Users Council Annual Meeting – April 10, 2009
Attendees: Ivy Anderson (CDL), Marcus Banks (UCSF), Sherri Berger (CDL), Ira Bray (CSL), Adam Brin (CDL), Mitchell Brown (UCI), Melissa Browne (UCD), Danielle Castronovo (CAS), Christina Cicchetti (UCR), Penny Coppernoll-Blach (UCSD), Sara Davidson (UCM), Jayne Dickson (CDL), Holly Eggleston (CDL), Laine Farley (CDL), Ann Hubble (UCSC), Charleen Kubota (UCB), Rosalie Lack (CDL), Chan Li (CDL), Rosemary Lowden (LBNL), Lorna Lueck (UCSB), Ellen Meltzer (CDL), Michael Oppenheim (UCLA), Leah Prescott (Getty), Elise Proulx (CDL), Tracy Seneca (CDL), Kris Veldheer (GTU), Perry Willett (CDL), Sherry Willhite (CDL), Leslie Wolf (CDL), Lena Zentall (CDL).
Welcome – Introduction of new members; role of Users Council – Ellen Meltzer, Information Services
See Users Council Recap of Activities May 1, 2008 – April 1, 2009 for information about Users Council activities during the past year.
eScholarship Publishing Services: New & Enhanced – Elise Proulx, Outreach & Marketing Coordinator, eScholarship Publishing Program
See Elise’s presentation eScholarship Publishing Services: New & Enhanced for details. Also, see the eScholarship Publishing Services and the University of California Publishing Services handouts for more information on these services.
Q: Collateral?
A: We mean paper and digital promotional materials so in addition to an interactive brochure on our website, we’ll have posters, bookmarks, Post-It notes, and paper brochures. We want to get our message out in as many ways as possible…that’s what we’re referring to as collateral (both digital and paper).
Q: (Referring to faculty home pages…) If someone moves from institution to institution…what about the body of work?
A: If people are now at UC, we can make their whole body of work available. And with the web service we are using for faculty home pages, it is possible to move this to another institution, but it won’t be branded in the same way.
Q: Can faculty publish in non-English language?
A: eScholarship supports foreign language papers as long as they are submitted in PDF and the metadata fields are completed in Latin script. Documents submitted in any other format (Word, HTML, text, etc.) would fail.
Q: Is there linkage between the NGM interface and the eScholarship service? A: [Ellen] If you look up an eScholarship article in WCAT Local, you should find it; eScholarship articles are found in Next Gen Melvyl.
Q: Why should UCSF also post here?
A: If you publish on PubMed you only reach a specific audience… if you publish here you can reach people in other disciplines. If people are really gung-ho about only publishing on PubMed, they can feel free to do this.
Bibliographic Services: What we do for you: Next Generation Melvyl, Melvyl, Request, UC-eLinks – Leslie Wolf & Lena Zentall, Project Managers, Bibliographic Services
See Leslie and Lena’s PowerPoint presentation for details.
Q: UC-eLinks…complicated types of records (papers inside of conference records – no way to request a specific paper… also plays inside of anthologies…There are similar issues with reviews.
A: (Lena) Did you report these via UC-eLinks feedbacks?
A. Yes.
Q: I find a lot of our users are confused because a lot of time it goes to the article directly and the next time it goes to the table of contents and the next time to the journal homepage. It would be good if we could profile this for users. Does this stand anywhere?
A: (Lena) When we talked to users they were OK with it. The frame keeps them in context. It is confusing when they get the UC-eLinks menu and are given several full text options. Linking within a frame helps to address this.
[Note: According to Margery Tibbetts, Technical Lead for UC-eLinks, where the user ends up depends on the quality of the OpenURL and on the structure of the vendor’s full-text site. CDL is continually working with vendors to improve the linking experience for UC users.]
Q: (Continuing on the topic of being able to profile UC-eLinks for users)… It is difficult to mitigate the problem where the person wants a specific article like the ScienceDirect ones.
A: (Lena) That would be fantastic.
[Note: According to Margery, it is not possible to profile UC-eLinks for users. There isn’t any mechanism for logging in nor any way to set preferences.]
Q: My enhancements to NGM – top 3 – improved print & email (that’s 1 & 2) and the third one – a real angry faculty member w/ 300 results, only the last page is saved. You can scroll from screen to screen marking these. Is there any fix to this?
A: (Adam) It’s something that we’ve talked to OCLC about improving. A lot of library catalogs and other database only address what you’re looking at and working with on the current page. It’s a big challenge.
A: (Holly) There’s the possibility that the text can be changed (“save on this page” or something like this).
Q: Why is all that functionality available in FirstSearch WorldCat and not in WorldCat Local? You can print, email… So, why can you not do the same things in WCL that you can do in FirstSearch WorldCat?
A: (Adam) Well, it is a different platform with different goals and a different audience. If you know how to formulate your search in FirstSearch, WLC can take some of these, although this isn’t advertised. We continue working with OCLC to improve the interface… metrics indicate the needs of our users, the more we can exact changes from OCLC. It’s improving and it will take some time to get it where we want it to be.
A: (Sherry) I’d like to highlight, when they send out the 30+ pages of improvements in April, they’ll point out that they will be going in two ways — the public library and the academic library. UC has been working with them to acknowledge the academic concerns and this puts us in a better place for improvements that matter to us.
Q: Early on, I received feedback from OCLC, “WCL was intended to be an end-users database”…this answer was frustrating to me as I was trying to teach Boolean searching.
A: (Ellen) It is being aimed at end-users so one of the messages we may need to get out is that we may need to use other tools. If the tool you’re using isn’t answering the question of your patron, then you may need to go to FirstSearch WorldCat.
When I look back a WCL to where it is now, there have been so many improvements. Aleph Melvyl doesn’t make the same kind of improvements OCLC does. So, keep sending messages about what works and what doesn’t work.
Q: I’ve never really thought about using FirstSearch… can you come up with a document, explaining why and when librarians should use FirstSearch WorldCat and WCL?
A: (Leslie) Yes, that’s an excellent idea and we’ll work on this.
Q: Does SFX pick up Tier 3 or locally licensed products? Also, we purchased an ebook package from the Royal Society of Chemistry that shows up in ANTPAC, but we cannot load these into WCL?
A: (Adam) The Tier 3 is question is easy. Each campus has a UC-eLinks liaison who can turn on campus-licensed content.
Regarding ebook packages, we’re working with OCLC to improve these, and any pressure you can put on the vendors to allow OCLC access, the better. CDL is working on this too. Regarding your issue with the Royal Society of Chemistry, UCI has not completed synchronizing their records with OCLC yet, and this may be one of the cases where we’re out-of-sync.
Q: I’ve been using a lot of WCL lists, but I’m realizing that as I get more and more lists, there isn’t any way to organize this page. There needs to be some way to organize these.
A: (Ellen) There are some enhancements in lists coming in the April install so look after April 20 and let us know what you think.
Q: You mentioned Serials Solutions ERMS, will it be possible to get a spreadsheet for interlibrary loan and course reserves?
A: (Lena) To know what CDL has licensed on behalf of the 10 campuses? We’re still right in the middle of figuring out reporting issues. You should expect to see at least the same level of information as now and hopefully more.
Re-envisioning Digital Preservation: Micro-Curation and Web Archiving Services – Perry Willett, Digital Preservation Services Manager and Tracy Seneca, Web Archiving Coordinator
See Tracy’s PowerPoint presentation and Perry’s PowerPoint presentation for details.
Q: Can you talk a little about collection development?
A: Collection development planning for web archiving is sort of an emerging art/science, since it’s a new area for libraries. We supply collection planning guides and forms on the WAS website at: http://was.cdlib.org/user/training. These help each organization think about the scope of what they want to collect, and it helps CDL to see what’s just about to come down the pike.
Another aspect of collection development is sharing information across the UC campuses about what is being collected. We’ve found that curators are hesitant to start collecting sites if they think someone else may already be doing that. That’s a harder problem to solve, but one that we’re thinking about.
Q: Do you have the ability to export?
A: Not yet, but we know that the institutions are very interested in this. This important to institutions outside UC to keep their own copy on hand but also to institutions that want to anaylze their data with tools not yet available via our services.
Q: So in terms of digital objects preserved, is there a standard for say a web page for future retrieval?
A: (Tracy) Yes, there are a couple of standards involved. The Internet Archive and CDL are involved with the International Internet Preservation Consortium. This organization includes the Internet Archive, and is the source of most open source tools and standards now broadly used in web archiving. John Kunze of CDL worked with the IIPC and contributed to the ARC file format and we’re moving to the WARC (web archiving format). This is now a formal standard. This piece is very important to us. This data needs to be standardized if there’s any hope of sharing information across archives.
For example: CDL is engaged in a collaborative project to archive the entire federal government …through the change of presidents so this began last September and continues through the end of April. At that time, all of the organizations who’ve been capturing data will bring that content together into one archive; those standards allow us to do that.
Q: (Rosemary) Does NIH use the National Archive and Reference Standards? We have to archive digital reference according to this standard.
A: (Perry) I’m sure that there is a patchwork quilt of different standards in use.
[Note: Perry indicates the following information regarding submission formats (from the NIH website):
In what format must I submit my manuscript?
Users should submit the complete text of their manuscript(s) along with any corresponding image files, table files, and/or supplementary materials that were submitted to the accepting journal. NIHMS supports a wide variety of file types (MS Word, Word Perfect, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.). Just as required by journals, high-resolution images should be submitted to ensure the best reproduction quality in PubMed Central. With the exception of supplementary materials, PubMed Central will convert the submitted images into standard file types.]
Digital Special Collections; OAC Redesign; UC Image Service Update – Rosalie Lack, Director, Digital Special Collections
See Rosalie’s PowerPoint presentation for details.
Q: Flickr: The Commons – does this have something to do with Creative Commons?
A: (Rosalie) No. We’ve really been struggling with the copyright issues…. It has to be in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions.
Q: The comments coming in? Are they being recorded in Flickr and staying in Flickr?
A: It’s not for us to put the comments into records because we are the aggregator. If the institutions review them and put the comments into the objects, they can then be added back into the file loaded into OAC or Calisphere.
Q: How are you going to make the decision on which images to include in your slow feed.
A: For this first pass, we’re considering this. Thereafter, it will be up to each institution about what images to include. For example, some may want images based on a certain upcoming event like Women’s History Month.
Q: Are you going to build a referral from Flickr back into Calisphere?
A: Yes, on the Flickr record there are links to the contributing institution and to OAC or Calisphere.
Q: From the shared images, but this applies to everything, the outcome result is someone seeing something on the screen or monitor, do you provide any guide for calibrating display devices, like for color rendition? Do your or artSTOR offer any calibration in terms of color rendition?
A: (Lena) We know that artSTOR does the other side (capturing the color at the right level when scanning images). (Rosalie) Bancroft has a color scale on the end of the images. We do not provide guidelines for calibrating monitors; something to consider.
Re-envisioning (and Re-purposing) Collections: including Mass Digitization, Google, and the HathiTrust – Ivy Anderson, Director, Collection Development & Management
See Ivy’s PowerPoint presentation for details.
On Google Book settlement…
Q: Is the Public Access Service restricted to just one terminal at each library?
A: Yes, there will be a single terminal at each library that is allowed access to all of the out-of-print books.
Q: With the HathiTrust, will there be attributions to the original holding library on the digital copies?
A: Yes, there will definitely be attribution. For example, copies available in full view in HathiTrust will have a watermark identifying the source library. There are other places where attribution and “branding” will appear. Within UC, we do need to make a decision about whether attribution is at the campus level or to all of UC. There are some technical issues that affect this decision, as well as policy issues that will be referred to the University Librarians. Most likely, it will be the ‘University of California’ but we’ll see.
Q: Do you have any idea when HathiTrust will open up to other institutions to contribute?
A: As far as membership is concerned, the door is open today; HathiTrust welcomes additional library participants. The timetable for ingesting content will depend on the development queue. Right now ingesting UC books is a high priority, so other contributors would probably be behind us in the queue. Ingesting non-Google books will require additional development effort, but is definitely planned.
Q: Is the HathiTrust or UC working with Google to talk to congress about copyright issues?
A: I assume this question pertains to orphan works legislation. The settlement itself is a document that the court will approve or disapprove, so its provisions cannot be altered by Congress. However, the Settlement includes a provision allowing orphan works to be used in accordance with orphan works legislation if such legislation is adopted.
(Comment) Mary Beth Peters, head of the Copyright Office, said that not one single member of congress had asked her opinion of the settlement.
Q: Will there be a different interpretation of what copyright means as we go forward?
A: Some folks are concerned that the Settlement will create a business model around orphan works that would not have developed independently, which could undermine a fair use interpretation… There is also some risk that Congress will decide that orphan works legislation is not necessary.
Q: When Google makes a decision to scan in a new language, does this suggest that they have OCR for this language?
A: They do have OCR in multiple languages, but the OCR does not have to be in place for Google to start scanning. They are interested in scanning in as many languages as possible.
What does it all mean? – Laine Farley, Executive Director
See Laine’s PowerPoint presentation for details.
Round the table – All, Reports from the trenches, UC Digital Reference
UCLA: In addition to ongoing participation in the UC Digital Reference service (“Ask a Librarian”), UCLA Library staff are also involved at the same time in another digital public service: this past March, the Library began a pilot program called the Library Web Contact Center —a single point of contact, through the UCLA Library website, for any kind of question a UCLA user may have. (The pilot is for UCLA users only, and is operating separately from the UC Digital Reference service, but not instead of it). Renovation of the 1st floor and the “A” level in the Young Research Library is proceeding on or ahead of schedule; an ongoing photographic record appears in the University Librarian’s Blog (http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/universitylibrarian/category/yrl-renovation/). The renovation work is frequently very noisy, obviously, and many collection management issues inevitably have arisen, as well.
UCSB: We have purchased ContentDM and hired a new metadata librarian, so we’re ready to start some local digitization projects. We are hiring a web programmer and redesigning our website using Drupal. We are participating in the UC and 24/7 chat reference and so far have no major problems.
UCR: We have been leading the campuses with the number of students using the chat reference service. We attribute this to having the chat link on every page of the library website. Our collection activities have turned more toward de-selection. We’re cancelling print journals that we have in e-format. Next week, we’re celebrating National Library Week with a ribbon-cutting ceremony for our new Leisure Reading Collection, made possible by an alumni donor.
LBNL: We’re working to transform the focus of the library from physical to digital. We’ve had to give up a lot of space. We’re really focused on improving our access to electronic content. We’re re-designing our library website. We’re changing our photo archive; we’re using a tool called Canto Cumulus. Federated search…we’ve had to put that on hold for a while now too.
UCSC: We’ve just begun participating with 24/7. Previously we answered chat questions via a Meebo chat box, and questions were answered only during staffed reference desks hours. The new 24/7 qwidget replaced the Meebo box on library web pages and has resulted in a large increase in the number of chat reference questions asked and answered. The UCSC Library is undergoing a large staff reorganization which should be complete in the next few months. We’re also embarking on a large journal review project with significant cuts anticipated. The McHenry library building addition was finished and work continues on renovation of the old portion of the building. We’re using Drupal, an open source content management system, to completely redesign our library web pages. Projected launch of the new website is late summer or early fall.
UCD: Like many others, we’ve been dealing with budget issues and have been advised by campus to be cautious with hiring decisions–the library has a soft hiring freeze in place. Shields Library is participating in a campus sustainability program to reduce our energy footprint. We’ve installed motion light sensors in the stacks and better building temperature controls. UCD is celebrating its centennial anniversary. The library will participate on Picnic Day, the campus-wide open house, on April 18th.
CSL: Greetings from the acting State Librarian, Stacey Aldrich. I would have liked to bring greetings from the new State Librarian but we are waiting on the governor to announce the new State Librarian. The Library is just completing a move, the old Library and Courts I building is empty and most of the collection has been moved to West Sacramento. We hope that once the new State Librarian is in place that CDL staff can meet with that person to continue the longstanding relationship between the State Library and the California Digital Library.
UCI: We are involved in 24/7. It has been a mindset change. The volume has been very high. The librarians were getting questions from non-academic locations. The more we work with it, it more it becomes manageable. The volume is still high and we’re trying to filter by UC Qwidget users first. We’re working to implement ERMS in III system this summer. We’re in the midst of changing over our website using a Content Management System. We’ll be using the same system for Campus Housing, Registrar, Business Office, Development, and Campus Communications. The library will be driving this. The same software will exchange with the student portal. We’re trying to build widgets to deliver library information to the campus portal.
We also had a session in LAUC on collaborative tools. We’ll be able to share this from the LAUC-I website (http://lauci.lib.uci.edu/). SOPAG might be working on an inventory for librarians working on project management. The ULs might like being able to tap on campus librarians that have been trained in these skills.
UCM: UC Merced is involved providing digital reference service through 24/7. We are relying more heavily on policy pages from other institutions that are not UC. We are always picking up UC Qwidget questions since these do not roll into the 24/7 queue. We are finishing some assessment of library services by surveying our graduating students and following-up with focus groups. We are also involved in an assessment of the information literacy skills of Writing 10 students both before and after library instruction. For the fall, we are planning to implement a library introductory tour for new students, particularly focusing on Writing 1 students to engage students in the adjustment to college and to make them aware of library services, space and resources. A new business school is also on the horizon in the next 6 months to a year and additional resources are needed to support those upcoming programs.
UCB: UCB is now part of the Ask a Librarian 24/7 chat service. Our numbers have increased dramatically. We had 28 sessions the first month we joined the Ask a UC Librarian coop in July 2008. We had our highest usage month in February with over 300 hundred sessions. The increase might be related to the switch from the old viewport interface to the qwidget chat box and to extended service hours. Our experiences with dealing with higher request volume has been similar to other UC campuses that are participating in the 24/7 cooperative. User feedback is usually very positive. Someone from UC Irvine logged into the chat reference service during one of my shifts and sent the message, “Librarians rule! Have a nice day”.
UCSD: Adding a Qwidget (QuestionPoint chat widget) has really made our UC-wide chat statistics go up by 63%. We hit a high of 2,647 chat requests in February. The minus is that the Qwidget doesn’t require an email address so it is not possible to follow up if they hang up without giving us their email address. At UCSD, only 1 of our 8 scheduled chat hours is a 24/7 collaborative hour. Our chatters are only required to handle one chat at a time, but many do juggle multiple chats at once. All chat requests that roll over from 24/7 are supposed to be from the QP Academic Queue, but some of the questions seem more public library oriented. Our UCSD Arts Library is under renovation, with all their reference desks are being merged into one service desk. Our UCSD Libraries website is being redesigned, moving off Vignette to the Hannon Hill Cascade Server software.
GTU: In the first year of a 5 year strategic plan; we’re working on 4 basic ends. 1. We have redesigned our website and are adding content. 2. Bringing in federating searching and beefing up some of the features of III. 3. Beefing up our special collections area and getting our resources digitized so we can put them online. 4. Becoming the on-campus hub for e-learning. We are the place on campus managing the learning management, Moodle.
Getty: The Getty Research Institute has submitted approximately 600 images to Calisphere for a test batch in June. We received one of the CLIR hidden collection grants, and have begun creating new workflows to get minimum level finding aids up. These finding aids are constructed in Archivists’ Toolkit and mostly consist of a box list and description. We’ve come up on both DigiTool and MetaLib, and as part of our new website design there will be a MetaLib search box on every page. We’re still involved in mass digitization of books and journals with Internet Archive. The digitization is happening both at the Southern Regional Library Facility at UCLA and on the Scribe station that we have in-house. To date the Internet Archive has digitized approximately 1.6 million pages from the GRI collection, and we attempting to conform to the Registry of Digital Masters in our cataloging of the digital objects. We’re in the process of getting about 67 images up on Flickr Commons (19th century Algerian images), and hope to have those publically available in May when a related exhibit opens. We are increasingly using Confluence as part of our regular work and it is the primary tool for organizing a major Los Angeles-wide exhibit which is being managed at the Getty. We are talking with the people from ArtStor about further digitization of our major photographic collections relating to Southern California architecture, and about getting those images into ArtStor.
UCSF: I’m on the staff reference SIG…we’re going to start shadowing this next week. We’ll be observing to see what it is really like. We’re about to roll out deep web as a federated search. We just revised out website. Collaborative learning site (Web CT), we’re migrating to Moodle. One of the reasons we did this was to better collaborate across the UCSF campus. Additionally, I’m the statewide LAUC rep to the Scholarly Communication…
CAS: We’ve re-opened and we’ve had lots of visitors. We have a new digital lab and we’re in the process of migrating 18,000 images from Canto Cumulus into Luna. We re-did our website but now the whole research division is creating a web portal. My colleagues are concerned that they are not represented in WorldCat Local.