debt and for profit colleges

At the Frye Institute and in EDUCAUSE circles, I've often heard a lot about how we should be keeping our eye on the for-profit higher education sector. This speech (referenced in IHE), given by Steven Eisman, an investor who was profiled in The Big Short, is pretty interesting.

faculty perceptions of academic libraries

There were a few things that I found interesting in this recent ITHAKA report by Schonfeld and Housewright on faculty views of academic libraries. First was the delineation of five library roles:

1. Gateway
2. Archive
3. Buyer
4. Research support
5. Teaching support

The buyer role continues to be perceived as the most important. These roles are fuzzy, of course. One could say that a library fulfills its archive role when it buys services such as JSTOR or Portico that effectively archives materials.

They find that the library's role as a gateway to information is continuing to decrease in importance in the eyes of faculty.

Helping users “locate information for their research” has become a far more competitive endeavor than it was in the days of print, and the library now competes with Google, publishers, aggregators, and other network-level services to serve its constituents. The fact that the perceived value of the gateway role has declined is a point that must be factored into libraries‟ resource allocation decisions;

Does this mean that we should invest less energy in discovery tools because Google has it covered, or does it mean that we should invest more in them? I think the conventional wisdom has been that libraries need to invest more, but this is perhaps worth rethinking. My view has been that the gateways that we do manage (our catalog, our website, and more distantly, research databases) provide unique functionality and we need to invest more resources in them to meet user expectations even though they are becoming less important on a relative basis.

The two new roles in our most recent survey, teaching support and research support, suggest unique opportunities for libraries to further develop campus relationships. But notwithstanding noteworthy library investments in everything from the information commons to data curation services, faculty members across disciplines do not yet value the teaching and research support roles nearly as highly as they do the “infrastructural” roles.

I think that it's possible that the new teaching and research support roles of libraries will by their very nature unevenly benefit faculty constituencies. Whereas traditional library services tend to focus on the provision of broadly beneficial, transactional services such as access to books and journal articles, these new roles are more consultative in nature. They may benefit a smaller percentage of faculty who's teaching and research needs align themselves well with new library teaching and research support services.

On one hand, the fields whose practices are most traditional also appear to contain the library‟s greatest supporters; therefore, if the library shapes its roles and activities based on what is currently most highly appreciated by faculty, it may lose a valuable opportunity to innovate and position itself as relevant in the future. On the other hand, if the library develops new and innovative roles and services that address unmet needs, becoming newly relevant and even essential to those scholars who have moved farthest away from it, in the near term it may lose the support of its most ardent supporters.

I find this to be a relevant question. Should libraries simply give up on the scientists who seem to be more self sufficient and concentrate our services on the humanists who continue to regard the library as their 'laboratory'?

digital humanities at liberal arts colleges

At the NITLE Summit, I became aware of some digital humanities programs at liberal arts colleges. I'm working to move our digital services work here at Watzek towards a more fleshed out digital initiatives program, so I was really excited to see other colleges moving in this direction including Hamilton, Wheaton, Occidental, and Willamette.

open access and institutional repositories

I have been watching with interest as some liberal arts college libraries adopt faculty resolutions on open access and commit to archiving preprint versions of journal articles in their institutional repositories. Oberlin did this not too long ago, and Rollins passed a resolution in February.

I spoke with Jonathon Miller about the Rollins initiative at the NITLE Summit in New Orleans last month. He said that one key to their success was that a couple faculty champions backed the process. Faculty were motivated to support the proposal because of a.) an awareness of the financial problems related to the current systems of scholarly communication and b.) a motivation to more widely disseminate their work, especially to scholars without access to pricey journals.

While I am supportive of such resolutions, I do question whether associated mandates to deposit scholarship in an institutional repository make sense. As an alternative, I would propose adopting a faculty resolution in support of open access with a mandate (or at least a suggestion) that faculty deposit preprints of articles in an appropriate disciplinary repository like arXive. It seems to me that most faculty work fits better alongside other work in the same discipline rather than alongside mostly unrelated work done at the same institution.

Institutional repositories can be beneficial as a way of showcasing and tracking the scholarly output of an institution. But I think that newer platforms like Vivo and BibApp that support scholarly bibliographies but also aim to achieve broader things like scholarly reputation management and the fostering of interdisciplinary connections are a potentially more effective way of doing this.

WorldCat Local and Electronic Resources

One of our biggest frustrations with WorldCat Local has been the difficulties involved in surfacing e-book collections. The standard way of adding an ebook set to your catalog--uploading a file of MARC records provided by the vendor--doesn't surface records in WCL.

To get records for an e book set in WCL, you need to add records to your local ILS catalog, make sure those records have OCLC numbers in them and have your holdings set on the corresponding records in OCLC. This can be hard to achieve if vendor provided record sets don't have OCLC numbers on them to start with.

OCLC has an initiative in place to get vendor supplied MARC records into WorldCat, but agreements are not in place for all vendors and the process is somewhat cumbersome. Also, as I understand it, in some cases these vendor record sets aren't truly in WorldCat, they just show up in certain WorldCat Local instances where the library subscribes to the ebook collection. Effectively, this is creating "shadow" records in WorldCat that are only available to certain subscribers.

I really wish that we could just flip on and off collections of ebooks in WCL in the same way that one adds and removes collections of e journals in Serials Solutions' management interface. Having to load records into a local system and worry about connecting those records to OCLC records is a big hassle. I realize that there may be some vendor licensing issues that prevent this, but this seems like a good goal.

Perhaps there could be some kind of connection between Serials Solutions and OCLC along the same lines as their e serials holdings project that would achieve this sort of ease in adding and removing e book sets.

Another question to ask within the e book arena: why are we so dependent on vendors for bibliographic records? Libraries should be able to collectively catalog e book sets, especially in cases where the vendors want to hold their records tightly to their chest. Some kind of crowdsourcing application for cataloging an entire e book set might achieve this. Any libraries who want records for a certain e book set sign up, and the app divvies up cataloging between them.

shared ILS concept

The Orbis Cascade Alliance's Collaborative Tech Services Team has been charged with implementing "a Shared Best Practices working group to develop guidelines for effective technical services policies and operations that support the Alliance goal of a shared ILS (Integrated Library System)."

At our team's first meeting, I was charged with taking a shot at what an ideal Alliance shared ILS might look like. I am supposed to produce a white paper on this topic for consideration by the Team.

The work of the Shared Bibliographic Database Task Force serves as a good starting point in this thinking process. Their report points out many of the potential implications of a shared ILS as well as advantages and drawbacks (scenario 3).

Perhaps the most common notion of a shared ILS would be all 36 Alliance members piling on board a traditional ILS software package that was designed for large, complex organizations (but might not be designed to handle as many separate and large organizations and sub organizations as comprise the Alliance). A big advantage in doing this would be savings on system maintenance, local system administration and hardware costs.

To make this happen successfully, member libraries would have to standardize their operations around certain system settings like circulation loan rules because the system simply couldn't handle as much local variation as is in place now. This standardization might create efficiencies in itself in that it would promote common best-practices workflows around the shared settings. A shared system could also create efficiencies through the reuse and sharing of data. For example, by sharing bibliographic records, we could reduce the overall time and effort required for database maintenance.

The big disadvantage in sharing a system this way would be a potential lack of flexibility to tailor the system to the each institution's needs: whether this customization came in the form of special loan rules, distinct subject headings, etc. Another issue might be that the system would simply become unwieldy for staff to use because data from all the institutions would overload user interfaces for staff. Imagine having to wade through hundreds of item records for a given bibiliographic record (of course these effects could be mitigated by special views, etc.) And finally another disadvantage would be the potential red tape needed to make any change to system settings.

Another model of a "shared ILS" would provide every library with an independent "virtual" ILS delivered in a Software As a Service (SAAS) fashion. Because the software would be delivered over the web, we would "share" the underlying software and computing infrastructure. We'd be "sharing" an ILS with other Alliance members (and perhaps whomever else the vendor contracted with) but we wouldn't even know it. By doing things this way, we wouldn't lose any independence and we'd still potentially save money on system maintenance (both vendor supplied and via our own staff). But we wouldn't be gaining any potential benefits possible through the sharing of data.

The third option would be a hybrid of the two above and is the one that probably corresponds to the most likely reality. The ILS would be shared where there were benefits to be gained, separate where there were not. For example, in circulation every library could have their own patron types and loan rules, but those patron types and loan rules would map to higher consortial levels of abstraction in order to support borrowing between institutions (kind of like they do now in Navigator but in the same system). In acquisitions, data about what materials were on order at each institution would be shared, but fund data wouldn't. In cataloging, we would share bibliographic records but perhaps control some of our own fields. In e resources, both individual and group purchases and licenses would be supported.

Another twist, of course, is the notion of sharing the ILS on a global level, which is more or less the vision of OCLC webscale management services. This creates the need for an even higher level of abstraction than at that of the consortium.

In coming up with a model for an ideal shared ILS for the Alliance, I'll be considering all of these scenarios.

Liberal Arts and Web Collaboration

Pete Vidito, of our Environmental Studies program, recently published a web page that suggests how elements of liberal arts learning can be developed using Web 2.0 tools.