Building an Electronic Resource Collection

Citation

Eaton, J. (2003), "Building an Electronic Resource Collection", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 37 No. 1, pp. 66-67. https://doi.org/10.1108/0033033031046053

The licensing of electronic resources – or “datasets”, as this book describes them – now plays an ever more dominant role in libraries’ collection development activities. However, datasets pose their own management challenges in the key life‐cycle processes of evaluation, procurement, deployment and maintenance. Stuart Lee’s book aims to help address these challenges in the face of an ever‐proliferating array of electronic services. In one respect it offers a basic primer on dataset collection development for the professional or student reader. In another, it usefully serves as a benchmark for those with practical experience who may wish to review their own policies, processes and performance against the precepts, case studies and check‐lists provided.

The author’s extensive experience of licensing a variety of datasets in his post at Oxford University gives this book a stamp of authority that will be welcomed by practitioners at all stages of their careers. However, it has been written with a wide potential audience in mind, with care taken not to focus exclusively on the particular needs of the UK higher education sector, but rather to address the universal nature of the challenges and the techniques that can be developed to tackle them. Lee begins by defining “datasets” and establishing his axiomatic principle that any electronic collection development process must directly relate to and interact with its print collection development counterpart. The next chapter, entitled: What is on offer? The Electronic Resources Landscape provides a clear and extensive survey of exactly what is “out there”, touching on the problems of reliably defining different datasets categories. A separate chapter is devoted to the highly topical and inherently problematic topics of e‐journals and e‐books – problematic principally because of their long‐established print analogues. The remaining half of the book is given over to a series of blueprints and check‐lists for dataset assessment, acquisition, delivery and maintenance.

The organisation of the book into an initial survey section followed by a more action‐oriented approach also includes short summaries at the end of each chapter, which make it suitable for quick reference as well as more extended reading. Selective use of brief “example” box‐outs and case histories illustrates and reinforces the argument. The inclusion of a select glossary is a welcome touch, as the electronic resources landscape is itself full of jargon terms that frequently require explanation or amplification in their context. The book is rounded out with a good index and a select bibliography including many recent Web‐hosted documents. There is emphasis throughout that successful electronic collection building requires the interlocking of both tactical and strategic approaches to ensure, for example, that any stakeholder (such as a department funding a specific dataset) is always in a position to examine overall collection development policy. This becomes especially significant when dataset funding responsibilities become devolved and fragmented across organisations.

A great virtue of this book is the author’s adherence to clarity in writing style and organisation of this material, which effectively builds the reader’s confidence when engaging with the issue of dataset management for real. The section on authentication in the chapter reviewing the electronic resources landscape is particularly helpful in identifying the predominant access control techniques and explaining their respective strengths and shortcomings. However, it is perhaps a pity that this section does not (as others do) point to the work of others (such as Clifford Lynch, omitted from the bibliography) who have explored authentication issues in more extensive and authoritative detail in recent years. One other criticism of structure is that, despite the author’s belief in the inter‐relation of electronic to print collection development, it is only relatively late on (Chapter 4, page 83) that the fundamental difference between the two is stated. Because electronic materials are normally always licensed as opposed to purchased, datasets inherently pose complex issues of access and use. The subsequent section on licensing placed midway in the book is admirably written, but could perhaps have been more helpfully brought forward than being so deferred.

These minor criticisms aside, Building an Electronic Resource Collection can be strongly recommended as an important guide to a still‐evolving and major area of library and information management. Its clarity, structure and, above all, the quality of the practical advice it contains will give this title a deservedly wide appeal to the novice and the experienced professional alike.