Collections News

  • APC-free publishing news: ACM

    A top publisher of computing research, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), is transitioning all of its publications to Open Access, an initiative it calls ACM Open. Sustained national advocacy and consortial negotiations have resulted in an agreement to support ACM Open, which UAL has now joined. This agreement gives U of A corresponding authors APC-free Open Access publishing in all ACM journals, magazines, and conference and workshop proceedings.

    CSU will send out a brief announcement soon via the Academics Digest email. In the meantime, feel free to raise awareness of this new agreement in your areas, as you see fit.

    We’ve added the ACM publications (n=80) to the SciFree Journal Search Tool, and, thanks to Natasha Nunn, ACM is now listed on the APC Support Page.

  • The Lynch Annual Report Collection is now available online!

    The historic Lynch Annual Report Collection (LARC) consists of over 16,000 annual reports, plus a small mix of other public documentation like prospectus statements, filing and listing statements, shareholder reports, and information sheets. Representing (mostly) Canadian businesses from approximately 1935 to 2011, the majority of the reports are from the 1960s to 1990s. Metadata for each item is simple, consisting of the company name, the publication year and, when available, the location of the company headquarters and former company names.

    This collection access points include the catalogue, A-Z database list, the library digital collections page and directly from the Internet Archive.

    Even if you don’t think graphs and charts are interesting, check it out to see how corporate communications and graphic design have changed over the decades for such companies as Molson Breweries, Air Canada, and Harlequin Publishing. Have a reference question about greenwashing in communications? This might be the perfect primary resource for some serious deep dive research! For more information, you can read a blog post written by one of the digitization assistants who worked on the collection from 2024. This project began in 2019 thanks to Janet Williamson’s suggestion and many digitization assistants and ISS colleagues helped us prepare the material for digitization by matching up the metadata with the physical items. 

    This collection is complementary to McGill Library Canadian Corporate Report collection (which is also *eventually* migrating over to the Internet Archive ), a smaller collection from Columbia University and the subscription database Mergent Archives.

  • New York Times Cancellation (NYT.com)

    As part of our ongoing work assessing Library subscriptions and responding to changes to our acquisitions budget, the CSU team has decided to cancel our subscription to the New York Times via NYT.com and the NYT app. This access will terminate on December 31, 2025.

    The Library retains access to the content published by the New York Times via:

    Please share this changes with interested community members, and thank you for your collaboration. And don’t hesitate to get in touch with csu@ualberta.ca if you have any questions or concerns.

    Sincerely,

    The CSU Librarians’ Team

  • Update to Recommend a Purchase process

    Effective Friday, 29 August, there is a change to the CSU team’s process for handling requests submitted through the Recommend a Purchase form: requests for titles that have not yet been published will be cancelled. This is noted on the Recommend a Purchase form. Tracking unpublished items must be done individually, by hand, and this is no longer sustainable. CSU continues to welcome requests for titles that have been published.

  • NEW Digital Collections section!

    The Digitization/Digital Production Teams will be using this new section to regularly information about new digital collections to better keep the library informed of new resources as they go online. This will replace any all staff emails and provide a quicker and be a more regular space for announcements. We encourage you to share within your own networks, update your LibGuides and contact us at digitization@ualberta.ca with any questions or suggestions for things you’d like to see us cover.

    A big thank you to the Collection Services Unit for letting us share this communication space and bring together Library collection news.

    Figure 1: One of our most popular books in the Wiedrick Collection of historic school resources is Basic Physics for secondary Schools from 1958.
    https://archive.org/details/basicphysicsfors00euba