Getting to Know TS Librarians: Dana Deseck-Piazzon

1. Introduce yourself (name & position). 
Hi! I am Dana Deseck-Piazzon, Librarian at the National Center for State Courts in Williamsburg, Virginia.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?
Yes, as the solo librarian I have my hands in a little bit of everything from original cataloging, managing electronic subscriptions, and managing undergraduate interns in our library transformation project. This next year I will commence a metadata audit of our digital library called the eCollection , which requires knowledge of metadata schemes and an investment in metadata! As an employee in Knowledge and Information Services (KIS), I just completed my three – week residential phase of the Institute for Court Management Fellows Program. Next year after I complete my court project, which is the metadata audit I will graduate at the U.S. Supreme Court.

3. What are you reading right now?
I also usually read two books simultaneously. For my new project at work (metadata audit), I am reading Metadata in Practice and (soon I will read Information Resource Description: Creating and Managing Metadata.). For pleasure, I am reading Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun. Her books continue to amaze and entertain me!

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?
I would like to work at the Seattle Art Museum’s (SAM) Library for a month! It’s called the Dorothy Stimson Bullitt Library and it’s closely associated with the McCraw Foundation for Asian Art. I just love visiting the SAM, and I’ve also toured the library when I attended the University of Washington. I would really love to become more familiar with their collections and celebrate the Puget Sound region’s gems, especially the Porcelain Room that contains “vast quantities of translucent, elegantly decorated white-bodied porcelain from China and Japan”.  To be immersed in art, art history, and assisting art enthusiasts would be intriguing! The SAM’s collections encompass European, Asian, and Native American art. 

Lean Library Browser Extension

A colleague recently called my attention to a new library discovery product, the Lean Library browser extension. While a library who wishes to make this browser extension available to users must pay to get in configured to work with their electronic resources, library users who install the extension will get seamless access to the electronic resources licensed by their libraries, without requiring them to go to a library’s web site first. According to the Lean Library web site:

“It makes library services available right in the users workflow – where and when they are needed. One of those services is off campus access: the Lean Library browser extension simplifies the process of getting access to the e-resources that the library subscribes to. The browser extension works autonomously. Installing it requires a 'once only' installation process of two mouse clicks. The extension functions without the user having to subscribe, or register for an account. When used to simplify the process of getting access to licensed e-resources, it does not somehow provide 'free' access: users need to be affiliated with an academic or research institution that subscribes to those e-resources." 

The browser extension works with librarians to provide access to e-resources without making library users jump through all the usual hoops. They do not have to be in the library itself to access the resources through IP address authentication, and they do not have to remember their login information to access resources through a proxy server when they are away from the library.


In addition to its main purpose of simplifying access to licensed e-resources, there are some other features of Lean Library. It can be used to provide analytics about e-resource use. Also, if a user is trying to access an article that is not licensed through their library, Lean Library can re-direct them to an open access version, if it exists.


 More information about Lean Library can be found in this blog post on Musings About Librarianship.

LexisNexis acquires case analytics firm Ravel Law

Data is the name of the game! And now Ravel, a legal research and litigation firm, has proved data is very profitable. LexisNexis has acquired the firm and plans to use its technology to enhance Lexis services. Ravel uses machine-learning techniques to analyze litigation records and predict the behavior of judges, firms, and courts. Ravel is also working to complete a project with Harvard University to digitize all case law in the school's library. Ravel Law chief executive Daniel Lewis says Lexis will support the effort in providing public access and expanding materials with APIs. 

This acquisition shows the further utility and adoption of artificial intelligence in analytics tools created for legal research. Find the entire article at http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lexisnexis_acquires_ravel_law

OCLC Works with Wikipedia to Link Citations to WorldCat

Sources are integral to verifying facts in articles, and OCLC has been working with Wikimedia’s Wikipedia Library to improve linking of citations to library materials in WorldCat. OCLC’s WorldCat Search API has been integrated into Wikimedia’s cite tool, an interface that “helps editors automatically generate and add citations that link back to resources represented in WorldCat.”

You can get more details in OCLC’s press release at http://www.oclc.org/en/news/releases/2017/201713dublin.html.

ALLStAR

We live in an increasingly data-driven world, and if you're anything like me you find playing with data and statistics fun, interesting, rewarding, and sometimes confusing and frustrating. It can also be time consuming - my colleagues and I spent more hours than I'd like to think about completing all the surveys to our reporting agencies this year. When there's a tool available to make all of this easier and less time-consuming, I'm immediately interested in learning more.

ALLStAR, the new tool created in partnership with NELLCO and Yale, is certainly fun to play with, and while it does have a learning curve, once you've spent a little time with it it can make your life easier.  It's preloaded with the last several years of survey data from the ABA, USNews, IPEDS, and other agencies, which gives us a jumping-off point for using the data. We've started to use it to benchmark things like collections spending, staffing levels, volumes and databases added, and records added to the catalog, but the possibilities don't stop there. If you're interested, I'd recommend checking out the link above, and attending the deep dive at the AALL Annual Meeting this year for a great hands-on workshop (we saw a version of it at NELLCO this year).

We've mostly been using it for these benchmarking tools from data preloaded from the major surveys; however, we're also going to start to use it to help us complete those surveys by setting up accounts for all of our staff to complete the ALLStAR Employee Questionnaire. ALLStAR talks to LibAnswers, which we use to track our reference statistics (and statistics from a variety of other library projects, like faculty requests and institutional repository work). After LibAnswers puts its data into the system, it should not be more onerous for staff to complete the Employee Questionnaire than it is for them to email the responses we need to complete the survey data. We are really hoping this cuts down on managerial time completing these surveys.

Finally, if enough schools begin to use ALLStAR, we could use it to define our own benchmarking and statistics that we want to keep. The information we send to various agencies (volume count, anyone?) is not necessarily useful for us. If we have the discretion to create our own tool from ALLStAR, we could begin to keep statistics that are truly meaningful - for internal tracking purposes, for reporting to stakeholders, and for benchmarking among ourselves.

ALLStAR has real possibilities to help us use statistics and data to our advantage. It will be even better if we use it as a community, especially if we decide to use it to track our own metrics as a group. I'd like to encourage everyone to take a look at it and see if we can really use this tool to make our lives easier.