Digital Commons Network^™

Representation Of Atypical Resources In The Discovery Layer: Metadata And Cataloging Aspects, Brian J. Falato

Charleston Library Conference

The discovery layer is commonly used in libraries to provide a more “Google-like” experience that offers one-stop searching. The original selling point of the discovery layer was that journal articles could be retrieved as well as monographs. But as libraries have acquired many other formats, particularly non-print, the discovery layer has struggled to provide results that include these “atypical” resources.

Metadata is crucial to the discovery layer because it is what is used for the search. The higher the quality of metadata, the better the retrieval results will be. NISO has provided a list of elements to be considered best …

Let’S Give Them Something To Talk About… Textbook Affordability And Oer, Linda K. Colding, Peggy Glatthaar, Derek Malone, Jennifer Pate

Charleston Library Conference

This Lively Discussion brought together librarians from Florida Gulf Coast University in Ft. Myers Florida and the University of North Alabama in Florence, Alabama. Both libraries were eager to share their experiences with others who have or are considering establishing a textbook affordability project or use Open Educational Resources (OER) to assist students succeed despite the high cost of textbooks.

Glimpsing Into The Future: Using The Curriculum Process System For Collection Development, Jennifer Young

Charleston Library Conference

One common problem facing academic libraries is the art of materials selection that ensures users have what they need when they need it, or at least the majority of the time. Methods frequently used are librarian selectors, faculty selectors, approval plans, and demand-driven acquisitions. Having close relationships with teaching faculty is pertinent when acquiring monographs to support the courses currently offered as well as those upcoming. However, when that relationship is not strong, libraries must find other methods to gather that valuable insight. This paper will cover how East Tennessee State University’s library uses the curriculum process system to inform …

Change: Watch For The Right Time, Caryl Ward, Jill E. Dixon

Charleston Library Conference

Collection budgets are an essential tool for building collections yet the amounts of allocations can ebb and flow over the years. Modifying the budget structure is an intimidating, exhausting exercise with administrative and political ramifications that affect the workload of collections librarians as well as the workflows in acquisitions departments. External and internal forces such as impending budget cuts and serials reviews, a new library system, new department heads, newly minted librarians’ learning curves, and the creation or demolition of big deals seem like roadblocks to a budget revision process. They can also be seized as opportunities to look at …

Matching Made In Heaven: Collections And Metadata Collaboration For Print Preservation, Alie Visser, Erin Johnson, Christina Zoricic

Charleston Library Conference

Following the trend of repurposing library space to meet modern user needs, Western University is undergoing a planned revitalization and renovation of its largest library on campus. As a result, 500,000 items will need to be shifted to other locations or off-site storage. In this session we will outline the impact of metadata work in shifting this large collection of material to a shared print preservation storage facility, in coordination with Western University’s Keep@Downsview partnership (https://downsviewkeep.org/). Keep@Downsview is a partnership of five universities to preserve the scholarly record in Ontario in a shared, high-density storage and preservation facility.

We will …

From Big Ideas To Real Talk: A Front-Line Perspective On New Collections Roles In Times Of Organizational Restructuring, Meghan J. Ecclestone, Sally A. Sax, Alana P. Skwarok

Charleston Library Conference

Academic libraries across North America are restructuring to meet user needs in an e-preferred environment, resulting in major changes to traditional collection development roles and workflows. Responsibility for collection work is increasingly assigned to functional librarians dedicated to collection development activities across a broad range of subject areas, often serving an entire faculty or college. This paper discusses the history, process, and outcomes of the transition to functional collection development roles at two mid-sized universities. Both Carleton University and the University of Guelph support a wide range of undergraduate and graduate research needs from a single central library, but have …

Reason Minus Zero/No Limit: Trying To Bring It Back Home, Thomas C. Reich

Charleston Library Conference

Negotiations connected with database renewals are sharply critical and ultimately impact renewal decisions. Today, academic libraries face an ever-consolidating marketplace, often accompanied by disruptive cost increases that toss sound reasoning aside. Instances of super-exponential cost increases transfigure once reasonable practices based on sound criteria to unsustainable subscriptions and inappropriate access models. Most troubling is that libraries have seldom been asked to participate in stakeholder discussions before these models and decisions were made. The paper reviews University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Libraries struggle with these changing metrics. In context, the paper looks at how recent political upheaval in Wisconsin has overturned Wisconsin’s …

Six Impossible Things: Moving Kbart Into The Next Decade, Andrée Rathemacher, Robert Heaton, Noah Levin, Christine Stohn

Charleston Library Conference

KBART is one of the most successful NISO recommendations today. Formally supported by over 80 organizations across all stakeholder groups, it enables a standardized transfer of data between content providers and knowledge bases. Most recently KBART added an automated process to transfer holdings data to localize an institution’s knowledge base holdings. While KBART was originally built to focus on journal and book data, the world has moved on—the different flavors and nuances of open access, the increased use of audiovisual material, holdings at the chapter and article levels, and issues around translations, transliterations, and author names are just some of …

Approvals, Slips, And Dda! Oh My! The Yellow Brick Road To Collaborative Approval And Dda Profiling, Keri Prelitz

Charleston Library Conference

In the last several years, approval profiling has changed significantly and grown increasingly complex, particularly due to the prevalent shift toward collecting in electronic formats. While approval profiles have been predominantly e-preferred for some time, the growth of demand-driven acquisition (DDA) has led to new license models, modes of acquisition, and tighter integration of DDA with approvals. With the advent of the DDA-preferred approval plan came options for the inclusion of multiple e-book platforms as well as complexities involving publisher embargoes. Additionally, the numerous approval and DDA profile parameters, workflow options, and administrator settings vary widely, resulting in a seemingly …

Canceling The Big Deal: Three R1 Libraries Compare Data, Communication, And Strategies, L. Angie Ohler, Leigh Ann Depope, Karen Rupp-Serrano, Joelle Pitts

Charleston Library Conference

Canceling the Big Deal is becoming more common, but there are still many unanswered questions about the impact of this change and the fundamental shift in the library collections model that it represents. Institutions like Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the University of Oregon were some of the first institutions to have written about their own experience with canceling the Big Deal several years ago, but are those experiences the norm in terms of changes in budgets, collection development, and interlibrary loan activity? Within the context of the University of California system’s move to cancel a system-wide contract with Elsevier, …

Embrace The Hive Mind: Engaging Ill And Research Services In Unsubscribed And Oa Content Discovery, Jeffrey M. Mortimore, Ruth L. Baker, Rebecca Hunnicutt, Natalie Logue, Jessica Rigg

Charleston Library Conference

Deciding whether to support discovery of unsubscribed and Open Access (OA) content raises questions for technical and public services librarians, from the philosophical to the pragmatic. Doing so requires careful curation and monitoring of resources, and benefits from library-wide input. This paper describes the process at Georgia Southern University for vetting unsubscribed and OA resources with ILL and liaison librarians for inclusion in the discovery layer and on the A-Z database list. For the discovery layer, this involves a three-step evaluation of collections for overall metadata quality, likelihood of ILL fulfillment, and value to the library collection. For the database …

The Time Has Come... To Move Many Things: Inventorying And Preparing A Collection For Offsite Storage, Rachelle M. Mclain, Hannah Mckelvey

Charleston Library Conference

In the spring of 2019, the Montana State University (MSU) Library embarked on a large-scale inventory project that involved weeding and moving portions of their collection to an offsite storage facility within six months in order to create more student study space in the Library. The department primarily responsible for leading the project, Collections Access & Technical Services, the result of two departments merging, was also simultaneously navigating their new structure and a remodel of their workspace thus adding further challenges to the project. This poster session demonstrated how MSU Library approached and completed this project by advocating to their …

Wrangling Weirdness: Lessons Learned From Academic Law Library Collections, Courtney Mcallister, Megan Brown

Charleston Library Conference

Academic law libraries face some challenges that are consistent with larger trends in higher education. However, there are unique aspects that shape the way collections are selected, evaluated, managed, and promoted. Most electronic resources designed for legal research do not generate COUNTER compliant usage data. Many subscription resources and services that libraries provide access to are primarily geared towards non-academic customers, such as law firms and corporations. Patrons increasingly need and request research products that rely on data collection, personalization, and non-IP access controls, which complicates law librarians’ professional commitment to things like preserving patron privacy and providing walk-in access. …

Legacy Missions In Times Of Change: Defining And Shaping Collections In The 21st Century, Antje Mays, Oya Y. Rieger

Charleston Library Conference

Despite the rapidly changing information and technology landscape, collections remain at the heart of academic libraries, signifying their enduring importance in providing access to our cultural heritage. Given broader trends in research and the current information ecology of an increasingly networked, distributed, and licensed environment, building collections and developing collection polices is increasingly ambiguous. These trends impact librarians in form of ever-expanding portfolios, diffusion of effort, weakened sense of focus, and a rising sense of persistent yet unmet needs for developing new skills. This paper outlines current research on collection trends and summarizes the interactive exchanges from the 2019 Charleston …

Acquiring E-Books – Does (Should) Workflow Play A Role?, Alexis Linoski

Charleston Library Conference

The methods in which e-books can be purchased vary greatly compared to print books. In the past, a print book was purchased either as an individual title (firm order) or through an approval plan. Once the books were received, there was little deviation in how the items were processed – purchase orders were created, books were processed, invoices were input and paid. However, with e-books, the work is more complex and there are a many ways to purchase e-books – firm order, Demand (or Patron) Driven Acquisiton (DDA), Evidence Based Acquisition (EBA), yearly front-file purchases, back-file purchases, or subscription to …

Incoming!: Surviving The Barrage Of Vendor Communications, Edward F. Lener

Charleston Library Conference

For those in collection management, dealing with vendors is an integral part of the job. Yet the sheer volume of e-mails, phone calls, and other communications can sometimes leave one feeling as though under assault. This paper analyzes real-world examples of vendor communications and assesses their relevance and usefulness. It also provides tips and strategies for managing such communications effectively. Conveying library needs and expectations back to vendors, for example, is a critical step. For their part, vendors will have an opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t from a librarian’s perspective so that they may in turn learn …

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 …

Comparison And Review Of 17 E-Book Platforms, John Lavender, Courtney Mcallister

Charleston Library Conference

The University of Michigan Press, with support from the Mellon Foundation, asked John Lavender, of Lavender Consulting, to conduct a review of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Humanities E-Book collection (HEB) following its launch on Michigan’s new Fulcrum platform. ACLS-HEB is an online collection of over 5,400 high-quality humanities books from over 100 publishers. Now that the market for e-books has matured, part of the review was a comparative study of e-book platforms run by publishers, university presses and e-book vendors; 17 platforms were selected. The review looked at the key features offered by each platform, how they …

Down The Rabbit Hole We Go Again (The 19th Health Sciences Lively Lunchtime Discussion), Susan K. Kendall, Ramune K. Kubilius, Sarah Mcclung, Jean Gudenas, Rena Lubker

Charleston Library Conference

This year’s sponsored, no holds barred health sciences lively lunchtime gathering was open to all. It began with greetings from luncheon sponsor, Rittenhouse. The moderator, Rena Lubker, introduced the session and provided introductory remarks about this year’s three presentations: a commentary on issues that keep us up at night; a report on considerations to make when leaving big deal licenses and entering into new, OA friendly arrangements; and more discussion about the impact of expansions on libraries of academic medical affiliation. All three topics provided fodder for lively discussion at the end.

Ramune Kubilius provided her brief annual update …

Piloting The Surge: Streaming Video And Academic Libraries, Joanna Kolendo, Azungwe Kwembe, Charlene Snelling

Charleston Library Conference

Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Library decision to trial and acquire Kanopy, A Patro-Driven-Acquisition video streaming service, was completely a patron-demand-driven undertaking. The decision to obtain this service was led by faculty interest in the resource and ranged from the initial inquiry for a trial by a foreign language faculty member to its PDA model, which has allowed faculty to select the films purchased. The article discusses the acquisition process, set-up steps for making the trial and then the resource available to the CSU community, and the steps taken to promote the resource.

Tip Of The Iceberg, Part 1: Choosing What Shows, Karen Kohn

Charleston Library Conference

In the summer of 2019, Temple University’s main library relocated to a new building, in which most of the 1.3 million-item main stacks collection resides in an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS), and a small portion in open stacks. The open stacks, or browsing collection, includes highly circulating items, new books, and materials with a particular need for browsing. Highly-circulating items were identified by dividing the total number of loans by the number of years the library had owned the book. Materials with a particular need for browsing, generally those with significant visual components such as art and music …

Tangled Up In Books: Using The Lyrics Of Bob Dylan To Understand The Changing Times Of Collection Development, Thomas A. Karel

Charleston Library Conference

The lyrics of Bob Dylan can be an interesting way of understanding the changes that have occurred in academic libraries in the past 40 years.

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 …

Primary Rights And The Inequalities Of E-Book Access, Roën F. Janyk, Arielle R. Lomness

Charleston Library Conference

The e-book landscape is in a constant state of flux. More recent developments include new acquisition models, advances in platform usability and navigation, more lenient DRM provisions, and improvements to simultaneous user access licenses. However, what has not been addressed recently are the inequalities in e-book access for libraries across the world due to ‘primary rights.’ Territorial rights versus world rights is a licensing issue affecting libraries globally, and yet little is being done to address the inequalities of access. Join our discussion that will examine the ‘unavailable in your country’ message libraries often see alongside e-book purchase options, review …

Strategic Reinvestments Of Journal Packages At The Pennsylvania State University, Mihoko Hosoi

Charleston Library Conference

In the face of budget challenges, organizational strategy changes, and the new open access (OA) policy, the Pennsylvania State University Libraries (PSUL) are reevaluating negotiations and collections of ‘big deal’ journal packages. While a growing number of libraries are considering cancelling subscriptions to ‘big deals’, PSUL has been taking a careful approach in containing cost and making sure that faculty and students have access to resources that they need. Current efforts include: renegotiating ‘big deals’; cancelling low value titles in title-by-title agreements; obtaining single agreements for the entire Penn State; promoting green OA for future subscription negotiation purposes; and renegotiating …

Trot So Quick: Addressing Budgetary Changes, Star Holloway, Jeff Bailey

Charleston Library Conference

This session discussed the planning and implementation of strategies taken by the Dean B. Ellis Library to address a significant budget reduction that went into effect in FY19. Holloway and Bailey covered methods taken to optimize a reduced collection development budget and distribute funds to various subject areas in an equitable and justifiable manner. Presenters reviewed meetings conducted with faculty to clarify the new budget and resource alterations. Examples of data provided to stakeholders was shared. Topics covered include deadlines implemented for resource renewals and requests, methods used to track and disclose information regarding the process, and interactions with vendors …

Begin At The Beginning: Revamping Collection Development Workflows, Elyssa M. Gould, Jennifer Mezick

Charleston Library Conference

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” This paper describes how two librarians newer to the University of Tennessee Libraries refreshed collection development workflows at the Libraries after a reorganization. This reorganization distributed tasks across departments in a different manner due to the new departmental configurations. In this new matrix environment, more communication was required to achieve desired outcomes, but more buy-in was also needed from constituents such as the subject librarians. This paper describes how a new Collections Committee was formed to make decisions on high-dollar …

Tip Of The Iceberg: Part 2, Discovering What's Hidden, Rich Gause

Charleston Library Conference

Remote storage for large collections is becoming common, making those books inaccessible for physical browsing by researchers. The main libraries at Temple University and the University of Central Florida (UCF) each have approximately 1.3 million print items on-site. Both libraries are storing 90% of their collections in automated retrieval systems with 10% remaining available for browsing in open stacks. In Part 1, “Choosing What Shows,” Karen Kohn, Temple’s Collection Analysis Librarian, describes the decisions and processes used for the 10% left physically visible. This second part explores UCF’s efforts to improve discoverability of the items in storage. The visual aspects …

The Open Landscape Environment As The Expanse, Barbara I. Dewey

Charleston Library Conference

Building on the 2019 ACRL/SPARC Forum on Collective Reinvestment in Open Infrastructure, this program will explore how libraries can make different commitments to fund content created by open infrastructures. Library collections increasingly promote and reflect such open content and many have chosen to contribute to funding those products. There is not one formula or roadmap to underwrite the publishing and distribution costs of these open resources. There are many variables and considerations as some open content corresponds to serials and others are books or monographs. Open access content is increasingly found in nearly all subject areas, as scholarly publishing models …