Professional Development

I’m back from this year’s annual conference of the Music Library Association, held in Chicago (during a snowstorm) Feb. 17-21. This year I also attended the pre-conference hosted by MOUG (Music OCLC Users Group). Some highlights:

Sound Recordings and Copyright

Tim Brooks of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections described the ARSC’s work lobbying Congress to reform US copyright law on pre-1972 sound recordings. These recordings are not covered by federal law, but are often governed by state law, which tends to give copyright holders, in Tim’s words, “absolute control.” Tim cited some startling statistics: of all recordings made in the 1940s-70s, only 30% have been made available by the copyright holders; of recordings made in the 1920s-30s, only 10% are available; and of the enormous corpus of ethnic and traditional music from all over the world that was recorded by Columbia and Victor in the early years of the 20th century, only 1% is available. Because US copyright law for sound recordings is the most restrictive in the world, early recordings of American artists are currently legally available in other countries but not in the US — which means that American libraries and archives are unable to preserve this portion of our own heritage.

In response, the ARSC has made the following reccomendations:

• Place pre-1972 recordings under a single federal law.
• Harmonize US copyright law with that of other countries.
• Legalize use of “orphaned” works (whose copyright holders cannot be identified).
• Permit use of “abandoned” works, with compensation to the copyright holders.
• Permit “best practices” digitization for preservation. Libraries and archives are the most likely to preserve early recordings (they have a better track record on this than the recording companies themselves) and the least likely to re-issue recordings (so they’re no financial threat to copyright holders).

Of ARSC’s experiences lobbying Congress members, Tim reports that many were simply unaware of the situation, but were sympathetic when informed; that libraries are seen as non-partisan and a public good, “the guys in the white hats”; and that there is now much “soft” support in Congress. Other ARSC activities include a “white paper” for the Obama administration, and the establishment of an organization called the Historical Recording Coalition for Access and Preservation (HRCAP) to further lobbying efforts.

In another copyright session, attendees and speakers offered some good tips for approaching your legal counsel re digitization projects:

• Present your own credentials (copyright workshops you’ve attended, etc.) pertaining to libraries and copyright.
• Cite specific passages of the law (section 108, 110, etc.)
• Show you’ve done due diligence (e.g., you’ve replaced LPs with CD re-issues where available; you’ve determined other LPs are in deteriorating condition, etc.)
• Try to persuade counsel to adopt a “risk assessment” approach (i.e., just how likely is it that a copyright holder will challenge you in this case) versus the more typical “most conservative” approach.
• File a “contemporaneous writing” — a memo or other document, written at the outset of a digitization project, in which you explain why you believe that you are acting in good faith. This will go a long way towards protecting you if you are in fact challenged by a copyright holder.

Is the Compact Disc Dead?

This was the question addressed by a very interesting panel of speakers, including a VP of Digital Product Strategy at Universal Music Group; the CEO of the Cedille recording label; a concert violinst (Rachel Barton Pine); a former president of the American Symphony Orchestra League; and a music librarian at Northwestern U.

The panel quickly cited a number of reasons to believe that the CD remains a viable format: among these, the universal human desire to own a physical artifact “to give and to show”; the ability to listen on room speakers, not just earbuds; violinst Pine noted that she sells and autographs some 40-70 of her CDs after each performance, that people enjoy the personal contact with the artist, and relish being able to take home a souvenir of the concert. Flaws of downloadable releases were cited in comparison: garbled indexing, making identifying and retrieving of classical works difficult; frequent lack of program notes to provide historical context; the inferior audio quality of compressed files. Changes in student behavior were also noted: in online databases, students tend to retrieve only selected works, or excerpts of works; there doesn’t seem to be the inherent incentive to browse like that offered by physical albums, with the result that students don’t develop as much in-depth knowledge of a composer’s works. On the other hand, the reduced cost of digital distribution has enabled smaller orchestras and other groups to reach a larger audience.

Concern was expressed over an increasing trend among major labels to release performances only in the form of downloadable files, often with a license restricted to “end user only” — preventing libraries from purchasing and making available these performances to their users. The panel proposed that performers and IAML (the International Association of Music Libraries) put pressure on the record companies. Alternative approaches? CDs-on-demand: Cedille’s boss sees this as a growing trend. Also, consortial deals with individual record companies: OhioLink has recently done one with Naxos.

Finally, a concern was expressed about the aggregator model of audio-steaming databases: that these hamper libraries’ responsiveness to local user needs, and the building of the unique collections important for research. The music library community needs to negotiate for distribution models that enable individual selection for traditional collection development.

How Music Libraries are Using New Technologies

• Videos demonstrating specific resources, such as composers’ thematic catalogs (similar to Lauren’s Research Toolkits).
• “Un-associations,” in informal online forums like Yahoo or Google groups. There are currently groups for orchestra libraries, flutists, etc.
• Use of Delicious to create user guides.
• Meebo for virtual ref.
• Twitter for virtual ref and for announcements/updates.
• Widgets and gadgets to embed customized searches, other libraries’ searchboxes, and other web content into LibGuides, etc.
• ChaCha (a cellphone question-answering service) for virtual ref. Indiana U is partnering with ChaCha in a beta test.

JSTOR

A JSTOR rep presented palns to add 20 more music journals to the database, including more area-studies and foreign-language titles. Attendees pointed out that popular music serials (Downbeat, Rolling Stone, etc.) are becoming primary source material for scholarly research — would JSTOR consider including them? The rep replied that JSTOR originally required that journals be peer-reviewed, but had recently begun to relax this rule. A dabate ensued among attendees as to whether the pop publications were sufficiently relevant to JSTOR’s mission — some believed that JSTOR should stick to its original focus on scholarly literature, and that others could preserve the pop stuff.

Bibliographic Control and the LC Working Group (or: Music Catalogers Freak Out)

The MOUG plenary session gave catalogers a forum to discuss ramifications of the LC Working Group’s recommendations on bibliographic control (see my blog posting for RTSS 08). Concerns expressed:

If collaboration is properly defined as “doing something together for a purpose,” then the disparate (and sometimes opposing) purposes of publishers, vendors, and libraries means that LC’s vision of collective responsibility for metadata and bibliographic control will not constitute true collaboration, but merely exploitation.

The Working Group appears to some to harbor a naive faith in digital architecture to meet all discovery and retrieval needs (it reminded one attendee of predictions that microform would solve all our problems). This is perceived to cultivate a gobal, generalist, one-size-fits-all outlook divorced from existing patterns of scholarly communication and “communities of practice” (e.g., the subject specialist and the community of practitioners that he/she serves). Bibliographic control should be “a network of communication between communities of practice.” An MLA liaison to ALA’s RDA committee noted that the RDA folks expected local catalogers to help fill in the gaps in the currently-vague RDA code — but when specialist communities actually propose details (such as a list of genre terms for music), they’re “dissed.”

Others fear that if LC backs away from its historical role as national library, relying on the larger community of publishers, vendors, and libraries to collaborate in bibliographic control, the actual effect will be that library administrators will think: “If LC isn’t doing this work, then we don’t have to either” — and collaboration will disappear.

Yet others fear the “commodification of cataloging.” With the increasing availability of MARC records and other metadata from third-party sources, there seems to be a growing perception that all metadata is the same — and a concommitant decline in willingness to investigate its source and quality. Administrators increasingly speak of metadata as a commodity.

Remember Katrina?

I’ll close with an item from the business meeting of SEMLA (the Southeast chapter) which was a cause of great celebration: our colleagues from Tulane University in New Orleans, whose music collection was flooded in Hurricane Katrina, announced that 70% of their collection has successfully been restored, and the last portion of it recently returned to them. They brought along a few representative items for show and tell — including a score died pink by its red paper covers. Recalling photos of the original damage, a 70% recovery rate seems a miracle!

On Oct. 9, I drove down to East Carolina University in Greenville for the annual meeting of the Southeast Music Library Association. It was a very interesting and varied program this year:

Library “Infomercials”

Nathalie Hristov, Music Librarian at UT Knoxville, gave a presentation titled “The Music Library Informercial: a Practical Guide for Creating the Most Powerful Marketing Tool You Will Ever Use.” Nathalie had noticed that certain materials in the Music Library — audio-streaming databases, directories, vocational literature (job ads, etc.) — seemed to be under-utilized. She contacted Alan Wallace, UT’s Education Librarian, who had made videos for the main library, about producing an infomercial on the Music Library’s resources and services, with a special focus on the under-used resources, to be shown at the music school’s fall convocation, which all students were required to attend.

The infomercial fulfilled all expectations: surveys conducted before and after showed increased student awareness of the Music Library’s services in general; an increase in the number of students who knew about the under-used materials and who had used or planned to use them; and a large majority who reported that they found the infomercial to be both entertaining and helpful.

Nathalie’s and Alan’s advice on the nuts-and-bolts of producing an infomercial:

Script:

• Don’t overload your infomercial. Decide what you want to focus on (e.g. under-used resources), and cut your script to make it as concise as possible.
• Keep narration to a minimum, or you’ll lose viewers’ attention.
• Speak the students’ language (not librarianese).
• Play on students’ strengths, wants, and needs (papers due, rehearsals to prepare for, finding a job after graduation).

Scheduling:

• Create a timeline. Divide the project into sections, and set a deadline for each section’s completion.
• Stay on schedule to avoid losing currency of information.

Cast:

• Use local talent. (One option: drama students.)

Taping:

• Survey your venue for aesthetics. Ugly objects like trash receptacles, signs taped up on walls, etc., are “forgiven” by the eye in real life, but jump out on the video screen.
• Use cue cards, since your cast are likely not to be trained actors.
• Use uniform clothing (a school T-shirt is good) for your cast. Otherwise, if you’re filming the same people in separate sessions, subsequent editing can create a comical impression of sudden costume changes (say, for warm and cold weather).
• Go for interesting angles (from above, below, etc.). In cramped stacks spaces, the UT team shot through openings between shelves.

Editing:

• The UT team used iMovie, a Mac-based software. They also used Final Cut Pro, but warned that this product was expensive and involved a steep learning curve.
• Screencasting tools like Snagit and Camtasia can be used.
• The final step is exporting and burning to disk, which depending on the application can take anywhere from a couple of hours to fifteen.

Evaluation:

• Solicit viewer feedback, as the UT folks did with before-and-after surveys.
• Also important is cost/benefit analysis. Document everything: the UT team made daily records of time spent, tools used, etc.

Embedded Info-Lit

Sarah Manus, Music Librarian for Public Services at Vanderbilt, gave a presentation titled “Librarian in the Classroom: an Embedded Approach to Music Information Literacy for First-Year Students.” Vanderbilt’s music curriculum includes a “core” of four courses on music history and literature which all incoming music majors are required to take. Sarah took advantage of this opportunity to embed herself in all four courses, giving progressive instruction from the basics (the library’s catalog) in the introductory course to advanced research tools (composers’ thematic catalogs) in the fourth. Her original plan was to give two info-lit sessions per course, but faculty subsequently asked her to “front-load” her syllabus with more sessions in the first course.

Sarah’s participation included:

• Attending all class sessions.
• Participating in class discussion, when asked to by the instructor.
• Answering students’ questions about their research.
• Holding office hours twice a week.

Sarah warned that this degree of embedment required a huge time committment, especially after the music school added a second section to the core, and she consequently found herself attending class five days a week. Sarah said she also had difficulty remembering which material she had given when to each section!

(It’s also worth noting that Vanderbilt has three music librarians — one for public services, one for cataloging, and a director of the music library — which enabled Sarah to make the necessary time committment to an embedded project of this scale. As Sarah noted, where you have one person performing all three roles (like at Wake), or you have a large program with several hundred students enrolled, it would not be the most feasible option.)

There were some other unanticipated difficulties with the embedded approach. Sarah’s familiar presence in the classroom led some students to draw the wrong conclusion. The inevitable procrastinators expected her to do their research for them, and others prevailed on her to pull strings on their behalf, such as having library fines forgiven. The instructor had to give the class a stern lecture to the affect that “Sarah is not your slave, and will not do your work for you!” Still, Sarah found that the opportunity to get to know the students and their needs, and to be more closely involved in the overall educational process, was well worth it.

Improvements Sarah plans:

• Devote more time to the research process. Sarah found that many of the students were used to doing short critical essays, and had never done an extended research project before.
• Use active learning techniques, such as small-group work.

Ethnological fieldwork

Holling Smith-Borne, also from Vanderbilt, gave a presentation on “Recording the Traditional Music of Uganda.” This was an update on the development of the Global Music Archive project, a website hosted by Vanderbilt that offers audio streaming of traditional music, so far from Africa. Holling became acquainted with a prominent Ugandan musician who served as an adjudicator for Uganda’s annual national music festival. This man consequently knew all the best traditional musicians in the country, and had an extensive network of contacts with universities, govenment agencies, and other institutions interested in preserving Ugandan culture. Vanderbilt provided him with a salary, recording equipment, and training, and engaged him to travel the country supplying material for the Global Music Archive. Holling and his team hope to identify similar contacts in other African countries, to expand on this work.

They next plan to add to the Archive:

• Appalachian dulcimer music
• Indigenous Mexican music
• An existing Vanderbilt archive of tango music

http://www.globalmusicarchive.org/

Greenville being so near the coast, our guest speaker was retired ethnomusicologist Otto Henry, who shared wonderful reminiscences of his fieldwork on the Outer Banks, recording old-timers singing and playing folk music of the area. Many of his recordings were issued on the Folkways label.

Business meeting

We missed the company of a number of colleagues this year due to cutbacks in travel funding (Georgia’s state library system in fact announced the total elimination of travel funding just a day before the SEMLA meeting). We dovoted some time in our business meeting discussing how the general downturn in the economy was likely to make professional travel increasingly difficult for many for some time to come, and explored ways of compensating for this unfortunate trend, including screencasting future SEMLA meetings.

Also in the business meeting, a student member proposed creating a Facebookaccount for SEMLA, with the object of outreach to library-school students, and of increasing awareness of music librarianship as a career. The idea was well received, and an exploratory committee was set up.

All in all, a very enjoyable and informative meeting this year — I’ve come back with lots of ideas for our LIB250 course and other endeavors!

RTSS 2008 - The Future of Bibliographic Control

At NCLA’s Resources & Technical Services Section’s Spring workshop, held this year on May 22 in Raleigh, the keynote speaker was Jose-Marie Griffiths, Dean of the Library School at Chapel Hill, and also a member of a working group charged by the Library of Congress to:

(1) Explore how bibliographic control (formerly known as cataloging, also including related activities) can support access to library materials in the web environment;

(2) Advise the Library of Congress on its future roles and priorities.

The group published its report, titled “The Future of Bibliographic Control”, in January of this year. It’s available on LC’s website: http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/

Concerning the web environment, Giffiths began by noting that many users nowadays turn first to Google or some other web browser for their information needs; that despite the number of web-based library catalogs, there are still many separate library databases that are not accessible by a web search; that, due to the web’s worldwide reach, our users are increasingly diverse, using multiple venues (vendors, databases, social networking, etc); also, that bibliographic data now comes from increasingly diverse sources via the web; and that, as a result, bibliographic control must be thought of as “dynamic, not static”, and that the “bibliographic universe,” traditionally controlled by libraries, will in future involve “a vast field of players” (including vendors, publishers, users, even authors/creators themselves).

As for LC’s role, the report reminds us that LC’s official mandate is to support the work of Congress. It has never been given any official mandate — and most importantly, the funding — to be a national library, providing the kinds of services (cataloging, authority control, standards) for the nation’s other libraries that national libraries typically do. Of course, over the years LC has become a de facto national library, providing all the above services, upon which not only American libraries but libraries worldwide rely heavily. As this unfunded mandate is rapidly becoming unsustainable, pressures are building to “identify areas where LC is no longer the sole provider” and create partnerships to distribute the responsibility for creating and maintaining bibliographic data more widely (among other libraries, vendors, publishers, etc.); also, to review current LC services to other libraries with an eye to economic viability, or “return on investment.”

To achieve these aims (exploiting the web environment, and sharing responsibility), the working group offers 5 recommendations:

(1) Increase efficiency in producing and maintaining bibliographic data. Griffiths noted that duplicated effort persists not so much in creating bib records nowadays (thanks to OCLC and other shared databases), but in the subsequent editing and maintaining of these records: many libraries do these tasks individually offline. Proposed solutions: recruit more libraries into the CCP (Cooperative Cataloging Program, those other large research libraries that contribute LC-quality records to OCLC). Convince OCLC to authorize more libraries to upgrade master records (the ones we see when we search) in the OCLC database. Also, exploit data from further upstream: Publishers and vendors create bib data before libraries do. Find more ways to import vendor data directly into library systems, without library catalogers having to re-transcribe it all. (This may cause some of us who’ve seen certain vendor records in OCLC to blanch; however, the Working Group’s report adds: “Demonstrate to publishers the business advantages of supplying complete and accurate metadata”[!]). Similarly, recruit authors, publishers, abstracting-and-indexing services, and other communities that have an interest in more precisely identifying the people, places, and things in their files, to collaborate in authority control. Team up with other national libraries to internationalize authority records.

(2/3) Position our technology, and the library community, for the (web-based) future. We need to “integrate library standards into the web environment.” Proposed solutions: Ditch the 40-year-old MARC format (only libraries use it), and develop a “more flexible, extensible metadata carrier [format]“, featuring “standard” “non-language-specific” “data identifiers” (tags, etc.) which would allow libraries’ bib data to happily roam the World Wide Web, and in turn enable libraries to import data from other web-based sources. Relax standards like ISBD (the punctuation traditionally used in library bib records) to further sharing of data from diverse sources. “Consistency of description within any single environment, such as the library catalog, is becoming less significant than the ability to make connections between environments, from Amazon to WorldCat to Google to PubMed to Wikipedia, with library holdings serving as but one node in this web of connectivity.” Incorporate user-contributed data (like we see in Amazon, LibraryThing, etc.) that helps users evaluate library resources. Take all those lists buried in library-standards documentation - language codes, geographical codes, format designators (GMDs), etc. - and put those out on the web for the rest of the world to use. Break up those long strings of carefully-coordinated subdivisions in LC subject headings (”Work — Social aspects — United States — History — 19th century”) so they’ll work in faceted systems (like NC State’s Endeca) that allow users to mix-and-match subdivisions on their own. (This is already generating howls of protests from the cataloging community, with counter-arguments that the pre-coordinated strings provide a logical overview of the topic — including those aspects the user didn’t think of on their own.) The Working Group supports development of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, a proposed digital-friendly standard), but like many in the library community, remains skeptical of RDA (Resource Description and Access, another proposed standard meant to bring the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules into the digital age) until a better business case can be made for it: “The financial implications … of RDA adoption … may prove considerable. Meanwhile, the promised benefits of RDA — such as better accommodation of electronic materials, easier navigation, and more straightforward application — have not been discernible in the drafts seen to date…. Indeed, many of the arguments received by the Working Group for continuing RDA development unabated took the form of ‘We’ve gone too far to stop’ or ‘That horse has already left the barn,’ while very few asserted either improvements that RDA may bring or our need for it.”

(4) Strengthen the profession. Griffiths noted that in many areas we lack the comprehensive data we need for decision-making and for cost-benefit analysis. We need to build an evidence base, and “work to develop a stonger and more rigorous culture of formal evaluation, critique, and validation.”

(5) Finally, with the efficiencies gained from the above steps, LC and other libraries will be able to devote more resources to cataloging and digitizing their rare and unique materials. The Working Group feels that enhancing access to more of these “hidden materials” should be a priority.

Griffiths shared with us LC’s immediate reactions to the Working Group’s report. The concepts of shared responsibility, and of accepting data from multiple sources, were “expected.” More controversial were the shifting of priorities to rare materials; the relinquishing of the MARC format; and the focus on return-for-investment in assessing standards, such as RDA.

LC’s final decisions regarding the Working Group’s recommendations are expected to be announced this summer.

Before I talk about the conference, I saw one idea on my vacation that might be worth stealing. This is the public library in Farmington, New Mexico. They have a wall section devoted to TV screens. Some show TV news and others display library events and tips (like how to place a hold).

I saw WorldCat Identities for the first time. It uses WorldCat data to graph activity by and about an author over time.

This conference was also my first encounter with Library Thing’s Unsuggester (Did you like…? Then you will not like…)

Workflow Ideas

• One library created an e-book task force to look at the Tech Services options for dealing with them.
• Another library assigned serials staff to manage e-journals based on publisher. Therefore one staff member became adept at the quirks associated with Blackwell and the next with ScienceDirect and so forth.
• This library also used Gold Rush to evaluate some abstracting databases for overlap.
• Planned Abandonment must be held in tension with New Initiatives. Any process you abandon will adversely affect a few users. The key is to strategically replace it with something new that will benefit many users.

Collaboration Ideas

OCLC revolutionized data sharing for printed books. How can libraries share data related to e-resources? We could share

• E-journal title change and transfer data
• Librarian reviews of databases similar to Amazon reviews of consumer products.
• Troubleshooting information. Internally, we’ve begun documenting how to recognize and solve specific problems. What if that info were in a public wiki? IMHO, that would be more useful than digging through listserv archives.

SerialsSolutions Presentation

One time slot was devoted to vendor presentations. I chose SerialsSolutions and their 360 Counter usage statistics product.

• So far it doesn’t download the stats for you (they are waiting for full SUSHI compliance first)
• It normalizes titles using the SeSo knowledge base
• It assigns (SeSo’s) subjects to journals
• It assigns cost per use (Unclear how much manual input would need to be done for us to realize this.)

Marketing Ideas

I also went to a session on marketing electronic resources. Very little of this presentation had to do with e-resources specifically, but there were plenty of ideas for library marketing in general. A few we might try…

• Branded coffee sleeves (in our new coffee shop?)
• Branded sticky notes inserted in our annual letter to faculty
• They also mentioned linking to your digitized collections from Wikipedia, but Digital Forsyth has already done this.

Concluding Thoughts

Users don’t compare us to other libraries and universities. They compare us to other information providers like Google.

Finally I did a personal e-book experiment on my conference trip. I downloaded a book from Project Gutenberg to my PDA and read it on the subway and during other downtimes. I read the first few paragraphs about ten times before figuring out a good way to move a virtual bookmark. (I cut and pasted the word “BOOKMARK” every time I moved ahead in the book.) I finished the book on my last day. The book was merely OK, but I enjoyed the PDA format enough that I will try it again next time.

Electronic Resources and Librarians is an excellent conference–focused, well-run, and invigorating.

I highly recommend it for folks who may want to attend next year.

The entire conference–schedule, PowerPoint presentations, conference blog, conference wiki, and audio from each presentation–is available online, and if you’d like more information, I’d be happy to help you find it. (That is, I’d be happy to log in and get the information to you.)

If you’d like, check out some photos taken by ERL staff or check out some photos uploaded by ERL attendees.

On Saturday morning, I attended 2 sessions.

The Challenges and Opportunities for Cataloging in Today’s Changing Metadata Environment

Sandy Chen, New College of Florida.

Chen started with the question: Must MARC die? She concluded, no–thanks only to XML which is breathing new life into MARC.

She then provided a broad overview of several metadata schema and crosswalks necessary to work back and forth among them.

Next, she provided an overview of FRBR and examined what OPAC display might be like under FBRR.

And lastly, she looked at FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology)–which I had never heard of. The easiest and quickest explanation I can provide is that it’s a new protocol which breaks LC subject headings into their constituent parts and treats each part as its own individual tag in order to facilitate the tagging of texts in an electronic environment.

I’d be happy to discuss this presentation in further detail with anyone who’s interested, but I imagine this will be limited to a small subset of Technical Services folks….

Mediawiki Open-Source Software as Infrastructure for Electronic Resource Outreach

Millie Jackson, Jonathan Blackburn, FSU

This presentation explained FSU’s nascent attempts to create wiki subject guides to replace their static subject guide web pages. They explained their choice of MediaWiki as their software choice and explained how they were providing wiki training to subject/outreach librarians at FSU. Plus, they commented on their fast roll-out–accomplished in only a month, and their need to develop a set of “best practices” to share among their colleagues in order to ensure a quality presence.

Furthermore, they discussed how their implementation doesn’t really fit the Wikipedia model in that only the subject/outreach librarians will have editing privileges. On the surface, this seems like a perfectly reasonable choice. But I have to admit that I had an epiphany during this presentation–but not necessarily from anything said during this one hour. Instead, I think it was a culmination of the entire conference which came to fruition during this final session.

And the epiphany took the form of a question–why not provide a true wiki for subject guides? Why not trust the user-generated content? Why position the librarian as the sole “expert” in this situation? As a profession, we are frequently lamenting the fact that we can’t seem to get professors to allow us to “partner” with them. However, in this instance, aren’t we being guilty of not being willing to partner with our users? Aren’t we constructing a barrier behind which we can claim a position of authority? Isn’t this what frustrates us about faculty?

Erik and I have been round-and-round about the idea of trust, and I’m finally ready to make that leap with Erik…. It’s time for us to open ourselves up–and trust our users.

It’s also time, on a larger scale, to stop doing things just because we’ve always done them.

Closing Session

Managing the Virtual Library

Jane Burke, Vice President, Proquest CSA, General Manager, Serials Solutions

As a broad introduction, Burke announced that her presentation would do the following:

• Ignore day-to-day issues.
• Ignore traditional values in order to preserve an ability to deliver information to end-users.
• Attempt to be deliberately controversial.

And her warning about what she was going to say was on target—except that she failed to disclose that much of what she was going to say dovetails nicely with the goals of the companies which she represents. This remark isn’t a criticism of her talk because I tend to agree with her compelling ideas; it’s just a reminder of the lens through which we need to view her comments.

Her ideas on the current state of libraries and some developments she’s heard about through her work:

• The old model of library use is gone. It was developed in 60s with big bucks being infused into universities. Librarians spent the money on what they could buy—big buildings and print collections. This is no longer the environment in which we operate—for multiple reasons.
• Most libraries are approaching 50% of their materials budgets spent on e-resources; we know that these resources are under-utilized. We also know that these electronic collections are much more volatile and thus harder to manage than traditional print resources. But rather than bemoaning the paradigm shift, we have to remember it’s all about the USERS and what they need.
• Burke referenced a recent article in the Feb. 15 Library Journal on Google Scholar and its popularity. We can’t bother trying to teach users individual interfaces any longer; we have to meet them at Google which is what they prefer to use. There has been a paradigm shift.
• There has been a fundamental change in the academy: Courseware and Google are the lingua franca.
• A university in Minnesota (one of the satellite campuses) has moved the reference librarians’ offices from the library into academic departments. They no longer live in the library.
• Disintermediation—a “coming apart” is a current risk for libraries.

So, what can we do?

Align priorities and behaviors with reality. Stop doing lots of stuff that isn’t appreciated by users. Her basic mantra: you can do anything but you can’t do everything. Included among the activities Burke recommends us giving up or revising:

• Reintegrate technical services and put E-resources at the heart of your activities. Discontinue all the processing activities associated with print resources—“Starve the books; they won’t go away. Just don’t focus on them.”
• Stop doing Bibliographic Instruction. It doesn’t work.
• Don’t accept the “long tail” as an excuse—there aren’t enough staff resources. The long tail doesn’t apply to us in libraries.
• Stop serials check in; don’t worry about claiming. Rely on RSS to alert readers to new issues/articles.
• Treat the ERM as the acquisitions module for E-resources.
• Buy your metadata when possible and use local expertise to develop only that which can’t be purchased.
• Use hosted systems. Think: SaaS (Software as a Service). This will preserve time and money for unique resources

Tools for our use:

• On Discovery: You must make some sort of federated searching option available for your patrons. No, it won’t be perfect, but they’re using Google Scholar as their federated search engine now, and if we don’t offer an alternative, we’ve lost the battle.
• On the new Discover layer: Burke thinks there are a few main players: Primo, Encore, Open World Cat, and Google Scholar. It’s too early to tell which will win out, but something will. You can’t wait, however, to see which one wins. All solutions are temporary until something better comes along.
• Push your link resolver to get what you need. Hold your vendors accountable. Also, skip the landing page; you don’t need it. Patrons find it intrusive; instead, put branding on the article and save the patrons a step. If it fails, then have a landing page. But remember they want one-click access.
• “Gotta have XML.” Get an XML server layer for your ILS; understand XML gateways to publishers.
• Support the NISO MXG effort. (This gets XML into federated search products.)
• Learn to speak ONIX (XML-based set of standards): This is one of the tools that Barnes and Noble and Borders use to present data to their customers.
• Participate in the development of ERAMS. (In some ways, Burke seemed to be suggesting that this would replace ERMs; then at other moments, she suggested that ERAMS would live on top of and be supported by ERMs.) So what does ERAMS stand for? E-Resource Access and Management Services. It’s a new way of thinking about how we manage library collections and make them accessible. ERAMS will:
  • Collect—a comprehensive e-resource knowledgebase which will allow the deployment of a library’s entire e-resources collection in one single, easy-to-use interface.
  • Correct—maintain the accuracy of currently available content through a team-maintained knowledgebase (because no single library can manage a thorough knowledgebase).
  • Connect—provide users with answers using the best method.
  • Control—give libraries the tools needed to budget, analyze collections, etc.

We don’t know what will make ERAMS complete, but that’s why librarians have to help vendors design them.

Conclusion:

“Being” truly Web 2.0 means that you do the whole thing: harness the collective intelligence and judge ourselves by YouTube and Fickr. Are we the center of our community?

After all, the relevance question is on the table…. If we’re questioning it ourselves, then you’d better bet the provost is questioning our relevance when he or she talks to the president.

Here are some thoughts about the sessions I attended on the second day.

Don’t leave me in the dark

Shining a light on Electronic Resources Communications

Nathan Rupp, ER Librarian, Cornell

Since Cornell spends approximately 40% of their $15M acquisitions budget on electronic resources, they are obviously concerned about an effective and efficient deployment of these resources. Cornell’s has attempted to mitigate communication breakdowns among all the parties involved in deploying electronic resources with three initiatives:

• Redesign of Technical Services.
• Embedding Technical Services librarians across library teams/committees.
• Employing various IT solutions.

1. Redesign of Technical Services:

After the Technical Services reorganization, there are four units:

• Acquisitions/cataloging
• Database management services
• Eresources and serials management
• Metadata services.

The key here is the combination of Eresources and serials together because of their logical connections. Furthermore, this combination allows for focused crosstraining that prevents functional silos from developing.

2. Embedding Technical Services librarians across library teams/committees.

Embedding Eresources librarian into selection units and committees; the key goal here is to allow Technical Services personnel to become involved very early in the deployment process, thereby preventing potential later delays.

One of the most important embedded positions is one on their Database Review Committee which is responsible for allocating additional resources to selectors who don’t have enough money to purchase high-cost items. Since these large databases often require significant Technical Services work for deployment, it’s especially crucial to get T.S. involved early in the process.

Another key embedded position is on their Systems Department Committee called ReDS—a group that is responsible for investigating and developing next-generation finding tools for their libraries.

3. Employing various IT solutions.

Among other initiatives described in the presentation, the most interesting IT solution is an e-form which they use to process new electronic resources.

The key is for selectors and Collection Management personnel to provide all the key information to Technical Services in a single, standard format.

Other random notes:

They’re struggling to determine if they need to provide 24-7 support for e-resources. In effect, they have some staff who have informally taken on responsibility for monitoring patron problems on what amounts to a 24-7 basis. But they don’t know if or how they could make this an official policy.

Their ERM is used only by Technical Services staff.

Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Push Your E-Resources

Cindy Carpenter, Georgia Tech; Sarah Steiner, Georgia State

Cindy Carpenter described Georgia Tech’s desire to break out of library website prison using Web 2.0/Social software.

Among the interesting ideas which are germane to us at Wake: the use of wikis to replace static Subject Guide webpages. Among the most interesting examples was a business wiki developed by a librarian at Ohio University.

Another interesting tool: the creation of screencasting to create various kinds of research guides—for instance, showing students how to search Lexis-Nexis for specific newspapers. The key here is to not bury the content on the library’s website but to post it to YouTube so that students will be much more likely to find it—or will remember how to look for it at some point in the future once they know it exists. Obviously, serendipity may lead them to find the content on YouTube, but more likely, they will learn that the content exists during a B.I. or reference transaction and will remember where to look for the tool on YouTube in the future even if they don’t remember the intricacies of Lexis-Nexis.

Steiner talked primarily about Facebook and MySpace. She and Carpenter spoke about a colleague at Georgia Tech, Brian Matthews, who regularly scans student blogs and other student virtual spaces in order to “jump in” with research advice as possible. The model of actively meeting students where they are on the web may be more aggressive than some would be comfortable with; however, the model is out there and it works at Georgia Tech.

The Evolution of a New World Order: How and Why UCLA Drew the Line between ‘P’ and ‘E’

Sharon Farb, Andrew Stancliffe, and Angela Riggio described the formation of a Digital Collections Services Unit at UCLA.

The unit, in existence for less than a year, has staff with expertise in Acquisitions, Metadata, Collection Management, and Licensing. In addition, their Liaison to the California Digital Library is part of the unit. As they were putting together the unit, they recognized that it had to be formed with high-level staff and that they had to cultivate a strong working relationship with selectors and public services.

What’s working well with the new unit:

• Centralization of licensing, electronic acquisitions, ERM maintenance, and SFX activation in one place.
• Library staff know where to go.
• Troubleshooting.

Note: they have a home-grown ERM, but CDL just purchased Verde for all the participating institutions, so they will begin using it in the next year. Interestingly, they anticipate running both systems until they are comfortable with discontinuing their in-house ERM.

What’s not yet working as well as they would like:

• Well-defined roles for selectors and the DCS with respect to ERM maintenance have not been defined yet.
• Print acquisitions still need to be more involved to handle print + online subscriptions.
• Lack of understanding by some selectors about letting the DCS unit take over the deployment process.

The most striking part of the whole presentation, and what was referenced at many points throughout the rest of the conference was a single shocking slide:

The 39 FTE positions in the flowchart on the left represent those working on print acquisitions. The 7.5 FTE positions in the flowchart on the right represent those working on e-resource deployment. To put this in context, their print/electronic split in their budget is 60% print/40% electronic.

This dichotomy is even more striking when you learn that the DCS unit is also responsible for handling Scholarly Communication initiatives for the libraries and the campus as a whole: copyright, intellectual property, rights metadata, and e-scholarship repository work especially as it pertains to the California Digital Library.

39 to 7.5. 60% to 40%.

If there were one statistic which could encapsulate the message of the entire conference, this would be it.

Tips for Tackling Electronic Resources

Dennis Gibbons, Susan Hawk, Dennis Odom, Texas Christian University

General Tips

Susan Hawk

1. Select a composite team (systems, public services, cataloging, periodicals, collection development, and acquisitions). Make sure that the team has a well-established, often revised mission statement.
2. Develop and promote policy statements, both for public and private consumption.
3. Develop and streamline workflows for specific situations/types of resources.
4. Provide OPAC redundancy.
5. Cultivate vendors and use their training sessions/free publicity materials.

Best practice narrative: Faculty/Vendor/Library partnership

Dennis Gibbons

As the leader of the Collection Management team, Gibbons described their situation at TCU—and there was much envy in the room. Over the past few years, they have been experiencing growth in their materials budgets. Moreover, they can carry over unspent funds from one year to the next, so they can save funds for strategic purchases if they plan properly.

Note: they’re a liberal arts institution which sounds similar in some ways to Wake, actually.

So their success story began with using some of their saved money to fulfill strong faculty requests for American Periodicals Series and Early American Imprints: Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker.

In an attempt to foster a relationship with the grateful faculty, Collection Management took the faculty to ask for faculty assistance with helping make the case for even stronger institutional support for the library and to solicit testimonials for and evaluations of the new products.

This led to several other purchases, accomplished with creative financing: Early American Newspapers and the U.S. Congressional Serial Set.

Then, of course, the faculty started asking for ECCO. This was too expensive for TCU’s budget. However, because the library had established these strong partnerships with the faculty (especially the Chair of the English Department), they collectively put together a grant proposal for funding from the Trustees’ Strategic Initiative Fund. And because they received funding through this campus-wide process, they were able to purchase ECCO. To celebrate, the library hosted an 18^th-century Salon party attended by the Provost, faculty members, library staff, and two VPs from Thompson-Gale—another way to express gratitude to the Provost and faculty who worked hard to get the Trustees’ grant.

Workflows

Dennis Odom

The workflows discussion didn’t contain much ground-breaking information other than to confirm our feeling that, on the whole, Serials Solutions does a pretty good job with their products. They are cancelling as much print as possible because they are out of space.

During the question/comments section at the end of the presentation, one person reported on her library’s current attempt to seek funds from a local office of a Big 4 accounting firm to purchase an accounting database since neither the library nor the accounting department could afford the subscription.

Opening Plenary Session, Day 2

Nathan D.M. Robertson, University of Maryland School of Law

Kristin Eschenfelder, University of Wisconsin, Assoc. Professor School of Library and Information Studies

Robertson provided a basic overview of Copyright and Contract Law and how they apply to intellectual property licensing discussions.

One of the most interesting parts of this discussion was the initiative described at www.editeur.org

The organization is a collection of people working on developing standards for “electronic commerce in the books and serials communities.” In particular, they are looking at standards for encoding license interpretations into ERMs. This should facilitate the negotiation process and allow consortial partners to share interpretations and coding. This won’t solve a lot of the current ambiguities; however, it will smooth the process somewhat.

Eschenfelder then spoke about her work which studies the negotiation process between librarians and their “supplier partners.” In particular, she spoke about Digital Rights Management which is yet another layer of complexity on top of licenses. Her Motivating Question: Will digital scholarly licensed resources come to be protected by DRM in a manner similar to popular consumer media? What’s going on with DRM in the scholarly resource market?

She argues that DRM should be replaced by narrower term, technological protection measure. TPM is a narrower term referring to technological tools employed to control access to or use of a digital resource. Furthermore, she proposes a refinement of librarians’ usage of various terms. Our current conceptualizations of TPM are too narrow; we should talk about Hard TPM and Soft TPM:

• Hard TPM: tools that strictly control or disallow certain uses.
• Soft TMP: tools that discourage certain uses. Use may be achieved trough workarounds that may be non-obvious or inconvenient.

Examples of Hard TPM:

Secure container system that encrypts content and requires an external software device to decrypt and serve the content to the user. Patron may or may not be able to save content to a local location. E.G., ARTstor and SAEInternational both require secure container devices. On the good side, ARTstor allows you to save the whole container to desktop; on the more troubling side, SAEInternational—allows you to print, but you can’t store to the desktop.

Basic examples of Soft TPM:

• NetLibrary. Content is chunked—very inconvenient.

Eschenfelder’s basic point: SOFT TPM is changing the way we should think about our rights.

She identifies six types of soft TPM:

1. Extent of use TPM.Blocks excessive or suspicious extent of useBatch sizes limits are in place (e.g., EBBO and ECHO which limit how much users can view from the results of their search).
2. TPM by obfuscation. Interface does not adequately advertise use functionality (e.g., users have to put something in your “box” before you can print them out).
3. TPM by omission. Users have to use browser or operating tools for functionality (e.g., HTML version of NetLibraries where you can’t right click to get a copy toolbar).
4. TMP by decomposition. Putting things into HTML which limits usability for patrons, especially printing and emailing.
5. TPM by frustration. Content is broken up into chunks. Or sometimes, having to download the “whole” can be just as bad.
6. TPM by threat. Declaration of end-use or popups that discourage uses. (e.g., Science Direct pop-ups which seem to threaten students with expulsion if they misuse the downloads).The question remains: are soft TPM really intentional? Or are they just bad design?

   Eschenfelder’s point is that we need to be vigilant about documenting these limitations and develop vocabulary to describe the problems so that we can then determine if it’s intentional or not.

Some highlights of the other presentations I attended, Day 1.

Beyond Proof of Concept: Social Software

Zoe Stewart-Marshall (Cornell) and Mason Hall (FSU) discussed the use of social software in their respective libraries.

Stewart-Marshall described the limitations to using wikis to document Technical Services workflows at Cornell. While initially hopeful, they realized that their organically grown wiki needed more “care and feeding” in order to make it useful. They should have instituted an organizational plan for the wiki and provided training for its use. There were also some “trust” issues which had to be worked through in order to make the wiki possible.

One of their success stories, however, is the use of Mantis, an open-source tracking system which they use as a bugtracking system. They have developed a webform for selectors to provide all the relevant information to technical services personnel regarding the acquisition and cataloging on electronic resources. The webform standardizes information and doesn’t allow things to fall through the cracks, and this webform is then dumped into Mantis which allows all the interested parties to track the electronic resource’s process through various technical services processes.

Hall discussed the implementation of AOL AIM at FSU for communication purposes. Their implementation has striking similarities with ours, except that they instituted a naming convention whereby they use their university usernames as their screennames to allow for consistency with email addresses.

University of Pretoria Beats to a Different Drum: UPSpace in Rhythm with Research
Elsabe Olivier, University of Pretoria

Olivier described her South African university’s use of DSpace to create an institutional repository, one of the first major repositories in South Africa.

They have an interesting component to their repository. They are archiving not only the scholarly output of one of their major scholars, Jonathan Jansen, but also all of his television/radio interviews, columns in the popular press, university lectures, and so forth. He truly exemplifies the idea of a public intellectual, and UPSpace is collecting his public presence in all its forms. I’ve never heard of using a university repository to do this kind of archiving work, and it is truly fascinating. It also requires very unique copyright negotiations to make it happen, and these negotiations are the responsibility of library personnel on behalf of the university.
https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/

There are also the standard components to their repository–a digital repository of the university’s scholarly output. Also, there are research collections which are housed in the repository.

One of the most important aspects of Olivier’s talk was her discussion of how the university repository became the library’s responsibility, and how this important work has increased the library’s central role in the university’s intellectual life.

The WorldCat Institution Registry: Making the Case

Scott Shultz, OCLC and Celeste Feather, Ohio State.

The description of the “birth” of this new OCLC service reminded me of a line from the movie Field of Dreams: “if you build it, they will come.”

That is, OCLC is building a system whereby libraries can load the data which they share with their “supplier partners” on a regular basis in a standard database maintained by OCLC. For example, you can load billing addresses, local contacts, IP ranges, etc. into the OCLC database and then refer your supplier partners to this site (or send them the URL). That way, if something changes locally with your library, you can edit the information in one central location rather than having to contact all your supplier partners on an individual basis.

The key here is that it’s unclear when or how supplier partners will start using this registry, but the hope is that if enough libraries begin to use the registry, that the supplier partners will start to see its benefits and thereby start using the system too. (This is the “if you build it, they will come” part.)
Celeste Feather described how Ohio State helped in the development of the Institution Registry and how they think they will use it.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore: Delivery of Library Resources through Learning Management Systems.

Cindi Trainor from Claremont Colleges

Trainor described her colleges’ use of Sakai, an open source LMS. The library was chosen as the unit to implement the system because the library is not directly tied to any one of the seven colleges which form Claremont Colleges. Their status as an “independent” unit allowed them to work with everyone and get beyond turf wars.

There wasn’t too much to take from this session which would be applicable to us because we’re a Blackboard campus–except the general idea that we need to do a better job of helping professors learn how to get our licensed content or library designed learning objects into their course pages.