From Cancellations to Coding: Pandemic-Centered Tech Topics on Day Two of the OBS/TS Summit 2020

So far, day two of the summit has delivered fantastic programming. I wish I could attend it all! The final virtual event takes place at 6 PM EST tonight. This morning my two favorite sessions both dealt with the new realities we are living in post COVID-19 closures, touching on this from the perspective of budget cuts to work from home workarounds. Here were my takeaways:

Top Left to Bottom Right: Gilda Chiu-Ousland, Wendy Moore, Heather Buckwalkter, Anne Lawless-Collins.

TS Resource Management Roundtable: Budget Cuts & Collecting Pivots
I was really on the fence about which of the earliest morning sessions to attend, and I am so glad I selected this one on resource management and collecting pivots. Wendy Moore from the University of Georgia Law Library led the discussion with a powerful statement that really summarizes the entire roundtable and the timeliness of the topics:

"Crisis can lead to LOTS of creativity."

What followed were introductions from each of the panelists including Heather Buckwalter, Gilda Chiu-Ousland, and Anna Lawless-Collins. Each shared the state of things at their institution, the fallout from COVID-19 closures including the stopping of shipments and the addition of online study aids and other e-resources to help students and faculty get through a quick pivot to virtual learning, and the budget (if they had %'s or figures yet) that they are each facing for fiscal year 2021 and 2022. This session (as with several from day one of the summit) was not recorded to allow attendees to feel more comfortable sharing the details and situations of their library, law school, or larger institution. Two polls were executed in the larger Zoom room before dividing into smaller groups for more personalized and in depth discussions. The polls were very interesting, revealing many of us still do not know our budget, or have vague %'s that are yet to be approved, and that the majority of us are cutting print journals more than any other area of our collections.


In the smaller groups, attendees were better able to share their own situations, including some very creative strategies for how to negotiate with vendors, what data they are using to make those decisions about what and how to cut items from the collection, and what they have already or are planning to cancel to meet the demands of the coming fiscal year. There was a big focus on mitigating expectations of faculty and other stakeholders, and many were open about having these difficult conversations with their faculty members related to monograph acquisitions and with their institutions related to print course reserve materials. Overall an excellent program that was really open to sharing their situations so we can all learn from one another and continue best serving our library users.

Hot Topic: Technologies We Use

Presented by Jesse Lambertson, this session was more of an open discussion than a straight-forward presentation. Sharing his own library system as the beginning example, Lambertson pitched questions to the audience with lively responses in real time and invited members to un-mute and speak to their specific system challenges in the work from home environment. It was really interesting to hear individuals sharing the pros and cons of their various integrated library system platforms once they were catapulted into teleworking. The clear up-side to having a web-based interface was the ease that these librarians and their staff could quickly pivot to working from home without the hassle of using VPN or requiring remote desktop. These included those using TIND and Alma to name a couple. Several of us still working with iii's Sierra were able to join in chorus about our struggles in working from home with spotty VPN support and the differences in Sierra web as compared to the desktop client.

Presenter Jesse Lambertson screen shares Python script snippets hack for working with CSV data.

For importing and exporting records, both individually or in batches, many hacks were shared including creative ways use Marc Edit when working from home and the potential for more API's between Marc Edit and the ILS. It is of course that time of year when we are all gathering statistics. With much overlap from the previous session I attended, many of us commented we are accessing collection and user data much more right now to better inform decision making in a time of budget cuts. As a result, further roadblocks and workflow workarounds were discussed for various systems. Several attendees shared how they query their system for cataloging and other statistics, the issues they experience in the format of the data they pull out, and the obstacles that come with trying to do this type of work from home or with very limited access to the library. Many individuals (myself included!) are periodically retrieving data from their systems, exporting it at txt or csv files, and then taking it home on laptops of flash drives to be able to spend more time with it when teleworking. However, and few shared more innovative approaches to both massaging data as well as collecting and sharing it. Lambertson shared a highly creative approach using Python scripts to automate certain aspects of the csv to Excel conversion of his data. Another attendee shared their library's customized Google Sheets dashboard which pulls data from the ILS into the same location as reference transactions statistics (populated by Google Form responses). A truly fantastic session with lots of open dialogue between attendees. I am so glad I attended and I can't wait to see and hear how the experiential system and data approaches our members are working with now unfold in the coming months and years as access to our offices and systems remains largely unknown during a pandemic.

Ex Libris Acquires Innovative

The library services platform market continues to shrink with the December 5th announcement that Ex Libris has acquired Innovative. Innovative has long been a major player in the ILS/LSP arena but in recent years has seen a number of its academic customers migrate to Ex Libris products or other systems. Many public libraries remain Innovative customers and this acquisition gives Ex Libris a foothold in that market. Library Technology Guides show that Ex Libris' next-generation platform, Alma, is currently in use in only 6 public libraries. Sierra, Innovative's most current product is in use at 1383 public libraries. The Polaris platform, which Innovative acquired several years ago, is still in use at 1355 public libraries.  While Ex Libris will benefit in gaining customers among public libraries, Innovative, on the other hand, will no doubt stand to benefit from Ex Libris' cloud technology infrastructure and greater pool of development resources.

According to the the FAQ on the acquisition, Innovative will continue to operate as a separate business unit within Ex Libris. There will be no immediate changes to Innovative's management structure, product lineup and technical support system, including third-party integrations with other systems. While current Innovative customers may eventually see the benefits of Ex Libris development resources, ultimately this acquisition means less real choice in the LSP/ILS marketplace. Libraries looking for a new system to support changing needs will have fewer options from which to choose.

BIBFRAME goes International

A recording of the Library of Congress webcast BIBFRAME Goes International. 2019. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-8682/ presented April 2, 2019 has been made available. A number of speakers addressed experimentation and implementation of BIBFRAME and/or linked data concepts in Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia/New Zealand.

Some highlights:

Kungliga biblioteket, The Swedish National Library of Sweden has a production BIBFRAME based union catalog available for exploration. They are actively seeking a path out of the MARC environment.

Judith Cannon spoke at length about the PCC/LD4P grant funded group. Seventeen selected PCC libraries are working in a "sand box". Metadata will created and saved using "Sinopia", a linked data platform developed by Stanford University. More information about the project and its goals is available at https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/LD4P2/LD4P2+Project+Background+and+Goals. The Library of Congress is developing initial training material based on LC's BIBFRAME editor. It is not clear when these tools might be available for non-participating libraries to play with.

Paul Frank and Jodi Williamson spoke about Share VDE, a collaboration with Casalini Libri focused on converting MARC bibliographic data to linked data. "VDE" stands for Virtual Discovery Environment. The environment is available for exploration at http://www.share-vde.org/sharevde/clusters?l=en.

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has an experimental Bibliographic Linked Data Learning Platform. With this tool, you can view and compare bibliographic data presented in different serializations, plus information about the work contextualized using Wikidata knowledge cards. The site also has an experimental SPARQL query form that can be run against their bibliographic data.

The National Library of New Zealand has made their Ngā Upoko Tukutuku / Māori Subject Headings available as linked data as an aid to bibliographic description centered on a  Māori world view.

Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) R5 Update effective January 2019

COUNTER, founded in 2002, is a non-profit organization supported globally by a community of library, publisher and vendor members. Members contribute to the development of the Code of Practice (COP) through working groups and outreach. The Code of Practice provides guidance and enables content providers to produce consistent, comparable and credible usage data for their online content. This allows librarians and other interested parties to compare the usage data they receive, and to understand and demonstrate the value of the electronic resources to which they subscribe. In 2014, the organization developed and implemented COUNTER Release 4 (R4) as the Code of Practice for information providers. With the rapid development of technology, this rendition soon became outdated and complex. A working group of librarians, publishers, representative of ERM systems, and other usage service providers came together to meet changing needs and reduce complexity. The aim was to simplify reports, increase consistency and clarify metric types and reports. The group released a new iteration, COUNTER R5, which replaces the former release and becomes mandatory for content providers beginning this month, January 2019. See COUNTER's online guide, The friendly guide to release 5 for librarians and read more at the COUNTER website.   

LawArXiv One Year Anniversary Report

It hardly seems like it's been over a year since we posted about the launch of LawArXiv. LawArXiv now houses nearly 700 open access legal articles. The organization has published a One Year Anniversary Report.

Some of the highlights from the report:

• 89% of the submissions to the repository are from Cornell, one of the developers of the platform
• The majority of the submissions deal with intellectual property law
• A process for batch uploading of articles was developed in April 2018

Goals for the coming year included:

• Adding the ability for institutions to use their branding on their submissions
• Setting up subject-based email alerts
• Adding a data field for the institution of the article author

Digital Scholarship Guide

One of the project the Labs team at the Library of Congress worked on in 2017 was developing a guide for digital resources. The guide was rolled out in 7 posts this year on The Signal, but is now conveniently available as a single document, the Digital Scholarship Resource Guide.

This document is a fairly comprehensive look at what digital scholarship is and how to get a project off the ground, from digitization basics to file storage and preservation to document analysis and assigning metadata to analysis projects with digital data.

If you'd prefer the original posts, here they are:

1. Why Digital Material Matters
2. Making Digital Resources
3. So now you have digital data...
4. Text Analysis
5. Tools for Spatial Analysis
6. Network Analysis
7. People, Blogs and Labs

Project COUNTER publishes librarian's guide to COUNTER release 5

COUNTER release 5 is scheduled to replace COUNTER release 4 by January 2019. In preparation for this change, Project COUNTER has issued The friendly guide to release 5 for librarians.

COUNTER release 5 represents a revision of the COUNTER code of practice to better reflect changing reporting needs. Types of reports have been simplified to both assist providers in becoming COUNTER compliant and provide librarians with "usage statistics that are credible, consistent and comparable." Page 19 of the guide provides a table comparing Release 5 reports with covered Release 4 reports. Several sample usage scenarios are provided.

The COUNTER code of practice provides consistent guidelines for publishers reporting electronic resource usage, assisting librarians in evaluation of their usage.

RA21 - Resource Access for the 21st Century

A recent series of posts in The Scholarly Kitchen discussed the pros and cons of RA 21: Resource Access for the 21st Century. What is RA 21, and how does it relate to more familiar means of authentication?

The current norm for authentication used by academic institutions is IP authentication. If a researcher originates within the IP range associated with an institution, s/he is presumed to be associated with that institution and entitled to resources provided by that institution. For a non-technical explanation of how IP (and other authentication methods) work see Understanding federated identity, RA21 and other authentication methods.

RA21 is a joint NISO/STM initiative "aimed at optimizing protocols across key stakeholder groups, with a goal of facilitating a seamless user experience for consumers of scientific communication." (https://ra21.org/index.php/what-is-ra21/). The basic assumption of this initiative is that IP range based authentication no longer works for users of scholarly information. In place of IP authentication and proxy servers, use of a federated authentication model is proposed.

Hinchliffe and Schonfeld express concerns about patron privacy, which may be ameliorated by  requirements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) scheduled for enforcement beginning in May 2018. Given some publisher's attempts to cover all aspects of scholarly work flow, would they be inclined to mine and monetize the information about a scholar's research patterns federated identity could generate? Additionally, access for walk-in users may also be an issue.

RA21 is hardly a done deal, but it certainly bears monitoring.

Hinchliffe, Lisa Janicke What will you do when they come for your proxy server?
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/01/16/what-will-you-do-when-they-come-for-your-proxy-server-ra21/

Schonfeld, Roger C. Identity is everything 
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/01/22/identity-everything/

Carpenter, Todd A. Myth busting: five commonly held misconceptions about RA21 (and one rumor confirmed)
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/02/07/myth-busting-five-commonly-held-misconceptions-ra21/

Artificial intelligence laboratories in libraries?

Libraries have often been the incubators of novel ideas and new technology. In an effort to share AI development to a wider array of students and the public, the University of Rhode Island is opening an AI lab in their university library. 

The University of Rhode Island is taking a very different approach with its new AI lab, which may be the first in the U.S. to be located in a university library. For URI, the library location is key, as officials hope that by putting the lab in a shared central place, they can bring awareness of AI to a wider swath of the university's faculty and student body.

The Dean of Libraries, Karim Boughida specifically mentions the lack of diversity of AI and its resulting issues of a biased algorithm as the reason to put an AI lab in the library, a place that values inclusivity. "Without explicit countermeasures, machine learning and AI could magnify existing patterns of inequality in our society", says Boughida.

Unlike a typical AI lab focused on research, the URI AI Lab will offer students and instructors the chance to learn new computing skills, and also encourage them to deepen their understanding of AI and how it might affect their lives, through a series of talks and workshops. The 600-square-foot AI lab will be located on the library’s first floor and will offer beginner- to advanced-level tutorials in areas such as robotics, natural language processing, smart cities, smart homes, the internet of things, and big data.

Read the whole article at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/01/17/rhode-island-hopes-putting-artificial-intelligence-lab-library-will-expand-ais-reach.  

eBooks in the Law Library - Part 3

LLRX recently completed its look at the status of eBooks in law libraries. The first half of this final installment is a case study of how the New York Law Institute added eBooks to their collection. It details how their original model had to evolve in response to changes driven both by publishers and by patrons.

The second half of the article is a brief survey of how other law libraries are incorporating eBooks into the collections. The main revelation of this overview is that no single approach may be appropriate for any one library. Many libraries are approaching eBooks in multiple ways, creating a custom process that is right for their users while also fitting within the budget.

If you're dealing with adding eBooks to your own collection, this three-part series on LLRX is a great place to orient yourself.

Librarians to play increasing role in OER

A survey of more than 2700 faculty members shows that there is an increase of instructors using OER over traditional textbooks. An article in Inside Higher Ed reports on the survey findings:

The "Opening the Textbook" survey, published by the Babson Survey Research Group today, reports that the number of faculty members at two- and four-year institutions using OER as textbooks has nearly doubled in the last year -- from 5 percent in 2015-16 to 9 percent in 2016-17.Awareness of OER -- openly licensed and freely accessible teaching and learning materials -- has also increased. Twenty-nine percent of faculty described themselves as "aware" or "very aware" of OER this year, up from 25 percent last year and 20 percent the year before. The proportion that reported they had never heard of OER fell from 66 percent in 2014-15 to 56 percent this year.

However as Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, mentioned in the article, awareness of OER is still low and there are additional barriers such as finding and evaluating currency of materials.

Raising awareness, finding resources, and updating materials are all very familiar responsibilities for librarians. That is why Nicole Allen, the director of open education for SPARC, a coalition that supports open policies and practices in education and research, predicts that librarians will "play an increasingly important role in helping faculty members find and evaluate OER content."

The comments following the article further press this point. Librarians are natural resource experts to faculty. One librarian mentions LibGuides as a tool to educate on open sources. Another librarian mentions that "incentivizing for faculty is key."

The full article is available at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/19/more-faculty-members-are-using-oer-survey-finds.

Recommendations for Next Generation Repositories

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has just released a report from their Next Generation Repositories Working Group: Behaviours and Technical Recommendations of the COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group. The recommendations in this report provide an interesting read about the potential for a much more interlinked and standardized repository front in the future.

The report states that ”many of the behaviors and recommendations for next generation repositories pertain to establishing links across repositories as a way to break down the silos and arrive at an environment characterized by interconnected networked ​repositories.”

We currently have a somewhat “under-regulated” system of repositories that may or may not play nice with each other. The suggested standards and protocols within this report would move towards a more standardized approach to repository content as well as the metadata backing these materials. If adopted globally these standards would provide the foundation for more interlinked data and materials by adopting, and then adapting, resources that are already available.

Acknowledging that technology is fluid, and in some cases the desired technology does not yet exist, the Working Group will soon be publishing their behaviors and technologies in a GitHub repository to support updates and engage the broader community. 

eBooks in the Law Library - Part 2

Law and Technology Resources for Legal Professionals, LLRX, continues its look at the current state of eBooks in law libraries. The second of their three-part series offers a great summary of the various pricing models that may be encountered during the acquisitions process. There are many ownership and subscription options for eBook acquisition and this article does an excellent job of explaining how the various plans work. It offers concise explanations for even the most confusing plans, such as non-linear lending and access to own. 

Still not sure what model would work best for your particular budget? The article also offers numerous helpful tips for keeping eBook costs down while growing a collection. 

The article concludes with a list of questions that should be addressed before selecting any eBook package. For example; making sure the technical requirements match the resources of your library and its users, examining the content and scope of the eBook package to make sure you're meeting your user's needs, and inquiring about user interface and other functions such as printing and copy/pasting from the eBook titles. 

This is an excellent primer for any librarian looking to add eBooks to their collection. The next article in the series will include a case study of how the author's library has built its eBook collection.  

eBooks in the Law Library

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed asked if medical schools still need books. The question of the role of eBooks in all types of libraries has been batted around in some form or another since the advent of eBooks. While the Inside Higher Ed article settles on familiar answers and case studies of paperless and hybrid libraries, it seems clear that all libraries are arcing slowly toward having eBooks as a substantial part of their collections.

Law and Technology Resources for Legal Professionals, LLRX, is addressing the state of eBooks in law libraries in a three-part series. The first part, published this week, gives a helpful overview of some the challenges and opportunities that come with adding eBooks to law library collections. Of particular interest to technical services librarians is the section on acquiring eBooks. Various platforms and modes of purchase are discussed. The article also briefly touches on issues related to integrating eBooks into the library's existing technological infrastructure.

The second article in the series promises to delve deeper into eBook acquisitions issues. The third part will present some case studies of how various law libraries have added eBooks to their collections.

Ebook collection analysis

Two publications recently came across my desk: the May/June 2017 Library Technology Reports called Applying Quantitative Methods to E-Book Collections by Melissa J. Goertzen, and the June 2017 issue of Computers in Libraries called Ebooks Revisited. This suggests that as ebooks continue to be a large collection issue for libraries on various levels (platforms, pricing, patron-drive acquisition (PDA) and demand-driven acquisition (DDA), discovery records, etc.) we are reaching a point where we can more fully evaluate the long-term impact they are having on our patrons and our budgets. I was particularly interested in the Computers in Libraries article called Ebook ROI: A Longitudinal STudy of Patron-Driven Acquisition Models by Yin Zhang and Kay Downey. The authors work at Kent State University Libraries and have been using a PDA program for five years now; they were able to use this long-term data to evaluate the usefulness of short term loans, determine if PDA purchases continue to be used after the purchase is triggered, and and analyze what books from various publication years and subject areas are purchased under their PDA profile. I found this study inspiring; we have only had our DDA program for less than one year, but I hope to conduct a similar analysis after a full year of the program and regularly thereafter so we can be sure our patrons are finding the program useful.

What can we learn from IT project management?

The implementation of educational technology is common practice for academic and firm librarians but rarely is there a tightly organized framework developed for an implementation similar to those in Information Technology. What could librarians learn about IT project management?

Jennifer Vinopal, Associate Director for Information Technology for University Libraries at Ohio State University, was the keynote speaker at DEVCONNECT, OCLC's conference for library developers and she speaks to the importance of harmonizing library and IT initiatives. You can watch her speech and read the full article on OCLC NEXT: http://www.oclc.org/blog/main/treat-it-projects-as-library-projects-and-vice-versa/.

Proxy Servers for Electronic Resources

As I recently struggled with Wolters Kluwer to get our CCH Intelliconnect service to work properly through EZProxy, this topic turned out to be rather timely. Many of our libraries already subscribe to a number of databases and other electronic services, and for law libraries our most popular services such as Lexis and Westlaw require individual logins and accounts. Managing those accounts can be time consuming, but for the user they typically ensure uniform access to the resource from on- or off-campus.

For many of our electronic resources, however, we tend to push for IP authentication instead of user accounts. IP authentication means that we set up the service to recognize the IP addresses (the numeric address of a ‘computer’ on the Internet) for our library or university campus. When a user connects to the service from the library, they are magically (in their eyes) identified to be a legitimate subscriber and granted access. But what about our patrons that are not actually in the library at the moment? One of the benefits of these services is supposed to be 24/7 access…

This is where proxy servers can be a key addition to your service! Basically, a proxy server (such as EZProxy from OCLC) acts as an intermediary for the electronic resource. Users connect to the proxy server, that server authenticates the user in some way, then the proxy server actually connects to the resource. The user never connects directly to the resource, so the only IP address the service sees is that of the proxy server.

In some institutions, proxy servers may also be used for on-campus access as well, simplifying the overall setup and allowing tighter control over who can access the services. Proxy servers might be set up on local servers as hosted services, depending on an institution’s size and resources. It's not always simple to configure or troubleshoot problems, as my recent experiences with Wolters Kluwer can illustrate, but the benefits of a proxy server can be many.

To learn more, visit Library Technology Launchpad’s recent post at http://libtechlaunchpad.com/2017/04/25/proxy-servers-basics-and-resources/

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.

Library Systems Report 2017

The Library Systems Report by Marshall Breeding was released earlier this month.  This report "documents ongoing investments of libraries in strategic technology products made in 2016." It lists any mergers and buyouts for 2016 as well as a look into open source ILS products.  This report was written from a survey requesting details about vendor's organization, sales performance, and narrative explanations of accomplishments. It also includes information taken from press releases, news articles, and other publicly available information.  Breeding sums up the overview of the report in his first paragraph:

"The library technology industry has entered a new phase: business consolidation and technology innovation. Development of products and services to support the increasingly complex work of libraries remains in an ever-decreasing number of hands. Not only have technology-focused companies consolidated themselves, they have become subsumed within higher-level organizations with broad portfolios of diverse business activities. The survivors of this transformed industry now bear responsibility to deliver innovation from their amassed capacity. Modern web-based systems delivering traditional library automation and discovery capabilities are now merely table stakes. Real progress depends on building out these platforms to support the new areas of service emerging within each type of library."

The full report can be read here: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2017/05/01/library-systems-report-2017/.

Open Access Legal Research Repository, LawArXiv, Launched

The movement toward open access continues in legal research with the launch of LawArXiv.  LawArXiv will provide provide open source, open access archives for legal research. This non-profit venture seeks to provide platform that is owned and controlled by the scholarly legal community. LawArXiv will accept preprints and post prints where the author has the copyright on their work.

The LawArXiv repository was developed jointly by the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, the Mid-American Law Library Consortium, NELLCO, and the Cornell Law Library, with the Center for Open Science providing the technological infrastructure via its Open Source Framework. The COS platform also serves as a preprint service, allowing organizations to control their branding, licensing requirements and taxonomy.

COS has established a preservation fund of $250,000 to ensure the archive will survive for at least 50 years should the COS be forced to curtail its operations.

For more information, see the COS press release or visit the  LawArXiv site.