Tag Archives: Taylor Periodical

Lecture @ UIUC GSLIS

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Yesterday I was able to go to UIUC GSLIS at the invitation of Kathie and Bill Henderson to speak to their Technical Services Functions class. (This is the same class that I teach in online form in UIUC GSLIS’s LEEP curriculum.) They’ve invited me every year for the past 14 years. Each time I go, I thoroughly enjoy the time with their students.

The topic of my talk was “The Times, They Are a Changin…or, How to Thrive in an Age of Chaos and Opportunity in Technical Services Librarianship.” What I try to do is give a quick overview of my career path thus far, and then focus on electronic resources as the “hot” area. We usually spend a lot of time talking about user expectations in this era of the Google Mindset, and how libraries are coping with the demand for online full-text while simultaneously struggling to manage the “traditional” collection. I demo’d the ERM system that we developed at Taylor, known as the Taylor Periodical Administration System (TPAS), and also talked quite a bit about OpenURL and metasearching technologies.

There are about 14 students in this class. Some years the students really get into a good discussion, while other times, they seem content just to listen to a lecture. I prefer interaction and was pleased that this year there were a lot of questions. Especially in recent years, students have expressed some apprehension about the future of technical services librarianship, or uncertainty about job prospects in this specialty. This topic came up tangentially in yesterday’s session. One student asked, given what we had been talking about in terms of the predominance of e-resources and vendor tools that libraries are stuck with, what is stopping vendors from selling or marketing directly to researchers? (We had also been talking quite a bit about Google Scholar.) I thought this was an excellent question. It really asks the question, are libraries relevant anymore? Why should libraries assume they are even part of the equation for information consumers? Have libraries given up way too much ground, ground that they can never expect to recover? Very interesting questions. We spoke about the decision made by libraries about 100 years ago to stop trying to do article-level analytics in their cataloging practice, and how that resulted in the whole development of vendor solutions in the form of abstracting and indexing tools. Those tools have then developed into online form in the last 20 years or so, and then have been developed further to provide aggregated full-text content. We have lost control (if we ever had it) of the means of access to our resources.

Overall it was a very stimulating time and I ran out of time trying to cover everything. I wish we had had all day!

The Henderson’s had made lunch and invited Linda Smith, Associate Dean and one of my former professors, to eat with us. It was nice to chat with them about various things. One of the things I noticed this time in my campus visit was that development of various areas of the campus continues at a rapid pace. Some areas are hardly recognizable anymore, they have changed so much since I was a student there.

PALNI meeting re TPAS

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Yesterday Dan (my library director), Matt (one of the students with whom I work), and I went to Indy to meet with some other libraries within our consortium, PALNI, to demonstrate our periodical management system, which we call TPAS (Taylor Periodical Administration System). I have to admit to quite a bit of nervousness about the whole thing, for a number of reasons. Other libraries represented in the meeting included DePauw, Butler, Concordia, and the University of Indianapolis. There were also folks from INCOLSA in attendance. The meeting went much better than I ever expected. I am really pleased at the level of interest in and appreciation for the software we’ve spent so much time developing locally. There is a real chance that other libraries will implement it and then we can all benefit from not only cooperative use, but also cooperative development of this alternative to a vendor supplied system. I believe quite strongly in the benefits of open source and the positive reaction from other libraries to TPAS gives us the impetus we needed to further develop it to a point where we can make the software freely available as open source via SourceForge.

Periodical Management Systems

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A while ago I mentioned that I had written an article for Serials Review on periodical management systems, and that I had been working for quite some time on such a system at my library. This topic continues to be of interest to a lot of folks. Recently there have been two or three threads on SERIALST related to this issue in which the predominant opinion seems to be that Serials Solutions walks on water. I haven’t used their services — the whole point of developing something locally is/was to do what they or competing services do for cheaper and do it better — but they seem to get consistently good press!

I have a meeting on Friday with a subset of PALNI libraries to demonstrate what we’ve been doing locally with this homegrown system. My hope is that at least a few other libraries within our consortium will join in using it. One good reason is that we all share SFX and the Taylor Periodical Administration System integrates SFX data, making it somewhat distinctive from other setups I’ve read about. My ultimate hope is to make the system freely available as open source because I believe that there are many libraries out there who simply can’t afford services from Serials Solutions, TDNet, Ebsco, and others. I think this is particularly true of many small college and university libraries, as well as some public libraries. A huge amount of credit for the whole system goes to one of my student workers, Matt Wissman, who has worked on it for over two years now. He is really gifted in database design, advanced web development, and other areas, and I am really going to miss him when he graduates next year.