This session is about Talis’s approach to managing electronic resources. I met with Sarah Bartlett from Talis yesterday and had a chat about what they are doing in this area – they have a project called Xedio which is working with customers, and representatives from the sector to develop a product – and she invited me to join the group, which I was very happy to do. From my point of view it is an opportunity to feed into a potential product, as well as get a feel for how other sites are dealing with the issues in this area. I know a couple of the other non-Talis customers on the group, and it sounds like they have put together a good and well informed group.

Project Xedio is a development project. Interestingly I just had a chat with Ross MacIntyre from MIMAS over coffee, and he mentioned a UKSG project to look at the issue of Knowledge Bases which underpin products in the e-resource area (Link Resolvers, Federated search, and of course, ERM) – it will be interesting to see what the Talis take on this is. I’m not sure whether the project Ross was talking about was the ‘Link Resolvers and the Serials Supply Chain‘ that has just published its final report, which might be worth a look.

The Xedio project is being run using the ‘Scrum‘ methodology, which Talis has been using in it’s development recently (for Talis Engage and Zephyr). The advisory group is currently prioritising requirements and feeding back to Talis, after this there will be a Webinar for feedback and discussion.

Now Chris Armstrong  from ‘Information Automation‘ is talking about eContent. He doesn’t like the phrase eContent, and feels it is unhelpful. He suggests that there is a myth that users are format agnostic – but he doesn’t believe this to be the case. He believes this is being used by Aggregators
to talk up their databases. He feels it is more useful to talk about e-journals and e-books. Although I agree with him partially – it is important that a student understands the difference between a peer reviewed paper published in a journal, and a book chapter, I think that the point that the article is ‘peer reviewed’ is the important bit – not the format of publication.

The JUSTEIS project showed that although levels of provision were quite consistent across different types of content, but levels of use were quite different – essentially Search engines got used, everything else wasn’t very used. Chris argues that we don’t solve this by ‘dumbing down’ and bundling everything into a google type interface, but to teach users about the resources as part of Information Literacy. I don’t really agree with this – I think that Information Literacy has to apply when a user has found a resource and is assessing it, not at some pre-qualification level, where they only search ‘approved’ resources.

Chris hopes that Information Literacy will start to be taught at younger ages – specifically in the 16-18 age group (6th form students).

Chris believes that e-books are going to become a serious scholarly medium – and e-book readers will become more significant, digitisation will grow (Google Book Search, Open Content Alliance etc.) and new models will become accepted using Social Software "Blooks". Also social software for reading – e.g. Book Glutton (here is an explanation of how this works)

Now Frances Hall is talking about the experience of dealing with e-journals at the University of Wolverhampton. There are many models to subscribe to a single title, with different rights attached. There are different levels of management required – e.g. for free titles, aggregated titles etc. However, users are only interested in finding the content they want at any particular time.

Frances is describing the ‘e-journals’ lifecycle, and highlighting some of the issues – the complexity of deals on offer etc. At Wolverhampton in their workflows they differentiate between journals and e-journals because of the different requirements – although for e-books they have a better integration between e-book and print book workflows.

In terms of setting up access, it tends to be the smallest resources that take up the most time – ones from suppliers not used to supplying the HE sector.

Finally in the lifecycle they have ‘cancellations’ – the Schools have the final say in theory, but the nature of some e-journal subscriptions, especially the ‘big deals’ means that they have had cancellations for print titles that they have had to reinstate, because they aren’t allowed to cancel the print under the electronic license. The usage stats informing cancellations tends to be reactive rather than proactive.

Even after cancellation, there are ‘post-cancellation’ access issues where you need to ensure you continue to have access to any backfiles you have the rights to.

I’m sitting here feeling rather smug, as think Imperial is doing a pretty good job at a lot of this (that’s not to say we have solved all these problems, but relatively we are doing well) – what we need is systems that help us with these problems, and allow us to do this work more efficiently.