Atla Annual 2020 Online

A bibliometric analysis of the scholarship of ninety-five Social Science faculty members at the University of West Georgia yields findings about journal usage of interest to ATLA librarians who support scholarly communication in Religion. In addition to a brief overview of the methods employed and the conclusions drawn from the dataset, lessons learned about the effectiveness of citation analysis sites, emerging trends in the use of open source research resources by scholars, and tools employed by authors in Social Science disciplines to assert their rights and promote their work emerged from the study. They will be presented for consideration in relation to the discipline of Religious Studies.

This presentation advocates for theological librarians to engage in the practice of writing and publishing book reviews. Reviewing books for academic and popular publications is one avenue through which librarians are uniquely situated to contribute to scholarly conversations and engage our communities. Reviewing can be a manageable way for busy librarians to publish, it contributes to professional development, it can promote diversity in our collections and institutions, and it can sharpen reference skills. I will offer some practical suggestions for how librarians who have little or no experience reviewing books can begin to do so. I will discuss the pros and cons of reviewing for popular vs. academic publications as well as traditional vs. online and open access platforms.

During this session, attendees will learn the basics of U.S. copyright law and fair use jurisprudence as applied to libraries as well as discover best practices to be employed when engaging in digitization of library and archive collections. Permissions and post-digitization licensing and reuse policies will also be covered.