Selection and Presentation of Commercially Available Electronic Resources
Timothy D. Jewell
University of Washington Libraries
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Selection Policies, Guidelines, and Plans
3. Organization and Roles [section to be added]
4. Purchasing Strategies, Consortia, and Publishing Initiatives
5. Licensing Practices
6. Web Presentation Strategies
7. User Support
8. Evaluation and Usage Information [section to be added]
9. Procedure Streamlining and Support Systems
10. Summary and Conclusions [section to be edited and expanded]
11. References
12. Appendices
A. Commercial E-Resource Good Practice Candidates and Web Sites
B. Consortial Purchasing of Major Databases and E-Journal Packages
C. Functions and Data Elements for Managing Electronic Resources
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Introduction
As is true of the other two essays in this series, the goal of this one is to review and discuss
practices that various libraries have put in place for developing their digital collections – and
especially those practices that stand out in some way as “good or best.” Here the focus is on
selection and implementation of “third party” electronic resources that libraries spend their
resource dollars to acquire.
This category of resources is very broad – perhaps impossibly so – since even the crudest
inventory would have to include such tools as indexing and abstracting databases, electronic
journals, hybrid “aggregator” databases that combine features of both, full-text encyclopedias
and similar products, historical full-text collections, and now electronic books. Most ARL
libraries now have well-established websites, on which are typically to be found extensive lists
of widely accessible electronic resources. From the imagined perspective of a hypothetical
library user of ten years ago the extent, richness, and variety of these offerings must be striking
(and a little bit daunting), since it is common to find hundreds of databases, and literally
thousands of electronic journals, on the larger ARL member library web sites.
It is hardly surprising that spending on electronic resources has been gradually rising for over a
decade. Among ARL libraries, expenditures for these products and services has increased from
3.6 % of resources budgets in 1992-1993 (or about $172,000) to over 10% (an average of about
$742,000) in 1998-1999. Preliminary data for 1999-2000 indicate that the long-term growth
trend in spending is continuing, and many suspect that it will increase more rapidly over the next
few years as more and more material becomes available on the web, established companies
modify their offerings to emphasize electronic access, and new companies begin to offer a range
of electronic resources directly to users – thus possibly becoming serious competitors to libraries,
or at least occupying a “new competitive space.” (Hughes 2000). The rapid development of the
Internet, followed by the dramatic emergence of the Web, has clearly been among the more
obvious drivers of recent growth in these expenditures. Although reliance on “linear models” of
change may be risky (Brown and Duguid 2000) it does seem quite safe to assume that in another
ten years the typical ARL library will be spending considerably more for electronic resources
and access than they do now, and will have plunged much further ahead into an “electronic
future” -- though it may hard to guess at more than the contours of that future.
It may seem surprising that the subset of ARL libraries that also belong to the Digital Library
Federation – which have typically taken strong leadership positions in developing digitized
collections and thus might be expected to have made more radical moves in acquiring access to
fee-based electronic resources – appear to spend roughly the same proportion of their materials
budgets on electronic resources as do other ARL libraries. For example, Table 1 shows that
while the median percentage spent by ARL libraries on electronic resources was 10.18%, the
corresponding percentage for reporting DLF member libraries was actually a little less than that:
9.65%. Interestingly, in 1998-1999 several non-DLF ARL libraries spent more as a percentage
of their materials budgets than did the DLF libraries at the high end of either measure.
Nevertheless, Table 1 also shows that reporting DLF member libraries, as a group, invested
significantly more money on average in electronic resources (about $1.1 million) than did the
typical ARL library.
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Table 1. DLF Member Libraries’ Expenditures for Electronic Resources
(As reported to ARL for 1998-1999)
Reporting DLF Institutions
E-resource
Expenditures
California, Berkeley
Columbia
Cornell
Emory
Harvard
Illinois, Urbana
Indiana
Library of Congress
Michigan
Minnesota
New York Public Library
North Carolina State
Penn State
Pennsylvania
Princeton
Southern California
Tennessee
Texas
Virginia
Yale
Total
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
$
305,351
1,105,102
1,178,866
1,034,488
2,524,677
874,660
667,316
493,625
1,941,139
1,242,732
741,819
1,309,592
1,502,722
1,295,109
973,829
847,916
460,314
1,795,329
658,635
997,000
21,950,221
Average
ARL Average
$
$
1,097,511
742,598
Median
ARL Median
$
$
1,015,744
645,495
Percent of
resources
2.37%
9.23%
10.61%
11.94%
11.89%
9.26%
7.28%
5.67%
12.32%
12.50%
6.75%
17.08%
11.76%
13.33%
9.15%
10.04%
8.10%
17.66%
8.19%
5.65%
9.65%
10.18%
If DLF libraries are not spending a larger portion of their resources budgets for electronic
resources, the fact that they are spending larger amounts of money does suggest that they share
problems of operational scale.
Perspectives and Definitions
Most readers of this essay will be well acquainted with developments in electronic resources and
– given the levels of expenditures just sketched -- will appreciate the breadth of the topic in the
DLF context, the great diversity among electronic resources currently offered for sale or
subscription and of interest to its members, and the amazing rapidity with which relevant
developments continue to take place. Such readers may well wonder whether it is possible to
identify “best practices” in this area, or to do much more than offer a “time slice” that will
quickly be outdated. Perhaps above all, they may wonder what level of treatment “granularity”
for such a broad topic might be both achievable and useful?
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The research that I have done for this project has led me to conclude that – whether or not
examples of “best practices” are readily identifiable -- there are plenty of good, interesting, and
even inspiring practices and documents that can be adapted by other libraries to their local
situations. Since locating them wasn’t always easy, I suspect they may have had little impact
beyond their local settings. With this in mind, I have tried to select and organize pointers to
documents and websites that strike me (as a fellow “practitioner) as especially useful, interesting,
or illustrative of one thing or another.
In line with the goals of the DLF initiative, I have tried to pay particular attention to practices
that I feel help foster “sustainability and scalability” – though the idea of “sustainability” merits
some discussion in the context of commercially available electronic resources. The first meaning
that many librarians will now associate with the word relates to the economics of the “system” of
scholarly communication or publishing. For example, the “Tempe Principles” adopted in May
2000 by a group librarians, university administrators, and others states that the “ . . . current
system of scholarly publishing has become too costly for the academic community to sustain.”
<reference> This may well be the single most important “sustainability” question, and a variety
of approaches and strategies (such as consortial buying arrangements and such initiatives as
SPARC <reference>) have recently been introduced and will be discussed. These appear to
merit “global” treatment as “best practices” – but they are fairly few in number, and their longterm effects are unknown.
As important as such initiatives are to the marketplace within which purchase or subscription
decisions are made, there is a very wide array of operational activity that goes into selection,
presentation, and support of electronic resources. Well-organized and effective practices can
contribute to sustainability by minimizing the amount of time and effort that must be expended
by users and staff.
Aims, Methodology and Organization
The idea of putting together useful practices and internal documents is, of course, hardly new.
ARL SPEC Kits perform a similar function and are highly valued by those interested in the
topics they cover. This essay and its supporting documents depart in several ways from the SPEC
Kit model, however. For instance, because of time constraints and the broad scope of possible
topics, I did not attempt to write a questionnaire that I thought would cover all or most relevant
points. As a result, this report is probably somewhat more impressionistic and less representative
of the state of the art than it could be. However, I have tried to provide somewhat more context
and discussion than might typically be found in a SPEC Kit. In addition, I have tried to present
an idealized model or list of practices that, taken together, depict my own view of “how things
should work” in this area – not with a view to establishing a set of standards, but to assist with
local decision-making. Lastly, a summary table is presented (see Appendix A) which includes
document links and descriptions that could be posted with little modification to the DLF website
for the use of the membership and other interested parties.
My approach to the research I conducted for this article involved a variety of things. First, I
found the recent ARL SPEC kits on Managing the Licensing of Electronic Products (number
248) and on Networked Information Resources (number 253) to be especially helpful. Although
the documents reproduced in both were interesting and useful in themselves, they also often
provided jumping off points for web searching for similar documents, other documents from the
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same institutions, or names of people for me to contact with exploratory questions. I also spent
substantial time simply looking at the websites of DLF members and of other ARL libraries with
similar levels of investment in electronic resources. The opportunities that I have had over the
last few years to attend meetings of the International Coalition of Library Consortia have also
been extremely helpful, and led to further questions and contacts.
The remainder of this essay has been organized into several rough topical categories:








Selection Policies, Guidelines, and Plans
Organization and Roles
Purchasing Strategies, Consortia, and Publishing Initiatives
Licensing Practices
Web Presentation Strategies
User Support
Evaluation and Usage Information
Procedure Streamlining and Support Systems
Few of these topics can really be treated in isolation from the others, and any given document or
practice could conceivably fall into multiple categories. I hope that by organizing them in this
way and making them more visible and “findable,” this review will lead to wider discussion and
improved and innovative practice.
Selection Policies, Guidelines, and Plans
Most libraries have decided that the selection and implementation of commercially available
electronic resources is different enough from selection of non-electronic (sometimes now called
“traditional”) resources to warrant trying to arrive at a commonly understood frame of reference
through formalized policy documents. Nevertheless, a common observation made by librarians
about decision-making with respect to electronic resources at their own institutions is that it
tends to be “ad hoc” or “opportunistic,” which suggests some understandable ongoing tensions
between formal policy and actual practice.
Perhaps the single most common thread running through the selection policy documents sampled
for this project is that although electronic resources raise some new and different questions, the
value system brought to bear on selecting other resources is still valid and is to be applied. For
instance, Penn State’s document on Evaluating Electronic Resources begins by stating that “the
guidelines for evaluating print publications . . . can also be applied to electronic resources,” and
the California Digital Library’s “Collection Framework” document that “conventional collection
development criteria should be paramount and should be applied consistently across formats,
including digital resources.” The Library of Congress’ “Collections Policy Statement for
Electronic Resources” notes that “the criteria used to evaluate electronic resources do not differ
greatly from those used for books or materials in other formats. Following a similar statement,
USC’s “Collection Policy Statement for Information in Electronic Formats” states somewhat
more specifically that these general criteria are:
a. The resource contributes to the University Library’s mission of providing support for
instruction and research
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b. There is a demonstrated curricular or informational need or an identifiable potential
audience for the resource.
Lastly, the University of Texas’ “General Libraries Digital Collection Development Framework”
notes that
“As with all formats, digital material should meet the same subject, chronological,
geographical, language and other guidelines as outlined in the library’s subject collection
policies; and possess the same standards of excellence, comprehensiveness, and authority
that the library expects from all of its acquisitions.”
Though attempting to anchor decision-making in broader and older understandings, selection
guideline documents also typically list and discuss factors that are unique to electronic resources,
and which need to be considered -- although in some cases these are presented in checklist form.
These questions are often grouped together in internal documens, although different institutions
have done so in slightly different ways. Yale’s “Examining Networked Resources” checklists,
are unusually thorough -- extending to 13 pages – but have much in common with those in use
elsewhere. Several of the following topical categories are drawn from that list:

Content. Comparisons to printed versions in terms of completeness/selectivity,
backfile coverage, update frequency, etc.

Added Value. Wider access, searchability, potentially greater currency, etc.

Presentation or Functionality. Usability, searching and limit functions, linking, etc.
(The Yale checklist and a similar one in use by the California Digital Library have
especially useful lists of these considerations. The CDL list differentiates between
those that are seen as “critical” and others, and assigns them a higher score for
evaluation purposes.)

Technical Considerations. Typically includes standard or preferred vendor/interface,
hardware and software requirements, including storage space, web browser
compatibility, plug-in requirements, authentication, etc.

Licensing and Business Arrangements. Problematic license restrictions, ongoing
access rights, costs, etc.

Service Impact. Documentation, publicity, staff training needs, etc.
Other interesting considerations mentioned in some of the documents include the perceived need
to maintain a balance among disciplines or subject areas, or with traditional formats, when
choosing electronic resources. The Texas “Framework” document also contains a useful section
of “Observations and Qualifications” on different categories of resources, such as electronic
journals, indexing and abstracting databases, etc. – describing the context for each, along with an
attempt to delineate goals.
This feature of the Texas framework makes it both a policy and a planning document. Several
other DLF member libraries, including Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, Illinois, and Virginia have
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recently emphasized this future orientation by developing strategic plans for electronic resources
– each with its own emphases and approaches. For example, the time span covered by Cornell’s
“Digital Futures Plan” is the current two years, Virginia’s “Library of Tomorrow” plan is for five
years, Carnegie-Mellon’s “Digital Library Plan” is for seven, and the Illinois “Electronic
Collections Strategic Plan” is open-ended. The projected future states articulated by these plans
and the issues identified in them are somewhat different, but as with the selection policy
documents there are a number of common themes:

Value context. Decision-making needs to be done with reference to the kinds of
traditional values articulated by the policy documents mentioned earlier in this
section.

Funding issues. The digital future will be more expensive, additional internal funds
will be reallocated to fund electronic resources, and consortial arrangements will be
pursued to conserve funds -- but existing funds are inadequate and new sources of
funds will need to be found. Carnegie-Mellon’s plan interestingly poses three
different financial “levels of commitment” to its digital future: “steady state,”
“higher profile,” and “leading digital library.”

Scholarly Publishing. It is important to be proactive and help develop alternative
services and publications that libraries and their institutions will be able to afford over
time.

Licensing and Fair Use. The emerging reliance on licensing as the basis for access
rights poses threats that must be understood and actively resisted. The Illinois plan
mentions the challenge licensing poses to its traditional role as a resource for other
libraries in the state – which is probably of particular concern to many DLF and ARL
libraries.

Evaluation and usage information. Vendors have generally not supplied the kinds of
quantitative information that libraries need to evaluate the resources they have
licensed, and efforts across libraries are needed to motivate vendors to correct the
situation.

Archiving. This is a serious unsolved problem that may require maintaining both
local print and electronic subscriptions while working toward better long-term
solutions.
This could be considered a “core set” of concerns that could serve as useful starting points for
other libraries interested in forming their own strategic plans for electronic resources, and several
will be touched upon later in this essay.
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Organization and Roles <section to be added; notes follow>
Committee Structures – widely recognized need to pull a variety of players into decision-making
process
Examples
CDL
And other consortial groups – how interplay with institutional decisionmaking?
Cornell
Harvard
Michigan
MIT
Stanford
Yale
Questions:
How do these work in practice?
Do committees sometimes slow down/impede decision-making?
Selection roles
E-resource coordinators
Harvard
MIT
Stanford
Yale
Resource-specific coordination/stewardship (key to scalability – recognition that a single
resource coordinator can’t deal with everything)
CDL – Resource Liaisons
Harvard – Resource Stewardship Program
MIT – Product sponsor
Yale – contact info.
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Collaborative Purchasing Strategies and Publishing Initiatives
As discussed in the Introduction, DLF member libraries spend considerable amounts of money
acquiring electronic resources or access to them, but as noted in the segment on selection policies
and strategic planning, it is widely felt that costs and finances are a major problem. Not only are
costs considered to be high, but fee structures are also extremely variable from one vendor to
another and can be quite complex. Terms of license may undermine well-established
cooperative relationships among libraries, require ongoing commitments that may be difficult to
evaluate or have other consequences that may be hard to foresee. Above all, there is a common
perception that individual libraries are at a decided disadvantage when acting alone in this
environment – especially when they negotiate with large corporate entities -- and that
collaborative efforts are necessary.
The rapid growth of consortial purchasing is one obvious response that has taken place within
the last few years, and the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) has emerged as
an active and influential umbrella organization through which consortia can work toward
common interests. There are a variety of types of consortia, including those that are academiconly or multi-type, and state-oriented or regional. Consortia also vary widely as to funding –
with some receiving significant amounts of money from their state governments and others being
largely or exclusively self-funded. Some have broad mandates to foster resource sharing through
online catalogs and to develop systems of shared databases, while others function primarily as
opportunistic “buying clubs” that attempt to leverage available funds for the benefit of their
members.
Pricing structures and issues have occupied a prominent position on the ICOLC agenda, although
there is recognition within the group that a product or service must be profitable for it to be
“sustainable” from a vendor’s perspective. One reason why consortial arrangements “work” for
vendors is that they help reduce the costs of marketing – thus contributing to profitability. For
libraries, better pricing must be weighed against the other costs of doing business consortially,
which can include staff time and some potential losses in control and flexibility. Price is not the
only concern that libraries have, of course, and ICOLC has actively discussed and come forth
with influential documents on a variety of other issues, such as technical requirements, licensing,
and statistical reporting.
Not surprisingly, most DLF member libraries are members of at least one major consortium with
an interest in cooperative database licensing, and the majority are members of more than one.
(see Table 2.) Many group buying arrangements seem to be ad hoc, however, and difficult to
identify. As a consequence, it seems likely that the typical ARL and DLF library will actually be
involved in many different collaborative buying arrangements having varying degrees of
formalization.
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Table 2. DLF Member Libraries’ Major Consortial Memberships, Fall 2000
Institution
California, Berkeley
Carnegie Mellon
Chicago
Columbia
Cornell
Emory
Harvard
Illinois, Urbana
Regional
Consortia
CDL
NERL (affiliate)
CIC
NERL
NERL
ASERL
NERL
CIC
Indiana
Library of Congress
Michigan
CIC
Minnesota
N.C. State
New York Public Library
Penn State
Pennsylvania
Princeton
Southern California
Stanford
Tennessee
Texas
Virginia
Yale
CIC
ASERL
CIC
CIC
NERL
NERL
Big 12 Plus
ASERL
Big 12 Plus
ASERL
NERL
State Consortia
PALCI; PALINET
Galileo
ILLINET; IDAL
(Illinois Digital
Academic Library)
INCOLSA
Michigan Library
Consortium
MINITEX
NCLive, TRLN
PALCI; PALINET
PALCI
TexShare
VIVA
ASERL = Association of Southeastern Research Libraries
CDL = California Digital Library
CIC = Center for Inter-institutional Cooperation
NERL = Northeastern Research Libraries
<Question: include links to consortia home pages?>
Assessing the role that consortial membership plays in the buying behavior of DLF members is
difficult, as is evaluating the efforts of a given consortium. (For example, although it is tempting
to try to establish “cost savings” attributable to consortial buying, some consortia find that phrase
misleading, and speak instead about “cost avoidance” when making the case for their
effectiveness to funding agencies.) Nevertheless, as suggested by the two tables in Appendix B
(Consortial Purchasing of Major Databases, and Consortial Purchasing of E-journal Packages),
there is clearly significant impact – and that impact appears to be more important in some cases
than others.
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Of the few “major databases,” selected for this review (principally aggregator services, plus a
couple of expensive STM databases and full text services) the most widely held is Academic
Universe. As is well known, this service is only available via consortial arrangement through a
“national deal,” with aggregated “FTE’s” dictating the price to all, and it is interesting to note that
all of the academic DLF member libraries currently subscribe to it. The situation with the
competing full-text “aggregator” databases offered by EBSCO, Gale, Proquest/Bell&Howell and
H.W. Wilson Company is much less clear. The Proquest ABI/INFORM and Research Library
databases are the most commonly held of these services, but consortial arrangements seemed to
be involved only a quarter (or less) of the time. Gale’s Expanded Academic Index and Business
databases are also relatively popular, but consortial buying appeared to be involved in only 4
cases. EBSCO’s general academic and business databases were somewhat less popular, but
statewide contracts appeared to be the major factor where they were available. And, lastly, H. W.
Wilson's databases appear never to be available from DLF libraries as a result of consortial
buying.
ISI’s Web of Science databases are very nearly as popular among DLF libraries as Academic
Universe, with 21 of the 22 academics offering it. The importance of consortial pricing is
suggested by the fact that 80% of the subscribing libraries were purchasing it through consortia –
most through either the CIC or NERL. All eight of the nine DLF libraries having access to
Scifinder Scholar purchased it through consortia: of those, six were buying through NERL.
Fourteen DLF member libraries have significant full text databases from Chadwyck-Healey, of
which six were buying through NERL. Of the seven libraries determined to be subscribers to
Early English Books Online (EEBO) five are NERL members.
A somewhat more mixed picture emerges with respect to E-journal packages (somewhat crudely
defined for purposes of this study to include both JSTOR’s archival offerings and the current
journal coverage offered by other publishers.) The three most widely-owned packages are
JSTOR 1 and 2, and Project Muse (no differentiation between levels of Project Muse coverage
was made). Consortial purchasing was involved only in a few cases – which is not surprising
because JSTOR has rejected consortial pricing as a matter of policy, and consortial pricing for
Project Muse is relatively new. There are a number of other e-journal packages with somewhat
lower but still significant levels of apparent adoption (i.e. more than half the academic
membership) by DLF libraries – including Academic Press Ideal, Elsevier’s Science Direct,
ACM, American Chemical Society, Annual Reviews, IEEE, Springer, and Wiley. Most of these
had relatively low levels of consortial activity, but with several – including Academic Press
(whose policy on consortia is opposite JSTOR’s, since they sell only to consortia), Science Direct,
and Wiley, consortial purchases stood at 40% or more. NERL played a role in a number of these
arrangements.
The meaning of all this is a good deal less than clear, but it seems apparent that NERL has
succeeded very well in offering attractive buying opportunities to its members, and it appears
necessary for other consortial arrangements to be developed or become available for other DLF
libraries to find some of these services affordable. (What else to say here?)
Another set of important cooperative initiatives has recently been organized by the Association of
Research Libraries under the name SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Research Cooperative). As
is well known in academic library and publishing circles, the Association for Research Libraries
has actively tracked the rapidly increasing costs of scholarly journals, and shown convincingly
that those costs – particularly those associated with a handful of important commercial publishers
of scientific and medical journals -- have far outstripped the growth of ARL libraries budgets and
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such standard economic indicators as the Consumer Price Index. The goal of SPARC is to help
control these costs by introducing electronically published publications that compete with highcost scientific journals. As shown in Table 3, most DLF member libraries have supported
SPARC by becoming founding members, and several (including Columbia, Cornell, and the
California Digital Library) have initiated SPARC-affiliated projects.
Table 3. DLF Member Library SPARC Membership and Related Initiatives
Institution
California Digital Library
Carnegie Mellon
Columbia
Cornell
Emory
Harvard
Indiana
Library of Congress
New York Public Library
N.C. State
Penn State
Princeton
Stanford
UC – Berkeley
University of Chicago
Univ. of Illinois
Univ. of Michigan
Univ. of Minnesota
Univ. of Pennsylvania
USC
Univ. of Tennessee
Univ. of Texas at Austin
Univ. of Virginia
Yale
SPARC
Membership
founding
founding
founding
founding
founding
founding
Scholarly Communication Initiatives
e-scholarship
CIAO; Columbia Earthscape
Project Euclid
founding
founding
founding
Highwire Press
founding
founding
founding
founding
founding
founding
founding
founding
founding
PEAK; JSTOR; EEBO
Other influential publishing initiatives by DLF member libraries have included Michigan’s
PEAK experiment with Elsevier, its key role in the highly successful JSTOR program, and
Stanford’s Highwire Press.
Another SPARC-related initiative (called “Create Change”) aimed at educating faculty members
– particularly editors of high-priced journals and members of their editorial boards – about the
economics of scholarly publishing has also gotten under way. It is probably too early to assess
the impact of SPARC, but there is some evidence that prices of specific journals have been held
down in response to the availability of new alternatives.
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Licensing Practices
As noted in the section on selection policies and strategic plans, there is increasing concern
among libraries over licensing terms and practices because the majority of commercially
available electronic resources are made available only through such formalized licensing
arrangements. The full impact of this development has yet to be realized, but reasons for concern
are not difficult to find. To cite one obvious example, these arrangements quite often define
permitted uses much more narrowly than does current copyright law or the “Fair Use” doctrine
that has become accepted over a period of years. As larger and larger portions of library budgets
are devoted to acquiring electronic resources, libraries’ ability to share resources through
interlibrary loan becomes more and more constrained. Noncompliance with such provisions by
library staff or end-users may also raise a range of new risks for libraries and their parent
institutions -- from simply losing access to having to pay legal costs of being sued in faraway
venues – or even to being forced to pay damage claims.
These risks are widely recognized within the library community, as are a number of important
initiatives to help counter them. For example, ARL has developed and offered outstanding
training materials and classes for libraries wishing to upgrade staff skills and institute organized
local processes for dealing with licensing issues. The development of the liblicense web site and
listserv have also had considerable impact, as have efforts to work with publishers and libraries
toward standardized license language acceptable to both. Several libraries and consortia,
including the California Digital Library, Harvard, and the CIC, have contributed to
developments in this area and to the efficiency of their own operations by devising and making
available their own sets of standardized license terms or requirements.
Specific license terms aside, there remains the very large problem of informing staff and users of
what they are. This might seem to just a reasonable precaution against having license terms
violated and thus possibly prompting a vendor to cancel a contract and withdraw a product.
However, it is not at all uncommon for libraries to agree to license terms requiring that they
make an effort to communicate license terms to users. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be
much consensus on what this might mean, and there are a number of reasons why it is difficult to
do.
Since license details do vary significantly from one product or service to another, reliance on a
generalized disclaimer for this purpose would seem to be inadequate. Even if sufficient time to
do so was available during the typical classroom presentation or reference interaction, relying on
“person to person” contact to convey license terms seems doomed to failure because of the sheer
proliferation of licensed products within ARL libraries. Although it seems possible to achieve a
general level of awareness of licensing issues among staff with public contact, it would be nearly
impossible for a single librarian to be familiar enough with those in force at a given institution –
or even all of those in a given subject area at that institution -- to be able to inform users and staff
adequately of what they may and may not do.
Some licenses require that subscribing libraries route their users through a “click-through” page
containing some standardized language informing them of use restrictions, and sometimes that
they certify that they are eligible to use the product. This approach is clearly not “scaleable,”
since libraries might find themselves having to write and maintain such pages for a large number
of products. If vendors do not address this issue directly themselves through their web sites and
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services, libraries must devise and implement their own, more scaleable ways of tracking license
terms and making them available both to users and staff.
The VERA system developed by the MIT Libraries presents one such interesting model. First, a
general awareness that usage is governed by license terms is achieved through by placing a
general statement near the top of the lists of available databases:
Use of many of these resources is governed by license agreements which restrict use to
the MIT community and to individuals who use the MIT Libraries’ facilities. It is the
responsibility of each user to ensure that he or she uses these products only for individual,
noncommercial use without systematically downloading, distributing, or retaining
substantial portions of information.
Use of such a general “disclaimer” should be relatively easy for many libraries to achieve. The
VERA system also enables staff to excerpt and present key license terms in a fairly elegant way
– which would be more difficult for others to emualte. During the licensing process, special
provisions are noted and entered into the system, and in those cases an unobtrusive “L” logo
appears on the relevant resource lists in a column labelled “More.” Clicking on the logo takes
the user to a summary of the special terms. Such license terms are not yet made available through
MIT’s online catalog, but this has been under discussion.
A more schematic approach to presenting license terms has been adopted at Yale, which
provides “Yes/No” information for 8 categories of use (including whether a resources can be
used for Interlibrary Loan and Course Packs, or by “Walk-in Users”) through its lists of available
resources. The University of Texas also analyzes key license terms, enters them in a local,
specialized tracking system, and then makes them available to staff. ILL provisions alone are of
sufficient interest for several libraries (including MIT, the California Digital Library, and VIVA
consortium) to maintain lists of vendors that permit it. However, ILL staff and students may or
may not recognize a given title as being part of a specific package, which argues against the
effectiveness of the “package” package. A number of libraries provide staff, and sometimes
users, with links to the full text of license agreements or to versions of them from which any
confidential terms have been removed.
As interesting and promising as these various approaches are, there are some significant barriers
to developing scaleable systems in this area. A principal problem lies with the complexity and
variability of the license agreements themselves, of course. Those factors make it difficult, for
example, for a single library to analyze or “catalog” a license in detail, and then share the results,
as is so commonly done for cataloging books and serials. However, it may be possible to work
toward more standardized definitions of key provisions that may either lead in this direction or
help streamline local analyses of them.
Web Presentation Strategies
If commercially available electronic resources are viewed as distinct entities, their presentation
does not necessarily require different approaches to presentation than those used for “free” web
resources or locally digitized collections. Most ARL libraries – and particularly DLF member
libraries – have found effective and frequently elegant and visually appealing methods for
presenting these resources. This is often done via alphabetical or subject lists of databases or
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electronic journals, gateway search functions, and so on. Just how effective some of these
presentations may be, or may become as collections of such resources grow, is an important
question.
One interesting alternative approach to presentation is currently in use at the University of
Pennsylvania – which organizes resources according to flexibly-defined communities of interest.
These resources are also identified by bibliographer/subjects specialists as being critical or less
important to the particular user community. This system also allows new resources to be
highlighted – a useful service that has also been integrated into web pages elsewhere – including
the University of Texas. Other institutions (including N.C. State, the University of Washington,
and the California Digital Library) have also introduced fairly simple ways for users to
“personalize” their views of available resources by identifying those that are of particular interest
– which they then see as a “default” when they log in to the local system.
However effective the presentation of distinct databases may be, of course, what users may find
more useful is effective integration of the contents of disparate resources. As noted in the
section on purchasing strategies, all of the academic libraries that belong to the DLF subscribe to
Academic Universe and typically to at least two other “aggregator” (hybrid abstracting/indexing
and full text) databases from EBSCO, Gale, or Bell & Howell’s Proquest. These subscriptions
typically cost in the tens of thousands of dollars and contain full text coverage for from several
hundred to several thousand periodicals. Nevertheless, most libraries have so far been unable to
incorporate journal-title holdings information into their online catalogs, or to integrate articlelevel links with their other abstracting and indexing databases. To some degree, this is due to
marketing decisions by companies that sell aggregator and sometimes other databases, based on
the perceptions that such integration is of sufficient value that libraries will be willing to pay for
it. (For example, Bell & Howell has recently announced availability of a subscription service
through which MARC records containing urls for the periodicals in some of their databases, and
both Bell & Howell and EBSCO offer versions of third party databases with article-level links to
their licensed full text.)
An interesting alternative or supplement to these vendor based offerings is embodied in Yale’s
JAKE (for Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment) and the related jake2marc program.
JAKE currently incorporates periodical holdings or coverage information for nearly 200
databases, enabling users to determine which database or databases include a given title.
Institutions can customize it to reflect their own holdings, as well as use jake2marc to generate
catalog records for local use. Of considerable importance is the fact that these services are open
to interested libraries, which has encouraged development and minimized usage costs.
Yet fuller levels of integration are the goals of vendor-based services like Silverplatter’s
Silverlinker, ISI’s Web of Science linking feature, and similar offerings from Cambridge
Scientific Abstracts, OVID, PubMed, and others. These services allow subscribing institutions
to enable catalog lookup functions and article-level links between index/abstract database
citations and their licensed e-journal collections. Among the significant and obvious drawbacks
to these services is that they tend to provide links to somewhat different sets of e-journal content
and require setup and ongoing maintenance. Since larger libraries often have subscriptions to
databases from more than one of these vendors, a fair amount of effort must be duplicated.
Crossref is another industry based initiative, but one of its primary goals is to enable article to
article linkages across participating publishers. It also has some drawbacks, including the fact
that it does not allow libraries to control which links are enabled for users to follow.
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A related and very promising development has been the appearance of SFX, which is based on
an open linking standard. In addition to local choice and control of links, SFX offers libraries
the ability to administer and maintain them for multiple vendor offerings without duplication of
effort.
User Support
In a real sense, as libraries invest more money in electronic resources, they begin to look and
operate more and more like online services. It seems apparent that most users of online services
of whatever kind want them to be understandable and usable with a minimum of help or
intervention from others. Whether libraries have succeeded in creating such environments is
something of an open question. Evidence in favor of that idea includes the fact that licensed
electronic resources appear to have gotten both more usable and more reliable. However,
libraries present their users with increasing numbers and variety of resources to choose from, and
their interrelationships seem to be more complex than they have been.
Just what kinds of support may be needed is a continuing question, and libraries have developed
a range of responses to it based on local perceptions, available resources and priorities –
including extensive programs of instruction and faculty consultation which are beyond the scope
of this article. A couple of basic needs that users have, of course, are knowing what they are
eligible to use and how they can connect to the available resources – both of which have been
addressed by many libraries through the use of fairly simple web pages describing how that can
be done, and by indicating on resource lists which are available only to affiliated users. More
elaborate approaches incorporate a basic “how to use” instructional element with information on
making a connection.
Of course, any number of problems may arise for users while using locally licensed resources –
especially when doing so remotely. For example, service may suddenly become unavailable due
to technical problems experienced by a vendor, web browser configuration or unrelated
connectivity issues, or to invoicing and payment problems. Users coming to a library’s gateway
through a commercial Internet Service Provider may find services to be unavailable to them and
not realize that this may be because they have not authenticated themselves through an available
proxy service, or have done so incompletely or otherwise incorrectly. One simple solution has
been to post basic lists of known problems and solutions for users, and to provide information on
how to contact staff for help. Some libraries have tried to improve their ability to respond as
quickly and effectively to these situations as many users now expect by providing additional
troubleshooting details for staff, including “triage” paths for different situations and vendor
contact information, which will be elaborated upon in the upcoming section on streamlining
procedures and support systems.
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Evaluation and Usage Information
This area also widely recognized as important, with major initiatives under way
Planned/cyclic reviews prior to renewal
To some extent, good local practice dependent on resolution of issues with vendors, etc.
Usage Information Reporting
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Procedure Streamlining and Support Systems
As suggested in several of the preceding sections of this essay, a library’s acquisition of a given
electronic resource may be a complex process involving any number of people and groups in
evaluating its content and features, as well as complex cost and budgeting, licensing, consortial,
technical, and other considerations.
Many larger libraries have invested substantial time and effort in trying to understand, document,
and streamline or rationalize their local processes. The documentation of some of these local
processes appears to be of potential value to other libraries trying to grapple with the same issues
individually. A useful graphical representation of some of these complexities is provided by
MIT’s “Process Map” for acquiring electronic resources, which is further supplemented by a
detailed workflow document. Although the California Digital Library is both larger in size and
more complex than most library systems at single institutions, the outline of “CDL Acquisitions
Procedures” touches on many steps that single institutions would need to go through. Other
useful documents from single institutions include those from Minnesota, Penn State, and Yale.
Owing to the complexity and range of details that must be gathered in the acquisitions process,
several of the larger libraries have developed standardized forms for selectors to use in
requesting that a resource be purchased or considered for purchase or trial. These forms may be
used simply as templates for gathering the appropriate information, and then used in paper form
or transferred more or less by hand to other systems or web pages. For example, in large scale
operations it may be a real challenge simply to track and effectively communicate what may be
under consideration or “in process” at any given time to staff and users. A number of the larger
libraries, including Harvard, Yale, the CIC, and the California Digital Library maintain such
“status” pages – often created and maintained “by hand.”
Several institutions have also developed electronic systems intended to gather and use the
necessary information efficiently, and sometimes to interact with and support online acquisitions,
cataloging, and other systems for gateway page generation and to cut down on costly duplication
of records and effort. A number of systems for supporting the acquisition and management of
electronic resources – both paper-based and electronic -- were identified during the course of this
project and profiled in a rather rudimentary way in Appendix C. The purpose in doing so was to
identify and inventory their functions and data elements, with a view toward devising common
specifications or data standards in the future. (Staff at Cornell and the University of Washington
are now actively pursuing this idea and hope to define and register metadata standards for
electronic resource management data.)
A quick review of the system profiles will reveal that despite some commonalities, the existing
systems do not share all of the same objectives, or degrees of complexity or development. In
addition, they all exist within somewhat different operating environments or run on different
platforms, thus making comparisons more difficult. Of the available systems, those that appear to
be the most fully developed and interesting for this review are the VERA system that was
already discussed in the section on licensing; Penn State’s ERLIC (Electronic Resources
Licensing and Information Center) and the License Tracker system developed at the University
of Texas at Austin. Another system of interest which is currently at an earlier stages of
development is Stanford’s (which employs Artesia Software’s TEAMS product). The column
labeled Cornell on the appendix shows the fields that their staff identified as important to the
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management of electronic resources, and numeric values indicate whether they were designated
as required (1), optional (2) or additional/to be considered (3).
As shown on the first two pages of the Appendix, several of these systems have been designed to
generate and maintain lists of available databases, electronic journals, or both. The VERA
system, as noted earlier, integrates license terms with the other list elements, as do Yale’s and
Texas’ License Tracker systems. Although Penn State’s system provides a link to scanned
versions of the licenses, a more comprehensive and complementary approach to license term
management and reporting is now in development. Stanford’s current license focus is just on
whether a given resource may be used for Interlibrary Loan purposes. Interestingly, MIT’s, Penn
State’s, Stanford’s and Texas’ systems are also designed to include and present availability or
problem status information. Other identified functions are related to the status of a given product
within the acquisitions process (Penn State’s identifies those for which some follow-up attention
is required), or to finances and expenditures. It is in this last category that interaction with
established online acquisitions systems become evident. Other information is provided that
some librarians feel is not always done adequately or conveniently by established acquisitions
systems, includes renewal dates, location and IP restrictions, and vendor contact information.
Pages three and following of the Appendix show the large number and variety of data elements
that these systems may use or require. Bibliographic data elements are clearly important in
several of the systems, although in some cases an existing library system is relied on, and linking
fields used. Despite the importance of trials to the typical evaluation process, few of these
systems appear to include information about them.
<more details and discussion to be included here>
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Summary and Conclusion <more to be added here>
A wide range of topics and a large number of practices have been touched upon in this essay.
Rather than review them again, I have tried in the following table to identify those practices that
appear to be important elements of good programs of selection and implementation of
commercially available electronic resources. Some of these practices have been implemented in
some significant way by several libraries, which reflects that good practice can be implemented
locally in different ways
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Table 4. Idealized model of good/best practices
Topical Area
Selection Policies, Guidelines, and
Strategic Plans
Suggested Practices



Organization and Roles

Purchasing Strategies, Consortia, and
Publishing Initiatives




Licensing Practices


Web Presentation Strategies


User Support

Evaluation and Usage Information
Procedure Streamlining and Support
Systems







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Well-developed selection guidelines and policies
Strategic approach/articulated goals for e-resource
development
Established committee structures and selection roles that
provide for overall coordination and involvement of
subject specialists
Support responsibilities shared smoothly among central
staff and resource “stewards” or coordinators
Member of active, successful consortium
Active support of SPARC initiatives
Initiates and supports campus scholarly communication
discussions and projects
Smooth handling of licenses with clear policies and
responsibilities
General and specific licensing terms made
systematically known to staff and users
User-oriented, flexible and customizable presentation of
licensed resources
Effective integration and linking of full text and
abstracting and indexing services
Working system for providing users with basic
information about connecting to and using electronic
resources, and about common problems.
Established, understood and effective problem
escalation/triage paths
Planned/cyclic reviews prior to renewal
Systematic reporting of usage to staff
Work flows systematized and clear; appropriate forms
are utilized to expedite handling
Standardized information about library (FTE’s, IP
ranges, site definition, licensing policies) readily
available to vendors.
Clear system of conducting trials that includes clear
communication of availability and process to staff (and
users if appropriate)
Order status of a given e-resource can be easily
determined
E-Resource support systems in place or in planning
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References (needs additional work)
Barber, David. “Internet-accessible Full-text Electronic Journal & Periodical Collections for
Libraries.” Library Technology Reports, Vol. 36, no. 5 (September-October 2000). Chicago:
ALA, 2000.
Bleiler, Richard and Terry Plum. Networked Information Resources. SPEC Kit 253 (December
1999) Association of Research Libraries.
Duranceau, Ellen Finnie. “License Compliance,” Serials Review, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2000): pp. 5358.
Duranceau, Ellen Finnie. “License Tracking,” Serials Review, Vol. 26, No. 3(2000): pp. 69-73.
Holleman, Curt. “Electronic Resources: Are Basic Criteria for the Selection of Materials
Changing?” Library Trends, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Spring 2000): pp. 694-710.
Hughes, Carol Ann. “Information Services for Higher Education: A New Competitive Space.”
D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 6, no. 12 (December 2000)
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/12hughes.html>
Loghry, Patricia A. and Amy W. Shannon. “Managing Selection and Implementation of
Electronic Products: One Tiny Step in Organization, One Giant Step for the University of
Nevada, Reno.” Serials Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2000): pp. 32-44.
.
Metz, Paul. “Principles of Selection for Electronic Resources.” Library Trends, Vol. 48, No. 4
(Spring 2000): pp. 711-728.
Montgomery, Carol Hansen and JoAnne L. Sparks. “The Transition to an Electronic Journal
Collection: Managing the Organizational Changes.” Serials Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (October
2000): pp. 4-18.
Okerson, Ann. “Are We There Yet? Online E-Resources Ten Years After.” Library Trends,
Vol. 48, No. 4 (Spring 2000): pp. 671-693.
Soete, George J. and Trisha Davis. Managing the Licensing of Electronic Products. SPEC Kit
248 (August 1999) Association of Research Libraries.
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