Oh past self, come here and let me kick you in the shins
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•2,417 views
Notes. We put them everywhere, in order records, item records, database records, etc. They tell us how to process something, mark historical decisions, and guide us in our next steps. We would be lost without them, and yet they’re typically unformatted, by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of information. This session explores the theme of ‘notes’ from several perspectives as librarians who use different e-resource management systems talk about what kinds of notes they make, where they put them, and what their uses are.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Oh past self, come here and let me kick you in the shins
Similar to Oh past self, come here and let me kick you in the shins (20)
More from Marie Kennedy
More from Marie Kennedy (7)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Oh past self, come here and let me kick you in the shins
- 1. Oh past self, come here and let me kick you in the shins Marie Kennedy (Loyola Marymount University) Anna Creech (University of Richmond) Kristina DeShazo (Oregon Health & Science University) ER&L 2014, Austin TX
- 2. Not all research comes from noble birth
- 5. Not all research comes from noble birth • Sometimes you’re just curious about the way other people manage things
- 6. Not all research comes from noble birth • Sometimes you’re just curious about the way other people manage things • And so you call them up and say, “Hey, I was wondering something.”
- 7. Not all research comes from noble birth • Sometimes you’re just curious about the way other people manage things • And so you call them up and say, “Hey, I was wondering something.” • And the next thing you know you’re doing a presentation together at ER&L.
- 8. Not all research comes from noble birth • Sometimes you’re just curious about the way other people manage things. • And so you call them up and say, “Hey, I was wondering something.” • And the next thing you know you’re doing a presentation together at ER&L. • This is that kind of research.
- 9. Agenda • In this presentation we will discuss NOTES, in all their manifestations, in managing electronic resources. • You will hear from librarians who use different library systems. • We’ll show examples from those systems for how NOTES are formatted • Innovative Sierra (Marie!) • Voyager / ProQuest (Anna!) • Innovative to Alma (Kristi!)
- 10. Our goals •Learn from each other •Share what we learn with you •Improve our use of NOTES in systems as a result of this presentation
- 11. We’ve asked ourselves the following questions: •Why do we write notes? •What do we do with a note once it’s written? •How have we made decisions at our institutions about notes?
- 12. Why do we write notes? •Notes to our future selves (reminders) •Directions to others •Alerts to our patrons •Pointers to additional information (contract office contact, links to copy of license) •CYA
- 13. What do we do with notes? •Statistics •Document cancelation decisions •Funding decisions (e.g. pay from X fund this year and Y ongoing) •Publication status (e.g. delayed) •Public notes in the ERM for users and document delivery staff about license terms
- 14. The kinds of records where notes may be found •Order record •ERMS record •License record •Item record •A-Z journal list
- 15. How have we made decisions about notes at our own institutions? • Delimiters • Permanence • Repeatability • Fixed-length • Variable-length • Deletion of existing notes fields • Repurposing of fields • Formatting
- 16. What we have decided about notes (LMU) •Names formatting
- 17. What we have decided about notes (LMU) • Names formatting • Last names with first initials • Last names only • Last names with first names • Full names • Faculty selector with liaison initials • Liaison selector with faculty initials • Selector with staff initials • Selector with department abbreviations
- 18. What we have decided about notes (LMU) • Names formatting • Last names with first initials • Last names only • Last names with first names • Full names • Faculty selector with liaison initials • Liaison selector with faculty initials • Selector with staff initials • Selector with department abbreviations
- 19. What we have decided about notes (LMU) •Names formatting
- 20. Lastname_YYYY
- 23. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond) Notes are good for coverage dates, cancelations, and anything weird
- 24. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond) •Order record •Invoice •Line item of invoice
- 25. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond)
- 26. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond)
- 27. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond)
- 28. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond)
- 29. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond) Our ERM (SerialsSolutions 360 Resource Manager) also has a notes function….
- 30. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond)
- 31. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond) Back end: Front end:
- 32. What we have decided about notes (U. of Richmond)
- 33. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) License records *Caveat #1 these are preliminary ponderings as we have not yet migrated all data or really ANY license data from current system (III) to new (Alma) and, **Caveat #2 this talk is limited to license record data/information and our current perception of what Alma has to offer.
- 34. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) •Necessary
- 35. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) •Necessary •Nuisance
- 36. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) •Necessary •Nuisance •Nice!
- 37. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) • Current system fixed and variable fields • Type of license
- 38. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) • Current system fixed and variable fields • Type of license • Official archive
- 39. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) • Current system fixed and variable fields • Type of license • Official archive • Authentication method
- 40. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) • Current system fixed and variable fields • Type of license • Official archive • Authentication method • Terms of Use (Patron) • Terms of Use (Staff)
- 41. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) •Notes, Notes, Notes A succession of notes over time
- 42. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) • In Alma • License Terms & Notes
- 43. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) • Here a note. There a note. Everywhere a note!
- 44. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) • And then there is Notes! • A blank canvas . . .
- 45. What we have decided about notes (OHSU) •Reflection
- 46. What haven’t we decided about notes yet (U. of Richmond) •Standardization •Consistency
- 47. What haven’t we decided about notes yet (LMU) •Date formatting • (10-88) • 11-6-2013 • 2/07/2012 • 1/2014 • 2010
- 48. Thanks • To @RachelMFleming for letting us use her tweet as the title of this presentation • https://twitter.com/rachelmfleming/status/380697949413449728
- 49. Slide citations • Slides 2 and 3: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/GlossPo pup.ASP?ImageName=Marginalia/c3906- 07.jpg&Pmark=Burney%20MS%20224,%20f.%203 • http://www.webdesign.org/photoshop/drawing- techniques/magnify-glass.13819.html
Editor's Notes
- The idea of research can be a bit intimidating, as if the purpose is to discover a great truth. And sometimes it looks like that on the surface, like this illuminated manuscript from the British Library, for example.
- But then when you look a little closer you’ll notice that research most often begins with a practical musing. Something that seems elegant on the surface…
- …turns out to be something simple and very practical.
- Seen as marginalia, notes are typically unformatted and ad-hoc, but are vital in the management of electronic resources. When we DON’T make a note of something and come back later and can’t remember what we’ve done, or what decision has been made, it feels very much like you should kick your own past in the shins.
- We’ll tackle these in order, beginning with why we write notes.
- CYA: any time we cancel a subscription we enter a note in the order record that says who told us to cancel, when, and a reason.
- These are all the possible things that CAN be decided about notes for e-resource management.
- Here’s a simple example of why formatting a name might be useful.
- LMU enters names into records (mainly order records) to mark the decision to purchase or the decision to renew. Our purpose for this is not documented (of course). Our system currently has all of these manifestations of names formatting.
- And what can we do with this information? Nothing. Without any standardization when we query the system for any names it all comes out in a clump, with the only obvious delimiter of a space. And then once delimited you have to figure out if that is a first name or a last name or what. This is why e-resources librarians drink.
- We sat down as a group and talked about what we needed that data to actually do for us. One of the practical things we’ve never been able to do is run a query of the system to see who requested an order for an e-resource, and when. So here is how we decided we would be entering names in records going forward, for continuations and e-content.
- Its simplicity kills us. Only one name will be used. Here are the rules we’ve imposed on ourselves:1. If staff are supplied with multiple faculty names, use the first name listed where the faculty member matches the department in the fund code.2. If multiple librarian names are supplied, use the name associated with collecting in the fund area.3. If faculty and librarian names are both supplied, the order is considered a faculty selection. Use the faculty name and the faculty selector code. 4. The surname only will be used in conjunction with the calendar year formatted as yyyy. Check the online campus directory in order to verify name spelling if needed. Enter one space between the surname and the year.The space will be used as a data delimiter for separating the field elements in Excel.
- This is a screen shot in the Innovative Sierra ILS of what needs to be cleaned up now that we’ve made our decision. We’ll need to go into every open order record and adjust the SELECTOR variable-length field to match the new name schema. We’ll likely do this during renewal season, when we open each order record to review. While there we will also match the name with the SELECTOR TYPE. In this case we’ve missed entering whether or not the selector was a librarian or a faculty member.
- Preparing this presentation inspired me to look around the Innovative system to find out more about what it could do for us. It occurred to me that there were some fields in the ERM that let me customize some drop-down menu language, like for Authorized Users. Instead of having to type in the same thing every time I create a new resource record I can just select it from the drop-down menu. I asked if they could create one for notes on our resource records and they said yes. And then they did it. And now look at my tears of joy. I can add more values to this drop-down menu in the system but for now we started by adding these COUNTER report codes. Once added I can pull all of the resources for which we pull Book Report 1 into a list. If we pull BR1 AND JR1 from the same resource I’ll simply add two notes to the same resource record.
- First of all, I really miss III. That aside, we really appreciate notes for the weird stuff, and for general information stuff that is helpful for identifying what’s what, particularly since our historical data entry has been inconsistent.
- In Voyager, there are several places where notes can live: the order record, the invoice, or the line item of the invoice.
- The notes field for the order record is large, and we have no standardization of what goes in there, mostly because we’re not running reports and compiling data in Excel. When we look at those notes, we’re looking at them with this view. For eresources, the notes will include anything about the subscription that is important such as customer numbers, or as in this case, when we moved the journal to online-only and when we eventually canceled it.
- The notes field on the invoice record is not used much, but for subscription databases, we do try to put the coverage dates in case there is a question later about what that invoice covered.
- Within the line item record, there is another place for a note about what the invoice covered, which we use mostly for our standing orders. In this example, it’s just the volume number. In other cases where the standing order is a book series with different titles, we’ll put the title there. We rarely use the large notes field in this place, but it could be useful if there is more to note than what can be covered elsewhere.
- We can also put notes about the status of a book order if we receive notice that it is delayed. We have standardized this for the different types of delays such as not yet published, out of stock, or backordered. We’ll include the expected availability date along with a two- or three- letter code for the status. (I’m not sure why it goes in the “instructions to vendor” field, as this is an area I took on after my acquisitions librarian of 33 years retired. Many of our practices seem to have stemmed from old system limitations or personal preferences.)
- Our ERM (SerialsSolutions 360 Resource Manager) also has a notes function….
- …but it functions better as lists of things, which can also be helpful: canceled subscriptions (including those with perpetual access), the number of simultaneous users of ebooks, and consortia purchases
- We can also add notes and location information to our title-level holdings, which display on the public side. I will put simultaneous user limits there if needed, and our print holdings locations are listed there as well.
- We can also display the terms of use from the license, if anyone bothers to click on the little info icon next to the journal or book title in the look-up tool. ILL uses this, for the most part.
- License records *Caveat #1 these are preliminary ponderings as we have not yet migrated all data or really ANY license data from current system (III) to new (Alma) and, **Caveat #2 this talk is limited to license record data/information and our current perception of what Alma has to offer.
- Necessary – Must keep track of licenses for a number of reasons Tied to fiscal responsibility Be able to answer questions about terms & conditions May include ILL rights and restrictions …more
- Nuisance – Can be a real hassle to maintain Must be diligent – OHSU has 100s of licenses (not all negotiated – but remember we put EVERYTHING in our ERM to begin with) and you know how particular those publishers can be about their babies! Must be consistent – If managing license data is not done in a consistent manner and with consistent language you may as well just put a paper copy in the drawer because that would be just as useful! Must be thoughtful – The trick is figuring out what data needs to be captured and maintained for later use in data extraction (e.g. what publishers/vendors do we have a simple Terms of Use agreement on file? Or, how many licenses have we included the OHSU-mandated Confidentiality clause?)
- Nice! – Really pays off when you need some piece of data about a license and you can find it; very satisfying
- In the current system (Innovative Millennium ERM module) license records included a number of fixed and variable fields that could be used to tag licenses. III did a pretty good job of implementing the DLF ERMI standard way back in 2004-2005 when OHSU was a beta site for the new moduleType of license – this was really important to us as we initially entered data into III Main push for having ERM was to publish terms for public consumption and ILL/document deliveryNo specified place for this data in Alma – option may be to incorporate into Name field (i.e. Society of Clinical Nephrologists (Terms of Use))
- Official archive – initially created by our license manager at the time to indicate whether we needed to maintain print, or if we could rely on e-only for archive. It was 2004/2005 and we were in the very early stages of decision making regarding the move to electronic only subscriptions.Could use this field as a limiter or excluder – not sure we ever didNo specified place for this in Alma – putting in as freetext could be difficult to pull out of a notes field On the other hand, this may not be quite so important now as it was then
- Authentication method – differentiate IP/Ezproxy vs Log-inWas important in initial set up in III when we had a number of resources with username/login requirement. So 2002! Not so important now?
- Terms of Use (Patron) – In Alma we’ve found most common Terms of Use are available as Y/N selections but some are not listed – e.g.No systematic reproduction;no creation of derivative works; no removal or modification of copyright notices; no use of robots, spiders, crawlers or other automated downloading programs (all of these are or are becoming standard)All of the above terms could be put in “Other Use restriction note” field (Alma)Begs the question of how can any system keep up with the changing world of licensing?Terms of Use (Staff) – here we will definitely use the “Interlibrary Loan note” field in Alma
- And then we have Notes, Notes, Notes
- In Alma – License Details includes two tabs: License Terms Notes
- Under the License Terms tab is a long list of terms – What you don’t see off to the right of each term on this page is text boxes, some of which have drop down options to choose from, sometimes Y/N, sometimes more specific (to their credit, Ex Libris did base these off of the DLF ERMI work but it needs some additional work!) What you do see is that there are fields for notes tied to specific terms. These are blank, free text fields. Course Pack Note Course Reserve Note Digital copy note Print copy note Interlibrary loan note
- And then there is. . . (Ta dah!). . . Notes! A blank canvas to include . . . ??
- Reflection on the status quo – the migration process makes you think about things, what’s important, what’s not. (Sort of like when you move and you have great opportunity to purge!)We have a lot of decisions to make about where to migrate notes to in Alma!Notes and types of notes we started with may become unnecessary over time Notes may lose meaning if not attended to and integrity maintainedNotes are everywhere!
- You know, the important things you might want for creating reports and whatnot. This is in part because the database is already such a mess it would take too much effort to clean, and also in part because our system can’t handle much more than what we’re doing already. If I wanted to track who requested something as Marie does, I’d have to do it in the large notes field, and it wouldn’t be the only information held there. I have hope that our next ILS will give us the opportunity to start over, or at least integrate our eresources data better, which is a much smaller collection (relatively speaking).
- So far it is only in our order records for continuations that LMU has decided to treat year data with the y-y-y-y approach. In the rest of our system, all bets are off. Most of the time you can figure out what is intended by the data entered but it makes a systematic approach to getting those data OUT of the system problematic.