Archive for May, 2007

Standards & Control Issues

jemery May 17th, 2007

One of things my group talked in-depth about was OCLC’s attempt to build one knowledgebase that everyone could contribute to and borrow from for electronic resource management. One of the more interesting comments that was made during this discussion was a reminder that libraries had initially started along this road with the advent of JAKE and in the end, our collaborative spirit petered out and this ended up being one of the failed collaborative efforts to carry forth into the openURL realm. One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is do we really have the staff time to expend on creating another shared knowledgebase of this sort and are librarians really committed to this level of collaboration?

There major issues identified with electronic journal transfers included: problem of titles changing from one provider to another…short catalog of standards/best practices for web site such as the transfer journal group & creation of database of tracking of title changes from one publisher to another, rights management change from one publisher to another and from one year to the next, and journals changing pricing models and how to management that and how to capture this in a knowledgebase. Everyone at the table agreed that this was an ideal place for subscription agents to step-in and help to create tools for librarians to keep up with these changes and bits of metadata.

Our group also spent quite a bit of time discussing archiving initiatives and how best to manage back-files and older generation material. It was noted that at this time there really are not any digital preservation standards available. It was also noted that we have been reliying heavily on JSTOR to provide us with archival material and we want to start investigating other alternatives. It was suggested that consortia could play a vital role in this arena.

Then the group began a fairly intense discussion on standards and why librarians are slow adopters of new standards. Many felt it was due to lacking the tech savvy on how to best implement standards prior to our systems and software incorporating new standards into their platforms. This forum could help out the process by developing a best practices documentation on the web site in order to push harder for standards development where needed.

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General Comments from ACRL

jemery May 17th, 2007

Here’s a brief summary of some of the more general ideas from the ACRL discussion. Please comment if I’ve missed anything or if you want to expand on anything.

*We need to include consortia and consortia staff when sending out invitations to discussion group meetings

*It was felt that control was too strong word and not truly getting at what we are attempting to do with electronic resources. It was suggested to change this segment to “Manage” instead.

* We need to create a segment or separate web site where all related standards development is captured so that we can truly see what standards are being created, at what point in development each standard may be at, and hopefully so we can see where there are intersections or needs to fill in gaps.

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The ACRL Discussions

Bonnie Tijerina May 3rd, 2007

A group of about 50 people met in Baltimore during the ACRL Conference to talk about e-resources and how we as librarians would like to see things move forward. We started with a presentation given by Jill and Elizabeth and then broke into three groups. Here’s a few topics covered (I don’t think I’ve listed them all):

  • Jill’s group talked about standards, authority control and vendor’s responsibilities.
  • Elizabeth’s group focused on work flow, staffing and budgeting.
  • My group talked about how we want to see resources made accessible to our users.

We had great discussions and lively debate. This week the three of us will be posting our notes.

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Welcome to the new ER&L Forum

Bonnie Tijerina May 3rd, 2007

Here’s the new ER&L Forum. The content you see that is older than March ‘07 is content from all blogs from the ER&L Moodle site. We decided to put them all together and bring over all the tags.

For those who have blogged on the ER&L site: We removed entries of the general or technical nature (2-3) and left everything in private and draft as a “draft” post.

Everyone: If you have an ER&L username/pw, then use that to add posts. If you are not a member of the ER&L community, its easy and takes a minute.

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