The Delicious Burden

Collection assessment session

Collection Analysis and Assessment: finding the best and worst in the library collection
Jennifer Arnold
Director, Central Piedmont Community College Library
cpcc.edu/library -- Look for Policies information

First of all, we are in a tiny, tiny room in the Francis Marion Hotel; whomever did the room assignments really got this mixed up!  More likely, though, its just a reflection of the overall high conference attendance.  Every session I has been overcrowded, people sitting on the floor, people standing, people standing in the doorway, people standing out in the hall...

On to Jennifer's presentation
Overview:
Project Scope/planning
Data
Tool selection
Staffing
Outcomes
Tips

Snapshot of CPCC
-largest CC in NC
-curriculum FTE ~11,000
-6 campuses in Mecklenburg Cty
-7 libraries
-RAPID enrollment growth and online environment

Origins of Project
-SACS recommending eliminated older materials in its collection
-bulk weeding, but wasn't appreciated by some academic departments

A New Approach
"The Big Picture"
-collection strengths and weaknesses
-support for programs and subject areas
-improving perceptions about the collection
-telling the story of the collection
-embracing change

Getting started
Planning:
-what did we need/want to assess about the collection?
-What did we mean by 'collection'?

What did we want to know?
What did we need & want to know about the collection?
-age
-circ, usage
-relative strengths & weaknesses

What data?
-circ stats, ILS
-usage stats, ILS & journal finder
-age of the collection, ILS
user perception, surveys
relative strengths & weaknesses, ?
overall quality, ?

Tools
-Bowker Book Analysis
-WorldCat Collection Analysis

Chose to use Bowker's Book Analysis
-lower-division undergraduates
-initial concerns about comparing our collection with other libraries
-look at overall quality by how many RCL items were held
-ability to compare against the core RCL collection

Staffing issues
-Tech Services
-Reference
-Circulation
-Systems

Action Plans
What to do with this data?
-weed based on the data
-change our CD focus
-update policies & procedures
-change/improve services
-communicate!
  *tell the story of the collection
  *involve the college community
  *make the funding arguments

The Assessment: collection age
ILS data
0-5 yrs 6%
6-10yrs 10%
11-20 yrs 22%
21+ yrs 58%

Subject area details

The Assessment: Circ States
What wasn't circulating?
-in past decade
-problems with new materials
  *lower circ than wanted to see
  *relationship b/tw the two?

The Assessment: Quality
-used Bowker
-only had 6% of RCL core titles
-subject areas varied widely
-highest % were in subjects with accredited programs (allied health & paralegal)

The Assessment: Core titles
core title subject detail

The Assessment: User perception
-students need more resources-
-lots of outdated books
-below-average materials
-not enough up-to-date books

The Print Collection
What did we learn?
-its outdated
-some subjects better shape than others
-titles for weedings
-way to frame the story of the collection

Serials
Primary Concerns:
-Accreditation
-Support for programs
-Appropriateness
-Cost

Serials: procedures
-consultation with faculty
-physical examination
  *appropriateness
-determine database availablity
-look for lower-cost alternatives

Serials results
-cut 23 titles and saved $7800
-added 8 titles at a total cost of $1100
-savings of $6700
-beyond savings, a better collection
  *cut titles; changed focus, programs eliminated, etc.
  *again, more than just weeding!

Databases
primary concern:
-usage vs. cost-database we purchase (vs. receive through NC Live)
-looked at usage statistics

Databases: the results
-lowest usage & highest usage were both high enough that no databases were cut

Overall findings:
Electronic resources
-high usage, no weeding necessary
Serials
-needed minor adjustments
Print
-needed weeding
-needed collection development focus changed

General outcomes
-could quantify what we knew anecdotally
-begin telling the story
-knew now the areas where we needed improvement

Specific outcomes
-RCL titles held percentages increased
-removed/weeded 2500 books from oldest collection

What did we do?
-revised collection development and weeding policies to
include references to RCL, percentages to weed, etc.
Established a communication plan
-admin support
-faculty support
-student support

What did we do?
-developed a new procedure for weeding
-changed collection development focus
  *Adding RCL titles
  *Identifying weak areas to focus on

Weeding our process
-develop a collection evaluation slip
  *outdated
  *usage (lack of circ)
  *physical condition
  *duplicate copy
  *curriculum changes
  *no longer under accreditation requirements
  *superseded

Weeding:
Librarians assigned call number ranges
flagged materials with slips
faculty review
flagged materials pulled to TS
checked/withdrawn/replaced

What did we do???
Wrote a grant
-LSTA Grant : strengthening academic library collections
-focused on math and science
-weakness in collection
-received $10,000

Collection Assessment Tips:
Planning/scope
-What can you do in a reasonable timeframe
TheTools
-automate the tools
-find the tools that works for your collection or library
Staffing
-if possible, hire par-time help
-re-assign existing staff time

Get the DATA!!!!!!
always Assess in Context
expect the unexpected
 -- found preview records?!
prepare for the impact on services
 --reserves
Be willing to change accepted practices
 -- got rid of oversize
Communication
--upfront
--consistent
Find project management tools
--software, timelines, deadlines, etc.
Assess regularly and consistently

Great presentation -- Jennifer knew her stuff and did a fantastic job talking about the steps her library took to plan and conduct the assessment and weeding project.

Trends & themes at Charleston

I'm in my second full day at the Charleston Conference and am floored by the intensity and overwhelming amount of information and presentation.  So many good presentations to choose from, so little time!  I only wish there was more time to see more sessions.  Within each concurrent session time slot, there are at least 4 or 5 sessions I'm interested in attending.  Its proving to be a tough choice. 
Today, Tim Spalding from LibraryThing was supposed to give a talk on social cataloging; however, Tim's flight was delayed and he was stuck in Cleveland (poor guy!).  Another talk was given by Andrew Pace on "webscale workflow", emphasizing the need for discontinuation of our independent silos and a more cost-effective and efficient streamlined networked library management systems he calls the webscale workflow.  Here is just a sampling of some the trends & themes I'm encountering here at Charleston:

- Creation of a peer review watermark and/or symbol to indicate trustworthiness of documents and webpages on the web (a la Creative Commons symbol for copyright)

- RDA (Resource Description & Access) -- what is it, will it succeed, will it die?  This is a new one to me, not being familiar with the ins and outs of cataloging, but this will have implications for us with regards to metadata and cataloging our digital content

- OCLC's WorldCat Selection to streamline ordering and acquisitions of materials via one system without having to go to multiple vendors and/or publishers and/or jobbers

- Change in Technical Services operations; reorganizing and changing workflows of Technical Services operations as our organizations change in response to new and different services and priorities

- Scholarly communication -- what does it mean for libraries, how does it impact libraries and our workflows, what do we do with Institutional repositories, scholarly content created on our campuses and digitization of this material?

- Google and the settlement with the publishers/authors -- sounds like a really complicated settlement, but it might mean the way to increased access to material all over the U.S.

- EBooks, eBooks, EBOOKs!

Are there badlands ahead for Higher Education?

Dr. Harry Pence' talk on the future of higher education...

In the new "bazaar", the rules and roles will be flexible, the best information will come from social networks, leadership is no longer based on hierarchy and there are little or no fixed reference points.

We are moving towards the age of improvisation. 
We need new types of leadership.
Globalization is the emergent phenomenon (our students will have to compete with the world).
Traditional social compacts are vanishing

So...
Our students must be more flexible.
2002 National Research Council study, "Preparing for the Revolution":
...the impact of information technology on the university will likely be profound, rapid and discontinuous...

Clayton Christensen:
The Innovator's Dilemma
* disruptive technology requires new ways of working
* sustaining technologies improve the way we currently work

So far, most of our instructional technologies have been sustaining:
Course management systems, clickers, Powerpoint

Disruptive:
RSS, del.icio.us social bookmarking and Wikipedia

Knowledge is fluid

New report, "Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future":  students are power browsers and are developing new ways of searching content and reading, which we don't fully understand yet.

Our students expect to participate in a personalized experience when dealing with a service provider (and this is how they think of their places of higher education).

What will the teacher of the future look like?

Key skills & resources for first year students

I am at a CIT presentation called, "Introducing Key Skills and Resources to Freshmen Students", presented by Jackie Ritzko and Kathy Maxwell of Penn State Hazelton. 
One of the trends in higher education is to create one credit or three credit courses on information or technology literacy and either require everyone to take the course or designate it as an elective.  Do these work?  How effective are these courses at integrating technology or information resources into the content which students are learning?
This session goes a long way to developing a course where we are integrating technology and information literacy into a first year seminar.  The presenters developed a seminar around:

1. Introducing students to key campus personnel and resources (who is the registrar on campus? who takes care of financial aid?)
2. Divide students into teams.  Develops their group decision-making skills.
3. Integrate technology by requiring students to create a powerpoint (or some other technology creation program).
4. Use a communication format to interview key campus personnel for the content.
5. Used the Gary Smalley personality assessment (lion, beaver, otter, golden retriever) to assess students' leadership and team abilities.

Their integrated first year projects utilized technology and information resources,
Some things they learned:

1. Don't use the same "people" on campus, over and over again. Use a revolving set of campus personnel.
2. Don't assume your students KNOW the technology you are requiring them to use.

Perceptions of librarians at CIT

I'm pleasantly surprised by the turnout of librarians at the CIT conference.  I arrived this morning and met my co-presenter, we talked about the conference and she said to me, "I didn't realize that this was a library conference!".  It turns out she was discussing CIT with another faculty member who told her this conference was for librarians.  Which surprised me of course, since I don't think the conference is specifically geared towards librarians, but rather to technology specialists and faculty using technology at SUNY campuses.  It was flattering to think that some faculty view this as a library conference.  Librarians just happen to be one of the main constituencies on campus who use technology heavily; presenting, talking, and using lots of the good stuff.  In many cases, libraries were the first departments to use technology in higher education institutions.  On my campus, librarians are the staff attending and presenting at technology conferences.  In fact, there are two of us from my library presenting today; six of us are here in attendance from my library alone.  The bloggers, twitter users, and presenters are librarians; participants are librarians; learners are librarians.  I'm always impressed by the amount of training, workshop attendance and staff development which librarians undertake.
There may be a flip side to this - the colleague didn't bother coming to this conference because it was a "library conference", but maybe this also means the faculty know that librarians are at the forefront of applying and using instructional technology on our campuses.   Now, if only our computing & information technology department wasn't so territorial about instructional technology, we might be able to work together more productively to create some engaging and worthwhile faculty & staff training programs.

Copyright and DRM: more than I wanted to know...

A couple of weeks back, I went to a copyright and digital licensing workshop in beautiful Ithaca, NY at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (if you have never been and you are a birdwatcher, this is a must-see).  Informative and overwhelming, the speakers were engaging and extremely knowledgeable, took questions and tried to answer or provide guidance on where to find the answers.  Being a copyright newbie, I found all the information helpful, but needed a few days (or weeks) to synthesize it, and now want to present a workshop for library staff on copyright.  IDS folks are pretty savvy, but may not know much about licensing agreements.  Reference and instruction librarians may have more knowledge about licensing, but still may need a refresher on both DRM and copyright. 

Another relevant issue was the support of faculty electronic course reserves in our campus' new course management system (myCourses).  We currently have Docutek electronic reserves (ERes), but will no longer support it at the end of May.  How do we monitor what faculty are doing with their electronic reserves? Do we need to monitor them or should they be left to manage their own course content?  How are other libraries tackling copyright and licensing issues when they have no control over what faculty are putting in their learning repositories?  There were no easy answers at the copyright workshop, and I want to think maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill, but I do feel as though our library has not really thought through the consequences of how we are handling this problem.  We will provide support to faculty if they want help in scanning or loading content into their course repositories, but does that mean we are also monitoring copyright abuses?  Before, since ERes was housed on a library server, we had total control over procedure and any copyright violations.  Now, since myCourses is actually a remote server, do we have control?  I'm wondering how other libraries are handling this problem.

On the digital licensing front, there were even more questions than answers.    How do we secure access to online resources and manage patrons' expectations?  How do we negotiate contracts to get the best deal for our library or consortium?  If a license is "silent" on an issue, does that mean you can go ahead and do "it"? (actually that last one did have an answer and it is, "no, you do not have the right to "do it" even if the license is silent on the issue).  What about managing digital audio or video content? 
I have lots of homework to do...