Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“They Didn’T Teach This In Library School”: Identifying Core Knowledges For Beginning Acquisitions Librarians, Lindsay Cronk, Rachel M. Fleming

Charleston Library Conference

Library workers new to acquisitions or taking on new acquisitions duties can find themselves lost without appropriate resources. We often hear the refrain “they didn’t teach this in library school.” Basic introductions to issues confronting acquisitions librarians can be hard to find and out-of-date. Meanwhile, emerging issues are addressed in journal literature, but few reviews of the issues are available to provide background to newcomers. While professional development opportunities strive to provide sure footing to acquisitions newcomers, we can often fall short, leaving our new colleagues feeling adrift.

Through a positive and structured discussion we will explore the existing and …

Decoding The Scholarly Resources Marketplace, Lindsay Cronk, Rachel M. Fleming

Charleston Library Conference

Developed with input from a variety of library workers and industry representatives, this session will provide a current and concise introduction to the scholarly resource marketplace for academic libraries, highlighting the financial and functional connections between major market actors providing services and content to libraries.

Discussions of vendor relations in libraries have often focused on the interpersonal collaboration of library workers and vendor representatives. In the process, they have overlooked or neglected the connections between publishers and vendors, their parent corporations and subsidiary companies.

Decoding requires a focus on vocabulary and building shared understanding of the marketplace for scholarly resources. …

Nothing Happens Unless First A Dream: Demystifying The Academic Library Job Search And Acing The Application Process, Scottie Kapel, Elizabeth M. Skene, Whitney P. Jordan

Charleston Library Conference

Academic library positions can be highly desirable for both new librarians and experienced librarians interested in transitioning into a different setting. Yet for both novice and experienced librarians alike, landing an interview for an academic librarian position can feel intimidating and overwhelming. Applicants may have difficulty understanding tenure track requirements, no academic library experience, no coursework in relevant areas, and may be competing with a large pool of qualified candidates. When academic job openings ask for years of academic library experience and library school specializations suggest that the path you pick is the path you keep until retirement, it begins …

Engaging Alumni: The How And Why Of Author Outreach For Dissertation Scanning Projects, Christy L. M. Shorey

Charleston Library Conference

In 2008 the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries began a project to digitize their collection of over 14,000 print dissertations, ranging from 1934 to 2006, and upload them to the Institutional Repository (IR@UF). At UF, copyright remains with dissertation authors and not the university. Thus, we started an outreach effort to ask authors to opt in to the Retrospective Dissertation Scanning (RDS) project. We worked with the Alumni Association to get contact information for our doctoral graduates, then reached out to them through multiple mediums: e-mail, letter, and postcard. In 2011 Gail Clement and Melissa Levine published “Copyright …

(Un)Structuring For The Next Generation: New Possibilities For Library Data With Nosql, Matthew D. Harrington, Dennis B. Christman

Charleston Library Conference

For many years, libraries have relied upon relational databases (RDBMS) to store, manipulate, and query various types of data, and this database model works extremely well when data are highly structured. As the data become more complex, however, the relational database model strains under the burden of maintaining complex joins, which can decrease a database's performance and limit its functionality. Furthermore, data are not always best represented in the RDBMS's flat, tabular format. Library data often require flexibility and extensibility to accommodate the increasing volume and variety of library resources and metadata. To address these issues, transforming the underlying structure …

What Are We Doing? Capturing The Uncaptured: Workload Data To Demonstrate Service, David Brennan

Charleston Library Conference

Capturing service data can be difficult, particularly for technical services and electronic resources librarians—using standard tools such as RefTracker is cumbersome, and taking more time to enter the transaction than it actually took to perform the task is an impediment to gathering good service data. The services provided by these librarians are equally as public-facing as those provided at the reference desk, but are often not captured or reported. A possible solution is to use sent e-mail as a data source for demonstrating services provided by technical services and electronic resources librarians. This lightning round demonstrates one such approach using …

Good Partners? Can Open Access Publishers And Librarians Find Meaningful Ways To Collaborate?, Sarah L. Wipperman

Charleston Library Conference

What should the relationship be between the purely Open Access publishers and librarians? Yes, in theory, among publishers these are publishers who are fully aligned with libraries to end the stranglehold which the traditional subscription publishers have on libraries. Yes, they are 100% attribution-only (CC-BY) publishers living up to the goals of Open Access (as described in the Budapest Open Access Initiative [BOAI]). But, are they just replacing over-priced subscriptions with over-priced APCs (Article Processing Charges)?

Since they don't have renewal revenue at risk they may not pay sufficient attention to usage and integration with library systems [KBART?, COUNTER?, etc.]. …

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 …

Going It Alone: Why University Presses Are Creating Their Own E-Book Collections, Charles Watkinson, Terry Ehling, Sharla Lair

Charleston Library Conference

Most university presses deliver their e-books to libraries through aggregators. However, in 2019, two university presses, the MIT Press and University of Michigan Press, will launch their own e-book offerings for direct sale to institutions, and other presses are considering following suit. While there are a few university presses who have offered their own e-book products for a number of years, the intensity of discussion within the university press community about “going it alone” is new and deserves further interrogation. This paper summarizes why the MIT Press and University of Michigan Press are taking the bold step of launching their …

Open Letter(S) On Open Access, Ingrid D. Becker, John G. Dove

Charleston Library Conference

It is well known that one major obstacle to achieving open access (OA) is misunderstanding among stakeholders; some say it is the biggest problem of all. Throughout the supply-chain of producing and consuming scholarly literature, many participants—especially authors—understand the broader objectives of OA but not the practical steps they can take to help increase the accessibility of research. The purpose of “Open Letter(s) on Open Access” (OLOA) is to provide initial examples of communications that illustrate such steps. We do so by examining sets of well-regarded academic sources and evaluating the various paths that authors choose as a means of …

Preparing Researchers For Publishing Success: The Case Of Auburn University, George Stachokas

Charleston Library Conference

As part of a panel discussion organized by Dr. Gwen Taylor of Wiley, this paper reviews current efforts undertaken by Auburn University Libraries to support the research enterprise at Auburn University, including preparing researchers for publishing access. Despite financial constraints, Auburn University endeavors to transition from a Carnegie Classification of R2 to R1, add 500 new faculty members by 2022, and increase research output in STEM disciplines, agriculture, allied health sciences, and cybersecurity. The Libraries are working to support all of these efforts through cost effective collection development, systematic improvements in assessment, catching up with aspirational peers by implementing best …

International Copyright In Historical Context: Who Are The Real Pirates?, Paul G. St-Pierre

Charleston Library Conference

Copyright is usually justified with arguments about defending the natural right of authors to control their creations, or claims that limited monopolies spur innovation for the greater good of society. I contrarily assert that the primary intent of copyright has generally been to protect powerful industries in advanced countries and ensure control over emerging markets that rely on the importation of intellectual property.

As global trade expanded in the 19th century, a patchwork quilt of domestic copyright laws and bilateral treaties failed to stem rampant infringement that hurt publishers’ export revenues. Re-printers and readers, however, benefited from lower prices. The …

Library-Supported Scholarship: Increasing Faculty Scholarly Reach With Author Services, Russell Michalak, Monica Rysavy

Charleston Library Conference

The researchers’ primary goal when working with faculty on the research and publication process is to empower them to independently write literature reviews, deploy surveys, collect data, analyze data, and submit manuscripts to peer-review journals and edited book collections. The authors coach faculty in doing so in a variety of ways, from one-on-one trainings to small group workshops. For faculty who have recently earned their PhD, librarians have worked with them to narrow their dissertation topic into a publishable product. As part of the publishing process, the authors have shown them how to select potential publication outlets by reviewing the …

Supporting Open Education With The Wind At Your Back: Lessons For Oer Programs From The Open Textbook Toolkit, Mira Waller, Will Cross, Erica Hayes

Charleston Library Conference

What does it take to move open education from idea to practice? In this session we led a discussion about what supports instructors need to engage with open education and how we can make adoption and adaptation easy and inviting. We set the stage with an overview of findings from our IMLS-funded research (LG-72-17-0051-17) on the needs and practices of psychology instructors for adopting or creating open textbooks and OER. We then shared some lessons on what faculty say they need and where they feel we can do better, as well as offered some insights from our research on student …

Transfer Turns Ten: The Future Of The Code, Jennifer W. Bazeley, Gaëlle Béquet

Charleston Library Conference

Libraries, publishers, and intermediary vendors strive to disseminate the most current information to their patrons and clients through the metadata in their catalogs, services, and software. One significant pinch point in this landscape is the transfer of journals from one publisher to another. The Transfer Code of Practice was created to provide these stakeholders with guidelines to ensure that the transfer process occurs with minimal disruption and that journal content remains accessible to subscribers. The importance of these guidelines has grown since the creation of the Transfer Code in 2008, as the number of online titles, publishers, and intermediaries has …

A Dream Of Spring: Creation Of An Ir Managers Forum, Christy L. M. Shorey, Anna J. Dabrowski, Pamela Andrews, Erin Jerome

Charleston Library Conference

Sometimes it’s hard to find answers for work-related questions. This difficulty is compounded when one lacks the means to engage with a community of peers who face similar situations and problems. As institutional repository (IR) managers, we found ourselves with access to resources and listservs that didn’t quite fit our needs. Available discussion spaces were either too general in scope, drowning out repository-specific concerns; or too narrowly focused on platform-specific issues and technical details.

Lacking an appropriate forum, we decided to create a discussion space for IR managers. The IR Manager Forum (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/irmanagers) is designed to foster a community of …

The Saint Xavier University Freshman Oer Challenge, David Stern

Charleston Library Conference

A previous article described a variety of possibilities for enhancing pedagogy while reducing costs to students. The impetus was a migration away from expensive textbooks and toward more affordable or free teaching materials. The conference presentation “Textbook Alternatives: Less Expensive and Better Pedagogy” discussed many of these issues, with suggestions for implementation incentives. This paper provides additional information about the Freshman OER Challenge initiative mentioned in the presentation.

Charleston 2018: Closing Session Presentation, Stephen Rhind-Tutt

Charleston Library Conference

Stephen's Takeaways: Join Stephen Rhind-Tutt for a summary and wrap-up of the whirlwind week in Charleston. What were the trending topics? Major takeaways? Pithy quotes and most talked-about statements? Find out the answers to all of these questions and more at this 30-minute closing talk.

Navigating Access To Knowledge: Copyright, Fake News, Fair Use, And Libraries, Ruth Okediji

Charleston Library Conference

New technologies have profoundly changed the way content is produced, shared, and disseminated. Some commentators argue that the ubiquity of digitized content means that libraries have become superfluous in the digital age. This presentation presents evidence to the contrary. It will discuss challenges for libraries arising from globalized copyright, including issues related to fake news and threats to fair use. The presentation will also highlight the strategic ways libraries are being embedded in the design of copyright law nationally and globally, exploring whether these developments–that are sometimes conflicting–are good for libraries and the public in the long term.

Data Expeditions: Mining Data For Effective Decision-Making, Ann Michael, Ivy Anderson, Gwen Evans

Charleston Library Conference

Beyond library budgets and content usage reports, libraries and consortia are searching, sorting, managing, and hunting for deep data that allows them to understand their environments and represent themselves and their patrons more effectively in these changing and complicated times. But data challenges exist at every turn. Finding data, which is often housed in a variety of disparate sources, is the first challenge but it is immediately followed by measuring, adapting, and distilling data down to the most important factors. Libraries and consortia spend many person hours gathering data from scratch and then deriving information and knowledge from that data …

The Open Scholarship Initiative Update, T. Scott Plutchak

Charleston Library Conference

The Open Scholarship Initiative is a multi-year effort to engage all of the stakeholders involved in scholarly communication activities. This presentation will briefly review the goals, progress and future plans of OSI.

The Future Of Research Information: Open, Connected, Seamless, Annette Thomas

Charleston Library Conference

We live in the age of the web. For information professionals in particular, this has been the defining fact of the last 25 years. It has enabled ever greater quantities of research to be published, expanded the range of media we can use, and offered new possibilities for recognizing and rewarding research contributions. But such opportunities also bring challenges and pitfalls. If we do the right things, this could be a golden age for research, but to make the most of it we must embrace the original principles that made the web itself such a powerful force.

Tradition + Evolution: Providing Scaffolding For Librarians In A Time Of Change, Mira Waller, Hilary Davis, Scott Warren

Charleston Library Conference

Changing technology, evolving research methods and requirements, shifting expectations in teaching and learning, and the ongoing transformation of the scholarly communication landscape have all given libraries more opportunities than ever to participate in the full research life cycle, including areas previously considered outside their scope.

As a result, libraries have been seeking ways to evolve the liaison role and its influences on collections, services, and the identity of both libraries and librarians. Some changes have been more fluid while others have been more prescriptive. Some roles have shifted in direct response to a specific need, for example, supporting research data …

Managing Vendor Relationships, Michael Rodriguez, Jason Chabak, Lindsay Cronk, Allen Jones, Christine M. Stamison, Kimberly Steinle

Charleston Library Conference

Libraries and vendors are all too often trapped in the paradigm of swapping content and services for dollars. Pivoting from this transactional model, this preconference panel of one moderator and five speakers explored the following questions: How can librarians and vendors work together to develop better products and services? What can impede these relationships? What are best practices for collaborating effectively and ethically? How can everyone build, negotiate, and sustain these relationships for mutual benefit? And when conflict inevitably arises, how do we deal with it? This preconference featured perspectives from two vendors, three libraries, and one consortium, based in …

When The Wind Blows: Changing Roles For Changing Times, Mira Waller, Shelby J. Hallman

Charleston Library Conference

Subject liaisons have traditionally focused on providing domain-specific services and collections. Recently, however, their roles have shifted from a support model to actively engaging and collaborating with scholars throughout the academic life cycle and research enterprise. At the same time, users increasingly require functional information support (e.g., for GIS, data visualization, or data mining) in place of or in addition to domain-specific services. As the liaison role continues to evolve, finding the right balance between the roles of generalist, subject specialist, and functional expert will provide both challenges and opportunities.

This proceeding focuses on a case study of two librarians …

Future And Value: The Library As Strategic Partner, Antje Mays

Charleston Library Conference

Broader economic trends spawn budget pressures for education and libraries, prompting a plethora of studies on the value and relevance of libraries. Numerous reports on economic decline in libraries and studies with mixed pronouncements on the value of libraries have led to a negative self-image within the library profession. Yet libraries’ leadership in connecting learners to knowledge is at the heart of producing many of the key skills sorely needed in robust societies and economies. Librarianship has many untapped opportunities for positioning itself as a prominent strategic partner. This paper outlines current research on the economic and societal context for …

Thirty Days And Counting: Conducting Effective Product Trials For Library Resources, Edward F. Lener, Tracy J. Gilmore

Charleston Library Conference

Product trials for evaluating potential new resources can be a challenge for any library. To be most effective, several key elements must be addressed including determining suitable trial dates, establishing and confirming access, creating appropriate links, publicizing product availability, collecting usage data, and gathering feedback from participants. If one or more of these steps is missed, it is all too easy for trial access to run out before much useful data is gathered. The University Libraries at Virginia Tech have developed a method for managing this process through a Trials Workflow team and the use of free, Web-based project management …

East Meets West: The Japan Association Of National University Libraries (Janul) And The University Of Central Florida (Ucf) Exchange Librarians And Learning Commons Information, Barbara G. Tierney, Yuka Taniguchi

Charleston Library Conference

Is your library contemplating an international librarian exchange? Such exchanges not only increase participants’ understanding of other cultures, they also challenge participants to look at their own cultures from a new perspective. Two academic librarians, Yuka Taniguchi from Kobe University1 (Japan) and Barbara Tierney from the University of Central Florida2 discuss their visits to each other’s libraries in 2016–2017 to share information about their respective learning commons and outreach programs. This article focuses on the lessons learned for each librarian and practical tips on how to accomplish a successful academic library foreign exchange.

Reimagining Research Services’ Outreach To Faculty And Students: A Tale Of Two Research Departments (University Of Central Florida And Florida Gulf Coast University), Barbara G. Tierney, Linda K. Colding

Charleston Library Conference

Two academic library research managers discuss innovative outreach strategies that they coordinate in their respective libraries (University of Central Florida serves 68,000+ students; Florida Gulf Coast University serves 15,000+ students) to support faculty and student success for teaching, learning, and research. A poster1 was created to illustrate these strategies.

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Publishing Community Efforts And Solutions To Mitigate The Risks Sci-Hub Poses To Researchers, Librarians, And Publishers, Sari Frances, Juan P. Denzer, Don Hamparian

Charleston Library Conference

Sci-Hub has been referred to as the “Robin Hood” of science, but in reality, it is not. Sci-Hub is a disruption to the entire scholarly publishing research cycle. Over the last three years, the amount of licensed e-content that has been illegally obtained by Sci-Hub has grown significantly. This content has been acquired through stolen institutional staff and student credentials. Acquiring and misappropriating these credentials creates serious risks for an institution’s systems and users as well as publishers. What can libraries and publishers do to minimize or eliminate these infractions? This discussion about the collective efforts of publishers, libraries, and …