I would have never heard of Aphra except that we had a near shelving crisis in the A’s. Too many journals; too few shelves. Our small 3-volume run of Aphra: the Feminist Literary Magazine landed on the shelves of my office. As I debated the precarious future of our small run of Aphra, I noted that when it was published, in the 1970s, a library could subscribe to Aphra for a mere $5.50 per year.
Why is Aphra so important? According to the Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature’s article on Women’s Magazines:
From 1969 to 1976 the high standards of Aphra, named for the 17th-century playwright and novelist Aphra Behn and edited by dramatist and novelist Elizabeth Fisher, suited the first feminist literary journal. The makeup served an audience eager for creative writing as well as critical articles on the arts and society. Among the contributors were the playwright Myrna Lamb, author of the satiric Mod Donna (1970) and Apple Pie (1976); the novelists Marge Piercy and Rita Mae Brown; the theorist Kate Millet; and the poets Andre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. The magazine serialized the playwright Dacia Maraini’s Manifesto from 1972 to 1973 and, in summer 1974, Daphe Patai’s essay “Utopia for Whom?”
Murphy Library holds v.3(1971)-v.5(1974), v.6:no.3-4(1976) of this important feminist title. To learn more about feminist literature, the Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature is available in the reference section at PN471 .W455 2004
April 27, 2011. Journal of the Month, News. .
Today is the first day of the semester at my university. Students will not arrive back for classes until next Monday, so this week will be full of meetings and planning for the semester ahead.
7:00 a.m. Check email from home. I can’t decide whether this practice is worthwhile or just discouraging but I just can’t stop myself.
8:00 a.m. Arrive at the office, grab a mug of tea, start editing documents for presentation later today to our department chairs about our institutional repository, MINDS@UW, and green OA.
9:00 a.m. Hear back from vendor that access to one of our journals, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, has mysterious changed from 1987-present to 2004-present. Dig through voluminous email files on this title and realize that the publisher actually never nailed down access dates. Curious. Spend the next hour on the phone and email trying to resolve the issue. Sinking feeling that resolution will involve me purchasing journal archive for said title.
10:00 a.m. Start posting this update.
10:25 a.m. More tea!! Sat in on staff break time. Always good to catch up with colleagues after the long break.
11:25 a.m. Back to FAQ page on green OA. Heavily influenced by Peter Suber’s A field guide to misunderstandings about open access, but with a lighter, more positive tone.
11:40 a.m. Colleague dropped by to see if I would support a semester-long trial of EBSCO’s new discovery resource. In a heartbeat! I love the idea of searching all our content through one interface. Even more exciting is the speed through which this dream may become reality. Now the final challenge: funding the dream.
12:00 p.m. Lunch at my desk; spicy Thai noodles…yum.
12:25 p.m. New drafts of OA presentation and handout sent out for review.
1:00 p.m. Handouts made, prepping for presentation.
2:35 p.m. Back from presentation – I think my colleague and I generated some interest in green OA!! Adding handout and PPT to web page and sprucing it up a bit.
3:30 p.m. Ready to start porting some old ASP pages to ASP.net
4:00 p.m. The first day back always goes quickly!
January 19, 2010. Tags: librarydayinthelife. News. .
Dear EBSCOhost:
For the past four years, our campus has used Ex Libris’ SFX as our link resolver. We also license many, many EBSCOhost databases (our students love your interface!) so having EBSCOhost integrate well with SFX is a huge priority for us. Unfortunately, EBSCOhost’s holdings format does not work well with SFX and the openURL format.
Here’s an example that a student let me know about just last week:
Author: Lintner,, Timothy
Article Title: The Savage and the Slave: Critical Race Theory, Racial Stereotyping, and the Teaching of American History
Journal: Journal of Social Studies Research
Volume: 28
Issue: 1
Year: 2004
Pages: 27-32
ISSN: 0885-985X
SID: EBSCO:ERIC
OpenURL: http://sfx.wisconsin.edu/uwlax?genre=article&isbn=&issn=0885985X&title=Journal of Social Studies Research&volume=28&issue=1&date=20040301&atitle=The Savage and the Slave: Critical Race Theory, Racial Stereotyping, and the Teaching of American History&aulast=Lintner, Timothy&spage=27&pages=27-32&sid=EBSCO:ERIC&pid=
The holdings available in SFX for this title are: $obj->parsedDate(“>=”,2004,undef,undef) (which translates to: available from 2004). This format (year only) would be great if all your publisher agreements started in January of each year, but that’s not the reality. The actual holdings for the EBSCOhost full text for the title above are: 09/01/2004 to present. So, anytime one of our users wants an article from v.28, no.1 (March 2004) they are going to be extremely frustrated. I manually edited the holdings for this title (so if you try the openURL above the holdings look perfect) and all titles that students encounter problems with, but there are thousands of titles and I simply do not have the time to edit each and every one of them.
I don’t understand why you can’t send metadata to Ex Libris that includes volume, issue, and year for your journal holdings. I’m posting this message to my blog in the hopes that other librarians are wondering the same thing. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to facilitate a resolution.
Sincerely yours,
Jen Holman
December 15, 2009. Tags: EBSCOhost, openURL, SFX. News, Subscriptions. .
Our GetText menu targets (the links to the full text, library catalog, etc.) are incredibly confusing. In talking with one of our insightful student workers at the reference desk today about this confusion, I realized that if I split our z39.50 library catalog target in two (one for ISBN look-up and one for ISSN look-up), I could simplify the language used to describe the target.
So, this message that once had to serve for both books and journals:
gets split into a message for journals (still a confusing message as the z39.50 search is linking at an ISSN level and isn’t checking whether we actually have holdings or not, but moving in the right direction):
The journal target will also always display with the ILLiad link as many times the journal article requested will either be prior or after our actual holdings.
and a new target for books:
Next on my list…manipulating Wiley journal use statistics.
December 1, 2009. News. .
I had an anonymous chat with a user over the summer. S/he was asking about what “fun” magazines we had in the library. I was quickly scrambling to think about “leisure” magazines that we have (we categorize them only as “general”). I rattled off Guitar Player, Glamour, Elle, Rolling Stone and then it hit me – what makes these titles fun or even popular?
For the past ten years I’ve been so busy managing access to scholarly journals that I haven’t given our “fun” titles a second glance. When the person chatting with me asked about what alternative press titles we had I knew I was in trouble. We have some titles – like Ms. and Viet Tide, but there are many areas, such as GLBT, in which we are greatly lacking. I also realized that we don’t have an easy way to display our popular titles.
And there it was: a new project!
So, I’m reviewing our “general” titles (many of which are indeed general, but don’t seem either popular or fun) and adding in some core titles in a number of areas. I’ll also be working on a way to display these titles electronically via our library web site.
If you have suggestions for magazine titles to add (or cancel!), please let me know.
October 22, 2009. News, Subscriptions, Uncategorized. .
8:00: in office, tea in hand. Send out final plea asking for feedback on revised SFX menu display. I’ve only heard from 4 out of a possible 11 librarians. Realize that I am perhaps the only person who thinks this is a big deal. Will update menu at the end of the day.
9:00: Focus on fixing header and footer CSS style issues in LibData header and footer.
11:00 Where did the morning go? I never realized how much time troubleshooting takes, nor did I realize how much I would learn from figuring things out myself. The learning is the best part of being a librarian.
11:15: Staff member fills me in on latest publisher saga. After a snafu with our periodicals vendor, publisher will not be sending us two issues from the fall. Consider going electronic only, but the e-license will cost $300 more and I am not convinced these titles get enough use. Also, publisher refuses to work with periodicals vendor for the electronic purchase. Since all our money is with our periodicals vendor, this little snag could pose real problems. Make a mental note to follow up on Monday.
12:45: Break for lunch.
1:00: More CSS troubleshooting. New footer is in place; no more tables! Just learned new IE CSS hack – CSS will no longer validate, but perhaps will display properly. It’s all about choices.
2:00: Call colleague to talk me down from extreme frustration on getting margin thing figured out. While talking to him, re-fresh my file one more time and voila! It’s fixed. Sometimes you just need to talk it out. And re-fresh.
3:00: Run over to the Cleary Center to listen to chancellor’s open forum on campus budget woes. Our library will get possible funding for more hours, but no money for materials such as journals and databases. Not looking forward to trying to wringing another year out of a budget that hasn’t increased in 10 years. Wondering if I should share my 2002 paper on how to central many library services in order to save money. Publishers have been asking me lately why we don’t order more journals consortially. I have to make more progress in this area this semester.
3:40: Sneak out of forum. Run to car (again a little too late) and drive home to pick-up daughter for her piano lessons.
4:30: Post blog posts for past few days and check email one last time. Also, update display for SFX menu.
5:00: Unplugging for the evening.
January 31, 2009. Tags: librarydayinthelife. News. .
Pre-work: Same morning routine as all the other days this week. Twist for this morning: took 2 full cups of coffee before my brain function kicked in.
8:00: Arrive in my office. Computer refuses to let me in to our shared file space because I was forced kicking and screaming to change my campus password yesterday. Reboot computer, wait full 5 minutes for it to reboot, re-set links to mapped drive. Access email folders, send password for journal-which-shall-not -be -named to colleague.
8:30: Catch up on blogs, email, check calendar. No meetings!
9:00: Run down to staff lounge for tea, stop procrastinating working on Course Page for Choosing a Topic. It’s fun learning how to create a new page in LibData and checking out how other libraries approach this on their web sites. Wow! Styles are crazy for my course page. Check to see if other librarians are editing the style sheet; they are not. Will ask e-resources librarian for help later.
10:00: Note that I included my old office hours in my little video showing how to find my office (It’s a little difficult to find, but the view is worth the aggravation). When I go to edit it, discover that I didn’t save all the original files. Re-create parts of the movie and think it is even better than before. After I’m finished, find all the original files.
11:30: “Mouse” hand is starting to ache. Might be time for a break. Walking over to the mail room. Stretching.
12:30: Still working on Course page. I think It’s taking shape.
12:45: quick lunch in break room.
1:00: Get news from US News & World Report might be ceasing their print edition. Turns out they are just switching to a monthly edition, but the emails are really flying. I would not be surprised if more of our weekly news titles publish fewer issues.
2:00: Still working on Choosing Topics page. Adding Librarian’s Internet Index. Notice that our description of this resource is still listing the old title, go into LibData and update it. LibData makes it very easy to update database information.
3:20: Leave a little late; run to car to drive to daughter’s school and then take her to her tap class.
4:00-5:00: Enjoying the YMCA’s wireless. Notice that the styles on many of our web pages are not displaying well in IE. Work until keyboard stops working (no enter key!) and decide that’s enough for the day.
January 30, 2009. Tags: librarydayinthelife. News, Uncategorized. .
Pre-work: Same routine as Tuesday. Added attraction – tax materials are complete and just need to be dropped off at the accountant’s office.
8:15: arrive at office, slightly frozen; check email, blogs, and calendar. Talk to staff member about my position responsibilities possibly changing slightly. Discover that I’m actually on the reference desk from 9-10:30 instead of 10:30-12.
9:00-10:30: Many computers frozen, printer jams and paper outages. Eureka moment on how to fix our SFX menu so that the relating holdings information displays properly.
10:30: Work with staff member to figure out re-linked component nightmare in Voyager Acquisitions module. Draft email to librarians and staff asking for feedback on proposed SFX menu changes.
11:15: Hear back from Ex Libris about linking problem with Allen Press title. They are deleting the only record that works because the Library of Congress doesn’t list it in the official record. Quickly contact Allen Press. Learn that “problem ISSN” is actually the e-ISSN. Reply back to Ex Libris begging them to re-instate the ISSN so that we can link to this title.
11:30: Grab a chicken parmesan wrap from the library coffee shop and eat at desk while trying to clear out email inbox. Current emails in inbox: 716.
1:00: Wonder where the time has gone. Email inbox: 570. I think it’s taking such a long time because something has to be checked or read before I can safely delete each email.
2:45: Working on creating “chunks” for library instruction sessions. Simple chunks where students can run their own searches. Chucks like finding books, findings news articles, finding research articles, finding AV materials.
3:30: Running out of steam. I’ve decided to do a Course Page on finding topics so the instructor can run with it. Also thinking about asking students to take a tutorial: What is an article database and watch a “movie” on the differences between scholarly journals and popular press materials.
4:15: Another day gone too quickly. I feel like I got a lot accomplished today though.
January 28, 2009. Tags: librarydayinthelife. News. .
Ever wonder just what it is that librarians do all day? Are we secretly curled up in a sunny window reading with our cats? Read about the real daily lives of all sorts of librarians at Library Day in the Life. And below, I give you my Tuesday.
Pre-work: 5:30: alarm goes off. Get the coffee started and eat breakfast. Give cat her spoonful of tuna, drop tuna on the floor on way to her bowl. Cat does not seem to mind. Get son up at 6:15; Realize that daughter is still sleeping at 6:45, wake her up. Leave house at 7:30 and drop daughter off at surround care.
8:00: Arrive at office, check email, get tea, check my calendar.
8:15: Update embedded librarian documents on course management system for new CST110 sections.
8:40: Send out Access query for determining how many standing order volumes we added in a given year so Tech Services Librarian can complete ALS statistics. Start work on figuring out query for our current journals, regardless of format.
9:00: Work on revising our library services web page. I am attempting to organize library services into categories. This task seems like it should be much simpler than it is. Sent out a draft page to web team members. Also ask for feedback on the new RSS feed display.
9:30: Answered staff questions about a Sage survey, signed timecards, and talked about how we fill checklists (each time a journal gets canceled, added, ceases, etc. lots of changes occur in the OPAC, link resolver, shelves, etc. We manage the changes through checklists).
10:00: Preparation for 10:30-1 reference shift. Tea re-filled, scone from our library coffee shop purchased and consumed, ran over to mail room, signed another time card.
10:30 – 1:00: Reference Shift – Typical questions for first week of the semester: Where is the restroom, where is the paper cutter, the printer is jammed, where is the computer lab?
1:15: Quick lunch
1:30: Created a database from ILL requests made from July –December 2008 by our Health Professions folks. We want to actively manage these requests so that we can order new subscriptions if need be. Results are not what I expected: 316 unique journal titles requested. Top two journal titles each had a mere 10 requests. We already have subscriptions for both titles, but requests were for outlying issues.
2:30: Was planning on working on instruction material for upcoming CST110 classes, but got an urgent email about a title not linking properly in SFX. I spent 40 minutes troubleshooting the problem, fixing it, and reporting it to Ex Libris.
3:10- running Xenu in background to make sure broken links reported last semester are fixed.
3:10-decided to run Xenu against all inks on library web site. Lots of broken links. Fixed about half of them.
4:00: heading home.
January 28, 2009. Tags: librarydayinthelife. News. .
Newspaper publishers are struggling to make a profit as news gets disseminated via the internet, hand-held devices, and television 24/7. Last spring, we were notified that our subscription to Madison’s Capital Times would be refunded, as the newspaper would cease to be printed. In May, we learned that our newspaper delivery guy would be unable to continue delivering our newspapers. While many newspapers offer mail delivery, what good is Monday’s news on Wednesday? In consultation with our library staff, we decided to drop subscriptions to the following newspapers as we were unable to provide access to them on their publication date:
Chicago Tribune (most recent 4 days available at PressDisplay | 30 day archive at publisher’s web site)
St. Paul Pioneer Press (free content at publisher’s web site)
Star Tribune (most recent 60 days available at PressDisplay)
USA Today (most recent 60 days available at PressDisplay)
Wisconsin State Journal (free content at publisher’s web site)
While the printed newspaper will no longer be available for the above titles, access to the current content of these newspapers will be enhanced through our new license to PressDisplay which provides electronic access to over 700 newspapers from 76 countries in 38 languages in full-color and full-page format. Users can browse articles and other key content, such as pictures, advertisements, and classifieds.
Some newspaper subscriptions were already mail delivery and will continue:
Christian Science Monitor
Coulee News
Green Bay Press Gazette
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Onalaska Community Life
India Abroad
Indian Country Today
Washington Post (PressDisplay)
And three newspapers will continue to be delivered in print on a daily basis:
La Crosse Tribune
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
If I hear a great outcry (I’m hearing a low, steady outcry asking for a subscription to Wisconsin State Journal so stay tuned) we will gladly reconsider these decisions.
September 16, 2008. News. .
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