This article is more than 5 years old.

I had a great time in Charleston this year, including a dinner with Derrik (he says “Hi” to everyone). I also had to choose between attending Alice’s presentation or my husband’s presentation at the same time slot. I picked Alice, and she did a great job!

Zepheira was promoted as a service that uses BIBFRAME and linked data to push library content out to patrons’ Google searches.

Of all the sessions I attended, I took the most notes at the session “Access to Freely Available Journal Articles: Gold, Green and Rogue Open Access across the Disciplines.” The presenters tested whether they could find free copies of articles Out There on the Internet. They looked at legitimate sources (Green & Gold OA) and also a pirate site (which I won’t name lest I corrupt innocent young people). If you don’t have any scruples, the pirate site had the highest percentage of articles available, and therefore it’s the best discovery platform for morally impaired searchers. For honest people, try Google Scholar and regular Google separately because some OA articles were found in one, but not the other. The panelists and the audience suggested that discovery services (like Summon, our home page search) should do a better job at surfacing legitimate OA sources. These findings also call into question the studies that repeatedly show that when a library cancels a big journal package, ILL stats do not go up appreciably. Is that because the canceled content truly isn’t needed, or are patrons going rogue instead?

Alice’s panel, “Beyond Usage, Measuring the Value of Library Resources” had several takeaways for me. When looking at referral data, referrals from your LMS (Sakai at WFU) may be more important than other referrals because they indicate class use. It was also pointed out that the end goal is not to have usage; the goal is to make students smarter. How can we establish or prove that?

I attended “Using User Research to Improve Site Redesigns” because I’m a member of our User Experience Committee. They suggested reading “What Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks.” Also notable: this library used free printing credits as an incentive to participate in their user studies.

One of the last presentations I attended was the annual “Long Arm of the Law” session. This year, the General Counsel for Elsevier talked about his typical week. He does not spend his days responding to our requests for license changes! One item of interest (because I’ve spotted it in recent license documents) is the UK Bribery Act of 2010. Corporations have to certify that all their suppliers comply with the law. Since multiple publishers work with the same suppliers, they can contract with a firm to perform the due diligence for them. Instead of 50 publishers contacting the same supplier, they get contacted once by the compliance firm. A new business opportunity!