Plinkit? What is that??

Flippantly, it's the project I walked in the door as the Project Coordinator (with no clue) that was expected to do a state-wide roll-out of 100+ libraries by the end of the year. So, within 2 weeks of being at my new job, I was off for a week attending Plone administrator bootcamp.

(Really, Plinkit (Public Library Interface Kit) is a Content Management System offered to empower small rural libraries in creating intuitive, dynamic websites with little effort and no technical expertise.)

Some much simplified background --

Oregon created a product that allowed libraries to choose from a variety of templates placed on top of PLONE - an open source CMS. Oregon, Colorado, Texas, and Illinois have come together in a collaborative to distribute the product to public libraries throughout those states.

In our state, we have the State Library which grant funds the Library Regional Systems. So, the first order of business was to train all of the technical contacts at the Systems offices, which was conducted in late April. Those technical contacts have been in charge of getting the libraries in their region up on Plinkit. To date, we have 7 or 8 live sites.

Journal review

It's nearing our fiscal year end. Add to this the fact that several publishers have drastically increased subscription prices and, you guessed it, we're reviewing journal subscriptions. About the lists: one list is for a move to print only; one list is standing orders for titles that are not available electronically, so we are reviewing to see if we should keep the subscription.

Naturally, usage and cost come into play for both. For those available full-text, the consideration is merely is the usage there. At MPOW, we're definitely moving toward electronic, so print only isn't really an option, even if it is less expensive. In most cases yes, the usage is there. In a couple of cases, no it isn't. For those titles with low usage, I considered where else it was held and given the current usage, is ILL an option. Well, one title had four uses. In addition, I looked at the title's value to the field. So, even though a journal may have low usage, it might not get marked for cancellation if it is considered a top journal in the field.

The second set of journal reviews is the one that was more interesting. Up until now, I'd never really considered stats for journal titles from an indexing and abstracting database, just overall database usage. However, when reviewing journal usage for print subscriptions, it helps to know if it's being used. My OPAC shows "historical browses" for titles, but there is some debate as to how accurate it is. So, I pulled usage stats by title. I was surprised by the results. Titles that seemed obscure in name and had very few browses in the OPAC had heavy usage in the database. Since the stats were returning abstract requests, it doesn't tell if the user actually went to the print journal, but it does tell me that the title is appearing in searches run in these databases. And, most were fairly high, even the "obscure" title.

I've also got one or two titles that don't appear to be indexed in any database we subscribe to, but that have fairly high browses in the OPAC. I'd prefer that my print titles be indexed somewhere, but the OPAC stats tell me that there are people looking for this title. I'm not ready to stop the subscription, but I can't really say I should look at purchasing a database for one title.

Overall, the exercise has been a good one. I think a couple of titles can be cancelled and I have a better feel for the usage on other titles.

ALA... a few good sessions

Well, I'm a little behind on my posts for ALA, but I've been trying to catch up after conference and then the 4th of July. While I'm all into the Web 2.0 applications, I don't really have the opportunity to do much of anything with it. So, while a lot of folks had a lot to choose from, honestly, I struggled to find a couple of sessions that apply to what I do... electronic resources and collection development, heavy on the collection development.

I did find two really good sessions, though. The first session I attended was "We have the data, now what? Putting your collection assessment to work." It was a panel disscussion sponsored by RUSA. Since I had just finished evaluating the effectiveness of our collection development efforts for the previous fiscal year, I was interested to see what this session would offer up. The first speaker was Shirley Baker, Director of Washington University (St. Louis) Library. The really interesting thing I took from her session was the use of what is being digitized by the Google Nine (it was Five when she did it) to help weed your collection, either for permanent removal or removal to off-site storage. Like everyone else, I keep hearing about who's joined the Google digitization effort, but here's a library actually putting that product to their use. These are public domain titles prior to 1923. With the increase in copyright to 75 years, it will be harder and harder to do this, but pre-1923 can be a pretty big chunk for a lot of libraries. Naturally, they used WorldCat Collection Analysis for their comparisons. Now, I don't really care for WCCA (see previous postings), but his was a pretty cool use of a pre-defined group in WCCA.

The second presenter was Karen Neurohr, Assessment Librarian at Oklahoma State University. She did a measurement space study, then actively used what was available electronically in JSTOR to determine what journals could be moved off-site. The third presenter was Betty Gailbraith of Washington State University. They are using journal statistics to make collection development decisions. It sounds basic, but they are incorporating using statistics not generally used - titles cited by faculty and titles that faculty publish in, how did faculty use the title (online or in the library), and is it a core title. Having something in numerical format also helps faculty understand decisions.

Now, in retrospect, the second and third presenters didn't really come up with anything new, but in my previous position, it wasn't something I thought of when determining a game plan for our weeding project. Admittedly, I was working with monographs, but now I wonder what criteria was being used for journals. We moved a set of journals off-site thinking they would never be used only to find out that the Theatre Arts department used the ads in back issues to help with costumes. We wound up bring them back to the library.

The second session I attended was Technical Services 2.0 (guess I did get a 2.0 session in). It was presented by the ALCTS Technology Committee and was also a panel presentation. Matt Barnes pretty much gave an general overview of Web 2.0. Beth P. Camden spoke about Penn Taggs, which is a social bookmarking system for University of Pennsylvania library resources. In addition to uses for the students, library staff have used it to train new staff members. I'm completely fascinated by the use of social bookmarking in the academic setting, so I particularly enjoyed seeing a model in action. Elizabeth Winters spoke about Georgia Tech's use of Web 2.0 technology within the department. They use Wikis's for sharing processes and managing serials, Google applications (spreadsheets) for sharing documents, and instant messaging (IM) for internal communication. In my previous job, we had no share drive. After hearing about their use of Google apps, I had a "duh" moment and wondered why I didn't think about it. I'm a total believer that IM is not only good for reference but for internal communication as well - cut down on some of those e-mails. I first learned to use IM not for personal reason, but in a job setting. I worked for a software company doing in-depth customer support as part of a larger team. None of us where in the same office; in fact we ranged from East to West Coast, literally. We used IM to communicate with other members of the team; we all had "specializations" and it was generally more efficient to pop off a quick IM than to talk on the phone. Later the company purchased an IM system and went company wide with it.

All in all, I enjoyed both sessions and came away with something new.

I was a little disappointed in the vendor fair. It didn't seem to be as alive as it was in New Orleans. Some of the vendors evened seemed like they would rather have been somewhere else. Having said that, I did speak with those I wanted to and got to do a little exploring.