HAERVI is a project about access to e-resources for visitors in HE institutions.
If you work in your own institution, then accessing resources is relatively straightforward. However, as soon as you go to another institution, then you have problems – how do you get on to the network, and how do you access e-resources? There are legal, technical and administrative issues to overcome.
What has HAERVI achieved so far?
Interviews with IS and library staff at a range of institutions, a consultation event with a variety of people.
They found that UK Libraries+ and SCONUL Research Extra have widened visitor access to paper based resources in libraries – and these (esp. SRX) have had good take up.
However, a recent survey showed that fewer than 33% allowed visitor walk-in access to electronic resources. Ironically, for visitors, electronic resources have lead to a restriction of access.
However – there is a huge variation between institutions how they deal with walk-in access. This starts with ‘how do you get online’? Can you get a guest username? Is there a web kiosk? Will someone login for you?
Where many ‘content’ licenses allow walk-in access, you may not be able to get online due to network security and JANET AUP.
There is a lot of uncertainty in this area, which has led to ad hoc approaches, and this variation in practice.
The consultation event led to the idea that there should be a ‘one stop shop’ for visitors (haven’t heard ‘one stop shop’ in a while…). However, the needs of visitors can be a low priority (this rings a bell – we discussed implementing Eduroam recently, and certainly although seen as ‘desirable’ it was seen as extremely low priority)
At the moment there is no single definitive guide which clarifies which licenses permit walk-in use – HAERVI is working with JISC Collections to improve this for JISC Model Licence materials. Paul Salotti (the speaker) has said that this leads to librarians needing to go back to licenses and contracts to check – which is time-consuming – but for me, this just demonstrates what a poor job we are doing of managing this information at the moment – we should know the answers to this ‘up front’, and it should be clearly recorded in our systems – why on earth should it be a problem to know this information.
HAERVI has seen some partial solutions suggested – Visitor Portal and a Visitor Proxy – I didn’t quite follow how this would work, but it sounded like this would be a (national?) service, with local implementations…
HAERVI is putting together a Toolkit – should be useful.