Reference Librarians' Page

Substitutions ~ Laurie needs some for next month, and will email us about them.

Reference Desk / Instruction Issues - None reported.

Extended Hours for Reference During Finals ~ Anne & Scott have signed up. Sharon indicated that she can only work some of the hours already chosen. Anne & Scott indicated that they were flexible and could do some re-arranging. So, Sharon will work with them to re-arrange and put her’s in, and then she’ll put the Sheet in Jeff’s mailbox.

Ref Works ~ Laurie is working on the text for the future email to Steve & Vickie to open up discussion about this.

Planning for Reviewing / Adding Databases

• Sharon indicated that she would like to see if we can develop some kind of plan for how decisions about which databases should be listed for suggestion or review to insure that we are not just being driven by vendor calls, ads etc. She suggested that we perhaps draft something by which Liaisons review information needs in their subject areas to determine if there are gaps in our current coverage and/or better options for providing that same coverage. The idea would be that they would then only suggest to others for review and/or trials databases when they had determined a need and done a preliminary review of what was available. Sharon also indicated that it might also be useful if we could build into this process some kind of schedule or structure so that liaisons could be prompted to take various steps at various times. What I think we want to avoid is sending Laurie every email or phone call we get from a vendor about an online service.
• Jeff pointed out that we also needed to think about Individual Reference work titles - print equivalent kinds of things-, and that the process for these might be different or similar. He noted that for these maybe even more so than for databases that we would need to communicate directly with faculty about the options. He gave two specific examples of the type of thing we might want to do :
• Film Studies - identify if there were online Encyclopedias or other types of reference works in this area that might benefit the large group of students across departments that are working in this area. Then talk to all the faculty teaching film studies courses to see if one or more of these would be useful to have
• Asian Studies - Same thing as above.
• Sharon pointed out that we also do have something currently in place so that each time a reference work is suggested by someone, we investigate a print vs online option. So far, most of the time the resources have only been available in print. Several of the online reference books we have purchased so far were reference books suggested by faculty.
• Sharon brought up Laurie’s comment from the previous meeting that we would need to come up with plans for how to connect users with new online resources in addition to just planning for how to decide on them. We talked about the difficulties in promoting reference sources to students and faculty, and that we will need a strong plan for how to do this. Later in the meeting Laurie came back to this thought and suggested that the Lib Guides software might be a particularly effective way of doing this. If we have subject guides by department that then have links to these online reference sources, then students may be much more likely to get to them because they are writing an econ paper - so look for Economics - click on that and get to the subject guide and then see the reference work prominently displayed and easy to link to.
• It was brought up that there are some types of resources that are very large and expensive and that really don’t fit into our regular budgetary structure, but that sometimes we still need to review these because we may be able to obtain them with some kind of special funding. We talked about the need for a balance between not ignoring things just because they were expensive, but also not wasting too much time on trials and reviewing something that was probably out of the question financially.
• Two examples of this kind of resource were mentioned : Web of Science & ArtStor
• It was suggested that when a resource comes to our attention that is very expensive (say over $5000+?), that is interdisciplinary, and that is a major resource that would not be replacing something existing, but would be a basically adding something totally new that we consider these as a kind of Capital expense rather than a routine one, and that we review such items with Jeff to get a sense of whether they are totally out of the question or worth pursuing for potential extra funding before we do trials or extensive reviews.
• Plan for Choosing databases - We got back to this, and a tentative kind of structure / schedule was suggested as follows (this is a bit fleshed out based on what was said at the meeting):
• Summer - For each of their departments - Liaisons would review the courses that had been taught the previous year, the course schedule for the upcoming year, their experiences with reference questions and instruction, to determine if there are needs in certain subject areas that are either not being met at all, or that just need increased resources, or if there are problems with interfaces that could be improved by changing products. In terms of coverage they would look at both Indexing, and full text needs. They would generate a list of subjects that needed additional coverage and what type, and also if there were any products that should be reviewed because of interface issues.
• August - Liaisons would review the Annual Choice volume on online resources - with the identified needs in mind.
• Fall - Liaisons would consult the list of databases in the Try-It resource in the Fall in the areas that the had determined needed more coverage or review.
• Fall/Winter using the Choice volume, The Try-it resource, and potentially other sources, the liaisons would generate a list of databases/resources to consider adding or changing to. Liaisons can request usage data on current databases from Laurie if wanted to help make a decision.
• Winter - Liaisons would post to the blog their suggestions for resources to add or change and solicit comments.
• Winter - Librarians would review the blog regularly and make comments on these lists.
• Winter(late)/Spring(early) - Liaisons would review comments and decide on which resources to trial, and then would pass those requests on to Laurie, along with any info on dates that would be most useful for a trial.
• Winter(late)/Spring(early) - Trials would happen. Laurie would send info to librarians about trials. Liaisons would be responsible for communicating and working with their departments to get faculty and students to use trials.
• Spring - Liaisons would comment on the trialed databases on the blog. Librarians would review all the posts and comments.
• Spring - Librarians meet, having reviewed all the blog material, and begin working towards decisions in each subject area.
• Specific Resources/databases considering now
• Web of Science -
• Look into more information on this over the summer, and determine exactly what the options are and what subjects are covered, etc.
• Start to gather some feedback from departments in the summer to gauge interest.
• Schedule a Trial for Mid Fall
• Earliest adoption would be July 09
• Performing Arts Index
• Suggested that we do have gaps in current coverage for Theatre, Dance and Film - particularly for late 20th and 21st century - so worth looking at this and/or others to see if those gaps can be filled.
• Suggested that we determine if this index has late 20th and 21st century coverage before starting a trial.
• Anne & Scott will look into this, and then either recommend a trial for this or for something else or let us know if there are no resources to do this at this time.
• Gale Literature Collection
• Sharon pointed out the following drawbacks
• We do not currently subscribe to any of these titles - so there is no print to drop to make up for the cost.
• Several of the titles on the list (mostly the genre specific ones) are dead titles that ceased being added to 3-4 years ago. So, the info in these is not current, and her understanding is that these portions are not being updated.
• All overlaps with MLA. There would be no citations in this that would not also appear in MLA
• Sharon pointed out the following Strengths of the product
• Contains excerpts of the criticism
• Is Selective - so student is pointed to the seminal articles -and fewer, not as overwhelming as MLA, not as likely to pick obscure articles.
• Gives an overview across time - allows you to see how criticism on an author has altered across time.
• Sharon indicated that we might want to get pricing information first, before deciding on a trial. Because of the downsides to this, it does not make sense to invest a large sum of money in it. However, if the price is reasonable, the assets of this product could make it worthwhile.
• Laurie is going to get pricing. Depending on that, we’ll set up a trial.
• Miscelaneous - These are some things that came up tangentially - that did not fit in the above categories.
• Need to review collection development procedures across the board, as well as what we are doing now.
• How do we work towards a proposal / plan for routine growth in the acquisitions budget now that things have stabilized.
• How do we re-coop losses from the cuts that were made 4- 5 years ago.
• Periodicals - do we need more reviews of these
• Monographs - is our current model broken. Do we need to find a way to make this less burdensome on our faculty. Has the elimination of choice cards made this too difficult for faculty, etc.
• Jeff mentioned a couple of other specific reference sources that were moving online :
• Annual Register - we do not currently get this, and have not for many many years. Currently probably only need historical coverage not current.
• Annals of America - we stopped our subscription in 1991. May want to look at this at some point.
• Encyclopedia Britannica via Missouri Link- we get this free through CARLI
• RSS feed for Librarian blog - Scott will look into how to get RSS of comments. Scott later emailed the URL for this. If you need instructions for how to set this up, refer to Scott’s email earlier this month. If you can’t find the email, feel free to ask Scott or Sharon how to set this up - it is really easy : )

Here is another database trial idea:

• Literature Criticism Online (Gale)
  
• Contemporary Literary Criticism^®
• Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism^®
• Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism^®
• Shakespearean Criticism
• Literature Criticism from 1400–1800
• Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism
• Poetry Criticism
• Short Story Criticism
• Drama Criticism
• Children’s Literature Review

It was recently reviewed in Choice. Please post your comments: positive / negative / neutral.

Please weigh in in the comments about these, negative, positive or indifferent. Are you interested in trials?

• Web of Science
• International Index of Performing Arts (Chadwyck)
• Facts on File databases
• Facts on File World News Digest

The agenda of the meeting was to discuss:

A plan for how we will consider the adoption of Refworks or other citation software - we need to figure out how such a decision would be made and how we would move forward.

Start on a plan for how we will choose

1. which (if any) new databases to consider each year
2. which current databases need re-evaluation
3. and then how we will evaluate both of those
4. and how trials will be scheduled.

We need to figure out criteria for looking at databases

1. who will propose them
2. how we will narrow down the field
3. what kind of timetable we want to work with
4. how trials will be set up
5. and then how we will make final decisions.

After comparing Endnote and RefWorks and discussing where RefWorks should live institutionally, we agreed that Laurie would write a couple of paragraphs describing our interest in RefWorks, its advantages over Endnote, etc.; Laurie and Jeff will e-mail this to Steve Hall and Vicky Romano to open up a discussion of the future of this service on campus.

We didn’t get far in discussing how we might reform our identification/trial/selection processes for online collections or titles (though Jeff will prepare a spreadsheet outlining the library’s acquisitions budget for the next meeting as a way of beginning to address the question of how online resources fit into the bigger budget picture), but as far as how we will approach this task this spring we did agree to

• Send suggestions for new titles to the reference blog
• Review the list of titles on the reference blog to possibly migrate from FirstSearch to EbscoHost

And Laurie will assemble the spreadsheets identifying titles to be renewed and potential new titles for everyone to review. Decisions about CARLI brokered titles will be due late in May.

Laurie would also like for us – maybe when the current selection cycle is finished – the question of how we can go about making new digital titles not only accessible but more readily discoverable.

And in other news…

The ArtStor trial is scheduled for February 25 through March 10.

Here’s a list of new titles that have been added to Credo since October.

• Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development, Cambridge University Press, in Social Sciences
• Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia, Greenwood, in Social Sciences
• Reader’s Guide to the Social Sciences, Routledge, in Social Sciences
• Handbook of Environmental Sociology, Greenwood in Social Sciences
• Cambridge World History of Food, Cambridge University Press, in Food
• Collins Spurrell Welsh Dictionary, Collins, in Bilinguals
• Harrap’s Polish Dictionary, Chambers Harrap, in Bilinguals
• Encyclopedia of African History, Routledge, in History
• Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, Routledge, in History
• Reader’s Guide to British History, Routledge, in History
• Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Gale in History
• Encyclopedia of German Literature, Routledge, in Literature
• Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Routledge in Literature
• Dictionary of Italian Literature, Greenwood in Literature
• Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature, Greenwood in Literature
• Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, Routledge, in Language
• Reader’s Guide to the History of Science, Routledge, in Science
• Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained, Chambers Harrap, in Philosophy & Psychology
• Dictionary of Existentialism, Greenwood, in Philosophy & Psychology
• Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy, Greenwood, in Philosophy & Psychology

And here the titles that have been updated to their most recent editions:

• Collins Spanish Dictionary, in Bilinguals
• Collins Italian Dictionary, in Bilinguals
• Collins French Dictionary Plus, in Bilinguals
• Collins Portuguese Dictionary, in Bilinguals
• Collins Irish Dictionary, in Bilinguals
• The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics, in Science
• Merriam-Webster’s Medical Desk Dictionary, Revised Edition, Merriam-Webster, in Medicine
• The Wisden Archive of Cricketers’ Lives, John Wisden & Co. Ltd., in Biography
• The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, in Dictionaries
• The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, in Philosophy & Psychology
• The New Penguin Dictionary of Music, in Music
• The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, in Social Sciences
• The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, in Business
• The New Penguin Business Dictionary, in Business
• The Penguin International Dictionary of Finance, in Business

I would like to know what you all think of the idea of switching some of our FirstSearch databases to the EbscoHost platform. Some advantages to doing this are: 1) A more familiar, and more user-friendly, search interface for students; 2) Increased opportunity for linking to full text in the other Ebsco databases. Ebsco offers these databases:

• Philosopher’s Index
• RILM
• Art Abstracts
• PsycInfo and PsycArticles
• ERIC (we currently have this on Ebsco, at no charge, but we could choose to switch our links on the web site to this one instead of FirstSearch’s ERIC.)

Switching to Ebsco will probably depend on the pricing they can offer. From talking with the sales rep, I think that Ebsco can be competitive with OCLC on all of the above except for Philosopher’s Index. We pay very little for this on OCLC, for some unknown reason, and it may be that the only way Ebsco can come close to OCLC in pricing is by offering it at single-user pricing.

The following is a list of databases or online services for which I’ve gotten sales calls; the salesperson mentioned that they were referred to me by another librarian from our library. I’m not sure what to do with these calls because the librarians they mentioned did not contact me requesting a trial. So I don’t know for sure if these are products we are seriously interested in. So, could you all weigh in on these and tell me (in the comments) if any of these are ones you want me to set up trials for? It would also be helpful if you could say definitely that you are NOT interested in the products.

• Learning Express Library — This appears to be a collection of online test preparation stuff.
• Access World News from Newsbank –a collection of full text newspapers.
• Cambridge Collections Online — lots of reference books and other full text sources.

For the following products I was cold-called by a salesperson. Are you interested in any of these?

• Computing Reviews
• Literary Reference Center from Ebsco — I’m guessing this would be a replacement for LION.
• Education Research Complete from Ebsco and/or Education Research Index also from Ebsco
• SciFinder Scholar from CAS

I believe we talked about this earlier this year when it came out. Gale is having a sale, and I thought it might make sense to re-visit it - just in case. This encyclopedia was a standard that was heavily used in the past (i.e. 15 years ago and prior to that), and was a standard that no academic library would have thought they could survive without.

However, now that we have such a hard time getting students to use encyclopedias regardless of print or online, we’ve pretty much decided that these large, expensive and more general encyclopedias just don’t make sense to spend 1/5 of the entire reference budget on.

But, since Gale was having the sale - I thought I would double check.

So, it is 9 volumes and we can purchase it for $972 and free shipping - List price is $1080 and shipping for a 9 volume work would normally be about $20.

It is available in e book form - and we can look at pricing for that if there is strong interest. But so far we have not had much luck getting students to use online encyclopedias either unless they are sent there by faculty.

Let me know if this is something you think we should consider in print or online. The deadline for the sale is March 14th.

Sharon

Reference Subs

Anne still needed a sub for Feb 28th, previous idea to trade with Jeff did not work out. Scott will do Anne’s shift on the 28th and Anne will do Scott’s evening shift on the 26th.

Anne & Jeff have made some other Thursday switches, and Anne gave a list of these to Scott to change on the Schedule.

Scott needed a trade for Feb 18th 1-4:30pm - Anne will do it for him.

Assignments / Reference Questions

Anne reported that Neil Blackadder’s Dramaturgy class is now working on their assignment. There are 17 students in the class. They need to pick one of 5 plays. One is a Shakespeare Play, One is a Checkhov Play, One is Sexual Neuroses of our Parents by Lukas Bärfuss, and 2 others are very contemporary plays. The students have to write an 8 page project/paper on the play including components such as Bio of the playwright , Production history, literary criticism, etc. Anne has produced a handout that can be found in the handout folder at the ref desk. Anne has checked the reference books and LION and the 3 contemporary plays are not included. So, for those students will need to rely on information from newspapers and magazines. The assignment is due in 2 weeks. Anne will email Sharon the names of the 3 contemporary plays/playwrights and she will check if there is a reference related to contemporary playwrights that she could purchase that would be useful for future classes as well.

Sharon reported on a World Geography class question from a student, but it seemed that it was an isolated question and would not pop up again.

Miscellaneous

Faculty Searches - Sharon asked Jeff about ongoing faculty searches, but there was nothing new to report. It was noted that several departments are only sending notices to the faculty list and that others are not sending them out at all. We decided to have Sharon ask Jackie to add the Sharon, Laurie, Anne & Scott to the faculty email list.

Order Deadline - Laurie asked if we had yet set an order deadline for this Spring, and we have not. Jeff and Sharon will try to have that set by next week and then will send out a notice and reports at that time. Meanwhile, liaisons can answer questions by indicating that the deadline has not yet been set, but that it is likely to be March 14th with extensions available by request till March 25th. Sharon also asked that liaisons when answering questions about the deadline also note that faculty do not need to send in orders just once and that we prefer that whenever possible they send them throughout the year as they come across them. Anything they can do to not send them all at once on the deadline is greatly appreciated. Sharon also noted that liaisons could contact her if they had requests for budget totals from their faculty. Also, she will post instructions on how to view dept allocations in Voyager.

Using Blog for Feedback - Laurie indicated that she had a number of things she needed feedback from us on, but that if we would use the blog effectively - she would not have to take up face time with these. So, everyone promised to check the blog more frequently and to respond.

Getting RSS feeds via email - Scott mentioned that we could maybe get RSS feeds from the library’s blog. Sharon then asked - but what if we don’t have anywhere for the RSS feeds to go - can we get them via email. Scott said yes, and that he would send out instructions on how to do this. He then did that after the meeting. Librarians can then use this to get emails each time the blog is updated. I have set it up, and it works really well for me.

LION Down - Scott noted that he had seen in an RSS feed that all Chadwyck Healy databases would be down Feb 10th from 9am-2pm est. We discussed if we needed to send out a message to faculty - but decided it was not needed since a) it was just LION and b) it was on a Sunday. Laurie asked that Scott forward her the info.

Future meetings

Long meetings - No one seemed to have a strong preference one way or another, so Sharon decided that we would stick to a strict 2nd / 4th Wednesday of the month for the long meetings.

Next long meeting - Topics will be

• Database review planning - the goal will be to try to map out a plan for how we will review new and existing databases each year, what the timing should be, how we will decide on trials, etc.
• Ref Works - we want to map out how/when we’re going to finalize discussions on this and how we will make a decision.

Other topics - relegated to outside the meetings for now

• Interlibrary loan procedures - Sharon will look for notes on these and try to get them to Scott to organize, summarize etc.
• Copyright - Anne and Sharon will move forward on this outside of the meetings. They will ask for feedback periodically via the Blog.

Next meeting : Wednesday Feb 13th - 9am-10am long meeting.

Note : I can’t find my notes on this meeting - so I’m going from memory. If I’ve left something out or gotten something wrong, please add a comment to correct it. Thanks.

Substitutions

Anne needed to trade a Thursday with Jeff. Jeff said he would check and get back to her. He did and they arranged the trade.

No one else needed trades

Classes / Assignments

I don’t think anyone had much coming up.

Laurie reminded us that she needed feedback about some SFX things she had emailed us about - and that if we had no feedback, that we should let her know that as well.

LibGuides - we reminded folks about the trial. And that we’ll talk about this more at our next long meeting.

ArtStor Trial - Laurie let us know that she had received a request from Greg for an ArtStor trial on certain dates. Laurie wanted to know if she should set it up, how extensively we wanted to advertise it, whether we would have any event / demo, whether or not we wanted the ArtStor staff to come for a visit etc. We discussed various things back and forth and I believe this is what was decided :

• Laurie would set up the trial for the dates Greg wanted and let Anne know when these were - later Greg revised the date request and Laurie was able to incorporate the new dates.
• Laurie would ask the ArtStor folks to come to give a demo, and she would ask if they could come sometime about 1/2 way through the trial period - and let Anne know.
• When that was confirmed Anne would set up an event for the demo and for folks to play with the trial while the ArtStor folks and she were there to help them. She would advertise the trial to the Art Dept. and Vickie Romano exclusively, and she would also advertise the demo / try it out event to them as well.
• I believe it was decided to have the event in the Centel Lab if possible - or Stellyes if not.

Possible Agenda items for the next long meeting :

• LibGuides
• Interlibrary Loan procedures
• Plan for Database review / trials for items to purchase / change for next fiscal year.