Library Staff Papers and Publications

This study presents an overview of web-scale discovery service adoption in Canadian academic libraries. Web-scale discovery services (WSDS) have been widely embraced in Canadian academic libraries. EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) is the most adopted system for colleges and institutes while Primo Central from Ex Libris dominates the university market for web-scale discovery services. Bundling web-scale discovery services with library services platform (LSP) implementations are increasing in Canada. This study shows that Canadian academic libraries that have migrated from a traditional integrated library system (ILS) to an LSP have also opted for their LSP vendor’s corresponding web-scale discovery service. As more Canadian academic libraries implement an LSP bundled with a web-scale discovery service, there may come a time when web-scale discovery services are no longer separated from discussions on LSPs. The choices available for LSP and web-scale discovery services are shrinking due to vendor mergers and acquisitions in this area.

Fligstein's and MacAdam's Theory of Fields was used to analyze how Access Copyright lost its incumbent advantage in the traditionally stable field of copyright administration in Canadian post-secondaries and why that field is still unsettled today. Theory of Fields considers actions rather than motives and explains how a field moves into crisis using the concepts of: strategic action fields composed of incumbents (Access Copyright) and challengers (post-secondaries); external shocks to a field (e.g. court rulings); the social skill of the actors, particularly how an inability to envision alternatives leads to prolonged disruption. A field enters a crisis when the challenger(s) or incumbent act in ways which causes others to attempt to disrupt the status quo. Through interviews with copyright professionals and administrators actively involved at the beginning of the period of contention (2010-2012), analysis of institutional communications and records, and analysis of judicial and tribunal decisions, I used the Theory of Fields to analyze the actions of groups in the field of post-secondary copyright management and in proximate fields such as government and the courts. This approach moves us away from hyperbole and the "us against them" paradigm with its oversimplifications of "Access Copyright got too greedy" and "universities are trying to rip off creators". The presentation, using the Theory of Fields, will demonstrate how the actions of Access Copyright and of organizations like AUCC (now Universities Canada) led post-secondaries to challenge the status quo and how a series of actions/reactions, along with a lack of skilled social action by both incumbents and challengers, naturally brought us to the current period of contention in copyright management in the post-secondary environment.

Information literacy (IL) is fundamentally important for CS students and graduates who are required to write research papers and stay abreast of new technologies and ideas. However, IL is absent in CS curriculum guidelines and the literature is scarce on research focused on IL skills among CS students. In this paper, we discuss aspects of IL and introduce the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education in the context of an undergraduate CS course covering social issues. We share how we used the Framework as the basis of our learning activities, which included lectures, a reading, and an assignment in which students reflected on core ideas pertaining to IL. We analyzed responses from the assignment to assess whether students achieved our learning outcomes. Nearly all students recognized markers of scholarly authority, but fewer students achieved learning outcomes based on more abstract concepts. We provide recommendations on incorporating IL activities in CS courses, and encourage explicit interventions to improve CS students' IL skills.

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.