triskaidekaphobia n. fear or a phobia concerning the number 13. [source]

friggatriskaidekaphobia n. morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th. [source]

friggatriskaidekaphobiarelatusphobia n. a strong aversion to endless news reporting about friggatriskaidekaphobia on Friday the 13th. [source]

Yes, I made up that one.

From CBS to the Huffington Post to National Geographic, it seems that everyone in the news reporting world must drag out the same old tired stories about people that have an irrational fear of the number 13 and how Friday the 13th is an even more fearful day than Friday the 7th or Tuesday the 13th. Personally, I wish they’d just shut up about it already.

Friday the 13th is going to occur anywhere from once to three times a year. It’s frequent enough that it’s no longer news, so stop pretending that it is. Tell me something important that’s happening in the world today, rather than wasting my time and yours.

Article first published as Friggatriskaidekaphobiarelatusphobia, Or “Not Another Friday the 13th Story!” on Blogcritics.

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Technorati Tags: Friday the 13th, friggatriskaidekaphobia, friggatriskaidekaphobiarelatusphobia, triskaidekaphobia

When I arrived, lap swimming had been open for nearly 20 minutes already, and all but the one lane with the stairs were full. I knew I wasn’t going to be doing flip turns on my first day back, so I didn’t mind not having the wall on that end of the pool. I deposited my stuff on a bench near the stairs, and boldly stepped into the water, which was cool but not as frigid as I feared.

I dunked myself to wet down my hair, and then pulled on my goggles, making sure that I emptied as much water from them as I could. Then, I launched myself in to a freestyle stroke.

And floundered.

They say that you never forget how to ride a bike, but apparently, you can forget how to breathe when swimming. I could feel my lungs constricting as I panicked, and I quickly put my feet down and held my head above the water.

Thinking it was just a fluke, I tried again, with similar results. Resolved to do at least a lap before giving up entirely, I set off again with a modified breast stroke that left my mouth above the water so I could breathe normally.

It took me a lap and a half before I was willing to try freestyle again. Maybe it was because I’d gotten more comfortable with being in the water and my lizard brain calmed down, but I was much more successful after that point. I did a few more laps, pausing to catch my breath at the end of each length.

It’s a start. When I was at my peak swimming, I could freestyle a mile, pausing only infrequently. I know it will take me some time to get back to that condition, but I’m excited to do it. Swimming is by far my favorite athletic activity, but because I’ve been uncomfortable displaying my body in a swim suit, I’ve let myself make excuses.

No more excuses. I’m ready to get back in the pool.

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Technorati Tags: librarydayinthelife

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Arrived, turned on my computer, and while it booted up, I went and got an iced tea from the café.

Processed new email and scanned a document that I don’t need to retain in paper.

Attended weekly department meeting. We were extra chatty today and went 15-20 min longer than normal.

Worked my way through the action item email messages due today, including updating a resource description on the website and responding to a few inquiries.

Discussed with a co-worker ways we could use GoodReads for the library staff book discussion.

Discussed QR codes and their usefulness/popularity with a co-worker. Used the opportunity to yet again show off how my Android phone is as spiffy (if not spiffier) than his iPhone. I reserve this for Apple fanboys only.

Remembered again that this is DILO librarian day and began this entry.

Caught up on journaling accomplishments from the past three weeks. I’ll thank myself next year when I have to write my annual review. I normally try to do this at the end of each day (I use Memiary), but I’ve been lazy about it, and then overwhelmed by the backlog.

Continued working through today’s action items while chatting with a colleague via IM about the online resource renewal decision workflow/tool that I stole from her. Well, stole the concept, anyway. Learned about something else I can steal, too.

Planned out my project schedule for the week. Then left for lunch with a friend in the dining hall..

Back from lunch and on the Main Service Desk for two hours. Tried to track down a phone number of someone in rural Virginia. Answered an IM question from a law student about borrowing a netbook. Notified building manager that a copier is out of paper. Directed a software question to the Help Desk. Directed a product trainer to the conference room. Directed users to the bound journals. Referred a business student to the business librarian. Checked out a netbook to a user. Looked up a book for an IM user. Read some RSS feeds. Smiled at people passing by the desk.

Back to my cube and sorting through the email that has come in since before lunch. Only one new action item out of the pile. Whee!

Played around with some wiki software options for a departmental intranet. Still haven’t found the right combination of features and function.

Was about to start in on a project when I noticed that there wasn’t a Technorati tag description for librarydayinthelife, so I pulled something together and submitted it. Rewarded myself with peanut butter crackers and a Coke Zero.

Finally got into my current project, which involves pulling together information about our database subscriptions so that we can easily review upcoming renewals well in advance of the deadlines. Tweaked the Access tables, queries, and reports, and then set to adding more data. Worked on this until it was time to go home.

Technorati Tags: electronic resources, librarian, librarydayinthelife

Erin White: “Mobilizing your library website”
Used analytics to determine the popular pages hit by mobile users. They paid close attention to what other libraries were doing with their mobile sites to avoid reinventing the wheel (i.e. NCSU Libraries). They also included a mini feedback form at the bottom of every page of the mobile site, and the message sent includes details about the device used. The most popular pages tend to be information pages like hours, events, and computer availability.

Olivia Reinauer: “Creating SLACers: The Formation of a Student Library Advisory Committee”
In 2006, a think team put together a recommendation to create a standing library advisory committee populated by students in order to have a better idea of the needs of current students. They copied liberally from VCU’s student advisory committee to create the charge and structure. One thing that VCU that was different was actually paying the students an honorarium, so they did that, either as cash or in the form of a gift card. They meet once a month to discuss ideas gathered from colleague’s work and go through the suggestions from the suggestion box, using the students as a sounding board. They also have guest speakers come and talk about things happening in the library, which the students like because it makes them feel engaged. Some issues involve getting them to do things outside of the meetings and providing more enticing compensation.

Abiodun Solanke: “Did you find my…?: Lost and Found Issues at UR Library”
Students leave physical and electronic materials all over the library, from books and clothing to unsaved documents on public computers. When we find the items, they are happy, and of course disappointed if not found. The student activities also keep lost and found items. If the item is not financial or an ID, they take photos and display them on the lost and found cart, along with “safer” physical items like clothing and books. If the items are never claimed, we repurpose them for use locally or send them to other organizations. Before that happens, several attempts are made to locate the owners and contact them.

Carrie Ludovico: “LibGuides for Foodies”
Using LibGuides to engage with the community. The campus has a strong green emphasis, from bikes to hybrid parking to a community garden. The newest benefit is a CSA option for employees from June – September for full and half shares that are delivered on campus, and it has been more popular than the organizers expected. So, they created a LibGuide to highlight interesting and supportive resources. The most used tab is the scholarly and government resources, more than books, cookbooks, and recipes.

Betty Dickie: “Read This!”
Anything by Christopher Moore, for certain. David Maine tends to take Bible stories and rewrite them in interesting ways. A Canticle for Leibowitz – the library plays an important role. Alessandro Boffa’s You’re an Animal, Viskovitz! is small but mighty. Louise Penny has gotten good reviews for good reason – recommended for murder mystery fans who like good stories and character development.

Carol Wittig: “Boatwright Knitters”
They meet one day a week at lunch. It encourages home/work balance, improves morale, addresses the whole person beyond the job, increases cross-campus outreach, and builds bridges to reach diverse groups. You can involve the whole staff by “sponsoring a knitter” to pay for the yarn. They have a Ravelry group, a blog, and a set of Flickr photos of projects. Right now, they are a student organization, but don’t have enough student participation, so they’re working on outreach in that area. They’ve done charity projects like Knit One To Save One and caps for chemo.

Travis Smith: “The End”
There are many negative connotations about “the end,” so he wrote a poem. You’ll have to ask him for a copy.

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Technorati Tags: libraries, microconference, richmond

Teresa Doherty: “Cool sounds for Aleph Circ Transactions”
Originally presented at ELUNA as a poster session. They use custom sounds and colors to indicate specific circulation transaction alerts, i.e. checkin/checkout alerts. The sounds were selected because they’re short and fairly expressive without being offensive to users who may hear them.

Amanda Hartman: “Reaching Millennials: Understanding and Teaching the Next Generation” 
Those born 1980-1996-ish. These are generalizations, so they don’t describe everyone fully. They’re special and sheltered, team and goal oriented, more likely to be involved in community service, digital natives (mainly mobile tech) but don’t necessarily understand all of the implications or functions, impatient, and multi-taskers. They consider themselves to be relatively savvy searchers, so they may be less likely to ask for help. They have certain expectations about tech that libraries often can’t keep up with. They want learning to be participatory and active, with opportunities to express themselves online, and they have a sense of entitlement – get good grades for hard work, not necessarily for the product of the work. Libraries should have a mobile website. Hire staff that can support tech questions. Provide group workspaces. Explain why, not just how.

Deborah Vroman: “Errors, errors, everywhere! Common citation errors in Literature Resources from Gale”
Until recently, Gale was giving incorrect page ranges for citations for articles reprinted in their collections.  The problem is now fixed by removing the page numbers.

Anna Creech: “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics”
Uh, that’s me.

Suzanne Sherry: “Goodreads: I read, you read, everybody READS”
Social networking site for readers. You start off with read, to-read, and currently reading, but you can add other tags that then form collections. Once you’ve read a book, you can rate it and write a review. While you’re reading the book, you can leave comments with updates of your progress. The social element is handy for recommending books to friends and discussing the books you read. There are tools for virtual book clubs and online communities for local book clubs.

Nell Chenault: “Scanning to Save or Send”
They have 12 scanning stations, both Mac and PC, including two slide scanners. Also, they have microform scanners instead of the old light box machines. In the past five years, they’ve seen use increase 325%.

Abiodun Solanke: “Netbooks or Laptops” 
In the last hardware replacement cycle, they replaced circulating laptops with netbooks. Cost, capabilities, and portability were factors considered. Some specialized programs could not be loaded, but there are many desktop computer alternatives. Student reaction appears to be divided along gender – male students thought they were too small, but female students liked them. They did a survey of users borrowing the netbooks, and found that over time the negative comments reduced. They concluded that initial reactions to new things aren’t always indicative of their success. Currently would like to add netbooks with Mac OS.

Darnell Law: “Up In The Air: Text-A-Librarian and Mobile Technologies at Johnston Memorial Library”
Implemented service at the end of the spring semester, so they haven’t seen much use yet. They’re using a service called Text a Librarian. Users enter a specific number and a short code at the beginning of the message. The questions are answered through the service website. The phone numbers are anonymized. Some of the advantages of this service include working with any carrier, not requiring a cell phone to answer the texts, relatively inexpensive (~$1100/yr), answer templates for quick responses, and promotional materials.

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Technorati Tags: libraries, microconference, richmond

Recently, a friend was commenting on how by budgeting only $1000 a month and paying down debt using a snowball plan, she could be completely debt-free in just a few years. My initial thought was, “sure, you must not have nearly as much debt as me, or at as high of an interest rate.” And while I was partially correct, I was very surprised to discover that with the same amount of money, I could be completely credit card debt-free in two years and have my student loans paid off in six years.

Of course, this will require a level of discipline I have yet to master, and I’ll need to be more creative about planning for big purchases that occur in frequently. However, seeing the plan laid out before me and realizing that it’s not some unattainable dream has made me much more motivated to just do it already.

The plan starts July 1. I’m going to reassess where I am at that point, and then start tracking my progress, which is also a good motivator.

Technorati Tags: consumer debt, snowball

Despite the weather, or perhaps because of the weather, NASIGers came together for one of the best conferences we’ve had in recent years. All of the sessions were held in rooms that emptied out into the same common area, which also held the coffee and snacks during breaks. The place was constantly buzzing with conversations between sessions, and many folks hung back in the rooms, chatting with their neighbors about the session topics. Not many were eager to skip the sessions and the conversations in favor of drinks/books by the pools, particularly when temperatures peaked over 100°F by noon and stayed up there until well after dark.

As always, it was wonderful to spend time with colleagues from all over the country (and elsewhere) that I see once a year, at best. I’ve been attending NASIG since I was a wee serials librarian in 2002, and this conference/organization has been hugely instrumental in my growth as a librarian. Being there again this year felt like a combination of family reunion and summer camp. At one point, I choked up a little over how much I love being with all of them, and how much I was going to miss them until we come together again next year.

I’ve already blogged about the sessions I attended, so I won’t go into those details so much here. However, there were a few things that stood out to me and came up several times in conversations over the weekend.

One of the big things is a general trend towards publishers handling subscriptions directly, and in some cases, refusing to work with subscription agents. This is more prevalent in the electronic journal subscription world than in print, but that distinction is less significant now that so many libraries are moving to online-only subscriptions. I heard several librarians express concern over the potential increase in their workload if we go back to the era of ordering directly from hundreds of publishers rather than from one (or a handful) of subscription agents.

And then there’s the issue of invoicing. Electronic invoices that dump directly into a library acquisition system have been the industry standard with subscription agents for a long time, but few (and I can’t think of any) publishers are set up to deliver invoices to libraries using this method. In fact, my assistant who processes invoices must manually enter each line item of a large invoice of one of our collections of electronic subscriptions every year, since this publisher refuses to invoice through our agent (or will do so in a way that increases our fees to the point that my assistant would rather just do it himself). I’m not talking about mom & pop society publisher — this is one of the major players. If they aren’t doing EDI, then it’s understandable that librarians are concerned about other publishers following suit.

Related to this, JSTOR and UC Press, along with several other society and small press publishers have announced a new partnership that will allow those publishers to distribute their electronic journals on the JSTOR platform, from issue one to the current. JSTOR will handle all the hosting, payments, and library technical support, leaving the publishers to focus on generating the content. Here’s the kicker: JSTOR will also be handling billing for print subscriptions of these titles.

That’s right – JSTOR is taking on the role of subscription agent for a certain subset of publishers. They say, of course, that they will continue to accept orders through existing agents, but if libraries and consortia are offered discounts for going directly to JSTOR, with whom they are already used to working directly for the archive collections, then eventually there will be little incentive to use a traditional subscription agent for titles from these publishers. On the one hand, I’m pleased to see some competition emerging in this aspect of the serials industry, particularly as the number of players has been shrinking in recent years, but on the other hand I worry about the future of traditional agents.

In addition to the big picture topics addressed above, I picked up a few ideas to add to my future projects list:

• Evaluate the “one-click” rankings for our link resolver and bump publisher sites up on the list. These sources “count” more when I’m doing statistical reports, and right now I’m seeing that our aggregator databases garner more article downloads than from the sources we pay for specifically. If this doesn’t improve the stats, then maybe we need to consider whether or not access via the aggregator is sufficient. Sometimes the publisher site interface is a deterrent for users.
• Assess the information I currently provide to liaisons regarding our subscriptions and discuss with them what additional data I could incorporate to make the reports more helpful in making collection development decisions. Related to this is my ongoing project of simplifying the export/import process of getting acquisitions data from our ILS and into our ERMS for cost per use reports. Once I’m not having to do that manually, I can use that time/energy to add more value to the reports.
• Do an inventory of our holdings in our ERMS to make sure that we have turned on everything that should be turned on and nothing that shouldn’t. I plan to start with the publishers that are KBART participants and move on from there (and yes, Jason Price, I will be sure to push for KBART compliance from those who are not already in the program).
• Begin documenting and sharing workflow, SQL, and anything else that might help other electronic resource librarians who use our ILS or our ERMS, and make myself available as a resource. This stood out to me during the user group meeting for our ERMS, where I and a handful of others were the experts of the group, and by no means do I feel like an expert, but clearly there are quite a few people who could learn from my experience the way I learned from others before me.

I’m probably forgetting something, but I think those are big enough to keep me busy for quite a while.

If you managed to make it this far, thanks for letting me yammer on. To everyone who attended this year and everyone who couldn’t, I hope to see you next year in St. Louis!

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Technorati Tags: EDI, JSTOR, KBART, nasig2010, UC Press

Moderator: Clint Chamberlain, University of Texas, Arlington

What do we really mean when we are talking about a “next-generation ILS”?

It is a system that will need to be flexible enough to accommodate increasingly changing and complex workflows. Things are changing so fast that systems can’t wait several years to release updates.

It also means different things to different stakeholders. The underlying thing is being flexible enough to manage both print and electronic, as well as better reporting tools.

How are “next-generation ILS” interrelated to cloud computing?

Most of them have components in the cloud, and traditional ILS systems are partially there, too. Networking brings benefits (shared workloads).

What challenges are facing libraries today that could be helped by the emerging products you are working on?

Serials is one of the more mature items in the ILS. Automation as a result of standardization of data from all information sources is going to keep improving.

One of the key challenges is to deal with things holistically. We get bogged down in the details sometimes. We need to be looking at things on the collection/consortia level.

We are all trying to do more with less funding. Improving flexibility and automation will offer better services for the users and allow libraries to shift their staff assets to more important (less repetitive) work.

We need better tools to demonstrate the value of the library to our stakeholders. We need ways of assessing resource beyond comparing costs.

Any examples of how next-gen ILS will improve workflow?

Libraries are increasing spending on electronic resources, and many are nearly eliminating their print serials spending. Next gen systems need reporting tools that not only provide data about electronic use/cost, but also print formats, all in one place.

A lot of workflow comes from a print-centric perspective. Many libraries still haven’t figured out how to adjust that to include electronic without saddling all of that on one person (or a handful). [One of the issues is that the staff may not be ready/willing/able to handle the complexities of electronic.]

Every purchase should be looked at independently of format and more on the cost/process for acquiring and making it available to the stakeholders.

[Not taking as many notes from this point on. Listening for something that isn't fluffy pie in the sky. Want some sold direction that isn't pretty words to make librarians happy.]

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Technorati Tags: catalog, ILS, nasig2010, next-gen