Libraries typically use the COUNTER standard to count the “use” of e-content, but we know there are other ways to describe a use. This comic shows three alternatives.
what a rich study this is! i’m still digesting it myself. i’m pasting below a quote that is leading me to wonder about services the library can provide while the students stay put in the library to study.
Head, Alison J., and Michael B. Eisenberg. 2011. “Balancing Act: How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library during Crunch Time.” Project Information Literacy Research Report. Accessed October 12, 2011 http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_techstudy_Fall2011_noappendices1.1.pdf.
found via cheryl’s blog: http://blog.libraryjournal.com/eviews/2011/10/13/college-students-libraries-technology-crunch-time-the-latest-pil-report/
“Moreover, students told us they stayed online and in close proximity to their work. They did not get up from their seats, ask for help from a librarian, or use most library resources; indeed their most valuable devices run the risk of being stolen if left unattended. Nor do they leave their online worlds, where their most alluring self-incentives are” (p.48).
if you have a spreadsheet with geographic data in it and you want to make a map, quick-like, check out batchgeo.com. you copy your spreadsheet and paste it into the browser, choose a few options, and then BAM, map. the resulting map is presented as a URL or can be embedded. here’s the direct link of a map of the participants in my collaborative marketing for e-resources project (http://batchgeo.com/map/4e91627efa6e1eec2fd8c7fcd683527b) and embedded here in this blog post is the interactive version.
shout out to @kaijsa for suggesting batchgeo to me!
View Project participant locations in a full screen map
100 institutions have signed on to be part of a research/training project on marketing electronic resources! the project is designed to test whether a collaborative model of benchmarking the marketing of e-resources is feasible. discover the answer with us by following our progress at the wiki, http://benchmarketing.wetpaint.com. i’ll report our findings here at this blog at the end of february, when the project is complete.
the project is summarized at Marie R. Kennedy. 2011. “Collaborative Marketing for Electronic Resources.” Library Hi Tech News 28(6): 22-24. if you don’t subscribe to that journal you can read the pre-print at http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/librarian_pubs/4/.
when our patrons go to our library’s research databases webpage they’ll see databases listed there, as one might expect. they’ll also bump into single newspapers, e-journal collections, and encyclopedias.
this amalgam didn’t occur overnight, and it certainly wasn’t intentional. as the library began to acquire e-resources it naturally needed some place to put them to show our patrons that we had these special, new things; the research databases hand-coded html page was born. over time that page became the dumping ground for all new e-resources. that was the place the library told users to begin their e-research.
speed forward several years and several hundred e-resources, and enter our new electronic resource management system (erms), a metadata dream. the erms allows for the categorization of all of those e-resources so that they cluster together easily to make them more readily findable. now that we’re intentionally tagging e-resources with categories, the question of “what do we tag as a database?” came up. if an e-resource isn’t tagged as a database, it disappears from the research databases page and is discoverable only through our catalog. as a result we’re having some pretty lively conversations about how to manage that metadata.
we’ve talked about three possible ways to handle this, more intelligently than summarized in these bullet points:
of the three options, number 3 seems like the way most libraries are handling it but i really don’t see how that will scale as we continue to increase the numbers of e-resources. do we have time to pull together a small committee each time we license a new e-resource to determine if it should display on the research databases page?
how has your library handled this? is there perhaps a fourth option we haven’t considered?
i was talking to my dad on the phone the other night about deadlines. i mentioned that when i agree on a deadline i always make sure it is met. there’s hardly anything worse in my mind than making somebody wait on me for something. he said, “that’s grandpa, you get that from grandpa.” i’m off the hook, it’s genetics!
my grandpa would be 101 years old today. look how cute we were.
