University of Toronto Library Information

SystemIsuru Abeysekera

Kwangyun Cho

Samantha Dookloo

Murtaza Hyder

Karolina Kondrat

University of Toronto Libraries

• The Association of Research Libraries has ranked University of Toronto’s library system third in annual Library Investment Index, just behind Harvard and Yale.

• Library Investment Index measures the quantity of university investment in its library regards to the number of volumes, improvements from previous year, salaries and so on.

University of Toronto Libraries

• University of Toronto Library consist of:– 12 million volumes in 128 different languages– 93,000 of serial titles – 900,000 of e-books– 700,000 e-journals– 1,000 indexes– over 5,000 online newspapers– new print volumes of 100,000 are added each year.

• At the heart of University of Toronto library system is its expert staff—the librarians, information specialists, information technologists and many others whose work creates an environment conducive to academic excellence and facilitates discovery of the record of human culture and achievement.

University of Toronto Libraries

• “University of Toronto extraordinary collections have been built over several generations. The Ranking is really an indication of the depth and breadth of those collections (and) the extraordinary staff who make them accessible in all kinds of ways.”

According to Larry Alford, the Chief Librarian at University of Toronto.

• The dispersion of faculties:– University of Toronto academic librarians experience an

ongoing challenge of scholarly communication among three campuses in different geographical locations: Downtown Toronto, Scarborough, and Mississauga.

– Every faculty teaches and conducts research in various range of discipline and has its own s, making it hard to group all three campuses together.

UTL: Challenges

UTL: Challenges

• The increased use of Library facilities:– University of Toronto Libraries continue to be

more heavily used every year and it is working enthusiastically to adapt to increased demand.

– Shortage of staff to digitalize old scholarly works.

• Multimedia contents• Print documents

• Library infrastructure of tools:– T-Space– Open Journal System– Open Conference System– Synergies consortium:

• building infrastructure for University of Toronto scholarly communication among three campuses that are geographically dispersed.

– University of Toronto hosts 27 journals on various subject areas

• most heavily used article on Open Journal System was viewed over 100,000 times

UTL: Infrastructure

• University of Toronto Library committed to provide a national platform for scholarly research of journal articles, theses, conference proceeding, etc.

• T-Space – University of Toronto Library website search engine includes contents

from nearly 1,000 catalogue entries such as e-book, journals, books, etc.

• Synergies consortium – University of Toronto Libraries is in efforts to extend the access to

global network of resource sharing partners through University of Toronto Library Interlibrary loan service.

UTL: Preparing for the Future

• T-Space is University of Toronto’s research repository established by the University of Toronto Libraries to support the dissemination of knowledge by the University community.

• T-Space:– Showcases and preserves scholarly works

– Technical reports

– Pre-prints

– Conference proceedings

– Research data

– Websites

– Multimedia files

– Electronic presentation for long-term preservation

UTL: T-Space

• T-Space content can be searched using common search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. T-Space can be reached to a much wider audience. The strength of T-Space is that it supports broad range of content formats (Journal articles, multimedia files, datasets, etc).

• T-Space: – T-space has over 24,000 scholarly works. – which had visits from over 1,000,000 individuals from

over 200 different countries.

UTL: T-Space

• Faculty members have been slow to add their research to T-space because:– The time factor:

• for many faculty, time is already a precious commodity and they feel unable to take on the task of uploading their scholarly work on T-Space.

– Shortage of staff to ‘Digitalize the content’– Uncertainty about the copyright clearance work

that must be done in order to add materials to T-space. This is will always be an ongoing challenge with T-Space.

UTL: T-Space Challenges

• The challenge of identifying the best practices for managing the wealth of material available for archiving that are in non-digital form. Process of digitalize these content will require time and technology.

• University of Toronto faculties have research of national value in forms of non-digital form, boxes of materials, data sets, floppy disc files and other forms of contents.

• Issue of the copyright uncertainty of the contents.

UTL: Content Management Challenge

• Even with the most easy to use technologies encounters the challenge of the users refusing to change or adapt to the new technology. You cannot simply enforce individuals to use the new technology or system.

• University of Toronto Library IT staff sort of have to pitch the technology as if you are trying to sell it instead of just forcing them to use the new technology

• IT staff have to engage to individuals, try to impress the users to make them want to use the new technology.

UTL: Human Factor Challenges

• University of Toronto Libraries plans to solve the scholarly communication and open access issues by a stronger web presence with T-Space.

• Development of a LibGuide to cover the scholarly communication, cover a broad spectrum of content from research project to publishing or disseminating of research results

The future of UTL

• Re-establishing the network with Ontario library colleagues to face the challenges of information eruption and scalability related to copyright, publishing and data archiving.

• University of Toronto Libraries continues to work ‘to preserve the record of human culture and achievement’ for the future.

The feature of UTL

• Interview Susan Senese, Associate Librarian Research and Information Technology Service.

• Interview Ian Whyte, The Chief Deputy of Librarian Research and Information Technology Service.

Our Approach

• UTL seems to have no problem financially or logistically. The problem is more of a social problem.

• The librarian staff representatives don’t want to upgrade to the new system. Perhaps because they have been using it for a while and are very efficient at using it.

Our Approach

• Need to understand the faculty staff concerns;– The real causes of the problem– The Solution is a process

Our Approach to find the Solution

• Step 1:– Ask quality questions as how we can approach the

problem. Conduct multi interviews with several Library staff and faculty members.

• Differences between new system vs. old system

• Length of implementation

• Test beta versions

Our Approach to find the Solution

• Step 2: Diagnoses– Besides understanding the problem from our view, we

need to put ourselves in both the users and the developers perspectives.

– Stay neutral to the problem.

Our Approach to find the Solution

• Step 3: Theoretical Solution– Come up with a theory to provide a step by step solution

to the problem– The theory needs to be discussed with all the

stakeholders and see if there needs to be any changes

Our Approach to find the Solution

• Step 4: Plan– Discuss time and budget constraint

Our Approach to find the Solution

• Step 5: Implement– Take all the necessary measures – dispatching, re

evaluations and implement the theory

Our Approach to find the Solution

• Step 6: Debrief and Apply– Discuss all 5 steps we took and reflect on the solution.– Adaptation of the solution.

Our Approach to find the Solution