Features and Issues document, after day 1 discussion (day 2 minor edit)

Imagining an integrated future:
Library content, library services and the campus Course Management System
A CIC conference, February 23-24, 2004

Features and Issues – An Ongoing Discussion

Revision 2-23-2004: After day one discussion
Revision 3-26-2004: Post-conference, pre-posting

General observations from day one discussion
• The issues set forth are not uniform in scope; some are multi-part, others more simple. We must normalize these somehow as we move towards writing a report or otherwise disclosing the results of our work at this meeting.
• We have not yet established any way to capture the temporal: which issues can or should be addressed immediately, which must be addressed over a period of time, which have some mixture of a short- and long-term nature.
• We should strive, in analyzing all issues, to identify the “low hanging fruit;” projects that can be attacked and completed in a relatively short time period. Things we can and should do now. Cliff’s suggestions are quite helpful here (importing/linking content, policy issues).


Features
Possible library features to be integrated in the course management system:
Resources
1) Academic integrity guide
2) Bibliographic management tools
3) Citation guide
4) Copyright guide
5) Creating Course Web sites guide
6) E-books
7) Evaluating websites guide
8) Federated, or broadcast, search of subscription databases and ejournals
9) Faculty materials
10) Library catalog
11) Plagiarism guide
12) Research/search strategies guide
13) Scanning/media digitization guides
14) Subject guides and prepared subject searches
Services
1) Information literacy instruction online (training)
2) Course learning guides
3) Course packs
4) Course reading lists
5) E-Reserves for text and media, both library-owned and faculty-owned
6) Help desk/online help
7) Institutional repositories
8) Interlibrary loan and document delivery
9) Instructional support centers
10) Learning object management
11) Live and asynchronous online reference
12) Rights clearinghouse

Issues
Some of the issues that may face implementers working to integrate any of the features, above:
Technical and implementation issues
1) Authentication and single sign-on
2) Gathering and maintaining individual preferences
3) Technical platforms, compatibility and extensibility, middleware, APIs
4) Are open source solutions available, viable?
5) Do standards exist?
6) Metadata and controlled vocabulary: appropriate level and type of description for materials and scope of description; appropriate and supportable vocabularies
7) Is training necessary and is it accessible?
8) Outreach and publicity: reaching potential users of new services and resources
9) Lowering the barrier to initiating requests; designing accessible and visible new features
10) Implications for long-term archiving and preservation

Organizational issues
1) Library’s and IT’s involvement in evaluating and implementing campus information systems (CMS, digital asset management, online catalogs, etc.)
2) The Library’s and IT’s role in management of learning objects and locally generated, sharable course material.
3) Who are the stakeholders? Do they speak the same “language” and understand each other’s terminology, priorities, and goals?
4) Navigating trust between the Library and IT organizations
5) How do Library and IT staff work together to support this integrated offering?
6) Balance between faculty autonomy and aggregation of course material
7) Balance between customized service and quick, easy access to high quality library resources (broad and deep penetration)
8) Content rights management, including digital rights management: for a single course, for course reuse, for packing and porting courses. Compliance with U.S. Copyright law, TEACH Act.
9) Avoiding duplicate purchases: evaluating CMS content packages in light of library subscriptions
10) Does an environment exist where experimentation and failure are possible?
11) Does a collaborative effort between Library and IT overtly align with direction from the executive leadership of the institution?

Additional issues introduced through Day 1 discussion
1) Policy issues: legal (privacy, copyright, etc.) and cultural
2) Who are the other campus partners, in addition to the Library and IT? Faculty and students ought to be included in future planning for the CMS. How do we include early adopter-faculty and other faculty? What about the special role of graduate students?
3) What new or reallocated resources will the new offerings require: staff, time, money, etc?
4) Striking a balance between seamless publication and resource branding (in the interests of provenance, link resolution, access to appropriate help and support, etc.)
5) Usability and simplicity of use. What usability studies are we performing? Can these efforts be distributed? Can results be shared?
6) Who should have access to certain features of these integrated systems? What information (including statistics and tracking data) should be retained and who should have the rights to access it?
7) How does the institution encourage faculty to participate and adopt these systems and technologies? What reward structure is there?
8) Learner-centered systems and the centrality of the student role; eportfolios and assessing student growth and achievement above and beyond any one course.
9) Where is the pedagogy? What are the teaching philosophies? What role is there for the library in pedagogy?
10) Institutional partners (IT, Library, faculty, others) must have a chance to clarify language, express their needs, their goals, and their priorities before setting to work on collaborative projects.
11) How do we make a case for our collaboration to the highest-level administration?
12) Training and support: what impact will integrated systems and services have? How will staff gain new skills? Who will train and support the users and the staff? How will we provide help within the CMS?
13) Content accessibility: range of issues from ADA to format longevity.
14) Rights transparency. It must be easy to declare and easy to understand the rights surrounding any object or group of objects.
15) With an explosion of portals, how do we avoid portal creep? How to collaborate instead of compete on campus portal projects?
16) How can we make learning objects discoverable, and whose issue is this discovery? Are we sharing perspectives? Are there selection criteria? Description best practices?
17) If course management systems aren’t designed to retain course content over the long term, will we and where will we archive this material? Beyond the courses, what content should be retained long-term?
18) Integrating tools, systems, and staff in support of faculty course development. Understanding the differences in Library/IT culture. Do we change at the same rate? How quickly is technology adopted?
19) Just-in-time training and service provision, desire for self-service, disinclination to approach the library and the library staff.
20) What does it mean to achieve integration? What are the broad integration goals? Appearance of seamlessness, less clicking, fewest stops, a single environment. Do we wish to be organizationally integrated? Functionally integrated?
21) How do we define success? How will we know when we are successful? What statistics will we gather, have we gathered to demonstrate success or lack of.
22) Are we duplicating efforts between the organizations? Do we know what our counterparts are doing? Do we understand their jobs, their skillsets?
23) How can libraries collaborate with faculty on information literacy? How adequately have we estimated students’ information literacy?
24) Risk tolerance: how do we tolerate failure? Is it possible to innovate when working on an enterprise level?

Glossary terms
Academic technology
Accessible
API
Archival
Authentication
Authorization
Cataloging
CMS
Content object
Content rights management
Crosswalks (metadata)
Digital asset management system
Digital Library Technologist
Digital rights management
Dublin Core
Ereserves
Federated search
IMS
Institutional repository
Instructional technology
IT
JSTOR
Learning object
Life cycle of learning objects
Link resolvers
LMS
Mappings (metadata)
MARC
Metadata
Middleware
NetID
OCLC
OKI
OpenURL
Pathfinder
Pedagogy
Persistence/persistency
Portal
Provenance
Publishing system
SCORM
Secure computing
SFX
Stewardship
Subject guides
Systems Librarian
Textbook
Textbook

Straw Vote (values clarification exercise)
Use in conjunction with Organizational (Org) and Technical (Tech) issues, above.

Issue Number LT Library Other Total
Org-8 25 28 5 58
Org-5 22 33 1 56
Tech-1 20 31 4 55
Tech-6 21 27 1 49
Tech-10 17 22 6 45
Org-2 16 26 2 44 ^ More than 1/2 the votes^
Org-1 12 24 2 38
Org-7 7 28 1 36
Org-3 11 23 1 35
Tech-3 19 13 0 32
Org-9 7 22 1 30
Tech-4 18 10 0 28
Org-11 8 17 1 26
Org-10 4 13 0 17
Org-6 9 5 1 15
Org-4 7 6 0 13
Voters 32 47 4 83