Electronic Resources and Collection Development

Citation

Tedd, L.A. (2003), "Electronic Resources and Collection Development", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 280-281. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330310500801

Each year the University of Oklahoma Libraries runs a seminar and the theme for 2002 was electronic resources and collection development. Nine key library leaders in the USA were invited to present papers and share their experiences on the ways in which electronic resources have impacted on collection development policies and practices in research libraries. These papers were co‐published simultaneously by Haworth Information Press in the Journal of Library Administration (Vol. 36, No. 3) and in the work being reviewed here. Sul H. Lee, the editor of this work, is also editor of the Journal of Library Administration and is the dean of university libraries for the University of Oklahoma.

The papers were presented by an impressive set of people. Jay Jordan, president and chief executive officer of OCLC Inc. provided a view of collection development from OCLC's global perspective of serving 41,000 libraries in 81 countries. He noted that two people outside librarianship had greatly influenced the direction of collection development: Vannevar Bush (with his ideas of users creating trails of knowledge along storable links in the 1940s) and Tim Berners‐Lee (the inventor of the Web in the early 1990s). Jennifer Younger, director of the university libraries of Notre Dame in Indiana described how electronic resources have overtaken print resources in their importance to research library collections, and to their users. However, based on statistics from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) for 1999‐2000, research libraries spend more dollars on buying print resources than on electronic resources. She opined that this will change very soon as research libraries drop subscriptions to print journals in favour of electronic journals. The Committee on Institutional Co‐operation (CIC) is a consortium of 12 major teaching and research universities in the Midwest of the US. Its Director, Barbara McFadden Allen, reported on the results received from a poll of administrators (deans, research vice presidents and provosts) in the 12 universities on issues related to the use of ICT in the improvement and transformation of library functions. Her final comments acknowledged the new services that are being developed as librarians link with new partners (IT divisions, presses, colleges) and she advised collection managers to “share your love and passion for your work with everyone. It is absolutely infectious and an essential ingredient to your ultimate success”. The key phrase “information ecology” was used to describe the contents of the fourth paper, presented by Dennis Dillon, head of collections and information resources at the University of Texas at Austin. Dillon used the metaphor of trying to fish for information in an electronic river that is part of a larger information ecosystem to explain how libraries, the Internet and e‐books are all inter‐related. The challenges faced, and the opportunities provided by the Web for librarians running services to the increasing numbers of distance learners were addressed by Anne Marie Casey, director of off‐campus library services at the Central Michigan University. With the huge rise in availability of e‐journals and e‐books, distance learning students, or anyone wishing to use library services without physically being in the library, now have incredible resources available from their home computers. However, the licences that the publishers provide for the libraries do not always favour distance learners. Indeed, in writing this review from home I was not able to view the electronic version of the Journal of Library Administration,although this was accessible to me from my office desk‐top computer. William Crowe, Spencer Librarian at the University of Kansas reflected on the importance of developing archival and special collections in the electronic age. The ARL is developing a scholars' portal and work on this major project was reported by Mary Jackson, the senior program officer for access services at the ARL. The general aim of this project is to “develop a suite of Web‐based tools and supporting services that will connect the higher education community as directly as possible with high quality information”. Sarah Thomas, Carl A. Kroch, university librarian at Cornell University, noted how collection development managers needed to think globally, but act locally, in providing electronic resources for their users. She advised librarians to “exercise leadership in expanding consistent, high quality information service through the development of collaboratively designed and built discipline‐based portals”. The final paper in Electronic Resources and Collection Development is by Kevin Guthrie, the president of JSTOR, the not‐for profit organisation that provides electronic access to libraries (and their users) in 66 countries to back issues of 218 journals in 24 academic disciplines. Many of the thousands of e‐journals that are currently available do not have the full archive of the journal accessible online. Guthrie's final advice was for the collection development community to address the very real challenge of electronic archiving in the future.

For anyone who does not have easy access (in print or electronic form) to the Journal of Library Administration this work offers a good insight, at a modest price, to the thoughts of some key figures in the US on the impact of electronic resources on collections development. In general, the papers seem to have been included as presented at the seminar i.e. a few “good mornings” and “thank yous” appear in the text. One puzzling issue for me though was that the final paper included some statistics for JSTOR as of “May 31 2002” when the seminar was held in March 2002!

A fairly detailed subject index to the papers is provided.