Moving process completed, internal demolition begun

We are now fully moved into our temporary location for the library renovation.  All books were moved out of the library by professional movers.  Not all 80,000 volumes were able to fit into our temp location.  About 10,000 had to go to another facility along with the Archives.  Light demolition of the interior of the library has begun (ceiling panels removed, furniture removed, networking equipment removed).  Hopefully the contractors will begin work next week.

Meanwhile, five miles south of campus, the staff of Logan Library have taken up residence in Box City, a large room in a with over 4,000 boxes of books.  The weeding process has begun amongst all the chaos of settling into a new place full of books.  Two of us are located in the front reception areas, and the rest of us are wedged into various crevices of boxes stacked 4 and 5 high.  Numerous obstacles have been overcome in the past week including a wireless option that didn’t work.  With a very weak Internet signal, not only was it almost impossible to do our work, but our phone option was also a bust (Voice over IP).  So we now all have wired Internet connections.  Then yesterday the air conditioning was fixed.  We had temperatures in the 80s on Monday.  They needed to fix the fix today because this morning the temperature was 60 degrees while the thermostat was set to 73.  Brrrr!  That is now fixed.

I finally have a handle on things and am able to plan a little for my ASEE conference next week.  I am presenting a paper for the Technical Papers session.  My paper title is “Using LibGuides as a Web 2.0 Content Management System & Collaboration Tool for Engineering Librarians.”

New Time Management System

It’s been a while since I last posted.  That is because I’ve had to rethink how I complete tasks.  In my last post, I wrote about all of the projects I have going on and how busy that will keep me.  Not long after that post I hit a wall.  It dawned on me that I was multitasking and task switching on a large scale.  While I was making progress on several fronts, that progress was very slow and nothing was really being completed.  So one day I decided that I needed to make a list of the things (larger projects) I need to accomplish and focus on one at a time instead of bouncing around from one to another.  My first goal was to finish updating the list of AtoZ records in EBSCO AtoZ (at least the ones I have now; there will be more to come later).  I expected that to take me months, but I did it in three days.  Of course it was 3 days with my head stuck in a spreadsheet and web browser which almost drove me mad; but it has been completed.  Second, I created a summary of the student survey that I conducted last week.  Next, I finished updating my paper for the ASEE conference and uploaded the final draft yesterday.  Today, I start preparing for my IOLUG conference presentation.  My next major project will not begin until this one is complete.  Of course there will be other projects and tasks that will interrupt this process…students needing help, a variety of requests from my boss, and bibliographic instruction classes to prepare for to name just a few, but I think I have come up with a good time management  /project management system that will work well for me.  So far the results have been excellent.

Journal Archive Subscriptions Vs. Purchase: The Fear of Losing Digital Content Continues

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/journal-archive-subscriptions-vs-purchase-the-fear-of-losing-digital-content-continues/
One of the biggest fears of librarians since entering into the world of online journals is the fear of losing content once the paper version has been dropped.  Recently this issue has generated some serious discussion on the list-serve for the Engineering Libraries Division of ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education).  I don’t remember all of the specifics because I must have quickly read through dozens of emails and didn’t document the entire conversation, but here is a summary of the discussion.  In the past year or so, ASME, like many other societal publishers, moved their online journals to a “digital library” which encompasses more than just their journals.  It also includes their proceedings and eBooks.  The launch of this new platform did not happen overnight but occurred over the last several years while in “beta version.”  During this time, access was granted to journals back to 1990 and if I remember correctly, proceedings too, but I am not sure.

The current crisis arose when a librarian discovered that their library no longer had access  to the online journal content between 1990 and 1999.  They were told that their library had only subscribed to 2000 to the present and that content prior to 2000 was given as a freebie during the beta period.  Soon, librarians across the country discovered the same thing and the EDL list-serve became active with chatter.  For my library, we did some research and discovered that we began our electronic subscription in 2000 and that we still had our print copies prior to that so everything on our end was OK.  However, for other libraries, this created quite a crisis.  One library had moved those journals off site and one other had completely discarded their older copies.  It was also discovered that to gain online access to the archive from 1980 to the 1999, that it would cost $2,600 for a yearly subscription (not to purchase the content).  Another option was to purchase a CD for the content for each year at a cost of $250 per year.  It was unclear as to whether there was any index or organization to this CD content.  One reason for the confusion was that ASME was supposed to drop the bonus access to the 1990-1999 back-file content in July 2008, but there was a delay in doing so, a long delay.  They did not communicate this to their subscribers and as a result, there were was some misunderstanding, which in some cases had serious consequences.  ASME did in fact, state something about this in their January 2008 license agreements.  ASME has been quick to respond to this issue and has restored access to this back-content until March 2010.  But the notion of having to subscribe to an archive at the cost of $2,600 a year is absurd, especially since most libraries have already purchased these journals in print format.  For those libraries, I think a onetime purchase fee to the online back content would be reasonable.  Christina’s LIS Rant has a little more detail on this than mine – http://scienceblogs.com/christinaslisrant/2009/12/asme_debacle_unfortunate_mis-s.php

Another publisher has taken it much further.  SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers ) created their Digital Library and made it their only option for obtaining their content in digital format.  For years, we purchased the SAE Technical Papers on CD.  Each year our purchased CDs had the latest index going back to 1994 the Technical Papers for the previous year.  We had CD content going back to 1997.  We could also network the database and make it available on up to ten workstations.  While this was cumbersome in some ways, it was affordable and worked well for our users.  For several years they tried to push their new digital library on us but the cost was several thousand dollars more than we were already spending.  Finally, we were notified that they were no longer going publish the Technical Papers on CD and that the only option to receive the content electronically would be to subscribe to the digital library.  So we coughed up the extra money and we now access the Technical Papers online via a site license.  If we cancel our subscription, we will lose ALL of our content.  Not just the content that we have gained since we switched over, but everything going back to 1997 (what we have on CD).  Although we still have the CDs, the file names do not match up with the document numbers.  I doubt we will be able to install our latest index and so we will have all this content and no way to access it.  They’ve got us.  And this has infuriated many other librarians as well.  But that is not all.  The digital library indexes ALL of their content including standards, books, etc. going back over 100 years.  That means that most of the search results our users bring up will be to content that we do not have access to, and so our never ending stream of questions and complaints by students regarding content they find but cannot access continues to grow.  The search interface to the SAE Digital Library is an abomination!  There are THREE search screens and you have to search the right one and do it just the right way if you want to narrow it down to Technical Papers or to subscribed content only.  Since we still have not yet figured out how to teach our students how to find out if we have access to a particular journal, something we have tried with abandon to do but have yet to figure out, how can we expect them to know how to effectively search the SAE Digital Library?  It is absolutely maddening!  OK, one more shot at SAE and this has to do with some rather unorthodox license terms.  There were two stipulations I thought were completely unreasonable.  I won’t comment on the one I managed to have removed from the contract, but the one they would not budge on forbid Technical Papers to be transmitted via email.  That means if I am working with a student and we find a Technical Paper he or she wants, I have to print it and cannot email it to the student.  Can anyone name one other content provider that has that stipulation in their contracts?  I can’t!

The decade-long question regarding subscribed journal content vs. ownership and the fear of losing access continues to haunt librarians around the world.  It is only through collective action that libraries will have any form of leverage regarding this issue.  While I did get a little tired of the endless streams of emails regarding the ASME situation, I made sure to read them all and found a great deal of value in the communication that took place.  Most publishers have representatives who are members of these list-serves and they hear our complaints.  We may not always get our way, but they do listen and sometimes make changes when they realize that they not just dealing with us individually, but collectively.