FALSC UPDATE

From the Executive Director, Elijah Scott
 

APRIL 2018

Elijah Scott

In the annual academic lifecycle, April is generally the month in which the spring semester comes to an end, after which we all breathe a collective sigh of relief. For those of us in the more northern parts of the state, April can also be the month of spring for which Mark Twain aptly observed, “In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.” I don’t know that I’ve quite observed 136 different kinds of weather so far, but it hasn’t been unusual to need air conditioning in the evening, followed by the need for heat the next morning.

Speaking of warming things up, we’re turning up the heat on our efforts to support textbook affordability and OER initiatives. In February, FLVC hosted our first Florida OER Summit. The event drew in over 180 attendees from across the state. All of the presentations, along with some excellent videos, are available here. We received excellent feedback on the Summit, and we are in the process of planning a subsequent Summit in October.

To further support this work, FALSC has just finalized a consortium membership in the Open Textbook Network (OTN). As an added benefit to our members, faculty and staff at all of Florida’s 12 public universities and 28 public colleges will be able to participate in, and benefit from, FALSC’s membership.

Additional OTN membership benefits include:

  • Five day-long workshops for faculty and staff from all 40 institutions across the state. These workshops follow a train-the-trainer format, designed to educate and empower leaders in the area of textbook affordability and OER. Travel and expenses for all participants are included in the membership. FALSC staff is working to schedule workshops during the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019 at a variety of locations across the state, in order to maximize the opportunity for participation.
  • Participation by five representatives from FALSC-supported institutions in the Open Textbook Summer Institute at the University of Minnesota. All travel expenses are also included with the membership.
  • Access to workshop recruitment materials, OTN community of practice, data collection support and collection of follow up survey data to workshops, a venue for FALSC open textbook-related stories through OTN social media channels, and participation in future OTN events including but not limited to subsequent OTN Summits, community events during the Open Education Conference and other national conferences.

We look forward to sharing more information on the OTN membership and the associated benefits to the colleges and universities we serve.

As you read through the rest of this month’s Update, you’ll learn more about the work being done by FALSC in areas such as the revised direction for the ILS project, updates in E-Resources, and ongoing work in Digital Services. In all of these areas, FALSC is committed to providing the best possible resources and services to the students, faculty, and staff of the libraries that we serve.

One of my favorite comedians, Robin Williams, suggested that “Spring is nature's way of saying, 'Let's party!'” As we reach the end of the spring semester, I hope that all of our colleagues across the state will find some time to relax and enjoy nature’s party.

– ELIJAH SCOTT, Executive Director, Florida Academic Library Services Cooperative

 

Governance and Advisory Processes

MCLS Quarterly Meeting – Feb. 27-28

The Members Council on Library Services (MCLS) met Feb. 27-28 at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Members heard updates on:

  • The next-generation ILS project and possible future paths for the system
  • The Florida Digital Archive
  • Privacy of circulation records
  • FALSC hiring
  • The possibility of contracting with Lyrasis to assist in migrating from Archon to ArchivesSpace, an open source archives information management application for managing and providing web access to archives, manuscripts and digital objects.

Among other business, the council:

  • Decided to pursue a subscription with ACRLMetrics.
  • Approved several FALSC recommendations regarding current ILS-related services (see Going Forward, below).
  • Decided to change the SUS scrub policy on circulation records, which requires deletion of information on completed transactions within 48 hours, to comply with the FCS policy, which requires deletion of circulation records on the same day as completion of transactions. The matter now goes to the Resource Sharing Standing Committee for discussion, with a timeline for instituting the change to be decided and announced at a later date.
  • Approved meeting dates for Sept. 11-12 at State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, and Dec. 6-7 at the Tallahassee offices of the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) and FALSC.

Find more information on several of the meeting’s topics throughout this update. Download materials from past MCLS and Executive Committee meetings here.

The Executive Committee of the MCLS met most recently March 21 and will meet again on April 18.

 

Sierra/Encore Duet Implementation

During the first week of March, FLVC and UWF completed negotiations of an amicable agreement to terminate our contract with Innovative. Our immediate plans are to begin upgrading our current ILS to the latest version and bring all of our member libraries over to our Mango discovery tool.

Working Groups in the Organizational Framework for Implementation:
During the February MCLS meeting, there was a formal recommendation and approval where the Library Deans and Directors voted for the Working Groups to continue working on the project, as members have compiled knowledge that will be invaluable in determining its new direction. The FALSC liaisons will help with the process of researching, reviewing our previous ITN, and determining what questions to ask for a new system. Together they are tasked with refining system specifications. Should we choose to re-start the process of picking a new system, we will be able to do so with the most information possible. The final summary report from each of the Working Groups will be discussed at the May MCLS meeting.

FALSC is tremendously appreciative of the time and effort that library faculty and staff have poured into Sierra/Encore Duet implementation. While the Sierra/Encore Duet project is finished, the project to implement a next-generation ILS is not, and our organizational framework and its associated groups remain in place. ILS Coordinators and the Implementation Team are also asked to remain in place so that our information channels for the project continue to be available.

 

ILS Projects

Upgrade Aleph to v.23
All institutions are currently on v.20 of Aleph. FALSC has begun the initial work to upgrade everyone to the latest version, Aleph v.23. The plan and timeline to go live for all libraries is during winter break of 2018. As we move through the process, we will be sharing documentation outlining new features and functionality. We are planning to conduct webinars for all library staff and will have site visits to share information about what is new and different.

Mango Consolidation
The purpose of this project is to finish the migration of all state colleges to the discovery tool, Mango. Nineteen of the colleges are currently using the discovery tool, Primo, and it is reaching the end of life. Moving the remaining colleges to Mango will consolidate FALSC discovery tool support to the same product and allow us to decommission Primo. During the summer of 2018, the 19 colleges will come up on Mango by the first week in August in to prepare for the fall semester.

 

Other Library Projects

E-Resources

The Collections Management and E-Resources Standing Committee shared a recommendation on the 2019 collection of statewide resources to the Members Council at the December meeting. On the FCS side, the committee was split between a recommendation to cut one of two newspaper products, and the committee requested discussion by the FCS MCLS representatives. As a result, a poll was conducted, asking which of the two products should be retained for 2019. The results of the poll were almost evenly split, indicating that the entire group has the same difficulty as the committee. On the SUS side, the committee had just approved the last minute addition of NexisUni to the statewide collection, and had not yet reviewed the options for 2019. The CMESC continues to explore options, and will provide a revised 2019 recommendation soon.

FALSC is wrapping up the last of our statewide and group licensing agreements for 2018. We added five new vendor license agreements through our group licensing process this year, and we updated a number of the statewide agreements. We are still working with participating institutions on the agreements for SciFinder, SAGE, and Oxford for 2018, and hope to have those completed in the next couple of weeks.

 

New Content Guide

In case you missed seeing our new guide to “Black History Resources in Florida’s Digital Libraries” in time for this year’s Black History Month, it’s never too early to plan ahead for 2019. Researchers can find a wealth of historical images, oral histories, manuscripts, newspaper articles, and other items related to the African American experience in Florida’s digital collections. The guide is available for download in PDF and Word Doc format. Find other materials, on a variety of subjects, from our Digital Services department on the Reports and Publications page of this website.

 

Centralized Data Loads, Extracts, and Reports

SUS Aleph record counts for February are complete. February monthly FCS reports have been released.

The annual IPEDS/Academic Library Service closed for the FCS institutions on March 15 with all 28 reporting.

Ad hoc reports for various institutions were prepared on:

  • Report of duplicate holdings for a specific collection
  • Tags in Primo
  • Report of items with a specific internal note or a HOL with 852$x with specific text
  • Report of bibliographic records with multiple HOL records for the same campus
  • Report of titles added in a specific time frame
  • Report of bib. Records with specific text in subject heading fields
  • Shelf-list with number of loans for specific collection
  • Count of books for all campuses of an institution in 55 specific call number ranges
  • Add loan counts to Payments per Budget report for an institution
  • We automated several processes so that records are fetched and loaded automatically for YBP (VCC); OverDrive (MJC and SPC); and PDA YBP (FAMU, FIU, FSU and UF).
  • Automated most FCS patron loads
  • Created process to retrieve E-book ID’s from a list of ISBN’s for deleted PDA records. The E-book ID’s are then used for a more precise deletion.
  • Set up new process to extract full MARC records each month for holdings added and deleted for nine colleges. These are sent directly to OCLC.
  • LC authority loads complete through 1823
  • Marcive GPO for March loaded.
  • Serial Solution monthly updates applied through March for FAMU
  • EBSCO Serial bibliographic records updates applied through March for FGCU and FSU
  • Updated IEEE Xplore collection for FGCU
  • Updated Psychotherapy.net for FAMU
  • Loaded Taylor and Francis purchased records for FSU, FGCU and UWF.
  • Approved genload profile for Taylor and Francis for FIU

The following EZProxy database definitions have been added/updated:

  • Film Platform for Seminole State College
  • Education Week for Chipola College
  • Gale Infotrac for all colleges
  • Elsevier Science Direct for many colleges
  • Access Science for several colleges
  • Learning Express for several colleges
  • Omnigraphics for Hillsborough
  • Ambrose Digital and Video for Palm Beach
  • Journal American Veterinary for Santa Fe
  • Swank for FSCJ

Other recent FALSC activities include:

  • Added SFX automated localization of the Elsevier Science Direct targets for FSCJ
  • Working on automating more of the LAPS processes for both FCS and SUS
  • Preparing to Soft Launch the Dematic Robotic Arm testing on UCF Aleph
  • SUS record counts for Jan & Feb 2018 are posted

 

Digital Services

Islandora:

  • Florida Gulf Coast University has launched an institutional repository through its Islandora site. Institutional repository development is part of the Florida Islandora Institutional Repository Transformation (FLIIRT) which is software development through FALSC and FLVC to better promote and share scholarly output of Florida's campuses. The new content can be viewed here.

Florida OJ:

  • FALSC batch loaded 304 recent articles to the Proceedings of the Florida State Horticultural Society. These articles contain agricultural research and will be made available to the public after a brief embargo period. Any journals wishing to get more information about journal hosting in Florida Online Journals can visit https://libraries.flvc.org/scholarly-journals for information on the service.
  • Jan. 16 and 26 "Insecta Mundi" articles were loaded into the Florida OJ by FALSC.

Florida Digital Archive:

 

Around the Libraries

If you have any news that you would like to share in this newsletter and on our website, email us!

 

Upcoming Events

The Members Council on Library Services will meet:

  • May 15-16 at the University of Central Florida, Orlando
  • Sept. 11-12 at State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota
  • Dec. 6-7 at the Tallahassee offices of the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) and FALSC

See Previous Updates

Connect With FALSC

 
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