It's Academic

The vast digital world in Academic Libraries is continually changing. Here are just some examples of available sessions which include literacy toolkits, digital librarianship, filming and production strategies, and how-tos for expanding interactions with patrons and staff. Not only will these sessions provide you with some answers that you’ve been looking for, but they’ll also propose questions that are pertinent in today’s libraries!

• Check out The College & Research Division Lunch & Learn: Kick Back and Relax: Creating a Radical Sense of Belonging in Our Libraries! This session, applicable for all types of libraries, will take place on Tuesday at noon and will feature Ione Damasco, Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence, Engagement, and Operations at the University of Dayton Libraries. Libraries are places that hold the ability to connect people from different backgrounds and life experiences.  However, despite that being the goal, sometimes stories are left out, experiences aren’t told, and identities are not represented.  Hear how the speaker has been able to make connections across campus with partners to develop and implement programming that fosters a more inclusive campus environment and how you might do the same at your library. The development of these dialogue-based skills can make our libraries places where people don’t just belong, but feel at home.

• If your own dreams aren’t yielding solutions to issues, try Dreaming in Digital: Equitable Engagement across Distances. Attend this session to learn how collaborative documents and social media platforms can expand your interactions with patrons while supporting institutional efforts towards inclusion and accessibility!
• No scissors and glue are needed with: Crafting an Information Literacy Toolkit: Maximizing Faculty Options to Embed Information Literacy in the Curriculum. Learn the process of creating an information literacy toolkit that maximizes librarian and faculty choices and increases student information literacy skills.
• Welcome, Critical Pedagogy: Engaging with Social Justice Concepts in Library Instruction presents two academic librarians sharing strategies, lesson examples, and outcomes from their incorporation of social justice topics into business and technology-related information literacy instruction.
• Would you like to know how a restructured academic library department used cross-training to improve their e-resources usage data collection? Then join us for Managing E-Resources Usage Data: Learning by Jumping in the Deep.
• The Power of POV: Emulating the First-Person Style of Mister Rogers and YourKoreanDad in a Library Orientation Video introduces point-of-view videos and how the style can be used to create a library orientation video. Session attendees will learn simple filming and production strategies and will hear plans to study how POV videos contribute to student self-efficacy.
• How’s this for a title? OER SWOT: Importance of Institutional Culture to Library OER Involvement This presentation, with its intriguing title, addresses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats facing academic library OER involvement.
• What You Need to Know about Digital Librarianship: A Discussion Among Digital Librarians is answered through a discussion among digital librarians at Pennsylvania libraries. This session will examine digital librarianship in action within different library contexts and explore its collaborative character.
• As if you don’t have enough on your plate to deal with, is lateness among student or library workers an issue for you? If so, this session, Why is no one showing up on time? Utilizing Retail Strategies to Manage Student Workers can help. In it you’ll learn how to boost accountability and increase productivity using personnel management principles from the retail environment.
• What is bias? How is it evaluated? Both are good questions but answers in the library literature are scarce. Using theory from media studies and rhetoric, the presentation: This Title is Biased: A Theoretically Grounded Approach to Evaluating Source Bias describes a grounded approach to source evaluation.

Did You Know? Conference Scholarships are Available! Grants to attend the PaLA Annual Conference are underwritten by some of our generous conference sponsors and are available to PaLA members.  For more information on these opportunities, go to https://www.palibraries.org/page/2021ConfSchol. 

Hurry, the deadline to apply is July 30, 2021

Offsite library storage is often used for low-use materials (Hazen 2000, Powell in Nitecki & Kendrick 2001, vanDuinkerken and Romano 2016). At my institution, however, this is becoming less and less true.  

Here at Pitt, we’re in the midst of another big moving project. We’ve been undergoing a phased renovation in our main library for the past few years, and with each new floor we tackle, more books are being added to our offsite collection, ULS-Thomas Blvd. All these new accessions have had me thinking about the literature I’ve read surrounding selection for offsite library storage.  

Such literature suggests several strategies ranging from utilizing a combination of thoughtful liaison analysis and faculty input to system-generated lists informed by circulation statistics and publication date (Tabacaru & Pickette 2013, Carpenter in Nitecki & Kendrick 2001, Deardorff & Aamot 2006). With our library system undergoing such a large project and with such tight turnaround times (not to mention pandemic-imposed staffing levels), we are driven to approach selection of materials for storage not from a collection development angle, but from how much shelf space we’ll have in the main library when the renovation is over. We don’t have time to allow each liaison to handpick the titles to go offsite, and they don’t have the time to do it, either. When planning what to send offsite, our move committee experiments with a Tableau workbook to determine which set of criteria will get us to 85% of the available space. Then we can pull and ship them off! 

While low-use materials will absolutely get caught up in these criteria, it also means we also have surprising titles from Octavia Butler, Madeline Miller, and Joy Harjo sitting in trays alongside less used titles like The Barbed Wire Identification Handbook. In fact, our top three most requested titles library-system-wide (from the past three years) are held in our offsite collection. Additionally, even if a book is considered low-use now, any book has the potential to become high-use when an instructor assigns it for class, or it’s a work of fiction recently adapted to a movie or TV show. In cases like these, one could make a case for the restoration of such items back to the open shelves, but I doubt many librarians feel up to the task of constantly transferring books to and fro based on their usage. This reality underscores the fact that even high-use items have a place in storage because ultimately, storage is not a death sentence. When the usage level is no longer the sole driving factor of what goes offsite, and to a broader extent, when most of the collection is offsite, it challenges the perception of library storage as anything other than an extension of the open stacks on-site.  

All of these books belong in our offsite collection!

There is still a place for collection development, though. We can make these macro-scale decisions about criteria as the moving project requires, but I think there is room for liaisons to request the occasional exception. For example, if a series of reference texts truly serves no purpose to a patron when it is stored offsite, it might be a good candidate for staying behind on the open shelves. This should come up in planning meetings before the pull list has been generated. These broad strokes transfer decisions and the flexibility they afford us is why Pitt has no set offsite policy beyond “no duplicates” (and even then, exceptions can be made). 

Just as onsite academic libraries are changing to serve the needs of the student population, so are offsite storage libraries. Once seen as a solution to the so-called space crisis (massive collection growth in the mid-20th century making collections too large for their buildings to hold them), they are now, I predict, well on their way to being the main provider for all research materials. 

Works Cited

Deardorff, T. C., & Aamot, G., J. (2006). Remote Shelving Services. Washington, DC : Association of Research Libraries. https://doi.org/10.29242/spec.295 

Hazen, D. C. (2000). Selecting for storage: Local problems, local responses, and an emerging common challenge. Library Resources & Technical Services, 44(4), 176–183. https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.44n4.176 

Nitecki, D. A., & Kendrick, C. L. (2001). Library off-site shelving: Guide for high-density facilities. Libraries Unlimited. 

Tabacaru, S., & Pickette, C. (2013). Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Texas A&M University Libraries’ collection assessment for off-site storage. Collection Building, 32(3), 111–115. https://doi.org/10.1108/CB-02-2013-0006 

vanDuinkerken, W., & Romano, J. (2016). Embracing the future while storing the past: The Joint Library Facility story. Library Review, 65(6/7), 420–428. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-11-2015-0113 

It’s fair to think that when conducting research on a topic, a student will think to search for research articles and stop there. This is of course a perfectly adequate way to research a topic, but as an archivist, I can’t help but think students are missing out on quality sources by not considering primary sources. I’m biased, but there is a wealth of information often hidden in dusty boxes and the depths of the internet underutilized by researchers. There may be a misconception that archival materials are precious items that should be collected and locked behind a door, never to be seen again. While some of these items are fragile, these materials are begging to be read and viewed. Archivist’s want researchers to explore and learn from the materials. But how do we teach students to look for primary sources? I believe this needs to be a group effort from librarians, archivists, and professors to partner in promoting these collections. As archivists, we are the experts in what our collections contain, and often need to facilitate connections with faculty. Sharing collections via social media, presenting at faculty meetings and workshops, and building relationships with faculty all help to promote the use of archival materials.   

I’ve discovered in Widener University’s own archival collections interesting stories of marginalized voices that I know are used in some classes. A history course at Widener utilizes our George Raymond Papers, a collection of scrapbooks covering the Civil Rights Movement in Chester, Pa during the 1960s. Also, our Human Sexuality students often use materials from our Sexuality Archives in their course work. This is a great start and I am excited for future collaborations that may happen. I hope to partner with a faculty member in the future to teach using primary sources and share all of the interesting stories in our collections.   

Another misconception I’ve found is that archival materials can only be used in history courses or the broader humanities. I’ve recently spoken with colleagues about teaching with primary sources and the multidisciplinary opportunities collections offer. Maybe your collection has papers about an influential mathematician that can be added to a math course. Or maybe you have architectural drawings of buildings on your campus that engineering students would be interested in. There are endless possibilities. So, I encourage all to think outside the box, ask about the materials in your archives, spread the word, and promote the use of archival materials. They’re ready and waiting to be used.  

Academic libraries increasingly offer Research Data Management (RDM) services to their patrons and my library is no different. My interest in RDM began while in graduate school and over the past several years I have worked on turning my interests into action. The term “research data management” gets thrown around a lot and it is useful to define what I mean by it here. To me (and I would suspect a lot of you), research data management is the process of organizing, storing, preserving, and sharing your research data. In general, RDM involves the daily, everyday management of data throughout the lifetime of your research project. It is also worth noting that when I say “data” I am referring to all data types, not just numerical data. There are infinite research projects that our patrons are working on and data is always being found, collected, stored, and hopefully preserved. National and international funding agencies have been requiring Data Management Plans (DMPS) for years. In addition to being required, DMPs serve as helpful tools for researchers who are deliberate and specific when creating them. Assisting faculty researchers on my campus with creating effective DMPs is how I began offering research data management services at my local campus.

When I began offering one-on-one DMP appointments I realized how little faculty researchers knew about how to create them. And then I realized how little faculty cared about seeing them through, which was a bit depressing. I understand that researchers are quite busy and the process of jumping through all sorts of funding hoops can be stressful and daunting. It was with this in mind that I began, in earnest, to share my knowledge and expertise of DMPs and RDM with my local research community. After a few individual appointments I decided to create a more formal workshop on creating effective DMPs and I have been slowly offering it to small groups of researchers. Their feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and I used these connections as steppingstones to create new RDM workshops.

Over the last month I have created four additional RDM presentations to complement my DMP presentation. Practicing good RDM skills can be daunting, and it is often pushed aside to meet other research commitments. It is my hope that by offering more of these workshops – at an earlier date – will allow researchers to feel more confident in practicing these skills before it is too late. Additionally, my goal with creating several workshops was to deliver this information in bite-sized pieces. Few research faculty are on campus during the summer so I have yet to offer these workshops but topics include: data management and sharing; data discovery and storage; file naming and version control conventions; writing data management plans, and more. Though I would not consider myself an expert in any of these areas, I have spent a lot of time teaching myself and learning from others. If you or your library are interested in learning more, or offering RDM services yourselves, I have compiled a brief list of resources below that have significantly helped me in my pursuit.

If you are currently offering RDM services or are hoping to in the future, please leave a comment below! What have your successes looked like? Have you experienced any failures that have frustrated you? Is your campus community receptive to the support? Feel free to ask me any questions as well; I am happy to assist if I can.

Books on research data management

• Engaging Researchers with Data Management: The Cookbook by Clare et al.
• Exploring Research Data Management by Cox and Verbaan
• Managing and Sharing Research Data: A Guide to Good Practice by Corti et al.

Online courses/resources to learn more

• ACRL RoadShow Presenter Toolkit: Research Data Management
• DataOne Data Management Training
• Data Carpentry
• DMP Tool
• Implementing Effective Data Practices Toolkit (ARL)
• Research Data Management Library Academy (RDMLA)
• Research Data Management and Sharing (Coursera)

Organizations/groups

• Digital Curation Centre
• Research Data Access and Preservation Association
• Research Data Alliance