Summer is here. This is supposed to be the quiet time on campus, right? Hmm…

Well, quiet or not, I’m spending some time over the few months between terms doing a bit of research on monograph budget structures and allocation formulas. There are some interesting models in the literature. Adelphi University reported moving to a percentage-based budget that ties library allocations for a department to the university’s allocation to that department (Smith, 2008). Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, adopted a “cognate discipline” approach, grouping departments together (Paris, 2007). And Monash University in Australia described (some time ago, now) their practice of allocation to each of the branch libraries on their campuses rather than specific departments (Evans, 1996).

Some of the less traditional methods I’ve found in my reading so far came from the University of Hong Kong Libraries and Texas A&M. HKU adopted a modified zero-based budgeting approach in which deans were asked to justify increased spending for library resources in their area. Requests were vetted by a committee in the library (Chan, 2008). To me, this seemed like an awful lot of work for all concerned to distribute only 5% of the budget. Texas A&M opted to structure most of their monograph budget into five larger funds, down from more than 200 budget lines (and I thought my 60-odd funds were cumbersome…) (vanDuinkerken, 2008).

What’s been interesting is the diversity of approaches. The methods of structuring acquisitions budgets and allocating dollars (pounds, euros, what-have-you) among them are as varied as the libraries themselves. Indeed, I haven’t found any model that I would adopt wholesale, but find pieces in many of them that I like.

So what about your libraries? Does anyone have a great way of doing this that they’d like to share?

OCLC recently announced that they were beginning a pilot project to provide “Web-scale delivery and circulation, print and electronic acquisitions, and license management components to WorldCat Local, continuing the integration of library management services to create the Web-scale, cooperative library service.”

In other words, OCLC is going to build a web-scale ILS based on the WorldCat Local platform. The list of proposed features covers most of the basics, including print and e-resource acquisitions and management, circulation, and, of course, metadata/cataloguing (though from the academic library perspective, we also need reserves and recalls, which aren’t mentioned in the current plan). More from Andrew Pace here.

It’s a cool idea; I’ll be interested to see how this develops.

Yes, yes, I know. I’m behind again, and everyone else in the library blogosphere has commented on this and moved on. What’s a busy librarian to do?

If you’re one of the handful of people who haven’t read the Darien Statements yet, I encourage you to check them out. Admittedly, there are one or two things that I think are a bit of a stretch (e.g., “The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.” Um, OK. Maybe this is the go big or go home theory of libraries.). Overall, though, the authors do an admirable job of laying out a philosophy of libraries for the future.

What I really like about the Darien Statements is their positive outlook. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m sick to death of talking about all the things we’re NOT going to do–”we’re not going to catalogue”, “we’re not going to have collections”, “we’re not going to do in-person reference.” Bah. These are the same “we won’t be” statements I was hearing in library school ten years ago (and I stayed in the program anyway…not sure what that means). But guess what: we’re still doing all of them.

Are libraries changing? Absolutely. Is that change necessary? Definitely. Is it all doom and gloom? No. Libraries are in a period of very rapid evolution, and yes, there will be things that we stop doing. Does that really have to be our focus? As the Darien group put it, “Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will.” Let’s pick up the conversation from there.

In a previous post, I mentioned the creation of a new popular fiction (aka Popular Reading) collection at McMaster. I also mentioned that Vivian Lewis (one of our Associate University Librarians) and I were presenting on the collection at CLA in 2008 and promised further details. Well, the presentation happened…the further details, not so much.

Vivian and I recently did an updated version of our presentation for the library staff at McMaster. We looked at up-to-date circulation statistics and reviewed some of the analysis (and had quizzes/drawings for lovely prizes). It’s been interesting to watch this collection grow and develop and follow the usage patterns. A few of our findings:

The Popular Reading collection is very popular

• Students and staff (and faculty, we assume) are making heavy use of the collection. So much so that 40-50% of the collection is checked out at any given time.
• The most popular titles are into double-digit circulation.

Predicting what will be “popular” is harder than we expected

• When we started the collection, we set out to buy titles that would resonate with students and expected that we would see heavy use in a few key genres (graphic novels, fantasy, science fiction). That didn’t happen. The distribution of circulation by genre is much wider than we’d anticipated. We would never have predicted that Medical Fiction would be in the top 5 genres.
• Some selections are easy, though. If there’s a series of books that are popular in the Young Adult market, it’s a good bet they’ll circulate heavily. Think Harry Potter, the His Dark Materials trilogy, and the Twilight series.
• Users are reading both “literary” and “trashy” titles with equal zeal. The #1 title in our collection is Shopaholic Takes Manhattan. The #2 is A Thousand Splendid Suns. Both had circulated 22 times in our most recent data (Shopaholic has been #1 from the start, and so gets top billing).
• Despite the catchy title of our presentation, Robert Ludlum is not popular with our users. (OK, maybe that wasn’t so hard to predict.)

Don’t be too “librarianish”…

• …was our caution to the audience at CLA, and still holds in our thinking about the collection. Be prepared to live with some ambiguity and don’t try to have all the rules/problems/solutions identified before getting started. Make a few basic policy decisions and figure out the rest as you go.
• Get students involved in making the selections.  Back in August I took a group of our student library assistants on a shopping trip to the campus bookstore. Despite being in the collection only about six months when we pulled our last statistics, some of those books are into double-digit circulation. All of the top five had gone out at least eight times. We’ve also created a very basic form on our website for recommendations.

You don’t need a printing press (or an army of workers) in the basement

• We have a very modest budget for the collection and buy mass-market paperbacks whenever possible. They’re cheap to buy, cheap to replace if they get worn out, and less painful to withdraw if they don’t circulate. Students also like them because they’re small and easy to carry.
• Because the books are widely held by other libraries, cataloguing is readily available. We’ve relaxed some of our standards since we don’t view these books as permanent additions to the collection, and while we want them to be discoverable in the catalogue, we recognize that this is largely a browsing collection.
• Books for the Popular Reading collection follow the same workflow as our regular acquisitions. The few variations in processing have not created problems for us.

Just in time to be the perfect Christmas stocking stuffer, the first print-on-demand books from McMaster University Library’s mass digitization program became available on Monday!

Book lovers can choose between an illustrated first-edition of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol or a first edition of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine signed by the author. You can read the official press release here.

This is the beginning of a joint venture between the Library and Titles, the campus bookstore, which recently purchased an Espresso Book Machine. In the new year we’ll be sending files for all of the books digitized from our collection to Titles along with our other print-on-demand partners. Proceeds will benefit both library and student services at McMaster, and having a print-on-demand partner on campus means local customers can get their books very quickly.

Titles also has an online sales site, so if you’d like copies of our books but can’t make it to the Bookstore, look for them here. A title search will pull each of them up (look for the “replica edition”).

Happy Holidays!

If you went to library school at the height of the internet boom of the late 1990s, you probably heard (repeatedly) as I did that “library as place” was a dead concept. Ten years on, walk into an academic library and you’re likely to notice two things: 1) it’s crowded; 2) it’s noisy. What’s died is not the need for library space but the traditional notion of what library spaces should be. Libraries have gone from bastions of silent, individual labors to more social spaces for group work. (And as someone who avoided as much as possible sitting at a little study carrel in a windowless room listening to the fluorescent lights hum above my head, I’m all in favor.) We’ve built learning/information commons to bring services like writing support and peer tutoring into the library, torn down–or at least lowered–the silos, and added things like laptop-friendly rooms and cafes. This isn’t your father’s library…

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the More than Mortar conference at Wilfrid Laurier University. It was a great day of speakers describing their experiences transforming libraries into spaces for 21st century learners. In her session, Wendie McHenry from the University of Victoria Library talked about the renovation and expansion undertaken on their original 1960s facility (and how many of us wouldn’t like to do that). In discussing future plans, Wendie mentioned that they were looking into creating a “graduate commons”; like a learning commons, but with services geared to graduate students.

It’s a brilliant idea. Much as I like the bustle of the modern academic library and the demise of the shushing librarian, I think we have to admit that many of the new services and transformations we’ve implemented are aimed at a particular clientele: undergraduates. Undergraduates, to be sure, make up the largest single demographic for most academic libraries, and supporting their needs is vital. But it’s also important to remember that they’re not our only user group.

Have we gone so far in turning libraries into undergrad-friendly social spaces that we’re driving out other users? I hope not, but I’m not sure we know the answer to that question. At McMaster, one of the most frequent comments in our Library’s online suggestion box is a request for more silent study space, and we’re identifying ways to address that. We’ve also heard from our Provost in her State of the Academy reports that boosting graduate enrollment is a strategic priority for the University. I suspect McMaster is not unique in either of these. Perhaps the graduate commons is the next step in transforming the academic library. Not a return to the shushing (or the soothing hum of fluorescent tubes) but a space that graduate students can call their own.

If you haven’t yet read Janet Swan Hill’s guest editorial in the latest issue of Library Resources & Technical Services, it’s well worth the time (and yes, that goes for all you non-technical services folks, too).

In it, she traces a path from the “Old Universe” of libraries, where funding and staffing levels were more robust and libraries generally seen as a public good in and of themselves, to the “Alternate Universe” in which we find ourselves today. Janet is a frequent and well-regarded commentator on cataloguing and technical services issues, and makes a number of good points in her commentary. One of the reality-shifts that I think she correctly identifies is a new focus on the “weird”–rare books, archives and manuscripts, audio-visual materials–the unique things that our libraries hold. The irony, as she notes, is the timing:

As the amount of copy [pre-existing catalogue records] we could find through bibliographic networks or other sources increased from 50 percent to 70 percent to 90 percent and above, we decreased our local workforce, and leaned on LC and on the other members of our networks. Maybe we should have taken the staff we saved by using copy, and put it to handling materials that we had not paid much attention to before–such as government publications, maps, special collections, scores, audio recordings, and archives, but for the most part we did not. The realization that we should have done so has come a few decades too late.

Though our staffing and funding levels in technical services areas are not what they once were, the availability of cataloguing copy and vendor services for mainstream materials should have us thinking about the place of our rare and unique materials in the cataloguing workflow. Believe me, I know this is easier said than done… If you’ve followed my blog or those of my colleagues, you know McMaster’s libraries have been in a significant change process for the last couple of years. But even after all this time, I still find myself banging my head against this question. It’s not because I think we need to craft the perfect MARC record for everything (though I do think we should maintain some basic quality standards) or that rare books and archives aren’t important (my background, after all, is special collections). Rather, it’s finding the right balance of time (i.e., people), skills, and services to do both the “weird” and the routine. With the WoGroFuBiCo report’s call for greater emphasis on special and “hidden” resources, I hope this is something the larger cataloguing community can figure out together.

Hill, Janet Swan. “Entering an alternate universe: some consequences of implementing recommendations of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.” Library Resources & Technical Services 52.4 (Oct 2008): 218(9). Available online in Gale Academic OneFile.

We’ve recently loaded McMaster’s Popular Reading Collection on LibraryThing. You can read the official announcement on the Library News blog. Or you can surf your way over to LibraryThing and browse our virtual collection.

Putting the PR collection up on LibraryThing is an effort to be where our users are (or at least where they could be). It’s also another route to evaluative content (ratings, book reviews, tagging, and comments) and recommendations to help them find more books they might enjoy.

This truly is an experiment, which this small, discrete piece of our holdings is well-suited for. I’m curious to see what comments or other feedback we get from the Library’s users.

With three conferences, a vacation, and a visit from the family, it’s been a busy summer. Fortunately, it’s also been quiet the last few weeks, with lots of folks off on vacations of their own, and I’m finding some time to catch up on things.

One of the items that’s been on the back burner for a while is working with OCLC’s Bibliographic Record Notification Service. BRNS, which is included in OCLC’s subscription pricing, supplies a daily file of MARC records with the Library’s holding symbol attached that were updated during the previous day. OCLC provides a variety of options for how inclusive the files should be. Ours at McMaster are limited to monographic items (serials and other continuing resources just get way too complicated, and our e-resources Librarian is also working on the MARCit service, so we don’t want competing record loads…), but is otherwise pretty open. We could limit it to certain kinds of updates, but before doing that I wanted to see what we would get if they just sent everything.

Having now worked with several hundred of these records over the past few weeks, some patterns are emerging:

Changes to basic descriptive elements are fairly rare–Perhaps not surprising. The title is the title, after all, unless there was a typo or other error in the original record (which hopefully someone caught when it was loaded). I am occasionally seeing more complete pagination information in the new record, sometimes the publisher’s name is slightly fuller, or maybe they’ve added another publisher location but, by-and-large, nothing major.

Many of our older records are missing the item dimensions, and this addition has been more frequent. Omitting the dimensions wasn’t really considered significant until we recently tried using the data to support our mass digitization program. Oops. Just one more reminder that what seems trivial today may turn out to be important later.

More extensive subject headings and notes, and the addition of ISBNs and classification numbers are among the other enhancements to our older records.

Indicators, subfields, and 00x coding–Changes here have been more frequent simply because we have so many records with now-obsolete coding in the catalogue. Again, this is one that’s easy to initially dismiss as trivial. For years our OPACs have largely ignored subfields, indicators, and such, passively displaying the contents of catalogue records with little regard for how the information is coded. With Endeca powering our front-facing catalogue at McMaster, we’re now using subfield codes, as well as codes in the 00x fields and a variety of others, to drive faceted browsing. Getting updated records into the system therefore has a direct impact on the user experience by improving the consistency and completeness of the facets.

On the other hand–Sometimes the change IS dramatic. I’ve seen a number of records like this,

LDR 00777Cam 22001817? 45
003 BIBL
005 19940517000000.0
008 940405s ||||onc|||||b|||||||||||eng|d
050 14 $a LB
110 10 $a ONTARIO. $b MINISTRY OF EDUCATION. $b RESEARCH AND EVALUATION BRANCH
245 10 $a SCHOOL ATTENDANCE AND NON-ATTENDANCE IN CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES:
          CL ASSIFICATION OF MALE YOUNG OFFENDERS WITH SCHOOL ATTENDANCE PROBLEMS.
265 $a (7)
300 $a Microfiche
440  0 $a ONTARIO MINISTRY OF EDUCATION RESEARCH AND EVALUATION BRANCH RESEARCH REPORTS. $v 4702
700 10 $a PAUKER, J.D.

which have also been sitting in our catalogue for years, transition instantly to full cataloguing, complete with subject headings and an LC class number in the 050 (again, used for browsing in Endeca).

Content is king–By far the most common update is the addition of contents notes. Even records for items published in the early 20th century are getting this treatment. Certainly not information we would get but for someone at another library deciding it was important for their users and being willing to share with the rest of us. Having the contents listed in the MARC record itself also has the benefit of making them searchable.

It’s relatively painless–Records with OCLC numbers overlay seamlessly with no intervention. Our standard record loader protects certain fields (local notes and such), maintaining them in the updated record. Older records added to the catalogue before we joined OCLC frequently have to be manually merged with the incoming record. But, as these are generally the records most in need of updating, it’s a worthwhile exercise. It’s also not as time-consuming as it might at first appear. I’ve found that I can process a week’s worth of files in a couple of hours, frequently less.

Overall, I’ve found BRNS to be a useful tool for improving the catalogue. We’re not touching every record for every item, just those where an improvement is available. The changes being made to existing records are not undoing or redoing the work of our cataloguers, but adding to it. And finally, most of the updates are not “things only a cataloguer could love” (and I say that as someone who appreciates the nuances of cataloguing), but have direct benefits to the user’s experience.

So, last week we finally finished a project that’s been underway since last summer. Definitely longer than I’d hoped, but it’s the first time we’ve tried this…

We’ve now added records to library catalogue for a collection of books held outside the McMaster library system. The first group to go live in this new venture is the Student Health Education Centre (SHEC), one of McMaster’s student organizations. Read the official announcement here.

Working from a spreadsheet listing basic bibliographic information and ISBNs and using the batch searching feature of OCLC Connexion, we loaded nearly 600 records into the catalogue for SHEC’s lending library. We’re not physically relocating the books to the Library; they’ll stay with the organization, which will be responsible for notifying us of any additions to or removals from the collection and taking care of their own circulation. Links in the public catalogue guide users to SHEC’s website for contact information, location, and opening hours. We’re working with a few other groups at the moment, and with some experience under our belts it shouldn’t take quite so long to get records for their collections loaded.

Why do this, you may be asking.

Most of the books found in SHEC’s collection are titles that the library doesn’t own and is unlikely to buy, so it’s filling a gap in the resources available to our users. It also gives the collection broader exposure, meaning users who didn’t know about SHEC beforehand can still find and use their resources. And, well, just because we should. The Library should be a hub for the information resources available on campus, not just those within its four walls.