Lightning Talks, Tuesday 2/10/09

Elizabeth Winter February 10th, 2009

Below is a summary of the discussion at today’s Lightning Talks. Please let me know if you have any corrections or additions to this discussion: elizabeth.winter@library.gatech.edu Also, feel free to comment below. Thanks! -Elizabeth

Alicia Quagliana—UT Austin
Demo’d their internal problem reporting/tracking system—keeps track of eresource incidents/troubleshooting

Bob Richart—Madigan Army Medical Center
Access complaints/problems from users—how to be proactive?
Suggestions:

  • URL checkers (just gets a response, but not PDF; one has a script that can check for PDFs)
  • UGA SeeSau database for systematically and proactively checking for content access; contact Dana Walker for more info. on this: dmwalker@uga.edu
  • Eric Hellman OCLC Openly Informatics: http://www.openly.com/linkevaluator/ Firefox extension to check all links on a web page; make list of resources you care about—fire off link evaluator to check for access

Sarah Miller—CARLI

  • How to determine value of resources during tough budget times? Determine which resources are available where—unique title list script to determine where there was overlap, analyzed cost-per-use data from Ulrich’s to determine value of unique titles and overlapping titles.
  • How to think smarter about these things? One suggestion: Look at unique titles (sorted by highest number of full-text retrievals); start pricing single subscription and stop when you’ve paid for the package. What would the financial impact be? Very time-consuming.

Richard Jasper—SUNY Buffalo

Elizabeth Goodman’s quote: “Beautiful Serendipity” reminded him of an article: James Evans, Science, July 2008 study looking at citation usage in health sciences articles. “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship,” Science 18 July 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5887, pp. 395 - 399, DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;321/5887/395 *subscription required*). Conclusion: An increasing concentration of citations across a smaller group/narrower range of journals. Rapid consensus-building and preferential attachment…reactions?

Someone mentioned that Carol Tenopir had written a rebuttal to this. I believe this article is “Electronic Journals and Changes in Scholarly Article Seeking and Reading Patterns”, Carol Tenopir and Donald King, D-Lib Magazine, November/December 2008, Volume 14 Number 11/12 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november08/tenopir/11tenopir.html (freely available).

Katie Fearer—Alaska State Library

Huge number of IP ranges across the state of Alaska. Experiences with implementing a proxy server; what kind of logins could be used? People suggested using EZProxy—it will check the IMAP (mail) server and automatically send the username/pw along (or just put the giant range of IPs into your proxy config.)

Come back tomorrow for more Lightning Talks fun!

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