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Resource Sharing


DPI uses keywords that are used to associate content with major category/topic areas. By using this classification system, you are able to click a keyword and see a listing of DPI content that has been associated with this category.

Please scan over the titles below. If you see a topic that interests you, click the Read More link to access the page.

Use WISELearn to Weave Summer Learning into Fall

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Refreshed, renewed, and ready to reboot, the new school year is upon us. Many library media specialists and other educators have spent time this summer creating resources, leading professional development, and discovering tools to improve learning experiences for students. Rather than creating another new folder on a computer that may get buried in a sea of other important work, why not share all those great ideas with other Wisconsin educators and find even more fabulous resources in the process?

WISELearn provides a centralized location for connecting Wisconsin educators and sharing classroom and professional learning resources, and if you have not visited lately, it is time to explore the fabulous new platform introduced last year. The WISELearn Resources Library is a customized microsite of OER Commons. This personalization allows us to make choices about terminology and include our state standards. So, for example, if you want to add or find a resource to help integrate the Wisconsin Information and Technology Literacy Standards in grades 3-5, these are searchable fields. WISELearn also allows you to link resources out to Twitter and Pinterest or include them in your Google Classroom, and you can connect with the creator to provide feedback and make connections.

As a library media specialist, be an ambassador for WISELearn in your district. In addition to using WISELearn for your own instruction and research, coach a team of teachers in your district through forming a Group in WISELearn and using the site to share their resources and lessons. Demonstrate WISELearn to your staff and illustrate its great features using the guide, video, and links available on the Training page. You can also showcase some of the great work recently done by visiting the New London Math Interventions/Enrichment Group, the Lakeland Union OER Grant Group, or the CESA 11 ITL Resource Work Group for examples to inspire your peers in coaching sessions.

Your school library most certainly has a section devoted to professional learning. WISELearn allows you to expand this section into the digital world in a way that is inviting, useful, and social. Let’s build our Wisconsin educational community!

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New WISCAT Documentation Available on Blank & Multi-Copy Requests

Friday, August 17, 2018

There is a new document available for WISCAT users in the ILL section of the Documentation Google folder, titled ILL - Blank & Multi-Copy Requests. This document describes the scenarios for using the blank or multi-copy request features, as well as how to use them. 

As a reminder, this folder is accessible in the menu bar when logged into a WISCAT staff account, as shown below:

Screenshot of WISCAT staff view with Documentation link highlighted

If you're looking for instructions or information on a topic that isn't covered in the Documentation folder, please Contact Us!


Written by Gail Murray, Resources for Libraries & Lifelong Learning

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Top 10 most requested titles : June 2018

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

OCLC has released the most requested titles for June 2018. Starred titles are also on our In Constant Demand list. Titles on this list should not be requested as they are in high demand in their home library.                                                                                   Library bookshelves

  • How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
  • Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World… by Hans Rosling
  • Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng *
  • 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
  • I Light a Candle by Gena Turgel
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k… by Mark Manson *
  • I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: ... by Michelle McNamara
  • Bad blood : Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
  • Iris & Lily. Book one by Angela Scipioni and Julie Scipioni *
  • A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles *

Written by Christine Barth, Resources for Libraries and Lifelong Learning

 

 

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Statewide Electronic Resource Contract Options

Monday, August 6, 2018

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) recently completed a Request for Bid (RFB) procurement process working through the Wisconsin Department of Administration as statutorily required. The process was designed to maximize DPI’s buying power by selecting the lowest-cost bidder that could provide a product that best meets rigorous mandatory standards for electronic content in 13 separate Collection areas.

DPI recognized the total cost of the Collections might exceed the current BadgerLink budget and for the first time, the RFB included a clause allowing municipally funded library organizations to purchase selected Collections the DPI could not. Bidders were informed the price they provided for any Collection could be shared with those municipally-funded library organizations to make it easy for them to make purchases without having to conduct separate investigations and negotiations.

The subject areas to be included in Collections were determined with input from the Wisconsin library community. The community also provided input to the mandatory specifications for Collections.

DPI is signing contracts for all but two of the 13 separate electronic Collections included in the RFB. Public, school, or academic libraries may collaborate to identify a municipally-funded fiscal agent to purchase those two other Collections. If a statewide consortial purchase is made through this process, the DPI BadgerLink team is willing to host and provide technical support to the two additional collections on the BadgerLink website.

DPI is NOT licensing the following two Collections:

Collection 11: Full text Works of Literature
Vendor and product selected: Cengage Learning (Gale) - LitFinder
Price specified for the initial two-year (FY19 and FY20) contract: $52,000

Collection 12: Language Learning Resources
Vendor and product selected: Recorded Books - Transparent Languages Online
Price specified for the initial two-year (FY19 and FY20) contract: $69,000

Any library organization interested in learning about responses submitted by vendors not selected for any of the Collections included in the RFB should contact Martha Berninger (martha.berninger@dpi.wi.gov or 608-224-6161).

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LitFinder & Transparent Languages Online Update

Thursday, July 26, 2018

The Department of Public Instruction is signing contracts for BadgerLink resources selected through the Request for Bid (RFB) led by the Department of Administration. DPI is eager to update and enhance BadgerLink resources, and plans to release them as soon as possible, and hopefully within weeks.

However, because of the cost of the selected resources is greater than the current BadgerLink budget, DPI will not be able to sign contracts for all the Collections included in the RFB (read more about the Collections in the BadgerLink Procurement Update dated 7/3/2018). Decisions about which Collections will be purchased are still being made. They are being based on feedback from the library community, usage patterns and the availability of other resources that generally meet the same needs.

At this time, the Department of Public Instruction has determined that it will not be licensing the Cengage LitFinder database, which has been a part of BadgerLink since 2008 and Transparent Languages Online from Recorded Books, which represented a new content area, vendor and product.  The previous LitFinder contract ended 6/30/2017 and therefore this resource is no longer available. 

The RFB Cooperative Purchasing clause allows municipally funded library (including public libraries, the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium, the CESA Support Network and libraries represented by the System and Resource Library Administrator’s Association of Wisconsin) to contract with selected vendors for the selected resources at the same rates vendors agreed to in the RFB process. Any library organization interested in exploring that option can contact Martha.Berninger@dpi.wi.gov for more information. Please bear in mind that DPI is not able to share any information about unsuccessful bids submitted by vendors not selected.

Thank you for your interest in the future of BadgerLink and your support. DPI will share regular updates on the process.

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Perspectives on Resource Sharing Costs

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Guest Post by Joshua Steans, University of Wisconsin-Stout

For all libraries, the push of user expectations counters the pull of rising costs, budget gaps, and an aggressively shifting information technology landscape. Strategic decisions emerge from this scrum with the objective of providing as many relevant resources to as many patrons as possible, and to do so as fast, as often, and as simply as possible.

Flying books
Resource Sharing is no exception. In fact, more than perhaps any library service, Resource Sharing is remarkably transparent, with each transaction offering a microcosm of the whole library enterprise: acquisitions and metadata for holdings and discovery; reference to help patrons find and request an item; ILL to quickly, cost-effectively, and compliantly source it; lending ILL to screen, pull, update, and ship the item (plus their own Circ staff to keep it in the right place); ILL to receive it, connect loose ends of the transaction and plug the business end of it all into the Circ department; and then Circ to hand the item to the patron. Quite some effort to get one item for one patron.

And what does all that effort cost? First, one caveat: Resource Sharing is the only library service that has periodically undergone thorough cost studies. The anecdotal estimates for some other library services—$95 to add a book to the collection (after purchase); $105 for a reference question; $10 to simply store an item for one year—outpace even the highest estimates for Resource Sharing.

As for those Resource Sharing costs, another caveat: there’s no clear answer. Great variability exists between loans and articles, in-consortium and out-of-consortium transactions, lending and borrowing, academic and public, true Resource Sharing and commercial services. There are at least 10 cost categories, each with a different benchmark. Estimates range from a low of about $3-$4 per transaction to a high of $9-$17. The highest end of this spectrum comes from out of date research: ARL studies from 1993 and 2003 that were conducted at large research universities. In addition to skewing heavily toward high-budget university libraries, these studies predate modern Resource Sharing tools, workflow efficiencies, and hiring/staffing practices. More recent research, published in 2012, benchmarks the average cost of transactions at about $4-$9. For the most meaningful cost picture, each library should run its own numbers. And to that end, OCLC is developing an ILL Cost Calculator, which was inspired by a similar calculator developed by Lars Leon and Nancy Kress.

Regardless of exact numbers, there are universally accepted trends: consortium transactions and lending articles cost the least, borrowing articles are in the middle, and the undisputed heavyweight high cost champion (notwithstanding commercial document services) is out-of-network borrowing loans. But ranges trend higher and lower according staffing levels (ft/pt, librarian, assistant, clerk, page/student, etc.), policies, workflow efficiencies, and request volume at individual libraries.

Here’s one fact we can nail down: staffing is the biggest cost factor, and there’s no close second. But this is true of all library services and should come as no surprise. After staff, the other standard costs are: request systems, management tools, lender fees, shipping, equipment, and supplies. As mentioned above, the objective should be to get the most out of what you have. We know that when the number of transactions increases, the average cost declines. Implementing sustainable policies and workflows that encourage increased volume will lower the cost of each transaction and add value for users.

 

Written by:
Joshua Steans, University of Wisconsin - Stout

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Access to Genealogy & Historic Newspapers Will Continue in BadgerLink

Friday, July 20, 2018

We’ve heard from a number of libraries and genealogists who are concerned they may be losing access to resources they value and want to reassure Wisconsin libraries and patrons that BadgerLink will continue to provide access to historic newspapers and genealogy content from Wisconsin and beyond.

While the contract for Access NewspaperARCHIVE will not be continued, the Department is contracting with ProQuest to provide historic newspapers via Newspapers.com Library Edition World Collection. Access NewspaperARCHIVE is no longer provided through BadgerLink, and Newspapers.com Library Edition World Collection will be available as soon as possible. We are confident the Newspapers.com interface and ProQuest customer support will be a step forward for BadgerLink users. The collection contains newspapers from around the world, not just Wisconsin. Once a contract is signed, DPI will share the full title list.

Our current vendor of genealogy/local history resources, HeritageQuest Online, will continue to be our genealogy collection provider.  Access to their resources will continue without interruption.

The contracts should be finalized in the next few weeks and we will continue to provide updates about our resources on the Badger Bulletin as well as the Wisconsin Libraries for Everyone Blog.  We are working to restore access to historic newspapers as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.

To receive email notifications about our updates, sign up at https://badgerlink.dpi.wi.gov/subscribe.  Contact us at https://badgerlink.dpi.wi.gov/contact-us with any questions.

Written by:  BadgerLink Team, Resources for Libraries & Lifelong Learning

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Share WISCAT tips and tricks at our upcoming User Group Meeting on 7/26!

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Do you have WISCAT/ILL workflows that you use locally that you think would be helpful to others? Are you doing something interesting with your WISCAT stats? Are you holding trainings locally for patrons, and you’d like to share out how that’s going? Consider sharing your story or tips at the next User Group Meeting!  Join the WISCAT team for a quarterly User Group Meeting on Thursday, July 26 from 2pm to 3pm via webinar. There is no need to register, simply click on this link at the appropriate time. We will record the first part of the meeting and slides with notes will be available as well. Any live demo or question/answer period will not be recorded.  We will be using our conferencing system, GlobalMeet –see instructions on using GlobalMeet here.

WISCAT logo

Please email me at gail.murray@dpi.wi.gov if you’re interested in sharing, and we’ll get you on the agenda. While we love sharing news and updates with WISCAT users in our User Group Meetings, these meetings are even more useful to WISCAT users when we hear from you, too! Consider presenting next week, or at a subsequent user group meeting.

We also always welcome your agenda items and discussion topic ideas, so please share those if you've got them! 

 

Written by Gail Murray, Resources for Libraries & Lifelong Learning

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Make the most of WISCAT's Quick Menu feature

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Most WISCAT libraries have several Quick Menu shortcuts set up in their staff accounts. Typically these include Request Manager, Borrower Title Browse, Lender Title Browse, Borrower Request Number Search, Lender Request Number Search, and Staff Menu Dashboard. But did you know you can customize your Quick Menu to add additional shortcuts?

WISCAT quick menu displaying default options

To customize your Quick Menu, log into your WISCAT account and click on your username in the upper right hand corner. From there, click on Your Quick Menu. Use the Select a Menu drop-down list to choose which menu you'd like to display below, then select the options you'd like to add in to your Quick Menu. See the image below, where I'm in the process of adding the Maintain Shipping Labels page from ILL Admin to my Quick Menu.

Screenshot of adding maintain Shipping Labels to Quick Menu

Once you've made your selections, don't forget to click on Save! Now your new selection will show up in your Quick Menu, and with its own keyboard shortcut. You can use these keyboard shortcuts from any WISCAT page when logged in to be directed to the shortcut's corresponding page.

Updated Quick Menu showing Maintain Shipping Labels option

Note that these new shortcuts only apply to your specific WISCAT staff account. If your library has multiple staff accounts in WISCAT, a change in one account will not apply to the other account(s). 

Please Contact Us if you have any questions!

 

Written by Gail Murray, Resources for Libraries & Lifelong Learning

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Archives of American Art accessible through ILL

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Archive of American Art

I recently learned about a resource that may help your patrons find obscure historical material. It is the Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution. The Archives provide access to their collection via interlibrary loan.

This collection has primary sources that relate to the visual arts – diaries, letters, photos, films, A/V recordings, scrapbooks, etc. These items will not appear in WorldCat, so if your patron is looking for a rare item (usually on microfilm) to do with art or artists, this is a good resource to explore.

All requests are subject to the following conditions:

  • Requests must be submitted by a librarian, who has registered for an account at https://aeon.aaa.si.edu.
  • Materials are for in-library use only.
  • Microfilm requests are limited to eight reels per patron.
  • Each distinct collection or interview requires a separate form.
  • Access Restricted materials are not eligible for interlibrary loan.
  • Microfilm and transcripts are sent via U.S. Postal Service and are due back to the Archives' one month from the shipping date. International requests are due back six weeks from the shipping date.
  • A two week renewal may be granted if the Archives receives your renewal request before the due date. To request renewal, please send an email to aaaemref@si.edu with the subject line "ILL Renewal."
  • There is no charge for this service.
  • Copyright laws apply to all requests.

RL&LL has created an account and is now set up to borrow from the Archives.  If you are a WISCAT library, please use the blank request form and indicate in the borrower’s notes that you are looking for something at the Archives of American Art. Please add any applicable bibliographic information. We will take it from there!

Written by:  Christine Barth, Resources for Libraries & Lifelong Learning

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