ALCTS committees and interest groups submit reports to the ALCTS Office after each conference. Following are reports submitted by Continuing Resources Section (CRS) committees and interest groups.
Executive Committee
The Executive Committee met during the 2017 ALA Annual Conference on Saturday, June 24. The meeting began with an update from Vicki Sipe (ALCTS president) and Mary Beth Thomson, (ALCTS president elect). Sipe and Thomson recapped the year’s notable activities, including the mentoring program and ALCTS Exchange.
A round robin of committee chair reports and conference program announcements followed. The group discussed questions and concerns related to the new program schedule that will debut at the 2018 ALA Annual Conference. Schedule changes will have a significant impact on CRS, which will lose most of its standing forum timeslots. Committees were encouraged to consider alternative avenues for their content, including preconference and juried program proposals, joint forums, and virtual delivery. The group further discussed how CRS-generated content, whether through conference programming or other avenues, could potentially dovetail with recruitment, retention, and leadership development efforts.
Submitted by Anne Mitchell
Standards Committee
The Standards Committee met during the 2017 ALA Annual Conference on Saturday, June 24 to finalize plans for two programs held later in the conference: “Navigating the Stream: Leveraging Streaming Video Statistics” and “The Once and Future ISSN” (co-sponsored with the Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee).
Held on Sunday, June 25, the program “Navigating the Stream” featured Tom Humphrey (Kanopy), Pete Ciufetti (Alexander Street Press), and Brian Edwards (Swank), who discussed how libraries can interpret and take advantage of statistical data available through different types of streaming packages. Each addressed challenges and opportunities, and attendees were treated to a preview discussion of Library Journal’s soon-to-be-published survey on assessing the value of streaming video.
Nettie Lagace of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) also provided updates on the NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics initiative. This recommended practice is an expansion of the tools available for measuring the scholarly impact of research in the knowledge environment. It outlines altmetrics definitions and use cases, alternative outputs in scholarly communications, data metrics, and persistent identifiers in scholarly communications. NISO also is soliciting comments on a new draft technical report, NISO Issues in Vocabulary Management, which is now available as NISO TR-06-2017.
Submitted by Bonnie Parks
Committee on Holdings Information
During the 2017 ALA Annual Conference the Committee on Holdings Information hosted a forum entitled “The Future of MARC Holdings” held on Saturday, June 24. The program featured two presentations on the efforts to include local MARC holding information into BIBFRAME and FOLIO.
Roman S. Panchyshyn presented on serials holdings and BIBFRAME and how the MARC Format for Holdings Data (MFHD) fits into the library linked data environment. He began by discussing the challenges of MFHD not being used uniformly. He touched on where the information could fit in the BIBFRAME 2.0 class enumerationAndChronology. However, neither the Library of Congress or Zepheira have fully modeled MFHD.
Kristen Wilson discussed the FOLIO project to develop an open source library services platform and its model for holdings data. She began by talking about the architecture of FOLIO and the FOLIO Codex. The Codex record will point to many source records, one being the holdings data. Folio designed to allow relationships between resources in multiple places. One challenge is determining the appropriate level of detail in the Codex to distinguish between things while also bringing them together.
Submitted by Shelley Almgren
College and Research Libraries Interest Group
The College and Research Libraries Interest Group met during the 2017 Annual Conference on Sunday, June 25, with approximately 50 people in attendance. Our theme was “Text and Data Mining: Facilitating our Researchers’ Needs in the 21st Century.”
Christine Stamison (Center for Research Libraries) shared her licensing experience related to securing text and data mining rights for her members.
Hui Hua Chua (Michigan State University) described her library’s experience with creating a powerful web-based interface to provide all campus users with unmediated access to search and download news content from the LexisNexis corpus for text mining.
Patricia Feeney (Crossref) provided an overview of the metadata available through Crossref’s REST API and how it can be used to help automate text and data mining.
Presentation slides from this meeting of the College and Research Libraries Interest Group are available on ALA Connect.
Submitted by Andrea Imre
