These sessions focus on innovative or entrepreneurial thinking in libraries and will feature five 10-minute presentations back-to-back.
1) Better Metadata to Share: NISO E-Book Metadata Improvements Will Smooth the Supply Chain (Nettie Lagace, NISO)This presentation will introduce and summarize the newest NISO Recommended Practice, *E-Book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, and Preservation Supply Chain*. This publication is the distillation of NISO Working Group discussions among scholarly e-book publishers, platforms, libraries, library service providers, and preservation organizations, which have gathered and analyzed pain points in transmitting and managing metadata and drafted recommendations to address them.
The Recommended Practice recognizes that key stakeholders in the e-book landscape typically have specific requirements for their own processes. In fact, it’s been a hard, long winter: there is no single authority for e-book metadata, and multiple internal and shared standards used by supply chain participants. In addition, metadata connected to e-books and required by stakeholders is created in a fragmented way as pre-publication metadata are revised, and different parties enrich the metadata to suit their customers and patrons. The NISO recommendations are therefore designed to illuminate these “crevices” in order that adopters of the Recommended Practice may then be able to complete their own work and share metadata with each other effectively, correctly, and comprehensively. Come and learn about the impending spring: how you may take up the recommendations, for the betterment of the e-book community.
2) Food for OA Thought: Subscribers or Shareholders? (Michael Cook and Deborah Cooper, Cornell University)The purpose of this innovation lightning round is to focus on an OA publishing approach based on a community supported agriculture model (CSA), determine if it really is as unique in the OA community as it appears to be, and find out if it may be of interest to editors, authors and libraries.
After consulting with their subscriber base for ideas and on the advice of a librarian, in early 2018 the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development (ISSN 2152-0801) transitioned from a traditional subscription model to become "the world’s first OA journal based on a Community Supported Journal (CSJ) financial model.” Instead of the usual subscription base, in this model allied academic, research, extension and outreach programs, foundations, and national nonprofit organizations purchase “shares” annually in the journal and join an OA Shareholder Consortium. Share revenue supports an unusual range of services provided by the JAFSCD staff, including a consulting editor program for authors whose native language is not English, an author mentor program to assist any authors with limited experience in scholarly writing, as well as the publication of non peer-reviewed submissions from professionals in the field called “Voices of the Grassroots.”
Among several "perks" of this model are no APC for authors of shareholder institutions, OA with no embargo, Creative Commons licensing, no individual subscriptions, no reprint permissions or payments, and Altmetrics to measure social media impact. Shareholder representatives also advise on special call topics and editorial policy. Furthermore, authors are required to submit their published papers in their institutional repository. HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, and Hispanic-serving Institutions are allowed to join the Consortium at no cost.
3) Cost per use as an electronic resources evaluation parameter: Can you use it under extraordinary circumstances? (Luis Joel Crespo, University of Puerto Rico)In 2017, the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) suffered two extraordinary events that substantially affected library services. From March through June 2017 the university was closed due to a student strike that affected daily activities and academic services. In September of the same year, our country was hit by the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in its history which left the whole island without power and communications infrastructure for many months. In both scenarios, access to electronic resources was seriously affected. This was evidenced in the usage reports corresponding to the year 2017 which showed a substantial decrease in the full text requests of several titles subscribed by the Library System of the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras (UPRRP).
Usage reports are important for, among other things, evidencing the use of electronic resources in a certain collection, justify the allocation of funds, and as criteria for evaluating resources. Cost per use is one of the evaluation parameters used by many academic institutions, including the UPRRP Library System. However, what happens when there are extraordinary factors that affect the calculation of the cost per use during a period of time? How can this affect the feasibility of using cost per use as a parameter for evaluating electronic resources? What alternatives exist to be able to continue using the cost per use as an evaluation parameter?
This study proposes the development of a new way of calculating and analyzing the cost per use of the electronic subscriptions of the UPRRP Library System using data that is not influenced by extraordinary events and that may affect the final result. The use of the median instead of the average to calculate the cost per use can be an effective alternative to deal with this problem.
4) Bridging the Gap between Discovery and Access: A Pilot to Connect Users to the Content they Need (Jason Chabak, ReadCube and Michael Levine-Clark, University of Denver)Despite the effort and expense that libraries put into managing the discovery experience, many users skip the library entirely, opting to use PubMed, Google, Google Scholar, or even Sci-Hub to discover and access articles and other scholarly publications. Libraries have not helped our cause: our discovery tools are cumbersome, and we force users through multiple steps to get to the content they need. In far too many cases, even when they discover an article, they are unable to access and read it because our tools have thrown up road blocks.
In this session, we will report on the pilot of Anywhere Access at the University of Denver. Anywhere Access, a tool designed to create a seamless process for users to get to the content they need, regardless of the patron’s starting point, may be the solution to many of these problems. This simple solution allows libraries to guide users to content from the places they are already searching – Google, Google Scholar, PubMed – as well as from library discovery tools. In addition to bringing users to licensed content, this tool will bring them to open and pay-per-view versions of publications, leading to fewer dead ends and more satisfaction for the user.
Anywhere Access is a simple solution that can be implemented regardless of discovery system and has the potential to bring users to the library, even if they have started their search elsewhere. We will share some of the early results in terms of usage data, user feedback, and project costs.
5) License Back: How Crunching Publication Data Can Bring the Scholarly Landscape Back into Balance (Jennifer Chan, UCLA) Much ink has been spilled over the serials crisis. Approaches to addressing this
problem vary from assembling and breaking up Big Deals, to a variety of open access publishing
models, but none of these has resulted in a shift that wrests agency and control from a handful of
multinational commercial interests and returns them to universities and libraries, the very
institutions supporting the factors of research production.
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