Migrating to a New Integrated Library System (ILS): Update #1

Image credit: http://infomotions.com/musings/web-scale/ngc.gif

The Armacost Library faculty and staff are deep in preparations for migrating to a new integrated library system (ILS), a complex system that facilitates many library functions from acquiring materials (ordering, receiving) to making them discoverable (cataloging, indexing) to tracking use of resources (borrowing). Preparations began in January and will continue through July, when we go "live" on the new system.

This is the first in a series of updates intended to inform students, faculty, staff and administrators on our process, progress, and about changes that will affect our community members.

Image credit: Sanjeet Mann

Library faculty and staff are meeting weekly as members of multiple implementation teams: Fulfillment & User Services (FUSE), Acquisitions & Resource Management (ARM), and Primo (the public-facing discovery layer). Additionally, a core team meets weekly via conference call with the ILS vendor's project management team. Sanjeet Mann, our project manager for the migration, and Emily Croft are at the center of all of this work, mapping our current system functions and data to the new ILS.

Image credit: Emily Croft

All of this planning and preparation includes:

• Technical: translating, mapping, and managing system functions and data 
• Conceptual: translating and understanding system functions and work processes
• Philosophical: reconsidering policies, descriptions of data, and the way we interact with the systems as researchers and library users
• Training: translating and learning a new language for our daily work

Snapshot of FUSE implementation team homework. Credit: Paige Mann

Needless to say, we are feeling a bit stretched thin and even fatigued with multiple weekly meetings and accompanying study, homework, and decision-making. Not unlike our students. It feels like midterms every week. 

Open Access Week

Open Access Week

October 19-25, 2015

“’Open Access’ to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Open Access (OA) has the potential to... ...increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year.”

Open Access resources available to all, and linked from the Armacost Library website:

arXiv.org

“Open access to 1,084,095 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.”

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)

“BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.”

Approximately 70% of the 75,000,000+ documents indexed in BASE are open access, full-text.

Digital Commons Network

“The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.”

UR’s InSPIRe is a part of the Digital Commons Network.

Digital Public Library of America

“The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.”

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

“DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.”

Celebrate the Freedom to Read

This is Banned Books Week, Sept 22-28^th. It is an annual event that gathers the entire reading community in a celebration and a protest. We celebrate our freedom to read, to have open access to information, to express ideas and expand our knowledge. But we also protest against those who want to restrict our access to information and removed books from libraries.

There are some surprises when looking at a list of banned and challenged books. a list of events for this week is at http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/  More information on banned and challenged books at http://www.ala.org/bbooks/

Besides the displays and readings, this year for the first time Banned Books Week will include Twitter parties to be held Monday Sept. 23 from noon pm – 2pm, and Wednesday
Sept 25^th from 2pm-4pm.  Supporters are urged to tweet using the hashtag #bannedbooksweek. And additional tags: #bannedbookparty, #heroes, @OIF, @KidsRight2Read, @freadom, @FTRF

Visit the display in the Armacost Library, join in the Twitter party and CELEBRATE!

ALERT: 10/26/12 Hoover's Online is currently down

Currently, Armacost Library is unable to connect to Hoover's Online. The issue involves Hoover's servers. Armacost Library staff members have received word from Hoover's Online that we will know more on Monday, October 29, 2012. We expect this to mean that the outage will last over the weekend.

We apologize for the inconvenience this outage may cause.

Sincerely,

Armacost Library faculty and staff members

Fanning the Embers of Knowledge

From September 1 to October 31, 2012, Armacost Library is holding an Intellectual Freedom Blogathon featuring posts on topics concerning censorship, the freedom to read, view, and express, and the connection these various freedoms have to individual life experiences and the state of society. The following essay is part of the Armacost Library Intellectual Freedom (ALIF) Blogathon. 

All libraries do the first aspect of facilitation, providing access.... Where too many libraries fall short is in how they: see knowledge as a thing, overemphasize access, and support consuming knowledge instead of creating it. If our libraries are going to support our communities in the future, they must do a better job across the spectrum. 

~ R. David Lankes, 2012, Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today's Complex World, p. 43

Lately I've been asking myself why I chose to be an academic librarian. This navel-gazing is not just because my faculty review dossier, including a reflective evaluation piece, is due in a few weeks. I've been asking myself this question mostly because I have been feeling a little...lost in the dark. I entered library school thinking that what I was studying to become, the profession I was seeking to be a part of, made a difference in the world. I still hold this opinion. Well, I cling to it. The daily tasks of emailing, organizing, meeting, reviewing, and scheduling have made me lose sight of what drew me to academic librarianship in the first place.

Finding my professional path

While thinking about my professional purpose as an academic librarian, I settled on Armacost Library's own organizational vision statement. Simply, it affirms intellectual freedom as our reason for being, our collective purpose, our heartfire. Intellectual freedom, in brief, encompasses two parts -- the freedom to access others' ideas and the freedom to express one's own. Both are important and rely greatly on the other. The freedom to access and to express, germane elements of intellectual freedom, are necessary conditions in a world where knowledge is dynamic, powerful, and constructed in the hearts and minds of people.

Thinking about the active nature of knowledge presents big challenges. Questions abound. If reading about some things only provides initial steps toward learning, how do we go further, especially with our shelves and shelves of printed books? Our continuous searching for and licensing of more, increasingly expensive, databases and digital content? How can we nurture active learning spaces, feed the carefully tended intellectual flames throughout the University community? These are some questions we are currently grappling with at Armacost Library in order to better facilitate knowledge creation within our communities.

Armacost Library Intellectual Freedom (ALIF) Blogathon is a small spark of light. It does not offer comprehensive answers or assume final solutions. But it does open up a part of our library online space for wider conversation.

How can Armacost Library inflame the embers of your knowledge creation?

Melissa Cardenas-Dow
Outreach/Behavioral Sciences Librarian
Armacost Library, University of Redlands
melissa_cardenasdow (a) redlands (dot) edu
909.748.8089