Open Access is Sustainable Access for the Library

13 October 2009 by Eileen

Faculty scholars and researchers routinely give away the fruits of their labors to for-profit publishers of scholarly communication. To maintain the integrity of our peer-review process, faculty also function as unpaid reviewers for these same publications. Finally, faculty frequently serve as unpaid or poorly paid editors for these journals. Yet after faculty have freely and willingly contributed content and labor to the publishers of our scholarly journals, the resulting publications are sold to our Libraries, at an enormous expense, generating significant profits for the publishers and creating an ever-expanding budgetary black hole for the Library!

If this situation fails to arouse an appropriate sense of injustice, perhaps consider that the general public –- which has already paid for all of this research through their tax dollars –- often cannot access this literature without paying a per-article cost to the publishers!

But change is at hand. There are concerted efforts on multiple fronts to restore some sense to the scholarly communication process. A growing number of university libraries have established institutional repositories to provide general access to the work of their scholars and researchers. Authors are amending their copyright agreements to ensure that their work can be freely accessed via their institutional repositories. The National Institutes of Health are requiring research that they fund be made accessible — at no additional cost — to the public that paid for the research. An increasing number of scholars and researchers are taking scholarly communication into their own hands by introducing Open Access (OA) journals as an alternative to journals produced by for-profit publishers.

Join us in exploring these myriad efforts to liberate scholarly communication during the international celebration of Open Access Week, October 19 – 23, 2009. Events organized for the week are:

PANEL DISCUSSION ON OPEN ACCESS ISSUES
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
12:00 noon
Queen Lili’uokalani Center, Room 412
RSVP required*; light lunch will be served*
*RSVP at <http://128.171.57.14:3128/surveyor/survey.asp?s=01068210099083128> by October 19th)

Listen to faculty members who are involved in Open Access publishing discuss trends and issues.
Panel Participants:
Mark Wright, Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences
Will McClatchey, Professor of Botany
Ken Rehg, Professor of Linguistics
Gary Ostrander, Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education

COPYRIGHT AND AUTHOR RIGHTS PRESENTATION
Thursday, October 22, 2009
12:00 noon
Queen Lili’uokalani Center, Room 412
RSVP required*; light lunch will be served
*RSVP at <http://128.171.57.14:3128/surveyor/survey.asp?s=01223122096186058> by October 19th)

Speaker:
Danielle M. Conway, Professor of Law & Director, UH Procurement Institute

VISIT THE GRADUATE STUDENT OPEN ACCESS INFORMATION TABLE
Monday, October 19th
Tuesday, October 20th
11:00 AM to 1:00 PM
Campus Center

You can talk to graduate students about Open Access issues, receive free information, and an get an Open Access pen!

Sinclair Library Hours Change effective Oct. 1, 2009

8 October 2009 by Eileen

(Sorry I’m a bit late with this one….)

In order to work within the latest reduction in funding the Sinclair Library will move from a 24/7 operation to a 24/5 operation.

We have planned this reduction in such a way that it will impact the fewest number of our valued patrons. We have tracked the usage of our facility for years and we know when our lowest usage occurs. Using that information we established the following hours beginning October 1, 2009.

BUILDING HOURS
Sunday noon to Friday 6 p.m. — OPEN CONTINUOUSLY
Saturday — Noon to 6:00 p.m.

WONG AUDIOVISUAL CENTER
Monday to Thursday — 8:00 a.m. to 7:45 p.m.
Friday – 8:00 a.m. to 5:45
Saturday and Sunday — Noon to 5:45 p.m.

Please note that Sinclair WILL be open for six (6) hours on Saturday while Hamilton Library will be closed.

Be sure to arrange your study time accordingly. If you plan ahead you can request to have books from Hamilton Library sent to Sinclair Library for Saturday pick up. Please allow at least 1-1/2 days for this transaction.

E-resource access problem resolved

6 October 2009 by Eileen

From UH Manoa Library DNS Department:

“Access to libweb.hawaii.edu and Manoa proxy resources has  been restored.  I will continue to monitor the situation…”

Great work guys!

More on e-resources access problem

6 October 2009 by Eileen

From the UH Manoa Library DNS Department:

“We are been experiencing high traffic load for the electronic resource gateway and libweb.hawaii.edu for the past 2 hours.  All requests through the electronic resources gateway including access to remote electronic reserves will be disrupted.

I have had to shut down access to these two resources for now while we attempt to find a resolution.  I apologize for the inconvenience this will cause everyone.”

Stay tuned!

E-resources Connection Problem

6 October 2009 by Eileen

From our Electronic Resources Librarian at 9:30 am this morning:

“We are currently experiencing problems connecting to the Electronic
Resources Gateway at http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu/ezproxy/ .  DNS has been notified and are looking into the issue.”

This will affect access to all types of resources including electronic journals and databases.

Science Direct Down on Saturday, 19 September

17 September 2009 by Eileen

From our Electronic Resources Librarian:

ScienceDirect, the online platform for Elsevier journals, will be down for scheduled maintenance this Saturday, Sept. 19, starting at 2 a.m. Hawaii time. The outage is scheduled to last until 3 p.m. of the same day. The University of Hawaii at Manoa currently has access to approximately 2,000 journals via ScienceDirect.

Manoa MAGIS offers Free GIS classes

8 September 2009 by Eileen

Manoa MAGIS (UH Manoa Library), in collaboration with the Botany GIS Lab and Pacific EMPRINTS will be conducting two free GIS classes this Fall. Each class will meet on three afternoons and will cover introductory, intermediate and advanced GIS concepts and skills. Each class will provide intensive hands-on training in which you will learn how to do a GIS-based project from start to finish.

The course has two tracks.  Each track covers the same material, but uses a different class project.

What: Fall 2009 GIS Essentials Class

When:
Track 1: Tuesdays: October 6, 13 and 20, 2009: 1 pm to 5 pm
Track 2: Thursdays: October 8, 15 and 22, 2009: 1 pm to 5 pm

Where:
Pacific EMPRINTS Lab, Room A210
Biomedical Sciences Building
1960 East-West Road
Honolulu, HI 96822

Seats are limited.  For more on this class and to register, please visit:

http://magis.manoa.hawaii.edu/gis/training.html

Many thanks to Pacific EMPRINTS for working with MAGIS and the Botany GIS Lab to help make this happen.  For questions, please do not hesitate to contact me or Stephanie (saephan@hawaii.edu)

Library Resources Impacted by Budget Cuts

4 September 2009 by Eileen

Message from Kris Anderson, UH Manoa Library Collection Development Officer:

Aloha,

I’m writing to update the faculty, staff and students of UH Manoa about the effects of the mandated budget restrictions to the University Libraries.

The 4% cut plus the most recent cut of 6% mean a total reduction of $1.7 million to the Library’s working budget. To address the reduction, the Libraries have cut student employment hours, cut casual hire staff, reduced hours of service, and restricted or eliminated entirely other internal expenditures. The reduction has also affected the purchase of library resources such as books, journals, audiovisual materials and databases.

The rest of this message is to inform you what changes have been made to the available resources. Some of these measures will be felt immediately, while others will not take effect until 2010. We have:

  • Ceased getting automatic shipments of books from our major vendor.
  • Distributed minimum amounts of money for new book purchases.
  • Cancelled some expensive, low use databases.
  • Cancelled a number of journals from the publisher Wiley/Blackwell. We will also lose access to some Wiley titles previously available through a consortial arrangement, because Wiley has changed access rules and increased the pricing for the consortium.
  • Cancelled journals, microfilm and newspapers from other publishers.

The full list of cancelled titles, which will take effect in 2010, may be viewed at: http://library.manoa.hawaii.edu/about/collection/2009serials/2009cancels.html
The list of additional titles to which we will lose access in January 2010 will be available soon.

Everyone at UH Manoa Library understands that these reductions and cancellations will have significant adverse effects on the UH Manoa community. Unfortunately the size of the budget reductions leaves us with few choices. We will try to cushion the impact of these losses through subsidized interlibrary loan, however, we predict that our interlibrary loan allocation may not be able to cover all anticipated requests.
Questions regarding the impact of the loss in funds may be directed to Kris Anderson (krisa@hawaii.edu).

-Kris Anderson, Collection Development Officer
September 3, 2009

EndNote Workshops for Graduate Students

20 August 2009 by Eileen

Science & Technology Librarians Allie Jordan and Sarah Myhre are once again offering their very popular EndNote workshops. These workshops are designed for graduate students and the schedule begins in September. In addition to the basic EndNote Workshop, they will be teaching Advanced EndNote and EndNote Basics for Mac Users. For more information and to sign up for the workshops visit the EndNote Workshops calendar at

http://www.hawaii.edu/sciref/Endnote/endnote_workshops.html

Reduced Fall Library Hours

13 August 2009 by Eileen

In order to meet the 4% budget reduction, Hamilton Library is reducing its weekday, weekend, and interim public hours. This includes closing on Saturdays, the day after Thanksgiving, and during the winter break. Sinclair Library will continue to be open 24/7 unless further budget reductions require reducing those hours as well. Sinclair will, however, also close on holidays and during the winter break. This means that you will not be able to use library print resources or computers from 19 December 2009 through 10 January 2010. Remote access to electronic resources will continue to be available during the times that the UHM Library buildings are closed to the public. Details of the new Fall semester hours are available at http://library.manoa.hawaii.edu/about/hours_fall09.html