2015 Charleston Library Conference

Investigating the use of gold open access content within subscription content has been a near impossible task until the adoption of the COUNTER 4 statistics in 2014. By reviewing the COUNTER JR1 GOA 2014 reports, two librarians evaluate the gold open access usage at their respective institutions from the following publishers: Elsevier, NPG, OUP, Sage, Springer, Taylor and Francis, and Wiley. This initial investigation will be a benchmark for future studies to see if there is any impact on subscribed content or if usage is limited to non-subscribed content from these providers. Attendees will become familiar with the JR1 GOA reports from COUNTER as well be introduced to new evaluative techniques for hybrid open access content.

When faced with multiple competing priorities for investment in library resources, there are many important aspects to consider. From student enrollment to prominence of programs, there are both data-driven and intangible factors to weigh. In addition, most library collections now focus on the immediate needs of students and researchers instead of collecting for posterity. This just-in-time versus just-in-case collection development mindset prioritizes different resource attributes and requires an often unfamiliar level of acquisitions flexibility.

Where do we go from here? What are the most important factors to consider before subscribing to or purchasing library resources? What do scholarly publishers believe are the most relevant points to consider when academics make collection decisions?

What attendees can expect to learn?
Participants will learn what librarians should consider when making collections decisions – from the availability of COUNTER statistics to accessibility issues and beyond. The presenters will share a checklist of factors to consider, pitfalls to avoid and how to clearly communicate with our vendor partners. Publishers will learn what really helps academics make collection decisions and share their perspectives.

In a time of ever increasing physical collection space shortages and rapidly evolving higher education institutions, a holistic understanding of the collection lifecycle as well as a strategic approach to collection development and retention as well as stakeholder engagement is needed. Some struggle with what materials to withdraw, especially if there is faculty opposition and how to move forward collaboratively. Leveraging the experience of leading the local culture shift in a large Association of Research Library, the principles, policies and methods required to shift mental models towards what must be retained, facilitating withdrawal decisions, and connecting collection development with ongoing collection management will be explored.
Audience members will leave with:
• An understanding of why collection lifecycle management may be beneficial
• key questions to ask themselves and colleagues when wanting to shift to collection lifecycle management
• an understanding of how existing policies and high-level workflows feed into the collection lifecycle management approach
• an understanding of the practical aspects of implementation,
• a link to a toolkit with policy templates, guides on collection evaluation and stakeholder engagement.
Largely relying on traditional presentation style, a series of poll-like questions will be used to learn about the audience and find resonance in audience members with the presentation content. Further, at the end of each section, a Q&A period will be built in.

Alternative assessment metrics (or "altmetrics") are a relatively new phenomenon in scholarly communication and publication, but their creation and application is very wide-ranging. Typically seen as a complement to more established measurements such as impact factor, altmetrics utilize fresh data from online sources to view and inform scholarship and many decisions connected to scholarly output. As the field continues to establish itself, there is still a plethora of innovative tools that are yet to be created, especially when one considers opportunities such as connecting this data semantically.

Come hear how the cross-stakeholder groups working under the aegis of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)’s Altmetrics Initiative are improving the scholarly communications field by creating definitions and use cases to help create common ground among users; determining new output types for the application of altmetrics; discussing how to better apply and utilize identifiers in this field; and recommending quality measures to be used for data contributed to altmetrics practitioners. Recommendations from these working groups, who are also working with other related industry efforts, will be an important contribution to the further growth and acceptance of altmetrics-based tools. There will be ample time for audience members to provide their own views and practices on how altmetrics are transforming how communications and decisions are made.

Outsourcing the management of electronic journals has significantly reduced the autonomy academic libraries have over their collection’s metadata, as well as the ways in which that data is summarized and made available to the library, yet the ephemerality of serials data makes quality-control burdensome and costly on the corporate end and necessitates ongoing title-tracking and database maintenance on the library’s end. As a result, the quality of data in outsourced knowledgebases is often inversely proportional to the library’s tolerance of “bad data,” as well as our inability to tell the difference. This session demonstrates how an MS Access database was constructed that integrates data from various sources in order to reconcile title lists from varied sources, process yearly subscription changes, and manage the distribution of work to departmental staff. As such, it both serves as a reconciliation tool with administrative functions for linking and displaying summary data about subscribed e-journal packages, and it provides a workflow tool with a user interface designed for staff to easily manage ongoing subscription maintenance. Serials are dynamic by nature, and a management system should have the ability to track and respond to these changes. This easily-maintained tool offers a model for managing change across the interrelated applications that manage subscriptions to online serials.

In 2015, the University of North Texas Libraries implemented an access-based collection development policy. This new policy, coupled with the increase of interdisciplinary studies at the University, dictated the necessity for a more exhaustive evaluation of continuing resources such as databases, journals, and standing orders before they are purchased. The Collection Development department created a rubric of criteria to address all aspects of the evaluation. This session will provide a brief description of access-based collection development and a detailed discussion of the rubric’s criteria and how it will be implemented. The session will close with an opportunity for the audience to provide additional criteria for evaluation.