E‐Serials Collection Management: Transitions, Trends and Technicalities

This book attempts to survey and address the most significant management issues and trends in the field of electronic serials (“e‐serials”) collection management. Contributors are mainly library professionals in North America, with additional chapters by practitioners in the UK and Australia. The 13 chapters variously discuss a variety of strategic, tactical and technical issues raised by e‐serials, to offer both an overall market perspective as well as a view from the “shop floor”. Given that e‐serials increasingly account for a major part of libraries’ resources commitments (both in terms of budget and staffing), this balanced editorial approach lends the book wide potential appeal to general and technical library managers alike.

The opening chapter (contributed by Harwood and Alderson of Swets UK) provides a helpful summary of the market context of e‐serials, reviewing current trends in pricing, licensing and technology. This reviews the different pressures that have come to shape the print and e‐serials marketplace from the perspective of a key stakeholder involved with all other key stakeholders (libraries, publishers, and channel partners) – the serials agent. The chapters that follow debate the relative merits of employing serials agents; cataloguing; the vagaries of authentication issues (IP addresses and passwords); and the emergence and significance of consortia as an e‐journal licensing mechanism.

Other contributors examine emerging guidelines for improving usage data reporting and collection; and a variety of case studies tackling a range of practical issues (claiming and troubleshooting, electronic reserves and finally database‐driven e‐serials collection management techniques). As an illustration of how the digital library universe is expanding, Lewis examines the longer‐term role and market for electronic books after a period of initial hype characterised by the familiar competition between incompatible “reader” and file format technologies. McKiernan reviews potentially the most liberating (or destructive, depending on one's viewpoint) development to have emerged for decades – the rise of Open Access and the Open Archives Initiatives (OAI) which propose radical and fundamental changes affecting the publication of – and electronic access to – the world's research literature.

However, despite its merits and the strength of some contributions, there are a number of significant shortcomings in this book that weaken its claim to address “transitions, trends and technicalities”. There are two or possibly three “missing” chapters. These would cover such important technological developments as the digital object identifier (DOI) system, and particularly the OpenURL standard recently ratified by the National Information Standards Organisation (but which has been of dominant interest to libraries for flexible document linking and widely deployed since late 2000). Besides extending discussion, it would have provided an important corrective to the impression (gained by reading the case studies) that in order to manage e‐serials effectively it's necessary to develop your own database.

This is not necessarily so, as the kind of “link resolver” servers typified by commercial instances such Ex Libris’ SFX, or open source alternatives like Jake, are now very widely used as a key database‐driven Web tool both to administer and facilitate access to electronic journals. Such a resolver server database can be used to manage and continuously update an organisation's current e‐serials access permissions across the complex supply chain (i.e. access via publishers’ systems, aggregating full‐text databases, archives, other channel partners and library collections).

It is also disappointing to see discussion of authentication issues confined to (the admittedly highly entrenched) status quo practice of IP address and/or passwords. Given the book's North American provenance, it would be expected at least to mention, if not discuss, the importance of the emerging Shibboleth authentication model, developed as part of the Internet2 project. Although in its infancy, Shibboleth is highly significant for academic organisations in particular as a far more flexible and granular approach to authentication using “attributes” to determine access rights, thus offering tangible long‐term benefits to content systems owners and customers alike.

Checking the index in vain for the above topics also revealed some general indexing errors and omissions. As an example, LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) is mentioned in the initial glossary of technical terms but not indexed despite multiple occurrences on p. 246; the TDnet service is recorded in the first 50 pages but subsequent entries occur (e.g. p. 260).

As a survey of how the e‐serials landscape has evolved, and how it might change in future, this collection is helpful in offering both a high‐level and a practical perspective that will interest library managers responsible for strategic or technical aspects of e‐serials resource management. The content is relatively up‐to‐date (mainly written in 2001‐2002, to judge from the range of references in each chapter's bibliography). Anyone with direct experience of the many issues that characterise the complexities of e‐serials management will recognise and agree with much of the content this book contains. Still others will find the case studies a genuine reflection of working life at the sharp end of delivering access to electronic journals via local initiatives and establishment of specific in‐house systems, and consequently of considerable interest for benchmarking and strategy development.