These sessions focus on innovative or entrepreneurial thinking in libraries – new ways to solve problems, new technology or existing tech utilized in new ways, etc. It will feature four10-minute presentations back-to-back, with a moderator for introductions, Q&A, and time keeping.
1) E-book Metadata in the Supply Chain: Can't We All Just Get Along? (Nettie Lagace)
The e-book publication space is still young, with publishing models and content models evolving day-to-day. Publishers, libraries, aggregators, preservation agencies, collection management systems and discovery services are working through the complexity of selling and buying e-books, making information about e-books available to end users, making the actual books available to end users, and preserving them.
One particularly difficult area for many members of this supply chain is receiving and working with quality e-book metadata. Book publishers and others need the metadata about e-books very early in the publication process in order to enable sales, which means that publishers are often making descriptive metadata about e-books available well before they are published. Discovery and cataloging services need metadata records as soon as the e-books are accessible to libraries and their end users. Libraries need metadata to track what e-books they have purchased, what e-books are accessible to their end users, and to populate metadata in their catalogs and discovery services. Preservation agencies and publishers need to confirm that the content received for preservation is the entirety of what was published.
The NISO Working Group creating a Recommended Practice on E-Book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain (yes! It has a short title: NISO E-book Metadata Working Group) is tackling this complex area of work to determine specific uses for various metadata elements in different users’ workflows. It is taking a multi-phased approach to properly analyze impact and priorities for each, to create and communicate recommendations for e-book metadata that can be adopted by as many parties in the supply chain as possible.
2) Mobile Management for Shifting Collections (Elizabeth Henry, Wen-ying Lu)
As the needs of academic students and faculty evolve, academic libraries must consider how to optimize the space they have on campus to deliver the greatest value to their users. This frequently means needing to shift collections. Whether facing a large-scale weeding or re-location project, or looking for ways to manage iterative movement of materials, the challenge of managing physical materials during these processes is significant. At Santa Clara University, the University library has leveraged mobile technology to make these processes more manageable. Using the Mobile Worklists app, they have been able to move materials to and from ASRS (automated storage and retrieval system location), as well as to different spaces within the library, in a way that increases staff efficiency and minimizes any interruption in access to these materials for students and faculty. Additionally, the library has found opportunities to increase the quality of work performed by student workers by using the app to support training for their pages. Again, this results in better materials management practices which contribute to improved success for students trying to locate physical materials needed to support their studies. With so much attention on electronic resources, it is easy to forget the challenges of the physical collection. But Mobile Worklists reminds us that modern technology can be used to improve processes we haven’t thought about for years. At a time when it is critically important to support current and future changes in library services, it is worth reevaluating how we can improve traditional processes to make way for what is coming next.
3) Like, Reply, and Buy: Using Social Media as a Collection Development Tool (Camille Cooper)
Both academic librarians and publishers put substantial energy into determining what researchers want to read. The best way to get at that information is to ask the researchers, but they’re often so busy that you can’t catch them in person, over the phone, or via email, and even then, you’re cold-calling them. Faculty and graduate students don’t always think to tell their librarian when they’ve read or viewed something interesting in their field, but they do tell each other, often through social media channels, at a time right for them. Learn how one librarian has leveraged a popular social media platform to make timely, targeted collection development decisions and, in the process, formed stronger relationships with researchers at her institution. The presentation, which will open with a few multiple-choice questions about social media use in the academic community, may also be of interest to publishers looking to enhance their social media presence.
4) Discovery Pathways Make Tracking a Link a Dicey Proposition: NISO Tracking Link Origins Count Correctly! (Nettie Lagace)
A new NISO Recommended Practice, Tracking Link Origins, will be available to Charleston Conference 2017 attendees and the general library/publisher/vendor population. This document is the output of a cross-stakeholder working group which investigated options for full reporting of link origin information, when users connect to a publisher's content via a discovery service. Typical web log analysis may obscure this origin information or report only the "last stop" of the request, typically a link resolver. The Working Group, in construction of its recommendations, charted complex data flows using different discovery/link resolver providers and varied library subscription data and licensed content, with and without proxy server application. Recommendations from the Link Origins Tracking Working Group will enable full reporting of source data and allow content providers, libraries, and discovery providers to measure true success of their work supplying metadata and content to this environment. Expected industry outcomes from the publication of the Recommended Practice include more accurate content renewal decisions for librarians, who will possess more accurate usage reports of content accessed through discovery services, and improved assessment by publishers of their investments providing their primary content to discovery services.
