Weeding

Umm... maybe I should call it deselection. Whatever the term, my library is in the midst of a large weeding project. We had several thousand titles stored in a remote facility in a different part of the state. That facility ran out of room and the books are being returned. All 43,000 of them. The returned items do contain journals as well as monographs.

To start, we pulled a list of the journal titles and made decisions on what to keep or discard before they arrived. My criteria for this was if my holdings were incomplete and complete holdings were available locally, then I withdrew my holdings. However, there are five librarians involved in this project, each with collection development responsibilities for different areas. And, we're all making the withdraw or keep decision differently. It's really rather fascinating to watch.

Then, we get to the monographs. They are in our local remote storage and have come in by size (they were stored by size). So, they are in random order. This means you have to peruse every shelf to see what titles fall in your area. They went to remote storage because they had one or zero circulations. However, upon reviewing many titles, those circulations were since we brought up the ILS. Prior to that, many titles had very high circulation, but due to age or change in instructors or programs or the way classes are taught, that usage has dropped off. Some have been recalled from remote and have a flag on them, so those automatically get kept. That was a fairly easy decision, though I've wanted to discard a few that were recalled, because I know I have more current titles in those areas.

I have collection development responsibilities for areas that have materials that age out, although I think most areas have materials that age out, but it has to be thought out. Each subject area here basically has it's own collection development policy (called an Information Management and Access Plan); there is a general weeding/deselection policy, but it hasn't been updated in awhile. So, again, all five librarians are using different standards/judgement to do their deselecting. For me it goes if: the age of the book (especially if it's a text book) is over five years old; bibliographies (pretty much replaced and outdated by databases); symposium proceedings, pamphlets specific to a particular event or city (unless it's in my state), especially if the condition of the item is bad; biographies, especially if they've never circulated or it's a person not widely known (we received many by donation); dissertations; and statistics and other data that can now be found online. I also look closely at materials related to other countries for fit with programs that are offered by the university. If the fit isn't good, the material goes. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, as well as some materials that just have to be reveiwed.

We have one more shipment to go. It's time consuming and tedious, but it has given me great insight into not only the process of deselection, but also collection development. Since it's time to be updating my the collection development plans for my areas, what I've learned from doing this project will be incorporated there as well.

On a side note, I did attend the Charleston Conference last month and attended some very good sessions and lively lunches. Once I can get my thoughts together on that, I will be posting on the things that really stood out to me.

NISO Forum

Last week I attended the NISO Forum Understanding the Data Around Us: Gathering and Analyzing Usage Data. This forum came at an appropriate time for me, as many of our databases (as I'm sure is the case at most libraries) renew in January. So, I've spent the past couple of weeks digging for usage statistics and then trying to interpret what I got.

The Forum was basically two well spent days. I won't give a synopsis of every session, but will point out ones I particularly enjoyed and then some of the key pieces of information and thoughts that I walked away with.

For the most part, all sessions were good, but there were a few that I particulalry enjoyed: Usage Data: Seeing the Full Picture by Kevin Cohn, Product Director, Atypon; From What to Why: Electronic Resource usage Data in Collection Development and User Behavior by Karen Coombs, Head of Web Services, Univeristy of Houston Libraries; SUSHI & COUNTER by Oliver Pesch, Chief Strategist, E-Resources, EbSCO Information Services; Why Collect Data? by Colleen Cook, Dean of the Texas A&M University Libraries; Real World Data: Using Usage to Shape Libraries by Virginia Steel, University Librarian, University of California, Santa Cruz; and Electronic Resource Usage Statistics: Defining a Complex Problem by Caryn Anderson, Doctoral Studies Program Manager, GSLIS, Simmons College.

One idea stated by many presenters is that all data is good. The key is knowing what to do with it. There was some overlap between presentations, but the general consensus is that usage data are a good thing. This may sound basic, but apparently there are folks out there who do not think usage data serve a purpose. I like usage stats, so I have to agree with this. I have an undergraduate business degree and business experience; I tend to say if it isn't being used, then don't subscribe to it. However, we live in the real world and while I'd like to live by this adage, sometimes you can't, given the nature of programs offered by the university. I'm not sure if the same would ring true in public libraries. However, usage statistics are being used for a variety of reasons outside of subscription/renewal decisions - weeding/deselection, marketing, editorial decisions by journal editors, just to name a few. An off shoot of this is that everyone approaches usage statistics from a different perspective; the variety of ways to use usage statistics are limitless. In the end though, usage statistics of any kind should help you be better informed about your users.

There is no standard, so to speak, on how to use usage data, however, there is a standard for getting/providing those usage stats. I felt like I'd had my head in the sand when several presenters mentioned the problems with COUNTER. After listening to them, they made some good points. (Several presenters mentioned problems with COUNTER, but Kevin Cohn with Atypon defined them well. Link to the presentations is provided at the end of this post). I agree with what they were saying, but, I have a slightly different perspective. All of those presenters were assuming that usage stats were coming in a COUNTER compliant format. Ah... if that were true. There may be faults with COUNTER, but I deal with a lot of business databases and they are not COUNTER compliant, which makes it quite difficult to compare usage for similar databases, though admitedly many business databases provide unique resources. One database provides usage for their Quick Search, Company Snapshot, General Sources, etc. The only totals they provide for all this are the "What if Total Price," the amount we would have been charged if we didn't subscribe. I don't find that particular piece of information useful. I then had to try and reconcile what I did have to something along the lines of searches and sessions. There was also the assumption that usage statistics were being provided. I have a subscription to one commercial database that does not provide statistics and has no intention of doing so. Their viewpoint - it's the same cost regardless of the number of users. My thought of course, is if no one uses it, why should I subscribe.

Powerpoints for the NISO Forum are available at http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/usage07/agenda.html.

Also available is a new Usage Data wiki at http://usagedata.pbwiki.com/. Join the community conversation about developing a usage data decision framework (and other usage data issues). For more information about the usage data conversation, see Caryn Anderson's closing remarks (available on the presentations page).

LITA National Forum 2007 -- Day 1 Sessions

Future of Libraries Discussion

This session posed a few key questions to the group and asked us to think about hte year 2023. We were asked to ponder --
WHAT IF...
-- There were 100,000,000 free full-text books
-- Copyright legistation were completely rewritten to more reasonably reflect real world practices
-- Star Trek-level reference were really available

What I found most interesting was how difficult it was for a room full of librarians to think beyond today's technology. Any mention of information implants or anything close to AI was immediately poo-poo'ed. The conversation focused on how we stay relevant despite a couple of non-librarians in the audience trying to explain that we may not be already.

Topic Mapping

I didn't get to stay long for this one as I had to hit the session below, but I found the intro highly interesting. It is essentially a way to aggregate index information instead of focusing on full-text and create new access points. This is an area I'm going to have to look more indepth at when I get home.


Tagging the Catalog & Keyword in Headings

This session showed two concepts. First it demonstrated how heading data could harvested and allow keyword searching to actually pull a relevant list of subjects back. IE. User does a search for Civil War and instead of getting "no hits", they get back a list of all of the subject headings that include the words Civil and War. Second, it showed the value of allowing users to tag their own items. "Users are no longer passive." This allows an additional access point. Tags allow for "changes as language changes". One unique implementation of this was providing students of a method of finding all items from a specific professor.

LITA National Forum 2007 -- Preparing

I'm at the conference this weekend and preparing for our presentation on Plinkit Sat afternoon. In the meantime, I've also stumbled upon the opportunity to publicize our upcoming book on Federated Searching. We hope to provide a practical guide to reviewing, selecting, and implementing a federated search tool to librarians of all kinds.

There's a Five Minute Madness session which affords people like me to ramble on about projects they are currently working on. I hope to get the word out that we need participants in our survey to make sure that we are addressing all of the concerns of the field.

If you have time, please fill out our survey AND pass it along to your colleagues. Our publishing deadline is January and every response helps!

Cubicle chaos....

We've all been there. Offices move, new furniture comes, etc. And, usually we just see the end result by moving into our new work homes.

Last Friday, I finally got my very own cubicle. Now, I'm like all the other librarians in my department. Woo hoo! We've had the planners in several times to map it out, decide on configuration, etc. Then we got the date. So, last Thursday afternoon, I and several others (we rearranged some open work stations as well) packed up our desk stuff in anticipation of the activity the next day. We got to work and waited. And waited. And waited. They didn't start installation until almost 2:00 pm. And, of course, it wasn't as smooth as we had anticipated.

We're in a big, open room, so to get power to the workstations, we have power poles coming down from the ceiling. The planners said they wouldn't need to be moved. We didn't question this. We should have. The power poles had to be moved. Rush order to the physical plant for electricians. We were hoping for Monday, but one actually showed up that afternoon. He couldn't do anything then, but he stopped by to see what was going on so he would know what to do. And, he realized that they were going to put my partition wall in front of the electrical outlet and run power strips under the wall for my power. His question (one I hadn't yet voiced) was "what if you need to unplug it?" What indeed. And, they had wanted to plug one power strip into another. I said no and was backed up by the electrician. Can't do that, unless you want to get in trouble with the Fire Marshall.

So, no power in the cubicle and no power in the workstations. And, no phone either, because no lines where the workstations were moved and of course, my phone and data outlet couldn't be blocked by my partition walls either.

I will say, the electricians, the data guy, and the phone guy had us up and running by Monday afternoon. We weren't expecting to be down two days, but those guys really put us at the top and for that I'm grateful.

In addition, the wood for my desk is a different color - it's lighter than everyone elses. And, the overhead cabinet doesn't match the trim in the cubicle. My manager has decided to let me keep the lighter wood (we all like it better), but the overhead cabinet will have to be swapped out. We were first told a new one would be ordered. Yesterday, we were told this one would be painted. The off color one is still set up because I need the light. So, I'm not sure when they'll come take what I have or what will happen with the overhead.

Somehow, when the installers finally showed up, I wound up being the point person for the set-up, the electrical moves, the phone moves, the data stuff, etc. Since I couldn't do much of anything else, that was fine and I kind of enjoyed telling people what to do. But, I also have a whole new respect for facilities and office managers who coordinate entire build-outs of new office space.