Merging your stats from your reference desk and document delivery service
I’ve been working lately on testing out the new faculty services software created for libraries by Michigan State University. Although not exactly ground-breaking, the software package, released as open source, aims to create a package that manages the document delivery, research, and instruction requests from faculty. Much like a ticket system used by IT support departments, a faculty member can log into the system and fill out a request. They can then follow this request and check its status until it has been completed by a librarian.
Our current document delivery service was just changed last academic year from a web fill-in form to another fill-in form powered by Google Docs. This has the advantage of storing all requests into a single spreadsheet than can be sorted and archived. Additionally, you can setup the Google Docs account to email a notification whenever a request is added. So far this system has worked well.
Yet, in trying out these new software options I noticed that there is still a chasm between how to gather statistics for faculty services and the reference desk. One of the major advantages of using a program like libstats was that it centralized your statistics from work you do in your office, at the reference desk, or roaming about through the library. As reference services change and move away from the traditional reference desk model, it becomes increasingly important to document our work when providing “non-traditional” reference services.
I’m hoping that someone will eventually create a solution so that both libstats and a faculty services package will write to the same MySQL database. That way when a faculty member makes a request it is automatically included in the statistics along with everything else the reference department does. Since both of these programs are using MySQL as the back-end I can’t imagine that it would be too difficult to do this. If someone has already noticed this need and made a solution please share in the comments section.
As you may have read in an earlier post, I am exploring how to create a digital repository for the law school. The start of this project began as I saw a need to create a digital preservation policy for the law school as so many of the documents and materials we produce are now in digital formats. Over the last 10 to 15 years, much of what the law school has produced has been in a digital format yet without a clear preservation policy, many of these materials are now inaccessible. We may actually find ourselves in a position where we can gather more documents about the law school’s history from the 1970s than we can from the 1990s.
To rectify this I started exploring the software options available. I had already heard about Dspace, a project that initially started at MIT libraries. After some initial difficulties, I have found that a Dspace installation is rather easy to setup and that creating a personalized theme, using Manakin, is relatively straightforward. If you can edit CSS, you can probably create a nice Manakin theme without too much trouble.
The one challenge I had was how to modify the metadata that would display for an item. Because I intend of using this for a law school, I wanted the ability to include a Bluebook citation field that would display by default. This took a little bit of investigation, but I finally discovered that by copying the desired element from /themes/dri2xhtml/DIM-Handler.xsl into your theme’s XSL you can modify the metadata display to your liking. You can follow the wiki on How to Modify Metadata Item Display that Dspace has created for more information.
In terms of actually installing Dspace I am using a pre-made distribution created by Jumpbox. Although installing Dspace and PostgreSQL on a Ubuntu distro is relatively straightforward, using the Jumpbox distro saved me probably half a day of work. At a subscription price of $150 a year, which includes technical support, I felt it was a good choice.
After this initial setup, and modifying the Manakin theme, I played around with Dspace to see what other functions it may serve the law school other than simple digital preservation. Right away I saw potential in using it for student law review cite-checking projects. By restricting a Dspace collection’s access to law review students, they could upload their cite-checking documents in a central place and sort them easily by their Bluebook citations. I spoke with some students on the three law reviews we have here at SCU and was surprised how truly disorganized the process has become. I think this is largely due to the leadership changing every year and wanting to “reinvent the wheel” for how things are done. This has led me to investigate how to create a policy for student law reviews that encourages consistency from one year to the next (which I will blog about shortly).
I found that some students were using Sharepoint for organizing their cite-checking documents and others weren’t really using any system at all. Oddly enough, our international law journal is using HAL, a French-made digital repository product used widely in Europe. I looked at the documentation for this and found that most of it was not easily available in English. Obviously, this product wouldn’t have been the choice I would have made for their journal.
Finally, I see potential in using Dspace for faculty document delivery. Other law librarian bloggers have written on how to use Dropbox and Drupal-based websites for document delivery. I think the solution available through Dspace may actually be easier to use for faculty. The University of Michigan has also created a Faculty Research Database for document delivery. A demo is available at http://www.law.msu.edu/demo. For Dspace you can create distinct collections that have their own user privileges. You can therefore create a collection for each faculty member so that only they are able to view their documents stored there. Additionally, you can subscribe, via RSS, to changes made in each collection. If you want to use Dspace for faculty document delivery you can setup a collection for each faculty member, use their email address to subscribe to changes, and then whenever a new document is added they will receive an email with a link to it. Very simple and straight-forward.
If you have experience setting up Dspace in your academic library please share it in the comments section.
I’ve been thinking about getting an e-reader for quite some time now but just simply haven’t been happy with any of the available choices on the market. Although Amazon’s Kindle has proven to be successful, particularly during this last holiday season, the device is still largely crippled due to DRM requirements. For example, users can’t lend their e-books to other Kindle users, nor can you use the Kindle to check out e-books available at public libraries. Perhaps even more disturbing, however, is that Amazon continues to have control over content even after purchase. For example, customers who purchased George Orwell’s “1984″ suddenly found that the book went missing from their Kindles. Apparently there was a licensing dispute over the book and Amazon simply removed it from any Kindle user who purchased it.
As a librarian who works in higher education, I receive discounts through our campus bookstore which is owned by Barnes and Nobles. I was considering buying the Nook made by Barnes and Nobles but it seems the product was released too early as user reviews complain about slow performance. Additionally, the claim that more titles are available for the Nook compared with the Kindle may be overstated as many of them are in the public domain, which Amazon doesn’t count.
All of this has made me wait eagerly for the arrival of Apple’s Tablet. Although reportedly designed to be more than just an e-reader, the introduction of Apple into this market is bound to make some impact. The estimated price of Apple’s new tablet will likely be near $1000, much higher than any of the e-readers currently available. It should also be noted that Apple is predicted to not use e-ink display technology, unlike both the Nook and Kindle. What affect this has on battery life compared to other e-readers remains to be seen.
I was particularly impressed with this video, produced by CourseSmart, that is being demoed at this week’s CES Conference in Las Vegas. The company makes textbooks available for e-readers. They demonstrate how their products may work on a future Apple tablet. Very impressive.
Demo of CourseSmart – CES Conference
I realize that this blog has been rather dead lately. I have been swamped with exams and then took a much needed vacation. Although I didn’t travel anywhere outside of California, it was nice to have some time off to recoup and get ready for the next semester.
I have, however, been working on creating a digital repository for the law school. As I wrote earlier, I am exploring using Dspace as a tool for not only archiving law school materials, but as a document intranet for student cite-checking and perhaps even faculty document delivery.
Some of the options I have been looking at include running Dspace in a cloud, using Amazon’s EC2 service. I have also explored the Dspace Jumpbox installation which makes setting up Dspace much easier.
All of this has made me think of what law schools should do in terms of creating a digital retention policy. As far as I know, no law school has created an official retention policy that meets the unique needs of legal education. Although Harvard’s DASH has a great policy to model, it includes subject areas that produce far more empirical research than typically is done at a law school.
I’d love to hear thoughts from other law librarians about what types of policies were should institute and what tools are best suited for hosting documents of interest to the larger legal community.
Ever since watching a great demonstration at Internet Librarian about cloud computing I have been looking at the various virtual machines available on Amazon’s Elastic Computing service, including those made by Bitnami, JumpBox, and others. Currently, a virtual appliance for the open-source digital library program, Dspace, is only offered by subscription through JumpBox for $150 a year or $.02 an hour via Amazon’s cloud computing service. For many libraries, this is a much lower cost than many of the commercial options available for creating a digital repository (such as OCLC’s ContentDM).
I’m hoping that creating a digital repository for the law school will address several issues. For one, it could act as a “staging” area for faculty to host their research and scholarship before they submit to journals or SSRN. Secondly, it can be used by student law reviews as a centralized location to store materials for cite checking thereby reducing inter-library loan requests. And finally, it can be used as a digital archive for the law school thereby enabling access to historical materials that may be currently inaccessible.
One of the nice features of Dspace is that all records are XML-based using tags from Dublin Core. These records can easily be exported, converted into MARC records using an XSLT transformation, and imported into the OPAC.
Excellent presentation this morning on the value of using virtualization software to create a sandbox for software testing and development. The speakers spoke about VMWare, BitNami, and JumpBox and the pros and cons of each. I was particularly intrigued with running BitNami and JumpBox stacks under Amazon’s Web Services. The presenter showed an example of a Drupal installation that he had created in five minutes using a BitNami stack and Amazon Web Services. Very neat.
Notes:
So what is a “sandbox”?
- A place to test code that is isolated from your production environment
- Software development model used to test new products
- Also, as a “wiki” model where people can gather to learn new technical skills
Who should be using a sandbox?
- Public service librarians who teach technology to the public
- Those wanting to be on the cutting edge of library technology
Sandbox must be a safe place
- Not going to affect your production environment
If you have to wait for IT to setup this environment it may lead to lost time
If you are evaluating software you want to test its features before you commit to storage and server space
Sandbox rules
- Place nice together
How do I do this?
- Three approaches:
○ VMWare
§ Virtual Appliance Marketplace — preconfigured machines to use with VMWare
□ Very little investment, you can start machines up when you need them
§ VMWare working on virtual desktop that would be suitable for public access terminals
□ Not quite fully developed
○ BitNami
§ Most focused towards web services
§ Installed as a stack (web server, Linux distro, MySQL)
§ Have packages for Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, lots of others
§ Not really designed for a production environment
○ JumpBox
§ Geared towards development environments
§ Have a distribution for Dspace
§ Must be run under VMWare or Virtual PC
§ Has a nice administrative panel
Amazon Web Services
- You can install all of these services in the cloud
- Can spin up a new server in about 5 minutes
- Have partnerships with BitNami and JumpBox
Librarysandbox.info for more information
Preparing your library sandbox for disasters
- Do you have a Plan B?
- Do you have support in the event of a disaster?
○ Administrative support?
Just finished a session on IM reference services that was actually very interesting. I really wasn’t expecting much on this topic assuming that there hasn’t been much released over the last year that is of much interest. It seems like more and more libraries are creating Meebo accounts for their IM reference services. I setup a Meebo account for our library last year with mixed success. We have had some students that have used, and appreciated, the service but the traffic hasn’t been very impressive. We are probably averaging about one IM reference transaction per day. I think this may simply be the nature of law students who require more time and detail in their reference questions than would be expected in an undergraduate environment.
What I found particularly interesting from this presentation is how to embed your IM chat widget into your OPAC without creating additional technical issues. A speaker from Nova Scotia described her problems with her campus IT on getting the widget included and then the further problems they had with Meebo when a chat session was spawned every time a student used the OPAC. They created a dynamic widget at first that required students to click on it before it would start a session. Eventually, they moved over to Libraryh3lp with offered some benefits over Meebo including allowing more than one librarian to sign in at any one time, keeping statistics, and avoiding the issues Meebo had with the OPAC.
Some resources discussed during this session:
Jing
Awesome Highlighter
LinkBunch
Notes:
Making Virtual Reference Multidimensional
Patrons typically don’t start their virtual reference session with their actual reference question
Virtual reference problems tend to be rooted in the attempt to replicate a real-life reference transaction
Communicate differently online
- Use short sentences
- Avoid entire paragraphs
- Use conventions (abbreviations, etc.)
Tech tools
- Jing (jingproject.com)
○ Screen capture tool that also include audio function
○ Can be used for real-time virtual reference transactions
○ Uses a free hosting service called Screencast.com
○ Can also do screen capture photos in addition to video
- Sharedcopy (sharedcopy.com)
○ Allows you to quickly highlight a web page
○ Automatically generates a URL
- YouTube
○ Create video tutorials for the most common questions
- CopyURL (Firefox plugin)
- LinkBunch (like TinyURL but for more than one link)
- Screenr (like Jing but entirely web-based)
- ScreenJelly
- The Awesome Highlighter (much like Sharedcopy)
Embedded chat reference
Consortium in Nova Scotia using OCLC’s Question Point
Then moved to chat widgets
- Pidget was backend
- Open-source stats database (UNLV product)
- Wiki (PBWiki)
Did user study and found that IM was the most popular method of using a librarian followed by face-to-face
- No undergraduate student said they wanted to communicate via email
Ubiquitous use of chat widgets
- “Ask a librarian” page
- On database pages
- On LibGuides
- Also placed widget on OPAC
Results of placement
- Unexpected increase in use
- Technical issues
○ Problem with Meebo and placing the widget on OPAC
○ Eventually created a dynamic Meebo widget for the OPAC
§ Had reference schedule embedded into script
§ User would have to click on the widget to actually start a Meebo session
- Dropped individual IM accounts and used Meebo exclusively
LibraryH3lp
- Fee based IM chat service
- About $450 a year
- Can have more than one person sign in at a time
Problems integrating into WorldCat local service
Tips
- Place chat widgets at point of need
- Be aware of online environment of widget placement
- Experiment and share results
- Refresh Meebo accounts by logging into native interface
- Separate accounts for tracking purposes
I didn’t go to this presentation and really wish I had. It has become a tradition at Internet Librarian.
The conference is abuzz with discussion about the new discovery tool by Serial Solutions. The new product offers a federated search capability with a significantly simplified user interface. Sounds like a move in the right direction. I think, however, that this service may have limited utility for law libraries as WestLaw and Lexis continue to refuse to participate with other companies in providing an index to their services.
Michael Hemment, a librarian at Harvard, gave a presentation on using learning management systems. He discussed Harvard’s research guide software system that automatically generates guides for classes. It didn’t really cover much new area for this subject. I thought it was interesting, however, that Mr. Hemment discussed how the library was still using LibGuides in addition to their existing research guide system based on their campus CMS. I find this to be very odd and perhaps reflective of the LibGuides “fad” which has swept through libraries over the last two years. I have never understood the value of LibGuides and really don’t see what value it offers that doesn’t already exist in a modern CMS. Plus, hosting your content with an outside vendor poses some unique challenges and problems. For one, you have far less control over the appearance and branding of your research guide when it is hosted by an outside company. Secondly, you cannot use tools, such as MAJAX, to incorporate your catalog data into the guide as it must be on the same domain as your ILS (in the case of MAJAX, a Millennium system).
I’d like to hear what other conference attendees think about LibGuides. Is this an idea who time should come to an end or do you really see value in this service? With most librarians forced to learn their employer’s CMS system already, does having to learn to use LibGuides worth it? Shouldn’t librarians have the tech skills to build a research guide that compares with one built using LibGuides?
Notes:
Integrating Library Resources into Course Sites at Harvard
Students still find library catalogs to be confusing and cumbersome because they are so accustomed to them working like Google
Guiding Principals:
- Create modify learning objects anywhere and at anytime
- Repurpose, share, and link content
- Easily add a broad range of features and tools
- Collaborate with colleagues
- “Push” library research tools to the point of need
- “Let’s find them”
The Team
- Harvard College librarians
- Faculty and student advisors
- Academic Technology Group
- iCommons
iSites Topic Box Types
- Announcements, blogs, discussions, documents, dropbox, image, iframe, library search, podcasts, profiles, etc.
○ Similar to LibGuides
Assessment
- Focus groups, faculty and students
- Individual consultations with faculty
- User testing
- Embedded surveys
What’s next
- Auto-populate subject guides and learning tools with essential e-resources
- Collaborate with other Harvard librarians
- Facilitate research guide authoring by students and faculty
- Use screencapture tutorials to “summarize” library research classes
- Make research guide creation a central activity of library research classes
Jing
- Screen capture tool can be used to answer difficult reference questions
