CIC's CLI Staff to Present at Charleston Conference

 

Staff from the CIC's Center for Library Initiatives will be presenting at the 33rd Annual Charleston Conference, which centers on the latest trends and issues in collection development.

In addition to presenting on a panel during the conference, as the Self-Pub 2.0 pre-conference keynote speaker, CLI Director, Mark Sandler will discuss "Managing Abundance"--how can libraries better manage discovery and acquisition in this exploding world of humanities books and materials not on the radar of traditional library ordering systems?

CLI staff will present on the following:

Rebecca Crist: Shared Print on the Move: Collocating Collections

 As university libraries devote increasing portions of staff time and budget dollars to electronic resources, many are looking for cost- and labor-efficient ways of storing and ensuring access to legacy print collections. Shared print repositories have emerged as one possible solution, but setting up a shared storage system is never easy. Issues of selection, preservation, access and use, and interoperability must be resolved, but first comes one pivotal question: Where are we going to put all these books?Collocating shared print storage is one answer. Rather than securing holdings in place, The Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s Shared Print Repository selects volumes for preservation from multiple universities, relocating materials as necessary to create a comprehensive print backfile collection of scientific journals. We feel that collocating the collection means more secure conditions can be maintained, and better user services supported, by holding some bodies of print content in common, thus relieving each individual school of the obligation to commit the necessary resources to manage these resources on its own. Nonetheless, physically transferring items (but not ownership) to other locations creates specific challenges.

This session will explore the opportunities and costs associated with collocating shared print storage. How is such a project governed? Who decides what and who will deposit materials, and who will host? How do such items become findable in both physical space and in the world of available library resources? How does resource sharing work in this environment? This session will cover these questions and more using the CIC Shared Print Repository as one example.

Kim Armstrong: The Fly in the Ointment? Does Open Access=Savings?

The consolidation of scholarly publishers has resulted in higher costs for journal subscriptions and library budgets have been stretched to accommodate price increases. As a result libraries have less latitude in what they choose to purchase to support research and teaching. One solution to the scholarly communication crisis has been the growth of open access journals and alternative publishing streams. Additionally libraries have invested in institutional repositories and some support publishing operations in an effort to offer alternatives to for-profit publishing for faculty and scholarly societies. Are any of these models any more economically sustainable than relying on traditional publishing models? Can a library make intentional decisions to support open access that would provide budget relief and wider dissemination of the intellectual output of their faculty and researchers? Do the various open access models (e.g. Article Processing Charges, OA Institutional Memberships, hybrid journals, SCOAP3-like projects) provide budgetary relief or is this transitional period likely to add costs for a library and its parent institution?

The authors will conduct a survey of 52 U.S. university libraries representing two academic consortia: The Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the Orbis Cascade Alliance. Respondents will be asked to answer a series of questions about direct and indirect costs to the library as a result of open access efforts. The survey will include topics such as: costs to the library to support OA memberships (PLoS, BMC, SpringerOpen, etc); costs to the library to support OA projects such as SCOAP3, arXiv, COPE; new positions in scholarly communication/copyright; and more broadly, whether local institutional repositories, publishing units or outreach efforts to educate faculty about open access have resulted in any direct ability to manage or draw down the costs of their journals spends. The results of the survey and implications for long-term collections planning will be presented.

Mark Sandler: Pitch Perfect: Selling to Libraries and Selling Libraries to Non-Users

Sales is the art of persuasion. It is intentional activity to move another individual (or group of individuals) to a desired outcome—e.g., “no” to “yes”; “maybe” to “yes; ”yes, someday” to “yes, now.” And, not surprisingly, there are numerous strategies for selling—challenger, consultative, high-touch, solution selling, etc. Regardless of the particular sales method in use, it’s important to recognize that sales activity is purposeful, goal driven, and remarkably effective. Paradoxically, the most effective sales interactions are those where the customer doesn’t even recognize that they’ve been “sold.” The mark of a great sales person is the ability to leave customers thinking that it is they—the customers—who have realized their will.

This program looks at three questions related to library sales:

1) What are the characteristics that library suppliers look for in their sales personnel?
2) How do library vendors train, manage and incentivize their sales teams?
3) Should librarians—especially subject liaisons in academic libraries—be recruited, trained and managed as if they were sales workers, charged with influencing faculty and student uptake of library materials and services? 

While libraries generally characterize themselves as “learning organizations” as opposed to “sales organizations,” the fact remains that when libraries talk about liaisons assigned to provide “outreach” or “engagement,” they might just as well be talking about sales. And, if they were to think about library work in the context of sales, administrators would undoubtedly hire differently, manage differently, and use different criteria to evaluate and incentivize library staff. They would also recognize the need for different strategies for management, including the recruitment of experienced sales managers to direct the goals and activity of their library sales force.

This program, led by librarians and professional sales managers, is intended to address the need of libraries, as customers and service providers, to understand more about the theory, practice and management of sales, including the potential use of tools like Salesforce.com to monitor and evaluate librarian performance.

 

Visit the Charleston Conference home page for more information.