ALCTS Role of the Professional Librarian in Tech Services Interest Group meeting at ALA Midwinter

Posted on January 14, 2016 by

The ALCTS Role for the Professional Librarians in Technical Services Interest Group held their biannual program at the American Library Association Midwinter meeting in Boston, MA on Saturday January 9^th from 10:30 am EST to 11:30 am EST. The structure of the program consisted of two presentations followed by a guided discussion. Three questions were prepared in cooperation with the presenters and shared with the audience at the beginning of the program. Those questions were: (1) What one thing do you think you can help staff accept change and collaboration?; (2) How have you encouraged colleagues to self-identify by skills and abilities rather than job title?; (3) What are obstacles and opportunities in creating a learning environment focused on growth?. The guided discussion also included the opportunity for the audience to ask direct questions to the presenters. The slides can be found online at: http://connect.ala.org/node/66069.

Solution Creators: Enabling Innovation in Technical Services Departments

The first speaker was Sally Gibson, Head of Cataloging, Acquisitions, and Processing at Illinois State University (ISU). Sally explained that she has been at ISU for two years and experience ISU’s landscape as a changing one. There has been reduction of silos, more focus on collaboration, more outsourcing, and adoption of how to add value to services. The biggest question faced with outsourcing as stated by Sally Gibson was: “What are the routine tasks to outsource?” This question lead to digger deeper into how routine tasks can be less onerous or be done by less people. These were hard questions to ask but necessary when faced with budget restrictions and staff reductions. Sally noted that at the time of her presentation the state of Illinois had yet to pass the state budget. Despite that, the overall picture had to change from negative to positive. For this to happen, Sally advocated the need to focus on learning outcomes and solutions to problems instead of processes.

For technical services, this focus according to Sally revolves around a holistic view of solving problems collaborative. There is a tendency to emphasize the individual and an individual’s job title. This doesn’t allow for change and growth. Instead, centering on skills and abilities, staff can move forward. Further, a synergy of abilities and skills across units promotes collaboration. As such, functions and roles are valued and act as a bridge to understanding how tools work and can be adopted throughout the library. Another issue with focusing on titles rather than taking a more holistic view is that it displays a comfort level with a traditional approach.

Definitely, changing perspectives can be daunting and involves taking a risk with which many are not comfortable. Sally highlighted the importance of evaluating employee strengths and their comfort levels. Further, she noted the overarching significance in disseminating information and engaging in discussions throughout the library. Sally’s primary question was: Is your unit using an active learning environment that promotes growth? Sally defined growth as the desire to embrace challenges, an intelligence that can be developed, an open exchange of ideas, exploration, and the desire to understand the big picture, the holistic view. Furthermore and more importantly, a learning environment is one where every employee is valued.

A learning environment strives to overcome barriers exist. One obstacle is fear: fear of failure, sharing, risk, being wrong. Another is trust. Sally again brought out the positives in relation to fear and trust. It is crucial to integrate flexibility in the learning environment. Growth involves making mistakes. Instead of being punished for those, a learning environment learns from them integrating the flexibility needed to change course sometimes multiple times. Trust here is key as Sally clarified. It is through communication for example in a circle where curiosity, open discussions are key. By valuing the skills and abilities of employees, they begin to be empowered and look at solutions holistically.

Sally concluded that solution creators work in learning environment that supports growth. Solution creators recognize patterns and provide meaning. Everyone has a voice. Open discussion is valued. Questioning practice and procedures is encouraged. Skills and abilities are value and trust is key.

Technical Services Librarians as Factotum: The Reality in a Small Academic Library

The second and last speaker was Denise Garofalo, Associate Librarian, Systems and Catalog Services, Kaplan Family Library and Learning Center, Mount Saint Mary College. Denise began her presentation with a description of her library and her role. Mount Saint Mary College was founded almost 55 years ago. It is a small liberal arts college with approximately 1943 full time employees. The library used to be the mother house for the nuns and the Dominican center. The building included dormitory rooms on the upper floors. When the library moved in to the building, the dormitory rooms stayed meaning frequent visits of students in bathrobes. Recently, the library moved to electronic resources because of the demand of information literacy from faculty. The faculty’s response was so positive that the faculty begin to demand more information literacy courses. In fact, the information literacy program became a success.

Denise explained that the library was thrilled to have the support of the faculty at the same time of they wondered how to deal with the success. Denise took a step back to highlight three projects done in the library. These were a reclassification from Dewey Decimal Classification to Library of Congress classification, moving the library to the renovated new space, a the personal librarian project for 1^st year experience students. These projects involved everyone in the library. From this experience, Denise began referring to employees as factotum or staff who do all kinds of work. A factotum do a little bit of everything. This is accentuated because the librarians at the Kaplan Family Library are also tenure track. Moreover, there are only 5 librarians, one for access, curriculum, reference, collection development, and technical services. All librarians have a heavy instruction load, must do work that involves processing, and of course work for tenure. The priority of the library is to keep it open and the staff resources are dedicated to doing this. As a result, technical services lost a processing assistant.

The conundrum was how to deal with the same workload and less staff in technical services. The issue was to ensure that processing of materials continued as normally as before. Denise said that they first solution was to hire work study students. Unfortunately, the students were not reliable and often unavailable during intersessions and breaks. The students also found the work boring and preferred to be moved to the circulation desk. It was necessary to look for a different solution with the knowledge that there was no funding to hire. Thinking outside the box wasn’t enough Denise stated. It was time to rethink the box entirely. Thanks to a recent library reorganization, an opportunity presented itself. The night supervisor needed more tasks. Access and technical services began a new collaboration building on the three projects from earlier. To help the night supervisor take on the skill of processing materials, tasks were accessed and procedures developed and redeveloped. Trainings in person and via documents with numerous pictures were used. Communication between both units and the library continued and the training refined. The collaboration was a success. The night supervisor now processing materials as well as supervising the night shift. The advantage of retraining the night supervisor is the person loves the work, isn’t bored, and feels engaged in the library beyond just a title of night supervisor.

Denise concluded that this experienced worked because of team work and a willingness to learn new skills. It is important to question procedures. Developing new skills needs to be offered to all employees. More importantly, it’s necessary to reflect, review while being flexible, receptive, and open.

Charleston Conference

Posted on November 16, 2015 by pcarr

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.

Open Classrooms, Open Libraries: Academic library services supporting the creation and use of open education resources

Posted on July 6, 2015 by pcarr

On June 28, 2015 at the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco, I attended the session “Open Classrooms, Open Libraries: Academic library services supporting the creation and use of open education resources.” This session included two presentations.

The first presentation was titled “The Open Textbook Network: Libraries Working Together to Advance Open Textbooks” and the presenter was Sarah Faye Cohen, Managing Director of the Open Textbook Network at the University of Minnesota. Cohen explained that the network originated because one of the biggest barriers to instructors adopting open textbooks is the fact that they don’t know where to find them and how to evaluate them. The Open Textbook Library attempts in part to solve this problem. The library aims to provide a complete catalog of open textbooks along with reviews from faculty. It currently contains 178 textbooks and 204 reviews. Since going live in 2012, traffic on the Open Textbook Library website has steadily increased.

The Open Textbook Library is maintained by the Open Textbook Network. Through Hewlett Foundation funding, this network partners with academic institutions to promote the adoption of open textbooks. Currently, about 20 universities participate. There is a one-time fee of $5,000 for participation and institutions must also pay certain fees to some of their faculty in order to incentivize use of open textbooks. The network provides on-site training that aims to engage faculty in the value of open textbooks, particularly emphasizing the issue of affordability for students. According to Cohen, 39 percent of faculty who attend the network-provided on-site training eventually adopt an open textbook for a class that they teach. She said that future plans for the network include developing strategies for scaling up their operations and better assessing the impacts of the adoption of open textbooks. They will also be releasing a new website later this summer.

The second presentation was titled “Open/Alternative Textbook Initiatives at Kansas State University” and the presenter was Beth Turtle, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Kansas State. Turtle explained that an important point of origin for KSU’s initiatives was the interest that two faculty members had in creating open textbooks. After creating such textbooks, they became advocates for their colleagues to develop similar resources and they requested that the KSU Libraries assist in their advocacy. This request resulted in a pilot project with funding from both the university’s Student Governance Organization ($80,000) and the KSU Libraries ($20,000). Subsequently, this initial funding was replaced with funding that the provost has agreed to provide ($50,000 this year and another $50,000 next year).

The goal of the initiative is to save students money and to lead a transformation in textbook models from ones in which students must purchase these materials to models in which the materials are openly available. Additionally, they wish to facilitate the development of materials that will lead to enhanced teaching and learning. Ultimately, they would like for every freshman and sophomore class to use an open/alternative textbook.

The initiative promotes a related set of efforts. These efforts include the development of open textbooks, the adoption of existing open textbooks, the creation of OER models, and the integration of library-licensed content into course curriculum. They have been targeting low-level high-enrollment courses that are frequently taught. Since the spring of 2013, they have awarded 32 stipends (ranging from $2,000 to $5,000) to KSU instructors for the development of open/alternative educational resources. The stipends have impacted about 11,000 students in 38 courses. They estimate the savings to students to be at least one million dollars.

In working with instructors on the development of alternative and open textbooks, Turtle stressed that mentoring is important; while some instructors have clear plans, others are not sure how to get started or may lose track of their efforts as other priorities arise. When an instructor receives a stipend, half of it is paid up front and the other half is paid after the completion of the project. Additionally, they work with instructors to connect them with the expertise that they need, including experts on copyright, instructional design, accessibility. Each spring, all stipend recipients meet together to discuss their efforts and share their successes and problems.

KSU Libraries has recently begun formally assessing its efforts so far to promote the adoption of open/alternative textbooks. The assessment has included student surveys and interviews with instructors. The student survey results indicate that students are somewhat satisfied with the open/alternative textbooks that have been developed. Their biggest reason for supporting these materials is the savings that they offer and their biggest concern is that some students prefer to learn using a hardcopy. Students were strongly supportive of the continuation of the KSU Libraries’ initiative.

Ivies Plus Access Services Symposium 2015

Posted on June 16, 2015 by emcneil

Ivies Plus Access Services Symposium 2015

Yale University

Post by Erika McNeil and Stan Huzarewicz

This past Friday, Stan Huzarewicz and Erika McNeil attended the Ivies Plus Access Services Symposium at Yale. The themes of the symposium included fair use, evolution of staff skills, strategies for dealing with change, and access to collections. Attendees included staff from: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Stamford, MIT, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Chicago, Penn, Emory, and Rutgers, as well as representatives from Atlas Systems.

Susan Gibbons, Yale’s Deputy Provost for Libraries & Scholarly Communication, launched the symposium, and her introduction focused on the concepts of partnerships and collaboration. She stressed that we need to find more ways to collaborate and create new partnerships, and that we can’t move forward alone. Yale trustees, she said, support these concepts at Yale; we need to create best practice together, and that doing so for copyright and fair use is critical.

The panel then began on Copyright, Fair Use, and the GSU Decision, led by Kevin Smith (Director of the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communication at Duke), Peter Hirtle (Senior Policy Advisor to the Cornell University Library and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University), and Joan Emmet (Licensing and Copyright Librarian at Yale). As we know, Georgia State is not finished; decisions have been made, but Kevin Smith stressed that no decision yet has changed Georgia’s daily work practice. What we know now: fair use does apply to e-reserves, even though it is not considered to be transformative; classroom copying guidelines do not define fair use (10%); you can reuse e-reserve articles each semester under fair use; using an item-by-item approach is more important than ever; and it is critical to search for a digital license. Consider what your book is, the 10% or one chapter guideline is still probably a good rule of thumb, but it must be flexible; less is recommended if the pedagogical need does not require 10% or if a digital license is available; if the teaching purpose is for more, then this may be okay too. Flex up, flex down.

In terms of ILL, there isn’t any explicit fair use language, with the exception that in general, ILL cannot be used as a substitution for a subscription. In terms of explicit permissions of the law, it’s not there. There are guidelines, like ILL’s common best practice of CONTU, but CONTU is not a law. In terms of your e-resource licensing, Joan Emmet stressed the allowing of ILL; if ILL restrictions are in a license she receives, she strikes it out. Her reasoning is that it’s not enforceable by law now, but if it’s restricted in a license, then it becomes so. It’s critical to look for undue restrictions and to use a database to record these licenses. Yale provides specific information about their e-resource license restrictions to ILL as well as reserve and is proactive in informing these groups.

At the session Evolution of Access Services Staff and Strategies for Dealing with Change, many commonalities emerged. Many institutions are dealing with budget cuts and loss of staff (e.g. New Jersey is also under a hiring freeze). Systems and technologies are changing more quickly than some staff can adapt, but training is key when you can’t hire new staff. It is essential to keep your job descriptions current. There was a group motion to create a core competency document. At Yale, all staff are cross trained for ILL and circulation and share the work. At Johns Hopkins, it was important to bring staff skills up even if it meant reclassing them. Yale does peer-based training. All staff at Cornell went through customer service training. Rutgers is doing an evaluation to see where training is needed. MIT did customer service training for all staff as well.

At the session Discovery Tools and Access to Services and Collections, similar issues again arose. Link resolvers don’t always resolve, what metrics we should keep . . . Johns Hopkins has begun to use Enterprise Authentication: users log in when they access the system, which gives them single-sign on functionality—there is no need to authenticate with every system. Atlas is working to integrate ILLiad requests into the LMS and has done so at Harvard and at VCU (it works with an ILLiad addon). (We’re going to investigate this, as Virginia also has Alma.) Dartmouth is using Stack Map, which lets you see exactly where a book is in the library. At Harvard, they put a QR code on a door that patrons think provides access to a certain study room—the code brings up a short video on how to get to the correct door. Chicago is exploring using Google Maps to bring you into their library and to all of the floors. Chicago is working to eliminate recalls; for every book that a patron recalls, they’re inserting a bookmark directing the patron to ILL next time; Johns Hopkins and Penn echoed this, emphasizing “stop saying no!”

The session on Technology in Libraries addressed libraries’ experiences with circulating technology. Tom Bruno (Yale) facilitated the session and suggested that, in addition to meeting patrons’ needs, libraries are providing a ‘technology sandbox’ where patrons can learn about new technology. Libraries are still dealing with basic questions surrounding loan periods, liability for damaged items, shelf life, etc. Demand for a new technology decreases as patrons acquire the items for themselves, leaving items to gather dust and eventually become obsolete. Technology can quickly become cost prohibitive – can the library find allies in other areas who can share the cost? The session concluded with the most fundamental question—should the library even own this service?

There were some interesting demos during the lunchtime demonstrations. At Penn, they have begun 24/7 in earnest, hiring staff to cover the overnight shifts. These staff receive training in tech support, reserve, shelving, and chat. All of these services are covered all of the time. They have found that services are caught up and that patrons are benefiting. They have on average over a hundred patrons in the building at any hour during the night. Johns Hopkins now embeds the ILL request link both in the list of search results as well as the item level for patron convenience; one of the biggest benefits was the reduction in recalls. At MIT, they conducted an initiative to improve customer service. They wanted to create a unified voice and send a better message. Each message sent from the library for any service (automated or personal templates) was looked at and rewritten to remove jargon, remove strange strings of numbers, offer actionable alternatives, and to create simple subjects. It helped show their value and was done concurrent to a mandatory public service training for all staff. Emory profiled an app that they created with a developer to note seating in the library, including PC stations and music stations; it has helped them evaluate staffing and plan for future needs.

3d Printing on Campus and Across the Curriculum

Posted on June 11, 2015 by sbustamante

The NERCOMP group that did the 3D printing workshop was exceptional. (Norwood, Massachusetts. Workshop held on 6/10/15.)

Bryan Alexander, President, Bryan Alexander Consulting
Ian Roy, Research Technology Project Lead, Brandeis University
John Eberhart, Director of Digital Media, Yale School of Architecture

In addition to the speakers, there were a few very knowledgeable attendees.

Here are some of the highlights from the workshop. The information below doesn’t go into specific workflows, and is incomplete in terms of the steps I didn’t include, as this is just an overview.

Types of Printers:
Those who have a lot of experience with 3D printers said:

Makerbot is showing signs of slowing their innovation, and although their newer printers are much better than the earlier generations, they are not recommended for those getting into the 3D printing arena. (In a recent tweet from Nercomp, Bryan Alexander reported “A lot of skepticism about Makerbot’s future…”.)
Recommended printers: Lulzbot Taz, Printrbot, Makergear, Ultimaker2.

Things to note about the printers:

They can be noisy.
They can smell odd when printing.
Some use different types of materials to print with (Plastics and/or powder, and more. ABS, PLA, Nylon were all mentioned.), other printers are more limited.
They have products to recycle plastic to be used in 3D printing. These are called filabot reclaimers.
Other costs might include the Smart Extruder if you have a Makerbot, and print heads.

Working with Printers: Software

90% of person time will be spent creating the model to be printed.
The file type that needs to be added to the printer is a .stl.
Some .stl files are available at http://www.thingiverse.com/, but as a “representational tool” or “design tool” (Terms used by John Eberhart from Yale), you need to use a program like CAD, Maya, or Sketchup.
Some use Sketchup, but that has some limitations, and many think to use it because it was free, but they now have started to charge for its use.
Among many other things, Brandeis is using 123D Catch (App for droid and iPhone to create a 3d image using a cell phone.) along with TinkerCad. (A web based program that allows for adjustments to be made to uploaded .stl files.)
Printing can be additive, and subtractive. (Additive is creating by adding material bit by bit. Subtractive is taking a solid, and taking away material to reveal the object. )

Marketing and Outreach:

Faculty need to be approached in a variety of ways
Some departments that have been early adopters included archaeology, classical studies, history, theater (building sets for plays), engineering, art, math, robotics, media studies, business, psychology, engineering, etc.
Some opportunities exist in outreach with the community. Maybe looking for volunteers from those who have retired, but want to look at using their skills with this new techology.

Speakers

Brandeis: Ian Roy

Staffing at Brandeis includes 1 FTE, and 4+ students.
Much funding was obtained from the student organizations, and sponsors.
The students have a very active club.
3D printing is part of the larger MakerLab at Brandeis.
The Maker Lab has their own room.
They require that people get certified on the machine before they can work on a project.
They don’t charge for the use of the printers, and consider a project with a good educational justification as the currency.
Ian Roy at Brandeis said 3D printing is as disruptive as the internet. It will change the way we do things.

Yale: John Eberhart

Yale has a long history with 3D printing in their Architecture department. Going back to 1999.
Yale charges for print jobs.
Newer printers dropped prices dramatically. An item that would have cost students over $200 was reproduced at a cost of $24 with the new printers
As the cost of printing went down, the numbers of print jobs, and printers went up. 2012-13 they had 2 printers and did 50 jobs. 2013-14 they had 18 printers and did 2,500 jobs. 2014-15 they had 31 printers and did 5,100 jobs.
The print jobs are happening in a printer farm, which pretty much runs non-stop. The printers are locked up, but visible through glass, and students will often look to see what others are doing. This may encourage further exploration, and generate new ideas.
The newer 3D printers became very popular at Yale because the rendering was quicker and less expensive than other printers, and the quality was good enough for the job at hand.

Some apps and suggested pages

I should taken pictures of the prosthetic arms and leg they had created, but I just got a picture of these skulls. In the background is Ian Roy from Brandeis, sporting the frames he printed off of the 3D printer.

NASIG Annual Conference

Posted on June 8, 2015 by pcarr

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.

Medical Library Association(MLA) 2015 Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.

Posted on June 2, 2015 by sgiovenale

Before the MLA Annual Meeting, I had volunteered to serve as a mentor for the Medical Library Association’s Colleague Connection Program. The program matches returning members with first time attendees. Mentors help guide their mentee through the extensive program and give them a sense of community by introducing them to other medical librarians, telling them about social events, going out to eat, or walking around the city. Before the meeting my mentee, Jennifer Douthit, and I exchanged emails and photographs and agreed to meet at the Welcome Reception on Saturday, May 16^th. We also met my roommate, Penny, and her mentee, Emily, that evening and walked around the Exhibit Area, while enjoying a few hors d’oeuvres. The next morning the four of us attended the New Members/First Time Attendees Program and Breakfast. There were welcoming remarks by the MLA President, Linda Walton). Then iconic Lucretia McClure talked about the changes that she has seen in medical librarianship over several decades and asked the new members to reflect on what they might expect in their future careers. After breakfast, we had an activity where each of us would find a new person to speak with for three minutes. After three minutes we would find another person. This activity lasted thirty minutes and allowed us to make many new acquaintances.

Over the course of the meeting Jen and I learned more about our different career paths and families. Jen is a librarian at a medical device company. Her previous experience was in technical services in a large public library. She made the most of her time at the meeting by arriving on Thursday to attend two continuing education courses on instructional design. At her current job, she will be providing training. We discussed how to best tackle the meeting program and the benefits of using the online planner and meeting app. I told Jen that after the meeting we would have an opportunity to view recorded sessions that conflicted with the sessions that we decided to attend. We touched base at a couple of sessions, shared some meals, and went for a walk to the Congress Avenue Bridge.

On Sunday, I also attended the MLA Presidential address by outgoing president, Linda Walton, where she talked about the past year’s accomplishments. Her slides included information on a letter written by MLA to the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education regarding library support for colleges of pharmacy and the revised Draft Standards for 2016. This and input from other groups helped to put the “L”-word back into the standards.

Mae Jemison, a physician and the first woman of color to go into space as an astronaut, was an inspiring plenary speaker, who talked about her support for science literacy and her involvement with various organizations. She is leading the 100 Year Starship initiative to ensure that humans will be prepared for intersteller travel within the next hundred years.

The Pharmacy and Drug Information Section sponsored some special sessions. One that I found particularly informative, was the Access Pharmacy panel on “Serving English Language Learners.” Strategies to educate English learners about their health included using demonstrations and practice, integrating native language literacy, using popular songs regarding diseases such as diabetes to begin a session, and encouraging them to tell their stories to empower the learner. Another panelist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center talked about serving highly educated people with limited English skills. He encouraged us to use complete sentences when answering questions, to speak and stress syllables and words within a sentence in a normal manner, and to smile. One of my colleagues at the University of Iowa, Xiaomei Gu, talked about the librarian’s role in a research university. She served on a task force with a variety of university staff, students and faculty members. They created a list of library staff language skills, conducted focus groups, and created a library guide. Another useful session talked about the different perspectives of students versus librarians and wants versus needs.

There were many sessions on interprofessional education. One session which I attended was on interprofessional clinical informatics education and practice sponsored by the Collection Development Section. My colleague, Sarah McCord discussed the findings of her systematic review of the literature on the assessment of this topic. She found Helena M. VonVille’s Excel Workbooks for Systematic Reviews, licensed under a Creative Commons License useful. Links to the workbooks can be found at http://libguides.sph.uth.tmc.edu/excel_workbook_home.

If anyone wants to talk about what I learned about updates to PubMed at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) booth in the exhibits area, please let me know. At the NLM Update session, they discussed the National Institutes of Health Director search, research data access and clinical trial data, new data management plan guidance to be released for public comments, PubMed journal selection, linking an ORCID ID to PubMed, PubMed Commons – a forum for scientific discussion of articles, feedback requested on Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) RDF linked data, responsive web design, embedding learn.nlm.nih.gov in training resources, and NLM collections and exhibits. Questions from the audience included the issue that status tags are no longer available in the summary view and inconsistent inversion of MeSH entry terms.

The final two plenary speakers on Wednesday talked about two hot topics. Ann McKee, who serves on the Mackey-White Traumatic Brain Injury Committee for the Players’ Association of the National Football League, presented her research on CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). Discussion after the talk considered other areas of CTE concern, particularly women athletes and abused women.

Eszter Hargittai, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, presented her research on the role of internet skills or how people can benefit from their digital media use. She talked about her research techniques and what to look for to be sure that the research is credible. Higher skilled internet users use advertisements and user-generated resources in a cautious way. Bias toward resources that confirm our opinions is common. For example, if we believe that pregnant women should not drink at all, we will be drawn to resources that confirm our belief. Dr. Hargittai found that skill and socioeconomic status differences have persisted over time and may be increasing.

After the meeting I was able to renew a friendship that dates back to Junior High and to visit my son in Arizona. Time away was well spent.

Association of Centers for the Study of Congress, 12th Annual meeting

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Betsy Pittman

National Archives and Records Administration (Archives I), Washington, DC

Archives & Special Collections is a founding member of the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress, an organization which encourages the preservation of material that documents the work of Congress, including the papers of representatives and senators, and supports programs that make those materials available for educational and research use. Last week I attended the 12^th annual meeting of ACSC, hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration’s Center for Legislative Archives located in Washington, D.C.

Over the years I have been representing UConn in this organization, I have taken the opportunity of the location to meet with the staff of Connecticut’s Congressional delegation and this year was no exception. On May 12^th, I met with the Chief/Deputy Chief of Staff for Representatives Larson and Esty and Senators Murphy and Blumenthal to remind them that UConn would be interested in being identified as a repository for their papers and to answer any questions they may have regarding congressional research collections or Archives & Special Collections at UConn. Having already spoken with representatives of Rosa DeLauro and Joe Courtney earlier in the year, I hope to hear from all of them when the time comes for the records to find a permanent home!

The conference itself is a great opportunity to meet with colleagues from repositories with similar collecting interests and to learn what is happening in the wider world of documenting Congress, as well as hear from scholars and former members about their concerns, interests and activities associated with congressional papers. Sessions throughout the remainder of the week touched on think tanks, instruction support tools for the Bill of Rights, financial and friend support, women in Congress in the 1980s, electronic records and current research, and oral histories with a focus on the Voting Rights Act. Rounding out the two and half day conference was a presentation by a small group of ACSC members who have begun a collaborative online exhibition, an online Omeka instance hosted by the University of Delaware, that shares items from a variety of institutions illustrating issues associated with the 89^th Congress (1965-1966). Definitely a project to which UConn will be contributing! It was also a pleasant surprise to have our own Barbara Kennelly, who served in Congress for 17 years representing the 1^st District, speaking as part of the women in Congress presentation. This annual conference is always informative and sends one home bursting with ideas and plans…but having been away from the office for a week, I have some catching up to do first.

For more information about

The Association of Centers for the Study of Congress

The political collections in Archives & Special Collections

The Great Society Congress online exhibition

Congress creates the Bill of Rights information (app/ebook/pdf)

Barbara Kennelly Papers

Senate Oral histories

12th Annual Conference packet and authorized researcher pin

Computers in Libraries, Part II

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Marsha Lee

At this year’s Computers in Libraries conference in Washington, DC, I attended “30 Mobile Apps for Librarians in 40 Minutes,” presented by INFOdocket’s Gary Price. I’d like to briefly share with you the apps I found most interesting from that presentation:

AudioNow is a streaming audio service that connects mobile (or fixed) phone callers to live or pre-recorded radio broadcasts from around the world. It’s perfect for those without WiFi access, there’s no subscription fee, and users dial a U.S. phone number. *Regular calling rates apply

CamFind is a visual search engine. You snap away and CamFind will identify most, if not all, of the objects in your picture. It then links you to purchase options which is a useful feature when you find an item you like in real life, but you’re not too sure where the item is sold. Free, iOS + Android

DarkSky is a weather app that uses state-of-the-art technology to predict the weather at your exact location and up to an hour in advance. $3.99, iOS

Photomath is a camera calculator. You snap a picture of a mathematical equation and the app will solve it for you in real time, providing a step-by-step breakdown (math teachers beware). Free, iOS + Android

Sight saves an entire article with just a screenshot and allows you to read it offline at a later time. Free, iOS

Soundhound is a sound recognition app.. It will identify a song that is currently playing and provide you with song lyrics, artist information, and purchase options. It will also connect you to performance videos and music streaming services like Spotify. Free, iOS + Android

Urban Engines is a public transit app. It uses real-time data and allows you to download city maps which are totally accessible offline; great if you frequent areas with weak wireless signals. Free, iOS + Android

Word Lens is a real-time translator. You simply snap a picture of any printed text and Word Lens will translate it for you. Free, iOS + Android

For a complete list of all 30 mobile apps, visit https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/513947/CIL_MOBILE.html

Computers in Libraries 2015, Washington DC

Posted on May 5, 2015 by sbustamante

In the spirit of one of the sessions I attended, I will make this personal. Not all of the conference take-a-ways can be defined by the conference program, or even found in the videos that appear on the conference webpage after the fact. To be sure, the content of the sessions were interesting and often brought about things that I hadn’t anticipated being important, but the conversations between sessions, and at dinner were just as important as the content of the sessions.

Most useful sessions for me:

Customer Development M.J. D’Elia, Head, Learning & Curriculum Support, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph. M.J. presented a model based on techniques of startup companies. In this model, assumptions of the service provider are tested as users give valuable information, either directly, or indirectly, that identifies their real needs. This model helps to set expectations at the beginning, and to get valuable insight from early adopters. It allows service providers to keep an eye open for indicators of success from the customer’s perspective, making pivots in different directions easier when off track, and allows managers to better support growth based on the results of evaluations. Asking the right questions is key. One question might be; “Were there enough computers?” A follow up question might be; “How important was that to your satisfaction of the service?” The slideshow from that session can be found here. (This has already been something I have used for the video editing training service that we will be offering in WB and GH.)
http://www.slideshare.net/mjdelia/intro-to-customer-development-for-libraries
http://conferences.infotoday.com/documents/219/D201_DElia.pdf

Impact Measures Moe Hosseini-Ara, Director, Markham Public Library. Moe talked a great deal about connecting to the operational, and strategic goals of the larger organization. He also talked about making the statistics relevant to these goals, and in using statistics to tell a story that is both representative of the work, and meaningful. The goal is to collect and communicate the right statistics, which also means not collecting statistics that are no longer working toward the changing goals of the organization. (This will be useful for the video editing training service that we will be offering in WB and GH.)
http://s.uconn.edu/moelogicmodel

Video Streaming Tips & Learnings Marcus Ladd, Special Collections Digital Librarian, Miami University Elias Tzoc, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Miami University. The presenters talked about Kaltura http://corp.kaltura.com/ Pointed to an article, admittedly dated, called “Video use and Higher Education” http://s.uconn.edu/videouseandhighered (This talk was useful to the video editing training service that we will be offering in WB and GH.)

Community Librarian… Shelley Archibald Community Librarian, Technology Burlington Public Library. Shelley talked about engaging diverse groups in community building. She wrote, “Libraries need to be co-creators of the community’s goals and dreams.” (This gave me some ideas to enhance a class I plan on teaching with the OLLI program in Waterbury Spring 2016.)

Storytelling: Diane Cordell, Consultant and Writer, CyberSmart Education Company. (This gave me some ideas to enhance a class I plan on teaching for the OLLI program in Waterbury Spring 2016.)

Other Good Stuff:

Search tips: by Mary Ellen Bates, Bates Information Services, Inc.
http://conferences.infotoday.com/documents/219/A101_Bates.pdf

Building Community Partnerships: Melissa Christakos, Coordinator of Reference Services, Chesapeake Public Library. Melissa got me thinking about how to use a Memorandum of Understanding. (This has already been something I have used for the video editing training service that we will be offering in WB and GH.)

I attended other presentations on metrics, and a few on webapps that were quite informative, and provided many links. Look for those in the links to the presentations below. I’ll look through some of my other notes, and will post a reply here if there is anything else that really stood out as noteworthy.

Links to many CIL presentations:

http://computersinlibraries.infotoday.com/2015/Presentations.aspx
http://www.librarysummit.com/DC2015/Presentations.aspx