2012 Users Council Meeting
Monday, May 21, 2012 — 500 12th St–CBRE 5 Star Rooms at City Center
Attendees: Ivy Anderson, CDL; Sherri Berger, CDL; Melissa Browne, D; Heather Christenson, CDL; Christina Cicchetti, R; Trisha Cruse, CDL; Sara Davidson, M; Jayne Dickson, CDL; Jennifer Dorner, B; Jon Edmondson, SRLF; Laine Farley, CDL; Isom Harrison, LLNL; Ann Hubble, SC; Cynthia Johnson, I; Lorna Lueck, SB; Patricia Martin, CDL; Ellen Meltzer, CDL; Michele Mizejewski, SF; Michael Oppenheim, LA; Lisa Schiff, CDL; Leslie Wolf, CDL
All material is password protected.
9:30 – 9:35
Welcome – Introduction of new members; role of Users Council – Ellen Meltzer, Manager, Information Services
9:35 – 10:05
Flying Pigs and Other Wonders – Laine Farley, Executive Director
10:05 – 10:50
Libraries as Partners in Research: the UC Curation Center’s Tools and Services – Trisha Cruse, Director, UC3
Questions/Comments:
EM, CDL: When you mentioned DCXS you indicated that it was outsourced to India… Did we write the specs?
TC, CDL: Yes, we developed the specs from talking to UC faculty, researchers and librarians, and from the DataOne community. While our initial focus is on scientific data, this will extend to social science and humanities communities. We found that PCs are in far greater use over Macs. We also found that people across the board are using Excel to manage their data. We found a lot of good data about the necessary requirements and then we fed them to Microsoft.
LF, CDL: Can you explain a little more about DataOne?
TC, CDL: DataOne is an NSF-funded initiative to manage and preserve data. UNM is the lead on the Project. Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is the foundation of new innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that meets the needs of science and society for open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data. The idea is that institutions will become member nodes and feed into DataOne. Then this data will be available to researchers around the world. UC Santa Barbara and UC Davis are very involved in the project.
EM, CDL: You mentioned something about faculty paying for storing their data… does the faculty pay or library?
TC, CDL: Good question. Faculty can estimate what their costs will be and then include this into their grant costs. A possible model might be each campus gets this amount of storage and then researchers make us of this. We’re just trying to expose the costs so that people think about how to include this in their budgets.
11:00 – 11:45
Collections in the Cloud: Shared Collection Development in a Changing Climate – Ivy Anderson, Director, Collection Development & Management
Questions/Comments:
JD, B: It’s a great idea to use metrics to evaluate these journals especially when negotiating with vendors, but for the Journal of American History, one of the most important, got a low score. Obviously metrics did not work in that case.
IA, CDL: We’ve asked campus librarians to include a reason any time they recommend a change to a metric. We’ve coded all of these comments in our data, as well as capturing the raw data itself, and will be analyzing this information to see how the metrics might be improved. Some journals may not have usage information, some don’t have impact factors. The approach we’ve taken is that if there is missing data, this will cause the journal to fall into a lower value bucket, triggering a manual review. When we’re able to analyze the librarian input, we’ll want to understand things such as whether there is another variable that we need to take into consideration — are there other measures by which we can evaluate these journals, that we can factor into our approach? We’re really looking to the subject evaluators for help with this. Perhaps metrics can’t do everything, but it’s a place to start. High metrics tell us that a journal is valuable, but the ones that fall out may need more manual review. Again, we did capture all the input from the campuses, and will use this to refine our approach. Remember, this is not to a tool to cancel journals but make them more tractable for review. Use of metrics is a trend in the industry. We think we have an interesting approach because we don’t just use usage numbers.
JD, B: The pies charts in your presentation showing the value we get from vendors, will these be included in reports you send out?
IA, CDL: Not immediately. Our initial reports will describe the overall results of the evaluation process — what was changed, and what wasn’t — but more detailed analysis by publisher will have to wait until we have a chance to work with the results a bit more. I put that chart up with some trepidation about the assertions, because we haven’t had a chance to analyze the results as carefully as we intend to. It was meant to be indicative, but not definitive. Those data will be distributed, but not immediately.
PM, CDL: If we have an idea/suggestion about the algorithm who should we contact?
IA, CDL: You should contact Chan Li (who currently is out on maternity leave) or Jackie Wilson (jacqueline.wilson@ucop.edu).
11:45 – 12:30
Discovery & Delivery Services: A Peek Behind the Scenes – Patricia Martin, Director, Discovery & Delivery; Leslie Wolf, Project Manager, Discovery & Delivery
Questions/Comments:
LL, SB: The Melvyl feature that groups all the editions together, how is that supposed to work? I had a question from a faculty member who wanted a new version, but it was buried under the oldest version…
PM, CDL: That’s exactly how it works.
LL, SB: Why isn’t the most recent edition first displayed first?
EM, CDL: They make the copy that is most held the default record. Some people want the newest edition but some want it the other way. So it is in flux. We know this is frustrating.
JD, B: You mentioned dissatisfaction with HathiTrust. I know that I greatly misunderstand the public’s view of copyright law. Students think that if Berkeley books are scanned that the full text should be available. There should be a campaign to educate people about copyright law. I had to argue with a librarian today about why we can’t make the full text of a scanned book available.
PM, CDL: That’s a great suggestion. Thanks for that.
1:00 – 1:45
How HathiTrust Serves the UC Community – Heather Christenson, Project Manager, Mass Digitization
Questions/Comments:
IH, LL: You talked about getting scientific technical information (gathering information from U.S. government sources) out of Oak Ridge… they’d be happy to work with you.
IA, CDL: Great. We’ll be in touch with you about this.
SD, M: You mentioned services for users with disabilities… how do our campuses make use of this?
HC, CDL: I don’t know how involved a process it is, but we’d be willing to see if we can pilot this with Merced. We’ll check into this and follow up with you.
LF, CDL: There are processes that you have to do on campus to validate that someone is eligible for this service.
EM, CDL: All of the UC campuses have offices for disability services.
JD, B: UCB, we’ll volunteer. We really want to move on this.
IA, CDL: Sounds like we have a project.
JE, SRLF: Government documents — everyone is working to save these. What about city documents? For example, are the water plans (or documents) of cities or counties saved in any database?
CJ, I: The Web Archiving Service can do this now.
IA, CDL: We’re trying to work with the HathiTrust partners on collaborative collection initiatives that avoid unnecessary duplication – if this is a project that you think could benefit from collaboration across the partners, we’d be happy to talk about it.
HC, CDL: I know that the Internet Archive has been working with the San Francisco Public Library to digitize city documents.
IA, CDL: The copyright status of state documents is often questionable; city documents might be in that same boat.
EM, CDL: There was an interesting case of a faculty member at UCI whose father died (also a faculty member). The faculty member wanted to liberate his father’s copyright to make the content available and we worked with UCI staff to do this. If anyone owns a copyright and wants to make the content freely available, please contact us.
HC, CDL: We’ve worked with non-UC HathiTrust partners on this. We recently worked with the University of Virginia to make a resource available.
1:45 – 2:15
Open Access Publishing Solutions for UC – Lisa Schiff, Technical Lead, Access & Publishing
Questions/Comments:
PM, CDL: Since you can accept databases… is that different from how Merritt accepts datasets?
LS, CDL: Currently, researchers can publish databases in eScholarship as supplemental files, and all of those materials are then submitted to Merritt for preservation purposes. eScholarship is developing support for data publication, integrating Merritt and EZID services, so that researchers can include published datasets in a larger series of published research outputs (e.g., working papers, postprints, etc.). For example, we are working with the College of Engineering at UC Riverside that is using eScholarship, Merritt and EZID in exactly this way. However, researchers may want to do things with their datasets in advance of publication, on a dataset by dataset basis, or as part of a data-focused initiative, all of which might be reasons to go directly to EZID or Merritt for managing of datasets. In addition, EZID is part of a larger community of service providers focusing specifically on concerns associated with datasets, which means that it is targeting ways to provide greater exposure for those datasets registered with EZID.
Ultimately, there are several different ways of meeting dataset publishing needs, and it’s really a matter of emphasis.
2:15 – 2:45
OAC & Calisphere: New Tools and User Data – Sherri Berger, Program Coordinator, Access & Publishing
Questions/Comments:
EM, CDL: Did the creation of this type of record have anything to do with Next Gen services?
SB, CDL: To a certain extent. I don’t believe this was a specific recommendation; however, the NGTS (Next Generation Technical Services) recommendations for special collections and archives has a “more product, less process” orientation and a focus on uncovering hidden collections. Therefore this fits in spirit with those objectives. Also, Adrian Turner was on the Next Gen Task Force, and RecordEXPRESS was really his brainchild.
MM, SF: Before this, was the only option to encode EAD [by hand]?
SB, CDL: There are different kinds of EAD generators — for example, CDL supports Archivists’ Toolkit, an archival management system through which you can create EAD — but even those can still be off-putting or unnecessary for smaller institutions. Now they have a way to submit content.
JD, B: You have a note saying ‘searchable PDF inventory’ does that mean that these are searchable?
SB, CDL: Yes, this is in development but will happen soon. The PDFs attached to a collection-level record created with RecordEXPRESS will be fully searchable and integrated within the OAC framework. So, if a user searches on a keyword that appears in the PDF but not the top-level record, it will still appear in the search result set.
JE, SRLF: I see this all the time at the SRLF… they do this quickly and then we have to go back to find what is in several boxes. So now rather than sending down 50 boxes (entire collection), this might narrow the desired content down to 2 boxes.
SB, CDL: Yes, I see this as being the real service of the PDF attachment. If the inventory already exists, but it just isn’t in EAD, now we can surface it for users. And if the case is that at first there is a large collection that can’t be processed up front, but then later the institution is able to go in and do more, then this record is easily editable (rather than needing to re-generate and re-submit the EAD).
EM, CDL: You mean that they don’t begin at the themed collections?
SB, CDL: Yes.
EM, CDL: We should make the themed collections Google-searchable.
SB, CDL: They are, for the most part. So it’s not that they aren’t findable it’s that there a ton of other content vying for their attention.
JD, B: Is Calishpere as a subset — is that everything that is digitized in the OAC?
SB, CDL: Yes, except if an OAC collection guide links to a collection’s web site, outside of the OAC or Calisphere platform — that material that exists somewhere else won’t be surfaced in Calisphere right now.
MM, SF: How did you decide to use November for your survey?
SB, CDL: I looked at usage patterns and we looked for a time where the usage was pretty robust. It was the last week of November moving into December — it didn’t seem to conflict with any school breaks or major holidays — so it was a good time.
2:45 – 3:00
Wrap up – All
Questions/Comments:
CJ, I: At Irvine, we’ve been doing a lot of de-duping (getting rid of physical journals when they are available online) and we’re hearing that the quality of older scanned material isn’t very good. How do we get better versions?
JD, B: I just emailed Catherine (who is on the HathiTrust working group)… I have a book in my office where the illustrations are fold-out, but it wasn’t scanned that way.
IA, CDL: Heather Christenson is the person to contact. Fold-outs were not originally digitized and there are ways to do this now. We’re happy to talk to you about this.
JD, B: There needs to be some type of procedure of how to do this, to alert the folks about scanning these.
IA, CDL: If the illustrations are not good… are you finding this because of users?
CJ, I: Yes, we’re being alerted to this from users and in it is in the sciences rather than the humanities, like I might expect.
JE, SRLF: I get dozens of requests like these per month. People just requesting in bulk and they don’t even notice that an item is available online. Sometimes it is a JSTOR item but there isn’t a link, or the link broke, or whatever. I have a standing order with one professor that just doesn’t want to see online stuff. Also with WEST stuff, campuses need to keep these items on campus and they can’t be sent to an RLF.
IA, CDL: It’s not entirely clear that NRLF will have the same policies as SRLF.
JE, SRLF: I’ll see funny runs here with journals. People will want to look at 20 years of a resource. There’s one called commercial and financial chronicles… A few times over the last few years professors will go back years and years building a database…
CC, R: This might be an issue just at my campus… with emails for forwarding on to other staff that include things like graphics… the systems department is cracking down on large email messages… I used to be able to forward stuff on and now I have to re-package everything.
EM, CDL: Can you take attachments?
CC, R: There seem to be problems even if you have an attachment.
JD, B: You send these messages to all the campus users?
CC, R: It’s changed. We used to have a listserv for Users Council topics so people could self-subscribe — librarians and staff. So, this seems to be a problem unique to the Riverside campus. Our systems department need to allow for larger files.
EM, CDL: Other issues?
IA, CDL: Are you capturing statistics as you de-dupe?
CJ, I: What kind of statistics? Numbers of volumes? Oh, yes.
IA, CDL: It would be useful to get statistics like this.
LL, SB: I’ve seen a lot of situations where the online version is better than the print.
IA, CDL: A lot of the older digitization was not as good as they are now.