Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Digital Bookplates: Cataloging Processes And Workflows, Alie Visser

Western Libraries Publications

Historically, bookplates were found in the front of print monographs. Transitioning them to digital allows libraries to expand their visibility to researchers and to fundraising activities within institutions. Digital bookplates offer significant opportunities to honor or memorialize individuals with gifts to libraries at varying donation levels. This article discusses digital bookplates in an academic library and provides examples of the cataloging, metadata, and web processes involved in maintaining and collaborating on this active fundraising program. A previous article on this topic was published in 2012 and this article provides an update to its procedures and workflows a decade later.

Free And Open-Source Automated Open Access Preprint Harvesting, Jack Peplinski, Joanne Paterson, Courtney L. Waugh, Joshua M. Pearce

Western Libraries Publications

Universities are attempting to ensure that all of their research is publicly accessible because of funding mandates. Many universities have established campus open access (OA) repositories but are struggling with how to upload millions of manuscripts under numerous license agreements while also linking metadata to make them discoverable. To do this manually requires around 15 minutes per manuscript from an experienced librarian. The time and cost to do this campus-wide is prohibitive. To radically reduce the time and costs of this process and to harvest all past work, this article reports on the development and testing of a free and …

Digitizing And Cataloging A Corporate Annual Reports Collection: A Canadian Perspective, Alie Visser, Elizabeth Marshall, Joyce Cheung

Western Libraries Publications

Corporate annual reports provide a snapshot of a company's operations and financial status. Reviewing and comparing years of annual reports can provide a rich history of knowledge on a corporation. Preserving, storing, and digitizing Canadian annual reports has been a mission of the C.B. “Bud” Johnston Library in London, Ontario, Canada. In late 2019 when Western Libraries migrated to a new library services platform, Alma, there was a new opportunity to catalog and provide access to the digitized annual reports collection. This article describes a decade long plan to digitize the print collection by library staff and a subsequent project …

Information Seeking Behaviors, Attitudes, And Choices Of Academic Physicists, Ian D. Gordon, Debbie Chaves, Dylanne Dearborn, Shawn Hendrikx, Rebecca Hutchinson, Christopher Popovich, Michael White

Western Libraries Publications

Physicists in academic institutions utilize a variety of resources and strategies to seek, find, and use scholarly information and news. Using a sample of physicists, researchers surveyed 182 students and faculty at seven Canadian university institutions to explore self-perceived success rates, resources consulted, databases used, and use of social media and citation management systems. To complement the survey, 11 follow up interviews/focus groups were completed with participants to further uncover information-seeking behaviors, choices, strategies, and feelings around keeping up to date with information needs. According to survey results, a minority of physicists (15.4%) acknowledged that they were successfully keeping up …

Research & Scholarly Communication 2021-22 Report On Publishing Services, Courtney Waugh, Kristin Hoffmann, Emily Carlisle-Johnston, Kristi Thompson, Liz Hill

Western Libraries Publications

This report highlights the scope and impact of Western Libraries’ publishing services as undertaken by members of the Research & Scholarly Communication Team (RSC) for the period May 1, 2021 - April 30, 2022, in the areas of: Scholarship@Western repository services, journal publishing services, support for open educational resources (OER), and open data publishing.

Complex And Varied: Factors Related To The Research Productivity Of Academic Librarians In The United States, Kristin Hoffmann, Selinda Adelle Berg, Kristine R. Brancolini, Marie R. Kennedy

Western Libraries Publications

Academic librarians face multiple barriers in conducting the research that is expected in their work, yet they still manage to successfully complete it. This study aimed to identify the factors that contribute to their success. Through an online survey sent via email to a random sample of academic librarians in the United States, we gathered and analyzed quantitative data about education and experience, demographics, success factor statements, and research productivity to determine which factors are related to increased research output. We found that three categories of factors—Individual Attributes, Peers and Community, and Institutional Structures and Supports—contribute positively to overall research …

Understanding The Enumerated World: Making Sense Of Data As An Information Source, Kristi Thompson, Elizabeth Hill, Alexandra Cooper

Western Libraries Publications

Chapter in ACRL publication The Data Literacy Cookbook.

This recipe is a guide to preparing an instructional session aimed at postsecondary students in the social or health sciences or related disciplines on locating, evaluating, and using secondary data sources as information resources. Who collects data? Where can you access them? Why are data available on some topics and not others? Why are some statistics available at a detailed level of geography and others only nationally? What are some key limitations of official statistics, and where can information be found to fill in the gaps? This recipe uses these questions to …

The Ghosts Of Bindings Past: Micro-Computed X-Ray Tomography For The Study Of Bookbinding, J. D. Sargan, Jessica L. Lockhart, Andrew Nelson, D. L. Meert-Williston, Alexandra Gillespie

Western Libraries Publications

This essay describes the results of a new application of micro-computed X-ray tomography (µCT) to conduct nondestructive investigations of the binding structures of premodern books. This application addresses a twofold challenge in the study of historic bindings and their construction. Few premodern books survive in their original bindings. Moreover, until recently, when books were rebound, the original structures were rarely documented, and the remains were usually discarded. Where original bindings do remain in situ, much of their structure is, by design, hidden. Particulars of construction may be surmised; but without destructive disbinding, little can be proven. µCT enables an exploratory, …

What’S Hiding In The Spine? A Study Of Adhesives In Medieval Books Using Mass Spectrometry, Alice Hutton Sharp, Sarah Fiddyment, Anne Lama, Jessica Lockhart, Deborah Meert-Williston, Melissa Moreton, Lauren Williams, Alexandra Gillespie

Western Libraries Publications

Glues, and in particular glued spines, are notable features of late medieval European books, yet little research has been done into how they were sourced, produced, and used. In this article we present preliminary results from using the paleoproteomic methods of Electromagnetic Zooarchaeology through Mass Spectrometry (eZooMS) and Peptide Mass Fingerprinting (PMF) to identify the source species for animal glues used in late medieval books. We first introduce readers to the principal kinds of glue used in medieval craftsmanship and what is known about their use in bookbinding, principally from the discipline of book conservation. We describe the micro-sampling methods …