Author Archives: Iris

How students (and faculty) really find articles

By IRIS Posted on by

In January we started piloting the Wiley pay-per-view option. Based on our usage stats and other schools’ usage stats, we bought tokens that would get us through the calendar year, after which we would reassess. Sounded like a plan!

Due to several unforeseen factors, we didn’t turn on the pay-per-view access in our link resolver. Seemed like a tiny bump in the road. Our real pilot would be delayed a couple of weeks. No biggie.

However, in those first two weeks, we went through over a quarter of the tokens we’d purchased, tokens that were supposed to last us a full calendar year. Apparently Google, Google Scholar, and the DOIs in scientific citation styles lead enough students to the Wiley publisher website version of these articles that going purely pay-per-view would crush our serials budget.

And it’s not just the students. The last 2-3 years, one of the main themes to the questions at new faculty orientation has been how to get to the full text from Google or Google Scholar.

Now, if you’re like me, none of this is particularly surprising. It’s just the first time I’ve seen it quantified in budget form. But it’s left me wondering if our to-be-configured discovery system will make a dent, and what Google plans to do with Google Scholar anyway now that the redesign (rolling out slowly to different people) removes Scholar from the “more” menue. And I wonder about the future of aggregator databases and of our budgetary structures. Not that I think databases are “dead” or anything, but I do think that Academic Search Premier does not now serve the function it served even just a few years ago, so it and it’s ilk will inevitably change focus or fade.

Thank you, Steve

By IRIS Posted on by

What with one thing and another, getting this space looking functional again seemed like an insurmountable task. I couldn’t even make myself find a new base theme that didn’t have that awful, huge, contextless, ever-changing image. And I certainly couldn’t write here while that image was staring me in the face.

But then Steve Lawson swooped in and did all the heavy lifting (and nearly all of the light lifting, too), and now my blog is looking like my blog again. Thank you, Steve!

Library Hold Shelf Pros and Cons

By IRIS Posted on by

I recently got a notice that I had a book waiting for me at the circulation desk. Thrilled, I raced over there having completely forgotten a) that I had put a book on hold months ago, and b) anything about said book. What fun! What an adventure!

After having had my library card scanned and the book desensitized, I realized that there’s a downside to placing a hold on a book that’s so popular that a million other people had placed a hold before you and 85 million people had placed a hold on after me.

Non-harassing protest of SOPA at ALA Midwinter

By IRIS Posted on by

Quite a few of the vendors that will be exhibiting at ALA Midwinter support SOPA, which “could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression” according to the Stanford Law Review.

The Library Society of the World is here to help you help us conduct a non-harassing protest against these vendors. We recognize that the vendor representatives that will be staffing the boothes in the MidWinter exhibit hall are not the bad guys. They didn’t make these decisions and they don’t deserve to have bad days because of this protest. Their executives, however, need to know that SOPA is not ok with us. The Library Bill of Rights is clear:

III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

IV. Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.

So here’s the plan:

  1. Print off as many copies of the LSW SOPA Protest Coupons (PDF) as you can manage, making sure to print it double sided. (The file is in color, but it prints in black and white just fine.) Ideally, print off as many sheets as you think you can use and as many as you think you can carry to hand out to people at Midwinter.
  2. Cut or tear sheets into 6 protest coupons, each of which should have the letter on one side and the “+1 Protest Point” pattern on the other.
  3. Use Andy’s Exhibit Hall map to help you know which vendors support this legislation, and take them a coupon or three.
  4. Please try to be nice to the vendor reps, but make it clear that their higher-ups need to know that we’re not ok with this.

Ideally, by the end of Midwinter, each vendor booth should have a hefty collection of protest coupons quantifying our displeasure.

P.S. This post and the protest coupons have a CC0 license — that means that I claim no copyright on this work and that you can use it and share it at will.