Acquisition of electronic resources: High cost and high usage

Acquisition librarians are facing changes in their traditional work duties with the emergence of electronic resources. Martha Whittaker discussed these new challenges that are facing acquisition librarians in the digital environment such as licensing, system requirements, compatibility, authentication, proxy servers, and interface design. However, the new changes in trends are not replacing the old way of managing the acquisition of print resources but they are adding on them more duties and skills that acquisition librarians should learn to successfully manage the new resources. The librarians’ knowledge of technology and contracting can help them to effectively escort and adapt to the rapid changes in the management routine of acquisition departments.
Witthaker detailed some of these challenges such as the changes in pricing and the relatively high prices of e-resources, the preservation requirements of e-resources, the absence of trusted methods to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of e-resources, the duty of librarians to specify their demand for suppliers, and the need for international standards for sharing purposes. Witthaker also stressed the need for librarians to make these resources available to users through tools that they already user so they can be easily accessible and consequently highly utilized. These tools can be the social networking website such as Facebook, My Space, and others. Witthaker also talked about the need for librarians to get full access to the databases they purchase and to reach agreements with suppliers in order to customize these databases according to their users’ need. Witthaker introduced some trends in the acquisition of e-resources such as: the electronic resources management systems (ERMS) which is a software to manage digital resources especially in acquisition department, Open access and institutional repositories (IR) where a real problem exist which is the difference between licensing and owning electronic products, assessment tools and software like COUNTER, and finally electronic books that seemed to be not very practical in the way they have been used.
With no doubt, the big impact of electronic resources required libraries to change their work routine and to adopt new trends that help them in successfully managing these resources. Electronic resources are very expensive and librarians should make sure that they are highly used to be cost-effective. They key to success is to know how to promote these resources, in other words librarians should know how to acquire and provide the right resource to the right user with the right tool. For this reason librarians should create their own assessment tools and to analyze usage numbers in relation to their users’ needs. Yet, the use of social networking services to promote and provide digital resources cannot be very useful since people have the tendency to differ their personal and social life from work or study. Also, the promotion can be very expensive in relation to usage.

Whittaker, Martha (10/11/2008). "The Challenge of Acquisitions in the Digital Age". Portal (Baltimore, Md.) (1531-2542), 8 (4), p. 439.