- Marie Kennedy is the Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. This blog is about organization, librarianship, and sometimes monkeys and/or bananas.
Archives
Categories
new electronic resource management system
Posted in comic, e-resource mgmt
Comments Off on new electronic resource management system
journal lists, now with more journals
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.
Posted in e-resource mgmt, library
Comments Off on journal lists, now with more journals
yes, this
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.
Posted in articles i'm reading
Comments Off on yes, this
Batman responds to IRB shirker
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.”
Posted in articles i'm reading, library
1 Comment
reminiscing about the GRE
a friend is due to take the GRE tomorrow, with hopes of entering a master’s program for library science. it got me thinking about the last time i took the GRE…
we had just moved to north carolina and i was working full time on unc’s campus. i knew that unc chapel hill’s library school had a great reputation/ranking and so i thought i’d apply. i told myself that if i got in, i was meant to be a librarian. if i didn’t, well i’d be happy being an artist. but first i had to take the GRE. no sweat, it’s just a test. enter: WINTER.
we moved to north carolina from florida and were unaccustomed to the annual ice storms that hit the triangle area where we lived. unfortunately, an ice storm hit one week before my scheduled GRE test. the ice storm was so bad that it exploded transformers, split trees down the middle, and obviously knocked out the power to our house. we thought we’d be fine sleeping in front of the gas fire place but learned on the first night that it was ornamental. we stayed huddled in the house for two more nights, until the crown molding started to pull away from the walls. we brought the dogs to dave’s office and slept for three nights all sacked out on the floor, on top of couch cushions that we borrowed from the center where we worked. we would drive the dogs back to the house in the morning and then hike to the gym on campus for hot showers. i have no memory of what we did for food during that time. on day seven, we woke up in dave’s office, ate something (?), loaded the dogs into the car and car-skated across town on the icy roads to another campus where i took the GRE.
it was so nice and warm in the test room, and the lights were low and soothing, and i hadn’t slept well in days. i nodded off during the exam, several times. i have no idea how i got through it, yet somehow completed the exam well enough to gain me entrance into the library science program at unc. after i finished that program we promptly moved to southern california. i’m done with ice storms.
Posted in library, titter
2 Comments
Yodeling monkey, Craig Ferguson
link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lbekts52TI
Posted in monkeys/bananas, titter
Comments Off on Yodeling monkey, Craig Ferguson