USAIN 2024 Conference Proceedings

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https://hdl.handle.net/1813/115388

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USAIN/CBHL 2024 Biennial Meeting
United States Agricultural Information Network (2024-05-06)
Program for the 2024 USAIN Biennial Conference held May 5-8 at Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing, Michigan
The 2024 Edit: Extending Science Engagement to NC State Cooperative Extension
Fox, Hillary; Mentnech, Tisha (2024-05-08)
In 2020, Hillary Fox and Tisha Mentnech received an award to travel to different Cooperative Extension sites in North Carolina as a way to better engage the libraries with Extension professionals. This presentation will highlight our experience in working alongside Extension professionals during these site visits, including what library services and research needs were identified as being the most helpful.
Communication, Collaboration, and Calibration: Steps Toward Materializing the Carlquist Extended Specimen Network
Niño, Ana; Best, Jason H.; Shenoy, Krishna; Ekberg, Sam (2024-05-07)
In an age where libraries and archives are increasingly turning toward digitization to enable virtual access to collections, the question of how to add value to digitized collections arises. With the support of National Science Foundation grant funding, the Botanical Research Institute of Texas Library has been strategizing and working with California Botanic Garden to link related botanical and archival materials created by Sherwin Carlquist, a mid-century American botanist—uniting these disparate collections and imbuing their contents with greater context in the process. Through this project, the BRIT Carlquist team is reckoning with challenging questions such as: How can a small team efficiently and adequately digitize and describe over 150,000 digital objects? What are cutting-edge digitization methods we can draw upon from related fields for high throughput digitization, and how can we quickly adopt these specialized skills? Who can we enlist to assist with this multifaceted project?
Herding Cats: A Librarian's Guide to Launching a Veterinary Medicine Program
Burton, Karen (2024-05-06)
There is a chronic shortage of veterinarians around the country, and in a state with no vet school this shortage is even worse. The obvious home for a much-needed new School of Veterinary Medicine was the R-1 public land-grant university that already offered a veterinary science program for undergraduate and graduate students. As the current liaison for that program, I was asked to be involved in preparing the libraries for this new addition to our university. I benchmarked our collections and services that could potentially support veterinary medicine against our peer institutions with a vet school and produced a report that offered purchasing recommendations to effectively support a veterinary medicine program. This report included plans for hiring necessary personnel, options for library space usage, and a projected budget for the electronic resources, books, and journals we would need to purchase. I will share how I managed the project, what information I used for benchmarking, software and tools used, and I will offer a framework for future benchmarking projects that could potentially be used for any new program. I will also address the importance of open communication between the libraries and the administration for a new program as it relates to program accreditation. The subject of the library’s role in accreditation for the new School of Veterinary Medicine, as well as the timeline, was something I had to initiate conversations about in order to make hiring and acquisitions plans to meet those accreditation requirements by certain deadlines. This timeline begins years before the first student is accepted, and may not be on the library’s radar when they are asked to branch out into a new program dependent on accreditation, but is certainly an important aspect all librarians need to be aware of.
Beyond Blooms: Exploring the Multi-Faceted Significance of Seed and Nursery Catalogs in Historical Research
Aults, Erin; Mehle, Jocelyn; Mastel, Kristen (2024-05-06)
Historical seed and nursery trade catalog collections capture an elusive type of information. These catalogs were meant to exist no longer than a year or two, consulted heavily for a brief time and discarded once out of date. Today, librarians, archivists, and researchers view these collections as important primary source materials for numerous fields of study. While they are used primarily as a resource on the growth of ornamental horticulture and agriculture, they also serve as a portal into the social mores, political anxieties, local and national economies, the dinner table, farmer’s market, and florist shop. Whether the users are searching for the introduction of invasive plants or artists looking for inspiration, some of the challenges and opportunities for librarians remain the same. Who are the researchers and what do they want to know? What are the trends we see in the catalogs that might be overlooked by researchers? How do we better facilitate discovery and access and attract more users? What has worked and what could we do better in promoting the use of the catalogs? What does it look like in a born-digital world and the archival processes? What are the challenges that lie ahead in acquisition, outreach, use, and preservation? This presentation proposal will bring together the curators of two major collections of seed and nursery trade catalogs. These collections span four centuries, focusing on both United States and Canadian horticultural companies. The curators will discuss the questions posed above while determining a common path ahead for their collections and similar ones at similar institutions.
Extension Microfilm Digitization Project: Putting History Into Our Hands
Westblade, Julia; Haugen, Inga; Russell, Meagan (2024-05-07)
The Virginia Cooperative Extension microfilm digitization project aims to create digital copies of and provide access to the agricultural reports of the state of Virginia. These primary source reports consist of the work of extension agents at the county-level from 1908 to 1968 for men and women from white communities and communities of color, including information regarding production and salaries. This paper will discuss the process of digitizing 142 reels of microfilm and making the contents accessible to researchers. The paper will highlight the methodologies and challenges experienced during the process as well as the importance of the data uncovered in the documents. It will give an overview of the effort it takes to provide access to primary resources that researchers need to uncover untold stories. Digitization of the Microfilm The original documents were scanned onto microfilm in the 1960s. The digitization lab at Virginia Tech Libraries has digitized, reformatted, sorted, and combined into text-searchable PDFs over 100,000 pages of county-level reports adhering to FADGI standards. The team had to document progress as the project moved through several stages of production before members of the team sorted through these PDFs to create item-level metadata to ensure the reports are findable and searchable. Document Overview/ Importance This set of microfilm was the most complete set in the state and in WorldCat, and had a reel guide of the counties and years for only 86 of the 142 reels. This project will bring to light individual reports, the authors, and the work that was happening in the whole state from 1908-1968. Because the authors include women and black extension agents, this work brings local history into the hands of the communities we currently serve. As an example, a technician saw a report about her partner’s grandfather while processing the collection.
It's time to ACT UP: How privilege shapes academic conversations
Weigand, Kelly (2024-05-07)
This presentation describes how the ACT UP evaluation tool (Stahura, 2018) was used to frame class discussion on the use of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Students participated in a lecture on how animal agriculture may be contributing to human, animal, and environmental welfare, then were tasked with listening to a podcast that explores how dietary changes may lead to long term environmental change. During the following class, students were challenged to consider who was contributing to the conversation, what biases they may have, and whose voices were missing.
Search hedges to improve discovery of animal welfare citations
Tobey, Elizabeth (2024-05-06)
The "3Rs" of animal research refers to the replacement, reduction, and refinement of animals in biomedical research. The Animal Welfare Act requires that researchers consider alternatives to painful and distressful procedures that lab animals may undergo. One way to comply with this regulation is to conduct a literature search for the 3Rs (i.e., animal use alternatives) when planning a study using animals. However, 3Rs articles can be difficult to find in bibliographic databases due to inadequate indexing, searcher skill and knowledge gaps. The Animal Welfare Information Center at the National Agricultural Library (USDA) developed search hedges to improve the discoverability of 3Rs literature. This could lead to increased adoption and implementation of 3Rs methods. Search hedges are premade or predetermined search strings. Individuals, including non-librarians, can copy and paste hedges directly into a database to retrieve citations on a specific topic. We have worked in collaboration with librarians from the Search Strategies Working Group to create, test, revise, and publish animal welfare search hedges. In 2022, we published search hedges designed to retrieve citations on 15 species of domestic animals commonly used in research. Throughout 2023, we developed and tested new hedges focused on non-animal models (replacement), environmental enrichment for mice (refinement), and pain/anesthesia (refinement). In addition, AWIC also published two hedges on alternatives to oral gavage for rodents and social housing of laboratory animal species. We plan to assess hedge use by measuring page views and through user feedback. In this presentation, we will give an overview of our two-year process of creating animal welfare hedges. We will discuss the challenges and questions encountered when developing new hedges. We will also discuss our ongoing efforts to establish best practices for testing hedges. We hope that sharing our experience will empower other agricultural libraries to create their own hedges.
What will you pay? Investigating the impact of APC discounts
Stapleton, Suzanne; Spears, Laura (2024-05-07)
Open Access (OA) publishing makes scholarly research free to read, thus helping global researchers grow together. To support Open Access (OA) publishing, the University of Florida (UF) entered into a Gold OA Pilot agreement with Elsevier in 2020. Article Processing Charges (APC) discounts of 10-15% are available to UF authors who choose to publish their work as OA articles in eligible Elsevier OA or hybrid journals. Librarians at UF used this opportunity to better understand researcher publishing behavior. Surveys of authors who published OA or behind a paywall (Subscription) were distributed 11 times between January 2021 and January 2023. A total of 203 surveys were completed, 80% from Subscription authors and 20% from OA authors. Two focus groups were conducted in 2022 to explore researchers’ publishing decisions with qualitative methods. Results illuminate researchers’ familiarity with OA publishing and the complexity of factors that impact their publishing behaviors. Most respondents (66%) had previously published two or more OA articles. Factors influencing their decision whether to publish OA include fee amounts and availability of funds, target audience, and philosophy. Although 56% of survey respondents indicated that the amount of the APC discount influenced their decision whether to publish OA, this correlation was only significant at p<0.05. There was a significant negative correlation between the listed APC fee and the decision to publish OA. As APC fees increased, fewer authors elected to publish OA. From July 2020 through February 2023, APC discounts in this pilot reduced author expenses by nearly $64,000, an average of $1,560 per article yet the majority of authors elected not to publish their eligible articles as OA. Overall, this research exemplifies the challenges with current OA publishing where APC levels restrict sharing new knowledge with the global research community. Proposed new public access compliance mandates in the U.S. offer additional opportunities for researchers to disseminate their work widely
Seed Library: Dig into Seed Growing and Saving
Siegel, Leora (2024-05-06)
The Seed Library at the Chicago Botanic Garden's Lenhardt library provides an opportunity for library visitors to “borrow” seeds to plant, grow, harvest, and save seeds for themselves and for return to the seed library for others to borrow the following season. By offering free open-pollinated seeds with instructions on the growing cycle, borrowers become a part of the community of seed savers with shared knowledge to pass on to future generations of gardeners. This poster will do a deep dive into our seed library and offer practical steps to easily replicate at other institutions.

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