David Carlson leaving Morris Library

Texas A & M has made an official announcement that they are hiring Morris Library's dean away from SIU. The dean won't start at A & M until July. If all goes well, that should give the library time for a smooth transition.

Dean Carlson will have to be sneaky if he wants to reuse his SIU apparel. Aggie Maroon is not quite the same color as Saluki Maroon.

My Banned Book Reading

The following is the introduction from my presentation at the Banned Books Reading in Morris Library. Following the reading, I received confirmation of the rumor that the request had been for the books to be destroyed. The dean, associate deans, and director at Morris Library have been suggesting alternatives, such as redaction or restricted access, to the University Legal Counsel that would protect the books while also protecting the privacy of students' records. 

The book that I’m reading from is special to me. On the inside cover there’s a bookplate with my name and note that it was put in the book in 2010 in honor of my five years of service to Morris Library. I could have put a book plate in any book in Morris Library outside of Special Collections and thought carefully about which book I would put it in. I sentimentally decided that I would choose a book and if I continued my career at SIU, I would put another book plate in the same book at my 10-year, 15-year and other special anniversaries of my employment. My book is the SIU Personnel Listing, sometimes called the Salary Book. This one in particular is the 2005-2006 Salary Book from when I started working at SIU.

On Tuesday afternoon, I received the following message from an associate dean in the library.

“If you are looking for the Personnel Listings (also known as the Salaries book) that was kept in the office collection, I have all the volumes upstairs.  We have been asked by Legal Counsel to pull these volumes from the shelves because they contain information about student employees (GA’s, TA’s, Research Assts, etc) and this violates FERPA laws.  I am waiting for further information before proceeding.  I will keep you posted.”

I’ve heard rumors that the original request made of the library administration was to destroy these books. I’ve also heard speculation and alternative stories about the reason for this request. Given that the timing of this announcement coincides closely with the timing of strike authorization votes for four unions on campus, union supporters and even some union opponents are wondering whether FERPA is being used to justify hiding other information about salaries on campus.

The odd thing about that conspiracy theory is that the information can cut both ways. The information in the book might lead someone to question the priorities of a university that pays its basketball coach not just more than its chancellor but more than twice as much as its chancellor. But it also might lead someone to question the amounts that the union presidents are paid. In Texas, the kind of information found in the Personnel Listing is being used to publicize the teaching loads of faculty relative to the amounts that they are paid. Quite simply, the salary books contain information to help concerned citizens understand how this public university spends money.

You’ll notice that I’m not going to read directly from the Personnel Listing but rather from a photocopied page of the book. I’ve redacted the graduate students’ information -- partly to protect myself from the trouble I could get into for reading this information and partly to point out that a lot more than just the graduate student information is being hidden by pulling these books and could be lost if the books are destroyed.

University Home Page Update: THANK YOU!

The university's home page now has a link to Morris Library.

Thank you to everyone who encouraged the university to add the library to the home page. I've heard that a few members of the Faculty Senate even spoke with Chancellor Cheng to emphasize how the library contributes to the academic image of the university and to the academic success of our students. Everyone's emails to the Web Advisory Group and the senators' conversations with the chancellor worked.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Banned Book Week

Melissa Hubbard, the main organizer of Morris Library's Banned Book Reading and her co-conspirator, Megan Lotts, had the misfortune of choosing the afternoon of Thursday, September 29 for the event. I call this a misfortune because they may lose some people to the Chancellor's State of the University Address. They scheduled and announced the reading before the address had been announced.

I will be one of the readers. The book that I have selected is one that a patron called the "naughty book" when I helped him access it in the library. One librarian told me that she considered reading from it but didn't "have the balls" to do it.

Are you intrigued yet? If so, come to the reading in the library rotunda next Thursday afternoon from 12:35 to 3:00. Students from a University 101 section will read from banned books from 12:35 to 1:50, and other people will be reading from 1:50 to 3:00. If you would like to read a selection yourself, contact Melissa Hubbard at mhubbard@lib.siu.edu.

How Do I Cite this Citation Management Comparison Table?

I really like Cornell’s table of similarities and differences among RefWorks, Zotero, EndNote, EndNote Web, Mendeley, and Papers. I also enjoy the irony that it has two dates, July 2009 and the last update date, currently March 4, 2011, so it would be difficult to choose the appropriate date to cite this table.

Recently a librarian listserv had a discussion of comparative merits of different citation management tools. A few of the messages pointed out advantages or disadvantages of particular tools. The differences were small. One handled citations with journal abbreviations worse than another. A couple exported references to BibTeX better than the others. The differences would be important for people in specific situations, but they wouldn’t matter much to most people.

I switched from EndNote Web to Zotero for my last paper for my own quirky reason. The version of Word on my office computer didn’t have an up-to-date Cite While You Write plug-in. I could install the Zotero add-in to Word without administrator privileges, but I would have had to contact a system administrator to install the one for EndNote Web. Administrator privileges aren’t a make-or-break concern for people on their own computers, but it mattered to me.

When students ask me which citation management tool is best, I honestly say that I don’t know. I usually suggest that their field, and so they can find other people in the department when they run into (inevitable?) technical glitches. I’m just glad that they are asking. I can’t imagine how someone could study for comprehensive exams or write a dissertation without something to help keep track of what they’ve read and to take care of most of the citation formatting.

Anthroplogists Study Students and the Library

Some colleges and universities in Illinois have worked with anthropologists to study library use. This study is one of several that come on the heels of the University of Rochester study. Their results are that both librarians and faculty expect college students to be more thoughtful, skilled, dedicated researchers than they are.

Their results match my experience, so I'm surprised at their surprise. Someone who is 20 years old today does not have much of a memory of a time Before Google (B.G.). The whole frame of mind about how search is supposed to work completely different from what an "old fogy" like me expects. I've tried to explain how sparse the information in the library's catalog is compared to what Google pulls off a Web site and why it requires a different mindset. I think it just gave them the impression that the library catalog and paper books are a lot of bother.

The one statement that troubles me is, "Librarians tend to overestimate the research skills of some of their students, which can result in interactions that leave students feeling intimidated and alienated, say the ERIAL researchers." Comments on my teaching evaluations sometimes say that the information I present is too basic, but at the information desk, I see students struggle with things that I think should be easy. I'm still trying to find the sweet spot: not too easy and not too difficult.

I'm Celebrating a Subtle Change in the Catalog

A few weeks ago, Morris Library reintroduced "Location Codes" to the online catalog. I'm celebrating because the new limits let me narrow my search results down to just things that are available in the Morris Library building. When I help someone at 9 PM who has a paper due at 8 AM the next day, the limit will be much better than the tricks I had been using.

The location limit (marked in maroon) appears in the right-hand section of the results page in I-Share.

I won't break out the champagne until the books in McLafferty are back in the Morris Library building, but this change is good enough to merit some chocolate. 

How to Find Morris Library's Web Site

The most popular way for people to access Morris Library's Web site is by going directly to http://lib.siu.edu, but about 12-15% of the library's site visits came from the link on the siuc.edu  home page for the university. It rivaled Google's 11-17% as the second most popular way to get to the site.

The library does not have a link on the university's home page right now. It's hard to find the library on second level pages such as "Academics," so the most efficient way currently to get to the library from the university's home page is to type library in the search box on the upper right hand corner, being careful to remove "SEARCH..." from the box.

If you are in the 12-15%, I hope this helps.

Special Librarianship Research: We're Number 32!

The July / August issue of Information Outlook has a list of U.S. universities ranked by number of articles published in 2000 - 2010 for subject specialist librarians. To create the list, Amy Hardin and Tony Stankus counted the number of substantial articles librarians had published in fourteen journals. The fourteen journals were in special librarianship areas such as medicine, law and music.

I already knew that SIUC would be on the list. SIUC comes in at number thirty-two with twenty articles. A lot of the credit for this rank goes to the librarians at the law school for publishing in law journals. There's also plenty of credit to go around at Morris Library. Mary Taylor was a coauthor of four articles in medical librarianship journals. Cassie Wagner, Beth Cox, Andrea Imre and I were authors or coauthors of two articles each in special librarianship journals. Jonathan Nabe, Melissa Hubbard, and Ann Myers also have written articles in these journals.

Are you a Physicist who Compulsively Checks for Reviewer Comments? There's an App for that!

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) just announced iPeerReview. It’s an app to make it easier for authors and reviewers to access AIP's manuscript submission system from an Apple mobile device. 

My first thought, probably because I'm curmudgeonly, was that a mobile device is not the right tool for the careful thought that peer review should receive. On second thought, it could be useful at times. When a reviewer gets the notice that a deadline for returning a review is fast approaching, s/he can act on it immediately. An author who is eagerly awaiting the reviewer comments can find out whether the news is good or bad as soon as s/he gets the message that the comments are in. As someone who submitted an article at the beginning of summer and who is hoping to get the comments before school starts, I know that urge.

PDA found in the Cornerstone

No, the library isn’t giving away Blackberries to readers of its Cornerstone newsletter. No, the latest Cornerstone doesn't have a picture of a couple getting intimate in the stacks. This PDA is Patron Driven Acquisition. Dean Carlson’s column describes two kinds of “patron-initiated on-demand acquisitions” that the library has for books.

PDA is different from a “suggest a purchase” form because there’s less librarian involvement in the purchase decision. At the outset, a librarian decides on parameters such as the price range and the types of books to include for PDA. After that, library users pick the books. When someone requests a book on interlibrary loan or when an electronic book crosses some threshold on how much it is used, the purchase happens.

The idea didn’t make it into the Chronicle of Higher Education until late last year because it’s becoming popular lately. Even at Morris Library, the idea has been around for a few years. By definition, books selected this way are going to be used by someone at least once. Moreover, within certain limits, being used in the past is one of the better predictors of whether a library book will be used in the future. 

Most libraries that I’ve heard about, including Morris, are only setting aside a fraction of their book budget for PDA. Even though programs have been popular, librarians are hesitant to jump in with both feet. One concern is whether this approach produces coherent collections that will be valuable over the long term. Another concern is that PDA mainly is sold for electronic books.

PDA for electronic books brings in all of the problems that electronic books currently have. Basic functions of print books are missing from many electronic library books. Being able to skim and browse without DRM blocking you, being able to print or copy a few pages for personal use, or being able to send a book on interlibrary loan are often (usually?) missing from electronic library books. At one of the sessions of the SLA conference, a speaker described licensing for e-books as “a jungle.”

If you want to know more about how “patron-initiated on-demand acquisitions” has worked at Morris Library, Andrea Imre and Jonathan Nabe have posted some conference presentations about it.

Why don’t we have volunteers bring the books back?

Every couple of months, I see something in the comments section of a blog or a news article that asks why Morris Library can’t just have volunteers bring the books, all the books back from the McLafferty Annex. Aside from all of the issues with liability, loss, misshelving, and the scale of such a move, there’s an obvious reason that it isn’t happening. The basement of Morris Library, where the books are to go, does not have shelves. Despite all of the people who have been to the basement for events or tornado warnings, this information still is not widely known.

In case you don’t believe me, here are some photographs of the unfinished parts of the library.

The basement has space for shelves but no shelves.

The sixth floor needs more work than the basement.

The seventh floor looks a lot like the sixth. 

Morris Library after Midnight

The north end of Morris Library will be open all night for SIUC students Sun. - Thurs. this fall. The possibility to open part of the library late at night without having the entire building open was part of the building design when it was renovated a few years ago. Morris Library had been cutting back on late night hours because there wasn't enough money to have enough staff to monitor all of the floors late at night nor interest in having lots of security cameras instead of staff. The extended hours area at the north end of the library has study and computer space but does not have print books or other physical library materials that would need to be protected.

According to the article in The Southern, Chancellor Cheng comments on this change were, "Institutions that have high quality and rigorous programs, like SIU, must provide appropriate opportunities for on campus and off campus students to study individually and in small groups in a quiet and safe setting." I'm not sure if the extended hours area will live up to that. It already is a challenge for the library to be simultaneously as welcoming, busy, and quiet as everyone would like. The quiet part is especially hard. For example, the UIUC Undergrad Library at 12:13 AM is busy, but it is not quiet.

Big Deals and Opportunity Costs

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article recently the decision at Morris Library and other libraries to drop out of ‘Big Deals.’ David Fowler and Jonathan Nabe gave a conference presentation about the topic, and the article was based largely on that presentation.

Both the Chronicle article and the subsequent comments emphasize the raw dollar cost of the deals and of dropping out of them. Some of the comments note that when they examined their usage statistics, they realized that it would cost more to offer the same level of access to journals in their Big Deal if they dropped out.

When the inflation rate for journals outstrips inflation and the library’s collections budget lags behind inflation, it means the library is going to offer less of something. In the last decade, there were big cuts to the journals outside the Big Deals. It had reached the point that not dropping out of the Big Deal would amount to cancelling subscriptions to important journals from societies and small publishers that weren’t in a position to have a Big Deal.

If you think that the library should have cut something other than journals, please keep in mind that from 2004-2005 to 2008-2009, the serials spending at Morris Library, the Law Library, and the Medical Library in Springfield went from $5.5 million to $6 million. The total (non-capital) library expenditures for that same time went from $14.6 million to $15.2 million. A lot of the cuts already were coming from something other than journal subscriptions. (These numbers come from the ARL Statistics and are not constant dollars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator, $14.6 million in 2005 is $16 million in 2009 dollars).

We were not looking at how much it would cost to keep the same level of access; it was looking at what loss of access would be the least painful. 

Higher Impact Factor this Year than Last - So What?

Thomson Reuters recently announced that the newest Impact Factors are available. Soon after, I received emails from journal publishers bragging that their Impact Factors had gone up this year compared to last year. My response to these emails was to roll my eyes. According to the documentation, "The journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year." It isn't exactly that, because it only counts the times that the articles are cited by other sources in Thomson Reuters' database, but that's not my problem with bragging about an Impact Factor going up. My problem is that Impact Factors in general have been going up because reference lists have been getting longer. I would be much happier if journals would advertise that they'd gone up in the Impact Factor rankings for their subject areas than if they advertised something as empty as the raw number going up. Although it wouldn't solve all of the problems with interpreting what a boost in Impact Factor means, it would be an improvement over the raw number.

By the way, if you heard somewhere that citations were going down, you may have gotten it from the article in Science by James Evans. Its abstract certainly suggests that by stating, "I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles." The article itself makes it clear, though, that the number of citations went up over time. It says, "In each subsequent year from 1965 to 2005, more distinct articles were cited from journals and subfields. The pool of published science is growing, and more of it is archived in the CI each year. Online availability, however, has not driven this trend." In essence, Evans is saying that the growth in citations and in citation diversity was slowed rather than created with online availability, not that it was reversed.

What I Learned at SLA: Mathematicians Publishing and Collaboration

At the SLA conference, Kris Fowler presented results of a survey of mathematicians that she conducted. She used Web of Science to find people who had published in mathematics journals and contacted a random sample of them for an online survey.

She had a lot of findings about how people used online tools and collaborated online. One of her big findings was about open access journals coming of age. The mathematicians' reasons for choosing one journal or another were basically the same regardless of whether the journal was open access or subscription. Open access journals weren't just for open access die hards. About a third of the mathematicians indicated that they had published in an open access journal. The main reasons for choosing to submit to a particular journal had to do with reputation and audience, with open access way down on the list for importance.

The survey included a follow-up question asking people who published in open access journals to write the name(s) of the open access journal(s). About a quarter of the journals the mathematicians listed were not open access journals. If I heard correctly, this was much better than a previous survey (not necessarily of mathematicians), in which two thirds of the "open access" journals that people listed were not actually open access.


I liked her presentation a lot. She gathered information beyond just her own library or own institution and did it without having a big grant. Apparently other people also liked what she did. Aside from the article she's preparing to submit to a peer-reviewed journal, she's slated to provide a write-up in Notices of the AMS.

Research from Morris Library: We're Grrreat ... or at Least Pretty Good

On June 13, SIU was honored at the SLA conference. SIU is one of the top 50 university libraries for research productivity in special librarianship.

From the email announcement that I got from Tony Stankus, "...we are announcing the roll call of honor of the top 50 universities which  contributed the most papers to the literature of special librarianship from 2000-2010, based on an analysis of the author affiliations of over 2,000 papers of substantive research or professional commentary in the eleven most cited journals in these areas, using procedures adapted from Wiberley, Hurd & Weller (College & Research Libraries 46(4): 334-342; 2006)
       Using the US News & World Report listings of over 1400 institutions of higher education as our baseline,  we calculate that your presence on the top 50 list places you in the highest 4% of the country in terms of scholarly productivity in this area, something I am sure would not greatly surprise you."

I missed the award ceremony, so I don't know where in the top fifty we fell. In other rankings of research in library and information science, SIU hasn't made it to the top ten for published articles but made it to the top ten for conference presentations.

I would quibble with the statement that being in the top 50 puts us in the highest 4% of scholarly productivity. The 1400 institutions in the US News listings include about a thousand colleges and universities no publications. Nevertheless, even being in the top quarter says something about the faculty in Library Affairs.

Citation Counts Part 1 of many...

A couple years ago, one of my ideas for an article was to collect tricks for citation counting together in one place and publish it. I worked on it for a while, but it just didn’t seem like something worthy of publication in a journal. In addition, when I would reread my outlines, I was bothered by how cynical it sounded. One of my colleagues recently suggested that I put together a workshop on the topic.

To get started on planning a workshop, I’m going to put the pieces together here.

To start, there was a news article this week that bugged me. There isn’t enough detail in the article to know for sure what happened, but I have my suspicions.

Jeffrey Litwin took the amount of money that universities received for research and divided it by the number of journal articles from those universities. That gave him average cost per paper. Then he ranked the universities.

Some of the “least productive” universities in dollars per publication were Texas A & M, Carnegie Mellon, North Carolina State, and MIT. These colleges are known for their engineering programs. Patents and secret research conducted for the military don’t get included in Litwin’s paper count, so it’s a penalty for universities with a lot of that kind of research under Litwin’s method.

Litwin’s data came from Thomson Reuters. The news articles don’t say exactly how he got them. Assuming Litwin used the Web of Science data, though, there may be a hidden penalty from in Web of Science’s choice of which journals to include or exclude. Web of Science is not perfectly even in its journal coverage for every discipline. I’m not sure it would be possible for it to be perfectly even.

Are You Being Served?

Morris Library used the LibQual+ Lite instrument to conduct a survey of the campus community about how the library is doing. The results have been posted in the OpenSIUC for all to see. The library did this as part of a larger strategic planning process to help us establish priorities for the next few years.