Week 12 - Reflections on the Worklife of an ER Librarian

Since I obviously have no experience as an ER librarian, I will be taking notes on the readings this week rather than reflecting.  Following are the parts I found particularly important or interesting:

"How to survive as a new serialist" by Griffin

•  Training and Continuing Education
• Can apply for stipends from ALA, ALCTS, LITA, NASIG, etc.
• Many ILS vendors provide training such as conferences or webinars
• Associations and Organizations
• Possibly join and:
• Attend conferences, meetings, and workshops
• Use webinars and online training
• Participate in an online discussion group
• Must weigh benefit vs. cost in time and money
• Most of those listed I've heard of except for NASIG - North American Serials Interest Group and SCCTP - Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program
• Books
• Mostly on cataloging and organization of information
• Slyly, Griffin includes the book in which this chapter is contained
• Print and Electronic Journals
•   Many of these I'm already aware of because we've read sections of them for this class - Against the Grain, Library Resources and Technical Services, Serials Review, etc.
• Online Sources
• Especially useful for learning about standards - MARC, Dublin Core, Dewey Decimal, etc.
• Identify New Needs
• Serialist is a rapidly changing profession
• Must keep up with revisions to standards and new standards
• Publish
• American Reference Books Annual, NASIGuides, and NASIG, Resource for Authors can help
• Terms
• CONSER- Cooperative ONline SERials
• integrating resource - resource that is added to or changed by continuous updates (ie website)

Ok, actually I'm going to reflect here just for a second.  Reading this chapter really made me realize how much I've learned this semester in all my classes and library school in general.  I've gone from knowing almost nothing last August about the LIS field to having heard of almost all the organizations, terms, journals, and so on mentioned in this chapter.

"Marian Through the Looking Glass: The Unique Evolution of the Electronic Resources (ER) Librarian Position" by Albitz and Shelburne

• Very little literature on ER staffing
• Authors decided to conduct survey and compare results of three other articles
• Administration structure
• 52% technical services in this survey
• Most are in public services in three other articles
• Responsibilities
• Most frequent response:
• Fisher: Reference
• Followed by instruction, "computer applications," and collection development
• Albitz: ER Coordination
• Followed by reference, instruction, and web apps
• Survey: ER Coordination
• Followed by purchase management, license negotiations, and IT 
• Reference and instruction have low response rates probably because patrons do not need as much help with resources in 2005 vs. 2001 and earlier
• Responsibilities become more focused on ER and technology (link-resolvers and federated searching) because this is more complicated than in earlier years
• ER librarians have diverse backgrounds but none held a previous ER librarian position
• Training varies widely - licensing workshops, organization (ie ALA) provided training, or self-taught

"Process Mapping for Electronic Resources: A Lesson From Business Models" by Afifi

• Process Mapping
• Create flexible organizations by continually re-evaluating business processes
• Similar to a flowchart
• Start with inputs and outputs then fill in steps in the middle
• "Swim lanes" across the page indicate who is involved in each task
• Use
• Construct "as is" and "should be" maps
• Select, Acquire, and Deliver ER as an example
• Case Study
• Some departments depicted processes idealistically but recipients challenged this
• ER team created to map complex ER related processes
• Created three processes
• Select electronic resources
• Acquire/deliver electronic resources
• Manage electronic resources

p.s.  While taking a break between the readings, I decided to change my Firefox Persona (http://www.getpersonas.com).  I noticed something interesting - all of the Personas have Creative Commons licenses.  How cool is that?