Category Archives: eresource management

My big news

Posted on by
4

My big news is that I will shortly begin a new job. Yesterday I accepted a job offer from one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to manage their library’s systems as well as their technical services operation. I am really excited about this opportunity. I’ve worked for two large, academic research libraries, for a small college library, and for a library systems vendor. Now I will find out what it’s like to work in a corporate library environment. I submitted my resignation today at Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., and my last day there will be May 17. I start my new job on May 22. In the new job I will still be tied somewhat to Endeavor but in a new and different way. This corporate library uses most of Endeavor’s software products, including Voyager (a traditional integrated library system consisting of an online catalog and other stuff), Meridian (their electronic resources management system, or ERMS), Discovery: Finder (formerly, ENCompass for Resource Access, which is a federated search tool), and Discovery: Resolver (formerly, LinkFinderPlus, Endeavor’s OpenURL service).

This opportunity is a real answer to prayer. Now my family and I have a sense of direction, of where we’re going in the coming months. It’s going to be pretty stressful because we will be looking for a new home, a new community to live in, and moving again. At the same time I will be starting a new job, teaching a graduate course, and finishing up a book chapter.

Course on e-resource management

Posted on by
Reply

Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: Library Schools Must Teach E-Resource Management (& What Else?)

I couldn’t agree more with the need for library schools to integrate a course on e-resource management into their curriculum. Furthermore, I think it should be a required course. The course I teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in their LEEP curriculum, Technical Services Functions (LIS578LE), focuses on e-resources quite a lot. But there is so much ground to cover in the course that it seems that there never is enough time to adequately address this important topic.

Because of that, several months ago I approached the associate dean with a proposal for a new course on e-resource management. She was quite receptive to it and asked me for a formal course outline and a proposed syllabus. Unfortunately I haven’t written that up yet. Any suggestions or thoughts about this would be appreciated.

Updating course on technical services functions

Posted on by
Reply

This past summer I taught LIS578: Technical Services Functions as part of the LEEP (distance education) curriculum at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC. I was contacted today to ask if I’d be willing to teach the same course again next summer because students are already requesting it. The official description of this class is as follows:

“Seminar on the principles, problems, trends, and issues of acquiring, identifying, recording, and conserving/preserving materials in all types of libraries and information centers; includes the special problems of serials management; emphasizes service aspects.”

If I decide to accept this offer, a thorough review or shakeup of the syllabus might be in order. While I mull this over I thought I’d post the question here: What significant changes have happened or are happening in technical services functions that a course such as this should incorporate?

Currently the course is divided into the following parts:

  • Acquisitions/Collection Development (2 sessions)
  • Cataloging: An Overview (1 session)
  • Preservation (2 sessions)
  • Serials (2 sessions)

There is also an introductory session at the beginning and a wrapup session at the end. It’s important to note that this is the only course in the GSLIS curriculum that deals in significant way with serial publications. There are other cataloging courses already in the curriculum and that is why I only touch upon that part of technical services in this course.

The course objectives I’ve written are as follows:

  1. articulate the particular role that technical services plays in the work of the library as a whole
  2. understand the importance of the interrelationship between technical services and other library components including, but not limited to, public services and systems
  3. discuss the role that technology has played, and will continue to play, in the fulfillment of technical services functions
  4. understand past practices, current reality, and future directions in technical services
  5. appreciate the challenges and opportunities of serials management as an important component of technical services
  6. know where to look in the literature and in other information resources (e.g. websites, discussion lists) to understand issues and resolve problems in technical services work

I haven’t found any good textbook on this broad topic that isn’t already out of date and for that reason, I rely almost solely on a large number of book chapter, journal article, and website readings.

One of the main challenges of this course is that there is so much to cover in so little time. Another challenge is to somehow work in more “hands on” type work even though the course is taught almost entirely from a distance via the Internet. A partial answer to the former challenge would be to separate out the whole serials/e-resources piece and I have already proposed that a new course be defined for this (which I’d love to teach). I just need to flesh out a proposed syllabus and objectives and send them in to GSLIS to be considered. In my view, this is where a huge amount of the action is and it behooves every single student to have some understanding of this rapidly evolving arena before graduation as it is almost certainly going to be a large part of their future jobs.

Lecture @ UIUC GSLIS

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday I was able to go to UIUC GSLIS at the invitation of Kathie and Bill Henderson to speak to their Technical Services Functions class. (This is the same class that I teach in online form in UIUC GSLIS’s LEEP curriculum.) They’ve invited me every year for the past 14 years. Each time I go, I thoroughly enjoy the time with their students.

The topic of my talk was “The Times, They Are a Changin…or, How to Thrive in an Age of Chaos and Opportunity in Technical Services Librarianship.” What I try to do is give a quick overview of my career path thus far, and then focus on electronic resources as the “hot” area. We usually spend a lot of time talking about user expectations in this era of the Google Mindset, and how libraries are coping with the demand for online full-text while simultaneously struggling to manage the “traditional” collection. I demo’d the ERM system that we developed at Taylor, known as the Taylor Periodical Administration System (TPAS), and also talked quite a bit about OpenURL and metasearching technologies.

There are about 14 students in this class. Some years the students really get into a good discussion, while other times, they seem content just to listen to a lecture. I prefer interaction and was pleased that this year there were a lot of questions. Especially in recent years, students have expressed some apprehension about the future of technical services librarianship, or uncertainty about job prospects in this specialty. This topic came up tangentially in yesterday’s session. One student asked, given what we had been talking about in terms of the predominance of e-resources and vendor tools that libraries are stuck with, what is stopping vendors from selling or marketing directly to researchers? (We had also been talking quite a bit about Google Scholar.) I thought this was an excellent question. It really asks the question, are libraries relevant anymore? Why should libraries assume they are even part of the equation for information consumers? Have libraries given up way too much ground, ground that they can never expect to recover? Very interesting questions. We spoke about the decision made by libraries about 100 years ago to stop trying to do article-level analytics in their cataloging practice, and how that resulted in the whole development of vendor solutions in the form of abstracting and indexing tools. Those tools have then developed into online form in the last 20 years or so, and then have been developed further to provide aggregated full-text content. We have lost control (if we ever had it) of the means of access to our resources.

Overall it was a very stimulating time and I ran out of time trying to cover everything. I wish we had had all day!

The Henderson’s had made lunch and invited Linda Smith, Associate Dean and one of my former professors, to eat with us. It was nice to chat with them about various things. One of the things I noticed this time in my campus visit was that development of various areas of the campus continues at a rapid pace. Some areas are hardly recognizable anymore, they have changed so much since I was a student there.

Catching my breath and other ruminations

Posted on by
Reply

I have a lot of guilt and I’m not even Catholic…One of the things I feel guilty about is not posting more often and more regularly on this blog. It’s not for lack of things to write about, that’s for sure. I am just trying to catch my breath most days. There is so much to do, so little time (how unoriginal of me to write that, but it’s true). I have been preoccupied with many interesting yet stressful things. One of them is MetaLib training. For those who aren’t familiar with this product, let me just say that it is an example of a metasearching tool, sometimes also known as federated search. My library is part of a consortium that purchased this software in a package along with an integrated library system called Aleph 500, and a context-sensitive linking software called SFX. MetaLib is really cool and this kind of tool can help libraries like mine to offer a much more user-friendly way to find information for our users.While thinking of MetaLib and the issues of metasearching (or federated searching), I was reminded of the fact that I created a pretty barebones webliography of articles, reports, etc. on this topic here. I originally created this webliography as a companion tool for a presentation at last year’s NASIG conference, and have had several requests from people who want to share it with others, link to it, whatever. This a.m. as I was watching the kids while Michele went to her MOPS meeting, I was thinking that I desperately need to update that webliography. I have saved over 100 additional article citations in RefWorks (another neat new e-resource that I have purchased for our library users) and I need to figure out a time to look through them all and select those that I want to add into the webliography. Then, lo and behold, one thought led to another, and I had a “Doh!” kind of moment: Why don’t I reformat the webliography so that I can offer it as an RSS feed? That way, anyone who wants to do so can subscribe to the feed and automatically keep informed about any additions or changes I make to it. Why on earth hadn’t I thought of this before? How stupid of me…So, here goes with another thing to do…Anyone who thinks life as a librarian is boring doesn’t know their head from a hole in the ground.

UIUC GSLIS

Posted on by
Reply

The week before last I made what has now become an annual tradition for the past twelve years or so: a trip back to my alma mater, UIUC GSLIS (the best graduate library school in the country!), to speak to the Hendersons’ Technical Services Functions class. As always, I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the class and the students had very good questions about my topic, which was the opportunities and challenges of handling e-resources. Each year the Henderson’s assign me to be a mentor to one or two of their students in this class. I enjoy that part as well. I cannot say enough about how much I admire and respect Kathryn Luther Henderson and her husband, Bill. They have been my mentors and close friends since my library school days and I am thankful that they include me in their course.

When I first made this new blog public last week, to my surprise, who should pick it up and mention it in LISBlogsource, a blog about library blogs, but a former mentee of mine from this same class. Greg not only co-moderates LISBlogsource but also has his own well-regarded library-related blog, OpenStacks. And, he apparently is an Indiana resident like myself. It’s a small world. I was really pleased to connect with him again.

Preprint article on journal management solutions

Posted on by
Reply

Just finished webifying a preprint version of an article I wrote for the summer 2004 issue of Serials Review . It’s entitled “Which Route Do I Take? A Viewpoint on Locally-Developed vs. Commercially Available Journal Management Solutions” and I hope it’ll garner at least a bit of interest in terms of the focus on a locally developed e-resource management system into which I’ve put a lot of effort.