The Authority File

In this third of our four episodes about big data research, we continue our conversation by focusing on the The University of Southern California’s library’s day-to-day work with Big Data, and how integral partnerships with researchers are to understanding the individual research questions and the tools necessary to answer them. They also discuss how prevalent big data research is at USC and some of the exciting projects that are currently in the works.

In this second of our four episodes about big data research, we continue our conversation by focusing on the library’s role with not only services and instruction, but how big data impacts collection practices and how it’s altering the relationships between libraries and vendors. Fundamentally, a library’s broader strategy for supporting big data research starts with the reference interview and grows from there.

In this final episode of our four-part series on the evolution of institutional repositories, our guests talk about how they not only sustain engagement with their IRs, but grow it as well. A key driver of success is relationships. Partnerships with faculty and students are, of course, crucial, but Illinois Wesleyan’s Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Utah State University’s Dylan Burns both describe how they target entities such as admissions and university communications to help expand the circle of repository influencers. They also put the time in for personal connections with individuals, which is also important to expanding the repository’s promotional network. Stephanie and Dylan also talk about how they’ve kept the IR mission purposefully broad in scope to accommodate a range of content types and the communities it serves.

For this series on the research methodologies around—and library support of—big data, our guests discuss the growth of big data research and how the academic library is stepping up to meet its unique service and instruction needs. In this first episode of our four-part series, we define what the term “big data” means in an academic setting and how big data research is outgrowing its science-based origins and bleeding into the humanities and social sciences.

In this third episode of our series on institutional repositories, Illinois Wesleyan University’s Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Utah State University’s Dylan Burns describe how their IRs are currently structured and how they’re are opening up new collaborative opportunities. At USU, for example, the physics department has been especially active with the IR, going so far as to use it for their personal websites to display their lab work, pre-prints, posters, and presentations. At Illinois Wesleyan, Davis-Kahl notes that the inclusion of faculty governance documents has become a “really useful way of learning about the institution, understanding what discussions have been the most contentious or the most important in the institution’s history, and, more importantly, it’s really helped to communicate to the faculty and administration what an IR is capable of doing.”

Shifting funder mandates. Hybrid open publication. Institutional repositories. Libraries as publishers. These are just a few of the issues COUNTER’s Code of Practice (COP) 5 addresses. Learn how these items and others impact COUNTER reports and the ways librarians can demonstrate their value to their university administration and other stakeholders using new metrics in COP 5.

Institutional repositories are not part of the service package libraries have traditionally offered their patrons, but the institutional repositories at Utah State University and Illinois Wesleyan University have both recently celebrated their tenth anniversary and continue to support their library’s missions. In this episode, Dylan Burns and Stephanie Davis-Kahl discuss what it took to start the repositories at USU and IWU, how student and faculty work helped to launch the repositories, and how the strategies for the repositories have changed along with the academy.

Join us for an insightful discussion on what it took to get the repositories up and running at USU and IWU.

How can librarians motivate publishers of every shape and size to implement COUNTER compliant reporting on their products? Does a publisher ever adjust their subscription rate based on COUNTER usage statistics? Bill, Iris, Lorraine, and Stuart explore the answers to these questions and others relevant to publisher-library relations in this week’s episode.

In February of 2018, Choice released the first in a series of white papers designed to provide actionable intelligence on issues important to academic librarians. That white paper was titled, The Evolving Institutional Repository Landscape, and was written by this week’s guest Judy Luther. In this episode, Judy talks with Bill about the current state of the institutional repository: what institutions are using them for, some of the trends based on institution size, how Lorcan Dempsey’s idea of “The inside out library” fits with the use of institutional repositories, as well as many other issues.

Two librarians also join the discussion in upcoming episodes to provide insight into exactly what is working at one small liberal arts college, Illinois Wesleyan University, and one large research institution, Utah State University. Join us for an in-depth discussion that touches on best practices as well as more theoretical concerns.

What did it take to build consensus on standards in the scholarly publishing marketplace? Who were the key players, and how did they motivate publishers, aggregators, and librarians to work together? This week, Bill dives into the history of COUNTER and uncovers a few gems about the people that worked tirelessly to bring digital standards to scholarly publishing.