1. Peeling Back the Discovery Layer: Web-Scale Searching, User Expectations, and Information Literacy
Nora Almeida, Alexandra Hamlett, Helen Georgas
This session will examine how a newly adopted web-scale discovery tool at the City University of New York (CUNY) has impacted user experience and information literacy initiatives. Through a discussion of user experience based on qualitative interactions with students in various research contexts, search statistics, and chat reference inquiries, we will explore implications of web-scale search environments on reference service and instruction at three CUNY campus libraries. We will touch upon institutional differences and how technological and disciplinary contexts impact customization decisions and instructional priorities. Attendees will be prompted to consider how research environments and technology impact user expectations in ways that may contribute to critical reflection of their own approaches to information literacy instruction. We anticipate that session attendees will discover how libraries can analyze web-scale discovery environments and student search behaviors to enhance information literacy initiatives at their own institutions, while improving individual user experience. Additionally, we will provide practical instructional strategies for use in reference consultations, one-shot instruction sessions, and credit courses that attendees can adapt for use at their own campuses.
2. Collection Development and External Data: An Opportunity
David Brennan
Many library systems and analysis tools focus on reporting library holdings and use metrics. There are fewer tools that allow for comparing holdings to external data such as bibliographies and vendor packages for the purposes of collection assessment and development. This session describes the experience of the George T. Harrell Health Sciences Library, Penn State Hershey, in developing a tool to compare this external data to holdings using the SIRSI WebServices API. It is intended to encourage the audience to investigate what APIs are available to them for developing tools for their own environments.
3. VHS, DVD, Streaming Video: One Library’s Dilemma
Ibironke Lawal, Emily Davis Winthrop
Video Home System (VHS) videocassettes appeared in our homes in the 1970’s, changing the discourse of the television and movie industry. It was a welcome phenomenon for libraries. Before VHS, there was the U-Matic format, which did not last very long because of the cost and limited storage. After surviving the competition with Betamax, VHS became the standard format between the 1970’s and 1995 when DVD’s were invented. DVD’s (Digital Versatile Disc) as the name implies can be played on multiple types of players and they offer higher storage capacity. Gradually, DVD’s became the default for libraries and VHS cassettes slowly became obsolete. Libraries are now transitioning to the streaming media. Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user in real time as it is delivered by the provider. With these three formats in the collection libraries face the dilemma of what to do with the old (DVD), the older (VHS), and the oldest U-Matic. At Virginia Commonwealth University, we have over three thousand VHS tapes. This summer, we decided to review our VHS collection. We have more questions than answers. This presentation, apart from giving the workflow of our activity, creates an opportunity for librarians and vendors to continue the conversation of addressing this dilemma.
4. Less is More...Likely: Lessons from Departmental Libraries in the Decreasing World of Library Space
Corey Seeman
The shrinking library is not news. Academic libraries have been responding to space constraints for many years, especially in the context of increasing student spaces or alleviating space constraints elsewhere at the university of college. Shrinking footprints have not only reduced library's capacity to manage a print collection, it has potentially changed it role on campus. While the print age heralded the library as a repository of knowledge, we have seen it transform into academic student centers. And while many libraries may chart their own course in bringing on new services and creating new student spaces, many departmental libraries have been forced to space reductions based on other needs at their respective schools. The more ambitious the school, the more programs formed and space needed to house them. While many will assume this is the plight of the departmental library, responding to space contractions will impact all academic libraries in time. Exploring the contractions made at these business, medical and science libraries, we can see a glimpse of what the future might hold for many academic libraries. This presentation will explore space contractions in departmental libraries and how they responded on both the collection and service aspects of library work. In addition, we will explore how this trend might expand to colleges and universities' main libraries.
5. The User-Driven Collection 4.0: To Infinity and Beyond
Darby Orcutt
For more than a decade, the NCSU Libraries has had some level of user-driven collecting, beginning with very small-scale programs and leading up to full-scale e-preferred Demand Driven Acquisitions (DDA) plans. Over the last two years, however, we have rapidly increased our reliance on user-driven selection far beyond vendor-side DDA programs, developing an in-house Books By Request (BBR) program, and working with our primary book vendor to engineer approval plans in novel and unique ways (for which their current systems were not designed) to support the automated curation of DDA and BBR pools. The results thus far include: better aligning monographic expenditures with documented user needs, greatly increasing the acquisition of books in electronic versus print format, and eliminating most title-by-title selection decisions, thus freeing subject specialist time for new and more strategic work.Participants in this session can expect a rapid-fire introduction to new methods of crafting user-driven selection pools, see quantifiable results from implementing these, and learn the challenges of implementing such a plan within a publishing and vendor landscape that is not yet designed to support it.
