NASIG Autumn 2024

Tribal librarians are knowledge keepers; tribal libraries are primary sources of cultural learning that support tribal communities in a good way. Libraries that belong to the people and tribal librarians are at the forefront of ensuring tribal language cultivation, celebrating the oral storytelling tradition, intergenerational learning, and ensuring literacy for all generations. Tribal archives preserve tribal history, ancestral knowledge, and the words and voices of community members for research and preservation of knowledge. This keynote offers best practices on how to best serve Native populations, provide culturally responsive care for Native American cultural materials, and build relationships with tribal librarians and archivists.

Leveraging the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for Strategic Library and Institutional Decision-Making

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a curated database comprising over 20,800 peer-reviewed open-access journals. Its mission is to enhance the visibility, impact, and profile of high-quality open-access journals on a global scale, irrespective of discipline, geographic location, or language. All services and metadata provided by the DOAJ are available free of charge. In this presentation, I will discuss various strategies by which libraries and institutions can leverage DOAJ data for informed decision-making in their operational activities. These strategies include advising researchers on publication options, integrating content into library search systems, allocating funding, and conducting quality assessments.

1. Core Competencies and Acquisitions Job Ads: How Well Do They Match?

Core competencies provide a baseline understanding of the knowledge, skills, and abilities that practitioners should have, and are especially important in rapidly changing fields. NASIG first approved the Core Competencies for Electronic Resources Librarians in 2013, and those for Print Serials Management in 2015. A key component of Serials and Electronic Resources work is acquisitions; the other competency statements for acquisitions were developed by ALCTS in 2018. Do these competencies still reflect the needs of acquisitions leaders in academic libraries? The researchers have begun collecting recent job advertisements to analyze which competencies are most included and whether there are gaps to address.


2. Workflows, workarounds, and workouts: Successful cataloging from a distance

Stockton University’s Richard E. Bjork Library will be undergoing a massive renovation, displacing everyone in the library for at least 2 years. Library departments have started to move into various classrooms all over the main campus while Library Administration and the Metadata Librarian have been “housed” in a small ranch-style home over 2 miles away from the main campus. This presentation will highlight the early attempts to stay connected and revise workflows, despite being physically apart from the rest of the cataloging staff.

This presentation explores the evolving landscape of licensing in academic libraries, focusing on trends and workflows at The University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC). It begins with an overview of the importance of licensing in managing electronic resources and the role of the Electronic Resources and Acquisitions Librarian. Then it delves into current licensing trends, like open access and vendor consolidation, offering a detailed look at the licensing workflows at UNTHSC. This presentation will also discuss challenges faced and innovative solutions that have been implemented, with recommendations of future direction for effective licensing management in academic libraries.

While it may be a portion of the story, having readily available charts showing 1) database usage, 2) year-to-year cost, 3) percentage changes, and 4) cost per use to share with library stakeholders can make all the difference when decision-making for renewals or communicating trends. If you’re already spending lots of time with Excel, why not gather it together there? This session intends to show how to set up a master data table in Excel, create PivotTables and PivotCharts, and add a unifying slicer to help see with a one-click view the four data points over multiple years.

In February 2023, the library was notified an IT server room would be relocated to the journal stacks floor, resulting in the loss of 28 rows of shelving of the print collection. We will describe how we analyzed and selected the titles that made up the over 33,000 print volumes we withdrew. We will also show how our record and inventory practices changed to not only address this project but also to establish new standards and reproducibility in the future.

EBA programs combine features of subscription packages and firm order acquisitions. For libraries with separate subscription and firm order assessment routines, this may limit possibilities for ongoing evaluation of the success of EBA programs. This session describes a project to develop a holistic and routine assessment of EBA programs. The assessment informs renewal discussions by a deciding committee of teaching librarians and collections personnel and provides data to support communication about decisions to university stakeholders. Presenters will describe the process of selecting data points to analyze and share a template of their EBA assessment spreadsheet.

Is your library looking for alternatives to support open access publishing beyond directly underwriting APC charges for your faculty? Are you considering open investment opportunities for publishing e-books? CCU University Libraries recently identified several memberships and initiatives that changed our open access initiatives to not only support our own faculty's scholarly publishing, but to support broader open access for all scholars.
This presentation will discuss the various methods used at CCU to expand and support open access publishing, including an institutional APC fund, the move to open investments, targeting specific journal and e-book publishers that support our faculty's research, successes and challenges, and next steps.

Staff from the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN) at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will share two case studies about onboarding journals. The first case involves a journal led by students with limited understanding of copyright and Creative Commons licensing. The second case concerns a faculty-led journal that resurfaced after a two-year lapse in communication. Both journals were eager to move forward, but our team’s efforts were often met with long periods of silence and expressions of frustration from editors. This presentation will detail how we resolved these issues and ensured the journals met standards required by our institution and indexers before going live.

Processing unique archival collections at the Montana State University Library was historically a complex and challenging experience, often requiring the collaboration of three departments. In 2021, a project to develop better workflows was undertaken. A Cross Functional Group (CFG) was created to facilitate communication between the departments and track progress to ensure success. The role of the CFG is to review project plans, determine capacity, assign personnel, and monitor progress in a project tracker. The presenter will share her perspective on how this process improvement project went and how the formation of CFG has increased the successful completion of projects.

"Emerging tools to support collection access, analysis, and open access are proliferating. This session identifies the utility, strengths, and weakness of some of the specialized tools evaluated or implemented by Collections librarians at McMaster University, including:
o Collection Assessment: Choreo, JUSP
o Access: LibKey, Lean
o OA Support: SciFree, OA Switchboard
o Bibliometrics: Overton, Dimensions, InCites, Lens, OpenAlex
o AI: scite, Dimensions ResearchGPT
Through brief overviews and discussion, this presentation will address solutions, gaps, and overlaps in services offered. It will also demonstrate how we select tools, and illustrate use cases to optimize collection analysis and access in academic libraries."