What explains the dip in library use in 2011-12?

We just published our annual Leading Indicators Report for the academic year 2011-12. Even though the news is not great (if you think an ever increasing quantity of service is good) we are committed to transparency so we publish such results -- warts and all. What we are wondering now is what led to this dip?

In both digital services, physical services, and physical and digital resource use we have seen a marked decline of between 7-23%. Gate count, the number of people who actually come through the door declined by almost 22% which correlated with a 15% in total check outs and a 14% decline in reference queries. OK, so were people going even more heavily digital than in previous years? But no, we also saw a 23% decline in searches for digital resources, an 8% decline in digital documents views, and a 19% decline is visits to the library's website. A small bright spot here is that people's searches continue to become more efficient in that they seem to be finding the documents they want with less searching. We also saw a 23% decrease in instruction sessions. Did this decline cause the others? If faculty requested less instruction from librarians and we were in fewer classrooms, perhaps students used library resources less. This really concerns me because I don't think we are well enough integrated into the classroom, partnering with faculty to teach information literacy as it is. I really don't want to fall back from the gains we have made.

Interestingly two bright spots are increased queries in Special Collections & Archives, admittedly from a very low base, and continued strong growth in interlibrary borrowing, which continued to rise, this year by just over 12%.

With the renovation of the main floor and a full complement of public service librarians focused on instruction, we are looking to see if that number turns around in 2012-13. We are also planning to repeat LibQual to see if we can learn anything from that.

Stay tuned.

Florida Survey Results from the Open Access Textbooks Project

Some interesting survey results from this project.

Here is a direct link to the executive summaries of student and of faculty/administrators survey results. 

The cost of textbooks continue to take a toll on students, but their are largely unaware of OER. Faculty and administrators are beginning to recognize open access textbooks and course materials, but not to use them very heavily.

 According to their website, "The Open Access Textbooks Grant Project is working with others involved in open content to create a sustainable model for Florida and other states to discover, produce, and disseminate open textbooks. This three-year initiative was funded by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). The project builds on efforts in Florida and across the U.S. to create a sustainable open textbook model and a collaborative community to further implementation of open textbooks."

ALA Annual 2012 -- Serial Solutions Intota.

Intota is the name for SerSols upcoming ILA. Jane Burke gave the presentation. Here are my very hasty notes. Bottom line: they are furer than I expected, what they have looks quite good. But there is still a long way to go.

EDUCAUSE research on users show they value self sufficient, don't ask, think they know more about technology that you, they are the next faculty.

Three big buckets of pain for staff -- workflows, system maintenance, assessment.

Not first to market, but unique for:
Unified intelligent workflows -- cross training
Knowledgebase -- rebuilding it for Intota.
Assessment -- intelligence around usage data, blend it with outcomes data
Interoperable -- with registrars system, etc.
Developed and supported by SerialsSolutions

API's from the beginning.
Not print and not batch, immediate action.
Freeing staff to work with users.

Full functionality -- selection, acquisitions, description, discovery, fulfillment.

Selection -- united, inherent PDA,  
resource mgmt and acquisition -- unified workflow, auto copy cataloging, etc.
Description -- shared data, networked authority control, local editing possible, mutation formats ( MARC, Dublin core, other schema)
Fullfilment -- all functions, reserves, interoperable with ILLiad, link to user records. 

Expanded Knowledgebase, building FRBR, using RDA toolkit.

Multi-tenant SaaS. Individual instance, shared Knowledgebase etc.

Subscription model, lower total costs, profile migration fee, 

Phase 1 data mgmt
Phase 2 selection
Phase 3 fullfilment

SUNY Geneseo, Marist College development partner (closest in size to us)

To prepare: Convert and organize data, benefit from centralized data mgmt now, export/migrate to web scale.

Geneseo director. Cyril Oberlander cyril@geneseo.edu

Aiming to free up time. 

Redefining academic libraries http://www.educationadvisoryboard.com/pdf/23634-EAB-Redefining-the-Academic-Library.pdf
GIST get it system toolkit.

ALA Annual 2012 -- SPARC/ACRL Forum.

SPARC/ACRL Forum on Open Access Author Funds

First Heather Joseph gave some updates including:
PLoS One now biggest biomedical journal.
New OA journals -- Peer J and e-Life.
Growing focus on campuses not on introductions of services, but on refining and making things work.
Need a robust network of diverse funding sources. Which is where author funds come in.


Sue Kriegsman (Harvard) 


Compact for OA Publishing Equity (COPE) http://www.oacompact.org/
Current model -- costs hidden in library budgets, authors don't want to pay.
Looking for sustainable, economical, and without market dysfunction.
COPE -- right for own institution, timely, durable mechanism, reasonable publication charges, published in peer reviewed journal articles, OA journals., don't cover fees that others, like grant agencies, could cover.

15 inst have signed onto COPE plus supporting groups and institutions.

HOPE Harvard not supporting hybrid journals or when could have been written in grants.
SPARC collects stats on OA funds. Most schools have caps, most around $3000. 849 articles funded overall.


Check Eckman (Simon Fraser)


Peer review article growth 3-4% per year, about 20% is gold OA. Perhaps top out at 27%.
Article Processing Charge (APC) is the dominant model in OA. CERN found this as a barrier.(SOAP Survey)
Carleton (2012) is the only lib arts college that has one.
Accomplishments -- library visibility, school comm conversation, better understanding of publishing patterns, 
Do your homework, consult broadly, explore funding sources, define goals, establish eligibility criteria, consider hybrid journals, budget, cost control options, promotion, workflows, assessment.

Average cost per article -$1500.


I had to leave at the beginning of Andrew Waller's (Calgary) remarks.Rollins has not found a need for such a fund up to now, but we shall see as OA grows and faculty increasingly publish in such journals.

ALA Annual 2012 -- Copyright Discussion Group

ACRL Copyright Discussion Group


Jennifer Rothman http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/rothman.html

Her advice:
ARL code overemphasizes the transformative nature of these uses.
Look for what commercial options exist.
Be wary of code and set forth your dissent on paper.


Cambridge UP v. Becker (GSU)


Four Factors

1. Not transformative use, not not profit and educational
2. Factual and scholarly works, thinks 11th will overturn.
3. clear lines 10% etc.
4. Court focused on availability of exist license.

Sage got most of these because they had easy to use licensing service.

Court  didn't decide on books with different authors, anthologies, came up too late.
What happens if a licensing market comes later?

Don't allow more than 10% or more than one chapter.

Two pending cases to watch

1. UCLA streaming of video
2. Authors Guild v Hathi

Read licenses!

Congressman wants to get clearer fair use guidelines written. Sympathetic to users on this.

She described as "Overly sneaky" = 10% in the first half of semester, 10% in second half, for instance. I agree.

ALA Annual 2012 -- OCLC's Worldshare.

Attended Selecting OCLC Worldshare Management Services: Perspectives from Different Libraries 8:30am Saturday. Here are my notes.



Andrew Pace (OCLC)

Collections and users are changing, our back office systems are anachronistic. Users flocking to the cloud and we are missing opportunities to collaborate.
Strategy -- ensuring relevance -- syndication to the web,  efficiency, meeting users at PoN on the web. Unified Col Mgmt. Break down the silos. collaboration and innovation between libraries.

The system is INCIP (?) based. Links to 3rd party systems, standards based.

Gives staff the same easy interfaces as users. Staff are users too.



Margie Harrison (San Juan Island Lib)

implementation is a group experience, weekly meetings, chat, email, phone with User Support. 24/7 training tutorials. Live weekly training.
Workflow changes really saves time.
8 months from signing on to implementation.



Robert Powers (NASA Jet Propulsion)

early adopter. 3-4 month intensive period of implementation. Pressure on staff and need to added value services. Archive and library. 
"We don't want the OPAC to get in our way." Looking for efficiencies in cat and acq staff. ERM seen great efficiency. Simplified Circ. 
Want to see improved metrics and reports.
Discovery -- improving, but seems unsure. Satisfied with the knowledge base. 
Systems admin is very straightforward, all in the cloud at OCLC.



Gary Cocozzoli (Lawrence Tech Uni)

Wants to give same level of service to distant as well as local students.
Dissatisfied with previous ILS.
Asked all the questions we at Rollins are: Open Source, trad SAAS, next gen, local consortium, which was more expensive than WMS.
Buying a service, not a system, just joining in.
Using OCLC so much already.
Knowledge base and PubGet. Set it up in KB and it automatically updates KB.
Saving money and time.
More sophisticated vendor relationships/communication.
Again likes cohort implementation system and training.
4-5 months for implementation

What are you going to do with items in OPAC that are not in OCLC?
Review local serials holdings records LHR.



WMS-- vendors

Auto load or order records
Using API for transfer of data to Banner
Single  sign on
Quarterly upgrades
Roadmaps
Drupal site for user support.

Course Reserves, Copyright, and the GSU decision

Finally Judge Evans has handed down her ruling on copyright and course reserves in the Cambridge, Oxford, and Sage publishers v. Georgia State University. Many university and college libraries, including us, have been waiting for a decision in this case before reviewing their own course reserve policies. The case will almost certainly be appealed, but even so we now have some guidance. Over the summer we will be reviewing our policies in relationship to Judge Evans' ruling  and seeing if we need to make any changes.

I am going to be using this post to collect various resources about the decision.

• The ruling.
• Justia's Dockets & Filings.
• Kevin Smith's post on the decision.
• The Chronicle's article.
• The Inside Higher Ed article.
• James Grimmelmann's post on the decision.
• Atlanta Journal Constitution article.
• Bloomberg's article.
• Publishers Weekly article (which, touchingly, in the headline at least spins the decision in the other direction.)
• TechDirt post.
• Paid Content post.
• Ars Technica post.
• GSU Official response
• Matthew Dames' post on the decision
• Copyright Clearance Center statement 
• ARL Issue Brief .
• Jonathan Pink's post on the decision. 
• Cambridge University Press response to the decision.
• Barbara Fister's post on the decision.
• AAP's statement on the decision.
• The Library Journal article. 
• Karen Petruska's posts. Part 1 and Part 2. 
• Christine Ross' post on the decision. 

• The publishers' proposed injunction.
• Kevin Smith's response to the proposed injunction.

So, do you know of any other posts that should go here?

A snapshot of the Olin Library

Every year the Florida Library Association runs a Snapshot of Florida Libraries project that shows how people are using libraries around the state. Susan Montgomery took comments the users of Olin Library contributed and created this wordle word cloud.


What really strikes me about this is how closely their comments reflect what we are trying to achieve at Olin -- library, place, study, quiet, focus, friends, help, good.

Nice job Susan.

Persistence Pays Off for Mobile Site.

Paul Gindlesperger has been working for weeks to find a way to automatically redirect visitors using mobile devices who come to our regular site to our mobile site. This should not be difficult, but our CMS made it so. He finally did it (with an assist from Bill Svitavsky.) So, give it a whirl. Go to http://www.rollins.edu/library from your mobile phone or iPad and let me know what you think.

I will be interested to see if this results in a bump in traffic from mobile users.

CLIR Symposium : Collaboration with untraditional partners (Sam Demas.)

People had some great ideas for collaboration:

Participating in art gallery crawls
Local history collaboratives
Information literacy in community engagement and service learning.
Gaming nights
Rock bands in the library (how about tiny reference desk concerts?)
Flash lectures (advertised on Twitter.)
Social tagging of archival images
 (evidently the new version of Contentdm will allow this.)
A mobile library (on a bike!) to take to event son campus with a laptop for check out.

CLIR Symposium (Chuck Henry, President of CLIR)

This was a really interesting session in which we really began to think about what kind of futures we might have (if any.) Chuck introduced a series of what he called "deep collaboration" projects:

Hidden Collections
Digging into Data
Digital Public Library of America
Data Curation:building a new profession
Linked Data
Federated Research and Educational Depository System (secure digital preservation. Can't find a link for this.)
Centers for Digital Humanities and the Liberal Arts (no link for this either.)
Medical Heritage Digital Collaborative
National Humanities Press (sorry, no link.)
CLIR/Mellon Fellowships: Dissertations in Original Sources

"From a strategic vantage point, there is no ambiguity: the future of academic libraries and higher education rests on the ability to reconceive ourselves holistically, with the various components of scholarly information-- discovering, reconstituting, publishing, and sharing knowledge, and keeping its various manifestations securely preserved and accessible -- understood as interrelated and interdependent. The inherited norms, customs, traditions, and institutions that have structured research and teaching now need to be constructively challenged, redefined, and subsequently reassembled."

So what is the role of librarians at liberal arts colleges in this environment? Are we ready to connect our faculty and students to such macro solutions?

CLIR Symposium: the Future of the Liberal Arts College Library (Victor Ferrall.)

I am in Milwaukee at this symposium with about fifty other college librarians worrying about whether we have a future or not. Victor Ferrall, author of Liberal Arts at the Brink is giving the keynote.

• We fail to recognize that there has never been much demand for liberal education.
• Single biggest change in US higher ed. was post war opening up to first generation students who were looking for a practical degree.
• Are we selling education, or buying students?
• Competition for students raises costs and cuts revenue. It is the tragedy of the commons.
• Vocational education focuses the student on the utility of the knowledge they acquire. Liberal education focuses them on the utility of acquiring knowledge.

What does the move away form liberal arts education mean for libraries (specifically collection use)?

• Vocational majors  are likely to read more manuals, with more focus, and read less widely.
• Since they read for answers, this will emphasize online information.
• More pressure to support the curriculum, and less to support scholarship in general.

Move from liberal arts to vocation is a trend not a cycle, we need to cooperate not compete.So here is my question:

Librarians are good at cooperating, yet we still have a library at each liberal arts college. What if we had one library for all liberal arts colleges, with librarians available to each campus and all students? Would we save money and improve services? 
It turns out Victor Ferrall is specifically thinking about cooperation in marketing liberal arts education, but he is not getting much traction form other presidents.

Oberlin Group 2011 day One.

The day started with a discussion about organizational change in our libraries. While there are some common themes -- refocusing staff away from traditional cataloging and acquisitions and towards digital services, focusing our librarians outward to the faculty and students -- but what is really striking is our distinct this discussion on each campus. My colleagues have problems I had not even imagined, and vice versa.

Then I moderated a discussion of e-books and open access. Joanne Schneider discussed progress towards the Digital Public Library of America, Ray English discussed the Open Library's digital lending library, Neil McElroy discussed the Hathi Trust and finally Bryn Geffert discussed the proposed Liberal Arts Open Access Scholarly Publishing Project (which has no website yet.)

We had a tour of the impressive Woodruff Library at the Atlanta University Center (you will find my idiosyncratic photos from the tour in this folder.)

Then it was open mic: at Neil McElroy at Lafayette gave iPads to the members of their Library Advisory Council to get them thinking about mobile technologies, Deb Dancik at Willamette is further along with records management than we are, Terri Fishel at Macalester organized a reading group for librarians and staff around Char Booth's book Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning that seems to transformed their teaching, and lots, lots more.

The final session was about digital archives and repositories. Richard Fyffe just mentioned DataVerse, sounds interesting. Deb Dancik just mentioned Pachyderm. Willamette has developed a Contentdm/Pachyderm plugin (open source) and is using it to help students incorporate institutional repository images into presentations. She also mentioned Islandora. Rick Provine also mentioned ArtSTOR's Shared Shelf.

Enacting the Mission

The title of this post is a quote from Scott Bennett (Bennett, Scott. Libraries and Learning: A history of paradigm change. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, vol.9,  no. 2, (2009), pp. 181-197.)

"Those of us responsible for libraries and other non-classroom learning spaces should be mindful of what [John Seely Brown] says, however, if we want buildings that foster intentional learning and that escape the pitfalls of schoolwork, if we want to promote learning communities rather than trafficking in information, if we want ourselves to enact the mission rather than merely to support it." 

At Olin we are definitely interested in fostering intentional learning and promoting learning communities and we are working in all kinds of ways to make this happen. One small example of this finally came to fruition this summer. 

Readers of the library's Facebook page and this blog already know that we have done some small rejuvenation on the 4th floor. Well we finally took possession of seven of the end tables created by students in Josh Almonds 3D Foundations course and installed them on the fourth floor. They look great.

Why is this enacting the mission? Well the library is now a site for the display and use of student work, not just a place student study or 'traffic in information' in order to produce work of their own. I visited the class in the spring and explained what kind of end tables we needed, the dimensions, and specifications, and how they would be used. Then, at the final show, I negotiated with the students to buy the end tables that met my criteria. This was an important element in the course for Josh, who wanted the students to understand about the business of art. Finally, the tables are now in use, and on permanent display for the student artists to enjoy and as reminders to all students that their work has real impact beyond the classroom.

Mission enacted.

Check out Archive's new blog.

Congratulations to Darla Moore for her first post on the Special Collections & Archives blog. An interesting piece about Virginia Roush d’Albert-Lake, a remarkable alumna of the College.

What might the DPLA end up being?

Update from John Palfrey on The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA): http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/dpla
DPLA Beta Sprint: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dpla/

Great library sign.

I love this sign. Libraries always struggle with how to explain to users that they can ask for help. "Reference" is meaningless jargon to most users. Any particular library might want to change the words on the sign to reflect their services, but this can be seen from various angles, is entertaining, and covers all your bases. Anyone know where it is from?

Innovative Fund Raising -- ALA 2011

Most of this was not new (for any private college, but it was useful to check that.) There were a couple of things though:

The public library in Williamsport, PA has program to enable donors to support days of service. Literally, you call the library's general phone number and you hear that, "today's library services are brought to you by ...." I love this idea! What a great way to celebrate a birthday or anniversary. They are under charging at $100 per day, but I wonder if the idea would fly at Rollins? By the way, a day of service for the Olin Library would cost you $6,000, an hour just $400. Williamsport thanks donors with this card.

Gettysburg College library accepts donations to supply coffee from friends and a poster asking students to, "thank a friend for coffee!" The student all write cute thank yous on the poster and then the library publishes this in their friends newsletter.

Berlin Declaration -- ALA 2011

The Berlin Declaration is one of the founding documents of the open access movement. Berlin 9 (the first of the Berlin Open Access Conference Series to take place in North America) "convenes leaders in the science, humanities, research, funding, and policy communities around The Berlin Declaration." 

Dieter Stein talked about the changing role of librarians in an open access environment. So much of our society is based on science and "free and equal participation and access" to scientific research is a necessary foundation for participation in "democratic discourse." I was reminded of the debate around global warming. This is true on a global, as well as a national level.
He argued that open access is not just open access to the final, published end results of research, but throughout the research process and the relationship is changing between the research and the reader(s.)

Lorraine Haricombe gave a far more pragmatic presentation based on her experience at Kansas University:

• No whining!
• Two of David Shulberger's Seven steps:
• 6. "Develop habits of depositing articles." (But students will respond much better to a mediated service in which library staff add manuscripts to the IR on the author's behalf.)
• 7. "Develop PR program and outreach strategies." (Liaison librarians and faculty liaisons have been really useful in this regard.)

Lunch with Brewster Kahle and Robert Miller -- ALA 2011

Ray English arranged this lunch meeting with these two representatives of the Internet Archive. Unfortunately it was a long table at a loud restaurant, so I will have to wait for Ray's summary, but their project to create an open  lending library of digital books will definitely appear on the Oberlin Group agenda in October. Stay tuned.