In Perpetuity: Institutional and implementation challenges with electronic resources librarianship
Lisa Sibert and Julia Gelfand
University of California, Irvine
Presenters conducted a survey about electronic resources in libraries during Fall 2008. Full survey is on flash drive (I think) along with their paper. [Although, in the Q&A, one of the presenters seemed to indicate that one would need to contact them directly for a copy of the paper and the full survey - confusing.]
Irvine is a growth campus, most notably in e-resources - journals, databases, and ebooks. Two e-resource librarian positions created in 2000 have been augmented since 2007.
Survey data seems to indicate that "electronic resources are growing up" - the rule and mainstream rather than the exception.
Survey respondents: 82% academic: 69% university, 15% research institution, 14% 4-year college
Results: Allocations differed wildly among serials, ebooks, databases, streaming video, and other formats, but serials and databases took most of the allocations (not a surprise).
33% of respondents reported neither an E-Resources Librarian nor an E-Resource Unit - management was conducted through IT, Instruction, or other departments.
Most reported between 3 and 5 staff (including classified and unclassified) devoted to e-resource management.
Interesting - 92& of responders reported actively collecting usage data. Most either visited vendor sites to gather data or waited for the vendor to supply the data via email or notification. Few gathered data into their ERM via a SUSHI server. They were surprised by this, but I don't understand why; there's only one functioning ERM that I know of that is SUSHI-compliant.
A question asked what the deal-breakers were in signing licenses. IP authentication was the only overwhelming deal-breaker, but (disturbingly) things like OpenURL compliance and availability of usage data were not. Yikes.
This survey seemed to go on and on - understandably, since the world of electronic resources is vast and confusing. The presenters used most of their time and slides to graph, tag cloud, and otherwise visually represent answers to (possibly) each question. The short lessons learned section at the end of the talk both gathered up the presenters' conclusions and summarized their overall findings. However, none of these conclusions was particularly earth-shaking or eye-opening. The people who attend this conference are intimately familiar with these issues. I think the presenters would have much better spent their time (and ours) by summarizing the survey results first - laying out the broad response themes and selecting a few notable specific responses - and then pushing out from that known territory into "what can we do about this?"-type speculation. This was not (for me) the innovative, thought-provoking type of session I've come to expect from ER&L.
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