Organization Monkey

in the last 3 years of my work experience i’ve brought an e-resources management system to fruition, started a perpetual access inventory project, am in the middle of a thorough review of license agreements, tried a new usage statistics reporting system, and organized our order records for maximum ease for other kinds of reporting. dude, i’m tired. i’m also wondering what happens next. we’re *so close* to having a functional, easy workflow with quality people appropriately trained to do the heavy load of work required for the management of e-resources. what happens then? what will we be prompted to think about when the big technical problems have been resolved? how have you addressed this at your own institution? have you been able to think about this at all?

the e-resources world is a fragile ecosystem because we rely so heavily on a variety of data sources (e-journal and e-book MARC records likely come from different suppliers, holdings information from possibly another supplier) and services (openURL, statistics reporting), and having those merge seamlessly with our e-resources management system relies on quality metadata. if any of those things goes wrong, if one piece doesn’t connect properly, our ecosystem is quickly thrown into disarray. when the processes are working well, which is happening more often than not as vendors and suppliers are getting used to providing data in standardized ways, i feel pretty optimistic about where e-resources technical requirements are headed. are you too? can you see beyond the realm of our current technical successes and limitations to think about what happens next?

I’ve been waiting for this moment to happen for 3 years, since i first began working at this library. We’ve finally e-tipped. E-tipping is when a library has enough electronic resources in its collection that the distinction between print or electronic isn’t as important as the content the resource holds. The process of e-tipping is as elegant as it sounds, kind of like cow-tipping or knocking over a pitcher of milk; everything’s going along fine, then there’s a jolt, a slow-motion flail, then BAM.

I’m the first electronic resources librarian my library has ever had and some of the concepts I brought with me were obviously strange to the library. We’ve been doing some major thinking and talking about e-content since I arrived, getting our staff and librarians comfortable and familiar with using electronic resources. Obviously not all of our staff are newbies in this arena, but building confidence to a certain level has taken some doing. We’ve been working steadily at it as a team, committing to an ERM, and then implementing all the features.

How did I know we had e-tipped? For about a month I had been steadily adding usage rights/restrictions into the license portion of the ERM — the last feature of the ERM to be implemented — so that information about the ways patrons can use the material gets filtered down to the e-journal title level, the streaming video level, and the e-book level. One of our librarians didn’t like the way the information was displaying, and overnight it seemed that everyone in the library had Questions About E-resources. They were vocal that it was very important that we make access to our licensed resources as seamless as possible. In other words, after years of keeping e-resources separate (on a separate page on the website, even) they wanted the e-resources to look and act just like any other library resource.

As I answered the Questions I mentally cheered to myself, “We’re there! We should be celebrating!” It’s really hard to celebrate a cultural shift like this. It’s hard enough to even explain a cultural shift like this. I know it happened, though, and I guess this blog post is celebration enough.

I wonder if the readers of this blog have experienced something similar at your institutions? Have you e-tipped? Do write and let me know.

I was recently in Austin, TX for a conference and made a trip afterwards to visit my childhood friends still living in my home town of Galveston. We had recently reconnected via facebook and it seemed like a perfect time for a visit; the last time I had been on the island was in 2006. The first thing we did as we drove over the causeway was to go to look at my childhood home. Shockingly, it wasn’t there anymore. Hurricane Ike came to the island in September 2008 and washed it away. Google maps street view has preserved a view of it, though (photographed in December 2007). Look how small and cute it was.

It was strange to drive down the street and see that there was just a blank spot where my house had been, with just a bit of front walkway and driveway left. We stood there in the empty lot for a long time, just trying to make sense of it.

There is a sadness to the island that lingers, and I’m still processing that. There were good things to come from the visit to Texas though, especially reconnecting with a bunch of old friends. Texans are a strong lot, and I don’t think it was a mistake that the morning we left Austin and drove to Galveston I saw this sign:

When a major content provider goes down, social networks light up with alerts from people noticing the problem, cries of alarm from students trying to finish last-minute projects, and reports from librarians of calls with database sales representatives with the story of why the resources are down. Earlier this week our main database provider, EBSCO, went offline unexpectedly due to an error on their system back end. Curiously missing from the usual network of communication was any contact from the provider. Not a peep, not on twitter, facebook, or e-mail.

From a library perspective, when a major content provider goes down, it is a legitimate disaster. For electronic resources librarians, all the usual work stops and crisis management mode takes over. At my institution we alert all library staff via e-mail of the problem to let them know we are aware of the problem and are monitoring it, we update our public services wiki so that staff sitting at service points like the circulation desk and reference desk are aware. As we get more information we send out follow-up e-mails to our library staff. When the problem is resolved we alert them that way, too. During the day we follow twitter, facebook, and the lsw page on friendfeed to see what other librarians are saying, to get any hints of information that may be helpful to our patrons. Unfortunately for all of us, we did it all this week without the help of EBSCO.

I’ve sent a note to our database sales rep outlining what I’d like to see when e-resource problems arise, and she graciously acknowledged the note noting that she would forward to her director for consideration. In the meantime, however, damage has been done. Choice tweets were plucked from the twittersphere, highlighting the frustration of library patrons trying to access the downed resources, collated at http://storify.com/jeremygsnell/ebsco-the-reckoning. What a shame that we weren’t able to respond to their concerns with any real information about the problem. I wonder if a degree of trust patrons have with their libraries has been broken as a result of this.

We’ve taken the opportunity here to examine our own disaster planning process for when something like this happens again. There are a variety of options for communicating outages and problem resolutions. I wonder which of these your institution uses:
e-mail to library staff
e-mail to university
e-mails to faculty liaisons
blog post
note on the main library web page
alerts in the ILS
facebook
twitter

When I’m back from ER&L I’ll be drafting a communication plan for how the library will respond when an individual resource goes down as well as when a suite of resources goes down. Do you already have such a document? If so, please consider sharing.

inspired by http://ff.im/SKQm4.

Libraries have been in the process of weeding print journal titles in favor of the e-format for years now. Some libraries are using their JSTOR backfile collections as their guides for which print to discard; if the title is in JSTOR a library will withdraw the print from its collection. This seems an odd choice to me because libraries don’t own the e-content, it’s a subscription.

You can argue that in principle a library owns the content because it paid a collection archive fee when it began the subscription, but to access that owned content libraries have to continue to pay an annual access fee. If the library stops paying the access fee JSTOR promises to keep the collection for you, but they’re not going to let you see it. They do promise that if you stop paying the access fee for a while and then start up the subscription again later they won’t make you pay the archive fee again (see 7.1 Archiving of Back Issues near the bottom of http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp). How nice of them?

In essence libraries don’t own JSTOR content in a “gimme it now” kind of way, like e-journal publishers tend to provide. A perpetual access license through an e-journal publisher usually provides a clause with approval to make your own archival copy. Sure, you’ll have to store that content locally, but you can have it and know you’re holding something at the end of the day.

Has your library withdrawn print because you have the e-format of the same content via a JSTOR backfile collection? How have you reconciled this “owned, sort of” situation? When you made your withdrawal decisions did you know that JSTOR wasn’t owned content like our other usual e-journal packages?