Folks,

Please use the text below to send out to your designated elists that the
March 2019 issue of ITAL is now available. Let's make sure people know
about the results of your hard work. Remember that I'll cover lita-l. Thanks

Mark

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<subject line: March 2019 ITAL Issue Now Available>

The March 2019 issue of Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL)
<https://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ital/> is available now. With this
issue we begin a new regular column, "Public Libraries Leading the Way."
The column will highlight technology-based innovations from a public
library perspective. The inaugural piece is The Democratization of
Artificial Intelligence: One Library's Approach
<https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10974>, by Frisco (Texas) Public
Library's Thomas Finley. If you work in a public library and have an idea
for a column to share, please check out this LITA blog post
<https://litablog.org/2019/01/propose-a-topic-for-the-new-ital-public-libraries-leading-the-way-column/>
with
details on how to submit your idea.

In this issue:

Library Services Navigation: Improving the Online User Experience
<https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10844>
Brian Rennick

While the discoverability of traditional information resources is often the
focus of library website design, there is also a need to help users find
other services such as equipment, study rooms, and programs. A recent
assessment of the Brigham Young University Library website identified
nearly two hundred services. Many of these service descriptions were buried
deep in the site, making them difficult to locate. This article will
describe a web application that was developed to improve service discovery
and to help ensure the accuracy and maintainability of service information
on an academic library website.

Taking The Long Way Around: Improving The Display Of HathiTrust Records In
Primo <https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10574>
Jason Alden Bengtson and Jason Coleman

As with any shared format for serializing data, Primo's PNX records have
limits on the types of data which they pass along from the source records
and into the Primo tool. As a result of these limitations, PNX records do
not currently have a provision for harvesting and transferring rights
information about HathiTrust holdings that the Kansas State University
(KSU) Library system indexes through Primo. This created a problem, since
Primo was defaulting to indicate that all HathiTrust materials were
available to KSU Libraries (K-State Libraries) patrons, when only a limited
portion of them actually were. This disconnect was infuriating some library
users, and creating difficulties for the public services librarians. There
was a library-wide discussion about removing HathiTrust holdings from Primo
altogether, but it was decided that such a solution was an overreaction. As
a consequence, the library IT department began a crash program to attempt
to find a solution to the problem. The result was an application called
hathiGenius.

The Map As A Search Box: Using Linked Data To Create A Geographic Discovery
System <https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10592>
Gabriel Mckee

This article describes a bibliographic mapping project recently undertaken
at the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).
The MARC Advisory Committee recently approved an update to MARC that
enables the use of dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in
MARC subfield $0. The ISAW Library has taken advantage of MARC's new
openness to URIs, using identifiers from the linked data gazetteer Pleiades
in MARC records and using this metadata to create maps representing our
library's holdings. By populating our MARC records with URIs from Pleiades,
an online, linked open data (LOD) gazetteer of the ancient world, we are
able to create maps of the geographic metadata in our library's catalog.
This article describes the background, procedures, and potential future
directions for this collection-mapping project.

Measuring Information System Project Success Through A Software-Assisted
Qualitative Content Analysis <https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10603>
Jin Xiu Guo

Information System (IS)/IT project success is a growing interest in
management due to its high impact on organizational change and
effectiveness. Libraries have been adopting integrated library
systems (ILS) to manage services and resources for years. It is essential
for librarians to understand the mechanism of IS project management in
order to successfully bring technology innovation to the organization. This
study develops a theoretical model of measuring IS project success and
tests it in an ILS merger project through a software-assisted qualitative
content analysis. The model addresses project success through three
constructs: (1) project management process, (2) project outcomes, and (3)
contextual factors. The results indicate project management success alone
cannot guarantee project success; project outputs and contextual factors
also influence success through the leadership of the project manager
throughout the lifecycle. The study not only confirms the proposed model in
a post-project evaluation, but also signifies that project assessment can
reinforce organizational learning, increase the chance of achieving
success, and maximize overall returns for an organization. The qualitative
content analysis with NVivo 11 has provided a new research method for
project managers to self-assess an IS/IT project success systematically and
learn from their experiences throughout the project lifecycle.

A Systematic Approach Towards Web Preservation
<https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10181>
Muzammil Khan and Arif Ur Rahman

The main purpose of the article is to divide the web preservation process
into small explicable stages and design a step-by-step web preservation
process that leads to creating a well-organized web archive. A number of
research articles were studied. The proposed comprehensive web
preservation process describes and combines strengths of different
techniques observed during the study. For each web preservation step,
different approaches and possible implementation techniques have
been identified that can be adopted in digital archiving. The potential
value of the proposed model is to guide the archivist, related personnel,
and organizations to effectively preserve their intellectual
digital contents for future use. The model can help to initiate a web
preservation process and create a well-organized web archive to efficiently
manage the archived web contents. A section briefly describes
the implementation of the proposed approach in a digital news stories
preservation framework for archiving news published online from different
sources.

Determining Textbook Cost, Formats, And Licensing With Google Books API: A
Case Study From An Open Textbook Project
<https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10738>
Eamon Costello, Richard Bolger, Tiziana Soverino, and Mark Brown

The rising cost of textbooks for students has been highlighted as a major
concern in higher education, particularly in the US and Canada. Less has
been reported, however, about the costs of textbooks outside of North
America, including in Europe. We address this gap in the knowledge through
a case study of one Irish higher education institution, focusing on the
cost, accessibility, and licensing of textbooks. We report here on an
investigation of textbook prices drawing from an official college course
catalog containing several thousand books. We detail how we sought to
determine metadata of these books including: the formats they are available
in, whether they are in the public domain, and the retail prices. We
explain how we used methods to automatically determine textbook costs
using Google Books API and make our code and dataset publicly available.

*Editorial Content*

   - The new Public Libraries Leading the Way
   <https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10974> column, by Thomas Finley,
   joins our two regular columns, the LITA President's Letter and Editorial
   Board Thoughts.
   - The March Letter from the Editor
   <https://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ital/article/view/10992> contains
   more details about the new Public Libraries Leading the Way column.
   - In her March letter <https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10980>, LITA
   President Bohyun Kim provides updates from January's ALA Midwinter meeting.
   - In his Editorial Board Thoughts column, Kevin Ford talks about
the importance
   of user stories and use cases <https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10979> to
   any technology project.


*Submit Your Ideas*

Contact ITAL Editor Ken Varnum at [log in to unmask] with your proposal.
Current formats are generally:

   - Articles – original research or comprehensive and in-depth analyses,
   in the 3000-5000 word range.
   - Communications – brief research reports, technical findings, and case
   studies, in the 1000-3000 word range.


*Questions or Comments?*

For all other questions or comments related to LITA publications, contact
us at (312) 280-4268 or [log in to unmask]



--
Ken Varnum
Senior Program Manager for Discovery, Delivery, and Library Analytics
Library Information Technology | University of Michigan Library
[log in to unmask] | @varnum | 734-615-3287
https://www.lib.umich.edu/users/varnum