E‐Serials Collection Management: Transitions, Trends, and Technicalities

Citation

Pehar, F. (2005), "E‐Serials Collection Management: Transitions, Trends, and Technicalities", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 No. 4, pp. 557-560. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510607534

Books on serial publications in library and information science are often written by theoreticians and educators. The publication of Haworth Press published within Haworth Series on Serials Librarianship and Continuing Resources publication series is primarily the result of practitioners' experiences. The intention of the book is to present the current library environment, publishers and all stakeholders in matters of production, purchasing, processing and presenting electronic journals, as well as to present electronic information resources in general. The book deals with contemporary trends and problems in managing electronic serial publications, although the published materials and bibliographic units are mostly “old”, from 2001 to 2002. It is designed for all professionals that are involved in managing e‐serials collections, but with particular emphasis on academic libraries, because most of the authors work in academic libraries and they derived their motivation and ideas from practice and experiences from their own institutions. Individual topics are discussed in 13 separate (independent) chapters that comprise the most important problems in e‐resources management in a logical sequence: from transitional problems to technical issues and possible solutions. Besides these topics, the book also deals with the concept of electronic book and with e‐resources access management in general. The authors of the papers are experts from North American or Australian universities and representatives of one subscription agent from Great Britain, which confirms the trend that has been particularly emphasized lately through increased cooperation between librarians and other professional communities involved in production and distribution of e‐resources.

David C. Fowler, coordinator for e‐resources from Iowa State University and editor of the issue presented here, was put before a demanding task of selecting the authors of the essays and creating a logic concept/framework of the publication. Editorial work was performed successfully by dividing the papers into three groups. The first group includes papers dealing with historical and transitional dimension of the occurrence of e‐serials, the second includes those dealing with contemporary trends, but they mostly refer to North American and Australian libraries, and finally, the last group of papers includes several studies on particular cases with detailed descriptions of the problems and technical solutions. D. Fowler is also the editor of a new edition in the same publication series named Usage statistics of e‐serials, which is due until April 2005.

The three introductory papers present a framework of the whole issue of e‐serials management. In the first paper Paul Harwood and Carolyn Alderson discuss the intermediating role of a subscription agent in resolving financial issues between the libraries and publishers. The authors evaluate the added value of the e‐journals collection management through a single interface offered by the agencies, then they discuss openly about the problems of negotiating about licensing terms in order to protect the interests of the libraries. Additionally, they give a preview of the main pricing models and competently analyze many other problems that occur in the world of e‐journals, which changed the traditional relationship between the libraries, agents and publishers. Among other things, the authors present the experiences of their own company in negotiating between the members (individual libraries) of British National Electronic Site License Initiative (NESLI) and the publishers.

In the second chapter Patricia A. Loghry employs librarians' point of view to discuss the advantages and challenges of using intermediars, primarily subscription agents in the process of providing access to e‐resources. She presents some practical experiences in advantages and disadvantages of cooperating with agents, publishers and third party providers (TTPs). In the conclusion the author says that only those agents that become metamediaries in the future will continue having a significant role in providing value added services to the libraries.

A four‐membered authors' team from Sam Houston State University presented the results of a telephone survey that included 92 North American libraries. The aim was to find out what these libraries were prepared to do in order to collect, provide access and catalog online resources (databases with its contents, e‐journals and document with whole texts and online resources).

In online environment it is usual to regulate the access to electronic information resources by providing username and password or restricting internet protocol (IP) address range and by requiring authorization by publishers, aggregators or TTPs. Both methods have certain comparative and real advantages, but also some disadvantages. The paper written by Lee Ann Howlett gives a preview of the development of standards and emergence of rules concerning e‐resources access restriction. A situation in which the publisher employs flexibility, depending on specific needs of particular libraries, in offering larger number of possibilities/options for accessing e‐journals should be a guiding light in resolving the problem of access. Unfortunately, the paper does not deal with some of the very important and widely used access management systems like Eduserv Athens access management system that is used by over 2,000 organizations, especially in Great Britain, and Shibbolteh authorization standard, based on standard SAML protocol, which has become standard at academic and research institutes included in Internet2 Program.

Improved cooperation between libraries in 1990s, incorporation of particular interests and collections into larger units of long‐range are a dominant trend in the whole world, particularly in academic libraries that have revitalized a phenomenon known as library consortia. Cooperation between the libraries had existed long before the emergence of e‐journals, but the libraries' need to reduce the purchasing costs, increase resource sharing, stimulate the development of quality services and upgrade collections resulted in unprecedented cooperation between libraries. Miriam Childs and Wil Weston used the example of Ohio LINK network, which includes over 70 private and public institutions of the state of Ohio, in order to point out the advantages of membership in some of the modern consortia whose primary purpose is to be cost‐effective and to increase the standards to information access. Besides the evident advantages of the consortia, the paper also discusses some problems that are imminent to most “super‐institutional” formations like consensus‐building process, conflict of priorities, distribution of responsibilities and costs, etc.

In chapter on usage data of e‐journals and other electronic products Joanna Duy gives a preview of guidelines (JSTOR, ICOLC), standards (revised ANSI/NISO Z39.7‐1995, EQUINOX), main initiatives/projects (E‐metrics, PALS, COUNTER), particularly from the sphere of academic libraries, measuring usage frequency and the most frequently used methods, their advantages and drawbacks.

Barbara Schader discusses the cases of claiming or, to be more precise, troubleshooting in e‐journals and this paper is the first of several papers that deal with examples from practice. Ebe Kartus and Susan Clark discuss the problem of making and maintaining e‐reserves collections, or, as they are usually called, “digital readings collections” at Deakin University in Australia, while their American colleagues from the University of Oklahoma and Utah State University deal with solving the problems of access and e‐resource management by developing their own systems and databases (LORA and USU e‐journal collection).

And now the eternal chicken‐and‐egg question. Is e‐book a device or is it just a way of presenting contents? The editor also decided to include a paper by Vivian Lewis in which the author gives a preview of the most important e‐book technologies, definitions, historical development, ways of implementing e‐books into library collections, ways of determining the price and many other issues related to challenges that the publishers, authors, libraries and users are faced with after the emergence of new ways of contents distribution.

The problem of open access of the scientific community to peer‐reviewed journal papers, but also to preprints is discussed by Gerry McKiernan. He discusses in detail budapest open access initiative (BOAI) for creating the so‐called “new generation of journals” and self‐archiving digital copies of (prepublications) publications by authors themselves, as well as interoperable open archive initiative (OAI) framework that is open to all data providers and/or service providers. Accepting open access concept and self‐archiving does not only depend on improving the archiving program and retrieval, but also on the level of acceptance by all stakeholders.

This book can be recommended to all those interested in e‐serial publications, particularly to those that are interested in concrete “practical” examples from e‐resource collections management. Authors' provenance trends and techniques in resolving the problems of e‐serials management presented in this book are more familiar to the professionals from North America and Australia, particularly to academic librarians, because most of the authors in this book are academic librarians and their research topics are also derived from their practice rather than from the rest of the world and non‐academic libraries. However, this fact does not diminish the value of the book as a quality source that presents the main concepts, trends and possible solutions to e‐information resources management.