ALCTS CITSIG ALA Annual 2017 Program
Sunday, June 25, 2017
1-2:30PM at McCormick Place, W190b
Providing Textbooks for your students (Beth Bernhardt, UNC Greensboro)
In the past two years UNC Greensboro University Libraries technical services staff have be working with the bookstore to identify textbooks that the library can purchase as ebooks. Many libraries across the country are doing this also, so this roundtable discussion would look at what works and best practices.
Archivists and metadata librarians, library reorganization, and new understandings for archival description and discovery (Ivey Glendon, University of Virginia Library)
In 2015, the University of Virginia Library conducted an organizational restructuring resulting in greater integration among special collections and non-special collections technical services staff, thus matching together groups with related but unique motivations: careful stewardship for collections (important to the archivist) and broader access to the widest array of materials (energizing to the metadata librarians). This roundtable discussion will be an open discussion on changing organizational structures, exploring overlapping skillsets among technical services staff, and identifying opportunities for future collaboration.
Cataloging & metadata outreach (Sarah Hovde, Folger Shakespeare Library)
Current trends (increasing prevalence of non-MARC metadata, transitions to linked data, shrinking staff and budgets) represent new challenges for cataloging and metadata professionals, but can also offer interesting opportunities for collaboration and relationship building across a library community. Outreach efforts (for instance, lunchtime presentations, listening sessions, reading discussion groups, social media presence, flyers, etc.) by cataloging and metadata professionals can produce a number of outcomes: keep both users and fellow staff members informed and engaged with technical services departments, ensure that the time and effort of technical services staff are meeting users' needs, encourage support for metadata activities such as ILS upgrades, create opportunities for cross-departmental collaborations, and above all underscore the importance and relevance of metadata and cataloging work within an institution.
The Changing Nature of Paraprofessional Labor in Technical Services (Dejah Rubel, Ferris State University)
Technical services is changing very rapidly and tasks that were once the sole purview of professionals, such as complex copy cataloging or batch metadata editing, are now being assigned to para-professionals. There are many ways this can both positively and negatively impact the information profession, so I would like to discuss how we can positively embrace these changes while still awarding an appropriate level of recognition and support to these key organizational positions.
Application of project management in Technical Services (Nastia Guimaraes, University of Notre Dame)
ALA’s LLAMA lists project management as one of its 14 Foundational Leadership and Management Competencies (http://www.ala.org/llama/leadership-and-management-competencies), yet very few librarians have official project management (PM) training or have time to learn techniques used in the PM discipline. In addition, with the changing nature of the work TS departments are asked to perform and with the increasing level of cross-departmental collaboration on new library-wide initiatives, how ready are TS to manage additional projects more efficiently? This discussion topic will help participants examine possible ways of implementing PM in TS areas in a more meaningful way and offer some solutions to introducing added efficiency when running projects.
Building a better toolbox: when to create our own solutions and when to use vendor tools? (Morag Stewart, University of Washington)
The shift to cloud computing and library service platforms (LSPs), while a brave step for library systems technology, has not necessarily resolved issues in technical services processing. According to Marshall Breeding in his 2017 library systems report, “Real progress depends on building out these platforms to support the new areas of service emerging within each type of library." However, the services he references may not include ordering, receiving, and cataloging of physical materials. What software and other tools, library-born and otherwise, do staff turn to in order to process, track, and catalog a diverse array of formats and materials when the vendor system just won’t do?
Crowdsourcing for technical services projects (Regina Romano Reynolds, U.S. ISSN Center, Library of Congress)
Technical services staffs are challenged by the need to take on new projects to bring existing collections under control and new types and sources of resources to acquire and catalog, all with often inadequate staffing. Crowdsourcing can help cover these gaps. The Library of Congress Flickr project and a developing Law Library of Congress project will be used as examples, along with some library menu transcription projects available for online participation.
Consortial Technical Services (Christine Dulaney, American University Library)
In order to increase efficiency and reduce redundancy, many libraries which are members of consortia are encouraging their technical services departments to work more collaboratively. This type of collaboration can take many forms including sharing expertise, sharing workloads, sharing personnel, or centralizing technical services within a consortia. This roundtable will discuss consortial projects which technical services departments have completed as well as the challenges which were overcome. Are consortial technical services projects threatening or do they create opportunities?
Data-oriented technical services in academic libraries (Haiqing Lin, C.V. Starr East Asian Library University of California Berkeley; Karen Yu, University of Chicago Library)
To response to the growing field of data-driven scholarship, academic libraries have begun to develop data collection and provide data-related services to researchers. However, how to organize data collection in order to make those research data accessible becomes paramount importance and presents a challenge to academic library community, in particular, technical services community. The emerging data collection and data-related service model are so different with traditional library resources and services, it is impossible to simply apply existing resources description methods to organize data collection. A new data description and access framework and service model, data-oriented technical service, need to be developed to meet the requirements of data-related services. This discussion will be conceived as a brainstorming session where participants will be able to present their idea about this new service model at academic libraries. The discussion will be focused on following issues,
• How to describe data, including data set and single piece of data
• How to represent data combining with metadata
• How to publish data, including data sets and single piece of data
• How to bring our existing experiences to new data-oriented services model
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