Good morning Jim and everyone, hope you’re all healthy and safeJ To start we’re being selective in what open offers we take advantage of. Not everything being offered is something our users would be interested in or need, so our subject librarians are applying the normal evaluation procedures to the offers. So that cuts down on how much we have to manage.
As far as actually managing the ones we do choose to take advantage of – we’re doing a couple of things. We use Libguides to manage our databases and present them in subject groupings to our users. For resources we don’t already have a customer-vendor relationship with we created a new category in our libguides called “temporary resources”, clever I know;) We’re treating them like we would a normal trial resource, just segregating them into their own category in the hopes our users will understand they’re temporary and we likely won’t have access to that content when the pandemic is over or the access ends.
For vendors we do have customer relationships currently set up we’re trying to just let the new content appear on our normal vendor site with the understanding that the non-subsrcibed/owned content will go away at some point in the future. De Gruyter, T&F, etc. are good examples – we just let the new content appear along with our normal content. If the vendor doesn’t let us do that or has a different platform for the gratis content we’re doing normal trial types of entries in libguides. (so far we haven’t needed to do trials, but the option is open if not used).
I have a full-time library associate who manages our database entries and the first couple of weeks were a real chore for him to keep up, thankfully it has slowed down now.
Happy Tuesday ya’all,
E
===============================================================================
Eric Elmore |
Electronic Resources, Discovery & Access Coordinator |
John Peace Library (JPL 04.03.16k) |
University of Texas at San Antonio |
One UTSA Circle |
San Antonio, TX 78249-0671 |
(O)210-458-4916/(F)210-458-7577 |
===============================================================================
From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2020 16:20:01 -0700
Over the past few weeks, academic libraries have been awash in generous offers of temporary free access to electronic information resources that otherwise come with a sturdy price. The complications are real: Can we hear on the list from anyone who has or knows of good models for handling this shower of benevolence.
The complications are real. First, there is little rhyme or reason or pattern to what is being offered. Some single publishers are offering a short extract of their publications list, others make their entire collections available, still others are aggregators with thousands and thousands of titles. Some offers are made to all; some are to specific institutions or specific consortia; others are to end-users only. Some are for longer and others for shorter periods of time. Second, it is difficult to know, without investing staff time, just what is contained in any given announced resource. Third, promoting these resources usefully to faculty and students would require some curation time at least to determine who might be interested in what and to display the possibilities intelligibly (with their end dates, which may change and will need to be updated). Fourth, there are numerous (and different) lists and places for announcements of such offerings. Fifth, some of the purpose of making this material freely available may come from vendors that are hoping to entice users to some products they've not seen before and send those users back to their librarians insisting -- when the free period is over -- that we absolutely must subscribe to some of them -- at a moment when prospects of budget flexibility are evaporating and cancelations are looming.
So my question is: how do we balance the impulse to make known with the real costs of doing so? At ASU, we have a "libguide" page listing resources we think possibly relevant to our users in alphabetical order: a dog's breakfast of a list. Our liaison librarians will call items they think highly relevant to faculty/discipline attention. Is there a better way to handle this?
With thanks for any enlightenment,
Jim O'Donnell
ASU