CMDS Committee Reports on E-Resources Management Survey

Cynthia Shelton, UCLA, and Karen Schmidt, University of Illinois

One of the strongest dynamics in libraries today is electronic resources; how libraries select, license, and manage these materials, and serve users, are part of our changing landscape. The CMDS Administration of Collection Development Committee recognized the need for benchmarking how libraries are managing this growing area of library resources. In 2002, the committee developed and administered a survey that looked at staffing levels, responsibilities of staff and committees in handling e-resources, and budget and negotiation issues. The committee also looked at general demographics by type and budget of library, and cross-tabulated results of various survey answers to better understand the trends and issues we all face. A link to the survey was sent to several listservs that address collections, acquisitions, and electronic resource issues. This survey does not purport to be a scientific sample of our libraries, but does represent a good cross sampling of our present engagement in managing electronic resources. In this and following articles in other ALCTS publications, the committee will present our summary findings.

GENERAL FINDINGS
215 institutions, representing academic, public, and special libraries responded to our survey. The overwhelming majority of institutions responding were academic libraries (83%); fourteen percent were public libraries. Over 58% of the libraries have someone designated as an electronic resources coordinator, and of these, 69% are not librarians. When a person was designated as e-resources coordinator, he or she was likely to have this designation as a full-time position. Fifty-five percent of the coordinators do not have other staff reporting to them. Most coordinators report to a library administrator (as opposed to the collection development librarian, a technical services librarian, or other middle management position).

Electronic resources coordinators have responsibility for a number of activities, with most taking the lead on researching the products, serving as the contact with vendors, negotiating the license and the cost, suggesting products for the library, reporting statistics on use, trouble-shooting, and coordinating the representation of the e-resource in the OPAC and registry.

Slightly more than half of the libraries have electronic resources committees. Most of the committees are comprised of collection development librarians, reference librarians, and technical services librarians. The committees are responsible primarily for researching, proposing, and selecting products for the library; they are less likely to coordinate trials, market the products, train, or negotiate contracts.

The funding for electronic resources comes from a number of sources: centralized pools (42%), serials money (25%) and subject funds (24%). Many libraries (about 41%) use a combination of all of these budget lines, with some 22% taking money off the top for e-resources. Ten percent cancel print resources to pay for electronic ones, while about 11% have no model in place as yet. Finally, fully 91% of libraries are members of consortia that purchase electronic products.

In an upcoming article, the committee will report on how user satisfaction correlates with various factors in the management of electronic resources.