Business Commons^™

Introducing Seamlessaccess.Org: Delivering A Simpler, Privacy-Preserving Access Experience, John W. Felts, Tim Lloyd, Emily Singley

Charleston Library Conference

Managing access to subscribed services in an era of abundance is a major challenge for libraries. Users have come to expect a seamless, personalized experience on their mobile devices, but traditional approaches to access management force librarians to choose between the anonymous ease of onsite IP authentication or the access friction experienced by users authenticating across multiple resources with Single Sign-On. Building on the work of the RA21 initiative, a recent NISO Recommended Practice on Improved Access to Institutionally Provided Information Resources charts a way forward. It will enable libraries to provide seamless, privacy-preserving and one-click access to its subscribed …

Hacking For Good - Workshop Summary, Alex Humphreys, Curtis Michelson, Heather Ruland Staines, Geoffrey P. Timms, Caroline Muglia

Charleston Library Conference

At the 2019 Charleston Library Conference, five facilitators from a diversity of organizations led a pre-conference called Hacking for Good. The goal of the half-day pre-conference was to introduce participants to the “hacking mindset” beyond the traditionally understood technology-driven terminology. In this context, hacking refersred to an approach of identifying a challenge or set of challenges in their respective knowledge organizations and gathering a set of techniques or approaches to address and overcome those challenges. The pre-conference provided a highly interactive and supportive environment to consider all aspects of a workplace challenge related to workflows and personnel and determine the …

Should You Pay For The Chicken When You Can Get It For Free? No Longer Life On The Farm As We Know It, Sharon M. Mattern Büttiker, James King, Susie Winter, Crane Hassold

Charleston Library Conference

The scholarly publishing ecosystem is being forced to adapt following changes in funding, scholarly review, and distribution. Taken alone, each changemaker could markedly influence the entire chain of research consumption. Combining these change forces together has the potential for a complete upheaval in the biome. During the 2019 Charleston Library conference, a panel of stakeholders representing researchers, funders, librarians, publishers, digital security experts, and content aggregators addressed such questions as what essential components constitute scholarly literature and who should shepherd them. The 70-minute open dialogue with audience participation invited a range of opinions and viewpoints on the care, feeding, and …

When You Don’T Know What You Don’T Know: How Two New Collections Librarians Right-Sized A Collections Budget, Cara M. Cadena, Marcia Lee

Charleston Library Conference

Due to impending campus-wide downsizing, the Grand Valley State University (GVSU) Libraries projected that a worst-case scenario would result in a 14% cut to the library’s collections budget for fiscal year 2020. In the same year, GVSU Libraries welcomed several new members of its leadership team, including the dean, two associate deans, head of systems, head of collections, business administrator, and a vacancy after the long-time acquisitions manager retired. Budget cuts and staff turnover are tough, but they prompted a much-needed reassessment of roles, culture, and priorities in the library. Different approaches to spending and curating the library’s collections were …

Pain Points And Solutions: Bringing Data For Startups To Campus, Kelly Lavoice, Daniel Hickey, Mark Williams

Charleston Library Conference

Entrepreneurship is growing as a cross- and inter-disciplinary area of focus for higher education. From patent and tech transfer offices to business, science, and engineering programs, the demand for entrepreneurship resources and support delivered via libraries is booming. Building library collections to help patrons design, launch, and run successful businesses is challenging: Market research and private equity/venture capital resources arrive at premium prices. Increasingly, these resources must interoperate with software used to clean, analyze, and visualize data. This data is often difficult to find and deploy. Restrictive, corporate-style licenses reflect that new vendors are not yet acclimated to the academic …

Resource Discovery In A Changing Content World, Allen Jones, Cynthia R. Schwarz, Hannah Mckelvey, Rachelle Mclain, Christine Stohn

Charleston Library Conference

Discovery services have evolved to include not just books and articles, but databases, website content, research guides, digital and audiovisual collections, and unique local collections that are all important for their users to be able to find. Search and ranking remain at the core of discovery, but advanced tools such as recommendation, virtual browse, ‘look inside‘, and the use of artificial intelligence are also becoming more prevalent. This group of panelists discussed how content in their discovery systems can change based on the context of the user, using as examples Primo and Blacklight, and how content is populated, discovered and …

Is Your Library Ready For The Reality Of Virtual Reality? What You Need To Know And Why It Belongs In Your Library, Carl R. Grant, Stephen Rhind-Tutt

Charleston Library Conference

VR is no longer just gaming. It’s increasingly being deployed across academic campuses and is becoming indispensable in fields ranging from the humanities to engineering to anthropology. A recent survey indicated that 100% of ARL campuses were using VR, with 40% of libraries actively supporting it. This paper discusses practical examples of how libraries are helping their institutions build out virtual reality, utilizing 3D objects and explains why the library is the best place to do so. It provides a basic grounding in VR and related areas, showing what it is and why it's important to libraries. Specific attention is …

Library Marketing: From Passion To Practice, Jill S. Heinze

Charleston Library Conference

As discussed in the Charleston Briefing entitled Library Marketing: From Passion to Practice, successfully marketing libraries requires more than a sound communication strategy. Marketing is, in fact, all of an organization’s activities that deliver a product or service to its intended customers. This distinction means that library organizations need to expand their views about what it means to “market” themselves to encompass all of the touchpoints users have with their services. In the process, librarians are challenged to reconcile marketing practices from the business world with their public service ethos, as well as ensure their missions are well defined and …

Professional Development In Libraries: One Size Does Not Fit All, Patricia D. Sobczak, Kathy Bradshaw

Charleston Library Conference

With the constantly changing landscape in 21st-century libraries, it would seem that professional development would be more important than ever. However, research indicates that few libraries have formal professional development programs, and there are mixed messages from library leaders regarding the necessity and importance of professional development. It is no secret that libraries always seem to be facing budget cuts, and funding for professional development is often seen as a low priority. We were curious to understand how professional development is viewed and executed in other academic libraries.

Professional development means different things to different people. To some, professional development …

Landing The Job: Tips And Tricks To Prepare Students For The Job Hunt, Nora B. Wood, Heather A. Howard, Lauren Reiter

Charleston Library Conference

With universities, parents, and politicians paying close attention to student success after college, academic libraries are making efforts to support career readiness and preparation through collections and licensed resources as well as related instruction sessions and reference services. This paper presents examples from business librarians at three universities, covering a wide range of practical opportunities for libraries to support career preparation across campus, including partnering with Career Services for database cost sharing and career readiness workshops, teaching students to conduct company and industry research for interview preparation and salary negotiation, and out-of-the-box opportunities at career fairs and Alumni Association events.

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 …

One Root, Many Trees: Reviving Collections Practices, Kevin Farley, Emily Davis Winthrop, Ibironke Lawal, Patricia Sobczak

Charleston Library Conference

Collections are undergoing intense change and pressure from technology, budgetary uncertainties, and emerging perspectives on future approaches. Our case study—drawn from our experiences as collections librarians—examines these complex issues facing academic collections, large or small, across the profession. Through the development of “collections of distinction” within the local collection, collaborations and scholarly partnerships with colleagues and faculty, and advocacy for the importance of dedicated oversight to ensure that collections investments fulfill the academic mission, we explore possible solutions to the complicated issues defining contemporary collections practices.

Statistical Analysis, Data Visualization, And Business Intelligence Tools For Electronic Resources In Academic Libraries, Cheng Cheng, Tracy J. Gilmore, Colleen Lougen, Connie Stovall

Charleston Library Conference

Analytics, business intelligence, and data visualization have an increasingly important space in the changing assessment landscape of academic libraries. Today, most academic libraries are spending a significant amount of their total expenditure budget on electronic resources. While they are high-value assets for modern libraries, the expensive annual subscription cost and continuing price increases of e-resources also make them a substantial budgeting burden. It is therefore essential to have a clear statistical view of the trends and patterns in price changes for e-resources and vendors. This paper focuses on three major topics vital for developing such a view: first, the e-resources …

The Nuts And Bolts Of Supporting Change And Transformation For Research Librarians, Mira Waller, Heidi J. Tebbe

Charleston Library Conference

Libraries have a rich tradition of providing services and support to researchers. In recent years, changing technology, evolving research methods and requirements, and the transforming landscape of scholarly communication have revealed a need for libraries to actively engage scholars and participate in the entire research lifecycle. As liaison and subject librarian roles shift to a more holistic and engagement-focused model, it is important that libraries provide them with the tools and resources to develop new skills.

This paper will focus on three ways in which the North Carolina State University Libraries created and supported relevant training and opportunities for research …

Project Management Office To The Rescue: Aligning Workforce And Resources With Library Vision And Delivering Results, Anastasia Guimaraes, Zheng (John) Wang

Charleston Library Conference

Many libraries today are inundated with increasing number of tasks, projects, and initiatives through which they hope to achieve their mission and strategic vision only to find themselves losing focus and drowning in the volume of work. Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame struggled with absorbing an exponentially growing number of projects and aligning them with institutional strategic initiatives and goals. The increasing number of projects and the relatively stable size of the workforce significantly impacted the institution’s ability to complete projects in a timely fashion and within the budgetary allocation.

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 …

Publishing Makerspace: A New Approach To Scholarly Publishing, Sylvia K. Miller, David Phillips, Courtney Berger, Marjorie Fowler, Rebecca Kennison, John D. Martin Iii, John Mcleod, Chelcie Rowell

Charleston Library Conference

This article describes the concept of the Publishing Makerspace, which is a publishing environment that is reconfigured as a place where all the components of a scholarly project—books and e‐books, virtual and physical exhibits, visualizations, live performance and film—can be integrated using a collaborative process. This place enables the creation of a multimodal publishing environment that fully integrates digital content with manuscripts and “traditional” scholarly content. Starting with an overview of the history of the team that devised this approach and its membership, the article describes the problem that the authors have identified with current approaches to multimodal publishing and …

How Much Do Monographs Cost? And Why Should We Care?, Nancy L. Maron, Charles Watkinson, Meredith Kahn, Shayna Pekala

Charleston Library Conference

What does it cost to make a high quality, digital monograph? What may sound like an obvious question turns out to be a very knotty one, driving to the heart of the essence of scholarly publishing today. It is particularly relevant in an environment where the potential of a sustainable open access (OA) business model for monographs is being explored. Two complementary studies funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2015 have explored this question to understand the costs involved in creating and disseminating scholarly books.

The team at Ithaka S+R studied the full costs of publishing monographs by …

Levitating Libraries To The Clouds: A Strategy For Academic Libraries, Mark Dehmlow

Charleston Library Conference

The University of Notre Dame’s Office of Information Technology is in the process of implementing a “Cloud First” strategy through which it intends to move 80% of its core technical infrastructure into the cloud by the end of 2017. The strategy advocates a tiered prioritization structure that recommends the hosting (SaaS) model for most services, the AWS (IaaS) model for fewer services, and finally on premises for a handful of the remaining services. As a campus technology partner, the Hesburgh Libraries has begun planning for moving many of our services and infrastructure into the cloud. This initiative represents a radical …

The Magic Of (A)Ffective Management, Ryan Weir

Charleston Library Conference

(A)ffective management is a people-first approach to managing employees. After all, employees and supervisors are people first. No matter how hard any individual may try, inevitably the stress and strain of life outside of work can and will bleed through into the work environment. The (A)ffective and effective manager understands this and incorporates this understanding into how he/she interacts with superiors and subordinates in the work environment on a daily basis. This article offers strategies on how to be an (A)ffective manager.

Navigating The Flow Of Value Streams To The Seas Of Collection Management, Acquisitions, And Preservation, Greg W. Voelker, Richard J. W. Zwiercan, Michael Frazier

Charleston Library Conference

Our process of repairing damaged items had no clear ownership and an ever growing amorphous backlog consisting of approximately 2,800 items at the start of the process review. This backlog continues to hinder access to materials in the collection. We are currently in multistage process review which incorporates Lean methodologies to improve workflow across a number of departments. At the core of these improvements is gathering data to measure current levels of work. From that perspective, we can see where value is needed in the workflows, including areas of collection access, level of repair needed, item replacement/weeding, and meeting user/stakeholder …