August 27, 2013 Meeting of Content Access Policy & Technology (CAPT)

Agenda not yet available.

Tim Cole, Jim Dohle, Bill Mischo, Michael Norman, Sarah Shreeves, Robert Slater, Lynn Wiley, Beth Woodard, Jenny Johnson, Beth Sandore Namachchivaya, Tom Teper, Lisa Hinchliffe, Sue Searing, Cherie Weible

1. Uborrow implementation – Cherie Weible

In late 2010/early 2011 the University of Chicago and the CIC set up the U-borrow system (http://www.cic.net/projects/library/reciprocal-borrowing/uborrow). This is an unmediated borrowing system—essentially I-share for the CIC libraries. We are in a different position than the rest of the CIC schools. Implementing U-borrow for our patrons will drain the resources of this Library (other borrowing options re more economical than U-borrow, and in many cases, offer faster service to our patrons). This operates off the Z39.50 protocol. Illinois doesn’t run our Z39.50 server, CARLI does, so CARLI would need to be involved in any implementation. CIC schools previously shipped all materials through the Lantern service, but have since switched to UPS (which has proven to be a large financial big drain for OSU). For “big” schools in Illinois we use ILDS through Carli for delivery. OSU has OhioLink and we have I-share (equivalent consortial operations), so we can anticipate a similar drain on funds here if we implement U-borrow for our patrons (we already participate in U-borrow as a lender).

(Uborrow does no checking/prevention to stop user from requesting items their institution already owns)  or that could be more quickly and cost-effectively filled through I-share. It’s essential we push people to I-share first, as it is far cheaper than getting the same items from any CIC institution. Uborrow is its own web catalog/interface (although some Primo institutions have incorporated Uborrow records directly in Primo search results). Think of ILL fulfillment as ever growing worlds. When a request comes in to borrowing they handle it routing it through the most local option. To that end, they cancel more than 8000 ILL requests each year for items Illinois owns. When we don’t have an item, the next pool to pull from is I-share—there is no (per item?) cost for borrowing or shipping materials through I-share. If I-Share can’t fulfill the request, the next step is to request the item from CIC school—we pay to ship the item, but there isn’t a borrowing fee to obtain the item. Finally, if all other more local avenues fail, we turn to the world at large to fulfill the request. We process more than 30,000 ILL requests a year, with 6,000-9,000 of those requests being filled from UIUC and I-Share collections without having to be farmed out to one of the “larger” (and more expensive to use) pools beyond I-Share.

The pitch other CIC schools are making for Uborrow is that it makes service to patrons faster for borrowing, but that is not likely to be the case here. We have a 24 hour turnaround time on routing ILL requests, and are the 3^rd fastest ILL fulfillment service in the CIC.

The other reason people want Illinois to become a Uborrow participant for our patrons is that it would commit us to that system and would get Illinois to “throw our weight” behind other CIC activities related to using/integrating UBorrow if we had a dog in the hunt, although Cherie has repeatedly voted for related projects even though we don’t directly benefit.

2. Results of the Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey – Jen-chien Yu

[Distributed document available as additional documents for meeting minutes]

We allowed library faculty to participate in this, and other institutions don’t (or haven’t generally in the past). When Jen ran analyses with and without library faculty in the group, the results didn’t change much, with a few exceptions. Librarians are historically harder on themselves than outside faculty (as multiple other studies like LibQual show). Jen will generate an analysis of the data with the library faculty removed.

If you consider only faculty using and teaching with primary resources, as compared to all faculty, the percentage that view the library as filling that role increases a lot for Teaching Facilitator and Research Supporter.

Jen will have a full session going over this data tomorrow at 1pm.

3. Webscale Implementation –Michael Norman

[Distributed document available as additional documents for meeting minutes]

The Implementation Team has met all the documented milestones for the planned Phase 1 implementation of Primo.

The biggest challenges facing the use/promotion of Primo are:

• Primo has serious problems with relevancy ranking for items in the Primo Central Index (all content that isn’t from a local/harvested source, e.g. the Library Catalog, Ideals, etc.). The Ex Libris focus on full text searching, and not on weighting metadata matches, leads to problematic ranking (especially for topical searches or known item search in particular situations—e.g.  adding an author or date to a publication title as a keyword search resulting in the relevant item being pushed down the result set, instead of moved up, as you would expect).
• We have run into a database/set size problem—on our current hosting environment we are essentially out of space. Adding any significant number of records (any new collections) will require us to move to one of two different hosting solutions, both of which will cost more and are beyond the no-bid limit, requiring an RFP.

For now, the team is done with major development for Primo, pending next steps/decisions on how the library should proceed with Primo specifically or web scale discovery systems in general. The current contract with Ex Libris runs out in October of 2014. An RFP takes 9-12 months, meaning we have roughly two months, at most, to make a decision about how we should proceed.

4. Aeon Update – Beth Sandore

Aeon helps you build a profile of user information (kind of things they want to use when they come on sight, having conversations with curators). It’s more like a Customer Management System. It keeps stats in a more robust way on use than Voyager does.

The Aeon group has submitted their report, and in it they recommend one of the two hosted solutions (one has a larger up front cost). The option that has a larger up-front cost is more attractive if we become heavy Aeon users. The report will be passed on to the budget group and they will make the purchase decision.

5. Digital Collection Management – Sarah Shreeves

Deferred until the next meeting.