Review of OAIS (ISO 14721)

The ISO standard for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model will be up for its 5 year review in 2017. This standard lays out the framework for an archive that will maintain the long term preservation of information and make this information available to a designated community. More information about OAIS is available from the Society of American Archivists’ Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology.

To prepare for this process, which involves making revisions to ISO 14721 and the identical text in the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) documentation, at 650.0-B-1. The process of revising these standards is complex, so the review process has already begun. If you would like to take part in the review, or just keep yourself appraised of its progress, you can access the information and documentation at the OAIS five-year review website.

Getting to Know TS Law Librarians: Anna Lawless-Collins

1. Introduce yourself (name & position). 

My name is Anna Lawless-Collins and I’m the Associate Director for Systems and Collection Services  at the Boston University School of Law Fineman and Pappas Law Libraries.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not? 

My title is vague enough to encompass what I do.  I oversee the Collection Services department, which includes library systems.  I used to be the Collection Development Librarian and those duties rolled into this position as well.  I supervise the department staff and do the administrative work, and work with the library’s management team to guide the department and the library into the future, which is where the associate director duties come in.  I really depend on the strong team in the department to keep us moving and provide excellent service.

3. What are you reading right now? 

I like to have a few books going at the same time so I can change what I’m reading depending on my mood.  I’m currently reading Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik, and LaFayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell.  

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?

I would love to be a children’s librarian.  I love helping kids connect with reading.  I used to sub in elementary school libraries and had such a great time, and the librarian in my hometown was a huge part of my own childhood.  For now I have to settle with talking about books with the kids in my own life.

ISNIs and ORCIDS - the impact of identifiers

A recent post in The Scholarly Kitchen, Why persistent identifiers deserve their own festival got me thinking about the use of identifiers and how these might transform traditional technical services tasks. A post by Karen Smith-Yoshimura in Hangingtogether.org, Impact of identifiers on authority workflows, describes explicitly how the use of identifiers could simplify and enhance the process of associating works and creators. In fact, we are told that use of identifiers is essential to shifting bibliographic description out of MARC into a linked data environment. The implementation of personal identifiers is strongest in the sciences, but their use is expanding into the social sciences and humanities.

According to their website, ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) is an

ISO certified global standard number for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution, including researchers, inventors, writers, artists, visual creators, performers, producers, publishers, aggregators, and more. It is part of a family of international standard identifiers that includes identifiers of works, recordings, products and right holders in all repertoires.

NACO and OCLC plan to incorporate ISNIs in the 024  field of LC/NACO authority records as part of the long delayed RDA authority file conversion phase 3B.

ORCID  is a subset of ISNI - a block of identifiers reserved for authors and researchers. ORCID's mission is to provide

an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. We provide open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations. We provide this service to help people find information and to simplify reporting and analysis.

Author's and researchers can register with ORCID, then share their ORCID ID with their institution. My institution, Cornell University, is actively encouraging faculty in all fields to establish ORCID IDs. Use of identifiers makes it possible to precisely identify authors without the squishy ambiguity of parsing out character strings.

Curious about the persistent identifier festival? PIDapalooza is scheduled for November 9-10, 2016 in Reykjavík.

Project COUNTER Wants to Hear More from You about Hidden Metrics!

With the increasing diversity of scholarly communication systems providing us with a constant influx of new ways to share information with one another, search out content and access materials, traditional usage statistics may fall short in telling the story of the value of research and scholarship – from the perspective of those conducting the research and producing the scholarly pieces, those providing online access to these works, and those using the associated usage statistics to inform collection management decisions and calculating cost per use.

Publisher’s content can be scattered across multiple platforms, including institutional repositories and scholarly social network sites as well as aggregators such as EBSCO and ProQuest, so single platform usage metrics may be limiting.  Additionally, alternative metrics such as likes, shares, tweets and citations on Wikipedia can communicate important information to both consumers and providers.

In response to the landscape changes that result in increasingly hidden usage, COUNTER is working with Information Power Limited to undertake research into a new method of reporting called “Distributed Usage Logging” which enables publishers to provide reports on “total usage” regardless of where that usage happens. Such reports could also provide more details in the emerging altmetrics field, such as shares and tweets.

At this point, COUNTER needs your help!  They’d like to discover what additional data would be useful to YOU, as librarians, institutional repository managers, publishers and vendors.  So take a moment to fill out their survey and let your voice be heard. It consists of short question and should take no more than ten minutes to fill out.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/K5HC8B3

I reached out to Lorraine Estelle, Director of COUNTER, and she provided me with some background information about the project as well as a link to the following slideshow presented at the Fall SSP Seminar on September 16, 2015 at Washington DC:

CrossRef Distributed Usage Logging Pilot from Victoria Rao, MS

For additional information about hidden usage and metrics from a law librarian perspective, check out what some of our AALL colleagues have to say:

• Assessing Altmetrics: Why law librarians (and law schools) should care about altmetrics. Mark Popielarski, AALL Spectrum, 19:2 (2014) http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Publications/spectrum/archives/Vol-19/No-2/altmetrics.pdf
• Altmetrics: How to For Using the “Invisible Metric”. Katie Brown, AALL Annual Meeting presentation, 2014 http://www.slideshare.net/KAtieBrown1/altmetrics-how-to-aall-2014
• Altmetrics: Documenting the Story of Research. Collister, Lauren B. and Timothy S. Deliyannides, Against the Grain, 28:1 (2016) http://www.against-the-grain.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/fea_collister_deliyannides_v28-1.pdf
• Telling the Story of Research: Altmetrics at Pitt. Collister, Lauren B. and Timothy S. Deliyannides, AALL2go webinar, 2016 http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Education/aall2go/webinars/2016/aallwebinar201609.html

Be sure to respond to the COUNTER survey by October 15^th!  

Your responses will help formulate developments in this area of work, and results will be shared in summary format on the COUNTER website.