The Role of the Professional Librarian in Technical Services Interest Group (RPLTS IG) presents three talks about building the future of technical services. In these presentations, librarians will address how they have responded to recent challenges at their organizations by creating controlled digital lending workflows, implementing tools for effective diversity audits, and developing librarians' electronic resources skills.
The program will take place on Friday, March 8, 2024, from 2:00-3:00pm Central. The program is free and open to all:
Register for the session
The program will include the following presentations, followed by time for Q&A:
"Proposing Controlled Digital Lending to the University of Houston Alma Stakeholders", presented by Diana Dulek, Metadata and Digital Initiatives Librarian, University of Houston Law Center, and Leonard (Leo) Martin, Interim Head of Resource Management and Metadata, University of Houston Libraries
This presentation will discuss the importance of controlled digital lending to the different libraries on campus, how the Covid-19 pandemic pressed the matter for stakeholders, and the importance of collaboration across campus and departments. We will look at where the project stands currently and provide insights we've learned along the way. In April 2019, the University of Houston Law Library began exploring options to provide access to its collection of study aids via controlled digital lending. This project took on renewed priority and significance in early 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began, and the university community went remote. The Law Library contracted with an external vendor to pursue a pilot for in-house digitization and controlled lending access via a remote content server. The pilot met basic needs but was ultimately discontinued in favor of finding a way to integrate a controlled digital lending workflow with the library services platform, ExLibris. In 2022 the Law Library joined with stakeholders from University of Houston Libraries to begin exploring Alma Digital offerings. After experimenting in the Alma sandbox, the team met with another Houston-area university who had experience with the ExLibris ecosystem and had successfully implemented CDL through Alma Digital. The cross-campus team then began making our case for implementing controlled digital lending through Alma Digital on the University of Houston main campus.
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"Diversity Audits and the Role of Technical Services Staff", presented by Rachel Fischer, Member Services Librarian for Technical Services, Cooperative Computer Services (CCS)
Since 2017, an increasing number of libraries have taken on the task of auditing the diversity of their collections manually or with the assistance of vendors. Yet, auditing a whole library can be time consuming and expensive. To assist libraries with making their diversity audit process more efficient, Cooperative Computer Services (CCS), a public library consortium in Illinois, created a diversity audit tool using Tableau. This tool allows all libraries in the consortium to analyze the diversity of the collections and selection areas as well as provide them with a way of benchmarking against the full consortium or libraries that serve a population area with similar demographics. Additionally, a collection development component allows a selector to identify diverse titles that the other libraries in the consortium own that are not owned by their library yet to increase the diversity of the collection. This can make both the selection process and the cataloging of these titles more efficient. Cataloging and Systems Administration staff played an important role in making this diversity audit tool possible. This presentation will introduce the concept of diversity audits, the options available from vendors, and the role that technical services staff played in creating an automated diversity audit tool for the consortium. This included designing the tool, identifying the subject headings to audit, and automating its functionality.
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"How Are We Developing Future Electronic Resource Librarians?", presented by Cara Calabrese, Acquisitions & Access Librarian, Miami University
Technical Services (TS) has had a long-standing place in the education of new librarians. Cataloging is one of the core classes for many MLIS programs, but TS encompasses a wide range of skills and areas of expertise. Unfortunately, many outside of Technical Services are not as familiar with what we do and Electronic Resources (ER), specifically, was not well represented in course offerings either. When I graduated in 2015, every ER related posting seemed to require 3-5 years of experience, but how was a new grad meant to reach that level when there were no courses in library school focusing on electronic resource management or associated tasks? This presentation will showcase the findings from a qualitative analysis of the top 10 highest enrolled MLIS programs course catalog as compared to the NASIG Core Competencies for ER Librarians to see if we, as a field, are prepping new professionals to succeed. I'll also share how I developed skills in ER along with how I am training others and designing workflows to be more transparent and allow TS to more easily communicate and share our expertise.
Hope to see you there!
Co-Chairs - Alayne Mundt (mundt@american.edu) and Greg Ferguson (greg.ferguson@nyu.edu)
Co-Vice Chairs - Anne LePage (alepage@mta.ca) and Rebecca McClure (mcclurerl@cofc.edu)
Join the interest group
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Gregory Ferguson
Head of Resource Management
New York University Libraries
He/Him/His
gf41@nyu.edu------------------------------