As of tomorrow, I’ll officially be the Web Services Librarian - and I’ll no longer be part of the library’s Research & Instruction division. However, I will still be working at the reference desk and teaching information literacy topics to a few sections of our introductory writing class. I’m hoping that I’ll get to continue working with two professors that I worked with last year.

Recently, a few of my colleagues developed some information literacy core competencies. I have recently begun thinking about how I can incorporate these competencies into the courses I teach. One of the competencies stumped me, mostly because I know I’ve tried to teach it in the past, and I feel I’ve done so inadequately. The outcome of this particular competency is that students learn to “Develop a manageable focus appropriate to criteria of assignment.”

I’ve asked a few of my coworkers for feedback, but I thought I’d ask here, too - what are your strategies for helping students choose and develop topics of reasonable scope?

I mentioned on FriendFeed that I am planning to propose a small change to my colleagues - that we remove the link to the FirstSearch interface to WorldCat and replace it with a link to WorldCat.org. Someone commented that they’d like to hear more about my proposal, so I thought I’d post what I believe to be compelling reasons for us to switch…

(1) The interface. Simply put, WorldCat.org looks more like Google. FirstSearch seems clunky to me, in part because I don’t think it’s changed dramatically since I was in library school seven years ago.

(2) From what I can tell, you do not lose any search functionality in WorldCat.org. You can still limit your search by audience, year, language, format, and so forth.

(3) From what I can tell, you don’t lose any other type functionality, either. You can still print, save, and export records. Our link resolver works with WorldCat.org, as well.

(4) Here are some features that the FirstSearch interface doesn’t appear to have:

• Persistent URLs for records
• The ability to choose whether it’s more important to have the work in general, or a specific edition of that work, and locate them at nearby libraries
• Automatically created citations in the most popular styles (APA, MLA, etc.)
• Reviews are incorporated from a variety of sources (including Amazon)
• Users may create persistent lists (unlikely the seemingly session-based lists of the FirstSearch interface). These lists may be public or private; they may be downloaded to Excel as .csv files; they can be exported to bibliographic management software.
• Users are also shown where they can buy items

If you have other reasons you think users would like WorldCat.org better than the FirstSearch interface, I’d love to hear them - and of course, I’m curious to know if you think there are good reasons to stay with the FirstSearch interface as well.

Inspired by Catherine Pellegrino’s recent post about what she is working on this summer, I thought I’d do a post about my own summer projects.

Although I’m officially transitioning to my new position on July 1, I’m already working on some web projects. They include…

• We’re updating our database list - the design, not the actual database subscriptions. I’ve been working with our Electronic Resources Manager and my boss to come up with a better design, and the university’s Institutional Marketing team is actually doing the hard work of the coding.
• I’m taking some early steps toward starting a usability program. Right now, I’m investigating usability testing software - namely, Morae.
• My coworker Patrick & I are planning to switch our chat reference software over to Google Talk, using their Chatback widget. He’s doing the hard work, and I’ll probably do the training.
• My coworker Mary & I are working on redesigning the LibGuides home page. Again, Mary’s doing the hard work. I’m just contributing design suggestions (based on the feedback we received in the survey).
• Mary & I are working with another coworker, also named Mary, to add some structure to the library’s wiki/intranet. People have generally been putting up information in a non-systematic manner, so it can be difficult to find things.
• I want to put together some documentation for the liaison librarians on how to use the LibGuides API to create content boxes for Blackboard.
• I set up a Facebook fan page for the library, and now I need to populate it with information.
• Later this summer, I will be learning Camtasia and setting up some guidelines for the liaison librarians who want to create tutorials.

I’m also trying to get some government documents projects completed before July:

• Weeding the non-topographic, non-depository maps and correcting the accompanying inventory information on the website.
• Updating the government documents website. Before I knew about the new job, I wanted to overhaul the site completely; instead, I’m just fixing broken links and out-of-date information.
• Weeding. Although we will be hiring a new government documents librarian, I anticipate that s/he will not start work here too much before the start of the new semester. Therefore, I’m trying to get the weeding done for June, July, and August prior to July 1. August is the real bear - according to our state plan, we can dispose of Department of Interior and Department of Justice documents that month, and we have quite a few CDs from the Interior, and over 500 Justice documents that I need to look through.
• Item selection. There’s a pretty narrow window for selecting new documents to “subscribe” to, so I’m doing that, also on the assumption that the new librarian won’t be here in time to do that.

I don’t think that’s everything, but these are the projects occupying my headspace right now!

I was thinking about this earlier today, and since I was wondering about it, I thought others might be too. Here’s what I’ve learned from my colleagues.

Federated search works by “broadcasting” a user’s search term to several databases. Essentially, it searches the other databases when the user is searching.

Discovery services, such as Summon (by Serials Solutions) and Ebsco Discovery Service, searches the databases beforehand. I assume they will probably search these other databases at a regular time - perhaps once a day, once a week, or once a month. They build up their own index of all the items in these other databases, so when the user searches, they’re not sending the search out anywhere - it’s all right there, on their own servers.

The potential benefits of these discovery services include:
- Quicker searching (because there is no “broadcast” involved)
- Results that are easier to interpret (by building your own index, you’re able to list the titles, authors, etc. in a consistent fashion)
- Better deduplication

A potential drawback is the competition. If content providers decide to offer their content to Ebsco but not Serials Solutions, or vice versa, libraries may end up basing their choices largely on that content. While that seems acceptable to me when choosing a discipline-specific database to subscribe to, it seems somehow counterintuitive for a search tool of this scope.

What else do you know - or do you want to know - about these new-fangled “discovery services”?

I recently received an e-mail from someone at another library who wanted to know how we set up our LibGuides home page here at Grand Valley, as we did not use their default page. I figured others might be curious about how we did this, hence this post. I should note, however, that we’re likely going to change how we display our guides in the coming months, due to the feedback received in the survey we conducted a few months ago. I promise to post a how-to once we figure it out.

That said, here’s what it looks like now:

First, set up subject categories by going to the System Settings tab and clicking on Subject Categories. (They won’t actually be “subjects” - this is just how we manipulated the system.) There should be a text box and a button right next to it that says Create Subject Category. We created one category called Subject Guides, another called Course Guides, and you get the idea, I think.

Second, you want to add existing guides to their appropriate categories. There should be a green plus button with the text next to it that reads Associate a guide with Subject Guides. (Or Course Guides, etc.) It might be easiest for the admins to go through and add the existing guides to the appropriate categories, but there is a way for individual guide maintainers to do this. (I recommend you teach your guide maintainers how to do this, so that the admins are not stuck categorizing every new guide.) Instructions are below.

After this is done, you need to decide how you want this all to look. Will you have 4 boxes on one page? A separate tab for each type of guide? (We used the latter option.) Create a new guide - this will become your home page.

This is how to go about getting an A to Z list of all guides.

I recommend opening two windows. In one, you’ll want the API page. You can get to that from the LibGuides admin menu. Click on the tab that says Widgets & API - then select API Utility from the menu.

In the other window, you’ll want to open the guide you’ll be using for the home page.

Go to the API Utility window. You actually don’t need to do very much on this page. Just select the first option, which reads List of guides/pages with links. Go to the box that says Number of Results and select the button next to Hide “More Results” Link. Then scroll down to the box that says API Request Format and select the button next to Show me the JavaScript include code.

You should see the words that read Here is the URL, HTML, or JavaScript for your API call - copy the text underneath that.

Now switch back to your guide, and create a new rich text/dynamic content box. Once you’re editing that box, you should see text at the very top of that box (it’s the second bullet point, I think) that reads If inserting JavaScript code you must use the plain text editor. The words “plain text editor” should have a link you can click on.

Once you’re in the plain text editor, paste the text you copied from the API page, and then Save Changes. Refresh the page, and you should see your A-Z list.

The process is very similar to get the list of guides in a specific category. Go back to the API page, and go to the second box on that page, which is titled Display Filter. Select the button that says Return links to guides within categories containing this term. Start typing in the category name - you won’t even need to type in the whole thing. You could just type course or subj or oth. (If you had two similar category names, like biology and biomedical, you’d need to at least provide it with enough letters to distinguish between the two. So you’d have to do biol or biom - bio wouldn’t work. I digress, but this is good to know.)

Then scroll down to the API Request Format box and make sure it still has Show me the JavaScript include code button selected, and again, just copy the text provided. Then all you have to do is put that text into a content box, as I outlined above.

Repeat as necessary for your other categories (Course Guides, Other Guides, etc.).

That should be it! One thing - once you are done making the guide that will be your home page, make sure to let the folks at Springshare know. They will fix it in the system so that it acts as the home page for navigational purposes.

Now, I mentioned above that individual guide maintainers can change the category their guides are in. This is how…

(1) Maintainers should go to the guide the want to change.

(2) Go to the yellow command bar at the top of your screen and click on Status, and then Change Guide Status.

(3) After you click on that, you should get a pop-up box. In the middle, you should see the heading Subject Categories. Click on the drop-down box next to Associate with: and select the category you want your guide to be in. Then click the Associate button.

That’s it.

Let me know if you have any questions, or if I can clarify anything.

Dorothea Salo’s recent posts about teaching closed databases (see this repost on Peter Suber’s blog) have reminded me of my desire to teach graduating students about resources that are available to them after they lose access to our databases. (I agree with Dorothea that we shouldn’t be teaching our students to complain about losing that access, but I would like to note that I have seen a few graduates mention they miss our resources.)

My first instinct would be to show them the licensed databases they will continue to have access to - or might have access to instead. I’m not sure how many states offer something like Michigan eLibrary, but my guess would be many.

I think I’d also teach the following resources:

• Google Scholar
• Interlibrary loan
• the Directory of Open Access Journals
• WorldCat.org
• Archive.org
• Project Gutenberg
• Creative Commons
• Many government resources (a few that come to mind are the statistical ones - Statistical Abstract, American FactFinder, and FedStats)
• any subject-specific free resources that might be of use (like, say, arXiv) - perhaps it might be worth pointing out that most LibGuides have websites sections?

It would also be a good time to teach or reteach the following skills:

• Truncation - how this is used in databases and Google
• Phrase searching - again, how this is used in databases and Google
• Boolean searching - …ditto the above
• The slew of Google tricks (everything from converting ounces to milliliters, getting flight times, weather, etc.)
• Website evaluation

Of course, there’s really no reason we shouldn’t be teaching these resources and skills to students who are just starting college, as well. I hope that many of these things are being taught to students in library instruction sessions (I know I try to teach some of them).

Have I missed anything, or is there anything you would add?

My dean recently sent the libraries’ faculty and staff a link to this blog post about open access and mixed messages. In it, Wally Grotophost¹ describes a discovery he made while testing a metasearch project he’s currently working on.

While testing a metasearch engine, Grotophost found an interesting-looking article in America: History & Life, and couldn’t find it in George Mason’s collections. However, he found it quickly using Google - because the journal (Left History) is  open access (at least, I think it is; the link in Grotophost’s post isn’t working for me right now. He does say that the journal is hosted on the Open Journal System platform, however). This raised a question among his electronic resources management team - what open access journals should be included in library systems?

At my place of work, the answer to this question is “the journals that the liaison librarians select.” About two years ago, our collection development librarian decided that we would add journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to our link resolver (Serials Solutions). The electronic resources management team gave each liaison librarian a list of the open access journals in his or her liaison areas, and we were tasked with deciding which journals to add to the electronic journal list in Serials Solution. Since that time, we’ve been given a list - about once a month - of journals that were added to the DOAJ, and we basically go through the same process. All in all, I don’t remember the initial process being arduous, and I can say that the monthly upkeep only takes me about 30 minutes or so.

Grotophost’s post has me wondering whether this is enough. The first issue that comes to mind is: why aren’t database providers doing this? Why not simply check a database’s title list against DOAJ (or some other tool), and add direct links to articles published in open access journals? If the journal is in your institution’s link resolver, your user will get to the resource eventually, yes. But it seems to me that it would be preferable to save the user a little time and a few clicks.

Another advantage to doing this is that the librarian selection process is imperfect, and incomplete. If the database providers simply add all open access journals on their title lists, they may include something a librarian has (perhaps mistakenly) deemed as inappropriate for the library’s collection.

I also wonder about institutional repositories. Now, I’ll be the first to admit my understanding of open access is muddy, so let me know if the example I’m about to lay out is flawed. So - let’s say a person submits an article to a journal that is not freely available online, period - no embargoed issues, etc. Let’s say the same person, however, is savvy enough to retain her archiving rights, and submits the article to her institutional repository. How do we capture this? I daresay it’s a great deal more difficult to find these types pre- and post-prints, as they are likely not deposited in a systematic way. (I imagine, however, that if there was an institutional mandate to deposit in the IR, then database providers might have an easier time of it, as “affiliation” seems to be a common field in databases that index scholarly literature.) So who is responsible for making this findable? Should the author be the person contacting database providers and saying, “Hey, I notice you index Journal of Q. I published an article in that journal, and I have a post-print in my IR. Could you please link to it?” Or would this be the responsibility of librarians? Publishers?

I’m pleased to announce that as of the 1st of July, I will be the Web Services Librarian here at Grand Valley State University Libraries. While I have enjoyed working with government information, I’ve always been rather passionate about technology, and I’m very excited that I’ll be able to focus my energies on improving the libraries’ web presence.

I feel extremely lucky to work here; I have been working here for about three years, and the administration (everyone from the Dean down to my direct supervisor) has been extremely supportive in offering me and helping me take advantage of opportunities for professional growth.

It’s my hope that we’ll be posting the government documents position in the next month or two; I’ll post a link here when we do. I love working here, and would strongly encourage you to apply for the position if you have any interest in government information.

(This was also sitting in my drafts folder, and became a post on Free Government Information. I’m reposting it here, because I think it’s important.)

I find it interesting that John Schuler recently referred back to his January blog post about what future generations of government documents librarians should know, as something he discussed in that entry has been on my mind for the last few weeks:

I am going to try to teach them how to be the best librarians who can find government information, not the best government information librarians…I am convinced the next generation of government information librarians will come to professional maturity in library organizations that do not give government information services or collections any special consideration.

In my experience, librarians who don’t work in government documents often seem to regard government documents as an inscrutable and mysterious body of information. I will admit that, prior to working with government information, I was a member of that group.

Upon reflection, this attitude doesn’t make much sense. Government information seems to me to be a format of information - a publication type, like a book or a newspaper article.

As an academic librarian, my responsibilities also include liaising with several of the science departments at my university. Among other duties, I am expected to purchase books and evaluate related databases to ensure that those we subscribe to best support the research of students and faculty in those areas.

Why shouldn’t it also be my responsibility - and that of all academic librarians in similar positions - to be aware of relevant government publications in those areas? The American Library Association (more specifically, the Association of College and Research Libraries) defines information literacy as “a set of abilities requiring individuals to ‘recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.’” Surely government information is often the type of information needed. How can academic librarians effectively teach students about when to use government information when we seem to fear using it ourselves?

Academic librarian involvement can go beyond reference and instruction, however - the collections would be far more robust if subject librarians worked with the depository librarian to both weed, select, and deselect items to ensure that the depository collection is best meeting the needs of the university and the community.

I have not experienced any difficulties in my own work while trying to form these collaborative relationships. I frequently share relevant government resources with our subject librarians, and I’ve worked with our education and health sciences librarians to weed those areas of our depository collection.

This kind of collaboration isn’t enough, however; to confront the belief that “government documents are mysterious”, we must start earlier in the librarian life cycle. We must dash the misconceptions people have about government documents in library school. As John said, the trick is not necessarily to create the best government documents or government information librarians, but to create the best librarians who can locate government information.

As I was reviewing my folder of blog posts drafts, I came across this one, and thought it might be worth visiting.

I’ve read about the gap between faculty and librarians in the past, but it often seems to focus on whether or not librarians are “real” faculty or not, and whether they’re perceived as such. That’s not what interests me - what interests me is why the library, and librarians, are seen as low priority.

I do try to do outreach; I try to attend university and department events. I’ve networked with faculty members with varying levels of success. But still, I find myself surprised by incidences of ignorance. Last month, we held our third author recognition reception for faculty members that published in 2008. Prior to this reception, we sent out e-mails to the faculty in our departments asking them to send us citations for their publications. I myself sent three e-mails to my faculty members discussing this topic alone, and yet several faculty members sent their citations to another librarian - a librarian who was their liaison nearly three years ago.

This was in a department in which I am fairly well-connected; I have met with the chair two or three times, and I meet with three of the faculty members on a regular basis. I have sent approximately two or three e-mails per semester to the faculty as a whole over the last two years. And yet it would seem that, perhaps, they don’t read these e-mails.

At my place of work, there is usually one faculty member from each department who is chosen to be the liaison to the library and work with the liaison librarian. In my experience, the faculty liaison is generally different each yet. Talking to faculty members in various departments, I’ve gotten the impression that it’s not an envied position.

Occasionally, I get an e-mail from a faculty member asking question - one that springs to mind is someone asking if a student would be able to read some online journals from off-campus. I answered the question, of course, but I’m honestly concerned - I feel like knowing that you can access most of our resources online - no matter where you are - is one of the basic library facts that a faculty member should know.

I’m frustrated. Please understand I’m not trying to criticize faculty; I’m trying to understand why they don’t know or, in some cases, seem to care. Where did we mess up? Was there a liaison librarian in the past who should have imparted this information? Was the library presentation at new faculty orientation inefficient?

I know that several of my tenured colleagues have good relationships with their faculty. There are certainly faculty members with whom I have a closer relationship than others. But this feels, somehow, to be an inefficient way of reaching faculty. It shouldn’t just be about forming and fostering relationships - it should be a cultural thing.

One of my (librarian!) coworkers has referred to librarians as vampires - in that we can’t get into the classroom unless we’re invited in by faculty. I feel this applicable in other ways, too - we can’t help the faculty in any way, or provide them with useful information, unless they let us.

How can we change this?