A Review of “Digital Libraries and Information Access: Research Perspectives”

This article reviews the book Digital Libraries and Information Access: Research Perspectives

A Review of “Digital Media: Technological and Social Challenges of the Interactive World”

A review of “Digital Media: Technological and Social Challenges of the Interactive World

Automating Your Way to Easy Faculty Scholarship Collection Development

Involving faculty liaisons in a collaborative collection development process is a time‐consuming but worthwhile effort to increase library staff and faculty buy‐in in the repository. Involvement levels can be improved when staff workflows are refined and streamlined as part of an overall plan. This presentation will describe the development of a new set of procedures to automate the majority of the collection development effort using the SHERPA/RoMEO API and OpenRefine, leaving liaisons to focus on the personal outreach portions of the process. The presentation will include an overview of the literature as well as step by step descriptions of the process used at Loyola, lessons learned, and plans for the future

Measuring Altruistic Impact: A Model for Understanding the Social Justice of Open Access

INTRODUCTION Traditional assessment of ways in which open access initiatives and institutional repositories have provided a return on investment normally use pragmatic measures such as download counts and citation benefits. This pragmatic approach misses out on the powerful altruistic impact of improving access to international and/or marginalized communities. Using a frame of social justice, this article considers the importance of developing altruistic measures of repositories, particularly for institutions with missions specifically related to social justice and related themes. METHODS Using web analytics data for search keywords from eight institutions and geographic usage data from nine institutions, the authors were able to determine how well social justice related content is accessed by search engines and how much overall content is accessed internationally, particularly by lower-resourced countries. A social justice term list was developed to permit corpus overlap analysis with each institution’s search keywords, while the World Bank country income lists were used to determine international access by low and low-middle income countries. RESULTS Universities with mission statements explicitly mentioning social justice or Catholic social teaching had greater overlap with the social justice corpus. Low and low-middle income countries as defined by the World Bank were among the most engaged users. All institutions had at least one social justice search term in their top ten; Marquette University had five. Collection development in social science and environmental sustainability at Loyola University Chicago successfully increased this term overlap year-over-year and increased user engagement as measured by session length. DISCUSSION The results of this exploratory study indicate that it is possible to use repository data to evaluate the success of an institution’s open access and social justice initiatives. The year-over-year improvement of Loyola’s numbers suggest in addition that it is possible to increase social justice impact through collection development. Performing an analysis of social justice impact can be used as an overall strategy for repository success and outreach on campus, particularly for institutions where social justice is an important part of the campus identity. For repositories in need of further resources, the ability to quantify impact for university administrators and decision-makers may be of use. CONCLUSION For institutions with a social justice mission, improving social justice content may improve repository ranking in social justice related search results. Collection development strategies should focus on departments and/or individuals who are working in social justice related areas, which defined broadly could encompass much of an institution. For institutions that emphasize social justice, it may be easier to approach faculty who might not otherwise have an interest in open access issues

Collaborative Growth Toward Discovery: Becoming Stronger through Change

The radical act of replacing a traditional OPAC and ILS with a hosted library services platform (LSP) and web-scale discovery (WSD) system creates the impetus for libraries to rethink core workflows and practices. Both of these tools have the potential to greatly improve access to library collections and enhance user experience, but only if the implementation is a collaborative effort between different stakeholders, technical experts and subject librarians, grounded in a thoughtful selection process that emphasizes user needs. Furthermore, because this model removes the traditional OPAC, subject librarians must take on the challenge of understanding the tool and work as partners with backend technical experts as well as the vendor so that they are not left out of providing research assistance as algorithms replace some traditional library skills. Grounded in the literature of collaborative learning and librarian attitudes towards discovery systems, this chapter describe the process of creating a culture of collaboration centered on user needs. Such a model is central to the process of evaluation and implementation of a LSP and a WSD service, particularly in the context of a university with multiple campuses and diverse users. We established a well-structured collaboration model from the systems evaluation phase, and continued to apply the model to the implementation phase. In 2010, the initial solution was to keep a traditional OPAC, and implement WorldCat Local as article discovery tool while doing in-depth user studies and gathering feedback from subject librarians to create a data-driven decision making habit. In 2014, we determined that Alma and Primo should replace the current Voyager ILS and WorldCat Local. The implementation process started in January 2015 and will go live in July 2015. The chapter will share the journey of creating a collaborative model and implementing unified resource management and discovery

Library Labs

Libraries can experiment with innovative ideas through collaboration with members of their communities. Successful programs are discussed, with practical advice for starting similar programs

What Does Your Repository Do? Measuring and Calculating Impact

A multifaceted approach at understanding the impact of institutional repositories using both quantitative and qualitative processes, particularly with regards to alignment with institutional mission

What Does Your Repository Do?: Understanding and Calculating Impact

Librarians working in scholarly communications need to understand how to calculate and explain how including work in a repository affects its impact. This presentation describes the current state of research and practice into metrics for repositories including traditional metrics and newer alternative metrics, and some preliminary results of a research study assessing the usage and impact of a Digital Commons repository