Editorial: Creativity and Innovation
One of my Rutgers colleagues recently published a book on managing creativity and fostering an innovative library culture. Creativity drives innovation in libraries, leading to novel approaches to challenging issues. Change can be daunting and working against prevailing practices and conventions can be difficult. Creativity and innovation are frequent themes in technical services work. Through collaboration and shared ideas, we as a profession can develop creative solutions.
Following on the theme of creativity and innovation, I am delighted to announce that M. Pilar Alonso Lifante and Francisco Javier Molero Madrid’s paper “Enhancing OPAC Records: Evaluating and Fitting Within Cataloguing Standards a New Proposal of Description Parameters for Historical Astronomical Resources” by (LRTS volume 59, no. 4) is the 2016 recipient of the Edward Swanson Memorial Best of LRTS Award. A press release is available at www.ala.org/news/member-news/2016/02/swanson-best-lrts-award-alonso-lifante-and-molero-madrid. Alonso Lifante and Molero Madrid’s paper discusses how enhancing content description of specialized resources, particularly astronomical resources, is an unresolved issue in library and information science. They provide a proposal of astronomical parameters for a better description and discuss how to accommodate these parameters using current criteria including MARC21, the ISBD and RDA. The authors take a creative approach to description to describe resources that fall beyond what typical cataloging operations handle to provide robust description that will help researchers locate astronomical resources, which typically are located outside library catalogs.
Questioning the status quo is another aspect of innovation and creativity. In “More Than a Name: A Content Analysis of Name Authority Records for Authors Who Self-Identify as Trans,” Kelly J. Thompson discusses how FRAD and RDA broadened the scope of name authority records to provide a fuller description of creator. While intended to enhance discovery, these practices and the MARC 375 field for gender can be problematic for authors and creators who self-identify as trans. Thompson explores how the ability to control how information about how one’s identity is shared with others is important, particularly when a person’s social identity can result in discrimination or even violence. Her research includes an analysis of name authority records for authors who identify as trans that were collected during the course of her cataloging work. The analysis considers the type, breadth, and depth of information that is provided in these records.
Another aspect of innovation is customization. In “Customizing an Open Source Discovery Layer at East Carolina University Libraries: The Cataloger’s Role in Developing a Replacement for a Traditional Online Catalog,” Barber, Holden, and Mayo detail how they customized Blacklight to replace their traditional online catalog. Proprietary software was limiting, and they needed an interface that provided both the ability to customize and indexing flexibility to meet the different needs of their users, who are located on three separate campuses. Their paper includes a discussion of their initial work with one discovery layer, and the decision to switch to Blacklight as it provided a robust development community. Their experience will benefit other institutions that are considering alternatives to the traditional library catalog.
Libraries increasingly face the challenge of tracking outages related to e-books and e-journals as the number of these resources in our collections continues to grow. Jennifer Wright details how her institution implemented the FootPrints ticketing system to track electronic resources outages and their causes. Implementing the software eliminated previous practices of using email and anecdotal information to track and resolve outages, which were time consuming and not always effective. “Electronic Outages: What Broke, Who Broke It, and How to Track It” identifies twelve different types of outages and provides problem resolution. Wright acknowledges that personnel at her library realized that changes to their workflows to better capture certain types of information related to electronic outages were necessary. Her library’s experience and resolution of electronic outages provide practical information for others who continually face similar challenges.
In addition to the papers I have highlighted, this issue also contains the following:
- “Survey of Classification and Organization of Videorecordings” by Barbara J. Bergman, Jessica Schomberg, and Dorie Kurtz;
- “Literature of Acquisitions Review, 2012–13” by Angela Dresselhaus;
- “Leveraging Author-Supplied Metadata, OAI-PMH, and XSLT to Catalog ETDs: A Case Study at a Large Research Library” by Ken Robinson, Jeff Edmunds, and Stephen C. Mattes; and
- book reviews commissioned by LRTS Book Review Editor Elyssa Gould.