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Keynote

Technical Services in the Age of Open
Marilyn Billings
Scholarly Communications and Special Initiatives Librarian
UMass Amherst Libraries

Libraries are in a time of unprecedented change. As more emphasis is being placed on access to and discovery of local collections, where do technical services operations fit? What do we envision for new services areas? How do we see ourselves positioned to offer our areas of expertise showcased in new areas of open scholarship? This talk will explore these questions and propose possibilities.

Marilyn Billings, Scholarly Communication and Special Initiatives Librarian, is the head of the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She provides leadership in alternative scholarly communication strategies, including open access, open education and the role of digital repositories in today’s academic environment. She oversees the management of the UMass Amherst institutional repository ScholarWorks @ UMass Amherst and provides leadership and inspiration for the campus’ Open Education Initiative established in 2011. Since November, she has held the position of Interim Director of Instructional Innovation at UMass Amherst. Current research interests include the Open Scholarly Commons and discussions about inside-out collection development. At the national level, she is a member of SPARC’s OER Advisory Committee, the Library Publishing Coalition Board and is an Open Textbook Network presenter.

For more information and a listing of presentations, please visit http://works.bepress.com/marilyn_billings/

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Morning Breakout Sessions

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or, 20,000 Dewey’s reclassed to LC?

Session 1A

How does one person reclass 20,000 books from Dewey to LC in one year? They get help! Find out how the Acquisitions and Cataloging Departments at Smith College’s Neilson Library collaborated to get the job done.

Mary Lou Bouley is the Catalog and Metadata Librarian at the Smith College Libraries. She has worked in the Libraries for almost 37 years. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with an undergraduate degree in American History.  She got her Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Rhode Island.

Lucinda Williams began her library career when she was hired as a student assistant in the library at Smith College. Over 33 years later, she is still at the library at Smith and still happy with her decision. She is currently the Acquisitions Supervisor. Outside of her work at Smith College, she (along with her husband and son) own and operate a family dairy farm in Hatfield, MA, which helps keep her quite busy.

Canton Remembers Project

Session 1B

The Canton Public Library scanned photographs and memorabilia submitted by local veterans and their families. The results are online in an Omeka Exhibition at cantonremembers.omeka.net and we’re planning to send everything we scanned to Digital Commonwealth for archiving, and build more exhibitions in the future.

Matt Amory, Librarian for Information and Technology | Canton Public Library
Carolyn Elkort, Community Outreach Librarian | Canton Public Library
Lisa Quinn, Senior Librarian and Head of Technical Services | Canton Public Library

PCC ISNI Pilot: Paving the way for an Identity Management track in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging 

Session 1C

A panel of metadata practitioners from Brown and Harvard discuss their experiences in PCC’s ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) Pilot and the transition from traditional name authority work to identity management.

Jeanette Norris, Metadata Management Librarian | Brown University
Amy Armitage, Metadata Enhancement Librarian | Harvard University

New Approaches to Collections Strategies

Session 1D

The Information Resources Department and the Scholarly Communications Department at the University of Massachusetts Libraries have developed collaborative innovative approaches to re-imagine traditional collections strategies. This presentation will provide details of current an ongoing activities.

Sally Krash, Interim Associate Dean for Content and Discovery | UMass Amherst Libraries

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Afternoon Breakout Sessions

Ragtag bunch of misfits: Forming an informal metadata interest group across multiple institutions and departments

Session 2A

Library staff from the Five College Libraries drew upon their existing consortial network to start a cohort of metadata-interested individuals for support and collaboration across institutions. The resulting (unofficial) Five College Cataloging & Metadata Group meets twice per semester to share new skills and ideas, help each other with tool and technology questions, and to provide a sounding board for potential training and professional development across all colleges and for metadata practitioners at all levels.

Ann Kardos

Ann “I Never Meta Data I Couldn’t Crack” Kardos
Occupation: Metadata Librarian
Homebase: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Mission: To bring out of the darkness unique materials, no matter their shape, form, or super-secret hideout!
Special Powers: Decoding the Library of Congress lexicon; reading/coding in tongues; singing any light rock song of the 1970s, 80s and today; facing all the labels towards the front with lightning speed.

Mandy MacLeod

Mandy “There can be more than one” MacLeod
Occupation: CLIR YWCA digitization project Metadata Archivist
Homebase: Smith College Special Collections
Mission: To create access to materials, no matter the form, putting the user first!
Special Powers: Wrangling metadata; juggling multiple content standards; sharing the joys of metadata anywhere and everywhere; reading copious amounts of fantasy novels and comics; and the ability to make everything about the YWCA.

Erin Jerome

Erin “The Knitter” Jerome
Occupation: Open Access & Institutional Repository Librarian
Homebase: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Mission: To break down barriers to accessing scholarship in all its many forms!
Special Powers: Deciphering publisher self-archiving policies; convincing students and faculty to share their research; decoding mysterious music requests for interlibrary loan; continuously almost killing and then reviving a sourdough starter; and, obviously, knitting!

Manda Wise Pizzollo

Manda “Wordly Wise” Pizzollo
Occupation: Bicentennial Project Metadata Librarian
Homebase: Amherst College
Mission: To bring the finding power to the people!|
Special powers: detecting & describing, making unnecessary gifs from digitized archival objects, reading Discworld novels at lightning speed, transforming any short story into a long one, and taking meeting minutes like a boss
Arch-nemesis: The concise emails patrol

Johanna Radding

Johanna “The Mad Metadata Maven” Radding
Occupation: Metadata/Discovery Librarian
Homebase: Amherst College
Mission: To make resources discoverable!
Special Powers: Wrangling discovery tools and metadata schemas, making sense out of chaos, snark, judging books by their covers, multi-tasker extraordinaire

Design for Diversity: Towards More Inclusive Technical Systems

Session 2B

Design for Diversity is an IMLS-funded project focusing on the ways in which information systems embody and reinforce cultural norms, asking how we might design systems that account for diverse cultural materials and ways of knowing. To empower both users and designers of information and technical systems in libraries, and also better educate the next generation, we created a teaching and learning toolkit with case studies, readings, and other educational materials. Participants in this workshop will explore issues of diversity and inclusion in the technical library systems we use every day, and also add their experiences to the toolkit through feedback and suggestions for new topics.

Amanda Rust, Assistant Director, Digital Scholarship Group and Digital Humanities Librarian | Northeastern University Libraries
Sarah Sweeney, Digital Repository Manager | Northeastern University Libraries

Finding a forever home: Migrating scholarly journals to a digital repository

Session 2C

Student-run journals and alumni newsletters are a great way to showcase the intellectual output of a college or university. Too often however, these types of publications are stored as flat web pages on the school’s site, which means they can be moved or even taken down if the website is redesigned. Learn how a hosted institutional repository solution can be used to successfully manage a journal or other serial publication.

Ellen Phillips is the Open Access Specialist at Boston University Libraries where she works to promote and make available open access scholarly communications. Before coming to BU she worked for the University of New Hampshire where she managed the law school’s section of the institutional repository.

Creating XML Files to Catalog Oral Histories Transcripts

Session 2D

Using the recent collaboration between multiple departments in the MIT Libraries (Institute Archives & Special Collections, Acquisitions & Discovery Enhancement, and Technology Systems & Support Services) on the recent digitization of the Margaret MacVicar Memorial AMITA (Association of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alumnae) Oral History Project collection as a case study, I will explain how XML files can be used in cataloging digital collections and items. At MIT, Encoded Archival Description (EAD) metadata from the ArchivesSpace records were crosswalked to create DublinCore metadata. XML files were coded using the DublinCore metadata schema. These files were used to provide descriptive metadata for the recently digitized AMITA (Association of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alumnae) oral histories transcripts. By making the digitized transcripts available online and providing descriptive metadata the MIT Libraries is enhancing access to a collection about the careers and experiences of MIT alumnae.

The case study illustrates the importance and necessity of collaboration across multiple departments in the 21st century academic library. Collaboration is a key component to ensuring access to archival and special collections is more equitable and open to a wider, more diverse audience. By doing so libraries and archives provide a digital space where new ways to discover, use and exchange information can be explored. Another key take-away from the case study is an approach of how to implement a flexible, agile multi-department digitization workflow which incorporates cataloging and curating online digital collections.

Emily Crawford, Digital Collections Associate | MIT Libraries

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Lightning Talks

• Wrangling a Hidden Fine Art Collection, Or, a Librarian, an Archivist, and a Curator (cross)walk into ArchivesSpace
  Emily Baldoni is the Metadata and Digital Projects Librarian at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. She is responsible for creating, maintaining, and enriching metadata for NEHGS print and digital collections. Emily is also an Adjunct Professor at Simmons College, where she teaches Information Organization for the School of Library and Information Science. She has an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College. Prior to joining the staff at NEHGS, Emily worked for Harvard College Library and EBSCO Information Services.
  Sally Benny has been the Curator of Digital Collections at the New England Historic Genealogical Society since 2014. She manages the NEHGS Digital Collections website, and is responsible for digitizing manuscripts, and arranging and describing born-digital archives. She has an M.S. in Library Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons College. Before joining the staff at NEHGS in 2010, she worked at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
  
• How Library Extension and LibX Can Improve Service to Patrons Outside the Library
  Katherine Montgomery, Graduate Student | Simmons College; Intern | MIT Program on Information Science
• Proposing a new LCSH
  Tachtorn Meier, Catalog Librarian | Yale University Library
  
• Simplification as Resource Management Strategy
  Michael Rodriguez is Licensing & Acquisitions Librarian at the University of Connecticut, where he negotiates contracts, builds vendor and stakeholder relationships, manages electronic resources and projects, wrangles EZproxy, and simplifies all the things. Michael chairs eresources management interest groups for LITA, ALCTS, and the New England Chapter of ACRL. He has been named a 2015 Library JournalReviewer of the Year, a 2017 Charleston Conference Up-and-Comer, and the winner of the 2018 NASIG Horizon Award
• Diverse BookFinder : developing a vocabulary to describe diversity in picture books
  Deborah Tomaras has been a cataloging librarian for more than sixteen years; her interest in creating and modifying controlled vocabularies includes a stint as the NACO Coordinator at The New York Public Library. Deborah joined the Diverse Book Finder project to help explore the limitations of traditional cataloging languages in describing diversity in picture books. She helped standardize the vocabulary developed by other team members, determined how the vocabulary could interact with traditional book cataloging, and provided a framework for describing the vocabulary to other librarians. She earned her MLS from the University of Maryland at College Park, and presently serves as the Head of Technical Services at the Patten Free Library in Bath, Maine, and as a Collections Processing librarian at the Lewiston (Maine) Public Library
• Collaborating Across Disciplines in the Santo Domingo Collection
  Ryan Wheeler, Library Assistant | Houghton Library
  Susan Wyssen, Manuscript Cataloger | Houghton Library
• Cleaning up the catalog: Collaborations between ILL and Tech Services
  Sarah M. Paige, ILL Coordinator at the Bailey/Howe Library, University of Vermont, is a lifelong Vermonter (who took a short break from Burlington to live for 4 years in Oregon). She has worked in interlibrary loan for almost 9 years now, with a 2-year break in the middle to work in her library’s Reference Department; she also drove a Bookmobile for her local public library for a couple of years.  She loves books and reading, owns two rescue dogs, and is planning visits to Denton, Texas and Portland, Oregon, this year.

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Questions? Email netsl@nelib.org and a board member will respond.