Tag: erl13

ER&L 2013: Courage of Our Connections

“Hanging On” by Nic C

Speaker: Rachel Frick, Digital Library Federation

Sees herself as a community builder for the greater benefit of the profession as a whole.

There is a lot going on in libraries, and it can be overwhelming. At the same time, it’s an exciting time to be a librarian. If we embrace the challenge of the change and see the opportunities, we will be okay.

We are at “the incunabula period of the digital age.” -T. Scott Plutchak

The network changes everything. See also: Networked by Lee Raine & Barry Wellman

This can be good, or it can be bad (see also: Google Buzz). We have the opportunity to reach beyond our home institutions to have a broader impact.

Data has many different facets. We are talking about data-driven decision making, research data, data curation, linked (open) data, and library collections as data.

When we started digitizing our collections, we had a very library/museum portal view that was very proscribed. The DPLA wanted to avoid this, letting folks pull data through APIs and display it however they want. When we start freeing our stuff from the containers, we start seeing some new research questions and scholarship.

“Local collections are the dark matter of a linked data world.” -Susan Hildreth, Director of IMLS

Catalog and pay attention to the unique things that are at your institution. We need original catalogers back. This is the golden age for catalogers. We need to reinvent the way we process the hard and difficult things to describe. It’s about the services, not the stuff.

If the car was developed in the library, it would have been called the e-horse. Please don’t hire a data curation librarian or eresearch librarian or … data and local content is everyone’s job. The silos have to come down in our services, too. By silo-ing off the jobs, we’re not harnessing the power of the network.

Print-based societies needed the buildings, but in the digital society, it’s more about the connections. We should talk about what librarians do, not what libraries do. Do we want to serve our buildings or serve our communities? We cannot allow the care and feeding of our buildings to define us. The mission is what defines us.

Our mission is greater than our job. “Our mission is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.” (R. David Lankes) If this isn’t why you show up every day, then maybe it’s time to reassess your life and career choice.

We are a community, with permeable borders, and room at the table for everyone. But, this causes a lot of fear and anxiety, and can raise the spectre of the snark. This is detrimental to open community development.

Snark: “I really wish the DPLA would do ___.”
Frick: “The DPLA is you! Show up!”

If we come with our 10lb hammer to smack down every new idea, we will not be able to move forward.

Vulnerability is “the courage to show up and allow ourselves to be seen.” (Dr. Brene Brown) Be open to feedback — it is a function of respect. Admitting a vulnerability builds strength and trust, and a culture of shared struggle/experience.

We need to hang out with not the usual suspects. If this is the 10th time in a row that you’ve attended a particular conference, maybe you need to try something new. We need to think of librarianship outside of our normal communities.

The hacker epistemology says to adopt a problem-solving mindset, and the truth is what works. Our “always” of doing things will not translate to the networked world. The #ideadrop house was a wild success. People wanted to share their ideas with librarians!

Jason Griffey created the library boxes — small hard drives with wifi capability that allow anyone to access and download the content. They put them everywhere at SXSW — pedicabs, volunteers carrying them around, etc.

How do you communicate your ideas to people outside of your community?

In this world of networked individualism, our success is up to us. We have to have a personal responsibility to the longevity and success of our profession. This golden moment for librarianship is brief, so we have to act now. Be engaged. Be there.

How do you lead? Leadership is not being an AUL or head of a department. We lead by example, no matter where you are.

The stuff that’s easy to count really isn’t important. We need to have a national holiday from performance metrics.

Dare a little. Be more open. Take more risks, even if they’re small. Be easy on yourself.

ER&L 2013: Overcoming Librarian Resistance to Adopting Discovery Tools — A Focus on Information Literacy Opportunities

“X-Factor” by Andy Rennie

Speaker: Stefanie Buck (Oregon State University)

It’s safe to say that discovery products have not received a positive response from the librarians who are expected to use them. We always talk about the users, and we forget that librarians are users, and are probably in them more than the typical freshman. They are new, and new things can be scary.

OSU has Summon, which they brought up in 2010. She thinks that even though this is mostly about her experience with Summon, it can be applied to other discovery tools and libraries. They had a federated search from 2003-2010, but toward the latter years, librarians had stopped teaching it, so when discovery services came along, they went that way.

Initially, librarians had a negative view of the one search box because of their negative experience with federated searching. Through the process of the implementation, they gathered feedback from the librarians, and the librarians were hopeful that this might live up to the promise that federated search did not. They also surveyed librarians outside of OSU, and found a broad range from love it to not over my dead body, but most lived in the middle, where it depended on the context.

Most librarians think they will use a discovery tool in teaching lower division undergraduates, but it depends if it’s appropriate or not. The promise of a discovery tool is that librarians don’t have to spend so much time teaching different tools, so they could spend more time talking about evaluating sources and the iterative process of research. Some think they actually will do that, but for now, they have simply added the discovery tool to the mix.

Participation in the implementation process is key for getting folks on board. When librarians are told “you must,” it doesn’t go over very well. Providing training and instruction is essential. There might be some negative feedback from the students until they get used to it, and librarians need to be prepared for that. Librarians need to understand how it works and where the limitations fall. Don’t underestimate the abilities of librarians to work around you.

These tools are always changing. Make sure that folks know that it has improved if they don’t like it at first. Make fun (and useful) tools, and that the librarians know how to create scoped tools that they can use for specific courses. If you have a “not over my dead body,” team teaching might be a good approach to show them that it could be useful.

Speaker: Leslie Moyo & Tracy Gilmore (Virginia Tech)

Initially there were mixed perceptions, but more are starting to incorporate it into their instruction. With so many products out there, we really need to move away from teaching all of them and spending more time on good research/search skills.

Students “get” discovery services faster if it is introduced as the Google of library stuff.

Move away from teaching sources and towards teaching the process. Enhance the power of boolean searching with faceted searching. Shift from deliberate format searching (book, article, etc.) toward mixed format results that are most relevant to the search.

ER&L 2013: Truth or Dare — Discovery Systems Secrets Unveiled

“Space Shuttle Discovery Landing At Washington DC” by Glyn Lowe

Moderator: Dan Tonkery
Panel: Roger Schonfeld (ITHAKA S + R), Jon Law (ProQuest), Amira Aaron (Northeastern University), Brian Duncan (EBSCO), & Susan Stearns (Ex Libris)

What features of discovery services do students prefer? What ones do they dislike?

Law: The search box is intuitive and familiar, and their expectations of speed are set by web search engines. Being able to quickly scan the abstract to see if it is relevant, and then quickly retrieve the content when they want it.

Stearns: Needs to be flexible and reflective of different user types and the environment they are in. Contextual searching based on who they are and how they look for information. Students also expect to access related content about their relationship with libraries (i.e. materials checked out, notices).

Duncan: Finding the results on the first page, and at least the second page. Metadata and relevancy are important.

What impact is open access having on discovery?

Aaron: Depends on the model of OA. Not really sure if it has an impact on discovery systems yet. It has and will have an impact on discovery in general, but not sure if it’s impacting library discovery systems any more or less than open web searches.

Law: Our customers are turning OA links on in the discovery service.

Stearns: It’s easy to make the OA content available, but are you managing it? How does this impact back-office workflows?

Will discovery services replace the online catalog?

Stearns: It’s been painful for some libraries, but yes. There is no OPAC in next generation library systems, it’s all about discovery. And we need to get over it. Discovery services need to have the functionality of the OPAC (things librarians like). This is an opportunity to rethink workflows and what you do with metadata in a discovery environment.

What are the advantages of selling both a family of databases and a discovery service?

Duncan: Users have automatic full-text because it’s built into the system and doesn’t need to go through OpenURL. Thinking a lot about how to make this simpler for students and integrating high-quality metadata from A&I sources along with the full-text.

Aaron: That’s fine for the vendor, but it takes away the choice for the librarian as to where to send the user. It’s taking away choice.

Law: We want our discovery service to be content-provider neutral.

What impact can libraries reasonably expect discovery services to have on traffic patterns?

Schonfeld: We see the majority of traffic coming from Google and Google Scholar, at least for JSTOR. If the objective is to change where users are starting their research, then we need different ways of measuring that and determining success.

Stearns: Our customers are thinking about not only having the one search box on the web page, but also where else can you embed linking and making sure the connections work, particularly when users come in from different sources.

Aaron: Success is not measured by how many people come to your website and start there, it’s how they get to the content from wherever they go.

What metrics do librarians expect from discovery services?

Aaron: Search statistics aren’t very meaningful in the context of discovery services. Click-through, content sources — those are the important metrics.

Schonfeld: This is not just a new product – it replaces old products, so we need to think about it differently. Libraries might want to know what share of their users is coming from what sources (i.e. discovery services, Wikipedia, Google, etc.). It’s still early days to be able to come to any strong conclusions.

Duncan: Need to measure searches that don’t result in any click-throughs as well.

Does your discovery product provide title-level information to the user community and how often is it updated?

Law: How do you measure your collection? We need some definition around this in order to know how to tell libraries how much of it is indexed in our discovery service. We are starting to do more collection analysis for libraries.

Duncan: The title list doesn’t equate to the deep metadata of an A&I database. If we don’t have the deep metadata, we don’t say we have the same coverage as that database. Full text searching is not a replacement for controlled vocabulary and metadata, it’s just a component of it.

Stearns: We also want to make sure the collections we expose are actually the ones the users access, by looking at historical usage information.

Aaron: It’s important to have the deep metadata, and it’s troubling that the content providers aren’t playing well together. I should be able to display content we purchase to our users in whatever interface I want. If I can’t, I may not continue to purchase or lease that content. It’s the same problem we had with link resolvers years ago. If you really care about the user and libraries, then start playing together.

[Missed the last question because I was still flying high from Aaron’s call-out, but it was something dull about how much customization is available in the discovery system, or something like that. Couldn’t tell from the responses. Go read product information for the answers.]

ER&L 2013: Ebooks — Their Use and Acceptance by Undergraduates and Faculty

“Kali, Avatar of the eBook” by Javier Candeira

Speaker: Deborah Lenares, Wellesley College

Libraries have been relatively quietly collecting ebooks for years, but it wasn’t until the Kindle came out that public interest in ebooks was aroused. Users exposure and expectations for ebooks has been raised, with notable impact on academic libraries. From 2010-2011, the number of ebooks in academic libraries doubled.

Wellesley is platform agnostic — they look for the best deal with the best content. Locally, they have seen an overall increase in unique titles viewed, a dramatic increase in pages viewed, a modest decrease in pages printed, and a dramatic increase in downloads.

In February 2012, they sent a survey to all of their users, with incentives (iPad, gift cards, etc.) and a platform (Zoomerang) provided by Springer. They had a 57% response rate (likely iPad-influenced), and 71% have used ebooks (51% used ebooks from the Wellesley College Library). If the survey respondent had not used ebooks, they were skipped to the end of the survey, because they were only interested in data from those who have used ebooks.

A high percent of the non-library ebooks were from free sources like Google Books, Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, etc. Most of the respondents ranked search within the text and offline reading or download to device among the most important functionality aspects, even higher than printing.

Most of the faculty respondents found ebooks to be an acceptable option, but prefer to use print. Fewer students found ebooks an acceptable option, and preferred print more than faculty. There is a reason that will be aparent later in the talk.

The sciences preferred ebooks more than other areas, and found them generally more acceptable than other areas, but the difference is slight. Nearly all faculty who used ebooks would continue to, ranging from preferring them to reluctant acceptance.

Whether they love or hate ebooks, most users skimmed/search and read a small number of consecutive pages or a full chapter. However, ebooks haters almost never read an entire book, and most of the others infrequently did so. Nearly everyone read ebooks on a computer/laptop. Ebook lovers used devices, and ebook haters were more likely to have printed it out. Most would prefer to not use their computer/laptop, and the ebook lovers would rather use their devices.

Faculty are more likely to own or plan to purchase a device than students, which may be why faculty find ebooks more acceptable than students. Maybe providing devices to them would be helpful?

For further research:

  • How does the robustness of ebook collections effect use and attitudes?
  • Is there a correlation between tablet/device use and attitudes?
  • Are attitudes toward shared ebooks (library) different from attitudes toward personal ebooks?

The full text of the white paper is available from Springer.

ER&L 2013: E or P — A Comparative Analysis of Electronic and Print Book Usage

“Book & Phone Book” by Lynn Gardner

Speakers: Michael Levine-Clark & Christopher C. Brown, University of Denver

If someone checks out a physical book, do you know if they really read it? If someone accesses an ebook, do you know if they really read it? If a faculty member has a print book checked out for a year, is it more valuable to them than an ebook they access several times?

Sometimes, the title format in the catalog record can influence what is found and used. Vendor records can sometimes have series names in the beginning of the title, which the cataloger would not do with print.

ISBNs don’t match/merge easily. His solution was to remove the check digit and the prefix, and match on the “ISBN 9”. This works, mostly, but another solution was needed. Ended up having to do a lot of matching to pull together useful comparison of circulation and download data to compare e versus p use.

They found that when both formats were available, a little over half of the print books were used, and less than half of the ebooks were used. Of the titles used in both formats, there was higher use all around. The lowest level of use came from ebooks where the print was not checked out at all.

Use of electronic books may lead to print, but use of print doesn’t seem to lead to electronic. It may be that if dual format is higher it may be that good books get used no matter what format they are in. It may also be that e-discovery drives p-use.

Future considerations: the role of discovery and the role of ILL in a demand for print when electronic is available.

ER&L 2013: Internal and External Clients — Why Do We Treat One Better Than the Other?

Speakers: Dawn McKinnon & Amy Buckland, McGill University

someecards.com - Since it's difficult to infer tone in an email, you should assume all mine are sarcastic or bitchy.

We have pretty good outward-facing communication and support, but internally, we’re not so polite or explanatory.

Always reply to an email if a reply is needed, even if it is to say you can’t do it right now (or ever). Use the same pleasantries you would with an external client.

One solution is to make everyone give a job talk, which helps everyone understand a little about what each other is doing. Another solution is to provide topical workshops and general updates to help everyone understand workflow and impact on other departments.

Committees that combine staff from different departments/areas can help make sure that all the bases are covered.

Communicate! You cannot communicate too much, especially if it is important. Email lists, blogs, weekly meetings with management, regular open office hours, bimonthly recorded talk with the Dean, etc.

Pitfalls to watch out for: spreading negative misinformation, public shaming, and shoveling crap (i.e. typical librarian passive-aggressiveness, or passing the buck).

Libraries are about community. Service levels should be the same for students, donors, colleagues… anyone who is part of the community!

ER&L 2013: Freeing Funds for Flexibility

“Street Yoga 2” by Jason Verwey

Proactive Deselection of Library Subscriptions

Speakers: Doralyn Rossmann & Nathan Hosburgh, Montana State University

Proactive deselection is getting rid of things before you have to. It allows for meeting requests for new subscriptions, adjusting for curricular change, adjusting for research change, redirecting funds elsewhere, and reducing the budget if needed.

Step one: Identify core journals. This sets a positive tone. They created lists organized by LC class and provided them to the liaisons for departments. (They filtered out packages and JSTOR collections.) The communication with faculty varied by librarian, as well as the type of feedback provided. This resulted in some requests for new subscriptions, and enhance the credibility of the library as good stewards.

They kept track of who said what in the feedback, so that if down the road that person left, they could revisit the titles.

Step two: Journal coverage in a unified discovery tool. They identified the compartmentalized/marginalized titles that were not included in the unified discovery tool index (report from vendor).

Step three: Database coverage in a unified discovery tool. This can be challenging to make sure the comparison is even. Also, what is a database versus a journal package with a searchable interface? Not clear how they compared A&I information, since there is no good tool for that kind of overlap.

Step four: Usage statistics. Typical challenges (which COUNTER format, not COUNTER, no stats, changing platforms, etc.) along with timeliness and file format. This also identified resources that were not listed on the DB page.

Step five: Coverage in A&I databases. This may help identify A&I sources you should add, but it’s time consuming and may not have big payoffs if you are emphasizing a discovery service as a primary search interface.

Step six: Coverage in aggregators or freely available. Can be risky, though.

Step seven: Other considerations. Impact factor — does it matter? Cost metrics, alternative access options like PPV or ILL, swappability in big deal packages.

Step eight: Feedback from liaisons. Get input on titles considered for cancellation  Share externally to make sure that everyone is on board and have time to comment.

Step nine: Do we have the right stuff? Review ILL statistics and compare with download stats (should be trending down as subscriptions go up). Citation studies, LibQual+, and liaison communication. Publicize what was added each year with freed funds, and which department requested it.

They plan to review this every year, and keep it updated with additions/deletions and coverage information. They are also considering the sustainability of high cost packages plus inflation.

 

ER&L 2013: Lightning Talks

“¡Rayos!” by José Eugenio Gómez Rodríguez

Speaker: Emily Guhde, NCLIVE
“We’ve Got Your Number: Making Usage Data Matter” is the project they are working on. What is a good target cost per use for their member libraries? They are organizing this by peer groups. How can the member libraries improve usage? They are hoping that other libraries will be able to replicated this in the future.

Speaker: Francis Kayiwa, UIC
He is a server administrator with library training, and wanted to be here to understand what it is his folks are coming back and asking him to do. Cross-pollinate conferences — try to integrate other kinds of conferences happening nearby.

Speaker: Annette Bailey, Virginia Tech
Co-developed LibX with her husband, now working on a new project to visualize what users are clicking on after they get a search result in Summon. This is a live, real-time visualization, pulled from the Summon API.

Speaker: Angie Rathnel, University of Kansas
Have been using a SAS called Callisto to track and claim eresources. It tracks access to entitlements daily/weekly, and can check to make sure proxy configurations are set up correctly.

Speaker: Cindy Boeke, Southern Methodist University
Why aren’t digital library collections included with other library eresources on lists and such (like the ubiquitous databases A-Z page)?

Speaker: Rick Burke, SCELC
SIPX to manage copyright in a consortial environment. Something something users buying access to stuff we already own. I’m guessing this is more for off-campus access?

Speaker: Margy Avery, MIT Press
Thinking about rich/enhanced digital publications. Want to work with libraries to make this happen, and preservation is a big issue. How do we catalog/classify this kind of resource?

Speaker: Jason Price, Claremont Colleges
Disgruntled with OpenURL and the dependency on our KB for article-level access. It is challenging to keep our lists (KBs) updated and accurate — there has to be a better way. We need to be working with the disgrundterati who are creating startups to address this problem. Pubget was one of the first, and since then there is Dublin Six, Readcube, SIPX, and Callisto. If you get excited about these things, contact the startups and tell them.

Speaker: Wilhelmina Ranke, St. Mary’s University
Collecting mostly born digital collections, or at least collections that are digitized already, in the repository: student newspaper, video projects, and items digitized for classroom use that have no copyright restrictions. Doesn’t save time on indexing, but it does save time on digitizing.

Speaker: Bonnie Tijerina, Harvard
The #ideadrop house was created to be a space for librar* to come together to talk about librar* stuff. They had a little free library box for physical books, and also a collection of wireless boxes with free digital content anyone could download. They streamed conversations from the living room 5-7 times a day.

Speaker: Rachel Frick
Digital Public Library of America focuses on content that is free to all to create a more informed citizenry. They want to go beyond just being a portal for content. They want to be a platform for community involvement and conversations.

ER&L 2013: E-Resources, E-Realities

“Tools” by Josep Ma. Rosell

Speakers: Jennifer Bazeley (Miami University) & Nancy Beals (Wayne State University)

Despite all the research on what we need/want, but no one is building commercial products that meet all our needs and addresses the impediments of cost and dwindling staff.

Beals says that the ERM is not used for workflow, so they needed other tools, with a priority on project management and Excel proficiency. They use an internal listserv, UKSG Transfer, Trello (project management software), and a blog, to keep track of changes in eresources.

Other tools for professional productivity and collaboration: iPads with Remember the Milk or Evernote, Google spreadsheets (project portfolio management organization-wide), and LibGuides.

Bazeley stepped into the role of organizing eresources information in 2009, with no existing tool or hub, which gave her room to experiment. For documentation, they use PBWiki (good for version tracking, particularly to correct errors) with an embedded departmental Google calender. For communication, they use LibGuides for internal documents, and you can embed RSS, Google Docs, Yahoo Pipes aggregating RSS feeds, Google forms for eresource access issues, links to Google spreadsheets with usage data, etc.. For login information, they use KeePass Password Safe. Rather than claiming in the ILS, they’ve moved to using the claim checker tool from the subscription agent.

Tools covered:

  • Google Calendar
  • Google Docs (includes forms & spreadsheets)
  • PBWiki
  • LibGuides
  • Yahoo Pipes
  • WordPress
  • KeePass Password Safe
  • PDF Creator
  • EBSCOnet

Others listed:

  • Blogger (blog software)
  • Mendeley (ref manager)
  • Vimeo (videos)
  • Jing (screenshot/screencast)
  • GIMP (image editor)
  • MediaWiki (Wiki software)
  • LastPass (password manager)
  • OpenOffice (software suite)
  • PDF Creator (PDF manipulation)
  • Slideshare (presentation manager)
  • Filezilla (ftp software)
  • Zoho Creator (database software)
  • Dropbox (cloud storage)
  • Github (software management)
  • Subscription agent software (SwetsWise, EBSCOnet)
  • Microsoft Excel / Access
  • Course Management Software (Moodle, Sakai, Blackboard)
  • Open Source ERMS: ERMes (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse) & CORAL (University of Notre Dame)

ER&L 2013: Breaking Up is Hard To Do

Ending a Relationship with an E-Resource

someecards.com - If you're tired of discussing my nightmarish relationship, I'd love the opportunity to begin discussing my nightmarish breakup

Speakers: Dani Roach & Carolyn DeLuca, University of Saint Thomas

We’re all very familiar with print serials cancellation projects, but now we’re starting to see this in the electronic world, particularly as more libraries are walking away from big deals. There are lots of documents talking about the life-cycle of an eresource, but cancellation hasn’t really been addressed until recently, with the TERMS section covering it along with others.

As much work as it is to get into a relationship with a vendor/resource, it’s just has hard to leave it.

Eresource breakups are often caused by the renewal time, low use, high cost, etc. The heart-breaker could be internal players like the liaison or ERMS staff acting as the divorce lawyer once the decision was made, or external players like the publisher/provider/broker/consortium/vendor.

The three types of breakups are cancelled, ceased, or migrated. In each case, you need to assess the status, the holdings, the platform, and the provider. There are some things we have control over, but there are many more things outside of our control, due to the marketplace around information. Don’t take it personally, libraries. It’s not about you.

There are tools where you make the change (catalog, ERM, course management system, and paper files, proxy config, local tools, customized holdings, archives/Portico/local), and then there are tools where you announce the change (LibGuides, RefWorks, site-wide search metadata, blogs & other social media).

UKSG created a cancellation form, which looks lovely. And sadly, our ERMS can’t track everything.

Vendors can play the role of best friend. They want to help, and make sure we’re making the right decision so we don’t come back crying on their shoulder later. Some tips: Know who signed the license, confirm post-cancellation rights, do not count on a refund, plan cancellations and migrations well in advance of renewal, and know what you want (if replacing a product, do your research).

Considerations from the publisher/provider: ownership transfers, licensing, grace periods, overlap periods, and personal relationships.

When does it end? In general, the library gets to decide when to shut it down. It could be immediate, or you could wait until the end of the semester or the end of the subscription term. Sometimes resources are put on probation and given some time to demonstrate value to the community.

What’s left? Post-cancellation access? Deleting or weeding — did you ask the provider to remove the old edition? When a product has migrated, you’ll need to change the tutorials, screenshots, videos, etc.

[copy of the presentation and accompanying materials]

css.php