NCLA 2019

This poster addresses the challenges facing Collections with born-digital materials that are numerous and seemingly never-ending. From financial support to technical ability and support, born-digital materials, specifically oral histories in this poster, already come with built-in roadblocks and obstacles. What do they offer an institution that would make the work worth it? Oral histories in legacy formats and digital formats offer a link to history and allow users to participate in a first-person narrative; placing that narrative online allows an individual to access and use materials that might not otherwise be available. Increased use and accessibility, higher discoverability, and potential for external funding from users and donors are all reasons to provide an engaging and visually appealing interface for a (traditionally) single-sense object.

The practice of managing collections in all library settings is increasingly more complex and dynamic. From the “bundled packages” of journal titles traditionally marketed by commercial publishers since the 1990s to the latest decision by the University of California system to not renew their journal subscriptions with Elsevier, the times are changing quickly in collection management. The winds of change are blowing all over the world and from Finland to Sweden and California as libraries reassess their collection management practices in terms of shrinking or flat budgets with uncontrollable price increases from publishers.
What is the impact of these current collection trends on libraries in North Carolina? This presentation will highlight the latest events in collection management especially regarding publishing models, open access and the future of managing collections. The session is designed with two parts; a presentation with an overview of collection management (20 minutes) and time for the audience to talk in small break out groups (30 minutes) including a wrap-up by the presenter of what libraries are doing in North Carolina to manage their collections in an era of powerful change.

Technical Services traditionally has focused around regular production, be it of metadata, electronic access points, or newly bound books. Yet projects--work activities that have a definite beginning and end and whose aim is the development of a unique result--make up a large amount of daily work. Migrations to new systems, implementations of new workflows and products, introductions of new types of standards and the clean up that entails, are all projects technical services departments regularly implement. In this session, panelists will share the methods they use to both manage individual projects and keep track of multiple simultaneous projects. This panel will be highly practical, with panelists offering concrete best practices for project management and highlighting tools and techniques that are free and easy to implement.

Libraries are places that support and are supported by their communities. One of the primary ways that community members support their libraries is through donations of books. I embarked on a project to understand the value of donated books compared to the investment of time in processing them. I analyzed 26 years worth of items donated to the NC State University Libraries in an attempt to better understand which types of donations provide the most value to our patrons. The poster will show my technique for assessing these donations, as well as highlight findings from my analysis of circulation and acquisitions data. This project will inform future improvements of our donations processes and workflows. It will also provide examples of how others can perform similar analyses in their own libraries, and inspire a closer look at the value of library book donation programs.

This poster will provide information about the history and the current function of the Federal Highway Administration Research Library.

Terri Ottosen will discuss how implicit bias impacts reference interactions and instruction effectiveness with library users. She will focus on providing consumer health information to users that will be inclusive in terms of race, religion, sexual preference, gender identity, ability, weight, and socioeconomic status. Sarah Jeong will discuss meta-analysis research done on the selective nature of citing research literature, which can favor positive results and result in citation bias. There are many textbooks, patient handouts, and other publications on health sciences topics that use language that may be offensive or even discriminatory in terms of race, religion, sexual preference, gender identity, ability, weight, or socioeconomic status. Karen Grigg will discuss methods collections librarians can use to evaluate implicit bias or self-blaming in health sciences and other science literature in order to guide their purchasing decisions. A rubric created by Karen Grigg and Terri Ottosen to evaluate collections for bias will be distributed.