May 19, 2015 Meeting of Library Occasional Reports Series Advisory Group

1.     Welcome and Introductions

2.     Innovation Fund Proposal Review- Lisa

3.     Examples of Potential Documents- Sarah

4.     Information Gathering Process- Emily

5.     Next Steps- Sarah and Emily

6.     Open Discussion

7.     Schedule of Advisory Group Meetings- Lisa

Atoma Batoma, Lisa Hinchliffe, Dan Tracy, Emily Hardesty, Beth Namachchivaya, and Sarah Crissinger

1. Welcome and Introduction

 Lisa welcomed everyone, and each member present introduced themselves to the group.

2. Agenda Review

Lisa briefly explained the items on the agenda for the day.

3. Presentation

Lisa explained that the Occasional Reports Series (ORS) pilot was funded by an Innovation Seed Fund grant and will publish the library’s grey literature that is not easily found. One intended outcome of this series is to help the library get recognized for its work. She mentioned that the project is currently on track to take a year to create but that it also funded by an investigatory grant, which means the series will need to be funded through some other mechanism in the future.

Sarah presented three documents that serve as examples for the kind of reports that will be included in the ORS. She explained that she was looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the documents to help determine the criteria for a document’s placement into the ORS, and she also asked the group if they had any feedback on the documents.

Emily then gave an overview of what she and Sarah have been working on in the beginning of ORS’ creation and explained the various details about the project that required research, including promotion, permanence, work flow, criteria, etc. She also gave a description of what she and Sarah learned from their meetings with Ayla Stein about IDEALS (uploading documents), Maria Bonn (workflow and promotion), Merinda Hensley (OJS vs. WordPress), and Cynthia Ashwill (GSLIS Occasional Papers). Emily also explained that after researching altmetrics and four metric software programs, the group had narrowed their choices down to two: Impact Story and Altmetric. Emily gave details about each program’s cost, layout, and benefits.

Sarah then explained the next steps for creating the ORS, which include setting up the WordPress site, comparing altmetrics programs, setting up IDEALS community, and creating the template, workflow, and criteria for the series.

4. Discussion

Dan suggested researching Impact Story about their current status to see if they are still in business. Beth raised the question of whether or not Altmetric requires a DOI with each item, and she highly recommended using DOIs in Altmetric. Lisa will follow up with Beth, Tom Habing, and the eResearch Committee about making DOIs for this project in IDEALS. Beth also recommended contacting Bill Ingram to see if IDEALS had planned on using a specific altmetrics plan in the future. The group will need to decide if using DOIs will be beneficial to the ORS.

The group discussed how the ORS will remain sustainable in the future and who would be in charge of editing the publications. The group decided that the person who will edit the ORS should be employed at the library for a considerable length of time, such as a librarian or a graduate assistant, as opposed to a GSLIS student through a practicum. The group agreed that the replacement for Sarah Shreeves and also the Head of Publishing could be included in this project.

Lisa then presented two options for numbering the ORS (numerically in order or by year) and asked for the group’s opinion. The group preferred that the title’s date would be the date of report, not the date of publication, but the group agreed that the reports did need to display the original publication dates. Lisa mentioned that the year of publication will need to be included on a template for submitting to the ORS.

The group also discussed which library reports will make it into the ORS. Lisa clarified that not every report will be in this series but that she hopes librarians will offer their work to be published in this series in the future.

To conclude, the group discussed how to communicate with the library and the external library community about the ORS, and it was decided that they could speak to Heather Murphy about creating a style guide for news releases and that they should create a style guide for Tweets. Both of these outlets will require a unique e-mail for this project, which Sarah and Emily will create.

 

Submitted by Emily Hardesty