Janice Simmons-Welburn Associate Dean of libraries at the University of Arizona, has been appointed dean of the university library at Marquette. Simmons-Welburn succeeds Dr. Nicholas C. Burckel, who retired at the end of December after 10 years of service to Marquette. As chief officer of the libraries, Simmons-Welburn will be responsible for development of a vision based on the university’s mission; the direction of planning within the context of changes in academic libraries, the disciplines of the university, and society; oversight of recruitment, development and evaluation of librarians and staff; and securing resources through fund-raising, budget negotiation, grants and contracts. Michael Pate, associate director of libraries, will serve as acting dean until Simmons-Welburn joins the university on April 3.
Matt Barnes has been promoted to the position of VP of Sales and Marketing, Blackwell's Book Services (BBS). Barnes joined BBS in 2002, most recently holding the position of director of market development.
Harry Dean has been appointed the new business manager of Project MUSE, the online repository of over 300 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and arts, managed by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Prior to joining MUSE, Dean was an independent consultant for medical specialty societies. He also served as the executive vice president and director for the periodicals division of the W.B. Saunders Company.
UC Task Force Urges Catalog Overhaul
A report from the Bibliographic Services Task Force of the University of California (UC) Libraries offers potent criticism of current practices and urges major changes in systemwide cataloging and access—a reflection of anxieties and potential solutions shared in the wider library community. “Our users expect simplicity and immediate reward and Amazon, Google, and iTunes are the standards against which we are judged. Our current systems pale beside them,” states the report, “Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California.” “The current Library catalog is poorly designed for the tasks of finding, discovering, and selecting the growing set of resources available in our libraries,” the report states. “It is best at locating and obtaining a known item.” The report is also critical of current work processes, pointing out that people perform duplicative work through the system. “Given its prohibitive cost,” the report states, “staff-created metadata should be applied only when there is proven value for current and future scholars.”
The report calls for centralization and/or better coordination of services and data, including the possibility of a single catalog interface for the entire UC system. “I think there’s a message when faculty and grad students tell us they do a search on Amazon first to figure out what they want and then come to the library system to figure out if it’s checked in,” Terry Ryan, associate university librarian for the UCLA Electronic Library, told the LJ Academic Newswire. “People should come to the library for a rich set of value adds. It’s time for some transformative planning. Also, there are things we can do, because they’re being done.” Among the suggestions: provide direct access to an item; provide recommender features; offer alternatives for failed searches, such as with spelling errors; and find new ways to navigate large sets of search results.
Catalog Report Also Points to Those Making Progress
In criticizing systemwide cataloging and access, a report from the Bibliographic Services Task Force of the University of California (UC) Libraries also identifies library projects and technology that exemplify progress, among them OCLC’s Fiction Finder Project, RLG’s RedLightGreen, ProQuest’s Smart Search, Elsevier’s Scopus, Talis’s Whisper, and Endeca’s ProFind, along with NCSU’s new catalog (see story below).
People are really interested, because it seems to be a once in a lifetime opportunity to discuses how we do information retrieval, or build core databases,” said task force member Amy Kautzman, head of research and collections at the Doe/Moffitt Libraries at UC Berkeley. “I don’t know that we necessarily had to dig that deep to come up with a vibrant assortment of ideas. One could say we were being librarians.” Added task force chair John Riemer, head of the cataloging and metadata center at UCLA, "It’s been said that the future belongs to those who collaborate. Libraries have to work more with each other, with cultural heritage organizations like museums, and with the vendors, to provide their users with more complete access to the resources they need."
NCSU Debuts New Catalog
North Carolina State University Libraries (NCSU) has taken an important step in making catalogs more robust and user-friendly, deploying the Endeca ProFind™ platform to add capabilities patrons expect from web browsing. Patrons can now search results ranked by relevance, and refine navigation by topic, author, genre, language, material type, format, and availability. Sorting options include publication date, title, author, call number, and popularity. Also, the application displays a “breadcrumb” of the refinements selected to allow backtracking and broadening of search results. Users can also browse by subject without searching at all. Endeca’s technology is used in TLC’s CARL•X library system that has been installed in a few public libraries, but NCSU worked directly with the company, which mainly sells its software to retailers. “Endeca was very interested in talking to libraries,” Andrew Pace, NCSU’s head of systems, told the LJ Academic Newswire. “They knew a lot about searching. We knew a lot about metadata. We did it in six months.” He said the technology “costs less than an ILS, but what you’d expect to buy a high end web search technology.”
Pace known by many of his peers for his colorful denunciations of OPACs, said he began examining Endeca and similar products offered by AquaBrowser and RLG last year. “We don’t have any relevance in Sirsi,” he noted. The last thing cataloged is at the top of the list, which is not great when you add 5000 government documents in a batch load. We’re hoping to expose those titles that users wouldn’t be able to find.” While other libraries may be using Endeca technology, “the thing that’s really first for [our library] is the [Library of Congress] classification browsing. We took LC subject headings and broke them up into their four component parts.” Previously, he noted, the system had to be down for three days to reindex the library’s keyword index of 1.5 million bibliographic records. “Endeca does that in about four hours.” How will users respond to the system? “I almost hope it’s met with deafening silence from the users,” Pace said. “It’s about time it made more sense. Nobody calls up Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart and asks them how to do a search.”
Indiana, Michigan Receive Grant for Invisible Web Project
The Invisible Web may sound more like a special tool used by a superhero librarian, but librarians say as much as 80 percent of the information sources on the Web are part of this “hidden” resource, which includes things like subscription-based online journals and databases. Now, thanks to a $438,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the Indiana University Libraries, in partnership with the University of Michigan University Library, will create and develop a set of online tools to make the Invisible Web, well, more visible. “Our goal is to integrate library resources seamlessly and easily so students think of and use these powerful resources first,” said Patricia Steele, Ruth Lilly Interim Dean of University Libraries at Indiana.
As the Invisible Web is currently structured, accessing library resources from courseware management systems or other web-based applications often requires students to visit the library web site separately, with few ways to effectively link resources between the resource and the course site. Innovations made by this project will enable professors to link to thousands of licensed online library resources from within the course management software. The IU Bloomington Libraries spend about $4.1 million a year on electronic resources, Steele said, "so working to integrate these resources more fully into online teaching and learning makes good economic sense as well." The grant will support the project over an 18-month period and will provide for project management, programming, interface design, and evaluation. Because the project will use open-source software, Steele added, other universities will benefit from the results of the project. More information about the project: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sakai/.
Steam Pipe Bursts, Yale U. Library Suffers Some Damage
On January 7, a burst steam valve in the adjacent Trumbull College forced steam into Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library building, setting off sprinklers in some basement areas, but, thanks to a good emergency plan and some dedicated librarians, damage has been held to a minimum. Library officials said that remediation company Munters worked round the clock to remove damaged materials for treatment and used fans to lower the humidity. Environmental health officials have since confirmed there is no risk of mold. About 250 cubic feet of books, newspapers, and pamphlets in all were being treated by Munters.
The majority of affected materials came from the Library’s Southeast Asian collection. Library officials said approximately 30 boxes containing 58 newspaper titles from Cambodia collected during the United Nations Transitional Period in Cambodia were soaked by the sprinkler system and approximately 3,000 volumes of Southeast Asian monographs and serials in the cataloging backlog were damaged. Fortunately, Bobbie Pilette, head of the library’s preservation department, said the University expects to recover most, if not all the materials. A clearer assessment, however, will be known after the materials have been dried. Alice Prochaska, Yale University Librarian, who served a thank you cake to library workers who gave up their weekends to pitch in with the cleanup, praised her staff and the library’s emergency plan: “The damage was far less than it might have been.”
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