Ab’s Blog

My spouse and I have a running joke concerning all the words you can’t spell without ab: abnormal, fabulous, flab, absent… you get the idea. I certainly didn’t intend to go the better part of a year without posting, that’s for sure. Sorry for leaving you all with a cliffhanger. It turns out that ERM implementations combined with Other Stuff Going On hasn’t produced prolific blogging, and now that I’m working on some other things in my day job, I’m going make a few more general comments than originally planned.

1. Know why you are getting an ERM. It’s not the solution to all your e-resource problems; you need to be clear going in on what led someone to plunk down the big bucks.

2. Understand whether software really addresses your reason(s) for getting an ERM. If you have communication problems among library staff, for example, an ERM could help by exposing information to more people. But if the communication problem is that your license negotiator hoards signed agreements and doesn’t share the terms, the ERM probably won’t solve that.

3. Don’t confuse ERM with the need to re-evaluate, streamline, and change staffing and workflows so you can work effectively with electronic resources.  It seems not uncommon to look at staff processes along with an ERM implementation, and I think that’s fine - as long as enough background work has been done to understand the probable causes for getting an ERM, regardless of whatever reorganization may take place.

4. Remember why ERM systems were invented in the first place. We’ve all struggled to capture data that can’t be easily stored in the ILS.  Sure times change, and there may be added benefits in an ERM that weren’t thought of a few years ago, but when you’re planning for ERM I think it’s worth reminding yourself of this often. Start with your core functionality and top priorities and work from there.

That’s all for today, kids.  If you’re reading this, thanks for hanging in with me for the past year!

One of the hardest things I’ve done professionally was to document and transfer to someone else the work of being an e-resources librarian. I knew what I did; I had e-mail and spreadsheets and gray hairs to prove it. But to set it all out for other people, to include the exceptions and asterisks, and to help them make sense of it all - well that’s difficult.

If you have an ERM in your future, whether it’s open source or commercial, then you will be faced with a similar task sooner or later. One of the difficult things about implementing an ERM is that you are confronted with the need to know exactly how you do things, whether you’re happy with how you do things, and probably with the need for some sort of group consensus as well.

In upcoming posts I will discuss in more detail:

1. Data,
2. Workflows, and
3. Interoperability

I started my professional life as a cataloger. I have felt the push and pull of inter-departmental wranglings: “they don’t understand the value of what we do!” and “they don’t understand how people actually use the catalog!” Now that I’ll be helping e-resource librarians implement an ERM system and will no longer be an end user myself, I’m conscious of the fact that I’ll start to lose touch with what it really means to do the job.

I would like to minimize that phenomenon as much as possible, and I’d like your help, dear reader. I still manage ERIL-L, I’ve recently learned about a couple e-resources blogs and have subscribed, and I recently joined the editorial board of JERDA, so I’ll surely be reading that. I plan to attend NASIG and start a subscription to Against the Grain. I know there’s more out there–what else should I be doing to stay connected to the front lines of ERM? Journals, websites, blogs, conferences? Send your suggestions, please, so I’ll be well prepared to assist should Verde be in your library’s future!

Did you know that any New York State resident can apply for a free New York Public Library card, which allows you to access some of their electronic resources from home? Among the databases are Ulrich’s, Rosetta Stone’s Online Language Learning Center, Library Lit, a bunch of Ebsco databases, and the Columbia Gazetteer, my personal favorite. The link above leads to an online application, which was pretty painless to complete.

(Reminder via Librarian Avengers.)

This little note was squeezed into the middle of an All My Eye entry about Ingenta at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

We’ve been working closely with Google for over 2 years now, and the latest development is that we will be making our library holdings data available to Google Scholar’s Library Links program.

The full press release is dated September 25 and I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it before today.

So scholars within an institution’s IP range (on campus or using proxied Scholar links) will get appropriate copy links to Ingenta content without an intermediate OpenURL layer; Ingenta presumably gets its contented highlighted in some way; and Google gets data about library holdings, which it may already have in the case of libraries who participate in the Library Links program. The downside is that the scholar may have no idea why he or she is entitled to the full text, unless the library ponies up for IngentaConnect Premium, which adds branding to the Ingenta site.

It is unclear to me what the user will see for content the library doesn’t license and how the distinction will be made. All in all, an interesting development and one to watch.

I didn’t blog very much this month; the start of the school year is always a hectic time and we had what must have been a record number of technical problems with our e-resources. Besides that, I’ve been preparing for Cornell’s Digital Preservation Workshop, which requires completion of a pre-workshop tutorial and the reading of a couple hefty articles beforehand. The tutorial is very worthwhile on its own, and even if you’re not into the whole digital preservation thing you might be interested in the Chamber of Horrors, which illustrates media obsolescence, and the Timeline of Digital Technology and Preservation, which reveals, among other things, the original name of IBM and the identity of the first computer bug (it was a moth).

I hope to blog about the workshop, but will probably do so after the whole thing is over since I’ll have a long commute to and from Ithaca all week.

Since I am moving on from electronic resource management, I thought it would be a good time to share what I’ve learned over the past six years.

1. The more usage a particular e-journal gets, the greater the chance that the holdings statement will be incorrect.

Corollary: Journals used by faculty/board members on the library’s advisory committee are more likely to have inaccurate holdings than journals used by other library patrons.

Corollary: If the holdings are accurate, the faculty/board member will be looking for a pre-Tasini article by a freelance journalist.

2. As soon as you compliment an industry executive on the high quality of the company’s technical support service, the quality of that service will decline precipitously.

3. The chances that a journal will be cancelled increase in proportion to the time and effort you have spent ensuring that it is configured correctly in your link resolver and/or e-journal management system.

4. Usage reports are available only for those resources whose renewal was never really in question.

5. The product with the most problematic licensing terms is the one must-have database in its subject area.

6. Thorny technical problems occur at 4:45 the Friday before your vacation is supposed to start.

Corollary: Thorny technical problems happen to patrons at the extreme ends of the networking knowledge bell curve.

7. The more time and energy you spend documenting purchasing decisions to demonstrate institutional savings and fiscal responsibility, the more likely that your documentation will be returned to you for additional information and justification.

8. If a journal provider confirms your e-journal holdings prior to March 1, the holdings on March 1 will be exactly the opposite of what you were told.

9. Databases go down 10 minutes prior to an instruction session and 10 minutes after a class assignment is given out.

10. Once an electronic resources librarian, always an electronic resources librarian.