Managing Electronic Resources: New and Changing Roles for Libraries

Citation

Azzolini, J. (2010), "Managing Electronic Resources: New and Changing Roles for Libraries", The Electronic Library, Vol. 28 No. 4, pp. 626-627. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471011065454

Those in the information industry can justifiably boast of a working landscape with a bounty of material capabilities. Content is plentiful and ever growing. Storage capacity has become a minor issue. Today's technology advancements swiftly consolidate and improve upon yesterday's. Librarians, publishers, and aggregators have an abundance of data, networks, and hard drives to manipulate and apply. It is the coordinated integration of these vast physical resources that is lacking.

As Peter Webster consistently emphasizes in his Managing Electronic Resources: New and Changing Roles for Libraries, the elusive goal is a seamlessly unified information environment. By this he means a one‐stop interface where the universe of an institution's disparate resources can be browsed, searched, and accessed without the user becoming aware of (and frustrated by) the underlying dispersion. The communication protocols and crosswalks would do all the processing sight unseen. The user would experience only the integrated final result, without being exposed to any of the wizards' levers sticking out from behind the curtain, as it were.

For Webster such an objective issues almost axiomatically from the library's commitment to patron service. Put simply, given our technical reach, we have no legitimate excuse for failing to make this seamless environment a reality. Or at least we should have made a lot more progress towards its implementation than we already have.

To reach this end state, however, will require the persevering application of a materials management model that in the past was given only moderate professional attention. Fresh focus will be on metadata, hyperlinks, information interchange standards, and bibliographic data – the fundamental connective tissue without which the sought‐after resources themselves would soon be lost. When turned to with new purpose and diligence, such a model will entail different priorities for library work.

Webster is an experienced systems librarian at Saint Mary's University, Nova Scotia, Canada, and his knowledge of the current state of electronic resources management certainly shows. He ably surveys the ongoing attempts of academic libraries to improve integrated access to an ever‐widening array of information sources. He covers the accomplished steps as well as the shortcomings and unfinished business. In both practice and long‐term implications, such projects center on a much tighter collaboration between librarians, industry vendors, and content providers in the creation of single‐point resource repositories.

Managing Electronic Resources does an excellent job of summarizing the potential of library online public access catalogs (OPACs), federated searching, and link resolvers for bringing about unified discovery and access. As the author makes clear, the structure of the Web enables the widespread institution of distributed yet shared and dynamic services. This automated, networked sharing of information underlies the seamless user experience. The design and the tools are in place. What's missing is the interoperability between the many existing information systems, exchange standards, and platforms. In other words, what's needed is the will toward large‐scale cooperation and standardization on the part of the major players.

One criticism I have of this title is not directed at the author's coherence or his premises but to the book's editing. A typographical error here or there is not noteworthy. However, I couldn't help but notice a higher‐than‐usual number of errors, whether spelling, grammar, or typo. There's also the inclusion of an entire Haworth Press news release that runs for two pages and includes several paragraphs of the company's boilerplate “About..” self‐description. This, as well as a two‐page excerpt on web services from IBM's developerWorks site, seems like the work of an indifferent if not sloppy editorial hand.

You do not need to be a systems or technical services librarian to find this a rewarding book. Anyone with an interest or stake in the administrative dilemmas and possibilities of the contemporary information environment will see its obvious value. It was written in 2008, which makes its technical overview rather dated, but its big‐picture framework of what libraries can hope to achieve – and should be achieving – is not something that readily grows stale.