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Category: Libraries and Librarians

The Problem of “Print” Resources in Research Assignments

Published by Iris on Friday, March 16th, 2007

We’ve all heard it before. A student comes to the desk and announces that although she already has almost all the sources she needs for a paper, her assignment specifies that she must include at least one “print” source.

In an interesting twist, I’m starting to hear this from students who’ve done everything right. They’ve consulted our databases and found the full text of scholarly articles online. But they get very nervous when I tell them that these full text articles online “count” as “print” sources. How in the world could they have known? It makes perfect sense to me and to their professors, but there’s no way a student could know that “print” simply means “formally published” in all but a small minority of cases.

So I’ve begun to teach Ulrich’s whenever I think this might come up. So far I’ve only done it twice, but each time was completely surprised by the reaction I got. The students ate it up, and of all the things we went over in class, this was the thing they’d come up afterwards to get even more information about. Finally, there’s a way for them to tell without a shadow of a doubt if the PDF they found on Google or via one of our databases is a “print source” or just some paper up online. Here’s the rule: if it’s in Ulrich’s, it’s a “print” source, even if it’s an e-only publication. As an added bonus, you can also tell right off the bat if a source is refereed, knew or established, some places it’s indexed, and whether or not it’s an e-only publication. (Added bonus for me, in order to teach Ulrich’s I have to check to make sure students are adept at finding the periodical’s name, which I always like to squeeze into library sessions.)

So that’s all well and good as a stop-gap measure, but what I’d really like to do is get away from requiring “at least three print sources.” Why not require at least three “formally published” sources, or ask students to determine if their sources were scholarly or not and then justify their choice? “Print” sources will only make less sense as we go along, not more.

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"Extra" Metadata: Two Roads in that Yellow Wood

Published by Iris on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

And while I’m in a musing mood… I think there are two directions you can go when faced with metadata (be it AACR2, Dublin Core, or what have you) that’s populated with a whole bunch of information.

You could say, “Hey, we’re putting more information into this record than our patrons use, so let’s not work so hard.” (Better study your patrons good and hard, though, before assuming you know this for a fact.)

Or you could say, “Hey, we’ve got all this stuff. What could we do with it that we aren’t doing yet?” (But be aware that this could range from the simple to the we’d-need-to-hire-programmers complex.)

The path you choose will depend on your circumstances, your patrons, and your ability to dream up ways to exploit metadata. But the path you choose will make all the difference.

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Print vs Electronic Workflows

Published by Iris on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

I’ve been kind of immersed in workflows recently. Our workflow consultants delivered their much-anticipated, much-talked-about, and much-feared reports yesterday. And today I’m musing about a few of their recommendations. Some I don’t think will fly at our library, or at least not to the extent they propose, but that’s a topic for another day or another lifetime. Tonight I’m mostly interested in the question of the relative workload of a print collection vs. an electronic collection. (Notice, I’m not talking access, relative value, or any of that. Just workflow and time commitment.)

I’m all for e-access. I love love love e-access to journals. Nothing makes me happier than to click our link resolver button and find that I don’t have to walk the 100 feet or so to our print journal collection. And I’m cautiously in favor or transitioning to e-access where ever that is warranted.

But… when I hear that we should consider reducing our print periodical holdings at every opportunity, I worry a little bit that only one part of our workflow would see a benefit while other areas might see increased time commitment. Granted, print periodicals take up a lot of space, a lot of packing and unpacking, a lot of binding, and countless other processes. But what might the process be in an e-only or e-mostly environment?

  • Acquisition decisions will take more time because suddenly we’ll be deciding on costly bundles of journals rather than single journals. We’ll have to think even more carefully about the benefit of groups of journals because we may not want every journal in the collection, and it’s a hefty chunk of change.
  • How much time will it take for ILL and eReserves staff to wade through license agreements to see what they can lend or copy from an e-collection rather than relying on more standardized (though not necessarily easier) copyright law? (I’ve talked about the other possible effects of e-resources on ILL before.)
  • Keeping up with links and holdings and access issues and changes in subscriptions won’t go away any time soon.
  • And there may be other unforeseen processes that we don’t know about because we’re still learning what an e-mostly world would feel like at our library.

I don’t know if these increased time commitments would or wouldn’t be worth the savings in the periodicals department of technical services, but these and other repercussions should be taken into account if efficiency is the name of the game.

And I haven’t mentioned archiving. It goes without saying that this is an important issue that has to be considered every time we cancel print subscriptions. But everyone knows that, and it’s not up for debate at the moment.

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Gimme Gimme Gimme

Gimme Gimme Gimme

Published by Iris on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

Yeah. Big ol’ “Me Too!” on this one. Cuz why? Cuz Meredith rocks, that’s why. Oh, and the book looks good, too.

There’s a section in the first chapter (a much better teaser than most introductions, btw) that I think asks the essential question: Why should librarians care about social software? Answer it for you and your library, adopt Meredith’s answers, or do whatever else it takes, but don’t leave this question on the back burner.

My answers? Well, they map very closely onto Meredith’s, and they’re constantly evolving, but here’s a sketch of their current state. I have not found that my students are very familiar with many of the social software we talk about all the time. I’ve had students ask me why I’d want to IM, diss Facebook and MySpace, give me blank stares when I mention social bookmarks, wonder what Flickr is and point out that I’ve left of the “e.” And don’t even get me started on RSS. But that doesn’t mean that social software isn’t important to me in my library with my user community.

No, social software is still important for many reasons, but foremost in my environment is that it’s a way for me to provide value-added, nimble, real-time, personalized access to online resources and research support, learn from and collaborate with colleagues near and far, and improve my own workflow and my students’ workflows. Six months from now, these reasons will have evolved again, I’m sure. But through it all Meredith’s last paragraph says it all. These things are, above all, tools. They’re tools that help libraries stop being faceless institutions and start being teams of people helping people.

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