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Winner of the 2026 SUNYLA Excellence in Scholarship Award

A complicated topic encompassing many disparate facets, digital accessibility in libraries is in constant flux as new technologies emerge and design standards continue to evolve. This makes it challenging for library workers to ensure that their libraries meet legal requirements while also fostering inclusion for all their community members. Incorporating advice from a range of outside accessibility experts and practitioners, this guide is here to help. It delves into practical steps you can take to ensure that your library’s online presence is welcoming to everyone and that all your digital offerings avoid barriers that can exclude users with disabilities. No matter your level of experience or type of library, from this book you will

• come to understand what is meant by disability and why libraries have obligations to support disabled users;
• learn about a wide range of software and hardware for creating inclusive spaces and services regardless of your budget limitations or staffing levels;
• get comfortable with the overarching principles of online accessibility and how they specifically apply to library websites, digital media and files, digital communications, and emerging technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence (AI);
• discover how libraries can verify the accessibility of the tools they develop or subscribe to, including best practices for working with vendors to optimize the accessibility of their library products;
• be invited to reflect upon the future of digital accessibility, particularly concerning education and hiring to ensure that accessibility remains central to the work done at all libraries.

Both Spina and Oling have worked within SUNY - The State University of New York to hone skills and thinking in this area, resulting in the Library Procurement Accessibility Toolkit, an ongoing project. They currently co-chair a subcommittee reviewing the SUNY libraries' implementation of the Electronic Information Accessibility Policy.

The recent announcement that Google will digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long-dreamed-of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infringement and unanticipated effects on the business of research and publishing. 

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, here takes aim at what he sees as a far more troubling aspect of Google’s Library Project: its potential to misrepresent—and even damage—the world’s cultural heritage. In this impassioned work, Jeanneney argues that Google’s unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad. This danger is made evident by a Google book search the author discusses here—one run on Hugo, Cervantes, Dante, and Goethe that resulted in just one non-English edition, and a German translation of Hugo at that. An archive that can so easily slight the masters of European literature—and whose development is driven by commercial interests—cannot provide the foundation for a universal library. 

As a leading librarian, Jeanneney remains enthusiastic about the archival potential of the Web. But he argues that the short-term thinking characterized by Google’s digital repository must be countered by long-term planning on the part of cultural and governmental institutions worldwide—a serious effort to create a truly comprehensive library, one based on the politics of inclusion and multiculturalism. 

Students are reading on screens more than ever—how can we teach them to be better digital readers?

Smartphones, laptops, tablets: college students are reading on-screen all the time, and digital devices shape students’ understanding of and experiences with reading. In higher education, however, teachers rarely consider how digital reading experiences may have an impact on learning abilities, unless they’re lamenting students’ attention spans or the distractions available to students when they’re learning online.

Skim, Dive, Surface offers a corrective to these conversations—an invitation to focus not on losses to student learning but on the spectrum of affordances available within digital learning environments. It is designed to help college instructors across the curriculum teach digital reading in their classes, whether they teach face-to-face, fully online, or somewhere in between. Placing research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, learning science, and composition in dialogue with insight from the scholarship of teaching and learning, Jenae Cohn shows how teachers can better frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital reading assignments. She positions digital reading as part of a cluster of literacies that students should develop in order to communicate effectively in a digital environment.

"By casting the collection explicitly as an outreach to the larger community of Americanists---not primarily those who self-identify as 'digital scholars'---Earhart and Jewell have made an important choice, and one that will likely make this a landmark publication."
---Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, which features a wide range of practitioner-scholars, is the first of its kind: a gathering of people who are expert in American literary studies and in digital technologies, scholars uniquely able to draw from experience with building digital resources and to provide theoretical commentary on how the transformation to new technologies alters the way we think about and articulate scholarship in American literature. The volume collects articles from those who are involved in tool development, usability testing, editing and textual scholarship, digital librarianship, and issues of race and ethnicity in digital humanities, while also situating digital humanities work within the larger literary discipline. In addition, the volume examines the traditional structures of the fields, including tenure and promotion criteria, modes of scholarly production, the skill sets required for scholarship, and the training of new scholars.

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age will attract practitioners of digital humanities in multiple fields, Americanists who utilize digital materials, and those who are intellectually curious about the new movement and materials.

Amy E. Earhart is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M University.

Andrew Jewell is Associate Professor of Digital Projects, University Libraries, at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Cover art: Book background ©iStockphoto.com/natashika

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

Your library is a vital information hub and resource provider every single day, and that’s doubly true when calamity strikes. In fact, your library’s role as an “essential community function” during disasters is now encoded in U.S. law. Engaging as a partner in planning and preparedness will build much-needed community support should disaster strike, and even a basic plan will also save you time and stress later on. No matter where your library is in the disaster planning cycle, this handbook will make the process clearer and less daunting. You’ll get tools, activities, easy-to-adapt templates, and hands-on guidance on such topics as

• the six phases of disaster response;
• 15 first-hand accounts of library disaster planning or responses, helping you identify the library services most needed during a disaster;
• three essential factors that will shape the form of your disaster plan;
• preparing for hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, floods, and earthquakes;
• ideas for connecting with your community’s emergency response teams; 
• federal government planning resources;
• pointers on working with state and local governments;
• a sample Memorandum of Understanding to outline mutual support for a speedier recovery;
• recommended courses and training, many of which are free;
• targeted advice for archives and special collections;
• sample building inspection checklists; and
• recommended games to help children and families prepare.

A library user can’t access an article. Your log in credentials won’t work. In the realm of electronic resources everything runs smoothly—until suddenly, without warning, it doesn’t. Invariably, systems will break down, but a trial and error approach to finding out what’s wrong is highly inefficient. This hands-on guide from two expert ERM librarians walks you through the essentials of troubleshooting. It outlines a methodical process that will help you identify the source of a problem even when it’s not obvious and take steps to reach a resolution. With the goal of developing a library-wide workflow in mind, this guide will teach you how to

• familiarize yourself with the components of electronic resources, using flowchart diagrams of common access chains such as discovery services, knowledge bases, research guides, and library services platforms;
• navigate the complete triage and troubleshooting workflow, illustrated through 14 in-depth examples;
• recognize the symptoms of common access disruptions;
• conduct efficient troubleshooting interviews;
• manage help tickets and design problem reports that capture key information without overburdening the user;
• create publicly available help pages for problems originating with users’ devices or computers;
• communicate with vendors and IT personnel for speedy resolutions, providing dozens of clear definitions of library and technology terms that will help you minimize confusion; and
• customize your own troubleshooting workflow chart for common use across departments and staff hierarchies.

• discusses the results of a unique survey that provides new and structured information on digital library outreach and instruction;
• presents outreach case studies illustrating uses of social media promotion, integration of digital collections into teaching and instruction activities, partnerships with external campus units or community organizations, and other activities;
• explores many types of instruction, from drop-in class sessions and training to course-integrated instruction and ways that digital library practitioners can contribute to the Open Educational Resources (OER) and open pedagogy movements;
• details the digital humanities and digital scholarship programs developed at the University of Utah by many of the authors through cross-departmental collaboration;
• describes the ways in which the pandemic spurred many institutions to use rapid response collecting to practice community engagement; and
• speculates on future directions for outreach and instruction for digital libraries.