Book Spotter's Guide to Avian Titled Literature

An installation by Zoë Sadokierski and Kate Sweetapple in UTS Library. See also cargocollective.com/

In defence of weeding

This is a silly beat-up: Books get the shove as uni students go online

It is poorly written and makes a number of awful errors and assumptions:

Most libraries have weeding programs. We do at UTS. With collaborative collection sharing programs like our Bonus+, there is no longer a need to each and every library to hold at least one copy of every book. Where would we put them even if we could afford them?

In many cases books are disposed of because they are worn out, beyond repair, or we cannot maintain multiple copies of texts which have been superseded by subsequent editions.

Newspapers are not always valuable or rare just because they are old. Copies are generally held by the state and national libraries and they are busy digitising them now for improved access. They are a right pain to store and preserve as they were not produced for long term maintenance. Very few academic libraries have the resources to maintain old newspaper collections. By their very nature they are ephemeral in their original form. I disposed of a large newspaper cuttings collections in the collection of the Australian War Memorial for exactly these reasons. All were held by the National Library.

A lot of those encyclopaedias, dictionaries, journals and books contain information and knowledge that has been superseded. They become redundant. This also relates to the point attributed to Professor Miller at the end of the article.

Weeding programs are carefully managed by professional staff and books are written off only after careful determination of their continued usefulness. They are not simply dumped in skips without consultation.

It is outrageous for anyone to claim they are all extremely good books without seeing them, nor assessing them in light of other collections held.

The “former library assistant” is probably not the most reliable source to quote on whether a certain library sees its function as an archive. In fact, most academic libraries do not function as archives. (I have managed both an archive and a library.)

The Starbucks claim is a complete emotional beat up and easy mud to sling. Libraries are to be about people, not just books. Time marches on and so too should the professor. Books are no longer chained up in libraries and controlled by monks.

Serendipitous discovery is still possible without all books on the shelves and in open access. Most European academic libraries operate like this. UTS will be providing serendipitous discovery to our collections in an underground Library Retrieval System, in different ways online. They may well be more effective means of browsing for something useful than someone browsing shelves, mostly at eye height, for books that stand out because of decorations on their spines. We have been talking to academics within UTS to explore this kind of assisted and extended serendipitous online discovery since 2010 and I am going to talk to some students tomorrow afternoon regarding a project to address issues such as this.

Looking beyond the metrics and towards our future (Part 1 of 2)

TWITTER v. ZZZZZZ

I'd been trying to get some thoughts together for a few presentations that I have to give soon about the future of libraries (ours in particular) and a friend (@zaana) advised me late last night to take a look at the Twitter stream (#edge2011) from the Edge 2011 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. At least the first of the two days looked to be very library-centric. A lot of the tweets seemed to be a bit too much like navel-gazing without any helpful suggestions, but there were a couple of positive and provocative ideas thrown in from some (service) design thinkers. A few ideas really helped me with my own thinking, even though it was all very late at night. More about that in a moment.

SOCIAL MEDIA METRICS

Already in my head was a little bit of a debate about some basic metrics that a colleague at work presented us with recently relating to our use of and progress with social media and social networks. They were OK, but nothing amazing, apart from a few interesting blips where certain content had really taken off. I think there are other more useful measures we could include as well such as referrals to our more traditional web content, but essentially, the point I want to make here is that for me at least I think our experience in this academic library with social media goes beyond what any metrics can actually measure. And it is in my opinion critically and positively related to the preparations we are making for our future library. That building isn't going to be designed on metrics alone and it will just be a building. It could be all about books and transactions relating to books.

UTS FUTURE LIBRARY: ASRS & RFID

So, to explain now: before we get to designing our future library, we've decided to jump in and implement two other major technology initiatives that take the focus away from books and transactions. Currently we are busy with a large team of designers working on an underground Library Retrieval System that will store and retrieve for our clients about 80% of our collections of books and journals. That will squarely refocus the library itself on PEOPLE. (Refocusing libraries on people was something I saw that was suggested at Edge 2011.) We are also busy implementing RFID technology that will assist us to take our focus away from transactions and onto the provision of more value-added services (e.g. improved and extended services for our researchers). These two initiatives will be implemented between 2011 and 2014, but there is also much to do to reshape the library and our services so that we can maximise the potential of those technologies and that is where social media comes in.

UTS LIBRARY & SOCIAL MEDIA/NETWORKS

At UTS Library we started playing around (literally playing around) with social media in 2009. Staff at all levels were encouraged to try some new platforms and to produce content for them. We also started setting up a presence and creating a sense of community in a few selected social networks. These things take a while. They don't happen overnight and I think you can make the mistake of killing it all off too soon by over analysing it before it has had the chance to grow and evolve. We've been patient.

THE REAL BENEFITS

In my view, however, the real benefit of encouraging these relatively new initiatives has been internal. Dipping our toes into social media has been a bit of a cultural fire-starter for us. We cannot hope to move into a brave new library world without some drastic changes in our own culture and our attitudes towards exploring new ideas and services. Social media has helped us with both. It has also helped reposition our "persona" from a corporate voice to a more personal voice (which is another thing I saw mentioned at Edge 2011 last night) and that is necessary because we cannot be all about people if that is just on the outside. The focus on people also has to happen on the inside.

Playing with social media has encouraged our people to learn about new platforms and about creating content for them. Those skills in both exploration of new or emerging technologies and content production are invaluable. They've also gained confidence in their writing and presentation skills and learned how to "network" more effectively (which is critical for liaison on campus). All of this has helped us promote our services and our people and now more than ever we are in demand on campus and elsewhere.

Our social media experiments have already led to the development of improved and new services for students and researchers at UTS all through establishing a culture of fun, playfulness and a willingness to try new things. They have really helped our people in the ways they use and help others to use our discovery layer and our website and that has also helped us to understand how we should improve that layer with the addition of new features and services. There is a real momentum of openness, sharing and experimentation that has developed accordingly.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUST

Underlying this has been a strong culture of trust at all levels of management and leadership in this library. We didn't issue a 27 page set of principles and rules for the use of social media. We simply referred to the existing UTS code of conduct for all staff and explained that for practical reasons we would concentrate our efforts on an agreed set of platforms: all the usual suspects. Everyone was treated like an adult and trusted to get on with it.

That's it for Part 1. In Part 2 I will explore a few more specific ideas about how we did this and what worked for us. (Oh, this is all straight off the top of my head after a late night following #edge2011, so I reserve the right to edit, add & change the content above over the next couple of days.)

Social media for academic researchers

Social media for academic researchersPresentation for UTS Library Research Week 2011.

View more documents from Mal Booth.

ASRS in academic libraries

As you'll see in Flickr, this set just pulls all of my ASRS related images and videos together. Hopefully it makes them more visible to those interested and it should also make them easier to use.

Why there's no real post today

I'm exhausted of ideas and I'm coming down with a head cold despite taking every natural immune system booster known in Western civilisation. Part of the reason I'm exhausted is because today I had to present most of our future library concepts to students in our UTS Designing Out Crime (DOC) Research Centre. I used a presentation of our key ideas around some illustrative images, but as it is a bit of a rehearsal for a short presentation that I'm to give later this year at the ILI conference in London, I don't think I should share it just yet.

By 2016 the UTS Library will be relocated to the building next the the big UTS tower on Broadway, one of the main avenues taking people into the city of Sydney. Having a more prominent location both within the University and within that area of Sydney will present its own challenges and we hope to get some decent ideas from the DOC students.

It isn't as if we are expecting a future series of Underbelly to be written about the crime in the UTS Library. We are just hoping for some proposals primarily to do with regulating or discouraging behaviours like theft, vandalism, consumption of inappropriate food and beverages, noise, etc. We are also looking for their ideas to assist us in presenting the key library resources and services as exclusive for UTS members (i.e not accessible by the general community). I spent a couple of hours with them making my presentation and then answering some really stimulating questions that gave me much food for thought.

I think we are really fortunate to have such a program at UTS and I love that we are giving UTS students the chance to contribute to the planning of the new Library in such a practical way (even though it is still very early in the planning stage).

The image is UTS tower from my place.

Help!

Hello academic library experts!

We are dealing with a couple of complaints from students (I suspect because the library is very busy at present) who say that our library staff are not doing enough to manage selfish, anti-social or even noisy behaviour by other students in areas of the library designated as quite or silent zones. We’ve also had to remove a computer mouse that was super-glued to a desk top recently and that will necessitate a lot of expensive repair work to the long desk top that was damaged in the removal process.

We do have our reshelvers and security staff talk to students if they notice anything inappropriate and we can also deploy our student rovers against such behaviour, but I suspect the more that we react, the more students will either counter-react or find another way around it. Last year I talked with many US academic librarians who told me that students mostly self-manage behaviour in their library “commons” and group study spaces. We seek to gently encourage the same thing here, but we don’t want to go as far as encouraging student vigilantes and we don’t want to be too “precious” about the space.

So, I would be interested in reading about any successful initiatives you may have tried recently to encourage more cooperative, tolerant and appropriate behaviour by students in THEIR library.

The image above is the University of Nevada Las Vegas Lied Library learning commons.

UTS on future academic libraries

On 9 February 2010 Dr Belinda Tiffen, Sophie McDonald and me from the UTS Library presented some ideas for our future Library to a national library conference in Melbourne (VALA2010).

As part of the UTS City Campus Master Plan, we have begun the early stages of planning for a new library building or “learning commons” on Broadway that will set new standards for online and physical services to our clients (students, researchers, academics and staff), green culture and operations, and our own work environment. About 60% of our current collection will be buried in a robotically-served retrieval system under Alumni Green (adjacent to the new library building), freeing up the library space for things other than book storage. That facility will be designed and built in the near future.

Our ideas for the future library were presented in three short but entertaining video clips outlining scenarios for:

• students (by UTS students James Shepherd, Dan Miller and friends),
• researchers and
• our staff (in homage the the well-known CommonCraft videos).

J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah

Here is the slide show from my visit to the "U of U" in Salt Lake City. Yet another impressive academic library with an ASRS by HK Systems (called "ARC" Automated Retrievals Centre), who also showed me around their manufacturing plant and the Utah State Archives ASRS.

I must also thank the helpful staff of the U of U Library who were very generous with their time and in answering all of my questions.



http://www.lib.utah.edu/portal/site/marriottlibrary/

Some pretty rough notes from my visit:
Trays/bins from the ARC are delivered straight up by the cranes. They have four cranes delivering about 2 million items in bins 6”, 9”, 12” & 18”. These bins are typical HK mini-load bins (or totes) and can cope with up to 750 lb loads. This is more than tightly packed paper (of any density) would weigh and they are tested for maximum load carrying capacity in the HK plant, also in Salt Lake City.

They have CD/DVDs in the lower 6” bins and are beginning to also include microform.

The trays only tilt about 5 degrees for the pickers as they are near the top of the system. It is 45 foot high crane.

They do not keep all serials in their runs and have not found this to be an issue.

They do not have spines facing up (none of the systems I saw in the US did), but the computer screens tell the pickers which zone o sector the item is in and then they must identify it themselves. Their zones are pretty full and they have to readjust the load of the zone before fitting some books in, or check it out again and note that the tray is full and re-store it elsewhere.

The Marriot Library did a “huge” library re-organisation to cope with the new library wing and the ARC. It has freed up much space and allowed for collection expansion. The ARC is attended by their Security, Circulation and Access Team. The ARC staff member who took us around the system said he had three days initially training and he had since learned more through daily use. Reference and loans staff estimate that only 5% of books used come from the ASRS. (I will email for through-put figures.)

They do not have RFID and are moving to ExLibris Primo as heir discovery and delivery system.

They undertook a 12 month intensive weeding program (completed in six months) before loading the arc totes and the library was continually kept open over the four year building and ARC-implementation program.

Reference Services staff say that a glass window so that (particularly new) students could understand the system would be useful. There are glass doors and walls, but they think students should be able to see the size/extent and working of the system including robotic retrievals in progress. A video camera showing the path of a requested book is desirable.

When walking around the Library I saw some excellent (& very popular) “Knoll” lounge chairs. See image on the Flickr set (above).