Rasmuson Library Collection Development

With my books budget axed for the rest of this fiscal year, and since I’m not teaching classes this semester, a few nosy folks have asked me what I’m up to all day long. It’s a good question. In this time of tight budgets, shouldn’t we all be a little more accountable for making productive use of our workdays?

With that in mind, and because sometimes I get to the end of a work week and can’t remember myself what I’ve accomplished, I am going to blog about some of the activities that have kept me busy. Here’s a short list from today only:

Counted and recorded gift books
Sorted books for transfer between libraries
Distributed unneeded gift items to other libraries (emailing, printing postal labels, packaging, sending)
Ran a few ILS system reports to look at the PQ1-3999 sections in the Library Annex and main collection; formatted report for pulling items for retention
Pulled items for retention from annex (takes an hour to pull a cart, did 2 carts today)
Conferred with colleagues about accreditation, budget issues, questions about materials
Submitted the last of my grades for Winter session
Looked at library vendor issue, reading and commenting on a professional listserv
Served Reference on-call for 2 hours
Contacted professor about doing library instruction for a class, updated a handout to use for the class
Returned a call from someone wanting help starting up a library in a remote part of Alaska; contacted State Library staff about that library effort
Posted a web page announcement about the new library coffee cart
Responded to an email suggestion for a video purchase (we already had it, gave them the call number)
Re-sent a message to the listserv for the College of Liberal Arts about the book funding cutback
Fixed a minor computer error in my monitor display
Conferred with colleague about an ILL issue
Answered a few patron questions (outside of Reference hours)
Probably something else too – oh yeah, visited the new coffee cart for the first time! Woo hoo! Good night all! More tomorrow.

Others have created more interesting websites on scholarly communication than I could, so I’ll just link out:

Scholarly Communication and Publishing Issues -  Stanford University

Reshaping Scholarly Communication – University of California Libraries

Transforming Scholarly Communication – University of Minnesota Libraries

Transforming Scholarly Communication – University of Iowa Libraries

Scholarly Publication – MIT Libraries

Q. What do all of these have in common? And what’s the big deal?

A. An acknowledgment that despite the advantages of high-speed digital, internet communication, access to scholarly research could become (is becoming?) less available to students and researchers, not more. Unless…those at stake discuss alternative ways to fund the publication of scholarly information.

Recommendations start with authors retaining the rights to their works, rather than signing all the rights over to an exclusive and overly expensive publisher. There’s more. On these web pages, faculty and librarians discuss faculty concerns about:  publication impact measurement, the need for faculty publications to positively affect tenure and promotion, grant potential, and researchers communicating with others doing related research.

At our library, we have seen tremendous budget challenges this year, and if  they continue, we will be  less and less able to provide access to journal research for our faculty. One disturbing trend with electronic journals is the unwillingness of libraries  to lend from these online subscriptions. It’s great to save the trees, and speed up access, but what will this mean when we can no longer borrow the titles to which we cannot afford to subscribe?  In this area, we are moving backward, not forward; ILL has made enormous contributions to the researcher, but if they cannot borrow what is requested, or if it takes longer to find a willing lender, service quality will decline, and the end result will not be a happy one. We cannot buy everything; no library can. As prices continue to increase, we will look more and more closely at what we can cut, and that means less access.

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.