Library Collections

Collection Management has licensed the JSTOR Arts & Sciences X Collection and the Sage Humanities and Social Sciences journal backfile. JSTOR A&S X contains over 125 titles in Business, Sociology, Economics, Education, Finance, History of Science Technology, and Medicine, and Public Policy & Administration.  Some notable titles include  e-Service Journal, HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science,  Journal of Assessment & Institutional Effectiveness,  Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School,  Mathematics Teacher, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Spectrum: The Journal of Black Men, and  Transportation Journal.  This JSTOR collection marks our 11^th JSTOR package acquisition, meaning that University Libraries has become a Sustaining Member of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization concerned with digital archives and preservation. Sustaining members earn a 25% discount on the archive capital and annual access fees on any future acquisitions.

Sage HSS offers 285 titles with over 424,000 individual articles.  Coverage goes back to Vol. 1, issue 1 for each included title.   Some highly ranked titles included the backfile are Group & Organization Management, Organization Studies, Journal of Teacher Education, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, School Psychology International, Politics & Society, Communication Research, Journal of Peace Research, Progress in Human Geography, Progress in Physical Geography, and The Holocene.

As part of an effort to purchase more ebooks in STEM disciplines, VIVA has added 22 Elsevier ebook subject collections within science and technology and also in the health sciences.   These titles are part of their 2013 frontlist. Currently, 158 such ebooks are available to us, but that number should grow rapidly over the next two years.

Project MUSE announced today that Johns Hopkins U. Press electronic content will be hosted on the Highwire platform.  No date for the transition was given.  From today’s press release:

The VIVA Resources for Users Committee met in early March.  Most invoices for the current cycle have now been paid. Overall the budget picture for the next fiscal year looks good but rising subscription costs continue to be a concern.  Numerous current products were reviewed  and recommended for renewal but there will also be a few changes coming for items previously identified as a low priority based on use and availability of alternate sources.  You can see Kathy Perry’s message of March 16 on the VAVIRTUA listserv for the full list of products renewed but the two that will be dropped are Books in Print and Contemporary Women’s Issues. Both cancellations will take effect this summer.

Ebooks are now becoming available to all VIVA public institutions as part of the 2013 frontfile collections through Elsevier and Springer. These titles will be provided by the ScienceDirect and SpringerLink platforms respectively.  Work in also progressing on a pilot program making DDA titles from STEM disciplines available to VIVA members. These DDA books will be on the EBL platform.  Three VIVA training fairs are being held across the state to better share information about these new resources.  Ladd Brown, Dave Beagle, and Ed Lener attended the session last week at Radford University and will report back.

The Resources for Users Committee also recommended funding for two initiatives that will look at cooperative collection opportunities.  One of these focus on video materials while the other will concentrate on English language monographs in the Q-T call number range. The VIVA Steering Committee approved the funds for the video project but voted to table the monograph collection development pilot project.

Not everyone subscribes to the VIVA listserve, so I’ll share some information that was posted by Kathy Perry yesterday.  The DDA RFP committee has completed negotiations with EBL to provide Demand Driven Acquisitions for ebooks in Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine, & Health (STEM-H).  EBL is currently negotiating with publishers to participate in the program.  The VIVA plan will take precedence over our own DDA plan.  It will include short term loans, just as our plan does.  E-reserves and coursepacks will be available upon special request.  The addition of VIVA’s plan should only affect Collections and Technical Services:  we’ll work with YBP to eliminate EBL STEM-H DDA selections from our consideration pool, and load discovery records for the new EBL collections to Summon.  Ladd and Ed will attend the VIVA ‘training fair” in March, so more information about ebooks will be forthcoming.

CASH!

(Now that I have your attention…)

The Collections Access Strategies Hub (CASH) is meeting this coming Wednesday to discuss the first two of many key articles to be tackled by the group (citations and links provided below).  Each hub meeting will also include a Lightning Round Report where representatives from various units relay ongoing work and upcoming changes within respective units.  The purpose of the reports include filling communication gaps between units, departments, and other groups so that we might all better anticipate problems and plan for changes in workflows.  If you don’t have a rep in CASH and you’d like to pass along information to our group, please get in touch with me.

Hub Readings

Strategic Direction: Transforming Research Libraries: Outcomes & Strategies http://www.arl.org/arl/governance/strat-plan/trl.shtml

2012 Top Ten Trends in Academic Libraries: A Review of the Trends and Issues affecting Academic Libraries.  C & RL News June 2012. http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/6/311.full

Approval Plan

As of January 30^th, consider the new policy of e-preferred approvals to be in full swing.  Ladd and Ed are working out details and getting answers to questions.  More information to follow soon.

VIVA

To quote directly from VIVA’s Kathy Perry, “VIVA’s hard work exploring STEM-H e-books has resulted in awarding contracts to Elsevier and Springer for 2013 frontlist e-books… As you know, VIVA received special funding from the General Assembly for the 2012-14 Biennium for e-books in the STEM-H subject areas.  VIVA can now confirm contracts for the Elsevier and Springer 2013 frontlist e-book packages and that all participating institutions have been activated for both Elsevier and Springer.”  At the local level we have made the necessary changes in our approval and DDA plans to reflect these new deals.

*WHO GETS WHAT THROUGH CENTRAL FUNDS?*

*PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS*:  All of the VIVA public institutions will have access to the following packages:

Elsevier – The entire SciVerse ScienceDirect eBooks Collection  2013

Frontlist:  http://www.info.sciverse.com/sciencedirect/books/ebooks

   Springer – 4 collections for the 2013 frontlist

http://www.springer.com/librarians/e-content/ebooks?SGWID=0-40791-0-0-0

– Behavioral Sciences

– Biomedical and Life Science

– Computer Science

– Earth and Environmental Science

Cooperative Collections
You’ve no doubt heard many mentions of the ASERL Print Journal Cooperative.  Now we have an additional partner:  the WRLC or Washington Research Library Consortia.  To understand how this partnership will work, ASERL will be holding a webinar next week.  Constance Malpas and Brian Lavoie of OCLC Research will provide an overview of how holdings at our member libraries would contribute to a mega-regional approach.  During the webinar, Constance and Brian will discuss an initial analysis of holdings at ASERL and WRLC libraries and how this could contribute to a mega-regional vision for national library print collections.  If you’d like to attend the webinar, it is listed on the library’s training events page.

Vet Med Library Collection

In case you haven’t heard, The College of Veterinary Medicine may be renovating spaces this summer and renovations will affect allotted space for the Vet Med Library. We’ll be looking at print and electronic journal overlap in this case, too, in order to help reduce the collections footprint from 25,000 volumes to between 15,000-18,000 volumes.  Expect more news as Brian, Leslie, and Vicki work with the architects and as we take a close look at the collection.

Journal Overlap Analysis

Analysis of overlap between print and electronic journals is moving along.  Most recently, we finished looking at the Oxford backfiles, and we are just one collection away from completing our overlap analysis for all the Taylor and Francis archives.

More next week… and until then, STAY WARM!

Connie

Morning All:

Lots of collection management news to share— but I’ve tried to bullet all the information below for easier reading. More soon!

ASERL Shared Retention Steering Committee

I will be traveling to Atlanta to meet with other members of ASERL’s steering committee for retention projects.  We will meet all day on February 12 in Georgia Tech’s library discuss the following:

• Progress of the Cooperative Journal Retention project, and its use of the 583 MARC field and whether to include subject headings in the cooperative database.
• JRNL (Journal Retention and Needs Listing): a database created at the University of Florida for the ASERL Cooperative Journal Retention Project. Contains names and corresponding holdings for journals saved by ASERL members for the Cooperative Journal Retention Project.
• WRLC (Washing Research Library Consortium):  WRLC and ASERL have agreed to merge their holdings for the Cooperative Journal Retention Project.  (This will not change plans for storing physical holdings.) We will discuss how our holdings will be represented in PAPR.
• Other potential shared retention projects:  suggestions thus far—Chem Abstracts, Thomas Register, NUC, NYT Index.

If you have other titles to suggest, monograph or serial or something in between, for shared retention, please let me know and make sure we talk about it in Atlanta.

ASERL Collection Development Initiative

John Burger (ASERL’s Executive Director), Michael Arthur (Head of Acquisitions & Collections Management at U Central Florida) and I have started teleconferencing monthly.  Most recently, we talked about the last Charleston conference and the prevailing topics that came up during meetings there.  More demand for consortia deals exist.  Michael will be meeting Ebrary, Springer, and SharedShelf representatives at ALA mid-winter to discuss any new offers.  Possible offers to look for in the future:

• John reviewed a draft of offer from Matt Hancox (Gale) for several archival collections before holiday break.  Should be finalized soon, available thru June 2013.

• Shared Shelf from JSTOR.  John & Connie will review info from Michael.

• Through talking with Ed and Leslie, we have suggested the group looks into options for audiobooks, too, although typically this has fallen to public libraries.

Another prevailing topic was training.  As a part of this group, we are identifying areas where we believe our members will benefit from webinars. Two webinars on the impact of ebooks on acquistiions workflow will be held in February.  See the University Libraries training page to register if you’d like to attend the webinars.

In the future, we also plan to take on other areas of interest including digital curation and open access as pertaining to collection management.

Approval Plan Changes

Ed and Ladd are working to tighten up the Lindsey & Croft portion of our existing approval plan with Yankee Book Peddler (YBP.)

• Elsevier ebook imprints will be blocked from our approval plan because we will now be gaining access to them through VIVA ebook packages.

• Some of you may have noticed that the approval shelves have gone away.  Since we are moving to an e-preferred YBP approval environment in 2013, the approval / review shelving has been removed.

• Print YBP approval titles will still arrive according to the regular shipping schedule and be available for review on book trucks signed YBP APPROVALS for roughly 3 days. Worldwide approval volumes, gift decisions, and space for other physical items are located in the existing shelving above the mail-processing area along the wall. Ebook approval titles will be available for review via the Approval Bookshelf tab in GOBI3.  Please check the options there for the available approval actions.

Collections Access and Analysis Hub
The Hub had its second meeting on January 8th where members worked together to finalize a draft of their mission statement, which is now available open to view by all employed within the University Libraries. Open with this link or click on mission statement: https://docs.google.com/a/vt.edu/file/d/0B5jDmSKSgyssX1VGdFVDY19RMjQ/edit

The next meeting will occur February 6, 3 pm in the Tech Services conference room.  All subsequent meetings will occur on the first Friday of the month at 1 pm—same place! Please feel free to suggest items for upcoming agendas, even if you are not a current hub member.

Ongoing Collections Analysis Work

Several members of the EAT (Electronics Access Team) are working with Jeremiah Puryear to determine the best next steps in updating or converting our existing database containing journal usage and cost data.  The longer range plan includes building a database to manage more and more data (big surprise, right!).  In addition to looking at usage and cost of journals, we plan to collect and analyze data from our ebook vendors about demand driven acquisitions of those ebooks.  Further, we’re looking into collecting and analyzing data from less traditional forms of scholarship and typical providers.  To see a beginning overview of these altmetrics, a topic you will certainly hear about again, visit www.altmetrics.org

In other news, many members of EAT  have been working together to create  print-electronic journal overlap reports.  Collection managers are using these reports to identify titles to free up space for new initiatives.

About Space and Collections

Leslie, Ed, Charla, Christopher, and I will meet January 22nd  to discuss ongoing plans for collection shifting.   Main points to discuss include:

• Weeding on 3rd floor so that 2nd floor collections can be shifted upstairs and corresponding, projected time-frame
• Potential plan for moving Gov Docs (and  perhaps Census) collection to 5th floor  Work together to submit budget proposal to make these move a reality

Lastly, Collection Management will be holding its quarterly meeting Thursday, January 17, 10:30 -11:30 in the boardroom.

CS

In light of the latest news about the library’s partnership with the Institute for Creativity, Arts, & Technology (ICAT), here’s an update on what’s happening with collections housed on the 1st floor.

Most of the maps and a sizable portion of the microforms will need to be moved to accommodate ICAT’s studios, workrooms, hardware storage, and instruction spaces.  The collections team, subject librarians, and maps & microforms staff are reviewing usage data, soliciting input from faculty, and investigating whether online equivalents are available to replace the existing collections.  Subject librarians have identified collections that are most heavily used, which will remain in Newman.  Some of the collections could go to the Remote Storage Building, and Dennis Herron is working with the Provost’s staff to find additional storage space.  Options for off-site storage would have to include the ability for Access Services staff to retrieve collections for use in Newman.  We haven’t ruled out the possibility of offering an off-site use option as well.  Southgate Center has been mentioned as a possibility for this option, but those plans have not been finalized.

To further reduce the footprint of the collections, and increase their accessibility, we are investigating replacing more collections with digital equivalents.  We’ve been able to withdraw the Early English Books and American Periodical Series in micro-format since we purchased online access.  Many of the microfilm journal titles are now available from journal archive purchases.  We are working with the Provost to secure some funding for additional journal archives or online newspaper collections.

Many of our maps and microforms collections are government documents.  Bruce Obenhaus is reviewing those collections and consulting with subject librarians.  We’re investigating the possibility of moving printed documents and census collections to the 5th floor, which would increase the available space for maps and microforms.

Ed Lener, Ed Brooks, and Bruce Obenhaus are carefully reviewing the map collection as well as the atlases.  Geosciences and Geography faculty have been invited to provide input on their needs.  Usage, as determined from reshelving counts, has declined significantly in recent years.  Many maps are available for free online from the U.S. Geological Survey or other sources.  The print collections will be reduced in size accordingly and focus on identifying the most important materials to keep in hard copy. Maps of Virginia and the surrounding region will also be given special preference for retention.

Please contact Connie, Ed, or Leslie if you have any questions about the overall review process, especially as you reach out to your departments for input regarding collections or the broader, ongoing goals of the library.  For more information about ICAT, visit http://www.icat.vt.edu/index.html

Hi All,

Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in participating in CAASH.  To kick things off, our members will be:  O’Brien, Leslie| Dalton, Gail | Nardine, Jennifer |Speer, Ryan | |Bowden Rosemary |Brown, Ladd | Bailey, Annette | Lener, Ed |  |Stovall, Connie | Doyle, Jana.

Sharon Gotkiewicz and Kira Dietz will attend meetings specific topics. Our first meeting will occur on October 1, 2012, 10:30 am – 11:00 am, in the boardroom. I’ll provide an agenda prior to the meeting. If you  are not on the Hub, but you have collections topics you’d like the team to consider during that meeting—or any other subsequent meetings—please feel free to send your ideas to me.

Best,

Connie

Call for Volunteers

Collection Access Analysis Strategies Hub, or: CAASH!

Should you volunteer? The answer is YES if you can answer yes to these questions: Do you have a strong interest in collections access and analysis?  Would you like to help brainstorm and provide input for developing strategies to provide timely access, anywhere, anytime—on a budget? Would you like to participate in brainstorming discussions to determine the type of analysis necessary to make this a reality?  Are you inclined to work across traditional boundaries and ideas, while also thinking systemically about how our goals fit in with our institution’s mission?

Please click on the link and fill out our Google form to volunteer by September 10, 2012.

•  Six volunteers will be chosen.
• First meeting October 1, 2012, 10:30 am – 11:00 am,  in the boardroom

Goal for the Hub

Our broad goal is predefined in the VT Libraries Strategic Directions, 2012-2018. Stated goal of collection access: Provide timely discovery and transmission of all information resources anytime, anywhere.

More specifically, this group will work together to identify more detailed strategies to make this broader goal a reality.

In terms of collections assessment/analysis, we’ll first define our mission. Questions to consider: Who and what are we attempting to support through providing collections access? What can we do to ensure we are providing the most needed/used resources for the best possible costs?  How do we go about assessing collections access?  We’ll aim to develop more specifics: What do we want to learn from our analysis? What data is necessary to collect?  Who needs to be involved?  How might roles change to meet goals? How do we identify in-demand resources to which we currently do not provide timely access, anywhere, anytime? How do we make such resources available?

HUB Members will want to be well acquainted with these articles:

2012 Top Ten Trends in Academic Libraries: A Review of the Trends and Issues affecting Academic Libraries.  C & RL News June 2012: 311-320. http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/6/311.full

ARL Strategic Plan 2010-2012

Strategic Direction: Transforming Research Libraries: Outcomes & Strategies

http://www.arl.org/arl/governance/strat-plan/trl.shtml

A Plan For A New Horizon: Envisioning Virginia Tech, 2012-2018 Strategic Plan.

http://www.president.vt.edu/strategic-plan/strategic-plan.html

Redefining the Academic Library: Managing the Migration to Digital Information Services. University Leadership Council.  2011.  http://www.educationadvisoryboard.com/pdf/23634-EAB-Redefining-the-Academic-Library.pdf