Linkspam! I won’t even attempt to arrange these into some kind of thematic grouping this time, just throw them all at you:

Perhaps of particular relevance right now, Running the Library Race “draws a parallel between fatigued runners and overworked librarians, proposing that libraries need to pace work more effectively to avoid burnout. Through an exploration of cognitive science, organizational psychology, and practical examples, guest author Erica Jesonis offers considerations for improving productivity and reducing stress within our fast-paced library culture”.

LIANZA 2012 was held this week and the conference proceedings are now online.

Aaron Tay rounds up 6 presentations/posts on librarianship that impressed me.

Elyssa Kroski has put together a list of 100+ law librarians on Twitter.

Jessica Olin writes about how she handles reference on chat – including a question on “Who would win in a fight? A bear or a tiger?” – in Chat reference is a weird beastie.

Meredith Farkas writes on Living our values, pulling together thoughts on a variety of events in the general “ownership vs [increasingly-expensive-]access” debate.

Speaking of which, I’ve particularly been following the saga since Jenica Rogers from SUNY Potsdam posted about her library’s decision to cancel subscriptions to ACS journals – not an easy decision for either the library or the faculty, but she’s been communicating transparently with the faculty about all the issues for some years so has been getting their full support both on the decision and on the backlash from ACS against the attention and support her post has been getting from librarians and chemists alike – ChemBark (with all the comments) has a good summary of a large part of it from a chemist’s point of view, as does Walt Crawford from a librarian-ly point of view; and Catherine Pellegrino focuses on how other libraries and chemistry departments should step forward and stand with SUNY Potsdam on this.

So this will be my last post to Counterculture… Thank you to everyone for not just tolerating but encouraging all my linkspamming – it’s been great having an outlet for my urges to share the shiny. 🙂 I’ll probably keep blogging on my personal blog though no idea yet how regularly – in any case I’m easily googleable and I know all your email addresses so no excuse for not keeping in touch. 🙂

Deborah

Sara, Margaret and I have done some number crunching of about 540 AskLive transcripts from Sept-Dec 2011 and wanted to share a bit of the data we got before getting distracted by other concerns…

When people contact us
Monday to Friday were the busiest days of the week, but we still got almost 13% of the week’s traffic in the weekend (about evenly divided between the two days). Of the weekdays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays were the busiest (over 20% each day) and Friday the quietest (13%).

The busiest times of day were from 9am – 5pm, especially 11am – 2pm. Between 5-6 was generally quiet, followed by a spike from 6-7pm slightly above the number of queries from 12noon – 1pm. But we got queries at all hours (including, if a glitch meant we didn’t log off overnight, the occasional one at 3am).

Where people contact us from
We looked at IP addresses for this and for various reasons this data isn’t perfect, but it does give a good indication.

44% of queries came from on campus – two thirds of these were from university computers, and one third from the wireless network (laptops etc).

47% of the remaining queries came from within New Zealand – of this number, 64% within Christchurch; 21% from Auckland, 5% from Wellington, 6% from various other towns, and 3% we couldn’t identify which area of New Zealand.

4% were queries from overseas.

5% we couldn’t identify the source at all.

How much they appreciate the service
This was very much a work in process but of the 198 transcripts coded, 172 conversations included some form of ‘thank you’ from the user for a total of 338 times – often including multiple exclamation marks and smiley faces. 🙂

Deborah

Usually LibraryH3lp have fixed any of their server problems before we wake up in the morning but today’s bug seems to be a bit more stubborn than usual. From their Twitter account:

(3 hours ago) Still looking into main US server issues. Chats are slow and messages are being dropped.

(2 hours ago) Quick update. First, VERY sorry to all for the trouble. We beg your patience as we continue to work on the problem. No ETA on fix yet. Until things are back to normal, consider logging out to bring your service offline, as messages are getting dropped during chats.

Staying logged out means users get prompted to contact us by other means, rather than sending us a message which we mightn’t receive and then wondering why we’re not answering.

I’ll keep an eye on their Twitter feed and post an update when things look solved.

ETA: AskLive should be working again now, so feel free to log in again!

Daughter of ETA: LibraryH3lp have posted an apology and explanation for the downtime and how they’ve improved the infrastructure as a result.

Deborah

Acquisitions and budgets
2012 Study of Subscription Prices for Scholarly Society Journals (pdf) is out from Allen Press. “[T]he average increase in 2012 dropped, more than a full percentage point below the average, to less than 6%.” (The Consumer Price Index, according to the same figure, was less than 4%.) Much more detail, analysis and discussion is at the source (pdf).

The Librarian in Black writes I’m breaking up with eBooks (and you can too) on the poor deal that current models of ebook provision are for libraries and, by extension, our customers.

Impact factors
Nixon, J.M. (2012). Core Journals in Library and Information Science: Developing a Methodology for Ranking LIS Journals. C&RL. Advance online publication.
–Outlines a methodology and resulting list of three tiers into which they’ve divided LIS journals according to “influence”. Uses a mix of expert opinions, impact factors, circulation rate, and acceptance rate and, unsurprisingly, comes up with a similar list as those derived from expert opinions or from impact factors.

Probably a good measure of influence; it doesn’t claim that quality follows. Which is good because Sick of Impact Factors which concludes that “if you use impact factors you are statistically illiterate” and has been so widely retweeted and commented on that the author has posted a followup summarising the long comment thread in sections: useful links; concerns about metrics; alternative metrics; and actions to take.

Marketing
Alison Wallbutton in #brandlibraries ponders what branding is, how libraries are branded, and whether we want to reposition that branding. She argues that libraries are successfully branded – as “books”; it’s in the very word. But of course (segue to my own thoughts) we as librarians get twitchy about wanting to make sure that users know we’re not just books, so we reject that outright – often without having put any thought into what we’re going to replace that branding with. Which leaves us in a position where we can’t effectively promote ourselves because we don’t have any image to put out there.

Just for fun
Library Shenanigans reports on The Stapler Obituaries – a mini-exhibition of dead staplers at an academic library.

Deborah

eBooks
In the Library With the Lead Pipe publishes a provocative and persuasive essay on the eBook Cargo Cult, beginning

“Libraries created the present crisis in scholarly publishing, and we are creating a similar crisis now with our approach to ebooks.”

A brief history of how libraries have handled (or given outsiders power over us by paying them to handle) the indexing of serials and how we’re doing the same with ebooks is followed by an overview of alternative models for ebook management – several great ones I’m familiar with including Unglue.It and Library License, and several more that are new to me.

Ellyssa Kroski has gathered her three posts on How To Compare e-Book Platforms (points to consider include technical requirements; content; functionality; and sales/pricing model) along with her presentation providing a background to these criteria.

Leadership
Two very insightful posts: the Librarian in Black posts 7 Lessons Learned While Being The Man; the Free Range Librarian responds with her own perspective in I am The Man — and you can, too!

Change
Jenica (Attempting Elegance) posts an 8-part blog version of her presentation on Killing Fear:

• part 1
• part 2
• part 3
• part 4
• part 5
• part 6
• part 7
• part 8

[ETA: This review of I Moved Your Cheese makes some good points about going beyond just adapting to/letting go of change.]

Deborah

I’m weeding old images from our webspace – about half of the images there aren’t actually used on any webpages. So far I think I’ve only removed one image that it turned out was actually kind of important for Camelot, and I’ve put that back now, but please email me or phone x7147 if you notice a page looking unusually bare. 🙂

Deborah

This quote from a recent tweet is a massive exaggeration, but if you’ve noticed problems with LibraryH3lp, or LibGuides, or other external websites, it may be because of what’s being dubbed AWSpocalypse – issues with Amazon Web Services (official status page).

A lot of sites, especially smaller startup companies, use storage space on Amazon’s servers for images, stylesheets, and other small files on their webpages. This cuts down their costs and is generally more efficient and robust than the smaller companies could manage themselves – but when it does fall down it has effects on a large number of sites all at once.

Of course being a big service, they’ll have all the expensive employees working to fix it quickly, so hopefully everything will be back to normal pretty soon. 🙂

Deborah

Some quick stats first: the Website Weeding project is to date about halfway through. Of around 998 pages on the library website, over 300 pages have been edited or kept as-is and over 200 pages have been deleted. Of around 663 images scattered in various folders, 117 have been kept, 140 deleted, and the remainder still to be checked. A big thank you to everyone who’s helped or is still working on parts of the site.

The homepage is basically excluded from the project – a proper review would be a separate project involving usability testing – but coming out of this work are a couple of tweaks we’d like to make. eServices have kindly mocked up a demo page. In summary:

• Exam papers are moved up under Resources so they’re more easily visible
• Journals are removed from under Resources so as not to strike the eye of students looking for journal articles; the link is however still in the How Do I Find menu.
• The current Reference page is removed and replaced with a How Do I Find page – this has essentially the same content as the dropdown menu but may be more accessible for some users. Note that most of the links from the Reference page are to content that is more easily found by a websearch; the remainder is either listed under How Do I Find or is more relevant to specific subject guides.
• the How Do I Find dropdown menu has shifted left to be more prominent.

Please comment or email me with any feedback.

Deborah

Lending eBooks
Colorado’s Douglas County Libraries has come up with a model whereby they buy, host, and manage the lending of ebooks (including DRM), rather than subscribe to publishers’ platforms. See more details on the model and a letter to publishers about how it works.

Here’s a cute way of reminding users of the value of libraries when they check out print books. It would be interesting to think of ways to make this work with e-resources…

Web design
See a demo of One-Pager, a free template for library websites designed and user-tested to make it easy to find the most important information – and to be immediately mobile-friendly and accessible. You can read more or download the code here.

Bibliographic software
Beyond Bibliographies: Collaborating with Citation Software (powerpoint) is a poster comparing Endnote, RefWorks, Zotero, and Mendeley.

Open Access
Some keen-eyed librarians noticed that the previously open-access Reference and User Services Quarterly was suddenly open-access no longer; the Library Loon investigated and reported back. Apparently in future articles will be embargoed for a year, although as at writing older articles aren’t available yet either.

(This reminds me that I keep meaning to find out whether The New Zealand Library And Information Management Journal is intended to be open access or if it’s just openly accessible by default, so to speak. In any case they’re there at the moment – as are all the LIANZA conference papers from 2004.)

The Library Loon also has a fantastic discussion about how to recognise scammy “open access” publishers.

SCORE Library Survey Report “aimed to get a national [UK] perspective on institutional engagement in Open Educational Resources through their librarians”.

Deborah

Customer service
UConn Discovers What Students Want From Their Library – too complex for a pull quote, follow the link for a summary.

Two solutions for increasing the usability of that blasted Article Linker page:

• simple and sweet
• more complex and risky (if you’re not a code geek, skip the discussion/coding examples and just scroll to the bottom for the “after” screenshot)

Open Access
JQ at the University of Oregon writes about High-impact open access journals and includes some invaluable tables of OA journals ranked by SJR, SciMago, and Eigenfactor impact factors. These (sorted by subject) could be useful for promoting OA to departments and to students graduating from university who still want to keep up with research.

Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking looks at OA journals in the library science field:
This research uses the h-index to rank the quality of library and information science journals between 2004 and 2008. Selected open access (OA) journals are included in the ranking to assess current OA development in support of scholarly communication. It is found that OA journals have gained momentum supporting high-quality research and publication, and some OA journals have been ranked as high as the best traditional print journals. The findings will help convince scholars to make more contributions to OA journal publications, and also encourage librarians and information professionals to make continuous efforts for library publishing.

Data curation
Demystifying the data interview: Developing a foundation for reference librarians to talk with researchers about their data
As libraries become more involved in curating research data, reference librarians will need to be trained in conducting data interviews with researchers to better understand their data and associated needs. This article seeks to identify and provide definitions for the basic terms and concepts of data curation for librarians to properly frame and carry out a data interview using the Data Curation Profiles (DCP) Toolkit.

Subscription statistics
Subscriptions in Context (powerpoint) is a clear and elegant presentation for University of Central Oklahoma library faculty liaisons on all the factors the Serials department considers when evaluating subscriptions.

Just for fun
A Library Society of the World thread began, “Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to find he had been transformed into a monstrous librarian” and went on from there.