Linda Eells

IT Competence for All: Propel Your Staff to New Heights

ABSTRACT In 2005, the University of Minnesota libraries charged a task force with the development of a list of core information technology (IT) skills that could be expected of all 300 staff, from technical services to reference services to stacks maintenance. Once this list was developed, the task force designed and administered an online self-assessment survey to identify gaps and patterns in staff computer skills. Both the development of the core competencies and the administration of the assessment are discussed. Also provided are recommendations for next steps, including using assessment reports and data gathered in the process to develop a training and professional development curriculum focused on the specific identified training needs of staff.

For Better or for Worse: The Joys and Woes of E-Journals

SUMMARY As electronic journals, or e-journals, have become more prevalent, publishers, libraries, and users have all had to adapt to a new paradigm, to new methods for publishing, acquiring, providing access to, preserving, and searching for research articles. Publishers offer new and constantly changing subscription and pricing models, and the prices of many commercial journals have been increasing at rates far exceeding the rate of inflation. The resulting budget crunch has driven significant changes in the way libraries develop their collections as they strive to reformulate their traditional role as provider and preserver of information. Some libraries are working more in consortium with other libraries to purchase large bundled journal packages now offered as one of the new subscription models developed by publishers. While this appears to be a win-win situation for libraries and users in the consortium, potential drawbacks to e-journals and the big bundled packages may impact libraries and researchers alike. This study investigates some of the potential effects of a move toward e-journal only collections, large bundled journal packages, and consortial purchasing including archival, economic, content, and research impact issues. Future predictions are difficult in the current, rapidly changing scholarly publishing environment, but a number of initiatives provide hope for the future of academic libraries and their users.

Institutional repositories: Home for small scholarly journals?

Small scholarly journals, particularly those published by academic societies, may not be positioned in a way that maximizes their discoverability and use. Many are on less-than-robust platforms and others are maintained by commercial publishers which means articles are either behind a pay wall or authors face steep article processing charges. We suggest that a better solution for these small journals would be for institutional repositories (IRs) to begin including them. This would mean a change in policy for many IRs, which currently limit submissions to work by their authors at their universities. Individual institutions could focus on one or two subject areas and work with local faculty members and professional societies to identify potential journals. While subject repositories may seem like a more appropriate solution, they only exist in a few disciplines. AgEcon Search, a subject repository serving the agricultural and applied economics community, is cited in this article as an example of a repository that includes numerous small scholarly journals.

Subject Repositories as Preservation Mechanisms

Years ago librarians began taking advantage of the incredible benefits offered by the movement of information to an online environment by creating new mechanisms like repositories to house and preserve digital content. The focus for most repositories has been on gathering fairly current material, or on books (e.g., HathiTrust) and commercial journal articles (e.g., JSTOR). The content scope for many “institutional” academic repositories is often focused on documents produced by researchers at a specific institution or organization rather than on resources in a specific subject area. In 1994 two far-sighted librarians decided to experiment with a brand new Internet protocol called Gopher to share agricultural and applied economics working papers between several departments at universities in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. Researchers in agricultural and applied economics have long maintained a tradition of sharing preliminary papers with colleagues to gather comments and suggestions for improvement by paper mailing (and later e-mailing) them to others working on similar studies. In the new Gopher-based system, papers were added to a homegrown database and then shared on the Internet via a subject repository, AgEcon Search (http://ageconsearch.umn.edu). In only 20 years that little database—one of the first subject repositories in the world—has evolved into an internationally recognized and utilized online home for over 75,000 documents from over 250 universities, institutions, and organizations around the world. The vision for AgEcon Search has been extended to incorporate the preservation of retrospective papers.

For better or for worse

SUMMARY As electronic journals, or e-journals, have become more prevalent, publishers, libraries, and users have all had to adapt to a new paradigm, to new methods for publishing, acquiring, providing access to, preserving, and searching for research articles. Publishers offer new and constantly changing subscription and pricing models, and the prices of many commercial journals have been increasing at rates far exceeding the rate of inflation. The resulting budget crunch has driven significant changes in the way libraries develop their collections as they strive to reformulate their traditional role as provider and preserver of information. Some libraries are working more in consortium with other libraries to purchase large bundled journal packages now offered as one of the new subscription models developed by publishers. While this appears to be a win-win situation for libraries and users in the consortium, potential drawbacks to e-journals and the big bundled packages may impact libraries and researchers alike. This study investigates some of the potential effects of a move toward e-journal only collections, large bundled journal packages, and consortial purchasing including archival, economic, content, and research impact issues. Future predictions are difficult in the current, rapidly changing scholarly publishing environment, but a number of initiatives provide hope for the future of academic libraries and their users.