With barely a half a day to catch my breath, I jumped from ER&L into the complexities of gender issues in the workplace where libraries and technology intersect via the LTG Summit. As a result, it’s taken me some time to go back over my notes from ER&L and pull out the things that are most poignant, or themes that kept resurfacing.
ebooks
Ebooks in a library setting are still pretty much a pain in the ass. Some sources are doing better about DRM and functionality, but the aggregators are still offering less than optimal solutions. Let’s not even mention ILL rights.
One thing that really struck me was how we all keep thinking the Sciences will be all over this ebook thing, since they took to ejournals like white on rice. However, we’ve managed to forget that the Sciences weren’t all that into print books compared to their love affair with print journals, so that’s not going to change much in the shift in format.
On the other hand, Social Sciences are gravitating towards ebooks pretty well. They’re more willing than the other disciplines to use the relatively crappy versions on aggregator platforms, per some research being done on eBrary and EBL usage over the past few years.
workflows
We’re still trying to figure out how to incorporate the quirks of eresources into our workflow models that were developed in the offline age of print. Division by format works only if the formats remain divided, but print and electronic comes bundled often, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s a book or a serial.
Larger institutions are doing a lot of work on reorganizing and retraining, some better than others. I’m still not sure how to handle this in my Acquisitions team of four, with Cataloging in a different division. Communication seems to be key, along with acting as a telephone switch, redirecting requests to the proper individual.
