Library Literature: July 2008 Archives

Every Library’s Nightmare? Digital Rights Management, Use Restrictions, and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources Kristin R. Eschenfelder - Eh.  An intriguing examination of "soft" DRM, such as warnings or limitations on use that have workaround or obfuscated solutions.  The paper does categorize these "soft" restrictions for later researchers.  Engineering was one of the subjects studies, but only a few specific instances were noted (one old) and no quantitative list was presented.

Status of Approval Plans in College Libraries Beth E. Jacoby - This would have been useful required reading before the PSU Libraries Collection Development retreat where we looked at coordinating our approval plan among one main campus and 23 college campuses (one university, geographically distributed), but I got behind in my C&RL reading.  I found out Penn State used to have a "Ogontz" campus, name changes keep my mind boggled.

What’s in a Name? Using Card Sorting to Evaluate Branding in an Academic Library’s Web Site Peter Hepburn and Krystal M. Lewis - Shocking reality check about library branded services.  A must read for any library web committee (at least the Findings and Table 1 sections for the time challenged)

Adjusting to the Workplace: Transitions Faced by New Academic Librarians Joanne Oud - Best Article (for me and Russ anyway)  Though it is about University Librarians in Canada, this will be a landmark study in my research agenda.  Great survey of new academic librarians that impacts mentoring, job training, hiring, collection development, and instruction (Russ!).  The questions were well contructed and the results are sometimes surprising and always quantitative.  I would love to duplicate this survey in the U.S. or at Penn State.

Transition to Electronic Resources in Undergraduate Social Science Research: A Study of Honors Theses Bibliographies, 1999–2005 Leslie Kriebel and Leslie Lapham - co-writing my own article about electronic resources in a subject area has taught me not to skip an article if it doesn't directly address your subject area.  This is a good study of undergraduate theses that reinforces our expectation that Websites are increasing in student citations, E-journals are trumping print, yet perhaps surprisingly e-Books are a flop (only 1% of citations where almost 9% of the citations were available as e-Books).  This reminds me to look at habits of grad students and not just faculty in my own citation studies.

Better than Brief Tests: Coverage Power Tests of Collection Strength by Howard D. White was the last article in the March 2008 C&RL issue that I didn't get to in my last review of the journal.  This was a pretty long article on a topic that I am recently interested in exploring: assessing collection development.  It does open with the disclaimer "When this article was first submitted, WorldCat users could easily perform coverage power tests as described below.  They cannot now...", which leaves me wondering if I can try to repeat the Methodology at all.  I hope so, this is a very good article on what comparing holding lists with OCLC really can mean, when the quantitative data is most meaningful, and the author is an experienced expert on the process.  A good background read, but perhaps less a less practical example.