The Discovery Working Group was charged by the University Librarian in early July 2016 to improve identification and access to materials in our collections. Key to the group’s charge is the guiding principle, “Create a comprehensive digital environment that is based on user need, optimizing navigation to ensure successful search, identification, and retrieval.”
Fortunately, the Working Group has access to a powerful key indicator of user need in the form of the LibQUAL+survey results. Among the tasks the group has taken on, they have read thousands of comments left on the survey that relate to discovery (search, website, library catalog, interlibrary loan, and resources). The Working Group has also devoted time to understanding the current architecture of our systems in order to best incorporate the influx of new resources (predominantly e-books) which have been recently acquired.
Chaired by Joseph Deodato, the group is comprised of members from all of the universities and Technical and Automated Services. Judy Cohn is the cabinet liaison to the group. The Working Group looks forward to sending an interim report to cabinet at the end of October. The charge and complete list of members is available at the Working Group’s website in Staff Resources – University Librarian – Committees and Task Forces. http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/staff/admin/committees.shtml.
Rutgers University Libraries faculty and staff had a busy summer preparing for the email and calendar migration to Rutgers Connect. The migration took place over three days between August 23 and August 25, 2016, but by the time we reached this milestone, over two months of work by Unit Computing Specialists (UCSs) and Integrated Information Systems (IIS) staff had already been invested into planning the process, preparing for the transition, and learning the new environment.
On December 26, 2015, Izzy Stern tweeted: “Today is the day I found out that Rutgers doesn’t even have full ebrary access. So many sad faces.” As a graduate student in a major humanities department at Rutgers–New Brunswick, Izzy might have expected to use ebrary, one of the largest academic e-book resources, for her research in the winter break, but then had a rude awakening that day when she found out that it was not available at Rutgers, yet. So she went online and shared her frustration on Twitter with the entire world, which was totally understandable. As a matter of fact, the lack of access to e-books was a major source of complaint from our students and faculty about the library collections—hundreds of similar comments can be found in the results of the LibQual+ and previous Counting Opinions surveys. Here, I quoted only Izzy’s tweet because it is on the open web, but the problem she reported was a common one.
Libraries operate on the premise of cooperation and support. Technical services, in particular, embodies this ideal, as evidenced by international union catalogs such as OCLC’s WorldCat and programs like the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), which contribute catalog records that are created to specific standards that are shared with other libraries, ensuring an efficient, accurate, and timely workflow.
Overnight library hours are among the most frequently requested service enhancements students would like to see in the New Brunswick Libraries. Popular during finals, students would like the option to work 24/7 during other parts of the academic year too. Twenty-four hour spaces are also standard in most of our peer libraries—in fact, only two of our Big Ten partner institutions do not provide this service.
