10,000 is a nice round number

So one of the things that I’ve been working on for the last few weeks is how to best draw attention to the fact that DigitalCommons@ILR is about to exceed 10,000 uploaded documents. The repository’s been around since the end of 2004, and my involvement began in early 2006, with me officially taking over management this past January.

As I said in the title, 10,000 is a nice round number, and we’re bringing attention to it in no small part because we want to get the word out about the resource that we’ve been putting together here at Catherwood, and making available to the world. But I also consider that number important because of the level of oversight each item in the repository receives during the upload process. Almost nothing is automated, and each item is processed by multiple staff members and frequently at least one or two student employees. We try to make sure each document is as useful as possible to anyone who downloads it, and that means there’s a lot of hard work on display in that repository.

Thanks go out to Steve, Fran, Angie, Julia, Clement, Lynette, Corinne, Katherine, Kayla, Susanne, John, and especially Mary Newhart and Suzanne Cohen (who were the driving force behind this thing when I came on board). I’m just glad to have gotten the opportunity to join up.

IRs@Cornell

On Monday I made a presentation for CUL’s Professional Development Week titled, “IRs@Cornell: The Expanding Role of Institutional Repositories“. I used Prezi.com to make it, so it’s viewable online.

Like many of my presentations, it loses something without my “voiceover,” therefore I will provide an excerpt from said that may clarify one portion of the presentation:

The purpose of institutions and measures like the Federal Depository Library Program was to preserve government documentation in case of fire, flood, technological mishap, or other natural disasters.

(beat)

Too soon?

See if you can guess where it goes!

Scanner suggestions?

No, not that kind.

So, here in the Web & Digital Projects group, we’re looking to snag a new scanner. It will mainly be used to digitize hardcopy articles for upload into our digital repository, so both the quality of the scans and the ability to scan many pages quickly and accurately are priorities.

I’m taking a look at options now, but I was wondering if anyone out there in blogland had some experinece or suggestions about models i should take a closer look at or avoid entirely? 

Thanks!

Millennial mythology and users in the wild

One of the most interesting sessions I attended at Computers in Libraries 2008 (and that’s a tough prize to take) was “What Do Users Really Do in Their Native Habitat?” Half of the presentation was by Pascal Lupien and Randy Oldham of the University of Guelph, and the other by John Law of ProQuest. Both halves described large-scale studies done to assess web resources’ usability for and impact on college students. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart, and I look forward to the full reports for use on projects like DigitalCommons@ILR and LibGuides.

As tempted as I am to summarize the results here, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek has already done a better job of it than I could. A lot of the data came as little surprise to the audience: the presenters from Guelph polled the audience about students’ use (academic and otherwise) of PDAs, chat applications, virtual worlds, etc., and the revealed stats matched the audience estimates quite well. But more surprising was that student respondents frequently noted that they wanted to use the library’s web sites because that was where the good information could be found, but were often rebuffed by usability issues. The students knew that Google and Wikipedia and so forth weren’t the best places to research, and they knew that the library had the information needed… but they found themselves frustrated by the interfaces standing between them and that information.

Law (who has, let us be frank, an awesome name) also found users who wanted the library’s information but found it difficult to get to. His study further indicated that many of these students were sold on using library sites by the outreach efforts of librarians. Once students became aware of a resource, either through their instructor or a visit from a librarian, they wanted to use it.

I found these presentations so useful that they went into the literature review for the Assessment Plan I handed in for LibGuides the day I got back from the conference. (An assignment written almost entirely in hotel rooms and airports, which was a first for me. Probably not a last, sadly.) This is great stuff, and honestly the kind of studies that need to be done if we really want to understand how all these electronic resources we buy and build and link to actually get used. Which is, I think, supposed to be the point.