Science Libraries in the Self Service Age

Developing New Services, Targeting New Users

Alvin Hutchinson

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780081020333
• eBook ISBN: 9780081020340
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Science Libraries in the Self Service Age: Developing New Services, Targeting New Users suggests ways in which libraries can remain relevant to their institution. This book describes the myriad of new services and user communities which science librarians have recently incorporated into their routines. Where applicable, the book focuses on both researcher needs and the simple economics that emphasize the need for new service development. Science librarians will have to adapt to changing behaviors and needs if they want to remain a part of their organization's future. As this trend has hastened science librarians to develop new services, many of them aimed at audiences or user groups which had not typically used the library, this book provides timely tactics on which to build a cohesive plan. - Provides a list of practical, targeted services which science librarians can implement - Presents unified topics previously only dealt with separately (data management services, scholarly communication, digital preservation, etc.) - Considers economic and resource issues in developing new services - Written by an experienced librarian at a global institution

Chapter 1

A Self-Service Story

Abstract

With the introduction of networked information technology, many of the activities for which we once needed to physically visit or contact a person can be done on a self-service basis. This has happened in many areas of modern life: retail, government services, education, entertainment, and other realms. This has had a disruptive effect on how business and other organizations are run and managed. Science libraries appear to be ripe for this kind of disruption, and the response of science libraries to these changes is discussed.

Keywords

Self-service; economic disruption; science library services; nontraditional library services; research support; scholarly communication; information seeking behavior

Disruption (like Google Scholar) can be responded to in several different ways but the only viable response from an academic library is service innovation.

Yeh and Walter (2016)

Like all service organizations in the digital era, libraries have been facing disruptive forces. What Clay Christensen called “disruptive innovation” and Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” can used to describe the effects of networked information technology on libraries over the last 20 years. But libraries were not the first to be affected by this change. Think of the video rental store of the 1980s and 1990s. At one time we visited a store with hundreds of movies shelved like a library from which we picked one or two we wanted to watch. We had a week (or so) to view, rewind (in the Video Home System days), and return the video or face a late fee. If a particular movie we wanted to watch was not on the shelf, we had to do without it and hold our hopes up for next week when it may be returned. If our local video rental place was small, or the manager/selector did not agree with our artistic and cultural sensibilities, the selection of movies might not be as varied as we wanted. Then came Netflix. Before long, people were able to access these films in their homes and all but lost the need to visit the video rental shop any longer.

Despite the assumptions of many nonlibrarians, not all library material is available online, so the analogy between science libraries and video rental stores breaks down when we get to special collections and legacy material. But an expanding body of literature is available outside of the institutional library, whether licensed or available on demand via websites, repositories, or by simply emailing the author for a reprint.

A Self-Service Story

For much of the last 100 years, the peer-reviewed journal article has been the most widely used vehicle for scientific communication. And until the 1990s, library users who wanted to find articles on a certain subject used the printed indexes which were specific to a set of journals in a particular discipline. This method was slow, involving manual lookup of terms in what could end up being dozens of physical volumes. In addition, users had to (again, manually) write down the publication data for articles that interested them. With that list of items to find in the stacks, she had to then refer to the catalog and lookup journal titles, recording library location and call number. Not only slow, this process often involved an initial training session by the librarian since the subject-based indexes were often arranged differently from one another and users needed some guidance. While this and other predigital library services may have had a self-service component, it was not something that library users looked forward to handling themselves.

Among the first bibliographic indexes to move online was Medline, a digital version of the printed, Index Medicus, which became available online by the early 1970s. When this and other article indexes were made available in digital form, library users seeking articles could ask the librarian to perform a search on their behalf. This may have been easier for the user if more time-consuming. The librarian performed the search under constraints of time and number of records viewed since online access was commonly billed on a per-minute and per-citation view/print basis. The potential expense of searching these online indexes required that the librarian work closely with the patron in a preliminary interview of the exact needs. Once a search strategy was formulated offline, it could be executed against the database. For reasons of this method of costing, the librarian was the gatekeeper to this data and the service was part of the librarian’s duties.

It was not long until science librarians introduced users to self-service bibliographic databases. At first, they were available via CD-ROM, usually on a single workstation, most often in the library and using proprietary software. These were mailed to the librarians with regular supplements. Users could go back to helping themselves, but they still had to visit the library, get the disk from the librarian (sometimes multiple disks as early CD-ROMs had limited storage capacity), and still receive some initial instruction on how to use the database since user interfaces varied and may not have been very intuitive.

By the 1990s, these article indexes became available via the internet, and by that time, most researchers had a personal computer on their desk which was connected to the organization’s network. Where the library licensed and provided access to online databases, authentication was often network based so that there was no need to share, store, and remember usernames and passwords. Network-based authentication to these licensed (or in the case of PubMed, freely available) resources meant that users did not have to visit the library or consult a librarian to find articles. Of course they would be doing themselves a favor if they took advantage of database search training sessions which the library offered, but in either case, the user was in full self-service mode.

The scientist could search, view, refine, and select relevant papers to print or download. There was no longer a need to manually write down journal names, volume, and pagination anymore. As library systems evolved to integrate and cooperate with one another, the user could capture the bibliographic data to a reference-management tool whether locally installed on her workstation or web based. And at the click of a button from within the online index, she could search her local library catalog for the journal and/or generate an interlibrary loan request from her library’s online request form.

With the introduction of the freely available Google Scholar in 2003, scientists could search for literature wherever they happened to be. While there are always leaders and laggards with any innovation, it is worth noting that scientists found out about this obviously game-changing tool at almost the same time as librarians, and they developed a dexterity in using Google Scholar almost as fast as their librarians did.

The above scenario illustrates the move in research libraries to a self-service model. Countless things that users once relied on librarians to do for them can now be done by themselves (for better or worse). This trend has several implications for science libraries, among them the imperative for flexibility among library staff to investigate and offer new services for their patrons who may no longer need help with certain tasks.

The emergence of Google Scholar is interesting in that it is emblematic of this rapid movement of services out of the librarian’s hands and into the user’s. Many other new science library services are often developed when a librarian discovers a new website, tool, or other gadget that can help library users in their day-to-day work. S/he investigates the tool and how it might apply to the scientist’s work, and s/he uses it to help. The new gadget or web service may become a standard part of the librarian’s toolkit, but soon the scientist realizes that he or she can help themselves, especially where no paid account and individual credential are required. Paid services with access controlled for monetary reasons were necessarily librarian mediated, but when available to all on the organizations’ network (appearing to be “free”), a self-service model began to emerge. IP-based services which are licensed or free services fall quickly to the self-service model just as happened with searching online indexing and abstracting services. Eventually, the librarian is mostly cut out of the process, and self-service equilibrium is reached once again.

The institutional repository (IR) movement presents another useful illustration. While archiving and the institutional stewardship of an organization’s scientific research output is a long-term goal of most IRs, their appeal to many scientists is that it provides a place to easily share and direct inquiries for their electronic reprints. In the early 2000s, repositories began to multiply as many scientific institutions installed and configured platforms to accept and archive digital content. Soon social network services such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu emerged, providing scientists with a much simpler interface than was common among most IR platforms and scientists flocked to them, removing that service from the librarian’s control.

In some cases, scholars are beginning to discover these new services themselves even before librarians have time to raise awareness. Figshare is a good example of a service that many scientists seem to have discovered at the same time (or before) their librarian. Librarians who do not discover and use these emerging tools early and teach or inform scientists risk becoming obsolete.

Many online discovery products include advanced search, display, download, and other tools that end users typically ignore (Haglund and Olsson, 2008). But science librarians can exploit some of these features to pilot services that might otherwise be overlooked, for example, with the commercial products, Scopus and Web of Knowledge which allow not only identification of publications on a certain topic but also of institutions and potential collaborators, metrics for publications, and evaluation of research outputs.

However, the advantage will probably be short-lived: these and almost all advanced services will one day be performed directly by users, and therefore, science librarians will need to continually search for innovations of which their user base is yet unaware in order to develop new services and remain relevant to their parent organization. Librarians may one day serve as the means to discover not newly published literature but new tools to foster efficiency in the research enterprise including a wider range of activity that scientists are normally involved with.

Science librarians should keep abreast of popular blogs, news, and Twitter feeds where new services, gadgets, and other items of interest to the science publishing community might appear. This can be overwhelming, but the use of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) formats to syndicate this content provides a more efficient way to cover this content more thoroughly. A proficiency and current awareness of new tools and services can ensure that science librarians are the go-to for latest developments in these areas which may not necessarily in the domain expertise of the scientist.

Administration and Planning for New Services

Sometimes, service development tends to be spontaneous and limited, while at other times, services are developed more systematically than sporadically and only after an initial inquiry, a definition of the problem, and the creation of a team or effort to solve it. The latter approach has advantages and disadvantages, and it should be noted that it is often a much slower process and can become a victim of mission creep. But this approach also ensures buy-in from management and keeps all parties informed who may ultimately be affected by the development and implementation of a new service.

Among the most basic services science librarians can provide is to inform their users that digital publishing is disrupting not only how users read but how libraries manage and collect published outputs. Scientists may often be lost in their laboratory or field work, but a succinct and clear presentation of the issues and soliciting their thoughts would be doing both librarian and user a great service.

Perhaps the most important service a science librarian can offer grows out of developing a real interest in the research of the library users. When librarians become conversant in the field and take an interest in what the scientists do—particularly their way of documenting and writing/publishing their research—then librarians can most easily create and develop new services (Gibson and Coniglio, 2010).

One could reasonably conclude that having someone else do your work for you is more desirable than doing it yourself. And for something like housework that is probably true. But it has become clear that most research library users like and want to do their research themselves, often from their offices or labs (Tenopir et al., 2012). Science librarians need to consider all implications this brings forth.

References

1. Gibson, C., Coniglio, J.W. 2010. The new liaison librarian: competencies for the 21st century academic librarian. In: Walter, Scott and Williams, Karen, (Eds.), The Expert Library: Staffing, Sustaining and Advancing the Academic Library in the 21st Century, As...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Chapter 1. A Self-Service Story
• Chapter 2. Introduction: Science Libraries and Service Innovation
• Part I: Non Traditional Library Services
• Part II: Cost Savings as a Service
• Index