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I spent last weekend in Starkville, Mississippi at the MSU LEETS conference. LEETS stands for Libraries eResource and Emerging Technologies Summit. The first day of the conference focused on electronic resources.

Tim Collins from EBSCO Publishing emphasized the development of the EDS discovery service in his opening keynote. He worries more about the erosion of library funding than the potential threat of Google. Just as Google covers all things free, he hopes that EBSCO will provide all things vetted. EBSCO bought up indexes like AHL and HA primarily because they can enhance other products like EDS.

He also reflected on EDS participation. All of the major publishers participate because usage increases, and nobody gets access without paying. Aggregators (like LexisNexis) may not participate if they don’t have rights to re-distribute the content. Indexers (like MLA) are reluctant to participate since their customers may stop buying MLA and may start relying on the discovery service instead.

Regina Reynolds from the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress spoke next on PIE-J. The proposed best practices under development for e-journals include (inter alia):

  • Keep all article content under the title current as of the time of publication.
  • Include accurate ISSNs, including variant ISSNs like p-ISSN and e-ISSN.
  • Include title history.

Western Carolina University recently canceled 190 journals. Kristin Calvert discussed the process of discovering and activating their post-cancellation access (PCA) rights. She affirmed that:

  • ERM data entry is time-consuming.
  • Long grace periods make it difficult to discern whether your archival access works or not.
  • Portico did not work as well as publisher sites for getting PCA.

Ed Cherry and Stephanie Rollins from Samford tried to assess whether library use correlated with academic success. They defined “library use” as logging into an e-resource, and they measured “academic success” by GPA. First, they set EZproxy to require logins for all users, on- and off-campus. Once they had a semester’s worth of login data (i.e., capturing usernames), their partner in Institutional Research could compare library use to Banner information like class year, major and GPA. They learned that more frequent library use correlated with academic success. (They carefully noted that their methodology could not prove causality.) They also determined which majors had low use of resources, so they could better target outreach efforts.

Tammy Sugarman from Georgia State discussed Institutional Repositories. First, she gave an overview of the concept and described the types of materials that typically enter the repositories. Then she outlined how Technical Services staff can be a critical ingredient in the success of an IR.

Yours truly closed out the day with a discussion of DDA. Some tidbits I haven’t shared out with ZSR yet:

  • In the first four months of our DDA program, five books were triggered for automatic purchase (at sixth use). In the most recent four months, 24 books were triggered, including five triggers in July 2012.
  • Of the eight books used on July 30, seven were used for the first time, and four of these titles were loaded on the very first day of DDA in March 2011.