WatsINFO

We met at 9:15 in the Reading Room.  Excellent cinnamon coffee cake by Gwen.  The main agenda item was a presentation by Gordon Barger, Associate Chief Human Resources Officer in charge of benefits.  There were only a few minutes for additional reports after his talk, so the agenda was abbreviated.

Gordon Barger: Set the context for changes in health benefits plan.  Museum spends c. $12 million a year on Oxford, of which Museum contributes approx $10 million, workers $2 million.  (Split is 85%-15%.)  Increases every year — over last 3 years, approx. $1 million per year — and will only go higher.  This year, argued 16% increase down to 9.2%.  Pressures include: reduced funding for Medicare (driving providers to look for other income sources — i.e., private insurers); legal changes requiring additional coverage, e.g., extended dependent coverage; and good things like longevity and new treatments. 

Three possible routes to resistance: Read the rest of this entry »

DECISION: Subscribe for 1 year with single-user access.

STATUS: trial through February 17th.

ACCESS: http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com

DESCRIPTION: Oxford Islamic Studies Online (OISO) offers unrivaled online access to the history and culture of Islam and provides full-text access to great Oxford reference and scholarly works, including The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Oxford History of Islam, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, two classic interpretations of the Qur’an, a Concordance of the Qur’an, What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam, and the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (due to publish in 2008).

PRICE: 

Oxford has a current sale on this resource with prices valid through March 30th.

Subscription Pricing:
-Single User Access: $950/year.  Sale price is $712.50 for the first year.
-Unlimited Access: $1625/year.  Sale price is $1218.75 for the first year.

Perpetual Access:

-Unlimited Access: $8125/year.  Sale price is $6906.25 (this is a one-time charge).
-There is a 5% annual maintenance and platform fee.  This is waived for the first year on a new purchase.  The fee includes the following:

• Hosting of all content by OUP on the Oxford Islamic Studies Online platform, which includes advanced searching and browsing capabilities, deep cross-linking within content, and metadata tagging.
• With Perpetual Access, the museum owns the content.  If at any time in the future, a decision is made to stop paying the annual platform and maintenance fee, the content will be delivered to us in a raw XML format.

OTHER:

• IP-authenticated
• Multiple simultaneous users
• Remote access allowed
• Usage statistics available

CONTACT:

Andrew Robbins-Pollack
Special Accounts Sales Representative
Institutional Sales Department
Oxford University Press, USA
andrew.robbinspollack@oup.com
Toll Free at 800-779-2871 or 919-677-0977 x5286
Fax 919-677-8877

Customer Support – Online Products
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Ave – 12th Floor
New York, NY 10016
oxfordonline@oup.com
Phone: 800.334.4249 ext. 6484
Fax: 212.726.6476

In attendance: KW, AW, DAS, KS

1. Review of Running Totals from the OPAC

• The Millenium purchases as of January 31 were slightly above the target amounts that were formulated by Watson Finance for Regular Purchases, Special Purchases and rlib, with approximately 64% of the annual budget having been spent in each category. More importantly, the aggregate purchases were significantly below the inflated January 31 year-to-date total for FY11. RD will selectively cut back slightly.
• Although Fund Transfers were done for caterings and 6402s, we will not do any for Reference Materials until we run out of budget dollars (probably March).
• Ebooks purchased to date were $2470, a new statistic that we are tracking under our new format.  

2. Maintenance

• We already have 100% of the Maintenance budget either spent or earmarked, including projections for most of the shelf-ready charges.
• Although we have no billings thus far from Backstage for the German shelf ready, we have earmarked $20,000 for anticipated expenses. DS indicated that we should be receiving the first invoices sometime in February.
• The hosting cost of using Innovative’s remote server, scheduled to begin in December 2011, will not be paid to Innovative until problems are resolved.

3. Hazen

• We have already spent 100% of the Hazen FY12 budget.
•  KW reported that an additional  $12,000 in electronic resources has been paid out of other lines, with another $18,000 to be paid by fiscal year end. We will consider deferring $7,000 of that until early next year.

4. Book Binding

• As of January 31, we have already spent 75% of the Bindery budget. If spending patterns remain the same as December, we should have just enough to get us through the year. 

5. Outside Storage

• With payments covering storage through December, we have spent 45% of the budget. At the current level of spending we should still be able to accommodate 13 periods in this year’s budget.
• DS will speak to LH regarding a larger Clancy shipment toward the end of the fiscal year, perhaps including the crowded LC areas. 

6. December Reports

• Incorrect depositing of proceeds by Development/Finance continues to be a problem. KW will contact Finance with details and copy KS and KM.
• Questionable Building and Security Event OT charges have been explained and appear to be justified.

There’s a new enhancement on ebrary — the ability to download page ranges and chapters (up to 60 pages per browser session) as an image pdf.  Things to note:

• The pdf will not expire
• Image pdf = no full text searching
• Known problem: the text of the pdfs is pixelated; ebrary engineers are aware of the issue and are working on it
• Downloading a page range/chapter will not make the title inaccessible for other users.  Once you finish downloading and close the ebook in your browser, another person will be able access the title.
• You must sign into your personal account on the ebrary site before you can download the pdfs
• pdfs are accessible on most devices
• Annotations to downloaded files won’t be stored on your ebrary bookshelf

Instructions for downloading have been added below and relevant portions of this post have been updated.

Read the rest of this entry »

American Wing – 25

Ancient Near East – 10

Ratti – 17

Arms & Armor – 12

Asian – 38 Read the rest of this entry »

The Database Evaluation Team will be meeting with representatives from Gale to discuss new and upcoming Gale collections that may be of interest to us.

The meeting will take place on February 7th at 3pm in the Watson Library Seminar Room 1.  All are welcome to join.

On Friday, KS, DPL, KES, OK, RD, DV and EH; Mark Polizzotti and Gwen Roginsky (Editorial); and Teresa Lai and Kevin Park (Digital Media) met with Sharon Gallagher and Elisa Leshowitz from DAP at their offices.

DAP is currently embarking on print to ebook conversion projects; see the ARTBOOK|DIGITAL page for an overview and some examples of their work:  http://www.artbook.com/artbook-digital.html.

The meeting focused mostly on art ebooks from the publishing and consumer market perspectives; they were eager to promote their work and to hear about the Met’s ideas and upcoming projects — online/e-catalogs; and plans to make out-of-print titles available on the website (still in discussions).

Some notes:

Read the rest of this entry »

Egyptian has moved its two cabinets of folios into a new space.  (The entrance is opposite the women’s restroom off of GRR.)  I have made all folios in that “department use only.”

Nolen Library now has a great visual guide to the layout of the collections and flow of the call numbers.  The new sign is located on the column opposite the Nolen Reference desk.

A reference forum will be held on Friday, Feb. 17th, 11:30-12 in Seminar Room 1. On the agenda:

-Vertical files, including artist files (LS)

-Status ON ORDER in Watsonline (RD)

Describing Electronic, Digital, and Other Media Using AACR2 and RDA written by Mary Beth Weber and Fay Angela Austin  is a great resource for anyone cataloging those formats. It has full MARC examples for all formats using both AACR2 and RDA (and MODS examples, too). I have a copy from the NYPL at my desk – come look at it before I return it in a few weeks.

Evernote is a cool new software/tool/app that can be used to capture information in a variety of ways. You can take notes yourself, you can grab images , save urls, pdfs, all while web browsing or even upload photos from your digital camera. What makes it even more powerful is that you can download the software to your laptop and yet access your information over any browser and even over your mobile phone (I use it on my iPod Touch). It allows you to gather the notes into notebooks which you can even share with others. You can add tags to your notes and all is searchable.  It is agonizingly easy to use.

A couple ways we might be able utilize it in the library:

• share notebooks into which we clip scholarly or informative articles on library topics (e.g. I have a folder for metadata articles)
• create a reference notebook into which we can post interesting questions

Try it out and see for yourself.

We are working on weeding CD-ROMs from the Hazen Center.  Decisions on removing or keeping specific CD-ROMs are based on the following factors:

• Availability of online version.
• Other publications in the collection on the subject.
• Software/installation requirements.
• Subject matter.

CD-ROMs that have been examined and shelved back in the Hazen Center are marked with a small round orange label on the front cover.

A small selection of juvenile and picture books relating to Lunar New Year are now on display in Nolen Library.  They are marked with a yellow band that says “Lunar New Year”.

Family Programs will also be offering an event on Saturday February 4th celebrating Lunar New Year.

http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/now-at-the-met/events/2012/lunar-new-year

How to place orders for serials — new subscriptions, back issues, print, online, and print + online…

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a list of the various types of materials or collections Nolen visitors may be interested in.  Many of these collections will be indicated on the Nolen floorplan  that will soon hang in front of the circulation desk.

Vendors

• Oxford – Oxford Index in beta; launching in the spring; provides access to all resources from Oxford plus other partners, e.g. JSTOR will be added: oxfordindex.oup.com; they would be glad to get our ideas and thoughts (Taylor Stang taylor.stang@oup.com; Oxford Art  Online searches multiple resources and other features: thematic guides (including fashion), timelines, and Grove/MoMA art resources for educators (under tools and resources); April Prendergast is always glad to come talk about it.
• Library of Congress – Dave Reeser gave a brilliant 25 minute summary of all that is happening surrounding RDA and MARC: www.loc.gov/aba/rda
• Harrassowitz was very interest to hear about our experience with MARCNow and our new arrangement with Backstage; discussed e-books – publisher’s platform (e.g DeGruyter) can often offer more features than aggregators, e.g downloading more pages.  They are in discussions with ebrary.
• Erasmus – ditto about MARCNow and Backstage
• LTI – talked about their new website
• EBSCO – typical sales rep with a lot of bluster and no real information about Wilson databases
• Casalini – discussed approval plans; they have a catalog of Italian graphic novels they prepared last year; they are offering e-books on their Torrossa platform (trial available)
• Aux amateurs – heard about their problems with e-books and French publishers
• YBP – spoke with Steve Sutton about e-books; he says there is now typically an 8-week delay between print and e-publication; 45% of books are available as e-books; offer e-approval plans
• NYTimes – I was going to complain about their searching but the guy there just wanted to sell subscriptions
• III – met our new rep who seems smart and competent
• I always try to stop by possible new interesting vendors, but they usually don’t work out: Islamic Books in Elmhurst NY (they only sell Korans); Starbright (described as a publisher of children’s books in 15 languages, but it turns out they will translate and publish books with minimum orders of 500 copies)

Sessions

• Big Heads – New Acquisitions Methods (still buy print because e-book comes out 6 months later, but for PDA (Patron Driven Acquisition) they only make print available as an option until e-book is available; old model of less overlap than expected in print collection is reversed in e-collections (they all get the same e-books); new motto: “buy what people want, not what won’t be used” (UTexas);   – UPenn update on their Kuali OLE project (Open Library Environment); it is a community source Library Management System that breaks away from paper-based approach; underlying software is Kuali Rice; locally configurable; shares data with other systems instead of duplicating – www.kuali.org/OLE/timeline; Bob Woolven (Columbia) spoke about building communities/new roles for Technical Services: web curator; manager of remote storage including identifying works in the public domain/in Hathi Trust; they are scanning tables of content for old journals going offsite; they create interest groups to discuss new initiatives; whoever has time takes on new projects; what they need is time to think
• OCLC Americas Regional Council Member Meeting and Symposium — Sara Lacy talked about her latest book, “Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky” based on 40 weeks travelling through developing countries on the hunt for the most impressive, up-and-coming e-entrpeneurs
• LC Bibliographic Framework Initiative: 3 goals: replacing MARC, implementing RDA, distributing records
• WESS Germanistas and Romance Languages Discussion Groups joint meeting of e-books in Europe; there is a preference in Europe for CD-ROMs vs. e-books; add e-books to Harrassowitz approval plan, by default they get multiple user option and it is cheaper than ebrary; re e-book functionality: “if we wrote a paper on Thursday it would be out of date on Friday.”
• Heads 0f Cataloging Departments Interest Group session on  new service models: integrating metadata creation into tradition cataloging; envisioning a culture shift towards a service oriented model using Strategic Framework model; shift to meeting need to “find things” (action: have ILL and circulation report when patrons can’t find things in the OPAC)

Dallas – a few nice museums (especially the Nasher Sculpture Center) but the downtown is very dreary.  The Dallas Museum of Art was having a Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition which highlighted how good our McQueen show was.  They had moving images of faces projected onto the mannequins.  Eerie!

There are always more interesting-sounding session than I have time (or bodies) to go to:

• Technical Services Workflow Efficiencies Interest Group
• Copyright status of orphan works
• Future of NACO
• Graphic novels in libraries
• Next Generation Catalog Interest Group
• Creating Virtual Exhibitions
• Creative batchloading

I’m glad to elaborate on any of these topics at the all-staff meeting or over lunch.

Google published Good to Know website to help web users manage their data and personal information and keep it safe and secure. While this resource is naturally concentrated on Google’s own tools, it is useful even if one doesn’t have a personal Google account. Here’s a link to the website: http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/.
Let me know if you have questions or need additional information about it.

A reference chart for ordering monographs using EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce, and Transport) from within Millennium Acquisitions.

This chart has been updated from the version originally published in 2008.  For detailed EDIFACT instructions, as well as the original reference chart (with numerous modifications), please refer back to the the June 2008 post.

Read the rest of this entry »

As announced here, we will meet on February’s First Monday as usual.  Tavia should be back among us on that day.  Please add to the agenda below — ALA conference reports, anyone?

DRAFT AGENDA:

Introduction (KS)

Medical benefit plan information — Gordon Barger, HR

• Innovative update, stacks air situation, personal annual reports, budget preparation, Friends new and old, Main Office/Hazen rethinking, Library Assoc for CJK, more (KS)
• LuXuan Liu (MX)
• ALA report (DAS)
• Harrassowitz update (DAS)
• 19th Century/European Paintings library update (DAS)
• Scanning/scanner update (RMF)
• Millennium Server update (OK)
• Feb classes for Volunteer Guides (RW)
• Events in Feb (nbm)
• Paola D’Agostino with Cosimo Fanzago scultore  and her thanks