Tips from the trenches

Abstract

What Johnson et al. said in their IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) e-resource guide in 2012 is still relevant today: “E-resources present a number of challenges not encountered with the selection and acquisition of traditional analogue materials...” (p. 3). Maintaining the links that provide the pathway to the electronic content library users seek can become an overwhelming task if this duty is conducted solely by a library without the aid of an outside service or vendor. Lowry (2020) summed up the situation well: “Electronic resources require maintenance and troubleshooting over time to retain the ease of access for users” (p. 26). And it’s important to remember that the vendors that do provide the knowledgebases and resources to assist libraries in keeping these pathways to e-content open and operational must develop and maintain an infrastructure to successfully accomplish this feet. As Breeding noted in 2012 in his study about knowledgebases and link resolvers, “One of the fundamental observations of this study involves the tremendous resources it takes to create and maintain these e-content knowledge bases” (para. 7). The resources a vendor may have available to accomplish maintaining links for their e-resource knowledgebases can be very different from what a library has on staff or in budget to do the same feat, whether that library be small or large, public or academic, or other. Given the fiscal situation around the globe, many libraries are operating with much less staff than they had a few years ago. Yet what was said in 2007 is still valid today: “The ubiquity of electronic and networked information has changed their customers’ expectations for timely access to an ever wider variety of materials and services” (Barton et al., 2007, p. 46). Ensuring that our customers, our library users, have that timely access can seem like a crushing undertaking that just never ends—“For e-resource librarians, maintaining e-book and e-journal holdings within electronic resource management systems is a labor intensive and often manual process” (van Ballegooie, 2016, p. 135). How do you handle the maintenance of your e-resource links?