2014 Users Council Meeting

Presentations and Q and A from the April 17, 2014 Users Council Meeting are available below.

Presentations covered such interesting topics as Reflections on Library Utopia; Why Data Matters; eScholarship and the UC Open Access Policy Implementation Project; and much more.

Thursday, April 17, 2014 — 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; Penny Coppernoll-Blach, SD; Sara Davidson Squibb, M; Jayne Dickson, CDL; Jennifer Dorner, B; Holly Eggleston, CDL; Laine Farley, CDL; Joel Hagedorn, CDL; Ann Hubble, SC; Cynthia Johnson, I; Rosalie Lack, CDL; Patricia Martin, CDL; Ellen Meltzer, CDL; Michele Mizejewski, SF; Michael Oppenheim, LA; Katrina Romanowsky, CDL; Charlotte Rubens, CDL; Kathryn Stine, CDL; Carly Strasser, CDL; Lena Zentall, CDL.

All material is password protected.

9:30 – 9:35

Welcome & Introductions – Ellen Meltzer, Manager, Information Services

9:35 – 10:05

Reflections on Library Utopia – Laine Farley, Executive Director, and Ellen Meltzer

10:05 – 10:50

Why Data Matters – Carly Strasser, Data Curation Project Manager

Questions/Comments:

Cynthia Johnson, Irvine (CJ, I): So for the free tools, are there ways to play in them and can we talk to you about them?

Carly Strasser, CDL (CS, CDL): Yes and yes. We encourage you to do this. Talk to me and I can refer you to other people/tools, if appropriate.

CJ, I: A lot of these tools are very science-specific, how do you see these being used for Arts & Humanities?

CS, CDL: UC3 in general is interested in supporting all groups. Data is anything digital that you are using—that’s what we’re talking about. DataShare looks scientific right now because it was created with UCSF, but we’re working on refining the interface to incorporate different types of research. The DASH system will be generalizable for anyone who needs storage.

Laine Farley, CDL (LF, CDL): We had a research agenda (Digital Humanities) for our planning retreat. We’re working with UCB and we’re on the verge of developing a plan to go forward. For example, consider text mining via HathiTrust… There are some other things we’re trying to put together like reconsidering the language – perhaps, digital scholarship rather than data. If any of the campuses have any experience with this, we’d love to hear about this.

CJ, I: I have people at Irvine that might be helpful.

LF, CDL: At CDL, Barbara Hui (eScholarship) is working on this. Send contact information to me and I’ll forward this on to the right people.

Ivy Anderson, CDL (IA, CDL): You talked about reproducibility—a lot of research appears not to be very reproducible. How much of this is because the data is not available. Also, with more funders expecting the datasets will be available via open access, how do researchers feel about this?

CS, CDL: I think about reproducibility a lot and the upside is fewer retractions and more accountability. Workflow systems are becoming more popular. For many researchers, if you have the data and the workflow, you’re covered. But we’re a long way from perfecting this. However, it’s still very difficult to have experiments reproduced accurately.

Some researchers are really scared. Recently, PLoS published their new data policy and researchers really reacted. There was a lot of hoopla. Some researchers felt that PLoS was not going to tell them what data they would have to make publicly available. And also, some researchers felt that they don’t want someone proving them wrong.

The other side of data sharing is re-use. How do we combine datasets (work that’s already been done) for new research? How do we make the most of this?

11:00 – 11:30

eScholarship and the UC Open Access Policy Implementation Project – Katrina Romanowsky, Access & Publishing Community & Outreach Manager

Questions/Comments:

Charlotte Rubens, NRLF (CR, NRLF): Any thoughts being given for putting dissertations out?

LF, CDL: Actually, some campuses only have dissertations in dark archives and some have made their dissertations openly available in eScholarship. Currently, we store dissertations for all campuses except Davis.

Christina Cicchetti, Riverside (CC, R): Following up on this — recently, a student wanted a copy of her dissertation, but it seems she put a 5 year embargo on it and did not realize that this meant the dissertation would not be available. What can campuses do to provide students with accurate information about dissertation options?

LF, CDL: I was talking to Perry Willet-—he works on the Merritt-side (dissertations are saved first in Merritt and then in eScholarship), and he mentioned that embargoes are the biggest problem CDL sees. We don’t know what information students are given. We can provide lots of information but how this gets transmitted to students…

Ellen Meltzer, CDL (EM, CDL): We now have Katie Fortney on staff – she’s got an MLIS and a JD — and she’d be glad to talk with campus people about what embargoing a dissertation really means. Katie works in the Access & Publishing group; she’s an available resource.

CR, NRLF: At Berkeley, this is a big problem. The form for filing a dissertation had a 5 year embargo as a default. You need to work with the graduate commission on the campuses. Many universities don’t allow the embargoing of dissertations at all.

IA, CDL: It’s complicated too because some societies are counseling students to embargo their dissertations.

11:30 – 12:00

UC Libraries Digital Collection Project Update – Sherri Berger, Product Manager, California Digital Library

Questions/Comments:

CJ, I: What are wireframes?

Sherri Berger, CDL (SB, CDL): Wireframes are the representation of where elements are on the screen. It’s the user experience component of the design.

Sara Davidson Squibb, Merced (SDS, M): Are you thinking that people will come in through the objects, not the interface…?

SB, CDL: We did a project a year ago that grouped objects… but the reverse is not really available. With respect to digital objects, we’re experimenting with different widgets etc. where users can discover ‘like content’.

Ann Hubble, Santa Cruz (AH, SC): Is there some kind of local or collective branding?

SB, CDL: Attribution – one of the things that is tricky is communicating to users ‘if you’re interesting in a specific item, you must contact the contributing institution’. Branding will mostly come into play for libraries and institutions. Each library will have a landing page and then users will be able to see other objects/collections at that library.

Michele Mizejewski, San Francisco (MM, SF): You’re saying this will subsume Calisphere — what about the audience?

SB, CDL: The target audience, when Calisphere was launched, was K-12 teachers. By targeting K-12 teachers, the hope was that this would make the content understandable by most people. K-12 teachers, comprise 10-12% use of Caliphere, but undergrad students are huge users of Calisphere. It will continue serving the same audience. There will be less emphasis on teachers in the new version.

12:30 – 1:15

Transforming Collections – Ivy Anderson, Director, Collection Development & Management

Questions/Comments:

SDS, M: Knowledge Unlatched — is CDL funding this for all campuses?

IA, CDL: It’s just 28 books right now; we funded this to get this to help get this project started.

CJ, I: Can you elaborate on Knowledge Unlatched?

IA, CDL: It was started in the UK — the creator had a long involvement in open access. In supporting open access publishing, she works with university presses… Basically, if enough institutions agreed to fund the publishing of university press titles already in the pipeline and if a certain funding level is reached, the publisher makes the book open access. Many publishers are grappling with the funding of open access books.

1:15 – 1:45

HathiTrust Update – Heather Christenson, Manager, Digital Content Development & Strategy

Questions/Comments:

Regarding HathiTrust Research Center — tools for scholars and the UnCamp”…

LF, CDL: They had to create a baseline of tools to be used; they had to get permissions for scholars…. They are trying to figure out how to convey what they have, what it’s good for, etc.

SDS, M: Is the camp open to everyone?

Heather Christenson (HC, CDL): This camp was open to anyone. They’ve had two now. Last year, it was open but it wasn’t widely publicized.

Jennifer Dorner, Berkeley (JD, B): I’m a heavy user of HathiTrust because of my discipline… often the books in HathiTrust have pages or images missing. How do we get those fixed? How can we guarantee the quality of the books in HathiTrust?

IA, CDL: Internally, within CDL, we have projects but they do not scale – if it is a UC book, can we fix it? In Europe, they can often scan a replacement page and insert it. But at the larger HathiTrust level, the issue is 11 million books and how do you scale this? HathiTrust is considering quality metrics. There are Google metrics available but they reflect the scanning process. We’re hoping to bring this to the steering committee, to find a scalable way to fix this. It’s a problem of scale and distribution.

2:00 – 2:30

Discovery & Delivery Services – Kathryn Stine, Metadata Analyst Discovery & Delivery; Lena Zentall, Project Manager

Questions/Comments:

CJ, I: The Advanced Search screen and the placement of the databases… I think OCLC should consider moving the databases to the bottom of the screen.

Lena Zentall (LZ, CDL): Right now, everyone should see the same results because the databases being searched are the same. You can provide your feedback to OCLC (especially during the beta period starting on April 30, 2014) using the “Tell Us What You Think” link on the bottom of every page of WorldCat Local.

CC, R: UC-eLinks works really well for articles. But for book chapters, and the like, I don’t find them very consistent.

EM, CDL: One of the issues is how things are cataloged – monograph or serials. So, it can depend on how things were cataloged. UC-eLinks can only locate content based on the metadata.

JD, B: We discussed this earlier this week — people don’t understand that you can’t request an ebook.

Patricia Martin, CDL (PM, CDL): That’s good to know. I was just at a workflow analysis at UCD where it’s fairly far down the line when one determines if a book is an ebook or not.

2:30 – 3:00

Wrap up – All