eclectic librarian - Latest Comments

Re: ER&L 2012 reflections

Marie Kennedy — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:24:23 -0000

oh, you. :)

Re: ER&L 2012: Consortia On Trial — In Defense of the Shared Ebook

Michael Zeoli — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:14:11 -0000

Just one comment. YBP is in fact seeing a *dramatic* increase in library purchasing f ebooks - it matches the decline in print sales. Sorry not to have made that point clear in the presentation - it is an important one. Michael Zeoli

Re: #libday8 day 3 — never-ending powerpoint!

Rob Cottingham — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 02:21:25 -0000

My sympathies! And thanks so much for sharing my cartoon.

By the way, the next time it happens, maybe "accidentally" emailing the bottom-left PDF on this page - http://www.thegoodmancenter.co... - to the presenter might give you some karmic relief. :)

Re: #libday8 day 2 — mushy brain work

Chris Bulock — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:57:23 -0000

I share your opinion on monthly vs. annual usage stats at vendor websites. If a vendor has stats for an entire year, they should provide the option of displaying it that way. It always seems like the vendors that only offer monthly stats have the slowest load time too.

I actually did notice a problem with linked full text in Academic Search Complete, though I was looking at a journal with a lot of other problems at the time, so I assumed it was isolated to that journal. I did report it to EBSCO, but I think I'll do some further investigating now.

Re: resolutions and all that

Anna Creech — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:36:08 -0000

I've been listening to a lot of audio in the car lately (as noted in my post, four of the books I read last year were audio), as I drive around town. My commute is all of 10 min, and for a long time I thought I didn't have need for an audiobook. Nonfiction seems to work best for being able to stop and start with my short drives here and there.

Re: resolutions and all that

suzanne sherry — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:08:43 -0000

YES you gotta lose the "appropriate book thing" and consume more voraciously. AND take chances and abandon books that are just not working. So just add everything you like to the list...and read what is really interesting. And of course, skim if you need to. NO BOOK REPORT REQUIRED. Some books are maybe not for you and other books are not worth your time.

Some of the crew at my library do most of their reading during their commute, via audio. Just a thought.

Re: resolutions and all that

Dani — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:51:34 -0000

I get what you mean about your list feeling like a school assignment. In the past I have joined several themed book reading challenges that made the rounds of the book blogging community, but the only one I finished was the Spice of Life challenge because the theme was food-related books. In every other challenge, I lose interest in the books as soon as I make it a goal to read them. I find that my reading life is like my music listening: I never make it all the way through a playlist on Spotify because one of the songs will make me think of songs not on the list, so I switch to them. This year, I am going to use my Goodreads TBR list as a starting point but I won't beat myself up if I end up reading five prairie romances in a row before I get back to the list.

Re: musings on web-scale discovery systems

Char Simser — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:13:52 -0000

We'll be bringing up one by spring semester I believe. I haven't been as involved on that end of library operations since I left what is now called the Metadata & Preservation Dept. I am looking forward to it in some ways because I work the IM 'desk' 4 hours a week and help users navigate our resources. So I'll be interested to see how users interact with the search box. We've been doing usability on a soon-to-be released revamped home page. I understand that has been eye-opening:
- The bottom half of the page is overlooked, almost invisible, to patrons

- Patrons do not immediately correlate an alphabet chain (0 A B C D ...) with an alphabetical listing of titles, etc

- Patrons do not recognize the distinction between catalog, databases, and digital collections

Re: musing on the next generation of electronic resource management

Char Simser — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:09:06 -0000

Change & enhancements can happen as long as librarians keep talking to vendors about workflows & needs.

Re: musings on web-scale discovery systems

Anne Haines — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:04:09 -0000

We've fairly recently implemented EBSCO Discovery (which we've branded OneSearch@IU, the name we'd used for our old federated search - we thought that might make it seem familiar to students). So far it's nowhere near perfect, but a discovery service does seem like a good investment for us; it's proved to be a great "first resort" especially for undergrads who aren't quite sure if they want a book or an article or what. (It also helps when they think they want "a book" but the scope of their inquiry pretty clearly demands journal articles - they do the search and no books come up.) I refer students to it at the reference desk (and via chat) fairly often. Nowhere near perfect, of course, but it seems to be serving us reasonably well.

Re: musings on web-scale discovery systems

Chris Bulock — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:35:34 -0000

Our students do have some trouble finding the resources they're looking for, but I don't think a web-scale discovery tool is the answer. While doing some website usability testing, I was able to see that students do not interact with our website the way we expect them to. Things that seem obvious to me as a librarian are not obvious to an undergrad. No matter what kind of instruction and outreach we do, or how we label it, I don't think the purpose behind a search box on our home page is going to be entirely clear. Google is the go-to tool for most of our undergrads, and I think it's a little silly to try to one-up Google with expensive, limited systems.

Re: musing on the next generation of electronic resource management

Courtney F — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:24:12 -0000

I felt the same excitement (and hope) when I saw Alma demonstrated! I was thrilled to see the e-resources stuff so fully integrated into the rest of the acquisitions/cataloging workflows.

Re: reason #237 why JSTOR rocks

Anna Creech — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:52:04 -0000

You make some good points. I don't expect a refund, as what we paid went towards the initial costs of digitizing the content. I tried to make that point above, that it isn't free to create what JSTOR has created. Going forward, I do not expect to or plan to change how I negotiate costs with JSTOR. As far as I'm concerned, this is a public good, and as such, has been partially funded by the public (and private) institutions that use the JSTOR service. We're not buying anything but access.

Re: reason #237 why JSTOR rocks

NTKL — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:28:28 -0000

But are these works going to free indefinitely? Go back & re-read the announcement. There's no assertion that this offer will be ongoing "free". It appears to be a salvo to the hacking situation but the longevity of "free" is questionable. Secondly, think about it for a second, most libraries have already paid for this content in Arts & Sciences I-IX. Will we now get a refund for what we had previously paid an archive capital cost for this content? Will libraries see a reduction in the ongoing archival window to accommodate what is now "free"? Will libraries get a cost break going forward with Arts & Sciences X for example for the content that will be in public domain? Will this change how you negotiate costs with JSTOR going forward? Should this change how we negotiate costs with JSTOR going forward? Will MARC or RDA records be made free to libraries for this content?

In the end, how free is free?

Jill

Re: print holdings & javascript

stephenfrancoeur — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:06:36 -0000

Those are a couple of nice hacks! As always, thanks for documenting the work you and your colleagues are doing to improve your library's search and discovery tools.

Re: print holdings & javascript

Karen Coombs — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:03:26 -0000

Anna,

So glad the script is helpful.

You can see the table of contents script in action here - http://www.librarywebchic.net/...

An example of the code to add the table of contents links is in the Developer Network Subversion repository. Check out - http://www.worldcat.org/devnet...

This includes lots of journal enhancements but the Javascript portion which does the Table of Contents is commented in journal_enhancements.js . The TOC portion is commented. You'll need to alter it to screen scrape the ISSN from whatever screen you're adding the link to and also to insert the link into same screen at the right spot. My example is for the III catalog where I used to work.

You'll also need a PHP script to actually process the RSS feed and show it in the popup - http://www.worldcat.org/devnet...

Let me know if you need help via my email coombsk [at] oclc [dot] org

Re: camping & Hamlet

Secord — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 09:43:43 -0000

I find that finding time to unplug makes me more selective about what I tune into--and what I do with the unplugged time.

Re: ejournal use by subject

Lisa Kurt — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:16:43 -0000

Nice Anna- I love seeing the visualization to help tell the story- really cool!

Re: ejournal use by subject

Anna Creech — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:49:58 -0000

Including the number of journals is a good idea! Thanks.

Re: ejournal use by subject

Anna Creech — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:49:20 -0000

I'm thinking about including costs at some point, but mainly I was interested in seeing if our assumptions (i.e. that Business and Science make up the bulk of use) match the data, particularly given that we have resources allocated along those assumptions.

Re: ejournal use by subject

Kirstin Dougan — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:33:20 -0000

Very interesting. I wonder, though, how many titles are represented by each wedge? For example--are 100 engineering titles generating 7% of use while 10 social sciences titles are generating 24%? As a music and performing arts librarian we have what seems like relatively few ejournals compared to some other subjects, so 3% use doesn't surprise me. However, that may not in fact be true and we may have just as many, but fewer of our users use journals (e.g., performers tend to use them much less than musicologists). And the size of your population matters too...andI think we all wonder what are the most relevant numbers among all
the variables (and then what do we as selectors do with them!).

Anyway, all this to say, very good work and keep investigating!

Re: ejournal use by subject

joan — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 19:15:59 -0000

Anna, this is really interesting. It'd also be very interesting to see the pie chart next to it of how much these journals cost by subject. The most expensive journals, I suspect, are not in the highest use subjects. Do you know if any libraries consider resource use in their allocation to departments? What are other implications of this data? Thanks for thinking about this and sharing it.

Re: mapping ejournal use to subject areas

Char S — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:18:32 -0000

Keep us posted on this adventure.

Re: nifty enhancement for the A-Z journal tool

ranti — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 02:05:11 -0000

OK. Thanks for the pointers.

Re: nifty enhancement for the A-Z journal tool

Anna Creech — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:27:18 -0000

The RSS feed information is getting pulled from OCLC's xISSN web service. I don't know but would guess that if Ulrich's has a similar developer interface, the peer reviewed status is being added that way. The work was done by their web developer (Ben Durrant), so I'd recommend contacting him for the details on how this information was added to each title.