Electronic journals, or e‐journals, came into being at the end of the last millennium – not as a gradual and manageable process, but more as a big bang. It was almost as if one day they were under discussion as a potentially viable and powerful way of delivering print materials and the next, they were there, in bulk. As a consequence, libraries were faced with the tricky problem as to how they managed this emergent electronic resource, given that e‐journals presented a gamut of new problems which had not previously been encountered and with which the then current library management systems (LMS) were not equipped to deal.
In the final chapter of Electronic Journal Management Systems: Experiences from the Field Jill Emery, of the University of Houston, identifies five components that reflect the problems libraries faced. These are:
- 1.
Acquisition – highlights the new problems surrounding licensing agreements, which, though not original in libraries, were by no means common.
- 2.
Access provision – or alternatively, access management, which correlates with the problems deriving from licences in managing who can access a specific resource and from where.
- 3.
Administration – which replicates “normal” problems associated with title changes, stopping, starting, issue management, etc.
- 4.
Service provision – which she defines as being about the relationships between the library and the e‐journal provider.
- 5.
Evaluation and monitoring – which details the usage statistics and the like, critical for the uptake of an e‐journal and decisions on continuation.
A simpler analysis might be to think in terms of resource discovery, i.e. how libraries make clear to the users what is available and how you can link to that; and resource management, or the range of functions associated with any resource whether electronic or otherwise.
The papers in this review, edited by Ives, detailed experience of various American libraries in trying to come to terms with this new resource and the issues detailed above. Most, it would seem, began with relatively crude systems, such as A‐Z lists, which were common by the year 2000 in most university libraries, both as a way of cataloguing what was available but also to provide a helpful link into the e‐journals themselves. Such services were often backed up by paper management systems or, at the very best, some kind of spreadsheet approach.
The whole presented a very obvious business opportunity and three companies have emerged over the subsequent few years, which have purported to meet this need. These are TDNet, serials solutions and EBSCO, although all of these have in due course been taken over by other major suppliers and, as with many such systems, have become embedded into and integrated with existing library management systems.
So there are chapters here that describe each of these vendor systems and their implementation. There is also a chapter that looks at ERM (the electronic resource management module of millennium's innovative LMS). There is also a chapter that describes SFX and OpenURL, which are clearly associated technologies and which are described in chapters by Holman and Ives.
All in all this is a useful and informative collection, particularly beneficial to anyone who has not yet implemented one of the vendor products now available. It will, however, date, and probably quite quickly, as the systems and technology continue to change. But, as a state of the art of review, as at 2005, it is both valuable and timely.
My one major criticism, as often with Haworth Press, is that all the articles here are concurrently published in The Serials Librarian, Vol. 47, No. 4, 2005, so if you subscribe to that do not buy this book.
