These short “
pecha kucha-like” sessions will feature 5 PowerPoint presentations of 6 minutes and 40 seconds each. We will have time at the end of the session intended for Q&A for all presenters. Come for a lively, rapid-fire group of talks.
1. Setting our "sites" on a tiered collection: One major health care system's rapid expansion (Laura Schimming)
Institutional mergers and affiliation changes occur rapidly, especially in health care, and librarians should be equipped to respond to these changes in library collections, user populations, and budgets. When Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai combined with a health network of four large teaching hospitals in 2014, Mount Sinai's Levy Library was suddenly charged with providing library access for four new hospital sites, including a huge increase in the number of faculty, nurses, and resident physicians.
This presentation will discuss institutional affiliation changes from the library's perspective, including the Levy Library's process of building library access for a greatly expanded user base and additional hospital sites "from the ground up." This project included efforts to extend existing library subscriptions to additional sites, remove duplicate spending, negotiate with vendors to leverage current spend levels, manage 5 different budgets, and communicate with stakeholders. This presentation will also examine the library's ultimate decision to create a two-tiered library collection, including one tier for academic users and one for hospital users.
2.
The Stratigraphy of Subject Liaison Work: Using Data Visualization as the Bedrock for Faculty-informed Collection Development (Stephanie Hess)
As subject liaisons, we frequently gather input from faculty members in our assigned departments to help inform collection development decisions. Faculty expertise paired with the cost data and usage statistics harvested by librarians offers us a better overall picture of the true value and impact of a particular journal title or database when managing our print and digital subscriptions. However, engaging faculty members in such conversations can be quite challenging.
Data visualization can help drum up dialogues about collections, particularly in disciplines which rely heavily on modelling. For example, upon inheriting the environmental studies, geology, and map subjects at Binghamton University, I received a lengthy Excel spreadsheet of journals ranked by the faculty that included pricing, fund codes, and usage statistics from 2003-2008. After adding missing years of data, I uploaded the revised file to our electronic resource management system which acts as the central repository for recording commentary by librarians and faculty.
This approach created a rich, multi-layered data deposit, ready to be excavated in order to build interactive models to share with geology faculty when discussing collections decisions. Ideally, presenting data in more exciting formats will help facilitate the annual review of library resources purchased with geology funds and assist with budget justifications as necessary. Possessing a limited science background, I hope to garner new faculty input so as to better assess and expand our extant geology collection, thereby ensuring that the Binghamton University Libraries continues to meet the ongoing research needs of its geology faculty and students.
3
. Create Impact with Data Visualization (Kathleen Bauer)
Making an effective argument about the library collection and its use is key to winning backing for the collection budget, but it can difficult to attract and hold people's interest when giving them a lot of information about a collection. This challenge is complicated by the complex, large amount of data that are used to describe the collection and its use. Data that need to be communicated include pricing, size, rate of growth, and use. These data need to be further explored by subject and format. Conveying this information can require many dense tables of data, which most people do not have the desire or time to read and digest. Charts can also be used, but traditional charts are static and do not allow the user to select data to explore in depth. People are more interested when data are presented in attractive ways that are meaningful to them. Used well, data visualization is a great tool that can make it possible to present complex data in a concise and understandable manner. Tableau, a web-based data visualization software, can be used to create a small number of charts with high impact that bring together many types of data. Because charts created in Tableau are web-based and interactive, they can be designed to give a single, high-level view of data, while also letting the individual viewer select more granular, detailed views. This talk will show Tableau charts used by one academic library to successfully argue for budget increases.
4.
Designing Adaptable Tools for In-House User Studies (Alison Bradley, Rachael Winterling)
This session will provide a brief update on the work of the Charlotte Initiative's User Experience research team, comprised of 15 members representing 11 institutions, who are researching the ways libraries and publishers evaluate user experience with eBook collections in academic libraries. During summer 2016, the group is designing user studies and focus groups to conduct in-person assessments of user experience with eBooks in academic library settings. After testing the materials at multiple institutions, the group hopes to openly share replicable materials like task lists and question prompts that will allow individuals at other institutions to develop their own customized studies. The goal of this project is to develop a toolkit that institutions can utilize to conduct assessments of eBook platforms with a multitude of user groups.The session will provide updates on the first round of user tests, and give advice on collaborating across institutions as well as on designing and adapting appropriate criteria for user studies in-house. A complete update on the results of the project will be provided at an open conference in Charlotte in Spring 2017, and the toolkit will be made publicly available at that time as well.
5) Adding and Slashing Serials (Zeb Evelhoch)
This presentation will be two-fold and discuss how during a time of stagnating budgets and raising journal costs, Central Washington University Brooks Library evaluated and added popular print magazines and worked with faculty to eliminate redundant and low use journals. The process of identifying the need, researching, evaluating and gaining student input for popular magazines to be added to a recently opened coffee shop will be the first topic covered. Secondly, this presentation will cover how the library identified journal titles received in multiple formats and low use/high cost titles, then worked with faculty to change access models to realize a net savings. Participants can gain insight on how to identify low use and repetitive titles as well as how to gain feedback from students for creating a popular magazine collection and work with faculty on access changes.
