Lisa S. Blackwell

Starting with an Empty Map: Benchmarking Time and Costs for Serials Operations

SUMMARY Nancy Slight-Gibney and Mary Grenci from the University of Oregon Libraries presented the results of a time/cost study conducted during 2002 to measure resource utilization associated with all aspects of technical services operations performed in the University of Oregon Libraries Acquisition and Catalog Departments. This workshop focused on the data gathered regarding serials operations across the departments. The overall goal of the study was to provide a solid research foundation that could be used to support process and budgetary decisions that would best support the mission of the Libraries. The workshop concluded with an audience participation discussion regarding possible interpretations of the research results.

Do You See RSS in Your Future

SUMMARY Paoshan Yue and Araby Greene from the University of Nevada, Reno Libraries presented a broad overview of RSS, an XML technology in widespread use by bloggers and commercial industries to facilitate easy sharing of Web content. Librarians at the University of Nevada, Reno have begun to explore applications of this technology in the library setting. Several Reno Libraries pilot projects utilizing RSS technology were discussed. Finally, future applications of RSS in the serials world were postulated.

Critical Moments: Chance, Choice, and Change in Scholarly Publishing

Dr. Katherine Skinner is the Executive Director of the Educopia Institute. Founded in 2006, the Educopia Institute is a nonprofit educational organization that hosts inter-institutional, collaborative programs for the production, dissemination, and preservation of digital scholarship. She is the founding program director for the MetaArchive Cooperative that launched in 2004. That community-owned and community-governed digital preservation network now has more than 50 member institutions in four countries. Dr. Skinner also directs the Library Publishing Coalition project, a two-year initiative to create a new organization to support library publishing and scholarly communications activities in conjunction with more than 50 academic libraries.

The Value of Serials in Academic and Special Libraries

Megan Oakleaf is an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science in the iSchool at Syracuse University and provides consultancy services on academic library value, outcomes assessment, evidence-based decision making, information literacy instruction, and information services. She is the author of the Value of Academic Libraries Comprehensive Review and Report. Her research areas include outcomes assessment, evidence-based decision making, information literacy instruction, and academic library impact and value. In this presentation Megan discusses the evolution of library services and the corresponding changes in how a library’s value may be measured and assessed within the larger context of an organization.

Scholarly Video Journals to Increase Productivity in Research and Education

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) was born digital in 2006 as an open access journal and the first journal to utilize video production as the primary mechanism to convey scholarly content. Today there are over 395 institutional subscribers of which the majority are top-tier research institutions. Moshe Pritsker, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of JoVE, presented an overview of this unique journal that is produced to meet the specialized needs of laboratory researchers working in biological research and education.

Harnessing the Spiderweb: Collaborative Serial Maintenance, Challenges and Solutions at UC

Technical services representatives from University of California (UC) campuses formed a collaborative partnership to enhance local access to serials catalog records while also creating a mechanism for preserving local record data. This project was built upon the principles of a decentralized, cooperative cataloging system later envisioned by the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. A pilot project based on the UCs strong historical relationship with CONSER (Cooperative ONline SERials) provided the impetus for moving UC serials cataloging towards an efficient, high-quality single enterprise.

Crawling Out of the Web: Alternative Citation Sources

Summary Citation analysis is a very valuable, extensively utilized technique that permits a researcher to study the literature of a scholarly discipline. Sophisticated commercial databases now allow the researcher to perform citation analysis much more easily than the earliest manual methods. As information technology has advanced in the Web environment, the number of vendors incorporating citation analysis capability into their products has increased. This proliferation bears scrutiny to highlight differences, advantages and disadvantages when evaluating competing products.