NETSL Annual Conference 2017 Presentations

NETSL 2017 Annual Spring Conference Program

Keynote Address
Expanding Our Boundaries
In Service Of Our Values

The issues arising from data-centric technological development has cast a spotlight on the values and roles of librarianship and brought us into the center of information policy, privacy and intellectual freedom conversations. Some of our new roles fit clearly within the confines of our libraries and involve making minor changes to what we do. Others involve rethinking how we engage with our communities or require us to work beyond our traditional walls with new partners. Bonnie Tijerina, currently a researcher working on library-related projects at a think tank in New York City, will talk about the work of Data & Society, her projects, and her thinking on the impact the field can have in today’s world.

Bonnie Tijerina
Bonnie Tijerina Headshot

Bonnie was Fellow and now Researcher at Data & Society, a research institute focused on social, cultural, and ethical issues arising from data-centric technological development. There she focuses on academic library support in big data research and online privacy education in libraries.

Bonnie has worked in electronic resource management and leadership positions in libraries for over 10 years, most recently as the Head of Electronic Resources and Serials at Harvard University. Bonnie has written and presented on new roles for librarians and the ways libraries can support their communities in the digital world.

She is founder and President of ER&L (Electronic Resources & Libraries) conference and organization, created to facilitate communication and collaboration among librarians and information professionals who provide access to digital content. She is co-founder of Designing for Digital, a meeting of UX and design professionals from tech, media, academia, and libraries.  She tweets @bonlth.

Morning Breakout Sessions

1A: Beyond the Bento – A new discovery experience for Smith College

Smith College recently released a new discovery experience that aims to rethink how we approach designing bento box discovery layers. This session will include a look at how we designed, tested and implemented the new interface; the usability studies that went into shaping our current iteration, and improvements we are thinking about for the future.

Rob O’Connell has been the Director of Discovery and Access at Smith College since 2013. He was previously the Head of Technical Services at Higher Colleges of Technology in the United Arab Emirates. Rob has been working with discovery and open source systems for the past 10 years and has created several tools based on their architecture. Rob is the developer behind Smith Colleges new bento box discovery tool.

Barbara Polowy has been Head of the Hillyer Art Library at Smith College since 1996 and is currently serving as Interim Director of the Libraries’ Teaching, Learning, and Research Group. She has been involved with Smith’s discovery service since 2011, participating in the Five College Libraries EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) implementation team, working with Five College partners on usability testing the service, and managing Smith’s EDS content and presentation after the launch. As a member of the Smith Libraries’ Web Coordination Committee, Barbara coordinates usability testing for the development of Smith’s bento box-influenced “New Discover.”

1B: FOLIO – Open source ILS experiences and opportunities for Libraries

An Open source ILS, what does this exactly mean for libraries? Lehigh University Library is currently in production and running the OLE ILS and at the same time working on the FOLIO LSP project. This session will provide an overview of what to expect from FOLIO, what has been developed in FOLIO, what will be coming next in FOLIO and how to keep informed or involved in the project. I will provide as many prototypes and details about FOLIO library functionality with an emphasis on Technical Services workflow.

Sharon Wiles-Young is the Director of Library Access Services at Lehigh University Libraries. Previously she served as the Manager of Technical Services and the Serials Manager at Lehigh. Sharon chaired the OLE implementation team at Lehigh and is currently a member of the FOLIO Product Council. In addition to library work, Sharon is working on several community garden projects and other community programs.

1C: The Open Hub – How Libraries Facilitate Open Educational Resources (OER)

Jeremy Smith, the Digital Projects Manager and OER coordinator in Scholarly Communication at UMass Amherst will discuss the UMass Open Education Initiative (OEI), which has saved UMass students over $1.5 million in textbook costs since 2011. Jeremy’s talk will illustrate: the benefits of OER to students and faculty, how the library has lead OER efforts on campus, the results of the Initiative, and collaborations with national and international organizations working on OER. He will also showcase several faculty projects and discuss the benefits of creating and using openly licensed teaching materials.

Jeremy Smith works at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts. He has worked there since 2009, first as a manager on a project to digitize the papers of W.E.B. Du Bois and now as the Digital Projects Manager in Scholarly Communication. He is also a liaison to the Communication Department. He is a 2009 graduate of the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He holds a bachelors degree in Communication from the University of Massachusetts (Class of 1994). Before earning his MLS he was a producer/editor at the Media Education Foundation (MEF), a non-profit video production company specializing in documentaries that critically examine contemporary social issues through the lens of the mainstream media. He is also a board member at Flywheel, a volunteer-run, not for profit community arts space in Easthampton, MA. He is also on the board of the Holyoke Public Library.

Afternoon Breakout Sessions

2A: A Quinate and a Baker’s Dozen – the Tale of a Connecticut Consortium Migration

As two legacy systems approached their 2016 end-of-life, the Connecticut State Universities, Community Colleges, Charter Oak College and Connecticut State Library formed a new consortium and migrated to the ExLibris Alma/Primo ILS and Discovery environment. This session will describe the preparation and process including lessons learned and celebratory moments.

Cindy Schofield, MLIS, EdD, is the Technical Services Division Head at SCSU’s Buley Library. She served as the ExLibris Project Lead for her campus and co-chaired the system-wide Technical Services Functional Team for migration and implementation. Although her library career began in the dark ages of typewritten catalog cards, she manages to navigate through the digital environment as though she didn’t learn to read with Dick and Jane.

2B: Collaborative Education for Providing Access to Born-Digital Cultural Heritage Material

Archival best practices for processing and preserving born-digital material have developed over the last decade. Best practices for providing research access, however, are not as developed or prevalent. Archivists are working to make these access practices scale to match the volume of born-digital material and meet archival standards surrounding authenticity of records, descriptive metadata, and the protection of donor privacy and intellectual property.

How have archivists tried to collaboratively build these best practices and educate their peers about how to implement new policies and procedures?

A team of archivists has worked to research and build these practices through a collaborative, hackfest-generated model. They’ve also created an open, extensible curriculum for teaching practitioners to provide access to born-digital material.

Jessica Farrell and Alison Clemens led the Born Digital Access Bootcamp for the first time at the New England Archivists Spring 2017 meeting, and they will provide an overview of the research project; the hackfest model; the bootcamp implementation; and the bootcamp’s future.

Jessica Farrell is Curator of Digital Collections for Harvard Law School Library’s Historical & Special Collections. In addition to other curatorial areas, she’s responsible for the lifecycle management (from collection development to preservation) of all born-digital archival collections and processes at HLS. She hopes to one day provide scalable access to these materials.

Alison Clemens is Assistant Head of Arrangement and Description at Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. She’s also Chair of the Committee on Education for the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and a member of the Steering Committee for the Manuscript Repositories Section of SAA. She’s researched born-digital access practices since the summer of 2014, and her research team’s preliminary report is available online: http://bit.ly/hackbdaccess-report

2D:Publishing Bibliographic Records to the Web as Linked Data – An update on a project with Zepheira and the Library.Link Network

Boston University Libraries began working with Zepheira in 2016 to publish bibliographic data to the Library Link Network in linked data formats like Bibframe. The initial goal, to publish bibliographic data in linked data formats for general Internet consumption, was quickly accomplished. As linked data functionality was developed in Alma, the Libraries began exploring how to enhance their bibliographic records with a variety of linked data authority sources including Wikidata, Wikipedia, IMDB, GeoNames, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This update presents BU’s efforts to expose their bibliographic records to the Web in linked data format and early efforts to make Primo a consumer of linked data elements from their own bib records published to link.bu.edu.

Jack Ammerman is Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives & Open Access at Boston University Libraries. Throughout his career in libraries at Emory University, Hartford Seminary, and now Boston University, he has led in a number of library technology projects and initiatives. His research interests included textual analysis, linked data, and automated creation and curation of data. Jack is a member of the Linked Open Data Special Interest Working Group for the Ex Libris User Groups.

Afternoon Lightning Talks