The March 2019 issue of Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL) is available now. With this issue we begin a new regular column, “Public Libraries Leading the Way.” The column will highlight technology-based innovations from a public library perspective. The inaugural piece is The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence: One Library’s Approach, by Frisco (Texas) Public Library’s Thomas Finley. If you work in a public library and have an idea for a column to share, please check out this LITA blog post with details on how to submit your idea.
In this issue:
Library Services Navigation: Improving the Online User Experience
Brian Rennick
While the discoverability of traditional information resources is often the focus of library website design, there is also a need to help users find other services such as equipment, study rooms, and programs. A recent assessment of the Brigham Young University Library website identified nearly two hundred services. Many of these service descriptions were buried deep in the site, making them difficult to locate. This article will describe a web application that was developed to improve service discovery and to help ensure the accuracy and maintainability of service information on an academic library website.
Taking The Long Way Around: Improving The Display Of HathiTrust Records In Primo
Jason Alden Bengtson and Jason Coleman
As with any shared format for serializing data, Primo’s PNX records have limits on the types of data which they pass along from the source records and into the Primo tool. As a result of these limitations, PNX records do not currently have a provision for harvesting and transferring rights information about HathiTrust holdings that the Kansas State University (KSU) Library system indexes through Primo. This created a problem, since Primo was defaulting to indicate that all HathiTrust materials were available to KSU Libraries (K-State Libraries) patrons, when only a limited portion of them actually were. This disconnect was infuriating some library users, and creating difficulties for the public services librarians. There was a library-wide discussion about removing HathiTrust holdings from Primo altogether, but it was decided that such a solution was an overreaction. As a consequence, the library IT department began a crash program to attempt to find a solution to the problem. The result was an application called hathiGenius.
The Map As A Search Box: Using Linked Data To Create A Geographic Discovery
System
Gabriel Mckee
This article describes a bibliographic mapping project recently undertaken at the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). The MARC Advisory Committee recently approved an update to MARC that enables the use of dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in MARC subfield $0. The ISAW Library has taken advantage of MARC’s new openness to URIs, using identifiers from the linked data gazetteer Pleiades in MARC records and using this metadata to create maps representing our library’s holdings. By populating our MARC records with URIs from Pleiades, an online, linked open data (LOD) gazetteer of the ancient world, we are able to create maps of the geographic metadata in our library’s catalog. This article describes the background, procedures, and potential future directions for this collection-mapping project.
Measuring Information System Project Success Through A Software-Assisted Qualitative Content Analysis
Jin Xiu Guo
Information System (IS)/IT project success is a growing interest in management due to its high impact on organizational change and effectiveness. Libraries have been adopting integrated library systems (ILS) to manage services and resources for years. It is essential for librarians to understand the mechanism of IS project management in order to successfully bring technology innovation to the organization. This study develops a theoretical model of measuring IS project success and tests it in an ILS merger project through a software-assisted qualitative content analysis. The model addresses project success through three constructs: (1) project management process, (2) project outcomes, and (3) contextual factors. The results indicate project management success alone cannot guarantee project success; project outputs and contextual factors also influence success through the leadership of the project manager throughout the lifecycle. The study not only confirms the proposed model in a post-project evaluation, but also signifies that project assessment can reinforce organizational learning, increase the chance of achieving success, and maximize overall returns for an organization. The qualitative content analysis with NVivo 11 has provided a new research method for project managers to self-assess an IS/IT project success systematically and learn from their experiences throughout the project lifecycle.
A Systematic Approach Towards Web Preservation
Muzammil Khan and Arif Ur Rahman
The main purpose of the article is to divide the web preservation process into small explicable stages and design a step-by-step web preservation process that leads to creating a well-organized web archive. A number of research articles were studied. The proposed comprehensive web preservation process describes and combines strengths of different techniques observed during the study. For each web preservation step, different approaches and possible implementation techniques have been identified that can be adopted in digital archiving. The potential value of the proposed model is to guide the archivist, related personnel, and organizations to effectively preserve their intellectual digital contents for future use. The model can help to initiate a web preservation process and create a well-organized web archive to efficiently manage the archived web contents. A section briefly describes the implementation of the proposed approach in a digital news stories preservation framework for archiving news published online from different sources.
Determining Textbook Cost, Formats, And Licensing With Google Books API: A Case Study From An Open Textbook Project
Eamon Costello, Richard Bolger, Tiziana Soverino, and Mark Brown
The rising cost of textbooks for students has been highlighted as a major concern in higher education, particularly in the US and Canada. Less has been reported, however, about the costs of textbooks outside of North America, including in Europe. We address this gap in the knowledge through a case study of one Irish higher education institution, focusing on the cost, accessibility, and licensing of textbooks. We report here on an investigation of textbook prices drawing from an official college course catalog containing several thousand books. We detail how we sought to determine metadata of these books including: the formats they are available in, whether they are in the public domain, and the retail prices. We explain how we used methods to automatically determine textbook costs using Google Books API and make our code and dataset publicly available.
Editorial Content
- The new Public Libraries Leading the Way column, by Thomas Finley, joins our two regular columns, the LITA President’s Letter and Editorial Board Thoughts.
- The March Letter from the Editor contains more details about the new Public Libraries Leading the Way column.
- In her March letter, LITA President Bohyun Kim provides updates from January’s ALA Midwinter meeting.
- In his Editorial Board Thoughts column, Kevin Ford talks about the importance of user stories and use cases to any technology project.
Submit Your Ideas
Contact ITAL Editor Ken Varnum at varnum@umich.edu with your proposal. Current formats are generally:
- Articles – original research or comprehensive and in-depth analyses, in the 3000-5000 word range.
- Communications – brief research reports, technical findings, and case studies, in the 1000-3000 word range.
Questions or Comments?
For all other questions or comments related to LITA publications, contact us at (312) 280-4268 or lita@ala.org
