Kate Hill

Principles of Negotiation

This article summarizes a presentation given at the 2015 North Carolina Serials Conference by Derrik Hiatt and Lesley Jackson. The talk focused on principles useful when conducting license negotiations that Hiatt and Jackson discovered through their own experiences as electronic resource management librarians and, in Jacksons case, as an EBSCO representative. These principles cover a variety of concepts, but all seek to frame negotiation as an interpersonal relationship based on mutual need instead of the antagonistic, intimidating process that it can become.

In Search of Useful Collection Metadata: Using OpenRefine to Create Accurate, Complete, and Clean Title-level Collection Information

ABSTRACT University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), like many libraries, recently migrated to a new knowledgebase and integrated library system (ILS) and found they had to clean up a great deal of messy serial title list data. In their search for solutions, they discovered the free, open source tool OpenRefine, a software program specifically designed for data normalization, transformation, and cleaning. This article describes the steps that UNCG used to take a publishers title list file and transform it into a file format usable by their ILS. In doing so, this article will discuss major types of functionality in OpenRefine: downloading the software, importing data correctly, using the interface, transforming data on a column and cell level, exploring and normalizing data, and exporting files out of OpenRefine. At the end of this article, the readers should understand how to use OpenRefine on a basic level and be able to begin to use it on their own data.

Creating a Cohesive Discovery Service

Presenting at the 2014 North Carolina Serials Conference, Ginny Boyer and Virginia Bacon of East Carolina University (ECU) discuss how the three libraries on campus—Joyner Library, the Music Library, and Laupus Health Sciences Library—created a brand and an accompanying web framework to transform previously disparate user experiences into a unified whole. They begin by explaining some of the roadblocks that historically had stopped collaboration and then outline what techniques and circumstances helped overcome these issues. Of these techniques, they devote the most attention to the creation and gradual adoption of an official ECU Libraries brand via the development of a logo and a consistent template for all web pages. Finally, they detail the future of this project, including plans for in-depth user assessment.