countered with time differences other than jet lag. Overall it is such a great learning experience for me to interact with my colleagues and counterparts from this ...
The Charleston Advisor / April 2010
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Advisor Reports from the Field
Heard on the Net Or in This Case at the Conference By Jill Emery (Head of Acquisitions,The University of Texas Libraries)
F
ebruary was a very busy month. In the first week of the month, the Fifth Annual Electronic Resources and Libraries Conference was held at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center in Austin, Texas. The conference kicked off with a presentation from Lance Hayden, a professor at the University of Texas’s I-School, who provided a thought-provoking look at the security of the Web and some of the services we are using there. For more information on Lance, see . As usual, the conference was brimming with innovative and exciting presentations from a wide range of presenters from numerous types of organizations. The conference ended with Andrew Nagy and Ross Singer providing a look into where the tools and technologies of the future may take us. The overall conference evaluations are still being tabulated but given the attendance levels at all the sessions, this conference has been deemed an overwhelming success for 2010. Many of the programs presented can be read at . The programs from the conference that are rated highly may show up again at some point this year as webinar sessions from the Electronic Resources and Libraries, LLC. Keep your eyes peeled for these offerings, especially if you see a program that you might have missed and wish you had attended . Two of the best things about the Electronic Resources and Libraries conference are the people attending and their willingness to be interactive at all stages of the event. The program is preselected by attendees prior to the conference through an online voting mechanism, so there is great buy-in by the attendees to all that is offered at the conference. For all those administrators who often muse where and when the next generation of library leaders are going to emerge—attend this conference to find out! The librarians presenting and attending this conference are dedicated to making a viable future for libraries in the twenty-first century. The 2011 conference is still being set so keep your eyes out for this announcement and consider attending next year to see for yourself why this conference is all a-twitter and a-buzz on Facebook.
I’m typing this column in the wee hours of the morning in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. I have been invited to be a preconference presenter at the SLA-Arabian Gulf Chapter Conference. Tomorrow is the last day of a three-day workshop that I have been presenting on Electronic Journals and Electronic Resource Library Management. This has been a very fortunate and humbling trip for me. I have learned that many of our day-to-day resource management problems are shared and that there are many more problems that could be encountered with time differences other than jet lag. Overall it is such a great learning experience for me to interact with my colleagues and counterparts from this part of the world. In some cases, we do not share common ground and we should feel very privileged to live in a part of the world where service and support exist for us during our working hours. One of the main problems I’ve heard from librarians here is that they’re unable to work with some providers who do not offer service and support 24/7. The librarians here sometimes have to work through 8 p.m. or even later to get service or resolution to access problems they experience. Another difference that we North Americans do not need to worry about is how scripting resolution and printing of our language occurs from our OPACs and various electronic resources. While most services and resources do utilize Unicode, it does not always work correctly with java programming. The results can be loss of metadata or loss of scripting capabilities entirely. There are many problems we share in common: loss of access due to journal transfers from one publisher or platform to another; renewal problems when vendors do not pay publishers in a timely enough fashion and resulting in lost access to popular resource; how to manage usage statistics that may all be COUNTERcompliant but may not be deliverable and need to be retrieved from or requested from providers. As for many of us elsewhere, electronic resource management is a struggle in the Middle East, and trying to find systems that work together readily still remains a challenge for all of us. I’m very grateful to have had this opportunity to share with my colleagues how we are attempting to manage our electronic resources in the West and to learn from the experiences encountered by librarians living and working in the East. n
