Academic libraries have traditionally purchased books to support current and future curricular and research needs at their individual institutions. At the same time academic libraries have been challenged in times of static or declining budgets to balance patron demand for access to content against the security of owning collections uniquely tailored to the communities they serve. The costs associated with ownership of many of the same e-book titles combined with the duplication of effort by members of the PALCI consortium led to the development of a shared demand driven acquisition (DDA) model based on patron selection at the point of use. The PALCI DDA program was initially piloted in 2014 with EBSCO, ebrary and YBP, continued in 2014-15 and extended in early 2015 with a JSTOR pilot. The purpose of each pilot was to determine the value of a cooperative DDA model that could eventually replace the need for individual PALCI libraries to manage their own DDA projects, establish cost models that might be equal or lower than traditional ILL, and potentially lower overall costs of acquiring e-book content for member libraries.
This session will review the value of the PALCI DDA model to participating member libraries; marketing strategies used to gain buy-in from member libraries; the different publisher and aggregator DDA models; the different cost contribution models used to address differences in size of libraries across PALCI and the future of PALCI DDA. The program will be of interest to libraries that are considering or have already implemented DDA, as well as publishers, eBook aggregators, and information vendors. The PALCI consortium includes 69 academic and other research libraries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia and New York that support teaching and research interests at institutions that range from small colleges to large research universities.
With flat and declining budgets and the continuous annual inflation, many libraries face an unsustainable collection environment. Some libraries may need to return to title by title selection which protects disciplinary core journals. Difficulties arise in identifying core journals by discipline as traditionally defined in collection management and assessment as scholarship continues to broaden and diversify. As a result, MTSU librarians have been using a combination of serials usage data and assigned subjects to isolate core journals specific to our academic programs. We have created datasets that include 2012 thru 2014 data as well as Jan – June 2015 usage (annualize) to identify patterns in journal use for our campus. The result of analysis of this dataset is that we can identify the top used journals per subject over time. The practical implications for collection assessment include creating lists of highly used journals per subject and journals with the lowest use (ranked by subject).
These analyses have already proven useful in identifying areas of high usage in interdisciplinary journals as well as unexpected areas of scholarship (i.e. Medical journals when we do not have a medical school). We have also used these analyses in accreditation reviews for academic programs and they have led to productive discussions with outside reviewers.
Traditionally the role of the librarian as an enabler of technology advancement has been underestimated. Almost all innovators—faculty members, students, alumni, and industry professionals—have relied on knowledge assembled from library resources.
Today, more than ever, innovation is needed to fuel the economy. It is clear that advancements in technology specifically, carry the most opportunity to flourish in this ever-changing global economic landscape. From mobile technology breakthroughs to cyber theft, information science and technology issues are a central topic in the public conversation. Policymakers, economists, and other experts agree that in order to assure long-term economic growth, advancements in technology must continue to be significant in coming years.
IGI Global and our librarian advisory board seek to understand how college and university libraries can support technological innovations with an international survey. Findings of the librarian survey will be shared during the presentation and an infographic will be available for participants. The discussion will include profiles and examples of libraries leading technology innovation, including supporting innovation with programming, such as coding, gaming and robotics, and with cutting-edge research.
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Join us as special guest speaker, Peter Brantley, Director of Online Strategy for the University of California Davis Library, presents “A Hollow Sphere: The rise of interactivity and the submergence of publishing.” In this fascinating session, Peter will show us how the act of publishing is becoming less important than creating opportunities for continual engagement.
Plus, see how you can empower new levels of research and education success with ProQuest via:
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Digital textbooks, social media, video content. It seems as if instructors are moving everything into online and hybrid classrooms except for the resources of the library! How can librarians bring the world of quality databases, eBooks, and other digital resources from the library’s discovery system easily and directly into the online learning environment? Why is it imperative that libraries play an increasing role in these learning management systems, and how can we meet the expectations instructors and students have of learning technologies?
This presentation will showcase how a discovery plug-in for learning management systems (e.g., Moodle, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Sakai, Canvas) adds unprecedented functionality for online course instructors: the ability to create reading lists of library materials without ever having to leave the course site. The plug-in allows instructors to create library reading lists without grappling with permalinks, proxy prefixes, or PDFs, leveraging the value of the library discovery system in a frictionless environment.
Which is the best metric to use to uncover the merits of the journals in your collection? Should this same metric be used to understand the relative merits of the researchers at your university? Will it also work to find out which of these researchers’ articles is most impactful?
These and similar questions are hotly debated in the world of research. Quite rightly, they elicit strong, often emotional discussion, and rarely, if ever, is an answer arrived at. This is not surprising since the effort and debate stimulated by these questions cannot possibly lead to useful conclusions. Why is this?
Research excellence is sought after everywhere in the world, but what is considered “excellent” varies. Is excellence about being well cited by peer reviewed articles, about winning funding, or about making a splash in the popular press and/or on Twitter? Is it about working with experts all over the world, registering patents, making raw research data sets available for others, or is it about educating the next generation of researchers? Research excellence is of course about all of these things and more, and trying to reduce it to a single metric is counter-productive and potentially damaging to the diversity of skills needed to solve today’s research questions.
The multi-faceted nature of research excellence can be better captured by a “basket of metrics”. Complementing expert judgment by being able to draw on a wide range of metrics from a basket allows more varied and nuanced insights into excellence than is possible by using any one metric alone. It also enables different metrics to be selected to help to answer the many different questions that are encountered in research.
We will advocate the common sense approach of using a “basket of metrics”. We will present case studies to illustrate the value of this approach, and to form the basis of discussion.
A significant percentage of current library literature focuses on the technological advances stemming almost exclusively from the internet. Michael Gorman, in his book Our Enduring Values Revisited, 2015, invites libraries and librarians to reflect on the library as a whole, for a realistic assessment of those “noble” traditions, enduring values and best practices that make libraries one of the pillars of the academic community.
This paper will discuss Gorman’s ranking of those values and traditions and critically evaluate their importance to the future of the academic library in a small liberal arts university.
While librarians always had an ambiguous relationship with the big deal, publishers have been very satisfied with its economic outcomes. The move to database-deals, encompassing ejournals, ebooks, and databases, pushes the boundaries even further – offering libraries unprecedented discounts while locking them in into high volume, multi-year deals.
What has been overlooked though is the impact the big deal had on the relationship between major publishers offering distribution services to smaller publishers and even more so to learned societies.
The presentation describes the effect for libraries, societies, and publishers, particularly their ability to make economically sensible decisions in the context of the big deal versus an independent distribution and services organization.
Principal Investigator Chuck Hamaker and the UNC Charlotte based project team have assembled a Working Group of twenty participants representing library consortia, publishers, content aggregators, and academic libraries. In this session I’ll give an overview of the project and describe the scope of the publisher and vendor environmental scan. Please come with your questions and ideas.
As a Mellon supported project, our focus is the humanities and humanistic social sciences. We will discuss, define and investigate the impact on academic institutions of three principles for eBook licenses:
We have formed three research teams to explore licensing terms, user experience and the impact of DRM, and classroom and instruction use. The fourth component is an iterative environmental scan of the eBook market, which is a major part of my role as Project Consultant. We will share information throughout the remaining 18 months of effort. The project will conclude with a free conference in Charlotte in Spring 2017.
