FEDLINK
Technical
Notes
August/September, 1999 — Volume 17 Number 8/9
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Digital Library Profile: Los Alamos National Laboratory's Library Without Walls
Staff Profile: Customer Service and Community Drive FEDLINK Staffer
Call for Nominations—1999 FLICC Awards
Digital Library Profile:
Los Alamos National Laboratory's Library Without Walls
From Einstein's wild-haired theorizing to Frankenstein's electrical experiments, science is commonly portrayed as an independent pursuit.
Rick Luce, however, understands that contemporary science is highly cooperative. "Our vision is to create a network of knowledge systems that facilitate scientific communication and collaboration," says Luce, Research Library Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Library Without Walls (LWW). This customer-focused digital library initiative has flourished since its start in mid-1994, offering employees 24-hour Web-based access to the library's catalog, online reference tools, scientific databases, full-text journal articles, classified reports, streaming videos, and more.
The LANL is a natural home for a flagship digital library project; it hosts a premier high performance computing center which supports advanced research in digital modeling, simulation, and data mining. The laboratory is one of 28 Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories across the country, and is managed by the University of California. The LANL site covers 43 square miles and employs 12,000 people, making distributed access to information resources a necessity. Outside of LANL, the LWW serves external customers such as the Air Force Research Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. During business hours, the library also serves members of the general public.
LANL is one of the largest multidisciplinary institutions in the world; approximately one-third of the laboratory's technical staff members are physicists, one-fourth are engineers, one-sixth are chemists and materials scientists, and the remainder work in mathematics and computational science, biological science, geoscience, and other disciplines. From its inception, the success of the LWW has been measured by its ability to improve information sharing within and between disciplines. The project's goals are outlined on the LWW Web site (http://lib-www.lanl.gov/lww/welcome.html):
- Enhance scientific research productivity through enabling digital library technologies, which integrate user applications and digital content. Systems and products will be measured by their ability to facilitate new forms of collaboration among our users.
- Partner with our customers to enhance the access and usability of information, which contributes to our mutual success.
- Shift from customer/supplier relationships to partnerships with our key providers. We have successfully formed partnerships with primary journal publishers, secondary electronic database producers, and software companies.
Tailored Content
As has been the case in many digital libraries, staff members began the LWW project by placing the library's catalog and popular databases online and digitizing reports created by the LANL. By 1995, however, Luce decided that the existing online resources were not sufficient, and that the LWW should work on creating Web interfaces for widely-used scientific information products.
In a March 1999 feature in Online World, Luce described the LWW's decision to develop a Web-based full-text tool to retrieve information from the Science Citation Index (SciSearch). At the time, the Institute for Scientific Information, which owns the database, had no plans for creating a Web product. LWW staff members not only designed the SciSearch interface; they added valuable new features, including links to full-text articles and images. They also developed an alert service which allows users to create a customized research profile which is checked against the 18,000 journal citations added to the database every week. Organizations such as the Sandia National Laboratory, the University of New Mexico, and the Phillips Air Force Research Laboratory became interested in the project, and partnered with the LWW. Two years later, the ISI developed their own Web-based version of the Science Citation Index (http://www.isinet.com/products/citation/citsci.html). "That would be one example of getting in front of the pack and delivering content on a very large scale," said Luce.
In addition to SciSearch, the LWW system currently offers online access to BIOSIS, the DOE Energy database, the Engineering index, INSPEC, the Los Alamos Un-classified Publications, and Social SciSearch. LWW staff members continue to link and integrate content from existing databases to journal articles provided by Elsevier, Highwire Press, and other publishers in ways which provide researchers with faster, more dynamic access to full-text resources. In the future, the LWW hopes to provide search capabilities which are integrated to such an extent that users will not need specialized knowledge about particular databases or journals to find the information they seek.
LANL employees can currently tailor the information they access from the LWW through personalized Web pages that feature links, databases, and journals that they have specified. In the future, the LWW also hopes to provide users with an "active recommendation" or "knowledge mining" system, which could provide relevant information based on an individual's profile or previous pattern of information retrieval. This fall, the LWW plans to test TalkMine, a recommendation system which is both content-based and collaborative, and allows the crossover of information among multiple databases searched by users. For more information on this project, see http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~rocha/lww/description.html.
Emerging Trends in Scientific Communication
At the 1998 Faxon Federal Day, Luce spoke about the history and direction of the LWW. The project is at the center of a sea change in scientific publishing: the movement towards creating dynamic online content and away from publishing static articles in peer-reviewed journals.
The library is working with Paul Ginsparg's "xxx physics preprint system" (http://xxx.lanl.gov/), examining methods to integrate preprints, or unpublished research papers, with citation databases. The xxx database allows scientists to publish and comment on papers, a forum previously monopolized by journal publishers. As the costs for scientific journals have risen, and issues surrounding the ownership of online copyright have become more contentious, scientists have expressed increased interest in participating in such ad hoc working groups. Publishers are understandably worried. Luce discussed some unresolved questions related to preprints and other online scientific publications:
- The pace of scientific reporting may change, as online publications track incremental discoveries rather than the quot;newsworthy" events addressed in journal articles;
- Debates over who owns the copyright of scientific papers will continue (For example, while scientists may have previously signed their copyright over to journals, universities and laboratories may now claim that they own the rights to articles on research conducted within their facilities.);
- Online publications may be revised indefinitely, creating citation difficulties;
- There are ongoing debates regarding standards for online publication and archiving; and
- There are ongoing debates regarding standards for security and e-commerce.
He also predicted some trends for the scientific article in five years:
- articles will be "living documents, with hypertext links backwards (bibliography) and forwards (citation) in time;
- feedback and peer review will be instantaneous and transparent;
- readers will write letters directly to authors, rather than posting them in a public forum; and
- articles may offer a range of complexity, presenting lay versions and expert versions.
In another long-range initiative, LWW is working with Sandia National Laboratory to investigate visual user interfaces for navigating large sets of metadata and the interaction and manipulation of smaller sets of data. "We're trying to look at some of the relationships between data that might not be so apparent through traditional search-and-retrieval tools," Luce told Online World. Related datasets might be depicted as overlapping bubbles, for example, or as mountains of different heights. "That's something that is probably still a ways off," Luce said.
Leadership in the New Digital Library Paradigm
At Federal Day `98, Luce also spoke about the challenges and changes inherent in managing rapidly changing digital libraries. He discussed current funding and technology difficulties in libraries, and identified several common obstacles which block them from providing digital services:
- reluctance to identify with and follow the lead of similar organizations,
- the press of current business,
- fear and skepticism,
- authoritarian leadership,
- failure to eliminate "silos and think systems,"
- inability to take significant risks, and
- lack of vision and/or management commitment.
"Libraries must move from an identity crisis to a laser beam focus," said Luce. He explained that as librarians are reinventing the Internet, the Internet is also reinventing libraries. In order to keep up with the pace of technological change, librarians should focus on customer needs, develop a strategic focus, and use the tools of strategic business management (SBM) to move towards established goals. Library managers need to reconsider and optimize library processes, seeking regular customer feedback for guidance. He offered a series of interconnecting factors to consider when attempting to align an organization's core concepts and values with those of its employees:
- customer-driven quality, design quality and prevention, a long range view of the future;
- leadership, partnership development, results focus;
- fast response, management by fact, continuous improvement and learning; and
- employee participation and development, company responsibility and citizenship.
Luce also pointed out the importance of presenting both regular work and the new activities as part of the employee's "job." As the new activities become routine, they take less time and present themselves as less of a burden to employees.
A key SBM tool is the quarterly organizational assessment of customer needs and satisfaction, process performance, and results in relation to operational/strategic plans. These assessments provide the materials for fact-based decision making. "There should be no action without a plan, and no plan without data," Luce said. This sort of management requires demanding customers, he suggested. As improvements are made, libraries may move from gauging customer satisfaction to rating the levels of importance of various services, and finally, to comparing themselves to the best organizations in their field. Desired business results may be measured against five factors:
- Customer focus—are customers satisfied, loyal, finding added value?
- Product quality—are products accessible, usable, accurate, complete?
- Operational performance—how is the team doing based on the expectations of upper management? Is the library productive, competitive, efficient?
- High performance workforce—how do staff capabilities support the mission/vision? Are staff members involved in formal process changes? How is employee satisfaction, morale, training, and turnover?
- Prestigious reputation—how is the project doing relative to name recognition and movement toward best in class? What strategic performance results and benchmark results are available?
Luce offered several of the LWW's measurement charts as examples, including the results of measuring overall customer satisfaction over several months; customers' ranking of output processes for various library materials; an examination of the LWW customer base; customer assessments of the availability, quality, and delivery of materials; the price per transaction and productivity cost per transaction; usage and staffing trends; a comparison of customer satisfaction with responses from customers in non-related industries; research library funding over time; and comparative library expenditures as a percentage of overhead.
Finally, Luce spoke about the qualities that leaders and employees should cultivate to succeed in the new digital library paradigm. He suggested that leaders should challenge current processes, work to inspire a shared vision, enable others to act and collaborate, and model the way that others should act. He referenced an eight step process for leaders to create major change [Kotter, Leading Change, 1996]:
- Establish a sense of urgency.
- Create the guiding coalition.
- Develop a vision and strategy.
- Communicate the change vision.
- Empower a broad-based action.
- Generate short-term wins.
- Consolidate gains and produce more change.
- Anchor new approaches in the organizational culture.
He also offered a list of skills for library employees to work on, including a passion for service excellence, people skills, collaboration, initiative, flexibility, process skills, lifelong learning, self-empowerment, making a difference, and having fun.
In conclusion, Luce stressed four lessons that he has learned about managing in the new paradigm. Library managers need to establish a sense of urgency, develop a compelling vision and strategy, communicate the change vision strongly, and build ownership in the new processes by passing responsibility on to those who are charged with implementing change.
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FirstSearch Orders Due by September 15—New Pricing In Effect
FEDLINK members should submit orders for OCLC FirstSearch by September 15, 1999 to ensure billing within this fiscal year. Problems have occurred in prior years with orders submitted to OCLC in the last days of September, when federal librarians counted on billing to occur with September activity. All FirstSearch orders should ALWAYS be processed by fax, not by mail. Be sure to use the OCLC Team's fax: 202-707-4873. Contact the FEDLINK OCLC team at 202-707-4800 or askocfno@loc.gov.
As of July 1, 1999, FirstSearch costs 60 cents per search, available in blocks of 500 at $300 each.
FEDLINK's OCLCFED ListservOCLCFED is FEDLINK's moderated mailing list for federal libraries and information centers that are also members of OCLC. The FEDLINK Network Operations' (FNO) OCLC Team maintains the listserv and incorporates messages from OCLC's OCLC-ABSTRACTS listserv as well as general information about OCLC products and prices and the policies and practices of OCLC and the FEDLINK OCLC Network. It is easy to subscribe! Simply visit the OCLC Section of the FLICC/FEDLINK Web Page at http://lcweb.loc.gov/flicc/mmoclc.html and follow the link to subscribe to the FEDLINK OCLCFED Listserv. For questions or comments about the listserv, please contact the FEDLINK OCLC Team directly through email askocfno@loc.gov or by telephone (202) 707-4848. |
Staff Profile:
Customer Service and Community Drive FEDLINK Staffer
Allan Harrison joined FLICC/FEDLINK and the FEDLINK Fiscal Operations Section (FFO) as an accounts payable clerk more than two years ago. Harrison is pleased to work for FLICC/FED LINK and is impressed with its organization, management and staff. He says, "It is a pleasure to work with such a highly professional and dedicated group of people." Harrison has also worked for a number of private companies, and his current employment at the Library of Congress is his first experience working for the federal government.
Harrison obtained his A.A.S. degree in Accounting in 1992 from the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). Prior to receiving his degree, Harrison worked for the UDC Procurement Office and received an outstanding service award for reorganizing the filing system at the UDC office. In the private sector, he performed various accounts payable functions, such as data entry of invoices, posting of invoices, and the processing of payments. Harrison worked as an inventory control clerk, as an accounts payable clerk at the Hechinger Co. and the Account Data Group, and as an accounting assistant at the Benning Road Financial Center.
Harrison's major duties at FEDLINK include sorting, reviewing, and invoicing data within three to five days of receipt into the FEDLINK automated accounting system. He researches rejected invoices, identifies and corrects problems and returns ineligible invoices to the vendor. Harrison's position includes interacting with vendors and members over matters of invoices and data entry into an electronic archival storage and retrieval system (LAVA) using automated scanning devices. He operates optical scanning equipment to convert materials from paper to digital format and assists accounting technicians in generating monthly usage statements for FEDLINK members. Harrison also responds to questions from FEDLINK managers, team leaders, and accounting technicians, assisting in the research of fiscal documents and preparing financial spreadsheets.
Harrison is proud of his work at FEDLINK. He is a member of the FLICC/FEDLINK Customer Services Consolidated Management Team which conducted a survey of FEDLINK members and vendors using an online survey and focus groups. The team consulted with the members, worked with the FEDLINK Advisory Council, FLICC management, and staff to develop and implement customer service initiatives for FY99 and beyond. He is also proud of his work with the Combined Federal Campaign which earned him a Certificate of Commendation in recognition of his outstanding services as a Team Captain for the Combined Federal Campaign in 1997.
In the near future, Harrison plans to return to college and pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting to work as an internal auditor.
Harrison enjoys long walks, reading and playing tennis. He is single, resides in Washington, D.C., and is a licensed insurance agent for health and life insurance companies.
| Call for Nominations! Get Ready for the 1999 FLICC Awards for
For more information, nomination forms, and awards criteria, |
Editorial Staff
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