Rasmuson Library Collection Development

I’m back on scholarly publishing, and encouraging open access, now that we have discovered that our library materials budget has been seriously reduced for the FY10 academic year. Cancellation of library journals rarely makes anyone happy; it is also time-consuming and difficult. The most common suggestion from library patrons is to cancel someone else’s journal of interest, or else it’s “cancel the junk.” But does it make sense to cancel 100 $30 subscriptions that are regularly read by many undergraduates in order to retain a $3000 subscription regularly read by – perhaps no one? The scholarly journals are also the most costly, and we do everything we can to ensure that faculty, researchers and graduate students get the titles they really need. Would we need fewer titles if more scholars chose open access for their publishing venue?

Here is an interesting analysis by Steve Lawrence in Nature (Nature, Volume 411, Number 6837, p. 521, 2001) about the citation rate for articles freely available online, versus those that are “offline.”

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html

Free textbooks? Wow! That’s the dream of undergraduates everywhere. Given the significant cost of books over the course of a 4-5 or even 6 year Bachelor’s degree, even a few instructors using open access texts could save a bundle, reducing the amount of indebtedness for students. Is it a reality? Yes, for some. For more information about the possibility of using these textbooks, see: Make Textbooks Affordable

With a headline like this, any  net nanny or other censoring software will filter out this blog! Seriously though, it seems that despite the “sexual revolution” of the 70s we still can’t talk openly about sexual topics, especially around children. One children’s book that is frequently challenged is “It’s Perfectly Normal” by Robie Harris and Michael Emberley. I first heard about this book because it is so often banned, otherwise it might have easily passed under my radar, even though I have children ages 7 and 9, the intended audience for this book. I borrowed it and read it through, and promptly bought a copy for my own children and my niece and nephew. The kids were a bit put off at first “oh mom,” but then we all sat together and read it and talked about it. Now I occasionally see my daughter pick it up and read various sections, and she frequently asks questions. What a great tool for opening the discussion about sex, and a chance for me to impart my own values about the topics in question.

We do talk about sex at home, and it’s a good chance too to vaccinate my kids against pedophiles, a scary and tough discussion to have with impressionable children. There are better and worse books for kids on this subject, but this is one of the better ones. For more good options, keep an eye on the banned books lists! I do recommend reading them first, before offering them to your kids; you can then choose the ones most to your own liking. With so many published books on sex education for children, unlike my own generation, this generation will be very well-informed.

Frequent patrons of Rasmuson Library may notice a recent increase in the turnover in our book sale area. We are working on a long overdue project of deselection, formerly known to the library profession as “weeding,” but now more commonly referred to as “deselection,” a euphemism that makes the process sound less like hard labor, I suppose. If you have never made a trip to our “annex” on level 1, you may not know that there are several thousand books in that area, most of which have not been checked out in 20 years or more, some of which have never been checked out. These materials were moved off-site during our renovations a few years ago, and then moved back into the building, where some have been returned to the shelves on Levels 5 and 6. We are finding as we go through the subject areas in the annex, that most of these materials are no longer useful; subject coverage is out of date, or we have more recent, better books on the topic.

Every library has to make room for newer materials, and as large as Rasmuson is, we are no exception. If there are titles in the annex you are interested in reading, you’re welcome to check them out; after they circulate we return them to the main stacks, and those books won’t get weeded out. Otherwise, watch the book sale and enjoy the low prices!

After a long lapse, I’m back on the blog. Blogging is a lonely business when no one reads them…

We finally have RSS feeds on our library catalog, and you can get a feed on almost any LC class for new items. Just search the site for RSS and you’ll find directions. If you haven’t tried RSS yet, you might opt to receive them in a Firefox sidebar; I used to use a separate reader, and then I tried just getting them in Firefox, but the sidebar works much better. You have to download the sidebar as an “add-on” to Firefox, but it’s easy to do and worth it.

• Do open-access articles have a greater research impact?
• The access/impact problem and the green and gold roads to open access
• Open access increases citation rate
• What you can do to promote open access

I recently attended a library conference in Timberline, Oregon.  The keynote speaker, Ray English, Director of Libraries at Oberlin College, discussed what is currently happening with “open access” scholarly journals; these are the journals that do not require an individual or institutional subscription in order to read the articles. These journals are “free” to the reader, but not of course to the publisher, and there are numerous different ways organizations, societies and publishers are finding to fund these publishing efforts.

Ray has researched this topic in depth, has been on the steering committee for SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) for a number of years. Through articles in print and online, speaking engagements, and committee work, he strongly advocates for supporting open access journals.  At our conference, he estimated (based a recent study) that 20% of currently published, peer-reviewed journals are open access.

If the estimate is accurate or close, it’s pretty significant for libraries and for scholars. If open access gains wider acceptance by scholars in the future, it could mean broad changes in how academic libraries present information, as well as improve the budget picture for library materials, budgets that are currently predicted, even here at UAF, to decline in future years.

I would like to encourage faculty on campus to read about, think about, and discuss among themselves, the movement toward open access scholarly publishing. I will pull a few literature reviews on the topic and post them here for convenience, and I encourage all in the UAF community to add their thoughts about open access, including what they think about the current efforts, their own acceptance (or not) of the concept, or any other discussion about scholarly publishing.

Read this article:

Wikipedia Article in Information Today, Ind.

One way of keeping “up-to-date” in your field of study is to use the search alerting features in our many databases, or on publisher websites. You can usually get tables-of-contents (TOCs) delivered to your email or your RSS reader as soon as a journal issue is published. Unfortunately you will sometimes get these TOCs before we have access to the journal issue, especially if we are still subscribing in paper only, or if the publisher puts a “current issue embargo” on our subscription. In most databases, you can also set up special subject or author alerts, so that whenever anything new is published on a topic or by a specific author, you’ll get an email or RSS notification.

Rather than delineate here all the varied methods each web site uses to offer these alerts, you might want to just start checking out the ones you use most often. If you run into difficulty – and some are certainly not intuitive! – please ask a Reference Librarian for assistance. I have used most of the search alerting systems in our current suite of databases, so I am more than happy to assist you in setting them up.

If you currently use email alerts only, I strongly recommend you try at least one RSS feed. There are a number of ways to do these; you can get separate RSS readers to install on your computer, or you can use features within web browsers to deliver the RSS feeds. At this particular moment, I prefer RSS Reader – it’s a free download, doesn’t bombard me with updates, and just sits there working all the time; I don’t have to do anything. It’s easy to add a new feed, and I get an alerting sound and popup when something comes in. Then when I feel like looking at it, I click on the program icon and glance through. It doesn’t fill up my email box and I don’t have to organize or delete anything. Most publishers and databases are now using RSS as an option.

I usually read at bedtime, to relax, but not with this book! Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven,” published several years ago, focuses on the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints groups that have splintered off from the main church. The book is illuminating and upsetting, and probably offensive to some. While filled with verifiable facts, Krakauer also puts his “spin” on the topic, repeatedly stating the irrationality of all religious faith – who can argue with that? – and making comparisons of the FLDS to other fundamentalist groups, such as the Taliban. Religious converts will probably not want to read this book, while those without such ties will find the religiosity of the book’s characters frightening. Leave it to Krakauer to write another book that stirs up controversy!