Bridging the Gap Inside … Inside Document Delivery

Abstract

Librarians today are faced with many choices when acquiring information and directing their users to the sources they need. This is most evident with serials. The choices have become more confusing with new options requiring libraries to determine what a full text purchase actually buys, how to be sure users can identify the material needed, and then how to acquire the actual material in the most appropriate media. Providing access by the piece is a valid solution that can help lead to the transition to full text online journals. This article critiques the use of the British Library Document Supply Centre's “inside” service and its use at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library (UIUC). The article concludes with a review of the components of a good document delivery system.     

Partnership with Community Resources- Campus Police

Summary

It is the policy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to maintain a quiet and otherwise appropriate environment to assure an atmosphere conducive to study in all units of the University Library System. It is incumbent upon library users to conduct themselves in accordance with the rules of the University Library. It is expected that those who use the University Library System will do so responsibly and appropriately without harassing other users or library staff and without damaging the Library's facilities or its collections.

At Illinois, partnerships have been organized with the campus police to make the library a safe place for all users. With the assistance of our library security staff we have an excellent working relationship with the University Police Department. These partnerships promote initiative for learning and build a desire to pursue a deeper sense of being.     

What a User Wants: Redesigning a Library's Web Site Based on a Card-Sort Analysis

ABSTRACT

Web site usability concerns anyone with a Web site to maintain. Libraries, however, are often the biggest offenders in terms of usability. In our efforts to provide users with everything they need for research, we often overwhelm them with sites that are confusing in structure, difficult to navigate, and weighed down with jargon. Dowling College Library recently completed a redesign of its Web site based upon the concept of usability. For smaller libraries in particular, such a project can be a challenge. The Web site is often maintained by one or two people, and finding the time and resources to conduct a usability study is difficult in that situation. Additional demands of a site redesign, from restructuring page layouts to adding visual appeal, only add to the burden. However, our team of four librarians was able to do it. We focused on vocabulary and organizational structure using a card-sort analysis. This analysis taught us how our users approach the information on our site. Task-based testing confirmed what the card-sort analysis had taught us and smoothed out design problems. Incorporating user feedback at nearly every stage of the process allowed us to create a site that more closely mirrors how our users look for information on our site. This study details how using testing and analyzing results throughout the redesign process created a better, more user-friendly Web site.     

My Website Reads at an Eighth Grade Level: Why Plain Language Benefits Your Users (and You)

ABSTRACT

Writing in plain language aims to help users find what they need and ensures that the information is both useful and understandable. This is key for distance students whose primary library interaction may be with the library Website. A mix of user research and readability scores can be used to measure whether content is findable, useful, and understandable. There are several strategies authors can adopt to help them write in plain language, including keeping the users' needs and tasks in mind and structuring the content so that it can be quickly scanned. Converting existing Website content to a plain language format can be a large task; running a content audit can help determine which pages should be prioritized for revision. Once the Website is written in plain language, an ongoing content strategy is necessary to help it stay that way.     

The Open SESMO (Search Engine & Social Media Optimization) Project: Linked and Structured Data for Library Subscription Databases to Enable Web-scale Discovery in Search Engines

ABSTRACT

Today's learners operate in digital environments which can be largely navigated with no human intervention. At the same time, libraries spend millions and millions of dollars to provide access to content which our users may never know is available to them. Through the Open SESMO (Search Engine & Social Media Optimization) database project, Montana State University (MSU) Library applied search engine optimization and structured data with the Schema.org vocabulary, linked data models and practices, and social media optimization techniques to all the library's subscribed databases. Our research shows that Open SESMO creates significant return-on-investment with substantial increased traffic to our paid resources by our users as evidenced through analytics and metrics. In the core research of the article, we take a quantitative look at the pre/post results to assess the Open SESMO method and its impact on organic search referrals and use of the collection analyzing data from three distinct fall semesters. Returns include demonstrated library value through database recommendations, connecting researchers to subject librarians, and increased visitation to our library's paid databases with growth in organic search referrals, impressions, and click-through rates. This project offers a standard and innovative practice for other libraries to employ in surfacing their paid databases to users through the open web by applying structured and linked data methods.     

Library Learning Spaces: Investigating Libraries and Investing in Student Feedback

ABSTRACT

We examine how students in academic libraries work; their furniture, technology and space needs; research methods used to determine these; and the results and evolution of our space design and assessment efforts. From the creation of a new collaborative center at Mann Library at Cornell University in 2007 to our latest space redesign in 2015, we've used a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods—including surveys, interviews, usability tests, and participatory design exercises—to discover the study behaviors and needs of users, applied this data to help redesign our collaborative study spaces, and assessed the results.     

Library Research Project for First-Year Engineering Students: Results from Collaboration by Teaching and Library Faculty

SUMMARY

This article will discuss three years of collaboration between the Freshman Engineering Program and the Engineering Library of the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh. This collaboration has resulted in a library research project that is integrated into the freshman curriculum. The project ultimately provides the students with a research structure for presentations in an annual mock professional conference. The mission of the Freshman Engineering Program's academic and advising components is to create a first-year experience that promotes the student's continued pursuit of an engineering degree through commitment to clearly understood and self-declared goals. The goal for the Engineering Library is to introduce library research as a necessary skill-set for successful engineers. The successful outcome of all of these goals requires the collaboration between “teaching” faculty and “library” faculty and results in better prepared, more focused students. Developing and integrating a library research project into the freshman engineering academic curriculum is a significant opportunity for library instruction, and the approach demonstrated here may be transferable to other disciplines.     

Resourceful Blogging: Using a Blog for Information Sharing

ABSTRACT

In an effort to help raise awareness about the need for disaster planning in health sciences libraries, emergency response planners at the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library at the University of Virginia considered how best to promote the idea and provide a forum for gathering and exchanging information, while maintaining control over content in order to keep the focus and the quality of the entries consistent. The blog they created has been successful in providing much-needed assistance to hospital libraries and other libraries, both large and small, as well as for individuals and other organizations worldwide.     

Taking Library Recruitment a Step Closer

Abstract

During the summer of 2002, Cornell University Library implemented the Cornell University Library Junior Fellows Program-an initiative aimed at introducing high school students of color to academic libraries and librarianship. The six-week program was developed in response to the need for innovative approaches to the recruitment and retention of people of color to the academic library profession. Additionally, the program sought to support the academic achievement of minority students through involvement in research and technology training opportunities. This paper outlines the program's curriculum, performance outcomes, and challenges, and includes discussion of the need for similar programs or initiatives to be designed and implemented at other libraries.     

A New Scheme for Library Classification

ABSTRACT

This proposed new classification scheme is based on two main elements: hierarchism and binary theory. Hence, it is called Universal Binary Classification (UBC). Some advantages of this classification are highlighted including subject heading development, construction of a thesaurus, and all terms with meaningful features arranged in tabular form that can help researchers, through a semantic process, to find what they need. This classification scheme is fully consistent with the classification of knowledge. The classification of knowledge is also based on hierarchism and binary principle. Finally, a survey on randomly selected books in McLennan Library of McGill University is presented to compare the codes of this new classification with the currently employed Library of Congress Classification (LCC) numbers in the discipline of Library and Information Sciences.     

Meeting Students Where They Are: Just in Time Embedded Delivery of Information and Digital Literacy Skills

Abstract

At the University of Wollongong (UOW) Library we have been exploring ways to deliver information and digital literacy resources at point of need for students. Aligned with the University’s strategic direction, the Future Ready Library Strategy points to a digital first mindset and its application to services and resources offered to the UOW community. Combined with the need to embrace the real life challenges faced by higher education students in Australia today, this has led us to develop a suite of digital learning objects in collaboration with teaching academics that can be delivered at scale, enabling a sustainable way to target student needs. In this article, we discuss the drivers that have brought UOW Library to this point and outline the model for learning and teaching support for our academic community into the future.     

A Shared Experience

Abstract

In 1989, the University of Connecticut Library created the Academic Liaison Program to promote communication between the Library and the faculty by designating a librarian as a personal point of contact for each academic program. In consultation with faculty, the liaison librarian is responsible for understanding the department's needs or collections, information services, and instruction. By 1997, the success of the Academic Liaison Program, coupled with electronic services and a resulting need for greater communication with users, resulted in further expansion of outreach efforts. At the recommendation of the Liaison Advisory Team, the concept of staff partnerships within the program was developed. We will discuss our experiences in an informal dialogue further along in the article.     

MeeboMe! For Embedded Chat Reference: Patron-Initiated Encounters Without Downloads or Accounts

ABSTRACT

Virtual reference using chat or instant messaging clients (IM) has become an expected service offering for libraries seeking to cater to today's Web 2.0 patrons. The use of chat aggregators to monitor multiple accounts in one interface allows libraries to reach a wider audience of IM/chat users. Embedding chat widgets into library Web pages can further increase chat reference use because it allows patrons without IM/chat experience or accounts to reach librarians seamlessly. This article reviews the use of aggregator software for chat reference monitoring, examines the popularity of the MeeboMe! chat widget for embedded virtual reference and briefly describes the experiences and recommendations of librarians at Samford University Library as they have implemented its use.     

Going Where the Students Are

Summary

Increased student use of the Internet and declining reference desk statistics are factors encouraging academic reference librarians to look for new ways to reach patrons. Web-based customer contact center software gives librarians the tools to provide interactive, 24/7 reference service to Internet users. This article describes how the library at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona developed its live/web reference service. We discuss the factors that encouraged us to launch the service, the challenges that we encountered along the way, and examples of our experiences to date.     

The Importance of User-Centered Design: Exploring Findings and Methods

SUMMARY

Given the rising number of information resources available, it is increasingly important for digital libraries and archives to create usable services that meet their users' needs. Seeking input from users at all stages of development can help achieve this goal. This article briefly defines four methodologies for gathering user input: focus groups, interviews, questionnaires, and usability testing. In addition, it presents the “top ten” themes that emerged from over four years of assessment and evaluation activities at the California Digital Library.     

University of Portsmouth library subject pages: a flexible in-house system for guidance and resource discovery

Guiding students to library resources, and supporting users in their discovery and use, is a key role of academic librarians. Subject pages are a traditional way of asynchronously managing some of the complexity that exists, with off-the-shelf software packages often a solution.The University of Portsmouth Library (https://library.port.ac.uk/) decided to provide this support through an addition to our existing in-house content management system (CMS). This would be flexible and powerful in allowing freedom of design for Faculty Librarians within a shell that provided some similarity – and thus familiarity – between subject areas. It would also be easy to maintain technically. The Library's Web Developer, in consultation with the six Faculty Librarians and the Enquiry team lead, has built a PHP/MySQL based application which is tightly integrated to our existing web resources providing enhanced delivery mechanisms allowing for open ended content development while retaining support for legacy web pages.This allows new pages to be quickly and easily added to the system in real time, existing pages to be either edited alone, ‘linked to’ or copied and modified. Resource lists can be simply constructed which rely on Library metadata rather than copies of data which need updating; support material can be added whether video, slides or images; guidance can be included to help students navigate their information literacy journey.Despite a pressured summer period of lockdown and working from home due to Covid-19, the rollout of the system has been successful from the point of view of the faculty librarian construction and development, as well as in usage by our enquiries team supporting students requiring help. Student feedback has been positive.     

Communicating with medical library users during COVID-19

Background:The Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library serves a community of over 22,000 individuals primarily from the Yale Schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing and the Yale New Haven Hospital. Though they are geographically close to one another, reaching these disparate populations can be a challenge. Having a clear and thorough communication plan has proved invaluable in transcending communication chasms, especially in recent times of crisis.Case Presentation:This article describes the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library''s methods for communicating and promoting its remote resources and services in response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). It details our communication strategies and messages leading up to, and after, the Yale campus was closed and specifies how we pivoted from reaching users inside the library to reaching our audiences remotely.Conclusions:Our communication plan has provided the foundation for all of our messaging, be it print or digital media. In recent moments of crisis, it has been especially helpful for planning and executing large scale messaging. Similarly, knowing whom to contact around our organization to promote our message in different and broader ways has been extremely beneficial.     

Profiles in Resource Sharing: Peter Bae

ABSTRACT

At a large university library, helping patrons use a full text database such as LEXIS-NEXIS places pressure on reference staff because the service is complex. Staff cannot give the proper attention to patrons because activity at the reference desk can limit the time spent with each individual. Full-text services require more instruction and reference help than electronic bibliographic databases, but patrons often come for assistance just before the assignment is due. To relieve such pressure, librarians at Penn State's Pattee Library developed Just-in-Time demonstrations to help patrons learn how to use LEXIS-NEXIS when they need it. The Justin-Time demonstrations provide a weekly alternative which relieves the “I need it now” pressure by providing instruction on a weekly basis. These demonstrations have been well received by patrons and staff.     

A best-fit solution: transforming an NHS Library and Knowledge Service in readiness for a new hospital building without a traditional library space

Background:Over a decade ago, the Hill report argued that a shift in vision was required to change the perception of National Health Service (NHS) Library and Knowledge Services (LKS) in England from “book repositories” to essential services that underpin clinical decision-making by patients, carers, and health care professionals. Health Education England''s Knowledge for Healthcare: A Development Framework for Library and Knowledge Services in England 2015–2020 advocates embedding librarians within clinical and management teams in order to provide access to high-quality evidence at the point of need.Case Presentation:In April 2019, Royal Papworth Hospital relocated twelve miles from its historic village location in Papworth Everard to its new state-of-the-art hospital on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. The design for this new hospital did not accommodate a traditional library space and therefore necessitated a transformation of the LKS. The organization opted to embed the LKS staff into the clinical setting and relegate 80% of the print collection to off-site storage. This project and its associated steps are presented as an example of health care library transformation.Conclusion:Embedding the LKS team in the clinical setting, engaging in proactive outreach activity, and improving our marketing led to a 44% increase in literature searches requested compared to the same eleven-month period in the previous year. A 40% decrease in our print book loans indicates additional barriers to using a click-and-collect service and the need for greater investment in our e-book provision. However, early outcomes for our best-fit service transformation are positive. Having an open, dual mindset has enabled the service to embrace change and maximize emerging opportunities to collaborate with clinical staff on new projects.     

Freeing Ariel: The Prospero Electronic Document Delivery Project

ABSTRACT

Prospero is an electronic document delivery project initiated by the John A. Prior Health Sciences Library at The Ohio State University resulting in a software program that provides patron access to documents that are transmitted using the Ariel system. Using Prospero, documents no longer have to be manually printed out, packaged, and distributed. Patrons no longer have to come to the library to pick up documents or wait for them to be delivered. Documents can be accessed from wherever patrons have Internet access. This paper provides an overview of the Ariel system, background on the evolution of electronic ILL services, and details the development and features of the Prospero system.