Digital Commons Network^™

Collaborating The Support The Research Community, The Next Chapter, Kumsal Bayazit, Cris Ferguson

Charleston Library Conference

As a newcomer Kumsal Bayazit will share her observations about the dynamic world of Research including its evolving needs, challenges, and diversity of views on how to progress. She will look forward to the future, exploring the possibilities to support Research communities collaboratively as they work on solving Grand Challenges to advance society.

Dual-Campus Subject Librarians At University Of Central Florida, Barbara G. Tierney, Corinne Bishop

Charleston Library Conference

A new dual-campus subject librarian program is being rolled out at the University of Central Florida (UCF) whereby several subject librarians divide their time between two campuses, the legacy main campus in East Orlando and the new Downtown Orlando Campus. As of Fall 2019, four UCF subject librarians regularly travel to the new Downtown Campus to provide library support for academic programs, faculty, and students who recently relocated to the new facility. Dual-campus subject librarians are also maintaining support services for their assigned academic programs that remain at the UCF Main Campus. This article provides information and reflections about how …

Reconsidering Literacy, Audrey Powers, Marc Powers

Charleston Library Conference

Literacy, until recently, was defined as the ability to read printed text and to understand the nuances of both the form and content of that printed text. More recently there has been a focus on subsets of literacy – data literacy, numeracy, visual literacy, media literacy, etc. – that recognizes the means of communicating ideas and facts are not limited to the printed text and that there are multiple means which may be more powerful ways of communicating in our world. In recent years, higher education has been redefining what it means to be educated – from a focus on …

What Do Editors Want?: Assessing A Growing Library Publishing Program And Finding Creative Solutions To Unmet Needs, Julia Lovett, Andrée Rathemacher

Charleston Library Conference

The University of Rhode Island (URI) University Libraries publishes five active open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals on our DigitalCommons@URI platform. Our journal publishing program has grown slowly but steadily over the last decade, with new services added incrementally as needed. In early 2019, we conducted three focus group interviews with nine editors and assistants representing all of the journals on our platform in order to assess our journal publishing efforts. We asked editors to identify the successes, challenges, and unmet needs that they have encountered in the publishing process and what resources they have found to support their journals outside …

Are Economic Pressures On University Press Acquisitions Quietly Changing The Shape Of The Scholarly Record?, Emily J. Farrell, Kizer S. Walker, Nicole A. Kendzejeski, Mahinder S. Kingra, Elizabeth Windsor

Charleston Library Conference

The monograph remains central to humanities and qualitative social science (HSS) research as the form most suitable for the long-form argument and, crucially, as foundational to the tenure process in these fields. University and other scholarly presses have played a vital role in supporting the publication of scholarly monographs where such narrow research is not seen as being as commercially viable as, for example, journals. While there appears to be an erosion of traditional revenue streams, new funding models are not yet recuperating costs for scholarly monographs. Library budgets continue to tighten, with new collection strategies taking hold, putting strain …

Buy, Subscribe, Or Borrow? Consumers’ Use Preferences For Information Products, Xiaohua Zhu, Moonhee Cho

Charleston Library Conference

The information industry has been exploring business models for digital information products, but it was not until recent years that the new access model, especially subscription-based services, became popular. Thanks to the advancement of streaming technology, online advertisement, and DRM technology, information providers were able to design various pricing schemes and provide various services for users with different needs. Consumers seem to favor these services increasingly, but some questions remain: Is there a significant shift in users’ general preferences for all media content? Do they prefer any particular models under specific circumstances? What factors are related to users’ preferences? This …

Data Curation Workshop: Tips And Tools For Today, Matthew M. Benzing

Charleston Library Conference

The current state of research data is like a disorganized photo collection: a mix of formats scattered across different media without a lot of authority control. That is changing as the need to make data available to researchers across the world is becoming recognized. Researchers know that their data needs to be maintained and made accessible, but often they do not have the time or the inclination to get involved in all of the details. This provides an excellent opportunity for librarians. Data curation is the process of preparing data to be made available in a repository with the goal …

Managing The Changing Climate Of Business Collections, Katharine V. Macy, Heather A. Howard, Alyson S. Vaaler

Charleston Library Conference

Librarians that support business programs are weathering competing priorities in business collection management. When making decisions to cut and add new databases, we must assess the value of a given resource by considering a variety of quantitative metrics such as usage, cost per use, cost per citation, and pricing history. In addition, qualitative criteria are increasingly important when making decisions. These criteria include, but are not limited to, content coverage, accessibility, and whether a resource can be provided in a way that supports the principles of critical librarianship. This Lively Lunch discussion provided three brief presentations, which discussed (1) how …

African American Studies Collections And The American Season Of Redemption, Courtney Becks

Charleston Library Conference

In a Journal of Academic Librarianship article that appeared in 2000, Susan A. Vega García writes about the “dearth of empirical research that has examined multicultural diversity in terms of actual collecting patterns of academic and research libraries [...].” (Vega García, 2000) This article, nearly 20 years old, is one of the few that actually address the topic of African American Studies collections specifically in the LIS literature. Though there is, in fact, a literature of “diversity” in library collections, it lumps together an array of groups whose only commonality is having been labelled Other in the U.S. This lumping …

Critical Business Collections: Examining Key Issues Using A Social Justice Lens, Heather A. Howard, Katharine V. Macy, Corey Seeman, Alyson S. Vaaler

Charleston Library Conference

Academic librarians perform a balancing act between the needs of patrons, licensing restrictions, and the missions of our libraries. As part of the work to develop our campus collections, academic business librarians work with both schools and commercial vendors to provide resources that our business students and faculty require. Business publishers charge academic customers pennies on the dollar for access, but are likely to seek protections for their intellectual content by placing usage restrictions that run counter to what librarians would prefer. This can cause difficulties for librarians in serving their unique populations. This also can run counter to the …

Is The Past Really Prologue? The Effect Of A University’S Consolidation On Its Jstor Subscription, Melissa E. Johnson, Kate Kosturski

Charleston Library Conference

University consolidations do more than just affect students and faculty. Changes to the makeup of a campus and the programs available can have a great influence on needed journal and database subscriptions. The electronic resources and serials librarian from Augusta University and the outreach coordinator from JSTOR investigated how the consolidation of two universities with different academic missions changed the usage of their six JSTOR collections. Using data produced by JSTOR in 2012, prior to consolidation, and compiled again for 2016, the authors describe changes in usage, factors that could affect usage, and the implications for future resources.

Housing Diversity In Children’S Literature, Carla Earhart

Charleston Library Conference

Previous studies have examined diversity in children’s literature: Gender diversity, racial diversity, religious diversity, and diversity in family composition. This project examines an often overlooked diversity issue in children’s literature: Housing diversity. In the stories they read and the accompanying images, children need to see a variety of housing environments and need to see the settings and the people portrayed in a positive manner.

Renting an apartment is an increasingly popular housing option for many families. However, many children’s books glamorize living in a traditional house. Using a rubric designed by the course instructor, students in a university immersive learning …

Extreme Makeover: How We Decreased Our Collection By 40% And Simultaneously Increased It By 50% In 10 Months, Lydia A. Sampson, Amy Thurlow, Del Hornbuckle

Charleston Library Conference

The Brennan Library at Lasell College had not conducted a systematic weeding in over 20 years. With space in demand and an increase in online courses, desperate times called for drastic measures. Over a 10-month period, the library withdrew 40% of its tangible collections. Simultaneously, the staff’s focus shifted to promoting e-resources and adopting the EBSCO EDS discovery layer. Using a weighted collection development allocation formula, the librarians overhauled the materials budget and designed a departmental liaison program. After calculating the holdings of new e-book and streaming video packages, the library’s collection increased by 50% despite the massive deaccessioning. This …

Apples To Oranges: Comparing Streaming Video Platforms, Steven Milewski, Monique Threatt

Charleston Library Conference

Librarians rely on an ever-increasing variety of platforms to deliver streaming video content to our patrons. These two presentations will examine different aspects of video streaming platforms to gain guidance from the comparison of platforms. The first will examine the accessibility compliance of the various video streaming platforms for users with disabilities by examining accessibility features of the platforms. The second will be a comparison of subject usage of two of the larger video streaming platform providers (Alexander Street Press and Kanopy) done at Indiana University Bloomington, a large public university.

Assessing The Books We Didn’T Buy (The Sequel), Erika L. Johnson, Glenn Johnson-Grau, Rice Majors

Charleston Library Conference

Three universities (Santa Clara University, the University of San Francisco, and Loyola Marymount University) are leveraging patron-initiated borrowing data to inform our collection development. Expanding on a pilot project that began in 2014, we have been looking at five years of recent borrowing data, along with five years of acquisition data and five years of circulation data of local collections, to help us define what a “normal” level of borrowing looks like as well as identify gaps in local collections. We are also using the data to strengthen the meta-collection of our consortium (LINK+) through the intentional and coordinated diversification …

Cost Per User: Analyzing Ezproxy Logs For Assessment, Tiffany M. Lemaistre

Charleston Library Conference

Cost per use has long been a staple of collection development decision‐making for electronic resources, but what of the users behind those retrieval and search counts? Questions about the interdisciplinary usage of an e‐resource, the depth of integration into a given program or course, and who will miss it if it is cancelled are generally relegated to the realm of anecdotal evidence. Researchers at Nevada State College have made efforts to remedy this gap in knowledge by analyzing EZProxy logs, which can be set up to capture unique user identifiers at the point of authentication into library electronic resources. When …

Multiplying By Division: Mapping The Collection At University Of North Texas Libraries, Karen Harker, Janette Klein, Laurel Crawford

Charleston Library Conference

The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries has developed a unique collection assessment tool, the Collection Map, to provide support for a new access‐based collection development philosophy. UNT Librarians realized the limitations of traditional assessment methods to gauge the impact of emerging acquisitions models such as demand‐driven acquisitions (DDA) and large interdisciplinary e‐book collections. What was needed was a flexible, nimble assessment system to track access, holdings, and interlibrary loan (ILL) activity for each academic discipline. The Collection Map is a database that links items, and their associated data, to any one of several dozen overlapping subcollections via Library of …

A New Kind Of Social Media Strategy: Collecting Zines At The Vassar College Library, Heidy Berthoud

Charleston Library Conference

“Where do we go from here?” One way that the Vassar College Library is answering this question is by making concerted efforts to promote unique or rarely held materials—that is, nurturing collections that will make us stand out from the crowd. With that goal in mind, the Vassar College Library has spent the past year working to create a collection of zines.

This article will discuss the importance of social media in the acquisition of zines, using the Vassar College Library’s experience as an example. Zines are DIY, self‐published materials that are a vibrant and creative way to represent diverse …

Do-It-Yourself Title Overlap Comparisons, Melissa Belvadi

Charleston Library Conference

Discovery service indexing content can be highly customizable, which makes traditional title overlap analysis published by third parties less meaningful for a library making new subscription or cancellation decisions. This article presents a method for conducting basic title overlap analyses in‐house at minimal cost, tailored to the specific configuration of the library.

The Women’S Library Moves: Deeds Not Words, Elizabeth Chapman

Charleston Library Conference

The move of The Women's Library Collection to the Library of the London School of Economics (LSE) has been a long project with a high public profile. Building academic and financial support and withstanding public protest, the collection finally moved in summer 2013. Managing building works, staffing transfers, and more, the project reveals the riches of this UNESCO-listed collection on Women's History which, combined with LSE's existing campaigning collections, makes a rich resource for students, researchers, and the public. The paper sets out some of the lessons learned in such acquisitions and reveals some of the stories in the collection, …

Measuring And Applying Data About Users In The Seton Hall Library, Rachel E. Volentine, Lisa M. Rose-Wiles, Carol Tenopir

Charleston Library Conference

We present data on how faculty and students at Seton Hall University use scholarly articles and books, how the library can present its findings to stakeholders, and how librarians can learn from these findings to better meet user needs. The data were gathered using questionnaire surveys of university faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students as part of the IMLS Lib-Value project and based on Tenopir and King Studies conducted since 1977. Many questions used the critical incident of the last article and book reading to enable analysis of the characteristics of readings, in addition to characteristics of readers. Seton Hall’s …

The Truth Is Out: How Students Really Search, Beth S. Bloom, Marta Deyrup

Charleston Library Conference

The transition to electronic resources and the evolution of digital technologies has provided the public with the ability to conduct research without physically stepping into a library. This has led to the development of research habits using Internet search engines, mainly Google, which follow students to college. This presentation discusses the results of a two-year study of students’ online research behaviors which show that many students are comfortable with their current research habits and have little motivation to adopt new ones. Five examples of student research behaviors from the study are included to portray the burgeoning problem and provoke interest …

Freely Flowing: Openly Accessible Sources For Streaming Video, Deg Farrelly

Charleston Library Conference

There is considerable disagreement within the academic and library spheres as to what can be done to make streaming content available. The process of providing streaming content is expensive, labor intensive, and time consuming. This process, however, doesn’t always require prolonged licensing negotiations, expenditure of precious materials budgets, or large investment of personnel time and effort to digitize, upload, and maintain content. There are many websites that provide quality videos that libraries and media centers can both access and provide access to with minimal effort. This paper offers a list of these legal, openly accessible resources, along with a brief …

If You’Ve Got It, Flaunt It!: Refocusing A Collection With No Connection, Jennifer Ditkoff, Rodney Obien

Charleston Library Conference

Many libraries have a unique collection within their space that holds value and importance but has lost its connection to the college curriculum and the undergraduate research on campus. These collections may have had different people overseeing them over time or had changes in funding. They might have been created without thinking about the big picture. The paper examines one college library’s experience of turning an underused and unfocused collection into a vibrant and relevant part of the library through collaboration with key constituents in the academic and local community and staying true to the mission and vision.

Let Go And Haul! A Square‐Rigger’S Guide To Weeding “Age Of Sail” Collections In The 21st Century, Valarie Prescott Adams, Douglas Black

Charleston Library Conference

This nautically tinged talk explores what happens when two academic libraries begin reshaping their approach to collection evaluation and management by designing programs for large‐scale, systematic collection review. At both libraries, methodical and comprehensive weeding had not taken place for decades, if ever. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga restructured its collection practices by implementing a subject liaison program and creating a carefully phased review process in which discipline faculty were an integral part. Northern Michigan University set out to halve the size of its circulating collection within five years, as part of the library’s response to a campus‐wide strategic …

The Tower And The Free Web: The Role Of Reference, John Dove, Phoebe Ayers, Casper Grathwohl, Jason B. Phillips, Michael Sweet, Sam Linthicum

Charleston Library Conference

No abstract provided.