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Sarah at ALA
I attended the ACRL-Science & Technology Section (ACRL-STS) Council meeting on Friday evening. STS Council consists of the STS Executive Board and Co-chairs of STS committees and Discussion Groups. ACRL-STS has created 2 new Member at Large positions on the Executive Board.
On Saturday morning, I attended a program on collection assessment. Betty Galbraith and Diane Carroll from Washington State Univ. gave an informative presentation on “Using Journal-Use Statistics to Make Collections Decisions.” They use journal-use statistics in a variety of ways: considering journals for cancellation, considering backfile purchases, new subscription decisions, establishing core titles, and research on journal-use patterns at Washington State Univ.
On Saturday afternoon, I attended the ACRL/SPARC Forum on “The Progress of Open Access Publishing Models.” The panel included Mark Patterson from Public Library of Science (PLoS), Bryan Vickery from Biomed Central (BMC), and Paul Peters from Hindawi Publishing. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), there are currently approximately 2,500 open access journals. PLoS was originally an advocacy organization, but it reorganized into a publishing organization in 2003. PLoS has been innovative in the application of Web 2.0 tools to their electronic journals. Authors can include streaming video in their journal articles. PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed journal which covers all of the sciences, allows readers to electronically annotate articles by highlighting minor points and contribute to threaded discussions about the articles.
Biomed Central is the largest publisher of peer-reviewed open access journals. BMC currently publishes over 170 open access titles. BMC recently launched Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central, which provides access to peer-reviewed research on chemistry, math and physics in open access journals.
Hindawi Publishing Corp. was launched in 1997. Their journals cover mathematics, engineering, biomedicine, and the physical sciences. In 2007, Hindawi Publishing Corp. converted all of their journals to open access journals. They publish over 80 open access journals and have a 43% acceptance rate.
On Sunday morning, I attended the ACRL-Science & Technology Section (ACRL-STS) Breakfast meeting. We broke up into discussion groups on various topics. I participated in the discussion group on tenure-track v. non-tenure track. We discussed the need for mentoring programs at libraries with tenure-track programs. Dossier preparation workshops and writing working groups, where librarians can meet regularly to get feedback on their works in progress, were also discussed.
After the STS Breakfast Meeting, I attended a RUSA-CODES Liaisons with Users committee meeting. We discussed the results of a survey which was conducted last fall. The survey was on liaison responsibilities in collection development among academic and public librarians. Approximately 700 academic librarians and 200 public librarians responded to our survey.
On Sunday afternoon, I attended the STS College Librarians Discussion Group on “Replacing Subscriptions: Article Access via Pay-per-view (PPV).” Recently, the Trinity Univ. Library cancelled subscriptions from one major publisher and switched to a pay-per-view model. Benefits of PPV include greater immediate access and access to color copies of journal articles. Trinity University Library set up a username and password for each department and established a budget for each department. They discovered that faculty were accessing journals which were not available through their previous subscription.
I attended the ACRL-STS Research Forum Sunday afternoon. Amy Paster, Helen Smith, and Janet Hughes from the Life Sciences Library from Penn State University presented their research on “Assessing Reference Service in Academic Science and Technology Libraries.” They are using the Wisconsin-Ohio Reference Evaluation Program (WOREP) to assess the outcomes of reference transactions and compare their results with other science library reference services nationally. David Stern from Yale University served as guest commentator.
On Monday, I attended the ACRL-Science & Technology Section (ACRL-STS) Poster Session. As Co-chair of the ACRL-STS Research Committee, I organized the poster session and served on the committee which reviewed the poster proposals. Poster presentations focused on digital repositories which provide access to non-textual information. Over 100 people attended the poster session. One poster presenter brought a book on institutional repositories, which was recently published. It is entitled The Institutional Repository by Richard Jones, Theo Andrew, and John MacColl (Chandos Publishing, 2006).
Overall, this year’s programs at ALA Annual were informative and enlightening. On Monday evening, I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant. This was my first taste of Ethiopian cuisine, and it was excellent!