full text of 22 Henry Stewart journals by using the “find it” button in Business Source Premier or SCOPUS, or by using the Journal Finder.

Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA, is Business Librarian at Falvey Library.

By Nancy Foasberg

Hello again! I’m Villanova’s Scholarly Communication Librarian, and this Open Access Week I wanted to share some information about the theme for the week. To access the other posts in this series, please see this series of posts!

This year, the official theme for Open Access Week is Community over Commercialization.

Open Access, Community, and Commercialization

In yesterday’s blog post, I defined open access as the practice of making scholarly works available without price or permission barriers. So, why is the theme of community and commercialization so important for open access?

Currently, the open access landscape includes efforts by many different stakeholders: academic authors, libraries, universities, scholarly societies, granting organizations, and publishers both small and large.  However, these groups have very different goals! Consider which of these groups are likely to be most interested in:

• Ensuring that information can reach a broader audience
• Decreasing the cost of accessing information
• Building equitable scholarly infrastructure

On the other hand, large commercial publishers are likely to be primarily interested in finding new revenue streams.

Publishers play a key role in scholarly communication, but large commercial publishers’ involvement in open access usually comes along with the condition that they can use it to increase their profits. Their preferred solutions are often inequitable – for instance, there are many critiques of author fees and transformative agreements on the basis that they exclude scholars from publishing if their institutions cannot support these costs.

Additionally, large commercial publishers currently control a great deal of the infrastructure for scholarly communication – including tools that were originally built by members of the community.  For instance, Elsevier now owns SSRN, an important subject repository in which scholars in the social sciences share their work, and bepress, the software on which many institutional repositories run.

The Power of Community-Based Infrastructure

Resources built and maintained by the community remain extremely important to scholarly communication, and there are still scholars, advocates, and librarians building new resources.

Note that many of these tools are not, themselves, free to use. However, they are built and maintained by members of the academic community, are often openly licensed, and are intended to facilitate open access, especially fee-free open access.

For more information on what constitutes good open access infrastructure, see The Principles of Open Access Infrastructure is a good starting point. However, this post will primarily feature projects that are supported by entities other than commercial publishers.

Repositories (subject and institutional)

For instance, a lot of subject repositories are community-run, including arXiv (run at Cornell University), one of the oldest and most important preprint repositories. That is, it’s a way for authors to share their articles quickly, prior to undergoing peer review, which can be quite a lengthy process. Many other preprint repositories run on the Open Science Framework, which is a project of the non-profit Center for Open Science.

Many colleges and universities also run their own institutional repositories, and many of them have opted to use platforms like DSpace, Islandora, Hyrax, or Hyku, which are maintained and supported by universities or non-profit organizations. These might include articles before and/or after the peer-review process.

Community-run repositories are important because they don’t favor a particular publisher, they can set policies allowing a variety of types of materials to be shared, and, unlike popular academic social media sites (ResearchGate, Academia.edu), they don’t run on mysterious funding models that involve gathering data about their users.

Journal & Book Publishing

The large commercial publishers have fancy publishing platforms with lots of bells and whistles.

But publishing doesn’t have to rely on these systems.  A huge number of open access journals, including those hosted by Falvey Library, use Open Journal Systems, which is a product of the non-profit Public Knowledge Project and provides a rich, flexible platform that’s relatively easy to use.

When it comes to books and other materials, one good option is Manifold, which was jointly developed by the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding, and is used by several scholarly presses and other organizations.  It’s been used to create open access books, new editions of public domain works, and collaborative class projects.  It’s also been a major tool for creating open educational resources.

Other Tools

Building an open access infrastructure includes many tools other than the front-facing publishing systems described earlier in this post.

Community-built tools for managing scholarly metadata include OpenAlex, an open catalog of scholarly publications built and maintained by the nonprofit organization OurResearch, and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), which assigns persistent identifiers to research organizations (Villanova’s is 02g7kd627).

Standards, too, are a form of infrastructure.  I’d particularly like to point out the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which calls for institutions, funding agencies, and publishers to develop  standards for assessing research outputs that don’t rely as heavily on the role of commercial publishers or the metrics they produce. I would also like to point out the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, a group of institutions that support each other in developing best practices for institutional open access policies.

Thank you for joining me on this trip through some important landmarks in the open access landscape! This Open Access Week, I think we should be cognizant, not only of how many materials can be made openly available, but also how things become open.

Nancy Foasberg is Scholarly Communication Librarian at Falvey Library.

Photo courtesy of Oxford University Press.

By Laurie Ortiz Rivera

With today’s overabundance of information and misinformation, students and researchers alike can be overwhelmed in identifying what’s trustworthy, what’s up-to-date, and what’s accurate. This is the reality of many of us who want to be very well-informed on different topics.

Recently, Falvey Library subscribed to the Oxford Research Encyclopedias of Education to give access to more than 1,000 articles from a prestigious publisher Oxford University Press. The editor, George W. Noblit, wrote:

The ORE of Education provides thorough and balanced syntheses of what is known, what is disputed, and what is in progress in education research. The syntheses will be gateways to new domains of inquiry, providing provocative ideas and incisive critiques as well as addressing the broad controversies that mark education. The ORE of Education will be the singular resource for access to all that is known and all that is being thought in and about education. (Noblit, 2022).

The Oxford Research Encyclopedias covers topics in these general categories:

• Education and society
• Curriculum and pedagogy
• Education, change, and development
• Education, cultures, and ethnicities
• Educational politics and policy
• Educational theories and philosophies
• Educational administration and leadership
• Educational purposes and ideals
• Education, gender, and sexualities
• Educational systems
• Research and assessment methods
• Professional learning and development
• Cognition, emotion, and learning
• Alternative and non-formal education
• Educational history
• Globalization, economics, and education
• Languages and literacies
• Technology and Education
• Education, health, and social services

We enjoy the Encyclopedia’s capabilities to offer multimedia content and cross-links embedded so that readers can follow the rigorous standards of academic publishing. Log into our collection of Oxford Research Encyclopedias to access peer-reviewed summaries on an ever-growing list of topics.

Laurie Ortiz Rivera, PhD, is Subject Librarian for History, Art History, Education & Counseling at Falvey Library. 

By Nicole Daly 

If you have used any of our marketing and public relations databases or serials in the past, you’ll be happy to hear that Falvey Library has expanded access to PR Week online. In the past we have maintained access to PR Week articles, but there was a publication gap, limiting access to the newest and most up to date information in the field. Now with our expanded access students, faculty, and staff will have the opportunity to create a free account for the PR Week website. Giving access to the most relevant and up to date information! 

PRWeek has been around since 1998 and offers a website for public relations and marketing professionals to easily access news and opinion pieces relevant to the field. Our subscription now includes access to Breakfast Briefings each weekday morning, US Breaking News Alerts, and a Weekly Edition,which will provide students, staff, and faculty with the latest news coverage affecting the marketing communications industry. For more information on this resource go to https://www.prweek.com/us/about_us.

To benefit from unrestricted access to PRWeek.com you must be registered with your Villanova email address and not a personal email.

How to gain access:

Already registered? As long as you are registered with your Villanova email address, all you need to do is ‘Sign out’ and ‘Sign in’ at https://www.prweek.com/login

Not registered? Activate your subscription by completing a short registration Form.

• Step 1: To create your online account using your Villanova email address, visit https://www.prweek.com/register/ . Please provide your firstname, lastname, email and password, select your region and then click “CONTINUE”

• Step 2: Subscribers will automatically receive the Breakfast Briefing, Breaking News, Weekend and Weekly Online editions; Be sure to click “REGISTER” to complete your registration and activate your account. Once logged in, you may go to My Account, sign up for other newsletters and/or update your newsletter preferences.

Online support:

Forgotten your password? Simply enter your email address at users.prweek.com/password/ and a new password will be sent to you.

For further assistance please visit the FAQ page at prweek.com/us/faq . Alternatively, you can contact the support team at subscriptions@prweek.com . 

This resource is available from the Falvey Library homepage, Databases A-Z list.

Nicole Daly is Communication Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

Marie Roman poses with Jamie Ford, author of the 2011-2012 One Book Villanova selection, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

The Falvey Memorial Library staff recently learned of the passing of Marie Roman, a beloved former Falvey Memorial Library employee, on April 21. Marie retired in 2013, after working as a Resource Management Specialist at Falvey for over 20 years.

During her time at Villanova, Marie’s trademark was her warm, welcoming nature. She cared about her fellow staff and students and invested time in getting to know their stories. Marie was also notorious for her great attention to detail, especially having formerly worked for the Philadelphia Evening & Sunday Bulletin where she met her husband of 44 years, John Roman, who was a long-time reporter for the Delaware County Daily Times.

In addition to her role as a Resource Management Specialist, Marie had a secondary assignment on Programming and Outreach Team. It was there that she assisted with events and displays, often offering thoughtful input and suggestions. In fact. In honor of the anniversary of September 11, 2001, each year Marie would arrange a special patriotic display in remembrance by the entrance of the Library. There, she would carefully place American flags, original newspapers from 2001, as well as colorful bouquets of flowers. To this day, Falvey staff still carry on Marie’s tradition of remembering the victims and heroes of September 11.

Falvey’s patriotic display inspired by Marie Roman in honor of September 11,  2001.

Marie made a lasting impact on Falvey’s staff and student employees. Some Falvey staff members reflect on their favorite memories of Marie:

Jacqueline Smith, Finance and Administration Specialist:

Marie and I would always talk about the latest episodes of PBS This Old House. She and I always wished Tommy Silva, the lead contractor on the show, would come and work on our houses!

I also felt Marie would have made a great reporter with having worked for The Bulletin and being married to a journalist. She was always aware of the “Who,” “What,” “When,” “Where,” and “Why.”

Regina Duffy, Communication and Marketing Program Manager:

Marie and I spent time working together on the Programming and Outreach team during the last few years before she retired. From the time I met her, she was always so welcoming and gracious. I was always impressed with how she could carry on conversations with even the most introverted people—I am pretty sure she could get anyone talking! Marie was so good at making people feel comfortable in her presence.

Though Marie was extremely humble, I know that she was very proud of her husband John, her sons, and her granddaughter, Marissa, whom she talked about often.

I learned a lot from Marie and I will never forget her.

Regina Duffy is a Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

Fall break service hours:

Monday, October 14 – Friday, October 18: 9am-5pm (entrance doors and book stacks lock at 4:30pm, after-hours card access available)

Saturday, October 19: CLOSED (after-hours card access available)

Sunday, October 20: 12-8pm (entrance doors and book stacks lock at 7:30pm, after-hours card access available)

Regular semester hours resume on Monday, October 21. 24/7 areas will remain accessible to students, faculty and staff with a valid Wildcard when the service desk is closed.

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.

Erica Hayes recently joined Research Services and Scholarly Engagement (RSSE) as Digital Scholarship Librarian. RSSE works to support research, teaching, and learning at Villanova University; enabling the discovery of, access to, and stewardship of a vast array of scholarly resources.

Hayes earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Chapman University in Orange, CA; a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, specializing in poetics from California State University, Long Beach; and a Master of Library Science and Master of Information Science from Indiana University, Bloomington.

She is passionate about scholarship and was an Adjunct Professor teaching English Literature and Composition courses when a colleague’s spouse, who was a Digital Humanities Librarian, introduced her to the world of digital scholarship. Encompassing a variety of subjects, digital scholarship lies at the intersection between technology and research. She is excited to collaborate with Villanova faculty and students to help bring their research to life.

“Integrating digital tools into research methods can extend traditional methods of scholarship, sharing knowledge and pedagogy beyond the page,” she says.

While at IU Bloomington, Hayes worked on several projects including the Petrarchive Project, an open access “rich-text” digital edition of Francesco Petrarca’s songbook Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. “The project proposes a new digital way of visualizing, studying, and investigating Petrarch’s work by offering a more ‘authentic’ text as well as multiple indices and tools to access the diverse strata of the work’s composition and cultural contextualization.”

Exhibit: Bird by Bird
She also worked at the Lilly Library, IU Bloomington’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library, as the Web Development Assistant, managing digital collections, Omeka online exhibits, and their website. Collaborating with faculty, Hayes assisted in developing touchscreen exhibits for the library’s special collection exhibits: One of which accompanied the permanent exhibition of John James Audubon’s double elephant folio, Birds of America. “The touchscreen exhibit featured 50 plates of North American bird species from the collection and was created to make the volumes more accessible to library visitors. The touchscreen helped make the collection more interactive while offering an opportunity for patrons to learn more about Audubon and his life,” she explains.

Before starting at Falvey Memorial Library, Hayes completed a two-year fellowship at the NC State University Libraries working in the Copyright and Digital Scholarship Center and the User Experience Department. She led a variety of Digital Scholarship workshops including storytelling with GIS, georeferencing historical maps, and text and data mining.

As the Project Manager on the Immersive Scholar Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant at the NC State University Libraries, Hayes also worked with a group of scholars to create large-scale visualizations and extensible models for the James B. Hunt Jr. Library’s visualization walls. She says, “managing the grant’s workflows, I worked closely with creative residents we hosted at the NC State University Libraries on developing open source visualization projects to be shared across institutions.”

Mapping African Coinage
In her free time, Hayes enjoys traveling, experiencing new cultures, and is looking forward to exploring Philadelphia. Currently, she is also collaborating with her friend, Dr. Kacie Wills, on a digital humanities project, entitled “Exploring the Collections of Sarah Sophia Banks,” which was recently awarded a research grant from the Keats-Shelley Association of America. Sarah Sophia Banks was the sister to Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society and famed botanist on the Cook Voyages. “While her life has often been overshadowed by her brother, Sarah Sophia was an avid collector of coins, medals, and tokens from around the world. It was most unusual for a woman to study numismatics during the eighteenth century and some of her coins are incredibly rare.  For our project, we are mapping the African coins detailed in her coin catalogues that are housed at the British Museum and the Royal Mint,” she says. “Our GIS map features coins from her catalogues, which connects the coin’s location of authority to their places of issue in order to display these unique coins, tokens, and medals while showing how money was being distributed during the growing British Empire.”

As she works to build a digital scholarship program at Villanova, Hayes invites the campus community to reach out and set up an appointment with her: “I can help students incorporate digital tools into their scholarship and assist faculty with developing digital pedagogy assignments in the classroom.”

Hayes’ office is in the Learning Commons of Falvey Memorial Library, room 229. Email: erica.hayes@villanova.edu.

Kallie Stahl, MA ’17 CLAS, is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library. 

Sarah Hughes recently joined Research Services and Scholarly Engagement as the Nursing and Life Sciences Librarian. Research Services and Scholarly Engagement works to support research, teaching, and learning at Villanova University; enabling the discovery of, access to, and stewardship of a vast array of scholarly resources.

A native of New Jersey, Hughes has a passion for research, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Rutgers University and a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the Pratt Institute. She is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Professional Communication from William Paterson University.

“I enjoyed spending time in the library as an undergrad and eventually discovered that I wanted to pursue a career that was both research oriented, but also personal, where I helped people,” she says.

Her interest in the field began when she enrolled in a medical librarianship course taught onsite at Weil Cornell Medicine in Manhattan. “I was in the same building that was being used by the doctors, residents, and nurses. It was exciting. I liked the idea that the research I was assisting the community in could be used for making advances in medicine,” Hughes says.

Furthering her knowledge of the profession, Hughes worked several internships in various hospitals and institutions, including the New York Academy of Medicine, the Manhattan VA Medical Center, and the University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro. The experience she gained helped make for a smooth transition from medical librarian to academic librarian.

Hughes is familiar with academic libraries due to her work with nursing students at Dominican College and teaching library instruction courses to undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students at William Paterson University before transitioning to Falvey Memorial Library. Hughes knew Falvey Library was right for her when she saw that the scholarly librarian position focused exclusively on nursing and life sciences. “I have a deep respect for nurses. Working in the emergency department at Princeton, I was amazed by all of the tasks the nurses dealt with during their shifts.”

Hughes says she is excited to meet the students and faculty in the fall and encourages the Villanova community to reach out and set up an appointment. “I can assist nursing students with finding and using databases, utilizing citation management tools, and pointing them towards great evidence-based practice resources.” Faculty in the Fitzpatrick College of Nursing can also contact Hughes about research consultations. “Research is a big undertaking and takes a great amount of time—months, sometimes years. We’re exploring what tools the library can offer to help scholars in the sciences and other disciplines. Given that Villanova is R2: doctoral university, the stakes and the expectations are higher, and we need to support them.”

In her free time, Hughes enjoys going to see live music, watching foreign and documentary films, exploring new restaurants, traveling, and spending time outdoors kayaking. An avid tennis fan, she likes watching her favorite players Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

“My door is always open to students and faculty. The Fitzpatrick College of Nursing is very prestigious, so I’m thrilled to have a great group of students with which to work. There’s so many different avenues they can take once they finish their degree. I’m excited to help prepare students for their time at Villanova and beyond.”

I’m William Repetto, a second-year graduate student at Villanova University. This is the “‘Cat in the Stacks” column. I’m your ‘cat. I’ll be posting about college life, about learning and growing here at Villanova, and, of course, about the Falvey Memorial Library’s role.

It’s a short drive down Route 1, and a confusing interchange to I-76 West, then a turn south on 476 until a short drive down Lancaster Ave that brings you from La Salle University to Villanova University. Or the opportunity to expand the horizons of your history undergrad with a graduate degree in English ­– that could bring you to Villanova from La Salle as well, especially if the former offers you a very fulfilling graduate assistantship at their campus library.

Here’s me presenting our Diversity and Inclusion Resource Guide idea at Pitch Day, 2017 – one of my favorite memories here at Falvey.

When I think about how far some of my fellow graduate students have traveled to be here at ’Nova, I often feel blessed to have had such a minor change in location and studies. I usually have this thought when I park my car over at the Law Garage and start my walk toward Falvey. In fact, I’ve come to see this stroll from west campus to the library as a metaphor for my experience here at Villanova.

As I set out down route 1 from La Salle, so every morning I start walking down the hill from the garage to the train station. As I started my studies here at ’Nova, so too did I feel pulled heavily downward toward readings and papers more difficult than any other I’d yet read or written. Little did I know how quickly things could change. In one very, very short year, I found myself adapted to the workload, and the downward movement leveled off.

My morning walk levels off in the halls of the underground SEPTA tunnel. In my studies, I too ended up in a strange land – albeit a much more scenic one. During the summer between my first and second years, I enrolled in the Abbey Theatre Summer Studio Program. In the course of an MA, I somehow found myself in totally unfamiliar territory – writing a play of all things. My initiation felt somehow complete.

Many thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way so far, here at Falvey and beyond.

From here began the uphill climb to the thesis and, ironically enough, the library. Every workday I reached Falvey with the same sense of pride and accomplishment that accompanied my acceptance to Villanova. This morning, as I make this walk for a final time, as I feel the weight of my thesis removed, this is a sense of accomplishment that I’ll never forget. I found my way here a determined explorer, and I arose a Wildcat.

Article by William Repetto, a graduate assistant in the Communication and Marketing Dept. at the Falvey Memorial Library. He is currently pursuing an MA in English at Villanova University.