INTRODUCTION Undergraduate research journals provide students with an opportunity to disseminate their work while learning about the scholarly publishing process. The opportunities to learn about scholarly communication have been demonstrated, but such journals also offer a means of helping students attain necessary information literacy competencies. By partnering in the publication of undergraduate journals, libraries can further strategic goals related to information literacy and establish a connection between library publishing and student success. This paper reports on an assessment of the Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research (JPUR) that was designed to evaluate student learning outcomes and demonstrate connections between journal participation and student success. METHODS The assessment plan included all student and faculty stakeholder groups. Online surveys were distributed to primary stakeholder groups annually for three years; students who attended workshops were asked to complete evaluations; and web metrics were collected. RESULTS The findings indicated that students experienced gains in learning as a result of writing an article, writing a research snapshot, or mentoring a student author. Because of their involvement with JPUR, student authors intended to publish articles in the future. JPUR influenced career decisions. Faculty were motivated to continue to act as mentors for undergraduate research. DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION The assessment showed that student authors benefitted from experiencing the full spectrum of the scholarly publishing process. Notably, students gained knowledge of important information literacy concepts. These learning gains and the demonstrated influence of JPUR on student career and scholarly aspirations clearly show that publication of an undergraduate research journal supports university priorities for student success as well as the Libraries' strategic priorities of information literacy and scholarly communication. It is recommended that other institutions that are publishing undergraduate journals undertake similar assessments, which will further establish the value of such publications.

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Key points• Around 30% of campus-based members of the Association of American University Presses now report to libraries, more than double the number 5 years ago.• Beyond reporting relationships, physical collocation and joint strategic planning characterize the most integrated press/library partnerships.• The main mutual advantages of deep press/library collaboration are economic efficiency, greater relevance to parent institutions, and an increased capacity to engage with the changing needs of authors in the digital age.• There is emerging interest in collaboration at scale among libraries and presses that may extend the impact of press/library collaboration beyond single institutions.

This paper considers how the Communist dictatorship in Albania employed material symbols to help impose its ideological vision on the population. We illustrate the eventual demise of these strategies of domination, by describing what has become of some specific elements of Communist material culture (bunkers) in a post-Communist landscape, and by discussing the use and re-use of an individual artefact (a second-century AD architectural block) as a symbol of resistance during Communism and of new beginnings in the post-Communist era. Rather than presenting substantive archaeological data, this paper explores how the treatment of material culture in newly open post-Communist countries like Albania can stimulate archaeological thinking about the formation and manipulation of landscapes and the interplay between domination and resistance as an agent of change.

University presses occupy a distinctive field of publishing, heavily tied to the fortunes of the universities and colleges in which they are usually situated. COVID-19 has catalysed their adoption of digital technologies; focused their commitments to social justice; and given new impetus to business models and formats that fully leverage the Internet, especially open access. Economic pressures on higher education that seem set only to increase are also driving university presses to more interdependent approaches and an emphasis on the contributions of the university press network to knowledge infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. This article explores how university presses have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular reference to the experiences of the University of Michigan Press. It concludes that the diversity of types of university presses is one of the greatest strengths of this field of publishing and makes it resilient in a time of unprecedented change.

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This article explores the growing involvement of libraries in providing publishing services for the informal scholarly outputs traditionally referred to as 'gray literature'. By envisioning institutional repository (IR) infrastructure as a publishing platform, libraries can bring conference proceedings, technical reports, niche journals, white papers and other hard-to-source materials into the mainstream. The opportunities of such an approach for scholars, libraries and university presses open to collaboration are considered. Several directions for future expansion of this activity, such as the publication of student scholarship and the development of more formal products linked to gray literature, are suggested.

University presses have served two masters arguably since Cambridge began printing bibles, and certainly since Johns Hopkins’ first president included us among a university’s “noblest duties” in 1878. We are unique among our higher education colleagues in having one foot firmly in the academy and the other firmly in the marketplace. While presses generally have balanced these oft-competing demands, new pressure points are emerging. As technology offers new ways to deliver content and new ways to measure engagement … as traditional business models struggle under the combined weight of changed buying patterns and broader pressures on the higher education finances … is it time to ask: are we still measuring the right things? In this panel, diverse perspectives weigh in on how university presses might think about balancing mission and money going forward. Recording of a live webinar held on 21 May 2020 as part of the Redux Online series.