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Recent Activity
- “Libraries should get specific in our promotions”
I started reading this article for the usability testing content but ended up loving it because of this little marketing nugget of information.
BGSU students were most successful navigating the library’s database web pages when they were looking for the names of specific resources, not when they were browsing by subject. Therefore, if we want students to use a wider range of our resources, it is crucial that we teach them to recognize the resources that will be useful for them. … One way to do this might be to connect lesser-known databases to the most popular ones (for example, Project MUSE and JSTOR, Factiva and LexisNexis, or the ISI Web of Science and EBSCO) in instruction sessions, campus communications, and web guides. Ideally, students familiar with one resource would be able to link the two databases in their minds and remember or recognize both at their point of need.
Fry, Amy, and Linda Rich. 2011. Usability testing for e-resource discovery: How students find and choose e-resources using library websites. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 37, no.5: 386-401.
~1 month on
Organization Monkey - a quick note on giving and receiving thanks
i recently asked the participants in our collaborative marketing project to e-mail me to let me know which e-resource they are planning to market. in many of the e-mails they included notes of thanks for creating the project. it happened enough that it made me kind of teary. (tears in the office! scandal!) i don’t know why it made me so emotional exactly, but i really appreciated seeing those notes.
it’s a good reminder that a simple word of appreciation can really make someone’s day.
~1 month on
Organization Monkey - trust in e-resources
lately i’ve been thinking a lot about trust related to e-resources, and that whether an e-resource “just works” or “is broken” affects our patrons’ perceptions of the library. we know from e-commerce that if a buyer has a poor experience with an online user interface she is likely not to shop on that site again. that concept should easily translate to how a patron interacts with a library website — if it doesn’t work the way she expects, she’ll find her information somewhere else.
ask any librarian if this is acceptable and they’d say, “no,” but it happens all the time. look at the proquest rollout of their new platform. we saw it demonstrated in april of 2010, migrated to the new platform in december of that year, and then promptly migrated back to the old platform when our patrons reported major problems with it. it’s almost a year later and bugs are still being reported. how is this acceptable to any library?
i didn’t expect that the role of an e-resource librarian would be about advocacy but i’m finding more and more of my job is pointing out (mostly politely) to resource providers when their interfaces stink, are not ADA-compliant*, or have errors in the data we get from them. this is an increasing part of my job because the data streams we get from third parties is growing — we now have at least five different ways to get e-book content into our system, for example. if one of those streams goes wonky (technical term) i’d like to find it and report it to our content providers before our patrons do, but i’m only one person and can’t manage that kind of control on all of our data streams. the effect of this is that our patrons find the problems first, and that breaks their trust with us. i don’t want that, and i don’t think any librarian finds it acceptable, but that’s where we are now. until our data providers know that data integrity is critical it won’t be their priority.
and then i saw this, which drives my point home but also made me chuckle:
(screen capture from http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/)
* if you are an e-resources librarian and care about ADA compliance in the resources that your library licenses on behalf of its patrons, consider suggesting the addition of the following clause to the licenses you negotiate:
Compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act. Licensor shall comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), by supporting assistive software or devices such as large print interfaces, voice-activated input, and alternate keyboard or pointer interfaces in a manner consistent with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative, which may be found at http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/#Publications.~1 month on
Organization Monkey - book status: nearing completion
in june i started writing a book with cheryl laguardia, a how-to manual for marketing electronic resources in libraries. it’s not done yet, there’s still writing to do, but today is the first day i printed it out. i’ve worked exclusively on the computer so far and wanted to see what it felt like to actually hold all those words in my hands. it felt pretty good.
2 months on
Organization Monkey - Alternate kinds of “use” of electronic journal articles
Libraries typically use the COUNTER standard to count the “use” of e-content, but we know there are other ways to describe a use. This comic shows three alternatives.
3 months on
Organization Monkey - College Students, Libraries, Technology, Crunch Time: The Latest PIL Report
what a rich study this is! i’m still digesting it myself. i’m pasting below a quote that is leading me to wonder about services the library can provide while the students stay put in the library to study.
Head, Alison J., and Michael B. Eisenberg. 2011. “Balancing Act: How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library during Crunch Time.” Project Information Literacy Research Report. Accessed October 12, 2011 http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_techstudy_Fall2011_noappendices1.1.pdf.
found via cheryl’s blog: http://blog.libraryjournal.com/eviews/2011/10/13/college-students-libraries-technology-crunch-time-the-latest-pil-report/
“Moreover, students told us they stayed online and in close proximity to their work. They did not get up from their seats, ask for help from a librarian, or use most library resources; indeed their most valuable devices run the risk of being stolen if left unattended. Nor do they leave their online worlds, where their most alluring self-incentives are” (p.48).
3 months on
Organization Monkey - ooh, batchgeo
if you have a spreadsheet with geographic data in it and you want to make a map, quick-like, check out batchgeo.com. you copy your spreadsheet and paste it into the browser, choose a few options, and then BAM, map. the resulting map is presented as a URL or can be embedded. here’s the direct link of a map of the participants in my collaborative marketing for e-resources project (http://batchgeo.com/map/4e91627efa6e1eec2fd8c7fcd683527b) and embedded here in this blog post is the interactive version.
shout out to @kaijsa for suggesting batchgeo to me!
View Project participant locations in a full screen map
3 months on
Organization Monkey - the collaborative marketing for e-resources project is a go!
100 institutions have signed on to be part of a research/training project on marketing electronic resources! the project is designed to test whether a collaborative model of benchmarking the marketing of e-resources is feasible. discover the answer with us by following our progress at the wiki, http://benchmarketing.wetpaint.com. i’ll report our findings here at this blog at the end of february, when the project is complete.
the project is summarized at Marie R. Kennedy. 2011. “Collaborative Marketing for Electronic Resources.” Library Hi Tech News 28(6): 22-24. if you don’t subscribe to that journal you can read the pre-print at http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/librarian_pubs/4/.
4 months on
Organization Monkey - when a database is not a database is it still a database?
when our patrons go to our library’s research databases webpage they’ll see databases listed there, as one might expect. they’ll also bump into single newspapers, e-journal collections, and encyclopedias.
this amalgam didn’t occur overnight, and it certainly wasn’t intentional. as the library began to acquire e-resources it naturally needed some place to put them to show our patrons that we had these special, new things; the research databases hand-coded html page was born. over time that page became the dumping ground for all new e-resources. that was the place the library told users to begin their e-research.
speed forward several years and several hundred e-resources, and enter our new electronic resource management system (erms), a metadata dream. the erms allows for the categorization of all of those e-resources so that they cluster together easily to make them more readily findable. now that we’re intentionally tagging e-resources with categories, the question of “what do we tag as a database?” came up. if an e-resource isn’t tagged as a database, it disappears from the research databases page and is discoverable only through our catalog. as a result we’re having some pretty lively conversations about how to manage that metadata.
we’ve talked about three possible ways to handle this, more intelligently than summarized in these bullet points:
- ignore the problem. we’ve always told our users to go to the research databases page and that’s what we should continue to do.
- put your foot down that if it’s not a database, it’s not a database! off the list it goes!
- decide that well, mmmmaybe that one title can stay even though it’s not a database, and maybe that one, too.
of the three options, number 3 seems like the way most libraries are handling it but i really don’t see how that will scale as we continue to increase the numbers of e-resources. do we have time to pull together a small committee each time we license a new e-resource to determine if it should display on the research databases page?
how has your library handled this? is there perhaps a fourth option we haven’t considered?
4 months on
Organization Monkey
