Who's Responsible for Digital Preservation?

Many libraries are currently being restructured and rethought to support new campus goals, in response to concerns, or as staffing levels change. That doesn't mean that our core functions change - we're still here to describe materials, provide access to items in a variety of formats, and assist or manage the preservation of materials. What is less clear as we move forward is who is really responsible for what, especially when it comes to digital preservation. Should that the library handle it or should it fall under the realm of the IT department, a different department within your institution, or even an external department or company? These questions are hard enough to answer, but as we take on new roles, both comfortable and unfamiliar, finding the solution has become even more challenging.

To help answer the questions Harvard Library's Digital Repository Service (DRS) has recently produced and shared documentation of how the management of digital assets is being handled. There is a blog post available describing the process of developing documentation and the full document is available on the DRS wiki.

Getting to Know TS Librarians: Joni Cassidy

1. Introduce yourself.
Joni Lynn Cassidy, President, Cassidy Cataloguing Services, Inc.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?
My job title doesn't really describe my work.  I design and oversee all the projects we work on for the various libraries and institutions we provide cataloguing and technical services support for.  Every day, I meet with the members of my staff to discuss the details of their assignments, along with being responsible for new client development and the general direction our company is going.

3. What are you reading right now?
I love mysteries and am presently reading "The Detective's Secret" by Lesley Thomson.

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or specific one), what would it be? Why?
If I could work anywhere, I would be cataloging the books in the two libraries in Hearst Castle in San Simeon, CA.  This is an elegant place, and at lunchtime I would find a place to sit where I could watch the ocean.

The Idealis, An Open-Access Journal for Library and Information Science Research

"High-quality, library-related scholarly communication research has been historically difficult to discover. The Idealis aims to fix that."

New open-access journal, The Idealis, has this statement under the heading Liberating Research on the homepage of their website. Founding editors, Stacy Konkiel, Nicky Agate, and Lily Troia, gather the "very best scholarly communication literature from across the Web, working with authors to make their research available, ensuring that librarians are connected to excellent research that’s relevant to their work" (from About section).

Their current focus is limited to academic librarians interested in scholarly communication but the journal intends to broaden the scope to other areas of librarianship as well.  In their Discover section, they offer a long list of essays and articles with wide ranging topics including Orcid annual report, humanities and social science creative commons, evolution of scientific communication, social media, and others.  They plan to expand past articles to "create a carefully curated journal full of research that is relevant first and foremost to the needs of library practitioners" with "difficult to access research in all forms–articles, books, code, data sets, presentations, white papers, and more."  You can subscribe for new research alerts, submit library-related research, or apply to be an editor. 

Full post can be found at Chronicle of Higher Education. 

*Picture taken from home page of the website.

NMC 2017 Horizon Report

The New Media Consortium recently released the 2017 Horizon Report for libraries. The report identifies trends, challenges, and developments in information technology, related to academic libraries. While much of the report is geared toward traditional research institutions, there are some relevant takeaways for academic law libraries.

One of the more relevant identified trends for academic law libraries is the rethinking of library spaces. As students rely less and less on physical holdings for research, libraries are opening areas for active learning and collaboration. While this trend is nothing new in academic libraries, it continues to accelerate across all libraries.

Other identified trends include:

• Cross-institution collaboration
• Evolving nature of the scholarly record 
• Patrons as creators 
• Research data management 
• Valuing the user experience

One of the challenges identified facing information technology in libraries is adapting organizational structure and workflows to the new technological realities.  The rapid pace of technology changes often leads to steep learning curves from staff and a resistance to keep up. Other challenges listed in the report are:

• Accessibility of library services and resources
• Improving digital literacy 
• Maintaining ongoing integration, interoperability, and collaborative projects
• Political and economic pressures 

The full report can be found at the NMC web site. 

Supporting other law school departments with the ILS

Brian T. Johnstone has an article in the March 2017 Computers in Libraries about setting up his ILS, SirsiDynix, to support lending from the art department at his university.  It isn't a directly applicable situation but it certainly got me thinking about ways we can support other law school departments.  He was able to create a "mini library" using his ILS; one obvious challenge to overcome is setting up the resources so they don't get lost or become clutter in your discovery layer.

As we think about ways to collaborate with other law school or organization departments, ideas like this keep our creativity going.  We just need to be careful with how we go about it so it's actually useful to the new group without making life more difficult for our existing patrons.

Chrome Browser Extensions for Librarians

Google’s Chrome browser has gained immensely in popularity, with more than half of the global browser market according to W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php). Browser extensions that allow users to add functionality to their browsing experiences are readily available from the Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions), and most of these extensions are free.

Library Technology Launchpad has identified six Chrome extensions that will be of particular interest to librarians:

1. Adobe Acrobat (convert webpages to PDF)
2. DOI Resolver (access resources via a DOI)
3. Google Scholar Button
4. Grammarly for Chrome
5. Library Extension (to find books in a local library)
6. Wayback Machine (automatically access a cached page from a 404 error)

Of particular interest to Technical Services librarians, the DOI Resolver and Google Scholar extensions may help in accessing article or ebook content for cataloging or acquisitions purposes, while the Wayback Machine is useful for locating those helpful cheat-sheet sites that have suddenly vaporized.

The full post can be found at http://libtechlaunchpad.com/2017/02/21/6-chrome-browser-extensions-every-librarian-needs/