Final Reflection

As per the syllabus, this final post will be an "assessment of this reflective experience" and answer the following two questions:

What was your most important earlier entry and why has it been important for your personal development?

I feel that week 10's reflection was my more important entry.  That week's topic was "Finding Content: Discovery Tools" and was when I finally understood how OpenURL and FindIt work.  These tools are very important in libraries today as more and more resources are available electronically.  This understanding was even useful at work several times this semester.  I work at the reference/information desk at MERIT and was able to answer questions regarding why links sometimes go to the publisher's main page and sometimes to the individual article.  Furthermore, I realize now that FindIt isn't perfect and an article could be available electronically even if FindIt does not, well, find it.

How has your thinking about ERM changed over the semester?

I've realized how complicated it is to manage electronic resources such that entire software systems are created to aid in this task.  Prior to this semester, I had not thought much about electronic resource management and did not know that positions devoted entirely to this task existed.  When I used electronic resources as an undergraduate, I mostly took them for granted and did not think about the many difficulties involved in providing electronic resources for patrons. These include the fact that licenses must be negotiated including planning for perpetual access, resources must be linked so that patrons can easily find content with tools such as FindIt, and copyright related policies must be written to help prevent situations such as the Georgia case.  I am not sure if I am ready (or interested) in taking an electronic resource management position as my first professional position, but I feel prepared after taking this class to possibly work in this field in the future.

Week 13 - Perpetual Access

Notes again this week in preparation for the quiz:

"Portico: An Electronic Archiving Service" presentation by Eileen Fenton

• Provides an archive for electronic academic journals
• Started by JSTOR in 2005
• Separate from JSTOR so that it can preserve both JSTOR journals and others
• Not-for-profit
• Works to save "intellectual content" not "look and feel" on publisher's website
• Normalizes source file to an archival format
• One article may have 100 files of images in various qualities, text, etc.
• Access provided campus wide and remotely for libraries giving financial support
• Cost is based on total money spent on collection per year by a particular library
• Discounts used as incentive to provide support early (2006 and 2007)
• Publishers also pay for right to supply content
• Libraries get access to entire archive regardless of their individual journal subscriptions
• Journal issues only available on Portico when not available from publisher or other sources
• Portico can also provide perpetual access for an institution when it cancels a subscription
• Shared archive saves money vs. each library keeping own collection

"A Social Model for Archiving Digital Serials: LOCKSS" by Michael Seadle

• Open source software model instead of one not-for-profit institution
• Members contribute financially to support core programmers
• Issues in digital preservation
• Must be able to trust technology
• Need to preserve integrity and context of object
• Authenticity decided by comparing copies of "same" item and determining which copy is the most common
• Developed at Stanford
• 100 servers operating (2006)
• LOCKSS Technology
• Archive exact copy rather than normalized format
• Bitstream archiving seems to allow for migration to new file formats
• Each version of a journal kept as a separate object
• Need 6 or more copies to guarantee integrity
• Working towards metadata plugin with JHOVE, OAI, etc.
• Need to get permission from publishers before archiving contents
• Especially important to archive small publishers whose work is more likely to be lost

 "Preservation Concerns in the E-Resource Environment" by Jennifer Watson

• Accreditation for some programs now requires "access to information" not a physical library
• Why libraries compromise desire for perpetual access
• Patron pressure - More important to serve patrons than refuse licenses based on perpetual access
• Most content available in print (for now)
• Financial pressure
• Can't afford both digital and print copies
• Can't afford to hire staff to negotiate perpetual access
• Some publishers charge an access fee for perpetual access
• Difficult to store digital material because of large file sizes and obsolescence/migration
• Difficult to store online material
• Constantly changing
• Large volume of content
• Important to store online reference materials for historical research
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation- 3rd Parties
• JSTOR - Journal Storage
• subscription service that provides access to back issues after an embargo period
• LOCKSS - not normalizing data may lead to data becoming obsolete
• serve data during any outage of publisher's website
• Portico - assumes libraries do not want to manage long-term storage (ie LOCKSS)
• Does not accept post-publication changes
• Google Book Search
• PubMed Central - provides online life sciences journal content for free and makes backup copy in case of failure at publisher's website
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation - Libraries
• Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) member libraries purchase a single print copy of journal titles to preserve in CIC facilities
• Institutional repositories - version discrepancies for articles and lack of interest from authors
• National Library of the Netherlands takes responsibility for the country's digital preservation
• Also provides access to any licensee in the event the publisher cannot (calamities, bankruptcy)
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation - Publishers
• Many sign up with LOCKSS, Portico, JSTOR, and other initiatives mentioned above
• Publisher preservation initiatives are unreliable since publishers are bought, go out of business, and are profit motivated
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation - Governments
• Some require copy of all publications to be submitted to a legal repository
• Extend this legislation to e-resources
• Initiatives in e-resource preservation - Foundations
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Wellcome Trust provide funding

"From Dark Archive to Open Access: CLOCKSS Trigger Event Lessons" by Victoria Reich

• Controlled LOCKSS
• Similar trigger events as Portico
• Unlike Portico, triggered content is Open Access - provided to everyone for free
• Uses Creative Commons license
• Three volumes of Graft and Auto/Biography have been triggered
• 75% of use not identifiably academic
• Overall low use
• CrossRef is making CrossRef Multiple Resolution for triggered content
• Shows all archives where content is present

"Perpetual Access to Electronic Journals: A Survey of One Academic Research Library's Licenses" by J. Stemper and S. Barribeau

• Print retention projects - ensure that someone somewhere still has a complete run of a journal's print copy
• ex: CIC above
• Significant monetary investment, document delivery copyright issues, publishers may abandon print altogether
• Previous study in 2001 found that 22 out of 44 licenses granted perpetual access and 9 charged for this
• Previous ARL survey found that 44% were going e-only in 2003 but 85.4% did not see lack of perpetual access as a deal breaker
• Previous study by the authors found that 76% ask journal publishers for perpetual access but 76% still sign a license without assurance of such access
• Libraries seem not to take publishers up on their offer of LOCKSS access
• Libraries could use local data loading (ie CDs or LOCKSS) for perpetual access but format may become obsolete and this requires infrastructure and staffing costs
• Study of University of Minnesota licenses regarding perpetual access
• 64% grant perpetual access
• 72% of commercial and 56% of society publishers
• Print is an add-on to electronic now instead of the reverse
• Some licenses outright state no perpetual access or even require all downloaded copies to be deleted at the end of the subscription
• Some have a specific expiration parameter (5 years, 10 years, etc.)
• Aggregators rarely provide for continued access since their title lists and coverage frequently changes
• Of those granting perpetual access, 43.8% charge for this
• Roughly equal percentage of commercial and society publishers
• Typically paid to publisher but sometimes third party
• Fee is generally vague but occasionally specific (ie 10% of subscription cost)
• JSTOR does not grant perpetual access
• Continued access through publisher's own server and local data loading offered in equal numbers of licenses
• Many society publishers (71.4%) allow local data loading vs. 38.9% of commercial publishers
• Some specify that a third party will provide access
• 32% of studied publishers are partners with LOCKSS
• 6% of studied publishers are partners with Portico
• Only 1 publisher is a partner of both
• Some allow library to choose who will provide access
• Some licenses are intentionally vague regarding perpetual access
• Society publishers are not more likely to provide perpetual access than commercial publishers
• Cannot assume that library can safely cancel print version of journal included in a full-text aggregator database and retain access
• Libraries should consider making lack of perpetual access a deal breaker
• University of Maryland and University of California-Berkeley set precedent for this
• Consortia have enough economic leverage to possibly achieve this
• Libraries should budget for perpetual access
• JSTOR, Portico, publisher's back files, etc.
• Libraries should ask legal counsel whether perpetual access clause can stand up in court
• Need to include wording about publisher mergers

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.