Since the inception of the environmental justice movement in the late 1980s, studies have been conducted at national, regional, state, and local levels. However, environmental justice within the state of Illinois is largely unresearched. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining whether the presence of a Superfund site affects the surrounding communities in the state of Illinois with the intent to aid future siting decisions of hazardous sites and the amelioration of current sites. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was used to create buffer zones of one-, two-, and five-miles surrounding current Illinois Superfund sites. We then used these neighborhoods of the same size to analyze the current economic and racial demographics of Illinois communities that contain Superfund sites. Specifically, variables considered as indicators of environmental injustice were analyzed, including race, median household income, and homeownership. Our results support prior research that suggested race, rather than class, was the major indicator of environmental inequality. Additionally, as the distance from the Superfund site increases, the number of communities with socio-demographic disparities decreases. Our conclusions provide important theoretical implications for environmental justice research by distinguishing the racial factor from other socioeconomic factors (e.g., income and homeownership) and by identifying the socio-demographic characteristics associated with distance from a Superfund site.

In recent years, a growing number of libraries have canceled or unbundled their "Big Deal" journal subscriptionsthose subscriptions that include a full package of digital journal titles for one discounted cost. This started as an affordability problem but has slowly morphed into a challenge from libraries demanding a new pricing structure that accommodates and spurs the growing open access movement.The change has caused a variety of challenges for technical services units including the increased need for user data, increasingly complicated workflows as they manage partial subscriptions, new interactions with consortia, and ongoing campus conversations. Whether the library is seeking to simply unbundle due to budget constraints, or push for new models such as "read and publish", there is a tremendous impact on the work of technical services units. This chapter will explore the rationale and growth of the Big Deal, how it is breaking, four case studies on breaking Big Deals, a brief discussion of new transformative agreements, new challenges for consortia, and implications for technical services units moving forward.