Happy birthday, ERM! Two years ago today we met our trainer from Innovative Interfaces to set up the new module that would help us manage our growing collection of electronic resources. Here we are, two years later, with a fully developed module that integrates seamlessly with our catalog and provides our patrons with rights & restrictions information about e-resources in a proactive way.
(via http://www.alegriphotos.com/Two_year_candle_on_birthday_cake-photo-c14e4f986fe8930683dd4cc4d9d30be3.html)
And many mooooooore…
Sometimes my job is all about the small things. For example, I am sometimes asked how much we spend annually in access fees for e-content. Access fees (or “hosting fees”) are charged by a vendor once you have purchased e-content but want to continue viewing the content on a third-party platform rather than hosting it yourself. You’re asking yourself, “Who would want to host a bunch of disparate content on their own? Of COURSE we would want the vendor to keep all those e-books/e-journals/databases on the existing platform.” I know, it’s nutty. It’s also expensive. Sometimes we pay thousands of dollars to access content we’ve already bought. The library world is a strange place.
So, how much do we spend on all this stuff annually? I’ll tell you next year. We just created a fund code for Access Fees and I’m in the process of creating new order records that are tied to this fund. At the end of the year I’ll be able to run a report that shows how much money we spent in that fund. Hooray!
inspired by the conversation on friendfeed about the nearly impossible qualities a library is looking for in a new hire: http://friendfeed.com/lsw/8c3f8c41/my-kingdom-for-e-resources-librarian
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?
I’ve been waiting for this moment to happen for 3 years, since i first began working at this library. We’ve finally e-tipped. E-tipping is when a library has enough electronic resources in its collection that the distinction between print or electronic isn’t as important as the content the resource holds. The process of e-tipping is as elegant as it sounds, kind of like cow-tipping or knocking over a pitcher of milk; everything’s going along fine, then there’s a jolt, a slow-motion flail, then BAM.
I’m the first electronic resources librarian my library has ever had and some of the concepts I brought with me were obviously strange to the library. We’ve been doing some major thinking and talking about e-content since I arrived, getting our staff and librarians comfortable and familiar with using electronic resources. Obviously not all of our staff are newbies in this arena, but building confidence to a certain level has taken some doing. We’ve been working steadily at it as a team, committing to an ERM, and then implementing all the features.
How did I know we had e-tipped? For about a month I had been steadily adding usage rights/restrictions into the license portion of the ERM — the last feature of the ERM to be implemented — so that information about the ways patrons can use the material gets filtered down to the e-journal title level, the streaming video level, and the e-book level. One of our librarians didn’t like the way the information was displaying, and overnight it seemed that everyone in the library had Questions About E-resources. They were vocal that it was very important that we make access to our licensed resources as seamless as possible. In other words, after years of keeping e-resources separate (on a separate page on the website, even) they wanted the e-resources to look and act just like any other library resource.
As I answered the Questions I mentally cheered to myself, “We’re there! We should be celebrating!” It’s really hard to celebrate a cultural shift like this. It’s hard enough to even explain a cultural shift like this. I know it happened, though, and I guess this blog post is celebration enough.
I wonder if the readers of this blog have experienced something similar at your institutions? Have you e-tipped? Do write and let me know.
