E‐serials Collection Management: Transitions, Trends and Technicalities

Citation

Hardy, G. (2005), "E‐serials Collection Management: Transitions, Trends and Technicalities", Library Management, Vol. 26 No. 8/9, pp. 541-542. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120510631918

Most Australian and New Zealand libraries have evolved an electronic resources/data sets librarian position, typically filled by an astute librarian who has developed the specialised, detailed knowledge of this complex area of library service provision. For them this work probably contains little that they would not know. Although published in 2004, most of the articles seem to be of 2002 vintage. The delay is telling in this rapidly evolving area. Since 2002, there have been a number of key developments in the e‐resources arena, including Open URL, Federated Search, serials management solutions like Ebsco A‐Z and Serials Solutions, and the emerging electronic records management packages.

This work is a collection of 13 chapters from a wide range of predominantly North American contributors, although there is one excellent chapter from Ebe Kartus and Susan Clarke on Electronic Reserve at Deakin University which would be essential reading for any library which has not yet taken that step. Some degree of unevenness is inevitable in any collection but there is plenty of valuable knowledge sharing in this book on what for most of us is still an arcane and daunting area of library practice. For libraries at the early stages of the great transition from print to electronic, this is a useful resource book and starting point. For those libraries further down the track, the book gives a sense of how far and how fast we have come.