Gotta say, I loved the virtual conference format, especially for the asynchronous presentations. By spreading out my viewing over three weeks, I could watch almost all the presentations instead of having to choose from concurrent sessions. I watched most of them at 1.4 speed and bailed on any presentation I deemed irrelevant.
Some themes:
Are your collections accessible? No.
Multiple presenters covered accessibility with common themes like praise for the Library Accessibility Alliance. They also commonly acknowledged that single-source nature of library resources limits progress (since we can’t cancel inaccessible content in favor of their non-existent competitors). The most unique presentation in this space went into details about how the Library Accessibility Alliance tests resources and what responses they have received from vendors. (Only the titles of the presentations are searchable in this system, not the abstracts, so sadly I can’t find it again among the sea of similarly titled accessibility presentations.) Another standout was Erin DeWitt-Miller, Lindsay Duke, and Steven Guerrero (U North Texas). They described a remediation project where they used student workers to improve closed captions for their 700 locally hosted streaming videos.
Alma vs. the spreadsheets
At least three different Alma libraries reported using standalone spreadsheets to supplement within-Alma work. (One library acknowledged they needed to learn Alma better. The other two seemed to be mature installations.) I have access to these presentations for a year; I hope to re-watch some after we have more RS staff to dedicate to optimizing Alma.
One re-affirmation of what I’ve seen before: No one uses Alma/Primo to manage their Database A-Z list. Jen Montavon-Green (U. Kentucky) described their migration away from a local database of databases. They deliberated between Primo and Springshare and chose Springshare.
NISO Standards
Nettie Legace from NISO delivered three separate presentations about standards in various stages of development: Controlled Digital Lending, unique e-package identifiers, and audio/video metadata.
Interesting Applications of Data
COUNTER 5 includes item-level statistics. One set of presenters showed some use cases for this data. For instance, Phillip Hewitt (Lehigh) found that 20 of the top 25 most-used ACS articles were written by Lehigh authors.
OpenAthens: Russell Palmer (GALILEO consortium) showed how to authenticate resources for a single school or department. He gave ideas for how to gain statistical insights from OpenAthens logins, for instance, cost-per-use broken down by individual schools within a university. (WFU does not currently use OpenAthens, but I’m interested in similar functionality from our authentication system.)
3 Comments on ‘Carol at ER&L 2022’
Even though we attended the same conference, our blog posts cover such different ground that you’d think we attended different conferences. I got extra learning by reading your post! This conference was packed with good content.
Thanks for the “sunny side” of remote conferencing! I’m glad that accessibility standards are getting so much attention. You’ve provided an interesting recap of the issues.
Carol, many thanks for this concise summary of these key points from ER&L.