Panel 16: Roda-viva (2016)
RODA-VIVA
SALALM 61, Panel 16, May 13, 2016, 9:00am-10:30am
Moderator: Alison Hicks, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Rapporteur: Melissa Gasparotto, Rutgers University
Jade Madrid, Research and Instruction Librarian, Tulane University.
Straight to the Source(s): Research guides at the Latin American Library
Madrid engaged in a long-term ongoing makeover project for 21 research guides organized across discipline and format. The move to LibGuides v. 2, a new Latin American Library website, plus a new Primo discovery layer prompted the changes in 2015. Goals were to make guides friendly, integrate technology, and give good visibility on home page. The research guides were integrated into Primo and displayed along with search results. Every guide has a primary sources tab. Some guides have class tabs. Madrid approached Libguides as conversation to distribute info through various means and ask for feedback. Through list-serves and social media. She found them to be a helpful outreach tool.
Orchid Mazurkiewicz, Director, Hispanic American Periodical Index (HAPI)
HAPI’s Journal Evaluation, Part 2: The Faculty Survey
Mazurkiewicz presented on a survey HAPI undertook as part of a larger journal project. The goal was a systematic evaluation: assess HAPI content, identify the most important journals, identify titles for deselection. She noted the distinction between assessing quality and excellence. Latindex was used to help assess quality, while: SCIELO, ISI, SJR and Redalyc were used to help assess excellence. There was no data for ⅓ of titles. This analysis resulted in lots of lists: Top titles by impact factor, top by download, etc. A third measure, value, was also added.
It was important to identify a journal’s role in field relative to other titles. There are 62 subject areas within HAPI. Qualtrics was used to collect info on influence of each selection of titles in each subject. 676 experts identified who got the customized survey for that field and asked to assess contents, roles, influence compared to other titles in the field. 248 responses were received. Some fields got lower return rate. Both sets of data (spreadsheets and Qualtrics) pulled together in Filemaker for each title and an easy to search relational database was created. Sometimes this large amount of data is contradictory. Some journals have no data from part 1 but a number from part 2 (experts rate highly, but nothing in indexes). The survey resulted in 140 recommendations from scholars on what additional titles to add to HAPI. Some of those are duplicate suggestions from multiple scholars. The data was not totally useful for helping decide what to keep in HAPI and what to drop, and some gaps remain.
Anne Barnhart, Head, Instructional Services, University of West Georgia
Who’s next? Notes on training the next generation of librarians
Barnhart has been teaching at UIUC iSchool in LAS librarianship since 2008. She has developed a new course using FIL Guadalajara as a laboratory and pitched a course for Fall 2015 Library & Information Resources for Spanish-Speaking Populations. She got an independent study student to help develop it the summer before. Students picked a library to investigate the Spanish speaking population there.16 enrolled students were interested in public libraries, 5 in academic libraries, and 1 prison in libraries. Sample assignments included reference questions, assessing information needs. 10 students went to FIL. In Fall 2015 the course was an 8-week class but feedback said it should be 16 weeks so Fall 2017 will be 16 weeks. Students, some of whom had never left the country before, recognized that they were getting a perspective that perhaps gave insight into how their patrons felt, including empathy after having been in another country without language skills. The group visited a couple public libraries to see what Mexican concept of a public library was.
Michael Scott, Bibliographer for Latin American Studies and Iberian Languages, Georgetown University
The Newest Novedades: Using Social Media for Collection Development
Scott discussed the problem of “too much stuff” on Latin American publishing on the web. However writers, publishers, translators, bookstores, record labels and cultural orgs are all on social media. These can help you find out about important people and publications. Create separate lists for Brazilian publishers, for example, on Twitter. Searching hashtags can be helpful #novedadesliterarias, #historia, #futbol #livros. You can query your Twitter lists. Twitter also has an advanced search under More Options. The advantages of engaging social media for collection development includes the potential for a personal connection with authors, publishers, etc., tweets are immediately seen and are short, and librarians can also choose to use it passively. Disadvantages: the personal connection can be odd, limited character space, lack of context (reprint vs new pub?), can be overwhelming. Facebook seems to be more popular with publishers, but some authors also have FB pages. Literary magazines and cultural orgs are also active on FB. Film series, and other events, can let you know of things for collection. You can create groups on FB like Twitter, to help filter. Advantages: posts tend to have a broader focus. Maintained pages tend to be very current, and it’s easy to contact page owners. Disadvantages : the new search feature doesn’t work so well, there is lots of advertising, and it is hard to use passively. It can also be overwhelming. Scott recommended Follow/like based on research and teaching interests at your institution. This can also lead to invitations to present at your institution. Newsfeeds like Feedly can also help. Bookmark links to titles sorted by country, region, vendor, etc.
Betsaida Reyes, Librarian for Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies, University of Kansas
Digital Repatriation: Returning Guatemalan Broadsides Through Digital Access
Why digital repatriation? At a no-host during SALALM in Salt Lake City, Dan Hazen noted that buying trips aren’t just about bringing things from LA to US, but are an exchange. Reyes undertook a broadside digitization project, to connect Guatemala and University of Kansas. She wanted to share beyond the institution. When she attended FILGUA in Guatemala she went to the Biblioteca Nacional stand at the fair to get good contacts for the project and visited the Biblioteca Nacional the next day. She spoke to library director and Head of acquisitions about the collection Kansas had and why there was a tradition of Central American collecting there, and about the digitization project. She was not asking for support from them, except as a partner for sharing/distributing the materials. The broadside collection is part of the Griffith collection, and includes ephemera, broadsheets, manuscripts from the late 18th c to ~1920. UK digitized 611, over 400 Guatemalan broadsides from 1822-1920 (stopping there because of copyright). Biblioteca Nacional providing access to digital surrogates through their blog, but they are not particularly visible or well described on their site. The next step is to take all the data and image files, put them on an external hard drive and send them to the Biblioteca Nacional - they could do Spanish language cataloging and make images available on their own server. https://lib.ku.edu/broadsides
Ricarda Musser, Director for Acquisitions and Catalog- ing, Ibero-American Institute, Berlin Latin American Cultural Magazines (1860-1930): Acquisition and Digitization in the Ibero-American Institute Berlin
Musser took an acquisition trip to Lima in 2009 where she identified 3 cultural magazines: El Peru Ilustrado, Prisma and Actualidades. Funding came through 3 years later, to acquire and digitize 80 titles from LA and Caribbean, from 1860-1930. The funding included acquisition trips, scanning equipment, filling gaps in existing runs, etc. Cultural magazines are so important because they were interdisciplinary, written for everybody, on a wide range of topics. They reflect a huge diversity of genres and text types, are richly illustrated, and include ads for companies and products. They have a high cultural and social relevance, show intervention of intellectuals and artists into political and social life and played an important role in the development of a cultural and national identity. They also how international relations and have a high relevance for researching in different disciplines. Special pages for women are of high interest to gender studies. The digital collection “Cultural Magazines of Latin America” launched in 2014. Links from OPAC to other institutional digital projects (Memoria Chilena, for example). Pdf downloads are available through a 3-language platform. IAI Home-->Collections-->Cultural Magazines. Project ends Dec. 2016. 70 digitized titles, 6 titles in microfilm, 6 titles linked to other institutions. Season II funding application has been submitted and Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, Peru are targeted. Additional list of titles will be digitized with the IAI’s own funding.
Q&A
O Mazurkiewicz noted that Musser has a paper published in the next set of SALALM papers. B Alvarez asked Musser to comment on copyright issues. Ricarda noted that it’s difficult to find someone to ask and if they’re not sure, they’ll still do it. For some titles they get permissions. They will honor takedown requests. The penalty is only 60 Euros per issue, which they’re willing to pay. Most times they hear back that this is a great project because most journals or orgs in LA don’t have funds to do it themselves.
AJ Johnson asked Mazurkiewicz: how do the physical collections in HAPI work? Mazurkiewicz noted that for the list of titles they index, some are acquired in print, some digitally, some both. Clarified that when she talks about their collection, it’s about all of those.
Jana Krantz asked Musser if there was collaboration among other libraries to fill in gaps in title runs. Musser answered that yes, some holding institutions like Memoria Chilena help, sometimes libraries in US has copies to loan for digitization. Ultimately it is not possible to acquire all missing issues.
Peter Johnson asked Musser and Reyes: have these projects stimulated marketplace in that other collections may be available for purchase or otherwise incorporating into your projects. Reyes didn’t think so. Musser responded that during acquisition trips she made contact with vendors and collectors who continue to help provide missing issues. They can suggest related titles, even when they don’t have the needed issues. Making connections during trip to Peru yielded so much info about new titles that Peru is included in second phase of project. Collectors who do not often sell have seen the project and are not interested in sending issues. AJ Johnson asked about these collectors - have any expressed interest in lending rather than selling? Musser said no, but noted that in Peru, there is one vendor who plans to make facsimile editions.
Reyes asked Scott: how do you prevent your FB feed from getting overly tweaked, preventing visibility of the posts. Scott suggested using the groups feature. As FB improves searchability that could be the solution, as well. Keeping your followed groups on the smaller side also helps. Use Ad-block on Chrome.
Peter Johnson asked Anne Barnhart- in light of SALALM scholarship, if you took in demographics on the students, what is their substantive knowledge of the Spanish-speaking world? They have ambition to work with this population, but what is their background? Barnhart said group was fairly mixed. Such a high number were interested in public librarianship - this course maybe gave them a leg up in the market in the Chicago area. Some students were heritage speakers. Johnson noted that a public library background was no reason not to award scholarship for these kinds of students. Barnhart noted trepidation offering this class with public library focus, as she didn’t have the background. But since it was requested from students she offered it. Peter Jonson wondered if there was a need for SALALM involvement in these kinds of public librarian training/conference/prof develop opps, as members have a lot of important niche knowledge to share. Barnhart noted how important it was to help provide such a broad view of the Spanish-speaking population - very diverse in demographics and info needs.
AJ Johnson asked Madrid how much these guides were done from her own vision and how much she surveyed other guides. She always looks at other LA guides to help find more sources to include. For the design aspect LibGuides are limited and there aren’t many options so she didn’t spend a lot of time looking at design of other guides.
Hicks asked Mazurkiewicz: how did you decide who to send survey to? Mazurkiewicz said the HAPI intern at that time was an academic and started hunting around different univ. pages to identify prominent names in each field and get their contact info.
Peter Johnson asked Mazurkiewicz: to what extent did you rely on list of contributing editors to find names? Mazurkiewicz was not sure.
Lara Aase asked Mazurkiewicz: how was your 36% return rate in comparison to standard? Mazurkiewicz noted that while it was solid, she didn’t look at statistical significance.
AJ Johnson asked Mazurkiewicz if it will be written up and distributed? What else will you do with this? Mazurkiewicz said it’s been on the to-do list. Part One was presented a couple years ago at SALALM, and she’s now working with an intern to help analyze the data and write up the project. But still need to deal with the results themselves for HAPI. Doesnt’ want to embarrass certain journals that may not have ranked well. Reyes asked Mazurkiewicz about the process for creating an in-house database. Orchid noted Filemaker was used because they had experience with this, but that they also contracted with an outside expert to build the database structure and import data from two sources, which was a little outside their in-house expertise. Musser said that there is another open source software commonly used in German research and university libraries, but it was not possible to build a search platform for 3 languages with it so they contracted with an outside company who had developed those components, and paid for those. The IAI’s small IT department couldn’t handle that in-house.