What's Coming Up:
February 2019
Wrestling with Access and Authentication Control
NISO Webinar, Wednesday, February 6
This session will examine various aspects of access and authentication controls in the context of digital information resources. Is there a scalable approach that can satisfy the needs of both corporate as well as academic environments? If not, how can technology be engineered or leveraged such that the nuanced needs of all may be met? What trade-offs might need to be recognized and negotiated? Are there satisfactory answers to the questions that have arisen with regard to privacy and data exchange? This session will bring together a number of industry experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities.
Confirmed speakers: Tim Lloyd, CEO, Liblynx; Heather Flanagan, Pilot Coordinator Academic Pilots, RA21; Jessica Bowdoin, Head, Resource Licensing and Delivery, and Lara Bushallow, Director of Digital Technologies and Services, George Mason University Libraries.
Is This Still Working? Incentives to Publish, Metrics, and New Reward Systems
NISO Virtual Conference, Wednesday February 20
The primary selling point of metrics for the academic researcher was the promise that the proof provided by such metrics of the value of one’s work would be the increased and long-term funding needed to do such work. Prestige, tenure, influence, even celebrity -- these have been stepping stones to securing significant (and much-needed) grants to educational institutions of all sizes and types. But have these incentives been subverted over time or in specific ways? Is the drive to publish-or-perish the best mechanism for encouraging substantive study? The integrity of the publishing process and perhaps the integrity of the funding model for higher education itself is at stake. This session will look at some of the troubling questions surrounding the incentives offered to the working scholar, researcher, and scientist.
Presenters in this virtual conference will consider the following questions:
- How might institutions and research facilities best weld available indicators of use or influence into a meaningful metric?
- If individual scholarship is best gauged by the value assigned to it by the larger community, then what collection of metrics should be gathered for purposes of determining appropriate rewards in the context of academia?
- How might institutions better address this challenge and reward faculty appropriately?
This event Includes a Training Thursday, Feb 28, Presenting Metrics for Better Understanding and Use
Confirmed speakers: Holly Falk-Krzesinski, Elsevier; Christine Casey, Centers for Disease Control; Jonathan Adams, Clarivate Analytics
March 2019
Defining The Library: The Mission, Role and Community
NISO Webinar, Wednesday, March 13
Nearly twenty years into the 21st century, how exactly do we define the word, library? This is hardly a frivolous question. Neither is it a settled one. If a library is less defined by its information resources or access services than by foot traffic or usage stats, then appropriate assessment of its contribution to the institution -- through either quantitative or qualitative metrics -- becomes demonstrably more difficult. The question has implications for administrators with budgetary concerns as much as for educators in the field. Should libraries be focused on decentralization in order to better serve specialized research communities? Or should they be more centralized as the central organ of an educational organism?
Long Form Content: Ebooks, Print Volumes and the Concerns of Those Who Use Both
NISO Virtual Conference, Wednesday, March 20
It’s a muddled area for libraries, content providers and readers. Long-form content has traditionally been contained in printed volumes both for reasons of consumption as well as convenient access. With the arrival of ebooks, some aspects of engaging with long-form content became a bit easier – searchability, mobility, etc. Still, neither form seems to fully satisfy. Each user learns his or her own best practices for reading and referencing book content. Is it any wonder then that those whose scholarship relies on long-form content are suspicious of proposed changes to book production, delivery and access?
This virtual conference will consider from a variety of perspectives issues associated with creation, publication, and distribution of The Book. Speakers may explore metrics of usage (downloads, duration of reading session, etc.) as well as questions of reader behavior, assignment of metadata, and long-term access to licensed digital content.