Libraries frequently turn to new technologies to improve the user’s experience. This could be something as simple as a macro that speeds up data entry for catalogers to implementing a new discovery system. New technologies can result in a positive transformation for the organization or unit, but the process of implementing a new technology across an organization can be challenging.
The Kenneth Spencer Research Library, the special collections library at the University of Kansas, has implemented Aeon, an online circulation system that not only gets rid of the need for paper callslips but also facilitates data-driven management decisions for all areas of the library. Aeon has improved our users’ experience and transformed our workflows. This case study will address the reasons why we chose Aeon, how we developed new workflows, staff training and our plans for encouraging more data driven decisions.
During the 2011-2012 academic year, the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library merged the Student Computing Support Desk and the Reference Desk into a single Information Desk service point in the center of the main floor of the library. At the new desk, students could receive research assistance as well as computer assistance all in one place. Workers at the newly combined desk included library staff, IT staff, and student peer staff. This innovation session will demonstrate how we used an internal Information Desk Google site to streamline workflows and get everyone working together.
Attendees can expect to learn how the site streamlines workflows by locating disparate types of information in one place. Highlights of the site that will be demonstrated include embedded schedules, an online directory including after-hours cell phone numbers that accept text messages, shift coverage and trouble report forms, an online filing cabinet for essential documents, training modules, and a procedures wiki. Although this site was used in a public services setting, the concept can be applied to any department. The site is especially appealing to student workers because it is optimized for use on mobile phones. Members of the audience will be invited to share ideas about how this type of solution could be used to streamline their own workflows.
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Wide and cheap availability of cloud-based media services is upon us. With the transformations these services are already bringing to the consumption of music, video and interactive media, change has likewise come to educational and professional workflows: Documents in 2012 are read, written, collaborated on, and distributed anywhere an Internet-enabled device can reach. Among research institutions and other knowledge-intensive enterprises (e.g., R&D units, medical research teams, on-campus etc.), widespread adoption of this new cloud functionality will bring dramatic changes in the ecology and characteristics of content use and re-use. Repertory-style licensing is already an important component to facilitate this shift in knowledge workers’ and researchers’ workflows. Indeed, as cloud-based content usage increases, repertory-style licensing will likely become an ever more critical and indispensable part of the toolkit for collaboration and content-sharing.
Implementing a calendar approach to track the purchase of 1) award-winning titles of regional or local significance, and 2) works supporting known campus lecture series, activities, or assignments has helped me appear more prepared and less embarrassed.
Description: Book budgets are shrinking. We can’t own everything. We can use ILL for national/international awards until we can purchase a copy. Perhaps the need for physical books is vanishing. However, for us there are times when a display of physical books or at least a listing of available books goes a long way toward maintaining and building campus relationships. There is nothing more embarrassing than madly scrambling to identify holdings while a lecture is underway or a donor is visiting, or rushing back from an event to place an order, or explaining to a class of freshmen why we don’t have the latest Lillian Smith Award winner just announced and required for their writing assignment. We support campus lecture series, writing assignments, and honor regional collecting emphases by having associated physical copies of their books available and ready for use. Depending on “institutional memory” or past practice, doesn’t always work. A calendar approach allows the library to minimize the embarrassment of not appearing to support the campus by being prepared when lecturers arrive, donors are honored, or class assignments are made.
Objectives: identifying the why (support campus activities, known assignments, and regional emphases), the what (prizes/events selected), the when (selection and announcement process), the how (collecting levels, documentation, and dealing with publication exceptions), and the who (library and campus support staff) that has worked for us.
Audience benefits: dialog on how we got to where we are, including what has and hasn’t worked; how this might work on their campuses; and potential applications for other regularly occurring events/activities.
In the Jean Russell Quible Technical Services and Collection Management department at Virginia Tech, legacy workflows were preventing us from taking our electronic resources management into the 21st century. To make the changes that we needed, our Acquisitions Department head launched EWWW (Electronic Weekly Workflow Work). The EWWW model has enabled us to map out our existing processes and to efficiently design new workflows for our licensed electronic resources. With a sense of humor and some creative sticky notes, workflows have been transformed from dull to delightful. This presentation will cover the evolutionary process of transforming legacy electronic resource management workflows.
This concurrent session will describe an ongoing doctoral research project, supported by the British Library, which explores the concept of the library collection in the digital world. Based on interview and survey data collected from library and information practitioners, people working in social enterprises, faculty members and policymakers, three interpretations of “collection” will be suggested: collection as thing, collection as access and collection as process. The presentation will propose a revised collection development hierarchy which incorporates these three concepts, outlining the potential impact of these ideas on collection development strategies, tactics and operations in the digital world.
In today’s electronic resources world, we are faced with a multitude of ERM products to evaluate and consider for purchase. If a library chooses a commercial product, it requires thousands of dollars not only to purchase the product, but to populate the data as well. Often, our internal customers find these products too difficult to use and interpreting the ERM fields is challenging. Alternatively, if an open source product is chosen, that library would still have to invest hundreds of man hours in order to configure the product to the individual library’s needs. Often the data provided in the open source products are important to ER librarians, but do not necessarily get at the heart of what a subject selector needs to make informed decisions when evaluating resources. In short, when it comes to licensing and understanding ER information, subject specialists and ER librarians often experience a disconnect over what information is really important, and subject specialists often depend on the ER librarian for interpretation.
At the University of Houston, we responded to our subject specialists’ needs to have relevant and up-to-date licensing information by building a better mousetrap, or ERM tool, which we have called the Electronic Resources Licensing Repository (ERLR). We used ERMI definitions to determine the fields for the repository and built the tool in-house. The ERLR is not meant to supplant the ERM we currently use, but rather to give subject specialists access to relevant information quickly and easily. Also, the ERLR contains additional information not typically found in commercial ERM products.
This presentation will discuss how we designed and built our ERLR, how we populated both the ERLR and our ERM, and share feedback survey data we gathered from the library’s internal customers on the usefulness of the ERLR.
If you've picked up a conference program lately, you are well aware that so many of the conversations that librarians are having focus on the hurdles to establishing relationships with faculty members and the issues that arise when attempting to collaborate across sectors. In honor of this year's theme, this session aims to move beyond all of that gloom and doom. Those of us having these conversations and running into these barriers are obviously very convinced of the value of collaboration so let's talk about the positives for a change--let's talk about intrasector collaboration.
This lively discussion will focus on libraries collaborating with libraries, librarians collaborating with librarians, and librarians collaborating with library school students. We'll discuss best practices for saving time, saving money, and saving the future of the profession through working with colleagues who are just as eager to collaborate as we are. Advisory board members from Libraries Thriving, the online community for librarians interested in e-resource innovation and information literacy promotion that was conceived during a 2010 Charleston Conference plenary session, will share their experience with working in these areas and attendees will be invited to join in with their stories, experiences, and questions. Come with a positive attitude towards collaboration and leave with ideas about how to better your working relationships with colleagues.
Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is an important service that is highly valued by faculty, students, and staff at UC Irvine. Providing access to information resources quickly and efficiently is an ongoing goal of the UCI Libraries. Internal factors such as budget cuts and reduced staffing and external factors such as the ease and affordability of on-demand purchases made the time ripe to investigate and improve interlibrary loan services.
A series of pilot projects involving staff from Access Services, Collections and Acquisitions were conducted to measure the cost of services, decrease time to delivery and improve workflow. These pilot projects included purchasing items on demand, using staff expertise in other departments to assist in processing foreign language ILL requests, using existing technology to enhance workflow, and using short-term loans available from publishers through patron initiated acquisitions.
Our objective is to show how a number of smaller projects can make a big difference. Attendees can expect to learn strategies to help change workflow using existing staff and resources, manage staff expectations and to hear about our victories as well as our defeats.
Increasingly under pressure to demonstrate their value to the objectives of the institution or consortium, libraries are looking for ever more creative ways to improve efficiency and productivity. Powerful analytic capabilities enable libraries to put numbers on their value and to expose tangible evidence of their leading role in the academic lifecycle. From usage data and onwards, analytics shed light on the inner workings of the entire institution, as well as those of the library. Valuable insight into libraries’ operation can be gained via purchasing trends, comparative analysis, and even predictive analysis—helping managers to better to plan their daily operation. During this session, we will review Virginia Commonwealth University’s strategy to leverage library data and integrate it seamlessly day-to-day workflows.
Learn how to apply GIST to streamline local and cooperative acquisitions, collection development and evaluation, discovery, gift, interlibrary loan, and weeding workflows. Want to transform your acquisitions, collection development and interlibrary loan operations, but not sure how to start? Learn how to develop strategies for implementing the Getting it System Toolkit - a tool designed to reshape your library’s acquisition and collection development workflows. GIST for ILLiad was released in 2009 and allows acquisitions and interlibrary loan to work together, while also encouraging end-users to discover full-text from Google, Hathi, and other providers. In addition, in 2010, the GIST Gift and Deselection Manager was released - a tool for streamlining gift processing and batching collection evaluation workflows. Lastly, the GIST Acquisitions Manager was released in 2012 and is designed to work with various services and systems such as GOBI, ILLiad, OCLC, CCC Get It Now, Amazon, and many more. The session will describe how to implement these tools and bring together stakeholders from your library (as well as from across multiple libraries) with customized workflows that save staff time, increases collection diversity and value, and easily coordinates collection development.
This session describes a project at Kent State University to selectively move 600,000 monograph volumes to remote storage in seven weeks. The “smart pull” was performed on a database extraction based on a variety of criteria including use, publication year, and subject. Using nine crews with laptops, a storage vendor scanned 1.2million item barcodes at the shelf in order to find the 600,000 items that met the extract criteria; these found items were boxed and moved directly to storage. The library staff did not have to sort or move anything. The resulting collection left in the stacks contained those books with the most recent publication dates, the highest circulation counts, and the most important subjects – across the entire range of LC call numbers. No entire call number ranges were displaced in the process. The remaining collection is half the size, but is twice as focused and dynamic.
During this session, research conducted by LISU on behalf of SAGE will be announced. These results are based on a 6-month project that looked at libraries in the UK, US and Scandinavia to see how libraries are providing and demonstrating their value on campus. Working closely with librarians, the session looks to be an engaging discussion of the results, but also of best practices learned that can be applied to the libraries of the attendees. We hope to talk about how the results may be different or the same as attendee experiences, and what further questions may be researched.
