ELD Get Acquainted Session: Library Lightning Rounds

Jill Powell from Cornell – myiLibrary patron driven ebook purchasing.
Advantage: save money, price ceiling, selection criteria which disallows purchasing of popular books. They tap certain publishers.

Libguides Page for Senior Capstone Design Classes, Tom Volkening at Michigan State Libraries gets wide use by the students. May be using this with students/classes who don’t have library research sessions.

Ginny Baldwin talked about their extensive material deselection at her engineering library. Obtained load estimate in order to squeeze books in one area. They created a process by which they evaluated books and criteria for retention (see her handout) but they include: usage, historical use, local interest, value as  work, and classics. Consulted Books for College Libraries, and also brought in faculty to review decisions. For serials: duplicates with other libraries, online access vs. print.

Tutorials made easy with screencasting – Sheila Young from Arizona State shared insights on the library staff work to create online videos for students using Screenr. Demos, online courses, to support specific homework  assignment. They are also used for on-the-fly reference. See ASU libraries web site. It’s tied in with twitter.  See their article in istl.org online.

Kevin Drees from Oklahoma State teaches students about standards and specifications. Big picture: standards are as important as design is to the curriculum. See James Olshefsky article from 2010 ASEE on Standards Education Bridging the Gap Between Classroom Learning and Real World Applications.
A few useful links:
·         Standardslearn.org
·         ASTM – standards on campus, etc. check with Kevin for more.
Librarians’ role? Facilitate access to what we have in our own collections.

Jill Dixon from Binghamton University Libraries ponders the one search box ,which really isn’t always a one search and offers too many options for students. She looked at various web sites of libraries and fould 60% offer discovery tools. Four libraries using only discovery tool, all the others use multiple search boxes. What’s best for libraries? You decide.

Nancy Linden from University of Houston PowerPoint is your friend. She starts with evocative images to get students to discuss. She used PPT for small quiz type questions that are engaging, like a contest. She also has giveaways (1 GB drive) which gets students excited and into the activities. She uses a visual for high risk/low risk sources and the quadrants related. She also uses real life scenarios about being an engineering, which can illustrate why they do lit reviews. She tells students they shouldn’t reinvent the wheel.

Maliaca Oxnam updated us all on TRAIL the tech report archive. Over 772,000 hits over the past year. 993 reports were downloaded 89,600 times. This material is still heavily used by researchers. Coming soon technicalreports.org and winning an ALA Govdocs award this coming week! Congrats

Linette Koren Rochester Institute of Technology discussed their use of scvngr for their library. They purchased a license & a couple iTouch which students  can checkout. It’s an app from itunes which users can download onto their phone and they have set up challenges for touring through the library. BTW- There is an active hunt for ASEE in Louisville.  

MIT reorganization: Angie Locknar shared the new org chart for the MIT Libraries which is a new function based structure vs. by library. Research & instructional services (includes user experiences librarians, specialized content including GIS, etc.), information resources, information tech strategy, Administrative Services each with little bubbles which you can read all about later. See Angie for more details.

See Spot Run! Grand Valley State University, Debbie Morrow and the staff at the library in Grand Rapids, MI are celebrating a 10 year birthday party for their automated storage retrieval system (ASRS) named Spot. How cute. It’s been successful despite lack of browsability.  So successful, they are putting another one in their new library. Cool. Libraries. Robotics.

Najwa Hanel discussed another 10 year anniversary for their student written, peer reviewed magazine and her work mentoring and advising them.

I also talked briefly about our use of Twitter for outreach (see PDF of PPT): try it  & oddly, people will follow. Get students to help generate content (we have a Student  Social Media Content Developer). See twitter.com/WPI_Library

So, are we Meeting the Needs of Engineering Faculty, Researchers, and Students?

We are working hard and certainly trying to by analyzing collections & surveying users to make sure we have the "best fit" resources and services for our campuses.

Using Engineering Theses and Dissertations to Inform Collection-Development Decisions, Especially In Civil Engineering
Patricia Kirkwood, University of Arkansas, performed an analysis of Master of Science and Ph.D. projects to determine the percentage of items cited held by the library. She found that 85.7% of serial articles referenced were available at the university library. However, they held only 45% of the referenced books/monographs. Another finding: 1/3 of the citations of the civil engineering citations were incomplete or incorrect. Opportunity for instruction here.

This study helped her determine what additional resources the library should be considering for their collections. Kirkwood was surprised by the results, for the 3 Ph.D. dissertations that were analyzed, 64% of cited sources were grey literature (technical reports, standards, other non traditionally published materials). For the 22 MS theses, 33% of the referenced items were journal articles.

Kirkwood has been able to use this data to change their government depository profile. She’s added state level documents, such as transportation department publications, and cataloged specialized web resources and added them to library web guides. Also, she’s reviewing non-traditional publishers that were referenced and teaching new tools such as TRIS (Transportation Information Research Service, U.S. Department of Transportation) and TRB, Transportation Research Board, of the National Academies.

See also:
Materials Used by Master's Students in Engineering and Implications for Collection Development: A Citation Analysis by Virginia Kay Williams and Christine Lea Fletcher, Mississippi State University

As well her Kirkwood's other 2009 paper:
ROUNDING UP THE COLLECTION: THE STORY OF TRAIL DIGITAL CONTENT COLLECTION (digitization of technical reports)

Library and Information Use Patterns by Engineering Faculty and Students
William Baer and Lisha Li, from Georgia Institute of Technology, conducted an online survey of Civil/Environmental and Mechanical Engineering students and faculty in order to determine their use of the library and information.
They found that the undergraduates come to the library at least once per week and for most faculty who responded, they visit at least once per month. Top reasons undergrads come to library: individual study, group study, check email, word processing.
For graduate students, top reasons are to access books and journals, followed by checking out books, individual study, attending class/seminar or use of printers.

Google effect: Baer and Li asked if “Google is sufficient” for their research needs and more undergrads agree with this statement, however graduate students tended to disagree. For use of information resources undergrads choose Google first, while grads report use of databases as their first choice for searching. Researchers asked students to choose “best databases.” They found that graduate students selected evenly choose both Web of Science and Compendex as their top choices followed by ScienceDirect then Google Scholar. Several other resources were included in their student, see their paper for additional details. The engineering faculty chose Compendex as their first stop for information.

Baer and Li asked students to report how well they feel they know the databases, ranging from expert to no-knowledge. Librarians will use this data to help create instruction for students, especially in areas the students are reporting “no-knowledge.” The training method preferred for both graduate and undergrad students is “online tutorials.”

Finally, researchers asked library users to comment on one thing they would like the library to improve, suggestions included to gain access to more ejournals, faster ILL, among others. Since the study they have implemented rapidILL document delivery service. Overall, more outreach is needed to promote library resources and services as well as training on various research tools.

Download their presentation (PPTX)

Changing Library Vendor Contracts: A Case Study in Acquiring Ebooks from an Online Book Vendor
Charlotte Erdmann, Purdue University, first described her mindset, to get the materials that best fit the users of Purdue library. She mentioned various research studies on ebook selection which can be found referenced in her paper. Erdmann analyzed usage data from ebook usage over multiple years in order to get the best selection for Purdue students and faculty.
Ebook advantages: convenience, full text searches, broader selection
Since March 2005, Purdue began bargaining for ebooks and initially chose, due to user preference, ProQuest Safari. With only two simultaneous users they had 1000s of turnaways so found funding to increase number of users. By the end of 2007, they went with a “slot plan” to purchase certain amount of titles, which Purdue staff base on the four most popular publishers that made sense to Purdue based on prior usage data. They also take faculty input on selections of titles.