2013 Charleston Conference

When a library chooses an ILS system, it is making a long-term decision but that decision is often made without thinking about its discovery service. However, since discovery has expanded the available resources of a library, unless the systems from different vendors work together, those decisions influence both implementation and end-user experience. When vendors cooperate, libraries can select a discovery service that provides for the unique needs of a library –with the most full-text searching and instant access to full text; incorporation of leading subject indexes and link resolver support while leveraging the library’s existing investment of time and money in an ILS system. This session looks at an example of a successful implementation of EBSCO Discovery Service™ at a site that uses Innovative Interface’s Encore. Emma Lawson from Langara College will address the benefits and opportunities that vendor options provide and how the new hybrid service impacts the end user experience and long-term supportability. Representatives from EBSCO and Innovative will provide background, context and updates.

The complexity of research has opened up a proliferation of online technologies that offer a vast range of social capabilities, including sharing, analysis, discussion, networking and collaboration. Researchers are amassing information, making connections and learning from each other’s work more frequently and effectively. As resource experts, how can librarians harness the power of these social tools for their institutions in order to meet the productivity needs of researchers and to help advance the research workflow? How can librarians participate within these social networks and further lend their resource expertise? What are the emerging technologies that might shape the future of research?

The audience will:
- Discover the tools that are inspiring researchers now.
- Learn how active participation in the new technologies and social networks can enable librarians to channel their resource expertise.
- Share ideas and engage in a discussion about what the future holds for the social side of research.

Many academic libraries are struggling with collections size reaching or exceeding building capacity.  Meanwhile, the movement of “21st Century Libraries” calls for user centered space. The combination of these two factors has challenged libraries to identify ways to eliminate physical collections without losing access to content.

The academic libraries in the State of Florida, including the University of Central Florida (UCF), have discussed and developed plans for a shared print repository for several years. For the past few years a state wide Shared Storage Task Force was convened with representation from the state university libraries; and eventually formed the FLorida Academic REpository (FLARE) under the leadership of University of Florida.

In 2012, FLARE received the first large shipment from a participating library. After a few months of active planning, UCF implemented its project preparing our materials to send to FLARE, and is poised to be the next library contributing to FLARE.

As presented, the UCF FLARE project requires tremendous coordination and collaboration within the multiple units in the Technical Services Division at UCF, and with the external FLARE Team in Gainesville. Policies and procedures were developed with guidance from the FLARE Team; and internal workflow was designed to ensure accurate processing. Maintaining clear communication with the Public Services Division is also critical.

This presentation will give an overview of the FLARE project and its evolution, and share UCF’s experience in selecting and processing materials for this shared storage facility.

 

W. Lee Hisle (slides)

Many academic libraries face the challenge of decreasing the size of print collections. This 2-part presentation offers perspectives on a range of activities for successful projects. Connecticut College will share the background and principles that guided its recent project, including the importance of administrative support, marketing of the project to the faculty, the role of data in that effort, the lessons learned from other institutions, and the key documents and tools developed to encourage faculty support of the project. In addition, assessment markers to judge progress and the importance of consultant assistance will be discussed. Wesleyan University will compare the key differences in their project’s objectives, principles and challenges with those of Connecticut College, and summarize the lessons drawn from their experience.

The second part of the presentation will focus on organizational challenges and workflow changes in Technical Services as libraries engage in large and collaborative weeding and retention projects. Libraries at nine state-supported Michigan universities are working collaboratively to identify and manage a shared collection of widely held low-use monograph titles. The Michigan Shared Print Initiative (MI-SPI) distributes retention responsibility for each title to two libraries in the group, allowing others to choose to remove them. Ferris State University will share details about a comprehensive weeding project that included applying additional rules to the weeding lists, documenting decisions to keep titles, and developing processes and workflows. Central Michigan University will share new workflows that take into account retention responsibilities and discuss the development of a tool that facilitates communication among participating libraries about volumes that are missing or in poor condition. This broadly focused session will help attendees gain valuable insights about how to best carry out weeding and retention projects.

Effective management can be one of the most challenging issues facing any library professional. Managing even a small group of professionals, para-professionals and/or student employees can be a mine field of complex interpersonal interactions and time consuming effort. This session is designed to give the attendee insight into management practices that have proven effect, some theoretical musings of the presenter on why these practices have proven effective in a variety of settings and practical hints, information and strategies that the attendees will be able to take home and implement immediately.

Catalogers, electronic resources librarians and acquisitions librarians spend a lot of their time in the “back rooms” of the library. Yet even as their roles expand to include participation in innovative library initiatives like institutional repositories, shared print analysis, and digital collections, they are not often consulted on new “reference” activities, like enhancing the information literacy (IL) programs for their library community. Information literacy has become a requirement by many accrediting agencies, making it one of the hottest topics in public services today. There are endless library conferences, workshops and poster sessions devoted to its meaning, methods, and assessment. Is there any connection between Technical Services and Information Literacy? Do technical services professionals have a role at their library for improving information literacy within their user community? Can they have something to contribute to the discussion? This session will offer strong evidence that these “back room” librarians do have a place in IL initiatives and should be included in the conversation. We will offer suggestions for collaborating on IL with your public service colleagues, and we will get you up-to-speed on the information literacy topic by involving the audience in a couple of active learning methods designed for one-shot sessions, including one to explain the IL lingo. Additionally, the session will highlight ways to relate your professional role to IL initiatives, demonstrate how to make time for participation in these initiatives, and provide resources for staying on top of trending IL topics.

Seton Hall University instructional librarians will discuss their success in revising the first-year English curriculum to include a rigorous information literacy component, wrought largely by their changing the dynamics of the librarian-teaching faculty relationship. In the past, we tried several approaches to engage freshmen in information literacy instruction, including point-of-need instruction, comprehensive introductions to library resources, and the presence of embedded librarians in our Blackboard course module. Although these methods have yielded some success, we have been frustrated by students’ lack of retention of the information taught in these courses. We will discuss how our research and praxis have led us to conclude that information literacy must be imparted by the teaching faculty themselves and that, in order to be effective, information literacy must constitute an important part of the first year reading and writing syllabus. We will talk about the process we used to effect change: the revision of a university wide core curriculum that identified information literacy as an essential core skill for undergraduates, the on-line workshops we held for teaching faculty who were interested in improving their information literacy instructional skills, the impact our Google grant (reported on last year at Charleston) has had on our collaborative efforts with the teaching faculty, the decision by the English faculty to revise the first-year curriculum to focus on the NJLA Information Literacy Standards, and finally, the assessment that a joint team of library and English faculty have begun this year that will measure the information literacy skills of the entire freshman class.We will then engage attendees in a lively discussion about their experiences engaging with teaching faculty. With this discussion, we hope to help facilitate those partnerships.

October Ivins (slides)

In this practical session for publishers and intermediaries, we will discuss the importance of clean and standardized customer data, and offer concrete, simple take-aways for those wishing to implement some first steps towards improvement of customer data health. While one of the main goals of cleaner data is to improve service to subscribers, it can also benefit organizations internally: it ensures accuracy in reporting, and minimizes time spent on inquiries. Attendees will be asked to share their experiences with good or poor data, typical pain points, and discuss the practicality of solutions.

What do acquisitions policies and workflows look like in next-generation systems? How can institutions leverage automated processes to improve efficiency, and what happens when you also belong to a consortium that is looking to increase collaboration? The Orbis Cascade Alliance is a consortium of 37 public and private academic institutions in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. In January 2012, the Alliance began a 2-year process of migrating all 37 institutions to a shared ILS. Migrating in 4 cohorts every 6 months, the first cohort of 6 institutions went live with Ex Libris’s Alma and Primo in July 2013. Representatives from 3 of the 6 pioneering libraries will discuss topics such as preparing for migration to a new system, changes in workflow, challenges and opportunities for a new system, and what may be coming down the pike for cooperative collection development in the Alliance. Questions encouraged from the audience, especially from attendees who may be pondering or about to embark upon their own migrations.

Peter Binfield (slides)
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz (slides)
Mark Kurtz (slides)

The last 18 months have seen a number of new and interesting open access journals being started (for example PeerJ, F1000 Research, Elementa, e-Life, Cureus etc). Each of these start-ups have learned valuable lessons about the current journal market and how to promote and develop their new journals to the wider world. This panel of three representatives from PeerJ, F1000 Research and Elementa will briefly outline some of the lessons they have learnt as well as their future plans for each product. An open discussion with Q&A will then be moderated by Greg Tananbaum during which specific issues will be further explored.

The last few years have seen a significant growth in the number of online tools being offered to researchers that pledge to embed themselves in their workflows and significantly enhance their efficiency and effectiveness. This session will look at two types of these tools – those which focus primarily on managing content (like Zotero, Papers, PubGet, Mendeley, RefWorks, EndNote, and ReadCube) and those which focus primarily on individuals and collaboration (like academia.edu and ResearchGate), although many of these demonstrate attributes of both types, even though their provenance and key strength lie with one group or the other.

In this session:

• a university librarian will share with us how she has incorporated some of these tools into her own workflows and into the services which she makes available to her library users. She will assess their strengths and weaknesses and examine the challenges that can arise as a result of the development and growth of these tools.
• an A&I service provider will share his thoughts on how information discovery players can ensure that their services both enhance, and may be enhanced by, the functionality offered to users by these new tools. 

Both speakers will also provide insights into how end users are deploying these tools, looking at what they find useful, what they don’t, and what additional tools they would like to see developed.

Come to this session either to learn how you can benefit from using some of these tools, or to share your current experience of using any of them.

Data about library electronic collections increasingly drives much of what libraries do, from resource identification to procurement to management to discovery and use. This data describes both what we buy (packages, titles) and how we manage and use it (licenses, usage stats). The data shares the characteristic of containing both components that are globally true (the same for everybody) and components that are pertinent only to a subset of everybody, whether the subset resides at the national, regional, consortial or individual library level.

Managing this data and adding value as it moves across the global/local boundary is a core challenge to us as a community, from publishers to intermediaries to libraries. How do we effectively manage the multi-sourced and multi-purposed data at the appropriate level? How do we reduce the current structural inefficiencies that result in global data being redundantly managed?

The Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) is a community-driven initiative that is reconceptualizing the knowledge base by working collaboratively and differently to manage the global data about electronic collections. This session will describe how GOKb is setting up a technical and community infrastructure to tackle these challenges.

Are you getting the most out of your license management tools? Are you able to move key license elements to staff that need to know, where they need to know it? In this session we’ll give a brief background on the NISO ONIX-PL Encoding Project, describe the ONIX-PL encoding process, demonstrate examples of the power of ONIX-PL, and show you where you can find and download encoded licenses.

In the rapidly evolving scholarly ecosystem, ‘working better together’ is increasingly important. This session will explore how collaborations between libraries, publishers, and vendors can produce new efficiencies in workflows for library staff and lasting improvements to discoverability for academic researchers. Cross-sector representatives will share sector perspectives and discuss interoperability issues, with a common focus on publisher content, research tools, and library systems.

Panelists’ introductory remarks will explore interoperability issues and implementation implications. To set the stage for cross-sector discussion, Maria Collins (NCSU, Head, Acquisitions and Discovery) will describe NCSU’s technical services reorganization and highlight vendor collaborations. Within this framework, panelists’ Nicole Pelsinsky (Serials Solutions, Manager, Implementation Services) and Aaron Wood (Alexander Street Press, Vice President, Systems and Data Architecture) comments will address such practical questions as these: 

• Data – how to take advantage of publisher content to improve the research process via the discovery service?
• Implementations – what to expect from vendors to ensure a smooth and efficient implementation?
• Linking – how to ensure seamless access to content using data from the publisher?
• Tracking – what services are available to help librarians improve workflow?
• Maintenance – how can overhead associated with content maintenance be reduced?

Noting achievements and opportunities, panelists’ conclusions will consider high impact recommendations for improvements in library efficiencies and user experiences. The aim throughout is to better understand contemporary challenges and opportunities for ‘working better together’, with the aspirational goal of fostering cross-sector collaborations that enable libraries to deliver value-added research services. Therefore, Mary M. Somerville (lead author, SAGE white paper, Improving the discoverability of scholarly content in the Twenty-First Century: Collaboration opportunities for librarians, publishers, and vendors) serves as the panel moderator.