Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries: Issues and Solutions

Citation

Hurych, J. (2010), "Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries: Issues and Solutions", Collection Building, Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 38-39. https://doi.org/10.1108/01604951011015321

Effective acquisition and management of electronic resources have become important for all kinds of libraries, and especially for medical libraries where up‐to‐date information is crucial. This collection, jointly edited by a practicing librarian and a professor of library science (Elizabeth Connor) and a retired librarian from Penn State University (Sandra Wood), is a contains ten papers dealing with issues related to electronic access and utilization of e‐resources. These issues include collection development, pricing, open access, licensing, publisher liability, usage statistics and others.

Some of the health information issues discussed are specific to medical libraries but most are relevant to all other types of libraries. Examples of the papers include the following:

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  “Scholarly e‐journal pricing models and open access publishing.”

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  “Assessing online use: are statistics from web‐based online journal lists representative?”

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  “Off‐campus user behavior: are they finding electronic journals on their own or still ordering through document delivery?”

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  “Is there a pending change in medical publisher and library liability?”

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  “Semantic web technologies: opportunity for domain targeted libraries?”

Especially informative for libraries will be an overview of pricing models and a discussion of open access scholarly publishing (Wineburgh‐Freed). Also, analysis of the effects of electronic journal usage on document delivery service (Garrison and Grudzien) will provide libraries with useful data for collection development. Some authors use examples from their own libraries to suggest solutions to issues surrounding electronic resources, e.g. Kim and Koehler's article on the cost‐sharing Big Deal consortium at Johns Hopkins University and Yeh and McMullen's article on combined e‐journal web pages at the University of South Carolina. Some articles deal with extending electronic access to health information to libraries of other countries, e.g. Cornell University's branch library in Quatar and libraries in Latin America and the Caribbean region. Any library which has to deal with a journal cancellation dilemma will find the article by Ralston (“Assessing online use … ”) very informative. It demonstrates that online usage statistics are not accurate enough to be used in cancellation decisions.

This collection could be used by libraries as a guide to acquiring, licensing and managing the electronic access to books and journals, because it presents most complex issues that surround the use of electronic resources, e.g. negotiating consortial packages, developing a combined e‐journal Web page, integrating e‐resources into an online catalog, etc. However, there is a book/manual that does this in a more systematic way: Selecting and Managing Electronic Resources. A How‐to‐Do‐It Manual for Librarians, by Vicki L. Gregory (Neal‐Schuman, New York, 2006). By using these two books simultaneously, librarians will have a great tool for acquiring, managing and evaluating electronic resources. Connor's and Wood's book is highly recommended not only for all medical libraries, but also for all academic libraries with health sciences programs.