ER&L 2015 – Evidence Based Collection Models: Not Your Traditional DDA

Spreadsheet
“Spreadsheet” by Jon Newman

Wiley offers the entire collection or subject collections for a set access fee based on FTE tiers. At the end of the access period, titles up to (or for additional cost) exceeding the access fee are selected for perpetual access. Usage data is provided to help with selection.

 

Speaker: Galadriel Chilton, University of Connecticut

In general, ebook borrowers like public library books, but the formats of many academic ebooks is frustrating. If ebooks are not integrated with journal content, they are often not found or not found as easily. Convenience is key. There’s also the issue of unencrypted usage data being transmitted by Adobe, which is now being transmitted “securely,” but still profiling the reading habits of users.

They started the EBA with Wiley in April, and they saw a jump in usage before the titles were even in the catalog or discovery service. They were finding it on the platform already.

Downsides: Some content is only available on aggregator platforms, rather than Wiley’s platform. Some content is not included in the EBA program. Also, this adds another wrinkle to an already complicated ERM ecosystem.

It’s not an all-encompassing solution, but it is an ebook collection method that has significantly improved user experience.

 

Speaker: Monica Metz-Wiseman, University of South Florida

About 15% of the audience still has an approval plan. About 40% have a declining monographic budget. About 70% have declining monographic circulation.

They haven’t had an approval plan in 2009, have had a 50% drop in print circulation since 2008, and now rely on ebook packages and PDA (with STL).

They looked at STL costs in 2013 and saw that Wiley and Taylor & Francis were at the top. They decided to try the EBA with Wiley.

They wanted to recalibrate access with ownership. They wanted increased control over costs and content. They wanted to make sure the books would still be there later when a faculty member went looking for it (not always the case with PDA).

Challenges: The collection specialists were already removed from the collection process with PDA, and this was just another stake in the heart. There are two platform for Wiley collections, so they are having to maintain some of the titles on EBL still. The MARC records are not always good, requiring some manual fixes. Scalability is going to be challenging if there isn’t enough staff support. Funding uncertainty may make sustainability difficult, as well.

Benefits: Content integration, preferred DRM features, easier authentication, holding the line on price increases for STL and aggregator ebooks, and increased familiarity with Wiley content.

Selections were made on absolute use, without consulting subject specialists. They did not look to see if there were print copies available in the library already.

Not sure what impact this will have on ebook pricing in the future when publishers have more data about what users want.

 

Speaker: Robert Murdoch, Brigham Young University

He has prettier slides, but not much to say that wasn’t covered by the others.

ER&L 2015 – Monday Short Talks: ERM topics

Link
“Link” by Andrew Becraft

[I missed the first talk due to a slightly longer lunch than had been planned.]

Better Linking by Our Bootstraps
Speaker: Aron Wolf, ProQuest

He is a librarian trained as a cataloger.

Error reports are important, because for each one, there were probably ten instances not reported. Report early and report often.

Include the original query for the OpenURL in order to reproduce it. If you have the time, play around with the string data and see if you can “fix” it yourself and report that.

There are a lot of factors into how long it will take to fix whatever is causing the OpenURL error. They don’t want to raise false expectations by giving a date and time.

Once an error has been reported, it enters a triage system. If it has a broader impact, it will be prioritized higher. Then it’s assigned to someone to fix.

 

Trouble Ticket Systems: Help or Hindrance?
Speaker: Margaret Hogarth, The Claremont Colleges Library

We should be polite and helpful. Human.

Detail the issue as specifically as possible, with steps, equipment, screen shots, etc. Include account number or other identifier.

Vendors need to identify themselves in responses. They also need to include the issue in responses, particularly when the message trail gets long. Customers need to keep track of the trouble tickets they have submitted.

Respond promptly, even if it will take longer to resolve. Mine the trouble ticket data to create FAQ, known issues, etc. and add meaningful metadata.

Email is good for tracking the history. Online forms should have an email sent with the ticket detail and number. Some vendors hide their support email address, which is annoying.

If vendors require authentication to submit a ticket, provide examples of what information they are looking for.

Vendors should ask their most frequent support users for feedback on what would make their sites more useful.

Multiple tech supports make it challenging for reporting issues to large companies.

Jing screen casting is helpful for showing how to reproduce the problem, particularly when you can’t attach a screenshot or cast, since it provides a URL.

All of this is useful for your internal support ticketing systems, too.

ER&L 2015 – Understanding Your Users: Using Google Analytics and Forms

Google Analytics v2.0
“Google Analytics v2.0” by Panayotis Vryonis

Speakers: Jaclyn Bedoya & Michael DeMars, CSU Fullerton

There are some challenges to surveying students, including privacy, IRB requirements, and survey fatigue. Don’t collect data for the sake of collecting data. Make sure it is asking what you think it is asking to get results that are worth measuring.

Google Analytics is free, relatively easy to use, and easy to install. And it’s free. We’re being asked to assess, but not being given a budget to do so.

It’s really good about measuring the when and where, but not the why. Is it that you don’t see Chrome users because nobody is using Chrome, or is it that your website is broken for Chrome users?

If people are hanging out on your library pages for too long, then maybe you need to redesign them. We want them heading out quickly to the resources we’re linking to.

They’ve made decisions about whether to spend time on making sites compatible with browser versions based on how much traffic is coming from them. They’ve determined that mobile use is increasing, so they are desigining for that now.

They were able to use click data to eliminate low-used webpages and tools in the redesign. They were able to use traffic data to determine how much server support was needed on the weekends.

Google Forms are free and they can be used to find out things about users that Analytics can’t tell you. They can be embedded into things like LibGuides. There’s a “view summary responses” option that creates pie charts and fancy things for your boss.

They asked who they are (discipline), how often they use the library, where they use it, and what they thought of the library services. There were incentives with gift cards (including ones for In-N-Out Burger). The free-text section had a lot of great content.

The speakers spent some time on the survey data, but the sum total is that it matched their expectations, but now they had data to prove it.

ER&L 2015 – CALMing the cost of textbooks: How to create Affordable Learning Materials on your Campus

#erl15 session pics from Mallory
the audience listens attentively

Speakers: Carmen Mitchell & Barbara Taylor, California State University San Marcos

Cougars Affordable Learning Materials = CALM

Calming the price of textbooks and also faculty who are looking for textbook alternatives. It began in spring 2013 with funding from the Chancellor’s office. The academic technology folks started it and were welcoming when the librarians joined in.

They created a website with information specifically for faculty and for students. They developed a plan and piloted a course as a proof of concept.

The biggest hurdle has been getting the information out to faculty. A clear communication plan with customized presentations/examples will help tremendously. Try to have some funds that can be used as an incentive for faculty to do the research into open education alternatives and adopt them. They paid the faculty in tiers by how much they reduced the materials cost for the course.

Partnerships:

  • The bookstore provides faculty booklists and the top 10 most expensive books, and they will purchased custom used books if the faculty member commits to using it for at least 2 years.
  • The faculty center promotes CALM on their website and newsletter.
  • The academic senate resolved to support CALM.
  • They have met with faculty colleges and departments, as well as student groups.
  • The library offers a high speed scanner (with copyright limit explanations).
  • Encouraged faculty to create assignments looking at academic journals.
  • Teaching copyright workshops across campus.
  • Provides additional support for reserves.
  • Faculty training and support for accessibility (ADA).
  • Institutional Planning and Analysis added questions to the student evaluation forms.
  • Worked with publishers to create custom texts with chapters from different books, offer digital rental services, and faculty negotiating lower prices with textbook adoption, and ebook access with the print version.

They are talking about automatically putting all books on reserve the library owns that are on the list from the bookstore. It’s going to be a lot of extra work, but they are pretty sure they are going to do it, at least once.

They are working on creating an API that will take the bookstore list and automatically indicate whether the book is available in the library or not.

They are working on scholarly communication initiatives that encourage faculty to negotiate their author rights for not only articles but books as well.

Some of their ongoing outreach includes creating faculty ambassadors that do the door-to-door work as peers (some of the grant money pays for this). They did a recognition ceremony for the university administration and faculty who were involved. They are also recognizing faculty who have been doing these kinds of things long before the program began. They have some really nice posters — check them out in the slides.

Over two semesters, they saved the students over $413,000 in textbook costs.

They are working with the other CSUs on this, as well as SUNY and Georgia.

ER&L 2015 – Supporting Online Creative Collaboration: Tools and Social Context

#erl15 Monday
Amy Bruckman speaking at ER&L

Speaker: Amy Bruckman

If we had created a traditional organization and said we wanted to have video that would have anything anyone would want to learn about, could we have created something as vast and comprehensive as YouTube?

Could we have predicted open source software? WordPress is 62% of content management market share, Apache hosts 58% of web servers, and Wikipedia is the 6th most popular website in the world.

How do we get together and create something? How do you do it when you don’t know what the end product is supposed to do?

Newgrounds is a site where groups of people create animations and share them. Bruckman looks at how these folks collaborate. They found that the narrative structure of “continuation” shaped the process, requiring one person to complete their portion before the next could start on it, causing bottlenecks and conflicts of interest. Narrative structures can work in parallel, and collection structures have more guidelines for what is and is not included.

Does the final product need all contributions or can it be filtered? Is the product finished or is it iterative? How much coordination is required? In many projects, a strong central leader is required to move forward, and can be a bottleneck if they drop the ball.

To address all of this, Bruckman’s group developed a suite of tools called Pipeline. This replaced the burden of the leader, allowing individuals to claim tasks and automatically attribute credits at the end of the project. They created more of a wiki-like structure. Collaboration works better when we can see each other working and know that we can see each other working. Distributed leadership views leadership as a set of behaviors, not roles.

Pipeline allows groups that are initially centralized in leadership styles to decentralize, and for decentralized leadership to get more organized. It has been used for Newgrounds projects and GISHWHES teams.

There will never be a tool that will solve all problems. Better to design something that fits into an ecology of tool use for task management, communication, collaboration, etc.

Do users understand “fair use” and how does this impact their remix behaviors? Bruckman interviewed 33 content creators, analyzed forum postings about copyright, the content of remix sites, and surveyed the users of those sites.

No one read the Terms of Service agreements. A reading level analysis required college sophomore level reading, with some behind postgraduate level (particularly audio sites). Some sites TOS indicate you are giving them exclusive and irrevocable rights to the content you post there. Many people would behave differently online if they understood that.

People are not sharing content online because they are afraid they will get in trouble or that someone will reuse their content in ways they did not intend. Site designers could remedy some of these problems if they scaffolded the information to help folks understand through the design of the sites.

We are just at the beginning. People will do more amazing things together, if we give them good tools and social support. Research on developing these tools is important.

notes from the Charleston Conference

My hotel was a little over a mile from the conference, and while it included free wifi, by the time I made my way back there every evening, I was thinking more about getting enough sleep to get back in time for the early morning plenary sessions than about editing and posting my notes. So, why didn’t I do it as soon as I got back, you ask? Seriously? Have you never come back to work with more piles of things that need your attention than were there when you left? Anyway, they’re all up now.

new albums I really dig

061/365 - music
listening to new tunes

Editor’s note: I drafted this in August 2014. I’m not sure why I didn’t publish it.

One of the things I do in my “free time” is volunteer as music director at WRIR. Basically, I be a librarian for the genres we don’t already have covered by genre directors, namely Rock, AAA (Adult Album Alternative), and RPM (electronic). I receive the physical and digital albums from promoters and labels, keep track of how many times they are played, create weekly charts of the top 30 albums, and make sure that the new & recommended shelves stay fresh.

As you might expect, I get to hear tons of new music. We receive 25-40 new albums a week, depending on the time of year. It’s particularly notable, then, when an album catches my ear more than, “Oh, that’s pretty good. So-and-so will probably play it on their show.”

Land Observations – The Grand Tour (Mute)
This is the second album by James Brooks with the moniker Land Observations. It reminds me very much of Tycho, with whom I am mildly obsessed. Hypnotic patterns and melodies driven by acoustic guitar over electronic soundscapes evoking hazy dusks in late spring when the air is perfect and all seems right with the world. [Spotify] [Amazon]

Jenny Lewis – The Voyager (Warner Bros.)
I’ve been a fan of Rilo Kiley ever since I heard their 2007 album Under the Blacklight. Yeah. A little late to the game. I tried following Lewis after the band split up, but her music didn’t grab me until this album. Tight pop/rock arrangements that remind me of the early 90s in that they don’t have the over-produced sheen of modern rock. She doesn’t shy away from tough subjects in the lyrics, and the voice that drew me in seven years ago is still compelling. [Spotify] [Amazon]

Damien Dempsey – It’s All Good: The Best of Damien Dempsey (IRL)
Dempsey is an Irish singer/songwriter with an impressive catalog, as reflected in this double-disc retrospective. And yet, I hadn’t heard of him before. Well, technically I had, as he’s the subject of Amy Ray’s song “Damo,” but I didn’t know that until I listened to this album. Poignant lyrics paired with acoustic rock arrangements and a rough but steady voice you’ll learn to recognize immediately. [Spotify] [Amazon]

The Glitch Mob – Love Death Immortality (Glass Air)
I was introduced to the band through their last album, Drink the Sea, and played the song “Drive It Like You Stole It” more times than I’m willing to admit (last.fm says 17, but it’s probably more). Needless to say, I was looking forward to the new album, and I’m happy to say I was not disappointed. For the most part, the arrangements are driving, glitchy, electronic, and melodic with an aggressive rock vibe. It’s hard to sit still while listening. [Spotify] [Amazon]

Tycho – Awake (Ghostly International)
Scott Hansen’s first album as Tycho (Dive) came out in 2011, and I heard it because I happened to play it on my show at the radio station back when I was doing mostly electronic music. I was instantly captivated by the acoustic guitar and synth hooks over atmospheric soundscapes. Where Land Observations’ The Grand Tour reminds me of late spring dusks, Awake is more like cool summer sunrises. The styles are similar, but Tycho puts a little more drive in his arrangements, which almost lend themselves to lyrics and vocals, but remain instrumental. [Spotify] [Amazon]

Charleston 2014 – Crowd Sourcing of Library Services

Speaker: John Dove, Credo Reference

Lots of words about what crowd sourcing is and why we should care. This is why I’m not a scholar. Just get to the point and don’t spend so much time convincing me that the point is the point.

 

Speaker: Tim Spalding, LibraryThing

It’s a personal cataloging tool that becomes social with more people doing it. Personal cataloging is the basis, and it was started with the idea that it would only be that.

Users can add tags to categories their books, and there are over 112 million tags from users. Users can add cover images for their own books, creating a vast collection of book covers.

The next level of engagement is exhibitionism and voyeurism, followed by self-expression via reviews. Reviews happen after a person reads the book, not when they are looking it up in the library catalog.

Users can add their own series information, including sub-series, which is often more information than what librarians are able to add. Other common knowledge content includes characters, author information, etc. Members also manage the “authority control” — FRBRization, author disambiguation, tag disambiguation.

Policing (get off my lawn) and helping (here’s how to be on my lawn) — dealing with spam, trolls, etc. and also assisting newer users via forums.

The final level of engagement comes with collaborative cataloging of books by dead people or that have shown up in mass media (i.e. Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog).

Lessons: secure the bottom of the ladder, build it rung by rung or at least think about it that way, and finally, crowd sourcing is not a feature. It’s not about what you get, it’s about what you give.

 

Speaker: Scott Johnson, ChiliFresh

If the internet in the 70s and 80s, waterbeds would probably have not reached the 20% penetration due to online reviews.

The wisdom of crowd source information is also the madness.

Rather than having a closed database of reviews from local patrons only, they have a collaborative database of reviews from library users across the world that local libraries can choose to participate in it or not. The reviews themselves are written by patrons, but they are moderated by librarians.

 

Speaker: Ilana Stonebraker, Purdue University

How is my library like the Vlog Brothers 54 jokes video? There is a huge network and community doing important things that are not visible in just that video. We are icebergs.

Most reference questions are lower-level, even online questions. What’s supposed to happen is at a much higher level, but the reality is that isn’t most of what happens. The traditional reference service model also assumes that the librarian is the only one who can give the answer. For example, sometimes students who have had a similar problem and found a solution can help each other.

CrowdAsk is similar to StackOverflow for gamification and badging. It’s open source on Git Hub. You can ask a question, and assign a bounty using your points to get a faster answer. They use it in lower level courses to allow the students to work together. Users can vote on answers and questions. Students who are really good at answering each other’s questions gain more power/authority in the system.

There is a good level of participation so far, and there are quite a number of lurkers, with the average time spent at over 6 minutes. They did some usability tests and found that often the motivation is reciprocity — they were helped and they want to help others.

The goal is to create a sustainable user engagement and community involvement as a part of the library’s website, not just to triage late-night reference questions.

Charleston 2014 – Charleston Premiers

Speaker: Joel Mills, Apex CoVantage

GEMS was created for editorial workflow, specifically for managing freelancers. It’s a web-based task/project management tool. There are also some reporting and accounting features.

 

Speaker: Colleen Hunter, ArtStor

Shared Shelf is a tool for storing and cataloging digital media assets (audio, video, documents, and images). You can choose to use most existing metadata schemas. Access restrictions are flexible to any level.

 

Speaker: Jean-Gabriel Bankier, bepress Digital Commons

Download metrics was one of the biggest impacts on getting faculty to participate in institutional repositories. They built a near-realtime readership activity map, and it has been well-received by administration. Static images and reports aren’t as effective as live use reporting. Some show it to donors, some display it on monitors in the library.

 

Speaker: Maya Bystrom, Bevara Technologies

Developing adapters and playback tools for all file types, regardless of whether they eventually become obsolete or not.

 

Speaker: Tim Williams, Edward Elgar

Research Reviews is their major reference works online. They publish mostly books, but some journals. Their terms are pretty much what librarians have asked for, including ILL. The research reviews direct researchers to seminal works in the field, both books and articles, and links out to those works.

 

Speaker: Ray Abruzzi, Gale

Working with researchers to data mine the contents of the Gale databases. They may eventually host the data and provide tools to work with it, but for now they are providing the data on portable hard drives directly to the researchers.

 

Speaker: Greg Cornblue, Harvard UP

Loeb Classical Library covers the important Greek and Latin literature. You can create reading lists with annotations and bookmarks that can be shared with groups or specific users.

 

Speaker: Howard Burton, Ideas Roadshow

Video interviews with scholars and researchers. There are also ebooks of some sort, self-published it seems.

 

Speaker: Richard Hollis, IET Digital Library

Engineering content.

 

Speaker: David Sommer, Kudos

Kudos is a set of tools to increase the discoverability and impact of research. Authors can catalog their work, enhance the metadata, share it on social networks, and see the resulting click data. They are integrated with ORCID and will be incorporating citation data from Thomson Reuters.

 

Speaker: John Hammersley, Overleaf

Authors are shuffling multiple versions of the same documents over email, dealing with formatting issues, and maintaining the format of citations across different editing tools. Overleaf works like GoogleDocs but is based on LaTeX and can be easily reformatted for whatever style/template you want. There can be real-time collaborative editing, with track changes and commenting. Teachers can send an assignment, and the students can work in the tool to complete and return it.

 

Speaker: Barbara Olson, ProQuest

Lots of stuff about products with data sets.

 

Speaker: Jennifer Hopkins, SAGE

SAGE Business Researcher contains reports on relevant topics to introduce students to them. SAGE Business Cases collects case studies. SAGE Video collection to support pedagogical and reference needs, primarily in social sciences.

 

Speaker: Kendall Barge, Third Iron

BrowZine offers the library’s journal subscriptions in a newsstand format. They have been primarily an app-based tool, but they are developing a web interface with the ability to be embedded in LibGuides, etc.

Charleston 2014 – Reinforcing the Role of the Library: Communicating Value, Increasing Access and Knowledge

Speaker: Elliot Hermann, Nature

Libraries use a lot of statistical data to determine the value of their content. You know how it goes.

University of Utah and Nature worked out a pilot with ReadCube to provide rental article access. $2.99 for read-only for 48 hrs, $7.99 for purchase and available. In the end, this was a better value for the library for high demand titles that are not used enough to justify purchase/subscription.

How can publishers and librarians work together to determine and establish value? Publishers are trying to do more analytics beyond cost per download. Cost per citation, local citations, author submissions/affiliations, access denials, altmetrics – ultimately some sort of customized solution.

 

Speaker: Jill Emery, Portland State University

Collaboration, Content, Connection

PSU could not exist without the Orbis-Cascade Alliance, their consortia.

Librarians and publishers are complimentary. We are both invested in the success of authored content, and we agree that quality academic content carries a cost.

In consortium we are able to do things that we could not do individually, unless we are at the 800lb gorilla libraries. OCA did a DDA with EBL via YBP. They spent a lot of time figuring out who would work with them and how it would be set up. It was understood from the outset that it was a pilot project for all of them, and at some point things might change. So, last year when the STL prices went up, it wasn’t a surprise to them. What ended up being complicated was the communication.

It wasn’t a real loss for the publishers. They gained markets they wouldn’t have had. The other outcome was the proof that this could be done across multiple organizations to some success.

There is an agreement that quality academic content carries a cost, but the issue is the price point. The profit reports coming from the commercial STM publishers makes librarians uncomfortable with continuing to invest their collections funds in that market.

Librarians help add context to quality content. Librarians expand on the metadata of the quality academic content. Librarians and publishers partner to make sure standards are employed.

Publishers and librarians are enmeshed in the scholarly communication network. We need to continue to experiment and move forward, but in a way that is affordable for all of us, without negatively impacting the quality of the work.

 

Speaker: Maggie Farrell, University of Wyoming

Universities are under pressure to graduate students in four years with marketable degrees. They are under pressure to do research in areas relevant to local interests. They are under pressure to collect materials in those areas and be repositories for the research done.

She would like to link metrics to collection purchases, collection impact, value, and university pressures.

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