The exchange below was between me and a colleague who had recently been to a collections conference in Charleston, S.C.
DB wrote:
Hi all, Just got back from the Charleston conference and wanted to share a few thoughts and also questions. The conference is focused on Collections Development and Acquisitions, but the content went far beyond that. Web-scale Discovery and ease of use for patrons was key topic, and several libraries were using Summon from Serials Solutions. My understanding of these tools is the they pre-harvest and pre-coordinate a collection for fast, accurate results, but I was a bit lost at times.
Thanks for the run-down from the conference. Sounds incredibly
interesting. I'd love to discuss this at greater length, but I've
interspersed a few comments in your original post.
Steve
"Web scale discovery" is really exciting to me. Simply put it is the
next level of federated-search/single-search, although "federated" might
be a bit of a misnomer here. As you quoted the summon press in your
second post, "No need to broadcast searches to other databases" Webfeat is using "translators" to search each database separately, hence the slow and individually grouped results.
Seems like competitors are Worldcat Beta, Ebsco Discovery Service, Primo Central, and Google Scholar Beta, but I may have missed some. Excuse my lack of knowledge, but are we already in one of these products on our webpage, or will we be moving to Summon or another product?
We are not using a Web scale discovery tool on our Web pages, we're using WebFeat, a federated search tool as a simple one box article search from the "articles" tab.
A keynote on the mission of the library got a writeup in LJ:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6705641.html?nid=2673&source=link&rid= I had mentioned it in a meeting yesterday and wanted to send out the link which appears to contain a link to the full presentation, which was very thought provoking. Other topics were Is use "King" in driving collections? If so, is the use data we get accurate?
My opinion? NO! But use is definitely first among equals in terms of collection decision making. Making use the primary decision factor...
1. Assumes a lot about the equality and accessibility of our print and electronic resources. If use were to dictate decision making, then eventually only the most successfully branded and added-feature laden products would be collected. All other things being equal, (visibility,accessibility, discoverability) use might be the most significant factor. As things stand right now, the playing field is far from level.
2. A research library has to support the research mission of the university. In my mind that means we also have to anticipate and provide for scholarship in areas of research that may not be highly used.
Does one budget by use?
Maybe, if use could be quantifiably weighted into the decision.
Other topics at the conference were Branding, and new types of Branding. I talked with the R2 people and besides regular branding, we have the option of configuring the collection so that when people logout, they are automatically sent to a library webpage, to reinforce the idea that it its the library that supplies the product. Do we want to configure our resources to do this type of thing? Or will we annoy our patrons?
Yes! We should send or patrons back to our site. We should brand (in the unfortunately business-y parlance) our resources to the greatest extent we can and put concentrated effort into the development of our "brand" Our site is their gateway to the electronic resources, it goes beyond a "reminder" as to who is paying for it. If I had my druthers, we'd be pulling content into our library Web environment as opposed to linking out to licensed resource interfaces. Users need the content. The only people who NEED to know what Ebsco, CSA, Springer, etc. are, are the librarians.
I helped an undergraduate find an article via the our link resolver yesterday. We followed links through four different branded interfaces to get the pdf file. That is four different opportunities for the user to get confused about where the article is published and where it is coming from.
One speaker said "Brand It, Market It, Name It, Promote It, and give up BI." I don't know anything about the BI part and I'm not advocating that but just reporting, but the speakers point was that...
Ok, yes, brand it market it, promote it, but abandoning Library
Instruction (BI is sooo 20th century) is a thoroughly ridiculous idea.
...we should be able to make the library easy enough to use (like Google, with Summon or some other tools) that people should not need BI in the future, we should just have to tell them how to find our wonderful, self-explanatory web site. KISS was her theme (Keep It Simple ...)- we need to resist the urge to display complexities to our users but rather hide them.
This I agree with. Prioritize the content not the container.
Patron driven book aquisitions, and consortial based aquisitions were hot topics. One library loads all relevant records from its vendor into its catalog with a purchase button, so that the catalog was a bit like Amazon. Journal pricing was a topic of a plenary with both publishers and librarians speaking. IOP has seen their submissions go from 11,000 in 2000 to 40,000 plus in 2009 already, the growth of science research is staggering at the moment, and researchers expectations are changing as well, they want faster publication, instant access, etc... They used the journal Nanotechnology as an example, it published 126 papers in 2001 and 1,411 in 2008. I knew things were expanding but found these numbers to be an eye opener. How to cope with with above realities and the realities of our budgets and space were the constant topic of the conference, which had the title "Necessity is the Mother of Invention".
It was a bit of a pep talk: these are exciting times and we have the chance to really change the way we relate to out patrons, but only if we act to take control of our future. To be user focused and part of the user community was a constant theme, and to guard against having an inward focus on processes and artifacts.
But user-focus requires complex thought about the ways we are dealing
with processes and artifacts, in addition to having a finger on the
pulse of patrons needs.
One session was on never wasting a good serials crisis, another entitled "Its the Economy Stupid" talked about stepping back and using this chance to really look at what we do. One vendor scolded us librarians for not being good business people, well that may be true, I never took a negotiations class or business class in library school but I think I'm prepared to be a lot tougher in the future in negotiations.
Perhaps Library schools ought to develop courses on negotiating and licensing with the business college? Perhaps they already do?
