Miami University Libraries
Annual Report of Professional Activities
Jennifer Bazeley
Interim Head, Technical Services (Assistant Librarian)
Miami University Libraries
Start Date: 11-1-2009
Table of Contents
Part I - Performance of Primary Professional Responsibilities 2
Management Effectiveness 2
Electronic Resources / Serials / Monographs 4
E-Book and Serial Cataloging 18
Professional Development Activities 20
Professional Memberships 22
Part II - Service to the Library, the University, the Profession of Academic Librarianship, the Community 23
Miami University Libraries 23
Miami University 29
Professional Organizations and Associations 31
Part III. Scholarship/Creative Activity 37
Professional Presentations 37
Publications 38
Part IV. Goals for the next calendar year listed by Primary Professional Responsibilities, Service and Scholarly/Creative. 40
Goals: Primary Professional Responsibilities 40
Goals: Service 40
Goals: Scholarly/Creative 40
Appendices 42
Appendix I - Primary Professional Responsibilities, Current 42
Appendix II - Primary Professional Responsibilities Supplemental Materials 44
Appendix III - Service Supplemental Materials – Miami university libraries 47
Appendix III - Service Supplemental Materials – Miami university 49
appendix III - Service Supplemental Materials - Professional Organizations and Associations 50
Appendix IV - Scholarship/Creative Activity Supplemental Materials 51
This report and all supplementary materials are available online at:
http://staff.lib.miamioh.edu/~bazelejw/dossier/index.html
Annual Report of Professional Activities
Updated for the Review Year of: January 1, 2014 – December 31, 2014
Name: Jennifer W. BazeleyPosition Title: Interim Head, Technical Services
Rank: Assistant Librarian (LARPS, January 2010)
Intended area of very strong performance: Service / Date of Hire: 11/1/2009
Date: 2/16/2015
Review Year: 5th
Part I - Performance of Primary Professional Responsibilities
Management Effectiveness
Supervises department operations and services. Provides leadership in strategic planning and approves policies and procedures. Provides direction and resources for staff and evaluates performance of Technical Services librarians. Collaborates with colleagues throughout the library system and serves on library management teams as assigned.
In July 2014, my current position shifted in focus to supervisory duties and management of the technical services department. While many of my day to day activities still revolve around the activities of managing electronic resources (e-resources) and documenting and supervising the department’s work in acquisitions, serials, and e-resources, my primary focus has changed to guiding the staff and workflows of the department.
From January to June of 2014, my supervisory duties included overseeing five library staff (four classified staff, 1 librarian) in Technical Services who are responsible for monographic acquisitions and all aspects of serial and e-resource work. Beginning in July 2014, I began supervising all staff in technical services (six classified staff, three librarians).
Departmental Management (July 2014- )
For supplementary materials see Appendix II
Learning how to run the department has been an ongoing and challenging process, but a rewarding one. Between July and December of 2014, I undertook the following departmental tasks:
· Troubleshoot, edit, and approve classified staff timecards in Kronos every other Monday.
· Schedule and facilitate monthly technical services department meetings.
· Schedule and meet with the Technical Services Academic Resident Librarian every other week for one on one meeting to discuss progress and questions/concerns.
· Wrote the Primary Professional Responsibilities document for new academic resident librarian for technical services.
· Organized a retirement party for one of the technical services assistants.
· Organized a holiday lunch party for the technical services department.
· Oversaw the implementation of physical processing for receipt and copy catalogers to begin in 2015.
Library Collections Insurance Report (2014- )
For supplementary materials see Appendix II
In preparation for the retirement of the assistant dean who oversees technical services, I began working with her in early 2014 to learn how to prepare and compile the library collections numbers submitted to the university annually for insurance reporting. Under the guidance of the assistant dean, I updated item counts and costs for the library’s 2014 collection insurance report and completed spreadsheet calculations for the same report.
Staff Training (2012-present)
In December 2012, I began training our new Technical Services Assistant for Serials and E-Resources on both serials and e-resource job duties, including introducing him to library catalog software as well as LibGuides and our Journals A to Z list. This training allows him to perform some of the maintenance work that I was previously doing and also to be a back-up for the department’s serials assistants.
In 2013, we did extensive training on additional tasks including quality control for e-book bibliographic records in our DDA programs, updates to JSTOR e-journal bibliographic records, and updating the EBSCO ERM Essentials and Usage Consolidation software. He has also been trained to update the Technical Services LibGuide (e-resource usage statistics) and the PBWiki.
When I became Interim Head of Technical Services in July 2014, many of the e-resources tasks that I had previously performed became part of the job of the new Technical Services Academic Resident Librarian. Over the course of 2014, I worked with the Academic Resident Librarian to train him in numerous e-resource topics, including but not limited to updating and maintaining the Databases A to Z list on library website, standard e-resource license agreement vocabulary, managing the EBSCO annual subscription renewals list, creating and exporting lists in Sierra, and processing and maintenance of e-book bibliographic record batch loads (for both local and consortial resources).
We also hired a new Technical Services Assistant (to replace the position left open by the promotion of the assistant to Academic Resident Librarian), who I trained during the fall semester on a variety of e-resource topics, including but not limited to working in the EBSCO A-Z list and Databases A-Z list, Miami University IP addresses, the EZProxy server, all EBSCO software (ERM Essentials, EBSCOnet, EBSCO Usage Consolidation), and troubleshooting e-Resource problems (2014).
Technical Services Classified Staff New Hires (2012)
During 2012, the Technical Services department was able to fill two existing open classified positions as well as a third existing but revised classified position. Along with my colleagues in the Technical Services department, I offered input on the job descriptions, reviewed applications and résumés for potential candidates, and participated in the interview and selection process. While the two existing positions work primarily in cataloging, the revised classified position focused on work with serials and e-resources. Creating a job description for the revised position and interviewing for that position enabled me to better clarify my own job duties for delegation.
Annual Reviews – Technical Services Assistants (2010-present)
As the supervisor of technical services classified staff, I am responsible for conducting annual reviews for each staff member. Each year, we set goals for the upcoming year which we discuss at each successive review.
Serials Team Training (2010-2011)
· Monographic invoice processing training (2011) – Serials staff took over the processing of book invoices with the departure of the Order/Invoice Assistant in 2011.
· Withdrawals training (2011) – Serials staff in technical services trained staff in the Science and Art/Architecture libraries in how to withdraw materials from their collections.
· Serials staff cross-training (2010) – The department’s two serials assistant trained each other so that day-to-day work could be completed if one staff member had to be away from work.
· EBSCO online training (2010) – After we transitioned to EBSCO as our subscription vendor in 2010, all serials staff underwent online training in how to use EBSCO’s subscription management software, EBSCOnet.
Technical Services department Retreat/E-Book Update (2010)
On January 4, 2010, in collaboration with the former Bibliographic Systems Librarian, I organized a half-day retreat, gave a brief presentation about e-book challenges in Technical Services, and helped to screen, select, and lead a discussion of a motivational film.
Serial and E-Resource Budgets (2009-present)
For supplementary materials see Appendix II
At the end of each fiscal year, I create budget reports for serials and e-resources for initial allocations in the new fiscal year and for comparison with the accounting done by the Dean’s office and the University. The challenge of creating these reports at the end of the fiscal year lies in anticipating how much price inflation serials will undergo in the year ahead. Serial and e-resource costs tend to rise between 4 and 8 percent each year.
For fiscal year 2014, the challenge was in understanding the library budget under a new administration. An emphasis on transparency allowed us to create our budget allocations and compare them with the actual library budget allocated by the university.
In preparation for fiscal year 2015, the library began looking closely at legacy budget allocation structures as part of our work in adapting to the university’s responsibility centered management budget model. Additionally, fiscal year 2015 brought a change in our consortial invoicing, which affected budgeting. Regional campus OhioLINK subscription costs were combined with Oxford campus OhioLINK subscription costs. In order to help determine what percentage of subscription costs the regional campuses were responsible for, I created a formula based on previous year’s payments to apply to fiscal year 2015 costs (2014).
Electronic Resources / Serials / Monographs
Responsible for the oversight of subscription-based acquisitions and the creation and maintenance of access to library-provided electronic resources. Supervises the acquisition, cataloging, and management of the Libraries’ print serials collection, and the acquisition of the Libraries’ print monograph collection. Serves as leader of the Collection Access & Acquisitions Team. Serves as a member of the Libraries’ Collection Development and Management Cluster.
Management and maintenance are the mainstays of serials and e-resources work because of the changing nature of these materials. Work on these materials is often cyclical because the end of the calendar year is when the bulk of our materials are renewed or cancelled, and is also a time when publishers make large-scale changes to their resources (transfers between publishers, changes to Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), creation of new platforms, etc.). All of these changes are identified and recorded in our records, both at the local level (resources that we subscribe to locally for Miami University patrons) and at the OhioLINK level (resources that we subscribe to via the OhioLINK consortium, available to all OhioLINK patrons). Management of our resources also requires that we keep pace with the changing technology available to help us with management. Over the last four years, I have coordinated and managed several transitions in the software we use to manage these resources. Another essential facet of maintenance is troubleshooting e-resource issues for faculty, staff, and patrons. Solving these issues requires an in-depth understanding of the management and maintenance issues mentioned above, as well as courteous but efficient communications with the users who experience these problems.
Documentation has been a high priority in my position both to maintain consistency in the work that we perform and to ensure that delegated tasks will be performed in the same way in the future. Processes and procedures are documented in two primary places intended for two distinct audiences (technical services and public services staff).
In 2014, I delegated many of the maintenance tasks to the Technical Services Academic Resident Librarian. This has allowed me to coordinate several projects for the Academic Resident Librarian that have significantly improved the quantity and quality of information in our software systems. I continue to manage our software as an administrator and am available for troubleshooting whenever necessary.
Management and Maintenance: Library Software
Usage Statistics Software (EBSCO Usage Consolidation Module) (2011-present)
[2011 Goal]
For supplementary materials see Appendix II
An important part of evaluating our e-resources includes looking at how much they are used by our patrons. The vendors who provide access to our subscribed e-resources can often provide us with usage reports so that we may make informed decisions regarding future subscriptions. Prior to the development of commercial online tools which can aggregate a library’s e-resource usage reports, most libraries collected usage reports in Excel spreadsheets which required intensive manipulation to perform any kind of comparison. In 2011, I was offered the opportunity to be a beta tester for the new commercial tool created by EBSCO. Beta testing allowed me to experiment with the online product before committing funds to purchase it, as well as work with vendor representatives to contribute suggestions on improvements to the product. As a result of this collaboration, the library was given a free one-year subscription to the software for 2012. The free one-year subscription to this software for 2012 gave me the opportunity to input most of the e-resource usage reports that were previously only available on our Technical Services LibGuide. I was also able to experiment with and evaluate on the reporting functionality of the software. Some usage reports were set up to be harvested automatically by the software, while others had to be manually uploaded and maintained on a monthly or quarterly basis. Due to the success of the testing of this software and the fact that I was able to negotiate a reasonable price, the Dean of Libraries was able to commit to subscribing to the resource for 2013.
In 2013, I was able to activate automatic retrieval of usage reports for many vendors using a protocol called SUSHI. The Usage Consolidation software can then harvest monthly reports automatically, which makes the statistics gathering process much more efficient. For usage from vendors who cannot support the SUSHI protocol, I manually upload their reports on a quarterly basis and the technical services assistant cleans up errors reported by the software.
In June 2013, EBSCO added the ability to upload e-book reports for several of our e-book providers, and I have since uploaded multiple years of e-book reports. We currently have 88 vendors profiled in Usage Consolidation for which we can enter reports; 46 of those vendors support the SUSHI protocol allowing automatic harvesting and 42 vendors still require us to manually access their reports.
As a result of being able to load most of our usage data into the and clean it up, we are now able to utilize enhancements made to EBSCO’s subscription management tool, EBSCOnet. These enhancements allow us to view analytics like cost per use and to create graphical reports as well as spreadsheets to analyze our usage and spending patterns.
EBSCO ERM (Electronic Resource Manager) Essentials (2010-present)
[2010-2011 Goal]