Tuesday 9/13 at 9am EST, the 2022 PAM Board election ballot notice was emailed to PAM members. This year, we are voting on PAM President-Elect and PAM Secretary positions.
The ballot will be open from 9/13 to 9/27. Exercise your right to vote!
NOTE: The ballot notice will come from SurveyMonkey. Please check your spam/trash folders if you don’t see it. If you do not see a link to the survey in your inbox please contact a member of the Nominations and Elections Committee.
At yesterday’s PAM Executive Board Advisory Council Meeting, two items were raised that the Board opted to table until our next Executive Board meeting in the September timeframe after conference. This email is your invitation to comment on the two items before the next meeting.
International Relations Committee
-This Committee has not been formed since the pandemic began. It is our hope that in 2023 the committee’s charge can resume.
-To that end the suggestion was made to reset the Committee’s term of appointment from the September 1 to August 31st current interval to a January 1 to December 31st interval.
Awards Committee
-The PAM Awards Committee is charged with administering the PAM awards including the Division and Achievement Awards.
-The suggestion was made to expand the Committee’s charge to include taking an active role in nominating members for SLA level awards.
-The Committee would also monitor eligibility periods for new members to make sure no deserving member misses the early career window for the Rising Star award.
-This effort would not preclude any individual actions to nominate members for SLA awards.
Please email me or any member of the board by September 1, 2022 to share any comments you have on these matters. You can also email the entire Board with the address, pam-board@listmgr.nrao.edu . The board members are listed below.
PAM’s plans for annual conference 2022 Charlotte are finalized. Our four round tables are set, and we have a great slate of speakers prepared for the Community. We hope you will find them all enriching. We also have the traditional slate of social events at which we hope to see you!
Your Hospitality Committee has arranged a First Night Dinner and Last Night Dinner. The First Night Dinner,sponsored by Optica, is at 6 pm on Saturday, July 30th at Aria Tuscan Grill. The Last Night Dinner, sponsored by SPIE Digital Library, is at 5:30 pm on Tuesday, August 2nd at Mimosa Grill. Please see the details Chris Doty sent to PAMnet June 16th. We are incredibly grateful to Optica and SPIE for their generous sponsorship of our fellowship and networking events. Thank you!
The PAM Open House is scheduled for Monday, August 1st at 6:30 pm. This event is generously sponsored by AIP Publishing. Please plan to come mix and mingle at the Open House and show AIP how much they mean to PAM. We will be cutting a cake in celebration of the PAM 50th Anniversary. Many thanks to AIP for their support of this favorite event!
No conference would be complete without the IOP Publishing PAM Suite Daily Retreat. IOPP is once again providing a Suite for us to gather in, mingle, unwind, and enjoy each other’s company. Did you know IOPP has been supporting the Suite for well over 20 years!?!? Please plan to stop by repeatedly, join your PAMily on the couch, and catch up. IOPP sent each PAM member personal invites to attend the Suite including all the details, so please be sure to RSVP. This year the Suite will also include a Virtual Suite time for our distant PAMily to gather with us, too. Thank you so much to IOPP for once again providing PAM the beloved Suite for us where the true essence of what it means to be PAMily can be found.
For those staying until Wednesday after conference, there is a PAM group outing at the NASCAR Hall of Fame organized by the Hospitality Committee. Purchase your tickets online in advance and meet at the Hall of Fame at 10 am on August 3rd. Please see the details Chris Doty sent to PAMnet June 16th.
All indications from SLA are that sessions and events are now populated to the conference schedule. PAM will also provide Dance Cards to highlight all our events.
Speaking of things you’ll receive… Each PAM member attending conference will receive a 50th Anniversary lanyard sponsored by American Mathematical Society. You’ll receive a chocolate bar with a special surprise inside sponsored by American Association for the Advancement of Science. The coveted IOP Publishing mugs will be handed out in the Suite and everyone is dying to know what this year’s design is. And to celebrate the 50th Anniversary, we also have commemorative pins and shiny gold PAM stickers. Finally, those who attend the First and Last Night Dinners will receive Golden Tickets for the end of year raffle. Thank you so much to AMS, AAAS, and IOPP for the swag and your support of PAM!
I hope everyone is doing well, as spring seems to finally be taking hold in most areas. I wanted to share a few updates before I get into information about Charlotte 2022.
PAM Board
At the most recent PAM Executive Board meeting, February 23rd, the Board addressed the vacancy created by the resignation of PAM Secretary, Debal Kar. Board governance provides for the opportunity to have a volunteer fill the remainder of an elected member of the Board’s term, should they leave before that term ends. Ruth Kneale volunteered to take on the remaining months of Debal’s term, and the Board passed a motion to accept her into the role of PAM Secretary. Welcome back to the PAM Board, Ruth! Thank you for jumping in.
History Project
The Board also discussed the 50th Anniversary Task Force’s suggestion to form a task force to begin a PAM history project. After brief discussion, the Board voted to form said task force, and charged it with gathering oral and written history, stories of PAM members past and present throughout PAM’s 50 year history. Please consider volunteering to join to PAM History Task Force. If you are interested in being a part of this interesting project, please email me at lutley@nrao.edu today.
50th Anniversary
The 50th Anniversary Task Force continues to plan monthly events in celebration of our anniversary. So far they’ve hosted a trivia and puzzle game night, a Pecha Kucha contest, and a Wikipedia edit-a-thon. For April, the TF is co-sponsoring a Professional Development Committee training session, on making the most of LibGuides. At the 2022 annual conference, PAM attendees can look forward to anniversary commemorative items including a new anniversary pin, special decorations in the IOP PAM Suite, a super celebration at the PAM Open House, and more. After conference, the monthly activities will continue until December when those Golden Tickets you’ve been collecting turn into raffle tickets for prizes.
SLA 2022 Charlotte, Source Forward
Now for a conference update! PAM submitted four educational session proposals to the Annual Conference Advisory Council and all four proposals were accepted. PAM also submitted requests for five events: a First Night Dinner, the PAM Open House, the PAM Business Meeting, a Last Night Dinner, and a group tour. The ACAC is working now to iron out final details of those sessions and events and assemble a final conference schedule. In the meantime, they have offered an At-A-Glance schedule (https://www.sla.org/sla-2022-schedule-at-a-glance/) to give us an idea what the conference will generally look like. The early bird registration rate is available until June 1 and the ACAC has promised a final schedule in early May.
If you attended the recent Town Hall, you heard mention of the contingency plans being drawn up, in the event that local COVID considerations require adjustments to the conference plan. These contingencies consist of: changing an appropriate amount of in-person sessions to on demand; pre-recorded sessions; and possibly needing to restrict the schedule to limit the number of attendees in sessions, the number of sessions one person can attend, and the extent to which one can move about in the conference center. This is just contingency planning.
SLA has every intention of our conference being an in-person experience, with some changes from what we normally expect already in place. Namely, there will be no pre-conference Continuing Education courses, no meetings before conference, and all poster sessions will be virtual only. If you plan to attend virtually, SLA will be hosting one live stream of an in-person session during each time slot of the conference schedule. Virtual attendees will also have access to all on demand sessions, and your in-person registration will include all virtual components.
There is still much to be settled about 2022 Charlotte- as more details emerge, you can expect to hear about them in messages from SLA, and I will continue to provide updates through PAMnet.
As many of us are aware, the Hathi ETAS was launched shortly after the beginning of COVID-19, and lasted through August of 2021. The service was designed to help researchers and students continue their access to “in copyright” content during the pandemic as libraries were closed, or open with limited hours. For those universities that left the service on from April 2020 through August 2021, HathiTrust was able to supply those institutions with use data.
Indiana University has strong programs in music, languages, area studies, and the humanities in general, so it was no surprise that those subject areas dominated the top 300 books accessed by IU logins. Like most libraries, the distribution of use of materials during a fixed time frame, when graphed, resulted in a pareto diagram, with a small number of titles getting very high, regular use, with a long tail of infrequently used or low demand titles.
The first science or math to show up was the 18th most heavily accessed book, “Probability” by Jim Pitman. This book is regularly used as a text for courses, and has been a Reserve print book at IU for several semesters. It was accessed by 60 different IU users across IU campuses, with 108 online renewals.
The 30th most heavily used resource was the old journal run “Electronics”, with 48 unique IU users accessing, and 3 renewals. This is also a reminder that the Hathi ETAS did not simply include online books, it also included online journals, book sets, and book series.
At number 79 on our list was a 1946 “Adventures in Time and Space”, an anthology of modern science fiction stories, with 30 unique users and 6 renewals.
There is no doubt that other science monographs were heavily used online during the covid pandemic, it is just that IU users enjoyed access through means other than Hathi Emergency Access. It is most likely that heavily used mathematics and computer science was delivered to students by digital libraries held by IU such as Skillport, the platform for the extremely high demand 3rd edition of Cormen’s “Introduction to Algorithms” (MIT Press). Others were presented to students via Proquest Ebook Central, EBSCO, and other providers.
The next mathematics book on the list (182nd, with 19 unique users and 9 renewals) was Elementary and Middle School Mathematics, by Van de Walle, Karp, and Bay-Williams. Again, this text was most likely required reading for School of Education students preparing to teach K-8 mathematics.
Below is a listing of the top 10 books access by IU users ranked according to number of unique IDs viewing. There is no question that permitting access to these titles during the pandemic was a great benefit to both the institution, and the students and researchers working here. If you have questions, or if your university made use of Hathi ETAS through last fall, and you have access to the use data and would like to compare or contrast your experiences with Indiana University, please feel free to contact me.
Top 10 Most Heavily Used ETAS Books by Indiana University
Title
Publisher / Year
Author
Unique IU Logins
Renewals
Creating Black Americans : African-American history and its meanings, 1619 to the present
Oxford Univ Press / 2006
Nell Irwin Painter
406
222
The encyclopedia of popular music
Oxford Univ Press / 2006
Colin Larkin
354
830
Conversation in the cathedral
Harper & Row / 1975
Mario Vargas Llosa
107
69
The new Rolling stone record guide
Random House / 1983
Dave Marsh, John Swenson
103
52
Love Medicine : a novel
Bantam Books / 1984
Louise Erdrich
96
89
Reading Modern Russian
Slavica Publishers / 1979
Jules F. Levin and Peter D. Haikalis, with Anatole A. Forostenko
93
50
Island of Dr. Moreau
Penguin/ 2005 [1896]
H.G. Wells
86
70
Dark continent : Europe’s twentieth century
A.A. Knopf / 1999
Mark Mazower
84
64
Chopin at the boundaries : sex, history, and musical genre
Harvard Univ Press / 1996
Jeffrey Kallberg
80
48
Engaging art : the next great transformation of America’s cultural life
Palumbo, Laura Bolton, Jeffra D. Bussmann, and Barbara Kern. “A View from the Top: Library Leaders’ Predictions for the Future of Science Liaison Librarianship.” Library Leadership & Management 36, no. 1. https://journals.tdl.org/llm/index.php/llm/article/view/7511
Resources for College Libraries (RCL), the Choice/ACRL bibliography of essential titles for undergraduate teaching and research, seeks experienced library subject selectors and faculty to serve as peer reviewers.
We are currently seeking referees for the following subjects: Astronomy, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics.
Reviewers are tasked with: assessing the subject collection comprehensively; providing recommendations for editorial improvement; and constructive feedback on how well the core title selections support the college curriculum. The RCL peer review is one-time professional service and a capacity-building exercise that strengthens collection development skills, improves subject expertise, and informs local projects.
To apply, submit a current CV and a brief description of your qualifications, particularly developing or evaluating core collections and/or teaching in the subject area to Anne Doherty, RCL Project Editor (adoherty@ala-choice.org). Preference will be given to those who apply by May 20, 2022. We are committed to pursuing equity and inclusion and seek reviewers with diverse backgrounds and new perspectives to the RCL work.
This year’s Physics Roundtable will bring together librarians from different institutions to discuss transformative agreements in STEM disciplines. Following a brief introduction to transformative agreements, the session will focus on their implementation and outreach at the institutions, i.e. what are the best ways to advertise to the authors who can benefit from covered article processing charges (APCs). With various open access mandates/policies at the funder and institutional levels, we expect that many colleagues are hearing about different “flavors” of transformative agreements through their organizations or consortiums. As the PAM Industry Roundtable will be looking at such discussions with publishers, this beginner to intermediate level session will complement it by providing some tips for effective outreach. With an hour-long session, we hope to leave at least 20 minutes for attendees to share their perspectives.
Questions? Contact Sarah Siddiqui and JonLuc Christensen.
This year, your Astronomy moderators (Jenny Novacescu and Lance Utley) are putting together a panel session of observatory librarians to address open astronomy issues, that have a direct impact on library subscription costs and collections, research services, and support for astronomy departments.
Presentations will cover: developments in Open Access; new features and content at ADS; and upcoming mission, instrumentation, and policy initiatives underway. The audience will engage the panelists in a Q&A session to conclude this roundtable.
Attendees can expect to gain a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of various types of Open Access and gain insight into how to use SMD topical expansion, RORs, and citation formatting in ADS. The planning and resources required to comply with NASA SMD Policy Document SPD-41 will also be covered.
This year’s Industry Partner Roundtable (formerly Vendor Roundtable) will feature a lively, plenary style discussion on any issues that librarians have encountered related to open access transformative publishing. This will include read and publish and subscribe to open agreements. Representatives from scientific publishers will be available to respond to issues raised. If you have any specific questions that you would like to suggest, please feel free to reach out to the moderators.
In addition, Jenny Hart and Donna Thompson will present a short summary of their survey on the use of object identifiers in PAM subject publishing.
We are still working on recruiting speakers, so please reach out to us if you have any suggestions.
This session will focus on the engagement strategies for collaborative work between librarians and mathematicians. The session will help explore the depth and breadth of these collaborations and provide attendees with examples of the many different ways mathematics and libraries can work together. The open roundtable discussion time will provide librarians with the opportunity to learn from each other and share potential collaboration methods and how to better connect. The session is for current mathematics librarians and liaisons; librarians who support STEM disciplines; and librarians interested in learning new engagement strategies.
Questions? Contact Sam Hansen and Anya C. Bartelmann.
PAM Bulletin 