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

Week 9 - Data Standards and Silos

First of all, "Library Standards and E-Resource Management: A Survey of Current Initiatives and Standards Efforts" and "Standards for the Management of Electronic Resources" relate directly to my post last week.  Both of these articles include great information on the acronyms and phrases I learned then while also focusing on data standards. For example, the first article includes a short definition I particularly like of COUNTER: "a collaboration between libraries, publishers, and content aggregators focused on creating guidelines that will lead to consistent, comparable, and credible usage statistics."  After my exercise in definitions last week and reading these articles this week, I feel confident in my understanding of ERM terms.

I found some of the statistics in Carpenter's "Improving Information Distribution Through Standards" presentation especially interesting.  First, he states that the average academic research library has approximately 40,000 serials.  I knew that electronic resource management systems were important but this particular statistic makes it extremely clear why libraries need good ways to manage the license terms, publisher, cost and other metrics regarding their serials.  When subscribing to such a large number of serials, keeping track of all of this information could easily get overwhelming.  Second, I learned that only 25% of librarians' data analysis time is actually spent analyzing.  The rest is spent primarily in obtaining and organizing the data for analysis.  This statistic emphasizes the importance of SUSHI.  Specifically, SUSHI will help librarians spend less time performing these menial tasks and more time doing actual analysis.

Speaking of analysis, I am curious about several aspects of the usage bibliometrics purposed in "Counter: Current Developments and Future Plans."  Specifically, I am wondering about the impact of calculating usage statistics for individual articles.  Might this have an effect on the author?  Would universities evaluate their faculty partially based on the usage statistics of their articles rather than relying only on metrics such as the number of times an article is cited?  Also, regarding the journal usage factor, I wonder how an article that has only an abstract in a database could be included in this calculation.  Is there any way of knowing if the researcher actually obtained the print version of the article?  Perhaps if the researcher clicked the button to search his or her local library's catalog that could be counted as a use.

Week 8 - Electronic Resource Management Systems: Vendors and Functionalities

In this week's readings, I noticed that ERMS and those who study them seem to use quite a few unique vocabulary words.  For my own clarification, the following are the most important acronyms or phrases I wasn't familiar with and their definitions:

• ONIX - ONline Information eXchange
• According to Wikipedia's citation from www.editeur.org, this is basically an XML schema for book product information 
• PAMS -  Public Access Management Services
• From reading "ERM Systems: Background, Selection and Implementation" it seems that these are essentially ERM systems offered by third party for-profit organizations
• MARC 856 field
• The guide for this field written by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/marc/856guide.html) states that this field is used for "electronic location and access information to an electronic resource," ie: a URL, DOI, or handle
• The "Panorama of Electronic Resource Management Systems" chapter as well as quite a few webpages (for example: http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/marc-856-i-dont-like-you/) seem to indicate that this field is not an effective way to maintain location and access information
• COUNTER - Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources
• An "international set of standards and protocols governing the recording and exchange of online usage data" according to COUNTER's official website (http://www.projectcounter.org/)
• From the website, it seems that COUNTER is aimed at aiding libraries and licensees by creating standards for usage reports and listing which vendors are compliant with them
•  SUSHI - Standardized Usage Statistics Harvest Initiative
• According to "Project COUNTER and SUSHI: An Overview," a report on www.niso.org, SUSHI improves COUNTER by automating the process of gathering and managing usage data from a large number of providers
  

One thing I would like to see after finishing this week's readings is a survey of libraries' ERMS purchases.  The articles were excellent in explaining the different types of ERMS available as well as their advantages and disadvantages.  However, I would like to know what percentage of libraries are using each type of company (ILS, PAMS, Subscription Agent, etc.), what percentage make their own ERMS, and what percentage use the same company for their ERMS and ILS.  I haven't been able to find an article on this in LISTA, Library Lit, LISA or a simple Google search so perhaps no one has done a survey like this.

On a somewhat unrelated note, at MERIT yesterday a patron asked about emailing a particular article to their colleague in the Department of Education.  The article happened to be from a journal published by SAGE so I was able to tell him that yes, a copy can be distributed to a single colleague who is also an authorized user.

Week 7: Technological Protection Measures

Overall I thought the "Technologies Employed to Control Access to or Use of Digital Cultural Collections: Controlled Online Collections" article revealed some notable survey results.  For instance, the fact that only 44% of libraries use Network ID based Authentication seems to indicate that they are purposely lenient regarding who uses their "digital cultural materials."  81.7% of the libraries were academic libraries and, in my experience, it seems that all universities and colleges have some method of Network ID based Authentication in place to prevent unauthorized users from accessing library databases, course reserves, and other systems.  As a result, it seems that academic libraries are purposely not using this system for their "digital cultural materials" probably because they want the public to have access.

However, the survey reported in "Technologies Employed to Control Access to or Use of Digital Cultural Collections: Controlled Online Collections" has a couple of weaknesses revealed by the statements "The lower response rate for the technology questions may stem from respondents' lack of technical knowledge to easily answer these question sets. Or, it may be that respondents are not using the systems and tools listed in the survey." This quote refers to the fact that some respondents answered questions such as those regarding motivations for controlling access but did not answer one or both of the questions about systems use and tools use.  I feel that options for "Not Sure" and "None" should have added to the systems and tools use questions.  This would remove some of the ambiguity resulting from the lower response rate for these questions and, additionally, allow for comparison between libraries, museums, and archives of the percentage of institutions not using systems or tools for controlling access.

I've actually seen one-time passwords in use as described in "Authentication and Authorization."  My boyfriend worked for Livermore National Labs last summer and continues to do some work for them long distance this year.  Livermore is extremely careful about security because they do nuclear research.  They use a variant of one-time passwords in which a string of characters that changes every 9 seconds is appended to the user's password.  Although the article says the "small device" that calculates and displays the current string of characters is "the size of a credit card," his is actually smaller and more like the size of a flash drive.  I think this method of authentication strikes a good balance between convenience and security since carrying something the size of a flash drive is not difficult yet it prevents passwords from being easily guessed and prevents users from sharing passwords.

After reading "Every Library's Nightmare? Digital Rights Management and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources" I decided to look at an article published within a SAGE Journal to compare its restrictions with those in the Terms of Use I reviewed last week.  The first SAGE journal I found that UW-Madison licenses full text online for is American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and other Dementias.  Looking through the articles in this journal, I noticed that SAGE actually uses very few soft or hard restrictions.  Each article opens in a standard pdf window with options to save and print.  Furthermore, a tool bar along the right side of the screen lists "Services" including "Email this Article to a colleague."  A quick test of this tool reveals that the email may be sent to anyone and is not restricted to authorized users.  This is especially interesting since the Terms of Use restrict distribution to "other Authorized Users within the institution for their personal use."  Another of the "Services" of note is one that allows a user to "Request Permissions."  This sends the user to a form for obtaining a "quick price estimate" for making photocopies, reuse in a coursepack/library reserve, and other reuses or republications.  Filling out the form for a subscriber requesting reuse in a coursepack/library reserve shows a complete agreement with the Terms of Use because an announcement is displayed that use in a coursepack or electronic reserve is included in the Institutional subscription.

Week 6: Distance Education and TEACH Act

The "ARL Issue Brief: Streaming of Films for Educational Purposes" caused some confusion for me regarding fair use.  The authors refer to "recent judicial decision" that ruled in favor of fair use regarding digital technologies.  At the end of the discussion of these court cases, they state "The courts nonetheless found these uses fair because the defendants repurposed and recontextualized the works."  This left me confused because as far as I knew, fair use only involved four factors - purpose of the use, nature of the work, amount used, and effect on the market. 

After a little searching, I found an article by Troy Hicks for the Conference on College Composition and Communication on "Transforming Our Understanding of Copyright and Fair Use."  The most relevant section clarifies "If a copyrighted work is simply retransmitted, then it is a violation of copyright law. But, if the user 'transforms' the material in some way, repurposing it in a new media composition, for instance, then fair use likely applies."  This makes sense because a "transformed" work is less likely to have an effect on the market for the original work.  Furthermore, Russell in chapter two of Complete Copyright lists "transformative or productive use" as a factor under Purpose that favors fair use.  So repurposing or recontextualizing a work does fall under the four factors after all.

The first thing I noticed in Lipinski's article is that he was a visiting professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.  If it is at all relevant to our discussion on distance education, it would be neat to hear about his experiences there in class this Friday.

Since his article focuses on distance classes and I've only ever taken face-to-face classes, I have not experienced the effects of the TEACH Act personally.  However, I was surprised to discover that performances or displays for "recreation or entertainment" are not allowed in face-to-face as well as distance classes.  My teachers K-12 showed movies solely for that purpose routinely at the end of each semester.  At first it seems strange that they all disregarded this rule but, on the other hand, who would have any motive for enforcing it? 

For example, in middle school we watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas more times than I can remember each December (probably because of its convenient length and G rating).  We never once discussed, wrote papers, or otherwise integrated it into the curriculum so the viewing was solely for entertainment.  The copyright holder wants to sell as many copies as possible so he/she has no interest in telling a school they can't purchase a non-educational movie.  The teachers and students both enjoy the lack of effort involved in spending a class period watching a movie so they have no motivation to complain.  The only potential enforcers could be school administrators or parents looking to improve the students' education but, in my experience, neither seem to raise the issue.  Since this law is routinely broken and no one seems to have an interest in enforcing it, I wonder why it exists at all.