2019 Charleston Library Conference

1) Shining a Sun on the Sea: Improving Content Platform Migrations (Nettie Lagace) 

Online content is made available via web-based platforms to libraries and end users by publishers and content providers who may contract this service to third-party platforms. When contracts end and content moves to new platforms, changes can abound and affect all stakeholders. The NISO Content Platform Migrations initiative is new this year, with a Working Group in progress to develop and publish a Recommended Practice to be available in 2020. It is in the interest of all stakeholders to ensure that migrations run smoothly with as few disruptions as possible. This work at NISO will provide guidelines to stakeholders such as libraries, publishers, and platform providers on migration processes and communications. The Working Group is now executing its first phase of information gathering and will be able to describe this process to the Charleston audience, before efforts begin in late 2019 to draft a document for public comment.

2) Get It from the Source: Identifying Library Resources and Software Used in Faculty Research (Erin Wentz, Karen Alcorn) 

Libraries and Information Technology departments aim to support the educational and research needs of students, researchers, and faculty members. Close matches between the resources those departments provide and the resources the institution’s community members actually use highlight the value of the departments, demonstrate fiscally responsibility, and show attentiveness to the community’s needs. Traditionally, libraries rely on usage statistics to guide collection development decisions, but usage statistics can only imply value. Identifying a resource by name in a publication demonstrates the value of that resource more clearly. This pilot project examined the full-text of articles published in 2016-2017 by faculty members at a mid-sized, special-focus institution to answer the questions “Do faculty members have university-provided access to the research tools they need to publish?” and “If not, where are they getting them?” Using a custom database, the presenters indexed every publication by author, publication, resources used, availability of the identified resources, and more. Audience members will have the opportunity to skim a handout with a few of snippets from example publications and to collectively identify important information to record. Attendees will be able to adapt the methods used in this pilot study to projects at their institutions, gaining a better understanding of their own collections’ strengths and weaknesses. In addition, attendees will be able to identify ways to use that data to negotiate for additional resources, inform strategic partnerships, and facilitate open discussions with the institution’s community.

Note: The following people from MCPHS University contributed to the presentation but were unable to attend and present: Shanti Freundlich and Gregory Martin.

3) Aggressive Open Access Curation (Thomas Phillips) 

The rapid expansion of Open Access providers and content is an important development in scholarly communications. However, many librarians and information professionals have misidentified the central obstacle which prevents OA from becoming the standard mode of scholarly communication. This obstacle is the professional curation of OA content. Students and scholars have to be able to discover OA content either in their local ILS or through some other single search experience. Simply creating OA content and placing it in some digital silo is a failing strategy (as is the reliance upon for-profit search engines). The content must be discoverable, using MARC records. The OADTL, the only professionally managed, fully OA library in OCLC, offers a model for overcoming this discoverability obstacle. The OADTL curates OA collections in religious studies (and related disciplines) and then makes these collections available through (1) the OADTL website, (2) collection-sharing in OCLC's WorldShare Management System, and (3) the OCLC knowledge base. The librarians at the OADTL curate OA content from nearly 1,000 different providers, including archives, repositories, scholarly societies, museums, and publishers. The OADTL adds over 5,000 titles per month to its OA collections. Participants will learn how to locate OA content, curate OA content and share metadata for OA content.

4) Raising Your Librarians’ Research Cred: Integrating ORCID Works into Springshare Profile Pages (Barbara Bishop, Clint Bellanger)

In today’s library world academic librarians need a way to connect with their faculty constituents. One easy way is to provide a place where their research can be easily located. Adapting an ORCID API from GitHub and making some changes to the LibGuides Profile Page Template, Auburn University Libraries was able to easily integrate a librarian’s ORCID works onto their Profile Page. Once the changes are made to the template, even the most techno-phobic librarian should be able to cut and paste their way to raising their research cred!