Lyrasis

The increasing impact of catastrophic disasters has inspired a strong network of cooperative disaster resiliency programmes focussing on protection and response for heritage collections and sites around the world. A dedicated community of professionals has developed successful partnership organisations that form a collaboration of institutions, first responders, local community groups and volunteers. At the core in the United States is a consortium of governmental and private organisations. Advocating for and safeguarding cultural heritage against risks draws on conventions, policy frameworks and guidance, becoming an imperative part of effective collection and site management. This article outlines the history, missions, interrelationship and expanded programming of this resolute, primarily volunteer community. The evolution of strategic disaster resilience in North America is non-linear, as are the histories of the organisations and individuals who have contributed to the nascent specialty. Key people and agencies are dedicated to protecting cultural assets and progressively improving and professionalising disaster resilience and recovery. The strategic, physical and psychological needs of disaster-affected communities are now standard management protocols for cultural heritage collections. Tangible documentation of these changes and interconnections are spread between professional repositories and personal archives, with minimal finding aids and dependence on individual memories. This information is gathered, regularly shared and updated as part of experiential training but seldom published in historical or scholarly articles. This article is intended to bridge the gap between a literature review and a record of experiences that have moved the profession of cultural heritage responder and their support organisations forward in time.

This article investigates the opportunities and current challenges involved in using persistent identifier (PID) metadata to understand institutional research activity, based on a 2022 data visualization project led by the ORCID US Community (administered by Lyrasis) in partnership with two fellows from the Drexel University LEADING program. The fellows created an R [See: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language) , accessed September 12, 2023] script that can be used to retrieve information about publishing collaborations between researchers at a home organization and other organizations across the globe, based on metadata from researchers’ ORCID profiles and Crossref DOIs. The dataset produced by the script can be imported into a Tableau Public dashboard template, resulting in a data visualization that can be shared with multiple stakeholders to show trends in collaboration activity and emphasize how PIDs are useful for visualizing researcher activity and impact. However, multiple gaps in the ORCID and DOI metadata, such as authors with no ORCID iD, ORCID profiles with no institution or works data, and missing collaborator information in DOI records, indicate that we still have a long way to go before PIDs can be used to demonstrate a complete picture of research activity.

Following up on a proposal from OSI2016, this workgroup will identify and/or design new funding models for open scholarship, such as a venture fund that can allow more support for joint efforts, or propose ways to improve existing funding by improving the flexibility of library budgets (e.g. by examining the efficiency of “big deals”). After reviewing the challenges with funding open access, the group focused on the second part of the question to propose new ways to improve existing funding opportunities by finding flexibility in library budgets.

Remember in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, our two outlaws kept saying, “Who are those guys?”, referring to the posse relentlessly in pursuit. No doubt in similar fashion you might ask the same question of that band of folk who manage and govern library consortia. Well, they are the relentless posse dedicated to making libraries more than they can be than if they all act individually.