We strive to find and acquire resources that build a diverse, inclusive, and accessible collection. To keep our collections relevant as the university’s needs evolve, we continually evaluate and acquire resources, whether in response to requests from LMU faculty, students, and staff, recommendations by librarians who serve as liaisons to academic departments, or as new products come on the market from publishers and library vendors.
We add tens of thousands of e-books and hundreds of thousands of electronic periodical articles annually. Two of our recent requests for new electronic resources, however, fall into the area of primary source collections. On the Boards and HistoryMakers are both primary source products that enhance our collections by featuring previously underrepresented materials. On the Boards is a streaming video collection of contemporary dance, theater, and music with a focus on avant-garde productions unlikely to be included in more mainstream performing art resources.
HistoryMakers is the premier collection of video oral history interviews highlighting the accomplishments of individual African Americans and African-American-led groups and movements. LMU faculty have already incorporated both resources into select courses.
We also added a number of new databases from AM, a company that offers sophisticated primary source collections in an approachable package that is attractive to both undergraduate and graduate students. The AM collections we added this year include, but are not limited to: Amnesty International Archives, Conflict in Indochina, Royal Shakespeare Company Archives: Playwrights to Performance, and a collection highlighting the history of the East India Company.
Publishers and library vendors are constantly innovating with new offerings to the academic library market. In 2023-24, we subscribed to several collections from Coherent Digital and joined JSTOR’s Path to Open, both of which cover new ground in the library marketplace. Coherent Digital’s products offer valuable information outside of regular book and journal publishing, including reports from think tanks, intergovernmental organizations, and non-governmental organizations. These reports are sometimes freely available on the internet, but not easily searchable and may disappear from their host sites for any number of reasons, including regime change and funding cuts.
Our recent acquisition of their Global Think Tanks, Africa Commons: History and Culture, and South Asia Commons provide guaranteed access to these collections in an appealing search platform. By subscribing to JSTOR’s Path to Open, we are supporting sustainable open-access publishing from a highly respected library vendor that not only provides diverse, high-quality titles to the LMU community but also advances equity of access to researchers all over the world.