Life Cycle of Digital Ref Sources Farmer

This article examines the life cycle of digital reference sources by focusing on subscription databases: assessment, selection, acquisition, Web presentation and maintenance, archiving a

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The Reference Librarian, Vol 50, No 2, February 2009: pp 1–31

The Reference Librarian

The Life Cycle of Digital Reference Sources

Life Cycle of Digital Reference Sources

L S J Farmer

LESLEY S J FARMER

Department of Advanced Studies in Education and Counseling,

California State University, Long Beach, CA

Academic libraries increasingly complement print-based reference collections with digitally-based reference for financial and educa- tional reasons However, library collection policies have sometimes lagged behind the technology curve Too often, reference collection management practices have reflected a responsive attitude rather than a responsible, strategic stance Many costs are associated with this service, and intellectual and psychological consider- ations make these resources a complex set of issues This article examines the life cycle of digital reference sources by focusing on subscription databases: assessment, selection, acquisition, Web presentation and maintenance, archiving and preservation, and de-selection It offers factors to consider because academic librarians must make decisions about these increasingly dynamic collections.

KEYWORDS digital reference sources, database, academic libraries, collection development

“Projects should plan for the life-cycle management of digital resources, including the initial assessment of resources, selection of materials and digital rights management; the technical questions of digitizing all formats; and the long-term issues of sustainability, user assessment, digital asset management and preservation.” (National Initiative for a

Networked Cultural Heritage 1999, introduction)

Address correspondence to Lesley S J Farmer, California State University, Long Beach, Department of Advanced Studies in Education and Counseling, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA 90840-2201 E-mail: lfarmer@csulb.edu

INTRODUCTIONIncreasingly, academic libraries are migrating from print-based to digitally-based reference collections Publishers are offering more electronic products,often at more attractive prices than for their print editions Librarians realizethe benefits of remote access and the possibilities of multiple simultaneoususe Concurrently, clientele (particularly millennial students) are demandingconvenient online reference tools.

Nevertheless, library collection policies have sometimes lagged behindthe technology curve Too often, reference collection management prac-tices have reflected a reactive attitude rather than a responsible, strategicstance Just as individuals may focus on buying a car from a dealer whooffers a great price but forget to think about whether that dealer will ser-vice the car well later, so too can academic librarians forget about mainte-nance and de-selection issues The actual picture of electronic referenceresources is not as simple as plugging in a computer and clicking on theInternet connection Many costs are associated with this service, and intel-lectual and psychological considerations make these resources a complexset of issues

This article examines the life cycle of digital reference sources byfocusing on subscription databases and offers factors to consider becauseacademic librarians must make decisions about these increasingly dynamiccollections

OVERVIEW OF ELECTRONIC RESOURCES IN LIBRARIESTraditional reference collections usually focused on print reference sourcesand access tools, occasionally incorporating serials, such as the monthly

Current Biography and Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, and binder

services, such as Morningstar, to provide timely updates With the advent ofmicrofiche and CD-ROMs, the line between reference access tools and refer-ence sources started to blur, along with the separation of reference and thegeneral collection EBSCO’s index product line reflected the merging of asearchable index and the ultimate source itself Currently, the digital refer-ence collection typically consists of web sites (e.g., http://www.lii.org andhttp://www.refdesk.com), e-document reference monographs (e.g., http://www.free-e-books.net/reference.html) and ABC-CLIO’s e-book line anddatabases, which can refer to several types of reference sources from in-house customized databases of local resources to article aggregators Asearly as 2002, nearly half of the undergraduates surveyed used electronicscholarly sources almost exclusively (Friedlander 2002) By that same time,some academic libraries were spending half of their materials budget onelectronic resources (Bailey et al., 2003)

Technology has the potential to help all individuals gain physicalaccess to reference materials Thousands of reference resources are available

in at least two formats: print and electronic Cost and space enter into thedecision, but accessibility is another factor as well Particularly as distanceeducation has become a mainstay of many academic institutions, electronicreference collections help address equity access issues The Digital AccessibleInformation System Consortium (2005, 1) has developed international openstandards for digital resources with the intent that “all published information,

at time of release to the general population, be available in an accessible,highly functional, feature rich format and at no greater cost, to persons withprint disabilities.” The consortium also provides open-source tools to helppublishers and librarians produce and convert material for inclusive use.The question of the viability of digital reference collections is moot atthis point Indeed, one might consider the validity of print reference collec-tions to be a more salient issue What has changed in the last decade?Greater availability of materials, rising replacement costs, increasing userdemand, improved technology, more sophisticated student experiences,and the changing nature of education itself The single issue of educationalequity, addressing needs of individuals with special needs as well as distancelearners, requires that reference materials be made accessible for an everbroader population For example, the American Psychological Association

stopped publishing its 80-year-old print version of Psychological Abstracts in

2006, largely due to the increased cost of printing and the steady migration

of subscribers to its digital form, PsycInfo.

Nevertheless, electronic reference collections have their downside:connectivity and other infrastructure issues, privacy and security dynamics,access and dissemination rights, and vendor problems (e.g., uneven service orcompany buy-outs) More fundamentally, libraries are left with no documents

at all in lean budget times when online subscriptions must be cut; at leastwith print items, the older materials can still be accessed In that respect,electronic reference collection development might be more accurately

labeled reference access development, particularly because few permanent

options are offered by vendors Ownership, when copyright does not make

it a closed system, becomes trading rights

OVERVIEW OF ELECTRONIC RESOURCE MANAGEMENTFor more than a decade, academic librarians have been trying to developsystematic practices relative to electronic resource management, from selection

to maintenance Probably the most significant effort has been led by theDigital Library Federation’s Electronic Resources Management Initiative Tim

Jewell’s seminal 2001 report Selection and Presentation of Commercially Available Electronic Resources: Issues and Practices clearly laid out the

issues Keeping in mind the importance of affordability, Jewell asserted thatlibrarians need to base their collection decisions on their values and goalpriorities He emphasized the need for coordination and distributed respon-sibilities Furthermore, understanding the complexity of electronic resourcemanagement, Jewell pointed out the need for standard policies and proce-dures, efficient workflow, and forms to expedite order handling Jewellnoted that most integrated library systems could not handle electronicresource presentation and that local systems were trying to build tools to fillthe gap In response, he encouraged collaborative efforts to develop tech-nological systems to present electronic resources in a cost-effective andstandardized way On an industry scale, Jewell urged open standards to linkindexing databases to e-journal collections.

Seeing the need for coordinated efforts, Jewell and Adam Chandlerdeveloped a Web hub to foster communication about local efforts, whichled to the establishment of the Electronic Resources Management Initiative

In 2004, that body developed a report with the goal of developing “commonspecifications and tools for managing the license agreements, relatedadministrative information, and internal processes associated with collec-tions of licensed electronic resources” (Jewell et al 2004, 28) It should benoted that this group comprised academic librarians and electronic resourcevendors to optimize efforts As a result of this initiative, the ElectronicResources Management Initiative developed drafts of six deliverables:functional requirements of an electronic resource management system, abest-practices workshop diagram, an entity relationship diagram for electronicresource management to show how data elements relate, a data elementdictionary, an electronic resource management system data structure topromote standardization, and an investigation into XML use

Since the start of the Electronic Resources Management Initiative andother professional discussion, several publications have synthesized best

practices and raised further issues Library Technology Reports has

pub-lished two issues focused on e-journal management; Watson (2003) dealtwith sources for e-journals, their acquisition, access to e-journals, andmanagement issues and Geller (2006) noted issues of staffing and work-flow, and updated the Electronic Resources Management Initiative’s

efforts Gregory’s 2006 revised edition of Selecting and Management Electronic Resources offers how-to-do-it tips on acquisition and management

policies and processes Haworth Press has dealt with electronic resourcemanagement in several volumes Editor Thomas Leonhardt (2006)included articles on acquisitions and copyright, specifically selection, fairuse of electronic reserves, electronic data interchange, and vendors In

2007, Su edited a special issue of The Acquisitions Librarian that

addressed several institutional issues: staff reluctance, budgeting, e-journaldelivery, indexing quality, the feasibility of going e-only, copyright law,and preservation

THE LIFE CYCLE OF ELECTRONIC RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

In dealing with electronic resource management, the concept of electronicresource life cycle has been noted The concept is not new; in 1996, Robek

et al explained how records management involved a systemic control fromcreation or acquisition to maintenance and eventual disposition The maindistinctions with electronic resource management include license details,data configuration work, and other technical issues (Jewell et al 2004).Thetypical life cycle for electronic resource management contains these steps, asoutlined by Jewell (2001) and Ex Libris (2008):

Pre-planning: Organizational issues

1 Selection policies and strategic plans

2 Institutional finance and organization

Acquisitions:

3 Product discovery and trials

4 Internal procedures for initial evaluation and purchases (workflow,tracking, and communication)

Licensing:

5 Agreements with vendors and other institutions

6 Processes and policies for license handling

7 Communication with staff and users about permissions and userestrictions

10 User support: communication, instruction, problem-solving

11 Usage information: cost-per-use metrics, etc

13 Administration of resource properties, troubleshooting downtimeincidents/malfunction, dealing with contract breaches

Preservation and Archiving

14 Preservation techniques and strategies

in that area because they have few international databases Getting access tocurrent articles via subscription databases is given a high priority, particularlybecause global developments change constantly Concurrently, a greaterproportion of students are distance learners, so the librarians determine that

a Web-based solution would make sense

Checking the library’s budget, the librarians proceed to the next step:acquisitions In this scenario, the ABC library belongs to a state-wide elec-tronic resources review and purchasing consortium Through professionalaffiliations and good contacts with publishers, the members keep currentabout new and changing databases Through this consortium, the ABClibrarians can work with the consortium director to discover new relevant

products and test them The consortium has been alerted that sional Quarterly has expanded its product line to include CQ Global Researcher After creating a request for proposal and contacting the rele-

Congres-vant publishers, the consortium director sets up a month-long trial period

to allow the ABC library and other consortium libraries to determine thecost-benefit of this database, in compliance with existing selection criteriaand policies

Based on their examination, 10 consortium members decide to subscribe

to CQ Global Researcher At that point, the licensing stage of the cycle

begins The consortium director reaches a licensing agreement with thevendor and the interested campuses; with the collective approach, a dis-counted subscription price can be achieved, which benefits all parties The

license handling follows established processes for other Congressional

Quarterly product lines, so information about user rights and restrictions

comes as no surprise to the library and campus community

Similarly, the Web presentation stage is also straightforward Installationrequirements have already been met because of pre-existing subscriptions to

CQ Researcher On the other hand, the library hired a new database technician,

so she has to consult existing library documentation and contact her peers

at other consortium institutions to make sure that expected customizablefeatures are included and that linkages between databases using SFX, anOpenURL application, function correctly The technician sees a memo aboutWeb accessibility, and e-mails the ABC librarian in charge of electronicresources to make sure that the database complies with the new Americanswith Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations; the librarian reassures the technicianthat ADA compliance is one of the criteria for database selection

At the usage stage, the ABC librarians, both the electronic resourcecoordinator and the relevant subject librarians, announce the availability of

CQ Global Researcher to the campus community They demonstrate the

product at the Library Advisory Committee meeting to optimize dissemination

of information and create an online PowerPoint presentation that can belinked to online course platforms The electronic resources librarian also trackusage statistics to make sure that the subscription is worth its access cost

CQ Global Researcher enters the maintenance stage because a

refer-ence librarian reports that the database went down for several hours The

database technician contacts Congressional Quarterly and finds out that its

server was being upgraded and experienced a minor glitch The technicianlogs the incident and sends an e-mail to alert the librarians and letting themthat the problem has been resolved If a product has a lengthy log of issues,the technician will contact the electronic resources librarian, who will in turncheck with the rest of the consortium to determine the source of problems.Cost, usage, and maintenance issues enter the review stage equationwhen the ABC librarians, and possibly other consortium members, analyzeall of the electronic database subscriptions each year Is the cost per use

reasonable? Does CQ Global Researcher provide value-added service as

evidenced by usage and feedback from the campus community? Are other

consortium members interested in acquiring CQ Global Researcher, which

might result in lower per-site subscription costs?

Fortunately, Congressional Quarterly is a solid, long-standing publisher.

Nevertheless, the ABC Library and its consortium members should thinkabout the preservation and archiving stage of the electronic resource cycle.Fortunately, ABC University is part of a larger university system, which has aRisk Management office and established procedures Their emergencyresponse service includes a section about salvaging and restoring electronicdocuments The licensing agreement also has provisions for disasters, a

“boilerplate” section that is included in every consortium agreement theless, ABC University practices those emergency procedures, and the

librarians realize that they need to teach new hirees, especially the databasetechnician, what to do in a crisis As for preservation, the current budgetprecludes such discussion Most ABC librarians know about LOCKSS (Lots

of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), but the system has not joined that alliance It’s onemore issue to think about From this concrete example, general practices can

be considered as detailed below

ASSESSMENT OF RESOURCES

In the case of academic libraries, curricular needs usually constitute the corecriterion in assessing digital reference collections because libraries need tosupport their institutions’ missions As such, assessment should be done col-laboratively with the rest of the academic community to identify referenceneeds and resource gaps Curriculum development usually involves identify-ing relevant resources, although reference materials are seldom considered.Ideally, the involvement of academic subject librarians should be required

to optimize access to significant reference resources Thus, assessment ofresources should constitute a part of campus-wide strategic planning.This task, however, is two-edged because many teaching faculty do nothave a broad knowledge of electronic resources In some cases, faculty willneed to be trained in their use (and usefulness) by the librarian to optimizethe expenditure In other cases, faculty may remember university collections

and suggest older databases such as Public Affairs Information Service,

which is now available only in digital format and has changed publishinghands from OCLC to Cambridge Scientific Abstracts/ProQuest Similarly,

Chemical Abstracts has become subsumed by the electronic database SciFinder.

Students should also participate in this assessment because they constitutethe vast majority of potential users and may have prior experience usingelectronic reference sources Academic librarians also have to consider thelanguage ability of their clientele; thus, multimedia sites are attractivebecause students can access the information using visual and sound cuesalongside text Fortunately, most vendors allow librarians to preview theirproducts by using a time-sensitive guest password; academic librarians canthen publicize the potential electronic resource and have the academiccommunity assess its value

Of course, librarians need to assess their current reference collections,noting the impact of different formats Librarians also have to weigh full-textdatabases against citation databases; most librarians opt for full text becausethe two-step process of finding the citation and then locating the periodicalcan frustrate their users Additionally, space constraints also makes onlineperiodical databases an attractive solution; most academic libraries sub-

scribe to few print periodicals except for general news titles (e.g., Newsweek

and Wall Street Journal) and high-interest browsing titles (e.g., Sports Illustrated and Chronicle of Higher Education), and even those titles are more likely to

be accessed online than in print anymore Of course, such a decision maybackfire if funding is scarce and online subscriptions have to be curtailed;the library is then left with a dearth of periodicals, either in terms of owner-ship or access Libraries have nothing to show for their years of access fees,particularly if vendor agreements prohibit librarians from downloading data-bases or do not guarantee permanent access

This selection issue is exacerbated by the increasingly stringent royaltyparameters and the increasing cost of subscriptions, although these aresomewhat mitigated by the equally strong rise in Open Source initiativesand the Creative Commons whereby periodical publishers have decided tomake their publications accessible to academia in support of research(e.g., LibWorm) Nevertheless, because academic library budgets may fluc-tuate, only the highest-use and non-duplicative resources are likely to beselected Academic librarians look for products that span subject areas and

formats, such as Academic Search Elite and ScienceDirect, particularly when

subscription fees are based on total student population rather than the number

of students in a specific program The molecular gastronomy professor whoasks for a Russian database for his student population of ten may need torely on interlibrary services

For that reason, academic librarians also need to assess the availability

of digital reference sources at other campuses, either within their system orwith libraries with which they have well-established interlibrary agreements.Just as reference service may be two-tiered, with highly specialized queriesbeing referred to particular reference experts, so too might highly specializeddigital references such as non-Western language subject matter be collected

by one designated institution with the proviso that comparable resourcesharing would be made available Just as with joint development of printreference collections and resource sharing, so too should electronic referencecollection assessment transcend the academic walls

Regardless of format, reference collection development depends onusers’ information needs However, it is evident that equipment and con-nectivity are required to access electronic resources and that licensing costsneed to be considered when selecting digital resources These technology-based issue raise a dramatic tension: do infrastructure demands drive thecollection or do collection needs drive the infrastructure development? Forinstance, with federal Web accessibility mandates, should librarians chooseproducts that have fewer value-added features over high-quality vendorproducts because the latter has not met federal standards? A simple example

is ERIC, which was established as a federal government service; vendorssuch as EBSCO and ProQuest offer costly access to ERIC documents, adver-tising their added services beyond government baseline options Therefore,one of the first tasks when assessing which electronic reference sources to