in the last 3 years of my work experience i’ve brought an e-resources management system to fruition, started a perpetual access inventory project, am in the middle of a thorough review of license agreements, tried a new usage statistics reporting system, and organized our order records for maximum ease for other kinds of reporting. dude, i’m tired. i’m also wondering what happens next. we’re *so close* to having a functional, easy workflow with quality people appropriately trained to do the heavy load of work required for the management of e-resources. what happens then? what will we be prompted to think about when the big technical problems have been resolved? how have you addressed this at your own institution? have you been able to think about this at all?
the e-resources world is a fragile ecosystem because we rely so heavily on a variety of data sources (e-journal and e-book MARC records likely come from different suppliers, holdings information from possibly another supplier) and services (openURL, statistics reporting), and having those merge seamlessly with our e-resources management system relies on quality metadata. if any of those things goes wrong, if one piece doesn’t connect properly, our ecosystem is quickly thrown into disarray. when the processes are working well, which is happening more often than not as vendors and suppliers are getting used to providing data in standardized ways, i feel pretty optimistic about where e-resources technical requirements are headed. are you too? can you see beyond the realm of our current technical successes and limitations to think about what happens next?
Maybe you can start preparing for the demise of the MARC record (or liberation from the MARC record, depending on your outlook). It will be nice to be prepared for this eventuality so you can embrace the coming changes with enthusiasm!!
Then again, I’m not an e-resources librarian so this is probably just fantasy-land.
I wish I shared your optimism, but then maybe I haven’t been trying to troubleshoot link resolver problems for long enough to see that we’ve actually got better systems. Typically, when I find a link resolver menu that falls to lead me to the full text it says is available, I uncover 2-3 other related problems with the source database, the target database, or with the knowledgebase that the link resolver is drawing on. I should also note that not only are there too many databases whose products don’t properly handle OpenURL, there are still too many that will only take you to the front door (the search box) and not to the article level.
fantasy-land is a nice place. 🙂
i think librarians are going to have to advocate for data accuracy from third-parties for a while yet. openurl is such a ridiculous problem to have, isn’t it? and yet there’s a whole niso group charged with identifying quality issues related to openurl (http://www.openurlquality.org/).