And Speaking of Changes… July 19, 2006
Posted by tonywgoodwyn in General Incoherency, Librarianship, Serials.3 comments
… I’m moving to Houston.
I figure it’s just not warm enough in Minnesota right now. Because, while you can cook an egg on the sidewalk with the heat here the last few days, in Texas you can flash-fry them! How cool is that?
No, I don’t have a new job in Houston yet. Yes, I’ve resigned my serials position at St. Olaf (and no, I won’t go into details–let’s call it a mutual split and leave it at that). Where this will lead professionally, I’m not yet sure, but I’m also certain that this isn’t a bad thing.
The flat-out truth is that I’m still not sure what I want to do within the profession. As much as I enjoy my work with serials, I also have to confess that I find working strictly within technical services to be a little stifling. I also like working with patrons, and get a good deal of fulfillment and satisfaction out of the patron-librarian interaction. I think now–between positions, as it were–is a good time for me to think hard about the kind of role I want to play in the library world, and why.
I don’t want to abandon serials entirely. I’ve learned a lot in working with them, and think my experience in serials cataloging and management could be an asset in a public services capacity. But I’ve gotten a thrill–not to mention a solid sense of accomplishment–from helping patrons locate the resources they need, from teaching, and from interacting with students, faculty, and staff on a more regular basis. And I think, at this point, that’s probably what I need from my work.
I’m thinking back to a paper I wrote in library school, where we had to think about the importance of technical services and its relation to public service librarianship. My argument, as I recall, was that the ideal librarian would have a solid understanding of how all parts of the library functioned, and that to achieve this understanding, needed to have some experience in performing the duties of those areas: circulation, reference, instruction, cataloging, acquisitions, etc.
This is the type of position in which I would be most interested. A reference librarian with a hand back in serials cataloging. A departmental liaison who also does acquisitions work for their serials collections (beyond asking serials to order such titles). Or a serials librarian who takes a few hours a week at the reference desk and occasionally does instruction work, either for a particular class or in conjunction with another instruction librarian.
Of course, I’m not sure how plentiful or even existent these kinds of posts are, but again, I’m just thinking "out loud." For the time being, Sarabeth and I have more packing to do and other arrangements to make for our long trek south.
ALCTSDEU May 25, 2006
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No, I didn’t sneeze. 
I was recently exposed by a colleague to a neat little service provided by ALCTS. It’s the Document Exchange Union, and it’s essentially a listserv through which various libraries send lists of materials they’re no longer using to other libraries who might be interested in filling their collection. This includes books, journals, and other documents, and the only cost paid by the receiving library is the postage when it totals more than $3.
That’s potentially very helpful to institutions looking to fill collection gaps or acquire new materials, and while this service is geared mostly towards public and small college libraries, any and all kinds and sizes of institutions are welcome to participate.
I may have let my ALA membership expire recently, but I’m signing up for this, if only to keep an eye out for interesting titles. Heck, I’ve been working in serials for nearly a year and a half, and only recently discovered this, so hopefully any new serials librarians reading this will get faster heads-up!
More NASIG: Day Two May 10, 2006
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The next day was the start of what I call the "meat and potatoes" of the conference, the sessions. I sat and took as many notes as I could, which necessitated sitting near an outlet whenever possible. On a related note, does anyone know if there’s a non-wired way to keep your notebooks powered up? I’m rather ignorant about this kind of technology. Something like Bluetooth, except for batteries?
So, the day started off with our opening Vision Session, which was given by Robin Sloan. He showed us Epic 2014, a "documentary" about how information has evolved by the year 2014. I was happy to say I’d seen this before during a meeting at St. Olaf, but was still awed by the message it conveyed. Robin went on to show a slideshow about how this phenomenon might more directly affect libraries and information access, which was fascinating, raising the possibility that gatekeepers essentially may cease to exist. Some of my colleagues take issue with this projection, and I can see their reasons for doing so, but it was still a provocative statement that was too feasible to simply be ignored. Needless to say, it set the tone for the conference, getting we serialists talking about how information is handled and wondering how to keep relevant in the information economy. A great beginning.
From there I went on to my first (and for today, only) Tactics Session, which dealt with using methods and workflows common to the check-in of print journals to keep an eye on and "check in" electronic journals–which of course are always a hot topic in libraries these days. It was a good session, with me thinking along two lines as I left it.
Firstly, it makes a certain amount of sense to perform basic oversight on your e-journals: it’s easy to assume that since we should have access, for whatever reason we simply do, and that can be an easily fallacious presupposition. This, of course, was the point of the presentation, so from that standpoint it was a good session.
My second thought, however, was a bit more probing: why, in this whole session, was the possibility of using RSS technology never discussed? Applying print check-in methods to the digital equivalents apparently saves a lot of time over the former method: essentially, you’re clicking down to the article level, which is essentially much less cumbersome than receiving, handling, and physically processing a journal. Some providers have RSS feeds for their ejournals, which makes the process of digitally "checking them in" MUCH more streamlined (i.e., fewer clicks) than even the application of print check-in methods to e-journals. From what (admittedly little) understanding I have of RSS, there’s even the possibility of creating RSS feeds from scratch for those journals that don’t have them (again, I know very little about the specifics of this… someone, anyone, PLEASE feel free to educate me or set me straight if I’m just spewing misinformation).
The Strategy Session that followed was a presentation about the inclusion of Open Access journals in the OPAC: the pros and cons, how it would affect workflow, etc. I’ll say from the get-go that OA is not really my thing–it’s a possible solution to some of the larger puzzle of how to fix the scholarly communication system, but it’s still a bit too varied, nebulous and uncertain for me to have a sustained interest in it. With that said, the librarians who spoke had much to say about how OA journals in the OPAC could alleviate budget crunch issues, make holdings more robust through exposure, and how some services are starting to index the more popular OA journals (making them more likely to be seeked out in the first place). Of course, there were drawbacks, including life expectancy issues (OA journals can be notoriously shortlived), subject headings, and criteria for determining quality of the journals.
For my own part, this is an interesting subject, but I wouldn’t want to put OA journals into the OPAC here unless we had some pretty clear ideas regarding standards for them. And at present, I am content to let someone else look into the constantly changing minutiae of what OA providers are doing, how they’re improving, and whether or not to include them. Until a few more aspects become clear (what publishing/business models will work for OA, who the core providers are, and something approaching reassurance of their continued existence), it just seems a little too transparent for me to really grab on to the OA bandwagon.
The final session for the day was an examination of what it would take for those publishers that haven’t done so to "flip" to the electronic-only format for the journals they publish. Large publishers, of course, have for the most part done this, and offer e-only as at least an option, though in some cases they have morphed some of their titles into truly e-only titles, offering them only through the online environment. Smaller publishers, of course, are less likely to have done this, due to financial constraints and the absence of a viable strategic plan for doing so. This will cause some "growing pains" for libraries, as these changes will start to push up prices, and of course feel like price gouging.
Being interested in the scholarly communication system as I am, it was informative to see the pressures and obstacles faced by publishers from a more neutral theoretical perspective (the presenter was a theorist, and tended to stutter a lot). I know I’ve had my share of problems with apparent publisher attitudes toward libraries, so it’s nice to see what issues they are confronted with and how they are dealing with them (and what they MUST do to deal with them). I’m not certain I share the presenter’s hypothesis that the move to e-only will be inevitable–there are too many good points to print for it to vanish completely, even if the market might like that–but it certainly clarified some of the questions I’ve had about publishers. More on that for Day 2…
Back to NASIG: the Story So Far… May 5, 2006
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I’ve been in Denver, CO for the last day or so to attend the 21st NASIG conference. This was one event I was both looking feverishly forward to and dreading, for different reasons. It takes me away from Sarabeth for a few days (I know, I know; cue the world’s smallest violin), but that’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that I get to see a lot of my colleagues from serials and tech services that I don’t often get to see.
My day began EARLY yesterday, at 4am my time. I arrived at my hotel room at Marriot City Center by 9am (local time), napped, got myself together and headed over to the opening session, where I ran into Christian Burris, Scott McFadden, and a number of other familiar faces. We socialized until they opened up seating, and I got out the laptop, started up Evernote, and did my best to take notes for the proceedings.
Our opening session was not bad, essentially a slideshow by Dr. Thomas Noel, who spoke with wit, insight and obvious knowledge about Red Rocks Mountain Park and its Amphitheater, where an unbelievable number of high-profile music groups and performers have played over the years (a couple weeks ago, while I was on a Moody Blues kick, I listened to a friend’s CD that was titled A Night at Red Rocks. I’ve since confirmed that they did indeed play here, several times. Just a neat little coincidence.). We serials people went out to the site, where we dined, caught up, and basically relaxed from our arrival in Denver.
More on today’s events later… 
Rising Journal Costs April 13, 2006
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I know the continual escalation of journal prices in the academic world pre-dates my relatively new arrival on the library scene, but I think one of the most frustrating characteristics of this topic is that there seems to be little that can be done about it. This story about U of Kentucky and their journal budget woes is undoubtedly the latest in a long line of reports on the problems these price inflations are hurting library budgets and causing deep cuts, both in their funds and the quality of educational resources and information they can provide their patrons. Unfortunately, I have yet to see much in the way of articulated strategies for combating or responding effectively to these hikes.
Honestly, what can libraries do to fix this situation? Find a way to stonewall publishers price increases? I haven’t seen a particularly effective example of this lately, so if that’s the route we plan to go, we need to seriously re-work our approach. Find a way to keep pace with the price increases? Good luck! Even creative solutions like Open Access and institutional repositories seem to only be contributing so far in alleviating the situation.
Libraries are charged with bringing their patrons the resources they need. Many publishers, it seems, are almost directly opposing these efforts with price increases well above the rate of inflation. We HAVE to find a way to deal with this, and soon. I don’t pretend to be a genius about this sort of thing, though, so I’m asking what others may have in mind.
Presentation Post-Mortem January 26, 2006
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I gave a presentation at Carleton College today with my counterpart over there, Chris Sinkler-Miller. We talked about the status of our shared instance of SFX, our OpenURL link resolver, and also explored some interesting uses to which others were putting the service. It was a well-attended event, and I think we both walked away feeling, ever so briefly, a bit like librarian rock stars.
Chris, who covered SFX terminology, status updates, and useful tools within SFX, was responsible for a little over half of this presentation, and her slides are first. Mine, which covered innovative uses of SFX within the service and at other institutions, comprises the last half. I used a lot of materials from other presentations made by the other institutions, since they made such good examples.
We were both a little nervous about the presentation (okay, I was really nervous), but we buckled down and got our game faces on when the lights came up, so to speak. We might consider another presentation at a later time to continue the conversation this piece will hopefully create for our schools today, but in the mean time I’m just glad to have it done.
You won’t believe how I unwound. More on that later…
Now It Is (Semi-) Professional… January 16, 2006
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My document from a couple posts ago was accepted and published on the Innopac User Group
Clearinghouse website (it’s password-guarded for III users, so don’t
bother trying to get to it if your library isn’t a customer)! While I
realize this doesn’t make me published in the traditional sense of the
word, it was a bit of an ego boost to find that someone actually
thought my process document would be useful enough to share with other
information professionals. Hopefully my work will go a long way
towards saving some intrepid serialist or acquisitions person from some
of the slow torture that can be a serials review.
I also hope people don’t mind the humorous tone.
In New Year’s resolution news:
1. 3 units of pop last week… one so far this week
2. I’m currently at 11,561 words, putting my writing average at over 700 words per day
3. I’ve obviously read Starfighters of Adumar recently; now I need to find something else. Maybe some H.P. Lovecraft stories…
4. Still working on the dating thing…
It’s Not Professional Publication… January 5, 2006
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… heck, it’s not even semi-professional. It’s currently linked from my own website, so right now it’s technically self-promotion!
But hey, it’s my first contribution to helping other serialists out, so I feel no shame!
A few months ago I created this document, mainly to keep the structure behind the initial stages of our serials review intact (anyone remember those wonderful "Spreadsheet Limbo" entries I made? ‘Nuff said.) for the next time it was attempted, be it by me or some other enterprising serialist. After submitting it to some colleagues, it received some praise and it was suggested I post it to the IUG website for anyone else who might be starting a serials review. Nearly three months later, I’ve finally submitted it.
Anyone who bothers to read the thing will see that I obviously hadn’t written it with the intention of sharing it outside my place of employment. It’s tone is pretty whimsical, though I was as clear with the information as I could be.
Growth Into the Role October 5, 2005
Posted by tonywgoodwyn in General Incoherency, Serials.add a comment
Once, in undergrad, I was sitting in the dining room in my fraternity house, wiling away a late night by just relaxing. It was this reverie that was so abruptly and rudely interrupted by one of my brothers, whose surprisingly loud voice shot out the question, "Shouldn’t you be studying?" just beyond my ear. Turning, I saw that this uppity underclassman had snuck up behind me and startled me. But only slightly.
"Shouldn’t you be evolving?" I shot back, less than a second later.
The look of surprise on his face told me I’d won that particular exchange, and I went back to my respite after we both had a good laugh at this. It is that response, however, that sometimes rears its head when I look at my role as a (still-)new serialist (I claim that particular shield until I’ve been at it for a year… which is quickly approaching). I look at everything I do, everything I’m supposed to do, and everything I hope to eventually do, and often wonder if I’m evolving at a rate that allows me to keep pace with those goals.
Sometimes I have my good days, sometimes I have not-so-good days. Whether it’s accomplishing an unexpected task quickly and correctly; figuring out why item record counts for a journal don’t jibe with the holdings information in a bib record; or throwing up my arms and leaving the office at the end of the day, puzzled and unable to concentrate anymore, I can definitely say that working in the serials world keeps you on your toes and can take you for a ride at a moment’s notice. Still, I think I’m doing okay: I keeping coming back for more, I find that I actually like my work (and colleagues, a BIG plus), and I know a heckuvalot more than I did one year ago. See my previous post about MS Access for just one example of what I’ve learned.
There’s definitely a degree of familiarity with my work that lends itself nicely to my confidence level, and doubtless my ability to help others. Just today, a colleague came to me and gave me a journal that she’d been trying to figure out how to process. The poor thing had been working on it for two months, and waited to give it to me because she knew how busy I was. It turns out her wait was a good thing, as I took one look at the title and nearly snarled out loud.
"I’ve seen this thing several times while doing serials review tasks," I said, both amused and disgusted. "I’ve quickly learned to dislike it."
I took the title from her, and immediately took it to our continuations cataloger, since I had learned (through time and torture) that this title had ceased being a periodical and was now considered a monograph. We talked about it, checked the record together, and agreed that I was correct. I put a note in the record, and from here onward, my colleague should know to send that particular title to the continuations cataloger.
This story isn’t intended to make me look good; I’ve made plenty of missteps and mistakes since I started my work in serials. But I do think it demonstrates how far I’ve come since then. A year ago, possibly even six months ago, I wouldn’t have even known who to take this problem to, but after having worked with our periodicals collection, I was familiar enough to know right off the bat that 1.) it was a problem title; and 2.) there was one person in particular who could handle it properly.
Sometimes the most important part of being a librarian isn’t being able to find the answer so much as being able to locate the person or source that can provide you with the right answer. I’m learning, slowly, to not be too chagrined when I can’t immediately find the answer to a question, but I was happy to observe today that my growing familiarity with the collection is enabling me to know more about my colleagues’ problems. That in itself is pretty satisfying.
I don’t know that I’m necessarily "evolving" at the pace I should be: I’m still new, and there are still days and tasks that make my head spin. But for now, I’ll take comfort in knowing that I am growing, and that often, my head doesn’t spin anywhere near as fast as it used to. And, more and more often, I’m feeling more capable at being someone my colleagues turn to with a problem to fix…
… and I’m starting to like that feeling.
Emergence from Spreadsheet Limbo September 26, 2005
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As of Friday morning, I have more or less clawed my way up from and out of the quicksand that was the guts and innards of our serials review. At the very least, I’m through the first round of it, and can breathe easy for a little while. We actually have a long way to go, but I’ve got the preliminary work for it nearly finished.
You see, dear reader, for the past few weeks I have been in a place called Spreadsheet Limbo (or Hell, depending on your tolerance for spiritual terminology… and/or cursing). It is a maddening place, a place of carpal tunnel, of cold black borders and letters against a stale white background while you cut and past figures that your ILS couldn’t quite parse into the columns you wanted them in. For hours, indeed days, I would sit in front of my computer, plugging furiously and quickly away in my attempts to fill out department journal spreadsheets with the data for import into my Access database.
Little else was accomplished: cataloging fell by the wayside, invoices were paid only intermittently (much to the consternation of our acquisitions person), and any problems needing my immediate attention had to be brought to me personally, usually by gracious colleagues whose concerns simply couldn’t wait any longer. I became frustrated, first by the repetitious nature of cutting and pasting, then by the black on white, then by the fact that I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel (mainly because I was sick of white by then).
But, I am finally done with that part of it. Spreadsheet Limbo is indeed a finite place, containing a mere 37 departments and 2000 or so journals. I’ve already polished away several reports with the information in the spreadsheets (yay Access! I should have learned you long ago!). Once the rest of the spreadsheets are checked and edited (poor student workers…), I can present the reports to the faculty liaisons.
And then round 2 begins…
I turn my attention now to other things, things I’ve missed doing in the last few weeks. I never thought, when I was learning to catalog serials, that I would consider it a relaxing part of my job. But, as I look at my list of cataloging tasks, I can’t help but think, "You know, those electronic records need merging today… and they’re mine…"
