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Pegasus Librarian Posts

eReserves: Blessing or Curse?

eReserves: Blessing or Curse?

Published by Iris on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

Blessing. Definitely a blessing to our users and database vendors, but a blessing with a curse-ish aftertaste.

Everyone is familiar with the blessing part. Users get 24/7 access to their course readings, and database vendors get a more accurate picture of the amount of usage they’re getting for their license fees. (Without eReserves we’d have to print out a copy of an article and put it on paper reserve, where it would be read by a class of students, photocopied by most of them, etc. But there’d only be one hit on the vendor’s server.)

But on our campus eReserves is an easy target for all sorts of campus ills. For example, it’s common knowledge around campus that eReserves is the cause of our horrible printing problem, with reams and reams of paper filing through our printers every day. And I’m sure that classes that depend more and more on journal readings and less on text-book compilations do make for more use of eReserves and more printing. But what nobody seems to realize is that all the requests for electronic access to journals means that more and more of our journal collection is e-only. And even if we have electronic access and print access, guess which one will be used most often? And what do people do with journal articles they find online? They print them to mark up over lunch or a midnight snack.

Not only that, but there’s more and more good, authoritative, quality research available on the free web, and you can bet that students print these pages by the ream. This is especially true because printing is free on our campus, so everything from email to research to homework spills from the two printers in the reference area at the rate of 7.06 pages every minute the library is open. (The the two reference area printers account for more printing than every other printer on campus… combined.)

I’ve also seen more and more students lately who prefer to scan print journal articles slowly, page by page, and then convert the images into PDFs all so that they could print (for free) rather than photocopy (for a fee). In related news, the use of photocopiers in the library has dropped so much in recent years that our printing department is considering removing a few of the copiers from the library entirely.

So the upshot is that printing is a definite problem, but the answer isn’t as simple as, “Well, with the advent of eReserves printing went through the roof….” The information universe is changing, not just one section of it. All of it. eReserves, journal subscription, database licensing, online publishing, assignments and pedagogical approaches to information, everything.

Oh, and eReserves is also not a devious plot to keep professors from ordering text books or paying copyright fees or anything else like that. Moodle can do all that so much more easily. ;)

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Small Revelations in Copyright

Small Revelations in Copyright

Published by Iris on Monday, December 18th, 2006

Today Dan Donnelly from the University of Minnesota’s Copyright Information and Education Initiative came to talk to us about copyright in educational settings. It’s funny, but after a year of trying to wrap my mind around the four factors of fair use, I’d forgotten all about the actual language associated with fair use in the law. Here it is:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. (Title 17 USC, section 107)

This doesn’t get us off the hook for doing the four factor analysis, of course, but it sure does help with the confidence factor.

Dan reminded us that, ironically, this doesn’t apply to course packs, since those are by nature a commercial venture.

But he did emphasize that libraries play a HUGE role in the dissemination of information on a college or university campus. We’ve already licensed huge amounts of material and, unless the licenses prohibit specific uses, this means that we’ve already paid for permission to spread information to our users. So, if you’re making a course pack, DON’T include library licensed material or you’ll be paying twice for the right to use the articles. But if you’re worried about eReserves and copyright, link to as much licensed material as possible (within the license agreement, of course) because that’s already been handsomely paid for. And remember that I said “link” to licensed material. Don’t download and upload. Link.

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‘Tis the Season

Published by Iris on Sunday, December 17th, 2006

Cards of all sizes, sent with colorful stamps and mass-produced greetings, tumble from my mail box, each one a silent reproach against me and the stack of un-signed, un-stamped, un-addressed, and (most importantly) un-sent cards sitting on my desk. Long letters from half-remembered friends point out in tiny and ornate fonts that I have not had children (or grandchildren, or nieces, or nephews, or offspring of any kind), have not published a book, have not gone on a cruise, have not recently graduated from anything, have not started a not-for-profit organization or advocacy group (or a company of any kind). Nor have I recently adopted anything that would otherwise have gone homeless, or invented anything that will surely revolutionize … anything.

I will not be writing a letter this year. I have never written a letter. There’s a fine line between writing resume cover letters and Christmas letters, and I’ve seen too few actual Christmas letters to be any judge of my own writing during this season.

Truth be told, I’ll be lucky to send out a mailing of any kind this year, no matter how silently my stacked cards reproach me from the desk. And if I do, I will limit myself to an unimaginative, though legibly printed, “Merry Christmas, Love Iris.” I will concentrate on spelling names correctly and keeping names properly matched with addresses.

Next month I will go back to opening my mail box with anticipation rather than dread.

[Update: All that moaning and 45 cards later (many with individualized notes, no less), I’m done. Now I’m at liberty to enjoy any cards that should come my way in the next few weeks, secure in the knowledge that my cards are no longer on my desk.]

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Libraries in 2006

Published by Iris on Friday, December 15th, 2006

It’s hard to believe that 2006 is almost over. I was just getting used to writing that number on my checks, or when I sign important papers. There’s nothing quite like signing a VIP (Very Important Paper), dating it, crossing out the date, writing the correct date, and then contemplating all the various people who will grab your file and chuckle at the girl who doesn’t even know what year it is.

These are the thoughts that flitted through my head as I signed various (routine) medical forms yesterday, and then life continued all around me as I wondered how 2006 would be remembered in library circles. (And yes, I really am that crazy sometimes.) So what do you think are some of the salient features and overarching questions in libraries this year? I don’t pretend to have a clue, but I know that a couple of themes were important in my small part of the library world. In no order whatsoever, they are:

  • Space: everything, physical or electronic, takes up space. Ideas are cheep but space isn’t.
  • OPAC/Catalog/Discovery System Bruhaha: I have no idea if this was a theme in previous years because I wasn’t paying attention, but I know for sure it was a theme this year. People are pretty sure that what we have now isn’t cutting it for our users, but opinions are rather more divided on what should be done about the whole situation.
  • The Pedagogy of Information Literacy: what do our users need to know, and how will they learn these skills best? Active learning, gaming, virtual experiences, embedded information literacy… so many options.
  • The De-Scarification of Technology: Web Apps make doing stuff online, either privately or with networks of other people, easy and portable. This year (many) librarians started using web-based tools to work and play, and the amount of really great and authoritative information available online exploded… again.
  • The User Experience: There’s been a trend toward measuring every product and service by it’s effect on the user experience. (This one is very far-reaching and basis of many, many other topics)
  • Data: It’s not just about books any more.
  • Books: It’s still about the books. And how do you convince students that every once in a while there’s just no substitute.
  • Sustainability: This is especially important to my library, where printing is free. With more and more journals available only online, there’s a whole lot more printing than can be good for any planet. There’s also the problem of sustainability in terms of workload. It seems like there’s always enough work for twice the number of staff.
  • Doing vs. Collaborating: what with wikies and tagging and other such wonderful things, we can collaborate with each other and our users to create content where we used to have to do everything in isolation.
  • Metadata: We have the computing power, bandwidth, and massive aggregations of data to make metadata exploitation possible like never before.

I’m sure there’s more, but I wanted to put down some thoughts so that when I’m teaching library school classes 50 years from now I can tell my students with some authority what issues were interesting me and my compatriots back when users actually had to type their queries into crazy things called “search boxes” rather than simply think them while inhabiting a virtual discovery environment, and when we had to search three entirely different kinds of systems depending on whether we were looking for books, journal articles that might be indexed online, or journal articles that are too old to be indexed online.

Ok, so the thought-driven discovery environment is a little ambitious for 50 years… but you get the idea.

What would you add as a driving theme of 2006? Lets put our heads together and write the bird’s eye view of lib06.

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