LIANZA and open access

Moving to a new job has been keeping me happily preoccupied, but the email I received from LIANZA yesterday was just about calculated to spur me to break radio silence. To quote, interspersed with my commentary in [square brackets]:

From November 22, parts of the LIANZA website will be locked to members only. As the cost of developing and maintaining the website comes out of LIANZA membership fees, LIANZA Council decided to make certain pages exclusive to members. The Council worked with the Website Advisory Group to determine appropriate members-only content.

From November 22 you will need to login to the website to view these locked pages:

• LIANZA Blog
  [Really? Does anyone really think I'll log in to read a blog? I won't even click a link to read a blog; I certainly don't have time to log in to a website just to find out if there happens to be a post today. If the full post isn't in my Google Reader, I don't read it.]
• Library Life newsletter features
  [I occasionally click a link from the email newsletter to read the full story. That's about to become even more occasional.]
• Latest issue of the New Zealand Library and Information Management Journal (NZLIMJ)
  [This implies that previous issues will remain accessible, which is something at least. But still a tremendous disappointment. I thought I'd been seeing a move towards opening NZLIMJ up, and had hoped to see it soon appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals. In the current climate, I think a library association should be promoting open access, not locking information down.]
• Conference papers
  [!!!
  ...
  Just... What a tremendous disservice this does to the authors! Conference papers are hard enough to search as it is; locking these behind a login only guarantees that no LIANZA non-members (and not many LIANZA members) will ever read or cite these. Don't we want rather to raise the profile of New Zealand LIS research?]
• Copyright resources
  [...Okay, if you really must have an easter egg for LIANZA members I guess this qualifies as reasonable.]
• Member profiles
  [Okay, sure, whatever.]
• Advocacy Portal (already restricted to members)
  [Because it's... vitally important that only LIANZA members advocate for libraries...? To be honest I can see the argument for this as a valuable resource. I just think it'd be even more valuable if we all - members and non-members alike - cooperated on advocating for both our individual libraries and libraries as a class.]
• Code of Practice
  [This comprises the "policy and procedures that are to be followed, day to day, in the running of the Association." So mostly only of use to members; otoh it seems a bit odd to keep it secret.]

Does LIANZA actually have evidence that there are significant numbers of people choosing not to be members because the content's there for free anyway? Enough people to be worth causing this hassle to existing members?

Because as a member, this does increase the hassle for me to access the content, and therefore reduces the amount of content I'll be bothered to look up. When I was a member of the Website Advisory Group, a big concern was getting conversations going on the website; hiding those conversations away just seems likely to exacerbate that problem. This move also reduces the visibility of LIS scholarship published by LIANZA, so makes it less likely I'd consider submitting to NZLIMJ (however see footnote). And philosophically, I'm not overly happy about paying a subscription to a library association that is working against open access to information.

Lucky for LIANZA's coffers, membership comes with other benefits that still make it worth the annual cheque. Because the moment its website content is locked behind a login screen, its value to me plummets.

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Footnote for authors: If your conference paper is about to be locked behind the login screen but you actually would like other librarians nationally and internationally to have a chance at finding your research, you can deposit a copy at E-LIS - a subject repository for library and information science. (And/or in your institution's repository if it has one.)

Likewise for NZLIMJ articles - the author guidelines state a 6 month embargo for publication elsewhere, but I emailed editor Brenda Chawner to clarify this, and she says she interprets it to apply to formal publications, not repositories, and it would be fine with her if authors put copies of their articles into an institutional or subject repository.

Links of interest - 28th Sept

Linkspam! I won't even attempt to arrange these into some kind of thematic grouping this time, just throw them all at you:

Running the Library Race "draws a parallel between fatigued runners and overworked librarians, proposing that libraries need to pace work more effectively to avoid burnout. Through an exploration of cognitive science, organizational psychology, and practical examples, guest author Erica Jesonis offers considerations for improving productivity and reducing stress within our fast-paced library culture".

LIANZA 2012 was held this week and the conference proceedings are now online.

Aaron Tay rounds up 6 presentations/posts on librarianship that impressed me.

Elyssa Kroski has put together a list of 100+ law librarians on Twitter.

Jessica Olin writes about how she handles reference on chat - including a question on "Who would win in a fight? A bear or a tiger?" - in Chat reference is a weird beastie.

Meredith Farkas writes on Living our values, pulling together thoughts on a variety of events in the general "ownership vs [increasingly-expensive-]access" debate.

Speaking of which, I've particularly been following the saga since Jenica Rogers from SUNY Potsdam posted about her library's decision to cancel subscriptions to ACS journals - not an easy decision for either the library or the faculty, but she's been communicating transparently with the faculty about all the issues for some years so has been getting their full support both on the decision and on the backlash from ACS against the attention and support her post has been getting from librarians and chemists alike - ChemBark (with all the comments) has a good summary of a large part of it from a chemist's point of view, as does Walt Crawford from a librarian-ly point of view; and Catherine Pellegrino focuses on how other libraries and chemistry departments should step forward and stand with SUNY Potsdam on this.

My tips for vendors training librarians

In theory, I love the idea that vendors will send a rep halfway around the world to visit libraries and give us a training session on their products. In practice, I kind of dread these sessions.... Because - and I don't know how to say this without sounding like I'm Grouchy McHyperbole so I'm just going to say it anyway - the number of such sessions I've found both useful and enjoyable I can count on one finger. Maybe two.

These are products I'm interested in and need to know about for my work, so I'm already hooked and I'm not asking for whizzbang presentation skills. I just don't want my time wasted. I'm pretty sure vendors don't want to waste their time either, so I'm not sure what sort of global communication snafu between vendors and libraries is preventing mutually useful meetings. But in the interests of maybe untangling it a bit, here are my personal tips for folk who visit libraries on behalf of vendors, on ways you can immeasurably improve at least my own experience.

(And note that these aren't just things that I saw once. I've got plenty of those stories, too - doesn't everyone, in any context? - but these are things that I wish for regularly.)

Teach what your audience wants to learn.
I want to know about your product - what it is, what it costs, what its features are, what its limitations are (don't try to hide or justify them, just give it to me straight), and how I and my users can use it to best advantage.

I don't care about the history of your company or where its headquarters are, unless support vs timezones is an issue. If you merged with another company very recently that might be useful information if it affects your product, but anything more than a few years old, save it for a handout.

Teach at the right level.
If this is a brand new-to-me product, then go ahead and start from basics. Just be aware that I'm an experienced information professional; I can figure out how to do a basic keyword search in pretty much any product.

If it's a product we've had for several years, you can safely assume I've known the basics for several years and am coming along to hear about advanced features or features you've released in the last year.

Know what you teach.
If you're going to demonstrate a function to me, make sure you've practised it yourself. A lot. If you spend several minutes trying to remember how something works it makes me impatient, makes you look unprepared, and makes your product look badly non-userfriendly.

Let us know what you're going to teach.
You can't please everyone all the time. Lots of people will want different things than I do. So ask us!

And/or when you've worked out what you're covering, email us in advance and say "I'm going to demo X, Y, and Z" - then people who already know that stuff, or who don't care about that stuff, can stay away and save their time.

Yes, this means you don't get face-time with them. On the plus side, it means you don't get face-time during which they get increasingly irritated at you. On the whole, that's a win-win. :-)

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Any other library folk got tips for vendor folk?

And if any vendor folk are reading this, I'd love to hear from your point of view - are there factors I don't know about that mean you don't have the resources needed to be as prepared as you'd like? Or are there ways library folk could help the situation?

Links of interest: pricing, impact factors, marketing, and staplers

Acquisitions and budgets
2012 Study of Subscription Prices for Scholarly Society Journals (pdf) is out from Allen Press. "[T]he average increase in 2012 dropped, more than a full percentage point below the average, to less than 6%." (The Consumer Price Index, according to the same figure, was less than 4%.) Much more detail, analysis and discussion is at the source (pdf).

The Librarian in Black writes I'm breaking up with eBooks (and you can too) on the poor deal that current models of ebook provision are for libraries and, by extension, our customers.

Marketing
Alison Wallbutton in #brandlibraries ponders what branding is, how libraries are branded, and whether we want to reposition that branding. She argues that libraries are successfully branded - as "books"; it's in the very word. But of course (segue to my own thoughts) we as librarians get twitchy about wanting to make sure that users know we're not just books, so we reject that outright - often without having put any thought into what we're going to replace that branding with. Which leaves us in a position where we can't effectively promote ourselves because we don't have any image to put out there.

Impact factors
Nixon, J.M. (2012). Core Journals in Library and Information Science: Developing a Methodology for Ranking LIS Journals. C&RL. Advance online publication.
--Outlines a methodology and resulting list of three tiers into which they've divided LIS journals according to "influence". Uses a mix of expert opinions, impact factors, circulation rate, and acceptance rate and, unsurprisingly, comes up with a similar list as those derived from expert opinions or from impact factors.

Probably a good measure of influence; it doesn't claim that quality follows. Which is good because Sick of Impact Factors which concludes that "if you use impact factors you are statistically illiterate" and has been so widely retweeted and commented on that the author has posted a followup summarising the long comment thread in sections: useful links; concerns about metrics; alternative metrics; and actions to take.

Just for fun
Library Shenanigans reports on The Stapler Obituaries - a mini-exhibition of dead staplers at an academic library.

Links of interest: ebooks, leadership, and change

eBooks
In the Library With the Lead Pipe publishes a provocative and persuasive essay on the eBook Cargo Cult, beginning

"Libraries created the present crisis in scholarly publishing, and we are creating a similar crisis now with our approach to ebooks."

A brief history of how libraries have handled (or given outsiders power over us by paying them to handle) the indexing of serials and how we're doing the same with ebooks is followed by an overview of alternative models for ebook management - several great ones I'm familiar with including Unglue.It and Library License, and several more that are new to me.

Ellyssa Kroski has gathered her three posts on How To Compare e-Book Platforms (points to consider include technical requirements; content; functionality; and sales/pricing model) along with her presentation providing a background to these criteria.

Leadership
Two very insightful posts: the Librarian in Black posts 7 Lessons Learned While Being The Man; the Free Range Librarian responds with her own perspective in I am The Man — and you can, too!

Change
Jenica (Attempting Elegance) posts an 8-part blog version of her presentation on Killing Fear:

• part 1
• part 2
• part 3
• part 4
• part 5
• part 6
• part 7
• part 8

19: My first library job #blogjune

(It's called "Blog for many of the days of June, right?)

My first paying library job was, I think, when I was 19. A couple of years before that I had a week's work experience in a library.

But my first library job I don't even remember. I assume I had one because I was going through some old stuff from high school a while back and came across a "Library" pin. I don't think they handed those out just for borrowing lots of books. I guess I shelved? I can almost remember shelving -- or possibly browsing, but I think it might have been shelving. I may or may not have checked out books.

I do remember, with a friend, working out that if you held two books together in a certain way you could cancel out the security strips and get them both through the security gates. (Should I be saying this online? Ehhh, it was a long time ago, surely they've fixed that problem by now.... Also I don't think we got it to work every time.)

I also remember my first introduction to an indexing database. I used it to look for articles about Star Trek: The Next Generation and interloan a particularly interesting magazine article. (Previously my geeky scrapbook had contained only the snippets I could find from the Press and the Listener -- I had whole seasons' worth of the little plot summaries from the TV schedules and was always excited when they published a photo of one of the characters to go with it.)

8: accurate reference service #blogjune

[I have no idea why this didn't post yesterday as it was meant to.]

The "55 percent rule" - that unobtrusive studies tend to show a 55% success rate of librarians answering reference queries fully and accurately - seems to have been written about most in the mid/late-1980s so my quick-and-dirty Google Scholar search isn't bringing up much handy full-text to link to. (Some, but closed access and gigantic files that freeze my computer for a minute so needn't be inflicted on anyone else. Who decided to scan black-and-white Library Journal articles in as colour???) Anyway, my quick-and-dirty impression of the literature thus surveyed is that the number was so shocking that it prompted vast flurries of a) studies to try and replicate/refute the results, and b) studies to say that users don't care about full and accurate answers anyway.

I have a different response, inspired by today's date, which is: If the reference service we're providing is so incomplete and inaccurate, why not save our time/salaries and just hand users a Magic 8-Ball instead?

[NB: This post is not guaranteed to be more than 55% indicative of the actual definition of the rule nor the state of the literature, but it is at least 55% flippant. What I actually think is that we should be developing clever chatbots to staff our virtual reference service. Or at least 55% of it.]