Collection development in a multi-system cooperative: An acquisition policy and plan

Four libraries in Colorado through a cooperative agreement (Arapahoe Public Access to Libraries, or APAL) hired a contractor to produce a plan for cooperative collection development and acquisitions. The study included analysis of the collection by subject categories, collection use by reference, circulation and in-house study. This supply/demand analysis provided data for use with the ALA/RTSD Guidelines for Collection Development. The result was a plan for joint acquisition of materials and a schedule of purchases for stressed subject categories for the subsequent five-year period. A category was considered stressed if proportional demand exceeded proportional supply determined in the collection and use analyses. The model developed is applicable in any library.     

Finding congressional journals in the U.S. Serial Set

Congressional journals are the only government publications mandated by the Constitution of the United States. Unfortunately, they are often overlooked in favor of the sometimes more complete Congressional Record and its predecessors. From the beginning of the Serial Set in 1817 until 1952 the Journals were printed as a part of that collection. The attached list may be used as a finding tool for those needing to use the Journals included in the Serial Set.     

Choice for cooperative collection development

Book reviews from Choice, proximity, automation, and committed personnel are the bases for a cooperative collection development project among the Tri-College University Consortium libraries at Moorhead, Minnesota, and Fargo, North Dakota. The purpose of the project is to provide more titles for users of the Consortium libraries without compromising collection quality. Librarians at each library make selections from each issue of Choice, prioritize them, compare them, and decide which library should purchase each selection. The ongoing project, in existence for 15 years, currently diverts more than $59,000 annually to additional purchases. This study concludes that when automation, close proximity, and committed personnel are available, cooperative collection development based on Choice reviews is a worthwhile project and that cooperative collection development as a part of resource sharing is the best way to serve the library needs of the Tri-College University Consortium.     

The Impact of the Monographs Crisis on the Field of Communication

This study replicates and extends Yates and Chapman's [(2007), Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 26(1), 39–51] study of references from Communication Monographs, Communication Research, and Journal of Communication for the years 2010 and 2015 to draw further conclusions on the use of monographs in journal literature in the field of communication. Results show that the use of monographs in these journals has been outpaced by references to journal articles by a ratio of 5 to 1. The references were further analyzed by date and publisher. The authors then selected a random sample of the monographs cited in the journals to explore the availability of these monographs in electronic format and found that many are available as ebooks, particularly the more recent titles. The authors also examined the references from a collection of scholarly books in communication from 2005, 2010, and 2015 and found that the use of monographs may be declining slightly. The most notable trend in these references was the increase in the number of references to items in other formats such as film, television, comic books, and websites. The authors conclude that the monographs crisis is indeed affecting citation patterns in the field of communication.     

Exploring adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) as a platform for the predictive modeling of tangible collection usage

Low-use tangible print collections represent a long-standing problem for academic libraries. Expanding on the previous research aimed at leveraging machine learning (ML) toward predicting patterns of collection use, this study explores the potential for adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) as a foundation for developing actionable predictive models of print title use. This study deploys the AdaBoost algorithm, with random forests used as the base classifier, via the adabag package for R. Methodological considerations associated with dataset congruence, as well as sample-based modeling versus novel data modeling, are explored in relation to four AdaBoost models that are trained and tested. Results of this study show AdaBoost as a promising ML solution for predictive modeling of print collections, with the central model of interest able to accurately predict use in over 85% of cases. This research also explores peripheral questions of interest related to general considerations when evaluating ML models, as well as the compatibility of similar models trained with e-book versus print book usage data.     

BCL3 and notis: An automated collection analysis project

The availability of the third edition of Books for College Libraries in machine-readable format opens up new possibilities for using computer technology for collection analysis, particularly if a library's holdings are also in machine-readable format. Preliminary results from a collection analysis project at the Kent State University Libraries are presented. The project features a database created from the Books for College Libraries file that includes local subject categories and holdings status. Initial automated matching of records from the database against the Libraries' holdings was performed by a microcomputer workstation wired to the online catalog. Nonmatching records are being searched manually as a follow-up.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">EveTAR</Emphasis>: building a large-scale multi-task test collection over Arabic tweets

This article introduces a new language-independent approach for creating a large-scale high-quality test collection of tweets that supports multiple information retrieval (IR) tasks without running a shared-task campaign. The adopted approach (demonstrated over Arabic tweets) designs the collection around significant (i.e., popular) events, which enables the development of topics that represent frequent information needs of Twitter users for which rich content exists. That inherently facilitates the support of multiple tasks that generally revolve around events, namely event detection, ad-hoc search, timeline generation, and real-time summarization. The key highlights of the approach include diversifying the judgment pool via interactive search and multiple manually-crafted queries per topic, collecting high-quality annotations via crowd-workers for relevancy and in-house annotators for novelty, filtering out low-agreement topics and inaccessible tweets, and providing multiple subsets of the collection for better availability. Applying our methodology on Arabic tweets resulted in EveTAR, the first freely-available tweet test collection for multiple IR tasks. EveTAR includes a crawl of 355M Arabic tweets and covers 50 significant events for which about 62K tweets were judged with substantial average inter-annotator agreement (Kappa value of 0.71). We demonstrate the usability of EveTAR by evaluating existing algorithms in the respective tasks. Results indicate that the new collection can support reliable ranking of IR systems that is comparable to similar TREC collections, while providing strong baseline results for future studies over Arabic tweets.     

Increasing evaluation sensitivity to diversity

Many queries have multiple interpretations; they are ambiguous or underspecified. This is especially true in the context of Web search. To account for this, much recent research has focused on creating systems that produce diverse ranked lists. In order to validate these systems, several new evaluation measures have been created to quantify diversity. Ideally, diversity evaluation measures would distinguish between systems by the amount of diversity in the ranked lists they produce. Unfortunately, diversity is also a function of the collection over which the system is run and a system’s performance at ad-hoc retrieval. A ranked list built from a collection that does not cover multiple subtopics cannot be diversified; neither can a ranked list that contains no relevant documents. To ensure that we are assessing systems by their diversity, we develop (1) a family of evaluation measures that take into account the diversity of the collection and (2) a meta-evaluation measure that explicitly controls for performance. We demonstrate experimentally that our new measures can achieve substantial improvements in sensitivity to diversity without reducing discriminative power.     

Insights and opinions of readers of the Journal of the Medical Library Association

The Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) conducted a readership survey in 2020 to gain a deeper understanding of our readers, their reading habits, and their satisfaction with JMLA''s content, website functionality, and overall quality. A total of 467 readers responded to the survey, most of whom were librarians/information specialists (85%), worked in an academic (62%) or hospital/health care system (27%) library, and were current Medical Library Association members (80%). Most survey respondents (46%) reported reading JMLA articles on a quarterly basis. Over half of respondents (53%) said they used social media to follow new research or publications, with Twitter being the most popular platform. Respondents stated that Original Investigations, Case Reports, Knowledge Syntheses, and Resource Reviews articles were the most enjoyable to read and important to their research and practice. Almost all respondents reported being satisfied or very satisfied (94%) with the JMLA website. Some respondents felt that the content of JMLA leaned more toward academic librarianship than toward clinical/hospital librarianship and that there were not enough articles on collection management or technical services. These opinions and insights of our readers help keep the JMLA editorial team on track toward publishing articles that are of interest and utility to our audience, raising reader awareness of new content, providing a website that is easy to navigate and use, and maintaining our status as the premier journal in health sciences librarianship.

The Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA), in tandem with the Medical Library Association (MLA), periodically conducts readership surveys to gauge how well the journal meets the needs and desires of its readers. However, much time has passed and many changes have occurred since our last readership survey was published in 2013 [1]. These changes include our transition from a largely print-based to an almost fully digital mode of publication, more extensive reliance on providing access to supplemental materials to improve the rigor and reproducibility of research findings, and the use of social media to share and stay abreast of new scholarly works. Therefore, we conducted a readership survey in 2020 to obtain a more current understanding of our readers, their reading habits, and their satisfaction with JMLA''s content, website functionality, and overall quality.The survey was implemented using Qualtrics and consisted of sixteen closed- and open-ended questions (Appendix A). The survey invitation was distributed on July 6, 2020, through MLA email listservs and social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), JMLA''s Twitter account, and an announcement on the JMLA website. Recipients were encouraged to forward the invitation through other communication channels as appropriate. The survey was closed on July 20, 2020.     

The SISAC Barcode and the Periodicals Analysis Database

Summary

This woikshop described the development of two serials management databases at Wichita State University (WSU) in Kansas. The databases facilitate periodical labeling, checkin, and use data collection. Usage information is loaded into another database which serves collection development needs. Nancy Deyoe, Principal Cataloger at WSU, described the labeling and checkin processing and workflow features. Kathy Payne, previously Science Librarian at WSU and currently Head of Reference at Weber State University, described the development and use of the collection development program. Both presenters demonstrated the use of the two databases.     

Rural providers' access to online resources: a randomized controlled trial

Objective

The research determined the usage and satisfaction levels with one of two point-of-care (PoC) resources among health care providers in a rural state.

Methods

In this randomized controlled trial, twenty-eight health care providers in rural areas were stratified by occupation and region, then randomized into either the DynaMed or the AccessMedicine study arm. Study participants were physicians, physician assistants, and nurses. A pre- and post-study survey measured participants'' attitudes toward different information resources and their information-seeking activities. Medical student investigators provided training and technical support for participants. Data analyses consisted of analysis of variance (ANOVA), paired t tests, and Cohen''s d statistic to compare pre- and post-study effects sizes.

Results

Participants in both the DynaMed and the AccessMedicine arms of the study reported increased satisfaction with their respective PoC resource, as expected. Participants in both arms also reported that they saved time in finding needed information. At baseline, both arms reported too little information available, which increased to “about right amounts of information” at the completion of the study. DynaMed users reported a Cohen''s d increase of +1.50 compared to AccessMedicine users'' reported use of 0.82. DynaMed users reported d2 satisfaction increases of 9.48 versus AccessMedicine satisfaction increases of 0.59 using a Cohen''s d.

Conclusion

Participants in the DynaMed arm of the study used this clinically oriented PoC more heavily than the users of the textbook-based AccessMedicine. In terms of user satisfaction, DynaMed users reported higher levels of satisfaction than the users of AccessMedicine.Keywords and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Clinical Decision Support Systems, Computer-Assisted Decision Making, Decision Making, Evidence-Based Library and Information Practice, Evidence-Based Practice, Health Status Disparities, Health Care Disparities, Information Divide, Information-Seeking Behavior, Medically Underserved Area, Nurse Practitioners, Nurses, Physician Assistants, Physicians, Public Health Nurses, Randomized Controlled Trial as Topic, Service Learning, Vulnerable PopulationsHealth care practitioners regularly seek to incorporate valid information into their evidence-based decisions. Electronic information resources now provide easy access to current health information and summarized forms of evidence to support clinical decision making.

Access effects on health care

Health care providers who are affiliated with well-funded institutions benefit from access to a variety of high-quality information resources to support their evidence-based practices. Practitioners who are not affiliated with academic health sciences centers rarely have access to these same resources due to prohibitively high licensing costs. Ely et al. report that not having access to easy-to-use, high-quality, current information can negatively affect sound clinical decision making. [1].Patients in Isaac et al.''s study who were admitted to hospitals that had access to an electronic evidence-based resource experienced reduced length of stay and lower risk-adjusted mortality rates for prespecified conditions [2]. That study was validated on a broader scale by a multicenter investigation on the utilization of information resources by practitioners [3].Primary health care practitioners who are not affiliated with academic health sciences centers, particularly those who practice in rural or remote areas, often articulate the need for increased access to health information resources. The authors'' literature search and review of 114 of the most relevant research articles about the information needs and information-seeking behavior of health care practitioners suggested that these professionals most value speed and accuracy. For example, they likely would prefer to use point-of-care (PoC) resources for quickly and accurately answering their clinical questions.

Desirability of point of care

PoC resources quickly guide physicians through the diagnosis, treatment, and management of commonly encountered clinical conditions. PoC resources can present compilations of highly authoritative, often evidence-based, information. Physicians can answer more questions and revise clinical decisions more often using these PoC resources [4]. Meanwhile, many health care practitioners still rely on textbooks familiar to them from their professional training programs, despite their potentially dated contents [5–14].

Limited access in rural New Mexico

A randomized controlled trial involving public health practitioners across the rural state of New Mexico reported many barriers in accessing valued information resources [15, 16]. In another study, researchers in New Mexico set out to determine and analyze information needs of health care practitioners who were not affiliated with an academic center. Fifty-one interviews of rural physicians, nurses, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners showed both a need and desire for access to information resources [17].

Goals and hypothesis

This study sought to determine which rural health care providers found more useful in answering everyday clinical questions: electronic PoC DynaMed, which is more clinically oriented, or electronic PoC AccessMedicine, which consists primarily of a health sciences textbook collection. We hypothesized that free access to the explicitly clinical format of the PoC resource DynaMed would result in more extensive use than a baseline of zero over a six-month period than the electronic PoC textbook collection AccessMedicine. We felt this would be due to greater utility of DynaMed in clinical practice. We also predicted that clinicians using the clinically oriented PoC would express higher levels of satisfaction than those using the textbook-based PoC and that clinicians using these PoC resources would prefer using them over other information resources.     

American psycho: A collection management survey in Canadian public libraries

A survey of issues associated with the collection management of American Psycho in Canadian public libraries reveals that selection and circulation of controversial titles remains a difficult task for many librarians. Book reviews, articles in magazines and newspapers, and presence or absence of patron requests were important factors in both positive and negative purchase decisions. Large libraries were more likely than small or medium-sized ones to acquire the title, and very few complaints about the book were received from patrons. Librarians attempted to manage the interplay of the forces of quality, demand, media attention, community needs, and intellectual freedom when deciding whether to order American Psycho and how to circulate it in the collection.     

A long-tail inspired measure to assess resource use in information services

A measure for the assessment of resource use in information services provides an application within the information services area of the long tail concept. The analysis quantifies the long tail concept and is applicable to all libraries and information services, independent of their size and circulation properties. The paradigm of the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient from macroeconomics is adapted in the context of information services. The Gini coefficient examines the skewness of the Lorenz curve against an ideal cumulative distribution that is represented by a 45-degree line. In this context, the Lorenz curve depicts the cumulative percentage of collection items versus the number of loans and identifies the different levels of library resource use on the part of users by measuring how close the Gini coefficient is to the unity (i.e., the Gini of the 45-degree line is identified).     

#nowplaying Madonna: a large-scale evaluation on estimating similarities between music artists and between movies from microblogs

Different term weighting techniques such as $TF\cdot IDF$ or BM25 have been used intensely for manifold text-based information retrieval tasks. Their use for modeling term profiles for named entities and subsequent calculation of similarities between these named entities have been studied to a much smaller extent. The recent trend of microblogging made available massive amounts of information about almost every topic around the world. Therefore, microblogs represent a valuable source for text-based named entity modeling. In this paper, we present a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of different term weighting measures, normalization techniques, query schemes, index term sets, and similarity functions for the task of inferring similarities between named entities, based on data extracted from microblog posts. We analyze several thousand combinations of choices for the above mentioned dimensions, which influence the similarity calculation process, and we investigate in which way they impact the quality of the similarity estimates. Evaluation is performed using three real-world data sets: two collections of microblogs related to music artists and one related to movies. For the music collections, we present results of genre classification experiments using as benchmark genre information from allmusic.com . For the movie collection, we present results of multi-class classification experiments using as benchmark categories from IMDb . We show that microblogs can indeed be exploited to model named entity similarity with remarkable accuracy, provided the correct settings for the analyzed aspects are used. We further compare the results to those obtained when using Web pages as data source.     

A methodological issue concerning the use of Social Sciences Citation Index Journal Citation Reports impact factor data for journal ranking

Following a brief introduction of citation-based journal rankings as potential serials management tools, the most frequently used citation measure—impact factor—is explained. This paper then demonstrates a methodological bias inherent in averaging Social Sciences Citation Index Journal Citation Reports (SSCI JCR) impact factor data from two or more consecutive years. A possible method for correcting the bias, termed adjusted impact factor, is proposed. For illustration, a set of political science journals is ranked according to three different methods (crude averaging, weighted averaging, and adjusted impact factor) for combining SSCI JCR impact factor data from successive years. Although the correlations among the three methods are quite high, one can observe noteworthy differences in the rankings that could impact on collection development decisions.     

Mission-Focused Collections: Rebirth of the Seminarbibliothek as an Ebook Collection

German universities built over the years highly specialized book collections for use by faculty and graduate students. The German term, seminarbibliothek, is often applied to these types of collections, although examples can be found in universities across Europe. The purpose of this article is to examine a similar type of collection using ebooks in veterinary science and to compare this collection to the standard subject classified ebook collections. Most collection development in college and university libraries focuses on academic subjects. The type of collection being described here focuses on a mission. A mission-focused collection increases the use of library holdings and greatly benefits the stakeholders within the institution. This study looks at how such a collection might be formed and defined and what possible effects this might have on the use of collections of this type.     

Developing an Electronic Collection

ABSTRACT

The Internet has had a profound impact on the way people access and use information, especially in the area of monitoring and protecting human rights. This article reviews the development of the University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, one of the largest collections of human rights documents available on the web. The focus is on how the collection was built, how it is used to support research and teaching, and how it is maintained. Many of the issues examined in this article are relevant to the development, maintenance, and use of any electronic collection.     

Current Social Theory:

The present list resulted from the need for a monograph checklist suitable for collection evaluation in a major research library in a field not readily accessible through traditional subject headings or existing lists. It may also be useful to students working in the field. Two sources for review and cited monographs were identified (Contemporary Sociology and The Annual Review of Sociology), and all relevant works from them for the period 1980-1985 were added to the list. Some preliminary bibliographic analysis is supplied, with hints for use in smaller libraries.