On Friday, April 21, I remotely attended two CRL meetings.

Council of Voting Members Meeting

In CRL’s 2017 Council of Voting Members Meeting, participants considered recommendations by CRL’s Board and management for new measures and new investment in shared collections and related digital services, in accordance with CRL’s Agenda for Shared Print, 2017 – 2026. See here for the meeting’s full agenda.

In Scott Waugh’s Chair Report, he discussed CRL membership and explained that the number of CRL members has stayed about the same from last year to the current year. Two members have notified CRL that they will not be renewing their membership next year.

The most significant portion of the meeting was the President’s Report in which Bernard Reilly discussed important changes in direction for CRL. In his report, Reilly discussed and elaborated on information that he initially shared via a series of “Sea Change” posts that have appeared on the CRL blog over the past several months. In the print/microform arena, Reilly discussed a number of pressure points:

• New organizations and initiatives (he noted EAST as an example) are engaged in work to steward print resources on scales that are equal to or surpass CRL.
• Platforms such as JSTOR are expanding expectations for seamless access.
• Retrenchment: Some organizations scaling back print distribution/retention efforts
• There is a broken supply chain: channels for distribution of print and microform materials are stalling, falling apart.
• Vendors of microform are increasingly requiring license agreements that restrict how the microform content is used, including prohibiting interlibrary loan. Other vendors have simply stopped producing microform.

The digital arena has its own set of pressure points:

• Government information is proliferating on growing scales.
• Information is being privatized. This is tilting access away from academia and toward the corporate sector.

In response to these pressure points, Reilly discussed new directions:

• In the print/microform arena, the CRL Agenda for Shared Print (2016-26) calls for:
  • Increased focused on print materials in the humanities and social sciences.
  • Supporting the need of libraries to responsibly but rapidly manage-down their print collections.
  • Extending CRL’s partnership with the Linda Hall Library.
  • Exploring ways to combine resources and work collaboratively with other efforts to steward print (again, EAST was cited as an example).
  • Ensure that preservation commitments are auditable and readily accessible.
  • Working with CLOCKSS and Portico to expand preservation work to address the long-tail of information resources.
• In the digital arena, CRL is focusing on:
  • Preservation of content outside of—but relevant to—academic research (financial, news, governmental, geospatial).
  • Collectivizing digital content, ensuring that the content can be licensed in ways that reflect library standards and expectations.

Reilly discussed how the CRL will direct the fiscal and organizational resources needed to enable these new directions. CRL plans to wind-down certain of its former activities, ensuring that their focus is on meeting member-driven needs over just-in-case activities. For example, CRL is planning to cancel its print subscriptions to about 400 serials. Most of these subscriptions began in the 1980s, are rarely used, and are on topics outside of CRL’s main focuses for collecting. CRL is planning to stop routinely buying certain foreign newspapers (again, there is very little demand) and will no longer purchase microform of materials with licenses that prohibit interlibrary loan. In response to the news about the cancellation of subscriptions, an attendee asked if CRL has analyzed overlap between the cancelled titles and the holdings of member libraries. CRL responded that there has been some investigation but no systematic analysis. The initial bases for placement of the subscriptions was the fact that the titles were scarcely held, so CRL speculates that overlap is not substantial. Another attendee asked for a list of the cancelled serials and CRL said that such a list could be posted on the CRL website.

Following the President’s Report, Xuemao Wang gave the Treasurer’s Report. The most important topic here was the proposed CRL budget for FY2018. A number of attendees expressed concerns about endorsing the FY2018 budget without a better understanding of and more details concerning changes in CRL’s directions. Reilly attempted to address these concerns, emphasizing that CRL’s new directions do not map to specific items in the proposed budget. The budget was approved, with 70 in favor and 19 opposed.

CRL Global Resources Collections Forum

This forum consisted of two sessions, one on licensing global data and the other on digitizing global collections. Each session included a series of short presentations.

The first session was framed as a continuation of the discussion that occurred at the “Licensing Big Data” online forum that CRL hosted in November 2016. James Simon (CRL Vice President for Collections & Services) began by discussing ideas for the best avenues through which the CRL can deal with vendors of global data. He discussed the advantages (e.g., leveraging strengths and buying power; standardizing terms and use rights; promoting transparency; ensuring accountability of providers) and disadvantages (no one-size-fits-all approach; different levels of interest and needs among CRL libraries; diluted agency for negotiation among individual institutions; speed/timing) of centralized licensing through the CRL. He then discussed how best to frame the CRL’s role, emphasizing the key question of if/how best can CRL bring value to this problem space for its members. Greg Raschke of North Carolina State University provided a brief response to Simon’s presentation, noting that CRL should stay away from duplicating the licensing efforts of individual member libraries and “go big or go home” by striving to aggressively tilt the overall marketplace in directions that member libraries would benefit from.

Following Simon’s presentation, Lara Cleveland (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International, IPUMS) gave a short presentation on IPUMS, which is an organization that collects, aggregates, provides access to, and stewards census micro data. She discussed some of the hurdles that IPUMS faces as they attempt to license their content and also new directions, such as digitizing census results and integrating the contents of Integrating International Labor Force Surveys.

Susan Powell (Berkeley) then presented on supporting library dealings with vendors and sources of GIS data. Powell discussed some of the challenges associated with GIS data, including the variety of delivery and access mechanisms, the reliance on proprietary software, and the problematic manners in which authorized users are defined. Powell advocated for licensing GIS data in manners that allow users to manipulate data, copy it, and make derivative works based on it. She also discussed challenges of making GIS data discoverable and how to benchmark the value of this data. She said that CRL could have a role in the GIS data problem space through the development of a model license.

The forum’s second session focused on digitizing global collections. Reilly began the session by giving an update on CRL’s digital resource-building activities. Next, James Simon gave a progress report on CRL’s Global Collections Initiative, which is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded initiative to develop a framework for supporting international studies. More specifically, the initiative aims to create a sustainable apparatus for e-access to primary source document, establish an internal framework for collectively dealing with publishers, and assess web archiving practices. The initiative will be in a development phase until 2018, during which period the focus will be on Latin America materials.

Recordings of presentations will be available on CRL YouTube channel in coming weeks

CRL’s next annual meeting (April 2018) will be an in-person event and the topic of the forum following the meeting will be global data. Also, CRL will be hosting a forum at the 2017 ALA Annual Conference regarding future priorities for the organization.

On October 20^th and 21^st, I attended “The Transformation of Academic Library Collecting: A Symposium Inspired by Dan C. Hazen,” which was sponsored by Harvard University and was held in Cambridge, MA. This post is a short summary of highlights from the event.

A prevailing theme at the symposium was the concept of collective collections and the implications of this concept on managing research libraries’ collections. As Lorcan Dempsey (Chief Strategist and VP, Membership & Research, OCLC) discussed, libraries are transitioning from a “print logic” (which bases value attributions on locally assembled print collections) to a “network logic” (which bases value attributions on the library’s ability to meet a variety of research and learning needs through networks of libraries and affiliated organizations working in concert).  Many interesting points were made at the symposium as the presenters and attendees grappled with the implications of the network logic. What follows is a listing that should give you a sense of some of the key issues related to collective collections and the network logic discussed at the meeting:

• Dempsey drew a distinction between two categories of collections:
  • Outside-In collections: those knowledge resources that the library purchases from vendors and then makes accessible to its researchers.
  • Inside-Out collections: those knowledge resources that the library facilitates the creation of through a suite of services in support of scholarship and then enables publication, discoverability, and curation.
• Outside-In collections have traditionally been at the core of library identities, but, increasing, these collections are being framed as just one service of several.
• Reflecting the transition to collections as services, major publishers like Elsevier are shifting strategies from publication and delivery of content to enabling researchers to be more productive (through platforms such as Mendeley and SSRN) and then enabling for the assessment of this productivity (through products such as Pure and SciVal).
• There was discussion of how best to “right-scale” collective collection management; in other words, how do we partner at the right scales. Also, how do we develop and deploy methodologies for decision-making at scale.
• There was discussion of the need to develop more positions focused on collective collections over local collections: Galadriel Chilton’s position of Ivy Plus Libraries Director of Collection Initiatives was cited as an example the type of position that we need more of.
• As the network logic expands, overlap between libraries’ general collections should decrease as different libraries can focus their collections in more specialized areas; also, special collections should become “specialer.”
• There is a dialectical relationship between technology and user behaviors: there is a constant interplay of reconfigurations between the tools and the behaviors that surround those tools.
• Library are working toward collectivity in a context of “radical scatter” – information is diffuse, disorganized, difficult to discover.
• Libraries are still burdened by a print logic: there is a lingering desire for comprehensiveness and libraries still boast of the size of their collections even as this measure of value decreases in relevance. There is a focus on competition in collections among libraries when there needs to be a focus on partnership.
• Transition from a print logic to a network logic will depend on uptake both from our user communities and from library personnel. Galadriel Chilton argued that, to facilitate this update, we need to incorporate the network logic into pre-existing narratives of meaning about collections.
• Usage patterns at Yale University provide strong evidence for the growth of the network logic: Use of local collections is down by 33 percent over the past 15 years. Concurrently, there has been a 144 percent increase in resource sharing. The collective collection (primarily facilitated by Borrow Direct – resource sharing among the ivies) is overtaking the value of Yale’s local collections.
• Discussions of initiatives for collective collections should include a business plan – a way to make the initiative sustainable longterm.

Concurrent with the discussions surrounding collective collections, there were a number of other interesting points made at the symposium:

1. Tom Hyry (Harvard University) discussed how the paths of special collections and general collections are converging. Associated with this, there is a need to develop a holistic view of collections that will expand capacity and facilitate open conversation between the traditional disparate areas of special collections and technical services.
2. Jane Kamensky (Harvard University) discussed how memory as captured in archives and special collections is gendered. Typically, donations of personal papers come through a person’s daughter – the person in the family that traditionally saves, annotates, and organizes family letters. This “hidden labor” behind collections has important implications regarding how we should think about our collections.
3. Bethany Nowviskie (University of Virginia) discussed the concept of “speculative collections.” Using the artistic movement of Afrofuturism as her point of departure, she argued that the ways in which libraries organize, present, and make collections discoverable memorializes a linear view of history and does not foreground the possibilities that collections offer as problem-solving tools that are oriented towards the future and enable the envisioning of new possibilities. Libraries need to work collaboratively with their communities to develop new ways of designing information architectures that reflect an orientation towards change rather than immutability. Nowviskie cited Blacklight as a platform that suggests ways facilitate this new sort of information architecture.

Finally, the symposium contained remembrances of Dan Hazen (1947-2015) a leader in the field of collection development and a distinguished Latin Americanist at Harvard University. The symposium was inspired by Hazen’s forwarding think regarding collections and his enthusiasm for partnerships. Nearly every presentation at the symposium made reference to Hazen’s leadership in collection development and many cited his publications.

On April 14, 2016, I attended the Center for Research Libraries’ (CRL) Council of Voting Members Meeting in Chicago. This post is a short summary of the meeting.

Scott Waugh (UCLA, Chair of the CRL Board of Directors) began the meeting by briefly highlighting some potential areas of focus for CRL in the future: digitization of document delivery, an enhanced online presence, expanded global partnerships, expanded membership, improved services to members, and efficiencies to reduce costs.

Next, Thomas Burish (Notre Dame, CRL Secretary) provided CRL’s Secretary Report. He started by explaining that most of CRL’s funding comes through membership fees. Growth in membership has been challenged in recent years by the economy (and resultant library budget cuts). Also, some libraries have analyzed return-on-investment and concluded that the benefits of CRL membership do not justify the costs. There are 219 members of CRL, but eight members have notified CRL that they will not be renewing their memberships. CRL is working hard to recruit new members. Prospective areas for growth are land grant institutions, mid-sized private universities, and elite four year schools. CRL has marketing activities planned for the coming year.

Bernie O’Reilly (CRL President) then gave the President’s Report. CRL is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its Technical Reports Archive and Image Library (TRAIL), which digitizes engineering technical reports. This initiative has become one of HathiTrust’s top 25 contributors. TRAIL is one of several initiatives that are working under the CRL umbrella. Others include an effort to preserve Afghan publications, the CRL Latin Americanist Group’s preservation of El Diario de Juarez, and the South Asian Open Archives Initiative. O’Reilly stated that the top requestors of CRL physical collections are Harvard, Michigan, Notre Dame, Chicago, and Minnesota. The number of requests they are getting for loans is steadily declining, but the number of items they are lending is growing; O’Reilly said that this suggests that more researchers are taking advantage of online access to CRL collections. The top users of CRL online collections include Texas A&M, Penn State, Florida State, Hong Kong, and the Max Planck Institute. Once a CRL document is digitized, it is made accessible to all CRL institutions. Over seven million pages from CRL’s collection have been scanned to date. O’Reilly noted trends in use: there is growing interest in mining the literature of troubled parts of Asia and the Middle East, particularly materials related to religion, law, the courts, and civil society. Beyond scanning materials based on requests, CRL is also engaging in the strategic digitization of certain materials. In particular, they are digitizing international government documents that they anticipate may be repressed after a new regime takes power. CRL has identified the most corrupt nations based on the ratings of the organization Transparency International and then concentrated on the digitization of these countries’ materials. These materials will be made freely accessible online.

O’Reilly stated that another area of focus for CRL is the licensing of databases. Licensing of databases is a fairly new initiative. This year they offered 54 databases for purchase through them, an increase from the 30 they offered last year. CRL is interested in licensing databases not just to be a “buying club” but to use its large membership to gain leverage on use rights like data mining and also to ensure that vendors disclose the full contents of their databases. They are trying to focus on a niche of databases focusing on news and data concerning censuses, geospatial, and business. Vendors of these databases do not always consider libraries as their primary customers and so libraries have struggled to get leverage in negotiations with these vendors. CRL is trying to change this.

O’Reilly concluded with what he termed as three big questions:

1. Is our digital investment paying off? The amount of content CRL digitizes pales in comparison to other efforts such as Google Books and HathiTrust. However, the content that they digitize is more unique. They are involved in discussions with HathiTrust to collaborate to assess relative strengths and weaknesses and pursue a strategic alignment.
2. Should more CRL resources be OA? O’Reilly noted the potential for a “free rider problem” in which non-members could benefit from CRL-digitized content without subsidizing CRL’s digitization efforts. There are currently 219 members, but about 700 institutions in the United States and Canada fit the profile of a CRL member. O’Reilly further noted that some materials that they digitize are not in the public domain and therefore could not be made openly accessible. This question inspired a number comments from the attendees, with strong consensus that increasing access to knowledge is a core value of librarianship and, to the extent possible, CRL should attempt to make its resources openly accessible. Although the result may be some “free riding,” the ability to steer the direction of CRL and the materials that it digitizes would remain a major benefit that only members would enjoy.
3. Should CRL merge selected serials titles with related holdings at the Linda Hall Library? See this page for details: https://www.crl.edu/blogs/combining-and-improving-print-assets. According to O’Reilly, this was a “no-brainer” but, since decisions about CRL collections are up to the membership, they will pursue an e-referendum to discuss this issue.

Xuemao Wang (University of Cincinnati) provided the Treasurer’s Report. He reported that in FY15 there was a deficit in CRL’s accounts of about $377,000 and a projected deficit of about $500,000 in FY16. A deficit in FY17 is also projected. However, all of these deficits are due to a deliberate decision by CRL to draw on their significant reserve funds to build their investments in the key areas of digitization, database licensing, and collection analysis. They do not expect to be in a deficit beginning in fiscal years 2020 and 2021, when they plan to begin growing their reserve funds again.

On January 8, I attended the daylong ALCTS Symposium “Re-envisioning ‘Technical Services’ to Transform Libraries: Identifying Leadership and Talent Management Practices.” You can read a short summary of the symposium’s overall scope here. With this post, I wish to summarize a few of the sessions at the forum that I found most interesting.

The symposium’s keynote speaker was Keith Webster, Dean of Libraries at Carnegie Mellon University. His presentation took a high-level view of the future of libraries and how technical services can potentially fit into that future. He first highlighted some factors that might lead to a pessimistic view about the future of libraries. Indeed, although libraries are busier than ever, budgets are often flat or decreasing and the use that libraries receive is not always related to the tools and services that they provide. Additionally, the easy availability of journal content in online formats along with the emergence of a myriad of free online research management tools means that many faculty rarely if ever come into the library. Having explained the grounds for pessimism, Webster advocated for optimism. He traced a generational evolution in which libraries have progressed from being collection-centered to being client-centered, experience-centered, and, centered on connected learning experiences. The current generation of libraries is centered on collaborative knowledge, media, and fabrication facilities; uses of library space for purposes such as maker spaces show how libraries can take on new roles while also retaining their tradition status as sites for knowledge creation. He went on to identify five trends in the academic landscape that libraries need to be aware of:

1. Evolving research workflows: Throughout the research cycle of planning, experimentation, dissemination, and ideation, free online digital services (e.g., ResearchGate, ReadCube, FigShare, etc.) have emerged that are transforming scholarly workflows. Libraries have been slow to develop tools and services that fit into these workflows.
2. Evolving communication methods: There is a trend toward increasing use of social media; increasing multi-author papers, a growing emphasis on reproducibility and the repurposing of data to enable new findings.
3. Uptake of Open Access models of publishing.
4. Open science: Researchers today are sharing research knowledge more widely than ever in the past. The article is now just one of many scholarly outputs.
5. Funding: Increasing quantities of money in academia continue to flow into scientific research; concurrently, there is an increased public focus on tuition and the return-on-investment for higher education.

With these trends in mind, Webster asked where are libraries going. He advocate for the continued migration from print to online collections, review of shelving location of lesser-used collections, repurposing of the library as a learning space, the embedding of library expertise and resources in contexts outside the libraries where they are most needed, and an increasing focus on distributed collections. Finally, Webster zeroed in on technical services, suggesting that technical services entail all of those operations that connect communities with information. He said that one of the most important transitions in technical services is one that is occurring from locally owned collections to facilitated collections. Along with this, he remarked on a trend from scarcity to abundance: books going out of print is becoming something of the past; most publishers now say that they will never allow a book to go out of print. He said that technical services departments have roles to play in supporting evolutions in the scholarly record from a focus primarily on research outputs (e.g., published article) to inputs (e.g., data sets) and he also talked about the roles that technical services can play in support of research analytics and data analytics. In conclusion, he remarked that technical services personnel have a strong track record of engagement and change and we will need to build on that track record to explore the changes on the horizon.

Another of the symposium’s speakers, Meredith Taylor (University of Texas, Austin) discussed the concept of talent management (TM) and how it might be applied within the contexts of technical services work. She defined talent management as an integrated set of processes, programs, and cultural norms in an organization designed and implemented to attract, develop, deploy, and retain talent to achieve strategic objectives and meet future business needs. TM differs from traditional HR work by being more proactive, integrated, organization-focused (rather than individual-focused), customized, and aligned with organizational strategies. Taylor said that one reason that TM is particularly relevant to libraries today is that, between 2015 and 2025, it is projected that 30 percent of the library workforce will be retiring; additionally, there are demographic shifts in library workforces and, since 2005, an 82 percent turnover rate in the executive leadership of ARL libraries. Specifically within technical services divisions of libraries, workforce trends include decreasing numbers of personnel, the outsourcing of some functions, and an increased reliance on paraprofessional staff. With these shifts, Taylor asked: Are libraries meeting retraining and re-skilling needs? Are libraries losing critical knowledge? Are libraries able to find qualified candidates to fill positions? Having posed these questions, Taylor discussed the results of an ARL SPEC KIT study that she co-authored on TM in 2014. The study showed that talent challenges included a scarcity of fiscal resources, salary inequities, retirements, inability to retrain/re-skill current workforces, and a lack of ability to find and retain qualified personnel – particularly for positions in IT and senior management. Moreover, the study showed three troubling trends in libraries: (1) a lack of a systemic approach to TM, (2) widening skill gaps in the workforce, and (3) a lack of IT skills and executive expertise. To confront these problems, Taylor advocated that libraries strive to align their HR strategy to their library strategy, collect data to support informed decision-making, and make resource decisions based on TM. Programmatic starting points for libraries include developing a competency model, completing a job analysis, and undertaking a compensation analysis and succession planning. Other starting points include identifying high potential employees for development, creating customized development plans, and developing a succession plan.

The symposium’s final speaker, Jenica Rogers (Director of Libraries at SUNY Potsdam), gave a presentation titled “Bringing the Back Room Forward.” Rogers began the presentation by describing her background in technical services and emphasizing her view that technical services work is deeply connected with public services. She then discussed the challenges that her library faced when four of the library’s nine librarian positions became vacant in 18 months. In response, she led a reorganization within the library. One position created as a result of the reorganization was the position of Metadata and Subscription Resources Librarian. The search for this position failed due to a lack of qualified candidates and, as a result, Rogers’ library made some very minor changes to the position description and changed the title of the position to Coordinator of Technical Services & Discovery, which they hoped would make the position sound more prestigious and managerial. With this second search, the position received significantly more qualified candidates. Rogers was concerned, however, to find that, with the change in job title, there were significantly less female applicants. From this search process, Rogers suggested that one takeaway was that language use (e.g., traditional versus change-oriented) impacts candidate pools and that librarians should encourage potential candidates to look past traditional boundaries. She also said that we should explore cross-boundary experimentation in technical services in collaborate in a way that honors expertise. Finally, she advocated for transformations in graduate education so that students are prepared for library positions that do not yet exist in libraries.

From November 5th through the 7th I attended the Charleston Conference in Charleston, South Carolina. This conference focuses on issues of collection management in libraries. Below I describe some of the sessions that I found to be most valuable. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you’d like for me to share any additional information about the sessions that I attended.

In the plenary session “Star Wars in the Library,” Jim O’Donnell (director of libraries at Arizona State University) discussed three basic principles that should guide libraries in the future. The first of these principles is that “all students are online students.” Here he suggested that all library users engage with the library’s resources and services through online interfaces. The second principle is that “knowledge is a verbal noun.” In discussing this principle, O’Donnell argued that libraries should flip their view of knowledge. Rather than viewing knowledge as stable collections, libraries should embrace models in which they become places where knowledge is being collaboratively created on an ongoing basis. The third principle that O’Donnell articulated was that “print books have a long and glorious future.” He argued that libraries need to think very intentionally and deliberately about their print collections, giving focus to the value that they want these collections to serve for their users. He emphasized the importance of special collections, noting that it is the unique special collections holdings that—to a significant extent—will differentiate libraries.

“The Secret Life of Articles: From Download Metrics to Downstream Impact” was a session that I attended in which the presenters (Lorraine Estelle – COUNTER, Wouter Haak – Elsevier, and Carol Tenopir – University of Tennessee Knoxville) discussed the results of the Beyond Downloads Project in which one thousand scholars from around the world were interviewed and surveyed regarding how they access, store, share, and use the scholarly articles that they download. Five primary takeaways from the study were highlighted: First, sharing of information is an inherent part of the research process. A researcher’s initial action of accessing an article is just a means to the end of sharing that information. Second, sharing of articles takes many different forms. While sharing of full-text in PDF form is most common, researchers also frequently just share citation information. Remarkably, the study showed that, on average, a researcher will share an article almost a dozen times. Not surprisingly, the study found as its third takeaway that the primary means of sharing articles was through email messages, followed by cloud services (e.g., DropBox). The fourth takeaway was that, for scholars, the version of the article matters a great deal – they strongly prefer sharing the final copy of the article over an e/pre-print version. The final takeaway was that the library is a key tool in supporting the sharing of articles. The presentation also highlighted the fact that COUNTER data does not reflect the full extent of usage of an article. Beyond usage captured by COUNTER, there is a rich ecosystem of scholarly sharing.

Michael Levine-Clark’s (University of Denver) presentation “What Do Our Users Think About eBooks? 10 Years of Survey Data at the University of Denver” described the results of three user surveys (one in 2005, one in 2010, and one in 2015) concerning e-book usage and attitudes at the University of Denver. Not surprisingly, the survey results together demonstrate a steady increase in the frequency of use of e-books since 2005. Additionally, the results showed that, over time, an increasing number of users are reading entire books in electronic form. When asked if they prefer reading books in print or electronic form, the significant majority continue to prefer the print format. However, the date also shows that, when the reading experience is scoped to just a chapter, about half of users prefer the electronic format over print. Also, users showed a preference for the electronic format in instances in which they were using the book to search for just one specific piece of information.

“Life Post-ILS Migration: How Far Have We Come Since Our Go-Live Dates and Where Do We Go from Here?” was a particularly timely for me given that it’s three presenters (Susan Flanagan – Getty Research Institute, Moon Kim – California State University (CSU) – Fullerton, and Ann Kutulas – Tarrant County College) discussed their experiences with implementation of Alma/Primo. These experiences were quite different. The Getty Research Institute, for example, was an early adopter of Alma/Primo (they went live in late summer of 2012) and had the luxury of a significant amount of time to do pre-implementation planning. Tarrant County College, in contrast, had just four months to plan for a migration in the summer of 2015. And, CSU Fullerton is currently in the process of working with the 22 other California State university libraries to plan a transition to Alma/Primo in the summer of 2017. Some of the points that the presenters raised were:

• When migrating data, be sure to focus primarily on the functional fields in Alma.
• Do not always expect that existing workflows can be retained in Alma; rather Alma should lead you to rethink workflows.
• One attendee who also recently implemented Alma/Primo commented that she found it useful to think of Alma not so much as a system but has a member of the library’s team and as another voice at the table.
• Life post-migration gets better over time. Problem lists decrease in length. Weekly troubleshooting meetings eventually decrease in frequency to semi-monthly meetings.
• Make use of resources such as the Alma/Primo helpdesk and the listserv.
• Alma is changing each month. It is very important to play close attention to updates to the system and think about how the updates should impact workflows and processes.

In the session “The Unknown Path—Evaluating Electronic Resources for Accessed-Based Collection Development,” two librarians from the University of North Texas (Erin Miller and Laurel Sammonds Crawford) described a significant shift in the processes and criteria that their library uses in the selection of e-resources. Formerly, selection of e-resources was carried out by public services librarians. In response to significant budget cuts, the library has shifted to an access-based philosophy of collection management in which selection decisions are made by behind-the-scenes collection managers. The library’s new model is rooted in the following principles for decision-making: evaluation, negotiation, transparency, and documentation. The presenters noted that one of the things that they have decided not to consider when assessing resources is long-term ownership. The library developed a new rubric that it uses to apply these principles when assessing requests for new e-resources. The rubric helps the library to consistently assess the content and usability of e-resources. The library had developed a separate checklist that they apply when reviewing e-resource licenses. They begin the license review and negotiation process prior to when an acquisition decision is made so that (a) the acquisition can be carried out more quickly once the decision to purchase is made and (b) they can use license terms as a factor when deciding whether to acquire.

Katherine Skinner’s (Educopia Institute) plenary session “From Act to Impact” was all about transformation. Drawing on the fields of sociology and economics, she commented that, in general, innovation tends to occur in small pockets and those small pockets of innovation do not always scale-out to broader transformations. Skinner argued that all stakeholders in the ecosystem of scholarly publishing have important roles to play in effecting broad change during what she characterized as a critical moment and opportunity. The conditions that have aligned to create this opportune moment include:

• Technological innovations
• New competitors in the information ecosystem
• Political shifts from a focus on public goods to privatized interests
• An information deluge

Skinner said that, oftentimes, change occurs on the fringe of fields. Field-wide change depends on the development of networks of stakeholders, all open to and focused on achieving innovation over stasis. Skinner then shifted focus to trace the origins of the current scholarly communications crisis. She argued that the popularly attributed drivers of this crisis are too simple and that, fundamentally, this crisis was brought about by technological innovations (e.g., photocopiers) that made it much easier to copy/reproduce scholarly literature, the increasing specialization and diversification of fields of research, and a growing preoccupation with rankings in higher education (e.g., the rankings published by US News & World Report). These factors ultimately led to increases in the number of journals, the consolidation of publishers of these journals, and an inadequacy in library budgets to acquire access to the scholarly record. “Big deal” publisher journal packages seemingly provided relief from these pressures but such a model has also proven untenable, and today we have a deeply weakened system of scholarly communications. In trying to fix this system, we have a tendency to think locally (i.e., meeting the immediate needs of users) when we should be thinking globally. In addition to this challenge, we face obstacles related to the collection and analysis of data regarding the usage of information resources and services. The more data that we have, the greater is our ability for predictive analysis. Those stakeholders that have the most data and that have the funding and capacity for an in-depth predictive analysis have a greater ability to strategically plan for the future. This is a challenge for libraries since an individual library only sees a small slice of data and also upholds commitments to using this data in a way that is ethical and respects user privacy – boundaries that commercial enterprises may not heed. To try to address this challenge, Skinner advocated that libraries need to work as a community, sharing measurements, developing common agendas, and engaging in open and extended dialogue. She cited a new initiative, Project Meerkat (which is looking at usage data concerning monographs – including the ethics of data collection and sharing and cooperative infrastructure for usage data modeling) as one example of how libraries can build a communication network that supports transformation.

From May 27th through May 30th, I attended the NASIG Annual Conference in Washington, DC. My conference experience began with a daylong symposium that was co-sponsored by NASIG and the Society for Scholarly Publishing. This meeting which, I helped to organize through my participation on the planning committee for the event, was titled “Evolving Information Policies and Their Implications: A Conversation for Librarians and Publishers” and featured three keynote presentations (designed to represent the perspectives of the publisher, librarian, and vendor communities) along with two panels.

The first keynote presentation was given by Jayne Marks (Vice President of Global Publishing, LWW Journals, Wolters Kluwer) and was intended to reflect a publisher perspective on information policy. Marks’ presentation emphasized how changes in public policies are driving many forms of experimentation and innovation among publishers to identify sustainable new publishing models.

Next, T. Scott Plutchak (Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies, University of Alabama at Birmingham) addressed information policy from a librarian perspective. Plutchak emphasized the tremendous challenges of data management (as opposed to the somewhat less daunting work of managing the published outputs of research). He characterized data management as a ‘wicked problem’ which has boundaries that are difficult to define and which requires a multidisciplinary approach to effectively address. Plutchak argued that libraries can play a lead role in addressing these challenges through the development of data management plans, establishment of best practices, management of institutional repositories, and support of the digital humanities. In saying this however, he emphasized that library personnel need to look at the work of data management not as library problem but as an institution-level problem that libraries can play an important role in solving.

The last keynote presentation was from a member of the vendor community, Caitlin Trasande (Senior Strategy Editor, Nature Publishing Group). Echoing some of the points made by Marks, Trasande emphasized that changes in information policy are driving innovations. She placed particular emphasis on innovations involving the assessment of social impact and sharing of research processes and outputs, and, in this context, she described some of the products and services of Digital Science.

The NASIG-SSP event concluded with two panel sessions. The first panel session was moderated by October Ivins (Ivins eContent Solutions) and featured two lawyers (Peter Jaszi and Michael Remington) specializing in intellectual property and copyright. The second panel was moderated by Robert Boissy (Springer) and featured all of the speakers and panelists from the event’s earlier sessions.

The second day of the conference (May 28) began with a Speakers Breakfast in which I met most of the presenters in the six concurrent sessions that I introduced (I was assigned with this role because of my membership on NASIG’s Program Planning Committee). The first presentation of the day was a keynote presentation given by Dorothea Salo (Faculty Associate, University of Wisconsin – Madison) entitled “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do (Read Serials).” Salo advocated that libraries should be stronger guardians of patron privacy and that libraries should work to give users of library e-resources the same privacy protections afforded to users of physical libraries.

Next, I attended the concurrent session “Developing Standards for Emerging Forms of Assessment: The NISO Altmetrics Initiative” by Todd Carpenter and Nettie Lagace. The NISO Altmetrics Initiative has been in process since 2013 and aims to analyze the environment of altmetrics and create standards and recommended practices in support of the future development of altmetrics. Carpenter and Lagace reported that, since April, five NISO working groups have been formed to define key terms, calculate methodologies for specific output types, improve the quality of data, promote the use of identifiers, and describe the value of altmetrics. NISO’s goal is to have a draft recommended practice related to altmetrics published by the fall of 2015.

I then attended the concurrent session “Beyond Journal Impact and Usage Statistics: Using Citation Analysis for Collection Development” by Wenli Gao (University of Houston), which discussed a project that used Scopus to analyze the citations in University of Houston communications faculty publications between 2006 and 2014. The project attempted to find correlations between faculty citations, journal impact factor, and usage. Gao reported that the project found that there was a correlation between usage and impact but not correlations between faculty citations and either usage or impact.

The third concurrent session that I attended on May 28th was “Comparing Digital Apples and Oranges: A Comparative Analysis of Ebooks across Multiple Platforms” by Esta Tovstiadi and Gabrielle Weirsma (both from the University of Colorado – Boulder). The focus here was on a comparative analysis of how e-books can be accessed across multiple platforms. Using a sample of about a hundred e-books (all published by academic presses in 2014) that are accessible on at least three platforms, Tovstiadi and Weirsma examined 34 elements relevant to usability of the sample e-books. This analysis uncovered a wide variety of problems and inconsistencies ranging from bibliographic data to pagination, linking, and searching capabilities.

The third day (May 29) of the conference began with a meeting of the Nominations & Electronic Committee, a committee on which I am serving as Chair-Elect. Next, I attended the keynote presentation “Somewhere to Run to, Nowhere to Hide” by Stephen Rhind-Tutt (Alexander Street Press). Rhind-Tutt discussed the trends (including streaming media, open linked data, data sets, and text mining) that are driving change in the information landscape and examined the extent to which we can forecast the future development of those trends. He emphasized repeatedly that we are in an information landscape characterized by evolution (continual transformation) rather than revolution (one transformation followed by stability).

The concurrent session “Introduction to Usus, a Community Website on Library Usage, and a Discussion about COUNTER 4” was presented by Ann Osterman (Virtual Library of Virginia), Oliver Pesch (EBSCO), and Kari Schmidt (Montgomery College). Their presentation concerned Usus, a web resource supported by COUNTER as a community-based website to enable librarians, publishers and other stakeholders to share information and questions concerning library e-resource usage issues. The presenters discussed examples of how Usus has provided constructive solutions to complex e-resource usage issues and also discussed the recently released COUNTER 4 Code of Practice.

Next, I attended “Troubleshooting E-Resources with ILL,” which was presented by Beth Ashmore (Samford University). Ashmore discussed how Samford University used ILL request data for materials accessible online through the library to identify problems with the implementation of the library’s new link resolver as well as systematic problems related to the metadata of certain sources and the library’s knowledgebase. Ashmore described how the library’s analysis didn’t just solve linking problems but also led to improved communications between e-resource management library personnel and the library’s ILL department.

On the last day of the conference, May 30th, I attended the concurrent session “Beyond the Research Paper: Extending the Use of Collections” by Kristen Garlock (JSTOR) and Eric Johnson (Folger Shakespeare Library). Garlock’s portion of the presentation discussed a project at JSTOR to analyze usage patterns of JSTOR articles to identify and promote access to those articles that are being incorporated into course curriculum. Next, Johnson discussed a recent partnership between JSTOR and the Folger Shakespeare Library that resulted in the development of Understanding Shakespeare, an initiative to integrate links to JSTOR articles into the digital editions of Shakespeare plays. The integration functions such that users can click on any line in a play and be provided with a list of articles that cite that line of text.