2019 Charleston Library Conference

Newly retired as of October 31, 2019, Michael Mabe will speak about Plan S and what to expect down the road from the EU. Michael will speak as an industry expert rather than as the voice of STM so put on your listening caps!

This will be another in our irregular series of Hyde Park Debates. The proposition to be debated this year is "Resolved: Preprint servers have improved the scholarly communication system."

The structure of the event follows roughly the outline of a formal Oxford Union debate: we begin the proceedings by polling the audience to determine how many agree and how many disagree with the proposition. Then our debaters take the stage: Each delivers a prepared, ten-minute statement, one arguing against the proposition, and the other in favor. Then each gives a three-minute response to the other’s statement. Then we open the floor to discussion with the audience. Following the discussion, we poll the audience again, and whichever debater has moved the most votes is declared the winner.

Oya Rieger (Ithaka S+R, formerly of arXiv) has agreed to argue in favor of the proposition, and Kent Anderson (Caldera Publishing Solutions) will argue against it. Rick Anderson will serve as moderator and timekeeper.

In an era of disinformation, libraries provide access to published, vetted materials that can be cited and used to establish facts in published research and online platforms, such as Wikipedia. But all too often those books are only available in print and held by libraries far from the researcher. For many digital learners, if a book isn't available online, it's as if it doesn't exist. Facilitated by Wendy Hanamura, Director of Partnerships at Internet Archive, this panel will bring together Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of Internet Archive, and Dustin Hollan, CEO of Better World Books, to discuss how these two organizations are working together to supply and digitize books needed to turn the cited references in Wikipedia into active links. Laura Irmscher, Chief of Collections at Boston Public Library, will reflect on how libraries can mobilize their collections to meet this grand challenge.

Expectations and practices of privacy have changed dramatically in the space of less than a generation. Our phones broadcast our whereabouts. Biometrics confirm our identities and hint at ancestries to be discovered. We routinely trade personal information for personalization. Yet librarians have stood firmly upon strong principles of patron privacy. Is this conservatism justified, or have libraries lost touch with the modern culture? What opportunities might be lost to improve and tailor user experience, to contribute to student success via learning analytics, or to strategically leverage advanced data analytics? How might we across the library and information industry need to rethink our relationships with one another and with end users, as well as what privacy, data literacy, and consent even mean in a networked and surveillance society? Join us to explore new perspectives and new issues around privacy in our field.

Libraries and Museums: Perfect Together!

Description: In this talk, Dawes, who oversees the libraries and museums at his institution, will explore the benefits and pitfalls of the type of organizational structure he created, as well as the potential impact for the broader community.

Making it Last Longer: Archives, Museums, and Libraries

Description: Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LAMs) serve a vital role in preserving, educating, and interpreting history for future generations. In this presentation, Haykal will discuss projects undertaken by the presenter as well as projects undertaken by the information professional community that aim to bring communities into projects. Additional discussion will examine why these institutions should collaborate.

Since the enactment of the first copyright statute in England in 1710, libraries have been central to the curation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge for the public good. Historically, however, librarians as a class of professionals central to copyright's objectives have rarely featured in national copyright laws. As copyright law struggles to adapt to rapid technological change, the role of libraries and librarians is also undergoing significant transformation. This talk addresses why librarians are still missing from many modern copyright laws and how the confluence of technological change, globalization, and copyright reform is fundamentally re-shaping how librarians and copyright law interact.

2019 is shaping up to be the year that the scholarly community gets serious about open access books. In this session, we bring you the view from Europe and beyond. We’ll explore the position of authors, institutions, funders, and publishers, drawing on recently conducted research, and in a panel discussion we’ll consider what we as a community can do to change attitudes and support the transition to OA for books.

This year, Springer Nature conducted the first ever landscape survey dedicated to understanding the views of book authors about OA for books. More than 2,500 authors worldwide responded. Springer Nature will share highlights from their findings, including authors’ motivations for publishing books and why they choose to publish OA (or not to), as well as views on policy detail, and how attitudes differ by region and experience level.

The Knowledge Exchange (KE) partners, six national organisations within Europe, published a “Landscape Study on Open Access and Monographs” in 2017, and, in 2018, commissioned a follow-up survey and held a workshop in Brussels to help identify the next steps to support the transition to open access. KE’s presentation will provide an overview of the results of the survey and the follow up workshop, which developed key themes, such as policy, author engagement, technical infrastructure and monitoring, and called for the development of a European roadmap for Open Access monographs.

LIBER is the voice of Europe’s research library community. Earlier this year, they surveyed LIBER libraries about OA books. LIBER will share comments from respondents on how libraries can create workflows and funding mechanisms to encourage OA book publishing, on the kind of training needed for library staff to adapt to OA developments, and on ways libraries who are not starting their own university press can support OA book publishing.

In light of well-publicized negotiations around journal deals between major publishers and groups of universities from Germany to California, more and more libraries are engaging in discussions about making significant changes to current journal subscription models. Some look to expand big deals, some seek transformational changes that include increased open access, while others opt for outright cancellation. The actions of the UC System, Projekt DEAL, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and others suggest some alternative directions for the future of journal article publishing and access. This panel will discuss issues around journal package deals and what libraries need to consider in the future

Mergers and acquisitions are a normal part of any open marketplace, but it seems every time one vendor or publisher purchases another, many within the library world express concern and dismay. This level of concern has grown more acute over time with the increasing consolidation of library vendors and publishers and as many of those companies increasingly appear to be employing strategies in search of the horizontal or vertical integration of their slice of the marketplace. While some see this trend as a negative occurrence, the reality is that mergers, acquisitions, and other forms of strategic partnerships that result in market consolidation have both positive and negative impacts on libraries, universities, and the marketplace. In this session, we will explore the impact of an increasingly consolidated marketplace, looking at both short-term and long-term implications, benefits, and consequences of this continually evolving industry.

We know from a variety of studies that our students and faculty prefer print books for many uses. These same studies show that preferences for format are situational – there are cases in which the e-book is the preferred format for many of those same users. While many users indicate that they will switch formats based on use cases, libraries do not do a good job of linking users from the print version of a book to the digital version and vice versa. In addition, most libraries collect e-books from a variety of vendors, but do not provide clear connections from one version to another. Finally, we know that many users begin their discovery process on publisher or vendor sites (often guided there from Google).

In order to test how users will behave when confronted with a clear choice in format and to determine whether users beginning on a vendor platform will navigate to other library-provided licensed e-book content, the University of Denver has collaborated with JSTOR on a pilot to embed links directly on the JSTOR e-book page that will guide users to the print version of that title and/or to alternate e-book versions, including when the library does not provide access to that title on the JSTOR platform.

In this presentation, we will explain the rationale behind the project, describe the technical processes involved, and share preliminary usage data for the content involved. We will also describe an expanded vision for how this sort of service could work for journal articles.

Everyone is talking about Transformative Agreements in the abstract, but just what do they look like and how do they work?

Transformative agreements are, by nature, iterative, temporary and transitional but, at the same time, they all have certain features and fundamental principles that are consistent--from their stated objectives, to cost-shifting mechanisms, to the new open access workflows that are rapidly becoming standard business practice in scholarly publishing and library processes.

In this session, a trio of experts representing different stakeholder groups (library, consortium, publisher) will illustrate some of the practical aspects of their Transformative Agreements that all stakeholders navigating the sea of change in scholarly communication need to know.
 "We cannot control the winds nor subdue deceitful currents, but we can--by skill and care--trim our sails to ride the storm and steer our course to more promising shores!"
 

Canceling the Big Deal is becoming more common, but there are still many unanswered questions about the impact of this change and the fundamental shift in the library collections model that it represents. Institutions like Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the University of Oregon have written about the impact of their own experience with canceling the Big Deal, but are those experiences the norm in terms of the impact on budgets, collection development, and interlibrary loan activity? Within the context of the University of California system’s move to cancel a system-wide contract with Elsevier, how are libraries managing the communication about Big Deals both internally with library personnel as well as externally with campus stakeholders?  Three R1 libraries (University of Maryland, University of Oklahoma, and Kansas State University) will compare their data, discuss communication strategies, and examine the impact these decisions have had on their collections.

We are asking attendees to take a brief survey in advance telling us about their own status and plans with respect to the Big Deal (https://tinyurl.com/y3ka5vww).  Results will be shared at the end of the session, as will links to examples of communication and resources libraries can use to facilitate their own community conversations about the Big Deal.  

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!

For the last decade academic libraries have talked with each other and with potential partners about their roles in helping to manage research data and their plans to expand or initiate research data services (RDS). This is driven by mandates from funders, government agencies, and publishers to make research data accessible. The academic researchers served by libraries often do not know about the management and curation side of research data—including writing data management plans, finding data repositories, or describing data using appropriate metadata standards. These are all services that libraries can or do provide, but the range and maturity of research data services from libraries varies considerably. In summer 2019, our team surveyed a sample of academic libraries of all sizes who are members of the Association of College and Research Libraries to find out about their current RDS and plans for the future. This study is a follow-up to surveys of this same group in 2012 and 2015, when we discovered that most offered were informational services similar to traditional library reference services and, while some research libraries are leaders in RDS, many of the non-research libraries that had planned to offer a range of RDS had not yet been able to, often due to lack of resources or shifting priorities. From the 2019 survey we will talk about range of RDS now offered in all sizes of academic libraries, which types of RDS are more popular or practical, and how academic libraries can get started with research data services.