NASIG 2018

David Bradley will be our opening speaker. David is a self-described storyteller, writer, filmmaker, and history geek, with an obsession for the history of Atlanta, where he has lived for 33 years. David will perform a stand-up history and visual presentation of Atlanta history. Expect to be entertained, informed, and excited to be in Atlanta.

Title: Towards an Open Research Knowledge Graph

The document-oriented workflows in science have reached (or already exceeded) the limits of adequacy as highlighted for example by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature and
the reproducibility crisis. Now it is possible to rethink this dominant paradigm of document-centered knowledge exchange and transform it into knowledge-based information flows by representing and expressing knowledge through semantically rich, interlinked knowledge graphs.
The core of the establishment of knowledge-based information flows is the creation and evolution of information models for the establishment of a common understanding of data and information between the various stakeholders as well as the integration of these technologies into the infrastructure and processes of search and knowledge exchange in the research library of the future. By integrating these information models into existing and new research infrastructure services, the information structures that are currently still implicit and deeply hidden in documents can be made explicit and directly usable. This has the potential to revolutionize scientific work because information and research results can be seamlessly interlinked with each other and better mapped to complex information needs. Also research results become directly comparable and easier to reuse.

Digital Science and 100+ global research institutions have spent the better part of the last two years collaborating to solve three distinct challenges in the existing research landscape:

* Research evaluation focuses almost exclusively on publications and citations data
* Research evaluation tools are siloed in proprietary applications that rarely speak to each other
* The gaps amongst proprietary data sources made generating a complete picture of impact extremely difficult (and expensive)

The goal of this collaboration amongst publishers, funders, research administrators, libraries, and Digital Science was to transform the research landscape by attempting to solve the problems resulting from expensive, siloed data research evaluation data.

In 2014, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information and the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL) partnered in the development of the TALint (Toronto Academic Libraries Internship) program.  Focused on workplace-integrated-learning (W-I-L), the TALint program provides enhanced educational experiences for Masters of Information students by combining periods of in-class study with actual workplace experiences. The two-year program is intended to enhance the quality of student learning by providing interns with specialized knowledge and practical skills, professional development and mentorship opportunities. It is often the case that the workplace is ahead of academic programs. This is particularly true in technical services and the field of electronic resource management, where the requisite knowledge and practical skills required to perform these roles has traditionally been under-represented within library and information studies curricula. The TALint program has provided UTL with the unique opportunity to bridge the gap between the expertise developed through information studies programs and the specific knowledge and skills required to take on roles as electronic resource librarians.  With this year’s TALint cohort in UTL’s Metadata Technologies Team, we are using NASIG’s Core Competencies for Electronic Resources Librarians as a framework for training our two TALint interns.  In this session, presenters will discuss the development of a comprehensive student training plan in electronic resource management, the ongoing assessment of learning outcomes, student perceptions of competency-based training, and the benefits of using the Core Competencies that have been felt beyond the internship program. We will share how this training plan can better equip Masters of Information students for careers in electronic resource management by producing graduates who are qualified, technologically skilled and workplace-ready.

By now, you’ve probably attended several sessions to learn and understand what should and shouldn’t be in an electronic resource license agreement. It can be a daunting task to keep track of everything – what items does your university/state require in the license agreement, what can’t be in license agreement, and where exactly are you in that process? Is it under review? Sent for signature? With the General Counsel’s Office? Waiting on the vendor? The possibilities are endless. And, once you’ve got everything squared away, the job isn’t done. Is it in the ERM? Is it filed (either print or electronic or both)?

As anyone who’s worked with License agreements knows, the process of managing the workflow for a license agreement is almost as daunting as reviewing the license agreement. In this session, two librarians will present how they manage the licensing workflow from start to finish.

Alexis Linoski will share how she uses Trello to manage the license workflow from receipt to entry in the ERM. Checklists will be shared as will criteria for choosing what data from each license agreement is entered in the ERM. While the workflow will vary from institution to institution, and in some cases will vary depending on the type of license (i.e. locally negotiated agreement vs a consortial agreement), this process can be modified to meet any workflow need and accommodate collaboration and process management with team members. In addition, it will include a high level overview of some of the features of Trello.

Carolyn Carpan will share the how the Collection Strategies Unit at the University of Alberta Libraries inherited two licensing databases, one of which displays usage rights to users and how they merged the two database, using CORAL for their combined product. She will discuss why libraries would build a licensing database and display usage rights for licensed materials to users, how to use the CORAL licensing database for this purpose, discuss advantages and limitations of the CORAL licensing database over other products, and make recommendations for enhancements to the CORAL licensing module.

Vendor Lightning Talks

• Author Services (Ken May, AIP Publishing ) 
• Affordable Learning with Springer Nature eBooks (Courtney Little & Kait Neese, Springer/Nature ) 
• Research Now (Emily Farrell, DeGruyter) 
• Research Dashboard: Track Research, Populate Repositories, Support Public  Access (Caitlin Sheeder-Borrelli, Taylor & Francis) 
•  How ACS is Improving Peer Review Education 

(Yung Murphy, American Chemical Society)

• Bloomsbury Digital Resources (Kristin Cunningham, Bloomsbury) 
• Digitalia Academic Databases (Alvaro Arias, Digitalia Hispanica)
• Duke University Press: e-Books and Platform Migration (Kim Steinle, Duke University Press)
• What’s New at Oxford University Press? (Wyatt Reynolds, Oxford University Press)
•  EBSCO takes accessibility-first approach (Jill Power & Emma Waecker, Ebsco)

Title: Communities of praxis: transforming access to information for equity

Abstract: Access and accessibility to knowledge for research and professional practice has implications for social equity and democracy. Library and information services have many opportunities to make knowledge discoverable, retrievable and useable, but on many occasions are instead (actively or passively) complicit in maintaining a status quo that feeds social inequality. In this presentation, Lauren will combine work by key theorists in the field, empirical research into information experiences and practices, and her own experiences of establishing an evidence search and summary service for the social services workforce of over 200,000 across Scotland. She will explore issues of access, accessibility and user experience to consider the social justice implications of practices in library and information services, including scholarly communications and systems.

This talk will articulate how imbalanced power relations across librarianship and the systems we promote reflect those of society, and offer insights into how, through evidence-based, reflective practice, we can harness the transformative potential of library and information services to improve outcomes for society through democratising access to knowledge. It will explore how critical approaches to user experience, privacy and openness could act as as springboards to change structures within library and information services. With these tools we may mitigate against the inequalities caused by problems such as inaccessibility, algorithmic bias and ideologically-driven policies in the context of educational and workplace information practices, and maximise beneficial outcomes for the public good.

Collaborative Notes

Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that envisions a future with better metadata; not only increasing discoverability of content, but also benefiting reputation management, attribution, discoverability, efficiency, data reproducibility and reusability, in addition to future services that don’t yet exist! It aims to facilitate the collaboration of all in scholarly communications to consistently improve metadata to enhance discoverability, facilitate new services, and create efficiencies with the ultimate goal of accelerating scholarly discovery.

Almost a year after launch, Metadata 2020 has gained considerable ground in gathering information from multiple community groups surrounding metadata challenges and opportunities to find ways to enhance metadata and find new solutions. Now that Metadata 2020 has received feedback and stories from all sectors of the research and scholarly communication cycle, we are targeting crucial points where metadata needs to work across all groups in order for a mature metadata model to become a useful reality.

The Metadata 2020 Librarian Community Group seeks to conduct a workshop to narrow in on insights from serials metadata experts to:

1. Better understand the current state of serials metadata
2. Consider the flow of serials metadata between publishers, libraries, repositories and service providers, and how it could be improved
3. List the roadblocks that prevent smooth transition of serials metadata from one place to another
4. Develop recommendations for the groups within Metadata 2020 to consider (Library Group, Funder Group, Researchers Group, Publishers Group, Service Provider Group and Data Publishers/Repositories Group)

This session will use a roundtable and group discussion format, and will deliver a set of roadblocks and recommendations for improvement for Metadata 2020 to use in their goal of creating best metadata practices across the scholarly communications/research lifecycles.

1.  Great Relationships: Priceless (Susan Davis)
2. “Why don’t faculty use what we have?”: Integrating Technical Services into Liaison Activities (Courtney McAllister)
3. Computational Reproducibility with Code Ocean (Travis Howard Hewgley)
4. The UWI e Book Initiative (Colleen Johnson)
5. Assessing Demand for Unsubscribed Titles with SerialsSolutions 360 Link and Google Analytics (Matthew Jabaily)
6. Connecting Departments through License Review (Molly Rainard)

Twenty years ago the NASIG conference theme was "Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground." I was fortunate to attend, in my final term as a library school student, as one of the 1998 student award winners. I've been asked to share a bit about my path from serials clerk to dean. Whether that story provides some inspiration for career development or a cautionary tale about leaving serials for the dark side will be for you to discern.

Formerly known as the Business Meeting.

The Scholarly Commons working group has been engaged in a synthesis activity over the past two years to survey the existing sets of charters, principles and best practices and tools to try to knit them together into a coherent vision and set of practices for scholarly communications.

Based on this work, we’ve concluded that the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship is, indeed a FAIR, Open, Research-object based, Citable Ecosystem that we call the scholarly commons. The principles of these scholarly commons (https://www.force11.org/scholarly-commons/principles) define ways to practice open, inclusive and reproducible science and scholarship. They can function as an agreement among researchers and other stakeholders in scholarly communication to make research open and participatory for anyone, anywhere.

Two questions arise: Do we have such an ecosystem already? If so, can we also provide concrete guidance on how to work within it?

At a workshop in Sept 2016, it was proposed to address these questions by creating a series of decision trees that would help in making research objects Open, FAIR and Citable. These decision trees are both forward and backwards looking. That is, they define a set of practices that makes research objects maximally commons compliant. But they also define practical paths for those who are interested in getting started today working with existing artifacts or with limited resources. In these cases, we want to guide people to make the best possible choices given certain contexts. Here we propose to present an introduction to the scholarly commons and present a few (3?) of the decision trees. In building those decision trees we encountered many problems related to trying to use the currently available infrastructure for scholarly communication (archives, journals, repositories, review and commenting systems, ID-systems, linking mechanisms and more) to provide guidance on working in a commons compliant way. We will discuss some of choices we made and would like to have an active debate on research practices and activities for which commons compliant options have yet to be developed.

The format we envision is either a presentation/demonstration (e.g. 25 minutes) with extensive discussion (also 25 minutes?) or a full session were we invite other speakers as well. The latter could be representatives from organisations that are identifying themselves as commons (e.g. OSF and Humanities Commons), but perhaps also a representative of underlying infrastructure (e.g. ORCID or Crossref) or a proponent of distributed solutions (using e.g. blockchain and the IPFS). Such a full session could take the format of 3-4 short presentations of 10 minutes on each representative's take on what the scholarly commons is, followed by discussion on ways forward to make scholarly communication more open, efficient and fair.

Title: Open Access:  How Accessible Is It?

Abstract: The Budapest Open Access Initiative made the first public statement of open access principles in 2002.  In the more than 15 years since, open access publications have proliferated.  The ideals of the open access movement to make open access the default method of sharing research, however, have not yet been fully realized.  In this presentation, Lisa will examine where we are in the open access movement; the successes we can celebrate and the challenges still to be overcome.  She will also posit that we may have reached a moment in the open access movement when it is time to expand on our conception of open access and consider accessibility more broadly.  Librarians have been central players in the open access movement, but is there more we could or should be doing?  Should we broaden our definition of access to be more expansive and include accessibility?  As we close the conference, we’ll consider ways we can all contribute to making open access more accessible.