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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I think the problem with the whole creation of standards issue is that there is no single group in charge of doing this for eResources. Perhaps a group of us should join NISO’s Library Standards Alliance which already has structures in place for the creation of and disseminiation of standards? I haven’t researched it much, but their website looks pretty informative: http://www.niso.org/members/alliance.html