Library Staff Papers and Publications

After migrating to Ex Libris’s Alma and Primo for its integrated library system (ILS) and discovery layer, library staff at Simon Fraser University (SFU) maintained duplicate database information in a locally developed electronic resources management (ERM) system known as the CUFTS ERM for fifteen months. The CUFTS ERM provided the data for the library’s public-facing database list known as the CUFTS resource database (CRDB). A database search function had been on Ex Libris’s Primo roadmap for product development and was announced six months after the library went live with Alma and Primo. However, the new Primo database search function lacked the ability to replace the CRDB. Members of the library’s ILS Steering Committee who managed Alma and Primo were concerned about significant negative impacts on end-users if the library adopted the Primo database search function to replace the CRDB. The steering committee formed a task group to investigate options for creating a database list from Alma records to reduce duplication of staff time and effort, and systems resources, and to replicate the main functions of the existing CRDB for end-user discovery and access.

This chapter presents an approach for assessing information literacy skills based on the principles of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Much has been written on how to teach the Framework but little research has been conducted on student assessment. The authors created an information literacy unit for third year Computing Science students that covered concepts from two Frames, Authority is Constructed and Contextual and Scholarship as Conversation. The unit included two workshops and a written assignment. Researchers qualitatively coded the written assignment responses, looking for written evidence of a student demonstrating a “knowledge practice” or “disposition” of a Frame. They then aggregated the codes into four learning outcomes.  Results indicate that 94% of students achieved LO1, identifying markers of authority; 70% achieved LO2, challenging authority; 37% achieved LO3, acknowledging scholarly conversations; 18% achieved LO4, demonstrating metacognition in their search behaviour. These results suggest that a higher proportion of students have difficulty understanding more complex information literacy concepts. This study emphasizes the need for information literacy instruction to undergraduate students as well as further research in effective assessment practices. 

This article presents a case study for developing course journals, an approach to student writing and publishing that involves students in the production of an online, open access journal within a structured classroom environment. Simon Fraser University (SFU) Library’s Digital Publishing program has partnered with instructors in four different departments across the university to implement course journals in their classrooms using Open Journal Systems. Two models of course journals have emerged, both of which offer valuable learning opportunities for students around scholarly communications, information literacy, and open pedagogy. In Model 1, students act as both authors who write and submit their work for publication in the course journal and as reviewers who referee each other’s submitted work. In Model 2, students act as the course journal editors, crafting the course journal’s call for papers, soliciting content, recruiting reviewers, and managing the editorial workflow from submission to publication. This article discusses challenges and opportunities of both models as well as strategies for smooth implementation and collaboration with classroom instructors.

An important facet of the long-term usability of digital content is the trustworthiness of preservation metadata as it is migrated across successive generations of preservation platforms, accompanying the content it describes. There exists little investigation into and few practical examples of the implications of replacing preservation platforms, and on interchangeability of preservation metadata across platforms. PREMIS is a widely implemented standard for expressing metadata to support the preservation of digital objects and ensure their long-term usability. Like most standards, PREMIS has undergone some major revisions as well. This presentation addresses these issues in the context of concurrent migrations from Islandora version 7 to Islandora version 8 and from PREMIS version 2 to PREMIS version 3.

This session will introduce Ecocycle Planning as a qualitative method for collaboratively assessing a collection or portfolio of activities in order to understand the work as a whole, and to pinpoint blockages and opportunities for renewal. Ecocycle Planning is one of a collection of facilitation techniques called Liberating Structures, which are designed to be inclusive and to disrupt conventional or stale practices of working in groups. Liberating Structures can be employed in any situation that involves people working together, and many of them can be used or adapted for everyday evaluation and assessment practices. In Ecocycle Planning, a team or group works together to identify their work activities, projects, and initiatives, and position them within the ecocycle (birth, maturity, creative destruction, renewal). The exercise facilitates the team’s explorations of how to balance activities, set priorities, and identify opportunities for freeing up resources. The structure enables participation from every member of the team, and lets group members see their own work in the context of the team as a whole. In this workshop, participants will learn the essential design elements that make Liberating Structures successful. They will also understand how to facilitate Ecocycle Planning to assess a team’s activities and programs, and to develop strategies for using it with their working groups, teams, units, and collaborators.

Awareness of faculty research interests is an important aspect of a subject librarian's responsibilities. This paper illustrates the potential of Voyant Tools, an application in wide use among digital humanities researchers, to reveal word patterns in the research output of applied science faculty. A corpus of recent article citations from Web of Science from two engineering departments was obtained, and the articles' title field was extracted and uploaded to the application. The exercise indicated that articles on fuel cells dominates the research output of one department, and articles on optical coherence tomography dominates the other. Both the corpus of citations and its visualizations in Voyant Tools contribute to librarians' knowledge of their departments and historical spending patterns on specialized resources. This knowledge can be used in professional practice, including collection development and instruction. As academic subject areas become increasingly complex and multidisciplinary, this paper encourages librarians to engage with Voyant Tools to better understand the specialized language and concepts of these evolving fields.

As the Liaison Program continues to evolve in response to Library and University priorities, this brief survey is intended to:

- Identify and assess the strengths and challenges of the liaison program model;

- Elicit ways in which liaison librarians would like support in their roles;

- Determine the degree to which the liaison model and current liaison activities meet the emerging needs of the Library.

This 30 question survey was distributed online using SurveyMonkey to SFU liaison librarians (departmental and functional) in May 2018. Not all questions were mandatory, and librarians were told that their responses would remain anonymous. We received a total of 27 responses to the survey.

As the SFU Library Liaison Program continues to evolve in response to Library and University priorities, this brief survey is one element in a multi-faceted, continual evaluation process that intends to provide a snapshot of the overall program from the liaison librarians' perspective, as well as to identify 1) areas of success, 2) issues that require further investigation, and 3) new areas of growth emerging in the work.This 23 question survey was distributed online using FluidSurveys to SFU liaison librarians (departmental and functional) in May 2017. Not all questions were mandatory, and librarians were told that their responses would remain anonymous. We received a total of 24 responses to the survey, 21 of which were complete.

This paper aims to add to conversations on access, diversity, and representation in libraries by addressing the importance of language as a factor in library service and providing some of the first data on library workers’ language skills. Much of the literature on language in libraries focuses on issues of multilingual access and collection development, and there is less emphasis on the roles of staff and language skills in providing and mediating access. As well, while US librarians are less diverse than US library workers and the wider population in terms of gender and race, it has not been shown whether the same holds true in terms of language.

A pilot study of staff from three US public libraries sought to address these gaps in knowledge about staff language skills and representation and to generate further lines of inquiry. Responses were compared with US Census data to determine linguistic representation relative to the service population. The results indicated that while staff surveyed were more likely than the wider population to know another language besides English, they were not likely to use that language on the job, and those who did use a language besides English often reported low fluency. Responses also showed differences in language knowledge and use between staff with and without MLIS degrees. The results highlight the differences between language knowledge, fluency, and usage, offer implications for library service and professional values, and suggest many future directions for research.