This was my fourth AERA as an ACRL Liaison.
Library related programs:
New York prices led several of my library colleagues to decide not to attend. There was only one session, five papers, explicitly about library issues on the program. They were focused on school library/media centers The relatively new Special Interest Group -- Research, Education, Information and School Libraries sponsored that session. At their business meeting I learned that the SIG is composed mostly of library school faculty, many with joint appointments in education. They mentioned ALISE and AASL as other memberships.
AERA governance level issues:
For the AERA Council meeting, I prepared a one sheet summary that explained my position, described ACRL, my qualifications and the AERA issues that I was interested in engaging on ACRL’s behalf. The AERA Executive Director took this and handed it out as she introduced me. In what Jon Stewart would call a “Moment of Zen” she said that I was the AERA liaison to ACRL and had done a great job bringing library expertise to AERA’s transition of their publication platform. Since I had no opportunity to speak, I had to leave it to the handout to correct the mistake, but I thought it was a generous introduction that indicated that AERA feels some benefit from this relationship.
Joint Committee on Annual Meeting Quality:
This report will be a big liaison opportunity. So far they have only released the summary. This document advocates a very conservative approach to paper submissions. Every presenter, regardless of the format of the presentation will be asked to submit a paper three weeks in advance of conference. PowerPoints or other formats beyond the classic paper will not be accepted. Of more interest from the library perspective is the proposal to archive all these papers and sell access to them. Presenters will be required to allow this access, but will not be asked to sign over copyright for any other use. There was a rather poorly attended forum at the conference for feedback and I was surprised that all speakers were very supportive. Just a few sessions later I heard that David Berliner’s incredibly powerful presentation about poverty a few years ago was now the most read (by a factor of 3) article in a prominent non-AERA journal. I wonder how the mandated repository would have affected his publishing choices. I will contact other ACRL/AERA members to discuss the report and respond.
At a session later in the conference I heard the views of two AERA leaders on this report and they were not as favorable. Of particular note, John Willinsky mentioned the fact that AERA imposes a one-year embargo on authors for its journals before allowing them to put preprints in an institutional repository. He feels this is unnecessarily restrictive and worried that putting AERA presentation papers into a repository would impose new additional restrictions on access to timely information. Currently ERIC maintains a booth in the exhibits area of the conference and has people on hand to guide authors through the submission process to get their papers into ERIC. They appear in ERIC after only 30 days, so the AERA initiative while more complete than the ERIC one, would be a significant delay, and access would almost certainly be restricted to members, maybe even with additional costs beyond dues. AERA’s main journal, Educational Researcher (roughly an American Libraries equivalent) used to be open access on their web site, but since their move to Sage has been pulled back to member only access, except for the current issue. These are issues we will want to monitor.
Government Relations Committee:
The committee reported that the upcoming reauthorization of the IES (Institute of Education Sciences – part of the U.S. Dept. of Ed) is threatening the autonomy of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). I suspect this is more a matter for ALA than ACRL, but as a member of Council I’ll be watching for opportunities to have an impact.
Publications Committee:
The Publications Committee is moving forward with plans to release more information about AERA journals, in an attempt to solidify prestige I suspect. Submission and acceptance data for all the journals will be published every 6 month in Educational Researcher. The move to the Sage platform has had significant impact on the journal program. Their flagship journal – AERJ – was accessed over 60,000 times in its first year at Sage, well over the 40,000 average. The association has also had an increase in international memberships now that online access is available to members, from 27% to 38% of total membership.
Communication of Research Special Interest Group:
My term as secretary/Treasurer of this group expired and I was elected to be Co-Chair , which includes both the SIG and the SIG Program. We continue to struggle with the fact that issues related to access to information, while vital to the work of the organization, do not attract large crowds for programs. Among the topics that we felt were appropriate for our programs and likely to draw at least a reasonable crowd (25 is good at AERA) assessing quality in literature reviews, impact of open access and other new publishing opportunities on promotion and tenure decisions, new handheld technologies for communication, and standards for open access journals.
At the business meeting we discussed plans for the SIG’s list – soon to be a wiki – of peer reviewed open access journals in education. This list is fairly prominent in education, and is included in the Serials Solution product that places records in individual library catalogs. Luckily the person who has done an excellent job of maintaining it for the past several years agreed to continue as it transitions to a wiki.
Information Literacy Standards:
I discussed the ACRL standards with AERA Executive Director Felice Levine and also included reference to them in my report to AERA Council. As indicated in prior reports to ACRL, AERA does not have a facility for dealing with documents from other bodies for endorsement or consideration. Felice indicated that we could explore ways to bring the issue up within AERA and I will work with her about this in the coming year.