…because it was too hilarious not to try.
there are two more images linked from the daily what site that i haven’t tried yet. somehow this crudely drawn image was just the right amount of satisfying.
(thanx, the daily what!)
i casually mentioned on twitter yesterday that i was finding multiple unsigned copies of a license agreement in a single folder and got a surprise: i’m not the only one. i heard from friends on facebook that their license agreement folders are also a mess. it’s funny to me to think of libraries having anything out of order since the e-resources librarians i’ve met tend to be very neat people. i think we’ve uncovered a dirty little secret about libraries. i’m sure that what’s happened is that the people who used to be in charge of the licenses had an idea about what was important to save in those folders and as time moved on stuff was just added to the folder, weeding out nothing.
i inherited a whole file cabinet of these kinds of folders in my new job. i’m enjoying looking through them, weeding out multiple copies, fax cover sheets, and email printouts that note passwords long expired. i’m putting the leftover material in order to be scanned and eventually linked in our erms, a little procedure i cooked up many years ago. my organizational scheme is to put the current license on top, followed by any older licenses, title lists, then any correspondence that notes the administrative username/password or key contact information. all of this will be scanned into one pdf, and then i’ll create bookmarks in the pdf to point to the license start date, termination information, interlibrary loan rights and restrictions, number of simultaneous users, etc.
once in pdf form these licenses become much more meaningful as living documents because it’s easy to scan a new license and append it to the old pdf, or delete a sheet that no longer applies. also, a pdf is much easier to share with librarians that need to read them than coming to our office to request a folder.
annually we send to each academic department a list of journals to which we subscribe with funds for that department. well, we send them a list of *print* journals, and every year that list gets shorter as we move to more online-only subscriptions. this bums me out because it makes it appear that the library is annually less committed to supporting research and teaching in departments. we need a way to show our academic departments that in fact, we are expanding our support of their efforts. we came up with the following plan.
we decided to include online subscriptions in the list of journals we send to the departments. if we subscribe specifically to an online journal, it is easy to add to the list because we’ve already attached an order record and assigned a fund code in order to pay the invoice; it’s simple enough to pull those titles out of the system. the tricky part was figuring out a way to gather together all the titles that came as part of a package, for which the library – not the departmental funds – paid a lump sum.
the library subscribes to many big journal packages, several of which give us perpetual access to content. none of the thousands of these titles had order records attached to them. in essence, these titles were hidden from us because we had no way to track them; bibliographic records were ingested to the catalog but when you came across one you could never be sure why it was there or to which package it belonged.
over this past year the serials department has been attaching order records and assigning fund codes to bibliographic records of journal titles if we have perpetual access to the content. we’ve been attaching order records even if the amount we paid for that specific journal was $0 (that is, if we paid $X for the entire title list instead of an amount for each journal) so that we could assign a fund code based on the subject content of the journal. in this way we can quickly pull a list of all the journals assigned to “fund X” or “package X.” in addition to the inventory aspect of this project it allows us to gather a true title list for the departments. departmental funds may not be used to pay for access to a journal but the content is still used by a department.
our sociology department, for example, will be pleased to see a list of available journal content in their subject area go from 95 titles to 450.
do you ever read an article and it just resonates with you? everything the author has written sits perfectly within your world view, so that you exhale when completing it and say to yourself, “yes, this.” enter: deborah lee’s 2003 article, “marketing research: laying the marketing foundation,” library administration & management 17(4): 186-188. it’s a brief article; it gets in and gets out and leaves you with the understanding that libraries think about marketing all wrong but also outlines the steps to correct that.
i’ve just completed a research project that analyzes the text of 24 published case studies on marketing electronic resources in libraries. after reading the case studies it became clear that libraries generally do not do a good/consistent job with evaluating their marketing tasks. it occurs to me now that i have read this article by lee that perhaps libraries don’t analyze their marketing well because they’re not really sure *why* they’re marketing. lee’s article states that before you market you need to understand what your patrons want from you, and then develop a marketing plan to let them know that you can provide them with what they want. in the case studies i read i didn’t see any of that marketing groundwork described. it makes sense, then, that a library wouldn’t be able to successfully evaluate marketing tasks if the purpose was never defined.
also, a zinger on p. 186:
Picture this scenario: you’re a member of a committee drafted to examine the current library instruction program offered by your college library. Your library offers a number of free workshops for students, but attendance is very low. Too frequently, the discussion in such a committee will center on the question: how do we encourage students to attend the workshops and instructional sessions? According to marketing theory, as defined by Kolter and others, this is the wrong question.
made at http://www.batmancomic.info/ in response to this passage in christopher cox’s “hitting the spot,” published in the serials librarian 53(3), 2007:
The university has strict human subject rules, and each survey proposal must be reviewed by the Institutional Review Board, a process which takes about a month. Due to time constraints, the author had no choice but to employ a more haphazard approach. Surveys were gathered in three ways: a link was posted on the library Web site and an announcement put in the library’s monthly student e-newsletter. This garnered about six responses. An e-mail was next sent to all library student supervisors, asking student workers to fill out the survey. This yielded 45 more surveys. Finally, in order to gain a more representative campus sample, copies of the survey were printed and distributed to willing parties outside various academic buildings throughout campus (six in all) during the second-to-last week of classes. 94 surveys were collected using this method. This brought the total to 145 completed surveys. The majority of survey respondents (n = 135 or 94%) were students, with only 2 faculty members and 6 staff members completing the survey. Student responses were the primary target of the survey, so this result was satisfactory for us.
So, what’s the big deal, you may ask. When a researcher wants to do a study that involves humans his/her study proposal may need to go through an evaluation by a group of researchers charged with making sure that the rights and welfare of the humans used in the study is protected. That group of researchers is called an Institutional Review Board (IRB). The reviewers may ask the researcher to change parts of his/her study design to make sure that a participant is safe and enters into the study willingly and informed of any risks. At the end of a review by an IRB the researcher can be certain that his/her project is ethical. By deliberately bypassing the IRB step which the author states that his university requires, the above-quoted researcher chose an unethical path.
Libraries are viewed as trusted entities, and research like Cox’s chips away at that trust. I am really disappointed to have read this article in an international peer-reviewed journal. This research should have been rejected on the basis of the giant flaw in the research design of bypassing the IRB review. The HHS Web site says it nicely, “The value of research depends upon the integrity of study results.”
