TSLL TechScans

Marshall Breeding's 2025 Library Systems Report

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Wed, 14 May 2025 19:53:00 +0000

On May 1, Marshall Breeding released the 2025 Library Systems Report. For decades, this report has summarized the state of the library systems market, highlighting changes and trends. Over the past several years, the key trend has been consolidation of the marketplace as larger companies and investment firms have acquired smaller system vendors to expand customer bases and absorb technological innovations into their existing suite of offerings.

This year, however, the dominating trend seems to be stability. As Breeding points out, private equity firms have largely cashed out of the market, selling their products to larger, more stable companies that are interested in long-term development and growth over fast profits. Despite that, Breeding predicts at least some mergers in the next few years, especially as the smaller privately-held companies reach a point where founders and generational leadership wind down. Breeding also predicts acquisitions of companies that have developed technologies outside of libraries that library systems vendors wish to incorporate in their next-generation offerings.

Most of the new technologies being developed for inclusion in library systems, as Breeding points out, are related to AI. Examples include:

Alma Specto: A digital collections management platform slated for release by early 2026 that Ex Libris is developing in partnership with other institutions.
Primo Research Assistant: Ex Libris' discovery add-on that can combine results from their Central Discovery Index with AI-generated summaries and suggestions.
Natural Language Search and AI Insights: EBSCO's AI-assisted search interface and summary tools have completed extensive beta testing and are expected to be rolled out to all EBSCO customers by the end of the year.

Despite acknowledging the growing inclusion of AI in library systems, both in collections management and discovery, and admitting that AI tools could supplant existing technologies and give the competitive edge to the companies with the best implementations, Breeding concludes this year's report with a word of caution about these tools:

"Libraries will have to carefully parse which technologies can amplify their work and which may do harm. They are already working closely with vendors to ensure that products and services with AI features deliver appropriate results. Having the ability to automatically generate descriptive metadata at a speed and scale not previously imagined is an attractive prospect, but these tools must be accurate."

That is an astute point. AI is still prone to "hallucinations" and many users still misunderstand how AI works and blindly trust the results without double-checking, to their potential peril. A recent high profile story about a law firm that faced a $31,000 sanction for allowing hallucinations to slip into their filings demonstrates this point. It was not an isolated incident as other recent stories show.

Tariffs and Library Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 22:23:00 +0000

Anyone whose job involves dealing with library technology, either paying for it or maintaining it, has likely given some thoughts to the president-elect's vow to impose tariffs on imported goods. The proposed tariffs are more sweeping than he was able to accomplish in his first term. The most repeated promises are a 60%-110% tariff on Chinese goods, and a tax of between 10% and 20% on every imported product. In a report published just before the election by the Consumer Technology Association, the proposed tariffs could lead to the following price increases for some of the technology that libraries often buy.

45% for laptops and tablets
31.2% for monitors
6.2% for desktop computers
10.9% for computer accessories, such as speakers, headphones, printers, and scanners

Of course, specific impacts on individual libraries could vary greatly based on the institution's purchasing power and contracts with suppliers. It seems likely, though, that most libraries would see increases, with smaller libraries being hit proportionally harder. It's also conceivable that library resource providers, print and electronic, could increase prices to offset their own growing technology costs.

There are some obvious things libraries could do now to mitigate these likely increases to their technology costs.

Buy now, before the tariffs have a chance to go into effect. If resources are available, buy new or upgraded technology now to avoid paying more later.
Negotiate with suppliers. If possible, speak to vendor representatives about extending contracts or agreements at current, or marginally higher, costs to avoid larger increases in the coming years. If applicable, make sure any maintenance contracts with vendors are up to date to cover repairs and avoid having to purchase replacement devices.
Make do with current technology. Investigate strategies to increase the life of the technology already bought and paid for. Work with the institution's IT professionals to strategize how to make current devices run better and last longer. These recent articles offer some easy tips on how to extend the life of devices:

AI Assistants in Discovery Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:58:00 +0000

Our University library recently announced a pretty substantial upgrade to the Primo discovery service and since the College of Law library shares that system, we’re along for the ride. One of the new features that caught my eye is the Primo Research Assistant, a generative AI-powered tool that promises to make library research and discovery easier for the growing number of users who are getting accustomed to asking natural language questions in other AI platforms. Rolling out later this year, the Primo Research Assistant “provides immediate answers to natural language queries and offers visibility into sources and references, so libraries can empower users with a seamless discovery experience, grounded in trusted content, and advance institutional scholarly goals,” according to the announcement posted on the ExLibris blog earlier this summer.

The blog post offers a quick overview of how to use Primo Research Assistant and what it can do for users. When a library user enters a search in the usual Primo interface, they will get the option to engage with the Research Assistant. The Research Assistant interface will give the user prompts and options on furthering their research. As the user refines their query, the Research Assistant will provide summaries based on available library resources, with links to full-text resources. ExLibris plans to add new features as AI continues to evolve it’s capabilities.

Other discovery services are planning to integrate generative AI into their products, if they haven’t done so already. ProQuest, another company under the Clarivate umbrella with ExLibris, this summer announced further developments in its own ProQuest Research Assistant, which had been in beta-release since February. Indeed, Clarivate is integrating this type of AI-powered research assistance in many of its products. Outside of Clarivate, other companies are making AI assistants a bigger part of their discovery products. For example, OCLC recently added AI-generated book recommendations to its WorldCat discovery service. A recent post on Library Journal by Matt Enis, AI on the Horizon, is a good overview of how many library technology companies have integrated generative AI into their products, both internal-facing and public-facing.

Digital POWRR Institute

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Fri, 24 May 2024 19:17:00 +0000

Jaime Valenzuela is the Archivist and Scholarly Communications Lead at the Cracchiolo Law Library at the University of Arizona. In this guest post, he writes about his recent experience attending the Digital POWRR Institute on building digital collections and how it applies to his work in an academic law library.

I am a solo archivist at the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library and my responsibilities include documenting the life of the law school. Preservation is included in that responsibility so that others may access that life in its many forms in the future. Much of that life is now being produced or captured digitally. For a law library fortunate enough to find itself responsible for documenting its history, digital preservation is a key piece of responsible stewardship.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend the Digital POWRR (Preserving digital Objects With Restricted Resources) Institute at the University of Arizona. The Institute is designed for librarians and archivists to build skills for curating and preserving digital collections under the tutelage of Digital POWRR project staff. Topics of lecture and discussion included digital preservation policy, storage solutions, hardware obsolescence, and integrity.

One of the best aspects of the Institute was the “Walk the Workflow” demonstration of a digital preservation tool called DataAccessioner. This open-source tool is designed to create a copy of the files that live on external media to a new file location such as a shared network drive. Important features of DataAccessioner include the ability to enter descriptive metadata following the Dublin Core metadata schema and the creation of checksums of the file being migrated from one location to another.

To actively participate in the demonstration, I downloaded and installed the latest version of OpenJDK (a freely available version of java) and a legacy version of DataAccessioner to my personal laptop. For tool testing purposes, I choose to use my personal laptop to bypass any administrative privileges associated with my institutionally owned work laptop. With software installed, I used pre-selected files shared with all Institute participants to use during a live end-to-end demonstration of the workflow. The workflow was also distributed physically allowing for a secondary form of instruction and to serve as documentation for use in the future. Screenshots were included in the documentation, and the files that participants used were the same files used in the demonstration. With the help of instructors, I was able to successfully create duplicate copies of the material I worked with. Having the opportunity to test drive a tool such as DataAccessioner under the guidance of instructors was the highlight of my Digital POWRR experience.

Another great take away from the Institute is the “POWRR Plan.” The POWRR Plan is a personalized and actionable preservation plan that attendees work on in consultation with POWRR instructors to take home to their institutions allowing attendees to use some of their new found knowledge and take action. The plans include both short and long term goals that span form one month to twelve.

One of my short term goals within my POWRR Plan was to properly document the digital objects under my stewardship. Using an existing internal LibGuide created for the purposes of documenting library workflows, I included a section titled “Digital Material: What it is and Where is it Stored?” One of my long-term goals is to create a statement on preserving digital collections at my law library. Having such a statement will help ensure that digital preservation is a part of my law library’s core philosophy within archives and special collections.

Non-Library Technology Solutions to Library Problems

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 19:58:00 +0000

When looking for technology to address a library problem, I was recently reminded of the tendency to look for answers in old, familiar places. However, that doesn’t always lead to a good solution to the problem at hand. Sometimes, the best answer to a library problem can be found in a different area entirely.

While reviewing safety practices following a few significant security incidents on campus, access services staff identified a need for a way to call other staff for assistance. In situations where it would be unwise to step away from the service desk to get someone from their office to assist, there was no good way to summon that help. These situations would include demanding patrons, suspicious behavior, or other activity that wouldn’t warrant calling campus police but should not be left for one person to deal with on their own.

In trying to find a way to address this need, existing library technology infrastructure was the obvious place to look first. The landline phones were considered but dismissed because they are not discreet to use and it’s not always readily known who is in their office and available to go to the desk. The service desk is also equipped with a “panic button” but that was ruled out quickly as well since it is connected directly to campus police. Its intended use is for more urgent, more serious situations.

The first step in expanding our thinking to find a solution was, pretty obviously, to look at devices specifically designed for security. However, those devices also proved to be a sledgehammer instead of the scalpel we were looking for. They were also prohibitively expensive.

Much like conducting a reference interview, we had to get past the question being asked and determine what the real need was. In this case, it was simply a way to alert others that assistance was needed. With that in focus, our head of access services identified a solution that works for us: a medical call button.

Technically designed as a way for people with mobility problems to call for assistance and avoid risking a fall, this device also answered our need. The small call button is mounted under the service counter and can be reached easily and discreetly. When pressed, it activates a quiet yet still noticeable chime in the office suite area behind the public service desk. It chimes until someone responds and resets it.

This device perfectly met our needs. Access services staff now have a way to call for assistance if necessary and the peace of mind knowing that help is easy to summon. As an added benefit, this medical device was significantly more affordable than alarms designed and marketed as security devices.

Sometimes, a library problem can best be addressed by technology that wasn’t specifically designed for libraries. This situation was a good reminder to look beyond the familiar for solutions.

GIS and Land Grant Research: The Evolving Role of Technology in Law Librarianship

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 18:04:00 +0000

Samantha Ginsburg, Law Library Fellow at the University of Arizona's Cracchiolo Law Library, has been participating in a large project to gather data about the University's land-grant status and its impacts on Indigenous communities. She has authored this guest post to share her experience using GIS systems to present this data in a clear, visual way. Applying GIS in this innovative way is a first for the library and can serve as a model for others.

In the last year, the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library undertook a significant task: researching and realizing the University of Arizona’s land-grant history and its impact on the state’s Indigenous peoples. The goal was to convey this information in an informative, transparent, and interactive manner. Recognizing that the essence of the land-grant concept revolves around land itself, our team made a deliberate decision to harness the power of maps and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as the most effective means of presenting our research. Previously, I had limited experience using GIS from undergraduate coursework and infrequently encountered geospatial applications in my professional role as a criminal paralegal. This endeavor demanded a level of skill beyond what I was capable of. Fortunately, my supervisor, Cas Laskowski, is a mapping expert in addition to serving as our Technology & Empirical Librarian. We were able to navigate this ambitious project together, and as a result, I was able to continue learning and gain a deeper understanding of GIS technology. Ultimately, it became the perfect opportunity to see the practical application of how geospatial data could be used in an academic law library environment.

To provide some additional context, this project was in response to the compelling article by High Country News (HCN) titled “Land-Grab Universities” and their subsequent investigation into land-grant universities across the United States. Using the HCN data as a starting point, we realized the uniqueness of Arizona’s land-grant history and that the quantity of land transferred to the state for purposes of higher education surpassed our original assumptions. While some tracts have been sold or swapped over time, most of the land remains managed in trust by the AZ State Land Department. I used the Bureau of Land Management’s General Land Office Records (BLM GLO) Automation web site to locate and verify the parcels that were periodically selected in the years following Arizona’s statehood. I was able to identify most of the land parcels throughout the state and the authority under which they were granted. Next, I created a data set from the BLM Control Document Index records drawn from the state selection list. Once I completed “data scraping,” reformatting, and cleaning the BLM land data into our dataset, Cas turned the data into a shapefile (a geospatial vector data file format).

We used ArcGIS, a powerful GIS software developed by Esri, to capture and manage our geospatial data. Additionally, creating the maps based on the BLM data required advanced skills and techniques that went beyond the functionalities of the software. For instance, converting raw tabular data into a shapefile that would display geospatial information demanded the use of a computer programming language. To achieve this, Cas crafted a Python script enabling ArcGIS to read and interpret the data accurately and present a geospatial representation on-screen. Throughout the process, we collaborated closely addressing any errors or challenges that arose. Cas generously shared her expertise, teaching me invaluable troubleshooting techniques applicable to both coding and data engineering. Once the maps were created, we seamlessly integrated them into ArcGIS StoryMaps, another product offered by Esri. StoryMaps is a web-based program that allows its users to create and feature maps alongside engaging narratives and other multimedia content. Our StoryMap, titled University of Arizona Land-Grant Project: Tracking the History of Land-Grant Enrichment at the University of Arizona, is now available to view through the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library’s Special Projects’ page.

The impact of leveraging geospatial data goes far beyond historical projects like this one. Such technology within an academic law library setting can have profound benefits for law students and faculty. In subject areas such as real and property law, water and environmental issues, and particularly indigenous law, where border matters and sovereignty are pressing topics, geospatial data can play a pivotal role. The use of geospatial technologies revolutionizes a traditionally paper-heavy profession, ushering in a new era of interdisciplinary work. As a Law Library Fellow, essentially a novice librarian in training, I had the incredible opportunity to use our library resources and now understand the implications of what data-driven librarianship can do. Law libraries, by teaching and supporting law students in technologies like GIS, can foster significant advancements within the legal profession and shape a more dynamic and progressive future.

-Samantha Ginsburg

Thinking about the Future of Integrated Library Systems

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Thu, 18 May 2023 22:46:00 +0000

Two significant pieces regarding the current state and possible future of integrated library systems (ILS) were recently released. Taken together, these pieces show somewhat of a shift in the trajectory of ILS development. One on hand, the long trend of consolidation and shrinkage in the number of available systems continues, although at a slower rate since the major players have already consolidated. On the other hand, there are signs of cracks at the base as some libraries explore whether one integrated system can ever meet all their business and service needs and whether they want to be constrained by the development schedules of the major system vendors.

The first recent piece to discuss these trends is from Marshall Breeding. His 2023 Library Systems Report was published on May 1. This long-running, always useful report, is a thorough documentation of the current library system marketplace and well-informed discussion about potential future developments. There are no real surprises in this year’s report. As Breeding states, proprietary systems from large vendors continue to dominate the market. But the report demonstrates that a growing number of libraries are choosing open source systems when they migrate from older systems. Currently in the U.S., approximately 10% of academic libraries and 17% of public libraries use an open source system but that number is expected to grow as the historic barriers to these systems are dismantled. Long periods of development for these systems have finally got them to a place where functionality and customization options rival those of proprietary systems. The big development in this area, as detailed in the report, is how EBSCO’s support of the development of the open source system FOLIO is finally bearing fruit as a growing number of large libraries and consortia are migrating to FOLIO hosted by EBSCO. This gives them the flexibility of an open source system without the still-costly overhead of maintaining one.

Meanwhile, a two-part post by Andreas Mace at Scholarly Kitchen, Do Libraries Still Dream Unified Dreams, approaches the questions of ILS flexibility and customization from a different angle. It begins by posing the question, can any one system ever perfectly meet a library’s needs? For decades, the idea of one system running all functions has been the ideal that librarians and ILS vendors have tried to achieve. Lately, as demonstrated in the 2023 Library Systems Report, the focus has been on developing open source systems with flexibility and interoperability to meet that goal. What Mace describes in the second part of his post is a modular approach using a suite of integrated platforms; one for interlibrary loan, one for circulation, one for acquisitions, etc., all united seamlessly by open APIs and exchange-ready data standards. This modular approach would potentially allow libraries to more fully develop and customize the modules that are most crucial to their unique business practices without being tied to a development schedule for a larger integrated system.

A takeaway from reading both these pieces in conjunction is that, after years of seeing ILS development dictated by the contracting number of vendors in the marketplace, change and a different approach may be on the horizon. Going forward, ILS development may depend more on the growth of open source solutions, especially smaller scale platforms that can be tied together as modules, creating the “perfect” ILS for each individual library.

AI Cataloging and Technical Services

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 19:10:00 +0000

There has been a lot of discussion lately about artificial intelligence (AI) and the law and legal education. My colleague Sarah Gotschall has written extensively about various facets of the intersection of law and AI, asking if AI can make legal practice less stressful; what does AI think a law librarian looks like; and even getting AI to wax poetical about the state of the profession.

Most of the AI discussion I've read has centered on its impact on education and the practice of law. Those areas are significant but outside of the kind of law library work I and my department does. I decided to see how AI would fare at doing traditional Technical Services work. To that end, I asked ChatGPT to do a fairly simple task: catalog a recently purchased book for our collection.

There seemed to be some confusion about the difference between a bibliographic record and a citation. To ChatGPT's credit, it did give me two examples when I only asked for one, albeit two wrong examples. I clarified the question and asked for a bibliographic record in MARC format.

To my surprise, ChatGPT began constructing a line by line MARC record before my eyes. I was incredibly impressed and my mind began reeling with questions about the implications for human catalogers. MARC was developed back in the day to be machine readable so it made sense that something as seemingly sophisticated at ChatGPT would have already assimilated it and become proficient at using it. But then I began to wonder if ChatGPT had access to OCLC and was just copying the OCLC record. Still, pretty impressive since copy cataloging is the vast bulk of what our human cataloger does in this library.

But then I took a closer look at the record. I noticed the date of publication seemed off. Then I realized the publisher was wrong. The record includes ISBN numbers that don't seem to exist. It also includes an OCLC number that does not exist. To ChatGPT's credit, it did warn me that the record might need some editing. On the plus side, some of the subject headings are accurate and the call number is in the ballpark.

My library does require correct publication information. Doing a little research on this book, it seems to have grown out the author's previous article on the topic. Maybe ChatGPT was confused by the publication history but I couldn't find any connection between this work and New York University Press. Upon further questioning, ChatGPT said it pulled the information about this book from the LC Catalog. However, LC has the correct publication data. So while at first look, this looks like a good record for this title, it seems to be a fabricated mix of true and untrue elements, with AI filling in gaps. Imagine if human catalogers did the same.

Speaking of AI making something out of nothing, I also experimented with DallE. My colleague had previously asked it to generate images of law librarians. I got more specific and asked for an image of "Technical Services librarians celebrating a successful reorganization of their department."

This AI seems to have a very specific idea of what a Technical Services librarian looks like. Biases in AI generated art have been well-documented and I think we can see a little of that in these examples. After these two experiments, I reached the same conclusion as my colleague: AI is still very much a work in progress. I'm not quite ready to worry about AI taking Technical Services librarian jobs.

Making your invisible collection visible with Library Search by PowerNotes

noreply@blogger.com (Keelan Weber) — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 14:22:00 +0000

Getting our patrons to use our online catalogs can be a challenge, making much of our collections invisible. This summer, PowerNotes unveiled the new “Library Search” feature (conceived by Richard Leiter). When the patron enables the Library Search feature and performs a search in Google or Google Scholar, a PowerNotes box will show the top ten results from the patron's library on the same page along with the Google search results. The library results and the “see all results” link takes the user straight to their library’s catalog. This feature enables libraries to highlight their holdings without having to do anything beyond instructing patrons to turn on the feature in their PowerNotes extension.

Along with making our collections more visible, the feature allows libraries to meet the users where they are (i.e., Google) and provide them with authoritative library resources directly from our catalogs.

How it works:

The Library Search feature currently works with the following discovery services: ExLibris Primo, ExLibris Summon, EBSCO EDS, and more coming soon. PowerNotes uses a unique read-only API key generated by the institution (for EBSCO EDS the API credentials are generated by EBSCO). Only authenticated users in our institution can use this feature. Currently the PowerNotes browser extension is the only way to use the Library Search feature and it is only compatible with Chrome and Firefox browsers.

Users must have the PowerNotes extension enabled for the search integration to run. Users can enable the Library Search feature and disable for 24 hours or disable indefinitely.

Marshall Breeding's 2022 Library Systems Report

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Fri, 20 May 2022 22:16:00 +0000

Since 2002, Marshall Breeding has released an annual Library Systems Report, a "state of the nation" report on the library technologies market. Thanks to his efforts, the history of this industry over the last 20 years is well documented. The recently released 2022 Library Systems Report documents the impact the pandemic continues to have on the library systems marketplace. In short, it's a sudden acceleration of trends that have been growing for years, especially the trend of consolidation.

While much of the Library Systems Report is geared toward libraries of other types, this year's report does contain significant information for law libraries, particularly academic law libraries. Most notable is an examination of the May, 2021 acquisition of ProQuest by Clarivate. As Breeding puts it, this acquisition, "brings one of the largest library-facing companies into the broader industry of scholarly communications and research."

Implications for scholarly communication aside, with two of the largest library services platform vendors, Ex Libris and Innovative, now also under the Clarivate umbrella, libraries seeking to migrate could end up with fewer choices. For the time being, Innovative and Ex Libris operate independently from one another but as Breeding's report shows, the executive structures of all the companies involved have already been streamlined.

The 2022 Library Systems report also contains a few brief updates on companies that market to law firm and other special libraries. There is an update on Lucidea and its acquisition of smaller companies and a quick blurb about developments at CyberTools.

Always remarkable for its thoroughness, the Library Systems Report is especially important this year. As consolidations move beyond competing, similar-sized companies with similar products to much larger corporations acquiring companies with product portfolios encompassing every area of knowledge and resource management, there are bound to be ramifications for all types of libraries.

Pandemic Disruptions to Library Technologies

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 23:46:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic has been disrupting library operations and services for close to two years. In a previous entry, I wrote about disruptions to Technical Services workflows at my library. This time, I’m looking back on how the pandemic has disrupted our technological infrastructure and the changes we made to compensate.

First and foremost were the changes to our communications technology. Long reliant on email for most written communications, we had to find ways to replace the kinds of verbal conversations made impossible by the move to working from home. Enter Zoom and Teams. Almost overnight, we had to become proficient at video conferencing and screen sharing. We eventually settled on Zoom over Teams for large group meetings, finding that Teams was just not as stable a platform for those activities. Audio and video would break up and screen sharing would bog everything down. We did find a use for Teams as a place to store documents and as a chat client. Now that we’re back in the office for the most part, we’re still relying on Zoom and Teams. Meetings of more than two or three people still feel safer over Zoom. Plus there is the added flexibility of being able to connect from almost anywhere and the convenience of not having to travel to meetings. Teams is still used as a file repository interface and a chat client. I have found myself continuing to use Teams for quick chats, even though popping into someone’s office down the hall is once again an option.

The disruption to communications also affected how we respond to our library users. Prior to the pandemic, email questions from faculty, staff and public patrons were managed via a series of email listservs and a subscription to Gimlet, a service statistics tracking platform. There were a number of problems with that approach: email lists were siloed and it was not easy to share information among them; we wanted a more robust tracking and tagging system; users were not always successful in sending questions to the correct email list. When the pandemic closed the library and pushed all reference questions to email, these issues became unbearable. After some research and consultation with other libraries, we migrated to LibAnswers, a Springshare product that allowed us to streamline online reference questions, share them as needed, and track statistics all in one place. In this case, the disruption caused by the pandemic accelerated us down a path we had only just begun considering. Ultimately, we ended up with a system better for users and staff.

Another example of pandemic disruption pushing us to improve services was our room reservation system. Even before the pandemic, we had been searching for a replacement for our study room reservation system which, at the time, was a very low-tech clipboard with a sign-up sheet placed at the circulation desk. We had already investigated a few room management systems available from the University but found they were not good fits for our small number of study rooms available only to law students. For us, the solution was another Springshare product, LibCal. When the library began to re-open on a limited basis, LibCal allowed us to reserve not only study rooms but also the restricted number of study tables and carrels available in the library. That was a need we had not had prior to the pandemic. Another benefit of the new room reservation system is that it is completely online, reducing the number of users at the circulation desk, protecting our frontline staff from exposure.

We also were able to reduce staff exposure by implementing our library’s first self-check machine. Unlike other changes caused by pandemic disruptions, a self-check machine had not really been on our radar previously. We’re a fairly small library with relatively low circulation, even at times of unrestricted access. With the pandemic reducing our hours and the number of users allowed in the building at once (and our desire to protect frontline staff as much as possible) the time was right for a self-check machine. After much research, the MeeScan kiosk system was what we finally settled on, for a variety of reasons, including affordability, features, and integration with existing systems. The integration with existing systems involved a lot of collaboration among us, the vendor, the university library, and university IT offices. But ultimately we were able to implement a way for library users to have a contact-free experience while picking up library materials during limited hours. As pandemic restrictions eased, use of the self-check kiosk remained flat. However, we recently decided to take advantage of the self-check kiosk and move course reserve materials next to it, allowing for self-service by students. Usage is now going up.

Another service improvement for students spurred by the pandemic was the move to electronic document delivery. Students are able to request a limited amount of material be scanned and emailed to them. This has the additional benefit of limiting visits to the library, reducing the risk of exposure for both staff and students. Due to demand created by this service, we had to replace our previous scanners with a more robust system. Again, after much research, we settled on a ScannX system. We ultimately decided to purchase two scanners, one for staff and one for self-service located near the bookstacks. As more students return to the building and as pandemic restrictions ease, the number of scanning requests is trending downwards. Whether scanning requests will be a service we continue to provide once we are fully post-pandemic remains to be seen.

However, the other technologies we’ve adopted due to pandemic disruptions to services are here to stay. In many cases, the pandemic response pushed us farther and faster down roads we were already on. This has led to better services for our users and improved workflows for staff. The pandemic has been difficult in every way and trying to implement service and technology changes in the midst of it was not easy. As we hopefully move out of the pandemic over the next several months, one of the silver linings will be the improvements we have made.

Classification Web Interface Updated

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:19:00 +0000

The Library of Congress recently updated the interface for its Classification Web product. For those of us in libraries that use LC Classification and subject headings, Classification Web has long been a valuable tool for quickly researching and assigning call numbers and subjects. It's more frequently updated and infinitely more convenient for users than the printed schedules of yesterday. In addition to call numbers and subject headings, Classification Web contains several other controlled vocabularies as well as the name authority file. As someone who used to look these things up in the printed volumes, I greatly appreciated the office real estate I was able to reclaim when this all went online. While Classification Web has always contained a vast amount of useful and timely information, it has not always been easy to navigate. There have been incremental changes in the interface over the years but this latest upgrade, to Classification Web 4, promises to be be the most substantial improvement yet. How does it fare?

For one thing, Classification Web 4 has a much cleaner, more modern look and feel than previous versions. The official announcement claims that it, "incorporates modern web navigation techniques and a responsive design that runs on a wide range of hardware from desktop computers to tablets and smart phones." I found this to be true. It immediately looked more streamlined from previous versions. Even on a desktop computer, the display is reminiscent of a mobile app. The now familiar "hamburger button" in the upper left offers quick access to all the searchable collections as well as user and account settings.

Once logged in, the browse and search options offer different enough experiences to meet a wide-range of user preferences. I tend to rely more on browsing than searching and the predictive text makes browsing even easier. It's a welcome addition to the functionality of Classification Web. I also found the drop-down menus make the system much easier to navigate as well.

Search results, to my eye, seem to be better spaced and easier to read. One feature of the interface that, thankfully, did not change is how clicking on search results opens new tabs. This makes comparing results and returning to the original search a breeze and has long been one of my favorite aspects of Classification Web.

Overall, I found the changes in Classification Web 4 to be much needed and very welcome improvements over previous versions of the interface. I'm glad to see this tool that I've relied on for year is continuing to be developed and adapted for new platforms.

Details About the Shut Down of LawArXiv

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 23:32:00 +0000

LawArXiv was launched in 2017 to provide legal scholars with an open-access, non-profit platform for preserving their work. By the end of the first year, over 700 articles had been submitted to the archive and there were plans for additional features to make the repository more robust and useful to the legal scholarly community. However, those plans never made it to fruition. Earlier this year, it was announced that LawArXiv would no longer accept new submissions.

At the recent Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) annual meeting, more details were shared about why the LawArXiv project was shutting down. At the heart of the matter were irreconcilable issues with the Center for Open Science (COS), which hosts the LawArXiv platform as well as open-access platforms for a number of other areas of study. Due to insufficient demand from their other partners, COS was unable to support the development of new platform features, including school-level branding and batch uploading, requested by the LawArXiv Steering Committee. The Steering Committee was given the option of financing the development of these features but that option was cost-prohibitive. Further stressing the agreement was the fact that COS had also instituted a new annual hosting fee in January, 2021. The Steering Committee was left questioning whether it was worth paying the annual hosting fee knowing that features crucial to the growth of LawArXiv were not slated for development.

These issues proved to be deal breakers for the project. After extensive research and discussion of various options, the LawArXiv Steering Committee ultimately decided to end the partnership with COS. The agreement among the member institutions was formally dissolved on June 30, 2021. While LawArVix is no longer accepting new submissions, the 1,382 articles previously uploaded to the site are still available for the time being on COS’s general preprints platform.

Getting to Know Keiko Okuhara

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren Seney) — Mon, 24 May 2021 18:29:00 +0000

1. Introduce yourself (name & position).

Mahalo Lauren for keeping "getting to know librarians" going and giving me the opportunity to introduce myself to my dear colleagues. I am Keiko Okuhara and a mediocre librarian (ha ha!). I am the Bibliographic Services/Systems Librarian (July 2003-May 2020) and the Metadata Services Librarian (June 2020-Present) at the William S. Richardson School of Law Library of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?

Yes, it does. I have been working in Hawaii for 18 years by now, and there were many personnel turn arounds during my tenure in my department, including the change of library leadership with new visions. As the library evolved, I have become more engaged in metadata management work, and the library ventured into the archive collection development. This undertaking made me think of being a certified digital archives specialist (DAS). The training of the specialist expanded and reevaluated my perspectives of the metadata creation. There are various metadata of which cataloging is the highly well-established metadata creation process. While I don't have many archival projects to directly utilize my learning on archives, my role in archives has unfolded to work on oral histories. This work will be an exciting collaboration with my coworker who has experienced in curating archival materials. Also, I am working on the integration of systems, Alma and Omeka; and Omeka and Oral History Open Source system. I could easily slide into this kind of work, since I have some knowledge on the systems and metadata. I look forward to seeing how all these initiatives improve the discoverability of faculty scholarship and leverage our library systems and services.

3. What are you reading now?

I hope you won't expel me from the librarians’ community.... I have to admit and confess that I am not an avid reader, but of course, our most popular leading journal, ”Technical Services Law Librarian.” I thank the past and current Editor-of -Chiefs, article/column contributors, and layout editors for sharing their great talents that I don't possess! In addition, I like to look through cook books (I have strong affinity to food), the Prescription for Nutritional Healing, and any books or articles on self-improvement, integrity, and the art of happiness in general to maintain body and mind in a good shape.

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?

I would love to work in an art museum/library. What a great idea to be surrounded by imaginative and thought-providing art objects to stimulate our soul, but I also learned that those positions are hard to get and the work at the art museum is not that satisfactory to a certain extent. Also, I would love to be a children's librarian at a public library, which seems to be a popular vote in our community. It is kind of sad reality for me that I wasn't brought up in the USA during my childhood, which inhibits me from sharing my own enjoyment of English children’s literature with young and enthusiastic children.

5. [Imagine the world before the pandemic] You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?

If I am lucky enough to have a free day at work, I would organize my office. Due to the pandemic I was happily pushed out from the cubicle work condition to an enclosed office. I have accumulated a lot of junk in the course of 18 years of my time at UHM. However I am mainly teleworking and able to work in my office. I need to organize/de-clutter my office to find what I need easily.

Lessons from a Year of Working from Home

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 04:21:00 +0000

One year ago this month, I posted about the experience of transitioning my Technical Services staff to working from home in response to the pandemic .One year later, we’re still here. Passing this milestone has caused me to reflect on how our situation has changed over the year and take stock of the lessons learned from managing a Technical Services staff remotely.

Technology is Key

As I mentioned in my post last year, the sudden shift to working from home shone a light on the Digital Divide among my own employees. On one side of the divide, there was an employee with a personal desktop, laptop, and tablet at home as well as two internet service providers. On the other side, there was an employee whose tech consisted of a cell phone with a very limited data plan and no internet service at home.

Thankfully, we had the resources and support to get everyone equipped to work from home. But just as technology in the office requires regular maintenance and troubleshooting, so does technology at home. Over the past year, we've dealt with OS upgrades that wouldn’t install outside the campus network, software licenses that had to be updated to work off-campus, wifi hotspots with dying batteries, and more significant hardware failures requiring planned trips to campus for socially-distanced meetings with IT support.

We also had a variety of communications technologies and platforms to work with, some a lot more successful than others. My Technical Services department took readily to Zoom for group and, later on, individual meetings. We had fun with virtual backgrounds and appearance altering filters. However, we learned that those features have pretty high system requirements that not all of us could meet. To this day, I still do not know the joy of going into a meeting accidentally looking like a cat. For the most part, though, I have found Zoom to be consistently reliable and intuitive to use.

Less successful for my department was a foray into Microsoft Teams. While we have found it to be an adequate platform for storing files (if not as good for finding them later), it has been abysmal for purposes of working collaboratively on documents. For that, we have mostly settled on doing work in Google Drive and then copying to Teams as needed. Further, I tried having one-on-one meetings with my staff via Teams calls. But after several instances of frozen screens and dropped calls, I gave up. We now meet exclusively in Zoom. We handle other communications over phone calls or texts and the old standby, email.

While I have become a big fan of Google Drive since working from home, it is not without its own issues. Most of us already had personal Google accounts. Even though switching between Google accounts is easier than it used to be, it’s not always easy to remember to do so before creating a document to share. Further complicating matters is that my institution’s sign-in to Google requires a form of our email address that is being phased out. You have to remember to use the old form when inviting others to your document or else they are treated as permanent guests, unable to fully collaborate.

One big lesson learned is that even the best communications platform is useless if your home internet service goes out. The early days of the pandemic, with more people working and learning from home, seemed to put a strain on the two big internet service providers in town. Outages were frequent. During those times, I was relegated to working from my cell phone, using mobile data. Only once did I nearly reach my data cap and risk additional fees, however. I already mentioned an employee affected by the dying battery of a wifi hotspot. There was another employee who discovered that his home wifi disconnected every time someone turned on the microwave.

Communication is Even More Key

When the directive to work from home was issued, I asked each of my staff to send me a daily summary of their work activities. They have been diligent about that. As a result, I have a very well documented year of their activities. The daily reports may run the risk of getting repetitive but they are a good way to make sure everything stays on track and that I stay in the loop. As an added benefit, they helped inform annual employee reviews.

The daily reports are not the only communications I have with my staff. Every day, I have email conversations with all of them about specific (or general) topics or we collaborate on documents together. As mentioned above, we also have regular one-on-one and group meetings in Zoom. Last year, our administration asked that each department meet as a team once a week. After several months of working from home, we felt comfortable cutting that back to twice a month. One-on-one meetings are also scheduled for twice each month. Frequently, I will ask others to join in a one-on-one meeting to discuss a certain topic. That helps keep everyone on the same page and cuts down on the number of meetings and emails.

It’s not just internal communications that offered lessons during this year of working from home. We learned to adapt to different levels of communication with other departments around the University and with vendors. We weren’t the only ones adapting to working from home and other impacts of the pandemic. The level of customer support we got from certain places plummeted while others rose to the challenge. Some places reached out to us more frequently to see how they could adapt to our changing work environment or help us adapt to theirs. Other places were less accommodating, such as a few vendors who were suspicious when we tried to temporarily change our shipping address. We learned to be crystal clear in our communications and to try to be proactive in anticipating issues caused by what we thought were relatively small requests. It wasn’t business as usual for any place. We learned to be patient with others because we knew we’d need patience from others.

Everyone Reacts Differently to a Pandemic

One thing I learned soon after the transition to working from home was that each member of my staff reacted to the pandemic differently. For one, the isolation of working at home was hard to adjust to and a sense of claustrophobia began to set in. They were eager to get back to the office and I was asked almost on a daily basis if I had gotten any information about when that would be. For another staff member, working from home was a welcome relief. It meant less time away from home and less chance of exposure to COVID-19. The others fell somewhere between those extremes. One thing we all shared was an acknowledgement that we work someplace that allowed us to keep our jobs while minimizing our risk of getting sick. The pandemic was stressful for each of us in different ways but some of that pressure was mitigated by the extra time we all had by not having to commute and be at the office most of the day.

The lesson here is one of compassion. As a manager, I relaxed my expectations. And I let my staff know that. I let them know they could work odd hours if they needed. I was especially forgiving if something slipped through the cracks. We shared our concerns in a more familiar way, dispensing with professional formalities at times. I made accommodations whenever possible that allowed my staff to deal with personal issues. The result? We’ve gotten as much done this year working from home as we would have gotten done had we been in the building. I might even argue that, in some ways, we’ve accomplished more because on top of our regular duties, we’ve all had the added work of dealing with the pandemic and everything else 2020 brought.

Looking Back

I was recently asked by my director to list my department’s accomplishments this past year. Not to brag but we have accomplished some significant things. There have been publications and presentations; starting the process of dismantling racism and de-centering whiteness in our collections; shifting our collections more toward electronic resources and cancelling print subscriptions; providing new services to our users. All the while, my staff has also been keeping up with the important, regular duties of ordering, cataloging, and paying the bills. And we’ve done it all while working from home.

Of course, working from home was a big transition. Obviously, there were issues to address and challenges to overcome. It has not always been easy, from professional and personal perspectives. But we managed to make it work and work well.

Looking Forward

A year later, we’re still working from home. We’re still dealing with the pandemic. Our approach has changed as we’ve learned more about COVID-19. For one thing, we’re not as strict about isolating shipments and deliveries as we were in the early days of the pandemic. Also, as the University relaxed guidelines about being on campus, some of my Technical Services staff began to make routine visits to the library. I, however, have not set foot on campus since one quick visit last July.

The University is counting on vaccinations in hopes of having a more vibrant campus in the fall. However, with the vaccination rate slowing and infections of COVID variants seeming to strike younger people harder, I will wait and see what this fall looks like. No matter when and how it happens, I know that going back to campus is going to be as big a transition as leaving it was.

The pandemic was upon us so suddenly, it drove home the idea that you can’t plan for everything. No matter what the future ends up looking like, we need to stay flexible, adaptive, and compassionate. That is the big lesson from this past year.

Getting to Know Larissa Sullivant

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren Seney) — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 16:55:00 +0000

1. Introduce yourself.

My name is Larissa Sullivant. I am the Head of Collection Services and Adjunct Lecture in Law at the Ruth Lilly Law Library, Indiana University Robert McKinney School of Law. I started my professional career as a Slavic cataloger at the University of Michigan Graduate Library, and for the last 20 years I have been a law librarian.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?

I think that my job title, Head of Collection Services, reflects my duties accurately, with responsibilities that include bibliographic and statistical analysis of the Library’s collection; collection promotion, bibliographic selection, and “weeding”; electronic resources management, acquisitions, cataloging, and serials control; supervision of the Technical Services staff. I also handle negotiation of contracts and vendor relations and assist our Library director in budgeting. I have regular hours at the Reference Desk, which during the pandemic means handling virtual reference. The last may not seem semantically connected to the job title, but it is an important part of being successful in my position: I need to know what our stakeholders read and research.

3. What are you reading right now?

As a native Russian speaker, I am understandably drawn to that nation’s rich, literary traditions. I am currently re-reading Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat and Other Short Stories. Each of the stories is a parable of human tragedies and failings: vanity, pettiness, hypocrisy, self-absorption, cruelty towards others, etc. My favorites are The Nose and The Overcoat. The Nose has a decisive element of the absurd: a human-sized, disembodied nose of a privy counselor comes to life, parading around town and acting as a public official. The story is bitingly satirical, a critique of social hierarchies, which is a recurrent theme in Gogol’s work. The Overcoat concerns an impoverished clerk’s efforts to get a new and decent overcoat, so that his co-workers would stop berating him. In heartbreaking detail, it describes the clerk’s efforts in acquiring an overcoat, his various humiliations, and what happens after he finally gets his new coat.

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?

I am happy where I am: directing the Technical Services unit at the Ruth Lilly Law Library. I enjoy every aspect of my duties and responsibilities. My colleagues, both faculty and staff, are well-respected within the Library and the Law School communities and are wonderful and knowledgeable people. I truly enjoy working with all of them!

5. You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?

I think slow days in most work environments are rare. If I suddenly had a free day, I would focus first on organization – getting the paper and information monster under control – since, as all librarians know, organization is the key to everything else. After that, I would chip away at one of my current projects: a comprehensive inventory of our microform collection, reconciling the online catalog bibliographic data with the physical microfiche and microfilm holdings.

Preservation Week 2021

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren Seney) — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 23:31:00 +0000

In 2005 the Institute of Museum and Library Services partnered with Heritage Preservation and performed the first comprehensive national survey of the condition and preservation needs of the nation's collections. With almost a quarter of the institutions surveyed reporting that they had no staff dedicated to collection care, the idea of Preservation Week was born to help libraries connect to their communities and promote the work that is being done to ensure the longevity of our shared collections.

The last year has kept many of us from working with our collections on a daily basis, and the time for preservation work has likely been incredibly sparse. Which makes this annual awareness campaign even more important this month. So mark your calendars for April 25-May 1 and schedule the live (and free) webinars, check out the recordings from previous years, or take a look at the wealth of resources available and share them with your community.

Survival of the Fittest: 5 Vital Tips for Virtual Conferences

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 20:35:00 +0000

As I embarked on day one yesterday of the four day Innovative Users Group virtual conference, I was already exhausted. Hot on the heels of last week's three day Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries conference, I am a total mixed bag of emotions and energies. And I know conference season is just getting started... Past posts here at TechScans have given advice for attending conferences and selecting conferences to attend. Those posts were of course specific to in person attendance. In this blog post I hope to share a few tips for surviving the virtual conference universe.

1. Block Out Your Calendar

Block Your Calendar (orange = IUG)

Over the course of 2020 I tried to take full advantage of all the virtual things. Like many people I know, I tried to keep doing all the usual work too (all while working from home with a young child). Some of you out there are still fully working from home, and perhaps you too have children, pets, or other loved ones you are sharing physical spaces and bandwidth with. In the before times, attending a conference was always a bit of a break. You literally traveled somewhere, be it far or near, and were mostly able to focus on taking in new professional knowledge that would benefit you in your job when you returned. FOCUS is the key word here. Attending a conference virtually, we don't have the same luxury of full focus that we have for face-to-face attendance. Those emails keep coming in, and should you really use an out of office message if you aren't really "out"? If you are virtually attending a conference but are in the office as I am this week, the office phone still rings too. Other meetings are still taking place, because you know, everything is virtual so why not? I recommend going through the entire conference schedule, and as you might have in person, marking the sessions you really must attend. IUG's online schedule allows me to "star" must see sessions so I can more easily find them later. Then I went one step further and copied the session titles and links into my Outlook calendar. Whatever calendar you use, block out the time as if it were a meeting. This will keep you from over-scheduling our double-booking yourself.

2. Don't Over Work Yourself

Take Breaks Outside If Possible

I've already gone on a bit about the differences in face-to-face and virtual conferences as it relates to scheduling, but one thing I haven't specifically talked about is the time. Seriously, these online conference planners are in a tough spot. In real life, we would all be physically in the same place and therefore all using the same time zone. For IUG I would have been in Detroit, and everyone else would have been too. Accommodating national and international attendees means that sessions will either start too early for the west or run really late for the east (or both). There are also very few if any breaks built into the schedule. Sessions may end at 1:29 and another one begin promptly at 1:30. When the next "room" is only 1 click away to Zoom in or stream a recording that just went live, no one needs a bathroom break or time to walk through the hallway or around a corner to the next session location. With things happening so rapidly and your workday most likely being shifted, I recommend going easy on yourself. Let your colleagues know (one way is block out the calendar!) that you may be physically still working from the same place, but you are in fact attending a conference for some intense professional development. This will keep both yours and their expectations in check. If a session happens 5:30 EST adjust the start of your workday. Bake in some breaks so you are not hunched over a screen for a full day of conference presentations. Be conscious of the amount of time you are working!

3. Take Notes

Virtual IUG Meet & Greet = Great Notes!

Let's be real: are you really going to solely attend the virtual conference and not check your email or do anything else while listening to sessions? This is why note-taking is more important than ever. Sure, you may have taken notes at your last face-to-face conference and of course that was one of the keys to remembering the info you were taking in. But in the virtual conference world, distractions are multiplied rather than subdued. Do your best to silence notifications during presentations, and start a brand new steno pad or word doc for the conference. In advance, give each page the title, date and time of the session. If you must give into various distractions during any given session, your notes will help you get back on track. If you are lucky enough to have sessions provided on demand rather than just live streamed your notes will also help out when you return to the session recordings to play catch up. Virtual exhibit halls are another place where taking notes are critical. In real life you may have walked away from the vendor booths with a bag full of random goodies! Each one would have helped you remember that particular booth and what they talked about. For this section of your conference notes, I recommend taking screen captures and saving them to a folder, or if your conference "notepad" is a Word or Google doc, pasting them into the doc along with a few notes.

4. Network

#IUG2021 Badge

One of the things I have learned time and time again from more experienced librarians is that conferences and annual meetings are where networking happens. An excellent tip I picked up a few years back was to exchange 5 business cards with people you have never met before. This was a good goal for the before times. Normally you would use this goal to help you meet new colleagues from other institutions who have similar interests or job responsibilities. Later you would return to your colleagues post conference and share who you met and what you learned. This type of professional experience can still occur in the online environment, but it looks very different than meetups between sessions (because there is very little "between session" time as #2 in this post pointed out). If your online conference allows for attendee profiles, bio photos or conference badges fill it out. This will help you take full advantage of the other aspects of their online offerings. Some virtual conferences like IUG have "social feed", "birds of a feather", chat and forum sections. In addition to live-tweeting about your virtual conference experience, these non-public locations provide several ways for you to connect informally with others attending the same presentations, working with the same systems, or trying to solve the same problems in their libraries. Attendees are posting photos of their home or work office spaces, talking about what they would have done if they really were in Detroit, and sharing their general feelings in a few sentences or with a pic or two about the virtual experience. Your interactions within the various sections of the site will be connected to your "badge" the same way that physical name tag or business card served as a leave-behind. Since you have the benefit of being on a computer while attending virtual networking events like a meet and greet or happy hour, in place of getting a business card ask in the chat for email addresses, and connect with those individuals on LinkedIn.

5. Dress Down & Dine In

Conference Cat & Hat

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of before times conferences was deciding what to wear, observing the conference-style of other librarians, and of course dining out! Who doesn't love trying new food? Virtual conferences might be stressful in totally new and frightening ways, but three silver linings for me have been:

A. How we dress: pajama pants and hooded sweatshirt? cat-face baseball hat? house shoes all day?

B. Where we "Zoom" in from: your couch? a picnic blanket outdoors? with your cat in your lap?

C. What we eat: ice cream instead of continental breakfast? sushi take out? warm cup of noodles?

However you choose to dress and whatever you have for dinner, I won't be the judge! I do encourage you to take advantage of the creature comforts that virtual conferencing allows. Who knows how long this aspect of our professional development lives will last. In the very least, treat yourself to at least one meal of something different. If the conference would have been in a location known for a certain type of cuisine, give that a shot (and use this as a conversation starter when you try tip #4).

Cat House Shoes = Perfect Conference Footwear

What do you love or loathe about virtual conferences? What do you miss about face-to-face? Do you have any tips to share for surviving the online versions? Share with us in the comments!

Getting to Know Joan Stringfellow

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren Seney) — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 22:52:00 +0000

1. Introduce yourself:

Howdy! My name is Joan Stringfellow and I am the Head of Technical & Electronic Services at the Dee J. Kelly Law Library, Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth, Texas. Remotely coming to you today from my home office in lovely Bedford, Texas. I have been at the law school (then Texas Wesleyan) since 1993 where I was the receptionist for the school. About six months later, I was hired into the library as the serials assistant. I have worked in every aspect of the law library with the exception of ILL. I received my MLS from the University of North Texas in 2002 and was then promoted to Catalog Librarian.

2.Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?

Well, broadly speaking, yes and no. Since our library is a smaller one, this is probably true for many of us! As for the Technical Services part of the title, yes. I have a wonderful assistant, Sharon Jefferson, who does our copy cataloging and adding our new print materials to our collection. She does many other special TS projects as they come up. I am our library system administrator. I do the original cataloging although it is not a very significant amount, it does challenge me at times. Probably for lack of practice! As for the electronic services part of the title, I do it all. I take care of our electronic subscriptions from top to bottom. I perform most steps in acquiring our subscriptions. This includes setting up trials, demos, licensing, ensuring they are complying with state and federal accessibility laws, adding them to our catalog and A-Z list, invoicing, statistics retrieval, and making sure all of our students get their Westlaw and Lexis access set up! We also have an electronic sign in our lobby that I manage. I work with the director and collections librarian to create and manage the budget annually for our electronic resources of the library’s budget. Finally, I am the website editor for the law library’s pages.

Since I have been here so long, I have also acquired some facilities tasks. I am the liaison for the library working with the IT department, when there are any technical problems within the library public spaces. Specifically, if the library student or staff printers go down, I am the one who coordinates with IT to get those back up and running. The same goes for the public catalogs. We also have electronic compact shelving and I am the point person for any maintenance issues that come up. I will trouble-shoot the issues and, when necessary, work with the vendor for any repairs needed.

3.What are you reading right now?

So, I really hate to admit this, but I am not an avid reader, though I grew one in my daughter, who cannot get enough! She even became a writing and reading teacher. Makes total sense! When I do read, I love true crime. Way back when I was around 11-12, I remember finding Helter Skelter in my aunt’s room and was just fascinated! I am still fascinated with all things true crime. I also enjoy Steven King. I am amazed at his ability to describe what is going on in the story that I find myself deep in the story like I am really there in the room. I have recently received a couple new books that I am very much looking forward to. Becoming by Michelle Obama and, for Christmas, I received a book on decluttering. Hmmm…was that a hint?

4.If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?

I have always thought it would be so much fun to work at a specialized library. I love to watch movies and television, so I would love to work at the Disney film or animation library, network library, or other television or movie studio library. When I was in library school we had to apply for our dream job and I chose the MTV Library.

5.[Imagine the world before the pandemic] You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?

Well, since we are a smaller library, there are always projects to work on. I would love to be able to clean up our catalog from the past migrations and record loads and deletions. I would love to work on making sure all the records are clean, fix any call number problems, and make sure everything is as good as could be. That is the Virgo in me. While I am pretty good at our ILS, I would really love to become an expert!

OCLC Extends GreenGlass Functionality to Serials

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 22:51:00 +0000

OCLC’s GreenGlass has for years been used by libraries that want extensive collection analysis metrics in one dashboard. GreenGlass offers a lot useful data, such as subject coverage, age of collection, and rarity of titles, based on OCLC holdings data. As a user of GreenGlass at two very different institutions (a large university and a community college) one of the big benefits of GreenGlass is that it requires very little work on the part of the library to get access to a wealth of data. Generally, a library will assist with a holdings refresh with OCLC and GreenGlass does the rest. However, one of the big drawbacks is that GreenGlass has only been able to analyze monograph collections.

That is changing with OCLC’s recent announcement of GreenGlass functionality for serials. GreenGlass for serials aims to fill in gaps in serials collections analysis that aren’t covered in traditional retention agreements among libraries. GreenGlass connects with JSTOR and other journal archives to offer a fuller picture of title availability, both print and electronic.

At a time when many libraries are having to make decisions about the serials collections, to save both space and money, any tool that helps inform retention decisions is welcome. Hopefully, GreenGlass for serials can live up to its promise.

New Version of OCLC Connexion Client Announced

noreply@blogger.com (Travis Spence) — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 22:50:00 +0000

In a recent email to users of Connexion, OCLC announced that a new version of the Connexion client, version 3.0, is scheduled for release in May/June 2021. Support for 2.xx versions of Connexion will be discontinued in 2022, with at least three months advance notice. The web-based version of Connexion will remain unchanged.

Getting to Know Liz Manriquez

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren Seney) — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 13:00:00 +0000

1. Introduce yourself:

Hello! I’m Liz Manriquez, Scholarly Communications and Reference Librarian at the University of Wisconsin Law Library. I’ve been with UW for nearly 2 years, previously I was a Reference Librarian and Assistant Professor at the UNLV Boyd School of Law.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?

Yes! In this position I divide my time equally between reference duties, such as working the reference desk and collection development, and managing our digital repository, while assisting with all things scholarly, such as citation metrics and improving the discoverability of faculty scholarship. I work directly with faculty to enhance their online presence through scholar profiles and to ensure their scholarship is accurately represented within HeinOnline, SSRN, and ORCID.

3. What are you reading right now?

I usually read a few books at a time because my interest wanes, but have been reading much less since COVID began. I’m currently reading Lady Killers: deadly women throughout history by Tori Telfer for a virtual book club. I’m also working my way through the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith. I’m about to break down and buy the latest, Troubled Blood, because the wait at my local library is 25 weeks!

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?

Definitely the Giamatti Research Center, which is the library for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I enjoy all things data and statistics, so it’s only natural that baseball is my favorite sport. Is there anything better than a sunny day at the ballpark? One of my favorite memories as a child was going to Comiskey Park with my dad and filling out the scorebook, while we munched on hot dogs and peanuts. I would love working to preserve the various medias and documents created by the league and its fans, making them accessible to future researchers and sports fans.

From Cancellations to Coding: Pandemic-Centered Tech Topics on Day Two of the OBS/TS Summit 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 17:21:00 +0000

So far, day two of the summit has delivered fantastic programming. I wish I could attend it all! The final virtual event takes place at 6 PM EST tonight. This morning my two favorite sessions both dealt with the new realities we are living in post COVID-19 closures, touching on this from the perspective of budget cuts to work from home workarounds. Here were my takeaways:

Top Left to Bottom Right: Gilda Chiu-Ousland, Wendy Moore, Heather Buckwalkter, Anne Lawless-Collins.

TS Resource Management Roundtable: Budget Cuts & Collecting Pivots
I was really on the fence about which of the earliest morning sessions to attend, and I am so glad I selected this one on resource management and collecting pivots. Wendy Moore from the University of Georgia Law Library led the discussion with a powerful statement that really summarizes the entire roundtable and the timeliness of the topics:

"Crisis can lead to LOTS of creativity."

What followed were introductions from each of the panelists including Heather Buckwalter, Gilda Chiu-Ousland, and Anna Lawless-Collins. Each shared the state of things at their institution, the fallout from COVID-19 closures including the stopping of shipments and the addition of online study aids and other e-resources to help students and faculty get through a quick pivot to virtual learning, and the budget (if they had %'s or figures yet) that they are each facing for fiscal year 2021 and 2022. This session (as with several from day one of the summit) was not recorded to allow attendees to feel more comfortable sharing the details and situations of their library, law school, or larger institution. Two polls were executed in the larger Zoom room before dividing into smaller groups for more personalized and in depth discussions. The polls were very interesting, revealing many of us still do not know our budget, or have vague %'s that are yet to be approved, and that the majority of us are cutting print journals more than any other area of our collections.

In the smaller groups, attendees were better able to share their own situations, including some very creative strategies for how to negotiate with vendors, what data they are using to make those decisions about what and how to cut items from the collection, and what they have already or are planning to cancel to meet the demands of the coming fiscal year. There was a big focus on mitigating expectations of faculty and other stakeholders, and many were open about having these difficult conversations with their faculty members related to monograph acquisitions and with their institutions related to print course reserve materials. Overall an excellent program that was really open to sharing their situations so we can all learn from one another and continue best serving our library users.

Hot Topic: Technologies We Use

Presented by Jesse Lambertson, this session was more of an open discussion than a straight-forward presentation. Sharing his own library system as the beginning example, Lambertson pitched questions to the audience with lively responses in real time and invited members to un-mute and speak to their specific system challenges in the work from home environment. It was really interesting to hear individuals sharing the pros and cons of their various integrated library system platforms once they were catapulted into teleworking. The clear up-side to having a web-based interface was the ease that these librarians and their staff could quickly pivot to working from home without the hassle of using VPN or requiring remote desktop. These included those using TIND and Alma to name a couple. Several of us still working with iii's Sierra were able to join in chorus about our struggles in working from home with spotty VPN support and the differences in Sierra web as compared to the desktop client.

Presenter Jesse Lambertson screen shares Python script snippets hack for working with CSV data.

For importing and exporting records, both individually or in batches, many hacks were shared including creative ways use Marc Edit when working from home and the potential for more API's between Marc Edit and the ILS. It is of course that time of year when we are all gathering statistics. With much overlap from the previous session I attended, many of us commented we are accessing collection and user data much more right now to better inform decision making in a time of budget cuts. As a result, further roadblocks and workflow workarounds were discussed for various systems. Several attendees shared how they query their system for cataloging and other statistics, the issues they experience in the format of the data they pull out, and the obstacles that come with trying to do this type of work from home or with very limited access to the library. Many individuals (myself included!) are periodically retrieving data from their systems, exporting it at txt or csv files, and then taking it home on laptops of flash drives to be able to spend more time with it when teleworking. However, and few shared more innovative approaches to both massaging data as well as collecting and sharing it. Lambertson shared a highly creative approach using Python scripts to automate certain aspects of the csv to Excel conversion of his data. Another attendee shared their library's customized Google Sheets dashboard which pulls data from the ILS into the same location as reference transactions statistics (populated by Google Form responses). A truly fantastic session with lots of open dialogue between attendees. I am so glad I attended and I can't wait to see and hear how the experiential system and data approaches our members are working with now unfold in the coming months and years as access to our offices and systems remains largely unknown during a pandemic.

Functioning at Lightspeed: Day One of the OBS/TS Summit 2020 & Linked Data in Libraries Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 20:19:00 +0000

Screenshot from the Summit's OBS-SIS Business Meeting

Seriously, how fast is time going by these days? It seems like just yesterday I was attending the Work Smarter Not Harder Technical Services virtual conference from Amigos in mid-February, but here we are at the end of July on the heels of AALL 2020! Today the first ever summit of our two special interest sections is literally happening as I type this blog post. I could not contain my excitement for the topics covered so far, and felt compelled to go ahead and blog about two of the sessions. To find out more about the summit schedule which is still underway, (including business meetings too!) visit the AALL Calendar item. A big announcement from the OBS-SIS business meeting is that the official name of the SIS was voted to change to "Library Systems and Resource Discovery"! Now without delay, here are my two favorites with takeaways:

Facilitating Open Knowledge: The Intersection of Wikidata and Libraries - Presenters shared how "inter-collectional connections broaden the experience to go into parallel and related items". What a fantastic summary of Linked Data, and Wikidata in particular. The hyperlink for this session title will take you to the slides which I highly recommend saving as a resource if you are interested in more Wikidata. Many slides gave specific examples of using Wikidata for legal faculty scholarship. Of course it was noted in the session and from commenters in the Q&A that "we’re in the wild west days of wikidata (just like wikipedia used to be - it is very community based)." When considering Wikidata, remember that most things in wikipedia are in wiki data, but it is not always true the other way around. The discussion following the presentation focused heavily on "notability". Presenters made sure to comment that Wikidata allows you to create entries for faculty members that might not make it into Wikipedia. Questions were asked like "is just being a faculty member enough notability to be in Wikidata?" But the goal here is to build a robust citation network in Wikidata, adding items to support structure and more. One problem discussed what that not all language versions of Wikipedia have embraced Wikidata (yet) so the benefit of Wikidata is not across the board. Presenters also shared about a new Wiki-project called Wiki abstract which hopes to dynamically pull summaries from Wikidata). The biggest takeaway was “Notability (wikidata) is not the same as bibliographic warrant (authority control - NACO)”.
Finding the Silver Lining in System Migrations - What I discovered at the end of this session was that it was originally intended as a large face-to-face program in new Orleans had the AALL annual meeting and conference not gone virtual. It was planned to be a platform-neutral panel with speakers from a variety of law libraries talking about their migrations. As a result of things going virtual, this smaller session amd the one following it (Hot Topic/Local Systems Committee Meeting Making Post System Migration Efficient and Effective") covered the same terrain in two slices. There were so many takeaways from this session that I can't possibly share them all here, and even though the two speakers talked primarily about their library platforms, their joint experiences with systems and the discussion from attendees still rounded the session out to include a vareity of platforms including iii to alma, aleph, tind, wms, folio, sirsi, etc. A few of my favorite quotes and lessons from the presenters included:

You have to always look out for other people (not just the records you touch)
Always draw on the experience of people at other institutions who migrated before you, and don't be afraid to ask them "Please help me! How did you do this?"
You’ve got to build your own team. There’s the team you are forced to be part of (your department, your library, your university, your consortium) and then your own external team. That is the team you can build yourself, where you can gather info about the migration process from those at other institutions, and share it with others like you later after you have gone through it.
Carve out management and leadership opportunities for staff and other librarians using migration as the backbone, since it is such a major effort, it can be a milestone for any individual's professional growth and take them further in their career.
Turn it into a bootcamp (like a mini 2 day conference) where you are migrating from one platform to another. Invite others in your area going through the same process (example was a DC area libraries migrating from Sierra to Alma).
Know that other things may have to be sacrificed along the way. You will not survive migration if you try to do everything you have always done during a migration (or any other major project). If you’re the manager, you should be shielding your team from the onslaught of "all the things" during a big migration.
If you keep trying to do it all you will not do any of it very well...and you may not make it. You have to think about prioritizing things in advance. What will you stop or delay to get the new, major work done?
3 years out and many are STILL cleaning up post-migration data messes. But it becomes the new normal… so it will be OK!
Get to know and use your university IT department as much as you can. That has been more helpful for people migrating than their law school's IT when there is not an ILS expert in your library or a true systems librarian at your library.
Negotiate with staff and librarians to parse out what they really want and need to know how to do (you may need to reference interview the reference librarians!)
Host a series of in-person if you can (or virtual if you can't) sessions to show staff and librarians how to do all the things they need for workflows as a live demo.
Keep track of your training offerings and other documentation so you can show you did your due diligence for your library.

Also still currently happening throughout this week is TONS of programming from the Linked Data in Libraries 2020 Conference. The entire slate of sessions have been FREE to attend! You can find the schedule including links to the sessions in sched. You can also find all completed session recordings in the YouTube LD4 2020 playlist. I'm going to embed that below, but first my favorite session (so far) was today's "Linked Data for Sound" session. This excellent live program presented the work of Bethany Radcliff of the University of Texas in Austin. She talked about AudiAnnotate, and shared all of the resources related to the project. The session slides are available online, which include links to GitHub and all of the other pieces of this project. It was fascinating to hear how Bethany is using Linked Data in a practical way to make audio more accessible. The tool is also being used by professors as a teaching tool for literary criticism. Part of Bethany's resources realted to AudiAnnotate include short virtual workshops that show you how to download and use Audactiy (one of my personal favorite free audio editing tools!) to make annotations to audio of all kinds. The discussion was interesting and robust too, with attendees speculating how the tool could be expanded and adapted for video, or for non-traditional audio recordings like bird songs. The conversations and discussions are continuing throughout this week on LD4 2020's slack channel. Join in if you can, and watch the wide variety of sessions (there are 46 videos and counting!!) that already have recordings available in YouTube below:

Top 5 TS-Centric Webinar & Virtual Conference Highlights

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:36:00 +0000

The increase of wonderful, FREE programming being delivered virtually right now and available to audiences around the world is truly amazing. It can be overwhelming to sift through the options (especially if your inbox has exponentially exploded as mine has over the past 3 months). Take a trip back in time with me as I share below my favorite sessions that I feel offered the most valuable content to those of us in technical services positions.

BEST OF JUNE (so far): NASIG 2020

There are SO many great sessions slated for NASIG 2020 (which is happening as I type this blog post)! Honestly, my excitement around this virtual conference is what spurred me to go ahead and pen this post in the hopes that more people will read this and join in the NASIG sessions still to be delivered today and that will be available as recordings following each session. New to NASIG? I am too! This is my first year attending, so here's the background: Established in 1985, NASIG (formerly the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc.) is an independent organization that promotes communication, information, and continuing education about serials, electronic resources, and the broader issues of scholarly communication. The schedule for this year literally touches on every single one of those areas, all of which fall under or intertwine with technical services positions in one way or another.

So far the highlight from yesterday included a session on Rapid Contextual Design to create workflows between library departments that actually work. Today my favorite so far has been on the Accessibility of Repositories session. It shared excellent tips for doing accessibility audits of your site (I can see this applying to more than just repositories!) and provided resources including tools to create a guide of best practices. A major bonus for this virtual conference has been it is available in BOTH Zoom (where you can interact) and is simultaneously live streaming in YouTube (I'm looking at you fellow multi-taskers, this won't necessarily negate your other zoom meetings AND for me is keeping my computer from overloading which Zoom tends to do)! Visit the YouTube live streams and recorded sessions. You can also contribute to the discussion forum at any time during the conference, and view the schedule online for info on specific times for the remaining sessions.

Myself and two other TS-SIS members have divided up the NASIG sessions to offer more complete coverage for a future TSLL issue - so if you cannot make it to any of these sessions, fear not! Just keep an eye out for NASIG reviews in the Conference Round-Up section this fall!

BEST OF MAY: GLA TS-IG Linked Data Workshop

This one is a bit of a shameless-self-promotion plug since I was involved in facilitating this session. However, it really was so excellent and I was amazed at the attendance from across the globe that I would regret not re-sharing the recording for those that missed it. Delivered on May 19th live with the help of Georgia Public Libraries, the presentation about linked data was the first of several forthcoming virtual workshops from my state library association's technical services interest group. The speaker Robin Fay is a Metadata and Technology Professional who has worked on metadata & digital initiatives for a variety of institutions and organizations on cataloging and institutional repository projects.

Robin answered many big picture questions surrounding linked data initiatives, like "will the promise of linked data actually save us time? How will catalogers and machines work together to streamline recording of data and authority maintenance work, allowing catalogers and metadata practitioners to focus more on data stewardship and less on being data scribes? Will Real World Objects (RWOs) and linked data help bridge the gap between traditional cataloging and the larger semantic web communities of practice, ensuring that library metadata supports our users' search behaviors, those FRBR User Tasks? Or will it just provide more maintenance work down the road?" She also shared wonderful examples (fans of Prince will LOVE this), and provided case studies and other resources. You can now watch the video recording, and Robin has made available slides and other items in a folder for anyone interested in following along.

BEST FOR HOTTEST TOPIC: CS-SIS Controlled Digital Lending Panels

What could be more timely right now with the talk of reopening, course reserves and more in our libraries than Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)? Possibly the most controversial and therefore sexiest topic circulating our professional development lists right now is CDL. Fellow AALL members (many of which are also TS and OBS members) from the Computing Services SIS have organized two panels of experts discussing very candidly the technology side and the copyright side of CDL. Many libraries are looking into solutions for providing materials using everything from institutional-level shared folders (in either OneDrive or GSuite) to the Internet Archive's Open Library for managing, and restricting read-only time-limited access to digitized samples of varying lengths of physical holdings. This already hot topic is now literally on fire given the suit filed by multiple publishers against IA just last week. No matter which side of the fence you may be on related to CDL, one thing is certain that these sessions were very informative with engaging discussions. If you are on the fence, or just curious about what others are doing or not doing for course reserves and other high-demand items in the face of reopening this fall as a proactive measure against COVID, give both of these a listen: the Copyright Panel recording and the Technology Panel recording.

BEST FOR EXPERIENCE: CALICon 2020

Wow what a conference experience! Computer Assisted Legal Instruction's annual conference quickly transformed itself overnight into a completely free, fully fledged virtual schedule presented entirely in Zoom. Most sessions were live, and even those that were pre-recorded were still delivered synchronously in Zoom with engaging Q & A throughout, interesting and even hilarious chats, and a lively discussion forum for each presentation. I was highly impressed with the clusters that sessions were collected into, and the theme of the conference was even adjusted to specifically focus on pandemic situations. There was even an entire session delivered by a robotic-sounding adorable cat (Everything Important I Learned About Zoom Teaching From My Cat)! By far though the absolute best aspects of CALICon this year were the goodies box (seriously a glow in the dark yoyo, TONS of snacks, and the full create your own name-badge experience were ALL inside the box!) and the closing happy hour raffle (I didn't win anything this year - but it was still so much fun). They have really set the bar very high for all future virtual conferences, content-wise and experience-wise. As always, CALI is amazing about putting the video recordings for all sessions on YouTube following the live broadcasts, and their discussion forum is still available which includes links to slides, comments from attendees, and presentation descriptions. To get into the discussion forum topics and threads use you cali.org username and password.

BEST ON-GOING WEBINARS: MarcEdit Multi-Part YouTube Sessions

In my last post I shared the Shelter-In-Place videos that MarcEdit developer Terry Reese has made available for free in a YouTube playlist. So far there are 8 parts split into 11 different video segments. A few are over the hour mark in length, but the content is well worth it. Terry Reese is the head of digital initiatives at the Ohio State University Libraries. Over the past seventeen years, his research interests have centered on the changing nature of library metadata and the ways in which this data can be reused and transformed in different contexts. If you're reading this and saying (like I did in the not too distant past) who is this Terry fellow and what is the big deal with MarcEdit? I encourage you to visit his webpage and discover the amazing utility that is freely available online.