Curated tweetstream: what our audience said about Charles B. Lowry on the economic crisis

Here's another first for LiveSerials - rather than writing a report on the session by Charles B. Lowry, Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries, I thought I'd give you a snapshot of the tweeting that took place throughout:

Setting the scene:

• bookstothesky Telling wordcloud from Lowry re library budgets: key words emphasized are budget, reduction(s), cut, reduced :-/ #uksg

On US vs UK library budgets:

• jharvell Does that mean that 10 universities in the us had library budgets of over 40 million dollars before the cuts? #uksg #didimisssomething?
• chriskeene @jharvell and the lowest category was 'libraries with budget less than $20million'. different world!
• jharvell Don't get me wrong those big budgets are brilliant. Brilliant. But my gob hasn't closed for the last 5 mins. #ineverknew #uksg
• jharvell With the amount of money available in US budgets why are publishers even bothering listening to us in the uk #uksg

On the other hand:

• charlierapple Decreasing budgets are the new norm, not an aberration, with consequences for teaching and research internationally #uksg Lowry
• ORourkeTony @charlierapple #uksg I heard someone say recently that flat was the new up!
• MelindaKenneway Time to head to Canada by the looks of things - they seem to be the only libraries left with budget. #uksg

And finally ...

• antet Not sure I like the detached phrase "reduced commitment to human resources" #uksg

E-book readers in a mobile friendly library

Alison Brock, Open University, talked about a joint project with Cranfield University to look at how e-book readers could be used in a library setting. OU have a “digi-lab” of technology such as ebook readers, even a Wii console, to help tutors explore ways of using new technology in teaching.

The aim of the project was to explore student working practice of using e-books. There was a total of 12 participants using a mixture of Sony e-readers and iPod Touch (Kindles weren't available in Europe at the time of project). Students covered a mix of levels and subjects and were given the ebook reader to use for 3 months. The project team conducted a pre-pilot survey and start-up workshops on how to download books etc. A Ning forum was also set up, for blogging, news about the project, and technical help, and end of project surveys and interviews were also held.

Less than half the participants had used e-books at all before the project, and those who had used them had only done so on PC/laptops. Participants hoped e-books would help save paper, be more portable and lightweight than books and help them find things more easily.

Sony reader strengths were that is was:

• Good for sequential, narrative reading
• Lightweight, portable
• Easy on the eyes

Weaknesses:

• Slowness of navigation
• A bit “clicky and clunky”
• Only does one thing, e-books only

The verdict on the iPod was that it's:

• A “nice gadget”, it does other things
• Portable, pocket sized
• Page turning easy on touch screen
• Coloured pages aided reading

Weaknesses:

• Tricky to get content on
• Screen size just a bit small
• Reliant on wifi

The post pilot survey found that most participants had used the reader for more than just study, including listening to music and audio books, reading fiction and games. However, overall they found that the devices were limited in their functionality. The students said it was tricky to get content onto the devices, and use for study was difficult even for tech-savvy users: they were lukewarm about idea of borrowing e-readers from the library. Most would not consider buying the model they'd used. The main barriers (particularly for study purposes) were formatting issues (eg PDFs, diagrams, images), navigation, not being able to annotate or highlight text, and the fact they found the devices tiring to use.

The OU also found that library subscribed e-books were only licensed for PC use, not for downloading onto e-book readers. They even found that it could be impossible for libraries to buy suitable downloadable copies: in one situation, the student had to buy the book themselves and claim back the cost as the library couldn't buy it even with credit card due to the licensing issues.

Participants also complained that it was difficult to locate suitable e-book content to use, as it's available across so many places.

With text-based, sequential reading, they did see the advantages of portablility, and felt they could work more on the move and print less. The iPod was more popular than the Sony reader, but most still preferred the idea of a laptop which could do multiple things.

Conclusions of the project:

• Ebook readers are designed for reading fiction not academic texts (may change with arrival of iPad etc)
• They will only play a part in how people study, not replace textbooks altogether
• Potential for loan out of pre-loaded e-book readers? Potentially, but there have been issues in US about Kindle and conflicting advice on whether loaning pre-loaded readers infringes terms of service
• Potential role for libraries in facilitating and guiding students to e-book content, and also negotiating better licence agreements for commercial e-book content

Students' wish list for an ideal ebook reader would be

• Screen A4-A5 size
• Touch screen
• Ability to highlight/make notes
• Internet access
• Easier to transfer content quickly direct to device
• Lower retail price

They thought the OU could help by:

• Loaning out e-book readers with course materials and readings pre-loaded
• Offering help with finding appropriate e-book content
• Having better systems for transferring existing course materials onto reader eg OU courses being turned into ePub format

So, is 2010 the year of the e-book?

Similar e-reader projects have been run at Penn State University Library, North West Missouri State University, Princeton University, and the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. However there's still some big issues. There's the more general question about how e-textbooks will be made available in terms of licensing and pricing (mobile e-readers haven't even been part of the discussion yet). Most manufacturers and content providers are still working on the one-reader, one-book model, aimed at individuals not libraries. Technology still being developed, and still dependent on proprietary formats.

Maximising use of library resources

Sue White and Graham Stone, from the University of Huddersfield, were presenting a two phase project (although they emphasised that it's still a work in progress)

• Phase 1: Looking at low/no use users
• Phase 2: Linking use to student attainment, looking for evidence of impact and value, connected to the University Teaching and Learning Strategy

They identified three main indicators of use:

• Access to e-resources, via log-ins to MetaLib (as they can see who users are, which isn't trackable in other usage statistics)
• Book loans, through Horizon LMS circulation statistics
• Access to library, through gate entry statistics at the main campus library which identifies students via their ID cards

The results were sobering: figures for zero use are high, even in Schools perceived as 'good' library users.

They then matched usage data with the student record system (SITS) in order to get complete data for two cohorts of students on 3 year courses. More statistical analysis of data is needed but it suggests a clear correlation between MetaLib logins and books borrowed, and degree classification, across all Schools. There was no correlation with gate entry figures, however, which may be been due to complicating factors like an extensive refurbishment programme and the location of other student services within library building.

The project team have done more detailed analysis of 15 'low use' courses, focused on 3 year undergraduate courses delivered on main campus, and excluding courses with less than 35 students (to avoid the possibility of identifying individuals).

The results still suggest a consistent link between e-resource use, book borrowing and student attainment, across all disciplines. There are outliers, like students who have obtained firsts but didn't appear to be library users, and some courses don't follow the pattern eg where degree classification is influenced by book borrowing but not e-resource use. This raises some interesting questions: are e-resources not relevant to the course? is the tutor not advising them to use e-resources? have they bought the right e-resources? do users know about them? are students using Google to go straight to the e-resources, bypassing MetaLib?

This kind of project does raise some issues so Huddersfield's advice was:

• Politically sensitive topic to investigate, beware offending tutors
• Important to have support from senior management of university
• Identify academic 'champions'
• Need to acknowledge subject differences: there may be pedagogic reasons why some courses do not use resources the way a library might like
• Not cause and effect relationship: not a case of 'borrow more books and get a better degree'
• Be honest about findings eg university spent a lot of money on refurbishing the library but gate counts don't correlate with attainment

Hudderfield's academic librarians now have a mandate to go out to the Schools, to explore reasons for non/low usage on specific courses and develop an action plan. The action plans will cover:

• course profiling
• raising tutor/student awareness with targeted promotion
• reviewing the induction process
• embedded information skills training at point of need
• targeting resource allocation (both information resources and staffing)

They will produce an Annual Resource Statement each year with Schools, laying out what % budget will be spent on books, journals etc, a list of resources to be cancelled/renewed/started each year. Progress will then be reviewed annually.

More information is available via the University's repository

[This session was also a useful complement to the discussion about metrics and return on investment raised by Carol Tenopir in the second plenary session on "Economics of Scholarly Information", which focused more on the library's impact on research and in particular grant income]

In Support of Open Access, Jill Russell, University of Birmingham

Despite all of the excitement about open research and the possibilities of the semantic web, the “dead document is still the main unit of currency at most universities” says Jill Russell from the University of Birmingham, who is here to give an overview of her institution’s project to encourage its researchers to publish in open access publications.

Take-up of the green OA route (publishing in a subscription journal but depositing the article in the university’s institutional repository) has been typically slow at Birmingham, and there is a lot of confusion among researchers about what open access publishing - especially the green model - actually is. Gold open access (paying a publication fee so that the article is published as freely available to all) is better understood, and researchers are more willing to pay for the immediate publication that gold provides.

Russell and her colleagues ran a pilot project to communicate with grant holders and grant applicants to encourage them to budget for publishing costs as part of their research projects, and to offer administrative support. They identified the top funders and their policies on OA, focussing mainly on STM where OA already has more of a foothold. Throughout the project they were careful to stress that their researchers still had the choice to publish where they wished, OA or not.

The pilot quickly showed that they had underestimated costs, with the average publication fee being £1500, double their initial estimate of £700. Birmingham’s researchers publish between 3500 and 4000 papers a year, so publication fees to make them all OA would amount to £5 million annually. The budget is £120,000. From September 2009 to March 2010, twenty five articles were funded for gold OA by funding by a combination of Wellcome, MRC and EPSRC.

Birmingham has taken institutional memberships to BioMedCentral, PLoS and Nucleic Acids Research from OUP.

Researchers don’t care about the journal’s business model, just its profile. Articles have to be in PubMed, but many researchers not sure of difference between PubMedCentral and PubMed. The majority of top fifty journals in which University of Birmingham researchers publish do have some kind of OA policy, however many of these policies are extremely unclear, vary vastly from publisher to publisher and sometimes don’t make a great deal of sense (Russell gave an example where paying for gold OA didn’t allow them to deposit the article in their own IR). Publishers really need to make their OA policies clear.

Russell summarised by saying that OA fees are rising rapidly, but subscription fees are falling slowly, so they are not seeing any savings at the moment. If Birmingham were to switch to a complete OA model it would only benefit if publication fees were set at a maximum of £1000 per article.

• EDIT: view Jill Russell's slides (PDF)
  

Plenary 1: Technology and Change, Richard Wallis

“Libraries have always been at the leading edge of technology” says Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist from Talis, as he shows us some photos of very early OPAC systems, many times removed from the modern day library website. To further illustrate the changes of the past several decades he shows us a calculator from the 1970s, whose £39.95 price is the equivalent of £400 today, but whose functionality is now a free app on almost any electronic device you care to name.

The information industry is all about helping people to find things and linking students to the resources that they need. We need to rethink how we do this, bringing the information directly to the user, in the format that they want. There should be no need to bounce the user via resolvers and multiple URLs to a site that eventually proclaims “Here it is!”. It should just be delivered.

Getting users to the answers they need can be done via search (searching the OPAC or more likely Googling) but answers can also be computed (WolframAlpha) or navigated to. All of these methods rely on metadata. Librarians and metadata, Wallis points out, go back a long way, but there’s still a way to go. Library metadata for the most part is “built on principles that worked for physical stuff” and is more often than not only available from the library. This metadata can be made more useful.

And so to Linked Data, which, put simply, identifies things, links to those things and describes those things. The four principles of Linked Data are

1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs so people can look them up
3. When someone looks up a URI provide useful info about the thing, in the right format (for human or machine consumption)
4. Provide links to the URIs of other things to aid navigation.
   

To show some examples of Linked Data Wallis bravely attempts - and pulls off - a web demo. He shows us education.data.gov.uk, a semantic store of data about UK schools, and BBC Wildlife, which pulls in its descriptions of animals from Wikipedia.

What about libraries? Some are experimenting in Linked Data - the Library of Congress, National Library of Sweden, for example, so we’re seeing the start of library linking hubs. But we need to go further. Library linking hubs should link to non-library hubs (government data, the internet movie database, many other resources) and the library catalogue should become a set of links between concepts, become part of the Linked Data web.

The drivers for this evolution are not likely to be local cataloguers. Metadata for e-resources needs to be good and needs to delivered with the resource. Article level metadata can’t be catalogued, there’s just too much. But it is being aggregated (by CrossRef, for example). As this metadata gets better we’ll start to see non-library hubs linking to library data.

In summary, technology is evolving extremely quickly, and consumers are driving delivery methods - “get it to me on my device”. Education needs to link students to resources and search is only one way of doing this. Linked Data is powering the web but mostly outside of libraries, and libraries and publishers need to catch up.

“You can add great value to the web, but you need to be proactively of the web to do it. They won’t come just because you build it.”

See the slides here.

Consortia: not flaky, but unique

Kathy Perry reminds us that library consortia are not new; libraries have been cooperating for more than a hundred years (1876 - ALA committee on cooperation in indexing and cataloguing college libraries, and cooperative purchasing "expedition" started in 1913!) Since then, statewide consortia have sprung up - Ohio broke the mould by getting (new) state monies for this in 1987. ICOLC has been meeting twice annually since 1996 and now comprises 211 consortia representing over 5000 libraries, with particular growth outside the US in the last 10 years. Kathy quotes Merryll Penson (Galileo): "consortia are like snowflakes"; not flaky - "unique". Most have very low staffing and rely on volunteers.

Priorities are changing for consortia - tasks that wouldn't even have been on the radar some years ago are now among the top priorities - training, digital initiatives, next generation catalogues. Budgets are a problem here as everywhere - when asked how they are addressing this, one respondent to Kathy's recent survey said "Prayer". Tom Sanville, OhioLINK guru commented that "Flat is the new 'up'." Curiously, "negotiating contracts" is given as a 'new' priority - I don't understand how this wasn't already a priority for consortia! I was pleased to know that "advocacy / marketing" is a growing aspect of consortia's budget management - I think measurable end user engagement and traffic will be key to justifying and growing budgets ongoing (later, in the context of training, Kathy talked more about "justifying our value to our decision makers"). Very few consortia have research projects and very few are working together on issues related to archival storage of print collections.

During questions, Peter Burnhill suggested that a lot of information discovery, retrieval and usage is happening outside the library - between peers in both formal and informal contexts. How can libraries and consortia engage with this? Kathy's initial thoughts: this is why libraries and consortia are prioritising next-gen catalogues, to "more readily reflect the world as we know it". We're also working with products like Zotero to help researchers collaborate in a way that reflects not just scholarly publications but web-based materials and conversations. Libraries are trying to engage at this level. Jill Taylor-Roe adds comments from the OA perspective - we're managing a lot of the OA payments to publishers that we're also licensing big deals from, and there should be some synergies in managing the fiscal movements in a more cohesive and efficient way. Hugh Look notes the skills shortfall in this area and the lack of guidance. We need more investment in these skills that would be transferrable to many other areas.

Library marketing: a strategic approach to an interactive library experience

Olin College of Engineering is a young college (last ten years) set up to bring more hands-on training, entrepreneurial spirit, cross-disciplinary learning and design concepts into engineering education. Students are a diverse group with a range of talents beyond their academic excellence. Dee Magnoni is its Library Directory with some background in advertising.

The interactive library: escaping temporal exhaustion
Olin's library is not huge but Dee believes that you learn by more than just reading and writing; the interactive collections reflect this. The library is a 24/7 space to escape "temporal exhaustion" (when we're too busy to pause and contemplate, our creativity suffers). The small staff at Olin doesn't sit behind a desk. The virtual collection is much larger and deeper than the physical collection. The library is full of games (chess), modelling kits and other interactive "realia" to encourage creativity and thought. It sounds like an inspiring and fun place to learn.

Encouraging e-resource usage
Olin puts most of its budget into e-resources, and makes sure they're used by holding a vendor fair. Olin advocates four steps: goal, timeline, budget, communicate. Dee allows herself 6 months to plan a fair! and works with other departments (IT, facilities) and external partners (caterers, balloons, photographer). In attracting vendors Dee communicated her own excitement along with the benefits for vendors. Vendors have been "fabulous" in partnering with costs and prizes. In the run-up to the event she put together and distributed publicity posters and flyers, and re-confirmed all the vendors and suppliers.

Dee's event coincided with "Talk like a pirate" day and so they used this theme and the seasonal treats (caramel apples and cider) to theme the decor and catering. In order to enter the raffle, users had to answer the question "What did you learn?" - a great way to elicit feedback such as "I learnt where and how to do my research". She also gathered feedback from vendors as to the value of the event to them. "One event is not going to solve all my PR challenges," she notes, and tells us the lessons she learned:

• always communicate more, more, more
• be ready for something to go wrong, because something will
• don't do it alone - get all the support you can from vendors, suppliers, internal depts
• make sure you, as well as everyone else, have fun!

A multichannel approach
Olin does other forms of marketing and Dee cites Springshare's LibGuides as a useful tool for helping students to find resources in specific areas. The library has a Facebook page, uses Wikis, blogs, instant messaging and news feeds to reach its users (I applaud this multi-channel approach). Dee has also carried out considerable research among faculty and students to inform her strategic planning, and has created an external library advisory board (including vendors, researchers, a copyright expert, a consortia director and faculty from other colleges) to visit regularly and provide strategic advice as well as occasional tactical input. Isn't this a great idea - I wonder how many other libraries are capturing the skills of those around them in this way? Dee rates conferences as an opportunity to pick up on the zeitgeist and share experiences with others.

Exemplum, exemplum, an example from your own life ... One library realised its students weren't taking in the guidance they had received from the library as freshers, and were calling their parents for the kind of help the library should provide. So the library scrapped its freshers event and invited the parents to tea, so they would later tell their offspring to use the library.

The library as part of the bigger study picture
At Olin they talk about information fluency, not information literacy. Dee gathered together relevant standards and worked with students to come up with their own curriculum (which they called Lifehacks) with modules on sleep, nutrition, relaxation, and "everything else you need to be successful to study". She paints a compelling picture of a library that has been able to grow itself into being precisely what its students need it to be - I guess the challenge for others is to be able to evolve from a more traditional library into an interactive and welcoming environment such as Olin has managed to create.

Library marketing: running an event to promote usage

"Marketing isn't taught in library school, and I think we're at the point where it should be," says Ruth Wolfish from the IEEE. I have just followed coloured footprints along the hallway to Ruth's session so it was clear before I even arrived that it would be a break from the norm. I think the guys next door in the API session were jealous.

Ruth's starts with her tips for a successful event: make it meaningful, time it right for your audience, promote it well to the right people, get the endorsement of influencers in your target audience, make the benefits clear - and make it fun.

She then proceeds to set us a task list, starting with checking for conflicts and scheduling your project tasks. She suggests involving students in creating promotional materials, and seeking assistance from vendors and support staff around the university. She emphasises the importance of food in attracting attendees, and suggests a quiz or a raffle to keep people there until the end. Ruth's guidance even extends to design tips for your promotional posters - "uniform and easy to read" fonts, making primary messaging more prominent, avoiding too much text, being careful with colour combinations.

A really good event makes library staff more accessible - Ruth cites one library's Halloween event where librarians dress up; students see it as a "don't miss" event and remember the librarians personally afterwards. Ultimately the objective is encouraging more usage of the library and its resources (I was a tiny bit late for this session and I hope that objectives were brought up at the beginning as well as pitching up half way through - all marketing has to start with clear objectives against which success can later be measured).

Communicating your event
Library blogs are taking off - particularly in the US? I think - and Ruth shows us lots of examples, commenting on the layout of the text (make sure your offers are clear). She also shows examples of how universities are using Twitter "to communicate with our users more effectively" - library hours, catalogue updates, "whatever you want to say". It doesn't take the place of existing communication channels (website, newsletters) but adds to the library's means of publicising the e-resources on which it spends such a considerable amount. We look at one library's Facebook page which highlights all their events ("pizza in the library") and incorporates applications added by the library e.g. catalogue search, find articles, news feeds etc. Use the photo galleries to help build your library's presence and character.

Ruth moves on to "Little Ideas with Big Impact" - with examples from librarians all over the US, including "flyers in places people can't avoid (back of toilet doors)" and tear-off slips to remind people of the dates and times of your next library events.

I'm pleased that Ruth closes with measurement. I couldn't agree more with her assertion that you need to "make sure that you measure your success - that you have metrics when you're asked for them." She suggests thinking along the following lines:

• What does the library do for the school?
  
• Has usage gone up since you started running events?
  
• Have you had more research requests?
  
• Did you make new contacts?
  
• Have you been invited to speak at classes?

Ref. Bhatt, J., Wolfson, R. "A successful collaborative partnership among the Faculty and Librarians at Drexel University and IEEE" - a study Ruth co-authored that may provide further insight into the value of library marketing.