by Kathleen Lehman and Michael Chesnes

Brian Simboli, Michiko Tanaka, Emily Poworoznek, and Kris Fowler at PAM’s Physics Roundtable session at the SLA 2012 Annual Conference.

The Physics Roundtable Session, which was generously sponsored by OSA, took place on the Tuesday afternoon of the 2012 SLA Conference in Chicago. The session allowed for the PAM members at each table to discuss a common issue at their institutions. Topics included institutional repositories, faculty interaction, physics library instruction, space planning, and nontraditional services, as well and the popular “wild card” option. Attendees were given the opportunity of switching tables halfway through the session in order to discuss more than one topic. The session, which was attended by approximately 70 people, concluded with each table sharing the highlights of their discussions with the whole group. Thank you to everyone who participated and shared their notes!

Among the more vigorous discussions was one on the pros and cons of interdisciplinary vs. subject specific institutional repositories. For instance, general purpose search interfaces can retrieve subjects across a wide variety of disciplines, but some disciplines need to have their data retrieved by very specific search queries, for instance geographic coordinates.

There was also a big discussion of branch libraries at the Physics Library Instruction table, including the importance of using their own websites for outreach and creating distribution lists.

The Space Planning table discussed off-site storage options, as well as accessing and scanning documents from off-site facilities, while the Nontraditional Services table discussed embedded, concierge, house, and mobile librarians, in addition to data management through Dataverse.

Other topics that came up in multiple sessions were author disambiguation, faculty liaisons, food and coffee for library users – including parents of students.

Notes from the table discussions are below.

Institutional Repositories

• Interdisciplinary – how should we handle that?
• Discipline-specific repositories
• How to construct a search interface for a general IR?
  • If it can do term searching, is that enough?
  • If it needs to be searched with geographical coordinates
• Brookhaven Nat’l. Lab – closed repository for technical notes for certain departments. Must cooperate with IT Dept. and use Sharepoint (access is internal only).
• PEER Project – funded European project (on many aspects of IR’s)
• Supplementary data isn’t subject to copyright in the same way as text.
• Princeton has a DSpace IR w/ a funding model of having the provider fund (Serge Goldstein has her presenting about funding model (1.5 x needed – for year?))
• Author disambiguation will be an issue for IR’s.
  • Math reviews hopes that people will look to them to disambiguate mathematicians’ names. Authors have a vested interest in keeping their names identifiable in a specialized community – maybe not so much in the broader community that ORCID will serve
• Harvard has an IR (“DASH”); faculty are not seemingly committing to putting papers into the local school repository if they have access to larger/national/international repository.
• What is the sustainability of a local repository?
  • Dryad – bill publishers – someone has to pay!
  • SSRN = Social Sciences Research Network
  • REPEC = economics
  • AGECONSEARCH = int’l., successful solution for specific subdomain
• If repositories are highly dispersed, how will discovery be successful?
• UMinn – has institutional records, theses, working papers, conference proceedings, etc. Also has a separate image repository
• Can institutional repositories be considered permanent?
• The theses are a very successful repository item. But, does that make discovery difficult, if they’re not on Proquest Digital Dissertation?
• HAL – Thesis search (for artificial intelligence?)
• OPENDOAR – can search, but not specifically for theses – need to include a term for thesis or dissertation in search
• OAISTER
• Linked open data
• Eagle – I

Faculty Interaction

• Email distributor lists, newsletters ways of being embedded
• One or group or with faculty – so they know who we are they are and their work
• Personal connections as opposed to electronic
• “Coffee hour with Peggy”
  • Chat over beverages/coffee for 1 hour – what is going on in your area? – Way in!
  • Faculty started complaining about quality of student work and Peggy got involved (go see her poster)
• Email via Constant Contact service
  • Can track if they open email

Physics Library Instruction

• Do any of us do it? – hard to get buy in
• A way into department through citation management class
• Physics departments being dissolved- maybe step into this gap that is forming
• Ethics, communication scholarly communication sessions- orientations every month, size of audience differs
• Big discussion of branch libraries
• Ways to reach out for branch libraries- emphasis on their websites
• Creating own distribution lists

Space Planning

• Losing library space to departments- discussions on storage space
• We call it auxiliary and not storage
• Some ability to scan items there
• Spaces for users actually to work in facility
• Commitment to staffing- ILL, scanning
• Do it for everyone or certain people?
• Turnaround 24 hours for delivery of materials

Nontraditional Services

• Concierge librarianship
• Embedded librarianship – U Wisconsin, Madison- embedded in lab and helping them manage their data flow
• Harvard working with ADS, mining their records
• DMPS (data management plans)
  • Dataverse
  • Harvard using database, others using IR’S
• Outreach to departments, special prospects
• House librarians
• Breakfast for parents of incoming freshmen at Brown
• Mobile librarian- go to the lab, dorm, etc. with laptop
• Harvesting articles for IR, for faculty
• Delivery of PDFs to people
• Outreach to campus and the public (transit of Venus, event, displays)
• Proctor exams for department- gets undergrads to be aware of the library

Wild Card

• Elected Subscriptions
• SCOAP3
• Arxiv libraries and subscriptions
• What does the future hold for balance b/w library budgets and publishing cost/subscription rates
  • Profits vs. budgets
  • What’s going to give?
• How to influence budget planning – have no ability to change this
• Space at a premium- desire for more
• How do you feel about another IG
• How functional will the systems be?
• Who will manage libraries?
• Author ID – broad support but how to get it started? How functional will it be? How much work
  will we have to do?
• Interdisciplinary physics
  • NASA Goddard – many subjects related to Physics but almost always indirect
  • U. Penn – combined health sciences/medical imaging with Physics – library instruction including published
  • APS – hosts Physics events in building shared with other Physics societies. Some journal articles on physics of football, etc.
• Cancelling Inspec – ArXiv, rising costs
• Cancel Kovel because no way out of bundle