when our patrons go to our library’s research databases webpage they’ll see databases listed there, as one might expect. they’ll also bump into single newspapers, e-journal collections, and encyclopedias.
this amalgam didn’t occur overnight, and it certainly wasn’t intentional. as the library began to acquire e-resources it naturally needed some place to put them to show our patrons that we had these special, new things; the research databases hand-coded html page was born. over time that page became the dumping ground for all new e-resources. that was the place the library told users to begin their e-research.
speed forward several years and several hundred e-resources, and enter our new electronic resource management system (erms), a metadata dream. the erms allows for the categorization of all of those e-resources so that they cluster together easily to make them more readily findable. now that we’re intentionally tagging e-resources with categories, the question of “what do we tag as a database?” came up. if an e-resource isn’t tagged as a database, it disappears from the research databases page and is discoverable only through our catalog. as a result we’re having some pretty lively conversations about how to manage that metadata.
we’ve talked about three possible ways to handle this, more intelligently than summarized in these bullet points:
- ignore the problem. we’ve always told our users to go to the research databases page and that’s what we should continue to do.
- put your foot down that if it’s not a database, it’s not a database! off the list it goes!
- decide that well, mmmmaybe that one title can stay even though it’s not a database, and maybe that one, too.
of the three options, number 3 seems like the way most libraries are handling it but i really don’t see how that will scale as we continue to increase the numbers of e-resources. do we have time to pull together a small committee each time we license a new e-resource to determine if it should display on the research databases page?
how has your library handled this? is there perhaps a fourth option we haven’t considered?
Could you rename the “Electronic Databases” page and make it more inclusive? “Electronic Resources” or “Online Research Resources” or something like that? Because honestly, does anyone except a librarian care that something is called a “database” or an “aggregated electronic resource?” What do you call something like MD Consult, which is a database, but is also an e-book package, and also an encyclopedia? I think we should call these things, “Online Goodness for Smart-Making.”
We don’t have a database page per se, it says “Find E-Resources” and then there are more specific groupings by subject and type of material, like archival, encyclopedias, e-book collection, etc.
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We’ve got a “database page” too, but I’m working on getting it renamed the Digital Library. I mean, when Ancestry is cheek-to-jowl with Homework Help Now, and Chilton’s is rubbing elbows with the Virtual Reference Library, how can we think of it as a “database page” any more? Why should we continue to call it that?
Ann and Bob are making me wonder if we should even have a databases page at all. Should we just go ahead and lump all of the resources together in the catalog and be done with it? We don’t call out the e-books in any special way; they’re cataloged individually like regular books. Maybe we’re making a big deal for no effect on the patron.