2014 Charleston Library Conference

Slides from Rick Anderson

New ideas, business models and technologies enter the scholarly landscape at an ever-increasing rate. In response to this deluge of potential innovation, lightning talks, shotgun sessions and elevator pitches designed to help us understand these technologies have become a mainstay of publishing and library conferences alike. Despite this, it is very difficult for libraries and publishers alike to not only keep up with it all, but to understand which technologies will truly help them meet their specific needs and goals as well as serving academics at every stage of the research cycle.

This session will offer an overview of this complex, shifting landscape, and to explore the ways in which we might think about the role of technology in the scholarly landscape. What will really help us engage with our patrons and users? Which products will help us satisfy our specific missions? Whether you’re a Librarian, a publisher or even a technologist with an idea, the session aims provide you with a framework for thinking about technology driven products that goes beyond the cool factor and matches productized technologies to real points of need.

A little background: When we researched the STM ebook publishing landscape, we saw that it was dominated by disjointed chapter-level PDFs. These were effectively print books online, largely lacking even basic enhancements that electronic delivery allows, such as color or cross-linking. We saw a clear opportunity to launch a digitally-focused book program, offering authors and readers the true benefits of digital book publishing. Our ebooks were a major discussion point at six Library Advisory Board meetings, held worldwide, and the advice we received from librarians played an integral part in the development of the program, from content to delivery.

Description of the session: An inside look at how a society publisher developed and launched an innovative ebooks program.

Objective of the session: To bring librarians behind-the-scenes of a major product launch which was molded and designed based on feedback from the library community. Ways of including the audience: A question and answer session would be included where we would provide honest answers to even the most difficult questions.What attendees can expect to learn: We will not be aiming to sell or promote our ebooks in any way during this session. The intention is for us to give attendees a look into the process a publisher undertakes when developing a major new product. Librarians don’t often have the opportunity to learn about business strategy, research and development, successes and failures from a publisher’s perspective. This session aims to bring publishers, vendors and librarians together by reviewing how each plays a role in creating new products for the marketplace.

Users come to the library for many different reasons. They may want to find a quick overview of a specific topic, to check out the newest articles in a particular area, to search for material for a course assignment or a research project, or simply to obtain access to a specific book or article. One of the challenges for a library and their discovery system is to accommodate users at any academic level who are seeking information in any subject area or across multiple subject areas as cross-disciplinary studies increase. At the same time, libraries need to make sure that their local collections are well presented and accessible. In 2014, Harvard University Library and Ex Libris embarked on a user study to evaluate core usage scenarios for scholarly material and users’ expectations from a library and its discovery system. The first part of the project consisted of the collection of information such as detailed usage scenarios and feedback from a variety of stakeholders, followed by a multi-institution workshop to expand the scenarios with experiences from other types of institutions. The results will serve to create personas and common usage themes and scenarios that can then be used to optimize aspects of the discovery system, such as relevance ranking and custom search tools.After presenting the methods and results of the study, we will provide attendees with a platform for discussion.

Students use Wikipedia ubiquitously as their starting point for research.  Increasingly librarians have also come to grasp Wikipedia's importance as a way for libraries to make their collections discoverable where readers already are.  These trends coalesced in The Wikipedia Library, a nonprofit project that pairs top reference publishers with experienced Wikipedia editors through mutually beneficial donations.  Editors are given free access and set loose to add high-quality citations on Wikipedia's massively trafficked article pages.  Oxford University Press and JSTOR, among others, have joined up with the Wikipedia Library and seen their external links from the encyclopedia increase dramatically.  OCLC further partnered with The Wikipedia Library to develop a script based on their KnowledgeBase API which will help complete the circle of research and dissemination:  the tool allows institutionally-affiliated readers to click directly from Wikipedia article references to their own university's holdings. The ultimate goal is to help libraries and publishers reach readers, and for Wikipedia to become the starting point for research but not the end point!

The College of William and Mary Library offered collection development grants to its teaching faculty in order to supplement their research and teaching. This program also helped the library to fill in some holes in its collections while adding material that was essential to faculty research and curricular needs. This program will show how a new funding opportunity carved out of the material budget was developed to promote the library as well as enhance liaison collaboration with faculty. The panel will discuss the logistics of the grant process, what was gained, and mistakes made in its first year of a new collection development initiative.

This presentation will:

• Show library subject liaisons to use new ways to develop relationships with faculty by learning their current research methods and helping them develop new courses;


• Offer collection management and budget managers an alternative for adding flexibility to materials budgets;


• Demonstrate to public services and outreach librarians a new way to promote the library, its services, and collections. 

An outline of the presentation:

1. Process of promoting collection grants to faculty. 


2. Discussion of different ways liaisons collaborated with faculty.


3. Review of proposals and breakdown of proposals.


4. Lessons learned.


5. Budgetary aspect of the program – allocations, types of materials purchased.

With traditional higher education markets surpassing their peak in domestic student enrollment, library budgets and demand for research content, the industry continues to look to the developing world for growth. While the BRIC markets have dominated much of the media focus on emerging nations in recent years, for academia at least three of these—Brazil, India and China—are certainly important but they are not the end of the story. Recent data on the global origins of new scholarly publications, sources of institutions and users accessing content, and sites for overseas campuses of Western universities, yield some interesting new insights for publishers, vendors and librarians.

Bringing together a panel featuring a publisher expanding into new markets, a librarian with an international campus and a scholarly platform provider, this panel will explore the latest hot markets for the higher education and research communities and how to serve these diverse constituencies around the world. Based on data from institutional registrations and new content on the ingentaconnect research portal of 10,000 publications from 250 publishers worldwide, the session will reveal the geographic breakdown and recent trends of libraries accessing the service, site traffic and sources of new content. We will discuss what this means for publishers looking to break into these regions and describe some specific sales and marketing journeys abroad. Finally, we will overlay the library perspective on how to manage information resources across institutions with increasingly global reach and international branch campuses.

The panel will address such questions as: where are the fastest growing sources of traffic to digital content? What are publishers doing to identify opportunities and break into new regions? And what does it take to serve a globalized library? Attendees can expect to hear real data, test their assumptions about the world economy and delve into new adventures in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

As Outsell described in 2013, research analytics has taken on more importance for publishers, research offices and researchers, libraries, and funding bodies. Understanding an institution’s research performance, exploring new opportunities for collaboration, and benchmarking against other institutions has led to the development of different discovery tools for research institutions. Understanding how to effectively use these products has been an issue for some institutions, especially libraries. While there are different products in the marketplace, this presentation will describe for attendees how one product benefits three areas: publishers, research offices, and libraries. While focusing on Elsevier’s Scival products, the use cases presented are applicable to other products in the marketplace.

The first speaker, Jeff Voci, will provide a brief overview of the growth of the research analytics marketplace and how this data can help to improve a university’s ability to establish, execute, and evaluate institutional research strategy. He will present two brief case studies on how specific US research institutions have used these tools to improve results in the areas of decision-making, boosting collaboration, attracting investment, and optimizing expenditure investment. The second speaker will describe how Scival was implemented at Oregon Health and Science University. Rachel Dresbeck, a research development officer, will outline why research analytics are becoming more important on campus and how she partnered with their library in the early stages of the SciVal products, and how these tools have helped address problems such as identifying research strengths and driving strategic investments. The final speaker, Emily McElroy, will outline how libraries, especially at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, can use these research analytics tools in improving collections, programs, and services.

Just building the collection doesn't mean that the patrons will come. This session will look at strategies for building usage of the great content that you have licensed. The session includes presentations on how leading libraries build awareness of their collections, as well as a look at vendor-supported efforts to help librarians promote and market content to faculty and students. The session will include an assessment of a campaign to leverage social media and micro-marketing to spur awareness and usage. The presentation will focus on promoting media collections.