Celebrate the end of my summer contract hours by only working 2 hours on my citation video project.  All work and no play, don’t you know.  Too tired even to run today.

Thursday:

Work another 2 hours on citation videos  – now have 2 complete.  Drop son off at home after XC practice and drive into the office for a meeting on the migration of NetLibrary content to EBSCOhost.  Spend the next three hours getting updates on projects from staff.  Budget projections are looking pretty dire – we may need to make some unpopular decisions this fall.  Added staff member to this blog in hopes that she will write about all the cool things happening in periodicals – especially highlighting some of our hidden treasures.  End the day as usual at the YMCA with a 5K run.

Friday:

Another several hours on citation videos.  Finally discovered an easy way to play the content in PowerPoint while recording in Jing.  I quickly re-record my first 2 videos (now half the file size as the originals and much easier to view) and move on to the third.

I still need to call two vendors today about new databases; I wish there was a 24-hour rule in responding to customer requests.

7:00 a.m. Wake son for XC practice.

7:30 a.m. Wake son again for XC practice.

8:15 a.m. Drop son at XC practice; drive into work.

9:00 a.m. Budget meeting; the upcoming year looks a little dicey in terms of actually having funding to retain all the resources that faculty and students need.  I’m sure this is hugely surprising for anyone reading this!

9:05 a.m. Have officially burned through all the hours in my summer contract.  For the next month, working pro bono.

10:00 a.m. Meeting over.   Run over to periodicals office to alert staff member that our ERM is being worked on and that we shouldn’t be entering new data.  Come up with new student project to check a bibliography to make sure all the books are still in print.  Upon accessing Books in Print, realize that we no longer have access to BIP via FirstSearch.  Pay one invoice.  Sign, scan, and email 3 renewals, asking for invoices.

11:00 a.m. Hear back from FirstSearch that the database changes were announced over a year ago.  Cool.  We’ve lost access to 9 other databases besides Books in Print.  Update some budget numbers.

12:00 p.m. Alert my staff member that we can actually keep adding data to our ERM, no worries.

12:10 p.m. Rush out of library for a 20-minute drive home to pick up my daughter and get her to band practice.  Actual time allotted for 20-minute drive: 10 minutes.

12:33 p.m. Drop daughter off at practice (only 3 minutes late!), then over to Blue Cup for lunch.  Send out email to director and collection development librarian about FirstSearch changes.  Feel slight headache coming on.

1:15 p.m. Grab daughter and drive home.  Write this post.  Update a-z list to reflect access changes to those 10 FirstSearch databases.

2:30 p.m. Add a note to our FirstSearch databases about them being down.

3:15 p.m. Create new fund/ledger structure for our reference titles so that it will be easier for our reference librarian to track expenses.  Previously, funding had been split between monographs, standing orders, and electronic resources with no coding flagging the materials as “reference.”   With expenses continuing to rise, this new system is expected to help us better track expenses for this area.

4:00 p.m.  Hitting the YMCA for an amazing stress-relieving run.

5:50 a.m. ignore alarm, sleep until 6:30.

6:30 a.m. coffee, news, check of the interwebs.

8:15 a.m. drop son off at XC practice, hit my favorite local coffee shop (Blue Cup) to work until son shows up after practice.

8:30 a.m. Begin work on a series of quick videos about citing sources – not only how to cite (examples will be specifically geared towards actual resources used in an assignment for our CST110 classes), but why we cite.   In the background, trying for the umpteenth time to download the final section of data for my CST110 assessment project. Hoping that the bandwidth at the Blue Cup is better than what I have at home.

8:45 a.m.  Blue Cup internet rocks!  Files downloaded. Background files for videos gathered. Reviewing goals for the videos.

10:00 a.m. Leave to transport my son back home.  Make homemade waffles, clean kitchen.

11:00 a.m. From several emails, determine that I need to update our EZproxy config for Web of Science.  After updating the files and re-starting the server, add an alert to all our Web of Knowledge databases on the a-z list about the new interface going live.  Sent an email to my staff member about updating our ERM, e-resource blog, staff, and LibGuides with this information.  Contemplate just doing the updates myself, as staff member is out until Thursday, but realize that I am going to have to delegate to survive the rest of the summer.

11:30 a.m. See email about yet another library web form being broken.  Realize that I need to focus on getting my videos done.  Close email, close blog – focus on videos.

2:45 p.m. First draft of Why we Cite video completed!  Feeling like I’m finally accomplishing some summer goals.  Heading to the YMCA to run.

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

It has been a pretty amazing experience so far.  Checking in new microfiche and microfilm titles has led me to the decision that we really don’t need to continue receiving two microform formats.  Also, I now see clearly the need for putting our microform shelflist online.

By re-shelving our current titles and gathering use statistics, I have a better sense of how our print collection is getting used (or not!).

When uploading our print barcodes to our use statistics database, I discovered that 18 of our current titles had physical barcodes that did not match the barcode in our catalog.  Meaning, of course, that these data were not being included on reports.

Small discoveries, perhaps, but ones that help me to remember that in order to have those wonderful teaching/learning moments with our users,  there is still much technical work involved in libraries, and it is important.

photo by Dwayne Webb

Over the past ten years, we have quietly and slowly undertaken a revolution in the way we access scholarly journal articles. Our periodicals department once managed 1600 print and microform subscriptions. Now we manage 63,000 access points to journal articles (print, electronic, and microform) through our GetTeXt service (SFX).

Several years ago we moved our bound journals from our first floor to the lower level.  Just this past summer, we switched our subscriptions from print to electronic except for titles that are 1) leisure reading/magazines and 2) not available electronically.   We currently stand at 388 print subscriptions.

As our current periodicals area was meant for a much larger collection, we are in the midst of cutting in half  the amount of shelving we use, leaving more space for a comfortable lounge area, coming later this spring.

Anecdotally, we understand that some of our users still want to access their scholar journal articles in print and may be alarmed by our changes. In our community of 9,000 users, however, the data point to the majority of our users wanting instantaneous access to journal articles 24/7.

The following data illustrate the sharp decline in our print/microform titles as well as the rise in electronic use.  I hope these illustrations help explain why we are making the switch to electronic:

We can break down that use by format:

Which of our print titles are getting the most use?  These graphs show current periodicals used more than 50 times in a fiscal year (July 1-July 30):

As use continues to decline on the print front, we are moving our extremely limited funds to support electronic access.  Here’s just one example of why moving to electronic makes sense.  In the fall of 2007, we canceled 46 print titles, all published by Elsevier.  These 46 titles cost us $60,000 in FY08.  The costs of these subscriptions were rising approx. 10% each year.   We canceled those 46 print titles in favor of Elsevier’s College Edition, a series of three packages totaling 2100 titles in the areas of physical sciences, life & health sciences, and social and behavioral sciences.  The cost for College Edition?  $33,000.   The annual price increases?  A mere 3%.  We saved nearly $30,000 and added access to 2,000 more titles.  And is College Edition being used?  In 2009, 34,440 full text articles were downloaded.

Our students, faculty, and staff can access electronic journals whether they are studying in China, at a conference in San Francisco,  or in their apartment across town.  They can access the content at 3:00 in the morning or at 12 noon.  They can save the articles to their desktop or print them out.

Is electronic access to journals perfect?  Of course not.  Is research easier, quicker and more convenient with electronic journals?  Yes.

What are your questions?  Please share in the comments.

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!

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

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.

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.