Hey Vendors, Do You Really Understand Your Marketplace?

Both Sides Now: Vendors and Librarians — Hey Vendors, Do You Really Understand Your Marketplace?

Column Editor: Michael Gruenberg (Managing Partner, Gruenberg Consulting, LLC) <michael.gruenberg@verizon.net> www.gruenbergconsulting.com

One of the great joys of having a consulting business is that one never knows what project or question will unearth itself each day. Since I spent the majority of my sales management years working for a number of major information industry com panies, my daily plans were pretty much set for me. Customer/prospect meetings with the sales reps, preparation of sales projections and analysis for my manager, trips to the home office, etc., were all part of a daily, monthly, yearly schedule. Same stuff; different day pretty much sums it up.

In my current role as an independent con sultant, the opportunities presented to me for my consultation usually involve Negotiation Skills classes for librarians and vendors, speaking about my book at various library meetings and of course, sales force assessment. Although recently, I was asked by a librarian friend of mine to take some time to speak to a particular vendor. She wanted me to talk to them about that vendor’s inability to understand a new marketplace where they were trying to sell their product.

Apparently, the vendor in question has a product that is being used in the library market on a corporate library level. In attending the various ALA and SLA meetings they noticed that the University market had potential for their data and decided to immediately call on libraries at Universities with little success. As is so often the case, the intent is good, but the execution of the task left much to be desired. Apparently, the vendor did not understand there is a vast difference between selling the same product to corporate as opposed to public sector.

My background in the information industry began with selling microfiche copies of doc uments filed at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by public companies. That morphed into the information to be sold being contained on CDs and then of course, online. Our company was based in New York, so at the outset of my sales career I was given a territory of accounts to sell in NYC and in addition I was responsible for a territory in New England. Banks, financial companies, brokers were my prime prospects. Unfortunately, many of those “prospects” in New York were customers already so they didn’t need to see me unless I had some thing new to sell. And the ones that remained seemed uninterested. I exhausted my prospect list in the city and set off for New England.

Given that there were few, if any large financial institutions in Vermont, New Hamp shire and Maine, I concentrated my efforts in Boston. So, on a regular basis I took the air shuttle from New York to Boston to sell my wares. And although I had some minor victories in selling there, my overall performance was less than stellar.

On a particular rainy and cold November afternoon that saw many a door closed on my smiling face, I ducked into the public library on my way to catch the T out to the airport. While warming up and drying out in the library, I no ticed that they had a significant paper collection or corporate reports. To make a long story short, I convinced the librarian that I was the person to help convert all those reports from paper to fiche, by doing so, I would save the library a ton of money and the collection would now be complete for all their users. The order was forthcoming I was told.

Flying home that afternoon, I was quite pleased with myself. I turned a negative day into a positive one with an apparent order that would ensure my employment with the company. That joy turned into grief when I realized that the public library was not in my territory. I learned early on in my sales career that a sales rep’s territory is as sacred as marriage, family and sports affiliation. In actuality, I sold to a prospect not in my territory. As the plane descended into LaGuardia that evening at dusk, I saw my commission ascending up and out of my needy pockets. Yikes! What was I to do?

In sales parlance, we say that commissions are paid on “signed orders” not “mind orders” which means that unless you present the com pany with an order that is approved by the customer in your assigned territory, it really doesn’t exist. I knew that the order that I was about to secure would not be mailed into the NY office for a few days. This would give me time to contact some universities and public libraries to ascertain if there really was a market for our data. If my premise was correct that such a demand truly existed, then I could present myself to my boss as the person to sell in this market especially since there was no one else on staff interested in this position. If I were to become the Public Sector salesperson, I would have new territory and be paid a fat commission for my magnificent sale.

In the song, “Up on Cripple Creek” by the Band, the phrase “good luck had just stung me” comes to mind because that week, a significant order came in through the mail from a major University library in New York, without the assistance of a sales rep. With that order and my soon to arrive order, I felt that I had good standing to ask my boss to create that territory and give me that market to sell our data.

I did the research by calling various uni versity libraries, visiting the ones in New York and started the process to ascertain what they would buy, why they would buy it and what they expected to pay for the service the com pany was able to provide. When the public library order came in, I presented my case to my boss and the rest, as they say was “history.” I became the first Public Sector salesperson for the company,

With my new role, I deepened myself in learning the intricacies of the public sector mar ket and as a result, became the most successful salesperson in the history of the company. There was no question about that market that I couldn’t answer and I knew that the customers appreciated my diligence in learning about their needs and budgets.

All of which brings us back to the vendor who wanted to sell to a university library, but did not have the wherewithal to understand that market. So there are a number of steps a vendor should take when undertaking the task of sell ing their product into a new market. Clearly, the thought process for the vendor in this case was good because it is always wise to expand the universe of potential buyers. However, expanding the potential market is one thing, successful expansion is yet another. You don’t just expand for the sake of expanding. Careful research has to be part of the process.

At the outset of the proposed expansion is realizing that “you know that you don’t know.” That means you realize that you need to learn something new. In my business career, I was never leery of people who knew that they didn’t know. On the other hand, it was tough to deal with people who didn’t know that they didn’t know and thus, were unable to learn.

Other than hire a consultant such as me to educate them, a vendor looking to sell in a new market needs to talk to the target audience about their needs. Not the needs that the vendor envi sions, but the needs as defined by the potential customer. Too often, companies go through elaborate machinations in developing a new product or service without first analyzing the market potential and speaking to the very people to whom they will target their sales projections. So the first step is to talk to your market. An added benefit that results from talking to your new market is that it helps develop a stronger relationship between the library and the vendor. And after all, relationship selling is the key to success for any seller. And libraries are always open to the concept of helping a vendor improve their offering to the library community.

Secondly, the vendor has to understand that the sales cycle for selling to the public sector is vastly different from selling to the corporate sector. Having false expectations of the time it takes to prospect, present, follow-up and close the order will frustrate both the sales rep and their manager. It will probably take more time to close an order when selling to a university or public library as opposed to a corporate sale.

Pricing is yet another consideration. Many information companies in the information in dustry that sell their data to both public sector and corporate markets realize that by providing

their product to students on an undergraduate and graduate level they are in fact, training those students on the use of their data with the expectation that when those students enter the job market, they will request those resources at their new job. So it is in the best interest of both parties to offer the university library their product at a reduced cost from what would be charged in other markets. This acknowledges the funding difficulties faced by most univer sity libraries, gets the vendors product into the library and begins to train those students on the virtues of the data as presented by the company.

And finally, the most important part involves the people that must be hired to sell in the public sector market. Sales reps in the information industry that sell to corporate libraries need to be differentiated from the ones selected to sell to universities and public libraries. I have seen over the years companies making the mistake of saying their reps can sell in all markets. Usual ly, that is not the case. To ensure success, hire people familiar with the markets you want to sell in. If you hire the right people, the vendor has a good chance of success.

As a post script to the story, I contacted the sales rep who was working for the vendor in question. We had a few conversations, but in the end, he told me that his manager did not want to invest the time and money to learn more about the public sector market. At the last conversation that I had with my university librarian friend who suggested that I speak to the vendor, a sale had not been consummated.

In closing the song that best describes my thoughts on the topic at hand that ran though my mind as I wrote this column for ATG was from the musical, “The King and I” written by Rodgers and Hammerstein as sung by Julie Andrews, “Getting to Know You.” The lyrics say “Getting to know you; getting to know all about you; get ting to like you; getting to hope you like me.” Sounds simple, but the first rule in successful selling is to create a positive relationship with the customer and getting to know about them to understand their needs and fulfill them.

Mike is currently the Managing Partner of Gruenberg Consulting, LLC, a firm he founded in January 2012 after a successful career as a senior sales executive in the information industry. His firm is devoted to provide clients with sales staff analysis, market research, executive coaching, trade show preparedness, product placement and best practices advice for improving negotiation skills for librarians and salespeople. His book, “Buying and Selling Information: A

Guide for Information Professionals and

Salespeople to Build Mutual Success” has become the definitive book on negotiation skills and is available on Amazon, Information Today in print and eBook, Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, Kobo, Apple iBooks, OverDrive, 3M Cloud Library, Gale (GVRL), MyiLibrary, ebrary, EBSCO, Blio, and Chegg. www.

gruenbergconsulting.com

Being Earnest with Collections — Advancing Textbook Affordability: Considerations for Open and Affordable Course Materials

by Ariana E. Santiago (Open Educational Resources Coordinator, University of Houston, 4333 University Drive, Houston, TX, 77204) <asantiago2@uh.edu>

Column Editor: Michael A. Arthur (Associate Professor, Head, Resource Acquisition & Discovery, The University of Alabama Libraries, Box 870266, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487; Phone: 205-348-1493) <maarthur@ua.edu>

Column Editor’s Note: This edition of Being Earnest with Collections explores Open Educational Resources and the challenges libraries face when trying to help address the high costs associated with textbooks. In the article, Ariana Santiago has provided ATG readers with an overview of the project she has lead at the University of Houston. She provides comparisons between OER and library funded resources, outlines the pros and cons, and provides practical advice for other libraries considering similar programs. OER has been explored here at The University of Alabama though we have not stepped in at the level seen in Houston. On a personal note, I have known Ariana for several years and remember when she made the decision to become a librarian. She has now moved from being in a staff level position at the University of Central Florida to her current role as an up and coming leader in our profession. I am happy to have this contri bution to the Being Earnest with Collections column. I am sure others will find some key takeaways from this article. — MA

Textbook costs are widely recognized in higher education as a significant burden to students, preventing many from being able to access required course materials. A solution to this problem that is seeing growing success is to replace costly textbooks with open educational resources (OER) — learning materials made freely available via open licenses — so that all students benefit from having immediate access to resources that support their academic success. Along with OER, many replace traditional textbooks with other resources that are freely available to students, though are not openly-licensed, such as journals, eBooks, and other resources licensed through the library, and websites, videos, and other resources that are freely-available online. Should an institution’s OER program focus on resources that are truly OER, or be inclusive of non-OER resources (which will be referred to here as “affordable course content”)?

Grant programs, often spearheaded by the academic library, have emerged as a leading strategy in encouraging adoption of OER or affordable course content in order to eliminate textbook costs. There is wide variety in the scope and structure of such grant programs, including whether they are intended only for OER adoption or are inclusive of non-OER affordable resources. For example, the University of Arkansas OER Course Materials Conversion Program offers faculty “extra compensation funding to encourage moving from high cost commercially published textbooks to open educational resources (OER)” at three different levels, distinguished by whether the faculty adopt, adapt, or create OER (University of Arkansas, 2019). Miami University also focuses its program on OER adoption, offering professional development funds to faculty who replace traditional required materials with OER and assess the impact on course outcomes and student learning (Miami University, n.d.). Others, like Kansas State University’s Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative, provide funding for the adoption of “free alternatives to traditional print textbooks,” which can include any combination of open access textbooks, library resources, OER, multimedia resources found on the open web, or faculty-authored materials (Kansas State University, 2019). Similarly, the University of Oklahoma’s Alternative Textbook Grant can be applied towards the adoption of OER or library resources, though they specify that grants for library resource use are “applied to the purchase of multiple concurrent licenses” rather than awarded to faculty directly (University of Oklahoma, 2019). Many more examples are available in the “OER & Textbook Affordability Initiatives” document created by Grand Valley State University Libraries (Yahne, J., Rander, J., and Ruen, M., n.d.).

At the University of Houston, our Alternative Textbook Incentive Program (ATIP) takes a broad approach to resource type, awarding instructors for replacing required commercial textbooks with adoption, adaptation, or creation of OER, assembly of library-sponsored or freely available resources, or any combination thereof (University of Houston Libraries, n.d.). Launched in 2018, our incentive program is new and growing: in the first two ATIP cohorts, we have awarded thirty-nine alternative textbook projects which will result in an estimated student savings of over $960,000 by the end of the 2019-20 academic year. As an institution that has recently implemented a grant program to advance textbook affordability, we have seen some benefits and drawbacks to both OER and affordable course content. Based continued on page 76

on our experience with ATIP, I offer thoughts on how these resource types impact adoption and implementation, with considerations for why your institution might support OER, affordable course content, or both. Flexibility in Implementation

A significant benefit of OER is the flexibility provided by open licenses, as they offer automatic permission to use the content in a variety of ways. The permissions allowed by open licenses are often referred to as the “5R activities” (Wiley, n.d.), which are the abilities to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. These permissions allow faculty the flexibility to incorporate content into their course without the barrier of understanding how to comply with complex copyright terms. For example, the permission to redistribute allows OER to be shared with all students, whether by distributing printed copies, uploading document files in the learning management system, or sharing links to the resources — abilities which cannot be assumed with material protected under traditional “all rights reserved” copyright. The ability to reuse content ensures that it can be utilized for a variety of purposes — for example, assigned as course readings, incorporated into class activities or assignments, used for study purposes, and other innovative uses that may be restricted or constrained by vendor licenses for library content.

These permissions, along with the ability to retain the content, greatly benefit students by granting free and perpetual access to the material without violating copyright. This has immediately practical implications; for example, students have access to course materials on the first day of class, can download copies to their personal devices for use when they don’t have reliable internet access, and can keep the material to refer back to after the course has concluded, all of which further students’ potential for academic success. OER remove many barriers and concerns associated with traditional copyright while allowing faculty and students much greater freedom in how course content can be used.

Additionally, OER typically use Creative Commons licenses, for which the license deeds are relatively clear and easy to understand. In contrast, when embedding library resources in the curriculum, the wide array of license terms can make it unclear to faculty how to access and use the materials for their course. Although it takes some training to educate faculty on Creative Commons licenses, they ultimately remove many frustrations simply by being straightforward and consistent to all users.

Customizing Content

Focusing a grant program on OER rather than affordable course content can maximize the benefits of OER by making use of the abilities to revise and remix content. While affordable course content meets the goal of reducing textbook costs for students, it does not come with permission to adapt the content, meaning faculty will need to carefully curate and select resources that meet their course goals. This limitation is of particular concern when necessary content cannot be identified within existing licensed resources. Promoting OER opens up the possibilities to adapt existing content due to the built-in permissions to revise and remix. OER adaptations, whether they be minor edits or significant undertakings, allow faculty to truly customize course materials without having to write an entirely new textbook themselves. This can mean adding local context, ensuring cultural relevance, or including student perspectives within the resources. Additionally, faculty can create entirely customized course materials by creating their own OER, which many grant programs fund separately from adoption or adaptation.

At the University of Houston, we have seen significant interest in adapting OER to meet specific course needs. These projects take shape in a variety of ways, for example: adapting an OpenStax textbook by reorganizing and removing some chapters, but adding no new content; pulling together chapters from multiple open textbooks, and adding some new content, to create a customized open textbook; and modifying existing OER and adding exercises and assignments to create an open lab manual. All of these cases make use of open license permissions by building on existing works, which would not be possible in the traditional environment of library resources.

The extent to which OER can transform teaching and learning is evident in light of OER-enabled pedagogy, which Wiley and Hilton (2018) define as “the set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions which are characteristic of OER” (p. 135). OER-enabled pedagogy, often referred to as “open pedagogy,” typically involves students in the process of creating or revising OER. Students might write articles for Wikipedia, develop supplementary materials for an open textbook (such as study guides, test banks, tutorials, etc.), or contribute chapters to an open textbook. Often these activities contribute not only to students’ own learning, but to the learning experience of students who take the course in the future. Prioritizing OER efforts not only eliminates textbook costs for students, it allows for innovations and enhancements to the student learning experience that are just not possible with affordable course content.

Generating Buy-in

Although OER opens the door to flexible implementation of course materials and innovative adaptations of content, faculty buy-in is a common barrier to achieving those results. You might be starting at the ground level with raising awareness about OER before making progress on replacing commercial textbooks with OER. Specific concerns that may need to be addressed when educating the campus community include: understanding the difference between OER and free online resources; the OER production process, including how they are funded, authored, and reviewed; how to identify and evaluate OER; and lack of ancillary materials for OER, among others. The SPARC “OER Mythbusting” resource (SPARC, 2017) addresses top myths about OER in North American higher education, and is a useful tool in developing training opportunities.

In a risk-averse environment, OER may still feel too new or bleeding edge, where library resources are more familiar. Faculty are used to searching for traditional library materials and incorporating them into their course curricula. Thus, it is a natural step to apply this same process for replacing commercial textbooks with affordable content. Faculty who have no interest in pursuing using OER in their courses may be interested in switching to a library licensed DRM-free eBook instead of their standard textbook, or assembling electronic course packs from library journal articles.

If you aim to eliminate textbook costs for as many courses and students as possible, focusing on affordable course content is likely a quicker way to get there due to the existing knowledge and familiarity with these types of resources. The trade-off is that affordable course content comes with the expected limitations and frustrations of traditional copyright. Putting the focus on “affordable” does not take advantage of the unique benefits of “open.” This has proven to be true at the University of Houston, where our Alternative Textbook Incentive Program sees more activity in adoption of affordable course content rather than adoption of OER. Those faculty who are engaged with OER tend to adapt or create, rather than simply adopt open resources. If you want to focus on OER rather than affordable course content, it is necessary to put time into educating faculty and other stakeholders.

Navigating Affordable Course Content

It’s true that replacing costly textbooks with library-licensed resources meets immediate needs for students without being “open,” however, this approach faces different challenges in implementation. At the University of Houston, we are beginning to identify unique challenges as a result of increased use of library materials to replace textbooks.

As mentioned previously, it may be unclear to faculty if and how their students can access desired resources: for example, how many users can access an e-book simultaneously? What can they do within the bounds of copyright? Etc. It requires working with library staff to find out, which is an added layer of communication and takes more time for the faculty to achieve their goal. For those without knowledge of the variety of vendors and license terms, this can be a complicated barrier to integrating course materials, compared to Creative Commons licenses which are clearly labelled for all users.

The University of Houston uses the electronic course reserves system, Ares, to host copyrighted course materials in the learning management system, Blackboard. The growth of our Alternative Textbook Incentive Program and subsequent promotion of course reserves as a necessary tool have highlighted the fact that many faculty are entirely

unaware of course reserves. Not only does awareness of course reserves need to be raised, but faculty compiling library materials as the primary textbook will need to get accustomed to including course reserves in their course development process.

Of additional concern is the unclear definition of “OER” within our program, which strives to prioritize OER but currently sees significant use of affordable course content. This is reflected in informal communications with faculty, some of whom refer to both OER and library materials as “OER” when either resource type is used to replace a commercial textbook. Our primary goal of reducing textbook costs, coupled with high value of the open ethos and promotion of OER, seems to have led to a conflation of these ideas and inconsistent understandings of what the “open” in OER means. If your program supports both OER and affordable course content, it is important to clearly define and communicate those terms.

OER, or Affordable Course Content?

When considering OER and affordable course content, there is no one “best option.” Both are valuable resources that can eliminate textbook costs for students. Whether you want to focus support around one or the other depends on you institutional context and goals.

If your institution is heavily invested in advancing the open ecosystem, you can make a strong statement in support of open education by developing a program specifically intended to encourage the adoption, adaptation, and creation of OER. A focus on OER advances not only the cost savings benefit for students, but the mission of the open education movement: to provide free and perpetual access to quality learning materials for all. Rewarding faculty for using OER in place of a commercial textbook signals the institution’s support and contributions towards the open education movement, particularly when faculty create OER and share those back to the broader community for re-use and adaptation.

If reducing textbook costs is the primary goal, whether or not it is achieved with open resources, then supporting affordable course content might take precedence over OER. Starting with the familiarity of using library resources allows more people to get on board, especially considering faculty who aren’t yet comfortable with the idea of OER. Many programs take a hybrid approach, utilizing the advantages of both OER and affordable course content. This can increase awareness of OER while still working to lower textbook costs for students, and importantly, a hybrid approach presents even more options for individual faculty members to choose from when seeking to make course materials more affordable for students.

References

Kansas State University. (2019). The Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative. Retrieved from https://www.lib.k-state.edu/open-textbook.

Miami University. (n.d.). Open Educational Resources Initiatives. Retrieved from https://miamioh.edu/academic-affairs/teaching/open-educres/oer-initiatives/index.html.

SPARC. (2017). OER Mythbusting. Washington DC: SPARC. Retrieved from https://sparcopen.org/our-work/oer-mythbusting.

University of Arkansas. (2019). University Libraries: Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://libraries.uark.edu/oer.

University of Houston Libraries. (n.d.). Incentive Program. Retrieved from https://libraries.uh.edu/oer/incentive.

University of Oklahoma. (2019). Alternative Textbook Grant. Retrieved from http://guides.ou.edu/atg.

Wiley, D. (n.d.). Defining the “Open” in Open Content and Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://www.opencontent.org/definition.

Wiley, D. and Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-enabled pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(4), 133-147. doi: 10.19173/irrodl.v19i4.3601.

Yahne, J., Rander, J., and Ruen, M. (n.d.). OER & Textbook Affordability Initiatives. Grand Valley State University Libraries. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cVFDRaqrz595T3EWvPoKRvd3mlOIaLrllqRPgY7nNZo/edit#.

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Optimizing Library Services — Institutional Repositories and Knowledge Curation: Revisiting Knowledge Conversion in the Academic Environment

by Arjun Sabharwal (Associate Professor/Digital Initiatives Librarian, University of Toledo, USA) <Arjun.Sabharwal@utoledo.edu>

Column Editors: Caroline J. Campbell (Marketing Manager, IGI Global) <ccampbell@igi-global.com>

and Lindsay Wertman (Managing Director, IGI Global) <lwertman@igi-global.com> www.igi-global.com

Column Editors’ Note: This column features IGI Global author, Arjun Sabhar wal, Associate Professor/Digital Initiatives Librarian for the University of Toledo, USA, and a contributor to the publications Man

aging Knowledge and Scholarly Assets in

Academic Libraries, edited by Bhojaraju Gunjal from National Institute of Technol ogy Rourkela, India, and Digital Curation: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice, edited by Information Resources Manage ment Association, USA. — CC & LW

The ubiquity and importance of institutional repositories (IRs) in higher education have significantly increased over the past two decades, as IRs have become recognized tools for curating organizational records, digitized heritage collections, research data, and scholarly publications — in other words, organizational knowledge.

Knowledge curation combines commitments to long-term preservation with teaching and making institutional records more accessible for scholarly and public inquiries in order to inspire sustained discourse. In contrast, knowledge conversion represents the latent but truly epistemological dimension of knowledge curation with a focus on knowledge acquisition.

Knowledge acquisition is an outcome of research, observation, experiments, analysis, collaboration, and presentation, and it evolves in personal (tacit) and shared (explicit) forms, resulting from learning and communication. Knowledge conversion is, in fact, a human curation practice through acquiring, interpreting, and communicating knowledge within an organization, surrounding communities, and communication networks beyond. Institutional repositories play a clearly defined role in this context, as curation involves critical selection, knowledge organization, and communication.

However, not all knowledge-focused fields utilize an IR. For example, knowledge as it is understood in philosophy, psychology, ethnography, social sciences, and humanities evolves independently of such tools until scholars incorporate them into their practices.

As such, this article focuses on using the IR as a knowledge curation platform and, more specifically, as a knowledge conversion tool in the higher education environment to handle a broad range of data, information, and knowledge. The article first presents a conceptual framework of key concepts, and then it addresses the role of IRs in the four modes of knowledge conversion.

Conceptual Framework

Knowledge curation, knowledge conversion, knowledge architecture, and institutional repositories are related concepts. At the heart of knowledge curation are knowledge and curation. The Oxford Dictionary defines knowledge as “Facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject” (Oxford University Press, 2019). Curation means “guardianship” (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1971 “curation”) focused on selection, organization, presentation, and care of artifacts (in museums) and manuscripts (in archives) in collections and exhibitions. Knowledge curation means “The selection of a subset of information based on particular criteria that is distributed to users” (IGI Global, 2019, “What is knowledge Curation”). Murray and Wheaton (2015) have defined knowledge curation as “the care and feeding of an organization’s critical knowledge” (para. 2) with two dimensions: an explicit dimension dealing with technology used to record information; and a tacit dimension focused on knowing recorded information. To this end, knowledge conversion (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) refers to the interaction between tacit (personal and intangible) and explicit (tangible and transmittable) states of knowledge.

A university’s knowledge architecture (Applehans, Globe, and Laugero, 1999; Rebentisch and Feretti, 1995) is its framework for incorporating content (data, information and knowledge), people (researchers, faculty, students, administrators, technologists, information specialists, and others who create share, and curate content), and technologies (databases and digital repositories) used to curate knowledge.

As a part of such an architecture, the IR “is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members” (Lynch, 2003, “Defining Institutional Repositories” section, para. 1). An IR is also a “knowledge curation platform…to enable researchers and experts in a particular field to define, detail and explore the knowledge within that field via a quality-driven collaborative curation process” (Gorza, Tudorache and Dumontier, 2013, p. 1).

IRs are vital elements in the tool chain for knowledge management “in the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge” (Davenport, 1994; Davenport and Prusak, 1998). In his elaborate definition for knowledge management, Duhon (1998) includes identification, capture, evaluation, retrieval, and sharing of organizational assets (including documents, policies, and procedures) in databases with previously uncaptured employee expertise and experience. Young (2009) defines knowledge management as “the discipline of enabling individuals, teams and entire organisations to collectively and systematically create, share, and apply knowledge” (para. 2). Deshpande et al. (2017) define academic knowledge management as “a set of processes that provides academic(s) the most effective way to create and organize knowledge, share this knowledge, and foster its application…which supports the achievement of the goals related to their missions” (p. 8).

IRs are not just information retrieval mechanisms but curation platforms ensuring long-term access to organizational assets, they are important components in the systematic management and curation of organizational knowledge. “By virtue of their association with archives and digital curation, IRs play a transformative role in academic knowledge management,” which is vital to knowledge activities including the acquisition, creation, conversion, sharing, dissemination, transfer, preservation, and reuse of knowledge in higher education (Sabharwal, 2017; see also Sabharwal, 2010).

The Knowledge in Knowledge Curation and Conversion

Universities and scholarship evolve and revolve around humanistic knowledge and scientific research, which require rich source data, information, and knowledge obtained through observation, fieldwork, interviews, research, analysis, interpretation, and scientifically sound methodology, which serve as a foundation for continued scholarship. Knowledge creation is a cyclical process. In fields like ethnography, sociology, philosophy, folklore, and history (particularly, oral history), humans are the sole sources of rich local (and tacit) knowledge and other data and information that requires further analysis and interpretation.

Once published, however, explicit knowledge does not necessarily circle back to the sources who may not be available for future input in some fields. Researchers are able to customarily share their data, information, and knowledge through formal publication, informal correspondence or discussions, classroom teaching and other channels of verbal communication (such as workshops and conferences), or curation using a subject or an IR.

How knowledge becomes an object of curation may be evident in how it relates to the concepts of data and information. Zeleny (1987) and Ackoff (1989) have presented frameworks for clarifying data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. Building on Zeleny’s work, Ackoff (1989) has developed a framework for systematic thinking that distinguishes data, information, and knowledge and is illustrative for present purposes:

Data are symbols that represent properties of objects, events and their environments…they are products of observation…Information is inferred from data…[It] is contained in descriptions, answers to questions that begin with such words as who, what, when, where, and how many…Knowledge is know-how…[which] makes possible the transformation of information into instructions. (p. 3-4)

Ackoff also asserts that data, information, and knowledge may be available as sources of new data, information, and knowledge, thus underscoring the cyclical nature of knowledge creation. The systematic differentiation of knowledge from data and information facilitates the treatment of knowledge (in explicit form) as a self-defined object of curation (in the form of written documents, worksheets, databases, shape files, and non-textual media) while much personal knowledge (in tacit form) remains intangible or socialized via verbal discussions. Effective curation of knowledge then ensures fruitful conversion of knowledge discussed next.

Knowledge Conversion and the Institutional Repository

While it is possible for IRs to contain and represent tacit knowledge in limited form, such as lecture or field notes, they are designed to contain explicit (shared, printed, communicated) knowledge and can facilitate knowledge conversion between tacit and explicit forms. Several commonly known platforms have been in use for decades, such as DSpace, Digital Commons, Fedora Commons, Islandora, Hydra, Omeka, and CONTENTdm. Owing to their unique architectures and capabilities, some are more suitable for curating scholarly research (e.g., Digital Commons) while others are ideal for curating digitized heritage collection (e.g. Omeka) in a digital humanities context.

Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) have analyzed the four modes of knowledge conversion, but it is necessary to interject the role of the institutional repository in order that each of these modes fits into the framework of knowledge curation via such repository. Socialization, in most cases, retains tacit knowledge in that form. It is a “process of sharing experience and thereby creating tacit knowledge such as shared mental models and technical skills” (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, p. 62). A digital curator can hold workshops to train others to use the IR platform and share anecdotes, personal experiences, and even some horror stories related to content migration, metadata transformation, and reference transactions. Using the IR is essential in order to get points across to the audience favoring visual content also, but the purpose of the platform in this case is not to convert knowledge. In some cases, training materials may appear in published in technical publications, books, webinars, and posters, but these forms no longer fall under socialization.

Presentations and social media conversations involve a high degree of socialization, but the inclusion of some media (slide presentations, podcasts, YouTube videos, images, visualizations, etc.) indicates the use of externalization, which converts tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. “It is an essential knowledge creation process in that tacit knowledge becomes explicit, taking the shapes of metaphors, analogies, concepts, hypotheses, or models” (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, p. 64). Researchers present new knowledge resulting from research, surveys, interviews, and experimentations at conferences and publish in various forms, and universities have begun to encourage faculty to upload their post-prints (within legal limits set by publishers and copyright terms) into their IRs. However, such cases may truly be considered post-conversion activities unless authors voluntarily use the IR as a self-publishing avenue. Open access (especially Green OA) publishing is likely to enable IRs to become a part of the externalization process, which can convert authors’ tacit knowledge into explicit form. Archives are also increasing their efforts to make some institutional records available to the public, which is another demonstration in knowledge curation because data and information have been shared in reports, supporting decision making and other actionable knowledge by organizational leaders (chairs, deans, directors, and senior administrators).

Combination retains knowledge in explicit form. It is a “process of systemizing concepts into a knowledge system. This mode of conversion involves combining different bodies of explicit knowledge. Individuals exchange and combine knowledge through such media as documents, meetings, telephone conversations, or computerized communication networks” (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, p. 67). The IR serves as an ideal tool in knowledge curation since all contents in the combination process may be accessible. Data, information, and knowledge presented in digital form are accessible to anyone at the organization preparing reports and other studies.

Finally, internalization represents the reversal of the conversion process. It is the “process of embodying explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge and is closely related to ‘learning by doing.’ When experiences through socialization, externalization, and combination are internalized into individuals’ tacit knowledge bases in the form of shared mental models or technical know-how, they become valuable assets” (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995, p. 70). This method allows trainees to study data and information published in the IR in order to develop new (tacit) knowledge, which authors can eventually pass on to others through the methods described above.

Conclusion

Institutional repositories are vital to knowledge curation in the digital environment, and the discussion of knowledge conversion has presented a systematic view of the roles IRs have in creating and sharing knowledge through digital technology. Knowledge conversion is a knowledge curation process allowing researchers, teaching faculty, administrators, staff, donors (of special collections and archival records), interviewees (in oral histories), cultural informants (in ethnography and folklore) to share data, information, and knowledge with a wider audience in a variety of ways known to academics and practitioners in the business community and various industries. There is, however, a vast epistemological ground in the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, ethnography) and the humanities (e.g., philosophy, history) where knowledge creation does not rely on curation technologies (such as IRs). In fact, authors may decide to curate their own works in their institutional repositories well after publishing in a formal venue such as a journal, conference proceeding, or book chapter. The use of the IR represents interests related to historical reflection and preservation, which is where finalized reports and data are available for viewing and further study. Knowledge curation through the IR further supports collaboration across organizational units that have relied for very long on data silos and departmental databases.

References

Ackoff, R. L. (1989). From Data to Wisdom. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 16, 3-9.

Applehans, W., Globe, A., and Laugero, G. (1999). Managing Knowledge: A Practical Web-based Approach. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Curation. (1971). In The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Davenport, T. H. (1994). Saving IT’s Soul: Human-Centered Information Management. Harvard Business Review, 72(2), 119-131. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsbig&AN=edsbig.A14913078&site=eds-live.

Davenport, T. H., and Prusak, L. (1998). Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press.

Deshpande, D., Bhosale, N. P., and Londhe, R. J. (2017). Enhancing Academic Research with Knowledge Management Principles. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. continued on page 80

Duhon, B. (1998). It’s All in Our Heads. Inform, 12(8), 8-13.

Groza, T., Tudorache, T., and Dumontier, M. (2013). State of the art and open challenges in community-driven knowledge curation. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 46(1), 1-4. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2012.11.007

IGI Global. 2019. “What is Knowledge Curation?” In Info-Sci Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/ knowledge-curation/42291.

Knowledge. (2019). In Oxford Living Dictionaries. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/knowledge.

Lynch, C. A. (2003). Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure For Scholarship In The Digital Age. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 3(2), 327-336. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/42865.

Milton, N. (2005). Knowledge Management for Teams and Projects. Oxford, UK: Chandos Publishing.

Murray, A., and Wheaton, K. (2015). Welcome to Curation 2.0. KMWorld, 25(1). Retrieved from http://www.kmworld.com/ Articles/Column/The-Future-of-the-Future/ Welcome-to-Curation-2.0-108249.aspx

Nonaka, I., and Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press.

Rebentisch, E., and Feretti, M. (1995). A knowledge asset-based view of technology transfer in international joint ventures J. Eng. Technol. Manage, (12), 1-25.

Considering Games ...

from page 73

tography skills and deep thinking and colorful lights. By all accounts all of the participants had a blast, had fun and did learn a great deal about the science and necessities and danger and adventure in planning and executing a mission to Mars. The trick seemed to be that it was not necessarily fun to learn about those Mars and space things. But, in the process of having fun in the experience (by surviving a crash landing on Mars), the participants learned things — not the least of which was cooperation and problem solving under pressure. Indeed, hearts and minds were grabbed.

So, this games in education thing can actually work. I look forward to applying it directly to teaching library skills. Seeing my students having fun in a library instruction class is a particular secret fantasy of mine. I can hardly wait. Learning may not always be fun. But, one can more easily learn something while having fun. So, up with the online catalog and bring on the smoke machine!

Sabharwal, A. (2010). Digital Directions in Academic Knowledge Management: Visions and Opportunities for Digital Initiatives at the University of Toledo. Paper presented at the Special Libraries Association 2010 Annual Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Sabharwal, A. (2017). The Transformative Role of Institutional Repositories in Academic Knowledge Management. In B. Gunjal and M. Padmaja (Eds.), Managing Knowledge and Scholarly Assets in Academic Libraries (pp. 127-155). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

Young, R. (2009). Definition of Knowledge Management. Retrieved from http:// www.knowledge-management-online.com/ Definition-of-Knowledge-Management.html

Zeleny, M. (1987). Management support systems: Towards integrated knowledge management. Human Systems Management, 7(1), 59-70. Retrieved from http://www.milanzeleny. com/ documents/publications/mss.pdf.

Recommended Readings

Armbruster, C., and Romary, L. (2012). Comparing Repository Types: Challenges and Barriers for Subject-Based Repositories, Research Repositories, National Repository Systems and Institutional Repositories in Serving Scholarly Communication. In C. Wei, Y. Li, and C. Gwo (Eds.), Multimedia Storage and Retrieval Innovations for Digital Library Systems (pp. 329-341). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-0900-6.ch017

Axford, M., and Renfro, C. (2015). Personal Knowledge Management in Outreach and Instruction. International Journal of Digital Library Systems (IJDLS), 5(1), 16-30. doi:10.4018/IJDLS.2015010103

Belikov, O., and Kimmons, R. M. (2019). Scholarly Identity in an Increasingly Open and Digitally Connected World. In M. Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Ed.), Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Library Science, Information Management, and Scholarly Inquiry (pp. 579-588). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-7659-4.ch046

Bielenia-Grajewska, M. (2019). Knowledge Management From the Metaphorical Perspective. In M. Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Ed.), Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Library Science, Information Management, and Scholarly Inquiry (pp. 402-411). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-5225- 7659-4.ch032

Fteimi, N., Basten, D., and Lehner, F. (2019). Advancing Automated Content Analysis in Knowledge Management Research: The Use of Compound Concepts. International Journal of Knowledge Management (IJKM), 15(1), 53-68. doi:10.4018/ IJKM.2019010104

González-Pérez, L. I., Ramírez-Montoya, M., and García-Peñalvo, F. J. (2018). User Experience in Institutional Repositories: A Systematic Literature Review. International Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals (IJHCITP), 9(1), 70-86. doi:10.4018/IJHCITP.2018010105

Kisielnicki, J., and Sobolewska, O. (2019). Technical Infrastructure of Network Organizations. In Knowledge Management and Innovation in Network Organizations: Emerging Research and Opportunities (pp. 55- 85). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978- 1-5225-5930-6.ch003.

Säisä, M. E., Tiura, K., and Matikainen, R. (2019). Agile Project Management in University-Industry Collaboration Projects. International Journal of Information Technology Project Management (IJITPM), 10(2), 8-15. doi:10.4018/IJITPM.2019040102

Wimmer, H., Du, J., and Rada, R. (2019). Knowledge Portals: A Review. International Journal of Knowledge Management (IJKM), 15(1), 1-18. doi:10.4018/IJKM.2019010101

Zhang, Y., Deng, Q., Xing, C., Sun, Y., and Whitney, M. (2012). A Service Component Model and Implementation for Institutional Repositories. In X. Liu, and Y. Li (Eds.), Advanced Design Approaches to Emerging Software Systems: Principles, Methodologies and Tools (pp. 61-81). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-60960-735-7.ch004.

Column Editor’s End Note: As the curation and dissemination of knowledge is critical to the education of all researchers and professionals working within information and knowledge management fields, IGI Global continues to publish innovative, peer-re viewed research within Library & Information Science. With a collection of over 600+ titles in timely topics including collection devel opment, acquisitions, archiving, technology, administration and leadership, and more, all of these titles are featured in IGI Global’s

InfoSci-Library and Information

Science database. To learn more, visit: www.igi-global.com/ere sources. Additionally, IGI Global invites researchers within these fields of research to submit a book proposal or submit a chapter to one of our publica tions. To learn more about these publishing opportunities, please visit: www.igi-global. com/publish.

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Marketing Touchpoints — Value Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Building Bridges with User Experience Tools

Column Editor: Jill Heinze (Director, User Experience, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA 22904; Phone: 434-243-1368) <jill.ux@virginia.edu>

As the reader of my column called Marketing Touchpoints, you may be surprised to know that marketing isn’t explicitly in my job description. Yes, I’ve studied, published, and spoken about marketing libraries for more than fifteen years, but I spend my days at the University of Virginia Library as the Director of User Experience (UX). For some in the UX field, it’s sacrilege to conflate user experience with marketing — UX professionals are supposed to identify and advocate for user needs, while marketers, they argue, are charged with pushing organizational goals and services onto people. The Interaction Design Foundation puts it this way, “Marketing is focused on ultimately increasing the sales of the product (i.e., conversion), and directly feeds into the bottomline of the company. UX design, on the other hand, is focused on building the best experience for the user, regardless of whether it ultimately adds to the company’s bottomline.” 1 I concede that there is an innate tension between these fields (which is a subject ripe for another article). However, when done well, I firmly believe marketing and UX can complement one another to serve the greater good by informing the creation and distribution of services that people need, want, and value. In this way, the two worlds are simpatico. In fact, since embarking on my UX career, I’ve discovered a number of tools in the UX repertoire that can be equally handy in building marketing strategies.

I recently had a terrific opportunity to explore this UX/marketing synergy in delivering a webinar for the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM). I was invited to talk with medical librarians about how they can better market their data management plan (DMP) services. DMPs are documents increasingly required by research funding agencies that prompt researchers to describe in detail the data they intend to acquire, along with how they plan to describe, store, share, and preserve that data.

Though DMP consultation services are not universal library offerings, librarians have recognized for many years that these kinds of research data services are attractive opportunities to fill voids in researcher support at their institutions. As Carol Tenopir et al. asserted in a 2012 ACRL white paper, “As science becomes more collaborative, data-intensive, and computational, academic researchers are faced with a range of data management needs. Combine these needs with funding directives that require data management planning, and there is both a need and an imperative for research data services in colleges and universities. Academic libraries may be ideal centers for research data service activities on campuses, providing unique opportunities for academic libraries to become even more active participants in the knowledge creation cycle in their institution.” 2 While implementing such services have proven complicated in many respects, librarians certainly have much to love philosophically in providing data management planning support. This service fits seamlessly into our shared worldview that information should be organized and made readily available to support research integrity and further the research enterprise.

Herein lies the risk librarians face in successfully marketing these services – Since DMPs are an intuitive fit for us, we can easily become blind to researchers’ reality in which DMPs are sometimes perceived as mysterious, questionably worthwhile, and cumbersome. I was particularly struck by research conducted by Hunt and Bakker who analyzed

public health researcher needs at the University of Minnesota. 3 Overall, they discovered that researchers considered data management an afterthought, but they also unearthed nuanced insights into these researchers’ mindsets, which are invaluable to librarians seeking to forge new inroads to these users. They found, for example, a fascinating range of reasons why public health researchers are hesitant to manage and share their data: “Those who had never shared their underlying data expressed that they did not think anyone would care to see the data, had concerns over how the data would be used in the future (e.g., informed consent restrictions and ability of others to interpret the data), or were open to it as long as controls were in place to screen users of the data.” 4 Other DMP blockers identified include a perception it’s too time-consuming, and beliefs that data didn’t fit neatly into common data types. Another study of researchers who produce qualitative data conducted by Mannheimer et al. yielded a similarly rich view of their concerns, including great skepticism that data will be properly understood without the original context, and ethical dilemmas related to maintaining confidentiality and anonymity. 5

Among those for whom marketing means informing more people in more ways about their services, it’s easy to see how that approach falls short in light of research like this. If, for example, like my webinar attendees you want to get the word out about your DMP service, you can’t simply create more communications without recognizing that there are researchers in your audience who don’t even think their data is worth maintaining or that they can ethically share their data. Your messages won’t even have a chance to resonate if you don’t directly address these beliefs.

The first and primary marketing challenge, then, is to adopt your users’ perspective, which is where UX tools can be a great help.

One tool I recommend is a user journey map. 6 A journey map is a means of visualizing the steps, or actions, a representative user (graduate student, clinician, etc.) takes to accomplish their goal. In the case of a potential DMP user, you may consider examining the sequential steps users take to complete a grant proposal. Importantly, along with the actions taken, you would gather information about how the user feels and what they think at each milestone so that you can pick up on those otherwise obscured experiences that have tremendous influence on whether users are receptive to your service.

I adapted an example user journey map template (Fig. 1) from the Nielsen/ Norman Group and simplified it somewhat. 7 To use this template, you would first specify the representative user in question, along with the scenario of interest and the user’s goals within that scenario. This provides a workable scope of inquiry for you to then identify key steps with actions the user takes to achieve the goal. Each step should be fleshed out by noting the user’s thoughts and feelings as they proceed. This information can be derived from user data you already have and supplemented with details from interviews or other custom user research you may need to conduct to derive an accurate, complete understanding of what it’s like to accomplish the goal from the perspective you selected. Then, with each step, note any useful insights you glean that could inform how you communicate or design your service.

Figure 1: Simplified User Journey Map

More than just learning where and when you might communicate about your service, building a journey map will help you build empathy and deep awareness so that you’re able to affect meaningful change throughout your marketing planning process, which includes everything from how you structure and deliver your services to how you position them so they correspond with what users directly experience. To illustrate this point, let’s return to our DMP example and the article about qualitative researchers by Mannheimer et al.. In it, the authors proposed three ways in which academic librarians can overcome hurdles to data deposits. One such hurdle and related recommendation concerns faculty researchers obtaining informed consent from research participants so that they can confidently share their data at the end of their projects without fear of an ethical violation: “Data repositories and academic libraries can educate institutional review boards (IRBs) and researchers about planning for appropriate informed consent processes.” 8 In following this recommendation, librarians would target their DMP marketing on another user base (in this case the IRB staff) at a critical step in the user journey, and adjust their outreach and communication strategies so that they align with practical and emotional realities (like the sense of ethical unease) by focusing on the topic of consent rather than DMPs only. In effect, this represents a shift in marketing approach beyond ‘getting the word out’ about your services. It’s this mindset that you should adopt as you follow your users’ journeys. You don’t know exactly where those journeys will lead, but don’t be afraid to follow them into uncharted territory as you explore how to better market your services.

Endnotes

1. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/how-tochange-your-career-from-marketing-to-ux-design 2. Tenopir, C., Birch, B., Allard, S. (2012) Academic Libraries and Research Data Services. Association of College & Research Libraries. Available at: http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/ files/content/publications/whitepapers/Tenopir_Birch_Allard.pdf (accessed 28 June 2019), 3. 3. Hunt, S., and Bakker, C. (2018). A qualitative analysis of the information science needs of public health researchers in an academic setting. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 106(2), 184–197. doi: https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2018.316 4. Ibid., 188. 5. Mannheimer, S., Pienta, A., Kirilova, D., Elman, C., and Wutich, A. (2019). Qualitative Data Sharing: Data Repositories and Academic Libraries as Key Partners in Addressing Challenges. American Behavioral Scientist, 63(5), 643–664. https://doi. org/10.1177/0002764218784991, 644 6. The Nielsen/Norman Group provides a concise but thorough overview of what a Journey Map is and how and when it should be used. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/ 7. Ibid. 8. Mannheimer, 648.

Biz of Digital — Developing and Growing a New Repository Service: Part 3 Expansion

by Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Acquisitions and Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-6754; Fax: 410-455-1598) <flinchba@umbc.edu>

Column Editor’s Note: This is Part 3 of a 3 part series on Creating a New Repository Service. Part 1: Getting Started appeared in the June 2019 issue (v.31#3). Part 2: Procedures for Library Submissions appeared in the September 2019 issue (v.31#4). This is Part 3, which completes the series. — MF

Introduction

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a research-intensive institution with 546 full-time, 292 part-time faculty, was utilizing the Maryland Shared Open Access Repository (MD-SOAR) DSpace platform to develop repository services. Few faculty would self-submit, so the library was

Figure 1: Fields in the submission spreadsheet that student assistant uses to input items into the IR

developing processes, procedures, and documentation for doing submissions in the library. A librarian shifting duties to work full-time on a new repository, the Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) Librarian, was eight months into a soft roll-out with minimal outreach only to individual faculty members, and she was the only staff working on the repository. Despite the limited outreach, and that the system and services hadn’t been rolled-out to all of campus, a robust flow of submissions for her to process and enter had developed.

The system needed to be rolled-out to all of campus, and staffing needed to be added—both were done simultaneously at the beginning of the fall 2018 semester.

Expanding Service to the Entire Campus

First, the implementation of the system was announced to all of campus. Then the DSS Librarian attempted to tell all of the faculty on campus about the new system. First, she sent an email to email list for academic department chairs asking to present at one of their meetings in the coming year. Most didn’t respond, but she was scheduled into a few departments’ meetings. She then began contacting department chairs for the remaining departments individually, and continued with this through an entire semester. She was able to set up many more presentations at departmental meetings, but still the vast majority of departments, 68%, didn’t respond. For those departments where she wasn’t invited to present, she emailed a flier to all of the faculty in the department. Later she began contacting campus centers about ScholarWorks@UMBC. Via these presentations and contacts, and ongoing processing of new UMBC publications via Google Scholar Alerts, at the end of the first year 91% of UMBC’s academic departments had at least one work in ScholarWorks@UMBC. All of the major academic administrative units (the Provost’s Office, Deans’ Offices) and 18 centers also had works in ScholarWorks@UMBC.

Hiring Help

The amount of time that the DSS Librarian had to process and enter new submissions was insufficient to handle incoming submissions as soon as she began receiving long lists of publications. She notified both her supervisor and other administrators that she was only able to add a little more than 20 items per month, and of the number of submissions she had, and requested a student and began developing and preparing processes and documentation for a student to do the data entry work, and also possibly some processing of submissions.

continued on page 84

The challenge of having a student do data entry work was in how to convey information to the student on what to enter without entering all of the data on the item. The first attempt at this was a simple list of items to enter, along with a link to the item’s metadata record on the publisher’s site. Metadata values readily available on the publisher’s site (author, abstract, keywords, etc.) weren’t included in the list of items to enter since the student assistant could readily find, whereas information not available or that requires a judgement call was included in the list. Relying on copying and pasting from the publisher’s metadata record where possible speeds up both the processing of items and their submission to the system.

However, using a list, the librarian noted that there were inconsistencies in what information she included and didn’t include, some because of the nature of the work and others because of which versions of the work were available and what metadata was available, and yet others because she simply didn’t prepare the items consistently. Unhappy with the list, she switched to spreadsheet with columns, and decided most information that could be found in metadata records and the work itself wouldn’t be included in the spreadsheet, limiting the spreadsheet to links to works and metadata about works and information not readily available in metadata or on the work, or that required a judgement call. (See Figure 1.)

The spreadsheet was supplemented with detailed documentation on entering and completing items from a spreadsheet, available here: https://wiki.umbc.edu/display/ library/Entering+and+Completing+Items+- from+a+Spreadsheet%2C+Full+Procedure and a metadata chart to use as a short guide on what to look for and where to put it a record. (See Figure 2.)

To finish, the Dublin Core element was added to all lines in the “Where to put it column” to facilitate editing in administration which is done entirely by Dublin Core element.

In addition to providing these resources for the student assistant, after hire, the DSS Librarian spent a great deal of time training the student assistant, in steps, and checking and correcting work until it was done correctly. Initial training was only the submission processes utilizing the submission form. When that was mastered, the student was trained in utilizing administrative capabilities to edit metadata and map items to additional collections, then how to use the administrative capabilities to correct an error. In a final phase of training the student learned to add rights statements, change a Creative Commons license version, and embargo an item for automatic release when the embargo ends.

Once the student had worked through a substantive backlog of items to be entered, the DSS Librarian also trained the student to determine if an item is in-scope for the repository, to check rights and then enter those works that can be posted into a spreadsheet

Figure 2: Guide for what to look for and where to put when entering items into IR

for future entry. Substantive documentation was created covering this. The portion on scope covers theses and dissertations, CVs, obituaries, and abstracts with no full text, the requirement that an author must be affiliated with UMBC or the article about UMBC or someone affiliated with it. The section on checking rights is broken down by format, and covers Creative Commons licenses, open access, U.S. Federal Government publications. A final section covers determining which collections to add an item to. The full procedures is available here: https://wiki.umbc.edu/pages/ viewpage.action?title=Preparing+a+Spreadsheet+of+Items+to+Enter&spaceKey=library.

Additional detail could be added to spell out some situations and decisions not covered, but this already extensive procedure is very challenging for someone just beginning this work. Training on it best divided up, a new staff person doing the steps they know, and the DSS Librarian doing the rest. This would allow for training in more manageable phases and better mastery of the work.

Still Needing more Help

To date, the DSS Librarian has barely scratched the surface of outreach and much more can be done, but the bulk of her time has been spent on a perpetual backlog of items to process and enter for faculty. The current backlog of works to check rights and enter is reaching nearly 1,200. With the DSS Librarian working full-time plus the half-time student assistant, the maximum monthly rate of processing has been 256 per month so that this constitutes nearly a 5 month backlog. Additionally, they continue processing Google Scholar Alerts, and a commitment was made to re-visit publications website annually to add new materials that were added to them. The student assistant won’t be available during breaks, and graduates in a just a year and half. At the date of this writing, the DSS Librarian

continued on page 85

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For more information on how to support or participate in the archive contact us at info@clockss.org.

CLOCKSS Archive is a dark archive that ensures the long-term survival of web-based scholarly publications, governed by and for its stakeholders. The archive includes over ▪280 Participating Publishers ▪300 Library Supporters ▪25,000 journal titles ▪33,400,000 journal articles ▪188,000 ebooks ▪53 journals have been triggered as open access CLOCKSS is the first archive to be re-certified by the Council of Research Libraries for our Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC). Our score was upgraded for Organizational Infrastructure to the top score of 5. We maintained our top score of 5 for Technologies, Technical Infrastructure, Security. Our total score of 14 out of 15 is the highest score of any of the archives that have been certified. https://www.clockss.org

Biz of Digital from page 84

has requested a full-time line to hire a staff person which was promised if/when there is enough work to justify doing so.

Workflows

One workflow for loading ETDs, and second bifurcated workflow, first checking rights and finding info and filing it into a spreadsheet, and then using the spreadsheet to enter items was developed. These two workflows handle 90% of items going into the repository. However, some items don’t fit well into the spreadsheet because of their nature, and require utilizing Dublin Core elements not normally utilized, or entering multiple values into Dublin Core element where there is usually only one. Other items may be serials, multivolume sets, art, video, symposia with video of multiple presentation given by different people. Modified spreadsheets were developed, or will be developed to be used in these instances. At some point in the future, items that are particularly time consuming to enter manually (for example, works with more than ten authors) may also be loaded, depending on our ability to develop automated methods of reformatting data accurately.

Future Plans

With the large backlog of work, methods for making work more efficient are a high priority. In the short term, Macro Express can quickly automate some data entry tasks, making the entry of new submissions less time-consuming. The DSS Librarian has read articles on how other libraries have automated the submission processes using citation managers and spreadsheets to batch load new submissions, and in the future will investigate if what other libraries have done will work at UMBC and with MD-SOAR.

Another high priority is further extending outreach. Additional outreach needs to be done to professional programs, and faculty and programs located at distant locations in either Baltimore City or at University of Maryland System’s Shady Grove campus. Outreach also needs to be done to lecture series, campus awards, and student publications and research forums. Finally, outreach to new faculty six months to a year after they come to UMBC needs to be put in place. Finally, an annual email needs to go to faculty affiliated with each department and center reminding them to send materials.

Works in the repository also need to be promoted. A plan to have the system automatically tweet all new items has stalled. UMBC Library’s Committee of Social Media and Outreach will promote items on social media, but interesting items have to be identified and sent to them. Other means of promotion are also possible, but it’s been difficult to find time for this with a perpetual large waitlist of materials to process and add.

The Digital Service Librarian has also been working the MD-SOAR Governance Group toward enhancements to solve various inefficiencies and problems related to the system configuration. A current effort is being made to standardize how metadata indicates that an item is a preprint or postprint and to select enhancements to move forward. A new extended submission form is desirable, and additionally tweaks to the indexing and display, and field configuration would be of value.

Another area needing work is resolving inconsistencies in metadata as procedures have changed over time. In some instances, we’ve learned, in others, reached agreements not previously realized, so there have been inconsistencies between how we entered records six months ago and how we enter them now, and at some point hope to do a large scale batch edit of our metadata to make records consistent. Of particular importance is putting in place some type of authority control on the names continued on page 87