Ad hoc collection assessment

Today was a day for ad hoc assessment of our collection.  Yesterday, we received a notice from an ebook provider that certain packages are available. I was curious to see how many we already had in print and/or electronic.  I took a random sample, the size of which was to provide a 95% CI for the results, and looked each title up in the catalog, noting its availability.  I found out that we already had about 50% of the titles either in print or electronic.  Of those we already owned, about 25% were electronic.  So, purchasing the entire package would only have added about half the titles to our collection, at least as unique content.  However, we learned we could select individual titles, rather than only the entire collection.  So a library student worker will complete my work and we'll provide a list of all titles in that ebook package that are not at all available in the library.  This will then be used by the liaison librarian to select the best resources.

A little more complicated was looking at usage of back files of book series offered by another publisher.  The sales rep had already highlighted the titles to which we had current subscriptions, and offered a discount for these back files (good work on the part of the sales rep).  I wondered what usage there was of our print copies, which may provide a clue on the potential usage of the electronic back files.  This required running reports in our integrated library system, a skill I am only just starting to acquire.  The most efficient method I could come up with was this:

1. Look up the title in our catalog and copy the bib ID number.
2. Paste this into a query in the ILS that gathers the item records only for the bib record
3. Run the query
4. Look at the results and record the number of volumes, total circ, total renewals, and 2-year circ.
5. Calculate a circ per volume stat
6. Highlight the titles with the largest stats.

There were about 4 titles that had over .8 circs per volume.  These should be the titles that would give use the most bang for the buck.  However, given our budget situation, all of this may not matter.  

But, I was quite excited to do this work and provide this information.  It seems so much more informative and useful to our liaisons than requiring them to glance at long lists and expect them to make informed decisions.  While the first task was certainly something they could have done themselves, I doubt many would have had the time (let alone taken it).  The usage data should not be used by itself to select the back files, but I hope it helps narrow down the list of titles and stimulates the liaisons to consider the resources, rather than putting it in the "if we ever have money" pile.

First Anniversary - Paper

Yesterday was the first anniversary of both my new job and my new blog.  Looking back at my postings (starting on January 1, 2012), I wanted to see what the pattern of my interests were.  Here are two Wordles created from my blog entries (split about mid-year):

^Through June, 2012^


^July-December, 2012^

They are quite similar, with the two most used words being "libraries" and "ideas".  Other common words include "circulation," "resources," "ebooks," "books," and "electronic."  I'm a little chagrined at the frequency of "rather" and "however".  Words that I expected to be more prominent were "value" and "collection".  However, "metrics," "model," and "measure" are pretty big.

I also looked back on my ideas that I was wanting to pursue, notably my "Top Ten Questions" and "What to Study Next".  Well, my eyes have always been bigger than my stomach, and I did not pursue a course of study in logic, epistemiology and professions.  I did, however, carefully read Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science (see postings), from which I had gained much insight into the history of librarianship.  My top questions, however, I think are still valid and worth pursuing, particularly those related to measuring the quality of a collection, and what impact the collection has on student learning and faculty research.

Ideas I imagine I will be pursuing over this next year include:

• Library Impact Data Project - they have a toolkit that I'd like to look into using
• Assessment in Action (ACRL)
• More thorough overlap analysis of A&I databases (for yet another round of budget cuts)
• Evaluation of accessibility of our resources for those who are print disabled

I also tried making a timeline from my postings using TimelineJS.  This was not as easy as I had hoped...But I got something interesting:


When I started this blog, I wasn't sure if it was something I could keep up.  I did not want to have a blog that laid fallow with rare postings.  Now that I know that I can write regularly, I need to decide if this is something that I want to continue doing.  And while I think it is perfectly valid to write for my own ear, my goal is to develop conversations and discussions.  While I want to contribute my voice, I would hope that others would want to listen.  So, I'm hoping to generate a little more interest in my work over the next year.

Paying for e-resources per use

On the OEDB blog, Ellyssa Kroski pointed out this article on Forbes on the war between libraries & publishers over ebooks.  Although the author, David Vinjamuri, doesn't have a background in librarianship (he mentions that libraries are "already transforming themselves" by providing the same kinds of services libraries have been providing for decades), he does seem to have a grasp on the problems libraries are facing with the large publishers' reluctance of extending ebooks to them.   Phrasing the situation as being "at war", however, is a bit of an exaggeration - he extended the "tug of war" metaphor headlining an article from the New York Times piece from last year. But this may be picayune...

I wanted to focus this posting on his suggested solutions, notably, requiring libraries to pay for ebooks (indeed, all electronic resources) per use.  He bases this idea on the assumption that electronic resources are licensed and not sold, which itself is the key difference from books.  Essentially, the copyright law allows publishers to treat libraries as resellers of content rather than owners, which he recommends that libraries should challenge.   Taking his suggestion of a value between 50 cents and a dollar per use, I calculated the cost of our ebooks to public libraries using the mean ebook circulation reported in the latest ALA report on ebook usage in public libraries.  The 44,596 mean "circulations" (itself a difficult concept to apply to ebooks) would have cost an average of $33,447.  This is over three times the amount libraries planned to spend this year on ebooks ($10,400).  With ebook usage expected to increase, this doesn't seem to me to be a sustainable model.

Admittedly, increases are never infinite, and usage will eventually plateau, much like print circulation has.  So, if I based future ebook circulation to be similar to print circulation (an assumption fraught with problems, such as different circulation periods), I found that it would cost public libraries an average of $200,704 for the 267,606 mean circulations (calculated based on the Public Libraries Survey from 2009).  The average amount spent on collections by public libraries in 2009 was about $142,400 (Table 21A).

You can see that a pay-per-use model would not likely be sustainable.  It is, in fact, a model from which libraries have been struggling to get away since the very early days of online databases.  The problem with pay-per-use is that there is no way for the library to become efficient.  As collection assessment librarian, a key measure of efficiency of our collection is cost-per-use.  If this measure were to become fixed, our expenses would be much harder to contain.  Another factor to consider is the moral hazard of having our funds effectively spent by those who do not feel the risk directly (individual members).  By the end of the fiscal year, we would run out of money and access to resources would be restricted.

Finally, David ignores the libraries' fundamental role of preserving our culture (particularly written culture), which would not be possible in the pay-per-use model.  Access to the electronic books would be at the discretion of the publisher, and not the library.

I do fully agree that libraries need to challenge the basic assumption that libraries are resellers of electronic content and not owners.  In the meantime, I support the efforts being made for libraries to retain copies of electronic books on locally- or consortially-managed servers (a la Adobe Content Server and open-source DRM).

Where good ideas come from...

OK, so I'm a little behind the times here, but my weekly review of TED Talks sometimes goes back in time.  This is because I watch them through my TV, which has a YouTube app. So rather than listing the TED Talk videos with the most recently received first, I see them in order of popularity, and of course, popularity takes time to build.  Which is how I ended up watching the 2010 video, "Where do good ideas come from".  I've requested the book at my library, as well...but for this posting, I was inspired to write about Steven Johnson's ideas as it relates to libraries.  After all, good ideas do come from libraries, don't they?

Shared patterns of innovation, even within biological systems.

Rich vocabulary of creative moments share the basic assumption that innovation is a "single thing...a single moment".  But he advocates that innovation is a network.  Innovation is simply looking at a problem differently and coming up with something new.  "The spaces that lead to innovative thinking look like this..." Hogarth's painting "Humours of an Election," what Johnson calls "The Liquid Network".

Johnson recalls research conducted by Kevin Dunbar, using "the Big Brother approach," recording conversations of ideas, trying to find that "Eureka" moment.  What he found was that breakthroughs happened at the conference table when researchers discussed progress & problems, bouncing ideas off of each other.

Steven Johnson determined that "important ideas have long incubation period," what he calls "The Slow Hunch."  He uses the example of Charles Darwin, who, from analysis of his copious notes, had the full theory of evolution months and months before his self-described epiphany, but who was unable to think it out fully.

Johnson concludes that creating ideas requires time to think, as well as the opportunity to share the hunches or ideas.  The idea of connect ideas rather than protecting ideas with intellectual property restrictions - the power of open innovation.  He ends with this thought: "Chance favors the connected mind."

I see that Johnson's ideas about, um, ideas, justifies the changes librarians have been making within their libraries and with their job descriptions.  By opening the library to small groups, by encouraging the application of group projects, by providing the mild stimulants delivered in coffee and tea, we are providing the environments necessary to connect ideas.  But we are not merely conference rooms - the "liquid" in our networks is not the coffee, but rather the knowledge and information provided via books, articles, databases, reference works, manuscripts, music, images, maps, as well as locally-generated resources like posters and presentations from students and faculty.  We could further enhance this connectedness by making our resources more accessible, find-able, manipulate-able, and useful to our members.

Frequency of Letters

From Stephen's Lighthouse - a Zipf distribution of letters used.

Friday Fun: Frequency of Letters:
Frequency of Letter Use
http://ilovecharts.tumblr.com/post/35567084750/frequency-of-letter-use-via-kurt-white

Stephen

Perusing interesting ideas on a Sunday Morning

I've developed a new routine these last few weeks of watching TEDTalks on my TV (the convergence of TV & Internet in action) and reading miscellaneous blog entries on Sunday mornings while my better half is enjoying riding his motorcycle on the nearly empty streets.  Of course, my dog would rather I be taking him to the park, but his fun will come later.  This is my time to think and learn.  And here is what I've discovered this week:

If we want to help people, Shut Up and Listen!  Ernesto Sirrolli discusses the seemingly obvious lesson learned from decades of failed Western-based aid projects in African nations.  For instance, after attempting to teach some villagers how to raise Italian tomatoes in a rich valley, all the fruits of their labor were lost to the migrating hippos.  Sirrolli sums up why the villagers did not tell him about the hippos - because he didn't ask.

Sirrolli takes this lesson learned and applies it to his own NGO of nurturing entrepreneurship in developing countries.  His method is to approach a potential client with no problems to address and no solutions in mind, but rather to listen to what the client wants to accomplish and what solutions he or she has in mind.  While addressed to those in NGOs, this lesson should (and sometimes is) applied to librarianship.  Consider collection development.  Rather than prescribing the kinds of materials for a particular subject or collection, we should be listening or paying attention to what our readers (faculty and students) use and need.  They may not know the specific items, but they know they what they want to accomplish.  What we can provide is the knowledge of publishing and literature, as well as storage and retrieval, that enables the selection of and access to the most useful materials that will enable them be successful.

From The Scholarly Kitchen, I've read an essay that advocates relying too extensively on "metrics" or even "altmetrics" to measure the quality of scholarly communication.  His alternatives to metrics,  or "alt2metrics," addresses the problem that our current quantitative metrics (e.g. impact factor, Eigenfactor, etc.) are dismissed by the very sources of scholarly communications - the academic researchers: "More often than not, academics and researchers are dismissive of metrics, as they’ve seen how, once you poke at them, they end up being relatively blunt measures with little nuance or depth."  The author, Kent Anderson, then describes what he believes are the factors that the researchers pay attention to when evaluating research, namely:

• Brand (of journal)
• Authorship (within the journal)
• Results 
• Sponsorship

My thought, however, is that these are exactly the kinds of "signals" that the metrics are trying to quantify.  Impact factors are closely associated with brand of journal, as well as sponsorship, while h-index and the citation networks measure author productivity and impact, as well as networking.  Kent is advocating that we (those interested in measuring the quality of science) not ignore the "primary, original signals of value" that "scientists rely on every day to guide them and their searches for information."  This does make sense, but I'm beginning to believe that the Uncertainty Principle applies to many, many more things than physics.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who's come to this conclusion...

Library Stacks - The love-hate relationship we have

"Library stacks" - this phrase, or more simply, "the stacks", is intimately tied with libraries and librarianship, particularly academic libraries.  I grew up in my mother's elementary school library, and spent many hours at the local public library.  My military service included a stint as base librarian and my first post-service civilian job was at a small public library.  However, I had always references (and had heard referenced) the particular furniture that holds up the books as "shelves" or "shelving".  I did not encounter the word "stacks" until I started library school (my undergraduate education was mostly independent of any one institution).  I recall entering the Texas Woman's University library looking for a particular journal article and told to "look in the stacks".  Not being particularly dense, I realized "stacks" = "shelves".  I was thrilled to start using my first professional lexicon as an embryonic librarian: "stacks".  It sounded both ancient and mystical, so much more magical than the mundane, "shelves".  I have shelves in my home - only the library has "stacks".

"Stacks" is often associated with the academic experience, at least of the more studious, er, well, students.  In an episode of the "Bob Newhart Show", as Emily is struggling to finish her master's in education, she rushes out when she learns that she has a "stacks pass" for that evening.  To "go into the stacks" intimates an image of entering a labyrinth of narrow aisles and wondrous treasures.  Scholars in the Stacks is a tribute to the Widener Library at Harvard, with short eulogies by humanities scholars describing their experiences navigating these labyrinths.

The the word is most deeply embedded in our sense of librarianship.  Being a prototypical librarian, I did a quick search of LISTA, limiting my results to trade publications and magazine articles in order to get a sense of the phrase in the professional culture.  Several article titles jumped out at me, confirming my suspicion of just how deep the term is to us: "A walk in the stacks", "Behind the book stacks: tales of a new librarian", "Caught between the stacks and a hard place: Dealing with librarian stereotypes", and "Lost in the Stacks".  Thus, it is no surprise when I searched for "library stacks blog" in Google and found a wealth of cultural expression:  Closed Stacks, From the Stacks, An Anthropologist in the Stacks, and several "In the Stacks" blogs from academic libraries.  It was also no surprise to find a wealth of books on librarianship referencing this word, including In the Stacks by Michael Cart, Sacred Stacks by Nancy K. Maxwell, Straight from the Stacks by Laura T. Kane, and of course, Vandals in the stacks? : a response to Nicholson Baker's assault on libraries by Richard J. Cox.  Using the Google Ngram Viewer, I got this graph of lexical usage of the phrase, "library stacks":

Ngram of "library stacks"

This corresponds to the WorldCat search, limited to books, where the earliest entries found were in the late nineteenth century.   "In the stacks" appears to be of much later origins, with both WorldCat and Google Ngram showing the earliest references in librarianship to be around the 1920s.  

Now, all of my thoughts about this phrase did not, of course, come out of the blue.  You are probably already aware of Barbara Fister's recent post to her blog, Library Babel Fish, Stacks and Awe, in which she, herself, references yet another blogger's post regarding "the stacks" by Bohyun Kim.  Kim questions the romantic association of scholarly research with solitude and serendipitous discovery of the stacks.  Indeed, she poses a very intriguing question (emphasis on the question added): 

The fast and convenient e-resources in library websites and the digital library collections seem to deprive us of something significant and important, that is, the secluded and sacred space for thought and contemplation and the experience of serendipitous discovery from browsing physical library collections. However, how much of this is our romantic illusion and how much of it is it a real fact?

Kim then references qualitative research by Bess Sadler presented at the 2012 ACCESS Conference that  shows the association of emotional terms to the physical stacks ("joyous", "immersive" and "beautiful"), and more concrete terms to digital collections (e.g. "efficient" and "fast").  Sadler commented how the online research environment had not yet captured the same allure and emotional experience of simply "browsing the shelves".  In her blog post, Kim pointed out the obstacles to "flow" that the physical stacks and the online research tools each presented.  When needing "rare scholarly books", she described her frustration at the sheer distances she had to navigate, both between libraries and within, especially when the books were not where they should have been.  Conversely, she describes the annoyances of pop-up reminders and the multiple layers of authentication that can disrupt "being in the zone" of online research.

Barbara responds with a question of her own, which she answers:

Why is abundance so exhausting when it’s on the screen, so inspiring when it’s on the shelves? There’s a sense of patience in the stacks, an impression that time slows down. With your call number in hand (or sent as a text message to your phone), it’s tempting to check out what else is there.

 The Web, being what it is, enables quick dissemination of these expositions and inevitable responses, including from the Library Loon.  In On Hating the Stacks, the Library Loon "confesses" that she "hates academic-library stacks".  Indeed, there is much of the stacks to disdain - dark, "yawing caverns", dust that can tear up the eyes making reading nearly impossible, stairs and steps (I, too, wonder how our members in wheelchairs would navigate these aisles barely wide enough for a super-model to walk down), and of course, incredibly long call numbers.

So, it is clear to me that librarians have a love-hate relationship with "the stacks" that will likely not cease even if (when?) the last set of shelves are removed (see Kane's latest book, Working in the virtual stacks : the new library & information science).