Jill E. Grogg

Riding the eBook Wave

eBooks are here to stay, or so the signs of the times seem to indicate. A December 2004 press release from Google announcing new partnerships for digitizing library collections pushes us ever-closer to the ubiquity of the eBook. However, a word of caution for those poised to toss out print collections: While the continued existence of eBooks is a certainty, the manner of that existence is far from certain. Librarians are (and should be) key players in the evolution of the eBook industry; thus, librarians need to know the current issues and trends in the eBook market. This article swipes a broad stroke across the eBook landscape. The authors contacted a sample of eBook insiders — publishers, distributors, software and hardware providers, and others — and asked them questions about the state of affairs for eBooks. What follows are some of their answers. A caveat before we begin our journey into eBooks: All eBooks are not created equal; an online dictionary is a different beast, with different promises and problems, than an online Stephen King novel. With this knowledge in hand, it is best to view these questions and answers of various eBook insiders as a small crosssection of the industry as a whole.

Linking E-journals to databases: Full text linking practices : The wave of the future (and how libraries can stay afloat!)

Abstract Full text linking practices generally fall into three categories: internal, external, or hybrid. Publishers and aggregators have for some time employed both internal and external linking, but they are increasingly using a mixture of internal and external linking, or hybrid linking. New affiliations, such as the CrossRef organization, and new context-sensitive linking technologies, such as SFX, provide the possibility of unprecedented, article-level access to full text. These new affiliations and technologies also complicate the linking landscape for librarians. Librarians must be able to navigate this complicated linking landscape in order to provide the best service for their users.

The Swets Trap: Understanding the Past to Create the Future

Anyone who’s taken a history class has probably been told that in order to understand the future, you have to understand the past. Recently, the past has reared its ugly head in the guise of the recent bankruptcy of Swets Information Services B.V. in September 2014. You would pretty much have to live under a rock to miss the commotion across the listservs, emails, and news publications related to this recent serials crisis. Many of us have paused in our day-to-day operations to ponder what this might mean for the future of serials. Although this editorial focuses specifically on the Swets event, the special issue as a whole explores other areas challenging the serials landscape from innovations in the publishing world to evolved concepts of description through linked data or knowledgebase data to questions about acquisitions practices for journal packages. All of the articles included in this issue indicate that a time of reflection is upon us as a discipline. With these challenges, opportunities to innovate and repurpose our skills will come—if we are willing. More invited articles focusing on the “future of serials” will be included in the next issue of Serials Review. My thanks go out to Beth Ashmore, Jill Grogg, and Susan Davis for their contributions to this editorial. Please consider contributing your opinion for a future editorial about this latest saga to the serials crisis or any other challenges and opportunities that you see for the future of serials.

ER Options for Acquisitions: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The presenters described the complex nature of managing electronic resources and demonstrated how services offered by subscription agents may assist with this effort, particularly for managing e-journal packages. Using the University of Alabamas experiences with EBSCO Information Services as a case study, the presenters discussed specific advantages and disadvantages of using agents and going direct to the publisher. The session also described metamediaries in the context of the library–agent relationship.