NASIG Newsletter

SHARED UNDERSTANDING FOR ELECTRONIC RESOURCES (SERU)
Presenters: Judy Luther, Co-Chair of the NISO SERU Working Group and President of Informed Strategies; Seldon Lamoureux, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Member of the Working Group; and Tina Feick, Swets.
Reported by Morag Boyd

[Presented at the Serials Standards Update Forum at the ALA Midwinter Meeting, January 13, 2008.]

The session was an informal dialog with the audience about the status of SERU (Shared Understanding for Electronic Resources), a best practice to which content providers and libraries can mutually agree and therefore forego the need for a license agreement in an electronic resource purchase. SERU instead calls up copyright law and contract law, both well established and understood in our community, to govern these transactions. The SERU website is the best source for information: http://www.niso.org/committees/ SERU/ Continue reading 23:1 (2008:03) Other Serials News: SERU…

SKILLS FOR 21ST CENTURY TECHNICAL SERVICES:
WHAT ARE THEY TEACHING? WHAT DO WE NEED?
Presenters: Emily Hicks, Director of Information Acquisition and Organization, University of Dayton; Dr. Kimberly Kelley, Dean of the School of Library and Information Science, Catholic University of America; Carlen Ruschoff, Director, Information Technology and Technical Services Division, University of Maryland Libraries; and Bill Mayer, University Librarian, American University.
Reported by Marilyn Estes

[Presented at the 83rd annual conference of the Potomac Technical Processing Librarians (PTPL), at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia, on October 5, 2007.]

Emily Hicks got the conference started with a lively presentation entitled “Across the Great Divide: Building Generational Bridges.” Hicks introduced the characteristics of the four generations currently in the workforce and explored the impact of these characteristics on workplace values, job strengths and staff cooperation. Hicks offered some strategies she had learned through her experience of managing generationals. The strategies were: good communications, flexibility, consideration, respect, and incorporating “fun” time. As Ms. Hicks pointed out, “A team that plays together, stays together.” Continue reading 23:1 (2008:03) Other Serials News: Technical Services Skills…

COPYRIGHT: MYTHS, PRINCIPLES AND THE LAW WORKSHOP
Presenter: Dr. Kenneth Crews, Director of the Copyright Management Center, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis
Reported by Bridget Miller

[Presented at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 18, 2007.]

The librarians that packed the theater at the Carnegie Museum of Art for this workshop attended an interesting and informative day-long presentation on copyright. Many were able to attend this workshop because it was sponsored by ten regional organizations, keeping registration costs low. Continue reading 23:1 (2008:03) Other Serials News: Copyright Workshop…

CALL FOR PAPERS ON E-JOURNAL BUNDLING
Bill Cohen, Haworth Press

The Serials Librarian, the peer-reviewed journal published by Haworth Press (now part of the Taylor & Francis Group) announces a “Call for Papers” for a special supplement to be published in late 2008.

The supplement topic will be “Bundling & Un-Bundling of E-Serials.”

This supplement will examine the current state of e-journal bundling, and how libraries and vendors are strategizing and coping with rising costs, and the implications of “The Big Deal.” This will focus on how libraries initially purchased groups of titles in bundles for convenience and cost savings and how they then later were often forced to break those bundles down into smaller groups, or into individual title purchases, in order to deal with ever-rising costs and the desire to get more local control over what libraries collect. Continue reading 22:4 (2007:12) Other Serials News: Call For Papers on E-Journal Bundling…

MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY HOSTS NASIG-SPONSORED WORKSHOP ON E-RESOURCES AND LIBRARIES
Reported by Patrick L. Carr

For a seventh year, Mississippi State University (MSU) Libraries hosted an e-resource workshop for information professionals working in libraries across the Southeast. Co-sponsored by NASIG, MSU Libraries, EBSCO Information Services, Haworth Press, and SirsiDynix, this year’s workshop was held at Mitchell Memorial Library on July 20, 2007. Titled “Black Cats & Broken Links: Dispelling E-resource Superstitions,” this workshop provided the approximately one hundred attendees with valuable insights and knowledge that will enable them to overcome the many challenges related to the role and management of e-resources in libraries.

The workshop featured four presentations given by leading innovators in the field of e-resources and libraries. Keynote speaker Stephen Abram got the workshop off to a lively and thought-provoking start with his presentation “Our User Experience: Puzzle Pieces Falling in Place.” Drawing on his experiences as Chief Strategist of the SirsiDynix Institute, Abram argued that libraries’ tools for information access and management must evolve in light of the changing needs and expectations of users.  The presentation explored this topic by discussing the information environment in which libraries currently exist and highlighting the conceptual challenges that information professionals must overcome to succeed.  Abram ultimately provided attendees with ten key recommendations that will allow their libraries to thrive in the future.

The workshop’s second speaker was Tim Bucknall, Assistant Director for University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In his presentation, “Are Consortium ‘Big Deals’ Cost-Effective? A Comparison and Analysis of E-Journal Access Mechanisms,” Bucknall provided attendees with detailed data regarding the various e-journal acquisition models that his library has explored in recent years.  Comparing individual subscriptions, pay-per-view access, and consortium packages, Bucknall analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of each option, including cost-per-use and the impact on collection development at the library. Ultimately, Bucknall advocated that the advantages of consortial partnership for e-journal access—embodied in his development of the Carolina Consortium—can often provide a library’s users with the greatest amount of e-journal access at the lowest cost.

The workshop’s third presentation, titled “ERM on a Shoestring: Betting on an Alternative Solution,” was co-presented by Dalene Hawthorne, Head of Systems and Technical Services at Emporia State University, and Jennifer Watson, Head of Electronic and Collection Services at University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center Library. Hawthorne and Watson’s presentation provided attendees with snapshots of how two libraries with limited resources have developed innovative ways to use existing tools in order to effectively manage e-resources. Watson began the presentation by describing how her library has utilized three separate tools—a Filemaker Pro database, a MySQL database, and the Blackboard course management system—in order to successfully manage the licensing, access, and invoicing terms of her library’s collection of e-resources. Hawthorne’s portion of the presentation provided an alternative e-resource management strategy which utilizes the acquisitions module of her library’s ILS.

The workshop’s final presentation was given by Oliver Pesch, Chief Strategist at EBSCO Information Services. Pesch’s presentation, titled “Library Standards and E-resource Management: A Survey of Current Initiatives and Standards Efforts,” provided attendees with a whirlwind tour of the standards and initiatives which are currently shaping how libraries manage and provide access to e-resources.  Among the topics that Pesch described in his presentation were organizations leading the way in the development of e-resource-related standards and the role that specific standards and initiatives play over an e-resource’s lifecycle.

Based on the enthusiastic evaluations submitted by attendees, this year’s workshop can be deemed a success. While Abram’s presentation inspired the attendees to contemplate the larger philosophical questions related to the evolving role of e-resources in libraries, the presentations of Bucknall, Hawthorne and Watson, and Pesch all brought to light specific tools, trends, and strategies that promise to shape the future of e-resources.  Article-length write-ups of each of these presentations are to be published in an upcoming issue of The Serials Librarian. At present, the workshop speakers’ PowerPoint slides and handouts are accessible at http://library.msstate.edu/nasig/schedule.html.  Audio recordings of the presentations, along with the presenters’ PowerPoint slides and handouts, are accessible at http://library.msstate.edu/nasig/schedule.html

NORTH CAROLINA SERIALS CONFERENCE
Reported by Rebecca Kemp

The 16th annual North Carolina Serials Conference took place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, from March 29-30, 2007.  The conference was sponsored by North Carolina Central University’s School of Library and Information Sciences with the aid of other partners.  This year’s theme was “Serials at Warp Speed: Navigating Transitions.”  Although most attendees hailed from North Carolina, several other states were represented.  Academic, public, and special librarians as well as vendors attended and gave presentations.

This year’s conference was augmented by a half-day preconference, “Implementing an Institutional Repository,” presented by Carol Hixson, University Librarian, University of Regina.  Hixson talked about planning for and implementing an institutional repository.  Hixson indicated that it would be wise for libraries to create a business plan, including figuring out how long to support the IR.  Although Hixson emphasized that IRs will not solve the scholarly communications crisis, she noted that IRs are an excellent way to keep university-related intellectual property together as a promotional tool for the university.  She also discussed the considerable amount of marketing that accompanies an IR.  It is necessary to have a good deal of technical expertise on staff to be able to troubleshoot problems, ensure compatibility with standards, install patches and updates, etc.  Hixson outlined various methods of evaluating the success of the repository.

The conference proper began with the opening keynote, “The Changing Faces of Catalogs: Accelerating Access, Saving Time” presented by Karen Calhoun, Assistant University Librarian for Technical Services at Cornell University.  Calhoun presented the “Net Generation” library users’ preferences: most students surf the Web to find information; the library website and catalog rank very low in the list of students’ information sources.  Calhoun emphasized that the library can not assume that users will simply come to us; we have to put the library “where the user is.”  Some new strategies for libraries are digitizing books, using WorldCat.org, partnering with other libraries to create larger (but fewer) catalogs, and innovating within the catalog.  New catalog software such as AquaBrowser, WPOpac, and Evergreen are more user-friendly than older catalog models.  New products on the horizon are ExLibris’s Primo, Innovative’s Encore, and an open source Extensible catalog.

The keynote was followed by a panel on Institutional Repositories called “Transporters to the Next Generation or Just Another Holodeck?”  Panelists were Carol Hixson (University of Regina); Cat McDowell (UNC-Greensboro), Allan Scherlen (Appalachian State University), and Joseph Thomas (East Carolina University).  Hixson argued that IRs will not change established modes of scholarly communication.  McDowell concurred with this view, indicating that most of the IRs with a good deal of content in them are high research institutions, according to the Carnegie classification.  She held the opinion that IRs are not the vehicles for change that initial proponents thought they would be.  The other panelists brought forward other reasons for having IRs, though: Scherlen posited that IRs have overwhelming benefits for the participants, and that libraries ought to collect electronic faculty output as we do print.  Thomas indicated that IRs require a great deal of administrative, library, and faculty buy-in, but that they are very useful for tenure review and storing university output of any kind, whether videos, art exhibits, performances, etc.

The next session was a general session entitled “Empowering the Library Search Experience.”  This was a two-part presentation by Holly Johnson (Howard County Library, Columbia, MD) and Kristin Antelman (North Carolina State University Libraries).  Johnson presented her public library’s effort to make the catalog more user-friendly.  She demonstrated AquaBrowser catalog searches and features such as the “discover cloud,” which is a cloud of related terms to the search terms.  She also demonstrated the faceted search for refining search results and a library databases search that is linked from AquaBrowser.  Howard County Library has added selected RSS feeds, and it is also considering adding a “Buy it” link to bookstore websites when a patron would like to buy a copy of the desired item.  Antelman discussed NCSU’s implementation of the Endeca-powered catalog interface and the issues that are still outstanding a year after implementation.  Antelman raised a few concerns: serials still present challenges for relevancy ranking, and subject access is still a problem because of the disconnect between natural language searching for subjects and the LCSH terms for subjects.  In the future, NCSU will implement RSS feeds and a search box that can be used in patrons’ browsers.  Also, the Triangle Research Libraries Network (North Carolina State University, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina Central University) will be instituting a consortium-wide Endeca-powered catalog.

The concurrent sessions followed the general session.  A session entitled “Community College Libraries – How Far Do We Need To Go” was led by Marilyn Carney (Wake Technical Community College).  Carney discussed a survey of area community colleges that had three objectives: to find out how community colleges are enhancing journal collections despite small budgets, how they are responding to increased e-journal usage, and how their libraries have been affected by the switch to more online journals.

Another concurrent session, entitled “The Right of Passage: Going from Print to Electronic – Is it the Right Move” was led by Barb Dietsch (Environmental Protection Agency Library) and Leslie Covington (EBSCO Information Services).  Dietsch and Covington discussed the issues involved in the process of switching a library’s subscriptions from mostly print to mostly online.  Covington was able to provide a vendor’s perspective of this process for a full view of the transition.

Yvette Diven (CSA) and Beth Bernhardt (UNC Greensboro) presented on “The TRANSFER Initiative: Helping Develop Guidelines for Journal Transitions Between Publishers.”  The presenters discussed this United Kingdom Serials Group initiative to establish standard practices for title transfers between two publishers.  Recent updates were provided, and Diven provided a publisher’s perspective on the challenges of title transfers.

Sandy Hurd (Innovative Interfaces) presented a session entitled, “Got Chopsticks? Get SUSHI.”  Hurd described the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) that will automatically gather COUNTER-compliant usage statistics and transmit these statistical reports to libraries’ information systems seamlessly.  Hurd described work that has been done thus far and challenges that remain. 

Another session, entitled “Implementing ERMS: Opportunities and Challenges” was presented by Rebecca Kemp (UNC Wilmington) and Jeff Campbell (UNC Chapel Hill).  Kemp and Campbell described what an ERM module does and some of the challenges of implementation.  These included customizing the ERM, organizing and creating documentation, workflow changes, training or retraining staff, and integration with already-existing practices and resources. 

Rob Wolf (UNC Pembroke) led a concurrent session, “User-Based Serials Collection Development.”  Wolf described how UNC Pembroke’s library has used innovative methods of collection development, including consulting reference librarians for their recollections of frequently requested journals as well as usage logs and interlibrary-loan requests.

The closing keynote was entitled, “To Boldly Go: Transforming Cataloging and Catalogs to Meet User Needs.”  Presenter Regina Romano Reynolds (National Serials Data Program) first outlined the user needs of the Net Generation.  Today’s students would like libraries to aspire to the ease of use and customer-friendliness of Internet search engines, bookstores and coffee bars.  Reynolds then discussed how the library has historically responded to user needs, i.e., in the creation of metadata.  Reynolds asked whether there is a way to reduce the duplication of metadata created for the ISSN program, ONIX, and library catalogs.  Lastly, Reynolds discussed the new CONSER standard serials record as a case study in a new practice that has the potential to save cataloging time while still retaining a high standard of metadata creation.  Reynolds ended with the hope that libraries will continue to determine how best to serve the user, given all the new technologies at our disposal.

DOING SERIALS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Stephanie Schmitt, Library and Learning Resource Center, Zayed University

In December 2006, I moved my place of work from the Yale Law Library to Zayed University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.  As soon as I arrived at work (the day that I landed in Dubai), I was told about the ‘Serials Problems’ in my library and everyone seemed excited about the level of serials-related experience I had listed on my resume.  Now only four full months have passed, but I’ve already begun to wonder whether my skills were based on dependencies on the technologies I had become so used to; the assumptions I had made about being able to work with a reputable binder, any binder for that matter, and the presumption of knowledge about the inanities of serials publications.  You think the Germans and Italians have creative enumeration?  You’ve seen nothing compared to the lovely joys of Arabic language journals.  The basics of tackling claims were daunting in my previous jobs, but I have come to long for the slow and painful process of managing claims in the West, given that it takes 3-6 months to receive deliveries of issues that are already long past the publisher claim by dates once we receive them.  Electronic serials are a growing solution, but the bandwidth demands for overseas access can be frustrating and deleterious to the expectations of researchers.  In addition, regionally produced scholarship has not yet been bought up by the large publishing houses.  Electronic versions of local societies and academic publications have thus not yet been exploited.  But somehow it all gets done, inshallah.

In the Middle East, many of the routines of serials maintenance do not exist.  We do make use of international subscription vendors and jobbers, but vendors of locally produced materials are rare.  Government publications are delivered randomly (I guess that is a similar problem everywhere) and local vendors are hesitant to tackle the requested tasks of managing, with regular service, standing subscriptions.  Binders who can manage the scale of print resources from the larger institutions here don’t exist and the skill sets, tools, and machinery have not yet made their way into the regional, much less local, library marketplace.

Like nearly anywhere in the world, funding for serials is not matching the pace of new publications.  As a tome-based society, Arab nations are adjusting to the relatively rapid presentation of ideas in the form of scholarly journals.  Printing is growing at a pace unprecedented as ideas and opinions continue to be spread throughout the region.  The number and variety of available serial titles is growing.  Literacy is increasing.  Colleges are popping up everywhere.  The students are pouring in.  The time is ripe to promote serials librarianship and to create opportunities for training.

The solutions I seek will come by way of networking and collaboration.  By encouraging discussion and ideas about serials, we will build the infrastructure we need to maintain our serially produced resources.  I encourage NASIG to support the work of serials in the developing nations of the world.  Your wisdom and guidance will enable growth and understanding through the shared values of preserving knowledge.  For example, there are few library schools in the Middle East.  Basic knowledge of bibliographic structure and instruction in methods of acquisitions and serials control are desperately needed.  We will seek to rectify this situation through our local networking connections and by bringing teachers and experts to the region.  My hope is that NASIG and the UKSG will find ways to further promote organized instruction on serials issues and then bring these training opportunities to this region.  Just as the UKSG inspired the birth of NASIG, my hope is to foster and support the growth of Middle Eastern serialists.  Does not a “MESIG” sound great?!  I ask you all to help us get started on this good endeavor.

I’ll end this short note about my new life in Dubai with a call to you all to consider working overseas.  Life is full and good and purposeful anywhere, but it is so joyful to see the sparkle in the eyes of a student who has never seen a scholarly journal in her life when she comes to understand the magnificent amount of information hidden within enumeration and chronology, and then discover even more within its table of contents and index.  OK.  Perhaps I’ve been a member of NASIG a little too long, but the enthusiasm remains.  And enough humor as well to realize that like you all, I have the crazy mind of a loyal fan of serials.  Long live NASIG!

I’ll miss you all at conference this year! May it be the best one yet!

OTHER SERIALS NEWS 
CHARLESTON CONFERENCE 2006

THE TRANSFER INITIATIVE
CREATING BEST PRACTICE GUIDELINES
FOR THE TRANSFER OF JOURNAL TITLES BETWEEN PUBLISHERS
Reported by Nancy Beals 

Presenters:  Nancy Buckley, International Journal Sales Director, Blackwell Publishing; Jill Taylor-Roe, Head of Liaison and Academic Services, Newcastle University Library.

TRANSFER is a project that is creating standards to address the challenges of the movement of journals between publishers. Nancy Buckley (nancy.buckley@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com) is the chair.  TRANSFER, which was initiated earlier this year, is in the early stages of the project and there is a great deal of work still to be done. The aims, scopes and guidelines for transferring and receiving between publishers are available at the website. They have created a working group and an advisory board which includes many people from the industry such as librarians, publishers and agents. 

The movement of titles between publishers has created a lack of clarity, mainly in the area of print to electronic. Currently, it is not clear who is responsible for customer satisfaction. TRANSFER is creating a code of conduct or good practice guidelines so that movement causes minimal disruption. Communication, which is the largest issue, needs to be addressed so that this process can be easier. There are also legacy and archive, licensing and pricing issues.  

Many problems and frustrations lie in the changing of publisher arrangements for society journals.  Societies move to commercial publishers generally because of revenues, editorial policy and pricing, economies of scale, usage data, web presence, and for other reasons.  They want to promote their societies, include more content, and take advantage of the commercial publisher’s abilities with PR and innovation. 

There are implications for publishers, intermediaries, and libraries when a journal moves to a different publisher.  Publishers have to merge data with existing systems and be able to interpret it.  There are platform, format and content changes, and issues with links and backfile ownership.  For intermediaries, every title that moves to another publisher can create 10-15 subscription transactions in their systems.  So far, there have been over 5000 title changes this year.  It is easy to see how this can become a difficult situation.  Timing is an important issue for librarians, who need to know well in advance for budgeting purposes.  They need to retain appropriate access, to be able to collect usage data (preferable COUNTER compliant), and to experience no access problems.  Transfers need to be timely and there needs to be an easily accessible source of data on transfers.  TRANSFER is looking into the idea of a central repository to store journal transfer information. 

TRANSFER is currently in collaboration with the STM Association and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and is a project of the United Kingdom Serials Group. 

OTHER SERIALS NEWS 

CHARLESTON CONFERENCE 2006 
SERIALS RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Reported by Fran Rosen 

Presenters: N. Bernard “Buzzy” Basch, Basch Subscriptions, Inc.; Tim Bucknall, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Rick Burke, Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC); Julie Gammon, University of Akron; Chuck Hamaker, University of North Carolina, Charlotte: Jim Mouw, University of Chicago; Rollo Turner, Association of  Subscription Agents; Susan Zappen, Skidmore College 

On Wednesday, November 8, I attended an afternoon preconference on Serials Resource Management at the XXVI Charleston Conference.  Participants had a chance to hear about and discuss many different issues in serials. 

The preconference was moderated by N. Bernard “Buzzy” Basch of Basch Subscriptions, Inc.  Buzzy set the tone for the discussion, and helped pull the different ideas together.  Speakers included Susan Kappen, Associate College Librarian for Collections, Skidmore College; Julie Gammon, Head of Acquisitions, University of Akron; Tim Bucknall, Assistant Director for Information Technologies and Electronic Resources, University of North Carolina – Greensboro; Rick Burke, Executive Director of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC); Rollo Turner, Secretary General of the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries; and Chuck Hamaker, Associate University Librarian for Collections & Technical Services, University of North Carolina – Charlotte.   

Susan Kappen talked about journals at Skidmore College.  She said they cancelled 25% of their journal budget in 2004, have gotten decent budget increases every year, and are still overspent for 2006.  They are spending almost 80% of their budget on serials, and they pay 18% more for 885 print journals than they spend for access to 35,000 electronic ones.  They could cancel some print and rely on ILL, but they need to maintain the subscriptions that are tied to the curriculum.  She said it is clear that there will never be enough money for journals, so we need to look for solutions other than just finding more money.  Working with faculty to make sure they retain copyright, setting up digital repositories, and supporting open access are some things that we can do. 

Julie Gammon told us about the University of Akron.  She said that OhioLink gives them a great advantage.  They are spending more of their serials money through OhioLink and less with subscription agents.  She wondered if libraries are still trying to spread out our subscription dollars, to avoid being completely dependent on one subscription agent.  She also talked about change and how they are re-training library assistants to deal with new tasks. 

Tim Bucknall talked about giving our users what they need, when and where they need it.  He is able to track journal use for institutions using Journal Finder, the link resolver that was written at UNC-Greensboro.  In every institution free and open access journals are either the most used or second most used category of journals.  Tim looked at institutions around the country to see if they include free and open access journals in their catalog or link resolver.  He found that these titles are probably not in a library’s catalog, and may or may not be in the link resolver.  The easiest titles to add to a link resolver are the DOAJ titles, but these aren’t necessarily the most often used titles – for UNC-Greensboro, only 1 of the top 30 most often used free/OA titles was in DOAJ.  The most used title was the local newspaper.  He stressed that we need to work harder to find these titles and to make them available to our patrons.  Tim talked about some of the ways we can get people the information they want, when and where they need it, such as Google Scholar, COinS, Blackboard and other course management systems, context-sensitive linking, and bookmarklets. 

Rick Burke talked about how SCELC coordinates consortial purchasing for over 90 California libraries.  He showed us the database SCELC uses to track journal packages, license terms, and which members subscribe to which resources.  SCELC is involved in a joint project with Serials Solutions to develop an ERMS for the consortium, and he showed us that too. They are trying to coordinate purchasing and to help with cooperative collection development. 

Rollo Turner talked about ASA and what it does around the world.  They work on detecting and preventing fraud; for example, in some places, personal subscriptions are purchased and then re-sold to libraries.  They are also working on basic standards covering how to treat journal contracts.  They look at price increases.  He said this year prices went up 9%, but there is huge variation within each publisher’s list.  (Elsevier really did have an average price increase of 5%.)  He talked about the role of subscription agents; both large and small ones can offer processing help with electronic journals.  He stressed that subscription agents can provide many different services, including negotiating with publishers on behalf of consortia.  He said he did a survey and determined that approximately 15% of electronic subscriptions break down at renewal.  The problem is mostly with publishers, but this is a very difficult service area.  He also talked about claims.  Subscription agents spend a lot of time and money on claims processing.  He thinks it would be useful to have a dispatch database, which libraries can use to determine if issues have been mailed out yet; if not, the library could wait to submit a claim. The last speaker was Chuck Hamaker.  He started by expressing his irritation when a patron uses Google to access library-subscribed resources and then thinks she is getting it free through Google.  He asked why people don’t understand about IP recognition, and answered that 76% of downloads from journal publishers indexed on Google are PDFs.  There is no co-branding when they access the PDF, and nothing that says this came from a library.  (JSTOR is the exception.)  He called this an absolute failure of identification.  He proposes that there be a page that comes up before the PDF with the library’s name.  He pointed to a related issue, that they are seeing a drop in the number of searches in some databases but this is not correlated with a drop in the number of downloads.  This means patrons are finding library content using Google Scholar or other methods, and are not relying as much on the bibliographic databases that we purchase access to.  Users are starting their searches outside the library environment, and are losing understanding of how they found the item.  He also discussed funding.  University priorities are retention and graduation rates, which mean it is harder to get consistent budget increases for the library; instead of increases to base, his library is getting recurring one-time allocations.  Electronic journal price increases have been controlled, but they are still 2-3 times the inflation rate.  We need solutions, but OA and IR are difficult concepts to get across to administration and faculty.

POWERFUL ENERGY SURGING!!
SCCTP SERIAL HOLDINGS WORKSHOP, MANOA, HAWAII
Reported by Keiko Okuhara  

Again, we are very lucky to host the Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program’s (SCCTP) workshop at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Campus, Hawaii.  The Serial Holdings workshop was offered on March 29, 2006 at the UH Law School.  Thirty attendees took advantage of the luxurious classroom of the law school and welcomed an energetic instructor, Linda S. Geisler, from the Library of Congress.   

With a serials background and considerable experience giving serials training at the Library of Congress, Linda was able to bring firsthand knowledge to her serial holdings instruction.  After receiving a lei, Linda got the workshop off to a smooth start with an overview of the Z39.71 standard for the display information and MARC format for Holding Data (MFHD).  Because of her pragmatic serial holdings concept, her instruction was in tune with how users actually see serial holdings from the standpoint of holdings display and communication standards.  

Linda tackled various workflows for a holdings process and emphasized the practical aspects of displaying serial holdings with standardized and simplified punctuation. Then the workshop proceeded to the details of MFHD, the leader and MARC fields from 001 through 852, and how to record holdings and patterns.  Holdings information is recorded in two different fields that are paired and linked. While fields 853 (serial), 854 (supplement), and 855 (index) include the caption and the publication pattern, fields 863, 864, and 865 contain the enumeration and chronology. The fields are linked through the 853 subfield 8.  Pattern information is also coded and allows the system to predict the forthcoming issue. Since the textual holdings are used for the Hawaii Voyager system, discussions on free-text format combining captions with enumeration and chronology date in the 866 field were especially useful for the trainees.        

The concept and goal of updating a holdings record are well addressed in articulating how the holdings are complete for a title, the most currently received issue, and how you can plan for cancellation, etc. One of the challenges in maintaining holdings information is to factor in physical volume change due to binding, and it is critical to pay close attention to issue numbering and dates to understand the publication pattern.  Because the attendees’ level of experience was varied, Linda tried to focus on the basics of maintaining serial holdings. 

Last, but not least, we are very thankful to the Hawaii Library Association (HLA) and the NASIG Continuing Education Committee for their generous financial support to allow us to hold the workshop in Hawaii for three years in a row.  Also, I am grateful for local support from the William S. Richardson Law Library and School of Law of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  All these various support and assistance made the workshop a great success.  

Mahalo.