Get Full Text Research and the Search for Appropriate Copies

Abstract

A group of the largest academic publishers has launched a new service to simplify access to full-text research for users of discovery services and scholarly collaboration platforms. While this service aims to provide easy access to full-text articles using article-level entitlement information linked to institutions through Seamlessaccess.org, it also introduces ambiguity. The service allows for publishers to direct users to alternative versions when a full-text entitlement is not found for the user, though users may already be entitled to full text through providers that do not participate in the service. Depending on specific implementations, this could lead to further confusion and make it more difficult for users to find an appropriate copy.     

More Than Things

Abstract

The often invisible labor of serials, technical services, metadata, and electronic resources workers sits in the space between required and preferred, assessment and surveillance. Although libraries and information workers did not explicitly create the systems many of us live in, we are responsible for their everyday functioning. In many ways the narratives from technical services to the library are centered in objects: item counts, COUNTER stats, door counts, discovery, and other transactional data. And yet, we are stewards and maintainers, innovators and storytellers of the countless ways these objects are experienced. How can we help our colleagues understand the outreach component of this work? How do we responsibly confront power in our systems—which often miscalculates the necessity of care in favor of the shiny? What does it mean to honor expertise behind the scenes, and how might we gain agency in our systems once more?     

No Satisfaction? But We Try,and We Try,and We Try!

ABSTRACT

When Old Dominion University Libraries conducted the LibQUAL+ survey in 2015, results indicated a lack of satisfaction in effectively discovering and using our electronic resources. This article is based on a presentation from the 2017 North Carolina Serials Conference describing how Old Dominion University Libraries used data from the LibQUAL+ survey results to help our users connect more effectively with information resources, resulting in an improved user experience and an increased level of satisfaction.     

Single-Stop Ebook Reader “SimplyE”: Is It APPlicable for Academic Libraries?

Accessing ebooks from different vendors often requires switching between multiple platforms, which can be unwieldy for library users. To offer readers a coherent and seamless reading experience, the New York Public Library (NYPL) initiated a project called SimplyE (or LibrarySimplified). The end user deliverable of this project is an application (Android, iOS) that enables users to read ebooks from multiple vendors through a single interface, thereby delivering a Netflix-style experience for searching, browsing, and checking out ebooks. The back end consists of applications that manage ebook collections, circulation, and metadata for libraries. This column explores the viability of implementing SimplyE in an academic library setting.     

Shared Insights,Shared Collections

Abstract

Whitney Jordan, acquisitions librarian at Western Carolina University (WCU), presented “Shared Insights, Shared Collections” at the 28th Annual North Carolina Serials Conference. In her presentation, Jordan discussed the experiences of WCU and the Western North Carolina Library Network (WNCLN) in a consortium-based evidence-based acquisitions ebook pilot project. The three WNCLN consortium institutions partnered with Taylor & Francis to design an evidence-based ebook program, customized to each institution’s needs. Jordan emphasized the need for strong communication and effective project management in any collaborative collections project.     

Data-Informed Ebook Discovery: An Analytical Approach to the User Experience

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an effort to better understand the discoverability of ebook collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Library staff analyzed titles in nine ebook packages across disciplines and conducted a two-pronged analysis of how discoverable titles in these collections were, both in Summon Discovery Service and the online catalog, and the quality of what could be discovered about the ebooks with these tools. This study revealed that discoverability of ebooks is not equal across collections, and some collections require more work to make them discoverable in Summon and the catalog. Finally, the majority of titles were discovered in Summon, but the catalog still seems to be a better discovery engine for these ebooks.     

Tools of the Serials Trade

Abstract

The primary purpose of information services has always been and will always be to reduce to a minimum the amount of time required by local users to obtain access to that information they need to do their work.¹     

Building Bridges: Advocacy as a Tool for the Technical Services Professional

ABSTRACT

“The Sharpest Tool in the Shed” column seeks to introduce new systems and tools relating to scholarly publishing, serials, electronic resources, and more. This issue's column will focus on an important but often overlooked tool for anyone engaged in the work traditionally housed in technical services (TS)—advocacy for the work of technical services. This would include both advocacy regarding how technical services work supports the library's mission and the work in other divisions. How to make that work accessible for the novice to facilitate collaboration with other library departments is also discussed. As a serials catalog librarian at Michigan State University Libraries, I have worked to make advocacy a part of what I do and how I think about my work and the work of my colleagues. Locally, this has meant the development of a series of talks around TS expertise and projects to reach out to our colleagues about our work.     

Reports of Conferences,Institutes, and Seminars

Abstract

This column covers several conference sessions from the 14th annual Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference, providing guidance on how to navigate ebook duplication, improving documentation and workflows, implementing OpenAthens, and experiences with Project SILLVR (Streaming Interlibrary Loan Video Resources)and knowledge bases and related tools (KBART) automation. There is also a report from IFLA’s SIG Library Publishing Mid-Term meeting, which was an ideological meeting in nature, discussing community building, resource sharing, and status updates. A report from the 2018 Charleston Conference is also included.     

Moving to a World of More Seamless Single Sign-on Access: NISO’s RA21 Recommended Practice

Abstract

In this Standards Update column, Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), provides a preview of NISO’s upcoming RA21 Recommended Practice for single sign-on systems. Carpenter describes previous attempts at single sign-on standards, the essential difficulties in authenticating users, and how RA21 will address these issues while ensuring the privacy of user data.     

Just Popping In: Collections and Outreach Collaborations to Increase Student Engagement with Electronic Resources

Abstract

Promoting electronic resources in a physical space takes ingenuity and cross-library partnership. This article discusses a collaborative approach to promote electronic resources by an outreach librarian and an electronic collections librarian. As members of the teaching and research assistance team, the librarians observed how students relied on “big name,” multidisciplinary databases and were often intimidated by the expansive list of digital materials and electronic resources available to them. A literature review on the topic of similar promotional activities introduces the pop-up methodology used for the event. The purpose of the collaboration was to not only promote ebook collections but to also create awareness of the library outside of the traditional space, and librarians as resources. This collaboration resulted in student-librarian engagement, and a spike in ebook use was reported for the collection promoted.     

Constructing optimal projection designs

ABSTRACT

The early stages of many real-life experiments involve a large number of factors among which only a few factors are active. Unfortunately, the optimal full-dimensional designs of those early stages may have bad low-dimensional projections and the experimenters do not know which factors turn out to be important before conducting the experiment. Therefore, designs with good projections are desirable for factor screening. In this regard, significant questions are arising such as whether the optimal full-dimensional designs have good projections onto low dimensions? How experimenters can measure the goodness of a full-dimensional design by focusing on all of its projections?, and are there linkages between the optimality of a full-dimensional design and the optimality of its projections? Through theoretical justifications, this paper tries to provide answers to these interesting questions by investigating the construction of optimal (average) projection designs for screening either nominal or quantitative factors. The main results show that: based on the aberration and orthogonality criteria the full-dimensional design is optimal if and only if it is optimal projection design; the full-dimensional design is optimal via the aberration and orthogonality if and only if it is uniform projection design; there is no guarantee that a uniform full-dimensional design is optimal projection design via any criterion; the projection design is optimal via the aberration, orthogonality and uniformity criteria if it is optimal via any criterion of them; and the saturated orthogonal designs have the same average projection performance.     

Three Recommendations for Improving the Use of p-Values

ABSTRACT

Researchers commonly use p-values to answer the question: How strongly does the evidence favor the alternative hypothesis relative to the null hypothesis? p-Values themselves do not directly answer this question and are often misinterpreted in ways that lead to overstating the evidence against the null hypothesis. Even in the “post p?<?0.05 era,” however, it is quite possible that p-values will continue to be widely reported and used to assess the strength of evidence (if for no other reason than the widespread availability and use of statistical software that routinely produces p-values and thereby implicitly advocates for their use). If so, the potential for misinterpretation will persist. In this article, we recommend three practices that would help researchers more accurately interpret p-values. Each of the three recommended practices involves interpreting p-values in light of their corresponding “Bayes factor bound,” which is the largest odds in favor of the alternative hypothesis relative to the null hypothesis that is consistent with the observed data. The Bayes factor bound generally indicates that a given p-value provides weaker evidence against the null hypothesis than typically assumed. We therefore believe that our recommendations can guard against some of the most harmful p-value misinterpretations. In research communities that are deeply attached to reliance on “p?<?0.05,” our recommendations will serve as initial steps away from this attachment. We emphasize that our recommendations are intended merely as initial, temporary steps and that many further steps will need to be taken to reach the ultimate destination: a holistic interpretation of statistical evidence that fully conforms to the principles laid out in the ASA statement on statistical significance and p-values.     

An Introduction to Practical Sequential Inferences via Single-Arm Binary Response Studies Using the binseqtest R Package

We review sequential designs, including group sequential and two-stage designs, for testing or estimating a single binary parameter. We use this simple case to introduce ideas common to many sequential designs, which in this case can be explained without explicitly using stochastic processes. We focus on methods provided by our newly developed R package, binseqtest, which exactly bound the Type I error rate of tests and exactly maintain proper coverage of confidence intervals. Within this framework, we review some allowable practical adaptations of the sequential design. We explore issues such as the following: How should the design be modified if no assessment was made at one of the planned sequential stopping times? How should the parameter be estimated if the study needs to be stopped early? What reasons for stopping early are allowed? How should inferences be made when the study is stopped for crossing the boundary, but later information is collected about responses of subjects that had enrolled before the decision to stop but had not responded by that time? Answers to these questions are demonstrated using basic methods that are available in our binseqtest R package. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Data-Informed Collection Decisions Using R

ABSTRACT

Collection decisions can seem daunting to a librarian who is new to the job. In charge of many new-to-her subject fund codes, the author wanted to understand what had been previously purchased using these funds and how to effectively manage a custom ebook collection. The author used the R programming language to clean and merge purchase and usage data. This article will provide an overview of tasks in R that can be leveraged for making data-informed collection decisions and for sharing information with colleagues.     

An Interview with Jason Clark: Content Delivery Platforms

Abstract

For this installment of “From Picas to Pixels,” incoming editor Chad Hutchens interviews fellow librarian Jason Clark about building in-house content delivery platforms and applications using open source technologies. Specifically discussed is the Montana State University Libraries' Electronic Theses and Dissertations platform and its unique features. Can libraries compete with commercial vendors and publishers in offering Web applications and content delivery platforms? What new ways can we push content to our users?     

Acceptance of Koha Open Source System among Librarians in the Malaysian Academic Libraries: An Exploratory Qualitative Study

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that explores the requirements and level of acceptance for the Koha open source software implementation in Malaysian academic libraries. This is a qualitative study based on interviews with system librarians from library application and system divisions in 5 Malaysian universities. The interviews were conducted to understand the technology acceptance, system quality and system information, beliefs and attitude of librarians and to provide insight into a user and open system relations. These factors can be critical in order to understand what may hinder the acceptance of open source systems in Malaysia academic libraries. The findings disclose that the level of acceptance of the Koha open source system among Malaysian librarians is high as they are satisfied with the information quality, system quality and system platform. They have positive intentions to use this system and believe it meets their current and future information needs. The requirements of its implementation are focused on perceived usefulness (technology), attitude toward using (users), and perceived ease of use (system). The subsequent influencing factors are a reflection of Koha system stability and users’ acceptance of this system’s information quality, system quality, librarians’ awareness, satisfaction, user confidence level, support for library standards, highly integrated modules, a web-based solution, intention to use a system, and actual usage of an open-source system. Practical implications include cost savings, outsourced system maintenance, and accessibility of the system after office hours. The Koha open-source system is a new paradigm in system solutions for libraries in Malaysia. The results of the current study are applicable to other library settings.     

政府统计部门实施用户满意度调查的若干构想——基于欧洲统计系统的实践经验

通过用户满意度调查来测量用户对统计数据质量水平的主观感知,为统计数据质量评估与控制提供了一条重要的信息渠道。基于对政府统计部门实施用户满意度调查的社会背景及其必要性的分析,借鉴在国际同领域实践中起步较早的、较具代表性的欧洲统计系统用户满意度调查的相关实践经验,对中国政府统计部门实施用户满意度调查的制度保障、目标定位与内容设计以及调查组织实施等方面的实践要领进行了探讨。     

Evaluating area-wide crime-reduction measures

When we look around an imperfect world, we feel an understandable impulse to improve matters. We may therefore decide to intervene by prescribing medical treatment or by introducing crime reduction measures. But how do we know that what we do is likely to work? In medicine the standard answer is to do a trial; not surprisingly the same is true in crime reduction. But, says Paul Marchant, the lessons learned from medical trials have not been implemented in the latter field.