i casually mentioned on twitter yesterday that i was finding multiple unsigned copies of a license agreement in a single folder and got a surprise: i’m not the only one. i heard from friends on facebook that their license agreement folders are also a mess. it’s funny to me to think of libraries having anything out of order since the e-resources librarians i’ve met tend to be very neat people. i think we’ve uncovered a dirty little secret about libraries. i’m sure that what’s happened is that the people who used to be in charge of the licenses had an idea about what was important to save in those folders and as time moved on stuff was just added to the folder, weeding out nothing.
i inherited a whole file cabinet of these kinds of folders in my new job. i’m enjoying looking through them, weeding out multiple copies, fax cover sheets, and email printouts that note passwords long expired. i’m putting the leftover material in order to be scanned and eventually linked in our erms, a little procedure i cooked up many years ago. my organizational scheme is to put the current license on top, followed by any older licenses, title lists, then any correspondence that notes the administrative username/password or key contact information. all of this will be scanned into one pdf, and then i’ll create bookmarks in the pdf to point to the license start date, termination information, interlibrary loan rights and restrictions, number of simultaneous users, etc.
once in pdf form these licenses become much more meaningful as living documents because it’s easy to scan a new license and append it to the old pdf, or delete a sheet that no longer applies. also, a pdf is much easier to share with librarians that need to read them than coming to our office to request a folder.
