Classification Web Interface Updated

The Library of Congress recently updated the interface for its Classification Web product. For those of us in libraries that use LC Classification and subject headings, Classification Web has long been a valuable tool for quickly researching and assigning call numbers and subjects. It's more frequently updated and infinitely more convenient for users than the printed schedules of yesterday. In addition to call numbers and subject headings, Classification Web contains several other controlled vocabularies as well as the name authority file. As someone who used to look these things up in the printed volumes, I greatly appreciated the office real estate I was able to reclaim when this all went online. While Classification Web has always contained a vast amount of useful and timely information, it has not always been easy to navigate. There have been incremental changes in the interface over the years but this latest upgrade, to Classification Web 4, promises to be be the most substantial improvement yet. How does it fare? 

For one thing, Classification Web 4 has a much cleaner, more modern look and feel than previous versions. The official announcement claims that it, "incorporates modern web navigation techniques and a responsive design that runs on a wide range of hardware from desktop computers to tablets and smart phones." I found this to be true. It immediately looked more streamlined from previous versions. Even on a desktop computer, the display is reminiscent of a mobile app. The now familiar "hamburger button" in the upper left offers quick access to all the searchable collections as well as user and account settings. 

Once logged in, the browse and search options offer different enough experiences to meet a wide-range of user preferences. I tend to rely more on browsing than searching and the predictive text makes browsing even easier. It's a welcome addition to the functionality of Classification Web. I also found the drop-down menus make the system much easier to navigate as well.

Search results, to my eye, seem to be better spaced and easier to read. One feature of the interface that, thankfully, did not change is how clicking on search results opens new tabs. This makes comparing results and returning to the original search a breeze and has long been one of my favorite aspects of Classification Web.

Overall, I found the changes in Classification Web 4 to be much needed and very welcome improvements over previous versions of the interface. I'm glad to see this tool that I've relied on for year is continuing to be developed and adapted for new platforms. 

Details About the Shut Down of LawArXiv

LawArXiv was launched in 2017 to provide legal scholars with an open-access, non-profit platform for preserving their work. By the end of the first year, over 700 articles had been submitted to the archive and there were plans for additional features to make the repository more robust and useful to the legal scholarly community. However, those plans never made it to fruition. Earlier this year, it was announced that LawArXiv would no longer accept new submissions. 

At the recent Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) annual meeting, more details were shared about why the LawArXiv project was shutting down. At the heart of the matter were irreconcilable issues with the Center for Open Science (COS), which hosts the LawArXiv platform as well as open-access platforms for a number of other areas of study. Due to insufficient demand from their other partners, COS was unable to support the development of new platform features, including school-level branding and batch uploading, requested by the LawArXiv Steering Committee. The Steering Committee was given the option of financing the development of these features but that option was cost-prohibitive. Further stressing the agreement was the fact that COS had also instituted a new annual hosting fee in January, 2021. The Steering Committee was left questioning whether it was worth paying the annual hosting fee knowing that features crucial to the growth of LawArXiv were not slated for development.  

These issues proved to be deal breakers for the project. After extensive research and discussion of various options, the LawArXiv Steering Committee ultimately decided to end the partnership with COS. The agreement among the member institutions was formally dissolved on June 30, 2021. While LawArVix is no longer accepting new submissions, the 1,382 articles previously uploaded to the site are still available for the time being on COS’s general preprints platform.

Getting to Know Keiko Okuhara

 

1. Introduce yourself (name & position). 

Mahalo Lauren for keeping "getting to know librarians" going and giving me the opportunity to introduce myself to my dear colleagues. I am Keiko Okuhara and a mediocre librarian (ha ha!).  I am the Bibliographic Services/Systems Librarian (July 2003-May 2020) and the Metadata Services Librarian (June 2020-Present) at the William S. Richardson School of Law Library of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

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

Yes, it does. I have been working in Hawaii for 18 years by now, and there were many personnel turn arounds during my tenure in my department, including the change of library leadership with new visions.  As the library evolved, I have become more engaged in metadata management work, and the library ventured into the archive collection development. This undertaking made me think of being a certified digital archives specialist (DAS). The training of the specialist expanded and reevaluated my perspectives of the metadata creation. There are various metadata of which cataloging is the highly well-established metadata creation process. While I don't have many archival projects to directly utilize my learning on archives, my role in archives has unfolded to work on oral histories. This work will be an exciting collaboration with my coworker who has experienced in curating archival materials. Also, I am working on the integration of systems, Alma and Omeka; and Omeka and Oral History Open Source system. I could easily slide into this kind of work, since I have some knowledge on the systems and metadata. I look forward to seeing how all these initiatives improve the discoverability of faculty scholarship and leverage our library systems and services.

3. What are you reading now?

I hope you won't expel me from the librarians’ community.... I have to admit and confess that I am not an avid reader, but of course, our most popular leading journal, ”Technical Services Law Librarian.”  I thank the past and current Editor-of -Chiefs, article/column contributors, and layout editors for sharing their great talents that I don't possess! In addition, I like to look through cook books (I have strong affinity to food), the Prescription for Nutritional Healing, and any books or articles on self-improvement, integrity, and the art of happiness in general to maintain body and mind in a good shape.

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 work in an art museum/library. What a great idea to be surrounded by imaginative and thought-providing art objects to stimulate our soul, but I also learned that those positions are hard to get and the work at the art museum is not that satisfactory to a certain extent. Also, I would love to be a children's librarian at a public library, which seems to be a popular vote in our community. It is kind of sad reality for me that I wasn't brought up in the USA during my childhood, which inhibits me from sharing my own enjoyment of English children’s literature with young and enthusiastic children.

5. [Imagine the world before the pandemic] You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?

If I am lucky enough to have a free day at work, I would organize my office. Due to the pandemic I was happily pushed out from the cubicle work condition to an enclosed office. I have accumulated a lot of junk in the course of 18 years of my time at UHM. However I am mainly teleworking and able to work in my office. I need to organize/de-clutter my office to find what I need easily.

Lessons from a Year of Working from Home

One year ago this month, I posted about the experience of transitioning my Technical Services staff to working from home in response to the pandemic .One year later, we’re still here. Passing this milestone has caused me to reflect on how our situation has changed over the year and take stock of the lessons learned from managing a Technical Services staff remotely. 

Technology is Key

As I mentioned in my post last year, the sudden shift to working from home shone a light on the Digital Divide among my own employees. On one side of the divide, there was an employee with a personal desktop, laptop, and tablet at home as well as two internet service providers. On the other side, there was an employee whose tech consisted of a cell phone with a very limited data plan and no internet service at home. 

Thankfully, we had the resources and support to get everyone equipped to work from home. But just as technology in the office requires regular maintenance and troubleshooting, so does technology at home. Over the past year, we've dealt with OS upgrades that wouldn’t install outside the campus network, software licenses that had to be updated to work off-campus, wifi hotspots with dying batteries, and more significant hardware failures requiring planned trips to campus for socially-distanced meetings with IT support. 

We also had a variety of communications technologies and platforms to work with, some a lot more successful than others. My Technical Services department took readily to Zoom for group and, later on, individual meetings. We had fun with virtual backgrounds and appearance altering filters. However, we learned that those features have pretty high system requirements that not all of us could meet. To this day, I still do not know the joy of going into a meeting accidentally looking like a cat. For the most part, though, I have found Zoom to be consistently reliable and intuitive to use. 

Less successful for my department was a foray into Microsoft Teams. While we have found it to be an adequate platform for storing files (if not as good for finding them later), it has been abysmal for purposes of working collaboratively on documents. For that, we have mostly settled on doing work in Google Drive and then copying to Teams as needed. Further, I tried having one-on-one meetings with my staff via Teams calls. But after several instances of frozen screens and dropped calls, I gave up. We now meet exclusively in Zoom. We handle other communications over phone calls or texts and the old standby, email.

While I have become a big fan of Google Drive since working from home, it is not without its own issues. Most of us already had personal Google accounts. Even though switching between Google accounts is easier than it used to be, it’s not always easy to remember to do so before creating a document to share. Further complicating matters is that my institution’s sign-in to Google requires a form of our email address that is being phased out. You have to remember to use the old form when inviting others to your document or else they are treated as permanent guests, unable to fully collaborate.

 

One big lesson learned is that even the best communications platform is useless if your home internet service goes out. The early days of the pandemic, with more people working and learning from home, seemed to put a strain on the two big internet service providers in town. Outages were frequent. During those times, I was relegated to working from my cell phone, using mobile data. Only once did I nearly reach my data cap and risk additional fees, however. I already mentioned an employee affected by the dying battery of a wifi hotspot. There was another employee who discovered that his home wifi disconnected every time someone turned on the microwave.

Communication is Even More Key

When the directive to work from home was issued, I asked each of my staff to send me a daily summary of their work activities. They have been diligent about that. As a result, I have a very well documented year of their activities. The daily reports may run the risk of getting repetitive but they are a good way to make sure everything stays on track and that I stay in the loop. As an added benefit, they helped inform annual employee reviews. 

The daily reports are not the only communications I have with my staff. Every day, I have email conversations with all of them about specific (or general) topics or we collaborate on documents together. As mentioned above, we also have regular one-on-one and group meetings in Zoom. Last year, our administration asked that each department meet as a team once a week. After several months of working from home, we felt comfortable cutting that back to twice a month. One-on-one meetings are also scheduled for twice each month. Frequently, I will ask others to join in a one-on-one meeting to discuss a certain topic. That helps keep everyone on the same page and cuts down on the number of meetings and emails. 

It’s not just internal communications that offered lessons during this year of working from home. We learned to adapt to different levels of communication with other departments around the University and with vendors. We weren’t the only ones adapting to working from home and other impacts of the pandemic. The level of customer support we got from certain places plummeted while others rose to the challenge. Some places reached out to us more frequently to see how they could adapt to our changing work environment or help us adapt to theirs. Other places were less accommodating, such as a few vendors who were suspicious when we tried to temporarily change our shipping address. We learned to be crystal clear in our communications and to try to be proactive in anticipating issues caused by what we thought were relatively small requests. It wasn’t business as usual for any place. We learned to be patient with others because we knew we’d need patience from others.   

Everyone Reacts Differently to a Pandemic

One thing I learned soon after the transition to working from home was that each member of my staff reacted to the pandemic differently. For one, the isolation of working at home was hard to adjust to and a sense of claustrophobia began to set in. They were eager to get back to the office and I was asked almost on a daily basis if I had gotten any information about when that would be. For another staff member, working from home was a welcome relief. It meant less time away from home and less chance of exposure to COVID-19. The others fell somewhere between those extremes. One thing we all shared was an acknowledgement that we work someplace that allowed us to keep our jobs while minimizing our risk of getting sick. The pandemic was stressful for each of us in different ways but some of that pressure was mitigated by the extra time we all had by not having to commute and be at the office most of the day. 

The lesson here is one of compassion. As a manager, I relaxed my expectations. And I let my staff know that. I let them know they could work odd hours if they needed. I was especially forgiving if something slipped through the cracks. We shared our concerns in a more familiar way, dispensing with professional formalities at times. I made accommodations whenever possible that allowed my staff to deal with personal issues. The result? We’ve gotten as much done this year working from home as we would have gotten done had we been in the building. I might even argue that, in some ways, we’ve accomplished more because on top of our regular duties, we’ve all had the added work of dealing with the pandemic and everything else 2020 brought. 

Looking Back

I was recently asked by my director to list my department’s accomplishments this past year. Not to brag but we have accomplished some significant things. There have been publications and presentations; starting the process of dismantling racism and de-centering whiteness in our collections; shifting our collections more toward electronic resources and cancelling print subscriptions; providing new services to our users. All the while, my staff has also been keeping up with the important, regular duties of ordering, cataloging, and paying the bills. And we’ve done it all while working from home.

Of course, working from home was a big transition. Obviously, there were issues to address and challenges to overcome. It has not always been easy, from professional and personal perspectives. But we managed to make it work and work well. 

Looking Forward

A year later, we’re still working from home. We’re still dealing with the pandemic. Our approach has changed as we’ve learned more about COVID-19. For one thing, we’re not as strict about isolating shipments and deliveries as we were in the early days of the pandemic. Also, as the University relaxed guidelines about being on campus, some of my Technical Services staff began to make routine visits to the library. I, however, have not set foot on campus since one quick visit last July. 

The University is counting on vaccinations in hopes of having a more vibrant campus in the fall. However, with the vaccination rate slowing and infections of COVID variants seeming to strike younger people harder, I will wait and see what this fall looks like. No matter when and how it happens, I know that going back to campus is going to be as big a transition as leaving it was. 

The pandemic was upon us so suddenly, it drove home the idea that you can’t plan for everything. No matter what the future ends up looking like, we need to stay flexible, adaptive, and compassionate. That is the big lesson from this past year.

Getting to Know Larissa Sullivant

1. Introduce yourself. 

My name is Larissa Sullivant. I am the Head of Collection Services and Adjunct Lecture in Law at the Ruth Lilly Law Library, Indiana University Robert McKinney School of Law.  I started my professional career as a Slavic cataloger at the University of Michigan Graduate Library, and for the last 20 years I have been a law librarian. 

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

I think that my job title, Head of Collection Services, reflects my duties accurately, with responsibilities that include bibliographic and statistical analysis of the Library’s collection; collection promotion, bibliographic selection, and “weeding”; electronic resources management, acquisitions, cataloging, and serials control; supervision of the Technical Services staff. I also handle negotiation of contracts and vendor relations and assist our Library director in budgeting. I have regular hours at the Reference Desk, which during the pandemic means handling virtual reference. The last may not seem semantically connected to the job title, but it is an important part of being successful in my position: I need to know what our stakeholders read and research.

3. What are you reading right now?   

As a native Russian speaker, I am understandably drawn to that nation’s rich, literary traditions. I am currently re-reading Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat and Other Short Stories. Each of the stories is a parable of human tragedies and failings: vanity, pettiness, hypocrisy, self-absorption, cruelty towards others, etc. My favorites are The Nose and The Overcoat. The Nose has a decisive element of the absurd: a human-sized, disembodied nose of a privy counselor comes to life, parading around town and acting as a public official. The story is bitingly satirical, a critique of social hierarchies, which is a recurrent theme in Gogol’s work. The Overcoat concerns an impoverished clerk’s efforts to get a new and decent overcoat, so that his co-workers would stop berating him. In heartbreaking detail, it describes the clerk’s efforts in acquiring an overcoat, his various humiliations, and what happens after he finally gets his new coat. 

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

I am happy where I am: directing the Technical Services unit at the Ruth Lilly Law Library.  I enjoy every aspect of my duties and responsibilities.  My colleagues, both faculty and staff, are well-respected within the Library and the Law School communities and are wonderful and knowledgeable people. I truly enjoy working with all of them!

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

I think slow days in most work environments are rare. If I suddenly had a free day, I would focus first on organization – getting the paper and information monster under control – since, as all librarians know, organization is the key to everything else.  After that, I would chip away at one of my current projects: a comprehensive inventory of our microform collection, reconciling the online catalog bibliographic data with the physical microfiche and microfilm holdings. 

Preservation Week 2021

In 2005 the Institute of Museum and Library Services partnered with Heritage Preservation and performed the first comprehensive national survey of the condition and preservation needs of the nation's collections. With almost a quarter of the institutions surveyed reporting that they had no staff dedicated to collection care, the idea of Preservation Week was born to help libraries connect to their communities and promote the work that is being done to ensure the longevity of our shared collections. 

The last year has kept many of us from working with our collections on a daily basis, and the time for preservation work has likely been incredibly sparse. Which makes this annual awareness campaign even more important this month. So mark your calendars for April 25-May 1 and schedule the live (and free) webinars, check out the recordings from previous years, or take a look at the wealth of resources available and share them with your community. 

Survival of the Fittest: 5 Vital Tips for Virtual Conferences

As I embarked on day one yesterday of the four day Innovative Users Group virtual conference, I was already exhausted. Hot on the heels of last week's three day Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries conference, I am a total mixed bag of emotions and energies. And I know conference season is just getting started... Past posts here at TechScans have given advice for attending conferences and selecting conferences to attend. Those posts were of course specific to in person attendance. In this blog post I hope to share a few tips for surviving the virtual conference universe.

1. Block Out Your Calendar

Block Your Calendar (orange = IUG)

Over the course of 2020 I tried to take full advantage of all the virtual things. Like many people I know, I tried to keep doing all the usual work too (all while working from home with a young child). Some of you out there are still fully working from home, and perhaps you too have children, pets, or other loved ones  you are sharing physical spaces and bandwidth with. In the before times, attending a conference was always a bit of a break. You literally traveled somewhere, be it far or near, and were mostly able to focus on taking in new professional knowledge that would benefit you in your job when you returned. FOCUS is the key word here. Attending a conference virtually, we don't have the same luxury of full focus that we have for face-to-face attendance. Those emails keep coming in, and should you really use an out of office message if you aren't really "out"? If you are virtually attending a conference but are in the office as I am this week, the office phone still rings too. Other meetings are still taking place, because you know, everything is virtual so why not? I recommend going through the entire conference schedule, and as you might have in person, marking the sessions you really must attend. IUG's online schedule allows me to "star" must see sessions so I can more easily find them later. Then I went one step further and copied the session titles and links into my Outlook calendar. Whatever calendar you use, block out the time as if it were a meeting. This will keep you from over-scheduling our double-booking yourself. 

2. Don't Over Work Yourself

Take Breaks Outside If Possible

I've already gone on a bit about the differences in face-to-face and virtual conferences as it relates to scheduling, but one thing I haven't specifically talked about is the time. Seriously, these online conference planners are in a tough spot. In real life, we would all be physically in the same place and therefore all using the same time zone. For IUG I would have been in Detroit, and everyone else would have been too. Accommodating national and international attendees means that sessions will either start too early for the west or run really late for the east (or both). There are also very few if any breaks built into the schedule. Sessions may end at 1:29 and another one begin promptly at 1:30. When the next "room" is only 1 click away to Zoom in or stream a recording that just went live, no one needs a bathroom break or time to walk through the hallway or around a corner to the next session location. With things happening so rapidly and your workday most likely being shifted, I recommend going easy on yourself. Let your colleagues know (one way is block out the calendar!) that you may be physically still working from the same place, but you are in fact attending a conference for some intense professional development. This will keep both yours and their expectations in check. If a session happens 5:30 EST adjust the start of your workday. Bake in some breaks so you are not hunched over a screen for a full day of conference presentations. Be conscious of the amount of time you are working!

3. Take Notes

Virtual IUG Meet & Greet = Great Notes!

Let's be real: are you really going to solely attend the virtual conference and not check your email or do anything else while listening to sessions? This is why note-taking is more important than ever. Sure, you may have taken notes at your last face-to-face conference and of course that was one of the keys to remembering the info you were taking in. But in the virtual conference world, distractions are multiplied rather than subdued. Do your best to silence notifications during presentations, and start a brand new steno pad or word doc for the conference. In advance, give each page the title, date and time of the session. If you must give into various distractions during any given session, your notes will help you get back on track. If you are lucky enough to have sessions provided on demand rather than just live streamed your notes will also help out when you return to the session recordings to play catch up. Virtual exhibit halls are another place where taking notes are critical. In real life you may have walked away from the vendor booths with a bag full of random goodies! Each one would have helped you remember that particular booth and what they talked about. For this section of your conference notes, I recommend taking screen captures and saving them to a folder, or if your conference "notepad" is a Word or Google doc, pasting them into the doc along with a few notes.

4. Network

#IUG2021 Badge

One of the things I have learned time and time again from more experienced librarians is that conferences and annual meetings are where networking happens. An excellent tip I picked up a few years back was to exchange 5 business cards with people you have never met before. This was a good goal for the before times. Normally you would use this goal to help you meet new colleagues from other institutions who have similar interests or job responsibilities. Later you would return to your colleagues post conference and share who you met and what you learned. This type of professional experience can still occur in the online environment, but it looks very different than meetups between sessions (because there is very little "between session" time as #2 in this post pointed out). If your online conference allows for attendee profiles, bio photos or conference badges fill it out. This will help you take full advantage of the other aspects of their online offerings. Some virtual conferences like IUG have "social feed", "birds of a feather", chat and forum sections. In addition to live-tweeting about your virtual conference experience, these non-public locations provide several ways for you to connect informally with others attending the same presentations, working with the same systems, or trying to solve the same problems in their libraries. Attendees are posting photos of their home or work office spaces, talking about what they would have done if they really were in Detroit, and sharing their general feelings in a few sentences or with a pic or two about the virtual experience. Your interactions within the various sections of the site will be connected to your "badge" the same way that physical name tag or business card served as a leave-behind. Since you have the benefit of being on a computer while attending virtual networking events like a meet and greet or happy hour, in place of getting a business card ask in the chat for email addresses, and connect with those individuals on LinkedIn.

5. Dress Down & Dine In

Conference Cat & Hat

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of before times conferences was deciding what to wear, observing the conference-style of other librarians, and of course dining out! Who doesn't love trying new food? Virtual conferences might be stressful in totally new and frightening ways, but three silver linings for me have been:

A. How we dress: pajama pants and hooded sweatshirt? cat-face baseball hat? house shoes all day?

B. Where we "Zoom" in from: your couch? a picnic blanket outdoors? with your cat in your lap?

C. What we eat: ice cream instead of continental breakfast? sushi take out? warm cup of noodles?

However you choose to dress and whatever you have for dinner, I won't be the judge! I do encourage you to take advantage of the creature comforts that virtual conferencing allows. Who knows how long this aspect of our professional development lives will last. In the very least, treat yourself to at least one meal of something different. If the conference would have been in a location known for a certain type of cuisine, give that a shot (and use this as a conversation starter when you try tip #4). 

Cat House Shoes = Perfect Conference Footwear

 

What do you love or loathe about virtual conferences? What do you miss about face-to-face? Do you have any tips to share for surviving the online versions? Share with us in the comments!

Getting to Know Joan Stringfellow

1. Introduce yourself:

Howdy! My name is Joan Stringfellow and I am the Head of Technical & Electronic Services at the Dee J. Kelly Law Library, Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth, Texas.  Remotely coming to you today from my home office in lovely Bedford, Texas. I have been at the law school (then Texas Wesleyan) since 1993 where I was the receptionist for the school. About six months later, I was hired into the library as the serials assistant. I have worked in every aspect of the law library with the exception of ILL. I received my MLS from the University of North Texas in 2002 and was then promoted to Catalog Librarian.   

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

Well, broadly speaking, yes and no. Since our library is a smaller one, this is probably true for many of us! As for the Technical Services part of the title, yes. I have a wonderful assistant, Sharon Jefferson, who does our copy cataloging and adding our new print materials to our collection. She does many other special TS projects as they come up. I am our library system administrator. I do the original cataloging although it is not a very significant amount, it does challenge me at times. Probably for lack of practice! As for the electronic services part of the title, I do it all. I take care of our electronic subscriptions from top to bottom. I perform most steps in acquiring our subscriptions. This includes setting up trials, demos, licensing, ensuring they are complying with state and federal accessibility laws, adding them to our catalog and A-Z list, invoicing, statistics retrieval, and making sure all of our students get their Westlaw and Lexis access set up! We also have an electronic sign in our lobby that I manage. I work with the director and collections librarian to create and manage the budget annually for our electronic resources of the library’s budget. Finally, I am the website editor for the law library’s pages. 

Since I have been here so long, I have also acquired some facilities tasks. I am the liaison for the library working with the IT department, when there are any technical problems within the library public spaces. Specifically, if the library student or staff printers go down, I am the one who coordinates with IT to get those back up and running. The same goes for the public catalogs. We also have electronic compact shelving and I am the point person for any maintenance issues that come up. I will trouble-shoot the issues and, when necessary, work with the vendor for any repairs needed.  

3.What are you reading right now?

So, I really hate to admit this, but I am not an avid reader, though I grew one in my daughter, who cannot get enough! She even became a writing and reading teacher. Makes total sense! When I do read, I love true crime. Way back when I was around 11-12, I remember finding Helter Skelter in my aunt’s room and was just fascinated! I am still fascinated with all things true crime. I also enjoy Steven King. I am amazed at his ability to describe what is going on in the story that I find myself deep in the story like I am really there in the room. I have recently received a couple new books that I am very much looking forward to. Becoming by Michelle Obama and, for Christmas, I received a book on decluttering. Hmmm…was that a hint?  

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

I have always thought it would be so much fun to work at a specialized library. I love to watch movies and television, so I would love to work at the Disney film or animation library, network library, or other television or movie studio library. When I was in library school we had to apply for our dream job and I chose the MTV Library.

5.[Imagine the world before the pandemic] You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?

Well, since we are a smaller library, there are always projects to work on. I would love to be able to clean up our catalog from the past migrations and record loads and deletions. I would love to work on making sure all the records are clean, fix any call number problems, and make sure everything is as good as could be. That is the Virgo in me. While I am pretty good at our ILS, I would really love to become an expert!

OCLC Extends GreenGlass Functionality to Serials

OCLC’s GreenGlass has for years been used by libraries that want extensive collection analysis metrics in one dashboard. GreenGlass offers a lot useful data, such as subject coverage, age of collection, and rarity of titles, based on OCLC holdings data. As a user of GreenGlass at two very different institutions (a large university and a community college) one of the big benefits of GreenGlass is that it requires very little work on the part of the library to get access to a wealth of data. Generally, a library will assist with a holdings refresh with OCLC and GreenGlass does the rest. However, one of the big drawbacks is that GreenGlass has only been able to analyze monograph collections.  

That is changing with OCLC’s recent announcement of GreenGlass functionality for serials. GreenGlass for serials aims to fill in gaps in serials collections analysis that aren’t covered in traditional retention agreements among libraries. GreenGlass connects with JSTOR and other journal archives to offer a fuller picture of title availability, both print and electronic. 

At a time when many libraries are having to make decisions about the serials collections, to save both space and money, any tool that helps inform retention decisions is welcome. Hopefully, GreenGlass for serials can live up to its promise. 

New Version of OCLC Connexion Client Announced

In a recent email to users of Connexion, OCLC announced that a new version of the Connexion client, version 3.0, is scheduled for release in May/June 2021. Support for 2.xx versions of Connexion will be discontinued in 2022, with at least three months advance notice. The web-based version of Connexion will remain unchanged. 

Getting to Know Liz Manriquez

 

1. Introduce yourself:

Hello!  I’m Liz Manriquez, Scholarly Communications and Reference Librarian at the University of Wisconsin Law Library.  I’ve been with UW for nearly 2 years, previously I was a Reference Librarian and Assistant Professor at the UNLV Boyd School of Law.

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

Yes!  In this position I divide my time equally between reference duties, such as working the reference desk and collection development, and managing our digital repository, while assisting with all things scholarly, such as citation metrics and improving the discoverability of faculty scholarship.  I work directly with faculty to enhance their online presence through scholar profiles and to ensure their scholarship is accurately represented within HeinOnline, SSRN, and ORCID.

3. What are you reading right now?

I usually read a few books at a time because my interest wanes, but have been reading much less since COVID began.  I’m currently reading Lady Killers: deadly women throughout history by Tori Telfer for a virtual book club.  I’m also working my way through the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith.  I’m about to break down and buy the latest, Troubled Blood, because the wait at my local library is 25 weeks!

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

Definitely the Giamatti Research Center, which is the library for the National Baseball Hall of Fame.  I enjoy all things data and statistics, so it’s only natural that baseball is my favorite sport.  Is there anything better than a sunny day at the ballpark?  One of my favorite memories as a child was going to Comiskey Park with my dad and filling out the scorebook, while we munched on hot dogs and peanuts.  I would love working to preserve the various medias and documents created by the league and its fans, making them accessible to future researchers and sports fans.