Happy New Year to our User Community as well as our Library Blog readers! We are delighted that you continue to make us a part of your research process and decision-making.
At the end of last year, Library staff held a very lively goal setting meeting to determine how best we could support the Center and our users in 2014. Where could we deliver the best results? Where could we position ourselves in a way that matters and impacts information-driven projects?
All goals this year are truly focused on supporting our user community and ultimately enhancing their work environment – wherever that may be! With many of our users accessing content on mobile devices, we will be launching BrowZine, a mobile app that will certainly benefit them by not only allowing access to the MSK Library’s ejournal collection but the ability to customize within the app a book shelf to those journal titles they access most frequently. They will also be able to store articles to read at a later date. This will save time and provide another access point to institutional journal subscriptions. Additional announcements are coming soon – for now we invite MSK staff to reach out to the reference team to learn more about BrowZine!
We will be adding new features to Synapse, the authoritative resource for MSK publications from 2005 to present to include Alt-metrics scores (measures of a paper’s online presence), links to authors’ ORCID identification numbers, and MSK citations from 2004. We also will be launching an ORCID Support Service for all our authors. Researchers’ names aren’t enough to reliably identify they are the right author or contributor to a publication or dataset. Having a unique identifier, as provided by ORCID, should help resolve the author name ambiguity problem that currently exists in scholarly communication.
Document Delivery helps our users obtain journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations that are not available from the Library’s collections and plays an important role in providing often critically needed information. Again, upcoming enhancements means better service to our user community.
We will be implementing a new interface to Tri-Cat, our online catalog so that our users will have an improved discovery tool to published content at their finger tips.
Finally, we want to explore the value of implementing a Data Management Concierge Service or a Research Data Catalog in the future. We will be exploring this possible service with our user community via targeted surveys, focus group sessions, and one-on-one interviews. While this is not a novel idea, the concept would be new to our users — to develop and curate bibliographic records to data that could be repurposed and used by others. Visit Databib to browse other research data repositories.
These are our goals for 2014 which as you can see, does not include supporting our Library operations and providing ongoing services to our users. The Library team is energized and ready to tackle them. As a team, we bring to the table a mix of skill sets and creativity, ongoing support for each other, and a commitment to achieve. I would say this is definitely the right formula for success.
Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services