Many libraries are facing difficult fiscal climates with serials inflation, budget cutbacks, and reductions in allocations requiring difficult collection management decisions. Libraries may find their flexibility to plan and react unduly restricted due to being contracted to one or more "Big Deals," in which they are obligated to buy large, inflexible title lists from big publishers for a set price. This presentation discusses the experience of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and the University of Oregon in leaving "Big Deals," provides data on impacts on interlibrary loans, community response, and collection budgets, details the steps required before and after the decision, and describes the benefits that other libraries could achieve by following the example of these two members of the Association of Research Libraries.
Change is compulsory in collection management, especially these days, with the rapid transformation in how information is prepared, presented, and packaged. For the last few years, there has been no better place to keep up with the developments that face collection management librarians in academic libraries than Collection Management's "What's Next?" column. So it is appropriate to explore here the need for change in the organization and structure of collection management in order to address these developments and to provide one example of structural change designed to do so.Collection development is not what it once was. It has been vastly changed in the last ten years by changes in publishing, scholarly communication, technology, and budgeting. Developments in these areas have redefined what a library collection is, how it is acquired, and how it is used. All this is of course obvious, but the extent of the resistance to change, and the attachment to the status quo, in collection management organization and procedures in academic libraries belies our acknowledgement of the obvious. This is reflected in the structure most commonly employed in academic libraries, a structure that has been in place for two decades or more.There has always been some variability in collection management organization and structure in academic libraries. It may be the library function least susceptible to any particular model. In a 1987 study of libraries in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Sohn drew the conclusion that ARL members "have almost as many organizational patterns as there are ARL libraries." She attributed this to "restrictions of budget, personnel, politics, or innumerable other factors" (Sohn
Over the past decade, the U.S. has experienced an explosion in the number of institutional repositories (IRs), from just more than 20 in 2002 to approximately 400 active repositories as of August, 2011. For any institution seeking to implement a repository, Jonathan Nabe has written an informative and practical manual, divided into two parts. Part I provides guidelines for starting and managing an IR, while Part II shares seven cases of actual IR implementations. Nabe starts with the premise that all IRs need to begin with a plan which includes the key ingredients of staff, funding and platform. In addition, he stresses that librarians are the most logical choice for managing an IR because librarians are well-versed in sharing information, seeking input and gathering feedback, and, in academic institutions, have established contacts within the faculty and staff.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.