By james art As the University celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, the University Libraries recognize the significant writing achievements of our faculty. Faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno publish scholarly and creative books each year on an impressive array of topics. These works often represent long-term scholarly endeavors and may reflect career-spanning research projects.
The Collections and Discovery Division of the Libraries has been working since 2022 to identify, acquire and provide access to recent books, authors, edited and translated by University faculty. Although we already owned many of these books, both in print and electronic format, we acquired copies of works still available in print to ensure that the library had a physical copy that would be preserved for the future.
There were a number of challenges in moving this project forward, largely due to the nature of book publishing and the lack of a way to know when a university faculty member has published a book.
For published research papers, established indexing typically includes the author’s institutional affiliation, along with scholarly identifiers such as the ORCID ID, to bring the author’s works together. However, publication practices for scholarly books vary widely both by publisher and by discipline, so there is no easy way to discover what books university authors are publishing. Additionally, faculty may publish in creative fields (such as composing music, translating fiction, or writing poetry) where their work is unlikely to end up indexed in research databases (such as Web of Science) that track ORCID ID and Affiliation.
Having publication data in Interfolio (the university’s faculty information system) helped make the current collection initiative possible by giving us a central reporting hub to learn what books have been published. It’s not a perfect system, and there are only recent developments for current academic faculty, but it’s proven to be a good starting point.
The current initiative focuses on identifying and collecting recent (2017 or newer) books authored by current university faculty. We chose this publication window because it both allows us to recognize the work of current faculty and because we have a relatively reliable data source, faculty-reported Interfolio publication data. It becomes more difficult to identify faculty authors as you go back in time, and the older a book is, the less likely it is still in print. Although we started with this window, we have added tracking in our catalog for all printed books by a particular author once we have established their university affiliation. These books can be viewed in our catalog in the University Libraries Faculty Author Collection online and by note in the catalog entry for books we have identified.
We want to know about any books we may have missed! If there are any books of yours that we don’t have, or if we haven’t yet identified them as university faculty authored books, please let us know!
About the author
As Director of Collections and Discovery, Molly Beisler leads the departments of Technical Services: Budget, Electronic Resources and Discovery Services (BERDS) and Metadata, Cataloging, and One-Time Acquisitions (MCOTA). Beisler oversees the libraries’ materials budget and serves on the teams that support and set policy for the Alma library services platform and the Primo VE discovery service.