ENLARGINGTHROUGHPUT: THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII ATMANOA’S PLAN TO MOVEMATERIALS TO USERS FASTER
Kimberly NakanoHead of Monographic Acquisitions
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Good Morning, my name is Kim Nakano. I am the head of Acquisitions, Monographic Book Buying for the University of Hawaii at Manoa Libraries. To tell you a little about myself, I was a reference librarian from 1982 to 1993 at UHM, and Head of Sinclair Library from 1993 – 1996. From 1997 – 2009, I worked in the Washington State Community College library system. I’m very pleased to be back home again in Hawaii and re-connecting with old friends and making new ones.
Kyle and Kelsey all grown up!
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For those of you who remember, Kyle and Kelsey were seven when we left and now they are all grown up! The way I’m linking them to my presentation this morning is that they are a part of the vast generation of users that UHM Library seeks to serve, undergraduates.
Academic libraries?
Public libraries?
School libraries?
Special libraries?
Virtual libraries?
Library School Students & Faculty?
Who are you?
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So, let’s find out who’s in the room today. How many of you are from academic libraries? How many from public libraries? How many from school libraries? How many from special libraries? How many from virtual libraries? How many from the library school? Did I miss anyone? So let’s all take just a moment to think about in our own context the following…
Photo by Wil Frost
Getting materials to the shelves as quickly as possible
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Getting materials to the shelves as quickly as possible
In order to…Save the time of the user. Ranganathan
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Getting materials to the shelves as quickly as possible in order to save the time of the user. Saving the time of the user is the fourth law of Ranganathan who is the father of library science in India. As a result of the workflow study I think many of us at UHM are thinking about and exploring this notion much more deeply. It’s a very simple notion, isn’t it? But underlying it is a profound shift in philosophy for some of the staff and faculty at UHM. Rather than building the collections for the collections sake alone, let’s put the users first and keep them in mind as we analyze and evaluate our work.
UHM Technical Services Workflow Analysis Project
Trends in Academic Library Technical Services
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How UHM Libraries is trying to shift its emphasis and put users first is the underlying theme of my talk today. There are two parts to the talk: First, I’ll be describing the Technical Services Workflow Analysis Project report that was recently completed and has just begun implementation. Second, I’ll talk very briefly about trends in technical services.
UHM Technical Services Workflow Analysis Project
Library Administration
Public Services Collection Services
Acquisitions Cataloging Preservation Serials
Information Technology
Library Organization Chart
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Here’s a simple organization chart to provide some context for the library’s structure. The Technical Services Workflow Project mainly affects the Collection Services division which is made of up of the four departments Acquisitions Cataloging Preservation And Serials. For the most part Preservation issues did not float to the top in the report, so I will report on the larger issues for acquistions, cataloging, and serials.
Timeline of Development
UHM Libraries Strategic Plan
2008-2015
(June 2008)
Eight Strategic Action Teams
(March 2009)
Processing and Workflow Analysis S.A.T. #7
(March – May 2009)
R2 Workflow Analysis Study
(May – July 2009)
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This graphic explains how did the Workflow Analysis Study come to be? Back in 2008, the UHM Libraries undertook a re-writing of its long-term strategic plan shown here in the brown bubble. This process was expertly led by Alan Grosenheider who is the assistant to the University Librarian Paula Mochida. (Alan and Paula are you in the room?) Next, themes for work that needed to be done emerged and the University Librarian charged eight “Strategic Action Teams” with work to be done in March 2009. These teams are represented by the pink bubble. SAT # 1 Discovery and Delivery Team and #3 Digital Initiatives Team worked to review Web 2.0 initiatives and digital archiving. For example, SAT #6’s was the Sinclair Library Student Success Center Operations Team which was to write a proposal for long-term funding of the new Student Success Center. One of the Strategic Action Teams was SAT #7, Processing and Workflow Analysis shown here in the green bubble. This team was led by Mike Chopey, head of Cataloging. During the time period March – May 2009, SAT #7 studied this very complex issue and determined that the library needed an expert outside consultant. This resulted in the actual study being done during the May – July 2009 time period, shown here in the blue bubble.
Who are R2 Consulting LLC?http://www.ebookmap.net/
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The company that was chosen to do the workflow analysis study after a competitive RFP was R2 Consulting. R2 is a consulting firm that is made up of Rick Lugg and Ruth Fischer seen here from left to right. Rick and Ruth both have technical services backgrounds and have worked in the book vendor industry. Matt Barnes, seen here on the right was the third member of R2 and also worked in the book vendor industry. BTW, they LOVED Hawaii. This was the view from their room.
Create additional capacity to do work using existing staff.
Realign capacity with library’s priorities.
Shift emphasis from print to electronic.
Shift emphasis from commonly-held to unique content.
What does R2 do?
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What R2 does is to look at what a library is doing, ask a lot of questions, and then make recommendations for changing the way a library does its work to be able to free up manpower and resources to get to other important tasks or fund important projects. R2 has a specific lens they look through when the conduct their workflow analysis. First, they are about re-alignment of resources, both manpower and money, with a library’s priorities. Next, they definitely believe that the future of libraries is electronic. And third, they search to unearth the unique resources a library has and focusing attention on those items.
R2 looked at all of these aspect of technical services. The overarching question they wanted to answer was “How long does it take from the time a book is requested to the time it hits the shelves?” Now you might be asking yourself, why, if they are interested in electronic, do they focus so much time on physical books? What they have found after doing many of these reviews is that large research libraries are entrenched in legacy procedures that have staff time and resources hooked to buying, cataloging, and processing physical books and the only way to free up time to do other things is to find efficiencies in those processes.
R2 in-person visit May 11-14, 2009 All staff meeting Focused interviews
Return in-person visit July 14, 2009 All staff meeting Final report
How was the review conducted?
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R2 came to visit with UHM Libraries twice. The first visit was in May 2009 and was a kick-off visit. There was an all-staff meeting where R2 explained what they did, who they had worked with (which include all the top, large research libraries and the Library of Congress, OCLC), And what they hoped to accomplish. Then they had three days of interviews with individual and groups of staff in technical services, administration, and also information services because of the overlap in electronic resources work. R2 asked question such as What is important? What is not important? Why are you doing this? And why this certain way? These interviews resulted in over 100 pages of collated notes. R2 then began the process of discussion between themselves to determine what to recommend. In July 2009, Rick Lugg returned to present the results of the review. Our report was apparently the longest one the firm had ever written at over 80 pages with 68 separate recommendations. Again, an all-staff meeting was held to present the results.
Unique institutional situation due to 2004 flood
Physical displacement of technical services staff
Emotional toll on entire library staff
What did the review find?
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One of the first acknowledgements R2 made was that a library that experiences a natural disaster such as UHM’s 2004 flood does face unique institutional challenges that other libraries do not. The flood was highly devastating not only to physical structure of Hamilton library and collections but also to staff emotionally coping with the loss of materials, and then spending years replacing those materials. I believe though that the intense R2 interviews in some small way allowed many staff to talk through the turmoil of the flood and brought a sense of closure to some. We just passed the five year mark on Oct 31, 2009 and are hoping to move into renovated quarters in spring 2010.
Traditional way of doing things
Monographs
Serials
Cataloging
What did the review find in Technical Services?
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In each of the technical services departments, the review noted highly traditional ways of doing things that would need to change if workflow efficiencies were to be had. Over the next three slides I’ll give a couple of examples from each of the areas to give you a flavor of the kinds of recommendations that were made.
1. Pursue further consolidation of purchasing with Blackwell
2. Require electronic selection using Blackwell’s Collection Manager (CM)
Ordering and Receiving Monographs
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There were 20 recommendations for the Monographs area. Many of them had to do with exchanging information electronically with vendors, OCLC, Voyager and reconfiguring our workflow to speed things up and move things along. We started chipping away at these at the end of September and it is complicated stuff that will take several years to accomplish. Two sample recommendations from this area are: The study found that 63% of UHM Libraries purchases were from Blackwell Book Services. We had previously been varying our orders between Amazon and BBS for price reasons however R2 recommended looking for further consolidation with BBS in order to get a larger % discount AND to be able to get the books shelf ready meaning property-stamped, barcoded, call-number labeled. They felt this service more than off-set the small price break we were getting from Amazon. We have already begun this process. A second recommendation we have started to work on is to standardize how selectors send orders in if they find a title in Blackwell’s Collection Manager which is an online selection and fund management tool. The beauty of this is that our current paper order form won’t travel around the library from dept to dept. Rather the information would be electronically moved between systems. We are in the beginning stages of this process but I hope this description gives you a sense of how changing what we do we move materials to the users faster.
1. Streamline electronic resources management by conducting an electronic resources access/gateway audit
2. Standard routing and handling of journals
Ordering and Receiving Serials, E-Books & Databases
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The serials section of the Report contained 13 recommendations. For the first sample recommendation. There are currently multiple ways to get to resources and databases via our website and this sometimes confuses students. There is also the question of staff time in maintaining the multiple paths. Initial discussions are occurring about this recommendation. For the second recommendation is about the routing of journals internally to library faculty. Over time and with changes in staff, the routing of and handling of journals has become more and more specialized requiring a lot of serials’ staff time. The Report recommends an overhaul of this historical way of doing things and standardizing how an item is handled.
1. Begin the OCLC reclamation project
2. Catalog to the level needed.
Cataloging Materials
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There were 11 recommendations in the Cataloging section. The first recommendation listed here is a project to bring UHM Libraries holdings up-to-date in OCLC both to reflect accurate holdings, but also to be able to participate in future exciting projects that OCLC carries out. This second recommendation is certainly a hot topic conversation for catalogers but they have been asked to look at alternative standards for less-than-full-cataloging in order to free up their time to tackle the backlog of over 6000 items. These were just six examples of the many recommendations for Technical Services in the report and I hope give you a flavor of their depth of breadth.
Photo Courtesy Rick Lugg
What did we do after we got the report?
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So, with eighty pages of report and 68 recommendations, and about 150 faculty and staff that work at UHM Libraries, you can imagine the kind of head-butting that was going on, right? Seriously, though. I feel so privileged to have been here for the R2 work because it is one of those times when conversation happens around subjects that no one wants to talk about but they really need to be talked about, do you know what I mean? Each of the Technical Services department sat down together and talked and argued. And then the collection services heads got together over a period of about 10 weeks and talked and clarified and argued. I think it was a really healthy conversation. We ended up recommending all but two of the recommendations be implemented and are just starting on that work now.
Trends
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Now I’m going to move to describe several trends that have shown up in reports that R2 has done for academic libraries and that probably will have some resonance for other kinds of libraries as well.
Do you think students are starting their research at the library’s homepage?
How many say yes?
How many say no?
How many don’t know?
How are students using libraries?
Pew Internet & American Life Projecthttp://www.pewinternet.org
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Remember when I said that the underlying theme of my talk was going to be on putting users at the center. So let’s focus back on student users. (Ask the questions.) Do you think students are starting their research at the library’s homepage? Thank you. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has been studying college student use of the internet and many other related technology topics for the last ten years. What they have found through their surveys and observations is that students are not using libraries like they used to. And they do not start their research using the library’s homepage.
Trends
Why are we buying books in anticipation of a student using them?
Why not wait until they ask for them and get it to them expeditiously?
UHM ILL Purchase on Demand Jan Sung, Naomi Chow, or Ryan James
And if students aren’t starting their search with library homepages…
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So here is one question that leads to one trend… If students aren’t starting their search with library homepages… Why are we buying books in anticipation of a student using them? Why not wait until they ask for them and get them the exact one they want expeditiously? One trend is purchasing on demand. UHM Libraries has just instituted a pilot program to buy books for the collection via ILL. If you want more information see: Jan Sung, Naomi Chow, or Ryan James! All here at HLA
More Technical Services trends
Ability to order e-books from approval vendors
New electronic title alerts from vendors
Interfacing with college/university accounting systems
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Here are other trends in technical services. E-books are being treated just like any other format by vendors. Electronic collection development sites are becoming more sophisticated in pushing information to potential buyers. Linkages between vendors and library systems is very common. Now the push is to include the university accounting systems as well for full electronic processing.
More Technical Services trends
Alternate gateways to access materials (WorldCat, Google Scholar, etc.)
Reduced emphasis on controlled vocabularies in OPACs
Concern over cost of authority control
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There are many ways to access materials, the library is no longer the sole gateway With so many ways to access materials, controlled vocabularies in OPACs are de-emphasized. The cost-benefit of authority control in cataloging is being questioned.
The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Student and Information Technology, 2009 (EDUCAUSE)
2008 Social Networking Sites 2009 Mobile Revolution:
Internet-Capable Handheld Devices
General Trends
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This is a study that is important because is a longitudinal one in its 6th year. An excellent source of general trend information of how undergraduate students are using technologies. It asks three information literacy questions and we should follow this research. Each year it focuses on one area for in-depth review. Last year it was Social Networking sites. This year it is about Mobile Networking.
I’d like to end with this fun graphic. How many of you have heard or used wordle? Great! Would you please explain to the group what it does? I copied the entire R2 report into wordle and this is the graphic it produced. Looking at it reminds me that we are grappling with complex issues Going to continue to have many conversations Chipping away at the behind-the-scenes work to make the recommendations happen.
