Morning Breakout Sessions

Title: Shared Print Monographs: Analysis and Action

Presenters: Rick Lugg, Executive Director, OCLC Sustainable Collection Services & Ruth Fischer, Senior Project Manager for GreenGlass, OCLC Sustainable Collection Services

Program Description: The role of local print book collections is changing. Competition for library space, declining circulation, and improved ability to share collections have caused significant changes in how those collections are managed. Since 2011, Sustainable Collection Services (SCS) has worked with academic libraries to develop services and tools that provide rich context for decisions to retain, store, or withdraw specific items. Increasingly, consortia and other groups are collaborating, using tools such as the GreenGlass group features to model and allocate retention commitments, and to create a monographs safety net, which enables other group members to withdraw surplus copies. Join us as we discuss techniques developed and lessons learned from projects with EAST (Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust), Michigan Shared Print Initiative, Academic Libraries of Indiana, Central Iowa Collaborative Collections Initiative, Maine Shared Collections, and others.

Title: Building the Reef: Adding on to the CORAL ERM / Erin Wentz & Louisa Choy

Presenters: Erin Wentz, Electronic Resources Librarian, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science, and Louisa Choy, Digital Services Librarian, Wheelock College

Program Description: Learn about how we took an out-of-the-box, open source software and customized it for the shared and unique needs of several institutions, transitioning ourselves from consumer to creator.

In addressing our increasing inability to wrangle the growing demands of electronic resources management, members of the Fenway Libraries Online consortium came together to explore an open source solution: CORAL. We were satisfied with the out-of-the-box software, but saw its potential to grow into a more robust system that better suited our needs and workflows. Without knowing what we were getting into, we began a collaborative process to contribute back to the CORAL community. Along the way, we reexamined our own internal processes and learned a great deal about evaluating, implementing, and supporting open source software.

Consider how you can contribute to the open source world in your own way.

Title: Everything you ever wanted to know about Systems Librarianship (but were afraid to ask)

Presenters: Emily Singley, Head Librarian, Systems & Applications, Boston College, and Alison Thornton, Technical Services Systems Support Librarian, Harvard University Library

Program Description: Have you ever wondered what Systems Librarians really do? Are you interested in transitioning to a systems librarian career, or just want to learn more about the “backend” of library systems? Two librarians who work with systems will share their secrets.

Title: State of Technical Services in the Public Libraries

Presenters: Judy Njoroge, System Librarian for Bibliographic Services, Library Connection, Inc., Jessica Palmer, Technology and Technical Services Manager, Avon Public Library, Avon CT, and Dorothy Russel, Collection Management/Reference Librarian, Lucy Robbins Wells Library, Newington CT

Program Description: Judy, along with a few fellow public library Technical Services Librarians, will discuss the state of technical services in public libraries. What is the current state of technical services and where is it heading? We’ll discuss these, and other issues, pertaining to public library technical services.

Afternoon Breakout Sessions

Title: What Now: Current Opportunities in Preparation for Linked Data in Libraries

Presenter: Steven Folsom, Metadata Technologies Program Manager

Program Description: It is often difficult for technical service staff to know the best way to experiment with linked data techniques for managing library data, or how to justify the allocation of staff resources towards such R&D projects. This is especially true when there are few (if any) library vendor products or out-of-the-box open source solutions readily available for hands-on use. This talk will draw heavily on the speaker’s work in the Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) project and PCC URIs in MARC Task Group to advocate for a number of concrete low barrier activities to warrant staff time for experimentation and gain experience with linked data principles.

Title: Building and Rebuilding the Perseus Catalog, or CTS, Blacklight, and Github, oh my!

Presenter: Alison Babeu, Digital Librarian, Perseus Library

This session will discuss the iterative and ongoing development of the metadata and interface for the Perseus Catalog (http://catalog.perseus.org) with a particular focus on the collaborative work and relationship between the digital librarian, the head software developer and the digital library analyst (read developer with a different title) that went into getting the catalog online in 2013. First conceived of in 2005, with continuous data creation ongoing, the Perseus Catalog has suffered through various attempts at making its data accessible and searchable including a painful eXist experiment, a short lived eXtensible Catalog implementation, and its current instantiation using Blacklight. This talk will explore a number of aspects of the Perseus Catalog’s journey towards the light, including 1) the creation of MODS and MADS data and attempts to move towards linked data; 2) the utilization of Canonical Text Services as an overarching architecture; 3) the challenges of picking and then implementing an open source catalog system that could exploit the richness of the XML data; 4) the importance and challenges of making all bibliographic data and source code open and well documented; 5) the challenges and opportunities of building relationships between “traditional” and new professional roles created in a digital library by the need to move from closed data and services to an open collaborative environment.

Title: Building a Shared Print Network in New England and Beyond 

Presenters: Matthew Revitt, Special Collections and Maine Shared Collection Librarian & Anna Perricci, Project Manager, Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST)

Matthew Revitt’s presentation and handout ; Anna Perricci’s presentation

Program Description: Matthew will describe how nine multiple-type Maine libraries went through a group collection analysis experience and came out agreeing collectively to retain 1.4 million titles for 15-years. Included in this description will be the retention criteria used by Maine Shared Collections, how many copies & holdings were retained, how retention responsibility was allocated across the group, and how it was documented in local and union catalogs. Matthew will also discuss ongoing collaborative efforts to retain and preserve titles in Maine.

Building upon the experiences of state projects like Maine Shared Collections, the Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST) is leveraging a “distributed retention model” whereby libraries become retention partners committed to retaining and sharing designated copies of print monographs and journals for use of the patrons of any of the libraries participating in EAST.

EAST is a shared print retention partnership of 47 college and university libraries across the northeastern United States, which entered its implementation phase in mid 2015 with support from the Mellon Foundation.  Anna Perricci, EAST Project Manager, will give an overview of work done so far, including a collection analysis of over 17.5 million print monographs and a validation sample study conducted at 40 partner libraries with a cumulative sample size of 240,000 print monographs.  This presentation will also cover some lessons learned and an outlook for next steps.

Title: What You Need To Know To Produce, Use, and Work With Linked Data

Presenter: Robert Chavez, Senior Content Applications Architect for the NEJMGroup’s mobile and web digital publications: the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal Watch, Knowledge+, NEJM Catalyst, and instructor in semantic data for Library Juice Academy

Program Description: Information exists everywhere and many of us, our organizations, and our devices produce, use, and transmit more information on a daily basis. For various reasons, even today, much of that information is isolated, incomplete, inaccessible, and sometimes unintelligible. Linked Data, as a concept, is set of practices and an application of web technologies that can help us make connections between the many sources of information and of information itself. These connections, in turn, can contribute to bringing some measure of order to the chaos and can bring layers of meaning and value to the information we use and produce.

In this session we will talk about Linked Data in general, i.e. what it is, why the hype, what you will need to learn, what are the tools and technologies involved. We also will look at some of the things we can do with Linked Data.