[MUSIC PLAYING] INTERVIEWER 1: Hey, look, buddy. I'm an engineer. That means I solve problems. Not problems like "what is beauty," because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I saw practical problems. CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research-library rock-and-roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett, in the virtual studio with the whole gang-- Fred Rascoe, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Marlee Givens. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Our show today is called "Tickets and Tunnels," both of which are metaphors for the work done by the electronic-resources librarian. FRED RASCOE: Tickets and tunnels? So is the electronic-resources librarian part of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey? CHARLIE BENNETT: Spiritually, yes. MARLEE GIVENS: Our guest today is the new electronic-resources librarian at the Georgia Tech Library. We talked about the highs and lows of the job, and yes, tickets and tunnels. FRED RASCOE: And our songs today are about invisible work, rabbit holes, and solving problems about finding what you need. Let's start with a song that is, in a way, our guest's favorite song. George Harrison wrote "Here Comes the Sun" in 1969 about the feeling of spring and freedom. The electronic-resource librarian often brings light and freedom to the problems of accessing articles, so that's a good fit. And it's our guest's favorite song, but it is pretty famous. And WREK plays music that you don't hear on the radio, so we'll play "Here Comes the Sun," a version by the Voodoo Glow Skulls that's right here on Lost in the Stacks. [MUSIC - VOODOO GLOW SKULLS, "HERE COMES THE SUN"] MARLEE GIVENS: You just heard "Here Comes the Sun," by the Voodoo Glow Skulls. And this is Lost in the Stacks. Our show today is called "Tickets and Tunnels," and it features the electronic-resources librarian at the Georgia Tech Library, Anu Moorthy. CHARLIE BENNETT: Anu, what is this job? What is your official title, and what do you do at the Georgia Tech Library? ANU MOORTHY: My official title is electronic-resources librarian. What does an electronic-resource librarian do? They understand the collection. They don't actually work on discovery, but they facilitate the discovery because they have to have the knowledge of collections, the authentication, vendor relationship, discovery for the users. But they're not actually touching and managing everything, but they're facilitating everything. So it's tricky. That's a gist of it. CHARLIE BENNETT: Now, you said "they." They do this. Are there more than one of you at Tech, or is this just a job that is in many libraries? ANU MOORTHY: It's in many libraries. Collectively, as electronic-resources librarians, we do it in some institutions. The things differ. In my previous position, I did the collection development and discovery. In some places, I just did the discovery. In some places, I did just electronic-resource troubleshooting and handling all the vendors and usage statistics. So it differs slightly from institution to institution. But here at Tech, I will be working with everyone. CHARLIE BENNETT: If someone is not a librarian, doesn't work in libraries, can you define the difference between collection development and discovery? ANU MOORTHY: Collection development is-- say we have industrial engineering, and they need all these journals. So collection development is the curation of titles for that department. The electronic-resources librarian-- they'll authenticate it. They'll talk to the vendor, give all the information about our setup, our complex infrastructure off the discovery. And then, they'll also come back and work on the authentication on the institution side. So they are the connector between the content and the vendor. And then, in between, the users are discovering all these things. I don't know whether I'm saying it-- [LAUGHTER] --all correctly. CHARLIE BENNETT: Sadly enough, I don't, either. I'm an outreach and public-engagement librarian. For all I know, discovery is throwing journals at people. It sounds like there's a lot of diplomacy and liaison work, but not with people on campus, but with folks who are selling us journal access. ANU MOORTHY: It is both. It's with our users who are trying to access things, and they cannot access. Say we have a journal that we started buying in 2000, and user wants to access something from 1958, so understanding that we do not have access for the 1958 article. However, we can get anything from 2000 to 2022. So understanding that, and also talking to the vendor, saying that, hey, did we actually have access for this year, and communicating that with the user, saying that we do not have it, and this is the alternate way you can access it. At the same time, suggesting it to the collection-development librarian. Is there any way we can get this if it's really popular and we somehow don't have it, or somehow we just don't have the year? So it is a combination of many things. INTERVIEWER 3: And of those theoretical items that you just described, how often is it that we can get them from more than one place? ANU MOORTHY: Because we are a large library, there are many aggregators, so we get access, maybe, from 1958 to 1960 in one aggregator, 1980 to 1986 in one. So when we are trying to display it for the users, we are always struggling to make sure that we have the full coverage. If we did acquire these resources and we have coverage for gap years somewhere, are we going to display it all? So that's a question we all wonder. All the electronic-resource and systems librarians wonder, how do we provide the full collection that we have access to? But there are other options, like on paywalls. The browser plugins are available. Some browser plugins allow us to get the articles that are open which are beyond the embargo period. So those are options for the users other than the aggregators. CHARLIE BENNETT: This job-- it sounds like a lot of finding solutions to continuous problems. Is that what appeals to you about it, or what do you like about the job? And what's difficult about the job? ANU MOORTHY: I love to problem-solve, and I like to have-- it's a bunch of rabbit holes every day. [LAUGHTER] I resolved my first ticket last week, and I was so excited because it's not one thing. You're looking at all these different systems and how this thing is set up. How is the user authenticating into the resource? Is the authentication working? Do we have access? All of these questions, so you just keep checking each one. And finally, you hit the point where, aha, I know where all these things are not talking to each other. So that's what I love about my job. And the most difficult thing is I may not have the answer to the user immediately, because some things depend on the vendor, and by the time I get the response, it's too late for the vendors. We try to borrow the article for them. So that's the difficult part-- not the figuring out. That's the fun part for me. FRED RASCOE: We'll be back with more from Anu about her job at the library after a music set. INTERVIEWER 1: File this set under PR6051.D345W3. [MUSIC - ARCADIAN CHILD, "RABBIT HOLE"] [MUSIC - POM, "DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE"] WENDY HAGENMAIER:: You just heard "Down the Rabbit Hole," by P-O-M, or POM, and, before that, "Rabbit Hole," by Arcadian Child. Songs about rabbit holes. This is Lost in the Stacks, and our guest today is the electronic-resources librarian at the Georgia Tech Library, Anu Moorthy. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Is this the kind of work you wanted to do when you became a librarian? ANU MOORTHY: That was my first professional job, and I didn't know what it was. I knew about serials, which we called as periodicals before, in print periodicals. But I didn't know that I would enjoy this so much until I started working in a government research library. And that's when I discovered that this is what I love to do because there's always something to learn. So if you have the growth mindset, you're constantly looking for things. And the technology is changing. The standards are changing, so you're learning all these new things. And also, you're problem-solving. So I really didn't know. But once I started working, I knew that's what I wanted to do. CHARLIE BENNETT: So electronic-resource librarian-- it feels like a recent job. It feels like this is a job that's happened because of the internet. Did you start at the beginning of when this particular part of the librarianship started to form? ANU MOORTHY: It was actually cool because everything was so dynamic, and we have to learn and then just do the job. And I think the information overload for the users-- how we can make the user discover the things that they want intuitively, because the ecosystem is so complex. There are so many systems that are converging behind the scenes. The users don't know when they search for that article. They think it's magic. Everything that goes behind the scenes-- I call it ephemeral magic, all of those things. But all those things have to work for one article to open in that PDF or HTML. So learning each thing, learning about IPs or how authentication works, how the standards change, how do we gather usage statistics, what is being counted-- so learning about each one was really interesting. And everything changes so quickly. It still changes. It's still emerging into new things because technology is always changing. I don't know. I really enjoy the dynamics of it, how it evolved, and how I love being part of it. CHARLIE BENNETT: So I have a question from Fred Rascoe, who couldn't be here today because holidays, and he was very specific. So here's the full question. Quote, "What is a method of information discovery that you think is most underutilized or underappreciated?" End quote. ANU MOORTHY: I would say the library website. [LAUGHTER] The bento box search, because the users use the search engines to use and find things. I'm being really hypothetical here. If the users would just go to the library's search box and search-- I think that's the most underutilized because all the work that is being done for access or discoverability is tied to that box, the search box. MARLEE GIVENS: We can only really go so far at trying to reach users who are going via the open web, going directly to a journal website, and then thinking that we don't have access. I think that's a really good response. I recommend the library website all the time, but I know that people are not using it. Is that the nature of the troubleshooting that you do most often, or what other issues tend to come up? ANU MOORTHY: You mentioned one. They use the search engine, and then they go to the publisher's website. And if they're on campus, the publisher will recognize that we are coming from Georgia Tech. But if the user is off campus and they're trying to access a journal, and they go to the journal publisher's website, they're not going to recognize. So that's why going to the library website is so important. It's so critical because all the pieces in the back end are tied, and they should let the user or direct the user authenticate so they can get to the resource. But it's really the underutilized search box because the users think Google search is going to give them all the articles that they want, and it's free from Google. That's not how library collections or discovery work. CHARLIE BENNETT: If you could wave a magic wand and change something about how Google handles search for scholarly articles or connects to library websites, what would you magically change? A wish that will have to be granted-- what would be your wish? ANU MOORTHY: My magical wish is to somehow have all the subscriptions that the correct holdings something that will check the links if you had if a library has 100,000 journals, a quick search algorithm that will check our holdings, the 100,000 these are examples and so it will check and tell me, these are the things that are wrong, so you should go fix it. And that would be the magical one that I would want. CHARLIE BENNETT: How realistic is your wish? ANU MOORTHY: I think if one can write some code-- we can do it, I think. FRED RASCOE: You're listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll be back with more from Anu Moorthy, the electronic-resources librarian at the Georgia Tech Library, on the left side of the hour. [MUSIC PLAYING] MATT CHAPMAN: This is Matt Chapman. MIKE CHAPMAN: This is Mike Chapman. MATT CHAPMAN: And we one time made this thing called Homestar Runner. MIKE CHAPMAN: You're going to get lost in the stacks. [MUSIC PLAYING] MATT CHAPMAN: On WREK Atlanta. [SCUFFLING] If I can find my-- MIKE CHAPMAN: OK. MATT CHAPMAN: ...playlist... MIKE CHAPMAN: Let's get a-- where's the schedule? MATT CHAPMAN: I need a jewel case. MIKE CHAPMAN: Click-clack on the floor. Student-- student government announcement? Follow the blue light trail. CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called "Tickets and Tunnels," introducing the new electronic-resources librarian at the Georgia Tech Library. Our conversation reminded me of the invisible library. And I'd like to read you a bit from Barbara Fister's Inside Higher Ed article "Retrenched," from September 2019. Libraries are easy pickings because librarians' labor is, almost by design, fairly invisible. When you click on a database link and download an article, it may take only a second, but people did a lot of work to make that happen. They selected and negotiated a license annually for that database, put links to it in all the right places on the library website, changed them when the vendor randomly decided to rebrand-- please don't-- and did a ton of fiddly work to make sure the links to hundreds of thousands of individual articles actually work. When it all goes well, it appears seamless. In the classic words of SR Ranganathan, we want to save the time of the reader. But it's a ton of labor that nobody sees. File this set under HQ1237.C75. [MUSIC - EMILY BROWN, "UNSEEN GIRL"] [MUSIC - TY SEGALL, "EVERY 1'S A WINNER"] MARLEE GIVENS: You just heard "Every 1's a Winner," by Ty Segall, originally by Hot Chocolate. And before that, "Unseen Girl" by Emily Brown. Songs about important work that is unseen by those who benefit from it. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. Our guest today is Anu Moorthy, the electronic-resources librarian at the Georgia Tech Library. What do you expect to happen when fall semester starts and you get flooded? How are you preparing for the sudden increase in workload? ANU MOORTHY: I have my whiteboard where I write down my to-dos for the week and for the day. But I cannot plan, for the tickets that come in, what works and what doesn't work. On a particular day, it may be the vendor website. It may be their server. It may be a maintenance issue. So I just have to be ready to communicate with all of them-- the user, the vendor, the staff. I just have to take it as it comes. And I know the workload is going to be a lot more than summer tickets. CHARLIE BENNETT: Now, you've mentioned tickets a few times. Can you explain what you mean when you say you closed a ticket or you're expecting tickets? ANU MOORTHY: When a user is trying to access an article if they cannot access it, they inform the library that they tried to access this article from this journal, and they couldn't get in. Then, we try to troubleshoot and find why there is the access failing. Is it at the authentication point? Is it at our holding that we don't have it set right? Or something's wrong with the vendor website that particular minute. It could be a glitch for five minutes. It could be a glitch for a few hours. So we just reassure the user that we are looking into it. So those are the tickets-- our users who cannot get to the things that they are looking for. MARLEE GIVENS: I was wondering if you might like to tell us very briefly about a campus issue that you discovered via tickets at your previous job. ANU MOORTHY: Yes. In my previous job, they had rolled out a cybersecurity software which is going to be rolled out in many campuses, I'm sure. So the cybersecurity software technically created a new pathway, a real tunnel where the users can go into the library resources. Because they created that parallel tunnel to the other campus tunnel, the vendors didn't recognize the parallel tunnel, so the users couldn't access anything from campus, which was the most interesting troubleshooting ticket that I've ever dealt with. It was really fun. I was really stumped. I couldn't do the checklist. I didn't know what was going on at all. Just didn't know how to troubleshoot because they were on-site. They're trying to access a journal, and they couldn't get to it. And it's not user error. These are users who are power users who know how to use the library, who use library website to search for the articles. And then, it was not the vendor, not the authentication, not the website. And then, had to reach out to the campus IT, and they didn't know all these things existed. [LAUGHTER] I resubscribed to all these things. And they said, hey, we rolled out this software. Maybe it's this. And then, we had to ask the questions. What does this software do? How will it interfere with the user's authentication? How will it interfere with the subscription? How will the vendors see all these things? Because there are 300,000 things that are accessed by these power users, and they couldn't access it from campus. And it was also in a clinical setting, so they need the journals then and there. So it was really interesting to troubleshoot that and resolve it, and the resolution was not easy. I had to go through all the subscriptions that we had and create exceptions in the system that was implemented. It was just a lot of work, but then it created a solution for the problem that I was really stumped. CHARLIE BENNETT: I want to reiterate that this is another job, not a tech, and then ask, how long did it take to solve that? ANU MOORTHY: More than six months. [LAUGHTER] CHARLIE BENNETT: Well, we won't mention any other institutions, then. ANU MOORTHY: It was not the institution or the vendor. It's not any of them. We did create a workaround immediately. So the workaround was created so the user can get to the resource. That's the most important thing a librarian wants-- that the user has to get to the resource. But there are so many systems in place. If we touch one, are we breaking the others? So just thinking through that, talking with the stakeholders, sitting down, and mapping it, and creating exceptions, and testing it before we rolled out-- it was really fun. I really enjoyed it. And I think, now, everything is working great. It did take a very long time. CHARLIE BENNETT: Anu, thanks for being on the show today. ANU MOORTHY: Thank you. Thank you both very much. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Today's show is called "Tickets and Tunnels," featuring Anu Moorthy, the electronic-resources librarian at the Georgia Tech Library. MARLEE GIVENS: File this set under Z682.4.A34U77. [MUSIC - "TAKE IT"] [MUSIC - LUNGFISH, "FRIEND TO FRIEND IN ENDTIME"] CHARLIE BENNETT: You just heard "Friend to Friend in the Endtime" by Lungfish and, before that, "Take It" by Pop and Obachan Those are songs about working together to solve problems about getting the right information. [MUSIC PLAYING] Today on the show, we spoke with Anu Moorthy about her job as electronic-resources librarian at the Georgia Tech Library. We talked, in part, about rabbit holes and information tunnels, so I'd like to ask the show crew, do you have a favorite information rabbit hole to fall down-- a tool, a topic, a question? However you want to answer. Mine is chasing credits in the all-music database. Did you know Robert Palmer plays percussion on the Talking Heads track "Once in a Lifetime"? That's what happened when you recorded at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. FRED RASCOE: Toni Basil also directed the video for "Once in a Lifetime." CHARLIE BENNETT: Fred also likes-- FRED RASCOE: (SINGING) Oh, Mickey-- CHARLIE BENNETT: --going through the credits. FRED RASCOE: (SINGING) --you're so fine. You're so fine-- [LAUGHTER] Lately-- and this is just in the last couple of weeks-- I've discovered, online, setlist.fm, which compiles set lists of concerts going back decades for bigger-name bands. The smaller ones they don't really have a lot of good set lists for. But bigger names-- Sonic Youth, REM, Rush, things like that-- they'll have set lists for years and years of concerts. And so I go back to concerts that I attended when I was 14, 15, 16, and think, oh, I remember them playing that. It's cool. MARLEE GIVENS: I'm not cool. FRED RASCOE: I meant cool in a nerdy way. MARLEE GIVENS: Oh, no, I get lost in Wikipedia. One of my favorite Wikipedia pages is a list of common misconceptions about all kinds of things. But I've recently started following a social-media account called Depths of Wikipedia. And they collect all of those random graphics and illustrations that accompany Wikipedia articles, and they're taken out of context, and it's just so much fun. CHARLIE BENNETT: I got to admit, I'm interested now. WENDY HAGENMAIER: A recent rabbit-hole experience was-- there was this episode of the PBS show "Nature" highly recommended online. It's about this nature filmmaker stuck at home in the UK during the pandemic. And he gets obsessed with the bees in his yard and uses these incredible photographic techniques to capture their movement through his yard. And there's 60 different varieties of bees. Anyway, he goes down a bee information rabbit hole, and it's amazing, and you get sucked down with him. But then, also, because that show is so amazing, I started to look at the whole archive of "Nature," and there's 450 episodes. So endless nature-show viewing to be had there. It's a pretty inspiring rabbit hole. CHARLIE BENNETT: I hate the fact that all of you have given me something to go look at that will eat up all of my time today. Roll the credits. [MUSIC PLAYING] MARLEE GIVENS: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Today's show was edited and assembled by Charlie in between trips down various musical rabbit holes. FRED RASCOE: Legal counsel and some leverage against a predatory vendor were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Special thanks to Anu for being on the show. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. MARLEE GIVENS: You can find us online at lostinthestacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week's show is about stealing books. Spoiler alert-- we think you shouldn't do it. FRED RASCOE: It's time for our last song today. Let's consider the electronic-resource librarian who is part of the invisible work of the library. Most of the time, patrons don't contact the electronic-resources librarian unless there's something wrong with the catalog, with a link, with the database, with a vendor, et cetera, et cetera. And then, patrons will want to know right away what's going on. They might even say, tell me now. So this is "Tell Me Now So I Know," by Holly Golightly, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody. [MUSIC - HOLLY GOLIGHTLY, "TELL ME NOW SO I KNOW"]