2017 Charleston Library Conference

Tracking electronic access is a major challenge for libraries that cannot be ignored. Vast quantities of electronic resources continue to be acquired and libraries continue to seek a way to keep up with the evolving electronic resource ecosystem.

Libraries are immersed in monitoring electronic resources for access performance, features, functionality, completeness of content and usage. Publishers, providers and vendors are immersed in their innovative business models. Users are immersed in their research needs. With these immersion silos, there is a lack of communication between stakeholders that creates an unsustainable ecosystem.

Currently, stakeholders are creating piecemeal patches that partially address access problems rather than an integrated effort of the whole community to incorporate interconnected solutions. These patches are not solving the problems. They are focusing on the symptoms, but not treating the cause. Why? The electronic access ecosystem is constantly in a state of flux. The system was simpler in times past. In this digital age, the creation, dissemination and use of data is dynamic.

It is vital to the success of the electronic access ecosystem that there be interplay between all the stakeholders. One stakeholder cannot successfully manage electronic access by itself. There needs to be a concerted effort among all stakeholders for monitoring, identifying and addressing electronic access issues. These relationships are complex. What’s hindering the communication between stakeholders? What are we doing wrong and how can it be fixed? This problem can’t be fixed overnight, but must be carefully orchestrated. Libraries need to take the lead in the development of integrated networks.

This presentation will address some of the networking problems that plague stakeholders and provide suggestions for improved networking integration. Audience participation will be sought for sharing problems and suggestions.

Research Information Management (RIM) is the aggregation, curation, and utilization of information about research. It is emerging as a part of scholarly communications practice in many university libraries and is a service that is typically provided in collaboration with a university’s research enterprise. RIM may interoperate with and support research repositories, researcher profiles, awards management workflows, internal reports, and external assessment. Universities have diverse goals for implementing RIM, and case studies from the US and Australia will be demonstrated in this talk.

Research university libraries are increasingly involved in RIM activities because of the expertise and value that library professionals provide to manage information relating to publications, data, persistent identifiers and so forth. Library expertise adds value in terms of connecting research information across a wide range of library-managed information sources and systems which can assist and enhance assessment activities, grant management, strategic collaborations, teaching and research planning, commercialisation and other activities.

Librarians provide knowledge and expertise which are essential for connecting up relevant applications, information and metadata within RIM systems. They provide knowledge and expertise to visualise, interpret, collect and highlight relationships between data elements in order to demonstrate and define impact and reach of institutional research collaborations and outputs. In this presentation we will share how the libraries at La Trobe and Syracuse Universities are partnering with other campus stakeholders to achieve these outcomes.

This presentation is an outcome of collaborative research by librarians practicing on three continents through the OCLC Research Library Partnership, and is part of a growing body of RIM research to support libraries, researchers, and institutions.

Institutional open access funds are not new to academic libraries, but are they still relevant? How far can such a fund go towards transitioning scholarly publishing to a fully open access model? University of California Berkeley (UCB) and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) both dedicate approximately $100,000 annually towards helping authors pay open access publishing charges. Both institutions have also endorsed the goal to transition all scholarly publishing to open access through a plurality of models.

Libraries, as the coordinators of these funds, play an important role in promoting open access publishing and engaging with stakeholders on campus. The presenters will review how their funds have evolved over the years, how these funds fit into the larger ecosystem of open access publishing, and how they envision the funds in the future landscape. They will present the results of surveys of fund recipients and strategies to promote their funds.

As co-editors of an open access LIS journal, we manage a small, volunteer organization, and many of the practices we follow to solicit, publish, and maintain content on schedule might fit some people’s definition of predatory practices. As librarians, we understand best practices for publishing a journal, but as publishers of a small journal we are often forced to compromise. We will explore best practices for publishing an open access journal through the lens of our own experience, describe the process of migrating from one journal publishing platform to another, and reflect on how our experiences differ from “best practices.”

Many of the serials in an academic library are published by or in association with scientific associations and many scientific associations are made up of faculty at academic institutions. Yet society leadership and librarians rarely have opportunities to interact, communicate about their operations, or collaborate on shared goals. Moderated by a librarian, in this session, a panel of scientific society representatives will provide a close look into the inner workings of their organizations, explain how they advance research, and provide a forum for ideas on potential library/society collaborations. Specifically, they will address the following:

Publication
How do societies select manuscripts for publication? What does this process look like and how might librarians support your faculty members as they go through it?

Faculty Support
While publications are certainly a priority for many scientific societies, some list publishing as a secondary or even tertiary goal in support of scholars and discipline growth. What additional services and support do they provide their members and does there exist an opportunity for societies and librarians to collaborate in their shared mission to support faculty and research? From professional development, to creating a space for collaboration, to government advocacy, to communication with the media, policymakers and the public, the panelists will highlight the aspects of their missions that go beyond publishing.

Shared goals with librarians
Where do societies stand when it comes to issues supported – and often championed – by academic libraries such as access, discovery and transparency? Where do society and library goals overlap?

In this session, the panelists will answer these questions and more through a moderated question-and-answer panel. The panel will conclude with a rich discussion on potential opportunities for collaboration between librarians and society leaders.

Engaging and investment in research to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, encouraging innovation, enriching education, and stimulating the economy to improve humankind is all part of the research process. Sharing new ideas across the sciences enable researchers to expand their perspective through the engagement with other perspectives. Pre-peer review sharing is becoming more predominant to advancing the interests of researchers, scholars, students, business organizations, librarians, and the public.

Research takes time and publishing concrete ideas in reputable journals can be a long road.
What if research librarians could assist their young scholars with getting their ideas noticed early?

What if scholars posted their working papers and ideas in a community where sharing knowledge is valued and collaboration refined research to promote better research faster?

Primary Speaker Gregg Gordon, managing director of SSRN and the thought leader behind Tomorrow’s Research Today. He will discuss edge cases about accelerating interdisciplinary research in today’s digital world.

Gregg is the managing director of SSRN focused on the high quality, rapid, electronic dissemination of scholarly research at the lowest possible cost - Tomorrow's Research Today.

In May 2016, SSRN joined Elsevier, a world-leading provider of information solutions promoting the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, and deliver better care. Together, we can further enhance early discoveries of ideas in an open-access environment of sharing and collaboration.

Scholarly Speaker J.J. Prescott, Professor of Law, Professor of Economics (courtesy) Codirector, Empirical Legal Studies Center, Codirector, Program in Law and Economics University of Michigan
As technology becomes ever more integral to the research process, well-designed platform software has the potential to bring together researchers and scholarship from different disciplines, and ultimately, if done right, transform the production of scholarship into something fine-tuned and well-oiled, accelerating research generally. One age-old difficulty of university- and disciplined-based scholarship is that different fields develop distinct lexicons, which becomes path-dependent, exacerbated by the tendency of scholars to use non-descriptive terms to label ideas and methods (e.g., authors’ names). As a result, even the most knowledgeable scholar in a particular field may have trouble discerning which issues have been addressed and problems solved in other fields. Consequently, wheels are being constantly re-invented and collaboration opportunities are routinely missed, even by scholars working in buildings right next to each other. Smart tools, however, have the capacity to break down these walls. One exciting possibility is the use of machine learning to begin to automate the translation process and build field-specific “views” of other fields. Leveraging existing interdisciplinary scholarship or the substance of research itself, software can identify links between concepts in different fields and then use these links to “translate” advances in other fields into a scholar’s “native” language. Platform technology and big data methods also render the possibility of mapping disciplines, including their overlapping areas, a realistic possibility. Tools that allow scholars to know quickly when another field has dealt with the same or similar problem – or to know quickly that it hasn’t – may well be the combustion engine of research in the 21st century.

In this session, presenters will share insights from a recent research project undertaken to better understand the evolving role of libraries in supporting affordable and open educational resources. Highlights from a 2017 survey of 230 academic librarians will be shared along with the main themes that emerged from the data. A panel discussion will follow in which three academic librarians working with open and/or alternative educational resources will share their experiences. The moderated question set will relate to how these themes are serving as a catalyst for moving the library forward from a place of advocacy to one of action. Panelists will share the ways in which they leverage library resources and budget to support affordability initiatives, how they are creating effective learning experiences by design, and how they are developing copyright and licensing expertise.

Attendees will come away from this session with greater perspective on the actions their peers think are most important to undertake now and in the future with regard to OERs, how librarians rate their current performance on those objectives, and which activities are deemed to be the most challenging. From the panelist discussion, attendees will hear specific examples of how those trends are playing out on certain campuses, identify the largest obstacles that must be overcome, and gain insight into what the future holds for libraries working with alternative or open course materials.

The campus’s website is its most public face to students, faculty, and funders. Its goal is to tell them what sets the university apart. Meanwhile, many libraries are sitting on a goldmine of the institution’s most unique offerings, from student research conferences to faculty art. Increasingly, libraries are bringing the university’s scholarship and creative work directly to the campus website and the audiences it serves. They show interested visitors what makes the campus unique by embedding content from their scholarly repositories, faculty galleries of mentors and researchers, and live readership visualizations into the university’s primary marketing vehicle.

In this presentation, Jean-Gabriel Bankier, President and CEO of bepress, will provide a brief overview of this trend, sharing data and examples from a community of some 500 institutions. Next, Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communications Librarian and Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, will offer a case study from the Ames Library. She will describe how embedding content lets prospective students and faculty explore Illinois Wesleyan's intellectual and cultural life on a deeper level, which creates new opportunities for the university. In fact, multiple faculty members note that the strong student work they saw on Digital Commons @ IWU—prominently listed on the main campus site—played a role in their decision to apply for positions at Illinois Wesleyan.

The session will be interactive and have time for questions and discussion at the end. Attendees will come away with ideas of how to integrate library offerings into the campus website and culture in ways that strengthen the library’s role.

Even though open access is now a shared vision of the world’s academic communities, research councils, and funding bodies, only 14% of the world’s scholarly journals are available open access on publication, and the bulk of the leading scientific journals remain locked behind paywalls. New Open Access publishing initiatives have produced laudable results, but are not enough to liberate scholarly communications from the confines of an antiquated, print-based publishing system and the grip of hybrid costs and increasing subscription costs.
Based on data analyses conducted by the Max Planck Digital Library and described in their widely-read White Paper, a rapid transformation of the subscription system is possible and librarians have a leading role to play.

In this session, two librarians will present their strategies to propel open access forward, enabling the transformation of today’s corpus of scholarly journals from subscription to open access.

Open access publishing options have now been available for scholarly books for several years, but as yet there has been little research into the effects of making books free to access and re-use.

Is there a significant usage advantage for open access books? Where are the readers of open access books based? How does open access publication affect citations and coverage in blogs and news media? Does publishing a book open access lead to new collaborations and opportunities that would not have otherwise been possible? And how do these trends vary by discipline?

Meanwhile, what are the effects on libraries of making books available open access? How can libraries best support discovery and usage of OA books?

Drawing on recent studies from Springer Nature and UCL Press, and on the experiences of Grand Valley State in managing OA books, this session will provide some early insights into the impact of open access on scholarly books.

This session will explore a conundrum when it comes to scholarly reference sources and libraries: Basic research faces significant challenges due to the staggering proliferation of information and misinformation online. There is widespread concern about alternative facts and misleading analysis. Students and interdisciplinary scholars are challenged to rapidly develop broad knowledge of new fields. These are problems that scholarly reference publishers and librarians should be uniquely equipped to address, and yet we know at many libraries the reference collection, both in print and digital forms, is underutilized. Why is this? Is it a problem of information literacy? Does it have to do with the discovery environment within libraries? Do librarians no longer rely on reference for guidance and background? Is there an impact from Google and Google Scholar emerging as the predominant starting point for research? Have sources such as Wikipedia eclipsed the need or demand for vetted scholarly reference? Finally, what constructive role will reference play at libraries in the future?

What are the goals of your scholarly communications programs and services, and how do you define success? Critics and proponents alike often attempt to paint the scholarly communications movement with a broad brush. Both groups seem to push for a common definition of what the movement should look like and how success should be defined. In the world we live in today, these loudest voices are often amplified through their use of social media, listservs and prominent roles on the conference circuit, leaving some in the middle to question their own success and whether they have a place in this movement. And because scholarly communications programs do often grow out of the open access movement, some institutions may define their local success in terms of the movement as a whole.

We argue that effective scholarly communications programs are ones that are aligned with their institutions’ mission and goals, and use planning and evaluation methods that reflect their unique community and needs. This panel will explore the challenges posed by those who seek a singular definition of success and share brief examples of how scholarly communications programs are developed, sustained, and evaluated at three different institutions. Panelists from a liberal arts college, a comprehensive university and a research university will discuss the ways they define and measure success at their institutions, and how this may have evolved over time.

Renew Publishing Consultants and GVPi, a digital publishing solutions company, have recently invited the scholarly and professional communications community to share their views and plans for incorporating streaming video content into their websites and publishing platforms.
Although many publishers, societies and academic libraries are in the process of exploring ways to incorporate video content into their websites and publishing platforms, whether as new product lines, for teaching, or to offer more value to existing products and services, we hear that many are unsure about how to go about developing a video strategy whilst others have a clear idea of what they need and are in the process of implementing video content. Therefore, we thought it would be useful to survey the current state and thinking about streaming video, and have issued a survey aiming at finding out from publishers, scholarly societies, professional associations and academic libraries where they are in their video development plans, what they see as the main challenges and barriers to delivering video content online, and what opportunities they think streaming video offers. Our talk will address some of the challenges of streaming video content and include some case studies.

Sponsored by Clarivate Analytics.

Open Access isn’t meaningfully open if it can’t be found. Over 20 million scholarly articles are now available as Open Access (OA), and nearly half of recent article are OA. However, a lack of adequate discovery infrastructure has hindered use of the OA corpus in academic libraries. Recently, however, a number of services have begun to tackle the OA Discovery problem. These include browser plugins like Unpaywall, the Open Access Button, and Kopernia; purpose-made search interfaces like oaFindr and ScienceOpen; open web APIs like oaDOI and DOAI; and integration into other search tools like Web of Science. We will discuss these and other tools, with an emphasis on how they can be integrated today into library services and decision-making.

While a recent Ithaka S+R survey* found that approximately eight in ten librarians feel that the most important priority for their library is supporting student success, only about half feel that their library has clearly articulated how it contributes towards this success. In this session, Melissa Lockaby, Collection Management Librarian & Coordinator of Information Services, and Austina Jordan, Collection Management Librarian & Coordinator of Information Services, two University of North Georgia librarians who have had success in supporting student success, will articulate their best practices for putting students first. In particular, they will discuss how cross-campus partnerships such as those with faculty, student affairs departments, IT, and student resource centers like writing and tutoring can turn librarians into effective “front-line” responders for student needs and in-class achievement.

Articulated best practices will include:

• How to create successful programming partnerships in order to help students reach their goals
• How to work with faculty in the promotion of library resources so that students will use them as effective tools in research and other class assignments
• How to support faculty members’ own research and teaching needs in a way that turns them into library champions
• Fun ideas for appealing to students so that they come back to the library with learning and researching needs
• How to take advantage of outside-of-the-library campus resources for students

Their presentation will end with a lively discussion and Q&A from the audience.

*http://www.sr.ithaka.org/publications/us-library-survey-2016/

The figure of the “workflow” is common in studies of scholarly communications, including the role of libraries. Accounts and images of the workflow, based on surveys and interviews, ethnography, and scholarly autobiography, have identified the sequence of steps in research. The first part of the presentation (“What Do We Know?”) explains what is common to such work and how workflow configurations differ in representing the newest technologies in research and publishing. Thus, among other innovations, there are new tools and services (e.g., for citation management and collaboration) and formats for measuring impact via social media and influencing the academic reward system (e.g., altmetrics). Attention to the workflow challenges scholars and libraries to recognize how it is evolving technologically. The second part of the presentation (“What Should We Do?”) features recent work aimed at managing elements of the workflow as it changes. Thus, recent books, articles, reports, services, and organizational initiatives seek to guide scholars toward the uses of new tools for discovery and search, the production of multi-media digital texts, peer review in novel forms, open annotation, the dissemination of research including Open Access, and the evaluation of digital work in the reward system. Libraries too act in the remaking of the workflow, with proposals (as in a recent project at the Cornell University Library) to join research library design and organization to fresh research on how scholars work. Altogether, the workflow is a format for understanding how scholarly communications reflect the individual, disciplinary, and institutional conditions of faculty work. Still, steady innovation has prompted one influential observer to ask if a “piecemeal” approach will provide “fixes but no lasting and feasible rearrangement of the system.” The presentation closes by asking about the utility of such a goal, for faculty scholarship and the library’s contributions to it.

Open educational resources are a growing topic on college and university campuses and many libraries are considering starting OER projects. How can these projects best be pitched to university administration? What might convince your VP of Finance to support this project, and what might these administrators consider barriers? Through interviews with 10 Vice Presidents for Finance and Administration at public and private universities across the U.S., the researchers sought to gain an understanding of factors impacting OER programs as seen by those carrying primary responsibility for university budgets. Attendees will be presented with the study’s research questions and the initial findings, and will have an opportunity to ask questions about the interviews and suggest future directions for research. They will gain an understanding of themes emerging from the data that have an impact on librarians seeking to implement or grow OER programs at their universities.