Tag: librarian

print holdings & javascript

Topeka Public Library Periodicals area, ca. 1953

What does print holdings mean to you? If you said “the books/journals in paper on a shelf in the library,” then you’re probably a librarian. Our students don’t know what it means — most of them think it has something to do with printing something from a computer. And yet, that’s what we have had our print holdings labeled as in our “journal locator” (aka A-Z list and link resolver) for years. Until two weeks ago, when I changed it.

It never occurred to me that “print holdings” would be confusing to someone, since it’s pretty clear to me what it means. But I don’t think like an undergraduate student anymore, much less an undergraduate student in 2011. It wasn’t until I had spent so much time looking at our print journal holdings that it dawned on me that this language may not be very clear to our modern students.

My main project this summer involved taking information from an inventory of our print journal collection and adding the coverage dates to the entries in our A-Z/linking list. In addition, I added notes about the location (we have journals in four main locations, with a few in the book stacks and the archives) and any anomalies. Now when someone looks up a title, it will say “University of Richmond Libraries” followed by the location (i.e. “Boatwright Periodicals – Second Floor”).

I’d love to change the name “periodicals” to something else, but I’m not sure what. Also, it’s the location name in our catalog, and I’m trying to be consistent. At least it’s not “print holdings” anymore.

The next phase in my efforts to make our A-Z/linking list more useful to the novice was to add icons for peer-reviewed titles (example). I’m using the code that Karen Coombs developed a couple of years ago. Took me until now to realize that it’s not that complicated to implement, particularly once I realized that we’re using JQuery on our website already, so getting it set up and maintained is not my responsibility.

Next, I’m hoping to add links to RSS feeds where available, but I can only find references to the code for that. I’ll keep digging, but it’s dropping lower on the priority list.

libday7: day 4

Began the day by going through the handful of email messages that arrived overnight, with half of them being links to articles shared by colleagues. Then I fired up iTunes and started in on the print journal inventory project again.

Made some progress with the project, but then it was time to pick up tickets for Busch Gardens (they send us there every year as a benefit and to shut down campus for half a day). When I got back from that, I finished up the spreadsheet page I was working on and then did odds and ends until I had to leave for an early lunch.

After my early lunch and at the time I would normally be at lunch, I worked a two hour shift at the reference/circulation/information desk to cover for a colleague who was originally scheduled then. It was really quiet, with a few folks coming up to check out books and some parents with prospective students wandering through. Had one emeritus faculty member who was quite upset to learn we’d withdrawn a couple of history journals he liked to browse and photocopy. They’re in JSTOR and in the “what to withdraw” tool from Ithaka, so we figured we were covered for about 99.9% of the folks who’d want them. Did not take into account emeritus faculty who do not use computers.

Spent some time after the desk going through Twitter, reading librar* articles shared by colleagues there. And retweeting a few myself. Also cracked open my afternoon Coke Zero. Ahhh…

The only item left for today’s email inbox to-do list was to add a new eresource to the website. We’d acquired it a few weeks ago, and I’ve just been waiting for the subject librarian to send me the description she wanted to use. Got it late yesterday and bumped it to today’s task list.

Up next was going through the stack of eresource invoices that appeared on my chair while I was at lunch. I check to see if they’ve been paid already and if they’re on the cancellation list before either verifying with the subject librarian that they want to renew or giving them to my assistant to pay if I’ve already received renewal instructions. Some publishers send invoices well in advance, some only 30 days (or less) before the renewal date. I try to get renewal instructions from the librarian in advance of the license deadline, which varies from resource to resource.

This took me up to the end of the day, or at least the part where I leave to go sweat in the gym for a while.

libday7: day 1

This was an odd day for me. Several of us loaded up in a van and two cars to go visit some of the libraries at the University of Virginia. We were mainly interested in how they are using the spaces, and in the renovations that have happened over the past 15-20 years.

By the end of the day, we had toured parts of Alderman Library, Brown Science & Engineering Library, Clemons Library, and the Scholar’s Lab in Alderman. We also spent some time with University Librarian Karin Wittenborg, who is responsible for raising funds and advocating for most of the renovations. It was an eye-opening, educational experience. And an exhausting one.

McGregor Room in Alderman Library
cell phone quiet booth
replacement for formerly staffed service desk
creativity in the Scholar's Lab

nifty enhancement for the A-Z journal tool

Not sure if I’ve mentioned it here, but my library uses SerialsSolutions for our A-Z journal list, OpenURL linking, and ERMS. I’ve been putting a great deal of effort into the ERMS over the past few years, getting license, cost, and use data in so that we can use this tool for both discovery and assessment. Aside from making the page look pretty much like our library website, we haven’t done much to enhance the display.

Recently (as in, yesterday) my colleague Dani Roach over at the University of St. Thomas shared with me an enhancement they implemented using the “public notes” for a journal title. They have icons that indicate whether there is an RSS feed for the contents and whether the journal is peer reviewed (according to Ulrichs). The icon for the RSS feed is also a link to the feed itself. This is what you  see when you search for the Journal of Biological Chemistry, for example.

Much like the work I’m doing to pull together helpful information on the back-end about the resources from a variety of sources, this pulls in information that would be tremendously useful for students and faculty researchers, I think.

However, I have a feeling this would take quite a bit of time to gather up the information and add it to the records. Normally I would leap in with both feet and just do it, but in the effort to be more responsible, I’m going to talk with the reference librarians first. But, I wanted to share this with you all because I think it’s a wonderful libhack that anyone should consider doing, regardless of which ERMS they have.

NASIG 2011: Managing Ebook Acquisition — the Coordination of “P” and “E” Publication Dates

Speaker: Sarah Forzetting & Gabrielle Wiersma

They are sending bib records to their book supplier weekly in order to eliminate duplication of format and other ebook packages. This might be helpful for libraries that purchase ebooks through publisher platforms in addition to through their vendor.

One of the challenges of ebook acquisition is that publishers are delaying publication or embargoing access on aggregators in order to support the print book sales. Fortunately the delay between print and ebook publication is diminishing — the average delay has gone down from 185 days to 21 since 2008.

For certain profiles in the approval plan, Coutts will set aside books that match for a certain period of time until the ebook is available. If the ebook is not available in that time, they will ship the print. If the librarian does not want to wait for the ebook, they can stop the wait process and move forward with the print purchase right away.

Part of the profile setup for e-preferred or print-preferred not only includes the subject areas, but also content type. For example, some reference works are more useful in electronic format.

Oh, my! They have their PDA set up so that two uses trigger a purchase. I should find out what constitutes a use.

data-crunching librarian

Officially, my title is Electronic Resources Librarian, but lately I’ve been spending more of my time and energy on gathering and crunching data about our eresources than on anything else. It’s starting to bleed over into the print world, as well. Since we don’t have someone dedicated to managing our print journals, I’ve taken on the responsibility of directing discussions about their future, as well as gathering and providing e-only options to the selectors.

I like this work, but I’ve also been feeling a bit like my role is evolving and changing in ways I’m not entirely cognizant of, and that worries me. I came into this job without clear direction and made it my own, and even though I have a department head now, I still often feel like I’m the driver. This has both positives and negatives, and lately I’ve been wishing I could have more outside direction, in part so I don’t feel so much like I’m doing things that may not have much value to the people for whom I am doing them.

However, on Monday, something clicked. A simple comment about using SAS to analyze the print book collection use over time set all sorts of things firing away in my head. About all I know with SAS is that it’s some sort of data analysis tool, but I realized that I had come up with several of my professional goals for the next year in that moment.

For one, I want to explore whether or not I can learn and use SAS (or SPSS) effectively to analyze our collections (not just print books, as in the example above). For another, I want to explore whether or not I can learn R to more effectively visualize the data I gather.

Maybe some day down the road my title won’t be Electronic Resources Librarian anymore. Maybe some day it will be Data-Crunching Librarian.

Sounds good to me.

VLACRL Spring 2011: Clay Shirky, Fantasy Football, and the Future of Library Collections

As we shift to a demand-driven collection development approach, we will better be able to provide content at the point of need.

Speaker: Greg Raschke

Raschke started off with several assumptions about the future of library collections. These should not be a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention: The economics of our collections is not sustainable – the cost and spend has gone up over the years, but there is a ceiling to funding, so we need to lower the costs of the entire system. We’re at a tipping point where just in case no longer delivers at the point of need. We must change the way we collect, and it will be hard, but not impossible.

The old system of supply-side collection development assumes that we’re working with limited resources (i.e. print materials), so we have to buy everything just in case someone needs it 10 years down the road when the book/journal/whatever is out of print. As a result, we judge the quality of a collection by its size, rather than by its relevance to the users. All of this contributes to an inelastic demand for journals and speculative buying.

The new system of demand-driven collections views them as drivers of research and teaching. It’s not really a new concept so much as a new workflow. There’s less tolerance in investing in a low-use collection, so there is an increase in the importance of use data and modifying what we collect based on that use data. The risks of not evolving and failing to innovate can be seen in the fate of the newspapers, many of whom held onto the old systems for too long and are dying or becoming irrelevant as a result.

Demand-driven collection development can create a tension between the philosophy of librarians as custodians of scholarship and librarians as enablers of a digital environment for scholars. Some think that this type of collection development may result in lower unit costs, but the reality is that unless the traditions of tenure and promotion change, the costs of publishing scholarly works will not go down. One of the challenging/difficult aspects of demand-driven collection development is that we won’t be getting new funds to do it – we must free funds from other areas in order to invest in these new methods (i.e. local digital production and patron-driven acquisitions).

The rewards of adapting are well worth it. The more our constituencies use the library and its resources, the more vital we become. Look at your data, and then bet on the numbers. Put resources into enabling a digital environment for your scholars.

Demand-driven collection development is not just patron-driven acquisitions! It’s about becoming an advanced analyst and increasing the precision in collection development. For NCSU‘s journal review, they look at downloads, impact factors, publications by NCSU authors, publications that cite NCSU authors, and gather feedback from the community. These bibliometrics are processed through a variety of formulas to standardize them for comparison and to identify outliers.

For print resources, they pulled circulation and bibliographic information out of their ILS and dropped it into SAS to assess the use of these materials over time. It was eye-opening to see what subject areas saw circulation greater than one over 10 years from the year they were added to the collection and those that saw no circulations. As a result, they were able to identify funds that could go towards supporting other areas of the collection, and they modified the scopes of their approval profiles. [A stacked graph showing the use of their collection, such as print circulation, ejournals/books downloads, reserves, and ILL has been one of their most popular promotional tools.]

As we shift to a demand-driven collection development approach, we will better be able to provide content at the point of need. This includes incorporating more than just our local collections (i.e. adding HathiTrust and other free resources to our catalog). Look to fund patron-driven acquisitions that occur both in the ebook purchasing models and through ILL requests. Integrate electronic profiling with your approval plans so that you are not just looking at purchasing print. Consider ebook packages to lower the unit costs, and use short-term loans for ebooks as an alternative to ILL. Get content to users in the mode they want to consume it. Do less speculative buying, and move money into new areas. It is imperative that libraries/librarians collaborate with each other in digital curation, digital collections, and collective bargaining for purchases.

There are challenges, of course. You will encounter the CAVE people. Data-driven and user-driven approaches can punish niche areas, disciplinary variation, and resources without data. The applications and devices we use to interact with digital content are highly personalized, which is a challenge for standardizing access.

I asked Raschke to explain how he evaluates resources that don’t have use data, and he says he’s more likely to stop buying them. For some resources, he can look at proxy logs and whether they are being cited by authors at his institution, but otherwise there isn’t enough data beyond user feedback.

CIL 2011: Repositories — Strategies & Practices

Speakers: Mitzi M. Cole & Jeremy Gottwig

They wanted to create an author and publication repository. They maintain information about the authors with name variants and the codes for their divisions, in addition to identifying the relationships between the author and publication and among the authors themselves. The display of this information needed to be displayed with links to the full-text using their link resolver or by attaching full text files when allowed by copyright. Those needs helped identify requirements for the system they chose.

They were able to use the Homeland Security database of NASA employees to harvest information about the authors to begin populating that database. They then harvested data from a number of commercial sources to find their publications.

They developed crosswalks to move metadata from the various sources, and developed a utility to de-dupe the records and match author name variants. They also used the OpenURL standard to create full-text links.

They used Fedora Repository to store all of this. In order to use Fedora, you need to think in objects. Using relational queries, you can repurpose almost all of your data.

The author metadata was created using MADS in a separate tool and then exported to the format needed for Fedora. They used the local identification numbers for employees for the PID. On the public display of the author record, they show the author’s publications and the related authors (i.e. co-authors).

In the publications database, they used PUB_MD identifiers for publications to create unique PIDs. Unfortunately, there were problems with variations because they were pulling data from several sources.

The public end uses Drupal with Zen-based themes. For future consideration, they are looking at self-submission methods, Hydra, Islandora, BibApp, and whatever else may be developed which will plug into Fedora.

Talk to the end users early and often. We think like librarians and they don’t. Publisher metadata can be problematic — even they have trouble with author disambiguation. Automation can only go so far, and you still need human quality control. There’s always something new on the horizon.

Speaker: Amy Buckland

Many repositories are founded because someone at an institution wants one or sets it as a goal. But you need to know what that means.

Clifford Lynch calls it “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.”

If it’s a service, it impacts all areas of the library. It needs to be sustainable, and flexible as formats change. At McGill, they mediate the deposits in order to make sure copyrights are honored.

How do users find out about your IR? What kind of support will it have? You need to know this at the beginning so that you can market it to the stakeholders.

Who are the members of the community? Will students be included? At McGill, they are, and it’s a requirement for graduation that theses are deposited.

There is no way that what you are using for your IR will make it manageable and accessible. Be very wary of tools that promise this.

What goes in? What kinds of digital materials? Is it dark or open? Flat media (articles, papers, theses, etc) are easy, but it gets tricky with other objects and dynamic resources like blogs and websites.

The standards don’t stay standard for very long. Pick one and stick to it, because retro-fitting is challenging.

Who is a part of your institution? Do alumni get included? For public institutions, is the public included?

Institutional repository is a librarian term. Call it something else depending on who you talk to so that it has meaning to them.

“our goal is to take advantage of the web to make the knowledge created at our institution available to the world”

Speaker: Jim DelRosso

Digital projects are chronically understaffed. We need to be advocates to change that.

If you are going into digital repositories, copyright is going to be a pain in your butt.

Digitization isn’t magical. It takes people to figure out if it can be included and then do all the work to get it there. If it was possible to do this easily, libraries wouldn’t be doing it, Google would.

Step one: digitize
Step two: ???
Step three: Profit! (or for libraries, survive)

People are one of the toughest things to get support for. Tech is shiny and gets the attention, but it can be done without staff. Tell decision makers that technologies go obsolete, shiny gets dull, but people will last.

Our capacity to do works that will stagger our users and our peers is sometimes missed. There is right now more potential for the dissemination and preservation of knowledge than we have ever seen in human history. Go forth and do that!

CIL 2011: Thinking Strategically & Critically

Speaker: Rebecca Jones

She’s a librarian who started in corporate libraries and went on to human resources and organizational development. Working in different types of places has given her a perspective on different kinds of thinking.

We have gotten ideas at this conference to take back, but there a people at home who haven’t heard them yet, so you need to plan how you will approach this to not fail.

Strategic planning is not about the document — it’s about engaging people in the planning process so that everyone can see where they are making a difference. What are the implications for everyone? Consultants should not be doing the environmental scan — everyone in the library should be doing that.

Any time we have to do something differently, even if we know it is for good, it is uncomfortable to adjust to it. Viewing situations and solutions strategically will result in different types of decisions. Talking it through with others will suss out new solutions. It is too risky to not think differently in this economy.

Strategic thinking is as much about emotions as it is about finding out what the right questions are. What is the real problem that we are talking about? It is not about being critical. It is about opening up all of the possibilities.

It is our responsibility to have critical optimism. No librarian or library needs to play devil’s advocate. Have some fun planning! If we can’t see a better world, how will our stakeholders and users?

Be flexible and adaptable. Question the status quo — we tend to perpetuate what we already know. Focus on the future and don’t let the past stop you from moving forward. If you are already in a hole, stop digging. Gather the right facts in order to understand what is really happening.

Standing in the future is a planning strategy that has planners talk about the dream they have for the future as if it is in the present. By having all staff involved, you can get a clearer picture of how to get there. Buy-with is more effective than buy-in.

Some people will never like the change. Don’t listen to the 20% who are still whining — pay attention to the 80% who have moved on.

Consider following up with Rotman’s Business Journal for more of this kind of stuff. Also, Seth Goddin, Futures magazine, the Futures conference, Roger Martin’s work on design thinking, and what your community is reading. We have to be listeners. Be self-aware — you need to know what your assumptions are.

Why aren’t we at non-library conferences? We need to be aware of what is happening out there.

ER&L: Toward the Digital Public Library of America

Speaker: Amanda French

Korea has a national digital library that recently opened a physical space in Seoul. It is not small or inexpensive, and contains a large collection. They are digitizing books, and have more than what is available in Netlibrary. The equipment in the building is high tech and varied, with multiple purposes in use. You can see photos of this on Flickr.

This is not about the wow factor. This is about providing information and resources to the citizens of Korea. They changed laws to allow the di-brarians to collect as much as they can from everywhere.

There is some talk of building a national digital library in the US, but only in a virtual sense. It started from a classical/Jeffersonian perspective, but public librarians have gotten involved, and the scope has widened.

The library is a public good and should be municipally supported, but this concept is relatively new in US history. However, recent financial woes have caused these entities to reduce or remove funding. In one town, the public checked out every book in the building to protest the closing of the library.

The biggest barrier to creating a national digital library in the Us is copyright laws. Korea was willing to change laws, but is our government? Do we have the funding to pay for enough lobbyists?

The text of this talk is available on her blog. This is just my paraphrase of the points she made.

css.php