The Past, Present, & Future of Capturing the Scholarly Record of a Small Comprehensive U.S. Institution: Toward a Sustained Repository Content Recruitment and Workflow Strategy

For smaller institutions, limited staffing, expertise, and content recruitment all threaten an IR’s success. Launched in 2011, ValpoScholar (scholar.valpo.edu) is on its second version of content recruitment and workflow design with a third version in beta. With a primary focus on capturing metadata before moving to full-text access and preservation, this evolving approach has led to a 25 percent increase in record creation, while also increasing full-text availability. This poster will share this changing process

Neon in Nevada: A Case Study in Statewide Collaboration

Neon signs in Nevada capture the spirit of glitzy gambling meccas, boom and bust towns, and frontier settlements that dot the vast geography of this unique state. However, many iconic and hidden signs are in constant danger of disappearing as populations shift and the elements naturally break down the physical aspects of the signs. In addition, neon signs in Reno and remote, Northern Nevada locales have remained relatively undiscovered. UNLV has had a long history of documenting the art of neon and has partnered with the Neon Museum in Las Vegas to preserve this rapidly disappearing cultural heritage. Digital Humanities faculty and Librarians at UNR secured an IMLS grant to partner with UNLV to document and create an archive of images of neon signs in Northern Nevada. Taking this combined expertise, a desire to build partnerships and work together to solve problems and adding the statewide priority of piloting collaborative digital preservation workflows, UNR and UNLV committed to a statewide project that resulted in the successful digital preservation of thousands of neon signs from every corner of Nevada

Curriculum Data Deep Dive: Identifying Data Literacies in the Disciplines

Objective: Evaluate and examine Data Literacy (DL) in the supported disciplines of four liaison librarians at a large research university. Methods: Using a framework developed by Prado and Marzal (2013), the study analyzed 378 syllabi from a two-year period across six departments—Criminal Justice, Geography, Geology, Journalism, Political Science, and Sociology—to see which classes included DLs. Results: The study was able to determine which classes hit on specific DLs and where those classes might need more support in other DLs. The most common DLs being taught in courses are Reading, Interpreting, and Evaluating Data, and Using Data. The least commonly taught are Understanding Data and Managing Data skills. Conclusions: While all disciplines touched on data in some way, there is clear room for librarians to support DLs in the areas of Understanding Data and Managing Data

Using a Needs Assessment to Develop an Institutional Repository

Needs assessments can help librarians gain a better understanding of the scholarly communication practices and opinions of faculty within their communities, but they can also provide additional benefits. In the fall of 2016, two librarians at an R2 institution that had just started a scholarly communications program led a qualitative study of 18 faculty members at their institution in which liaison librarians conducted interviews with faculty in their departments. Although the main intent of the assessment was to better learn faculty views and opinions on scholarly communications-related issues such as open access, the librarians also used the study for several other purposes. First, the interviews became a mean of helping to raise awareness about the university’s new institutional repository and other scholarly communications services. Second, the interviews helped librarians discover potential projects that could become part of the institutional repository. Third, the interviews provided a tool for initiating liaison librarians to scholarly communications issues by having them conduct the surveys. Finally, results from the needs assessment have helped inform how the library’s new scholarly communications librarian conducts not only outreach to faculty and students but also training to the entire library staff to take part in these efforts, including promoting and supporting the institutional repository. Attendees will learn details of the faculty study and how librarians used it to meet multiple goals that helped to promote use of the institutional repository and other scholarly communication services offered by the library

Academic Special Collections and the Myths of Copyright

This study compares the copyright and use policy statements posted on the websites of the special collections of Association of Research Libraries member libraries. In spring 2018, 99 academic special collections websites were viewed, and data was collected based on the following: 1) presence and content of a general copyright statement; 2) mention of copyright owners besides the special collections; 3) presence and accuracy of statements regarding fair use and public domain; 4) policies for patron-made copies; 5) whether the special collections required its permission and/or the copyright owner’s permission to publish; 6) whether any use or license fees were charged and how clearly fees were presented. Authors analyzed whether these policies reflect copyright law or went beyond it, unnecessarily restricting the use of materials or imposing fees where rights are in question. A majority of the sites included general copyright statements, mentioned other copyright owners, and mentioned fair use, but only a minority mentioned the public domain. Just more than half restricted how patrons could use patron-made copies. About half required the special collections’ permission to publish a copy, and a fifth said any third-party owner’s permission was also required for publication

Assessing the Effectiveness of Open Access Finding Tools

The open access (OA) movement seeks to ensure that scholarly knowledge is available to anyone with internet access, but being available for free online is of little use if people cannot find open versions. A handful of tools have become available in recent years to help address this problem by searching for an open version of a document whenever a user hits a paywall. This project set out to study how effective four of these tools are when compared to each other and to Google Scholar, which has long been a source of finding OA versions. To do this, the project used Open Access Button, Unpaywall, Lazy Scholar, and Kopernio to search for open versions of 1,000 articles. Results show none of the tools found as many successful hits as Google Scholar, but two of the tools did register unique successful hits, indicating a benefit to incorporating them in searches for OA versions. Some of the tools also include additional features that can further benefit users in their search for accessible scholarly knowledge