Abstract

Outsourcing the management of electronic journals has significantly reduced the autonomy academic libraries have over their collections’ metadata, as well as the ways in which that data is collected, organized, and made available to the library. However, the ephemerality of this metadata makes quality control burdensome and costly on the corporate end and necessitates ongoing title tracking and maintenance for the library. As a result, the quality of data in outsourced knowledge bases is often inversely proportional to the library’s tolerance of “bad data,” as well as its inability to tell the difference. This session demonstrates how an MS Access database was constructed that integrates data from various sources in order to reconcile ejournal and e‐book title lists, process yearly subscription changes, and manage the distribution of work to departmental staff. As such, it both serves as a reconciliation tool with administrative functions for linking and displaying summary data about subscribed packages, and it provides a workflow tool with a user interface designed for staff to easily manage ongoing subscription maintenance. Electronic resources are dynamic by nature, and a management system should have the ability to track and respond to these changes. This easily maintained tool offers a model for managing change across the interrelated applications that manage electronic resources.

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Outsourced and Overwhelmed: Gaining a Grasp on Managing Electronic Resources

Outsourcing the management of electronic journals has significantly reduced the autonomy academic libraries have over their collections’ metadata, as well as the ways in which that data is collected, organized, and made available to the library. However, the ephemerality of this metadata makes quality control burdensome and costly on the corporate end and necessitates ongoing title tracking and maintenance for the library. As a result, the quality of data in outsourced knowledge bases is often inversely proportional to the library’s tolerance of “bad data,” as well as its inability to tell the difference. This session demonstrates how an MS Access database was constructed that integrates data from various sources in order to reconcile ejournal and e‐book title lists, process yearly subscription changes, and manage the distribution of work to departmental staff. As such, it both serves as a reconciliation tool with administrative functions for linking and displaying summary data about subscribed packages, and it provides a workflow tool with a user interface designed for staff to easily manage ongoing subscription maintenance. Electronic resources are dynamic by nature, and a management system should have the ability to track and respond to these changes. This easily maintained tool offers a model for managing change across the interrelated applications that manage electronic resources.