MLA 2008: Poster Session 2
There were a lot of great posters and there is no way I could write about all of them, but two stuck out in my mind.
Weed it and They Will Come: The Nitty Gritty of Assessing, Weeding, and Rebuilding a Physical Book Collection. See the full abstract: http://tinyurl.com/5txvqt
As we started talking, I found it interesting that they discovered that the process of weeding was handled differently by different generations of librarians. The librarian speaking with me told me that she sometimes found it hard to weed the books, but the younger staff appeared eager get rid of the old to make room for the new. The library began to increase their electronic book collection and in order to preserve serendipitous shelf browsing discovery, the librarians decided to add dummy books on the shelves for each electronic title.
Developing an RSS Current Awareness Service.
See the full abstract: http://tinyurl.com/5e7mkk
I loved how these librarians created their own service that captured over 1900 journal feeds which are available now on the library's web site and are bundled so that users can locate feeds alphabetically or by subject and can preview the table of contents. I completely applaud these librarians initiative, but I still think this is a needed service that can be easily done by a company like Serials Solutions or Ebsco and I don't know why they haven't added it to their A-Z service.
Labels: MLA2008
posted by The Krafty Librarian @ 6:45 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Hi Michelle - thanks for the shoutout on our RSS service! Just wanted to give you a few thoughts on why we're not waiting for vendors to provide this service.
We don't use one vendor/jobber, plus there's open access journals or gaps we'd still need to fill in. Many vendors don't provide proper feeds (or any feeds) as is, so we don't want to wait passively as is too often the case in our profession when we can do this now - its not even that hard, really. If vendors want to do this, however, we'd be delighted - less work for us! It'd be better still if they provided good tools like APIs and real feeds (not canned searches) to allow libraries or patrons themselves to "roll their own" bundles.
We want to be able to customize the subject classifications based on both what we have access to and what our local audience thinks should or shouldn't be included. It also allows us more granular control based on subscription status (dropping things due to embargoes or because we no longer subscribe but because we once did the vendor makes it look like we still do). And it would allow us to deal with interdisciplinary or other challenging subjects which can have a local flavor (i.e. which departments/schools/organizations work together) and are almost never dealt with by vendors. We used vendor categories as a starting point for ours, but then modified them and now expect our liaisons to help us keep the bundles fresh and up to date. Good robust data, good opportunity for interaction.
So while we agree, it'd be nice if vendors provided something like this, I suspect it'd be a lowest common denominator product which would still need tweaking to make it more useful for each community of patrons. I really hope libraries will start doing more development or creation of tools in partnership with vendors (or not) rather than expecting them to do all the work. They can get 90% of the way there and then its up to us to make things work well in our environment methinks...
abarclay,
I totally agree that we should not remain passive. I think everything that you have done is GREAT!
The reason I think that some of this needs to be created by somebody like Serials Solutions and Ebsco A-Z (who also track open access titles) is because there are ton of libraries out there that don't have people as creative and skilled as you all to create these products.
Not every library has people who can do this sort of thing, specifically the hospital libraries. There are many hospital libraries that can afford something like Ebsco A-Z but don't have the staff to do something as cool as you all did.
Granted I know you all are willing to share your knowledge, but for another librarian to create something similar tailored to their institution with their institution's correct LinkOut links to the full text is still a somewhat difficult task. They may not be reinventing the wheel, but they have to put all the pieces together and make sure it works as a wheel. Again I think this process is too much for many out there.
What would extremely cool is if you guys or other people like you developed an easy to adapt plug-in tool that one can use within their A-Z list in Ebsco or Serials solutions. The reason Ebsco and Serials Solutions A-Z list are so popular is because it EASY to use. Librarians simply just check the box to display library print and electronic holdings.
You mentioned collaboration.
"I really hope libraries will start doing more development or creation of tools in partnership with vendors (or not) rather than expecting them to do all the work. They can get 90% of the way there and then its up to us to make things work well in our environment methinks..."
I think academic medical libraries are perfectly poised for this. How nice would be that an academic medical library creates a product like this and then are able to make it a product that can be used by all hospital libraries with very little adaption or programming. Something as simple as checking a box.
Michelle - I agree, hospital libraries are under really heavy restrictions that make this sort of thing hard to do. Sometimes I want to cry at the things I hear hospital librarians say their IT or admin folks put them through, esp. when some of it is patent nonsense. The idea of an "MLA IT Strike Force" went through my head during one presentation in particular :-) Or maybe we need a matchmaking service for library coders looking for good deeds to do and the libraries that need them.
In any case it seems to me that the best solution is an outside-in one, that is something independent of any one vendor, platform or environment but that they can incorporate into their products. That's our angle anyway - try to avoid lockin to a single solution but make something that could be ported elsewhere in a freely available way (commercial or not). Maybe we can come up with a gadget to allow people to insert their own proxy strings into the database and customize the feeds. With things like Google Docs and all the mashups out there it wouldn't be all that hard. In fact we talked about creating a centralized repository so that anyone who wanted to could get whatever feeds they wanted, but that's beyond us for the moment anyway. Something like Medworm might be a place to start - build in more data import/export capabilities. Vendors, librarians and patrons could all use the same tool. Hmmm...
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