Tag: education

ER&L 2014 — Human TERMS of Engagement

TERMS logo
TERMS logo

Speaker: Galadriel Chilton, University of Connecticut

Used TERMS as a framework for developing an eresources team and a course at University of Wisconsin.

How are we going to systematically ensure that our eresources knowledge evolves and continues?

75% of UConn’s budget is for e-content. The human resources was 3.25 FTE when she arrived, but now they are at 5.65 FTE. The only other unit smaller is the digital scholarship and data curation team created a year ago.

Why does collection development for non-ERM staff exist as a term for non-electronic monograph acquisitions? In 2014? How do we establish eresources teams and teach this to staff?

She used TERMS and the NASIG Core Competencies.

TERMS helps build a framework for discussion among her students and her work team. The Core Competencies was used for class reading and discussions with her team, and became a framework for submitting training requests. TERMS has been a lighthouse for them, and they’ve continued to go back to them and review the cyclical process to identify successes and areas for improvements.

Only 19% of the ALA accredited LIS programs cover ERM topics, yet 73% of recent job ads require ERM competencies.

The financial resources are be allocated, what about the human resources to do our work. Eresources positions are not entry-level, and yet the spend in that content is increases. How can we expand/grow the ERM skill-set to more of our staff positions? This is not a new problem. We’ve been talking about this as a profession since 2000 or earlier.

The Core Competencies should be for the entire library, not just the ERM staff.

We need to eliminate the delineation between print and electronic management/acquisitions.

Establish partnerships with LIS programs. Establish paid fellowships that are at least two fiscal years in length. Get support from library administrators for adequate staffing and the time to teach courses, etc.

Good strategies for training staff: Listening to them and knowing what they already know how to do. Making analogies from what you know to what they know. Small chunks at a time.

Are the NASIG Core Competencies a laundry list of the ideal rather than true core competencies that can be expected at the beginning of an ERM career? No. The point is that no one person can do everything ERM. But, these are the things that are needed to manage eresources, regardless of how many people it takes to do it.

Audience member says she had to fail badly with only two staff in order to get the change needed to have a sufficient number of people on her team.

NASIG 2013: Collaboration in a Time of Change

CC BY 2.0 2013-06-10
“soccer practice” by woodleywonderworks

Speaker: Daryl Yang

Why collaborate?

Despite how popular Apple products are today, they almost went bankrupt in the 90s. Experts believe that despite their innovation, their lack of collaboration led to this near-downfall. iTunes, iPod, iPad — these all require working with many developers, and is a big part of why they came back.

Microsoft started off as very open to collaboration and innovation from outside of the company, but that is not the case now. In order to get back into the groove, they have partnered with Nokia to enter the mobile phone market.

Collaboration can create commercial success, innovation, synergies, and efficiencies.

What change?

The amount of information generated now is vastly more than has ever been collected in the past. It is beyond our imagination.

How has library work changed? We still manage collections and access to information, but the way we do so has evolved with the ways information is delivered. We have had to increase our negotiation skills as every transaction is uniquely based on our customer profile. We have also needed to reorganize our structures and workflows to meet changing needs of our institutions and the information environment.

Deloitte identified ten key challenges faced by higher education: funding (public, endowment, and tuition), rivalry (competing globally for the best students), setting priorities (appropriate use of resources), technology (infrastructure & training), infrastructure (classroom design, offices), links to outcomes (graduation to employment), attracting talent (and retaining them), sustainability (practicing what we preach), widening access (MOOC, open access), and regulation (under increasing pressure to show how public funding is being used, but also maintaining student data privacy).

Libraries say they have too much stuff on shelves, more of it is available electronically, and it keeps coming. Do we really need to keep both print and digital when there is a growing pressure on space for users?

The British Library Document Supply Centre plays an essential role in delivering physical content on demand, but the demand is falling as more information is available online. And, their IT infrastructure needs modernization.

These concerns sparked conversations that created UK Research Reserve, and the evaluation of print journal usage. Users prefer print for in-depth reading, and HSS still have a high usage of print materials compared to the sciences. At least, that was the case 5-6 years ago when UKRR was created.

Ithaka S+R, JISC, and RLUK sent out a survey to faculty about print journal use, and they found that this is still fairly true. They also discovered that even those who are comfortable with electronic journal collections, they would not be happy to see print collections discarded. There was clearly a demand that some library, if not their own, maintain a collection of hard copies of journals. Libraries don’t have to keep them, but SOMEONE has to.

It is hard to predict research needs in the future, so it is important to preserve content for that future demand, and make sure that you still own it.

UKRR’s initial objectives were to de-duplicate low-use journals and allow their members to release space and realize savings/efficiency, and to preserve research material and provide access for researchers. They also want to achieve cultural change — librarians/academics don’t like to throw away things.

So far, they have examined 60,700 holdings, and of that, only 16% has been retained. They intend to keep at least 3 copies among the membership, so there was a significant amount of overlap in holdings across all of the schools.

NASIG 2013: Losing Staff — the Seven Stages of Loss and Recovery

CC BY-ND 2.0 2013-06-10
“Autumn dawn” by James Jordan

Speaker: Elena Romaniuk

This is about losing staff to retirement, and not about losing staff to death, which is similar but different.

They started as one librarian and six staff, and now two of them have retired and have not been replaced. This is true of most of technical services, where staff were not replaced or shifted to other departments.

The staff she lost were key to helping run the department, often filling in when she was out for extended leaves. They were also the only experienced support staff catalogers.

The stages:

  1. Shock and denial
  2. Pain and guilt
  3. Anger and bargaining
  4. Depression, reflection, loneliness
  5. Upward turn
  6. Reconstruction and working through
  7. Acceptance and hope

The pain went beyond friends leaving, because they also lost a lot of institutional memory and the workload was spread across the remaining staff. They couldn’t be angry at the staff who left, and they couldn’t bargain except to let administrators know that with less people, not all of the work could be continued and there may be some backlogs.

However, this allowed them to focus on the reflection stage and assess what may have changed about the work in recent years, and how that could be reflected in the new unit responsibilities. The serials universe is larger and more complex, with diverse issues that require higher-level understanding. There are fewer physical items to manage, and they don’t catalog as many titles anymore, with most of them being for special collections donations.

They are still expected to get the work done, despite having fewer staff, and if they got more staff, they would need more than one to handle it all. Given the options, she decided to take the remaining staff in the unit who have a lot of serials-related experience and train them up to handle the cataloging as well, as long as they were willing to do it.

In the end, they re-wrote the positions to be the same, with about half focused on cataloging and the rest with the other duties rotated through the unit on a monthly basis.

They have acceptance and hope, with differing levels of anxiety among the staff. The backlogs will grow, but as they get more comfortable with the cataloging they will catch up.

What worked in their favor: they had plenty of notice, giving them time to plan and prepare, and do some training before the catalogers left.

One of the recommended coping strategies was for the unit head to be as available as possible for problem solving. They needed clear priorities with documented procedures that are revised as needed. The staff also needed to be willing to consult with each other. The staff also needed to be okay with not finishing everything every day, and that backlogs will happen.

They underestimated the time needed for problem-solving, and need to provide more training about basic cataloging as well as serials cataloging specifically. There is always too much work with multiple simultaneous demands.

She is considering asking for another librarian, even if only on a term basis, to help catch up on the work. There is also the possibility of another reorganization or having someone from cataloging come over to help.

[lovely quote at the end that I will add when the slides are uploaded]

NASIG 2013: Getting to the Core of the Matter — Competencies for New E-Resources Librarians

“Canyon do Buracão” by Joao Vicente

Speakers: Roën Janyk (Okanagan College) & Emma Lawson (Langara College)

Two new-ish librarians talk about applying their LIS training to the real world, and using the Core Competencies as a framework for identifying the gaps they encountered. They wanted to determine if the problem is training or if eresources/serials management is just really complicated.

Collection development, cataloging (both MARC and Dublin Core), records management, and digital management were covered in their classes. Needed more on institutional repository management.

They did not cover licensing at all, so all they learned was on the job, comparing different documents. They also learned that the things librarians look for in contracts is not what the college administrators are concerned about. In addition, the details of information about budgeting and where that information should be stored was fuzzy, and it took some time to gather that in their jobs. And, as with many positions, if institutional memory (and logins) is not passed on, a lot of time will be spent on recreating it. For LIS programs, they wish they had more information about the details of use statistics and their application, as well as resource format types and the quirks that come with them.

They had classes about information technology design and broader picture things, but not enough about relationships between the library and IT or the kinds of information technology in libraries now. There were some courses that focused on less relevant technology and history of technology, and the higher level courses required too high of a learning curve to attract LIS students.

For the core competency on research analysis and application, we need to be able to gather appropriate data and present the analysis to colleagues and superiors in a way that they can understand it. In applying this, they ran into questions about comparing eresources to print, deciding when to keep a low-use resource, and other common criteria for comparing collections besides cost/use. In addition, there needs to be more taught about managing a budget, determining when to make cancelation or format change decisions, alternatives to subscriptions, and communicating all of this outside of the library.

Effective communication touches on everything that we do. It requires that you frame situations from someone else’s viewpoint. You need to document everything and be able to clearly describe the situation in order to trouble-shoot with vendors. Be sympathetic to the frustrations of users encountering the problems.

Staff supervision may range from teams with no managerial authority to staff who report to you. ER librarians have to be flexible and work within a variety of deparmental/project frameworks, and even if they do have management authority, they will likely have to manage projects that involve staff from other departments/divisions/teams. They did not find that the library management course was very applicable. Project management class was much more useful. One main challenge is staff who have worked in the library for a long time, and change management or leadership training would be very valuable, as well as conversations about working with unionized staff.

In the real world being aware of trends in the profession involves attending conferences, participating in webinars/online training, and keeping up with the literature. They didn’t actually see an ERMS while in school, nor did they work with any proprietary ILS. Most of us learn new things by talking to our colleagues at other institutions. MLS faculty need to keep up with the trends as well, and incorporate that into classes — this stuff changes rapidly.

They recommend that ILS and ERMS vendors collaborate with MLS programs so that students have some real-world applications they can take with them to their jobs. Keep courses current (what is actually being used in libraries) and constantly be evaluating the curriculum, which is beyond what ALA requires for accreditation. More case studies and real-world experiences in applied courses. Collection development course was too focused on print collection analysis and did not cover electronic resources.

As a profession, we need more sessions at larger, general conferences that focus on electronic resources so that we’re not just in our bubble. More cross-training in the workplaces. MLS programs need to promote eresources as a career path, instead of just the traditional reference/cataloger/YA divides.

If we are learning it all on the job, then why are we required to get the degrees?

NASIG 2010: It’s Time to Join Forces: New Approaches and Models that Support Sustainable Scholarship

Presenters: David Fritsch, JSTOR and Rachel Lee, University of California Press

JSTOR has started working with several university press and other small scholarly publishers to develop sustainable options.

UC Press is one of the largest university press in the US (36 journals in the humanities, biological & social sciences), publishing both UC titles and society titles. Their prices range from $97-422 for annual subscriptions, and they are SHERPA Green. One of the challenges they face on their own platform is keeping up with libraries expectations.

ITHAKA is a merger of JSTOR, ITHAKA, Portico, and Alkula, so JSTOR is now a service rather than a separate company. Most everyone here knows what the JSTOR product/service is, and that hasn’t changed much with the merger.

Scholar’s use of information is moving online, and if it’s not online, they’ll use a different resource, even if it’s not as good. And, if things aren’t discoverable by Google, they are often overlooked. More complex content is emerging, including multimedia and user-generated content. Mergers and acquisitions in publishing are consolidating content under a few umbrellas, and this threatens smaller publishers and university presses that can’t keep up with the costs on a smaller scale.

The serials crisis has impacted smaller presses more than larger ones. Despite good relationships with societies, it is difficult to retain popular society publications when larger publishers can offer them more. It’s also harder to offer the deep discounts expected by libraries in consortial arrangements. University presses and small publishers are in danger of becoming the publisher of last resort.

UC Press and JSTOR have had a long relationship, with JSTOR providing long-term archiving that UC Press could not have afforded to maintain on their own. Not all of the titles are included (only 22), but they are the most popular. They’ve also participated in Portico. JSTOR is also partnering with 18 other publishers that are mission-driven rather than profit-driven, with experience at balancing the needs of academia and publishing.

By partnering with JSTOR for their new content, UC Press will be able to take advantage of the expanded digital platform, sales teams, customer service, and seamless access to both archive and current content. There are some risks, including the potential loss of identity, autonomy, and direct communication with libraries. And then there is the bureaucracy of working within a larger company.

The Current Scholarship Program seeks to provide a solution to the problems outlined above that university presses and small scholarly publishers are facing. The shared technology platform, Portico preservation, sustainable business model, and administrative services potentially free up these small publishers to focus on generating high-quality content and furthering their scholarly communication missions.

Libraries will be able to purchase current subscriptions either through their agents or JSTOR (who will not be charging a service fee). However, archive content will be purchased directly from JSTOR. JSTOR will handle all of the licensing, and current JSTOR subscribers will simply have a rider adding title to their existing licenses. For libraries that purchase JSTOR collections through consortia arrangements, it will be possible to add title by title subscriptions without going through the consortia if a consortia agreement doesn’t make sense for purchase decisions. They will be offering both single-title purchases and collections, with the latter being more useful for large libraries, consortia, and those who want current content for titles in their JSTOR collections.

They still don’t know what they will do about post-cancellation access. Big red flag here for potential early adopters, but hopefully this will be sorted out before the program really kicks in.

Benefits for libraries: reasonable pricing, more efficient discovery, single license, and meaningful COUNTER-compliant statistics for the full run of a title. Renewal subscriptions will maintain access to what they have already, and new subscriptions will come with access to the first online year provided by the publisher, which may not be volume one, but certainly as comprehensive as what most publishers offer now.

UC Press plans to start transitioning in January 2011. New orders, claims, etc. will be handled by JSTOR (including print subscriptions), but UC Press will be setting their own prices. Their platform, Caliber, will remain open until June 30, 2011, but after that content will be only on the JSTOR platform. UC Press expects to move to online-only in the next few years, particularly as the number of print subscriptions are dwindling to the point where it is cost-prohibitive to produce the print issues.

There is some interest from the publishers to add monographic content as well, but JSTOR isn’t ready to do that yet. They will need to develop some significant infrastructure in order to handle the order processing of monographs.

Some in the audience are concerned that the cost of developing platform enhancements and other tools, mostly that these costs will be passed on in subscription prices. They will be, to a certain extent, only in that the publishers will be contributing to the developments and they set the prices, but because it is a shared system, the costs will be spread out and likely impact libraries no more than they have already.

One big challenge all will face is unlearning the mindset that JSTOR is only archive content and not current content.

more degrees for the same pay

In a recent Chronicle article, Todd Gilman complains about the lack of job postings for librarian subject specialists who have secondary master’s or doctoral degrees. While I think he makes valid points for why subject specialists should have post-graduate education in their fields of study, particularly if they are in tenure-track positions, I think he misses the mark as to why libraries are hiring folks without those degrees.

In that job posting and many others, the most attention paid to subject expertise (in the form of a master’s or Ph.D.) is a brief mention in the list of “preferred” qualifications. That is a strong indication that the hiring institution will settle for less — much less. In fact, I’m told that in a number of recent hires, Ph.D.’s and M.A.’s — some with years of professional experience working in top academic libraries in addition to having an MLIS — have been passed over in favor of candidates straight out of library school whose only previous degree was a bachelor’s.

Were they passed over because they asked for more compensation than what the institution was willing to pay? I suspect that may play a much larger role than what Mr. Gilman is giving it.

Libraries are usually the first target for budget cuts, and one of the biggest expenses in a library is staff salaries. Someone who has post-graduate degrees beyond the MLS will likely expect to be compensated for the additional skills and knowledge they bring to the job. University administrators either don’t understand or don’t care about the value that these folks add to collections and instruction, and as a result, they are unwilling to meet the compensation demands of these “better qualified” candidates. Recent graduates in any field will cost the university less in the salary department, and that short-term benefit is the only one that (mostly short-timer) administrators care about.

Given all that, would you go through the trouble of getting a second master’s degree or a doctoral degree, knowing that unless you are already in a tenure-track position with fair compensation, it is unlikely that you’ll be payed any more than you are already? Probably not, unless you were particularly passionate about research in your field of study.

Even so, that research might not help you with tenure, as some colleagues of mine discovered when their institution’s tenure requirements changed so that scholarship in their primary field (read: library science) alone counted towards tenure and post-tenure review. Nevermind that they focused most of their scholarly research in their secondary subject specialties.

All of the above is why I took myself out of the tenure-track world. I have no interest (at this time) in becoming a subject specialist in anything but what I do every day: librarianship. I’m happy to let others make decisions about content, so long as they let me focus on my areas of expertise, such as delivery platforms, access, and licensing issues.

CiL 2008: What Do Users Really Do in Their Native Habitat?

Speakers: Pascal Lupien and Randy Oldham

Unsubstantiated assumptions about Millennials cause libraries to make poor choices in providing services and resources. Lupien and Oldham spent some time studying how students actually use the tools we think they use. They used typical survey and focus group methodologies, which make for rather boring presentation recaps, so I won’t mention them.

Study found that only 9% of students used PDAs, and tended to be among older students. 69% of students had cell phones, but only 17% of them have ever used them to browse the Internet. 93% of student have used a chat client, and most have used them for academic purposes several times per week. 50% of users had never used online social network applications for academic group work.

The focus groups found that students preferred email over online social networks for group work. Students are more willing to share the results of their work with friends than with other classmates.

42% of students has never played online games, and men were three times more likely to do so than women. Only 4.1% were involved with online virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life.

The survey respondents indicated they were more likely to go to the library’s website first rather than Google. The focus groups also confirmed this, in addition to indicating that the library had the best sources of information despite being the most difficult to manage.

Students are reluctant to mix personal and academic computing. The uptake on online social networks for academic use has been slow, but will likely increase, and we have to ask, “is this the best use of our resources and time?” Our priorities need to be more on improving the services we already offer, such as our websites and search tools. “Rather than looking at technologies & trying to find a use for them in our environment, we should determine what our students need & seek solutions to meet those needs.”

Speaker: John Law

Proquest conducted a survey of seven universities across North America and the United Kingdom, involving 60 students. As with Lupien and Oldham’s study, they conducted it anonymously. Observations were conducted in a variety of locations, from the library to dorm rooms. They used a program like web conferencing software to capture the remote sessions.

Law gave an anecdote of a fourth year student who did all the things librarians want students to do when doing research, and when he was asked why, the student gave all the right answers. Then, when he was asked how long he had been doing his research that way, he indicated something like six weeks, after a librarian had come to his class to teach them about using the library’s resources. Library instruction works.

Course instructors are also influential. “My English instructor told me to use JSTOR.”

Brand recognition is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily effect the likelihood that resources will be used more or less.

Students use abstracts to identify relevant articles, even when the full text is available. They’re comfortable navigating in several different search engines, but not as well with library websites in locating relevant resources. Users don’t always understand what the search box is searching (books, articles, etc.), and can find it to be discouraging. A-Z databases page is too unmanageable for most users, particularly when starting their research.

Students are using Google for their research, but mainly for handy look-ups and not as a primary research tool. Those who use Google as a primary research tool do so because they aren’t as concerned with quality or are insufficiently aware of library eresources or have had bad experiences with library eresources.

Librarians, students use Google and Wikipedia the same way you do. (We know you all use those tools, so don’t even try to deny it.)

Students laughed at surveyors when asked how they use online social networks for academic purposes.

graduate assistantships available

The James E. Brooks Library faculty announce a graduate assistantship program for individuals who already have an MLS, or equivalent, and who desire a second subject master degree.

Graduate Assistantships Available
The James E. Brooks Library
Central Washington University
2007-2008

The James E. Brooks Library faculty announce a graduate assistantship program for individuals who already have an MLS, or equivalent, and who desire a second subject master degree. This unique two-year program allows an individual to study in any of eighteen graduate programs while gaining valuable professional experience in an academic library. Ideal for new or experienced tenure-seeking librarians, candidates must apply to the graduate school and be accepted into a program prior to being accepted as a paid library graduate assistant.

The assistantship is really two programs; an opportunity to gain valuable professional experience under the tutelage of professional librarians while getting that second, often necessary, advanced degree required at many academic libraries. For experienced librarians this assistantship is also two programs; a chance to advance by studying for an advanced degree while renewing and recharging one’s self during an extended leave of absence. Total benefits include a stipend of $7,120, plus paid tuition, medical insurance and health center fees equaling approximately $13,888 per academic year. Summer study and employment opportunities may also be available.

Opportunities are available for candidates to gain professional experience in reference, instruction, library technology and systems, technical services, outreach, archives and record management, government publications, maps, assessment and research.

Application and queries may be initiated by contacting Dr. Thomas M. Peischl, Dean of Library Services at peischl@cwu.edu, or by telephone at (509) 963-1901, or by mail at The James E. Brooks Library, 400 East University Way, Ellensburg, WA 98926.

Central Washington University
The James E. Brooks Library
The Office of Graduate Studies and Research

vocal bands

It started one night a couple of months ago when I was cruising CD Baby for some music similar to The Bobs. I ended up buying two CDs: In Accord’s Departures and In the Buff’s Disturbing the Quiet Enjoyment of the Home. Then last week I was surfing the web and ran across a mention … Continue reading “vocal bands”

It started one night a couple of months ago when I was cruising CD Baby for some music similar to The Bobs. I ended up buying two CDs: In Accord’s Departures and In the Buff’s Disturbing the Quiet Enjoyment of the Home. Then last week I was surfing the web and ran across a mention of Grapevine, the women’s a cappella group at Swarthmore College. I ordered the CD and it’s been on regular rotation at work and at home. Now I’m hooked! I can’t get enough of this stuff! If you know of any other groups I should hear, please let me know.

to tenure or not to tenure

Meredith Farkas of Information Wants To Be Free has a great essay on one of the great conundrums of academic librarianship: Should we strive for tenured faculty status or should we embrace a support staff role within the context of the university? She leans towards the non-tenure side and makes some excellent points for it. … Continue reading “to tenure or not to tenure”

Meredith Farkas of Information Wants To Be Free has a great essay on one of the great conundrums of academic librarianship: Should we strive for tenured faculty status or should we embrace a support staff role within the context of the university? She leans towards the non-tenure side and makes some excellent points for it.

I’m a bit ambivalent. On the one hand, I do view myself as a colleague of the teaching faculty in that I use my expertise to educate our students just as they do. On the other hand, I’m more of a behind-the-scenes librarian, and most of my work is focused on providing research tools that are useful and functional. In that respect, I am more like support staff than faculty. As for my tenured librarian colleagues, I wish that there was still something that could light a fire under them because they often appear to be apathetic and uninterested in improving themselves or the library.

I will continue to jump through the hoops towards tenure, because in the end, that’s how I make myself a better librarian (and keep my job).

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