Tag: speaker

CIL 2011: Building Community with Faculty Suppliers

Speakers: Regina Reynolds & Laurie Kaplan

The US ISSN Center (part of the Library of Congress) is primarily responsible for assigning ISSN and metadata to journals. They work with the international ISSN network as well as answering questions from libraries and publishers.

R.R. Bowker is a subdivision of ProQuest. They create metadata for libraries and publishers and several products like Ulrichs. They have one employee working in the ISSN Center assigning ISSNs, creating CONSER records, screens incoming requests, and solves problems. Initially, they worked mostly with the Ulrichs database, and now are working with the SerialsSolutions database.

The relationship began over metadata. Bowker wanted data for Ulrichs, and the ISSN Center needed more staff to do it. The contract is non-exclusive, but to date, no other company has been involved. LoC would like to develop more relationships like this, in part to reduce duplication of effort.

The benefit for publishers is a one-stop shop for ISSN registration, Ulrichs inclusion, and CONSER records in WorldCat. The serials community benefits from having a standard number for each publication, fuller records, and an advocate for gathering that metadata.

Some of the challenges have been technological (firewalls, different computers, etc.) and administrative (different bosses, holidays, etc,). They are looking to better ways of collaborating between the ISSN record creation and the Ulrichs record creation.

Standards matter. Common data elements can be mapped.

More detail in the current issue of Serials Review.

Speaker: Jim DelRosso (DigitalCommons@ILR)

When creating a digital repository, start small. They started initially with getting faculty publications up. This required developing strong relationships with them.

While you may be starting small, you need to dream big as well. What else can you do?

Get support. Go to the offices of the people you want to work with. Get familiar with the administrative assistants. But, be ready to do everything yourself.

Plan ahead, but write it in pencil. They organizational structure of your repository needs to be flexible to handle outside changes.

Once you get going, take time to assess how it’s doing. Get familiar with the reports available in your system, or use tools like Google Analytics. Don’t rely only on anecdotes. Use both numbers and stories.

ER&L: Evolving Organizational Structures — are we keeping up?

Speaker: Glenn Bunton

He’s not a eresource person, and he doesn’t have the answers, but he hopes this will provoke some thinking. Users drive the libraries, not the other way around.

Organizations can’t change on a dime. You have to plan long term.

We are changing from the keeper of the materials to a service organization. Our organizational structure needs to change to match that. We still have the same old technical services and public services. [I disagree. The titles may be the same, but what we do is vastly different in many ways. He did not appear to have looked very closely at functions beyond titles.]

The paradigm is shifting. First with the advent of the iPhone, and now with the increase in ebook readers. Paper books are going away, like it or not.

He definitely doesn’t know anything about what he’s talking about. He’s observing the changes, but doesn’t understand or respect them.

ER&L: Innovative eResource Workflow

Speaker: Kelly Smith and Laura Edwards

Their redesign of workflow was prompted by a campus-wide move to Drupal. They are now using it to drive the public display of eresources. They are grouping the resources by status as well as by the platform. On the back end, they add information about contacts, admin logins, etc. They can trigger real-time alerts and notes for the front-end. They track fund codes and cost information. In addition, there are triggers that prompt the next steps in workflow as statuses are changed, from trials to renewals.

Speaker: Xan Arch

They needed a way to standardize the eresource lifecycle, and a place to keep all the relevant information about new resources as they move through the departments. They also wanted to have more transparency about where the resource is in the process.

They decided to use a bug/issue tracker called Jira because that’s what another department had already purchased. They changed the default steps to map to the workflow and notify the appropriate people. The eresource order form is the start, and they ask for as much as they can from the selector. They then put up a display in a wiki using Confluence to display the status of each resource, including additional info about it.

Speaker: Ben Heet

The University of Notre Dame has been developing their own ERMS called CORAL. The lifecycle of an eresource is complex, so they took the approach of creating small workflows to give the staff direction for what to do next, depending on the complexity of the resource (ie free versus paid).

You can create reminder tasks assigned to specific individuals or groups depending on the needs of the workflow. They don’t go into every little thing to be done, but mainly just trigger reminders of the next group of activities. There is an admin view that shows the pending activities for each staff member, and when they are done, they can mark it complete to trigger the next step.

Not every resource is going to need every step. One size does not fit all.

Speaker: Lori Duggan

Kuali OLE is a partnership among academic libraries creating the next generation of library management software and systems. It has a very complex financial platform for manual entry of information about purchase. It looks less like a traditional ERMS and more like a PeopleSoft/Banner/ILS acquisition module, mostly because that is what it is and they are still developing the ERM components.

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.

ER&L: Making Data Work

Speaker: Jamene Brooks-Kieffer

Spreadsheets are not usable information to most everyone else. It is not a communication tool. A textual summary or data story or info graphic conveys the information found in spreadsheets in ways they are easier to understand.

Every audience has diverse needs. Consider the scope appropriate for the story you need to tell.

Data stories are created with the tools you already have. You don’t need special funding or resources — use what you already have.

Example: In order to understand how the link resolver data is different from publisher data, she started a blog to explain it to internal users.

Speaker: John McDonald

Graphics can simplify the telling of complex stories. But make sure your graphic tells the right story.

Know your audience. Showing the drop in library funding compared to market trend to faculty will get them up in arms, but administrators see it as a correction to an out of control market and maybe we don’t need all those resources.

Collaborate with other people to improve your presentation. You might understand the data, but you are not your audience.

Speaker: Michael Levine-Clark

Guess what? You need to know your audience! And spreadsheets don’t tell the story to everyone.

Take the example of moving collections to storage. Faculty need reassurance that the things they browse will remain in the library. Some disciplines want more specifics about what is going and what is staying. Architects need space planning data and they don’t care about the reasons. Administrators need justification for retaining the materials, regardless of where they end up, and the cost of retrieving materials from storage. Board of Trustees need information about the value of paper collections and being a little vague about the specifics (talking about low use rather than no use).

ER&L: ROI — Why oh why?

Speaker: Doralyn Rossman

How to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to tell a story.

ROI is a hot topic. People outside of the library are aware of it. Comparing yourself to other libraries is challenging because your missions are different. Showing how you contribute to the mission of your institution is much more valuable.

Methods of assessment: ROI, use, impact, alternative comparison (lib versus other service), customer satisfaction & outcomes, and commodity production (services, facilities, resources).

When you tell your story, start at the top: strategic plan, accreditation, etc. Give administrators information in the language they need to share with others. What do they need to know that they don’t know they need to know? What do they not want to know?

There are plenty of examples out there — do your homework.

Quantitative metrics: COUNTER, simultaneous users, multiple-year deals, capped inflation, staffing & workflows, reference queries, instruction sessions, citation reports & impact factor of collection, cost if purchased individually.

Qualitative metrics: relevance to curriculum, formatting efficiencies, user self-sufficiency, condition and usabilty of collection, proactive trouble shooting, MINES protocol from ARL.

Story: cost avoidance for users, reduced cost of course materials, quick access to research materials for faculty and grant work, attracting and retaining faculty/students, what would you do if they library didn’t exist, contribution to the strategic plan.

Example: University of Tennessee surveyed faculty about their grant proposal process. They found that faculty used more materials and resources than what was reflected in the proposals themselves. There is an importance of library resources at all stages in the grant process and publishing process.

LIBvalue project is a good resource. It’s generated by an IMLS grant following up on the ROI research at various institutions. Recommended reading.

If you’re not already collecting data, start now. You want a long-term study. Build it into your routines so you do it on a regular basis.

There are no cookie cutter methods. You have to know what story you want to tell, and then find the data to do that. Each situation/institution will be unique.

From the audience: Sense Maker is a good tool for capturing qualitative data.

my presentation for Internet Librarian 2010

I’ve uploaded my presentation to SlideShare and will be sending it to the ITI folks shortly. Check the speaker notes for the actual content, as the slides are more for visualization.

E-Resource Workflow for a Small/Medium Academic Library

View more presentations from Anna Creech.

IL 2010: Personal Content Management

speaker: Gary Price

Giving generalities about mobile devices is challenging because there are so many options. If your library doesn’t already have a mobile website, go for a web app rather than something platform specific.

The cloud can be a good backup for when your devices fail, since you can access it from other places. But, choose a cloud service or backup service carefully – consider reputation and longevity. If you see something you want to preserve for future use, save it now because it could be gone later. Capture it yourself and keep it local.

Backup your computer (pay now or pay later). Price recommends Mozy and Carbonite. Also, pay attention to the restore options (internet vs. DVD).

[I kinda zoned out at this point, as I’m pretty sure he’s not going to talk about much of anything I don’t already know about or will read about on Lifehacker. Unfortunately, choosing a seat in the front row prevents me from politely leaving to attend a different session.]

CIL 2010: Productivity Tools

Speaker: Lynda Kellam & Beth Filar-Williams

Check out the presentation wiki for a list of the tools and such. I’ll just note the ones I really like or other commentary I might have. They’ve grouped them into three categories: tasks, notetaking, and scheduling.

The presenters are using Poll Everywhere to get audience input on which category to focus on first, as well as asking for hands for which one. They started with Tasks.

Things is awesome, but Mac/iPhone only. Without a cloud-based interface, it’s not accessible by any other OS. Based on Getting Things Done, the application helps you organize tasks based on contexts.

Todoist is cloud-based task tool. I just started using it myself because I wanted something that could let me add sub-task to tasks.

Remember the Milk is also cloud-based, and like Todoist, it has a mobile interface. Unlike Todoist, it has apps for Blackberry and Android as well as iPhone. Tasks can also be added by SMS. One complaint I had was not being able to see a list of everything due today or overdue in the main web interface (can see it in Gmail), but now I know how to create a saved search that shows overdue tasks (dueBefore:today) and tasks due today (due:today).

The presenters have lots of scheduling tools to share. I’ve heard of only one of them, Schedule Once. The presenters are most excited about jiffle, which pulls your Goolge Calendar availability along with your own selection of available times, and allows the user to request a meeting through the site, but only for the available times. This is really useful for students scheduling personal appointments with instruction librarians. If you’re not using GCal, there is likely a tool that will allow you to sync your calendar with a GCal account.

Cozi integrates calendars, photos, widgets, journals, tasks, and is more geared towards groups or families. It might be more friendly for folks who are not comfortable with disparate, more complicated tools.

They don’t have many notetaking tools listed (Google Docs, Evernote, & wikis). More folks were interested in Evernote. Personally, I just haven’t found a good way to integrate Evernote into my life/work, and I’m not interested in paying for the premium features until I have a reason to use it regularly. I like using the journal feature of Outlook for taking work-related notes, and I rarely need to note things for personal stuff beyond adding them to a task.

CIL 2010: The Power in Your Browser – LibX & Zotero

Speaker: Krista Godfrey

She isn’t going to show how to create LibX or Zotero access, but rather how to use them to create life-long learners. Rather than teaching students how to use proprietary tools like Refworks, teaching them tools they can use after graduation will help support their continued research needs.

LibX works in IE and Firefox. They are working on a Chrome version as well. It fits into the search and discovery modules in the research cycle. The toolbar connects to the library catalog and other tools, and right-click menu search options are available on any webpage.  It will also embed icons in places like Amazon that will link to catalog searches, and any page with a document identifier (DOI, ISSN) will now present that identifier as a link to the catalog search.

Zotero is only in Firefox, unfortunately. It’s a records management tool that allows you to collect, manage, cite, and share, which fill in the rest of the modules in the research cycle. It will collect anything, archive anything, and store any attached documents. You can add notes, tags, and enhance the metadata. The citation process works in Word, Open Office, and Google Docs, with a program similar to Write-N-Cite that can be done by dragging and dropping the citation where you want it to go.

One of the down-sides to Zotero when it first came out was that it lived only in one browser on one machine, but the new version comes with server space that you can sync your data to, which allows you to access your data on other browsers/machines. You can create groups and share documents within them, which would be great for a class project.

Why aren’t we teaching Zotero/LibX more? Well, partially because we’ve spent money on other stuff, and we tend to push those more. Also, we might be worried that if we give our users tools to access our content without going through our doors, they may never come back. But, it’s about creating life-long learners, and they won’t be coming through our doors when they graduate. So, we need to teach them tools like these.

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