ER&L 2008: Transforming Tech. Services

Janice Adlington
Electronic Resources Librarian
McMaster University

"On the Leading Edge: transforming technical services"

Transforming...
Organization & culture
Web 2.0
Verde
E-Resources Support Tools (Gold Rush)
Challenges

Mission and vision statements at Mac require "radical rethinking of library resources and services"

Endeca as front-end to Horizon starting in Fall 2007 - works for students, but some faculty have complained.
Cataloging has been largely eliminated; Technical Services is now Collections Services
Serials now staffed by 3 library assistants and 1 PT assistant

Learning 2.0 @ Mac
a 12 week program for staff (inc. tech services) to explore Web 2.0 tools
Resource Management Wiki has evolved from this program - serials staff run this wiki themselves

Verde @ Mac
Live April 2007 as a consortial installation
Advantages: shared documentation/best practices; collection comparisons; reduced work (licenses)

E-Resource Support Tools:
Verde/SFX
Serials Solutions - staff-only subscription for catalogers who put hard URLs into catalog, She says this can't continue b/c it's unmanageable, but while it does, SerSol offers the best URLs
Gold Rush Reports - looking at overlaps in e-resource subscriptions (FT and A&I) - can compare multiple resources at the same time, unlike SFX, which compares two at a time. Wishes for side-by-side year coverage, but data is there for extraction.

Challenges ahead:
Budget - monograph budget has been drastically cut, but will need to provide access to ebooks.

Evergreen (OpenILS):
Rough plan is for a consortial install of Evergreen for three Ontario academic libraries
Currently no acq. or serials modules - questions about whether they need prediction patterns beyond 5 simple ones; need to check in print serials?

Staff:
Library is offering retirement packages for staff newly eligible to retire.

"Make it work"
Planned abandonment makes it possible to take on new initiatives, knowing that abandoning an older service will negatively impact some users - hoping that new initiatives will positively impact more users than hurts.

Comments

[charS]

Two questions:
1) what didn't faculty like about Endeca?
was this library faculty? or academic faculty?

2) is the Resource Management Wiki available for public viewing?

[Jamene]

Janice wasn't very specific about what faculty didn't like about Endeca, since she was moving very quickly through a lot of material. She was talking about academic faculty.

I found the Resource Management Wiki here:
http://resourcemanagement.pbwiki.com/