April 17, 2013 Meeting of Library Faculty Meeting

Call to Order

 

Standing Items:

Adoption of the Agenda – Paula Kaufman

 

Approval of Minutes – Paula Kaufman

 

Introductions – Paula Kaufman

 

Report of the University Librarian (15 min – Paula Kaufman)

 

Executive Committee Discussion Items (15 min – Chris Prom)

 

Discussion Topic: eResearch Task Force (20 min – Beth Sandore)

Lightning Round (5 minutes):

Technology Prototyping Service Demo: Trending @ the Library– Jim Hahn

 

New Business

 

Announcements

 

Adjournment

Call to Order
Standing Items:

Adoption of the Agenda: The agenda was adopted with the notice that David Ward would report for the Executive Committee, in place of Chris Prom.

Approval of Minutes
The minutes were approved with a motion by Sarah Williams and seconded by Qiang Jin.  All approved.

Introductions – none

Report of the University Librarian
Dean Kaufman reported that there was nothing yet to report for next year’s budget. The Library’s budget hearing is Friday morning with the Campus Budget and Oversight Committee (CBOC).  Beth Sandore serves on CBOC.  Some other notes:

• Kappy Laing, Executive Director of Governmental Relations, expects the legislature will be finished in June.
• Paula reported on the status of the Biss bill (state senator Daniel Biss) that was discussed at the last faculty meeting.  Since that meeting the Senator withdrew the bill and submitted another one (Senate Bill 1900, Higher Ed Open Access Research) which he amended.  Senate Bill 1900 is very different from the first one which would have imposed mandates.  This one is now limited to public universities and colleges and calls for the creation of a committee for each University system to be appointed by January 2014 with representatives from the library administration, faculty and any others who the board wants to appoint.  These committees will be charged with creating an implementation plan to educate the faculty and to start the process of moving towards open access.  The first amendment seemed ok. The second, more recent one, includes more than just journal publications.  It now covers data research progress reports from professional conferences, phone logs etc. used to produce final manuscripts as well as the research resulting in works that generate revenue from books or patentable materials.  The bill passed the appropriate senate committee and will go to the floor of the senate. For the summary of the status of the bill see:  http://bit.ly/138SmEk.

 

Executive Committee Discussion Items: David Ward

• The Executive Committee (EC) met two times since the last faculty meeting.  The committee is still discussing the process for an updated Peer Review Committee and hopes to have a discussion at the next faculty meeting.
• As an FYI, David shared that a subgroup of EC consisting of Mary Laskowski, David Ward, Tom Teper and Beth Woodard are working on title changes and procedures.  David mentioned that even if your title isn’t changing officially, there will be documentation that everyone has to sign off on.  Tom Teper is getting the list together to verify.  You will keep the same job title.  The piece that will change is the title that reflects the tenure status, such as assistant, associate, or full professor.
• EC is still appointing Peer Review committees for those newly hired.

Discussion Topic: eResearch Task Force
Dean Kaufman reintroduced the topic (was previously presented at the November 2012 faculty meeting) mentioned that she, Beth Sandore, and Paul Hixson met with Peter Schiffer, the CIO to talk about the eResearch campus data service.  They are finishing up some revisions. Although the sense is that the campus needs to do this, there isn’t enough money to do what the library has asked for.

Beth Sandore mentioned that she, Harriett Green, Sarah Williams, Karen Hogenboom and others have been meeting regularly regarding this and the proposal that was submitted (The briefing document, PowerPoint, and charge of the task force is available at: http://www.library.illinois.edu/committee/eresearch_task_force/eresearch_task_force_charge.html ).  One of the recommendations that EC supported from the document was to create an implementation committee, with a life of 2 years.  Sarah Williams was appointed the chair. They have a couple more appointments to make for library representation.  Sarah and Harriett presented next steps for the implementation committee and results of a survey that was distributed regarding types of training and support needed to be well versed in working with faculty working with research data.

Sarah Williams indicated that they are still in the transition period and will try to keep things moving forward. Several task force members will continue to serve and new members will be appointed.  The implementation team charge is still being formed, but the main goal is to advance the library’s research data services initiatives.

Following are some of the initiatives from the Task Force Report that had been sent to EC:

• Work  collaboratively with the Scholarly Commons co-coordinators as a hub for eResearch people on campus- as a place to come to and then refer, if needed, to subject specialists;
• Work with subject specialists and functional experts for people working with research data;
• Organize training materials for library professionals for developing skills working with research data.

At the end of February the group attended a day long workshop with Dorothy Salo from the University of Wisconsin. About 25 professionals from UIUC participated, with hands on activities and discussions of how the library can move forward.

Harriett Green reviewed the highlights from the survey that was administered to UIUC library and faculty members to get a sense what they are doing with research data, what they plan to do a year for now and what skills they would need.  The survey was distributed to 193 Library faculty and academic professionals with a response rate of 29% (55 started and 39 completed). The Power Point is available here.

Some of the highlights included:

• Current experience: what research data are they currently using?  The highest response was for “accessing data” 55% (helping others) and the second highest was “I do not help users with this task” 36%.
• Of those who did help others (28 responses), the highest response of how often they helped was on a monthly basis (39%). However, after that the next high highest responses were tied at 29% for either weekly or once a semester.
• Responses for specific examples of research data questions they answered included for statistical data, texts, oral histories, applying metadata, digital newspapers, and financial data.  The type of examples also depends on level of researcher (graduate, faculty, alum).
• To represent how research data factored into their current job responsibilities, Susan Braxton made a Wordle.  Data is the biggest word in the Wordle, followed by research, faculty, students, data sets.
• Another Wordle created by Braxton includes words that describe what types of current data they help people with included text, video, numerical, statistical and audio and one that reflects anticipated future responsibilities included repositories, databases, and users.
• In response to future aspirations: what they HOPE to be helping users do one year from now, the top response was accessing data (81%) with other responses more evenly distributed after that (use and reuse data, creating data management plans, then creating metadata, ingesting data into repositories, and using data-related software.

Harriett then asked those at the faculty meeting, on behalf of the task force, in what ways do you hope to help users with research data management services 1-5 years from now?

Responses included:

• Beth Sandore mentioned that there are groups of faculty and staff in the library already engaged in this, including with team research (being part of teams working on subject domains or interdisciplinary research projects). This also includes the work that Mary Schlembach and Bill Mischo are doing with the research management portion of the project with the librarians and researchers in Kyushu Japan (see faculty minutes from October 17, 2012 for a report and Power Point on this). A goal would be to get more librarians involved in these types of projects.
• Jim Hahn shared that he had worked with CITES and students from an instructional engineering group to use data points to collect wifi information in the UGL, which included training on crunching numbers and the engineering group piecing together the data and information, so it was nice to share the efforts.
• Kirstin Dougan mentioned that some dance faculty were partnering with NCSA to do a study about movement and data points.  She said the biggest challenge is to figure out what faculty are working on and how to make a role for ourselves that is distinct from others on campus.
• There was a question of whether academics are required to create some data management. Harriett responded that there was.  The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for Humanities also now require data management plans.  Sarah Shreeves is the primary person assisting with faculty who are creating data management plans, but the goal is to have everyone in charge.

 

On another slide in the Power Point, Harriett showed another Wordle that represented the kinds of skills people needed to assist others (from the survey).  Some of the non-”data” terms that emerged were “data management”, software, and knowledge of the issues.

In response to the question on the survey of “what types of training for research data management did we not include or represent?” the vast majority said workshops, then discussion groups and invited speakers. Harriett then turned it back to the audience to ask about other types of training and ways to learn that weren’t covered?  Responses included: make sure that the materials are available; perhaps a repository of past workshop or training materials (such as data management plan); let people know what to do if they have questions after the training; perhaps a wiki or have some forum for people to ask questions when they actually start something.

When asked whether the Scholarly Commons or Sarah Shreeves would retain some sort of position/direction for all this, Harriett said that the Scholarly Commons will be the central point on this, but they hope to hire additional individuals. She also said that Sarah Williams intends to bring a group of subject specialists, research data librarians and functional specialists together to form best practices and how to provide a public face on this and to provide an opportunity for people to discuss things like this so other librarians know what is being done or ideas or approaches tried.

Wrap up.  For the question on the survey that asked those people who said they would never going to help users with research data, a follow-up question was “why not”? There were a number of reasons given, including: administration, retiring, weren’t in public service, their job has no research component, or users wouldn’t know to come to me.  Harriett hopes that the work by the committee can help with the last few reasons to make everyone aware.  She also said that the group will analyze the survey in more detail for concrete plans and if there are any questions or ideas from the survey to let them know.

Questions:

• John Wagstaff asked how often the committee will meet and what will happen next?  Beth Sandore said that the task force met once every two weeks, as well as the implementation committee.  They need to work with the Scholarly Commons to determine what the Scholarly Commons needs to support research data enrichment needs.  That should be the place where library faculty and staff go to refer or for a starting point.  Next is to figure out how to form a cohort of staff in the library to build best practices and to integrate with what we are doing, including with public service and behind the scenes activity to figure out how to do it and to support research data services.  There are some pockets of familiarity with social science research data.  An area of practice to build with includes user and technical services. Sarah Williams said that they will first determine initial workshops and training to do and the committee will come up with a concrete plan for fall and perhaps run the survey again perhaps in another year as a follow-up to training.
• Joann Jacoby shared that at the recent ACRL conference she attended a talk about research data services and they had done a survey of various stages for this in libraries.  Illinois was either at the advanced or beginning stage depending on the question. She said the challenge is to pull together the areas we are strong in — where we are setting the standards and ahead of the game and then to work on the areas we need to develop.
• Qiang Jin asked if there was a one-stop web site to find all the information about eResearch?  Harriett said they are gradually building the website so we can go to it and find information.  Sarah Shreeves is working on one with the Scholarly Commons geared for patrons to go for best practices for data management and campus resources.  There are currently a few places that pull the information together.  There will be a place for librarians– perhaps a Libguide with links out to the key journal articles that introduce this and sites for data management.

Lightning Round: Technology Prototyping Service Demo: Trending @the Library

Jim Hahn provided an overview of a demonstration prototype from the technology prototyping service funded by budget group this spring.  At the March 2013 faculty meeting he received some input about some technology prototyping ideas to develop from other library faculty members.  One of the suggestions was to create a “what is popular” or trending service. To investigate possibilities for this Jim found an admin panel (a twitter bootstrap wrapper for web development) and a bootstrap wraparound.  His students started working on data feeds, looking at this for assessment and reference service tools and what could be public facing.

 

Jim showed some demo slides and said this is a starting point to pull the information into it and asked if this matches up with what people had in mind with popularity trends.  He asked if there was anything else that should be there?

• Kirstin Dougan asked if the top checked out titles are actual titles here?  Jim said right now they are just demonstration data and that they aren’t yet populated or live.  They have been able to populate some technology feeds because they are already live (based on previous work Jim had done).  Kirstin also asked what users would be able to do from here.  Jim responded that these are things that are trending right now.  The index page has a refresh about every page load as well, so results change.
• Qiang Jin asked if the items displayed are materials we own.  Jim said the data come from the Voyager report server so they are things Voyager keeps track of, like things on hold or in hand.  He can start to incorporate other feeds from Voyager, such as electronic downloads.
• Beth Sheehan asked how loan periods would affect trending, like items that check out for 24 hours versus renew items for months?  She asked how useful that data would be. Jim responded that it certainly is a limitation at an academic library.  He mentioned that we have something similar in technology loan where there are 2 hours and 1 week circulations but we do popularity all together.  It may not be able to correct for that, but he may be able to parse it out.  Beth suggested that it might make more sense to have categories — what’s trending in media, video, audio, music, or things of similar loan periods and types so that the information is more comparative and meaningful to patrons.
• Sue Braxton asked if subject headings were used for the feeds? Jim said they have a filter for loanable technology items ranked by popularity and circulation.  He said it works well with the technology loan feed and with popularity so items go to the top.  Traditional bibliographic data may not be as useful as something like media
• David Ward suggested that with books that may only circulate every 16 weeks something showing title or subject may be useful for marketing what people are using in the collection.  Jim added that they could run trending for this by week or month.
• Antonio Sotomayor asked if there was a way to filter by area (library). Jim responded that there is circ location that they can grab and he will take a look.  JoAnn Jacoby also wondered if it could be done by fund report, like the new book list. Beth Sandore mentioned that there is synergy here because the Library CAPT committee had a conversation about revamping the new titles list.  There is an issue about how to actually use it to represent subject areas and not just fund areas and then how to aggregate.  Lynn Wiley has been thinking about this and suggested Jim talk with them, particularly about titles and what they are thinking about.  She said it’s not necessarily trending, but what’s new that we would like people to be aware of it.

New Business – none

Announcements:

• Sue Searing reminded everyone that the library is participating in the Community and Campus Day of Service on April 20, 9:30-ll:30.  They need volunteers at the Champaign Public Library to do whatever they need and to let Sue know by the end of the day if anyone wants to sign up.  She also mentioned there is a collection box for books for prisoners in the corridor and another project to buy 3 Kindles for Urbana Schools and they are half way there. Sue said to go to the Library Human Resources office if interested in helping out with that.
• Paula Kaufman added that Saturday is the Community-Campus Day of Service. The Chancellor is sponsoring an event to pack 146,000 meals for the local foodbank.
• JoAnn Jacoby reminded everyone that the there is another dean candidate (John Wilkin) presenting tomorrow afternoon at 4:00 in the Art and Architecture building (the gallery) with a reception afterwards
• Barbara Ford added that the final dean candidate presentation will be next week, at GSLIS.