Jennifer Leffler - UNC: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for the 1045 mountain time session improve access to online government documents during
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: A collaborative approach. My name is Jennifer Leffler I am part of the planning committee for the conference, and I am very excited to welcome Michael and Kate.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: Michael Hauser is a social sciences and data librarian at San Diego State University.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: As a member of the library faculty Michael provides data discovery and usage guidance for students provides research instruction and assistance for social science programs manages SDS us cartographer material collection and CO manages the SDS you libraries government collection.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: K told it is an electronic resources like brain at San Diego State University.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: As a member of the library faculty Kate provides assistance with Open Educational Resources copyright helps maintain the library's electronic resources access and CO manages the SDS you libraries of government document collection.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: Thank you both so much. And we look forward to your presentation as a note, I will be monitoring chat for our speakers, so please let me know if you have questions for them and I will hand it over. Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Kate Holvoet: All right.
Kate Holvoet: Why is it up. There we go. Um, so I'm Kate hold at San Diego State University. I am the FTP coordinator for the university.
Kate Holvoet: I have 18 years of experience with government documents at one point I was actually the head of government documents in micro forums at the University of Utah, and I still love the fact that I had the word micro forms and my title.
Michael Howser: Michael Hauser also at San Diego State. Prior to joining San Diego State. I was in at the University of Connecticut and also the state data center director as part of the US Census Bureau network.
Michael Howser: I've my career expands a couple institutions with 17 plus years of experience working specifically with GIS maps.
Kate Holvoet: So San Diego State University was founded in 1897 you know enrollment and 34,031 Hispanic serving institution.
Kate Holvoet: We are a our library is a two part building and you can see part of it is this dome. So the dome is the new part of the building. And actually, to the right of the dome is
Kate Holvoet: Another part of the building and the dome, however, is where people on campus, identify the library being so that's our sort of iconic building
Kate Holvoet: So the situational context. I think we are all dealing with is coated. Right. So our campus shifted to online only operations on March 12 2020
Kate Holvoet: Our library anticipates a limited on campus presence, starting at the start of the fall semester, which is August 24 but by limited, we mean we are going to have
Kate Holvoet: Space in the library available for studying for for limited socially distanced first come first serve up to capacity studying and we have a
Kate Holvoet: Dome side delivery. We don't have a curb. So people will come to a specific spot near the library dome to pick up material that they have physical, material that they have reserved and that is pretty much the only physical on campus services we anticipate offering
Kate Holvoet: Initially anybody coming to the building. We will only be serving SDS you campus community.
Kate Holvoet: interlibrary loan and our local resource sharing service circuit is not yet back online, but we anticipate a return to service at the start of the semester so
Kate Holvoet: Our campus guidelines currently are. If you are capable of doing your job from home, you will so they don't want people on campus, unless they truly need to be there.
Kate Holvoet: So Michael and I will have a very limited on campus presence and there are no student workers on campus for summer. It is unknown for fall
Kate Holvoet: But right now, the plan is no student workers on campus. We may potentially have student workers who are able to work virtually but our budget production for student workers is quite dire.
Kate Holvoet: Yep. So we had obviously when coven hit. We had several institutional and community needs that we had to do an assessment on
Kate Holvoet: Our immediate need was providing sort of meaningful work for staff who primarily work with the physical collection, including the government documents.
Kate Holvoet: staff person charged with processing physical materials and we were asked broadly by both the university administration and the library administration.
Kate Holvoet: To provide online work for current student workers so immediately it between March and April 18 the student workers were guaranteed to be paid, regardless of their ability to work off campus because that was just part of the university trying to protect
Kate Holvoet: That student worker income, but after April 18 for the students to continue drawing a paycheck. They had to be doing recognized specific tasks.
Kate Holvoet: So that was sort of our immediate need and our immediate sort of instigation, for coming up with these projects sort of our interim needs were more about the fact that
Kate Holvoet: In March of 2019 the entire SDS US government documents collection moved to close stack, we moved to compact shelving and so those materials are now paged basically, you go to circulation and tell them what you want and they go and get it.
Kate Holvoet: But we know for every barrier or every step you take an access problem, it reduces the number of people who will who will surmount that barrier to go get get the material.
Kate Holvoet: And so we wanted to improve electronic access to close that collection and that's
Kate Holvoet: Primarily for the California collection and for the Federal collection because of this move to compact shelving everything down there is extraordinarily tight.
Kate Holvoet: It's really packed and so we needed to do a really organized superseding of the collection to make room.
Kate Holvoet: We in the moving planning process, we started to do superseding but it was not very systematic. It was literally eyeball. Let's look at this is something we need to keep versus really doing a good assessment of the collection.
Kate Holvoet: Data and deciding what material could be superseded our long term needs are kind of mammoth, particularly for the California depository system. There is not a superseding list for that collection.
Kate Holvoet: So unlike the Fed docs. We can't do a good systematic assessment of what could be superseded and nor is there an electronic substitution list. So each library is on their own for discovering materials that are electronic and then requesting
Kate Holvoet: Permission from the California State depository coordinator to
Kate Holvoet: Substitute the electronic materials for the the physical print
Michael Howser: Right, so our project goals as Kate has outlined a number of challenges that we we sought to address through this
Michael Howser: moment of opportunity of increasing a discover ability of our materials that we have within our physical collections of materials that we might have an electronic version of making that more discoverable through our
Michael Howser: Through our alma primo interface that many of you have
Michael Howser: So the other portion was to provide meaningful off campus work for our library employees. So not just busy work things that contribute to the long term goals of the institution and the ability to really address some wishlist items that we'd always hope to get to
Michael Howser: Which were these two major projects, the California documents project where we were going to
Michael Howser: Kate. Now I think back in January or February had this dream like wouldn't it be great if we had more people to help us with this project.
Michael Howser: To identify the serial holdings compared to see if there's any electronic versions of those available recording any of those free access URLs that are stable.
Michael Howser: Identify records that need some data cleanup, which is always part of any of these projects, there's always things you find and identify
Michael Howser: Items for future public displays. So the on Constitution Day. What are other opportunities. We could have to think of doing a documents related display within the library.
Michael Howser: Or maybe now virtually speaking to
Michael Howser: And for the US documents project really looking at the superseding guidelines.
Michael Howser: So that's a little more complex to get people interested in understanding that process. So, so we would recommend starting first with California documents.
Michael Howser: And then moving into the US documents project, but once can identify records for cleanup and identify any potential future public displays for this collection as well to highlight what we have
Michael Howser: So our project outline is really threefold looking at searching for materials.
Michael Howser: Reviewing the records that that we have for each of these items to ensure the information is correct. Is it actually a serial
Michael Howser: Is it a pamphlet or, you know, making those kind of a judgment calls are very difficult until sometimes you physically look at the record.
Michael Howser: And and a digital digital surrogate of that item. So that's been very helpful because that will improve our searching ability within our system.
Michael Howser: And also the ability to update all this information to include those persistent links or if it was a link that no longer works, making sure that link now works.
Michael Howser: Which leads us to the California documents project.
Michael Howser: So to give sort of a purpose statement. So we sent this these project proposals out to everybody in the library. So we looked for volunteers from all departments for the California documents project. And the reason why is we really wanted to help identify an online version.
Michael Howser: Determine if that document is coded correctly. Everything we kind of outlined in this project goals.
Michael Howser: But the ultimate goal for the end user is to improve the experience in our primo interface. So the facets actually work when you're using
Michael Howser: Looking for government information that that you you are able to discover things effectively and. And if there isn't digital equivalent able to get access to it fairly quickly.
Kate Holvoet: So the California documents project is Google Drive based. So keeping in mind that we were trying to
Kate Holvoet: Appeal to the ability of people with a wide array of technical background abilities to do the work.
Kate Holvoet: So we, we just said basically, you need a browser and and enough horsepower to run Google Drive or Google Sheets actually
Kate Holvoet: And we provided detailed written instructions.
Kate Holvoet: And we, it was based on sort of an Alma for the California project had had to be based on collection location. So that's how we were able to identify the set of of materials, anything that was in
Kate Holvoet: shelved in the California documents location. And normally, and for the federal project. It was based on
Kate Holvoet: Material called member type, which was two dogs because all of our dogs are in the same location but we found in the data migration from
Kate Holvoet: I think it was from Sierra to Alma apparently all of our state documents are coded as to docs.
Kate Holvoet: Which
Kate Holvoet: So, so for the Federal collection we did Sue doc and location, just to make sure that we got that set
Kate Holvoet: And we don't also have that overlap, because all of our California documents are coded as to docs, which is puzzling. And again, part of that data cleanup that we're going to have to work on. But that'll be a batch job at the end.
Kate Holvoet: And we had student workers and non com so calm is content organization and management and that is
Kate Holvoet: Our what would historically have been called Technical Services staff. So we were also trying to create a project that would appeal to our be eligible for student workers and people who don't already have this sort of technical processing background.
Kate Holvoet: So our process was in our documentation. We have students and people they search for an online version first through the Depository library and not depository the Digital Public Library of America, if there is nothing in DP LA. They can go on and do an open Google search.
Kate Holvoet: And then if however in DP la because we know that those links are stable.
Kate Holvoet: We're, we're, we're happy to stop if if they find it and DP LA. They don't have to keep going if they don't find it. That's when they roll over and look in more places.
Kate Holvoet: If there's more than one like available. They're supposed to, sort of, select the most complete link and they should make a note in our spreadsheet that there are other links available.
Kate Holvoet: And in our spreadsheet for each title, there's a, you know, there's a series of fields across information.
Kate Holvoet: We had format information pulled because we were finding for both federal documents and for
Kate Holvoet: State documents that within a single record in multiple format marker areas, there will be disagreement on whether it is a serial or a monograph
Kate Holvoet: And so for wherever those markers were showing up. We're asking people to verify whether that information is consistent. Is it correctly marked as a monograph or as a serial
Michael Howser: So,
Michael Howser: Before the search example here, we wanted to let our colleagues that are working on this project, know that not everything will will result in just one example.
Michael Howser: When you enter the title. Does it come back with only one item. No, it often brings back up for the list where might be one scan.
Michael Howser: That's more complete than another, or pork portions of the entire series. So this was really as part of our documentation to kind of walk them through the process of how to use DP LA and then jumping out of DP LA to find those
Michael Howser: Persistent links and what actually is a persistent link. So because most of the folks working on this project have never encountered this kind of work before
Michael Howser: So it leads us to the Federal documents.
Michael Howser: And very similar to our California documents project similar goal in mind here or purpose, but this case we're really focused on that superseded list and as Kate is outline the challenges with California documents versus federal documents we love federal documents.
Michael Howser: Being able to have the superseded list to go to and and kind of work from that. But it is a, it's a little more of a lift for somebody new to this process. So we didn't start with this as your first project if you're volunteering. This is what you can aspire to work on.
Kate Holvoet: So again the same thing as with California documents. It's Google Drive based we provide a detailed written instructions we cross tabulated the 2002 superseded list with our all my analytics to doc slash location report.
Kate Holvoet: And this one was limited to content organization and management staff and faculty only because there is an actual collection decision that the person working on the spreadsheets, making
Kate Holvoet: And the collection decision is okay here's this object. Yes, there's an electronic version. No there's not.
Kate Holvoet: Should we keep the print. You know, so something just because something is on the superseded list doesn't mean we have to supersede it, but it does mean that it is it is something that we could choose to supersede if we wanted to.
Kate Holvoet: For for, you know, straight up material that is
Kate Holvoet: You know, social security updates or something. Sure you don't want to keep outdated information, but there is always the historical record to be concerned about with certain topics. So that was where we felt that more full time.
Kate Holvoet: staff and faculty sort of understanding and discernment would be important in this project.
Kate Holvoet: Again, our entire project. You can see here's a copy of the outline of the documentation that we provided for people
Kate Holvoet: As a Google Doc.
Kate Holvoet: And the process is very similar. So we do have our documents are electronic federal documents are sort of centrally managed
Kate Holvoet: Through the CSU consortium mark I've is our vendor. So using our mark hive are using our FDA LP item Lister profile, you know, Mark. I've sends out everybody's records and somehow somebody at the CSU is sorting, all of that. And it's amazing.
Kate Holvoet: But like everybody. We have a very large sort of long historical collection we have records from all over the place prior to using archive as our vendor.
Kate Holvoet: And so we want to be sure a that all of our links are working. So if the link isn't working, and a human being has looked at it. Hey, they searched us GPO and Google and anywhere else to search for persistent links for that content.
Kate Holvoet: We're recording those links and adding notes to the spreadsheet, because sometimes there's, there's, there's more information that we might need to know about the object.
Kate Holvoet: And then the, the staff and the faculty are reviewing the superseding rule for that call number and then they're making a decision and recording the decision and the decisions are
Kate Holvoet: Keep the print keep the electronic only and
Kate Holvoet: If there is a question for the reviewer where they're not sure there is a review option so that
Kate Holvoet: That would kick the review to me or Michael to anybody who is involved in the active management of the collection because most of the people doing this work.
Kate Holvoet: Don't primarily work with or may never have worked with government documents before. So this is sort of a, we wanted to give them a fail safe option for, I don't know what to do with this.
Kate Holvoet: So our progress since April 10 April 10 was the the the library wide announcement opening this project up to everyone, the directions that all been set like that day, people could start working on it.
Kate Holvoet: The California documents project for phase one, which is working on the spreadsheet is 20.5% complete. So our collection is
Kate Holvoet: 37,285 records in the system. And so we've got about 7600 that have been reviewed and addressed.
Kate Holvoet: And the US documents to proceeding project is mammoth it's 160 3000 almost 160 4000 documents and we're about 2.6% of the way through. There are fewer people working on the project.
Kate Holvoet: There's two people working on it compared to 14 who have been working on the California documents project. And so it's a slower slog. But again, it's that higher level project where that, you know, a collection decisions being made that we're being protective of that material.
Kate Holvoet: The project team is
Kate Holvoet: Faculty, staff and student workers so Michael and I are the government document liaisons and we designed the project.
Kate Holvoet: Our main faculty participant for the Federal document project is a special collections catalog or who cannot currently access any physical items.
Kate Holvoet: So he can't do his job at his core job at all. So he's been working like a machine on this project. He's amazing. And the project was made available to all faculty, but pretty much just the Special Collections catalog or really chose to participate because as I said his entire
Kate Holvoet: Workflow and possibility is knocked out because he can't handle on the physical collection.
Kate Holvoet: Among staff. We have several staff people who are working on this project, we have a serials catalog or who is part time
Kate Holvoet: She is working on this, and we have the, the government documents staff person. The person who routinely dealt with our physical collection is also working on this.
Kate Holvoet: And for student workers. This was opened up to all student workers in the library.
Kate Holvoet: And for pretty for most of them, not all foot, I'd say for about 90% of them. This was the only project available to them, you know, there were no other electronic projects that did not require highly specialized
Kate Holvoet: Like video editing skills to be had before they started working on the project. So we had students from content organization and management.
Kate Holvoet: Research instruction and outreach and we have this 24 seven area which is an area of the library that's open 24 seven. And so those students who would man the service desk there were
Kate Holvoet: All not all of them, but many of them were able to work on this project right now the only student workers, we have currently employed are on federal work study
Kate Holvoet: So from from the 14 original we're down to one student worker and she's the content organization and management student worker and she's on federal
Kate Holvoet: Work Study and she's, she's still working on the project. So total we had 14 students at one point, I'm working on the data.
Kate Holvoet: I asked the people who are currently working on the project sort of some questions about it.
Kate Holvoet: And this is a quote that car. The student worker said, You know, I'm happy to be part of a group that works on this project to help other libraries have access to California documents.
Kate Holvoet: And that's based on information, we'll get to in a little bit.
Kate Holvoet: The, the longer term goal for the California documents project is to address those longer term needs of a superseding list and an electronic substitution list and
Kate Holvoet: That those were some of the things that we sort of stress to people to kind of get the the meaningful impact of this work. This is not busy work. This is work that has an ultimate purpose that is very again collaborative and very cooperative
Kate Holvoet: Oh, and the other thing I want to say that, uh, Dan is our student worker who's not student worker. He's our staff person.
Kate Holvoet: And he's finding that he likes the project because it's very straightforward. You know, it's like cataloging, it's got this very concrete you process align, you move on to the next.
Kate Holvoet: And he is an extreme early bird. He starts work his workday starts at 630 in the morning by choice. And so unlike a lot of research instruction and outreach work. It's not time bound to some time in the afternoon or at a particular time. So there's that kind of flexibility.
Kate Holvoet: So our next step. I'm sorry, Michael.
Michael Howser: Yes, our next steps will be to review all the work that
Michael Howser: We've got all these people working on on these lists I Kate and I have been peeking at the list, but we've not done a comprehensive review of all the suggestions yet so that's that's our next steps ahead.
Michael Howser: After we complete that review, then we will move on to the enhancement of our all my records to include all this information once again without this project. None of this would be happening at all. And probably the year 2020 for us. So this has been actually
Michael Howser: An opportunity. We did not foresee which will result in better use for our discovery ability for our users.
Michael Howser: Through this process. We've also learned a few lessons right so connectivity, particularly of Google Sheets early on as we were all moving to remote
Michael Howser: Work what we learned is that we all have very different Internet speeds and the larger the Google Sheet. The worst experience. So for our federal documents.
Michael Howser: Google Sheet actually divided that into four separate documents to make that easier for promoting purposes.
Michael Howser: Looking at training so providing a brief introduction to the project via zoom somewhere able to read the instructions and sort of dive right in. Others who is more helpful to do kind of a zoom tutorial to kind of walk through the project. So I recommend that moving forward.
Michael Howser: The bandwidth for Kate and I
Michael Howser: You know as questions came in.
Michael Howser: First we we created the project questions come in. Can we manage all those questions at the same time. So being able to kind of phase into this project in future would be great.
Michael Howser: And then the opportunity to have more projects more sort of shovel ready projects of. Wouldn't it be great if we had people to help us with that and it's been great to have
Michael Howser: broader participation across the library because it actually brings more awareness to the opportunity that government documents provide an answer. The research questions.
Michael Howser: So for future projects, really. Let's look at the usage of materials. Looking at our search data to determine where users might be struggling a bit
Michael Howser: And can we make that content more discoverable through our alma primo interface and other tools, identify collections was address those gaps.
Michael Howser: And it might be just a highlight in the top of the search results. Hey, did you know this collection exist. Other ways to sort of bring bring them to the forefront of the researchers
Michael Howser: View and to further enhance that search ability, once again, all the edits that the students and our staff and faculty are doing to this project, improve the facets that we can use within our discovery system so that results in better results.
Kate Holvoet: Something that I think I forgot to explicitly say when we, when we were talking about, or when I was talking about sort of the long term phase three of this project being
Kate Holvoet: Of the California project being okay once we've identified which records in our set have
Kate Holvoet: Electronic material. And then for the serials to be explicit about what the electronic holdings are. Where does the electronic coverage start. That's the beginning of the electronic substitution list. That's the beginning of potentially
Kate Holvoet: Or the seed of a superseding list.
Kate Holvoet: As once we move out of the spreadsheet phase and we start working on enhancing the
Kate Holvoet: Alma records, it will be. We are going to be adding a local notes in to the field so that we could if if another library wanted to essentially cross tabulate their records against ours.
Kate Holvoet: That we could give them a mark download set. Here's all of our electronic California document records with current URLs, you know, so, so that there is this
Kate Holvoet: broader community hopeful benefits for the time that we have spent working on in these in all of these little spreadsheets.
Kate Holvoet: And that is the end of our plant content.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: Excellent. Thank you so much. So in the chat. We've got a couple of comments and then
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: One. Let's see here. We have someone asking if you would be willing to share your spreadsheet template for
Awesome.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: So there's contact information there on that last slide, if anyone is interested in that. And then from James, we have. It would be awesome to share your results with California State Library and other libraries in the California depository program.
Kate Holvoet: Absolute that is in definitely our intent.
Kate Holvoet: Which is why we want to be able, that's why we're going to be tracking and be able to extract those set of Mark records in order to be able to share them.
Kate Holvoet: With others.
Kate Holvoet: Because once once we've created once we've made sure which ones are electronic and they have the URLs in there.
Kate Holvoet: We can anybody could import or use that set of records and ingest them into their system as electronically records.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: And then not have to do the duplicative work. That's fantastic. Yeah.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: Okay.
Kate Holvoet: All right. Yeah, you know, the hot the trust records, while we have our students recording a lot of those URLs.
Kate Holvoet: There are some of them. Some of the holly trust records. Actually, the link out is not the the object isn't in healthy trust, it's out in a different repository, and so we are sort of trying to track back to the original source, if we can, um,
Kate Holvoet: I didn't realize I'm responding to Amy Bruni fans comment that they did the scan odd size map supplements.
Michael Howser: Always the maps.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: Always the maps. Yeah.
Kate Holvoet: So that's sort of
Kate Holvoet: Kind of where we are. And it's, I was surprised when I stopped to look at our progress that we were at 20% on the California project I'm, I'm actually super, super stoked about that when student workers more return
Kate Holvoet: I envisioned. This is the kind of project that we could ask students who are working on a service desk.
Kate Holvoet: You know, the research instruction outreach service desk like hey, you know, work on this project when you're not helping folks.
Kate Holvoet: And obviously for anybody who's, who is working remotely. We can have them work on this kind of project so I
Kate Holvoet: I'm glad we got a big push and I think things really are probably going to slow down a bit.
Kate Holvoet: But there's nothing that says that we can't start, we can because we've got 20% of the California documents done, we can start working on the actual Alma enhancements. Now we have enough content to
Kate Holvoet: To start training people to to go behind the front runners who are finding that the URLs to start adding them into the records.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: That's great. Yeah. And in the chat. We've got further comments about the great projects transfer ability to other kinds of other non Alma libraries.
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: So yeah, lots of people thinking about your presentation and transfer ability. I think that's fantastic. So we are past time. So thank you everyone for listening and participating in
Jennifer Leffler - UNC: The chat. I really appreciate it. So that's another break time, but please come back at 1130 mountain time for tracking federal regulations. It's a presentation by Chris Brown from the University of Denver. So thanks everybody. Thank you.