New at the 2016 Conference! These presentations are each 10 minutes in length, and will be timed by a moderator. We schedule 5 presentations back-to-back during a 60 minute time slot with time for questions and answers at the end.
1. Time to Take New Measures: Developing a Cost-Per-Cited-Reference Metric for the Assessment of E-Journal Collections (Virginia Martin, Megan Kilb, Tessa Minchew)
The current primary quantitative measure of e-journal subscription return-on-investment (ROI) is cost-per-use (CPU). While CPU is widely used, it also widely criticized, and should not be relied on to the exclusion of other factors when assessing ROI. Because CPU is an imperfect measure, the presenters developed a new, complementary metric for evaluating e-journal subscription ROI: cost-per-cited reference (CPCR). CPCR assigns a dollar value to each citation of a particular journal by authors affiliated with the subscribing institution during a specified time period. By focusing on the content that researchers cite in their scholarly output, a CPCR metric assists in measuring the value of journal subscriptions to researchers and the institutions that support them. This presentation will give a very high level overview of a collaborative project, conducted by librarians in the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN), to develop a local CPCR metric and to apply that metric to the evaluation of a consortial Big Deal.Presenters will explain CPCR, how they calculated and applied it to a particular shared Big Deal, and where they would like to take it in future.
2. Scholarly Needs for Text Analysis Resources: A User Assessment Study for the HathiTrust Research Center (Harriet Green, Angela Courtney)
Scholars across the academy are increasingly interested in using the wealth of available digital textual resources to integrate computational text analysis into their research. In this presentation, we will report on a study that the Scholarly Commons group of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) has undertaken to assess the needs of such scholars. The HTRC aims to facilitate the work of researchers who wish to study the contents of the massive HathiTrust Digital Library by providing tools and services for computational, non-consumptive text analysis. For this user requirements study, we interviewed faculty, graduate students, and academic support staff from primarily humanities disciplines about their research practices, desired resource needs for textual analysis research, and envisioned future work with text analysis in research and teaching. Through in-depth qualitative content analysis of the interviews, we have identified four primary areas with which the interviewees reported needing support: data acquisition and management, managing results, research collaborations, and teaching and training. During this lightning talk, we will discuss how our study is informing development at the HTRC, and how the results can be generalized to other initiatives for developing text analysis tools and interfaces. We will also discuss future directions for the study, including plans for a second phase of the study to encompass researchers from the social sciences and sciences.
3. Research Center as Distant Publisher: Publishing Non-Consumptive Compliant Open Data Worksets to Support New Modes of Inquiry (Robert McDonald)
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), founded in 2010, is managed by Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under an agreement with the HathiTrust Board of Governors and the University of Michigan. The HTRC mission supports new knowledge creation through novel computational uses of the Hathitrust Digital Library (HTDL). Through the introduction of the concept of distant publishing, this presentation will discuss ideas for data and software publication that support the HTRC non-consumptive research methodologies and offer scholars new methods for research inquiry. The type of data publishing discussed in this session will have larger impacts for textual data mining in libraries and for new modes of scholarly communication dissemination.
4. Let the good times roll: A new model publishing contract for long-form digital scholarship (Lisa Macklin, Melanie Kowalski)
Book contracts are an important component of the infrastructure of scholarly communication, and yet they have remained relatively unchanged over the decades. With the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, Emory University and the University of Michigan are working with stakeholders to draft a model publishing contract and relevant addenda optimized for the publication of long-form digital scholarship. The model publishing contract will be made openly available for use by any interested parties, including authors, university presses, academic publishers, and digital scholarship centers. In this working session, we will discuss the goals of the project, share a draft of the developing contract documents, and seek feedback from Charleston Conference attendees on the draft agreement and addenda. Attendees will have the opportunity to shape the future of a particular kind of publication agreement many of us depend on but few are satisfied with, and facilitators will receive valuable feedback from those we hope will eventually seek to adopt this agreement.
5. Acquiring Born-Digital Items: Single PDFs (Peter Rolla)
The acquisition and management of born-digital resources has proved challenging, as these items often cannot be purchased or acquired as part of our regular workflow. This presentation will look specifically at acquiring single PDFs, from both acquisitions and collections management perspectives, considering the workflow and preservation implications of these resources. Buying a single PDF of a textual work is not our first choice when acquiring resources, but often for non-mainstream items this is the only format in which a title is available. Many of these titles have high research value for our faculty members or are needed as part of one of our core collections of distinction (Marine Sciences, Melanesian Studies, modern poetry).This presentation will discuss the issues surrounding the acquisition of individual PDFs, including working with non-traditional vendors; reproduction rights issues; long-term storage; and access. The UC San Diego Library’s solution to these issues is to ingest individual PDFs in our Digital Collections library, and the presentation will discuss the pros and cons of this decision as well as the workflows implications. Audience participation will also be welcome, and in the Q&A audience members will be asked to share their challenges and solutions to acquiring and making available PDFs and other born-digital items.
