They never told me in library school that I would need to be a business and economics genius. They never told me in library school that I would need to be a computer programming genius. They never told me in library school that I would need to be a copyright lawyer. They never told me in library school that I would need to be a designing and layout genius. They didn't tell me these things because the information world was a different place when I went to library school.
But if they had, they would have been liars. You don't have to have years of experience in economics, programming, copyright law, or design work to collect materials in electronic format. You just need to have an email network of similarly minded colleagues and access to Internet web-sites.
In this talk I'm going to be dispensing a mixture of practical advice and theoretical mumbo-jumbo. I hope that it will be fairly clear when I'm doing which.
The greatest difficulty in making pronouncements on "how Chemistry Librarians should collect electronic resources" has to do with the way every institution is evolving different policies and procedures to deal with them. There is an enormous range of practice, with sometimes the institution telling the selector that "everything is in your lap" and other institutions telling their selectors that "we don't want you touching anything to do with an e-resource".
Today I am going to talk mostly about the "everything is in your lap" approach, partly because it means you have to know more. In addition, just because your administration is telling you that they don't want you to touch e-resources, doesn't mean that there aren't aspects of the e-resource process you definitely need to be able to sink your teeth into.
ITEM # 1 DON'T GO IT ALONE. And at this point, I mean within your institution. Most academic librarians are going to have colleagues to turn to. In the large institutions, that could mean a Physics Librarian, or a Medical Librarian, who just happen to have patrons who have been pestering them for years to duplicate something in your library. With electronic resources, location becomes much less of a factor in ownership, and you not only have the opportunity to share costs, you are suddenly put in a position where what you buy MUST be coordinated with your colleagues, so they can announce it, teach it, and use it.
ITEM #2 CHOICES, CHOICES. Guess, what? E-resources come in multiple flavors. You can have strawberry, lemon, grape. O.K. So it's not as delicious as that. Deciding if you want your e-resources flavored OVID, or FIRSTSEARCH, or SILVERPLATTER, or EBSCO, or BLACKWELL's, or OCLC, can be as heartrending as staring at a bowl of jelly beans, knowing that you are only allowed to taste one flavor. On the other hand, having 30 different journal publishers producing e-journals in 30 different ways, requires you and your users to remember 30 different browse modes, 30 different search structures, and so on.
Of course, it's not just as simple as finding out if a resource you are interested in is available via some 3rd party interfaces, or pushing for the publisher to cooperate with your favorite vendor interfaces if it is not. Are you willing to pay more to get the conformity? What if you lose a little functionality to get your product through a 3rd party? Are you now willing to pay a little more to get less functionality? What if your consortia decides to go with a different interface provider? Ahh ... the choices!
ITEM #3 LICENSING, CONTRACTS, AND LEGALESE. Learning to understand license language, highlight problems, and negotiate changes in a license agreement is something that can be the subject of day-long seminars. If you are given responsibility for final license negotiations, I highly recommend attending a workshop of that nature, or alternatively educating yourself by examining a useful resource such as the LibLicense web-site. What I want to emphasize today, is that even if you are NOT given responsibility for final license negotiations, or worse, are told by your institution to keep your nose out it, you STILL need to understand what is in the license to a certain degree.
Most licenses will specify what authorized users are allowed to do, and often what the institution's responsibilities are to enforce the terms of the license. I've seen licenses that go so far as to specify that only a single person at an institution can be the contact. You as the front-line librarian need to know at the very least what is in the license, and if at all possible need to be able to say what you can and cannot support in implementation. This assessment should feed the license negotiation. One of my nightmares is of a well-intended lawyer who has fought the good fight to get a contract's license terms to reflect proper indemnification for your institution, and the proper adjudication venue, and all those other pieces that mean a lot to your overall institution. But this same lawyer has read right over the terms that say that end-users are not permitted to download or print, and is ready to sign off on it. So read the licenses for your materials if you can possibly get your hands on them, before you pass them along for review by the group or person responsible for final license negotiation. INCLUDE notes on issues of concern to you.
Don't panic. Reading licenses is a bit like learning the MARC field tag codes. The more you look at them, the more you shock yourself by understanding what you are looking at. It gets to the point where nasty terms stand out as if they are thumbing their noses at you.
ITEM #4 WORKING THROUGH TECHNICAL NEEDS. If your institution has a well-organized and integrated technical systems group, you're pretty lucky. If they've already created a list of technical issues that need to be considered with any electronic resource purchase, kiss their feet. The problem with considering technical needs when purchasing an electronic resource, is that the issues change -- almost daily. Let's take for example authentication. Many large sites like to use IP authentication, because they then do not have to manage passwords and IDs for many authorized users. Other sites prefer password authentication, because their users move around a lot and may not be at an institution's workstation. Let's make the example more specific. On day 1, the recommendation of a large site systems staff is for IP authentication. On day 2, they hear through the grapevine of their colleagues about a password scripting program that will allow them to filter out users by IP address and supply a password behind the scenes to the vendor. They test it out on day 3, and all of a sudden on day 4, the recommendation has changed to: "we prefer IP authentication, but we can handle passwords if we need to now." Moral: Stay in touch, and don't assume a blessed thing.
Here's a list of items that you will probably need to stay on top of with your systems team.
ITEM #5 TAKING ADVANTAGE OF TRIALS. Most major vendors will enable free trials for their products. Many small vendors will at least provide a short time of free access as they bring a product online for the first time. There is almost no way to properly evaluate a product without at least several weeks to wander through all of its idiosyncrasies. Having a vendor demo the product for you, or wandering through it once yourself, is NOT the same as hitting on it, off and on over days or weeks, and having patrons actually try to use the product to do research. It's amazing how many annoying little quirks will show up once you've purchased a product, even if you HAVE trialed it.
ITEM #6 COMPLETING ACQUISTIONS/CATALOGING PROCESSES. Don't forget in the midst of all your sales conference calls-- and license negotiations-- that at some point, you do need to hand off the product to go formally through an acquisitions procedure. This could simply be creating an order, pay, receipt record on your acquisitions system, but believe me, you need that record in place when the invoice arrives! Alternatively, many institutions have a complicated acquisitions process for e-resources like running down an elaborate checklist and review process. Also don't forget that you want the resource cataloged! You have been telling your patrons for years to look in the catalog to find things. Don't confuse them now!
Having discussed the practical, let's talk a little bit about the impractical. Excuse me, I mean the bigger picture. Much of the scenery that I'll just briefly touch on here has been or will be covered in more depth by my fellow speakers. I want to mention them in the context of my own talk, to emphasize the fact that the practice of collecting electronic resources should not be divorced from the philosophy and environment of electronic collecting.
So while you think about the practicality of buying a particular e-resource at a particular price with particular license restrictions, and with particular technical implications, here's the other aspects that enrich that decision: Long-term Access and Control, Pricing Models, Scholarly Communication, Keeping up with the Changes, and Measuring Use.
Let's start with long-term access and control. It should be someone's job to think about issues like: what is the true importance of a resource, and the implications of buying it, or loading it locally, or licensing it short term. What about archiving it, or buying perpetual access to it. Do you just want to link to it a resource or mirror it. Translation: this is the ownership vs. access issue muddied by all the technical possibilities of a digital environment. Maybe it isn't your job to think about this mess, but no one else can really answer questions like this for a specific chemistry product except the chemistry librarian.
Long term access can mean continued access after cancellation (it can mean other things too). When you buy a resource you need to think about how long you want to continue to have it available. There is no need to panic. Most institutions have already made this decision already. You have your "discard after 2 years" titles. You have your "keep older years in microform only" titles, and you have your "keep forever and buy replacements if you have to" titles.
Here's some thoughts to chew on:
Pricing vs. budgets/models, etc. Those of you already digging into the electronic collecting world, will recognize that the marketplace for electronic journals is still defining itself. There are as many pricing models being tested as there are creative people to come up with them. We've got prices based on user populations, we got prices based on print equivalents, we've got prices based on packages, we've got prices based on historical purchasing patterns, we've got prices based on budgets, and we've got those ever-confusing consortial deals. Then there's the pricing based on square footage of the library times the square root of the departmental FTE plus the salary of the top five institution officers divided by p. This last one was just to see if any of you are still awake.
Why you shouldn't panic: the marketplace for electronic abstracting and indexing tools has become relatively stable. The balance of print and e-purchases has calmed down, with a slow, but steady, decrease in print subscriptions in favor of their e-equivalents. This has happened over roughly ten years, if we count from the beginning of stand alone CD-ROM databases. It will happen faster for the journal world, partly because the indexing tools are already there, and these will encourage use of e-journals because of the capability of linking directly to articles.
Why you should panic: while the market is stabilizing, there will be a demand for both print and e-resources. Unless you have an enormous and flexible budget (and who does?) you are going to have unhappy patrons who are either forced to move into the digital world faster than they are comfortable (if you switch to e-only) or are held back from using all the capabilities of the new digital world (if you move cautiously into e-only).
Then there are the hybrid digital collections that are available for purchase. These pull together a bunch of e-resources, index them minimally, and sell them to you for cheaper prices. Are you willing to give up selection control to acquire these at a lesser price?
And then there are our friends, the consortia. Even for those consortia that allow flexible membership participation for each resource, there is still a loss of control to gain price advantages.
Are you willing to try a transaction based pricing scheme? Yes, it works well for lesser used titles. Will you know which titles to subscribe to and which to buy articles from as needed?
Do you have any idea how your users will react to a world where browsing now means TOCs delivered to their mailbox? And searching means choosing between the fulltext search capabilities provided across your journal collection by an aggregator or instead going into a subject based A&I resource which has a controlled subject vocabulary?
How fast will patrons move into a world of information units instead of journals, a world of knowledge environments instead of books.
Are you prepared to review your resources after 1 year, 2 years, 5 years? The world changes pretty quickly these days. Are you (and your users) going to be willing to switch interfaces, if the features are better, or the license use terms are better, or a different interface/vendor offers archiving. How will we keep tabs on whether a publisher is publishing articles as soon as possible? You can't claim late issues, but can you keep track of submission-to-publication timing? If "issues" are no longer published, will you have build into your license the number of articles to be produced a year, so that you know that you're getting your money's worth?
Dealing with usage. How will you know to switch from subscription access to transaction access for a particular journal? Admittedly our current methods for tracking print usage are very crude. But, some useful information can be extracted and assessed by people who are used to considering all the implications of differences in time of year, impacts of intense research projects, different use patterns in different disciplines, and all the other caveats that usually accompany statistical analyses.
By this point in the game, most selectors are breathless. Trying to fit all of the non-conforming resources into a workflow that is already overcrowded can be daunting. Let me add one more straw to the camel's back. Do we want to react or pro-act? To look for things we don't have and which aren't available and push for them? "EEK," you say as you think about all the already published things that are available that you haven't had a chance to tackle.
The best thing that I can tell you is that "YOU ARE NOT ALONE." Have you noticed how many library conference sessions are devoted to some aspect of dealing with digital materials these days? There are colleagues out there who are building their policies and procedures, and the more who do so, the better the groundwork for other people who are joining the game now.
I'm providing a URL for a fairly arbitrary list of websites that I found useful as Yale tried to build a coherent selection procedure for networked resources, and that I added to as I was trying to decide what to say today. May you find them useful.