Week 12 - Reflections on the Worklife of an ER Librarian

Since I obviously have no experience as an ER librarian, I will be taking notes on the readings this week rather than reflecting.  Following are the parts I found particularly important or interesting:

"How to survive as a new serialist" by Griffin

•  Training and Continuing Education
• Can apply for stipends from ALA, ALCTS, LITA, NASIG, etc.
• Many ILS vendors provide training such as conferences or webinars
• Associations and Organizations
• Possibly join and:
• Attend conferences, meetings, and workshops
• Use webinars and online training
• Participate in an online discussion group
• Must weigh benefit vs. cost in time and money
• Most of those listed I've heard of except for NASIG - North American Serials Interest Group and SCCTP - Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program
• Books
• Mostly on cataloging and organization of information
• Slyly, Griffin includes the book in which this chapter is contained
• Print and Electronic Journals
•   Many of these I'm already aware of because we've read sections of them for this class - Against the Grain, Library Resources and Technical Services, Serials Review, etc.
• Online Sources
• Especially useful for learning about standards - MARC, Dublin Core, Dewey Decimal, etc.
• Identify New Needs
• Serialist is a rapidly changing profession
• Must keep up with revisions to standards and new standards
• Publish
• American Reference Books Annual, NASIGuides, and NASIG, Resource for Authors can help
• Terms
• CONSER- Cooperative ONline SERials
• integrating resource - resource that is added to or changed by continuous updates (ie website)

Ok, actually I'm going to reflect here just for a second.  Reading this chapter really made me realize how much I've learned this semester in all my classes and library school in general.  I've gone from knowing almost nothing last August about the LIS field to having heard of almost all the organizations, terms, journals, and so on mentioned in this chapter.

"Marian Through the Looking Glass: The Unique Evolution of the Electronic Resources (ER) Librarian Position" by Albitz and Shelburne

• Very little literature on ER staffing
• Authors decided to conduct survey and compare results of three other articles
• Administration structure
• 52% technical services in this survey
• Most are in public services in three other articles
• Responsibilities
• Most frequent response:
• Fisher: Reference
• Followed by instruction, "computer applications," and collection development
• Albitz: ER Coordination
• Followed by reference, instruction, and web apps
• Survey: ER Coordination
• Followed by purchase management, license negotiations, and IT 
• Reference and instruction have low response rates probably because patrons do not need as much help with resources in 2005 vs. 2001 and earlier
• Responsibilities become more focused on ER and technology (link-resolvers and federated searching) because this is more complicated than in earlier years
• ER librarians have diverse backgrounds but none held a previous ER librarian position
• Training varies widely - licensing workshops, organization (ie ALA) provided training, or self-taught

"Process Mapping for Electronic Resources: A Lesson From Business Models" by Afifi

• Process Mapping
• Create flexible organizations by continually re-evaluating business processes
• Similar to a flowchart
• Start with inputs and outputs then fill in steps in the middle
• "Swim lanes" across the page indicate who is involved in each task
• Use
• Construct "as is" and "should be" maps
• Select, Acquire, and Deliver ER as an example
• Case Study
• Some departments depicted processes idealistically but recipients challenged this
• ER team created to map complex ER related processes
• Created three processes
• Select electronic resources
• Acquire/deliver electronic resources
• Manage electronic resources

p.s.  While taking a break between the readings, I decided to change my Firefox Persona (http://www.getpersonas.com).  I noticed something interesting - all of the Personas have Creative Commons licenses.  How cool is that?

Week 11 - E-Books: Audio and Text

After three weeks of topics with which I have no person experience, now we're onto something I use almost everyday - digital audiobooks (DABs).  I listen to audiobooks before bed, when I go running, and when I walk around campus.  As a side note - audiobooks are an excellent cure for inability to sleep because they completely take your mind off whatever is stressing you. I discovered that OverDrive lets you download audiobooks to your ipod even if you're not in the actual area the library serves (ie there's no IP restriction) so I happily download from the Ohio E-book Project's large collection, http://ohdbks.lib.overdrive.com, with my hometown library card even though I'm in Wisconsin.

Since I use OverDrive audiobooks so often, I noticed some areas that have changed since the "Comparison Points and Decision Points" article by Thomas Peters in this week's reading was written.  These include:

• Collection size: According to http://www.overdrive.com, OverDrive now has 300,000 digital titles.  Granted this includes other formats such as e-books in text format, movies, and music but, nevertheless, this indicates that OverDrive has dramatically increased its collection from the 7,617 titles stated in Peters' article.
• Publishing partners and other content suppliers: The article states that OverDrive has fifty suppliers.  This has also dramatically increased since the time of this article's publication because the news for OverDrive at http://www.overdrive.com reveals that many new publishers have been added.  For example, Simon and Schuster, TantorMedia, and Penguin Group were all added in 2008.
• Single copies, owned versus leased with multiple concurrent users:  Peters states that OverDrive uses the single copies, owned model.  However, in my personal experience, I have found OverDrive to use the opposite model, leased with multiple concurrent users.  For example, the Ohio E-book Project currently has twenty copies of Twilight.  When the book was more popular, they had approximately thirty.  Consequently, it appears that OverDrive is leasing the collection to the library consortium and giving them the option to change the number of copies they lease rather than the library permanently owning copies.
• Playback options:  In my experience, very few DABs on OverDrive allow transfer to CDs.  However, in the "Comparison Points and Decision Points" article, Peters states that "OverDrive has agreements with its content suppliers that allow users of most of its audiobooks to burn the content to CDs."  He later claims that publishers are moving away from allowing CD transfer.  This prediction seems to be correct given that almost none of the audiobooks I've listen to from OverDrive allow this.

I also noticed two aspects of OverDrive that have changed since the article by Peters, Bell, and Sussman titled "An Overview of Digital Audio Books for Libraries."  These aspects are:

•  The "ipod impasse": I always listen to the audiobooks I checkout on my ipod and have not broken DRM or done anything else illegal so clearly this is an option now.  According to http://www.overdrive.com, a relatively recent agreement was reached between OverDrive and Apple in May 2009 allowing OverDrive media to be transferred to ipods.  One thing I've noticed, though, is that when DABs expire, they are not removed from my ipod.  In fact, it is somewhat difficult to remove them and requires connecting my ipod to itunes via my pc and manually deleting them.  Perhaps this is why it took so long for OverDrive and Apple to reach an agreement and also explains why a fair number of DABs do not allow transfer to ipods.
• Playback resume: The article states that "play begins back at the beginning of the book" when returning to an OverDrive audiobook after listening to other music on your MP3 player.  This is no longer the case because when I switch back to an audiobook on my ipod, I am presented with a "resume" option  that returns to the exact point where I stopped listening.

I enjoyed "Digital Accessibility for Blind and Physically Handicapped Individuals: A Panel Discussion" once I finally got it to play after 45 minutes of fighting with RealPlayer.  I thought it was interesting that the National Library Service has a copyright exception for narrating books although they need to somehow prevent the narration from being distributed to people other than the patrons they serve.  This makes a lot of sense because otherwise it might be prohibitively expensive to obtain recorded materials for distribution to the blind and physically handicapped.  Also, this occurred to me as an example of the numerous small exceptions in copyright law that Litman strongly dislikes.

Lastly, I thought an interesting point was raised in the "Think Tank on the Future of E-Books" panel discussion.  Specifically, several of the librarians were wondering how interlibrary loans would work with e-books.  Perhaps licensers will allow e-books to be printed and distributed similar to the ILL clause in many licenses for journal article databases.  However, this would be extremely inefficient and waste a lot of paper so I hope that licensers can devise a way for e-books (and journal articles for that matter) to be sent electronically that also satisfies their concern regarding the potential unauthorized distribution of the material.

Week 10 - Finding Content: Discovery Tools

To begin this week, I read through the Against the Grain special report on pay-per-view.  The articles reminded me of a particular event I witnessed while an undergraduate.  My school had a large number of journal subscriptions and once someone I knew (let's call her Wanda) downloaded and emailed some articles to her friend (let's call him Joe) who did not attend our school.  Joe needed these articles because he was attending a community college that did not provide access to the articles he needed to write his research paper.  Rather than obtaining the articles legally through an interlibrary loan or other means, he asked Wanda to violate the terms of use for her university's subscription since this would allow him to obtain the articles more quickly.  The Against the Grain articles reminded me of this because pay-per-view could be a viable option for the community college.  According to "Pay-Per-Use Article Delivery at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point" by King and Nichols, articles obtained through this method are delivered within 24 hours.  Furthermore, 63.4% of survey respondents rated the speed of document delivery as "very fast."  Length of time until access seemed to be the determining factor for Joe so even if the community college could not afford a particular journal's subscription price, they could still satisfy users like him by offering a pay-per-use program.

 Additionally, I found a section in one of the Against the Grain articles that relates to this week's readings.  Specifically, in the article "Pay-Per-View at the American Institute of Physics: One Scholarly Publisher's Experience with 'The Article Economy'" by Douglas LaFrenier, the need for discoverability is discussed.  He states that when publishers were first selling articles online, around 1998, the AIP was more focused on availability than discoverability.  They were unsure of whether to even allow Google to index their website and thought that, instead, users should "come directly to us for our content."  Now, of course, this sounds completely ridiculous.  Publishers can only hurt their sales by preventing search engines from including their website's contents.  In fact, the first recommendation of the "New Resource Discovery Mechanisms" article from this week's reading is that libraries should "ensure that library resources are well integrated into Google and, indeed, other search engines."  This article was written in 2006 so it is clear how important search engines have become in just eight years.

I thought CrossRef was the most interesting subject from the readings this week.  I had learned about DOIs in LIS 644 but I understand their purpose a lot better now that I've learned about a specific use for them.  With so many different systems needing to reference one piece of material, it makes a lot of sense to have a single identifier for this material which is then connected with a URL in a database.  This allows the URL to be updated in a single location rather than numerous times in each of the systems.  Additionally, I found CrossRef encouraging socially because publishers, who are normally competitors, were able to join together to create and fund CrossRef.  Although CrossRef was discussed in all five readings, I particularly appreciated the diagrams in Brand's "CrossRef" article.  While the other articles outlined in text how CrossRef works, the "Workflow for Reference Linking" and "DOI Resolution" diagrams showed the steps involved much more clearly.

The LibX Firefox extension developed by Virginia Tech intrigued me.  This was mentioned in the "Beyond Open URL: Technologies for Linking Library Resources" article.  The article also included a link to a website showing example toolbars used at various libraries.  Despite the separate listing for each library, the sampling of toolbars I examined seem to all have the same features.  These include a text box to search your library's OPAC directly from the toolbar, a special "cue" on a webpage if the item displayed (ie while browsing Amazon) is available at your library, and the ability to select text on a webpage and search for it as a title, author, or subject in your library's OPAC.  The toolbar has also been extended since the time when "Beyond Open URL: Technologies for Linking Library Resources" was written because, despite the article's claim that LibX is only available for Firefox, the website includes a version for Internet Explorer.  Overall this Firefox add-on looks extremely useful for research and, even though I try to avoid toolbars as a general rule, I'm strongly considering downloading the UW version.

P.S.  Metadata database is my new favorite tongue twister