Collaborative Collection Development: Engaging Liaisons and Sharing Information

Librarians at the Bailey/Howe Library of the University of Vermont found themselves in a challenging situation at the start of the 2016 fiscal year. Facing nearly unprecedented budget reductions, librarians were forced to assess current collections and expenditures, and look ahead to an uncertain future. With a critical eye on existing collection development practices, Bailey/Howe librarians embraced a spirit of collaboration and piloted a new evaluation project which engaged librarian liaisons and supported a more informed renewal decision‐making process. The collection development librarian worked closely with the liaison program director to design a project which asked liaisons to rank the library’s electronic resources. The project required liaisons to provide feedback on existing resources in a holistic manner, which would be used by the collections team for renewal and cancellation decisions. This exercise provided the added opportunity for bridge‐building between library departments and improved transparency. Liaisons were asked to rank electronic resources in their subject areas and evaluate multidisciplinary resources as a group. The collection development librarian supplied liaisons with resource lists which contained current and historic pricing and usage information. Additionally, the collection development librarian met with liaisons to discuss usage statistics and developed a quick reference sheet about usage data for liaisons to consult as needed. Although budget reductions are an unfortunate, yet common, reality in most academic libraries, the approach taken by Bailey/Howe librarians laid a foundation for collaborative collection development and liaison engagement

Nuanced and Timely: Capturing Collections Feedback at Point of Use

While libraries are using increasingly sophisticated metrics to determine electronic resource’s usefulness, impact, and cost effectiveness, much of these data reflect past usage. More nuanced information is still needed to guide collection managers’ decisions about which content to purchase, borrow, or deselect. To fill this gap, librarians at Oregon State University Libraries and Press and The Ohio State University Libraries are testing the utility of a pop-up survey to gather patron feedback at their point of use. By building an open-source application that inserts a survey between a citation and the full text, librarians are better positioned to capture users’ real-time reasons for selecting a given resource. Usage data can then be linked to qualitative information through questions such as whether a resource is being used for research or teaching; whether a user considers the journal core to their project; or even, if the resource is being used in class or with a student. Inspired by MINES for Libraries® this application was created to understand e-resource use beyond clicks. The authors discuss how the application works, whether users responded to the pop-up survey as expected, and other preliminary findings

Development and construction of China

Libraries in China's higher education institutions have been developing in keeping pace with the flourishing development of China's higher education. This article aims to make an introduction to the construction of China's higher education libraries, especially the recent three decades' achievements since China's reform and opening-up in 1978. In this article, the authors draw a general picture of the development of libraries in China's higher education institutions, covering such eight aspects as management, types and positioning, organizational structure and personnel, expenditure and buildings, reader service, building and sharing of resources as well as automation system.</p

Establishing a resource center: A guide for organizations supporting community foundations

Maintaining a resource center such as a library is a central tasks of an association to serve its members, though one of the first to be neglected. WINGS-CF commissioned this guide to assist organizations supporting community foundations to review and organize their resource items, and to propose several classification systems / taxonomies

Digital Scotland, the relevance of library research and the Glasgow Digital Library Project

The Glasgow Digital Library (GDL) Project has a significance over and above its primary aim of creating a joint digital library for the citizens of Glasgow. It is also both an important building block in the development of a planned and co-ordinated 'virtual Scotland' and a rich environment for research into issues relevant to that enterprise. Its creation comes at a time of political, social, economic and cultural change in Scotland, and may be seen, at least in part, as a response to a developing Scottish focus in these areas, a key element of which is a new socially inclusive and digitally driven educational vision and strategy based on the Scottish traditions of meritocratic education, sharing and common enterprise, and a fiercely independent approach. The initiative is based at the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University alongside a range of other projects of relevance both to the development of a coherent virtual landscape in Scotland and to the GDL itself, a supportive environment which allows it to draw upon the research results and staff expertise of other relevant projects for use in its own development and enables its relationship to virtual Scotland to be both explored and developed more readily. Although its primary aim is the creation of content (based initially on electronic resources created by the institutions, on public domain information, and on joint purchases and digitisation initiatives) the project will also investigate relationships between regional and national collaborative collection management programmes with SCONE (Scottish Collections Network Extension project) and relationships between regional and national distributed union catalogues with CAIRNS (Co-operative Academic Information Retrieval Network for Scotland) and COSMIC (Confederation of Scottish Mini-Clumps). It will also have to tackle issues associated with the management of co-operation

Content and services issues for digital libraries

Describes the neglected area of e-collection building, on the taxonomy of e-collections and on the possible range of online services

Research, relativity and relevance : can universal truths answer local questions

It is a commonplace that the internet has led to a globalisation of informatics and that this has had beneficial effects in terms of standards and interoperability. However this necessary harmonisation has also led to a growing understanding that this positive trend has an in-built assumption that "one size fits all". The paper explores the importance of local and national research in addressing global issues and the appropriateness of local solutions and applications. It concludes that federal and collegial solutions are to be preferred to imperial solutions

Electronic Resources and Academic Libraries, 1980-2000: A Historical Perspective

published or submitted for publicatio

TERMS: Techniques for electronic resources management

Librarians and information specialists have been finding ways to manage electronic resources for over a decade now. However, much of this work has been an ad hoc and learn-as-you-go process. The literature on electronic resource management shows this work as being segmented into many different areas of traditional librarian roles within the library. In addition, the literature show how management of these resources has driven the development of various management tools in the market as well as serve as the greatest need in the development of next generation library systems. TERMS is an attempt to create a series of on-going and continually developing set of management best practices for electronic resource management in libraries

Future Directions for Identifying and Collecting Open Access Electronic Resources in the Humanities

This paper presents research on the collection status of four different open access scholarly electronic resources in the humanities - the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Perseus Digital Library, the William Blake Archive, and NINES - among 110 university library members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The necessity of collecting these resources not due to the building of a permanent collection of materials, which is likely impossible with the current structure of scholarly electronic resources; it is a user service: by the act of providing an access point to open access resources, libraries provide the scholarly and academic context for patron experience in a manner that open web search cannot. Current aggregations like DOAJ and OpenDOAR are assessed, along with electronic resource management tools, in order to make recommendations toward facilitating the collection of high quality open access resources in ARL online public access catalogs (OPAC)