Harlan, Lydia
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Lydia Harlan is the Budget Analyst for Collections, Discovery, and Digital Strategy at University of Oregon Libraries. A librarian by training and budget analyst by circumstance, she holds an MLIS from San Jose State University and a BA in film from Emerson College.
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Item Open Access Check(Out) Your Privilege or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Putting on a Diversity Event(McFarland, 2019) Campbell, Damon; Harlan, Lydia; Lilley, RachelThe University of Oregon Libraries’ well-established Library Diversity Committee adopted a newly energized tone when a new Dean of Libraries joined the institution and assumed the responsibility of chairing the committee. Inspired by the sense of urgency in her leadership, our committee recognized the need to move conversations surrounding diversity into action which, ultimately, resulted in a public program focused on privilege.Item Open Access Leveraging SharePoint to Better Manage the University's HR Records(University of Oregon, 2024-02-27) Harlan, LydiaThe goal of this project is to survey UO’s current administrative processes, and how the information (records) from those processes is being handled (where are the records stored, who is responsible for them, how do the records get into those systems, who reviews the records for retention, how are the records disposed of). Next, determine which of those processes could be moved into SharePoint, and prioritize the list in terms of what you believe the University should focus on first.Item Open Access Don’t Call It a Comeback: Popular Reading Collections in Academic Libraries(American Library Association, 2018) Brookbank, Elizabeth; Davis, Anne-Marie; Harlan, LydiaDespite the persisting notion that recreational reading does not have a place in the academic mission of college and university libraries, these libraries have a long history of providing pleasure reading for their patrons. During the latter half of the twentieth century, the idea of academic libraries meeting the recreational reading needs of students seems to have fallen out of favor, but a literature review of that time period shows that the collections themselves still existed. Discussion of—and justifications for—these collections, however, has enjoyed a resurgence in the library literature over the past decade. Given this renewed interest, this study seeks to assess just how common these collections are in US academic libraries today, and whether or not they are, in fact, enjoying a comeback from previous decades. This study surveyed the thirty-nine academic libraries that make up the Orbis Cascade Alliance in the Pacific Northwest, a diverse group of libraries in terms of size, type, budget, and student populations. The results of the survey show that a majority of libraries have a recreational collection and that these collections are valued by patrons and librarians alike. Recommendations are made for shifting the perspective on popular reading collections and their place in academic libraries, as well as for how to study them in the future.Item Open Access Cost per Use in Power BI using Alma Analytics and a Dash of Python Authors Lydia(University of Oregon Libraries, 2024) Harlan, Lydia; Buxton, Kristin; Hayden, GabrielleA trio of personnel at University of Oregon Libraries explored options for automating a pathway to ingest, store, and visualize cost per use data for continuing resources. This paper presents a pipeline for using Alma, SUSHI, COUNTER5, Python, and Power BI to create a tool for data-driven decision making. By establishing this pipeline, we shift the time investment from manually harvesting usage statistics to interpreting the data and sharing it with stakeholders. The resulting visualizations and collected data will assist in making informed, collaborative decisions.Item Open Access Open Secrets: Exploring Institutional Spending on Open Access(Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA), 2024-12-20) Rigby, MiriamA robust corpus exists on Open Access (OA) spending within libraries, however there is less literature on assessing OA expenditures across colleges and universities. Due to the nature of the fragmented and uneven investment in OA, researchers are likely not optimizing institutional resources on Article Processing Charges (APCs) as part of the open access environment. This article describes how personnel at University of Oregon Libraries built a Power BI model to encapsulate and visualize our institution’s open access outlay as well as apprise researchers of their options for selecting OA publication venues based on APCs and impact metrics.Item Open Access Outshine with the Superfine Frankenstein Pipeline at Timberline: Visualizing Cost Per Use in Power BI(The Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge, Oregon, 2024-05) Harlan, Lydia; Buxton, Kristin; Hayden, GabrieleLooking to establish a current and reproducible cost per use analysis for continuing resources, three members of University of Oregon Libraries explored ways to ingest, store, and visualize cost and usage data. Our presentation describes how we developed a pipeline using Alma, COUNTER5, SUSHI, APIs, Python, and Power BI to create an easily refreshed dashboard for collections assessment. Our tool shifts the time investment from manually harvesting usage statistics to interpreting the data and sharing it with stakeholders. By establishing this automated pipeline, we created an up-to-date dashboard and reproducible model that we can share with others and improve upon in future permutations. We hope that attendees of this presentation will feel inspired to use visualization to tell stories and become curious about constructing a data pipeline of their own.Item Open Access Automating for Success: Making Invisible Work Visible(University of Oregon, 2023-10-27) Harlan, Lydia; Buxton, Kristin; Hayden, GabrieleKnowing your value and optimizing your time can help meet your professional and institutional goals. We describe how an ad-hoc team of people from three different departments, with three different primary goals, were able to successfully complete a project to automate the collection and dissemination of cost-per-use data for continuing resources, saving our colleagues many hours of work, and creating a dashboard that requires little maintenance. In the process we learned a bunch of current technology—Power BI, APIs, and data visualization, to name a few that we can apply to other projects.Item Open Access Uploadable Content: Collaboration in a Video Game Advisory Team(Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association, 2016-06) Harlan, Lydia; Cloo, Derek; Smith, Kate Louise; Zeidman-Karpinski, AnnieA misunderstanding led to the creation of University of Oregon (UO) Libraries’ video game collection. We thought we were replicating the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign’s (UIUC) Library collection. One UO subject specialist librarian got permission from her supervisor, gift money from an administrator, and since she wasn’t a gamer, asked around about what video games and consoles to buy and how to do it. As we set up this collection, we found out that UIUC didn’t let patrons take the games and consoles with peripherals home with them, as we were planning to do. With no space for the consoles in the library and a firm belief that material should circulate, this initial misunderstanding forced us to invent processes and procedures to handle the collection. What follows is our description of how our Video Game Advisory Team was formed, and how our team adds value to the gaming collection and culture at our library. We will discuss the evolution of our video game acquisition process, our circulation practice and statistics, and issues with the trend towards downloadable content.Item Open Access What's Old is New Again: The Popular Reading Collection at University of Oregon Libraries(2015-09) Harlan, Lydia; Rigby, Miriam