Serials Spoken Here

Reports of Conferences, Institutes, and Seminars

Christina Torbert, Christine E. Ryan, Beth M. Johns, Contributors

Kurt Blythe, Column EditorSerials Access Librarian, Davis Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USAe-mail: kcblythe@email.unc.edu

a b s t r a c ta r t i c l e i n f o

This quarter's column features reports from the Mississippi State University Libraries eResource & EmergingTechnologies Summit (MSU LEETS), held August 3–4, 2012, in Starkville, MS; a National Information StandardsOrganization (NISO) webinar on “Discovery & Delivery: Innovations & Challenges,” presented September 26,2012; and the Great Lakes E-Summit, held October 11–12, 2012, in Dayton, OH. Discussions on e-resources arethe order of the day for these three reports.

Mississippi State University Libraries eResource & Emerging Technologies Summit(August 3–4, 2012, Starkville, MS)

Christina TorbertHead of Continuing Resources and Bibliographer for Philosophy and Religion, J.D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677, USA

1. Introduction

Mississippi State University Libraries hosted its annual eResource& Emerging Technologies Summit (MSU LEETS) on August 3 and 4,2012. The summit is co-sponsored by EBSCO Information Servicesand the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG). The firstday of the conference focused primarily on the acquisitions, manage-ment, and evaluation of electronic resources in academic libraries.Videos and slides from most of the presentations are available onthe MSU Web site at http://blogs.library.msstate.edu/msuleets/?page_id=1223.

2. Keynote speaker: Tim Collins, president and founder, EBSCOPublishing: “eResources in Academic Libraries: A Look Ahead”

Collins gave a brief history of EBSCO Publishing, which he hasmanaged since he founded it. His purpose at this conference was toshowcase the current and future projects of the company.

The first focus of the company is discovery services. EBSCO's biggestworry in developing a discovery service was that libraries be able tokeep funding while expanding value. Discovery services give librariesthe opportunity to be gateways to vetted information. But what if pa-trons are not starting at the library site? EBSCOhost Connection will di-rect traffic from Google to the appropriate library for a particular user.EBSCO is also exploring how to provide real-time news by licensingnew sources and encyclopedias. EBSCO has taken a different approachto discovery by striving to provide the most comprehensive searchingof full-text journals, books, and subject indexes. The human-createdsubject headings and controlled vocabulary enhances the company'sstatus as a premiere provider of information and subject indexes.EBSCO believes that discovery should enhance the databases and ex-pand the market for subject indexes, not decrease the need for them.

Who is participating in the discovery process? Primary publishersare full partners in the discovery process. Publishers own the contentand have a vested interest in getting that content discovered. Theyparticipate by making their full-text content searchable. Aggregatorscannot participate at this level because they do not own the full-textcontent, but they can make their abstracting and indexing (A&I)metadata discoverable. Independent subject index providers are not

Serials Review 39 (2013) 72–78

E-mail address: ctorbert@olemiss.edu.

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Serials Review

j ourna l homepage: www.e lsev ie r .com/ locate /ser rev

0098-7913/$ – see front matter.

obligated to provide their metadata to discovery services. EBSCO'snext vision for discovery services is to partner with integrated librarysystem (ILS) vendors to create a single, shared knowledge base thatauto-populates with the library's subscriptions.

Farther in the future EBSCO is imagining how to combine thecuration of local content with the discovery tool. Content would behosted by EBSCO and exposed to the world through the EBSCOhostinterface. EBSCO would also like to develop more electronic resourcemanagement (ERM)-like functionalities within EBSCOadmin, the ad-ministration module for EBSCO products. EBSCO is looking for waysto cooperate more closely with researcher community sites to betterexpose the most recent conversations in research.

Another recent focus of EBSCO Publishing is e-books. After EBSCOpurchased NetLibrary, the company worked to incorporate those ti-tles into both the EBSCOhost platform and EBSCO Discovery Service(EDS). EBSCO has enhanced individual title ordering and has securedthe rights to more e-books from more publishers. EBSCO sees theneed for new interfaces for e-books and for more purchasing models.One model they are exploring is the patron-driven lease. Librarieswould pay for temporary use of the title for their patron withoutneeding to purchase the title and without gaining rights to loan thetitle. This model is very similar to pay-per-view for journal articles.

How does EBSCO see the future of e-books? They would like tomake the cited references within the books searchable with links toavailable full text from those references. EBSCO would also like toprovide chapter-level indexing of academic monographs, and oncepatrons can link directly to individual chapters, it is not a large leapto providing chapter-level purchasing.

3. Session speaker: Regina Reynolds, director, U.S. ISSN Center, andhead, ISSN Publisher Liaison Section, Library of Congress: “HavingE-Journal Title and ISSN Problems? Have Some PIE-J!”

PIE-J, the Presentation and Identification of E-Journals, is a set ofrecommended practices developed by a National Standards Informa-tion Organization (NISO) working group and defines how informationabout e-journals is to be found, interpreted, and presented. NISO con-sists of content publishers, libraries, and software developers, all ofwhom discuss the information standards and practices that allowthem to work together more effectively and efficiently. These differ-ent communities collaborate on mutually acceptable solutions thatenhance their functions today and build foundations for tomorrow.

As print journals have become electronic, areas of pain have devel-oped that would have been accounted for in previous print-basedmethods, but that are not easily handled in the electronic environment.Title changes are sometimes not reflected on publisher platforms, andcontent from the entire life of the publication is presented under themost recent title only. Electronic versions are sometimesmissing publi-cation statements, numbering, dates and ISSNs. Sometimes digitizedbackfile content is incomplete without explanation. These gaps aredifficult to determine and trace in the evolving methods of e-journalmanagement.

The PIE-J working group was organized to address these problems.The group consists of members from a wide variety of areas in the pe-riodical system: publishers, librarians, agents, and other vendors.Their draft document has been published and is available at: www.niso.org/workrooms/piej.

Some of the key recommendations from the working group in-clude the following:

• Content should be presented under the original title at the time ofpublication.

• Titles should have consistency across places and formats.• Publishers should include a complete title history and differentiatetrue title changes from graphic design changes.

• Provided information should follow good cataloging rules: present

the complete ISSN information for the title, both print and electronic;use the normal numbering system and mark the content clearly; andpresent all of the publication information on the Web site, includingthe front and back matter.

The appendices of the NISO PIE-J report give examples of all ofthese points. They also include a primer on how to find a title's historyand how to use the ISSN system. ISSNs can be different depending onthe geographic area of the publication, and the global nature of pub-lishing now is creating new difficulties for ISSN and publishing.

The comment period for the recommendations has concluded,so the next step for the working group is to consider and respondto the comments. Some alterations may be made before NISO pub-lishes the completed recommendations and begins to publicize anddistribute them. Arrangements need to be made for ongoing updatingof the practices as the nature of electronic journals and publishingchange. The goal is still a set of win-win practices that benefit users,libraries, and publishers.

4. Session speaker: Kristin Calvert, electronic resources librarian,Western Carolina University: “Starting from Scratch onPerpetual Access”

During the process of training two new librarians, one in a newposition, Calvert's library realized that the library did not have a per-petual access policy. The true nature of the problem came to lightwhen the library had to make a large serials cut, which meant the li-brary could no longer ignore the question of perpetual access withtheir subscriptions.

The first question to answer in the project was if perpetual accesswas included with the electronic subscriptions. Finding the answersrequired checking with a variety of resources: EBSCONET, the cus-tomer service rep, the licenses, or the publisher. Luckily, the informa-tion in EBSCONET was mostly accurate.

The second question was to what years the library should have ac-cess. They discovered that records about coverage were poorly kept.Often it was difficult to determine when a print subscription hadturned into a print plus online subscription, and if that online accesswas purchased or granted. Usually perpetual access is only given topurchased, online subscriptions. Libraries considering a similar inves-tigation should first determine if the cost in staff time is equal to thevalue gained in content tracked.

The third question was to determine to what access the librarycurrently has. Since they were working in the midst of a large se-rials cut, tracking access was complicated by the different amountsof time publishers allowed access after cancelation. Some pub-lishers quickly discontinued access and access thus immediatelydisappeared, while other publishers allowed long grace periods foraccess. In the latter case, the library made the decision to continueallowing patrons access while periodically rechecking that accessuntil it disappeared.

Next the library had to investigate how to handle titles that didnot provide perpetual access. The library looked to their Porticomembership for post-cancelation access (PCA), but found the re-quirements and restrictions made it not as helpful as was hoped.The library canceled 190 titles. Sixty-two of them did not provide per-petual access. Six of those had signed Portico PCA riders, but onlythree titles were ultimately approved for access through Portico.While Portico did not prove to be a great substitute for perpetual ac-cess, they did provide good customer service and reached out to pub-lishers on behalf of the library.

The library is now developing policies to track perpetual accessprior to any cancelations. The desired outcomes of the new proce-dures and policies are to ensure that perpetual access is set up prop-erly during cancelation and to assist with troubleshooting andverifying ongoing access into the future. Techniques used include

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spreadsheets, notes in the A-to-Z list, and in specially designated ERMrecords. Ongoing issues for tracking perpetual access still exist withspecific publishers. The library also needs to address a better methodof archival storage for electronic journals and the sustainability of theprocedures developed.

5. Session speakers: Ed Cherry, systems librarian, and StephanieRollins, instruction coordinator, Samford University Library:“Demonstrating Our Value: Tying Use of Electronic Resources toAcademic Success”

Samford University is a private liberal arts university in northAlabama with a national reputation for academic success. After thepublication of the report, “Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate:A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits,” (http://www.acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/archives/5482) the librarians at Samfordbegan to consider the question of how libraries demonstrate theirvalue to the stakeholders of the academic community. The librarysought a measurement that would connect the library to academicsuccess and that university stakeholders would understand. Whatdata would demonstrate this connection and how could it beinterpreted? What competencies are needed to demonstrate libraryvalue and how do librarians teach those skills?

The first step in the project was to determine a way to define theterms they were seeking to measure. The librarians decided on usinggrade point average (GPA), assuming that a higher score would be theequivalent of academic success. For a measure of successful libraryuse, the librarians decided to track database usage. If a student wasconsistently using the library's databases, they would be deemed tobe using the library successfully. Then the question became a matterof connecting the two measures.

In order to make these connections, the library began requiringevery user to log-in before they accessed any of the databases duringthe fall 2011 semester. The logins did not allow the library to seewhat was used, only when a student logged-in and how often. Aftera semester of gathering this data, student log-ins were connected to

demographic information about each student by the Office of Institu-tional Research (OIR). The project could not have happened withoutthe cooperation of that office, as the OIR data analyst gathered thedata and made sure that no personal information was seen. As theyshifted through the large amount of data points and began to graphit, the librarians did find a correlation between the number of timesa student used the library databases and higher GPAs.

The demographic information considered was varied and gave thelibrarians many points for further investigation. They had college, de-partment, andmajor information for each student. Therewere depart-ments that did not seem to use library databases very much. Whywasthat? There were students that did not use the library very much butstill had high GPAs. How can the library reach those students and helpthem succeed even more? It must be admitted that Samford attractsstudents who are already high achievers. It would be interestingto know if a university with a more open enrollment policy wouldhave similar results.

The implications for the results for the Samford University Librarytouched many areas of the library. How do they reach out to depart-ments whose students did not use the library as much as otherdepartments? How might the library's collections be modified to bet-ter help those departments with lower use? How might this informa-tion hold the different parties accountable for student success? Howcan librarians and academic faculty collaborate better? How can thisinformation be used to target funding for the right resources in theright areas?

Samford University Library has continued to collect log-in infor-mation, and they anticipate comparing the fall 2011 data to thespring 2012 data. They are considering comparing a particularterm's GPA to the cumulative GPA of each student. They wouldlike to compare themselves to peer universities with similar data.Additionally, they would like to add more facets to the usage theycollect and would like to know if the same premise holds for grad-uate students in comparison to undergraduate students. Overall,they want to do more of everything: outreach, instruction, andassessment.

doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2013.01.007

NISO Webinar: “Discovery & Delivery: Innovations & Challenges”(September 26, 2012)

Christine E. RyanElectronic Resources Librarian; Associate Librarian, Cooper Library, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634, USA

1. Introduction

In opening remarks for the webinar, “Discovery & Delivery: Inno-vations & Challenges,” Todd Carpenter, managing director for NISO(National Information Standards Organization), provided a brief over-view of one of the first modern day discovery systems, federatedsearch. While federated search (a.k.a., metasearch) had the rightidea—to simultaneously query multiple “content systems” (i.e., aggre-gated databases, publishers, etc.) and compile results in “near realtime”—it was fraught with issues. Speed was the biggest problem be-cause content providers' servers were individually queried after users

clicked the search button. Relevancy ranking was also problematic:content from systems that were the fastest to respond wereoften displayed first, virtually obliterating any relevancy ranking sys-tem that might have existed. Some federated search issues wereeventually addressed, but new discovery systems, which are basedon centrally indexed content, were already in the works.

These latest discovery systems, however, are not without theirown problems and because some of these problems venture beyondthe mechanical, they may be more vexing and will require more co-operation to solve. All major stakeholders are affected: libraries andtheir users, content providers, and the discovery service vendors.The following synopses of speaker presentations provide details onsome of these problems, as well as current and future endeavors toovercome them.

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E-mail addresses: ryanchr@clemson.edu.