All decisions about electronic resources must take the idea of increasing user satisfaction into account. (Hurd, 2006: 5)

The digital world is cyclical, and involves high-level staff almost exclusively; the process is different each time and is completely unstandardized. Communication, coordination, and team effort is required at almost every stage. More than twice as many players are involved, and non-library staff may be involved. In a minimum of fifteen steps, many involving extensive documentation, the purchase process is a long, complex, winding dirt road filled with potholes.

Serials librarianship shifts electronic

As the format shift occurred first for journals acquired as continuing resources, the challenges of the electronic environment initially affected serials departments, with these units bearing the greatest burden of staffing pressures, especially at the professional level. Susan Gardner (2001) conducted a survey of serials librarians at ARL (Association of Research Libraries) member institutions to understand how the shift to an e-only serials collection impacted staffing, and found a majority of respondents, 73 per cent, reported that the number of staff working on e-journal management had increased; 97 per cent reported that staff time spent on e-journal management had increased; and 88 per cent reported that e-journals required more professional librarians participating in acquisition than print journals.

This also meant that the serials librarian often became the electronic resources librarian. Hanna Kwasik (2002) reviewed position announcements for serials librarians found in SERIALST, American Libraries, College & Research Libraries News and Chronicle of Higher Education from 1999 to 2001 to understand how electronic resources changed the sought-after skills listed in these vacancies and identify areas of possible competency development. Her analysis highlighted the increased need for those experienced with Dublin Core, current technologies, markup language and cataloging e-resources. In addition, she found an increase in announcements with the title “serials/electronic resources cataloger”. No positions were advertised with this title in 1999, but by 2001 46 per cent of vacant professional serials positions had the title. Kwasik (ibid.: 36) writes of the new positions, “Although quite new, the serials/electronic librarian is permanent and will be an important position in most libraries.”

Although serials librarians felt the initial brunt of the electronic revolution in technical services, the dynamic nature of ERM workflow also pulled in staff from across technical and public services. Much of the new work involved high-level staff to negotiate licenses and pricing with a variety of vendors and publishers, evaluate coverage and overlap, and set up systems and technical requirements. This broad impact was evident at Drexel University Library, which embraced e-journal acquisition early on with a nearly full shift to collecting serials in e-only format in 2000 (Montgomery and Sparks, 2000). The decision, based on user preference and budgetary pressures, initially impacted the serials unit, but by the end of the migration it had affected all areas of the library. Drexel librarians discovered that “The selection/ordering process is a team effort involving professionals with subject knowledge, traditional serials ordering experience, negotiating expertise, and computer and technical skills” (ibid.: 8). At Drexel, as at many libraries, savings expected from decreasing staffing for print serials check-in, claiming, binding, stacks maintenance and photocopying were counterbalanced by increased staffing needs for high-level professionals in the areas of license and price negotiation, collection development and systems.

Electronic resource librarians: the public face of technical services

With e-journal acquisition came the issue of access: not only the technical requirements the library needed to set up access, but also how public services staff and end users would gain access to new acquisitions. Packages were often bought in bulk through abstracting and indexing vendors offering full-text aggregator databases or via “Big Deal” licenses wherein a publisher’s entire collection was licensed based on a library’s subset of historical subscriptions. How reference librarians directed patrons to this content was dependent on technical services workflow and processes. Joni Gomez (1999: 109), in her article “Human factors in the electronic technical services”, noted:

Deeper collaboration with public services ushered in new competencies for serials librarians and technical services librarians working with electronic formats in the areas of interpersonal communication, teamwork and flexibility. These competencies pushed the traditional boundaries of technical and public services and posed new challenges for library professionals who were often more comfortable working in the “back of the house”.

Claire Dygert (1998), in her seminal article “New challenges behind the scenes”, mapped out the skill set required of a serials librarian dealing with e-resources. These skills include knowing Internet technologies, understanding licenses, managing dynamic collections in a leased environment, promoting public awareness of e-journals and dealing with users experiencing access issues. This environment was very different to a traditional serials processing unit where successful workflows followed a linear process of ordering, invoicing, receipt, check-in, claiming and shelving, all without significant interaction with other units in the library or the public. Dygert (ibid.: 13) saw these challenges as an opportunity: “For many serials librarians, such public outreach work provides new opportunities for stepping out from behind the scenes, and sharing their growing expertise in this new and revolutionary realm.” The emergence of the electronic resources librarian as a specialization underscored the profound transformation of serials but also of librarianship – new skills were needed by all librarians to function effectively in the new digital library environment.

A number of studies of vacancy announcements examined the evolution of the e-resource librarian position, often focusing on the blending of public and technical services skills and responsibilities. Rebecca Albitz (2002: 592) undertook a position analysis of e-resource librarian vacancy announcements in College & Research Libraries News from 1996 to 2001 and found that a “certain ambiguity accompanying an electronic resources position in an academic library involves locating the position within the organizational structure”. Her analysis focused on three questions: where the new positions were placed within the organizational structure; the experience required of the positions; and their responsibilities. Albitz found 42 per cent of the posts were in public services, 33 per cent in technical services, and 26 per cent were in both or could not be determined by the vacancy announcement. Required responsibilities emphasized public services – reference (58 per cent), bibliographic instruction (53 per cent) – but also included broad work in technical services, including web design/support, collection development, automation/ technical support, licensing, cataloging, serials, acquisitions, copyright and data collection. Albitz (ibid.: 597–8) concluded that these new positions “might include almost any library function, depending upon the institution’s needs” and “electronic resources librarians tend to be jacks-and jills-of-all-trades”.

The findings of Croneis and Henderson (2002) in a study of vacancy announcements in College & Research Libraries News from 1990 to 2000 with either “digital” or “electronic” in the job title mirrored Albitz’s findings in demonstrating an emphasis on public services responsibilities for these new “electronic” positions, but the authors also documented a trend of public services responsibilities transitioning toward technical services responsibilities (ibid.: 235):

On the other hand, Emerita Cuesta (2005: 58) found in her study of online vacancy announcements for electronic resource positions that those with a reporting line in technical services:

Cuesta was unclear what this meant for electronic resource librarianship, stating that “it remains to be seen whether the electronic librarian is the interim step to a completely new paradigm of librarianship or simply will remain yet another format-based specialty with ‘other duties as assigned’” (ibid.: 61).

In line with Albitz’s, Croneis and Henderson’s and Cuesta’s investigations, William Fisher’s (2003) analysis of electronic resource librarian positions in American Libraries from 1985 to 2001 found that the majority of announcements centered on public service characteristics, namely reference and bibliographic instruction. He also identified a variety of other characteristics such as computer applications and found, notably, that announcements called for strong communication skills.

Although initially common, the view of the electronic resource librarian as primarily a public service position with a few technical service responsibilities began to be replaced as electronic collections grew in size and scope. By the mid2000s electronic materials had become dominant, at least in terms of patron usage, and by 2008 the average ARL library spent 51 per cent of its materials budget on electronic resources, which represented a growth rate far exceeding that of other types of materials spending (Association of Research Libraries, 2008: 18).

Rebecca Albitz and Wendy Allen Shelburne (2007) documented a survey of electronic resource librarians and their directors, outlining the evolution of the position in terms of reporting structure, responsibilities and professional experience. The authors compared their results regarding reporting structure to Albitz’s, Croneis and Henderson’s and Fisher’s previous position analyses and found a near-complete reversal, in that 52 per cent of respondents worked in technical services and 15 per cent in public services, with another 30 per cent in collection management, where responsibilities could be technical, public or administrative. In terms of responsibilities, purchasing, reviewing and cancellation coordination (71 per cent), licensing/pricing negotiations (62 per cent), troubleshooting (62 per cent) and managing/coordinating electronic resource programs (57 per cent) accounted for the bulk of reported work, with only 10 per cent of respondents working in reference and 19 per cent in instruction. Because of the shifting nature of the role, Albitz and Shelburne (ibid.: 27) concluded:

What is notable in this shift to a technical services focus for electronic resource librarians is the continued inclusion of public services work and the addition of new responsibilities in the areas of troubleshooting, web applications, user statistics management, link resolver management and trials/testing management. The broad scope of electronicresources-related posts and the unpredictable nature of where these positions tend to be found in organizational structures underscore not only the dramatic effect the shift to the electronic environment had on librarianship but also how electronic formats forced a new focus on access and blurred the bifurcation of public and technical services.

Workflow models: distribution or centralization

The electronic resource librarian, at first perceived as a specialized and niche post, was tasked, often singlehandedly, with coordinating order out of chaos. As the responsibilities of this position evolved, so did the workflow for acquiring and managing electronic resources. A key component of this new workflow was facilitating and maintaining access within traditional technical services structures, which were often not accustomed to direct enduser demands. ERM workflows also often relied on considerable coordination between technical services and public services staff as well as outside IT offices and staff at consortia.

Inadequate staffing levels to meet the growing and changing work of electronic resources were one of the challenges to this evolving workflow. Duranceau and Hepfer (2002) examined staffing levels supporting ERM and found that while e-resource collection size and expenditures grew exponentially between 1997 and 2002, with an average collection growth rate of 1,100 per cent, the corresponding staff growth rate to handle the associated workflows did not keep pace. Inadequate staffing to support ERM was significant, especially in the areas of “licensing; cataloging; non-OPAC record management; troubleshooting access problems; site monitoring for content changes; and setting up links between I&A databases and full text” (ibid.: 317), areas clearly outside the traditional scope of technical services work. This “new” work served as the basis for Duranceau and Hepfer’s (ibid.) functional areas of ERM, which included e-resource acquisition, licensing e-resources, setting up access, invoicing, cataloging, record maintenance in non-OPAC systems, proxy server management, union listing, troubleshooting access problems, systems support, site monitoring and maintaining links.

Inadequate staffing paired with new responsibilities that had ties with many different areas of the library created a variety of workflow models. These models could generally be divided into two kinds – distributed and centralized. For many libraries, the local staffing situation and the diverse responsibilities of e-resource management meant that the work was distributed among a number of departments, although an e-resource librarian, often one most closely affiliated with the serials unit, served as the coordinator of the process. In the ARL SPEC Kit 282 “Managing electronic resources”, for example, authors Grahame and McAdam (2004) found that all but two of the 68 respondents to their survey about organizational and staffing issues distributed ERM work. Distribution in this context was often necessary, as workflows required deeper coordination and stronger communication among not only technical service departments but also colleagues in public services, including access services. With selection as the starting point, new workflows that involved trials, communication with vendors and license negotiation would require consultation with end users and other library staff with expertise in the areas of systems, copyright and searching and retrieval.

The distributed model can be seen clearly in Loghry and Shannon’s (2000) study of the evolution of the University of Nevada, Reno’s “electronic products work form”, designed by a committee comprising people from public services, serials and access services to document all internal and external communications concerning a new electronic resource. The first part of the work form detailed not only pricing and product information but also subject and holdings coverage, license information, system requirements, existing service information, selection decision and a record of contact. All this tracked information was documented even before an acquisition was made by the serials librarian in charge of e-resources. A second part of the form included the actual procedural steps necessary for acquisition and access, with an important part of the process being the creation of a corresponding print license file. Order and invoice details are included, as are cataloging steps, alerting access services, website updating and, finally, outreach. The authors underscored the importance of the form as a means of standardizing ERM workflows in a distributed environment. What is notable about these processes, aside from the complexity and iterative nature, is that the bulk of the tasks, on both first and second parts of the form, happen outside the library’s main workflow driver, the ILS, and rely heavily on cooperation among many departments beyond technical services.

For some libraries, however, it made more sense to reassign staff and centralize ERM work within one department. This often happened when journal collections migrated in large batches to predominantly online-only collections. At Old Dominion University in Virginia, for example, print serial subscriptions declined by 25 per cent from 2002 to 2005 while e-journal access increased by 300 per cent from 2001 to 2005. Print serials work in the areas of claiming and check-in decreased, and a backlog in ejournal cataloging emerged. After a workflow analysis, administrators recommended the establishment of an electronic resources and serials unit, with work focused on e-journal cataloging, maintenance of the Serials Solutions knowledge base supporting the patron A–Z list and link maintenance (Graves and Arthur, 2006). Similarly, Indiana University Bloomington Libraries combined e-resource responsibilities that were once spread across three units under one new unit called Serials and Electronic Resources Acquisitions. Its responsibilities included print and e-journal management, maintaining the OpenURL resolver, MARC records, access management, all e-resource acquisition, licensing, troubleshooting, system support and digital media acquisition and management (Clendenning et al., 2010).

Defining electronic resource management and the role of new systems

Specialized responsibilities had initially led ERM to become an “add-on” workflow to the traditional print workflow. As early as 1998, Kristin Gerhard (1998: 281), writing about her position as e-resources coordinator at Iowa State University, noted “Electronic resources, particularly those available over the Internet, require us to develop new ways of managing. It has been easier to keep these titles in a category labeled ‘other’ and work around them.” However, new systems needed to facilitate user access and help manage metadata that the ILS could not accommodate began to define ERM workflows as truly distinct from the traditional workflows from which they had grown.

This was an important step for the field of e-resource management. Defining ERM as its own distinct workflow meant that electronic resource librarians could attend to the work at hand instead of being tasked with ancillary responsibilities better handled elsewhere, such as reference and instruction, and concentrate on the new systems and tools focused on end-user access. Defining ERM as separate from, not additional to, traditional technical services work also helped to justify ongoing change and reorganization. Wayne State University, for example, after a successful transition to nearly online-only serial collecting, hired a web librarian and an e-resources librarian to address network, access and electronic content issues and adopted two new systems, the SFX OpenURL Resolver and EZProxy authentication. These systems validated the need for more global change. After the new tools were in place to facilitate better user access, the library planned “to examine all technical services workflow with an eye toward shifting the focus of our work so that – as with the materials budget – the majority of our staff time is spent dealing with electronic resources” (Jasper and Sheble, 2005: 69).

Beyond electronic resource management

New ERM systems and tools, in addition to helping to define e-resource management, eventually shifted the focus of the workflow. At first, the time and energy of electronic resource librarians was largely spent in determining standard licensing practices, fair pricing models and content coverage – work most related to acquisition functions in the traditional technical services workflow. Once the initial challenges of acquiring the new format had been met and standardized, however, the center of resource management for electronic resources shifted from where it was for physical formats – selection, budgeting and description, primarily achieved within the ILS – to data management among many library systems. Users interacted with e-resources outside the OPAC through OpenURL resolvers, database and journal A–Z lists, metasearch/federated search systems, discovery systems, search engines such as Google Scholar, browser applications such as LibX and beyond. Much ERM therefore became data management among disparate systems, and access and discoverability issues now dominate much of the work of electronic resource management.

In this way, the electronic resource workflow has not only been defined as a workflow completely different from that of print, but has stepped far past it into areas more equivalent to the work done in access services. Whereas access services are traditionally associated with the borrowing, lending and maintenance of physical format materials, ERM involves access to and maintenance of online materials. Just as the order of books within the stacks can make finding resources easy or hard, how well data management is performed has a direct effect on how easily the user finds and interacts with the materials.

As the electronic format becomes increasingly dominant, ERM will no longer remain on the sideline as a complex add-on to the traditional, print-based technical services workflows. It will become the standard workflow, with print work as an increasingly marginalized process, it will demand a rethinking of the ILS to accommodate the needs of the electronic format and its associated workflows, and it will continue to bring into question where technical services end and public services begin.

The present state of staffing

Although its proportion of the materials budget may make it clear that the electronic format is now dominant in many academic libraries, at present that emphasis is still not often reflected in library staffing structures. ERM and all its outgrowths – discovery service implementation, web work and electronic archiving projects – continue to expand exponentially, but libraries still employ only a very small number of professionals, and often no paraprofessionals, to handle these tasks.

Matt Barnes (2009) of R2 Consulting, in a conference presentation entitled “The invisible mainstream”, shed light on this phenomenon. He reported that, typically, 75 per cent of the staff in technical services worked with print formats and only 25 per cent with electronic resources, but 60 per cent of the materials budget was spent on electronic resources and only 40 per cent on print. He dubbed this the “print inversion paradox” and maintained, “It could be convincingly argued that 60 percent of the people in Collections and Technical Services should work exclusively on electronic resources.” Barnes advocated workflow analyses to justify reassignment of staff.

Others have come to similar conclusions about the current state of ERM staffing. Bothmann and Holmberg (2008: 19), in a workflow and planning survey of electronic resource librarians on the Electronic Resources in Libraries listserv, noted that “Regardless of size, most of these libraries employ only one to three professional librarians to manage electronic resources, often with little or no paraprofessional support.” Respondents reported lack of time to document workflows and train others, and a lack of policy development because of the changing landscape of eresource management and dominant workflows being based on print.

One of the challenges to shifting staffing, however, is that retraining is not a clear and easy solution. Sarah Glasser (2010: 143), in her investigation of what happens when traditional library jobs, in this case print serials management positions, are discontinued, found that:

A related study by Sarah Pomerantz (2010) focused on how acquisitions librarians are adapting to electronic resources in terms of primary responsibilities, staffing and workflows. Her survey found that a majority of respondents, 61 per cent, reported having responsibilities for acquisition of all formats, but in terms of overall ERM their responsibilities were predominately shared with an electronic resource team or committee. One area in particular – licensing, the touchstone of any new e-resource acquisition – saw a high degree of shared responsibility, but respondents reported a lack of training in this area. Pomerantz (ibid.: 45) also noted: “The comments at the end of the survey universally acknowledged the challenges of managing electronic resources but did not show a consensus of the role of the acquisitions librarian in this process. Most indicated a need for more training, both for acquisitions librarians and paraprofessionals, and for more collaboration between departments.”

Glasser’s and Pomerantz’s findings suggest a critical problem for libraries in transitioning to a new technical services framework where workflows flip to favor electronic resource management: retraining existing staff and attracting new librarians into technical services by way of ERM are daunting tasks, especially during a time of decreasing library budgets and increasing concerns that the library as place, whether physical or digital, is losing focus as the intellectual hub of college and university campuses. On the other hand, these may be the very reasons for libraries to make this conscious shift to ERM as the primary workflow in technical services. The strong user preference for electronic resources, the increase of digital-only publishing initiatives, the innovation of library search by way of indexed discovery services, the creation of next-gen ILS systems and, most importantly, the growth of e-books, especially via patron-driven acquisition plans, are key motivators for technical services professionals to embrace this dynamic workflow. Consequences of not evolving, of continuing to shunt ERM aside as a specialized workflow, may cause the skill sets of staff working in traditional technical services positions to grow outdated and eventually obsolete as e-resources continue to account for the vast majority of total library materials expenditures and corresponding collection size.

Conclusion

True change in terms of resource allocation, training and staff development will only come when e-resource management is accepted as the primary workflow in technical services. At that point, ERM will not be a set of mysterious responsibilities coordinated by one librarian – it will be made up of functional tasks in which anyone working in technical services should have proficiency.

This will be a profound paradigm shift for libraries. It will mean moving from a linear to a cyclical workflow. It will mean staff must be comfortable viewing collections as a means to facilitate access, not as a means for comparably counting volumes held. It will mean shifting from systems designed for librarians to ones designed to facilitate end-user access and ease of use. This, in turn, will require attracting staff who are not only technically competent but also enthusiastic about end-user satisfaction. It will mean ongoing training and proficiency in e-resource management systems, knowledge bases, OpenURL resolvers, discovery systems and web applications beyond the scope of the library website. Finally, it will mean integrating ERM into traditional acquisitions and cataloging departments and deconstructing the false demarcation of responsibilities between e-resource librarians and technical services.

One challenging aspect of this shift is standardizing workflows across academic libraries. Currently, print acquisitions and cataloging workflows are essentially standard from one academic library to the next, as the ILS shares the same infrastructure regardless of the system vendor. Print acquisitions follow similar processes, and catalogers work with shared metadata schema. Because of this, an acquisitions or cataloging librarian can laterally move to a new library without too much of a learning curve. For electronic resource librarians, however, all workflows are local. One library may run an ERMS, OpenURL resolver and MARC record service and set up purchase orders through the ILS for new e-resources, while another library, even one with a similar size and setting, may not employ these same systems and services or run only a few, instead working largely through spreadsheets or a home-grown system. Although many standards-based initiatives and protocols have been developed to support different phases of the e-resource life cycle, the total workflow process is handled differently across academic libraries. Standardization of these workflows, broadly, is needed to support this paradigm shift.

A move in the right direction could be integrating electronic resource workflows with traditional technical services functions by way of the system most comparable to the ILS – the electronic resource management system. This would help libraries train staff in the e-resource life cycle, including utilization of knowledge bases, working with data in batches and understanding better how acquisitions decisions and record maintenance affect end-user access. Extending the ERMS beyond those working with e-resources is one step that will help prepare technical services staff for the next-gen ILS that are just around the bend.

Case studies

References