Here is a link to a nice writeup in the most recent issue of the NASIG Newsletter about the presentation I made at this year’s NASIG conference with colleague Sarah Morris.
Writeup of NASIG presentation
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Category Archives: eresource management
Continuous publication
A colleague informed me of the following interesting news from BMJ: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7659/1450.
Basically BMJ will be presenting articles continuously as they become available. At first this sounds ho hum, not a big deal. But then I got to thinking about it and I think this turn of events is significant. One of the things I talked a bit about in my chapter on the future of e-resource management (written two years ago) was this very thing, referring to the disaggregation of journal content and likening it to how iTunes changed the way we think of music albums. I’m not patting myself on the back here; it’s not an original idea or concept because others have talked about this for a long time. But I’m intrigued by the possibilities and implications.
Post print in hand
I now have, at last, the post print of my chapter in hand. Woohoo! There is so much that I wish I had done differently, especially in terms of length (it’s way too short). Oh well. I can’t wait to get a print copy of the book (E-Journals Access and Management, ed. by Wayne Jones, ISBN 978-0-7890-3385-7) so that I can read everyone else’s chapters. I wish I could post a link to my chapter here but I’m still waiting to hear back from the publisher, Routledge, for a clarification about its post print policy. (Yeah, surprise, it’s not very clear.)
E-Journals Access and Management book update
Just heard from Wayne Jones that the book to which I contributed a chapter, E-Journals Access and Management, will be published sooner than expected. It’s now due sometime in July as opposed to this fall. Good news!
Proposing an online course for NASIG
Last week, Valerie Bross, co-chair of this year’s NASIG Continuing Education Committee (CEC), asked for proposals for CEC funding for the coming year. I decided to submit a proposal for creating a pilot online course focusing on best practices and case studies for e-resources management. I don’t know yet if it will be accepted or if it will emerge with a different focus, but I am excited about the possibility of helping to provide an excellent, inexpensive, dynamic, topically relevant online course for the benefit of NASIG.
The landscape for developing an online course has changed quite drastically in the past few years. Meredith Farkas and colleagues, rightly famous for their excellent work on the Five Weeks to a Social Library online course, demonstrated emphatically that great value can be provided with little direct cost, using existing tools such as Drupal. I think this is an exciting time and developing or possibly working on something like this fits well with my ongoing love of teaching.
Proposal for e-resources management course
One of the things that came up in conversation a few times when I was at NASIG this past weekend was that last year I made a proposal to UIUC GSLIS for a new, advanced course on electronic resources management. My intent in proposing this new course was that an existing course that I taught, Technical Services Functions, would be a prerequisite as would perhaps one or two other existing courses. More than that, however, my goal with this course is to get GSLIS students some much-needed focused exposure to the increasing dominance of e-resources (especially serial e-resources) in libraries of all types. Such a course is, in my view, long overdue. And the students themselves are clamoring for it.
Several people I spoke with at NASIG showed interest in what I had proposed so I have dug the following draft syllabus outline out of my email (thanks, Gmail, for making it so easy). If you have a moment and are interested in this topic, let me know what you think about it, either by commenting on this post or sending me an email.
Electronic Resources Management: A Suggested Course Outline
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I. Definitions and Distinctions
a. What is an e-resource?
b. How does it differ from and how is it similar to other, more traditional library materials?
b. Overlap with integrated library systems work, serials management, acquisitions, collection development, etc.
II. Conceptual Framework
a. Access vs. ownership for libraries
b. Effect of living in an Amazon/Google/iTunes worlds
c. Relevance and authority issues for e-resources vs. other library material
d. Virtual vs. in-person library service
III. Types of E-Resources
a. E-journals
b. Websites
c. E-books
d. Databases
e. Other
IV. Management Challenges
a. Diversity of selection and workflow processes
b. Explosive growth in availability
c. Preservation issues
d. Issues for intellectual access (e.g. website lists or links vs. traditional cataloging vs. other methods for organization)
e. Licensing and copyright
f. Fiscal resources
g. Balancing “traditional” vs. e-content
h. Rapid change and high user demand
i. Evaluation of use vs. cost and other metrics
V. System Tools for Managing E-Resources
a. Locally developed
b. Commercial tools
c. Classes or categories of tools (e.g. OpenURL resolvers vs. ILSs vs. ERMS vs. Other)
Speaking at UIUC GSLIS and NASIG
Next week I will be speaking about electronic resource management at UIUC GSLIS. At the end of May I will be joining a panel of friends who are speaking at NASIG about alternative career experiences in libraries. These are my only speaking engagements for the foreseeable future. I continue to be amazed by how much other librarians are willing to commit to speaking at various conferences. Good for them, I guess.
As a side note, I am pleased that Mark Lindner of Off The Mark fame will join me on my trip to Louisville, KY to attend NASIG.
Thoughts on the future of e-journal management and access
“Thoughts on the future of e-journal management and access” is the title of a book chapter I wrote and submitted late last year for a book edited by Wayne Jones entitled E-Journal Management and Access. It is the concluding chapter of that work, which will be published sometime this year. My piece will also be published in the Journal of Electronic Resource Description and Access (JERDA), also edited by Wayne.
I turned in this contribution so unbelievably late, and didn’t do as good and thorough a job on it as I should have, that I am still trying to get past the guilt I feel about the whole thing. I will investigate the possibility of linking to a pre-print version sometime soon.
The Abbott Report
I recently read a final report from the task force on the university library at The University of Chicago, written by Andrew Abbott, a professor of sociology there. It is fascinating reading and I hope it will receive widespread attention because it touches upon many issues that large academic and research libraries are facing. The angle at Chicago may be somewhat different than some other places but I think it is broadly illustrative and informative. It is interesting to note Abbott’s discussion on the theory of library research. For example, he boldy states the following:
“There is a good deal of writing about libraries and library knowledge from an informational science (IS) standpoint, but the theory of knowledge it presupposes is rooted, like IS itself, in engineering-based theories of information that turn out to be largely irrelevant to what it is that humanistic research actually produces. And in any case the information science literature arises basically within the professional debates, which to this writer seem driven more by the familiar dynamics of interprofessional competition than by deep thinking about knowledge.” (emphasis mine)
Another highly interesting point made in this report is that research data on library usage at Chicago points to the fact that the dramatically increased availability of e-resources such as e-journals, e-books, and databases has not replaced reliance by Chicago students on traditional library material. As Abbott puts it:
“There is no evidence whatever of substitution of electronic for print resources at the individual level. The two seem synergistic.”
This is great stuff because it flies in the face of assumptions that we too easily make about e-resources vs. print materials. We often assume, in other words, that print resources are less valuable, less often used with the advent of e-resources. Granted, the mix of students and the culture at Chicago may be somewhat unusual, but even so, this conclusion has significant ramifications.
There is more, much more here to enjoy and to stimulate thinking about the role of libraries.
Visibility of library on organizational websites
It has always bothered me when a link to the library of a particular organization is not prominently featured on the home page of its website. This is particularly bothersome for educational institutions given the de facto role of the library as a centerpiece of learning. In fact when I browse the web or go directly to a known institution and do not see a prominent link to the library, this gives me a bad impression of that institution. In a previous job when I was responsible for library websites, the issue of placement for the link to the library was a battle that I had to fight with non-library campus IT folks, and fight fairly aggressively. In the campus website that existed when I came into that position, the link to the library was buried somewhere in a category for Academics, if I recall. Noone could find it. This, in spite of the fact that the library site was one of the most heavily used in the entire campus web structure. Fortunately after a campus website redesign, the link to the library was placed prominently on the home page for the institution.
So it was with a lot of interest that I read Steven Bell’s summary, posted to ACRLog, of a discussion on the COLLIB-L discussion list regarding this issue. One portion of Bell’s post particularly caught my attention:
Tom Kirk, library director at Earlham College, also brought up the value of examining web site data, but made the observation that data alone would hardly yield the information we need about student behavior in using institutional and library web sites. Until we do know more about how students use our web sites, Tom said, we may be unjustified in arguing for what belongs on a home page. As for alternatives, Tom suggested that many of our institutions have specialized portals for communicating with current students and faculty, where a more prominent library link could be placed. He also suggested that having the library under “academics†has “become a de facto standard alternative to a link on the home page?†So if they do move your library link from the home page to academics, don’t take it too badly.
This statement from Tom Kirk frankly astounds me, especially the part about having the library under “academics” being the “de facto standard.” Not true! And even if it is fairly common, I vehemently disagree that we should be satisfied with that! Furthermore, we should and often do have the data to back up the assertion that the link to the library belongs on the institution’s home page. And we should and do have data on how our students are using our sites. I would ask the question, are other campus wide sites being asked to adhere to this same requirement? Maybe, but in many cases, I doubt it, based upon personal experience.
One more point I’d make is that the library is not just for students, it’s for the whole institution including faculty, staff, and alumni. Even more than that, it is for the broader worldwide academic community. In other words, library websites, especially for educational institutions, have a worldwide audience and this is often overlooked. I mention this because one of the arguments I faced when in charge of library websites was to keep the library websites publicly available versus putting them behind a firewall and accessible only via an intranet. The argument for this restriction (made by non-library IT people) was that library resources and information was only for existing students, faculty, and staff, so therefore it needn’t be available to anyone else. Of course this is true when we think of licensed e-resources but this approach would make the library’s online catalog and other freely available resources invisible to anyone else.
I am not arguing that the library website deserves high visibility “just because.” But I find it troubling that the library’s online presence needs to be defended so often, and that there is frequently an assumption that the link to the library should be buried somewhere within an institution’s site.