Selecting and Managing Electronic Resources (review)

Selecting and Managing Electronic Resources, Vicki L. Gregory. (How-to-do-it Manuals for Librarians, no. 101). New York, London: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2000. 109 p. $55 (ISBN 1-55570-382-8).

Gregory, Professor and Director of the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa, provides a comprehensive overview of the issues facing all libraries that purchase, organize, and offer electronic resources to their users. Gregory, who teaches collection development, library automation and technical services, brings together in one volume the major principles relevant to electronic resources from all those subjects.

Written collection development policies are shown to be one of the most important tools libraries have in selecting materials in electronic format. Gregory distinguishes among traditional policies, separate policies, and integrated policies that include print, audio-visual, and electronic formats. However, revising the library's collection development policies regularly is also an essential part of the process.

Completing an assessment of community needs as electronic resources are added is another important process Gregory addresses. She presents a Who, What, When, Where, and How approach to elicit what new resources might be appropriate for library users. In this chapter, she also discusses selection criteria and how they might differ for Internet resources and provides a list of reviewing tools for Web sites and other electronic resources.

As part of the acquisitions and budgeting process, Gregory discusses the shift from ownership and retention of items bought from the library's budget to the more difficult concept of "leasing" information that may not become a permanent part of one's collection. She covers the basics, including placing the order, pricing models, and budgeting for materials that often need to include hardware and/or software in order to provide access to users.

Another chapter covers how to organize and provide access to electronic resources, a topic often overlooked in the selection process. Gregory presents a series of questions that librarians should address in determining how best to provide access to these new resources. She presents several levels of organization that range from no organization (Level 1) to full MARC cataloging (Level 5), as well as a discussion of user authentication.

Collection assessment has usually been associated with monograph and serial collections but the proliferation of electronic resources makes evaluation of these materials an important part of a library's overall collection assessment. A chapter provides suggestions for collecting evaluation data and presents a number of quantitative and qualitative measures that can be used to conduct an assessment project.

Gregory provides useful coverage of intellectual property rights, including purchase of the information vs. the licensing of a product. In particular, she reviews the current status of copyright and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), which can be a real threat to the concept of "fair use." The section on negotiation of licenses includes a series of questions that need to be considered during the negotiation process as well as who should do the negotiating. She also provides good suggestions on how to manage the licenses once they are signed. As "fair use" continues to be under attack, it is essential that librarians keep informed about the changing landscape of copyright and licensing issues.

Preservation is the last substantive issue covered. Library procedures for preservation largely have been based on traditional print materials. In most cases these will not work in the world of electronic resources. As the technology needed to provide access to these materials keeps changing, how will we be able to guarantee access to materials bought just a few years ago? The library and publishing communities are just beginning to grapple with the preservation and archiving of electronic materials. Although there are few answers, we must keep preservation of these resources at the forefront and work to find ways to solve that problem. Gregory makes the case that this is an issue for all libraries, not just the largest research libraries.

As libraries purchase...