From Users to Developers: NCSU’s Involvement with an Open Source ERM

A recent article in Code4Lib Journal describes the experience of library staff members at North Carolina State University when adopting and making enhancements to an open source electronic resource management tool.

According to the article’s abstract:

“CORAL, an open source electronic resource management tool, has been adopted by libraries around the world. The community manages the software development contributed to the open source codebase by independent organizations. NCSU Libraries’ Acquisition & Discovery Department started using CORAL to manage monograph orders at the end of 2013. Since then, they have completed a series of developments to enhance CORAL functions for workflow management, streamlining the complex electronic resource acquisition process. This paper presents NCSU’s adoption and development of CORAL. It explains what prompted the development, shares the experience, from identifying internal resources to outsourcing development work, and identifies challenges and opportunities of the current mechanism of CORAL development.”

The author of the article concludes that CORAL is a strong open source software product, and it seems like NCSU had a positive experience working with it.

Song, Xiaoyan. Code4Lib Journal, Issue 34, October 2016, http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/11954

Getting to Know TS Law Librarians: Corinne Jacox

1. Introduce yourself.

My name is Corinne Jacox. I have been the Catalog/Reference Librarian at the Creighton University Law Library for fifteen years. 

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

My title could be updated to Metadata/Reference Librarian to reflect the additional work I do with metadata in our institutional repository, as well as cataloging.

3. What are you reading right now?

Right now I am reading Bubonic Panic: When Plague Invaded America by Gail Jarrow.

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

If I could work in any library, it would be a genealogy library. I really enjoy working on the genealogy of my family and putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

4b. You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?

If I had a free day at work, the project I would work on would be putting together letters to commercial publishers to obtain permission to load articles by the Creighton School of Law's faculty into our institutional repository.

An Update from Project COUNTER on Hidden Metrics

Remember how Project COUNTER wanted to hear from you about hidden metrics back in October?  They’ve compiled the results from their online survey along with feedback from their face-to face focus group and international webinar, and recently published an official report of their findings called “Distributed Usage Logging: A Report on Stakeholder Demand.”

Here are a few highlights:

• All respondents are interested in going beyond basic counts of usage and having access to data on how users are actually engaging in the content.

• There is strong support for all content to have a DOI (digital object identifier) and for institutional repositories to mint them for items that do not have them.

• Demand for DUL (distributed usage logging) differs slightly, depending on whether participants are a provider or a user of the content.

• Content providers wish to have access to DUL data reports so they can clearly report to consumers a picture of total usage, across their own platforms and beyond.

• DUL usage statistics are desired by publishers to demonstrate the true value of a journal, to understand more about who is recommending particular authors, and to have access to country and article level data.

• Librarians generally discourage usage of academic sharing networks, in part due to copyright and impact reduction concerns.

• While altmetrics may not bring significant value to librarians when making collection management decisions, they are an important form of support for faculty authors and can provide consortiums with useful background information on academic engagement.

• Most are in agreement that standard usage reporting would help with the implementation of open access policy and would help simplify things across the current landscape, made up of multiple models for open access and freely available content.

• Some publishers already track open access usage for certain customers who have agreements where their license and open access publication fees are covered in the same deal.

Want more details?  Download their full report today to learn more about the respondent groups, their methodology, and to hear what your colleagues think about topics such as shared social network sites, calculating cost per use, and more!