InsideOCULA

Dear All,

The new InsideOCULA blog is online! This will allow more dynamic publishing of news and events in Ontario college and university libraries, and will serve as a forum for sharing innovative ideas and for building communities of interest and practice. We already have an article that discusses current trends and issues in collection development. Please check it out!

If you have any questions or comments please e-mail me at
gashough@uoguelph.ca or post on the blog.

Have a Great Holiday Season and a Happy New Year!

Gohar Ashoughian
InsideOCULA Editor   

Call for Submissions

OCUFA is proud to celebrate the outstanding achievement of academic librarians at Ontario universities, and recognizes your contribution to academe through its annual awards.

Nominations are invited from any group or individual within the university community. Since 1973, award recipients have been selected annually by an independent OCUFA committee that consists of faculty members, librarians and student representatives. Guidelines to assist in organizing a nomination are available on the OCUFA website, and should be consulted by prospective nominators. For more information on this year’s awards, please visit: www.ocufa.on.ca/awards/.

Nominations for 2006 awards must be received in the OCUFA office no later than February 23, 2007.

The original and six copies of the submission should be sent to:

OCUFA Teaching and Academic Librarianship Awards
83 Yonge Street, Suite 300
Toronto, ON M5C 1S8

Please direct inquiries to: 416-306-6033
www.ocufa.on.ca/awards/

Focus, Flow & Forget About It: OCULA Mini Conference 2006
By Laurie Morrison

The slate of speakers at this year’s OCULA Mini Conference on November 9th, 2006 asked us to question, to reflect and push our assumptions and abilities. Throughout the day we traveled along a road, stopping to consider the quality of our engagement with professional associations, with our work and scholarly endeavors and, not to be left out, with the social web of blogs, RSS etc. There was a message here for everyone regardless of where each of us is on our professional journey.

Our keynote speaker, award-winning columnist Judith Timson, coined the phrase ‘focus, flow and forget about it’. Judith turned the whole work/life balance question on its head. This balance she explained is the central myth of the modern work life. Citing a multitude of examples she demonstrated how work has become ‘our default setting’. That we work hard is evidenced by 3 AM emails and our 60 hour work weeks. Rather than seeking balance, she asked us to consider using our ability to focus to find a comfortable pace. Flow, which she defined as an attitude toward work involving concentration and clarity, is our ally. When we are in the flow we are more likely to be happy and find enjoyment in our work. Finally, each day is filled with compromises, to which Judith advised that once the decision is made, a limit is set, and boundary defined, forget about it.

The afternoon’s panel speakers exemplified Judith’s ‘focus, flow, and forget about it!’ Mary Anne Reinhard from Algonquin College discussed her focused career trajectory through the library world as a technician. Jennifer Peters-Lise’s (Seneca College) move from technician to librarian no doubt took much focus as she discussed with us. RSS, among the many social software options discussed by Amanda Etches-Johnson (McMaster University), is the best 2.0 tool for ‘forget about it’. No longer do we need to remember to check all our news and information sources, RSS is a one stop shopper location for everything that informs both our work and life interests.

There is so very much that demands our attention and asks to be made a focused priority but in spite of that Shelagh Paterson (CNIB Library) made a good case for putting association participation up front and centre. The benefits range from the personal to the professional and lead to exciting cross pollination of ideas and innovation between institutions — one must wonder why there aren’t more involved. Oh, but I forgot: time, focus of energy and compromise! Speaking of what I believe to be the highest degree of focus and requiring a critical sense of flow is research. For those of us who are novices, (like myself) Daniel Phelan’s (Ryerson University) talk about presentations, publishing and research was inspiring. Daniel took what feels like a mountain and pointed out a scalable path through the field of scholarly works. He provided simple and achievable tasks to start this journey NOW such as writing for a newsletter (yes, I took his advice), or a book review. Talk to experts to find a gap in our knowledge then pursue these areas for research.

It was a whirlwind day of reflection and inspiration such that by the day’s end I for one was eager to get back onto the playing field with new ideas to pursue. Thanks OCULA for making another mini conference a great success.

By Pamela Jacobs

One of the things I love about my job is that I’m never bored – overwhelmed, yes; confused, occasionally – but bored, never. In this article I will briefly touch on what I see as the key issues in collection development for today’s Ontario university libraries.

 
Through the combined purchasing power generated by programs such as the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), its award-winning predecessor the Canadian National Site Licensing Program (CNSLP), and the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) it has become possible for small to mid-size university libraries to provide access to a depth of scholarly digital information previously unthinkable.  The ongoing development of Scholars Portal (another award winning initiative) takes this concept a step further by locally loading and thus securing permanent access to a significant core of journal literature. The degree of cooperation shown by university libraries nationwide and more particularly within Ontario is a model to all library sectors and universities. Libraries are no strangers to the concept of partnership (think interlibrary loan) and it is more than fitting that we take a leading role in demonstrating how these partnerships can be used to benefit research and learning nationwide. Being part of OCUL, it is easy to become complacent about the relative abundance of resources and level of cooperation we enjoy here in Ontario. I think it is important to remember just how truly unique we are – particularly as we stand perched on the cusp of the brave new world of Knowledge Ontario[1] – a provincial partnership that spans library sectors. And at this point I’ll step off my soap box.

 
In the current climate of consortial purchasing, budgeting becomes at once both simplified and complex (say again?). Packages of content based on publisher or aggregator no longer allow for the title-by-title selection that dominated the print world. A single one line invoice from the consortial office replaces multi-line invoices from our vendors. An electronic package including titles in more than one subject makes budgeting by discipline an increasingly complex, some may say impossible, task. As our methods of access and acquisition become more innovative, our budgets need to become more flexible in order to capitalize on the opportunities that such innovations present.

 
No discussion of library collections can be complete without mentioning the issue of space. No matter where you are in the province, what the size of your library collection is, or whether or not you have storage facilities (either on- or off-site), you can count on one universal lament from collections librarians: there is never enough space (okay there’s never enough money either, consortial purchasing notwithstanding, but I digress). This is despite the tremendous shift from print to electronic format, at least for journal and database content.  The printed word still arrives in weekly shipments on our doorsteps as the universe of scholarly information continues to grow at an exponential rate.

 
The shifting demographic of library staff also bears consequences for university library collections. According to the 8R’s study, The Future of Human Resources in Canadian Libraries (which should be required reading for all Canadian librarians), two in five librarians and three in ten library support staff are predicted to retire by 2014[2].  As staff at all library levels retire, we are rethinking our priorities and workflows. Of particular concern to collection development is the loss of subject expertise carefully garnered through years of practical experience. Our retiring subject experts have witnessed nothing less than a revolution in collection development over the past 30 years: the dire journal cancellations of the 80’s and 90’s, the sudden and chaotic birth and near-immediate popularity of online journals, the complexity of aggregator databases with their adds, drops and embargoes, and the confusing pricing and access schemes of eBooks.  But I think it is fair to say that the heart of collection development has not changed - understanding the information needs of a subject discipline at an institutional level – knowing the courses that are taught, the research needs of the faculty, the breadth and depth of the field as related to other disciplines and so forth. Our experienced subject specialists have this information and we would be foolish not to mine this institutional memory and expertise. We can do this by keeping our collection development policies current (treating them as living documents), by sharing information on the use of specialized resources and developing cross-training programs so that such expertise can be shared.

 
Oh, and did I mention the internet? Have you noticed how much information is out there? I mean useful legitimate information. What are we doing about that? It is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking of collection development solely in terms of licensing and purchasing. What about all the freely available resources like Project Gutenberg, Google Books, the Open Access Initiative and the seemingly infinite world of online government documents? How are we providing access to these resources? What role does the library catalogue play in providing access to this rapidly expanding web of content? The fact that that the venerable Library of Congress has commissioned a report on The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools[3] speaks volumes to the challenges we face in this regard. If a collection is only as good as its access points, then it’s pretty clear we all have some work to do.

 
The digital world presents us with wonderful new possibilities for collections such as the addition of digital images and streaming audio and video content. It also allows for the possibility of digitizing our own unique collections to open them up to the scholarly universe – assuming of course that we can make our way through the fog that is digital copyright legislation. What is clear is that developing a university library collection has grown increasingly complex and we aren’t likely to be bored anytime soon.

 
Pamela Jacobs is Associate University Librarian, Collection Resources at Brock University

In October York University launched the 50th Anniversary fundraising campaign.  As part of this campaign York University Libraries has created a digital collection of photographs that chronicle the university’s history.  The 208 photographs that range from the early 1960’s to the late 1990’s were originally from the Clara Thomas Archives.  The photographs were digitized and put into the institutional repository YorkSpace.

The York University’s 50th Anniversary Photograph Collection may be viewed at

https://www.library.yorku.ca/dspace/handle/123456789/581.
Special thanks to Andrea Kosavic, Digital Services Librarian for all her hard work in creating this digital collection.

On September 5th, 2006, the Academic Data Centre (located in the Library’s West Building) opened for regular hours for students, faculty and staff.  The Data Centre is open Monday through Friday with dedicated staff able to offer help various ways including locating and analyzing data.

Knowledge Ontario (KO) held a summit in Windsor on September 18-19 for Digital Library projects to work together on a common Lucene platform, and to foster some planning for a Next Generation Catalogue (NGC) event to be held with the upcoming OLA Super Conference. Representatives from Elsevier, Librarian’s Index to the Internet (LII), Georgia Tech, Library and Archives Canada, Michigan State University, Scholar’s Portal, the University of Virginia, York University, the Alouette Canada National Digital project, the University of Alberta, and the University of New Brunswick were hosted by the Knowledge Ontario Technical Committee (University of Windsor, Oakville Public Library, Halton Hills Public Library, Windsor-Essex CDSB, Ontario Legislative Library, Ontario Library Association). Such well known names as Karen Schneider (Director, LII) and Erik Hatcher (author of Lucene in Action) participated in the two day event.

Jennifer Robinson, Western Libraries Student Services Liaison, recently teamed up with staff in Western’s Students with Disabilities to address unique needs of this user group in securing the library resources they need to succeed at Western.  In September a new Web site was launched on the Western Libraries homepage outlining library services for patrons with disabilities:  http://www.lib.uwo.ca/guides/ssdlib.html.  The site includes useful information such as the location of automated entrances to library buildings, how to secure alternative text formats and how to get assistance completing library research.  In addition to this new page, the library has begun producing audio versions of the library guides for those students who learn more effectively via spoken word.  New guides will be added to the library Web site as they are produced.  A purple audio icon on library Web pages indicates whether an audio version is available.

At the end of March 2006, Western Libraries’ staff had the opportunity to attend a special presentation on “ARL (Association of Research Libraries) and the Strategic Challenges Facing Research Libraries” by Duane Webster, Executive Director of ARL.  It was a stimulating, forward-thinking presentation on the innovation driving change in libraries and the impact that will have on libraries.  Duane Webster stressed that while the challenge is great, so is the optimism that North American research libraries will meet the challenge – to ask the difficult questions about the future and to engage in redesigning services and creating new roles that keep faculty and students at the centre of what we do.

Early in March, Steve Hiller, Director of Assessment and Planning at the University of Washington Libraries, and Jim Self, Director of Management Information Services at the University of Virginia Library, visited Western for a two-day site visit to talk about library assessment.  The visit came as a result of Western’s participation in the Association of Research Libraries’ program “Making Library Assessment Work:  Practical Approaches for Developing and Sustaining Effective Assessment”.  Two Canadian libraries were selected to participate in Phase II of the program:  Western and the University of Alberta.

The Ryerson Library has opened a Research Advisory Office in the new Ryerson Business Building located at Bay and Dundas.  Staff in this office will provide one-to-one and small group instruction in the effective use of Library resources, consultations with Business faculty, teaching assistants and graduate students, and liaison with Business faculty regarding delivery of library instruction to students.
Renovations to the 3rd floor of the Library took place over the summer to construct office space for two personnel from the Access Centre, which provides services and supports to students with disabilities.  This new space has been named Accessible Learning Support Services.  Their presence in the Library will help encourage greater collaboration between the Access Centre and the Library.

Orillia Campus Library Opening

Lakehead University’s Orillia Campus Library officially opened on September 8, 2006 to welcome the charter class of the Orillia Campus. Students have full access to the complete range of Lakehead University Library’s online resources as well as to a locally held developing print collection. A mail service has been established to deliver requested book materials from the Thunder Bay Campus to the Orillia Campus.

The Orillia Campus Library is a space towards which students naturally gravitate; it serves as a place for both quiet study and group discussion. Three breakaway rooms are available for students to reserve. The Library also meets students’ computing, photocopying, and printing needs with four computer workstations, laptops for loan, a high-volume photocopier which also serves as a printer and a scanner, and a colour printer. Additional high speed internet access is available through hard-wired connections located throughout the Library and in the breakaway rooms.  When the twelve-PC computer lab within the library space is not used for workshops it is available for student use. The computer services Help Desk is also situated in the Library.

At the moment, the Library is staffed with a Librarian and a Library Assistant who also acts as the Help Desk assistant.

The Library at Confederation College hosted an innovative open house to welcome students back to a new academic year.  The Library was transformed to a rockin’ place on campus as students were entertained by a live Rock Band in the midst of the group study area.  The theme, Rock’n Read @your library, attracted students & faculty alike.  Refreshments, displays and prizes were part of the program, but the main event – the student Rock Band was the highlight!  Emergency doors were opened to let the sound of the music flow into the halls.  The band was led by a faculty member with four students who provided a wonderful array of rock music from classic to contemporary.  Compliments flowed for days on how it was the best open house ever hosted by the library!