Registration Cost: $250 (Discounted rate of $125 available for Ithaka S+R Survey Participants) Academic and research libraries typically allocate the vast majority of their materials budgets to licensed e-resources. As usage has shifted toward these digital collections, researchers’ expectations for accessing them are being set not by improvements relative to the past but rather by reference to consumer internet services. Off-campus and mobile users face especially difficult challenges.
Instead of the rich and seamless digital library for scholarship that they need, researchers today encounter archipelagos of content bridged by infrastructure that is insufficient and often outdated, as Roger Schonfeld argued in a recent Ithaka S+R issue brief.
In this workshop, Roger will help academic and research librarians consider steps they can take to improve access to licensed e-resources for their user communities.
Topics will include:
- Using evidence to determine the extent of the problem among various user populations
- Developing organizational structures and decision-making frameworks that recognize users’ changing workflows
- Implementing acquisitions policies that foreground the importance of access
- Providing infrastructure and systems that foreground the importance of access
- How to balance collaborations and vendor contributions against the need to have a solution that works best for your institution
Participants will benefit from this workshop by improving their ability to identify and serve changing researcher expectations for access.
Prior to the event, we will ask all registrants to complete a worksheet enabling us to maximize the value of our time working together in person.
